On 4 September 1537, Sir Thomas Wharton wrote Thomas Cromwell triumphantly proclaiming the Tudor triumph in the north of England. “In the late Lord Dacre's day,” Wharton declared, “there was a cry of ‘A Dacre, a Dacre,’ and afterward, ‘A Clifford, a Clifford,’ and even then, ‘A Dacre, a Dacre.’ Now [there is] only ‘A King, a King.’” In addition to proclaiming royal supremacy in the north, Wharton also was noting a pattern of persistent change in officeholding in the far north, from Dacre to Clifford, and back to the Dacres. The shifts of fortune among the northern nobility under the Tudors have received considerable attention from scholars. Most importantly, Mervyn James has argued for a gradual Tudor revolution in the north, in which the government slowly replaced traditional noble elites with royal appointees. In several case studies Richard Hoyle has challenged James's interpretation of the behavior of particular nobles, and George Bernard has mounted an often persuasive jeremiad against James and others who have seen an essential conflict during the Tudor period between Crown and nobility. Both Hoyle and Bernard question James' assumption of a natural hostility between king and nobility, arguing, in Hoyle's words, for a relationship that “operated to their mutual and reciprocal benefits.

Between 1839 and 1848, the government and legal authorities in England and Wales were confronted with a popular movement of unprecedented size and energy. The numbers involved in active protest and in actual or potential disorder were much greater, and they were diffused over a wider geographical area and longer timespan, than any other protest movement up to recent times. Many departments of the political and legal system were engaged at some level in dealing with Chartist activity, from the Crown and Home Office to the local magistrates and special constables.

In 1839 committals for protest crimes comprised 5 percent of all committals to the assizes and quarter sessions. The figures for 1842 and 1848 were 7.5 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. In some areas the percentage was much higher. Committals for indictable riotous offenses in Lancashire in 1842 totaled 12 percent of all committals, and those in Staffordshire 19.5 percent. Nearly 2,000 Chartists were committed for trial at the assizes alone. About four times that number passed through the lower courts. Just under 90 percent of Chartists tried at the assizes were convicted.

Mid-nineteenth century elections in England's small towns were vividly described in contemporary fiction. For example, Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers included the Eatanswill contest in which a bucolic exuberance among voters rendered irrelevant the political differences between candidates Slumkey and Fizkin. Who could blame the enfranchised mob for their behavior during polling when “Excisable articles were remarkably cheap at all the public houses,” producing an epidemic of dizziness “under which they [the voters] might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility.” Following his bitter experience in unsuccessfully contesting Beverley in East Yorkshire, one of the Eatanswills of the sixties, Anthony Trollope parodied the election in Ralph the Heir when he took his readers to Percycross, where the Conservative Sir Thomas Underwood managed to edge out Ontario Moggs, the radical bootmaker. Similarly, at Trollope's Silverbridge (in The Prime Minister), the levers of the “Castle” interest had long been pulled by the ironmonger Sprugeon and the cork sole maker Sprout, issues and principles apparently being of peripheral importance.