David Rollison’s exploration of half a millennium of English social and constitutional history makes multiple references to modern American, British, and Australian political culture. Its origins in teaching at the University of Western Sydney are made clear in the introduction, which also meditates on the origins and fate of egalitarian ideas and plebeian movements. This is a history to be used, like paving stones at a barricade, in the ongoing struggle for commonwealth principles. The words “commonwealth,” “common weal,” and “commonalty” are poked, parsed, and pursued through several centuries of contentious usage. The main inference seems to be that we have been robbed of a populist or communitarian past by royalist and reactionary elements and that historians have been complicit in misreading both medieval and early modern history. Australian anxiety about their identity as a “commonwealth” does not seem to be echoed in Massachusetts, Kentucky, or Virginia.

Rollinson’s periodization announces his contention that the centuries between the Norman Conquest and the execution of Charles I should be understood in terms of recurrence rather than fundamental change. The community and the state have always been in conflict, communal interests have always driven elite politics, and commonwealth voices have always struggled to be heard. The long catalog of risings and rebellions, of which 1381, 1450, 1549 and 1642 are only the best known, reveal recurrent breakdown of order and consensus within a turbulent social system. They all exhibit the mobilization of an insurgent commonalty, energized by a plebeian public sphere, offering correctives to abuse of power. Charles I, we are reminded, was the fifth English monarch since Magna Carta to be deposed and killed by his subjects, and almost every reign faced dissidence, resistance, or rebellion.

One of the most provocative claims of this book is that “most of the themes and structures that shaped English history from the fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries were present by the end of 1327” (63). The early modern era had a very early start. England’s long social revolution was already under way by the reign of Edward II, with an articulate commons, a common vernacular, a national system of traffic and exchange, and traditions of challenge to royal tyranny. The heroes of this recovered narrative are the unnamed tenants, artisans, yeomen, and tradesmen who stood up for fairness and good governance, and who sometimes pressed their lords to challenge or confront the king. Its most articulate theorists and commentators included John of Salisbury, William Langland, Sir John Fortescue, William Tyndale, and Sir Thomas Smith, against whom Rollinson sets authoritarian snobs like Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Thomas More, and Thomas Hobbes.

The Lollards appear here as proto-Levellers, rather than sacramental critics, and lead to a distinctively English reformation tradition. They helped shape a popular, populist, vernacular commonweal ideology that owed little to classical republicanism. Rather than trickling down from elite commentators, commonwealth ideas flowed up from the humble people. Growing in agency and independency, the commonalty inspired rebellion and resistance until social polarization eventually sapped it of its force. Only when propertied commoners sided with the ruling class, and the poor became proletarian, did this radical tradition come to an end. Only when the state superseded the commonwealth, as it apparently did by force in 1649, did this phase of English history conclude.

This is an ambitious, opinionated, and provocative ride of a book. It would have benefited from a strong editor, though that might have reduced its raw fecundity. It builds on wide reading in primary and secondary sources and is laden with discursive footnotes (yes, footnotes) but lacks a bibliography. Rollinson cannot resist the concatenation of ideas, and some pages glitter with celebrity citations. On one page, for example, we have Shakespeare and Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Marx, Copernicus and Einstein, John Bossy and Bernard Crick, all connected to discussion of social order in Elizabethan England. A few pages later we have Brecht, Schweik, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Spike Milligan, and Monty Python to help decide whether Shakespeare in Coriolanus is being funny. Appearances elsewhere by Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Jürgen Habermas, and E. P. Thompson help move the argument along.

Part 1, on “the emergent community,” explores the origins of a constitutional landscape and the triumph of Middle English. Part 2, on popular resistance and rebellion, reviews populist insurgency from 1327 to 1549. Part 3, on “the English explosion,” shows how trade became an affair of state and how the Hakluyts, old and new, ordered information on behalf of a thrusting imperial economy. Part 4, “The Empowered Community,” deals in a somewhat labored way with Coriolanus and closes with a bravura evocation of the English revolution. The book ends abruptly after 464 pages, and readers may wonder, what happened to popular energies after 1649 when Rollison’s “age of commonweal” was over?