Commune, Country and Commonwealth suggests that towns like Cirencester are a missing link connecting local and national history, in the immensely formative centuries from Magna Carta to the English Revolution. Focused on a town that made highly significant interventions in national constitutional development, it describes recurring struggles to achieve communal solidarity and independence in a society continuously and prescriptively divided by gross inequalities of class and status. The result is a social and political history of a great trans-generational epic in which local and national influences constantly interacted.