JOSEPH Arch Day again takes place in the Warwickshire villages of Wellesbourne and Barford on September 7. This year Professor James Crossley will give the guest lecture at the Joseph Arch Commemoration. I took the chance to ask him a few questions.

Nick Matthews: I loved your book, The Spectres of John Ball. Great read and tremendous scholarship. Restoring Ball as a central figure in English history. One of the things that comes out of that work is the way historical characters and events are commemorated by different generations with their meaning often changing.

When we restarted marking the life of Joseph Arch it was 150 years after the legendary meeting outside the Stag’s Head in Wellsbourne, Warwickshire, which led to the formation of the National Union of Agricultural Workers.

Fifty years later in 1922, the obelisk over his grave in Barford was raised by the successor union. Then in 1952, the shelter over the spot where he spoke was erected. So has Arch gone the way of Ball — are we in a lull in the appreciation of his role or is he largely forgotten?

James Crossley: I think a bit of both. Obviously, appreciation of such figures depends on the context and Arch still has a recognisable place in local history and the history of rural trade unionism.

In some ways, it is probably worse for Arch than for Ball because the Peasants’ Revolt is more widely remembered today. Schools teach the Peasants’ Revolt and documentaries are occasionally made about the Peasants’ Revolt, not least because it is a violent, gory story.

Even if people don’t remember the name John Ball, he is not too far away for those interested in the 1381 uprising. In the case of rural union activity, it is too easily lost in the general story of the largely urban labour movement, and this has unsurprisingly affected Arch’s reputation.

Nevertheless, the preservation of such memories remains and at a national level this is often through the memorialising of the Tolpuddle martyrs (not least the annual festival). The potential is there.

Is there any significance in the different layers of commemoration? Are different generations trying to capture his memory?

Yes, there is an ongoing process of remembering, updating, and reminding people of the past through commemoration which reflects social and historical contexts. In the case of Ball, who has had many more centuries of being remembered than Arch, he has been remembered as a hero of the peasantry, a seditious threat to the realm (for at least 400 years!), a hero of English radicalism, a precursor to working-class agitation, a socialist before his time, a figurehead of a progressive English identity, and so on.

It was when his memory was in danger of being forgotten and when his name no longer carried the menace it once did that the physical memorials started to pop up in the late 20th century and into the 21st.

In fact, the memories of Ball and Arch are regularly interlinked, not least because of their rural connection. When Arch rose to prominence, he was almost immediately connected with Ball in the popular imagination.

One striking feature of the Peasants’ Revolt is the very label it has been given. Despite the popularity of the term “Peasants’ Revolt” today, it only really became popular from the 1870s onward. There is an argument (convincing to my mind) that this popularity owed much to the prominence of Arch and the founding of the National Agricultural Labourers Union around the same time.

These things ebb and flow. Arch’s memory may be much more recent than Ball’s but already we can see changes taking place in how he is remembered. In the case of the great historian and critic, AL Morton, we can see how Arch’s reputation was changing within years. When Morton published A People’s History of England in 1938, Arch received minimal attention.

Morton believed that the rural proletariat was in long-term decline and Arch’s activities were little more than a blip. By the 1950s, Morton was enthusiastically retelling the story of Arch and the formation of the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers Union and then the National Agricultural Labourers Union.

Morton was now arguing how this development in rural trade unionism destroyed the idea that it was impossible to organise agricultural workers, the spirit of which continued into the mid-20th century. And more than any other person, Morton argued, it was Arch who was responsible for this rise in awareness and ensuring that rural workers were conscious of being skilled workers like their industrial counterparts.

Morton shifted his emphasis not only because he had recently returned to life in the countryside. Morton and other like-minded historians wanted to promote the importance of an English radical tradition (failures and all) to counter the political conservatism in post-war Britain, show how the working class could now fulfil the hopes of their forebears, and highlight the dangers of working-class movements being dominated by middle-class interests.

Unusually perhaps for a man of the left you have taken religious belief seriously as a factor in social movements. How important was Methodism in Arch’s development?

Whether you love or hate religion, whether you see it as ultimately reactionary or progressive (or both), its role in the emergence of socialism in England and Britain is undeniable.

Arch as a Methodist is important because his form of Christianity (along with his radical background) placed him in a known dissenting tradition. By the time of Arch, Methodism had established (and not uncomplicated) sympathies with the English working class. In the countryside, Methodism helped mark out Arch in opposition to the Establishment church and its local clergy and Tories.

Certainly, the Anglican clergy, Tories, and landowners would fight back, but Methodism and the more radical Christian heritage still provided a language to fight the religion and politics of the ruling class and their supporters.

It seems to me that between 1834 with the introduction of the Poor Law (and the events in Tolpuddle) and 1872 a genuine working class had developed in England. How important a factor was this in the explosion of rural trade unionism?

It is for good reason that industrialisation in urban contexts is the focus of understanding the development of the working class. But this understanding should not be at the expense of rural trade unionism and agitation.

One obvious reason is that the production of food and even clothing was based on rural labour, certainly at the time Arch was active. The vision of rural England was crucial to the imaginations of socialists picturing transformation to a new society beyond exploitation — and it is not difficult to appreciate this attraction in a country that had undergone rapid industrialisation.

Rural trade unionism quickly became part of the popular understanding of a historic English radical tradition, and unsurprisingly so.

One example highlights how important rural trade unionism had become by the 20th century. The successor to Conrad Noel at the famed socialist church in Thaxted was Jack Putterill (who led the church from 1942 to 1973). Putterill combined his religion with labour activism and chaired his branch of the National Union of Agricultural Workers.

He could write and preach about the growth of ideas about fellowship and justice that were important for people like John Ball and were updated through the growth of trade unionism from Tolpuddle to his own union.

For Putterill, what was needed now was for workers to take rightful ownership of the land, complete the transition to socialism, and (in his words) “slay the dragon of exploitation” for good!

I see you are writing a new biography of AL Morton, famous for his A People’s History of England when our identity as British and English is in flux. Is it time to reclaim that alternative history?

Yes, emphatically so. Socialists and the left are often squeamish about promoting national identities. This is sometimes for good reason (eg the legacy of empire and imperialism, far-right and ruling-class uses of patriotism).

But this unease is often based on a misunderstanding of what progressive patriotism was (and sometimes still is). Morton was part of a once thriving, even popular, tradition that saw English identity as a potent force for historic change. It was an English identity that was explicitly presented as an alternative to the British and English identities promoted by the ruling class.

It was an English identity that was not grounded in race and ethnicity but in culture, working-class solidarity, the environment, the natural world, and progressive advances in history. For Morton (and many like him) it was an English identity that complemented other non-English identities, whether Scottish, Irish, Welsh or any number of international traditions, including those of slaves or from slave backgrounds.

This tradition needs revitalising, especially if socialism is to be taken seriously again by the working class. Decades of the working class being told (often by sections of the liberal left and the intellectual elite) that their culture has little positive value has taken its toll.

The far right has tried to seize on this situation, though often unsuccessfully even if the threat remains. More typical was the reaction found in the pro-Brexit vote where a concern for English and civic identity played an important role. Despite honourable exceptions, Brexit was a lost opportunity for socialists and trade unionists to promote a progressive, unifying English (or British) identity.

In a time where identities are sometimes fractured along racial, ethnic, and even religious lines in England Britain, and even encouraged by seemingly well-meaning politicians, the tradition represented by Morton is as important as it always was.

We have a long progressive story and cultured history in England in Britain that is being constantly updated and one which is not necessarily that of the ruling class. It is an ongoing story that should be central to anyone wanting to transform the material conditions of the nation for the better.

James Crossley will give his lecture in St Peter’s Church in Barford on September 7 after a wreath is at the grave of Joseph Arch around 2pm. All are welcome.