The Representative of the People?: Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts

Contested elections became a fact of political life for the first time in early-17th-century England as the gentry pressed for seats in a parliament which was growing increasingly important. Dr Hirst examines politics from the point of view of the ordinary man before the Civil War. He asks what an election and being represented meant: what kind of person voted; how did he vote and why; and what might he gain by it. England was not yet shaped in the oligarchic mould that characterised it in ...