The outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt in the summer of 1381 was arguably the most serious threat ever posed to the stability of English government in the course of the Middle Ages. All historians are agreed that government policy was in large part responsible for the rising. The failure of the crown to maintain its hold over territory in France and to defend the coasts of England, the tendency to bow to pressure from the landed classes and restrict the economic and legal rights of the peasantry, and the outrageous and inequitable taxes of the 1370s, culminating in the commissions to enforce the poll tax in the spring of 1381, all these factors combined to provoke a widespread and perhaps coordinated outbreak of rebellion in southeast England, as well as many more spontaneous and isolated revolts in the West, the Midlands, and the North. Not surprisingly, in most areas the rebellion was directed principally against the agents of the crown. The young Richard II may have been immune from attack, but this only served to increase criticism of his ministers and agents, who were believed to have usurped royal authority and abused the trust placed in them by king and community.

Considering the dramatic events surrounding this assault on royal government and the wealth of material available in the chronicles and the official records, it is surprising that so few historians have examined the specific question of how administration was affected during and after the events of 1381.

Under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts the English developed a relationship to time—current time within the cycle of the year and historical time with reference to the past—that set them apart from the rest of early modern Europe. All countries followed a calendar that was rooted in the rhythms of ancient Europe and that marked the passage of time by reference to the life of Christ and his saints. But only in England was this traditional calendar of Christian holidays augmented by special days honoring the Protestant monarch and the ordeals and deliverances of the national church. In addition to regulating the seasons of work and worship, the calendar in England served as a reminder of the nation's distinctiveness, of God's mercies, and of England's particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Other Protestant communities, most notably the Dutch, enjoyed a comparable myth of historical exceptionalism—a replay of the Old Testament—but no other nation employed the calendar as the English did to express and represent their identity. Early modern England, in this regard, had more in common with modern America, France, or Australia (with Independence Day, Bastille Day, Australia Day, etc.), than with the rest of post-Reformation Europe.

This article deals with changes in calendar consciousness and annual festive routines in Elizabethan and Stuart England. It examines the rise of Protestant patriotism, and the shaping of a national political culture whose landmarks were royal anniversaries, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, and commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot. It opens a discussion on the vocabulary of celebration and the degree to which festivity was sponsored and orchestrated in the interest of national consolidation or partisan position. And it will show how calendrical observances that at first helped unite the crown and nation became contentious, politicized, and divisive.

Significant change in the relationships between rulers, elites, and political authority is a common feature of the major European states in the last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. In Russia, under Peter III and Catherine II, the nobility was released from the obligation to serve the state as established by Peter the Great and allowed to own property, engage in trade and manufacturing, and participate in local assemblies. In the course of the nineteenth century the hereditary landowning nobility, particularly the wealthiest elements of it, became firmly entrenched in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy without ever being able to dominate it. In Prussia, under Frederick the Great and Frederick William III, noble and gentry landowners were allowed to filter into the ranks, especially the higher ranks, of the bureaucracy; this reversed the embourgeoisement that had occurred under Frederick William I, but not so far as to threaten seriously the bureaucracy's loyalty to the Hohenzollerns or to weaken its reputation for efficiency. Thus the great reforms that followed the defeat by France in 1807 and were designed in part to lay the basis for recovery were executed by a combination of noble and non noble officials, and the latter were especially encouraged in order to ensure that merit rather than birth prevailed as the qualification for state service. In both cases, it could be argued, rulers found it necessary to recruit officials as well as an officer corps from the landed classes when war and territorial aggrandizement expanded the scope of government; they were loath to encourage the idea that landed wealth could automatically bestow political authority.