15 - ‘More than freeholders ought to have voices’: parliamentarianism in one ‘countrey’, 1571–1643

Summary

… at that time it was the usuall mistake of particular associations to confine every enterprise to their own counties, and divide the common-wealth into so many kingdoms.

The contemporary term ‘countrey’, so important to the identity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English people, referred to a form of collective identity that was in part a corollary of the steadily increasing importance, from the early fourteenth century, of the House of Commons. Unlike the more mutually opaque pays of its larger and more populous neighbour, France, the identities of English countreys were formed, not only out of routine interactions, specific and distinctive accents, customs, economies and ecologies, but also from regular engagement, as parliamentary electorates, with national policy and government. The task here is to show why that feeling intensified in the decades leading to civil war.

In the outlying villages and market towns of the Seven Hundreds of Cirencester, as in every English shire, only freeholders holding land worth at least forty shillings per annum had ‘voices’ in parliamentary elections. This chapter will suggest that, in the fifty years before the civil wars, about one in five to six households of the ‘shire’ part of the Seven Hundreds were entitled to a ‘voice’ in the election of knights of the shire. If the issues interested them, they were active and aware enough to be willing to travel all day to whichever town was nominated for them to cast their voices at a poll.