Revel,Riot and Rebellion

This article considers the ways in which the question of scale: parish, county, regional and national, operated in David Underdown’s Revel, Riot and Rebellion. It is suggested that Underdown mixed the parish-based approaches of Keith Wrightson and the regional model of the Annales school with his own interest in national politics. These methodological influences helped underwrite and structure the book’s narrative in which older models of local communal identity were fragmented both by the long process of social, economic and cultural change from the sixteenth century onward, but also by the national political developments of the 1640s and 1650s.