David Rollison is an independent scholar and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (1992).

• Preface: points of departure; Introduction: an uncommon tradition; Part I. The Emergent Commonalty: 1. What came before: antecedent structures and emergent themes; 2. The formation of a constitutional landscape, c. 1159–1327; 3. The power of a common language; Part II. Accumulating a Tradition: Popular Resistance and Rebellion, 1327–1549: 4. Discords, quarrels and factions of the commonalty: an ensemble of popular demands, 1328–81; 5. The spectre of commonalty: popular rebellion and the commonweal, 1381–1549; Part III. The English Explosion: 6. How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640; 7. Touching the wires: industry and empire; Part IV. The Empowered Community: 8. 'The first pace that is sick': the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus; 9. 'Boiling hot with questions': the English Revolution and the parting of the ways.

'Ranging across language, landscape, politics, poetry and literature, David Rollison provides an important and powerful history of the development of pre-modern England. A Commonwealth of the People is a fascinating account of the development of the politics of 'commonweal': how, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the voices of common people became both 'English' and 'communal'. In its scope and imagination, this is an exemplary work of socio-cultural history, both deeply reflective on the process of doing history, and profoundly engaged with the historical landscape it seeks to uncover.' John Arnold, Professor of Medieval History, Birkbeck College