WAR AND ALLEGIANCE

Modern historians have found the Peak miners as difficult to understand as did their early modern rulers. In an economy which is conventionally described as pre-industrial, the lives of the mining workforce were dominated by the experience of industrial labour. In a society whose norms were supposedly built upon the reciprocal ideals of plebeian deference and elite patronage, the miners stand out as unusually assertive. It should therefore come as no surprise to find that popular allegiances in the Peak at the outbreak of the first civil war run against the grain of the contending historical explanations of that subject. The political loyalties of the miners and tenants of the area did not follow those of the local gentry and nobility. Popular deference to the political decisions of their social betters can therefore be ruled out. Neither did the miners enlist as a composite social bloc for one side or another, thereby frustrating a simple class interpretation of allegiance. The same goes for suggestions that religion constituted the key factor in individuals' and groups' choice of sides. While religion proved a motivating factor for some people within the Peak, religious divisions were not as deep as elsewhere within England. Instead, the plebeian inhabitants of the Peak followed their own circuitous and divergent paths into civil war.