Part 1 · 1381
Joanna Ferrour and the Women of 1381
The updated evidence on Ferrour, the acquittals, the unresolved Tower allegation and other women named in records of the rising.
Samuel Stephen Chronicles · Research Series
Revolting Women
Women, rebellion and the historical record — from the Peasants’ Revolt to the political movements that followed the English Revolution.
This series follows women through moments of political upheaval where the surviving evidence is often scattered across indictments, depositions, petitions, pamphlets, correspondence and local records rather than the best-known narrative chronicles.
The purpose is not to retrofit modern categories onto the past. It is to ask a narrower historical question: when women appear in the surviving record of rebellion and political conflict, what were they actually accused of, what did they do, and how did later narratives treat them?
Part 2 · 1536–37
Women in the Pilgrimage of Grace
Support, communication, noblewomen’s counsel and the execution of Margaret Bulmer.
Part 3 · 1642–51
Women and the English Civil War
Petitions, print, intelligence, finance and castle defence during civil conflict.
Part 4 · 1660 onwards
The Long Silence After Revolution
Petitioning restrictions, food protest, enclosure, Jacobite networks, print culture and the road to Chartism.
A series about visibility in the record
Across four periods, the same methodological problem returns: political activity is easiest to see when it enters the kinds of records historians usually privilege. When participation moves into household networks, local protest, markets, petitions, print or informal communication, it becomes easier for later narratives to overlook.
The series therefore treats absence from a major chronicle or official office as a question, not an answer.
