There are few periods in British and Irish history that can begin to match the horror of the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The human cost of the conflict—over half a million deaths, thousands maimed and bereaved, regional economies devastated—was exacerbated by the cultural shock of the Regicide. Religious and ideological divisions became wider, deeper, and considerably more bitter as the execution of Charles I was followed by the abolition of the monarchy and concerted attempts to replace it with a godly republic. The constitutional experiments conceived by the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes were imposed on a skeptical English population and then more forcibly on the rest of the British Isles. From 1660 onward, the demise of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy was habitually portrayed as proof that there was a divinely inspired “natural” order to politics and society. For over three centuries, mainstream histories, invariably predicated on high politics, tended to reinforce the impression that the vast majority of the population had greeted the return of political and social stability with joyful enthusiasm and relief. Religious nonconformists were seen as a marginalized minority, politically conservative and overwhelmingly quietist, while the few surviving political radicals were assumed to have been chased into exile or cowed into silence. Since the 1980s, this teleological narrative has been revised and problematized by successive waves of historians, not least those such as Tim Harris, who have widened the scope of Restoration history to encompass a social history of politics at the level of the local community. This has enabled historians such as Richard L. Greaves to demonstrate that the return of the ancien régime was not universally welcome. There was considerable residual affection for the parliamentarian cause, and even a degree of nostalgia for the late Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Edward Legon has shown in this monograph that he is not only a beneficiary of the general movement to revise the history of the period but also a significant contributor whose work provides a pointer to the future direction of Restoration historiography. Indeed, in the book's concluding chapter, Legon indicates several exciting avenues for further exploration.

Revolution Remembered answers the call for a “social history of politics,” and in so doing provides a perfect counterpoint to works such as Matthew Neufeld's The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (2013) and Erin Peters's Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture 1658–1667 (2017). Where Neufeld and Peters focus on the literate culture of the period, Legon delves into the murky world beneath the elite. His argumentation is aided by a sure grasp of the primary source material and the wider theoretical literature relating to the field of memory studies. In attempting to recover the social memories and views of a wide range of the middling and poorer sorts, Legon reveals a far more fragmented nation than that suggested by the traditional narrative. It is clear from the utterings of artisans such as the Yorkshire knife maker George Parkin, “wee were better without a King then with one” (81), that having been citizens of a Commonwealth, a significant proportion of the population were unhappy at being expected to revert to the status of mere subjects. Revolution Remembered shows exactly why Restoration institutions such the county Lieutenancy took a far greater interest in the activities of ordinary people than in previous periods. Justices and deputy lieutenants were right to be watchful for signs of sedition, disaffection, and nostalgia for the Commonwealth and Protectorate, for the civil wars had rendered public opinion far more significant than hitherto. Again and again, Legon reinforces Greaves's contention that Restoration historians cannot afford to discount plebeian murmurings of discontent as white noise. In this respect, the material in this book provides a useful context to more familiar historical sources such as the diary of Samuel Pepys, who, after the Medway disaster of 1667, fretted about the adverse opinions of “the silly people” (Pepys's diary, June 12, 1667).

Chapter 8 is particularly interesting in revealing seditious memories across generations, and how alternative concepts of government, and desires for a more equitable and just society, were transmitted and nurtured. The chapter on Scotland and Ireland rightly draws attention to the need for historians of the Civil Wars and Restoration to encompass the whole of the Stuarts’ composite realm, and the fact that seditious memories and opinions were just as prevalent in the Celtic nations as they were in England. That said, this chapter is clearly something of a reconnaissance, and there is much more work to be done on the complex issues raised. It would have been good to have seen some consideration of seditious memories in Wales, and possibly the islands and colonies around the Atlantic rim. The relative paucity of material relating to the views of those at the lower ends of society in Scotland and Ireland is paralleled by the scarcity of women's voices in the monograph—a limitation which Legon recognizes in his conclusion (203). This raises a methodological problem that has bedeviled historians since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: that the opinions of ordinary people can normally be viewed through the prism of authority; as Renato Rosaldo pointed out in his criticism of Ladurie's reconstruction of the medieval community of Montaillou, evidence of this nature is invariably preserved within a context of domination (“From the Door of His Tent: The Field Worker and the Inquisitor,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus [1984].) In the case of Revolution Remembered, the contexts of domination are most often legal records such as Quarter Sessions rolls and Assize records. However, such limitations aside, the project has certainly resulted in a valuable piece of scholarship, and Legon has used the available materials with sensitivity and verve. There is much to commend Revolution Remembered, and it will be an influential addition to the historiography of the Restoration.