Tim Thornton. Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480-1560. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000. xii + 320 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-86193-248-1.
Reviewed by Ethan H. Shagan (Department of History, Northwestern University)
Published on H-Albion (December, 2002)
Tim Thornton's new book is a detailed study of the administration and politics of the palatinate of Cheshire in the early Tudor period, an era usually imagined as a time of unprecedented national centralization under Henry VII, Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, and other Tudor administrators. Thornton argues that in fact Tudor administrators sought to negotiate with Cheshire through its traditional institutions of political independence rather than trying to eliminate those institutions, while Cheshire politicians used those same institutions to negotiate with the royal court rather than merely to preserve their autonomy. Hence Thornton concludes that "the stresses of the sixteenth century, religious, political, social and economic, meant that the Cheshire palatinate of 1500 emerged in 1560 adapted but not radically transformed, still less completely destroyed" (p. 14).
The book is divided into three roughly equal sections. Part 1 considers the traditional political conditions of the Cheshire palatinate and the ways in which they maintained a high level of local independence. These conditions include the sorts of social relationships that have often been discussed in "county-community" studies, but also include more unique institutions like the Chester mise, council, and exchequer, mechanisms which did not exist in most English counties. Part 2 considers relationships between Cheshire and Westminster, and Thornton questions the ability (and desire) of the royal government to extend its courts, laws, and officers into the palatinate. Part 3 puts these political realities into motion, showing how they evolved in the context of the Tudor "revolution in government" and the Reformation.
One of the most satisfying aspects of this book is that it has shown through a highly detailed local study that traditional arguments about Tudor centralization--generally associated with Geoffrey Elton--have been wrong to see the relationship between center and locality as a purely competitive one. In fact, in a pre-bureaucratic era, the royal government depended upon local intermediaries to implement its policies, and hence centralization was almost always a process of negotiation rather than domination. Local institutions could become more powerful through their alliances with the crown, while the crown could gain power in the locality through its alliance with those local institutions. This symbiosis has recently been described in synthetic, national studies by Steve Hindle and Michael Braddick, but it is exciting and reassuring to see it echoed here in such a thoroughly researched monograph.
Another very pleasing aspect of this book is that despite its neo-Eltonian subject and generally very traditional framework for understanding politics, Thornton is not afraid to use the sorts of literary and cultural sources that were largely absent from Elton's repertory. So, for instance, Thornton uses Cheshire manuscripts depicting the foundation of the palatinate to show its continued sense of political independence, and he describes how symbols of power and authority functioned in local rituals. This sort of acknowledgement that politics is a subjective process rather than merely a battle between modernizing and anti-modernizing forces marks a significant advancement from traditional county studies.
Perhaps the only major question that this book leaves unanswered is just how far Cheshire can be considered typical of Tudor developments as a whole. Thornton of course cannot be blamed for this omission, since he set out to write a local study and fulfilled his brief admirably. But because Cheshire was both a semi-independent jurisdiction and a county far from the political center, the reader is left wondering whether Thornton's model is intended to contribute to the arguments for local autonomy throughout England put forward by Reformation historians like Christopher Haigh, or whether it is intended to contribute to the literature on the Tudor periphery and imperialism exemplified by Steven Ellis. Overall, I think it works for the latter considerably better than it works for the former. Thornton shows, for instance, that in Cheshire the massive land transfers of the Reformation era did not result in an influx of new families but rather benefitted native Cheshire families and institutions. Clearly this had a remarkable effect on how the palatinate received and responded to the Reformation as a whole, but it was in no way typical of other counties, even in the North. The overall message of the book, then, seems to be not that England failed to experience the centralizing and bureaucratizing processes described half a century ago by Geoffrey Elton, but rather that those processes were not as incompatible with traditional politics as Elton believed.
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Citation:
Ethan H. Shagan. Review of Thornton, Tim, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480-1560.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6982
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