Historians and literary scholars have long agreed that the rate of change in English society in the seventeenth century was so great that only the label “revolution” can do justice to its magnitude. For the past hundred years, most historians who have written about the political upheavals of the middle decades of the century, for example, have taken it for granted that these events constituted a “revolution.” Indeed, the custom of referring to the political turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660 as the “English Revolution” is so established that many scholars would deny that they are relying upon an assumption at all, but would insist that they are simply stating an obvious fact. After 1660, most scholars agree, England's political and constitutional practices and presuppositions were fundamentally different from what they had been before 1640. The permanence of the change, combined with the extraordinary character of political events during the Interregnum, makes the label “revolution” the obvious and appropriate one.