Leech finders, The Costume of Yorkshire, George Walker (1814) CREDIT: Science Museum Group ©.

Common people used to be people of the commons. Leah Gordon & Stephen Ellcock with additional writing by Annabel Edwards, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance (Watkins: London 2025) explain this in such a lovely book. It brings together word and picture. Of the 240 pages there is scarcely an image-less page and no image without good speech quoted along with. I will say something about each but first overall on this the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ Revolt the book is introduced by images of Albrecht Dürer’s “Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.”

At the foundation of the column are sheep, pigs, and cattle then arising from the base a basket of eggs and another of bread, followed by implements of cultivation – the flail, the pitchfork, and spade, then a sheaf of grain, a butter churn, a chicken coop, and finally the dejected figure of the seated peasant with his head in his hands, and a knife in his back. The earthly plenty, the peaceable kingdom, good food, and the symbols of happy life have been ruined to near extinction by the class war. Likewise, these are the two moral poles in every word and every image, namely, human collective creativity with and in the land and abiding clear-sighted anger against the powers that hoard it to themselves. The two feelings are held in balance succumbing neither to amnesia nor to nostalgia.

After this introduction we plunge right in to history and its dates, eight pages of clear timeline of enclosures and resistance. Here are the facts of the English class war between the Haves and the Have Nots. These facts form what E.P. Thompson would call “idioms” or “peculiarities of the English.” I looked up the word “idiom” in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage........

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