ABSTRACT
The analysis of the composition of parliamentarian support is completed by an assessment of how the poor related to the parliament. Some modern studies have been inclined to define “the people” in a way that was not applicable at the time. The “people” were invoked with great regularity by the parliamentary side, but this did not carry the same meaning as now. The modern definition of the people incorporates the poor, but seventeenth-century usage tended to exclude them. Modern historians have sought to measure the allegiance of the poor by asking whether anti-enclosure protests were associated with parliamentarian politics, but the question was not relevant then. The parliamentary agenda was inherently antithetical to the vital interest of the poor in preserving their position on the common lands. The great majority of MPs were natural supporters of enclosure, and with rare exceptions, not troubled by the effect on the lives of the poor. When parliamentarian commentators spoke of the people they usually meant the broad class of yeomanry and traders. The Levellers found cause to extend the term towards the poor, but even they were middle sort in origin. This was a bourgeois revolution.
