Julia Thorogood on the value of local history studies. In his preface to Loyalty and Locality, Mark Stoyle tells of the death in February 1643 of the promising young gentleman-poet Sidney Godolphin. Godolphin was riding in the forefront of a party of Cavaliers in an early-morning attack on the stannery town of Chagford, mid-Devon, which had been occupied by a party of Parliamentary militiamen. It should have been a surprise incursion but the Parliamentarians had been forewarned by a glove-maker from nearby Okehampton and were ready with their muskets. And so Godolphin died, “leaving”, in the words of the Earl of Clarendon, “the ignominy of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention in the world”.

We see such places, obscure villages from areas of modern civil war, flashed a night or two on our television screens. We glimpse the inhabitants whom we will never meet and for an appalled moment we realise that they are as human as ourselves and their suffering is as personal. We may wonder to what extent they have committed themselves by their choices of allegiance or belief. Or have they simply been caught, unwitting, in the power-struggles of others?

Even labourers, wrote the Devonian Thomas Westcote in 1845, “though the most inferior, are yet, notwithstanding, liberi homines - free-men of state and conditions - no slaves”. Given the extent to which the Civil War was fought on issues of liberty, conscience, rightful authority, it is surprising that a lofty indifference to the choices made by labourers - or glove-makers - has prevailed among historians for so long.

Westcote is quoted by the historian David Underdown, who has done much to alter this perception. He, and Mark Stoyle after him, consider and essentially reject both the deference theory (ordinary people fought, and thought, as their social superiors instructed them) and the neutralism theory (ordinary people had no interest in the war and its issues except when they were forced to defend their own homes and livelihoods against invading armies). Both Underdown and Stoyle credit people with the dignity of making their own decisions - on the evidence of his single poem included in the New Oxford Book of English Verse, Sidney Godolphin might have agreed with them.

Loyalty and Locality focuses even more sharply than Underdown’s Revel, Riot and Rebellion on available sources of information about allegiance. Stoyle studies lists of “maimed soldiers” - those eligible to claim a pension from one side or the other; taxation returns - which JPs consistently failed to collect; impositions such as Ship Money; recruitment rolls - who joined the local posse comitatus and who refused. Then he plots them parish by parish. He collects precise local information about which parishes retained the traditionalist practice of raising money through “church-ales”; which protected their church furniture and stained glass; which towns, such as the Stanneries, had peculiar privileges granted by one side or the other.

Thus the second strand of the UnderdownStoyle thesis is proved: not only did ordinary individuals have the capacity to make principled choices but differing patterns of choice can be discerned within neighbouring areas of a single county. These may be linked with topography, trading opportunities, exposure to advanced Puritanism or change in agrarian practice. Stoyle is too scrupulous in pointing out exceptions for such localism to become an alternative determinism. His study reveals an interesting and convincing “ecology” of allegiance.

Something similar could have been attempted in Jane Cox’s survey of London’s East End - an area rich both in sociological interest and in robustly independent working class people. An ecology of the East End - yes. Jane Cox’s parish by parish approach is promising but suffers from an unease of tone which is perhaps exemplified by the attempt to sanitise the description “working-class” by encasing it in speech marks.

Some individual case-histories are colourfully exhumed from court records.Their impact is diminished by a broad-brush approach that does not hesitate to describe gatherings of East End people as “spell-bound” (three times) or “open-mouthed”. London’s East End is copiously and attractively illustrated. The accessibility of its text, however, is diminished by cramped type, shoddy editing and some irritating design features. Jane Cox’s scholarly achievement may be more fairly judged by her work in progress, provisionally entitled London’s Backyard and to be published by Juliet Gardiner books.