Despite the hopes of a few (like the Somerset man who declared that there was now no law in force) and the fears of many more, Charles I's execution was not to be the signal for the collapse of that social order whose keystone he had claimed to be. Previous ‘interregnums’ had seen an outbreak of rioting prompted by the belief that the law died with the monarch, but the ‘year of intended parity’ saw no popular rising emerge to take advantage of such beliefs; the intention remained unrealised. Indeed, an examination of disorder in the 1640s and 50s might suggest that the possibilities of an ‘intended parity’ were greater in the fantasies projected by the fears of the propertied classes than in the reality of popular disorder in the period. There exists a notable discrepancy between both the character and level of disorder generated by the ‘moral panic’ that gripped propertied contemporaries and the evidence recoverable in the historical record. While the Revolution imposed new sources of conflict on pre-existing social and economic tensions, it failed to produce that popular explosion, fear of which ran like a red thread through the political history of the period.

Measuring disorder is at the best of times a difficult (and even questionable) exercise. To the familiar problems of the under-reporting of riot and patchy record survival, the Revolution added its own obstacles.