Dr%20Jonathan%20Healey: List of publications

<p>On 14 September 1534, two men fought on a meadow outside the town of Weymouth, Dorset, watched by a crowd of their neighbours. Learning of the fight, one of the town constables charged between the men, and killed one of them, leading to his prosecution and subsequent appeal to the court of Star Chamber. The investigation by that court left several thousand words of testimony, making it one of the best documented fights in the sixteenth century. This article offers a microhistory of the fight. In particular, it asks what such an event can tell us about the nature of government in the early Tudor period. It suggests that at this time such flashpoints were crucial moments where the state was expected to play a dramatic role. But this in turn depended on participants performing their role as state actors. That could be very dangerous, but detailed reconstructions can also show how state actors, though lacking the visual symbolic apparatus we expect of the modern state, might deploy oral performances to signify their official role.</p>

The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century: the first century of welfare.

Despite plenty of work on enclosure and the riots against it, the ‘political culture’ of common lands remains obscure, despite considerable interest amongst social historians in ‘everyday politics’ and ‘weapons of the weak’. This article attempts to recover something of that culture, asking what political meaning was ascribed to certain actions, events and landscape features, and what tactics commoners used to further their micro-political ends. Using a systematic study of interrogatories and depositions in the equity Court of Exchequer, it finds a complex array of political weaponry deployed in commoning disputes, from gossip, threats and animal-maiming to interpersonal violence. In addition, it shows that the need to establish precedent, or ‘long-usage’, meant that certain physical acts and features were imbued with political meaning: acts of use, perambulations, old ridge-and-furrow, speech, even dying whispers, could all mean something in the politics of the commons. Moreover, commoners could be subject to moral scrutiny as neighbours; with antisocial behaviour liable to be used against them in disputes. All in all, it is argued that we are only just beginning to recover the politics of the English commons, and that there was much more to them than enclosure rioting.