David Rollison’s study of medieval and early modern Cirencester had its genesis during an archives visit back in 1979. While working on another project, Rollison came across an extraordinary record of mortality in the parish registers of Gloucestershire and vowed to return to this material when time allowed. Now, after many decades and intervening projects, he has fulfilled that promise. The result is a strongly argued book that can be read as a microhistorical companion to the author’s recent A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution (Cambridge, 2010). Animated by ideas similar to those set out in the larger work, Rollison here embarks on a local study of what he sees as the enduring conflict between collective forms of authority (the “commonwealth” of the title) and rule from above by self-interested outsiders. Across the five centuries covered by Commune, Country and Commonwealth, Rollison maintains that residents repeatedly articulated and acted on a concept of “popular sovereignty” (2) according to which everyone, but especially the rich and powerful, was expected to work in the interests of the common good.

The story begins with Henry I’s foundation of the Augustinian abbey of St. Mary in 1117. The introduction of this new manorial overlord launched a struggle between frequently obstreperous abbots and the community that ran all the way to the dissolution of the monasteries seven Henrys later. But the larger conflict did not end there. After a period of uncertainty in the mid-sixteenth century, “the phoenix of communal governance” (9) reappeared in the 1570s and remained active right up to the outbreak of war in the 1640s. Civil War historiographers should note the implication here that the origins of that seventeenth-century conflict lay deep in the past, going back not just to the social and religious disruptions of the Tudor era but all the way to the arrival of the Normans in the central Middle Ages—truly a long-term explanation.

One task facing Rollison is identifying the enemies of communalism after the dissolution of the abbey. Apparently there were many, but the reader has to pick carefully through the text to gather them all. They included the “survivalist Catholic” regime of Robert Strange (former bailiff of the abbey); the vaguely defined but colorfully described “rich” of Philip Jones’s fiery 1580s sermons (“no better then greedie dogs” with “their proud conceits, their voluptuous desires, their prophane epicurisme” [144]); Arminian clergy, such as Benedict Grace, appointed from without; and magnates with no interest in the commonwealth, such as the Brydges, lords Chandos of Sudeley. The scattered entry of these post-Reformation opponents of communal government is in part a result of the chronological organization of the material—each enters at a different point in the narrative. But it also reflects Rollison’s far greater interest in the communal side of the story. Even the medieval abbots are shadowy figures, popping up every century or so to perpetrate acts of physical or economic violence against the residents. Of the post-Reformation figures, only Strange gets much individual attention.

Rollison’s treatment of the outpouring of pious donations directed to the parish church in the fifteenth century provides the focus for the book’s longest chapter. Historians of the late Middle Ages are, of course, well acquainted with the evidence for parish-centered piety. Testators showered their churches with donations for lights, images, altars, and chantry foundations right into the 1520s, and church rebuilding took place at a brisk pace throughout the century preceding the Reformation. R. N. Swanson, Eamon Duffy, and others have used this evidence to argue for a vigorous Catholic piety on the eve of the Reformation. Rollison does not disagree, and even cites Duffy, but he offers a different interpretive emphasis. In the local context of fraught relations with the abbey, he sees the Cirencester donations as a thumb stuck firmly in the abbot’s eye. The construction of a new church tower, completed in 1415, stands at the center of this argument as it coincided with the abbot’s successful efforts to quash the town’s guild merchant—an important institutional expression of community. According to Rollison, frustrated Cirencestrians began putting their energy into the creation of a “people’s church” (66), building the aforementioned tower; using their wills to fill the building with prayer, candles, and song; and reconstructing the nave. In Rollison’s view, this “religious revolution” (65) was both a direct challenge to the abbot and a testament to residents’ vibrant communal spirit. Such a narrative of resistance, appealing as it might be, does beg some questions. Is it important that the church tower, as an architectural response to the demise of the guild merchant, was begun before the guild merchant was founded and completed about the same time that the guild was forced to disband? Did the fifteenth-century abbots respond in any way to the religious expressions of community thrown up next to their abbey? Do any of the testators invoke the language of community in their bequests? If not, how are we to differentiate the politically charged donations at Cirencester from similar bequests in other communities?

The finest parts of this richly detailed book are devoted to social analysis, particularly in two areas: discussions of wealth, occupation, and status from the fourteenth century forward and accounts of the high mortality and immigration that marked the town’s late sixteenth-century history. Worthy of special note are chapters 10 and 13, which use the evidence of parish registers, a muster roll, a probate inventory, and other documents to examine the topic that had first grabbed Rollison’s attention back in 1979—mortality. The picture he draws here of a small community beset by repeated waves of death and replenished by an astonishing influx of new residents should be read by all historians of early modern England, regardless of subfield or interest in eastern Gloucestershire.