Afterword : landscapes, memories and texts.

This volume forms a powerful antidote to the view that human life is determined by apparently impersonal forces such as price movements and demographics. Rather, it represents a decisive statement as to the political agency and cultural creativity of working people over five hundred years of English history. Throughout, the radical imagination is at work. Memory appears as politicised: detailed examples of early modern commoners and nineteenth-century radicals mustering memories of earlier struggles in the legitimation of their own conflicts demonstrate the point