ABSTRACT
The Marxist view of the Civil War as a social conflict (in its crudest form, the first bourgeois revolution) has been generally rejected in the face of contrary evidence: popular conservatism now appears to have been significant, a self-conscious middle class was non-existent, and Parliament clearly numbered gentlemen and peers alike among its adherents. Not all historians, however, have abandoned efforts to set wartime allegiance in a socio-economic context. David Underdown’s work on Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset approaches the problem by looking at regional patterns of allegiance and correlating them to cultural development. He finds that the Civil War can be traced to the earlier emergence of two opposing cultures. One was traditional, paternalistic, hierarchical and deferential, committed to the preservation of customary religious and communal rituals and festivities. The other was a culture of reform and discipline, intent on repressing popular festivities in the interests of godliness and order. The two cultures were regionalized, but not as the old version had it, with North and West conservative, South and East progressive. Underdown’s more complex pattern identifies traditional culture in arable regions of England, and the culture of discipline in cloth-making and wood-pasture regions, where economic change had been most pronounced in the sixteenth century and the parishes were most socio-economically polarized. He finds that the culture of discipline drew mostly from the gentry and middling sort, concerned with order in the face of economic dislocation. He thus reinstates a ‘high road’ interpretation, albeit in much revised form, and sees the war as a fundamentally cultural conflict.
