ABSTRACT
The revolutionary nature of the English Revolution can be demonstrated partly by its deeds and partly by its words. Its achievements included not merely the killing of a king, but the putting of a king on trial in the name of 'the people of England', on a charge of high treason for violation of 'the fundamental constitutions of this Kingdom'. The revolution was certainly not a war of the poor against the rich, for one of its most striking features was the almost total passivity of the rural masses, the copyholders and agricultural labourers. In contrast to the peasant risings during the French or Russian Revolutions, the rural poor in England were almost entirely neutral during the 1640s and 1650s. The main industrial activity of England remained the manufacture and processing of cloth, catering for a large domestic and export market, but there were none the less some significant new developments in the century after 1540.
