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Hindle provides a close reading of the representation of harvest labor in Edward Haytley's painting, which is popularly known as The Montagus at Sandleford Priory, paying particular attention to the subtle under-currents it reveals in the field of force that constrained relations between leisured patrician society and laboring plebeian culture. The analysis is principally concerned with perceptions of the changing practices of leisure and labor; and, more broadly, with the relationship between those perceptions and the lived experience of agricultural work in 18th-century England.

This article reconstructs the nature and scale of dearth in the late 1640s, emphasizing the coincidence of economic distress with constitutional crisis. It reconsiders the parish register evidence for subsistence crisis; examines the responses of central and local government; analyses the role of popular agency, especially though petitioning campaigns, in prompting reluctant magistrates to regulate the grain markets along lines stipulated by the late Elizabethan and early Stuart dearth orders, which had not been proclaimed since 1630; and accordingly suggests that the late 1640s represents a missing link in the historiography of responses to harvest failure.

This essay reconstructs the discourses concerning hunger, protest, punishment and paternalism that circulated during and after the Midland Rising, a series of anti-enclosure protests which spread across the counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire in the late spring and early summer of 1607. Through a reconstruction of the views of the rebel leader John Reynolds, of the monarch King James I, of the clergyman Robert Wilkinson and of the crown-lawyer Francis Bacon, it is suggested that, although though they disagreed about whether hunger might ever justify insurrection, those implicated in the Rising and its suppression shared a stock of common idioms – the scriptural critique of enclosure derived from the Book of Isaiah, the classical metaphor of the body politic, the hunger-pangs of the empty belly – with which to discuss the social problems of the day. These idioms, it is argued, were also deployed by a fifth observer of the Midland Rising, who in Act one Scene one of Coriolanus (first performed in 1608) represented a company of mutinous citizens standing up about the corn. Coriolanus is arguably Shakespeare's attempt to imagine insurrection by dramatizing it, and therefore constitutes a fertile source for the historian of early modern popular protest.