The counties and the country: Some thoughts on seventeenth‐century historiography∗

In the historiography of seventeenth-century England, the Crisis of the Aristocracy and the Crisis of Parliaments have been followed close on by the crisis of historians.1 A proliferation of county studies in the last two decades has altered our awareness of the importance of the world beyond Westminster and Whitehall, but this needed expansion of our horizons has also confounded our understanding of the causes of the English Civil War and the English Revolution.2 The difficulties of incorporating evidence drawn from local rather than from central sources and focused on economic and social rather than strictly political changes have heightened disharmony among students of a field long famous for its controversies. Any brief characterization of the disagreements between 'revisionist' and 'nonrevisionist' historians risks caricature, but most of the conflicts concentrate on one or more of three questions: (i) Was the outbreak of war in i 642 a natural continuation of a disillusionment that can be traced back at least to the I620S or was the fighting born of more limited and fortuitous circumstances? (2) Did allegiances in the war and later turn upon ideological principles, or upon local