I had never read this before I started my Masters, but did so in my first term for an essay I was writing on popular politics. Fire from heaven is the book I try to foist on friends who wonder why I bother with the early modern period and whether there’s anything of interest within it.įinally, there is Revel, riot, and rebellion: popular politics and culture in England, 1603-1660. Characters like Matthew Chubb or William Whiteway become as real as one’s neighbours today when reading it.

More importantly, though, Underdown was able to revive the ghosts of seventeenth-century Dorchester and make them come alive on the page.

Like Pride’s Purge, it was based on complete mastery of the relevant archives. Much of the book is the story of White and his supporters’ struggle against the less puritan elements of the town’s population. The fire gave John White, a godly puritan preacher, the chance to remodel the town’s spiritual life. Underdown tells the story of Dorchester in the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in 1613. Wherever I got it, I remember starting reading and being unable to put it down. I think it may even have been in a bookshop in Dorchester, the subject of the book, although something tells me I may have invented this. In Pride’s Purge, Underdown skilfully unpicked the twists and turns of political factions during the late 1640s and reconstituted them as a gripping narrative of events leading up to the purge of the Long Parliament and the execution of Charles I.Īround 2004, a few years after I graduated, I came across a second-hand copy of Fire from heaven: life in an English town in the seventeenth century. For a book on civil war politics to have survived so long without significant challenge is a testament to the depth of research that went into it. Most academic libraries will probably have multiple well-thumbed copies. I was still drawing on it for essays I wrote earlier this year. It was a staple of reading lists then, as it had been in the 1970s and 1980s and still is now. It was probably in about 1999, when I was doing a course on early modern politics in the first year of my undergraduate degree.

The first book by Underdown I ever read was Pride’s Purge: politics in the Puritan Revolution. Here are three that have made a particularly big impact on me. I’ve got a few books by Underdown on my bookshelves, and over the years a number of them have been texts I’ve returned to again and again. There is a moving obituary by Mark Kishlansky over at the NACBS blog. I found out earlier in the week that David Underdown, the distinguished historian of seventeenth-century England, had died.

Pride's Purge by David Underdown