On June 16, in the midst of the disturbances at Cambridge during the Rising of 1381, a woman named Margery Starre was said to have tossed the ashes of burnt documents to the winds, crying as she did so, “away with the learning of clerks! away with it!” The story of this woman's violence against texts is not unknown—it has been noted several times in major studies of the revolt—but its significance as part of the much larger story of women in 1381 has been overlooked.

Instances of women's participation appear in the judicial records, chronicles, and poetry produced in the decade following the revolt. These texts depict women as independent leaders and maintainers of rebel bands, as instigators of others' violence, and as accomplices with their family members in criminal acts. They also “participated” as victims: women were assaulted, abducted, and threatened with death, and their property was frequently stolen or destroyed. Despite the evidence, and despite the recent and widespread interest of medievalists in both social history and feminist studies, women's roles in the revolt have gone largely unexamined. In this initial sense, the women constitute an imaginary component of their society: overlooked and ignored by the scholarship, their presence in 1381 is assumed to be unreal. From the absence of study comes the absence of women in history.

But we should not be so surprised to “discover” women in 1381, since earlier and later medieval collective actions feature women either in active roles or functioning as symbols of insurrection.

Let us begin with two scenes of intimate violence. First, consider a man, a woman, and three male “guests” in a well-furnished locked room. Suddenly one of the men strikes the host, and another stabs him, and he falls to the floor. At this moment the woman steps forward (she had previously tried to poison him), seizes the knife, and plunges it home, crying, “Take this for hind'ring Mosby's love and mine.” Alice Arden, with the help of her new lover, a servant, and his avaricious accomplices, has murdered her landowner husband. So climaxes Arden of Feversham, a powerful play (frequently attributed to Shakespeare) first performed in 1592 and based upon an actual murder that took place in 1551. This murder “assumed an almost totemic significance in early modern culture,” reappearing in a great variety of forms over the following century (even as a puppet show), with Alice, among other things, ranked with the classical uxoricides Clytemnestra and Livia.

Consider another scene, set several centuries later: this is a starker setting, only two figures in a bare and shabby room. A ragged woman is pleading with her lover for her life, and she is urging him that it is not too late for both to repent of their former lives. Her lover, a fierce and powerful man, stands over her, nostrils dilated, grasping a pistol. Fearful of being heard, he does not fire, but instead strikes her twice with the handle, then seizes a heavy club and beats her down.

In recent years scholars have paid considerable attention to the problem of British identity and “Britishness.” Britishness and, for that matter, Englishness or Scottishness, are all, of course, impossible to quantify in any exact manner. While regional identities obviously persisted after 1707, this persistence did not preclude the construction of a national identity, a core set of “British” values that most people in Britain could agree represented them and their success as a commercial, industrial, and imperial power. In the press, popular fiction, and political dialogue, “British” was understood to stand for certain qualities, among them earnestness, prosperity, manliness, freedom, character, and civilization. These were the qualities used to contrast, compare, and find Britain superior to almost every nation and people in the world, especially Ireland and the British colonies.

This contrast has been central to scholarship on British identity, most notably Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Playing on Benedict Anderson's idea of an “imagined community,” Colley portrays Britain as an invented nation brought together primarily by confrontation with the French Catholic Other over the course of a century of near perpetual warfare. Britons came to define themselves as a single people “not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.” While a number of works seeking to modify, challenge, or even refute Colley have followed, most scholars concur that Englishness (or Britishness) was based above all on comparison with others, especially the Catholic French.

From its very foundation, most observers considered the ideas that motivated the British Labour Party to have been essentially empirical. As early as 1929 the German social democrat Egon Wertheimer famously remarked that, unlike his own party, Labour was “completely unencumbered by philosophy, theory and general views of life.” Over sixty years later, this opinion was endorsed by an academic survey of European social democracy that concluded that the party possessed a uniquely “practical brand of ideology.” Labour's apparent peculiarity is conventionally explained with reference to its historic role as the political arm of the British trade union movement and the privileged place held by members of the organized working class within party institutions. This intimate association supposedly gave rise to “Labourism,” characterized by many as a myopic preoccupation with the defense of male industrial workers' material interests. Labour's strong union link is also thought to have promoted a dominant “ethos” that directly reflected the proletarian experience of exploitation. Only in the 1970s, after many working-class members had left and been replaced by more bourgeois and marxist-inclined recruits, did scholars suppose that Labour became, albeit temporarily, more overtly doctrinaire.

In challenging this entrenched view of Labour thought, the present article focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which began with the lifting of the last vestiges of wartime austerity and ended just before the onset of a world recession. These years have now assumed the glow of, as Eric Hobsbawm has put it, “a sort of Golden Age.”