Talk:Scotland under the Commonwealth

The "meaner sort"?
I confess to being ignorant of exactly the implication. At the least, could there be an inline cite for this in the lead, as a quote? Also in the lead, what is a sectary?? And non-Scottish readers may not know what "the Kirk" is. hamiltonstone (talk) 12:31, 27 July 2014 (UTC)


 * The best way to deal with Kirk is to put in a link to the Kirk Party article, and to the Covenanter article.


 * The "meaner sort" non-nobility (think French revolution, lawyers, merchants and the like). Perhaps another way to look at it is who was excluded from the general pardon and forced to pay reparations see Cromwell's Act of Grace. That lot were clearly not the meaner sort!


 * In England a similar problem happened in Cromwell's Other House with all but one of the old aristocracy, even though parliamentary supporters in the Civil War, refusing to sit with the like of Pride and Hewson, the first of whom had been a drayman and the other a cobbler before the English Civil War. Sir John Hewson also got in in the neck (literally!) from the apprentices of London who used to throw old shoes at him as he walked through the city (did not like to see someone rise above their station in life). (In the Sharpe TV series about the Napoleonic Wars, Sharpe a fictional British soldier raised from the ranks, is always being told by both soldiers and officers "he is not a proper officer" because he is not a gentleman (born with a silver spoon in his mouth)).


 * In England it was the "middling sort" (to use a term used by Richard Baxter and others of the time that has become common coin), not peasants but artisans yeomen etc, who were the backbone of the revolution. To quote Cromwell's famous line "I'd rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else".


 * -- PBS (talk) 22:44, 7 August 2014 (UTC)