The String Untuned: A Riot at Hoddesdon, 1534

How could communities,

Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows!

- Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire is now a rather anonymous mass of streets between a trunk road and the lakes of the Lee valley. In the sixteenth century it had no more intrinsic importance, but chance made it the site of one of those events - trivial enough in themselves - which somehow illuminate an entire age.

For when the townsfolk set on a party of their betters in August 1534 they dealt some hard blows not only to their victims but also to the whole doctrine of hierarchy or social subordination that a one-sided reading of Shakespeare has foisted on the sixteenth century as its ‘world picture’.