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‘The Old Leaven’: The Welsh Roundheads after 1660*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Philip Jenkins
Philip Jenkins
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

Like other areas central to the royalist cause, Wales experienced a social and political revolution between about 1648 and 1660. In every county except Pembrokeshire, only a small minority of the traditional ruling families had supported the parliamentary side before 1645, and even fewer accepted the radical solutions proposed after 1648, or during the extremist revival of 1659. As a result, governments during the ‘radical’ periods had to turn to new social groups to administer these recalcitrant areas, and to supervise their conversion to puritanism and republican loyalty. The radicals in county society can normally be identified from their participation in local government in such periods (1649–53, 1659) although this is not an infallible guide, and appointment to a committee did not necessarily mean active service. If we compare the lists of justices, sequestration commissioners and committee men for, say, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Radnorshire, then in each case we find that about thirty or forty names consistently appear during radical periods. In Pembrokeshire these were mainly drawn from the traditional rulers who had supported parliament in 1642, while the ‘radicals’ of Carmarthenshire were broadly the socially conservative followers of the powerful earl of Carbery, the old royalist leader who won and retained the favour of Cromwell. In Radnorshire by contrast, the committees for these years contained a very strong radical element, from families often not hitherto represented in county government. Of about thirty-three men whose radicalism is suggested by their periods in office, at least seven were not only strong republicans, but also followers of the millenarian Vavasor Powell, who loyally supported the Rump and the Barebones experiment, and plotted against Cromwell. Moreover, it was Radnorshire which was representative of Welsh counties in the 1650s, while the two south-western shires were exceptional in their preservation of gentry continuity in government.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 807 - 823
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

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