As she notes, complaints were not new; English common law and the unwritten “ancient Constitution” all supervised in some ineffable way by a duty-bound monarch (in theory at least) resulted in widely-held beliefs about the rights of subjects: to speak their mind, to petition for redress, to be secure in their persons, property, and homes, and to use common areas. What was different about the complaints at issue in this book though was the reach and “bite” of the Parliamentary/ Cromwellian polity. Parliament’s excise taxes affected a much wider range of items and people than previous taxes and were enforced by sometimes intrusive and violent means. Also, Parliament’s elimination of a religous monopoly allowed the rapid growth of numerous “dissenting” – and proselytizing – sects. There was a lot to complain about.

But Parliament and Cromwell, not unreasonably, had reasons; they were concerned about what Charles’s ex-loyal-subjects might think, say, and do. So, laws constraining speech were put in place. And because laws don’t enforce themselves somebody had be the state’s enforcerl; the New Model Army got the job.

So not only were there new taxes being aggressively collected, new laws restricting what can be said in public, and new in-your-face religious fanatics challenging parish clergy in the streets and interrupting religious services, but professional soldiers were everywhere. Sometimes the soldiers lived in people’s homes. They enforced the unpopular taxes, speech limits, and religious heterodoxy. There was a lot to complain about, and no effective mechanism had been developed to replace the “ancient constitution.”

As our reviewers have noted, Boswell does an excellent job drawing all these elements together into a coherent narrative. What she doesn’t do a very good job of is connecting the lived experience of royalists, Anglicans, and village parishioners with the political and economic problems of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. That, of course, would require a different book. But without some explanation for the scope and scale for excise taxes, collectors, soldiers, censorship, and religious heterodoxy it is difficult to know how relevant the complaints that Boswell has so thoroughly documented were. Perhaps luck, cheap printing presses and skillful rhetoric were more important. Perhaps the locals had equally strong complaints in the 16C (persistent prickliness syndrome?) but too few records survive to allow a reconstruction of that discourse. Social history is fascinating, but tantalizingly incomplete.

I agree that this book was really easy to follow. She organized the chapters in such a way that allowed readers to slightly “get lost” but then always managed to bring them back to the main argument. Additionally, I think this was just a very interesting topic in general, as we got to see into the smaller geographic spaces of interregnum England that historians do not normally cover.