The failure of Charles I's political authority has long been a central focus for historians of seventeenth-century England. Library shelves are lined with books on the topic, and conferences never want for a paper or panel on the coming of the Civil War. In what might otherwise be considered a congested historiographical field, Daniel C. Beaver's Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War is not likely to get lost in the crowd.

There are several factors that make Beaver's book immediately interesting. Foremost among these is the creative source material at the book's core. Hunting and the Politics of Violence stands apart from other books on the coming of the Civil War because it focuses on a series of microhistorical case studies, each involving a violent contest over land use, animal husbandry, and hunting rights. As Beaver demonstrates, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century forests, parks, and chases were hardly neutral political spaces, nor was the hunting that happened in them. Rather, forests and hunting were part of a symbolic and performative power relationship between the English crown and England's nobility in the early modern period. In each of the book's four central case studies, Beaver argues that violence over forest lands, forest usage, and hunting rights was also a matter of political discourse, part of a conversation about royal authority, traditions of rights and privileges, and an emergent conversation about the nature of a forest “commonwealth.”

Beaver's is a book that argues for the significance of extraparliamentary politics, which the book locates in the novel setting of England's forests, parks, and chases. More important, though, Beaver's arguments challenge historians to think about power and politics as broadly social and cultural phenomena. Because of his respect for the forest as a political space and hunting as a symbolically political activity, Beaver is able to see significant political importance in what might otherwise have been overlooked as localized episodes of public violence. Debates about forest usage were, Beaver demonstrates, articulated in terms of rights and liberties long before 1642. To be clear, Beaver is not making the claim that contests over forest rights specifically involved “a choice between crown and commonwealth,” but he does want to argue that these localized standoffs reveal a great deal about “the longterm processes of political negotiation and change.” They were, he posits, “integral to the formation of an informed, activist political society” (2–3).

The second achievement of this book is Beaver's detailed archival research. In his acknowledgments, Beaver admits that Hunting and the Politics of Violence was not the book he set out to write. “This book began,” Beaver notes in his first sentence, “as a study of gifts and their meanings in early modern England” (ix). But as the archives kept turning up gift exchanges centered on venison, Beaver turned his attention to deer, hunting, and the social and cultural meaning of “the circulation of venison” (ix). The book's central case studies, then, emerged from the questions that Beaver formed as the archives themselves changed his project, and each of the cases is as interesting as it is meticulously researched.

Despite the strength of Beaver's archival work, the book's microhistorical format is not without its limitations. By Beaver's own admission, his efforts to chart the meaning of hunting and forests in local contexts have produced “a certain loss of breadth” (14). Hunting and the Politics of Violence is at its best when it is focused on what Beaver calls “forest politics.” The book's second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters—each with its specific case study—could each stand alone as worthy, well-researched, and sharply argued essays in local history. To pull these essays apart, though, would be to lose sight of important, macrolevel political developments.

The key to this book, then, is the collective force of the four microhistorical chapters coupled with the book's first chapter, entitled “Blood, Sacrifice, and Order: The Meanings of the Forest and Hunt in Culture, Politics, and Society.” It is in this first chapter that Beaver provides the political, social, cultural, and ideological meanings of forest spaces and of hunting itself, and it is this same insight that sustains Beaver's subsequent claims about the relationship between localized forest violence in early seventeenth-century England and the eventual failure of the Stuart regime's political authority. Analytically, this first chapter is the most important in the book, but its impact is diluted. “Blood, Sacrifice, and Order” is preceded by an introduction that really only serves to displace the chapter's introductory status. “Blood, Sacrifice, and Order” is neither an introduction nor is it one of this book's case studies, but it is far too important a chapter to be allowed to float as it seems to do.

More important, this book's first chapter—the intellectual key that unlocks the deeper meaning of the subsequent microhistories—gives us reason to believe that microhistory is not, after all, the most suitable structure for this book. Hunting and the Politics of Violence highlights the specific local context of its four case studies in chapters 2–5, but these microhistories all find broader historical meaning in Beaver's analysis of the meaning of hunting and forest culture in the first chapter. One might argue that Beaver has unnecessarily favored local and microhistories here at the expense of breadth. Indeed, the specificity of local cases might have been even more pronounced had they been set against a more comprehensive central narrative.

Hunting and the Politics of Violence is not a perfect book, but it is a valuable one. By taking seriously the meaning of underappreciated spaces and understudied practices, Beaver has demonstrated that the breakdown of Stuart authority in the first half of the seventeenth century was not a sudden phenomenon. Rather, Stuart authority was shattered in small ways and in unexpected places when local tensions over local matters empowered a politically active civil society.