This major anthology spans five hundred years of radical protest from the Peasants' Revolt to the first World War. In the richness and variety of its documentation, it provides an alternative political and social history of England: a history which puts at the centre of the record the actions of ordinary men and women discovering the common interests vital to them. This is history as creative defiance, as communal action. involving the intellectual and imaginative witness of those among the privileged - poets, writers, and thinkers - who have had the strength and courage to make themselves passionate spokesmen for the dispossessed.