A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1500–1750

The rise of social history has had a transforming influence on the

history of early modern England. It has broadened the historical
agenda to include many previously little-studied, or wholly neglected,
dimensions of the English past. It has also provided a fuller context
for understanding more established themes in the political, religious,
economic and intellectual histories of the period. This volume serves
two main purposes. Firstly it summarises, in an accessible way, the
principal findings of forty years of research on English society in this
period, providing a comprehensive overview of social and cultural
change in an era vital to the development of English social identities.
Secondly, the chapters, by leading experts, also stimulate fresh
thinking by not only taking stock of current knowledge, but extending
it, identifying problems, proposing fresh interpretations and pointing
to unexplored possibilities. It will be essential reading for students,
teachers and general readers.

KEITH WRIGHTSON is Randolph W. Townsend Jr Professor of History

at Yale University. He previously held positions at the Universities of
St Andrews and Cambridge, where he was Professor of Social
History. His publications include the ground-breaking English
Society, 1580–1680 (1982), Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in
Early Modern Britain (2000) and Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A
Scrivener, His City and the Plague (2011), as well as many essays
on the social history of early modern England. He is a Fellow of the
British Academy, a former President of the North American
Conference on British Studies, and an Honorary Vice-President of
the Social History Society.
A SOCIAL HI S TORY OF
ENG LAND, 1500–1750
Edited by

Keith Wrightson
Yale University
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S , United Kingdom

One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, U S A

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India

79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the

pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international
levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107041790

DOI: 10.1017/9781107300835

© Cambridge University Press 2017

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the

provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any
part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University
Press.

First published 2017

Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc

 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-107-04179-0 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-107-61459-8 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of U R L s for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in
this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Framing Early Modern England

Keith Wrightson

Part I Discovering the English

1 Crafting the Nation

Cathy Shrank

2 Surveying the People

Paul Griffiths

3 Little Commonwealths I: The Household and Family

Relationships
Linda Pollock

4 Little Commonwealths II: Communities

Malcolm Gaskill
Part II Currents of Change

5 Reformations
Alec Ryrie

6 Words, Words, Words: Education, Literacy and Print

Adam Fox

7 Land and People

Jane Whittle

8 Urbanisation
Phil Withington

9 The People and the Law

Tim Stretton

10 Authority and Protest

John Walter

11 Consumption and Material Culture

Adrian Green

Part III Social Identities

12 ‘Gentlemen’: Remaking the English Ruling Class

Henry French

13 The ‘Middling Sort’: An Emergent Cultural Identity

 Craig Muldrew

14 The ‘Meaner Sort’: Labouring People and the Poor

Jeremy Boulton

15 Gender, the Body and Sexuality

Alexandra Shepard

16 The English and ‘Others’ in England and Beyond

Alison Games

Coda: History, Time and Social Memory

Andy Wood

Further Reading
Index
 Figures
8.1 Population in towns over 10,000 as a percentage of
entire population.

8.2 The ‘cultural provinces’ of pre-modern England and

Wales. From C. Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and
Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local
History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), xvii. ©
C. Phythian-Adams 1996. Reproduced by permission of
Bloomsbury Publishing plc.

8.3 Rates of incorporation in England, Wales, Scotland and

Ulster, 1540–1640. From P. Withington, ‘Plantation and civil
society’, in É. Ó Ciardha and M. Ó Siochrú (eds.), The
Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2012), 70.
 Tables
7.1 The chronology of enclosure.

7.2 Land values, wheat prices and men’s wages compared.

7.3 Estimates of crop yields.

7.4 Population totals, age at marriage and proportion never

married, 1524–1751.

8.1 Urban percentage of total population, 1500–1800 (cities

over 10,000).

8.2 Cities in England and Wales by size of settlement, 1520–

1750.
 Contributors
Jeremy Boulton
University of Newcastle

Adam Fox
University of Edinburgh

Henry French
University of Exeter

Alison Games
Georgetown University

Malcolm Gaskill
University of East Anglia

Adrian Green
Durham University

Paul Griffiths
Iowa State University

Craig Muldrew
University of Cambridge

Linda Pollock
Tulane University

Alec Ryrie
Durham University

Alexandra Shepard
University of Glasgow

Cathy Shrank
University of Sheffield

Tim Stretton
Saint Mary’s University

John Walter
University of Essex

Jane Whittle
University of Exeter

Phil Withington
University of Sheffield

Andy Wood
Durham University

Keith Wrightson
Yale University
 Acknowledgements
As editor I wish to express my thanks to all the contributors to this
volume for their willingness to participate in the project. They were
asked to undertake the difficult and demanding task of handling large
themes within the constraints of relatively tight word limits, and to do
so in a manner that would not only survey the findings and
arguments of existing scholarship but also provoke fresh thinking
and suggest ways forward in research. Reading and discussing the
resulting draft chapters have been the most stimulating and
rewarding part of editing this book. I am grateful also for their
commitment in speedily writing final drafts, and their efficiency in
turning around queries and proofs in the final stages of preparation
and production. It has been a privilege to work with them.
The map in Chapter 8 (Figure 8.2) is reproduced from C.
Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580-1850:
Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1996), xvii (© C. Phythian-Adams 1996). It is used
here by kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing plc.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Christopher W. Brooks,
an outstanding historian of this period and a friend to many of us.
 Abbreviations

AHR
American Historical Review

BL
British Library

C&C
Continuity and Change

DUL
Durham University Library

EcHR
Economic History Review

EEBO
Early English Books Online

EHR
English Historical Review

HJ
The Historical Journal

HWJ
History Workshop Journal

IRSH
International Review of Social History

JBS
Journal of British Studies

JFH
Journal of Family History

JMH
Journal of Modern History

NRO
Norfolk Record Office

ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

P&P
Past & Present

RO
Record Office

SH
Social History

TNA
The National Archives, Kew

TRHS
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
 Introduction
Framing Early Modern England
◈

Keith Wrightson

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, the verb ‘to frame’

meant to construct, join together, shape, form, or devise and invent.
‘Framing’ was ‘the action, method or process of constructing,
making or fashioning something’.1 All historical periods are
constructed or devised in this manner. Sometimes they are
bracketed by key events deemed to be of particular symbolic
importance: happenings ‘to which cultural significance has
successfully been assigned’.2 Sometimes they are defined in terms
of broader processes that are cumulatively transformative: the ‘rise’
of capitalism or individualism, for example, or the ‘decline’ of magic
or of the peasantry. But whatever the case, historical periods reflect
perceptions of the shape of the past that originate in particular
attempts to give it form and meaning, gradually become
conventional, and persist while they retain the power to persuade us
that they help make sense of it.
 The term ‘early modern’ has become the conventional English-
language way of describing the sixteenth, seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries: the period covered in this volume. It is
relatively novel in use. The orthodox view is that it emerged from the
1940s, and became more widely adopted from the 1970s in both
history and adjacent disciplines (notably literary criticism of an
‘historicist’ cast). Despite this success, in recent years it has
become unusually contested. Those who dislike, or are at least
uncomfortable with, its widespread employment tend to emphasise a
number of objections. First, it is ‘a quite artificial term’, unknown in
the period to which it refers. It is a retrospective label, ‘a description
born of hindsight’, imposed upon the past. Moreover, it has been
uncritically adopted by those unaware of its deficiencies and
implications. It is vague and elusive in definition and inconsistently
applied. Its chronological boundaries vary not only with country but
also with topic. It may be meaningful when addressing some themes,
but is inappropriate to others. It is geographically restricted in its
applicability, making more sense when applied to those parts of
Europe in which these centuries witnessed significant change than to
those that retained more ‘traditional’ structures, and is largely
irrelevant outside the European context. While it has been widely
adopted in the historiographies of anglophone and German-speaking
countries, it is more rarely used elsewhere. Above all, the very notion
of an ‘early modern’ period allegedly embodies teleological
assumptions about the course of historical change. It is tainted with
‘Whiggish’ value judgements about ‘progress’ in human affairs.
Worse, that ethnocentric bias is compounded by its association with
the ‘modernization’ theories prevalent in the social sciences of the
1950s and 1960s. The very term ‘early modern’ ‘assumes that
European culture was travelling towards something called
“modernity”’; it contains ‘a teleological modernizing trajectory’, a
pre-ordained evolution towards ‘a uniform, homogenized world,
dominated by western-style economies, societies and participatory
politics’. Softer critics would warn against such linearity and redefine
the period so as to make its chronology even looser: back, where
appropriate, to the fourteenth century; forward, in other cases, to the
mid nineteenth century. Harder critics would abandon it altogether –
though generally remaining coy about what they would put in its
place.3
Such reservations are to be taken seriously insofar as they
promote reflection on the process of historical ‘framing’. Yet they are
not so telling as to demand the rejection of the very notion of a
distinctive and meaningful early modern period. To be sure, the
concept of such a period is artificial and retrospective. So is all
historical periodisation. It may be fair to say that it is sometimes
employed uncritically. So are many other historical coinages of
disputed meaning and generally forgotten ancestry that remain in
circulation because they are useful shorthands: ‘feudalism’;
‘Byzantium’; the ‘Renaissance’; the ‘Scientific’, ‘Agricultural’ and
‘Industrial’ revolutions; the ‘Counter- Reformation’; the
‘Enlightenment’; and so on. But it was not adopted simply as a
convenient label for a loosely defined period between
(approximately) the late fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Nor
did it arrive freighted with twentieth-century modernisation theory. It
emerged earlier, and for good reasons.

The sense that there was something distinctive about these

centuries of European history is hardly a new one. It existed long
before the term ‘early modern’ was coined, and it persists even in
those national historiographies that prefer to eschew that term. It
originated in the revival and dissemination of classical culture by the
humanist scholars of the Renaissance, and in an engagement with
that recovered legacy that enhanced their sense of difference from
what eventually became known as the ‘Middle Ages’ and convinced
them that they had entered a distinctive ‘modern’ age (meaning
simply the present or recent times). To this extent, our sense of the
early modern begins with an acceptance of ‘the terms of use laid
down by sixteenth-century scholars’.4 It culminates in the self-
perception of another justifiably self-conscious new age: that
ushered in by the American and French revolutions, the Latin
American wars of independence, and the technological and social
transformations of industrialisation. Historians looking back from the
vantage point of the nineteenth century came to divide ‘modern’
history into two phases. The earlier of these could be bracketed by
specific events: the opening of oceanic routes to the East, the
European discovery of the New World, the Reformation and the
shattering of western Christendom at one end, the Age of
Revolutions at the other. Alternatively, it could be defined in terms of
more diffuse processes: shifts in military technology; the formation of
(some) national states; the cumulative impact of print culture; the
expansion of commercial and industrial capitalism; the foundation of
extra-European colonial empires; philosophical innovation; radical
political thought; new ways of exploring the natural world. Whatever
the case, this period of European history seemed to have a
distinctive texture. It was not discontinuous with the past. All
developments have roots. It witnessed continuities as well as
changes. All historical periods do. But that did not preclude change
and growth of a kind that distinguished the period and laid tracks for
what came later. To recognise this does not imply teleology. It is
simply genealogy – a tracing of antecedents. Of course these
changes were not universal. Nothing ever is. But they proved to be
what most mattered.
The specific concept of the ‘early modern’ is also older than the
orthodoxy maintains. It was not, as is often alleged, coined in mid-
twentieth-century America in the context of economic history. So far
as is currently known, it originated in mid-Victorian England, in the
published Cambridge lectures of William Johnson, and in the context
of cultural history: specifically, as a means of expressing the way in
which the classical revival at the turn of the sixteenth century
enabled humanist scholars to engage critically with their own society
and to imagine a future. Johnson’s notion of the early modern has
been described as ‘an alternative and indigenous’ conception of the
Renaissance, one very much influenced by the self-perception of the
English humanist scholars of the sixteenth century. As a term it was
not immediately successful. But it re-emerged in the early years of
the twentieth century in another historical context: in the work of
scholars engaged in founding English economic history as a
distinctive approach to the past.
The notion that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a
period of significant transition in English economy and society was
also deeply embedded. It originated in the period itself, in the
writings of perceptive contemporaries who believed themselves to be
living in changing times, characterised by the erosion of an older
economic and social order and the animation of a new one. It was
elaborated in the work of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who traced
the emergence of modern commercial society from the sixteenth
century; it informed Marx’s historical account of the development of
industrial capitalism in England; and it was central to the writings of
the English Historical Economists, James Thorold Rogers, William
Cunningham and W. J. Ashley. The Historical Economists rejected
the bleak dogmas of classical political economy and turned to history
in support of their contention that the validity of economic theory is
relative to the circumstances and values of a particular time and
place. They advocated the study of past economic cultures in the
round – an economic history that was also social and cultural – and
were acutely aware that economic change involved a myriad of
factors other than the purely economic. While they might celebrate
particular economic achievements, they were also deeply concerned
with what has been called ‘the distinctive pathology of modern
society’.5 They dismissed teleological triumphalism, stressing
instead the complexities and contingencies of economic and social
change, – the ironies and human costs of the gradual, complex and
uneven process of transition from an older set of institutions,
practices and values towards the world of laissez-faire capitalism.
The British and American scholars who followed them with more
specialised studies of particular sectors of English economic life
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries shared that general
perception of the period’s significance. Indeed, it is hard to see how
they could have done otherwise, since it was perfectly evident that
the England of the Industrial Revolution was a very different place
from that of Henry VII. They were the first rigorous analysts of what
Christopher Hill called ‘the colossal transformations which ushered
England into the modern world’.6 And it was in the emergent
literature of a broadly conceived economic history, among those that
pioneered deeper research into those transformations, that the term
‘early modern’ began to appear more frequently. J. U. Nef, who is
sometimes credited with having introduced the term in a paper
delivered to the American Historical Association in 1940, was of
course one of them. It was adopted because it was more appropriate
to their concern with long-term, gradual and diffuse processes than
the dynastic and biographical dates or discrete centuries still most
commonly applied to frame conventional political history. A broader
vision of the past needed a different kind of ‘chronological
descriptor’.7

The notion of the early modern, then, was born of a more expansive
approach to the English past. That being the case, it is hardly
surprising that its more widespread diffusion occurred in the context
of the next major broadening of the range of historical concern: the
developments in social and cultural history that constituted the major
historiographical innovations of the later twentieth century.8 That
movement was both international and interdisciplinary in nature, and
ironically it introduced the concept of the early modern, through the
interventions of anglophone historians, to the literatures of countries
whose own historians mostly preferred to do without it – notably
France and Italy.
In the English case, which is our concern, the rise of social
history from the 1960s and 1970s was in direct line of descent from
the more inclusive vision characteristic of early-twentieth-century
economic history.9 But it was also creating a new field, sometimes
almost from scratch. That involved first of all a massive expansion of
the historical agenda to include previously little-studied or wholly
neglected dimensions of the English past. It aspired to create a set
of histories that were surely there but had been largely excluded
from the purlieus of conventional historical study: ‘absent
presences’.10 In effect, it amounted to a call to discover a new
country: a more fully inhabited country. Secondly, the pursuit of new
questions meant identifying and exploring the potential of previously
unknown or little-used historical sources (and the institutions that
produced them), often at the local level in the county and diocesan
archives that were becoming increasingly organised and accessible
at the time. Thirdly, it required new methodologies, some of them
developed under the influence of adjacent disciplines (notably social
anthropology, historical geography and literary criticism) or
innovative foreign historiographies (initially the French Annales
school and later American ‘social-science history’ and Italian
‘microhistory’). These included quantitative analysis where
appropriate, or at least a more rigorous and systematic examination
of qualitative evidence, both frequently supplemented by forms of
record linkage. Finally, interpreting the findings of this research
necessitated a higher level of theoretical awareness in the fashioning
of historical arguments, both in approaches to particular problems
and in thinking about how societies work as interconnected systems.
Such interdisciplinarity might begin with an element of imitation: the
adoption of concepts and questions appropriate to the problem in
hand. But it usually gave way rapidly to critical engagement: the
generation of fresh conceptualisation and new interpretative insights
as historians in dialogue with the evidence provided by the past
sought to characterise unanticipated realities and to construct
credible accounts of change.
This movement transformed the sense of the early modern as a
distinctive period in several ways. First, it enhanced awareness of its
contours. Economic historians concerned with economic growth
before industrialisation had already established a more quantitatively
precise and chronologically exact account of change in sector after
sector of English economic life between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries: prices, real wages, land ownership, domestic and
overseas commerce, the diffusion of agricultural and industrial
innovation, and so on. This continued, creating in the process not
only a reconnaissance of national trends but also a greater
sensitivity to regional and social variations in their impact. But it was
now complemented and elaborated by comparable studies (at local,
regional and, where possible, national level) of population trends and
their constituent elements, urban growth, migration, popular literacy,
criminal prosecutions and civil litigation, living standards and
domestic consumption, poverty, and much more. People might joke
about the existence of an ‘early modern curve’ in which everything
seems to be increasing between the mid sixteenth and mid
seventeenth centuries, followed by a century of relative stabilisation
and consolidation before renewed growth in the later eighteenth
century. In fact, it was much more complex. In some respects, the
later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a reversal of
previous trends – for example in the incidence of crisis mortality,
criminal prosecutions and litigation. In others they witnessed their
acceleration – in agricultural specialisation and industrial production,
urbanisation and metropolitan growth, commerce, consumption,
intensified communication networks, the expansion and
diversification of print culture, and the growth of waged employment.
And there were always forms of local and regional variation that
were in some respects enhanced over time – some towns stabilised
in size; others grew exponentially. The point is that the contours of all
this were being charted for the first time and that this mapping
seemed to confirm the distinctive identity of an ‘early modern’
period: one that was not imposed upon the evidence but grew from
it.
Within that emergent sense of the broad shape of the early
modern period the studies of social institutions, social relations,
attitudes, values and patterns of behavior that were undertaken to
elucidate particular trends began to create not so much an ‘early
modern narrative’ as a series of related early modern narratives.
These were not conventional historical narratives, but analytical
narratives, concerned with demonstrating and explaining medium-to-
long-term processes of change. They were usually developed to
explore specific themes – population trends and their dynamics, for
example, or the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions, poverty and
developments in poor-relief, the growth of popular literacy, or
resistance to agrarian change. But each provided context for the
others, and cumulatively they contributed to a growing sense of a
process of ‘social and economic reconfiguration’ that took off from
the sixteenth century and ultimately produced what E. A. Wrigley
terms the ‘advanced organic’ economy and society that gave birth to
industrialisation in the later eighteenth century.11
These narratives contained many surprises. Whatever their
initial expectations, people found that the evidence presented
unanticipated realities, leading them to uncover and address new
problems and to make unexpected connections. They opened new
perspectives. That meant initially sociological and social
anthropological perspectives on continuity and change in social
structures, social relationships, attitudes and beliefs. But it soon
came to involve both the introduction of gender as a new category of
historical analysis, and greater appreciation of the independent role
of culture in the construction of historical reality. The narratives of
social history began to include, and to be enriched by, those of
cultural historians and historicist literary scholars concerned with
understanding contemporary concepts in their context; with
‘discursive trends’ and their relationship to social change –
reconstructing ‘the discursive spine of English early modernity’ –
with the creation of a novel ‘environment … congenial to literary
creativity’; and with the ‘emerging lexicons’ that marked change in
what could be said, thought, felt and ultimately done. They came to
involve attention to material culture and its meanings; to changes in
the landscape and in how spaces and places were used, defined,
perceived and represented; to changes in the perception of time and
in awareness of the historical past. They detected shifts in identity:
the interconnected construction of a national identity and regional
identities; the recasting of social identities; the shifts in individual
identity made possible by what have been called ‘the development
of technologies and languages for representing the self’ and ‘an
extraordinary burgeoning of the language of reflexivity’: new media
of self-expression; newly coined self-words.12
These early modern narratives were full of new stories: those
evocative episodes and accounts of past experience that people
scraped up against in the archives and that left indelible marks on
their historical skins. They contained new voices: for the most part
those of hitherto historically obscure people who nonetheless
managed to leave a trace in the records from which we make history.
To this extent they constituted a democratisation of the subject, an
engagement with hitherto ‘under-represented lives’ – those of
members of subordinate groups in general and of women in
particular.13 As such, they contained a sustained examination and
critique of the conventional exercise of power. And they were critical
in a further sense also. Specific findings frequently came into conflict
with prior assumptions derived from the largely conjectural accounts
of ‘traditional’ society to be found in social theory and with narratives
of modernisation based upon them. This was particularly evident in
the furore that erupted in the 1970s and 1980s over the history of
family relationships.14 But it was soon to be found elsewhere, for
example among historians concerned with class relationships or with
nationalism, neither of which was supposed to exist before the birth
of modernity. Far from being tainted by teleology, the emergent
social and cultural history of early modern England was frequently
de-mythologising in its impact on theories of modernisation. It gave
rise to a notion of the ‘early modern’ that involved ‘resistance to the
master narratives of modernity’; posing questions rather than
accepting preconceived answers.15 And it demanded a heightened
sensitivity to the elements of continuity that persisted even within
changing contexts, and the perennial problem of the complex
relationships between continuity and change as ‘people carried on,
using both old and new social strategies, as they generally do across
moments of change’.16
All of this also had an impact upon the ways in which the
established themes and central dramas of the history of this period
were understood and addressed. The traditional prominence of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in English
historiography was of course because these were already viewed as
formative centuries in political and constitutional, religious and
intellectual history. These processes and the convulsive moments of
crisis and conflict that they involved could now be understood within
a much larger context, and interpreted in ways that drew upon a
richer conceptual palette. Historians of the English Reformation
concerned themselves not only with doctrinal and ecclesiological
change but with the long-term social and cultural adaptations
involved in the creation of a plurality of new religious identities. A
‘new political history’ emerged that placed the familiar landmarks of
political crisis and constitutional change within the contexts of
processes of state formation, changing governmental priorities, the
recasting of local political elites and the emergence of a more
participatory political culture.17
In sum, the rise of social and cultural history had a
transformative influence on the historiography of England between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It massively broadened the
scope of our engagement with the English past. It provided a new
sense of the shape and dynamics of these centuries as a distinctive
period of change, and it justified and advanced the notion of the
‘early modern’ as we now understand it. That term may well be of
limited applicability in the periodisation of other histories. If one
considers the whole of Europe, let alone the larger world, it might be
said, in Peter Krištúfek’s phrase, that ‘Every clock in this house
shows a different time.’18 But it works rather well for England, the
classic ground on which it was developed. If some of its forms,
concerns, debates and dilemmas have aged out of existence, others
to which it gave rise continue to resonate. They remain our own.
That is why the term is appropriate. It describes a deep past that is
not quite past.
This book is not intended as a compendium of what is now known
about English society between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries. It could have had many more chapters devoted to specific
issues that have of necessity been subsumed within broader
thematic essays. Nevertheless, it will certainly convey a great deal of
hard-won knowledge about the structures of English society, its
central social institutions, patterns of social relations and cultural
values. All save one of the authors of its chapters could be regarded
as members of the vital second wave of what used to be called ‘the
new social history’: those who absorbed early the pioneering studies
of the 1970s and 1980s, and went on to build upon, greatly extend,
modify and where necessary challenge them. This is deliberate.
Such scholars are in the best position to survey a particular area of
what is now a large field, to know the roads already travelled and to
suggest where we could or should be going next. Their chapters can
be read as free-standing essays upon particular themes and issues.
At the same time, however, they are intended to form a coherent
whole, in which each provides context for the others. And taken as a
whole, the emphasis of the book is upon the dynamics of early
modern English society: sometimes the dynamics of relative
equilibrium, more often the dynamics of change. The chapters are
ordered in a way that is intended to unfold a panorama of
interconnected processes that were cumulatively transformative;
how they were experienced; what they meant; how we can
understand them.
Part I, ‘Discovering the English’, is about the English people’s
discovery of themselves and about our discovery of them. One
chapter explores the development of a more elaborate sense of
national identity, the institutions central to its discovery (or invention)
and how it came to be written. Another details the practice of
surveying, listing, and categorising the population for a variety of
purposes, a practice that not only enhanced awareness of the nature
of English society (and its ‘legibility’ to the anxious men who tried to
govern it) but also collected information that facilitates its historical
reconstruction. Two more examine the basic social institutions of the
household and the local community. These ‘little commonwealths’
provided the setting for people’s most intimate personal
relationships. They were emotionally intense spheres of both inter-
dependence and conflict. They were deemed so crucial to the health
of a well-ordered commonwealth that they were the foci of a
prescriptive literature of ‘conduct’ books and manuals of
governance. And they were also among the first social institutions to
be rigorously examined (and argued over) by social historians.
Understanding their dynamics is a central part of both recovering the
texture of social relations in this period, and grasping the motives
and imperatives that so often shaped the course of change.
Part II, ‘Currents of Change’, is self-explanatory. Its chapters
provide pithy interpretative accounts of the processes that
collectively reshaped English society. Aspects of demographic and
economic change that were an essential part of these processes are
constantly alluded to and briefly described. They can be studied in
detail elsewhere.19 Here the focus is on developments that had an
impact upon social structures, social relations and social identities:
changes in the structures of rural and urban society; in religion,
education, literacy and employment of the written word; in access to
and uses of the law; in material culture and the consumption of
goods; in concepts of authority and the possibilities of protest and
resistance. These are well-established themes: some of the staple
narratives of the social and cultural history of early modern England.
But they are handled here with a difference: sometimes revising the
chronology of change; frequently recharacterising its nature; always
alert to the need to reconsider its possible meanings.
Part III, ‘Social Identities’, offers a further shift of focus to
chapters exploring the formation of social identities. Three of these
examine the worlds of the three ‘sorts of people’ that by the
seventeenth century had largely displaced more elaborate accounts
of the social hierarchy in English discourses of social distinction: the
ruling elite of landed ‘gentlemen’, which was itself undergoing
redefinition; the ‘middle’ or ‘middling’ sort, an increasingly salient
group struggling towards the formulation of a distinct and positive
social identity; the ‘meaner’ sort of labouring people and the poor, a
greatly increased segment of the population whose place and self-
definitions were shaped by their experiences of wage labour, social
subordination and the poor law system.20 Two further chapters
examine, first, the significance of gender and sexuality as pervasive
criteria of difference, and secondly, how English people defined
themselves in relation to a variety of ethnic and racial ‘others’
encountered either within England or in the larger world in which
some of them now moved. Finally, a short coda reflects on how the
people of early modern England came to perceive their past, and the
extent to which their memories of recent history formed a
distinctively early modern sense of the past.
Within this broad structure, the authors of individual chapters
have been accorded considerable discretion in their handling of
particular themes. They have been obliged to be succinct, but they
have worked within flexible chronological boundaries, and their
chronological emphasis varies as seems appropriate to them when
addressing the trajectories of particular developments. They were
encouraged to produce not bland textbook syntheses but
interpretative essays that would transcend, where needed, the
limitations of pioneering narratives and interpretations, present fresh
insights and redirect debate. Beyond this general expectation,
however, no attempt has been made to impose any single
interpretative perspective or to homogenise approaches to the period
as a whole.
There is no party line here. Nevertheless, certain themes and
issues tend to recur. First, the chapters tend to underscore the sheer
dynamism of the period. Together they offer a multi-faceted account
of a complex society in motion, making and unmaking itself,
sometimes purposefully, even cataclysmically, more often through
gradual adjustments of strategy and aspiration, sometimes by
degrees scarcely perceptible to most contemporaries. That
dynamism is perhaps what most defines this period: a multiplex
quickening – though one that was also uneven in its impact and often
paradoxical in its outcomes. English society became more defined,
institutionally, ideologically and culturally; better known
geographically and socially; more integrated and connected. But it
also became more diversified regionally and socially. The processes
of change charted here can be said to have affected everyone in one
way or another. They entailed generally heightened levels of
interaction and the involvement of a myriad of individual actors: a
participation that enhanced the social depth of governance, politics,
religious initiatives, engagement with the law, access to knowledge
and opinion, and the consumption of goods. Yet such opportunity
and agency were massively circumscribed by relative social position
and by gender. From the mid sixteenth century social inequality was
growing. Differentials of wealth, the fundamental criterion of social
status, became more pronounced.21 The social hierarchy was
gradually reconfigured, a process that might mean greater fluidity
and upward social mobility opportunities for some, but in which life
chances for most remained constrained by the dispensations of
relative advantage or disadvantage to which they were born. Where
change provoked resentment it might be challenged, disputed,
arbitrated. But people’s capacity to negotiate outcomes was limited
by inherited structures of power and authority: in the household, in
the community, in the commonwealth. To this extent, if
contemporaries were aware that their times witnessed a succession
of breaks with the past, the past still stood over them.
It is possible, then, to advance some broad generalisations
about the dynamics of English society in this period, and about their
outcomes. Its history, like that of all periods, was messy and
sometimes muddled in the living. But it was not just ‘a mess of
separate experiences’ or of ‘perpetually multiplying exceptions’.22 At
the same time, in interpreting the experiences of change in early
modern England, the authors of these chapters share some
recurrent theoretical preferences. They are resistant to notions of
linearity. They know that change varied in pace and in completeness,
that it was selective in its impact and that it was not uni-directional. In
interpreting its course and causation, they are sceptical of attributing
dominance to any single ‘prime mover’, be it demographic,
economic, political or cultural. Rather, they emphasise the interaction
of a range of relevant variables. They reject determinism, drawing
attention to the role of contingency in historical change, and the
unpredictability of its consequences. And they treat notions of
‘modernisation’ with suspicion. They are concerned with
demonstrating and explaining changes that in many respects
remade English society, but these ‘early modern’ narratives are far
removed from the teleological strait-jacket of modernisation theory.
Their interpretative perspective is closer to that to be found in the
distinctly un-dogmatic concept of ‘complexity’.
Theories of complexity have been developed in order to
understand the dynamics of change in complex systems, including
social systems, in which large numbers of entities or agents interact
with one another. They stress the continuous nature of change in
such systems, their adaptability to changing environments and
conditions, and their unpredictability. They explain how that
adaptability is the consequence of connectivity and interaction: how
new strategies emerge in response to initiating events or stimuli, are
modified by experience and are diffused through reciprocal
influence. Such ‘emergent behaviours’ can originate in any part of
the system, but can gradually exert transformative influence on the
whole. Adaptations may be influenced by cultural context – i.e. the
agents’ perceptions of change and the strategies deemed
appropriate to meet it – and other contextual constraints may affect
their outcomes. Ultimately, however, their consequences are
unpredictable; cumulatively they create new worlds.23
Such an approach to social change has much to recommend it
to historians. From the historian’s perspective it perhaps implies too
generous a conception of the agency of interacting ‘entities’ and
says too little explicitly about the costs of social adaptation, the
conflicts to which it gives rise and the inequalities of power that often
shape outcomes. But these can easily be incorporated. And that
done, it offers a model of change that avoids determinism and helps
explain diverse outcomes while also permitting generalisation about
the nature of the processes involved. It can be particularly helpful in
conceptualising the distinctiveness of the early modern period.
In important respects, changes in the ‘late medieval’ period had
already created the pre-conditions for the developments charted
here.24 Nevertheless, from the early sixteenth century English
society was galvanised by a succession of powerful stimuli –
demographic, economic, religious, political and cultural – that were
remarkably concentrated in time. Some were internally generated;
some were English expressions of larger shifts and movements.
They touched every section of society, albeit to different degrees and
with varied chronologies. These experiences triggered adaptations in
behaviour, attitudes and strategies that were the more complex
because they were in many ways interconnected. They influenced
each other, became entangled in the experience of individual lives
and intersected to shape the fortunes of particular groups. Over time,
these adaptations triggered further responses, not least by
increasing the connectedness of society and creating a social
environment more conducive to change. In sum, the dynamic of
social change was enhanced, sometimes continuously, sometimes in
sudden spurts. The sense of rupture that was felt by so many in the
later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that feeling of standing on
the other side of a series of significant watersheds that bred fear of a
crumbling order in some, and optimism about the promise of new
ways of being in others, was arguably an expression of this
accelerated state of becoming.
Such processes gave this period its special texture and flavour
as historical experience. Its landmark events and developments no
longer have quite the significance that they had to the thinkers of the
Scottish Enlightenment, who looked back from the later eighteenth
century and saw a pattern in them. They no longer provide the
directly ‘usable’ past celebrated by the historians of Victorian or
early-twentieth-century England in support of a particular
interpretation of British national identity. They have retreated in time
and have become less central to a sense of who we are than the
transformations of the twentieth and challenges of the twenty-first
century. But to those whose curiosity is aroused by a deeper past,
these centuries continue to provide a vital space for knowledge.
Much of what they created remains before our eyes, resonates in our
deepest assumptions, and is still on our tongues. They present a
world that is strangely alien in some respects and immediately
familiar in others. The evidence that people generated in such novel
abundance allows us to know them better, if never completely. The
social history of this period, in its broadest definition, is about
recovering that knowledge of what we have been and about
broadening our capacity, in Peter Laslett’s memorable phrase, for
‘understanding ourselves in time’.25 It contains much to excite the
imagination, offers much to engage the intellect, and retains the
power to arouse the emotions. It touches on all aspects of the history
of this period from a particular point of view. More: it is central.
Without the perspective it provides, the rest is at best a partial and
truncated history; at worst it is scarcely comprehensible.

Notes

1 Oxford English Dictionary, online edn,

www/oed.com/view/Entry/74152and…/ Entry/74162 (accessed 22
January 2016).

2 P. Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1982), 191.

3 See E. Cameron, ‘Editor’s introduction’, in E. Cameron (ed.),

Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), xvii; R. Starn, ‘The early modern muddle’,
Journal of Early Modern History, 6 (2002), 299; H. Scott,
‘Introduction: “Early modern” Europe and the idea of early
modernity’, in H. Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early
Modern European History, 1350–1750, Vol. I: People and Places
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 7. See also W. Reinhard,
‘The idea of early modern history’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion
to Historiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); and
the essays in G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History
(London: Hodder Education, 2005).

4 R. Brackman, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon

England: Lawrence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of
Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 1.

5 S. Collini, ‘For the common good’, Times Literary Supplement

(15 January 2014), 3. Collini was writing of R. H. Tawney, but the
same concern was central to the work of the Historical
Economists.

6 C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during

the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 384.

7 For the early development of English economic history, see K.

Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern
England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000),
introduction. For William Johnson and the subsequent stages of
the emergence of the term ‘early modern’, see P. Withington,
Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some
Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), Chapters 1 and 2.

8 For accounts of these developments, see A. Wilson (ed.),

Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its
Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993),
Chapters 1 and 2; S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter, ‘The
making and remaking of early modern English social history’, in S.
Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English
Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern
England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 2–10. I use the plural in
deference to those who see social and cultural history as
separate, and sometimes opposed, developments. I have never
personally seen them as other than interrelated and, despite their
differences of emphasis and concern, mutually supportive.

9 As noted in Withington, Society, 47, 66.

10 The phrase is borrowed from Annie Proulx, ‘Big skies, empty

places’, The New Yorker (25 December 2000–1 January 2001),
139.

11 Quoting N. Buxton, Domestic Culture in Early Modern England

(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 271, 275. For the notion of an
‘advanced organic economy’, see E. A. Wrigley, Continuity,
Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter
2.

12 Quoting Withington, Society, 1, 166, 172; and J. Scott-Warren,

Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 10,
226.

13 Quoting Lena C. Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14.

14 See K. Wrightson, ‘The family in early modern England:

Continuity and change’, in S. Taylor, R. Connors and C. Jones
(eds.), Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip
Lawson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998).
15 Quoting Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature, 15.

16 Quoting C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe

and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 831. Wickham’s point about the transition from the Roman
to the ‘early medieval’ world remains valid for any period.

17 Quoting P. Collinson, De republica Anglorum; or, History with

the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 14. For state formation and its relationship to elite
formation, see M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern
England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).

18 P. Krištúfek, The House of the Deaf Man, trans. J. Sherwood

and P. Sherwood (Cardigan: Parthian Press, 2012), 13.

19 See e.g. C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social

Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); or more recently Wrightson, Earthly
Necessities.

20 For shifts in contemporary descriptions of the social order, see

K. Wrightson, ‘Estates, degrees and sorts: Changing perceptions
of society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in P. Corfield (ed.),
Language, History and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and
‘“Sorts of people” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in J. Barry and C.
Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and
Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
21 For important new work on the changing distribution of wealth,
see A. Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the
Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015).

22 Quoting Wickham, Framing, 13; and Linda Pollock in Chapter

3, 62.

23 For brief introductions to complexity theory, see M. Mitchell,

Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); E. Mitleton-Kelly and L. K. Daly, ‘The concept of “co-
evolution” and its application in the social sciences’, in E. Mitleton-
Kelly (ed.), Co-Evolution of Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems:
Understanding Complex Systems (Berlin and Heidelberg:
Springer, 2013); G. A. Marsan, N. Bellomo and A. Tobin (eds.),
Complex Systems and Society (New York: Springer, 2013),
Chapter 1.

24 See R. Horrox and W. M. Ormerod (eds.), A Social History of

England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).

25 The phrase was the title of the concluding chapter of P. Laslett,

The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).
 Part I
◈

Discovering the English

 1
Crafting the Nation
◈

Cathy Shrank

In September 1589, a troupe of professional players – the Queen’s

Men – arrived in Carlisle at the north-west extremity of Elizabeth I’s
kingdom.1 We do not know where they played, but it is probable that,
like travelling players in subsequent decades, they performed in the
Moot Hall. Nor do we know what they played, but the symbolic
restaging of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in The Three Lords
and Three Ladies of London, penned by one of its members, Robert
Wilson, would have made that play a timely choice, coming as it did
a mere twelve months after the invading Spanish fleet had been
repelled. That being so, the inhabitants of Carlisle would have been
greeted in their civic space by an actor, ‘very richly attired,
representing London’, stepping forward to address the audience and
to deliver thanks that:

All England is, and so preserv’d hath bene.

Not by mans strength, his pollicie and wit,
 But by a power and providence unseen.2

Despite the metropolitan focus of the title, these opening lines frame
the play as one that concerns a moment of national significance,
affecting ‘All England’, and they testify to a belief in the special
favour that God shows the English nation. Those lines also collapse
the distance between London and the regions in which this play was
almost certainly performed. ‘London bids you welcome’, the preface
ends (sig. A2v), verbally transporting its audience to the capital itself,
where they are subsequently enrolled in the action, addressed
directly by characters in the play,3 or at one point participate as
judges in a singing competition arranged by the ‘everyman’ figure,
Simplicity, who rejects the adjudication of his ‘copesmetes’ on stage
and instead turns to ‘one of the auditory’ (sig. C1v).
This chapter studies the way in which ideas of ‘the nation’ – as
found in Three Lords and Three Ladies – were formed and
disseminated in early modern England. The nation is more than an
administrative unit; as Benedict Anderson writes, it is a construction:
a ‘cultural artefact’ capable of arousing ‘deep attachments’.4
Anderson’s definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political
community’ is useful (6). It is imagined because ‘the member of
even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-
members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion’; it has clearly defined limits (‘no
nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind’); and it is perceived
as a community because ‘regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived
as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (6–7).
Anderson’s influential work does not itself recognise the
existence of an English nation during much of the timespan covered
by this volume. Nonetheless, his definition – with its emphasis on
limits and on powerful emotive connections to an abstract concept –
is regularly cited by scholars of early modern Englishness, for whom
the years between 1500 and 1750 encompass a particularly fertile
phase in the development of the ‘nation’. During this period, we can
trace the coalescence of national identity around particular
institutions; the emergence of processes that enabled the nationwide
dissemination of ideas and standardised practices; and the
deployment of discourses in which the nation is an unquestioned
category of organisation and allegiance predicated on the
assumption that the people of the realm would identify themselves
as ‘English’, with particular customs and duties. As this chapter
argues, these discourses had also cumulative and mutually re-
enforcing impact, as the same ideas and rhetoric about Englishness
would have been heard in church, in civic spaces, in taverns and in
the street.
The essay focuses on English, rather than British, identities. In
the process, it traces a longue durée of ideas: as we will see, many
of the elements that historians such as Linda Colley regard as
underlying eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britishness –
namely, Protestantism; a geographically compact unit bound
together by an efficient communications network (including a highly
developed print trade); urbanisation; a culture of political participation
– are present in the articulation of English identity in the preceding
centuries.5 Moreover, whilst attempts (in 1603–10, 1670 and 1688–9)
to formalise the union of the crowns of England and Scotland into a
closer compact of ‘Great Britain’ were not fulfilled until the 1707 Act
of Union, the labels ‘Briton’ and ‘Britain’ were not necessarily new or
unfamiliar, at least to those with some schooling.6 Latin histories,
such as Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, were staple classroom texts
and the island history about which English (and Scottish) boys
learned was therefore that of ‘Britain’ (‘Britannia’) and the ‘Britons’
(‘Britanni’).7 The term ‘Britain’ was appearing on title-pages even
before the accession of James VI and I, describing not only an
English/British past but also its present, as in Maurice Kyffin’s
Blessedness of Brytaine, or a celebration of the Queenes holyday
(1587). Even before the Union, the English were thus well
accustomed to wearing different identities simultaneously, be those
regional or national, and to appropriating elements of Britishness or,
alternatively, of imposing Englishness on the larger landmass, as in
the oft-repeated geographical fiction that reimagined England as
‘this sceptered isle’.8 Considering the importance of sustained
hostilities with France which Colley identifies as the principal catalyst
for cohering ‘Britons’ after 1707, William Shakespeare’s Henry V
(first performed c. 1599) is both oddly prophetic and characteristic of
English cultural imperialism, as it co-opts into the war against France
not merely representatives of England, Wales and Ireland (regions
under English rule), but also of France’s ancient ally, Scotland, then
an independent nation.9
 One of the many challenges of writing a social history of early
modern nationhood is the difficulty of ascertaining what ‘ordinary’
people thought in a period in which the composition and
dissemination of written records were predominantly conducted by
an educated elite whose interests tended to align with the
preservation of the status quo. Nonetheless, discourses about
Englishness – the practices and beliefs that defined the nation and
bound it together – percolated through the social strata. Nationhood
was a lived experience in early modern England, encountered
consciously or unconsciously through a range of activities and
symbols. Even the food you consumed could be inflected with a
sense of Englishness, thanks to the wide proliferation of national
stereotypes that frequently centred on the preferred diet of each
people. An ‘English’ taste for beef and ale thus set them apart from
other nations: the Flemings and Dutch with their reputed love of
butter, the Welsh and their enthusiasm for cheese, the Irish and their
aqua-vitae, and so on.10 And, despite Anderson’s insistence that
nations only emerge after the destruction of the ‘legitimacy of
divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm’ (6), for much of the
period 1500–1750, far from being an impediment to national
consciousness, the monarchy was a focal point for it. Much of the
language and symbolism of nationhood was concentrated on, and
sponsored by, the crown, from the coins used in daily purchases,
stamped with the monarch’s head, to the oaths of loyalty sworn by
all office-holders, which – through additions made to the Stuart oaths
– internalised allegiance, as its subscribers were required to ‘swear
from [their] heart’.11 As Hugh Seton-Watson suggests of sixteenth-
century England and France, ‘there was a much stronger and wider
sense of community [than elsewhere in Europe]. Englishmen and
Frenchmen recognised themselves as such; accepted obligations to
the sovereign; and admitted the claim of the sovereign on their
loyalty at least in part because the sovereign symbolised the country
as a whole.’12
The years 1500–1750 also saw a series of structural and
ideological changes that expanded the range and nature of
institutions felt (like the crown) to bind compatriots together. Not least
among these developments was the creation of a ‘national’ Church
after England’s split from Rome in the 1530s. A foundational part of
the legislation that effected this break was the Act in Restraint of
Appeals (1533; 24 Henry VIII, c. 12), the import of which the Privy
Council planned to have disseminated across the land via the pulpit,
proclamations and printed copies affixed to every church door, and
endorsed verbally at the dining tables of the nobility and ‘the heddes,
governers and Rulers of every good town within this realme’.13 This
statute is a productive starting point for unpacking some of the logic
and rhetoric underpinning assertions of Englishness in subsequent
decades.14 Its opening statement – ‘Where by dyvers sondrye olde
autentiyke histories & cronicles hit is manyfestlye declared and
expressed/ that this realme of Englande is an Impire, & so hath ben
accepted in the worlde governed by one supreme heed and kynge’ –
affirms the sovereignty of the monarch, who is said to hold ‘entire
power … to rendre and yelde Justice and fynall determination …
within this his realme’.15 As such, it speaks to the power of the past
(the ‘olde autentiyke histories & cronicles’) when forging what is, in
essence, a national and legislative fiction. But the Act does more
than proclaim the jurisdictional authority of the English monarch. It
also asserts the autonomy of the English Church, which ‘hathe bene
alwayes thought … sufficient and mete of it selfe, withoute the
intermedynge of any exterior personne or persones’, and ascribes
particular importance to both ‘the lawes temporalle’, which keep ‘the
people of this realme in unite and peace without ravin or spoile’, and
the role of Parliament (comprising king, nobility and commons) in
making ‘sondry ordynaunces, lawes, statutes, and provisions … to
kepe [this realm] from the annoyaunce as welle as the See of Rome,
as from the auctoritie of other foreyne potentatis/ attemptynge the
diminution or violation therof’ (sigs. B6v–B7r). The Act thus embeds
the authority of the crown within a parliamentary system, in which the
legislation passed protects not simply ‘the prorogatyves, liberties/
and preeminences of the sayde imperyall crowne of this realme’, but
also ‘the jurisdictions spirituall and temporalle of the same’ (sig.
B7r). In addition, it inscribes a pattern of Englishness in which the
‘nation’ – characterised by its autonomous crown, Church and laws
– came to be defined against the Church of Rome and learned to be
suspicious of potential interference from supranational jurisdictions.
As Alan Cromartie observes, ‘the great advantage of [religious]
radicals, even in periods of adversity, was their ability to claim that
their antagonists were really “papists”, that is, adherents of a foreign
power’.16
Just as the legislation enacting the breach with Rome served to
enshrine the legislative role of Parliament (even as it worked to
establish royal supremacy), so too it reified the Englishness of
common law. The Act ‘concernynge the exoneration of the kynges
subjectes from exactions … payd to the see of Rome’ (1534; 25
Henry VIII, c. 21) lays down two criteria for testing the validity of the
nation’s laws: they must be indigenous (‘devised … within this
realme for the welth of the same’), or they must be customary and
consensual: taken by ‘the people of this your realme … atte theyr
free lybertye by theyr owne consent, and … bounde … by long use
and custome to the observance of the same’.17 By the 1560s, the
legal system could be used as a key way of distinguishing the
governance of England from that of ‘Fraunce, Italie, Spaine,
Germanie and all other countries, which doe followe the civill lawe of
the Romanes’, or confidently declared ‘to excell aswell the civile
lawes of the Empiere, as also all other lawes of the world’, as on the
title-page of Richard Mulcaster’s translation of John Fortescue’s De
laudibus legum Angliae (1468–71).18 The place of the law as one of
the bastions of Englishness is evident in the list of institutions that
Martin Parker’s broadside A Scourge for the Pope (1624?) presents
as resisting the foreign, corrupting influence of Jesuit missionaries:
‘Our king doth defy them’; ‘Our Commons descry them’; ‘Our laws
will prevent them,/ And shrewdly torment them’; ‘Our Parliament
Royall,/ Will give them deniall.’ But the law did not simply serve as
an institution that (like monarchy, Church, and Parliament)
commanded allegiance and that came to symbolise the nation and
its difference from foreign polities. Successive Tudor governments
also continued a process of standardisation (begun in the fifteenth
century), establishing a ‘national’ legal system, through the
codification of laws and the appointment and scrutiny of justices of
the peace, who were expected to follow ‘very specific instructions as
to the particular laws “deemed fittest to be put in execution”’.19
The institution of a nationwide system of justice was designed
and administered by government. A more culturally cohesive nation
was also achieved through ‘softer’ measures. Chief amongst these
was the growth of a ‘national’ system of education, in which, by the
end of the sixteenth century, virtually identical school curricula were
taught from St Paul’s in London to St Bees’ in Cumbria, employing
textbooks, such as Latin and Greek grammars, ‘approved’ by royal
authority. Many of these institutions were founded (or refounded,
from Church schools) under royal and aristocratic patronage, but
local communities likewise recognised the value of education and
subscribed to found schools, as the village of Willingham,
Cambridgeshire did in 1593.20 Access to this education was
admittedly limited to those boys whose families could afford both the
sundry expenses that schooling accrued (for items such as books
and candles) and the diminution in family income that resulted when
one potential wage-earner was removed from employment.
Nevertheless, the commonality of the educational experience
created a shared cultural resource and set of values that had further
impact as they leached into popular culture, through forms such as
ballads and plays, which recurrently drew on or alluded to the
classical literature and history studied in the early modern
schoolroom.21
At the core of the school curriculum were the writings of the
Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. The republican ideals of
liberty and virtues of deliberative counsel endorsed by Cicero, along
with his suspicion of would-be autocrats, might seem at odds with
the monarchical structure of pre-modern England. Nonetheless, as
John Watt has shown, the years between 1450 and 1530 saw the
consolidation and propagation of the powerful and affective term
‘commonweal’/‘commonwealth’, which frames the polity as a
mutually participatory body, in which (at least rhetorically) the well-
being of all is the proper aim of governance.22 This did not conflict
with traditional ideas of the ‘communitarian monarchy’, in which
monarchs were appointed by God to promote and defend the
common good. Rather, in Watt’s words, the late fifteenth century
witnessed ‘a merger of meanings … between a 1440s coinage for
an older notion of “common profit” or common good, and a re-
imported and revivified consciousness of res publica, based on a
fresher and more extensive engagement with Cicero and other late
Roman republican writers’ (150). Refashioning ideas of ‘common
profit’ along more Ciceronian lines had further ramifications, in the
conceptualisation of the holders of public power, including the
monarch, as ‘officers of the commonwealth’, and in the importance
of the role of law, to which even the monarch was bound (152, 154).
That ‘commonweal’ became such a dominant concept in early
modern England was, in part, due to the extent to which it dovetailed
with indigenous ideas and practices, not merely notions of the
‘communitarian monarchy’ but also the conciliar nature of
government; the need for a cadre of ‘lesser’ governors, below the
monarch, to implement policy and dispense justice; and habits of
participation and office-holding that extended beyond central
government to the administration of towns and parishes, and to the
English legal system, with its use of juries.23 As Thomas Smith wrote
in the mid 1560s, ‘A commonwealth is called a society or common
doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by
common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the
conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre.’24
In practical terms, the diffusion and implementation of all these
processes and ideas were enabled by nationwide systems of
communication. As Keith Wrightson observes, ‘However much they
belonged to their villages and parishes, the country people of the
period also moved in a larger world’ (41). The early modern English
population was a mobile one, even below the social elite, as
servants moved between households, and agricultural labourers
followed seasonal work. Kinship networks could thus be
geographically extensive, and early modern texts regularly depict
incomers to London meeting relations already settled, and made
citizens, there.25 Even those who never strayed beyond their parish
boundary would consequently have known about, and encountered
travellers from, other places. Communications were further enabled
by the postal roads, which existed even before the formal
implementation of a postal service that, from 1642, promised that
‘any man may with safetie and securitie send letters in any part of
this kingdome, and receive an answer within five days’.26 The
decades after 1560 saw the expansion of a network of royal standing
posts, enabling the rapid relay of the royal packet, as well as the
transportation of parcels on behalf of ordinary citizens and the
presence of exchequer-funded postmasters who supplied horses for
commercial hire.27 Travel was further aided by mapping and
surveying that envisioned the nation on the page, be it in the form of
charts, or in cheaper formats, printed as tabular itineraries, listing
distances between what become, through repetition across volumes,
conventional staging points along a standardised route, or (in the last
decades of the seventeenth century) more abstracted diagrams of
road networks, such as Mr Ogilby’s and William Morgan’s Pocket
Book of the Roads (1691), which depicts ‘a nation held together by
human mobility’.28 The development of English cartography served a
symbolic as well as a pragmatic function. As J. R. Hale notes,
without maps ‘a man could not visualize the country to which he
belonged’.29 Christopher Saxton’s 1579 Atlas of England and Wales
broke new ground in the detail and accuracy of its maps; further to
that, it placed the local and regional within a national context, each
map displaying the royal coat-of-arms, fostering what Richard
Helgerson calls ‘a cartographically and chorographically shaped
consciousness of national power’.30
These printed maps and itineraries highlight the crucial role that
print played in enabling the nation to conceptualise itself. It was not
simply that copies of works could be produced more cheaply in
greater numbers, allowing their wider circulation: the editions
produced would also be uniform (stop-press corrections aside). The
same words could thus be read in Newcastle as in Canterbury, in
Plymouth as in Norwich, independent of the personal and
professional networks along which manuscript works were
transmitted, accumulating multiple variations en route. Print
standardised as well as communicated: it meant that the letter of the
law or the Latin grammar was identical across the nation, and it
allowed people to travel in their minds as much as, if not more than,
in person.
It was print, for example, that enabled the Edwardian drive
towards uniformity in religion. The preface of the 1549 prayer book
announces its intention to combat difference: ‘where heretofore,
there hath been great diversitie in saying and synging in churches
within this realme: some folowyng Salsbury use, some Herford use,
some the use of Bangor, some of Yorke, & some of Lincolne: Now
from henceforth, all the whole realme shall have but one use’.31 The
Edwardian regime thus began a revolution in worship in which
congregations across the nation followed the same form of worship
laid down and authorised by the state, and disseminated through
texts such as the Book of Common Prayer and (from 1547) ongoing
editions of Certayne Sermons (the ‘Book of Homilies’), which
provided a series of sermons ‘to be declared and redde, by all
persones, Vicares, or Curates, every Sondaye in their churches’.32
The centrality of religion to national identity is further attested by
provisions made for church worship during the Civil War, when the
Book of Common Prayer was recalled in 1645 and replaced, on pain
of a 40s fine, with A Directory for Publique Worship of God in the
three Kingdoms. The emphasis that this placed on the communal
and uniform sprang from a fear of sectarianism. As the instructions
on the ‘assembling of the congregation’ state, ‘when the
Congregation is to meete for Publique Worship, the people … ought
all to come, and joyne therein: not absenting themselves from the
Publique Ordinances, through negligence, or upon pretence of
Private meetings’ (sigs. C1r–v). This anxiety bespeaks the
importance awarded to conformity of religion in fostering national
cohesion (even, or especially, as that cohesion was threatened); and
in its concern to promote ‘uniformity in Divine Worship’ (sig. B4r) the
Directory shares much of the spirit of the sixteenth-century prayer
book that lies at the heart of the Stuart liturgy it (temporarily)
overturned.
The standardising effect of church worship was not purely
devotional, however: it was also cultural and linguistic. It is striking
that the earliest known use of the phrase ‘the King’s English’ dates
to Edward VI’s reign, a period in which the same centrally prescribed
texts were supposed to be repeated on the same day, at the same
time, across the land, in exactly the same words: a common cultural
experience, but one designed and implemented from above, and
delivered in the vocabulary and syntax of south-eastern English.33
The stipulations regarding Edward VI’s injunctions are typical of the
Edwardian stress on both intelligibility and uniformity: they are to be
read in churches four times a year, ‘openly and distinctely’, ‘in
maner and fourme in the same expressed’.34
Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
kinds of demographic, cultural and administrative change outlined
above ‘drew together provincial communities into a more closely
integrated national society’.35 Yet processes and institutions alone
do not explain the emergence of the ‘nation’ as a meaningful
concept capable of commanding affection and allegiance. Much of
the work on early modern Englishness has been conducted by
literary scholars and focuses on the construction of nationhood in
texts – such as Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589),
Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, 1587) or Thomas Wilson’s
Arte of Rhetorique (1553) – which, despite increasing literacy rates,
would have reached relatively restricted audiences, on account of
the size and consequent cost of these volumes.36 Significant though
these more elite works undoubtedly were in shaping national
consciousness, this essay in contrast focuses on three media –
plays, ballads and broadsheets, and church worship – which had
deep social and geographic penetration, and were thus available to
literate and non-literate alike. It uses them to unpack the ways in
which the language used in discourses deployed by and about
‘national’ institutions (such as Church, state and monarch), and the
narratives spun about them, helped to cultivate the ‘deep
attachments’ that Anderson regards as a compelling feature of
national consciousness (4).
Wilson’s Three Lords and Three Ladies, with which this chapter
began, richly illustrates some of the mechanisms and ideological
prisms through which early modern Englishmen and -women were
invited to ‘imagine’ their nation. The play draws on an older tradition
of morality drama, in which characters represent moral traits, and
infuses it with a politically motivated xenophobia, whereby the
antagonists are depicted as morally, linguistically and ethnically
‘other’. The Spanish lords are identified as ‘Pride’, ‘Ambition’ and
‘Tyranny’; their pages ‘Shame’, ‘Treachery’ and ‘Terror’; and their
herald ‘Shealty’, whose name, ‘An Irish word, signifie[s] liberty,
rather remisnes, loosnes if ye wil’ (sig. G4v). Their otherness is
made more evident still in the way that they shift readily among
various languages (Spanish, Latin, French). The Vices
(personifications of moral failings) also appeal to popular stereotypes
of other national and ethnic groups. ‘I … am a Roman’, Simony
declares, his name (the practice of buying or selling ecclesiastical
preferments) and nationality striking a patently anti-papist note:
‘Dissimulation a Mongrel, half an Italian, halfe a Dutchman. Fraud so
too, halfe French, and halfe Scottish: and thy parentes [Usury] were
both Jewes’ (sig. F4r).
The play not only demonstrates the use of foreignness as a
counterpoint in the construction of national identity; it also reveals
one of the peculiarities of England as a nation in the way that the
dominance of its metropolis can be deployed as a focus and filter for
English identities. It is the ‘London’ lords who defeat the nation’s
enemies, collectively defined in stage directions as ‘Spaniards’.
They then assert their superiority over the provincial ‘Lords of
Lincoln’ to win the Ladies of London in marriage. Despite this
apparent show of metropolitan chauvinism, however, London is not a
‘closed shop’: like many London citizens, the everyman character
Simplicity is an incomer, who gave up being ‘a meal-man and came
to dwell in London’ (sig. C3r). ‘Time teares out milestones’, he tells
us: ‘Time seasons a pudding well, and Time hath made me a free
man.’
That the Queen’s Men existed at all and developed the patriotic
repertoire that includes Three Lords and Three Ladies owes much to
the desire of Tudor governments to exert control over and command
the loyalty of the disparate parts of the monarch’s territories. The
Queen’s Men were formed in 1583 on the instruction of Elizabeth’s
spymaster, Francis Walsingham, with the support of the queen’s
long-time favourite Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who supplied
many of its original members from his own playing company,
Leicester’s Men.37 The primary purpose of this new company was to
tour, carrying not only the queen’s name to the furthest reaches of
her realm but also plays that used English/British history to promote
a loyalist and often specifically Protestant ideology, such as The
Troublesome Reign of King John (printed 1591), King Leir (entered
in the Stationers’ Register, 1594), or The Famous Victories of Henry
V (Stationers’ Register, 1594). The Queen’s Men were by no means
the only touring company in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-
century England, but they toured more extensively and more
continuously than their contemporaries; they also reached more
venues by dividing the company in two.38 In 1589, the year in which
they played at Carlisle, for example, there are receipts for members
of the company performing at locations as dispersed as Kent, the
south-west coast, East Anglia, Ireland and the Welsh Marches.39
The county-by-county volumes of the Records of Early English
Drama are not yet complete, and the sources they collate are often
patchy, but there is nonetheless evidence of regular, nationwide
visits by touring companies: between 1560 and 1639, for instance,
there were 204 payments to licensed players made in Coventry; 133
in Norwich; 94 in York.40 On these visits, players would perform in a
variety of venues (drinking places, churchyards, civic halls, as well
as private houses) and some performances would be free to watch,
paid for by the mayor or his equivalent. In 1639, a seventy-five-year-
old Richard Willis remembered attending a play in Gloucester as a
child. The practice he describes is envisaged as both local and
national:

In the city of Gloucester the manner is (as I think it in other

corporations) that when Players of Enterludes come to towne,
they first attend the Mayor to informe him what noblemans
servants they are, and so get licence for their publike playing;
and if the Mayor like the Actors or would shew respect to their
Lord and Master, he appoints them to play their first play before
himselfe and the Aldermen and common Counsell of the City;
and that is called the Mayors play, where every one that will
come in without money.41

Plays, then, were not restricted to metropolitan culture, and they

were a powerful way of encouraging the nation to imagine itself,
particularly since the Queen’s Men established the English history
play as a staple part of theatre repertoire that other companies then
emulated.42 As Willis notes of the performance in Gloucester, ‘this
sight tooke such impression on me, that when I came towards mans
estate, it was as fresh in my memory, as if I had seen it newly acted’
(113).
The same social and geographic reach, and emotive impact,
achieved by early modern players can be ascribed to ballads and
broadsides. In Adam Fox’s words, ‘all manner of information and
entertainment was soon produced in broadside and broadsheet
format; it was cheap to buy, posted in public places, and distributed
throughout the nation in town and country alike’.43 Cheap print
could, moreover, act as ‘an instrument of social cohesion, as more
people were brought into the reading public, and as stories, images
and values permeated multiple tiers of English society’.44 Not all
broadside material was designed to be sung, but much of it was:
even sheets mainly composed in prose often contain a summative
rhyme, in ballad metre, the short lines of which, with their rhyme
scheme and regular rhythm, are easy to remember and thus to
disseminate orally. Another advantage of the single-sheet format
was the speed with which it could be produced: it probably took one
working day to set and print a run.45 Ballads and broadsheets are
thus a useful way of responding to emergencies (rebellions, like the
Northern Rising in 1569; threats of invasion, such as the Armada in
1588; the illness and death of monarchs) and of sharing news: about
sensational crimes, about war and peace, about prodigious births
and monstrous fish.
These ephemeral texts do not simply capture the sense of a
nation linked together by networks of news running into and out of
the capital, where the English printing trade was primarily based:
they also helped shape what it meant to be part of that nation.
Particularly striking is the recurrent utilisation of national history, as in
the ‘disguised ruler’ ballads, such as The Miller of Mansfield, The
Shepherd and the King and The Tanner of Tamworth, which were
reprinted regularly, well into the eighteenth century.46 These ballads
follow a similar formula, in which a king (Henry II, Alfred the Great,
Edward IV) encounters a provincial labourer, who fails to recognise
him and consequently treats him without sycophancy. By identifying
specific rulers, these ballads promote a shared national past, whilst
the fantasy of inclusivity and social mobility that they depict speaks
to Anderson’s conception of the fictions of ‘comradeship’ on which
nationhood relies (7). At the end of each ballad, despite their
inadvertent discourtesy – and, in the Miller’s case, proof of his
criminality (he poaches venison) – the labourers are rewarded with
land and honours.
As these ballads also demonstrate, national identity was often
focused on the monarch: their named, provincial locations bound into
a national story through the king’s mobility. This close link between
people and sovereign is underscored by the recurrent use of the
shared possessive pronoun: ‘Henry our roiall king would go a
hunting,’ The Miller begins; likewise The Tanner: ‘Our king he would
a hunting ride’ (emphasis added). The choice of the pronoun has
emotive effect, closing a temporal gap, knitting auditors/readers into
a common past and forging a relationship in which the monarch
belongs to them. The niceties of language used thus help mould
national identity, as can be seen in the recurrence of coercive
adjectives, such as ‘true’ or ‘naturall born’, to define the behaviour
expected of ‘Englishmen’ and figuratively to disinherit those who
demur. ‘True’ Englishness might entail living up to a brave and
glorious past, epitomised by exemplars such as the explorers
‘Gilbert, Hawkins, F[ro]bisher’ and the military men ‘the Norisses,
and noble Veeres, / and Sidnies[,] famouse many yeares’, in order to
defend the ‘true Religion’.47 Or it might be demonstrated by working
to thwart the ‘damnable and hellish Machinations’ of ‘those bloody
men of Rome’, as in A Catalogue of the Names of those Holy
Martyrs Who Were Burned in Queen Maries Reign (1679), which
commemorates the Marian martyrs, over 120 years after their
deaths: a clearly anti-Catholic intervention at the beginning of the
Exclusion Crisis.
Ballads could also coalesce the nation through cultivating a
sense of collective responsibility for its fate. As the rhyme at the end
of The forme and shape of a monstrous child, borne at Maydstone in
Kent warns in 1568:

This monstrous shape to thee England

Playn shewes thy monstrous vice.
…
Wherefore to ech in England now,
Let this Monster them teach:
To mend the monstrous life they show,
Least endles death them reach.

But it is not merely the active participation of its readers/auditors

through prayer or moral reformation to which these single sheets
attest. From the early sixteenth century, broadsides comment on and
express opposition to government policy, as can be seen in works
such as Questions worthy to be consulted on for the weale publyque
(c. 1548), which lists forty-eight perceived abuses of the
commonweal, or Thomas Churchyard’s Davy Dicars Dreme (c.
1551). As such, these broadsheets evidence the existence of a type
of post-Reformation, pre-Revolution public sphere, whereby ‘under
the rubric of the commonwealth, a range of issues concerned with
the workings and maintenance of the social order were discussed’.48
Nationhood is manifested not merely by the toeing of the loyal line
but also by a committed and often passionate desire to contribute to,
and profit, the commonweal. The role here played by cheap print
was enhanced by the increased range and quantity of material
circulating in affordable and accessible formats during the Civil War
and Interregnum. Jason Peacey does not make explicit connections
between national identity and the ‘democratization’ of knowledge
that he traces from the 1640s and 1650s onwards.49 Nonetheless,
printing information about daily proceedings in Parliament or the
conduct of individual MPs would have intensified, and made more
widely available, the sense of participating in a national community in
which business conducted in Parliament was recognised to be of
nationwide significance and a proper concern of all.
Ballads and broadsides thus shape readers and auditors into an
imagined community. This was achieved not only through subject
matter appealing to patriotic sentiment or fostering xenophobic
outrage, but also through style (such as the insistent use of coercive
pronouns) and the powerful ideological discourses into which their
authors tapped. Not least of these was the idea that their nation was
the recipient of divine favour. ‘The Lord of Hosts hath blest no land /
As he hath blessed ours’, asserts The Joyfull Peace (1613). For
those ballads that were set to music, the emotive resonance of the
national community they evoke or the enemies they mock, can only
have been enhanced by the communality of singing. Printed ballads
usually give a tune by its title only, rather than carrying musical
notation; this would seem to indicate that these were known tunes,
or ones that could be mastered quickly, and were thus designed to
cater to an audience without musical literacy.50 The ‘we’ of a ballad
text potentially becomes a ‘we’ experienced through communal
performance.
If evocations of national identity encountered in ballads were
recurrently focused on the monarch’s person, this was still more the
case when the English people moved from tavern or street into the
church. Aside from two brief hiatuses under Mary Tudor (1553–1558)
and during the Interregnum (1649–1660), the years after 1534 saw
the establishment and consolidation of a national religion, with the
monarch at its head. The use of church worship to cultivate loyal
subjects is evident in the prayers for the monarch that formed part of
the communion service, and a text such as The Homelie against
disobedience (first printed, separately, in 1570, in the wake of the
Northern Rising) being integrated into regular church worship
through its inclusion in the 1571 edition of the Second Tome of
Homilees. As the Homelie indicates, like the ‘obedience’ ballads
(such as Nortons Falcehood) that coincided with its initial
composition, the Church was used as a mouthpiece for the state at
times of crisis. In 1588, A fourme of Prayer, necessary for the
present time and state not only disseminated appropriate prayers to
be read in church, but also instructed ‘all Curates and Pastors’ how
they should ‘exhort their Parishioners’ to attend church ‘not onely on
Sundayes and Holidayes, but also on Wednesdayes and Fridayes,
and at other times likewise’. The prayers, Psalms and lessons to be
‘distinctely and plainly read’ included Old Testament readings, such
as Exodus 14 or 1 Samuel 17, in which God saved his chosen
people in times of tribulation, drawing an implicit parallel between
England and the ‘nation of Israel’.51 Preachers were also instructed
to ‘moove the people to abstinence and moderation in their diet, to
the ende they might bee the more able to relieve the poore, to pray
unto God to heare his holy worde, and to doe other good and godly
workes’ (sigs. A3r–v); interestingly, this rubric prioritises not
obedience (as we might expect) but charity, fostering a sense of
community as a means of buttressing the nation against external
threat.
The Church of England was more than an organ for preaching
obedience to the monarch, however. As is evident from Three Lords
and Three Ladies or the 1679 Catalogue, protecting the national
religion was a powerful rallying cry. ‘Englishness’ became
increasingly identified with Protestantism, and public expressions of
loyalty inscribed in oaths of association from 1584 onwards
‘redefined allegiance in confessional terms’.52 ‘The conditional
nature of allegiance to the monarch’ was not ‘spelled out’ in the
Elizabethan and Jacobean associations, but by ‘hint[ing] at an
implicit relationship between the sovereign’s defence of the faith and
the subject’s duty of obedience’, those associations sowed
‘intellectual legacies … which played an important part in English
resistance movements of the 1640s and 1680s’ (2). Once the
interests of Church, monarch and nation were no longer assumed to
be one and the same, the nature of what constituted the behaviour
and loyalties demanded of ‘true’ Englishmen inevitably became a
site of contestation. The inhabitants of Herefordshire might not have
perceived a conflict between their identity as ‘faithfull Subjects to his
Majesty’ and ‘as free-borne English-men’ when in 1642 they
‘joyne[d] in an unanimous Resolution to maintaine: 1. Protestant
Religion. 2. The Kings just power. 3. The Lawes of the Subject. 4.
The libertie of the Land’.53 Nonetheless, their belief in the
compatibility of all these objectives was not necessarily shared by
others. ‘True Englishmen’ might equally be defined by love for ‘the
Libertie of this Common-wealth’ and an unwillingness ever to be
‘reduced again under the Family of the Stewarts’.54
The mental uncoupling of the symbiotic relationship among
Church, monarch and nation in the mid seventeenth century was not
new, however. It happened strikingly early in the life of the English
Church, with the restoration of Catholicism under Mary Tudor. During
Mary’s reign, theories of justified resistance were not only developed
and propounded through texts such as John Ponet’s Shorte Treatise
of Politicke Power (1556), John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) and Christopher
Goodman’s How Superior Powers Oght to Be Obeyed (1558). Those
works were also accompanied by a campaign of cheap print,
produced abroad or at home on illicit presses by printers such as
John Day (under the imprint ‘Michael Wood’) or Hugh Singleton.55
The radical nature of these publications is evident from Certayne
questions demaunded and asked by the noble realme of Englande,
of her true naturall chyldren and subjectes of the same, printed by
Singleton in 1555. From the title onwards (which figures the country,
not the queen, as mother and thus the proper focus for the
obedience of her ‘subjectes’), the pamphlet reframes the nature of
the contract between ruler and ruled. ‘Item, whether the Realme of
England belong to the Quene, or to her subjects?’, it demands (sig.
A4v). In the process, it delegitimises Mary for violating the laws of
the land and positions Parliament as a representative body,
constituted not to do the ‘pleasure … of his Prince’, but to ‘speake
… for the profyte of the poore man, and the wealth of the realme’
(sig. A3v). It does all this, moreover, not in a long, complex,
expensive text (like Ponet’s or Goodman’s) but in a cheap and
easily disseminated single-sheet octavo, using a series of short
rhetorical questions, designed to produce the ‘right’ response from
‘true naturall’ Englishmen and women.
The temporary fracturing of the bond among Church, crown and
nation under Mary is a reminder that the expression and focus of
national identity is often contingent on historical circumstance:
Mary’s religious policies and her marriage to a foreign prince (Philip
II of Spain) shaped a response that would not have been evident
should Edward VI have outlived her. The scale of the prosecutions
that she authorised also helped harden the correlation between
Englishness and Protestantism, as they became etched into national
memory, aided by texts such as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
(editions from 1563), the ghoulishly illustrated pages of which were
supposed to be available in every parish church. Such fusion of
religious and national identity would have been compounded by the
annual remembrance of other ‘deliverances’, notably the
Gunpowder Treason of 1605. ‘Grant that we may still detest / that
doctrine and that sinne, / That teacheth us to eate our God, / and
eke to kill our King’, preaches one ballad, twenty years later,
equating the Catholic belief in transubstantiation with the promotion
of regicide.56
 The dynastic circumstances in which England found itself in the
last decades of Elizabeth’s reign, when political stability was felt to
be threatened by the lack of an obvious heir, similarly gave rise to a
particular manifestation of national identity. In the words of Patrick
Collinson, ‘the notion was freely accessible that the crown itself was
a public office which existed only to conserve the public safety: even
if the public safety was only spoken of, in terms, as the personal
safety of the monarch’.57 Like many of the other texts discussed
here, the 1584 Instrument of Association, which bound subscribers
to give their ‘lyves, lands and goodes’ in Elizabeth I’s defence, was
devised by those in authority: in this case, William Cecil and Francis
Walsingham, who also oversaw its dissemination.58 Nonetheless,
despite the fact that it was engineered from the top, rather than
emerging from grassroots, it was still a meaningful expression of
national allegiance. The thousands of gentry, clergy, nobility and
‘great number of inferior quality’ who subscribed to it did so as part
of a national community, binding themselves ‘joyntly’ as ‘natural-
born subjects of this Realm of England’, and swearing to resist
‘Publick Enemies to God, Our Queen, and to our Native Country’.59
At the heart of a document designed by the regime to ensure stable
government are thus a rhetoric and process of popular participation.
Even if this is a chimera, used opportunistically by those in power to
serve their own purposes, it nonetheless creates certain
assumptions about the role and place of non-elites in the national
polity. As Collinson notes, ‘to examine surviving copies of the Bond
… is to be given a vivid insight into both the autonomous political
capacity of the Elizabethan republic and its extent and social depth,
a carpet, as it were, with a generous pile’.60 There is thus a tension
(sometimes within the same documents) between those discourses
designed to encourage obedience and those that cultivate the
impression, and therefore expectation, of a more participatory
approach. Time and again, from the administration of justice to the
royal supremacy (which Thomas Cromwell wanted discussed at
dining tables across the land), the policies and propaganda intended
to centralise and buttress royal authority paradoxically relied on the
devolution of powers and helped to foster a discursive political
culture. The efforts to create a loyal, cohesive nation – efforts that
saw the Queen’s Men arriving in Carlisle – also served to
acknowledge that royal power needed to appeal to, and foster, what
Thomas Smith described as ‘common accord’.61

Notes

1 A. Douglas and P. Greenfield (eds.), Records of Early English

Drama: Cumberland/Westmoreland/Gloucestershire (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1986), 65.

2 R. Wilson, The pleasant and Stately Morall, of the three Lordes

and three Ladies of London (London, 1590), sig. A2v. Original
spelling and punctuation have been retained in quotations from
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, although i/j and u/v have
been regularised. For evidence that Three Lords and Three Ladies
was part of the Queen’s Men’s repertoire during this period, see
S. McMillin and S.-B. MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89. For the Moot
Hall as the probable site of performance, see Records of Early
English Drama, http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/venue.cfm?
VenueListID=48 (accessed 28 July 2014).

3 See, for example, Nemo’s address ‘to the audience’, sig. E1v.

4 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin

and Spread of Nationalism, new edn (London: Verso, 2006), 4.

5 Ibid., 369–72.

6 For the abortive attempts at union in 1670 and 1688–9, see C.

Whatley, Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2006), 29–31, 58, 91.

7 The work was available, in English, using these translations of

the Latin, from 1530 as The Commentaryes of Caesar as
concernyth thys realm of England sumtyme callyd Brytayne.

8 W. Shakespeare, ‘Richard II’, in The Riverside Shakespeare,

ed. G. Blakemore Evans et. al., 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997), II.i.43.

9 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1992), 5–6.

10 See, for example, W. Shakespeare, ‘The Merry Wives of

Windsor’, in The Riverside Shakespeare, III.ii.302–4.
11 An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish
recusants; 3 & 4 James I c. 4 (1606).

12 H. Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the

Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London:
Methuen, 1977), 8.

13 TNA, SP 6/3, fol. 86r; see J. Gairdner (ed.), Letters and

Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VI (London:
Longman, 1882), Vol. VI, item 1487(2).

14 See G. R. Elton, ‘The evolution of a Reformation statute’, EHR,

64 (1949).

15 Anno XXIIII Henrici VIII (London, 1533), sigs. B6v–C3r (B6v).

16 A. Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the

History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 62.

17 Anno. XXV. Henrici VIII (London, 1535), sig. F1r.

18 T. Smith, De republica Anglorum, ed. M. Dewar (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1982), 144. J. Fortescue, A learned
commendation of the politique laws of Englande, trans. R.
Mulcaster (London, 1567); this was reprinted in 1573, 1599, 1616,
1660 and 1672.

19 K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London:

Hutchinson, 1982), 152. For an overview of fifteenth-century
processes, see Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, 4–32.
20 Wrightson, English Society, 191.

21 The degree to which early modern England was steeped in

classical culture is evident from the range of allusions in
Shakespeare’s plays: for the gate price of 1d, theatre-goers could
have seen plays about figures from Roman history (e.g. Julius
Caesar, Coriolanus), derived from classical literature (e.g.
‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), or that
bandied allusions to mythical figures, such as Ganymede (in As
You Like It). For the use of learned allusions in cheap print, see C.
Shrank, ‘Trollers and dreamers: Defining the citizen-subject in
sixteenth-century cheap print’, Yearbook of English Studies, 38
(2008), 109, 112.

22 J. Watt, ‘“Common weal” and “Commonwealth”: England’s

monarchical republic in the making, c. 1450–1530’, in A.
Gamberini, A. Zorzi and J.-P. Genet (eds.), The Languages of
Political Society (Rome: Viella, 2011).

23 P. Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The

Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity,
2010), 134–68.

24 Smith, De republica, 57.

25 See, for example, the goldsmith Yellowhammer in Thomas

Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613).

26 Anon., A Full and cleare Answer to a false and scandalous

Paper (London, 1642), 1.
27 M. Brayshay, ‘Royal post-horse routes in England and Wales:
The evolution of the network in the later-sixteenth and early-
seventeenth century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 17 (1991),
373–4; cf. M. Brayshay, ‘Waits, musicians, bearwards and players:
The inter-urban road travel and performances of itinerant
entertainers in sixteenth and seventeenth century England’,
Journal of Historical Geography, 31 (2005), 431. See also P.
Withington in this volume, 183.

28 A. McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109.

29 Cited in R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan

Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
108.

30 Ibid., 108; for the growth of chorography in this period, see D.

Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical
Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp.
142–63.

31 The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the

sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche:
After the use of the Churche of England (London, 1549), sig. A2v.

32 Certayne Sermons, or homelies, appointed by the kynges

Majestie (London, 1547), sig. A2v.

33 Thomas Wilson’s use of the phrase in The Arte of English

Rhetorique (London, 1553), sig. P2r, pre-dates the first citation of
1616 in the Oxford English Dictionary.
34 Certayne Sermons, sig. A3r.

35 Wrightson, English Society, 222.

36 See, for example, A. Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National

Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; C.
McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); P. Schwyzer,
Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and
Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); C.
Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

37 McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 18–
32.

38 Ibid., 36, 52.

39 Ibid., 178–9.

40 S. Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 166–7.

41 R. Willis, Mount Tabor (London, 1639), 110.

42 McMillin and McLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 36.

43 A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9.
44 T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5.

45 H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1475–1557

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 231.

46 The English Short Title Catalogue lists editions of The Miller of

Mansfield (1588–1800), The Shepherd and the King (1650–1775)
and The Tanner of Tamworth (1596–1750). The Miller was even
adapted into a play by Robert Dodsley in 1737. For the
development of a ‘sense of a national past’ over the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, see Woolf, Social Circulation.

47 Anon., Gallants to Bohemia (London, 1620).

48 P. Lake and S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the public sphere in early

modern England’, JBS, 45 (2006), 275.

49 J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 397.

50 Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 33.

51 The significance to English Protestant identity of Exodus 14 (in

which, with God’s help, the exiled Israelites cross the Red Sea to
freedom) is also signalled by the fact that it features as a woodcut
on the title-page of the 1560 Geneva Bible.

52 E. Vallance, ‘Loyal or rebellious? Protestant associations in

England, 1584–1696’, Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002), 1.

53 A declaration, or resolution of the countie of Hereford (1642).

54 W. R., No Parliament but the Old (London, 1659).

55 See E. Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day

and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 29–37; C.
Panofré, Certayne questions demaunded and asked by the Noble
Realme of Englande, EEBO Introductions,
http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed 26 August 2014).

56 A Song or Psalme of thanksgiving, in remembrance of our

great deliverance from the Gun-powder Treason, the fift of
November (London, 1625).

57 P. Collinson, ‘De republica Anglorum; or, History with the

politics put back’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon,
1994), 19.

58 The Egerton Papers, Camden Society, 12 (1840).

59 The phrase ‘great number of inferior quality’ is that of Henry,

earl of Huntingdon in a letter to Francis Walsingham on 22
December 1584; TNA, SP 15/28/2, fol. 140.

60 P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, in

Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 48.

61 Smith, De republica, 57.

 2
Surveying the People
◈

Paul Griffiths

To preserve or augment revenues there must bee meanes: the

meanes are wrought by knowledge; knowledge had by
experience; experience by view and due observacon of the
particulars by which revenues doe or maie arise.1

To know the present state of my whole diocess before I would

enter upon my triennial visitation; I thank God I find no cause to
say upon the whole account, he that encreaseth knowledge,
encreaseth sorrow.2

I have been so ravished with the study of numbers, that if any

man will ask me, what is the chiefest Good next to God, that in
this life I take delight in? I must answer, Number; if, what is the
second? Number; if, what the third? Number.3
The making of surveys was always important to those who governed
England. Collecting and processing information had long been a
tried and trusted governing strategy, and medieval manorial record-
keeping, with its lengthy surveys of tenants, holdings and
obligations, provided solid grounding for later times.4 But beyond
doubt, the practice of surveying became more vital in all government
fields in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
information cultures and systems became more sophisticated and
widespread with the emergence of what Peter Burke calls the ‘paper
state’.5
Deep-seated, long-lasting change made the difference. The
English state was transformed by the start of the eighteenth century.
The apparatus of governance had to adapt, alter and grow in
response to the seismic shifts of the two centuries after 1500: a
population boom, religious revolution, economic and commercial
transformations in town and country, empire, and root-and-branch
reforms of financing and administering the state (to name just five).
The precise nature of the ‘Tudor revolution in government’ remains
debatable, but this sustained scope and scale of information use by
the state had not been seen before. A full list might fill a short book,
but we can start with Henrician muster counts; the mountain of
paperwork in fiscal returns to the Great Subsidy (1524–5); Wolsey’s
corn surveys; enclosure commissions; a nationwide system to
register births, marriages and deaths (1538); the Valor
Ecclesiasticus, which took stock of Church wealth in the wake of
Henry VIII’s royal supremacy (1535); and a string of state-sponsored
surveys in later decades.
 At the heart of England’s developing practice of surveying was
the greater reach of the state into parishes all over the land, crucially
through poor laws that could not work without counting and
classifying people, articles of enquiry in which Whitehall sought local
description and calculation to get to the bottom of all sorts of issues,
tax assessments, and Books of Orders to implement whenever
dearth or plague struck.6 And it is in the early seventeenth century
that we start to see Whitehall’s attempt to collect and collate data on
burgeoning trade hitting maturity, with the first Council of Trade set
up in 1622 to gauge ‘the true balance of the trade of this kingdom’
from ‘all records and writings as you shall find needful for your better
information’. The quest to balance trade generated reams of paper
and statistics in the seventeenth century when the state was seeking
data on fisheries, shipping, coal, cargos, and the old and new
draperies.7 Data flows if anything picked up pace after 1660 when
the Hearth Tax, requiring lists of householders and the number of
hearths in their homes; surveys of communicants; the Compton
Census of religious affiliation; the Marriage Duty Act; settlement laws
that tried to toughen up residence requirements and the right to
move somewhere; and the Poll Tax led to countless local ‘surveys’.8
In seeking information – or ‘making knowne’9 – on myriad
matters, the state (and Church) had helping hands in developing
local surveying cultures, drawing localities into data grids in which
parish and polity worked hand-in-hand to tackle social strains. State
and Church officials regularly told local governors to survey their
patch, hammering home the elemental essentials of numbers and
information. Quite typically, as he was getting ready for a visitation in
1686, Ely’s Bishop Francis Turner wrote ahead of time to his
parishes asking for their ‘light’, as he did not want to be ‘in the dark’.
He asked for presentments and a ‘notia’, by which he meant:

an account of every family, expressing the christian and

syrname of the house-keeper, the number and names of all
persons above sixteen years old in that family by themselves,
and of all under sixteen by themselves; setting for a mark the
letters A. C. overright the name of every adult, that is the actual
communicant in each family, and c. a. for a mark over the name
of every child that has been sufficiently well catechized; and con
for a mark over every one that has bin already confirm’d.

‘By this means’, Bishop Turner closed, ‘both you and I shall be able
to discern at one view what is already done, and what there is yet to
do’. A ‘good shepherd’, he mused in pastoral mode, ought ‘to know
his sheep and be known by them’ and ‘call his own sheep by
name’.10
These are census-taking words, but this information-relation
between parish and polity was two-way, with local initiatives often in
the driving seat. Local surveillance had self-generating priorities and
processes that were developed to meet local needs in a frequently
distinctive manner. Localities too stuttered from week to week,
coping with a hailstorm of troubles. Numbers of poor soared,
draining thin resources and deepening concern about need,
migration and real or imagined crime-waves that needed quantifying
to be understood. Communities up and down England felt that they
were ‘dayly’ under greater pressure.11
 In towns in particular we hear year after year, with rising heat,
that ‘the poor’ are ‘moche increased’ of ‘late yeares’; ‘the number of
poore’ has ‘greatly increased’; or, as Salisbury’s bench griped in
1638, ‘the number of those [needing] relieefe is growne farr greater
then in tymes past’.12 Reading Southampton’s records it feels like a
town stunned, as hard-up ‘inmates’ pour through the gates. The
town was ‘marvously oppressed’ in 1582 and ‘so comonlie
oppressed as no towne in England the like’ a decade later, leaving
leaders muttering darkly about ‘utter ruin’. The ‘abuses’ of ‘inmates’
were ‘intollerable’ in 1601 and ‘highly pesterous’ to ‘civil
government’, and their numbers were still ‘intollerable’ two years
later when ‘overmuch increasinge’ was an even bigger worry as
plague swept through the town.13
There was little that was not surveyed, and many places like
Chester in 1600 had monthly surveys helping governors to keep tabs
on most problems under the sun.14 Surveying the people was a rule
of thumb in government from Whitehall all the way down to the
smallest parish. England was more linked administratively and
magistrates could get guidance on the best way to survey in well-
thumbed texts like An Ease for Overseers of the Poore (1601) or
William Lambarde’s guide to The Duties of Constables, Borsholders,
Tythingmen and Such Other Low and Lay Ministers of the Peace
published the year before. Meanwhile, in rural England manorial
lords stung by sharp inflation and seeking to squeeze further income
from their estates turned to surveyors in an effort to ‘know their own’.
Conflicts of interest on the land increased the numbers of surveyors
stalking the fields and commons, measuring, calculating and
questioning alleged customs as lords tried to redefine their
relationships to tenants through surveys. John Norden advised
‘every lord of a mannor [to] cause his lands’ to be ‘truly surveyed’ at
least once a decade, and this became a regular reckoning rhythm in
his lifetime. ‘What would be more ridiculous’, John Lowe asked eight
decades later, ‘than for me to go about to praise an art that all
mankind know they cannot live peaceably without[?]’.15
Surveying was an art of government that was ever more deeply
rooted in culture and society. Above and below land people peered
into dark corners to survey rivers, buildings, roads, mineral deposits,
preachers, teachers, sewers, forests, money-lenders, wool exports,
Quakers and more besides. Survey was the generic term used for
chorographical works describing England’s counties and cities,
which multiplied around 1600, and for accounts of other lands:
Venice, Virginia, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, the East Indies, the West
Indies and lavishly with gusto ‘the whole world’.16 Towns like
Colchester in 1598 spent time and money to survey their ‘landes,
howses, and wast grounds’. As in every year since 1594,
Winchester’s mayor ordered a ‘view’ of land and tenements in the
town and its ribbon developments in 1603. ‘Begin at what part of the
town you please’, David Jenkins wrote in his surveying guidelines,
‘go through setting down every parcel of land, messuage or
tenement distinctly, abutting and bounding it’ and the ‘tenure and
title of the owner or inheritor’. Hospital and school lands also came
under this telling lens and not many acres were left unmeasured for
too long.17
 This was a world of surveying in a country of counting that
looked to a quantifiable future always better than the unsteady
present, when swift change evident in crammed towns or changes in
land-use or tenure soon made surveys out of date. The underlying
reasoning for bringing John Stow’s Survey of London up to date was
unsurprisingly that London was ‘so much alter’d since his time as to
be quite another thing’. ‘Reviewing’ his Cornish Survey in 1602,
Richard Carew noted the need for revisions as his ‘countrie hath
undergone so manie alterations since I first began these
scribblings’.18
It was hard to keep up to date as England’s varying fabrics
changed so deeply so quickly. Quite simply there was more to
survey. England’s population boom changed things forever.
Numbers mattered. What Southampton’s bench wanted in tense
times in 1603 was ‘knowledge’. Maidstone’s magistrates gave
orders to draw up ‘a boake of freemen freehoulders’ for ‘better
knowledge’ and also took ‘knowledge and notice’ of mischief-
makers sitting in pubs, not church.19 ‘Knowledge’ came from
‘experience’, and ‘experience’ in turn from ‘view and due
observacon’. Knowledge depended on ‘view’ or, in another word
with equal force survey. To survey was to discover, delineate,
calculate and categorise someone or something that needed
managing.
Information or ‘making known’ in narrative and numerical form
was the source of knowledge. Long before William Petty called
‘political arithmetic’ an ‘instrument of government’ local authorities
all over England had been using quantification to survey and govern
in a ‘more certain and regular’ manner (in the words of John Graunt,
another key pioneer of the infant science of statistics, who made
good use of figures from a single city – London – drawn from its most
regular form of surveying, the bills of mortality).20 The dawn of this
‘political arithmetic’ was in the second half of the seventeenth
century, but the steady development of surveying after the middle of
the sixteenth century was a long-term process in which the study-
based intellectual work of Graunt, Petty, Gregory King and others
was not at all separate but a late piece of a jigsaw that began much
earlier, when central government and the parishes worked closely
together to make governing through surveying a matter of routine.

What are archives for us today were information banks in 1600 to

further policy and policing. One Westminster parish noted in 1603
that ‘weekely almes’ were provided for seventy people, ‘whereof xii
have been verie good parishioners and have paid all duties’; while
‘the number of poore’ on the margins and ‘likely to come to have
reliefe are 123 men and widdowes besides their wives and
children’.21 Like governors back then historians make use of such
surveys to draw pictures of families and communities. We use them
to map social structures – household size and composition,
occupations, distributions of poverty and wealth – as well as keynote
social trends like population growth or the widening rifts of a harshly
unequal society. Such shrewd detective work is based on individual
surveys or combinations of records. But what we lack perhaps is an
overall understanding of early modern surveying as a process. We
know its intriguing documentary products but it reflects something
greater than the sum of its parts.
Our archives, then, were once working papers used to govern
from one day to the next, and no historian needs telling that we need
to know how they were made in the first place and in what ways they
were used to try to put things in order. It was felt that strategies to
crack crime and other ‘nuisances’ had a greater chance of success
if first understood through surveying. Localities were governed by
numbers. Counting gave something shape, putting governors in
better positions to take appropriate action. ‘The multitude of the poor
must be reduced to number’, an anonymous guide advised
overseers in 1601.22 The surge in census-taking after 1550 –
‘survey’ was often the word used – nearly always arose from
troubled times, leading hopefully, like the landmark Norwich Census
of the Poor (1570) to more finely tuned regulatory and relief
systems.23
From the third quarter of the sixteenth century, many cities,
some market towns and even rural parishes provided lists of ‘the
poore surveyed’, in the words of a note from Chester.24 More
broadly inhabitants and householders were added up for
administrative purposes: like the ‘catalogue’ or ‘kalender’ of
inhabitants’ names also provided for Chester in 1630.25 ‘In this
booke are contayned the names of all thinhabitantes yownge and
old’, taken down by constables, Poole authorities wrote quite proudly
in 1574: 1,373 ‘menn, wymen, and chyldren’.26 They now had the
town quite literally in their hands, in a book, always available when
they needed to track something down. Another place surveyed;
numbers collected; another little piece of England more ‘perfectly’
understood.
Numbering and listing were routine practices in ‘paper
parishes’. Local records are full of lists indicative of this surveying
mindset. The sheer range of issues and resulting paper stacks is
very revealing of synergies between social change and
administrative refinements. A catalogue of papers ‘for the towne’
was drawn up in Bridport (Dorset) in 1610, and with it we plunge
deep into the infrastructure of local-government-by-information. We
see: orders ‘for seats in the church’; leases; releases; rentals;
bonds; vagrant passes; the examination of an anonymous whipped
vagrant; ‘a note of all such as are rated’; ‘divers entries’ for
‘children’; Bridewell committals; Henry Lack’s ‘examinacon’ and
‘writing in greate letters to show cause of his ponnishment’; ‘a hue
and cry’; an almshouse ‘quitans’; ‘iiii records for binding of
Maniford’s children’; a letter requesting ‘a booke for the x and xv’; ‘a
booke for a voluntary benevolence of the best ablest for the sicke’;
rates for bells, highways and ‘repayringe of the church’;
‘examinacons of Robert Burrows that robbed a woman’; more
warrants; examinations; certificates; letters to and from Dorchester;
and much else besides.27
All this was from a small town far from key arteries in one year
of dealing with the knock-on effects of a society in transition. A
survey was the first course of action if problems piled up. Policy
could now follow. In a pattern replicated elsewhere, Salisbury’s
justices, sitting fretting in the hard 1590s, told constables to draw up
a ‘certificatt and information’ of ‘newecomers’, ‘straungers’, ‘base
borne children’, and rowdy houses for the ‘better government of this
citie’. Their successors two decades later made plans for a ‘veywe’
of the poor in 1613 to find out ‘in what sorte they may be relyved’.28
Complaints circulated 212 miles to the north in Chester in 1539
about ‘the greate nomber and multitude of vcalliant idell persons and
vaccabonds’ able to work who begged instead, leaving the worthy
poor to get by on scraps. ‘The nomber and names of all indigent and
nedye mendicant people’ were ‘serched, knowne, and wrytten’ down
in a ‘bill’ for ‘knowledge’ of who should get hand-outs. Three
decades later, in an order that word-for-word starts by following the
pre-Reformation one – telling us something about how they worked
with records – Chester’s officers in their ‘dowble charged’ city went
from street to street to take ‘viewe and certayne note’ of who did and
did not deserve help. Six decades later on, following ‘consideracon
of the multitude of poor vagrant and idle people that of late resorte
unto this citty’ – ‘more than former times’ it was said – thereby
‘hurting’ Chester’s own poor, governors asked constables to
‘serche’ monthly in parishes to get the names of anyone giving room
and board to shifty vagrants so that ‘some fitting course may be
resolved upon’.29
This law-and-order arithmetic was a product of its times,
embedded in the evolving experiences of England’s localities. We
see society in surveys coated in the ideological paint of magistrates’
prejudices. Records are only a version of what took place: the more
so because there was a tug-of-war between the authority of written
records and that of oral evidence. It was a drawn-out affair, leaving
Thomas Powell wondering in 1622 why ‘in many cases records do
clear the prescription in question yet in pleading they doe often use
no other argument but the memorie of man which may err’.30 But in
the end the power of recorded words was magnified. Archives were
representations of authority and necessary to clinch cases.
Governors and governed turned to records like custumals in boiling
controversies to establish a point in writing as a permanent footprint
to follow.31 The many times something is called accurate because it
‘appeareth by the booke’ tellingly express the internal power of
archives. A Great Yarmouth tussle ended when one side ‘appeared
[proven] by the particulars thereof’ from ‘bookes beinge viewed and
seene’.32
This empirical ‘knowledge’ on record was elevated when the
locality/parish became the core organisational unit for the 1598/1601
poor laws. A new status was conferred quite suddenly on ‘surveying’
and record-keeping. Even so there is concern for the safe-keeping
and state of records before and after this landmark legislation.
Accounts show payments for ‘making cleane the books’ and
‘dustinge recordes’. A Herefordshire Sessions clerk got a few
shillings for ‘keeping a constant fire in the castle house’ in 1688 and
‘airing records [that were] soe wett and damp [in] this extraordinary
wet winter’. Oxford’s ‘keykepers’ were told to ‘bringe upp all suche
writings as lye belowe in the treasure howsse and laye them above
in chests’ in 1583 ‘for that the nether howsse is somewhat moyste
and will hurte the writings’. ‘It is thought requisite and soe ordered’,
Maidstone’s magistrates said in 1638, ‘that proclamacons that … be
brought to this towne shalbee carefuly fyled in the towne hall to the
end that the same may there remaine without spoyling, tearinge or
looseninge’.33 Much money was spent on binding, stitching, and
‘coveringe’ records in ‘skynnes’ and ‘leather’. Norwich’s ‘old court
books and assemblie bookes’, needing ‘bynding’, were ‘decently
bound’ in 1680.34 And when calamity beckoned in Oxford in 1663 as
‘two auntient bookes of records … commonly called the red book
and the litle white book’ were ‘much obliterate and hardly to be
read’, the recorder hopped on a horse to London ‘to have them
transcribed in a faire and legible caracter’.35
There was much at stake in times when data systems mattered
more than ever before. Missing or damaged records impeded
authority. Parishes spent significant sums on chests to keep records
secure all being well: the ‘comon chest’, ‘parish chest’, ‘yron
cheast’, ‘strong chest’, ‘black chest’ and ‘chest of writings’. Reading
had a ‘great’ and ‘little chest’ in 1624 and seven years later
authorities spent £3 2s for a ‘new chest’.36 The keys to these
information-troves were put in the hands of civic officers or trusty
elders. Exeter’s ‘great coffer’ had ‘nyne keyes and nyne lockes’ in
1581, three times more than the usual number, as at Exeter’s
Heavitree parish, whose ‘stronge chest bounded with iron’ had
‘three lockes and three keyes’.37 Records were locked in secure
vaults for extra safety, like Gloucester’s treasury with five locks: the
‘cowncell howse’, ‘armory’, vestry or castle gatehouse. Great
Yarmouth had a ‘hutch’ for its ‘writings’, and nearby Thetford had a
‘litle’ and ‘greate hutche’ with three locks.38
There is a definite sense of seclusion in these archival
arrangements. Records were wrapped in layers of protective clothing
with resulting distance, as they nearly always remained out of reach
except to an elect few. In fact time and time again people low on
social ladders combed through records when, for instance,
customary rights were under threat.39 That said, however, a feeling
that records were quarantined under lock and key for reasons of
government never goes away. Leaders made calculated choices
about who might see records concerning delicate matters of
government and authority. Oxford’s magistrates decided to hold
‘meetinges’ in the ‘auditt house’ in 1640 and also agreed ‘that such
bookes [as] are fitt to bee kept secrett’ would be locked up there with
a fire burning ‘for the airinge of the writinges’ when needed.40
Local government was more secretive as social tensions and
disparities deepened. More people were surveyed but also
excluded.41 Meetings were run under a veil of secrecy and anyone
‘reveal[ing] secrets of the cownsayle howse’ faced a steep fine – 20s
in Colchester and Northampton (doubled for a second offence), and
£5 in Leicester and Tewkesbury (for a first offence) – or was
‘excpellyd’ if they ‘divulged’ the ‘private and secrett actings and
affaires’ of ‘assemblies’. Like surveying, ‘secresie’ was a mainstay
of ‘good government’ and the smooth running of ‘publique
affaires’.42 Increased information gathering was linked to tighter
limits on who could see records. Maidstone’s most sensitive records
could only ‘be redde, seene’, or ‘consideyid’ when six of the twenty-
four common councillors were in the room. It was a similar story in
Bridgnorth (Shropshire), where at least three burgesses needed to
be around the ‘chest or coafer’ whenever the coroner, high
chamberlain or high bailiff wanted ‘to see or use’ any ‘writeings’.
The ‘stronge chest’ in Heavitree parish (Exeter) could only be
opened when all four ‘sidesmen’ were at hand.43
‘Middling’ men like these ‘sidesmen’ were part and parcel of the
basic Zeitgeist of these surveying times. Office-holders were
recruited for the most part from the burgeoning ‘middle sort’, whose
influence shaped surveying across England.44 Increasingly able to
read, write and add up,45 these men moved in worlds where life was
lived in calculations made legible in accounts. To stay afloat in a
commercialising world, shopkeepers, traders and craftsmen
referenced records, devised finding guides and drew up inventories,
the same skill-sets deployed in office. ‘The exact keeping of books’,
John Hill noted in 1688, ‘is one of the hindges upon which trade
turns and commerce is held’. Edward Leigh stressed that a
constable needs ‘these things’ to do a good job: ‘honesty, science,
and ability’.46 Office-holders were a target audience for ‘practical
arithmetick’ pitched ‘chiefly for the benefit and use of tradesmen’,
and called ‘practical’, Arthur Leadbetter said, because ‘its end is
practical’ for ‘publick commerce’. Joseph Selden’s title-page puts it
in a nutshell: The Trades-mans Help, An Introduction to Arithmetick
(1694). ‘Practical arithmetic is the soul of merchandize’, said Edward
Cocker in a book directed to ‘tradesmen’ and ‘gentlemen’ alike.47
‘Practical arithmetic’ can be dated back before 1600 in moves
to make mathematics more accessible in ‘plaine’ form along with
advice on how to keep accounts. But the specific spotlight on
‘tradesmen’ was stronger after 1650 in another revealing overlap
with early ‘political arithmetic’. These guides to numbers taught skills
essential in life’s middle ‘station’ in or out of office: making a
‘kalender or alphabet’ to find something; keeping things up to date;
numbering pages; precise recording; keeping registers ‘for the sure
keeping and ordering’ of papers; summarising entries in the margins,
or painting pointing fingers there, to draw attention to something
significant; keeping inventories in ‘good order’ – ‘a merchant can not
display his reckoning too clearly’; and putting tables in neat columns
broken down by date and numbered so ‘there can be no mistake’.
Always keep books close at hand, John Hill told tradesmen, ‘so that
they may be easily found upon any occasion’.48
We see the results of ‘practical’ experience when turning the
pages of records as they did long ago, and moving from entry to
entry following alphabetical sequencing, indexing and scribbles in
margins. ‘The order I observe is altogether alphabeticall’,
lexicographer Elisha Coles stated, ‘for that best answers the design
of informing others’.49 Alphabetical lists are common: pensioners,
ratepayers, copyholders, prisoners, orphans, 502 signatories of the
Oath of Supremacy and Allegiance in Bideford (1660), and a
seventeen-page list of indicted recusants in Oxfordshire.50 A-to-Z
indexes – ‘table alphabeticall’ – helped to find a particular person or
matter. Sessions, and parish and civic books, often had coloured
letters cut down the side – on as many as twenty-two pages in one
Gloucester indictment book.51 Exeter’s chamberlain, with ‘labour
and care’, finished a twenty-page-long ‘index’ ‘alphabetically
digested under proper and particuler heades’ for the third Chamber
Act Book (1587–1601), six or seven decades after its last entry (that
distance matters). Kent sessions indictment books had alphabetical
indexes with cross-references to indictment rolls in right-hand
margins. Pointing fingers in margins made sure that something was
not missed. Any Marlborough inhabitant listed in the clerk’s
notebook with a ‘l[ett]re B against their names in margents’ had
‘black billes’. ‘A decree to enjoine secresie’ is written in a margin of
Tenterden’s corporation book next to an entry slamming leaks from
‘comon hall’ debates that ‘required secresy’.52
Surveying at all government levels in all walks of life became
more necessary when the state spread its managerial tentacles
across the land, drawing more information-minded localities into its
administrative embrace. Parishes were loaded down with archival
freight. Perhaps to support a legal claim or to improve their condition,
Barnstaple’s bench sent a heap of records to London in two batches
in spring 1613: ninety-seven sets of ‘receavors accompts’ in eight
bundles, three courtbooks, forty deeds, ‘19 courte rolles and
accompts’, ‘5 olde antient’ charters, and five more granted since the
mid 1550s.53 Middling men who drew up business, household and
personal records to order their lives were more often than not the
officers who took care to keep local records secure and did laps of
communities, ‘surveying’ people and problems.
They measured all the time: an action ‘marked by the play of
power relations’ in James Scott’s words.54 Whether measuring in a
field or going from door to door in a town, surveyors were creating
material and mental images or maps of what they found on the
ground. John Lowe’s surveyor walked over fields a handful of times
to have them ‘as it were a map in your head’ so ‘you may better
know where to begin and proceed with your work’.55 Local officers
likewise drew accounts and maps of their territory in their heads and
on paper. What they saw and surveyed is the substance of the next
section.

What they saw were the impacts of social change, sometimes good
but all too often bad. This is what constables found one day in
Winchester: 42 alehouse-keepers, 16 recusants, 325 ‘newcomers’
with no right to be in the town, 11 inmates living cheaply, 6 sabbath-
day dicers, 6 ‘fire places dangerous’ and 5 ‘souldiers married’.56
Officers crossed communities to ‘surveye’, ‘viewe and see’,
‘serche’, ‘enquire’, and ‘take notice’, and to bring back what they
found in notes, returns and certificates that were expected to be
‘exact’. Precision mattered. It was an aspiration, however
improbable, of governors more absorbed in numbers and
information. Surveyors were asked to turn in a ‘true and perfect
accompte’, ‘perfecte booke’, ‘perfect bill’, ‘exact list’, ‘an exact
survey of all the alehouses’ in Faversham, a ‘true and perfect list’ of
inmates in Winchester, ‘a certayne note’ of ‘vaccabonds’ in Chester
in 1571, and ‘a perfect list or callender of the names’ of all Quakers
locked up in prison in the same city a century later.57
Ambiguity bred anxiety. Information needed to be certain. Ralph
Agas wanted field surveys to be ‘sound and inviolate’ to ‘avoid
confusion’, and ‘exact’ in ‘callendring and retriving of evidence’ for
the ‘beating out of doubts’; and any magistrate worth his salt would
have said the same.58 Survey once, officers were often told, and
then do it again. It was more vital than ever to keep on top of swiftly
shifting situations by regular surveying. Alehouses were surveyed
‘every weeke twysse’ in Winchester (1572) and Great Yarmouth
(1599) along with ‘newe dwellers’ and anyone ‘dirtying’ streets.59
There were monthly counts of ‘newcomers’ in Colchester (1597);
Leicester (1574); St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster (1622); and
Chester (1590); and anyone under twenty-one living ‘at their owne
hands’ in Norwich (1668).60 Inmates were added up ‘every Munday’
in St Margaret’s, Westminster (1683) and ‘each third Wednesday’ in
next-door St Martin-in-the-Fields (1659); quarterly in Northampton
(1581); ‘every six weekes’ in Ashby-de-la-Zouch; and each week
‘duly and carefully’ in Great Yarmouth (1622) and nearby Norwich
(1600).61
Concern was expressed in the need for speed. ‘With all
convenient speed’, overseers in St Martin-in-the-Fields were told
when instructed to list the ‘names of all poore people … that are able
to worke’ in 1656. ‘Give an accompt in writing of ye names of all the
poore … forthwith’, Norwich parishes were told in 1686. Like
Thetford’s surveyors in 1578, Great Yarmouth officers were given a
week to draw up ‘trewe billes of the inhabitants’ in 1574. ‘Take the
names of every householder … in a fayre booke’, Rye’s constables
were told in 1593, ‘without delaye’.62
Surveying made issues legible, with the potential, at its most
eagle-eyed and comprehensive, to dissect communities on paper. A
1656 survey for ‘order and government’ in Maidstone targeted over
thirty types of offenders/offences including vagrants, ‘unthrifts’,
sojourners, good-for-nothing tapsters, ‘young fellowes and wenches
liveinge out of service’, crooked officers, and anyone dropping litter.
Wardens were asked each Saturday to ‘acquaint’ the mayor with
what they found. Articles from Exeter in 1560 also listed over thirty
offences: unruly women, heavy drinkers, apprentices strutting along
streets in glitzy clothes, ‘houses of office’ considered ‘fylthey’,
bawds, ‘decayed’ dwellings and – intriguingly five years before
Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursetors first appeared –
cant-terms like ‘upright men’ and ‘qyyer byrds’.63
The debris of change is in surveys everywhere: ‘singlewomen’
keeping ‘chambers by themselves’ who ‘goe to thir owne hands’,
vagrants, idle poor, crumbling buildings, tottering walls, workers
without seven-year apprenticeships under their belts and plague
hazards.64 ‘Articles to be inquired of by surveyers’ in Cambridge in
1600 are a textbook example of a town discovering the dimensions
of its difficulties. ‘Surveyers’ were told ‘diligently [to] inquire and
faythfully sett downe in writing’ the names of anyone who had lived
in the town for less than three years; down-on-luck paupers who
were ‘able to gett theire living by labour in whole or in p[ar]t’;
‘householders unable to ‘maynteyn themselves’ without hand-outs;
townspeople well off enough to ‘give’ to the poor; ‘all innekeepers
[and] alehousekeepers’ and householders giving room and board to
beggars; the number of cottages on the fringes of the town; and,
lastly, any inmate creeping into the town.65
Its people surveyed, Cambridge was better known. Paupers
were put in columns in categories in parish after parish and county
after county. Recurring headings, designations and strategies were
hardly unexpected in a nation increasingly unified by statutes,
administrative structures and common problems. There are repetitive
chords, as surveys drew from similar concerns but still reflected local
needs. The significance of this is that national laws and
administrative strategies at all levels created a common vocabulary
and process to categorise, list and analyse a viper’s nest of growing
problems. In Hereford officers surveyed victualling houses,
alehouses, inmates and anyone giving them somewhere to stay,
apprentices, inhabitants, sixteen traders keeping weights and
measures (with ten more names crossed out), whipped vagrants,
and ‘true’ lists of divine service shirkers and ‘exact accounts’ of
paupers able to work. Ipswich surveyed ‘all forrenors’, vagrants,
lodgers, ‘poore, nedye, impotent’ Gippeswykians, tipplers,
victuallers, alehouse-keepers, ‘mayds out of service’, ‘Londiners’ as
plague hit hard, and people bringing corn to market. And
Northampton’s leaders surveyed alehouses, ‘poore people late
come to the towne’, tapsters, ‘newcomers’ – ‘continuallie and
successivelie’ – inmates, apprentices – in a book – communicants –
‘a true accompt’ – servants – ‘speciall notice in writing’ – anyone
buying or selling corn or cattle, jobbers, poulterers, oatmealmen,
‘higlers’, maltsters, regrators, engrossers, forestallers, ‘newcomers
and knitters’ in plague time, and ‘all maides that worke at their owne
handes’ – twice every year.66
Numbers were organised into local political economies: 46
alehouse-keepers in Newbury (1667), 72 recusants in Loughborough
(1686), 1,728 inmates in six Cambridge parishes (1632), 68
Wintonians not paying rates (1599), and 20 Prestonians keeping
‘great and unruly doggs’ in 1665 (the mayor among them).67 And
governors often counted something again later to check if the tide
was turning. Norwich’s ‘du[t]ch congregacon’, noted down in muster
lists, was 1,200 strong in 1613, ‘but 999’ in 1624 and ‘but 678’ ten
years later. (Francis Bacon wrote that ‘the population may appear by
musters’.) On the eve of the 1570 census in the same city counts
showed 752 male ‘straungers’ living there, 681 women, 1,132
children and 26 servants (2,591); and in the year after the census,
officers counted 868 Dutchmen, 203 Walloons, 1,173 women ‘of
both nations’ and 1,681 children – 666 ‘inglishe borne’ (3,925).68
This cyclic categorising and counting imposed definition on
landscapes. It also imposed authority through inscription. Findings
were articulated and ordered in the discriminatory conceptions and
felt priorities of the authorities. Surveys, in effect, froze social
relations (and realities) in records formulated by articles. Like
criminal records, they reproduce (and start with) categories and
labels created by elite perceptions. Information flooded in but the
most vital step was next when it was put on the magistrates’ table
and processed, arranged and modified for use as policy to follow
including prosecutions and forced evictions.
Surveys done, magistrates were no longer left fumbling to
understand something. After going door-to-door they now had the
poor in columns, not hidden, with bits and pieces of information that
made them more legible in names, ages, addresses and abilities,
and slotted into preconceived categories: deserving/undeserving,
orderly/disorderly, employed/unemployed.
In Salisbury’s 1635 surveys, those on relief rolls in two of the
town’s three parishes were listed by street, life-course stage, age,
ability and weekly payment. Governors saw measly household
budgets and profiles of people perched precariously propped up by
hand-outs. We see the value of child labour in dragging have-not
households from week to week. There are gaps in columns about
conditions but there is enough to get us inside the doors of the poor.
Eighteen paupers limped through life lame or crippled and five could
not get out of bed. Seven were blind, one more was nearly blind,
another was blind in one eye and three others had weak eyesight.
One could not hear anything at all. Eight were sick, another eight
were feeble and three more were impotent. Five wives (one
pregnant) had to fend for themselves, having no idea where their
husbands were. Twenty-four-year-old Eleanor Macy shared a house
with her seventy-year-old feeble mother who was ‘sometimes
distracted’; Mellor Jones lived along Milford Street with his ‘crook-
backed’ daughter Mary trying to scratch a living on 25d each week;
while forty-year-old John Butler languished in prison, leaving his
thirty-five-year-old wife with 2s 6d each week to put food on the table
for young Crisse, Thomas, Ann, and Nabb.69
Similarly gloomy stories of the feckless, luckless and rootless
poor run through the Norwich Census (1570), which is a register of
need framed by magistrates’ questions revealing their deepest
concerns: how long have they lived here, where did they live before,
are they able to work for their living, how many in the house and who
are they? Be specific. Family after family are called ‘verie’ or
‘myserable pore’. Work is hard to come by or nowhere; husbands
are missing for years (one wife left reeling with eight children);
women with children have no ‘helpe’; men are ‘not in occupieinge’;
needy widows are aged anywhere from 20 to 100; aged people are
‘past’ work or ‘not able to work’ but still expected to; and children
are breadwinners. Widow Jenkinson would ‘spyn when she can get
ytt’. Sixty-year-old Robert Barwick, ‘longe in pryson for dett’, left his
wife Anne at home ‘that hath no exercise butt traveyle dayelye in hir
husbondes behalfe’ doing little apparently for her ‘ydle’ eight
children living on ‘the labor of others’. Many more were knee-deep in
the quicksand of poverty: not long in Norwich like lace-weaver ‘Alice-
lyve-by-love’; on the wrong side of the law (‘unruly’, scolds, ‘harlots’,
thieves); or suffering the pitiless scourge of the poor: sickness,
disability and everyday pain.70

‘Publick records, memorials, and evidences’ are ‘jewels of

inestimable value’, Gerard Maymes wrote gushingly in 1603.71 In a
vestry room somewhere in an English backwater ‘middling’ men
would have nodded their heads if they read this, and a couple of
them might have felt the key in their pocket that unlocked the chest
in the cupboard. They might have run through numbers in their
heads, maybe turning the pages of a ‘book of record’ open on the
table, tallying and thinking through the most recent threat to the
peace and purse. In office or at work, after all, little mattered more to
them than numbers.
The true value of surveying was not just what was recorded but
the power of paper and the processes that fed it. Writing smugly in
1586, Thomas Hariot bragged that the tribes circling Roanoke had
‘no letters nor other suche meanes as we to keepe records’.72
Settlers were more powerful for their capacity to stitch books of
records together. Whether at home or overseas the English surveyed
people and felt that they were superior for the winning utility of
knowledge in records.
Counting trumped whispering and not knowing. ‘In St Martins [-
in-the-Fields] I have heard of twenty or thirty thousand’ Catholics,
Peter Petit noted in 1689, ‘but the account was taken there and as
exact a one as could be, and I am assured by some that should
know’ that the real figure ‘upon most careful scrutiny was about
600’. ‘We hear of the vast numbers’ of Catholics in the north, Petit
continued, ‘but I believe there are much fewer than we hear’.
‘People’, he said snootily, ‘multiply the number of papists … in
common talk at least ten-folds’. Nine years earlier, he said to seal his
case, ‘a sheet of paper’ called ‘a catalogue’ of Catholics in London
was published: ‘catholics reckoned in St Martin-in-the-Fields are but
22’, and – the proof of the pudding – ‘the Bishops survey makes it
64’.73
Even as he used numbers to put a case, Petit ignored their
apparent inconsistency. Not everything went according to plan. Little
was ‘perfect’, ‘exact’ or ‘true’, despite great expectations. We lack
lists ‘of all those yt keepe guns and greyhoundes’, Westmorland
justices moaned in 1684. ‘A very smale appearance’, St. Martin-in-
the-Fields’ vestry complained one day in 1659, only two constables
bringing in ‘returne of ye inmates’. And a few months later the same
vestry slammed ‘the greate neglect’ of beadles bringing in inmate
lists in dribs and drabs.74
There were many such defects in surveying. Surveyors
sometimes could not even agree on numbers. Four constables were
sent to Cambridge’s Midsummer Fair in 1626 to keep an eye on
‘The Signe of the George’ where students boozed all Sunday long.
There were twenty there, one of them said, ‘drinkinge and
conversing’ and enjoying tobacco with ‘4 fidlers playing’ in two
rooms. No, another one said, ‘there were some xii there’, and he
wasn’t sure that it was in time of divine service.75 Yet we should
acknowledge the aspiration to ‘exactness’ behind one survey after
another. ‘From hennseforthe’, Reading’s rulers said in 1591, ‘there
shalbe a tolboke’ kept ‘orderly’ and ‘colours of the cattell and theire
proper markes’ registered ‘with the names’ of buyers and sellers.76
They tried. This is wishful precision on any score. They wanted to
get it right to make the place where they lived more ordered and
secure. Cattle, Catholics, con-men, citizens, conduits – anything
surveyed/counted was a crumb of comfort for magistrates seeking
policy.
This was perhaps a predominantly urban phenomenon, but town
vaults are exactly where records are more likely to have survived in
good order. Surveys cut from the same cloth, under Whitehall’s
influence, were mostly hatched locally, conducted locally and
digested locally. England was not presented in one great national
survey – that would have to wait until the census of 1801, the first
truly national survey since the Domesday Book. Yet thousands of
local surveys revealed England from the bottom up. Long before Sir
William Petty decided that surveying was key to government, local
officers across the length and breadth of England went up and down
streets surveying this and that for the same political practices and
principles as those of Political Arithmetic. Each was in a sense a
social and economic narrative of a particular place, a response to the
experience of change: the raw materials of history.
‘Survey the poore’, Gloucester’s foot soldiers were told in 1640,
and off they went back to their parishes to start counting house by
house.77 Another count, another year. Numbers.
England surveyed and revealed in little local particles.

Notes

1 J. Norden, The Surveyors Dialogue (1610), the epistle to the

reader, 2.

2 F. Turner, Letter to the Clergy of the Dioecess of Ely, from the

Bishop of Ely before and Prepatory to His Visitation (Cambridge,
1686), 1 (original emphasis).

3 W. Ingram, The Secrets of Numbers According to Theologicall,

Arithmeticall, Geometricall, and Harmonicall Computation (1624),
‘To the Reader’, A4r.

4 O. Coleman, ‘What figures? Some thoughts on the use of

information by medieval governments’, in D. Coleman and A. H.
John (eds.), Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial
England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).

5 P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to

Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 117–19. See also P. Slack, The
Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014); P. Slack, ‘Government and information in seventeenth-
century England’, P&P, 184 (2004); and P. Griffiths, ‘Local
arithmetic: Information cultures in early modern England’, in S.
Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English
Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern
England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013). For early America see J. H.
Cassedy, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the
Statistical Mind, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1969), Chapters 2–4.

6 S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern

England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); M. J.
Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); P. Slack, ‘Books
of Orders: The making of English social policy, 1577–1631’,
TRHS, 5th series, 30 (1980).

7 Slack, Invention of Improvement, 51–5, quotation at 52; P. Slack,

‘Measuring the national wealth in seventeenth-century England’,
EcHR, new series, 57 (2004).

8 K. Shurer and T. Arkell (eds.), Surveying the People: The

Interpretation and Use of Document Sources for the Study of
Population in the Later Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Leopard’s
Head, 1992); N. Landau, ‘The laws of settlement and the
surveillance of immigration in eighteenth-century Kent’, C&C, 3
(1988).

9 E. Coles, An English Dictionary (1673), and E. Phillips, The New

World of Words; or, A General English Dictionary, 4th edn (1678),
s.v. ‘information’.

10 Turner, Letter to the Clergy of the Dioecess of Ely, 8–9 (original

emphasis).

11 C[heshire] RO, Z/AB/1, fol. 265; LE[icestershire] RO, QS/6/1/2,

fol. 58v; N[orfolk] RO, T/C1/6, fol. 30v; H[ampshire] RO, W/B1/4,
fol. 110; C[ambridge] U[niversity] L[ibrary], CUR 37.3, fol. 126;
CRO, QJB/15, fos. 232v–34.

12 NRO, Norwich Assembly Book 5, fol. 273; WILT[shire] RO,

G23/1/3, fol. 397.

13 S[outhampton] C[ity] A[rchives], 6/1, fols. 17, 23, 25, 26, 27.

14 CRO, Z/AB/1, fols. 261, 263.

15 Norden, Surveyors Dialogue, 30; J. Lowe, Geodaesia; or, The

Art of Surveying and Measuring of Land (1688), preface, 1; D.
Jenkins, Pacis consultum … Describing the Court Leet (1657), 64.
See A. W. Richeson, English Land Measuring to 1800:
Instruments and Practices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1966); A. McRae, God Speed the Plough: The
Representation of Rural England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–97.

16 See J. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and

the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

17 E[ssex] RO C[olchester], D/B5/Gb1, fol. 160v; HRO, W/B1/3,

fol. 136. See, for instance, San Marino, H[untington] L[ibrary],
STTM Box-3, folder 37; Box-12, folder 33; C[entre for] K[entish]
S[tudies], FA/AC3, fol. 153v; Md/Acm/1a, fol. 71; Md/Acm1/2, fol.
59v.

18 Anon., The Model of a Design to Reprint Stow’s Survey (1694),

2; Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (1602), preface to the
reader.

19 SCA, 6/1, fol. 27; CKS, Md/ACm1/2, fol. 2; Md/JLP1/1656.

20 Petty is quoted in T. McCormick, William Petty and the

Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 304; J. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations … Made
upon the Bills of Mortality (1662), 100. See also J. C. Robertson,
‘Reckoning with London: Interpreting the bills of mortality before
John Graunt’, Urban History, 23 (1996); Griffiths, ‘Local
arithmetic’; and J. Innes, ‘Power and happiness: Empirical social
enquiry in Britain from “political arithmetic” to “moral statistics”’,
in her Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009).

21 W[estminster] A[rchive] C[entre], F6039. See also WAC,

F3348, F3349, F3550, F3551.

22 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore (Cambridge, 1601), 17.

23 P. Griffiths, ‘Inhabitants’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds.),

Norwich since 1500 (London and New York: Hambledon &
London, 2004), esp. 63–75. See also P. Slack, Poverty and Policy
in Tudor and Stuart England (London and New York: Longman,
1988), 48–52, 53–5, 73–80; P. Clark and J. Clark, ‘The social
economy of the Canterbury suburbs: The evidence of the census
of 1564’, in A. Detsicas and N. Yates (eds.), Studies in Modern
Kentish History (Maidstone: Kent Archaeological Society, 1983).

24 CRO, Z/AB/1, fol. 4. And see Peter Laslett’s listing of rural

censuses in manuscript and Richard Wall’s catalogue of others
that have come down to us in printed form in P. Laslett (ed.),
Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), 74–85 and Chapters 4–5.

25 CRO, Z/AB/2, fol. 24v.

26 D[orset] H[istory] C[entre], DC/PL/B/13/1.

27 DHC, DC/BTB/C88, fols. 30r–v.

28 WILTRO, G23/1/3, fols. 231, 291v, 153v.

29 CRO, Z/AB1, fols. 60, 126v; Z/AB/2, fol. 17v.

30 T. Powell, Directions for Search of Records Remaining in the

Chancerie, Tower [and] Exchequer (1622), 75.

31 A. Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular

Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), Chapter 5; A. Fox, Oral and
Literate Cultures in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), Chapter 5.

32 NRO, Y/C27/1, fol. 177.

33 CRO, TAB/1, fol. 30; NRO, Great Hospital General Account

Rolls, 1618–19; HE[refordshire] RO, Q/SM/4, fol. 225v;
O[xfordshire] A[rchives], C/FC/1/A1/01, fol. 261; CKS, Md/Acm1/2,
fol. 170v.

34 NRO, N[orwich] M[ayor’s] C[ourt] C[ourtbook] 25, fols. 69, 61v;

S[hropshire] A[rchives], 3365–523; DHC, DC/BTB/M2/1578; WAC,
E5/1574–76; E. M. Ramsay and A. J. Maddock (eds.), The
Churchwardens’ Accounts of Walton-on-the-Hill, Lancashire,
1627–1667, Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, 151 (2005),
55–6.

35 OA, C/FC/1/A1/03, fol. 311.

36 B[erkshire] RO, WI/AC1 fols. 36v, 53; E[ast] S[ussex] RO,

QO/EW/3, fol. 34v; Win/55, fol. 29; NRO, Norwich Chamberlains’
Accounts 1603–25, fol. 268v; WAC, SMF1580; WILTRO, G/23/1/3,
fol. 375; CKS, Md/Acm1/1a, fol. 66; D[evon] RO, Z19/36/14, fol.
130v; WAC, E2413, fol. 19; BRO, R/AC1/1/2, fol. 80; R/AC1/1/5,
fol. 11.

37 DRO, ECA B/1/3, fol. 25; 3004A/PW 2; LERO, BRII/1/3, fol. 31;
SA, BB/C/1/1/1, fol. 48v; NORTH[amptonshire] RO, 3/1, fol. 8v;
CKS, Md/Acm1/1a, fol. 66; S[uffolk] RO I[pswich], C/4/4/1/34, fol.
9; DHC, DC/LR/D1/3a, fol. 182.

38 G[loucestershire] A[rchives], GBR/B/3/3, fol. 512; NRO,

Y/C/19/3, fols. 129, 171; T/C1/1, fols. 11, 65v; GA, GBR/F/4/3, fol.
151; N[orth] D[evon] RO, Bi/3792, fol. 8; WILTRO, G23/1/3, fol.
406; G22/1/205/2, fols. 5, 33v, 74; WAC, F2002, fols. 46, 206;
E2413, fol. 93; CKS, TE/S2, fol. 374; NORTHRO, 3/1, fol. 8v;
HERO, Q/SM/4, fols. 23v, 89v–90.
39 Andy Wood vividly brings these disputes to life in his Memory
of the People.

40 OA, C/FC/1A1/03, fol. 103v.

41 Cf. P. Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and authority in late sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century London’, HJ, 40:4 (1997).

42 EROC, D/B5/Gb1, fol. 9v; NORTHRO, 3/1, fol. 103; LERO,

BRII/1/3, fol. 80; GA, TBR/A/1/2, fol. 36; HRO, W/B2/1, fol. 30v;
W/B1/5, fols. 105, 165v; CKS, FA/AC3, fol. 48v; TE/S2, fol. 247.

43 CKS, Md/Acm1/1a, fol. 38v; SA, BB/C1/1/1, fol. 48v; DRO,

3004A/PW/2.

44 H. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England

1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); J. Kent, ‘The
rural “middling sort” in early modern England circa 1640–1740:
Some economic, political, and socio-cultural characteristics’, Rural
History, 10 (1999); S. Hindle, On the Parish: The Micro-Politics of
Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004).

45 K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early

Modern Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2000), Chapter 1; K. Thomas, ‘Numeracy in early modern
England’, TRHS, 5th series, 37 (1987).

46 J. Hill, The Exact Dealer Being an Useful Companion for All

Traders (1689), 56; E. Leigh, A Phililogicall Commentary Or an
Illustration of the Most Obvious and Useful Words in the Law, 2nd
edn (1658), 48.
47 A. Leadbetter, Arithmetical Rules, Digested and Contracted for
the Help and Benefit of Memory Very Necessary and Useful, as
Well for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, as for Youth and Apprentices,
in Mercantile Affairs (1691), A2v, 2; J. Ayres, Arithmetick a
Treatise Fitted for the Use and Benefit of Such Trades-men as Are
Ignorant in That Art (1693), A3r; E. Cocker, Cockers Arithmetick
Being a Plain and Familiar Method Suitable to the Meanest
Capacity … (1678), A2v.

48 I. C. Gent, A Most Excellent Instruction for the Exact and

Perfect Keeping Merchants Bookes of Accounts (1632), 5; Hill,
Exact Dealer, 52, 59, 58; H. Oldcastle, A Briefe Instruction and
Maner Hovv to Keepe Bookes of Acompts After the Order of
Debitor and Creditor & As Well for Proper Accompts Partible, &c
(1588), Chapters 2 and 4. See N. Glaisyer, The Culture of
Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006),
Chapter 3; A. Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chapter 2; D. E.
Harkness, ‘Accounting for science: How a merchant kept his
books in Elizabethan London’, in M. C. Jacob (ed.), The Self-
Perception of Early Modern Capitalists (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).

49 Coles, English Dictionary, A3r.

50 NDRO, 1064Q/SO1, fols. 12v–13v; HL, EL 2178.

51 DHC, DC/PL/B/1/1/1, fol. 242; SRO, QO/EW7; GA, GBR/B/3/2.

52 DRO, ECA B/1/3, fols. 474–92; CKS, Q/SP1/1–2; WILTRO,

G/22/1/107; CKS, TE/S2, fol. 247.
53 NDRO, B1/46/366.

54 J. C. Scott, Seeing like a State (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1998), 27.

55 Lowe, Geodaesia, 142.

56 HRO, W/K5/8, fol. 35.

57 DRO, ECA B/1/3, fol. 411; NRO, Y/C/19/4, fol. 150; CKS,
U120/09, fol. 18; HRO, W/B2/4, fol. 53; CRO, ML/3/478; Z/AB/1,
fol. 126v; ML/3/486.

58 R. Agas, A Preparative to Platting of Landes and Tenements

for Surueigh (1596), 3, 13 (irregular pagination).

59 HRO, W/B2/1, fols. 3, 24v; NRO, Y/C/19/5, fols. 20v–21.

60 EROC, D/B5/Gb1, fol. 134; LERO, BR11/1/2, fol. 246; WAC,

F2001, fol. 162; CRO, Z/AB/1, fol. 231v; NRO, Norwich City
Sessions Minute Book, 1654–1670, August 1668.

61 WAC, E2416, fol. 134; F2003, fol. 192; HL, HAM Box-2/folder-
1, fol. 13v; NORTHRO, 3/1, fol. 209; NRO, Y/C/19/5, fol. 266;
Norwich Assembly Book 5, fol. 244.

62 WAC, F2003, fol. 97; NRO, NMC 25, fol. 198v; T/C1/1, fol. 8;
Y/C/19/3, fol. 91v; ESRO, RYE/5, fol. 282.

63 CKS, Md/Acm1/3, fols. 81–82; DRO, ECA B/1/4, fol. 106.

64 NRO, Norwich Aseembly Book 5, fols. 244–5; Y/C/19/5, fols.
20v–21, 83; EROC, D/Y/2/2/60; GA, TBR/A/1/1, fols. 8–9;
TBR/A/1/2, fol. 9; GBR/B3/2, fols. 113, 157, 284; HERO,
BG11/17/1/5, fol. 45; DRO, ECA B/1/4, fol. 396; CKS, FA/AC3, fol.
76v; WAC, E2413, fol. 82; E2416, fol. 190.

65 CUL, VC-CT-vi.15, fol. 80.

66 Hereford: HERO, BG11/17/1/4, fol. 14; Q/SM/2, fol. 61;

Q/SM/4, fols. 55, 65v; BG11/4/6, fol. 10; BG11/17/1/5, fol. 67;
BG11/17/1/4, fol. 34. Ipswich: SROI, C/4/3/1/1/3, fols. 34, 35, 95v,
100v, 127, 210v; SROI, C/4/3/1/1/4, fol. 24. Northampton:
NORTHRO, 3/1, fols. 209, 225, 227, 296v, 303v, 422, 423v–424;
NORTHRO, 3/2, fols. 8, 54v; NQS1, fol. 96v.

67 BRO, N/JQ/1/1, fol. 11; HL, HAM Box-27, folder-8; CUL, CUR
37.3, fol. 131; HRO, W/B2/3, fols. 22–3; LRO, CNP 3/2/1, fol. 241.

68 NRO, Norwich muster list, case 10/H, no. 11; Norwich Dutch
and Walloon Strangers Book, 1564–1643, fols. 22, 69v; Francis
Bacon, Francis Bacon: Major Works, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 302.

69 P. Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early Stuart Salisbury, Wiltshire

Record Society, 31 (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1975), 75–
80.

70 J. F. Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor, 1570,

Norfolk Record Society, 60 (Norwich: Norfolk Record Society,
1971); M. Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical
Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England
(London and New York: Longman, 1998), Chapters 3–4 and 6.

71 G. Maymes, England’s View, in the Unmasking of Two

Paradoxes (1603), 17.

72 Quoted in Cassedy, Demography in Early America, 5.

73 P. Petit, A Discourse of the Growth of England in Populousness

and Trade since the Reformation (1689), 140–1.

74 Kendal Archive Centre, WQ/O/3, fol. 48; WAC, F2003, fols.

189, 203.

75 CUL, VCT/49, fol. 15.

76 BRO, R/AC1/1/1, fol. 600.

77 GA, GBR/B/3/2, fol. 70.

 3
Little Commonwealths I: The
Household and Family
Relationships
◈

Linda Pollock

Introduction
When early modern people spoke of their ‘family’ they meant in the
first instance the household: those who co-resided under the
authority of a household head. The household was central to early
modern domestic, social, economic, political and religious life. It was
a unit of residence, affective bonds and authority, as well as one of
consumption and production, essential to the functioning of the early
modern economic and social world. Legal and social thought in
many ways regarded the household, rather than the individual, as
the main economic entity. Not all household members were
connected by birth or marriage, notwithstanding the scholarly focus
on the nuclear family. Non-related residents, there by contract, such
as apprentices and servants, were also a fundamental element of
the early modern household economies and an integral part of family
structures. Households typically were bastions of authority,
structured by hierarchical differentiation. A member’s role was
predicated upon basic presumptions regarding the proper place of
men, women, children and youths in society, and thus would differ by
gender and age.
A household was also the setting for the most intimate personal
relationships and the formation of identity. Early modern individuals
could not avoid familial labels. Women who came before the
authorities were described as ‘spinster’, ‘wife’ or ‘widow’. Lady
Grace Mildmay’s epitaph in 1621 depicted her as a ‘chaste maid,
wife and widow’. Even men, more commonly seen by historians as
being categorised according to their occupation, were described in
familial terms. William Hoar, ‘a dutifull child, a tender fathr, And a
most loving husband’, was accidentally killed by a musket shot on
Lady Day 1679.1 The ubiquity of these designations testifies to the
importance of the household in early modern consciousness,
conceptually and materially. Individuals were identified according to
familial categories, as well as being secured and connected by
domestic ties.
The concept of the family, though, as well as the make-up and
culture of any one unit, was constantly changing. A family was not so
much allotted – that is given at birth – as continuously created, as
members joined or left and intimate bonds were established or
broken. Newly married couples quickly added children to the home.
The latter in turn would start to leave the natal unit from the mid
teens on. Death frequently ruptured personal bonds. Around one-
quarter of children would die before the age of ten; many spouses
endured the loss of a partner. About 25 per cent of all marriages
were remarriages for the bride or groom, sometimes adding step-
children, followed by half-siblings to the home. As many as 40 per
cent of households had servants, ranging from over 80 per cent in
the case of landed to around 25 per cent of those of labourers.
Servants were often young – 60–70 per cent were aged between
fifteen and twenty-four – and for most service was a transitional
occupation. Servants left their employ often, either of their own
accord or because they were terminated. Samuel Pepys had 38
servants from 1660 to 1669, 13 of whom stayed less than six
months. Only 8 out of the 167 servants employed by Sir Richard
Newdigate from 1692 to 1706 worked there longer than five years;
63 lasted just six months.2 Moreover, personal bonds were not
confined to the household: individuals belonged to a family of origin
as well as one of marriage, and were embedded in wider social
networks that shaped and were influenced by what went on in the
home. All of this meant that a household was not a stable entity in
the past, if by that we mean unchanging. Rather, demographic
realities, life-cycle changes, and the comings and goings of contract
members ensured its composition changed often, necessitating
constant adjustment on the part of household members.
On so much scholars agree, but the history of domestic
relationships has been a notably contentious field. The nature of the
early modern family, the strength of English kinship, the prominence
of material considerations and the emotional ties of family members,
for instance, have been fiercely contested. The impassioned, at
times acrimonious, debates may have ended, but furore has not
given way to torpor. More recent scholarship has reframed old
debates, re-evaluated key concepts, and reshaped the field by
incorporating new topics. It highlights the simplistic tenor of the initial
questions. No longer do we investigate whether parents loved their
children in the past or whether financial concerns or sentiment
dominated in the choice of a marriage partner. Rather, concepts like
patriarchy, love, obedience, individualism or community are
examined anew, focusing more on questions of power, identity and
gender, and seeking to relate the household to a wider context. The
new research is sensitive to situation and setting, less attached to
the mean and more fascinated with deviations around it. It eschews
binaries, forced debates and stark interpretative choices; instead it
reconceptualises the family as a unit of dynamic, shifting relations
and investigates how ideals, values and norms played out in
everyday life.
All of this makes the study of early modern households a more
intellectually engaging and emotionally satisfying subject, but at the
same time renders it difficult to summarise concisely. Scholars have
rightly jettisoned the old metanarratives, but to substitute for these a
spate of increasingly specialised, local and detailed examples is
inadequate. What we are left with is an arch groaning under the
weight of perpetually multiplying exceptions. We need to return to
some fundamental issues with respect to the importance, role and
experience of the household but in a more nuanced and sensitive
fashion. One of the ways to do this could be by re-examining the
popular conduct books and advice manuals that appeared between
the late sixteenth and the early eighteenth century and defined
domestic issues and roles as contemporaries saw them. Again and
again they dealt with the essential themes of marriage and
household formation; the proper nature of marital relations; the dos
and don’ts of child-rearing; the duties of kin or ‘friends’; the relations
of masters and servants; and, running through all this, aspects of the
role of the household as an economic unit. This makes them a
valuable starting point. But if we follow their lead in examining these
central relationships, we need to take into account the diverse ways
in which people interpreted, adhered to, dispensed with or reworked
prescriptive norms. The implementation of normative values in daily
life along with the ever shifting, changing and evolving nature of the
household unit are the keys to understanding the dynamism of
domestic relationships and the role of change.

Marriage and Household Formation

Some of the most important decisions people faced in early modern
England related to marriage: should they marry, if so when, and to
whom? Contemporary moralists had apparently firm views on
marriage. It should be to a person with the appropriate social and
personal qualities, should take place only if the good will of all
interested parties had been secured, and should be undertaken at a
sufficiently mature age, when the couple were able to set up and
sustain a household of their own. Marital practice, however, was not
necessarily in harmony with these opinions. The question of when
people married appeared to have been settled in 1981 with the
publication of Tony Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s family
reconstitution of twenty-six parishes. On average, men married
around twenty-seven or twenty-eight and women around twenty-five
or twenty-six until the nineteenth century, when the mean age at first
marriage fell to around twenty-five for men and twenty-three for
women.3 This finding conclusively demolished the long-held myth
that people in the past married very young but it was not clear who
was marrying younger, nor why. Wrigley and Schofield’s
concentration on rural parishes, male breadwinners and national
averages spurred new research on urban demography, and local
and regional differences, along with the marital practices of women
and the poor. People in towns married younger. Proto-industrial
parishes in West Yorkshire had a low and stable age at marriage.
There appears to be both a decline over time in the number of
women marrying above thirty and a rise in the number of women
marrying around age twenty. Some regions, such as Northern
England, sanctioned unofficial but community-recognised unions,
thus bringing into question the reliability of data on marriage derived
from church registers. As scholars focused on the variation around
the mean, they quickly discovered that a declining marriage age was
not a national phenomenon: ‘variety rather than homogeneity’
characterised the marital scene.4
Wrigley and Schofield explained the drop in the mean age at
first marriage by the fact that improving economic opportunities,
especially rising wage rates, enabled more couples than before to
fund a household, and to do so earlier. This is probably overly
optimistic for those lower down the social scale, overlooking the fact
that courtship was sensitive to economic conditions and there could
be innumerable hurdles to surmount before the wedding took place.
Some unions would not receive the blessing of the community, and
thus, regardless of the intentions of the couple, would not take place.
Communities preferred stable, economically viable marriages, and
poor-law administrators and local authorities tried to stop the poor
from marrying. In 1570, the parishioners of Adlington, Kent, unhappy
with Alice Cheeseman’s choice of a husband, refused to post the
bans, demanded that she leave him and threatening her with
expulsion from the community if she defied their ‘hinderance’ of the
marriage. Parishioners could also prevent sub-letting, making it
difficult for newcomers to get hold of land or a cottage to establish a
home.5
Wrigley and Schofield’s thesis also assumes that early modern
individuals viewed their situation in the same light as, or had the
same goals as, early modern conduct-book authors and modern-day
scholars. Material resources undoubtedly mattered – as Mary Evelyn
in 1670 remarked ruefully to her brother-in-law Granville, who was
fretting over which one of two widows to marry, ‘religion and fortune
will come into one’s head whether one wills it or no’.6 But, as Steven
King points out, we do not yet fully understand how much influence
economic issues had on micro decision-making, nor how early
modern individuals assessed risk or balanced economic factors
against feelings, duty, hope and the opinions of others.7
 A couple may not have aimed for immediate financial
independence. Certainly, many wed apparently without planning,
saving or balancing economic prospects, making marriage a
‘triumph of hope over experience’.8 Job opportunities may have
encouraged some to take the plunge without a nest egg. Roger
Lowe decided to marry after his business failed when he had no
capital, nowhere to live, and knew that his wife Emm would lose her
position upon marriage. He did, though, have a job.9 It may have
made sense for some couples to marry early even if they were not in
the best of economic circumstances. The most frequently recorded
form of hardship affecting the poor was the breakdown or failure of
the nuclear family rather than ageing, suggesting that those in
straitened circumstances survived better in a family unit. Marriage
might have appeared to some as the best option in times of
economic downturn: the age of brides, for instance, declined most in
those areas where employment opportunities for women contracted.
The unpalatable truth for the poorer members of society was that
there was not enough money – that life was, and probably would
continue to be, financially hard. Even though couples later in life
could regret marrying with insufficient resources and long for more
ample funds, it was clearly unfeasible for the lower ranks to base all
of life’s decisions on economic prospects, given that financial
security might prove an elusive, often unobtainable, goal. Economic
growth, then, provides only a partial explanation for the age at which
people married. Cultural norms along with issues of occupation,
mobility, perceptions of status and desire all played a role. What we
need is a multi-layered interpretation of the practice of courtship,
marriage and household formation, one that would explain the entire
process of getting married rather than the end stage of the wedding
alone.
Economic concerns rarely explained the choice of a particular
marriage partner. To gain insight into marriage decisions, we need to
move beyond statistics and enter into the realms of personal and
family strategies, emotions and perceptions. And we should do so
without opposing affection and finances, thereby creating a false
dichotomy between romantic love and material concerns. According
to English law, marriage had to be based on the mutual consent of
the couple, but that ‘consent’ could take many forms from assenting
to the plans of others to finding one’s own partner, and the full range
is depicted in the historical record. Joan Hayward could have refused
to marry John Thynne in 1576 but she agreed, trusting that ‘God will
put into my father’s heart to choose me such a one as God will direct
my heart not to dislike’; whereas Elizabeth Rouse in the 1690s
married Sampson Bound without her father’s approval or
knowledge.10 Initially, historians concentrated on arranged marriage,
stressing the active role of parents in organising suitable matches for
their offspring. This remained an essential parental obligation for the
prosperous ranks and, although there were very few forced matches,
their financial resources undoubtedly gave them some leverage. A
marriage portion signalled respectability and familial approval
ensuring that, even for independently wealthy women, parental
refusal to give one could stop the union. Gradually scholars widened
their gaze to friends and kin, showing the collective pressures they
brought to bear on individual unions. Most marriages, though, were
neither arranged nor individually chosen but subject to the
‘multilateral consent’ of all interested parties. Love and personal
choice were only a few of the factors underlying a marriage. The
Pinney family papers show that marriage was viewed with a great
deal of anxiety and trepidation, particularly with regard to financial
matters and religious affiliation. In areas riven by religious dissent,
young people sought potential spouses with the same religious
views even if that meant searching further afield. The middling sort
fretted over ‘worth’, status and reputation to the extent that some
could not find a satisfactory partner. Elizabeth Isham’s account of
her unsuccessful marriage plans with John Dryden in the 1630s
details the emotional aspects of the break-up, revealing the
importance that familial love and honour played in the equation. Love
for her father rather than lack of love for her suitor ended the
negotiations. Material interest, affection, practical considerations,
influence of friends and family, parental love, honour, and personal
piety, along with a miscellany of other intangibles, shaped marital
choice. Any one individual thus weighed countless issues, making
marriage, even for those with resources, a leap of faith that things
would work out.11

Marital Relations
Scholarship has moved on from the pessimistic stance that early
modern marital relationships lacked intimacy and affection and were
characterised by submissive wives and domineering husbands. The
first wave of revisionism challenged the notion of the relative
unimportance of love in marriage and that low expectations were
brought to these unions. Later revisionist works portrayed early
modern marriages as more mutual and companionate than had been
thought, and pointed to the mitigating effect the demands of daily life
had on potentially authoritarian relationships. Much of this
scholarship, however, assumes rather than investigates the
emotional content of marriage. The most recent approaches explore
what marriage meant to early modern men and women, emphasising
love as a product of the material, social and cultural world, critiquing
the privileging of representation over narrated experience, and
examining the interaction between values and ordinary behaviour. As
Margaret Hunt states, early modern marriages reveal not so much a
gap between law and practice, as is commonly claimed, but the
creative enactment of cultural ideals in daily life.12
Most early modern English men and women believed that
marriages should be based on love. Frances Thorold wrote to her
husband William in 1683 that ‘thy well-being is the joy of my heart …
one hug with thee my dear would set all to rights’.13 Many couples
formed deep bonds and were often heartbroken at a spouse’s
untimely death. This was the case even for those at the bottom of
the social scale for whom grinding poverty and the relentless need
for subsistence undoubtedly strained the relationship. But merely
affirming the centrality of love to early modern marriages does not
get us very far. Even if both parties expected love to be a central
theme in their marital relationship, they could have different
understandings of what love meant and divergent expectations
regarding what constituted loving behaviour, ensuring that love was
not so much a recipe for marital bliss as a place where power was
continually negotiated. Sarah and William Cowper, for example,
argued constantly about domestic authority, especially who regulated
the servants. Sarah believed it was her sphere of jurisdiction,
regarding William as a tyrant rather than as a loving spouse when he
interfered in that arena.14 Nor did love necessarily increase the
status or autonomy of wives because women, even more than men,
were meant to sacrifice themselves for those they loved. Ruth Perry
goes so far as to claim that marriage and the stress on romantic love
detached a woman from her family of origin and from her pre-
existing friendships, and turned her into a companion for her new
husband, reliant on his benevolence.15 But to characterise the
position of married women as completely dependent on the good will
of their husbands misunderstands the early modern concept of
obedience, overvalues the power and authority of men, and
undervalues the contribution women made to the household.
The loving relationship between spouses in early modern
prescriptive literature was based on that between the faithful and
God. The scriptural definition of love emphasised performance: love
ought to be ‘fruitfull in good workes, and not an emptie and idle love,
that is, a love in shew onely’.16 Miles Huggard, in a poem published
in 1555 written ‘in termes plaine’ so that everyone could understand
what loving God entailed, declared: ‘If thou diddest him loue thou
wouldest his wil obay.’17 Loving God meant abiding by his will,
making obedience an integral part of the performance of love. Both
God and the faithful had obligations to fulfil in the name of love: God
provided support and protection; his flock gave trust, worship and
obedience. Conduct-book writers took this model of a loving
relationship and applied it to a married couple, gendering the model
in the process. Loving, fearing and obeying became a woman’s role;
loving, providing and protecting a man’s.
Obedience thus certainly constituted the core of femininity and
marriage in the well-ordered household. Women were urged to make
sure they joined themselves to a man whom they could obey. It was
as much the husband’s duty to command obedience as it was the
wife’s to give it. Even women like Henrietta Howard, countess of
Suffolk, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, unhappy in her
marriage, convinced that her husband was not living up to his part of
the marriage contract and eager to be liberated from his governance,
accepted his right to exercise it. But, despite the portrayal of
obedience as necessary and natural, women – along with children
and servants – were trained to defer to those over them, a tacit
acknowledgement that submission did not come naturally, and
compliance, on those occasions when it was enjoined, could be hard
won.
Women’s reflections on what marital obedience entailed reveal
that they did not equate wifely obedience with automatically carrying
out everything a husband wanted – thereby also showing that
agreement with a norm does not mean that a person was
unquestioning or unimaginative. Women had ways of getting around
unpalatable requests: responding affectionately to commands, for
example, but failing to carry them out, or claiming to have
misunderstood. A wife could withhold information then challenge her
spouse to give a direct order, knowing that he lacked the pertinent
knowledge to do so. Love could also be used to justify and excuse
actions that might displease a spouse. Obedience was never
intended to produce mindless submissiveness – servile obedience
was derided in the conduct books – and this allowed women some
space in which to voice their opinions. They also adapted the
prescriptive literature to suit their needs. A subtle process of
selecting what to attend to, of reinterpreting a text’s messages or of
blending a variety of texts enabled women to use these texts to
vindicate rather than guide their conduct. Sarah Cowper, for
example, cited from the printed texts to demonstrate her virtue in a
trying relationship and thus assert her moral authority vis-à-vis her
husband. A wife could also make use of the prescriptive norms to
critique a husband’s behaviour, as did Henrietta Howard, convinced
that she, notwithstanding her adultery, had fulfilled her marital
obligations ‘in word and deed’, whereas her husband was
conspicuously derelict in his duty.18
Moreover, male control of the family – as revealed by research
into the domestic life of men, one of the great growth areas of the
history of the family – was neither as complete nor as oppressive as
has been thought. The status attached to marrying and heading a
household has been a particularly enduring feature of manliness in
western society. Men sought to set up and maintain a household,
and placed great stock in providing for and behaving towards their
family in a proper Christian manner. A man, according to the
prescriptive literature of early modern England, should exercise
authority over himself and others, demonstrating self-discipline and
restraint. This concept of masculinity, however, excluded a
substantial proportion of men and was very difficult to live up to for
many more. In the case of Sir Thomas Barrington, it was his wife,
Lady Judith, and his mother, Lady Joan, who assisted him in his
mission to earn governing masculinity, by providing moral support,
writing on his behalf and taking on male roles.19 Masculinities were
relational, men usually governed and were subordinate at the same
time, and a household was never limited to the patriarch’s control
alone. Masculine power was also highly situational and frequently
nebulous and exploitable. This structure provided plenty of
opportunities for the ostensibly governed to exercise authority.20
Despite the opinion of the domestic conduct-book writers that a
husband should be the one to go abroad, discuss business and
procure goods for the family, while a wife should look after these
goods, spend money wisely and stay at home, in practice it was
essential that all members contribute to a household’s economic
well-being. Spouses were economically interdependent: a man, for
example, faced the loss of income, property, household
management and child care on the death of his wife. Marriage was
an economic partnership in terms of the merging of the financial
assets and skills that each partner brought to the union, and of their
management of the household economy. Scholars have assumed
that married women did not work because they were busy with home
and child care. Certainly, elite women may not have sought
employment, although they were more than ornamental: taking over
in a husband’s absence, offering medical services and running
complex households. Married women below the landed ranks usually
engaged in paid work in early modern England, either in the labour
force or in family trades, shops and businesses. Women were most
likely to have jobs – often laborious, at times dangerous – outside the
home in their prime childbearing years.21 Nor was it necessarily the
case that women worked because their husbands could not support
the family. Elizabeth Harvey, whose husband was an attorney and
clerk of Taunton Castle, worked as a cloth dealer. She was the one
who travelled on business, leaving her husband at home to tend to
domestic affairs and their children.22
Notwithstanding the presumption of female passivity in
prescriptive literature, that women petitioning the authorities for help
presented themselves as helpless and dependent, and the strong
link between economic mastery and masculinity, it is clear that
women expected to contribute to the family budget and did not view
husbands as the primary breadwinner.23 Women from all ranks of
society displayed considerable knowledge of economic and legal
systems and were fully capable of operating successfully in the
financial world. The ability to provide for a family, however, was an
important part of masculinity, and this affected the activity of other
household members. Women’s contribution to the household did
give them a sense of worth and status in the community but it did not
necessarily give women more power in the family. Though women
were undoubtedly involved in contractual society, their legal agency
was curtailed in the interest of maintaining patriarchal authority within
the household. Their ability to work was usually dependent on their
husband’s good will. In many families, a wife’s involvement in trade
or business created tension, at times spurring conflict. Some wives
were far less committed to the concept of male supremacy than their
husbands, especially if it cost them their future security, personal
possessions, access to their own money or the right to their own
trading profits. A husband could assert his right to a wife’s
possessions to the extent that he threatened the well-being of the
family unit. A wife thus had to balance her obligation to ensure
provision for herself and her children alongside her duty to her
husband.
The importance placed on a reasoned choice of marital partner,
the emphasis on both parties fulfilling the expected spousal duties
and the expectation that a wife would yield to her husband did not
prevent marital breakdown. Discord was a routine part of any
relationship in all ranks in early modern England. Its existence does
not necessarily indicate fragile bonds of affection and it did offer an
opportunity to re-examine roles and relationships. Marital conflict
was more complex than merely a result of men demanding rights
and wives challenging them. Both spouses deployed gender roles to
their advantage in marriage. In cases brought before the courts, men
complained of unloving, disobedient wives who had no just cause for
behaving that way. Wives were extravagant, mismanaged the
household and neglected the children. Husbands also stressed what
they considered fraud: the promised marriage portion was not
delivered, wives took goods from the home or refused to part with
real estate to pay husbands’ debts. Women, on the other hand,
depicted themselves as victims of cruel men who elevated the
prospect of financial gain above justice, equity and family duty. Many
women apparently did not agree that they gave obedience in return
for maintenance; rather they were entitled to the latter because they
were also doing their bit to support the family. Women complained
that their husbands refused to provide for them, kept their property
from them, denied them their right to manage the household and
were negligent fathers. Cases of marital conflict document that many
women tried to bypass coverture, felt demeaned if their husband
controlled the money and did not bow to a husband’s will.
Some conflict did become violent. Men had a legal right to
discipline wives until the nineteenth century but there was
considerable debate in the early modern period over how far
husbands could go: that a man could physically correct his wife but
not violently seemed to be the overall consensus. Marital violence
affected the whole family, including children, and abuse was broader
than beating alone, including material deprivation, isolation and
confinement. Though the causes of wife-beating were complex, the
main male defence was that violence had been provoked by a wife’s
insubordination and disobedience. Relatives, neighbours and friends
intervened in abusive relationships, offering refuge and material
assistance along with efforts to reconcile the couple if possible.24
Women themselves did not meekly submit to abusive male authority.
Anne Dormer, who married Robert in 1668, described how he
threatened, confined, isolated and yelled at her. Robert even
reprimanded Anne’s father when he tried to stand up for her. Despite
this dismal situation, Anne managed to carve out a space beyond
her husband’s control. She wrote letters when he was out of the
house and she did not silently accept his abuse; rather she out-
argued him or gave sharp retorts.25
 Wives could also take their husbands to court.26 Despite the
disproportionate legal, ideological and practical advantages men
enjoyed, they did not always win their case. Common law may have
been unkind to married women, but there were other legal systems
available. Equity law used in the prerogative courts such as
chancery or the court of requests was cheap and user friendly, and
enabled married women to maintain some control over their property.
Evidence from recognisances shows that even lesser forms of
spousal aggression were brought before the authorities. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, society held women’s violence
to be more threatening, but towards the end of the seventeenth
century, men’s exploitation of power became increasingly viewed as
a cause for concern. By the eighteenth century, court cases stressed
the irrationality and barbarous nature of violence. It was becoming
unchristian and dishonourable for a man to beat or deprive his wife.

Children
Many women – almost half by the eighteenth century – were
pregnant on their wedding day. Even with a relatively high child
mortality rate, and a typical birth interval of two years or more, most
married couples would soon begin, as Benjamin Shaw’s father put it,
‘to feel the effects of a growing family’.27 The original
historiographical debate over whether or not there was a concept of
childhood in the past, whether or not children were severely
disciplined in the past, and whether or not parents were bonded to
their children now seems unproductive and unimaginative. We have
a great deal of evidence to show that parenting was taken seriously,
that children were wanted and that a great deal of energy was
invested in their care. The problem is that scholars overwhelmingly
conceptualise parental relations in terms of instruction and restraint.
Not only are there many more issues to explore but also, given the
fluctuating nature of the household, we need a much more dynamic
approach to the topic.
Investigating how children were fitted to early modern society
would be one such approach, especially with reference to gender
socialisation. The cultural model of manhood in early modern
England stressed personal autonomy, independent judgement and
self-command, qualities that could be acquired and practised only by
knowing the world. Granting sons the freedom to do so was a must,
even though this threatened a family’s dynastic and financial
security.28 Sons away from home did stretch the rules, running up
large debts, becoming entangled in unsuitable romantic liaisons, or
failing to make progress in their studies or career. Parents, especially
fathers, had to step in to bail them out. Sons needed temptations to
test their virtue and this trumped parental concerns about the
expense and risk.
For girls, submission to duty and obedience to authority were
the most important lessons to learn. At the same time it was
recognised how essential wives were to the success of a household,
whether this be with reference to a husband’s business; to the
smooth running of the estate and home; to the economic contribution
of a woman’s paid work; or to keeping a family clean, fed and
housed. This meant that female initiative and capacity for action,
problem-solving and exercising authority could not be extinguished.
As with the bringing up of sons, parents had to balance competing
imperatives delicately. They limited the freedom of girls, especially
for the upper ranks, along with their intellectual educational
opportunities, and trained them to defer to their husbands, while
paradoxically trying to ensure their daughters would be able to rise to
life’s challenges. Some girls did resent the greater freedom granted
their brothers, illustrating that they could think for themselves.
Realising that the views of children were largely absent from
histories of childhood, a few scholars have tried to reconstruct the
child’s perspective. This, unsurprisingly, has proven to be very
difficult. Not only are there very few letters or diaries by children left
behind, but we also cannot be sure if these actually represent a
child’s point of view, as opposed to what he or she thought an adult
would like to hear. The realm of illness has some potential here
because it played a large part in a child’s life in the past, and
remarks from children trying to describe how they felt when ill have
survived. When six-year-old Frances Archer contracted an ague in
1679 she ‘could not forbeare shrieking most of the night’, saying she
‘had the crampe, and alas I know not what to do’. Metaphors of
torture, hell, animals or weapons were used to convey the pain.
Thomas Darling suffered ‘many sore fits’ that he said felt like ‘the
pricking with daggers or stinging of bees’, crying out ‘A beare, a
beare … he teareth me, he teareth me.’ Eleven-year-old Christian
Shaw told those around her bed ‘that cats, ravens, owles and horses
were destroying and pressing her down in the bed’, shrieking she
had been ‘pierced with swords’. Testimony such as this provides
rare and poignant insight into a child’s mind.29
There may have been no modern concept of adolescence in
early modern England but there was a recognisable period of youth
associated with people in their teens and twenties who were in a
state of dependence. This was a dynamic, transformative phase for
the young, and there was no single path to adulthood. Young people
were not passive social constructs of the dominant adult society but
had a great deal of creative potential. Youth was not stress-free:
young people had plenty of changes and problems to cope with. It
was certainly viewed as a time of potential problems relating to
sexuality and disobedience. Rebellion, though, has been over
emphasised in the historiography. Young adults were fully capable of
complicated manoeuvrings to get their own way without engaging in
outright defiance. For the most part, young people accepted patterns
of behaviour based on respect and deference to superiors, and
sought harmony in the household. They regarded adults not just as
authority figures but also as providers and as keepers of heritage. In
addition, because the household was fundamental to early modern
society and economy, the heads had to reconcile multilateral
demands to keep it functioning well. This ensured that subordinates
had areas of responsibility and privilege, granting youths
opportunities to learn decision-making and lessening the need for
revolt.30
Many of the young adults in a household might be servants
rather than offspring, replacing the children who have left for training
elsewhere and subject to a quasi-parental authority from master and
mistress. The conduct books are quite clear about the obligations of
servants: they are to obey and serve. As Robert Cleaver wrote in
1598, servants with respect to their masters are:

To love them and to be affectioned towards them as a dutiful

child is to his father; to be reverent and lowly to them in all their
words and gestures, to suffer and forbear them, to obey with
ready and willing minds all their lawful and reasonable
commandments, to fear them and to be loath to displease them,
to be faithful and trusty to them and theirs in deeds and
promises, to be diligent and serviceable, to speak cheerfully, to
answer discreetly.31

Employers, on the other hand, frequently considered servants to be

lacking in such devotion; rather, they stole and drank as well as
being careless and disobedient. Masters like Sir Richard Newdigate
sought to turn servants into model employees – sober, industrious,
punctual, deferential and discreet – but often failed. Newdigate had
to resort to paying one maid, Mall Porter, to spy and report on the
behaviour of the other servants.32 Servants found plenty of ways to
circumvent control: they carved out unofficial leisure time by
dawdling on errands, neglected their duties and stayed out all night.
Servants were difficult to regulate because they were highly mobile
and, even if dismissed, usually had the last word, commenting on
their former masters and mistresses to the community at large.
Parents were not the only shapers of childhood development;
siblings also formed bridges to adulthood.33 The initial focus on
marriage and parenting meant that sibling interaction was
overlooked, but the gradual recognition that sibling ties are the most
durable of relationships has led to a flurry of new work on the topic.
The emotional and financial interactions of siblings, positioned as
they were somewhere between hierarchy and equality, offer a new
way to look at the family. Sibling relations were regarded as naturally
loving, with siblings owing affection to one another rather than
deference or obedience. Sibling bonds could be deep and enduring
ones. Siblings helped look after and educate younger brothers and
sisters, and could raise them if parents died. Sibling economics – as
Amy Harris terms the exchange of emotional and physical labour –
were an important component of family financial strategies. Couples
had obligations to their sisters and brothers and would also make
use of them as an economic resource. Households could have
multiple sibling networks tied together by small household
expenditures and errands. Siblings were involved in one another’s
educational, occupational, business and pecuniary successes,
supplying child care, advice, nursing, account keeping and loans,
among many other activities. Siblings also, however, had to contend
with the reality that equality did not mean identical treatment or
opportunities. Parental affection for all their children may have been
the same, but parental investment was not, setting the stage for
sibling wars. It is easy to assume that most sibling conflict would be
between brothers, but in fact there are more court cases dealing with
brother–sister quarrels over property. This was caused less by
resentment of the privileged position of brothers and more by a
desire to receive the full provision of a parent’s will.
 As children grew up, some parent–child relationships turned
fraught and a few ruptured, but most parents were committed to
assisting their offspring, offering such vital services as financial aid,
advice, networks of adult friendships, or help with arranging service
or apprenticeship. Leonard Wheatcroft, a tailor who became the
parish clerk of Ashover in 1650 and was imprisoned three times for
debt in the 1660s, was actively involved in helping his older children
find new places. He personally accompanied his daughters to their
places of service, and once met with a bone lace weaver ‘with
whome I burgined to take a doughter of myne apprentis’.34 Even
after children left home, parents provided a range of material and
emotional support. They sent money, food or clothes; supervised
masters; took back sick children; and helped them find work or
somewhere to live. The parental home was a safety net for teens
and early adults, offering a respite from problems like debts, illness
or unemployment. Benjamin Bangs, for example, opted to become a
Quaker after completing his apprenticeship, travelling and preaching
around the countryside. When he became ill, he returned to his
mother and stayed with her the whole winter.35 Parents assisted
children even after marriage, especially in times of hardship. Jane
Adams and her three children returned to her father’s house in 1732
when her husband could not look after his family. She stayed there
for a year, with her spouse visiting two or three times a week.36 The
parental home was also a refuge for abused wives.
Most parents, to the best of their ability, made a substantial
investment in their children, and took care to provide for all of them.
Family property was usually passed on to the younger generation
over a considerable period of time rather than only at the parental
death. There was some privileging of the eldest son at all ranks but
primogeniture does not capture the entirety of practice. In towns,
equal sharing and exact portions to all children were the norm. In
other regions, parents paid apprenticeship premiums or marriage
portions, passed on equipment early, or left bequests in their wills
that attempted to modify inheritance rules.37 Parents tried to make
sure each child was given some of the family’s economic resources
to help establish him or her in the world.
Parents certainly felt obliged to support their children but they
also hoped that their children would return the favour. The ability of
children to reciprocate was restricted by demography and family
structure, and parents usually gave more, but even so offspring
offered material assistance, particularly helping parents when they
were sick or frail. They also provided more intangible benefits,
enhancing the prestige and reputation of parents and arousing
parental pride and satisfaction. Parents certainly encouraged a
sense of reciprocal obligation in their offspring by, for example,
placing emotional pressure on grown children to help, and by
reminding them of the care their parents had taken of them. This was
often a negotiated exchange of mutually agreeable benefits, and
though it might not be equal or symmetrical, some meeting of
obligations was expected from both parties. Parents who fell short in
fulfilling their part might not be able to count on help from their
children as they aged. Elizabeth Hewitt, for example, abandoned a
father ‘who took little care of her when young’.38
 The lack of adequate financial resources significantly affected
family life. Compared to her wealthier counterpart, a poor woman, if
she married, married later, had longer birth intervals and probably
ended childbearing a few years before menopause. Her children
were more likely to die, and if her husband also died she had less
chance of marrying again. Bringing up children was a difficult task for
poorer families, made even harder by the frequent criticism of their
parenting by those in authority. Not only was a tremendous amount
of maternal labour involved in keeping children clean and fed for
those lower down the social scale but also, because it cost a
minimum of £5 a year to maintain a child and £6 for a youth, it was a
real struggle for poor parents to supply adequate food or clothing.
Medical care was an additional burden. The lack of resources
caused enormous stress. Births were not necessarily welcome, even
if a baby was loved when born, because every new addition strained
the family budget. If a child died, parents felt simultaneously grief for
their loss and relief there was one fewer mouth to feed. Because the
poor lived in cramped accommodation, labouring fathers of necessity
were involved with family life. These fathers were less concerned
with inheritance, had less control over their sons from around the
age of fourteen on because they had usually left home to enter
service, and had limited involvement in their children’s decision to
marry. This meant there could be less conflict between fathers and
sons than in more affluent families. In general, however, poverty
could prevent poor parents from realising even the basics of parental
care: a father providing and a mother nurturing. Fragmented families
were more common, parents were less able to protect offspring from
misfortune, and very poor children may not even have had a home.
For the very poor, the family was often not the abiding scheme of life:
not a safety net in times of need; not a work unit; and maybe not
even a procreative unit, because spinsterhood, prenuptial pregnancy
and illegitimacy were all more common among the poor.39

Kin
Individuals did not leave one family behind as they embarked on the
next. New couples brought economic and familial obligations along
with emotional connections into the household. Population mobility
ensured that most early modern English households were unlikely to
have dense networks of kin in the immediate locality. Kin ties were
therefore believed to be of limited significance beyond the immediate
family for the majority of households. Family and kinship as
categories, however, are not necessarily linked, developing neither in
tandem nor inversely. It is a mistake to underestimate the
significance of kin connections dispersed over a larger social area,
or those that joined rural areas to major cities. Englishmen and
women had a loose but nevertheless systematic way of recognising
kin, and bonds could be activated when needed. New work on the
language of kinship shows that it could be used to construct a grid of
kin links, and endow these ties with social and moral significance.
Blood relatives, even distant ones, offered ready-made networks of
support to which claims could be made with less of the social and
emotional investment required for establishing other contacts. How
much energy and time was invested in sustaining kin connections
would depend on the goals and temperament of an individual. It
would be very difficult to maintain a relationship with all kin, but even
so plenty of evidence exists testifying to the vibrancy of kinship ties.
They were important for migration, for mercantile networks, for debt
and credit relations and reputation, for raising capital, for minimising
economic risk, and for supplying charity. Relatives gave material
gifts, help in bringing up children and assistance with jobs. They
were influential in political and occupational networks and patronage,
and involved in marriage negotiations. Kin clearly felt some
obligation to help but could not necessarily give all that was needed
because they had their own family to consider. Though there was no
absolute certainty of receiving aid, near kin, at least, offered much of
the strategic support needed through life, and their assistance,
typically given at critical junctures, improved the circumstances and
prospects of individuals.40
At first kin were deemed of more significance to those with
property, but as it was increasingly recognised that poor-relief, even
for those seen as deserving, did not provide enough support for
those in need, so it was uncovered that additional assistance was
often provided by kin.41 Survival for the poorest elderly inhabitants
required the combined resources of community, kin and individual,
making kinship, along with neighbours, friends and state, a locus of
support. The aged poor turned to families and communities only after
they had made every effort to be self-supporting and had exhausted
all resources at their disposal, but the help that families offered was
important. In eighteenth-century Terling (Essex) and Puddletown
(Dorset) a half of elderly men and a third of elderly women lived with
children. Adult children were a critical supplement to the elderly’s
attempts at self-sufficiency, and the poorer the parish, the more
important it was to have children. Having fewer family members
present in the community could lead to greater poverty for an
individual, demonstrating the importance of kin support. An adult
child may not have wanted to be a residential carer, as in the case of
Hester, the youngest child of John Pinney and a successful business
woman in London, who resisted staying on the family farm to look
after her father although she did visit.42 But grown children could
contribute funds to help the aged in their homes, as well as helping
in the house, or with meals and other domestic chores. At the level
of the dependent poor, however, adult children, often collecting poor-
relief themselves, were not the main pillar of the elderly’s economic
support.
Kin have been rediscovered more as a social security system,
and the questions scholars have asked revolve around the
usefulness of kin as an economic resource. Evaluating the
significance of kinship in early modern England solely through the
prism of material assistance, and deeming it important only insofar
as kin supplied aid or not, downplays its role. Even if one never
needed support, just knowing kin existed could be a source of
comfort, and for more than economic reasons. Historians too readily
discount the importance of so-called official kin – those who turned
up at major life-cycle events. Apart from the fact that it is doubtful
whether early modern English men and women ever divided kin into
the categories official or practical, this perspective does not take into
account bonds and familial identity. Inviting kin to witness significant
rites of passage, for those fortunate enough to be able to do so,
gave people a sense of belonging. A person’s community may have
been based on the household and framed by siblings, friends and
neighbours, but the wider kin group formed a supporting cast,
anchoring and comforting even when not economically solicited, and
immensely useful if called upon. Kin supplied roots, bonds and a
place in the world, making them a vital element in the enmeshed
connectedness of individual lives.43

Conclusion
All of the relationships within a household that we separate out for
the purposes of analysis, in practice impinged upon and influenced
one another. This aspect of household life is usually missed by
prescriptive texts, with their insistence on examining a series of
dyads, hierarchically arranged. Conduct books present a world of
clear choices, penalties and rewards. They had their own points of
focus: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on order and duty
within the ‘little commonwealth’; in the eighteenth century on the
concept of politeness. They offered mixed and contradictory
messages. They had coverage gaps, particularly with regard to
women. They had little to say about female civility and apparently did
not envisage a world in which sisters sparred as vigorously as
brothers. They provided navigational signposts but were of limited
practical use in coping with the complex challenges of living in the
world.44
The most recent scholarship on the early modern family, while
remaining indebted to cultural history, attempts to move beyond
discourse and representation to investigate the situated use and
application of concepts in everyday life – how ‘imagined cultural
ideals were rendered tangible’.45 Individuals, as shown in their
diaries, letters and memoirs, had expectations of family members
and relationships that were clearly shaped by the prescriptive
literature. But, far from viewing these texts as supplying definitive
answers, they made use of them in ways the authors probably did
not contemplate. They mixed together statements from a variety of
texts and merged these with their personal observations and
opinions. Furthermore, the act of living inevitably entails
prioritisation, negotiation, contest and choice. Obligations and
circumstances shift; some norms have more weight at given times or
in certain situations than others. Individuals were neither living in an
end point nor had a single goal. Decision-making involved an
evaluation of the current situation and the vision for the future for
multiple – at times competing – objectives.
Family life was a perpetual balancing act of a host of demands,
needs, obligations, resources and desires. It involved both
contractual relations and affect. It promoted and at times violated
important social values. It pursued stability, constantly adapting to its
changing make-up, and to changing social and economic conditions.
Historians, contending with the twin problems of initial work in the
field that emphasised dramatic transformation and improvement, and
of revisionist scholarship that stressed fundamental continuities in
family life, now postulate a slower-moving, more accommodating,
more inclusive change: a process of constant adaptation to shifts in
the economic, institutional and cultural contexts within which families
pursued their goals, and associated shifts in the manner in which
they understood their roles. Putting men back in the Georgian home,
for example, brings to light the lack of any straightforward continuity
between early modern and Victorian models of masculinity. Early
modern individuals were heavily invested in their offspring but they
inhabited a different mental world with a less developed concept of
emotional or mental development, and little concept of a
psychologically damaged child. Contemporaries thought of family
ties in the form of reciprocal obligations, rules and sacrifices, but also
in terms of affectionate bonds of nurture and sustenance. Each
household developed its own particular set of strategies to cope with
its own needs and achieve its own priorities. Acts of implementation
by a multiplicity of people with diverse experiences and agendas
inevitably created different scenarios. Even when an act appears the
same, it is neither imbued with identical meanings nor carried out in
similar circumstances each time. Thus, because of the unpredictable
and unintended effects of contingent human actions, the very
concepts and actions of continuity are themselves the seeds for
changes, illustrating, as Hannah Arendt stated, the creative potential
in human society.46
Notes

1 L. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor

Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620 (London: Collins
& Brown, 1993), 21; P. Sharpe, Population and Society in an East
Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton, 1540–1840 (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2002), 208.

2 P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 93; S. Hindle,
‘Below stairs at Arbury Hall: Sir Richard Newdigate and his
household staff, c. 1670–1710’, Historical Research, 85 (2012).

3 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of

England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 255.

4 S. King, ‘English historical demography and the nuptiality

conundrum: New perspectives’, Historical Social Research, 23
(1998); J. McNabb, ‘Ceremony versus consent: Courtship,
illegitimacy, and reputation in northwest England, 1560–1610’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, 37 (2006); B. Hill, ‘The marriage age of
women and the demographers’, HWJ, 28 (1989).

5 S. Hindle, ‘The problem of pauper marriage in seventeenth-

century England: The Alexander prize essay’, TRHS, 6th Series, 8
(1998); D. O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the
Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), Chapter 6.
6 J. Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed.
William Bray, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1850–2), Vol. IV, 27.

7 King, ‘English historical demography’, 136.

8 J. R. Gillis, ‘“A triumph of hope over experience”: Chance and

choice in the history of marriage’, IRSH, 44 (1999).

9 S. King, ‘Chance encounters? Paths to household formation in

early modern England’, IRSH, 44 (1999), 32.

10 A. Wall (ed.), ‘Two Elizabethan women: Correspondence of

Joan and Maria Thynne 1575–1611’, Wiltshire Record Society, 38
(Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1983), xix; E. Foyster,
‘Parenting was for life, not just for childhood: The role of parents in
the married lives of their children in early modern England’,
History, 86 (2001), 319.

11 O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint, Chapter 1; Sharpe,

Population and Society, 274–75, 278; I. Stephens, ‘The courtship
and singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634’, HJ, 51 (2008); M.
Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 136.

12 M. R. Hunt, ‘Wives and marital “rights” in the Court of the

Exchequer in the early eighteenth century’, in P. Griffiths and M.
Jenner (eds.), Londonopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social
History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), 116, 123.

13 J. Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in

England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 28.

14 A. Kugler, ‘Constructing wifely identity: Prescription and

practice in the life of Lady Sarah Cowper’, JBS, 40 (2001), 302.

15 R. Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in

English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 196–7.

16 J. Preston, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (London, 1630),

5.

17 M. Huggarde, A Mirrour of Loue (London, 1555), image 12.

18 These two paragraphs are based on: I. Tague, ‘Love, honor,

and obedience: Fashionable women and the discourse of
marriage in the early eighteenth century’, JBS, 40 (2001), 95, 98;
L. Gowing, ‘“The manner of submission”: Gender and demeanour
in seventeenth-century London’, Cultural and Social History, 10
(2013); S. Keenan, ‘“Embracing submission”? Motherhood,
marriage and mourning in Katherine Thomas’s seventeenth-
century “Commonplace Book’’’, Women’s Writing, 15 (2008), 81;
Kugler, ‘Constructing wifely identity’, 296.

19 J. van Duinen, ‘The obligations of governing masculinity in the

early Stuart family: The Barringtons of Hatfield Broad Oak’, in S.
Broomhall and J. Van Gent (eds.), Governing Masculinities in the
Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others, Women and
Gender in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011),
125–27.
20 H. Barker, ‘Soul, purse and family: Middling and lower-class
masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester’, SH, 3 (2008); E. A.
Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and
Marriage (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 139; S.
Broomhall and J. Van Gent, ‘Introduction’, in Governing
Masculinities in the Early Modern Period, 2, 14.

21 K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early

Modern Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2000), 30, 31, 42; M. R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce,
Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 22, 42, 128; C. Muldrew, ‘“A
mutual assent of her mind”? Women, debt, litigation and contract
in early modern England’, HWJ, 55 (2003), 52. A. L. Erikson,
‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’,
C&C, 23 (2008), 269; M. K. McIntosh, ‘Women, credit and family
relationships in England, 1300–1620’, JFH, 30 (2005).

22 P. Crawford, ‘A decade in the life of Elizabeth Harvey of

Taunton 1696–1706’, Women’s History Review, 19 (2010), 246,
253.

23 A. Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern

England c. 1580–1640’, P&P, 167 (2000); J. Hurl-Eamon, ‘The
fiction of female dependence and the makeshift economy of
soldiers, sailors, and their wives in eighteenth-century London’,
Labor History, 49 (2008).

24 Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 113–14, 198; L. Gowing, Domestic

Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 211; E. Foyster, ‘At the limits of
liberty: Married women and confinement in eighteenth-century
England’, C&C, 17 (2002); E. Foyster, Marital Violence: An
English Family History, 1660–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), Chapter 3.

25 M. O’Connor, ‘Interpreting early modern woman abuse’,

Quidditas, 23 (2002).

26 J. Hurl-Eamon, ‘Domestic violence prosecuted: Women binding

over their husbands for assault at Westminster Quarter Session,
1685–1720’, JFH, 26 (2001); Hunt, ‘Wives and marital “rights” in
the Court of the Exchequer’, 122; T. Stretton, ‘Marriage,
separation and the common law in England, 1540–1660’, in H.
Berry and E. Foyster (eds.), The Family in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); J. Bailey, ‘“I dye
[sic] by inches”: Locating wife beating in the concept of
privatization of marriage and violence in eighteenth-century
England’, SH, 31 (2006).

27 P. Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 116.

28 H. French and M. Rothery, ‘‘‘Upon your entry into the world”:

Masculine values and the threshold of adulthood among landed
elites in England 1680–1800’, SH, 33 (2008).

29 H. Newton, ‘“Very sore nights and days”: The child’s

experience of illness in early modern England, c. 1580–1720’,
Medical History, 55 (2011), 164, 165.

30 P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in

England 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1–2, 7, 16,
24, 60; I. Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early
Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8, 37.

31 R. C. Richardson, ‘Social engineering in early modern England:

Masters, servants, and the godly discipline’, Clio, 33 (2004), 171–
72.

32 Hindle, ‘Below stairs at Arbury Hall’, 73.

33 This paragraph is based on A. Harris, ‘That fierce edge: Sibling

conflict and politics in Georgian England’, JFH, 37 (2012); A.
Harris, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England:
Share and Share Alike (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2012).

34 Derbyshire Record Office, Ashover MS, ‘A history of the life

and pilgrimage of Leonard Wheatcroft of Ashover’, 2079M/F1,
fols. 19, 20, 21.

35 I. Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Reciprocal bonding: Parents and their

offspring in early modern England’, JFH, 25 (2000), 294.

36 Foyster, ‘Parenting was for life’, 315.

37 Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 61, 62–3; I. Krausman Ben-

Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange
in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 19.

38 Ben-Amos, ‘Reciprocal Bonding’, 304.

39 Sharpe, Population and Society, 204; Crawford, Parents of
Poor Children, 113, 22, 27, 29, 208, 41, 43–5.

40 This paragraph is based on: K. A. Lynch, ‘Kinship in Britain and

beyond from the early modern to the present: Postscript’, C&C, 25
(2010); N. Tadmor, ‘Early modern English kinship in the long run:
Reflections on continuity and change’, C&C, 25 (2010); R. Wall,
‘Beyond the household: Marriage, household formation and the
role of kin and neighbours’, IRSH, 44 (1999); K. Wrightson and D.
Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–
1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 99–102; D. Cressy,
‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, P&P, 113
(1986); I. Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and favors: Informal support
and gift-exchange in early modern England’, JMH, 72 (2000).

41 S. Hindle, ‘“Without the cry of any neighbours”: A Cumbrian

family and the poor law authorities, c. 1690–1730’, in Berry and
Foyster, The Family in Early Modern England; J. Healey, ‘Poverty
in an industrializing town: Deserving hardship in Bolton, 1674–99’,
SH, 35 (2010); L. A. Botelho, Old Age and the English Poor Law,
1500–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 79, 83, 98–102, 134–5.

42 Sharpe, Population and Society, 300.

43 P. P. Viazzo, ‘Family, kinship and welfare provision in Europe,

past and present: Commonalities and divergences’, C&C, 25
(2010); Tadmor, ‘Early modern English kinship in the long run’,
25–6.

44 Gowing, ‘The manner of submission’, 26; Barker, ‘Soul, purse

and family’, 12; Harris, Siblinghood and Social Relations, 89.
45 French and Rothery, ‘Upon your entry into the world’, 403.

46 H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1998), 95–6, 175–7, 237.
 4
Little Commonwealths II:
Communities
◈

Malcolm Gaskill

Introduction
Everyone in early modern England belonged to a community.
Membership entailed not just shared space but a social arrangement
that organised lives, managed relationships, and shaped identities
within lifespans and across generations. Communities were built on
values, informing the collective evaluation of conduct to determine
reputation and status. Yet ideals were honoured as much in the
breach as the observance, especially at times of rapid change, which
suggests why contemporaries worried about them so much. This
chapter will explore both enduring and evolving characteristics of
English communities, in terms of physical appearance and, less
tangibly, how community was experienced – a more transcendent
sense of attachment sustained by feeling and emotion.
 Community was so fundamental to existence that
contemporaries made little effort to define it. Unlike the household,
the term conveyed only a vague sense of identity and engagement.
In 1604 the schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey, drawing on the Roman
concept of communitas, gave it simply as ‘fellowship’, offering
‘communion’ as a synonym. Throughout the seventeenth century,
lexicographers elaborated on this without much deviation. One
described ‘Fellowship in partaking together’, another ‘injoying in
common or mutual participation’. The best definition that some
dictionaries managed was ‘to commune’, derived from
communicare, hinting that communities were arenas for making
human connections. Communities, then, grew from dynamic social
relations. The radical Robert Coster sought in 1649 ‘to advance the
work of publick Community’ by challenging landed tyranny. Only by
levelling its gentry and clergy, he argued, could England enjoy
‘Brave Community’. Thus ‘community’ had overtones of both
‘charity’ and ‘commonwealth’, fusing ideals of spiritual and
economic unity. Hobbes conceived community in terms of ‘concord’
and ‘covenants’, which like ‘peace’ and ‘love’ struck him as vital
pre-conditions for stable government.1 By this time, the secondary
definition of ‘a Corporation or Company incorporate’ was emerging,
shifting the meaning from ‘spiritual congregation’ to ‘political and
commercial collective’.2 This is not to imply, however, that the habit
of lay association was not already established in the Middle Ages,
nor that the community’s spiritual dimension had disappeared by the
modern period.3
 Early modern social historians have made ‘the community’ a
category of analysis, essential to understanding the intersecting
currents of continuity and change that characterise their period. Their
early work generated debate, much of it rooted in older sociology
where ‘community’ was coterminous with the local and implied
wholesome consensus prior to the atomising effects of
industrialisation. The distinction between Gemeinschaft
(‘community’) and Gesellschaft (‘society’) formulated in the
nineteenth century by Ferdinand Tönnies left an important legacy.4
The idea was taken up by Tönnies’s contemporary Max Weber, who
made a profound impression on the ‘new social historians’ of early
modern England between the 1960s and 1980s.5 Some wondered
whether communities were best characterised by individualism and
conflict or by collectivity and harmony. According to John Bossy, the
Church regarded parishes as hostile arenas where unity was ‘an
exceptional, temporary and exceptional feeling’.6 Lawrence Stone
went further, branding the village ‘a place filled with malice and
hatred’, a view James Sharpe found ‘extremely pessimistic’.7 The
debate never really went anywhere, perhaps because it addressed
the wrong questions. It was, in any case, overtaken by a more
sophisticated appreciation of community and society, one that
neither assumed wholesale change from the Middle Ages nor
simplistically equated change with decline.8 The best accounts
treated community ‘not as a feature of the social prehistory of
Europe but [as] part and parcel of the developing historical process
itself’.9
 The problem remains, however, our inclination to simplify and
stiffen an infinitely complex, varied and flexible entity. Not only did
the early modern world sustain different types of community, but
people belonged to several at once. Some communities were
subsets, others entire alternative ways of belonging, and yet few
were mutually incompatible. The dichotomy implied by Tönnies was
a false one, contrasting life in pre-modernity (rural and introspective,
organically bonded) with modernity (urban and expansive and
fissiparous), as if these were discrete geographical and temporal
zones. In fact, village communities co-existed comfortably and
productively with regional, national and even trans-national
groupings. And identities extending from community membership
were multi-faceted, intersecting and layered, without any necessary
tension or contradiction.10 People might simultaneously belong to an
ecclesiastical parish, the manor from which they held land, the
neighbourhood, or a religious guild or fellowship. Urban guilds were
exclusive associations, but their members also belonged to a wider
community of citizens and a parallel community of neighbours,
adding scope and depth to self-awareness. Even the ‘strangers’
ghettoised in cities identified with communities of kinship and trade
and religion, near and far.
Every community had complex relationships with other
communities, and was complex in itself. Neither inherently conflictual
nor inherently consensual, communities were marbled with
contradiction and contingency, ambiguity and ambivalence. The
essential processes of inclusion and exclusion were shifting and
uncertain; the demarcation lines were fuzzy; the rules were
prescriptive and proscriptive yet subjective and changeable.
Furthermore, narratives supporting the concept of community were
unstable: different social groups envisioned things differently.
Cherished norms were challenged and circumvented, as well as
quietly compromised by ‘the daily workings of communities made up
of flesh-and-blood individuals’.11 Habits and protocols that allowed
conflict and harmony, co-operation and individualism, to co-exist in
low tension were fundamentally important, leading us to a view of
community as a set of contingently enacted thoughts rather than a
predictably mechanical structure. Community itself is not a thing, as
Keith Wrightson reminds us, ‘it is a quality in social relations which
is, in some respects, occasional and temporary, and which needs
periodic stimulation and reaffirmation’.12
Moreover, as interests clashed in this era of profound social,
economic and political transformation, even dominant visions of the
ideal community diverged. Before the Reformation, the perfect parish
had been a holy congregation, focused on rituals of common prayer
and communion. And it made sense within the ‘great chain of being’
that this spiritual assembly should mesh with temporal orderings of
patriarchy, hierarchy and polity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, however, demographic growth, social polarisation, internal
migration and urban expansion – not to mention cultural upheavals in
faith and worship – led to rival ambitions that multiplied versions of
community. Essential ideals survived, even in towns and cities and
divided rural communities, yet these became strained and contested.
As Peter Burke has observed, ‘if real communities are messy affairs,
ideal ones … have clear boundaries’.13 And most of the tension that
transformed early modern communities, and indeed all society, lay in
the emotional gap between the dogmatic insistence of clear-cut
ideals and an endlessly various day-to-day reality.

Continuity
In 1500 the majority of English people lived in the countryside, as
they did in 1750 at the end of the period. Most inhabited hamlets and
villages, the rest market towns or cities, among which Norwich, York
and London were pre-eminent. Administratively, England was
divided into counties, and counties into ‘hundreds’ (or similar).
Counties formed regions with varying densities of settlement, a
pattern determined as much by topography as by human design.
Some people, especially in the uplands of the north and west, lived
remotely, relatively free from interference by Church or magistracy or
manorial lords; others, in the downland south and east, were cheek-
by-jowl and felt the constant glare of authority. Throughout England,
the course of life followed the seasons; weather; and availability of
food, fuel and raw materials; but also social and political imperatives.
Ties extended vertically and horizontally: between people of different
social rank through patronage and deference; and between
neighbours of equal rank who shared interests, for example
upholding the right to use common land for grazing and gathering
firewood. Such concerns even aligned landed manorial tenants with
landless labourers, while excluding the nobility and gentry. Rural
communities, especially the more compact ones, were mini-
commonwealths of work and worship, reproduction and recreation.
Pre-Reformation calendar customs persisted in adapted forms,
tracing the rhythms of life, satisfying basic spiritual needs and giving
meaning to existence. Common cultures also consisted in shared
dialect, proverbial wisdom and biblical phraseology to form
‘communities of speech’.14
The parish church lay at the heart of communal life – a focal
point for civic and administrative activity as well as for devotion. In
the vestry, the minister, churchwardens and other ‘principal and
ancient inhabitants’ met as an informal parish council. Vestries were
also storerooms for everything from fire buckets to hobbyhorses
(used in festivals) to the oak chest where parish registers, manorial
deeds and custumals were kept – the written memory of the
community. Tradition was also upheld by funerary statues – the
community’s memory in marble – bearing silent witness to the
ancient legitimacy of authority. Like the religious wall paintings
obliterated in the 1540s, these monuments to the aristocracy and
gentryreminded ordinary folk of their worldly place as they filed into
church and took their pews in order of rank.
Often the manor house, another monolithic symbol of power,
stood nearby. Many lords would open their doors at Christmas time,
treating locals to cakes and ale, and there were other similar rituals
intended to reinforce the patronage–deference relationship. In
Hampshire, it was customary for the Tichborne family to give the
poor doles of flour or bread on Lady Day. A painting from 1671
depicts the entire parish arranged before the manor house, a portrait
of an unequal relationship seen through the dispensation of charity.
The common people, drab and supplicatory, contrast with the silk-
clad Tichbornes, whom the artist made glow with privilege.15 Besides
great houses, larger villages and towns had guildhalls and corn
exchanges, where trade and tradesmen were regulated. Market
crosses, broken by Protestant iconoclasts but not completely
destroyed, served as rendezvous points for more substantial
communities. And in this post-Reformation era, former church
buildings were put to secular uses, and new town halls built to meet
the civic needs of administration and local government. Architecture
drew people together, concentrating attention in a way that
preserved social difference and promoted respect.16
At the same time, quite how such institutions were used lay
beyond the control of the ruling elite. Sites where the status quo was
reaffirmed were also where it was challenged. Most social protest
was conservative, not proto-revolutionary, however, and demanded
that those who governed abide by their obligations. Anonymous
petitions and rhymes were pinned to church doors and manor gates
and market crosses, and it was in such places that demonstrators
gathered in times of dearth. Precincts of officialdom were put to other
informal uses. Church porches saw ‘clandestine marriages’ and
sheltered watchers for spirits on All Hallows’ Eve, both practices
condemned by the Church. As well as a burial ground, the
churchyard was a site for spells, oaths, transactions, courtship and
games. Completing the picture were alehouses, the venues for
sociable events such as ‘ales’ to boost parish coffers, and quotidian
routines of relaxing with beer and tobacco, storytelling, singing,
dancing and gambling. Puritans reviled such disorder and
ungodliness, although some in authority valued the ‘good fellowship’
that alehouses promoted.
Churches and mansions and alehouses were connected by
neighbourhoods, mini-communities in themselves, where people saw
and heard and smelled each other – their cooking, refuse, livestock,
children, disputes. Even in London, neighbourhoods constituted a
primary setting for social experience.17 This was where food and fuel
were bartered and borrowed, begged and pilfered, and favours
exchanged – likewise news and gossip. Most people lived face-to-
face lives. Busybodies peered through cracks in the shutters; they
eavesdropped, made mock and started rumours. Pleasantries and
insults were traded, promises kept or broken, invitations accepted
and declined. If the Church and other institutions were the
community’s vital organs, this activity, for good or ill, was its
lifeblood. Social relationships were thus constantly renegotiated, in
practice often to further selfish or sectional ambitions, but always
theoretically to promote neighbourliness. After the Reformation,
‘good works’ to aid the disadvantaged were declared worthless as a
means to salvation but continued to benefit the community socially
and politically.18
The households that neighbourhoods comprised were more
than just homes or families: they were thrumming machines of work
and reproduction, instruction and devotion, nurture and sustenance.
They were also political communities – indeed symbolic microcosms
of the hierarchical state. Fathers and masters were seen as kings
ruling their own realms, and accordingly their murder was punished
as petty treason. A blow even at plebeian patriarchy struck at the
overarching ideology, which stood for the integrity of the parish and
the nation. Every aspect of life was connected. An individual’s
honour did not exist in a vacuum, but was subsumed by the
collective reputation of his or her household. Lives were, for the most
part, lived in plain sight of all, and for most people privacy was not
just unobtainable but undesirable. What for us might be a personal
aspiration or right was, to the early modern community, furtive and
suspicious.
To escape supervision and censure, subordinate groups did
form alternative miniature communities both within the whole and
distinct from it: ‘companies’ of sociability.19 Female activities such as
spinning bees, visits to the bakehouse, milking in the pasture,
washing clothes, attending births and serving on ‘juries of matrons’
all mattered for the well-being of ordinary women. On these
occasions, words could tumble out, unpoliced by men. Adolescents
of both sexes sought relief from the pressure to conform. Servants
and apprentices made friends, and in some towns ran riot on May
Day and Shrovetide. This was not revolutionary conduct: it was
bounded, limited, and akin to the sanctioned appointment of boy
bishops – a ritual of temporary inversion to validate the orthodox
order of things, however much alarm boisterous behaviour caused
law officers.20 These displays were communal lessons in conformity:
demonstrating right through wrong. Witches and murderers, their
crimes luridly described in pamphlets, were exemplars not just of
ungodliness but of bad neighbourliness and unsociability.21
Communities, then, did not cohere through unanimity or full
obedience but through structures of authority that permitted a degree
of dissent and clamped down on the rest. Arthur Dent’s The Plaine
Mans Path-way to Heaven, first published in 1601, denounced the
sins that poisoned the community’s soul. Drunkenness was
particularly injurious, causing misery, beggary, shame, strife,
quarrelling and fighting. Idleness, too, corrupted commonwealths.
‘There be many lazie losels & luskish youthes, both in Townes and
Villages’, wrote Dent, ‘which do nothing al the day long but walke the
streetes, sit upon the stalles and frequent Tavernes and Ale-
houses’.22 Malefactors might be legally whipped or pilloried, but
even formal sanctions required local assent. Many offences tried by
Church courts received punishments inflicted by the community for
the sake of the community, for instance forced repentance before the
congregation wearing a white sheet. Other sinners were ordered to
‘purge’ – that is made to find witnesses to their good character.
Ecclesiastical justice, meted out pro salute animae (‘for the good of
the soul’), was meant to restore errant sheep to the flock and correct
communal imbalances. Like manorial courts, Church courts settled
disputes cheaply and quickly, and were therefore popular.23
Communities also regulated themselves by extra-legal means
deemed legitimate through long usage. These included spreading
satirical ballads, humiliating adulterers and cuckolds with ‘rough
music’, and silencing outspoken women with scolds’ bridles and
ducking stools. Like Church court punishments, these sanctions
reinscribed the moral boundary of the community. Counter-measures
against witches also reveal communal values and their defence.
Mostly these were tests, such as the dubious ‘ordeal by water’,
which required popular participation. The intention was a theatrical
demonstration of guilt, of which at least some community members
were convinced but could not prove. The custom of requiring murder
suspects to touch corpses, which might ‘bleed afresh’ to identify
their killers, operated on similar lines. The local application of such
controls promoted a sense of mutual reassurance, good will and
harmony.
Communities, then, were places to observe hierarchy and
discipline, but also stages for displays of mutuality and obligation.
Horizontal ties were both constraining and sustaining, and put
individual liberty second to collective security. Neighbourhood
snooping was a means of self-regulation linked to the ‘moral
economy’, an unwritten code by which fairness and propriety in
everything from sexual mores to grain prices was fiercely upheld.
Protests defended custom, censuring miscreants and compelling
superiors to abide by paternalist rhetoric. The idea of the ‘politics of
the parish’ is also relevant here. If communities were building blocks
of the state, then they shared in its political character, from villagers’
adherence to faiths and factions in the national ‘public sphere’, to
the local calculus of reputations and negotiation of relationships.
Customary rules were constantly reappraised and protected, made
and remade.24 Even fun was literal ‘recreation’: feasts and
celebrations repaired the frayed social fabric. Community consisted
in bounded territory and its people, but also in activities that
promoted ‘intercourse between man and society, man and the
material world, and man and the supernatural universe’.25
 Change
Village communities, for all their introspection, were not islands. Like
towns and cities, they were connected through local institutions; lines
of kinship; and networks of work and trade and religion to other
villages, and to towns and cities and regions. Irrespective of size or
particular identity, a community belonged to a dynamic social and
economic world beyond. And through restless dynamism came
constant change. In the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
population expansion, urban growth, the enclosure of open fields,
industrialisation, expanding markets, and increased road and river
traffic had a significant impact on how communities looked, felt and
functioned. Migrants came and went, as did pedlars and traders,
beggars and vagrants. To geographical mobility was added social
mobility, further complicating the picture of the community as the
fortunes of individual families, and sometimes whole groups, waxed
and waned. The scale and pace of change varied according to local
society and topography. By 1700 the parish of Myddle in Shropshire
had remained remarkably unaffected, yet Highley, just forty miles
away, was transformed by enclosure. In Cambridgeshire even
proximate parishes had contrasting histories. The social structure of
Chippenham became more polarised, but that of Willingham more
egalitarian. The experience of Terling, as reconstructed by Keith
Wrightson and David Levine, does not stand for all Essex.26
Economic change was matched in scale and pace by state
formation, the extension of royal policy through law into
communities. From the mid sixteenth century, parishes were
increasingly hard-wired into a national framework through the
enforcement of common law and proliferating statutes by justices of
the peace, who also participated in local government and the ‘county
community’.27 These magistrates belonged to a structure of local
office-holding where constables were responsible to them, and they
to assize judges at Westminster. The imposition of Protestant
uniformity reinforced this hierarchy, with churchwardens answerable
to archdeacons and bishops and their delegates. The Reformation
made faith a test of allegiance policed by officials, from unpaid
amateurs (whose authority derived from local standing) to crown
appointees. Traditional religious practices were proscribed, as were
informal counter-measures against sin, which were deemed
disorderly and disrespectful to the law. After 1600 English life met
with higher expectations from within and without, although the
growth of state roles performed locally diminished distinctions
between internal and external pressures. Nor were ideals of civil and
godly order easily separable, with religion and the law forming two
halves of an ideology that fitted parish and state alike. Local
campaigns against everything from healers’ prayers to maypole
dances contributed to a puritan ‘reformation of manners’. New
standards were imposed by a burgeoning ‘middling sort’ whose
increasingly self-conscious identity as a community within a
community was cemented by what offended them – drunkenness,
idleness, fornication and superstition – as much as by social
aspiration. There were many barriers to realising their imagined ideal
community, but focusing on ‘the other’ offered practical reassurance.
Witches handily epitomised, indeed personified, the chaos to be
confronted.28
In the course of the seventeenth century, select vestries,
dominated by middling sorts (including parish officers), cast the
same influence over their communities as magistrates had over
counties – probably greater, given their propinquity with neighbours.
This local autonomy may even justify a view of the state as a
‘monarchical republic’ comprising some 10,000 parishes, each of
which, with its self-appointed, self-determining oligarchy, bore
republican characteristics.29 To compensate for the absence of
resident gentry, in 1596 vestrymen in the Wiltshire parish of
Swallowfield drew up their own moral and legal code, ‘to the end we
may the better and more quyetly lyve together in good love and
amytie’. Swallowfield reminds us what the English state owed to the
industry and initiative of the chief inhabitants of its constituent
communities. ‘Swallowfield was in some sense the Privy Council writ
small’, notes Ethan Shagan, ‘and the Privy Council was in some
sense Swallowfield writ large’.30
Once again, however, the picture is not only diverse – political
conditions varied widely from place to place – but we find ambiguous
meanings and ambivalent attitudes even within specific communities.
Whereas justices of the peace largely represented the policies of
central government, parish elites hovered between ‘two concepts of
order’ – on one side adhering to the law, and on the other making
decisions that satisfied the community (or, at least, people most like
themselves). Discretion was not just possible: it was essential for
keeping communities on an even keel. Magistrates and constables
and grand jurors were not perhaps obvious guardians of the customs
of the poor, but nor were they immune to such pressures.31 Under
the Tudors and Stuarts the spectre of popular rebellion and civil war
hung heavily over English life. One local consequence was that
defending authority and maintaining order required sensitivity to the
needs of working people, who often felt that superiors were not
rewarding their deference with patronage.
Another key office-holder in the vestry was the overseer. After
1600, ad hoc responses to poverty had evolved into the poor law,
administered at parish level. A fault-line in communities was thus
given legal definition, separating those who paid the poor rate from
the recipients. Ratepayers qualified through property and income,
but who received their money was subject to the officers’ discretion.
Paupers might be refused on moral grounds – for example because
of absence from church – and even men of modest means,
assuming they were ratepayers, might endorse these decisions.
Desire to keep the rate low, in times of escalating poverty, informed
judgements about who was deserving or undeserving, creating a
community of self-interest in the haves and the alienation of the
have-nots. Distinctions between ‘ancient inhabitants’ and
newcomers or ‘strangers’ were also made, to the extent that
different grades of wine might be provided at Christmas. If they were
lucky, vagrants were returned to the parishes of their birth: whipped
and sent home if unlucky. Once again, we see how exclusion and
inclusion worked together, creating a moral majority in the
community by castigating a minority. Hospitality, meanwhile, became
similarly discretionary – a ‘private virtue’ and more rarely
incorporated into ‘a holistic view of community’.32
The waning of affect in communities was widely observed.
Ballad literature, in particular, reveals a widespread feeling that
English charity – meaning love between neighbours, rather than just
generosity to the poor – had dwindled, and with it hospitality and
willingness to offer credit. One tale of poverty and woe was
addressed to ‘hard-hearted’ landlords, another mused on days gone
by: ‘Good hospitality was cherisht then of many / Now poore men
starve and dye, and are not helpt by any.’33 Much of this was pure
nostalgia for a golden age that may never existed. And yet before
the Reformation, religious houses did care for the poor and ‘good
works’ had contributed to the soul’s salvation as well as harmonising
parish life. The poor, back then in stable and manageable numbers,
furnished sinners with an opportunity to imitate Christ, and were
therefore not just accepted but valued. By the reign of James I, if not
earlier, the poor had become a burden to be treated with suspicion
and, if in doubt, active hostility. Christmas cheer for the needy had
vanished from the great halls; the gates were closed.
The same people in communities who feared losing wealth to
the poor rate also feared that the ‘many-headed monster’ would
burgle their houses and rob them on the highway. Laments for the
passing of a merrier England did not disclose the full extent of
growing social polarisation and the bitter emotions that came with it.
It was one thing to neglect the poor, another actively to fear them –
and indeed for the poor to resent this fear and neglect by the very
people, principally their own neighbours, who once might have gladly
helped them. Many witchcraft accusations, their rise coinciding with
the rise in poverty-related tension, began with doorstep
confrontations over alms – the so-called ‘charity-refused’ model.34 In
1646 Elizabeth Crossley, a poor woman ‘in evill report for witching’
in her community, left Henry Cockcroft’s house at Heptonstall,
Yorkshire, discontented with some milk she had been given. The
death of Cockcroft’s son three months later was attributed to her
rage, encouraging other people to make their own accusations.
Emotions ran high because the refusal of alms signified deterioration
in community relations rather than their disappearance, resulting in a
stressful ambiguity of status and obligation. Feelings were raw, not
dead, and where there was hope there would be disappointment –
and guilt (in the rich) and fury (in the poor). ‘The very intensity of the
charitable impulse’, writes Robin Briggs, ‘helped to create serious
tensions for all participants’.35
English communities were also frequently divided over religion.
Grassroots puritanism grew after 1600, clashing with the Church of
England, whose orthodoxy became militantly anti-Calvinist during the
reign of Charles I. Dissent led to persecution, and persecution to
emigration to New England. The policies of Bishop Matthew Wren
drove as many as 1,350 people from Norfolk, mostly travelling as
families, including fifty households from Norwich alone. Some
belonged to select sub-congregations that had crystallised around
puritan ministers, who now led them into the wilderness. The Revd
Robert Peck, excommunicated for ignoring Anglican liturgy, led the
first wave from Hingham, Norfolk, to Massachusetts in what became
an exodus from the parish. His ‘violent schismatical spirit’, inimical to
peace at home, was thus channelled into creating a new
community.36 In America, puritans reinforced the amity and unity
they already felt with regional godly networks, for example in East
Anglia and the West Country, and built communities in the more
traditional sense of like-minded people working and worshipping in
the same place.
The thinking behind emigration was not entirely religious: there
was a feeling that the public good on which communities thrived was
being weakened by selfishness. Some pointed to ‘want of duty in the
people’. Others feared the explosion of litigation (‘for matters of
commodity’) and an epidemic of private gain. The Digger Gerrard
Winstanley perceived how ‘the heart of covetousness swells most
against community, calling community a thief’.37 Landowners and
merchants, it was said, prospered at the expense of others.
Competition made it hard for people to live together. ‘There is such
pressing and oppressing in towns and country about farms, trade,
traffic, etc.’, wrote Robert Cushman, one of the founders of new
Plymouth in 1620, ‘so as a man can hardly live anywhere but he
shall pull down two of his neighbours’.38 ‘Swarms’ of idle paupers
posed the greatest threat, breaching the peace and draining
resources. Both helping and punishing the poor were wasted
opportunities. On plantations, these people would support
themselves and create markets for textile exports, demand for which
had slumped. Instead of collecting the poor rate, communities should
raise money to send paupers to America.39
Pragmatic considerations were framed by emotion. A minister in
Jacobean Virginia had pitied the beggars in England’s streets who
‘day and night call upon the passers by, and yet remaine unprovided
for’, and yearned for the restoration of faith and hope, charity and
love. Without these virtues the English were spiritually dead, their
communities redundant.40 ‘Selfe-Love is setled farre into everie
mans heart’, deplored Michael Sparke, whereas in America a lost
world of Christian love might be recreated, inspiring the Old World to
reform itself. Witness the title of the puritan leader John Winthrop’s
call to New England, ‘a model of Christian charity’, which proposed
colonisation as an antidote to selfishness in communities by
promoting compassion and trust. It was a crying shame, Winthrop
felt, for children to be seen as a burden and poor neighbours called
‘vile and base’. His friend John White never gave up hope ‘that the
love that waxeth cold and dyeth in the most part yet may revive and
kindle in some mens hearts’.41
Around 350,000 English hopeful people went to America in the
seventeenth century. Many, however, were sorry to find the new
communities as bad as the old ones, or worse. Within two years of
the foundation of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, ‘Ambition, Sloth and
idlenes had devoured the fruits of former labours.’ After tackling
America’s vast emptiness, colonists were, as the earl of Stirling
noted, ‘quickly entangled with the other extremities, grudging to be
bounded within their prospect, and jarring with their neighbours for
small parcels of ground’.42 Puritan expectations were higher than
those of Virginia’s settlers, which made the disappointment that
much greater. A year after the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620,
Robert Cushman was bemoaning New Plymouth’s disregard for
charity, hospitality, brotherly love and the common good. In 1637 the
joy felt by the Revd John Davenport and his congregation at finding
a godly community in Boston was marred by puritan controversy.
Peter Bulkeley, a minister who swapped Bedfordshire for Boston,
was shocked by the worst breaches of amity he had ever
experienced.43 By this time Boston was full, and its satellite
communities began arguing over boundaries. Satan, it was
supposed, had ‘cast a bone of division’ among colonists at
Hingham, named for the Norfolk village they had left a decade
earlier. This helps to explain why a third of the godly ministers who
emigrated in the 1630s returned home.44
As in England, colonial exclusion went hand-in-hand with
inclusion, rancour with harmony. Puritans in England deplored the
heartless divisiveness of New England’s congregationalism, which
produced communities of saints distinct from a disenfranchised
reprobate majority. By the time of John Winthrop’s death in 1649, his
shining ‘city upon a hill’ seemed more like any unregenerate English
town: venal, fractious and ungodly. The first fifty years of Watertown,
Massachusetts, were marked not by a consensus that eluded
England’s communities but by a dissension all its own.45 And the
witch-trials that flared up in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s
reflected a catastrophic failure of community. Colonial townships
were blighted by the same sins listed by Arthur Dent, and the
counter-measures were the same: a Boston drunk made to wear a
white sheet and placard, a Maryland murderer identified by a
bleeding corpse, and a suspected witch in Connecticut subjected to
the water ordeal.46 By 1700 colonisation had demonstrated that the
quality of an English community consisted not in its land or laws or
institutions or religion, nor in the prevention of discord, which was
impossible. Instead, it lay in people’s willingness to moderate selfish
impulses with consideration for each other and the common good,
and also in an ability to settle perennial disputes and to absorb
inevitable conflict.

Conclusion
How to sum up change in early modern communities? Most
obviously, the religious ideal of parish unity through caritas (‘charity’)
faded. By 1750 hospitality was no longer a realistic goal but instead
became ‘a rhetorical weapon, to challenge the dominance of the
market-place … by a return to a mythical past of open generosity’.47
As economic horizons widened, so too did the focus of economic
morality, from the village to the nation. Disputes emerging from
commercial sophistication were resolved with the dispassionate
language of the law, displacing more emotional appeals and
‘elevating universal calculated social good above … interpersonal
community values’. ‘Community’ was redefined negatively as the
need to find new ways for individualistic and competitive households
to trust each other. The meaning of ‘commonwealth’, an idea once
so binding and altruistic, shifted towards ‘government’ rather than
‘common good’, implying exclusivity rather than inclusivity.48
Commonwealth by the old definition was not repugnant, just difficult
to attain; as such, its politicisation from the mid seventeenth century
was yet another sign of ‘the slow decline, and intermittent
efflorescence, of medieval commonalty’.49 Increasingly, then,
‘territorial’ and ‘interest’ communities, united by proximity and
shared aims, were overlaid with ‘attachment’ communities –
emotional projections of collectivity across space and time, or what
Benedict Anderson once called ‘imagined communities’.50
Economic change in larger, denser local populations was mainly
experienced as social class: heightened consciousness,
differentiated relationships and mutual antagonism. Such feelings,
which later acquired regional and national scope as imagined class
communities, at first crystallised locally and interpersonally. Parish
elites retreated from the lower orders, encouraged by enclosure and
capitalist investment in land. Absentee landlords exploited people
they never met, and squirearchy wielded an authority that cared
nothing for popular assent. The ‘division of cultures’ was so
profound, even the rhetoric of community was redundant. Shared
pastimes and beliefs became a thing of the past. The witchcraft
accusations that offered a quick unifying fix for communities only
signified a widening gulf. Educated people decried the brutality and
superstition of the masses. The drowning of a suspect by her
neighbours at Chatham in 1675 was condemned by the naval
surveyor Sir John Tippetts as ‘a piece of such cruelty as I have
rarely heard of’.51 Such words came from sincere horror, yet also
served to sharpen a sense of civility. In urban areas especially,
middling sorts gradually formed a national community called ‘the
middle class’, aided by the discrimination central to the
administration of poor-relief. By the mid eighteenth century, the
burden of poverty had overwhelmed some regions, hardening
reluctance to assist ‘strangers’ and concentrating attention on ‘the
familiar neighbourhood needy’.52 (The Tichborne dole was
suspended in 1796 by local magistrates owing to abuse by vagrants,
despite a curse on the family if the custom ever ended.) To belong to
a class community was to be locked into ‘a hierarchy of economic
advantage or disadvantage’, depending on who you were.53
Even medieval communities had been to some extent
‘imagined’: they reinforced subordination by concealing it behind
politicised rhetoric, nurturing unity and obedience to serve the
interests of lordly government. Tangible aspects aside, pre-modern
communities were conjured into life with beguiling language. As Bob
Scribner once said, ‘concepts of community embodied universal,
virtually hegemonic values, that led everyone to seek to appropriate
them’. An individualistic reality was exactly what made the imagery
of community so desirable – for preserving the common peace as
well as for advancing sectional interests.54 Rituals of patronage, like
the Tichborne dole, were collective social therapies; but they were
also cynically coercive, demanding plebeian complicity in the
invention of common goals. What had happened by 1750 was
largely that the mask had slipped to expose the true face of
hierarchy and self-interested wealth and power.
Does this risk slipping back to the narrative suggested by the
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft model – the demise of community as
state and civil society took over? In fact, the shift towards collective
identities beyond the local context is better characterised by the
evolution of the parish within a regional and national framework. The
reigns of Elizabeth I and James I saw the strengthening of the idea
of the Protestant nation state, glorifying its monarchs and
anathematising popish enemies. Saints’ days were replaced with
propagandist commemoration, such as providential delivery from the
Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Villagers continued to celebrate ancient
festivals, but with a psychic connection to a larger, enclosing national
community. The quasi-religious flavour of all this makes preference
for ‘communion’ rather than ‘community’, expressed by Jacobean
lexicographers and modern sociologists alike, particularly apposite.
Other, often competing, religious identities emerged. Sects like the
Quakers and Baptists created an imagined community of
extraordinary range and intensity, while puritans across the Atlantic
world preached Protestantism in danger. Then there was the
development of ‘the public’, the most potent rhetorical iteration of
national wholeness, uniting political people and political space as a
‘community of the imagination’.55
Perhaps, then, we should think in terms of restructuring rather
than one paradigm replacing another, and return to the idea that
communities were a constant feature of a historical process, not its
primitive stage. State formation, one of early modern England’s most
distinctive characteristics, did not act upon community and so did not
displace it. Instead, the state grew through communities, meaning
that parishes, politically self-conscious and active in law and
administration, did not just belong to the wider nation: they
constituted it. By the later seventeenth century, communities drew as
much strength from external forces as from internal ones, specifically
dynamic regional and metropolitan connections. This change was
visible in a transition from religious to civic institutions, and with it a
shift towards ‘civic community’, an identity that looked outwards as
well as inwards. The moral regulation formerly undertaken by parish
vestries became work for public bodies such as the Societies for
Reformation of Manners, who operated locally but with a national
uniformity of rhetoric in pursuit of national ambitions.56
An ability to maintain order and resolve disputes indicated the
versatility of English communities existing in inextricable partnership
with an expanding nationhood, public and civic society. After all, the
secularisation of local institutions resulted in no Hobbesian civil war
of man against man, nor even the spread of atomised mini-republics.
The restructuring of communities can also be seen in class
antagonism, which was unifying in the very act of its divisiveness.
Working people in eighteenth-century Derbyshire clashed with
clergymen demanding tithes, but drew huge strength from ‘their
continuing membership of the community of pugnacious independent
free miners’.57 Disrespect for custom nurtured plebeian solidarity in
its defence. From friction came fraternity. In the towns, corporations
and craft fellowships were reinvigorated, and communities constantly
remade using languages of fellowship and brotherhood – more
‘imagined communities’, secured by emotion and imagination and a
common language.
These adaptations suggest that all communities – the traditional
rural parish governed by religious values and the imagined
communities of faith, class, state or nation – were shaped by
emotion: its needs and eruptions, rules and restraints, manipulations
and appeals. ‘Emotional communities’ are, according to Barbara
Rosenwein, ‘precisely the same as social communities’ except for
an emphasis on ‘systems of feeling’. Emotional codes governed
attraction and repulsion in local society, and defined good and bad
behaviour.58 Emotions are also a guide to early modern continuity
and change in that they bridged theory and reality in community life,
for instance guilt over neglecting charity and the growth of other
selfish impulses. This did not amount to some transition between
positive and negative emotions in public life, but rather a long-term
reconfiguration of universal emotions, which changed the meaning of
community. What remained constant was both the persistent self-
interest central to human nature, and a natural urge to combine and
to improve.

Notes

1 R. Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall (London, 1609), C1v; H[enry]

C[ockeram], The English Dictionarie (London, 1623); E. Phillips,
The New World of English Words (London, 1658); S. Skinner, A
New English Dictionary (London, 1691); R. Coster, A Mite Cast
into the Common Treasury (n.p., 1649), title-page, 6; T. Hobbes,
Leviathan (London, 1651), 55, 62–3, 68–70, 86–7.

2 T. Blount, Glossographia (London, 1656), K3; P. Withington,

‘Agency, custom and the English corporate system’, in H. French
and J. Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
3 S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe,
900–1300, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
Chapters 4–5; Z. Razi, ‘Family, land and the village community in
later medieval England’, in T. H. Aston (ed.), Landlords, Peasants
and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).

4 J. Harris (ed.), Tönnies: Community and Civil Society

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

5 M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative

Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013), i, 40–3.

6 J. Bossy, ‘Blood and baptism: Kinship, community and

Christianity in western Europe from the fourteenth to the
seventeenth centuries’, in D. Baker (ed.), Sanctity and Secularity:
The Church and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973), 143.

7 L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800

(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 98–9; J. A. Sharpe, Early
Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760, 2nd edn (London:
Arnold, 1997), 93.

8 R. M. Smith, ‘“Modernization” and the corporate medieval

village community in England: Some sceptical reflections’, in A. R.
H. Baker and D. Gregory (eds.), Explorations in Historical
Geography: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); K. Wrightson, ‘The “decline of
neighbourliness” revisited’, in N. L. Jones and D. Woolf (eds.),
Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); K. Wrightson, ‘Mutualities and
obligations: Changing social relationships in early modern
England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 139 (2006).

9 P. Collinson, De republica Anglorum; or, History with the Politics

Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17–18,
quotation at 18.

10 M. J. Halvorson and K. E. Spierling (eds.), Defining Community

in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1; C. J.
Calhoun, ‘Community: Toward a variable conceptualization for
comparative research’, SH, 5 (1980). Cf. the model of ‘subjective’
village life versus ‘objective’ city life devised by Tönnies’s follower
Georg Simmel: ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in K. H. Wolff
(ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press,
1950), Chapter 4.

11 Halvorson and Spierling, Defining Community, 21.

12 K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680, 2nd edn (London:

Routledge, 2003), 61–5, quotation at 62.

13 P. Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe

(Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 6.

14 D. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society:

Gloucestershire, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter
3, quotation at 69.

15 G. van Tilborch, The Tichborne Dole (1671), Tichborne House,

Hampshire.
16 R. Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the
English Urban Community, c. 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991).

17 J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in

the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), Chapters 8–11; I. W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability:
Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 74–82.

18 For the spatial dimension see Amanda Flather, Gender and

Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007),
Chapters 2–4.

19 M. T. Crane, ‘Illicit privacy and outdoor spaces in early modern

England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 9 (2009); P.
Withington, ‘Company and sociability in early modern England’,
SH, 32 (2007).

20 B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and

Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), Chapters 5–8; P. Griffiths, Youth and
Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapter 3.

21 M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chapters 2, 6.

22 Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London:

Robert Dexter, 1601), 175–90, quotations at 178, 185.
23 M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England,
1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

24 K. Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern

England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The
Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996).

25 F. Braudel, quoted in N. Schindler, Rebellion, Community and

Custom in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 134n.

26 D. G. Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the

Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974),
Chapter 6; G. Nair, Highley: The Development of a Community,
1550–1880 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), Chapters 1–6, 10; M.
Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), Chapters 3–5; K. Wrightson and D.
Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–
1700, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

27 S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern

England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), Chapters
4–6; M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.
1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J. R.
Kent, ‘The centre and the localities: State formation and parish
government in England, c. 1640–1740’, HJ, 38 (1995).

28 M. Ingram, ‘Reformation of manners in early modern England’,

in Griffiths, Fox and Hindle, Experience of Authority; A. Reiber
DeWindt, ‘Witchcraft and conflicting visions of the ideal village
community’, JBS, 34 (1995).

29 P. Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994),

Chapter 2; M. Goldie, ‘The unacknowledged republic:
Officeholding in early modern England’, in T. Harris (ed.), The
Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2001).

30 S. Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and community in the Elizabethan parish:

The Swallowfield articles of 1596’, HJ, 42 (1999); Collinson, De
republica Anglorum, 30–4, quotation at 30; E. H. Shagan, ‘The two
republics: Conflicting views of participatory local government in
early Tudor England’, in J. F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical
Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

31 K. Wrightson, ‘Two concepts of order: Justices, constables and

jurymen in seventeenth-century England’, in J. Brewer and J.
Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their
Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London:
Hutchinson, 1980).

32 S. Hindle, ‘Civility, honesty and the identification of the

deserving poor in seventeenth-century England’, in French and
Barry, Identity and Agency; S. Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief, and
social relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600–1800’, HJ, 41 (1998), 94;
S. Hindle, ‘A sense of place? Becoming and belonging in a rural
parish, 1550–1650’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.),
Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); F. Heal,
Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), 387–93, quotations at 388.

33 A Lanthorne for Landlords (London, n.d. [c. 1620]); [M. Parker],

Times Alteration: Or the Old Mans Rehearsall (London, n.d. [c.
1620]).

34 K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972); A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor
and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1971). Macfarlane later
backdated individualism by several centuries: The Origins of
English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

35 TNA, ASSI 45/1/5/38–9; M. Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and

neighbourliness in early modern England’, in S. Hindle, A.
Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society: Social
Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013); R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours:
The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London:
Penguin, 1996), Chapter 4, quotation at 139.

36 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 68, fol. 332; J. Britton and

E. Wedlake Brayley, A Topographical and Historical Description of
Norfolk (London, 1810), 262 (quotation).

37 E. F., Englands Deplorable Condition Shewing the Common-

wealths Malady (London, 1659), title-page; T. Stretton, ‘Written
obligations, litigation and neighbourliness, 1580–1680’, in Hindle,
Shepard and Walter, Remaking English Society, 189; T. Scott, The
Belgicke Pismire (London, 1623), 29–30; G. Winstanley, quoted in
Hindle, ‘Sense of place?’, 111.
38 R. Cushman, quoted in John Demos (ed.), Remarkable
Providences: Readings on Early American History, 3rd edn
(Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 8; W.
Symonds, Virginia: A Sermon Preached at White-Chappel
(London, 1609), 19–22; F. Higginson, New-Englands Plantation
(London, 1630), C3v.

39 R. Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609), B2–B3v; J.

Hagthorpe, Englands-Exchequer (London, 1625), 24–5; J. Smith,
A Description of New England (London, 1616), 40; R. Eburne, A
Plaine Path-Way to Plantations (London, 1624), 9–16, 47–9; T.
Morton, New English Canaan (London, 1637), 55–7; C. Levett, A
Voyage into New England (London, 1624), 35–6.

40 A. Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 4–6,

18–21, quotation at 6; W. Bradford, A Relation … of the English
Plantation Setled at Plimoth (London, 1622), 67.

41 M. Sparke, Greevous Grones for the Poore (London, 1621), 3;

A. Heimert and A. Delbanco (eds.), The Puritans in America: A
Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1985), 71, 81–92; J. White, The Planters Plea (London, 1630), 79.

42 R. Johnson, The New Life of Virginea (London, 1612), C1v; W.

Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (London, 1624), 5.

43 R. Cushman, A Sermon Preached at Plimmoth in New-England

(London, 1622), 3–5, 10–11, 15–16; I. MacBeath Calder (ed.),
Letters of John Davenport, Puritan Divine (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1937), 5–6; Boston Public Library, MS Am.
1506/2/7.
44 E. Winslow, New-Englands Salamander Discovered (London,
1647), 4; S. Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the
Call of Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 55.

45 R. Thompson, Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts,

1630–1680 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
2001).

46 Boston Public Library, MS fAm. 2176, p. 72; W. Hand Browne

(ed.), Judicial and Testamentary Business of the Provincial Court,
1649/50–1657 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1891),
536–7, 539–40; Connecticut State Library, Wyllys Papers, fol. 22.

47 Heal, Hospitality, 403.

48 C. Muldrew, ‘The culture of reconciliation: Community and the

settlement of disputes in early modern England’, HJ, 39 (1996),
942; C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of
Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 4; C. Muldrew, ‘From
commonwealth to public opulence: The redefinition of wealth and
government in early modern Britain’, in Hindle, Shepard and
Walter, Remaking English Society.

49 P. Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The

Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity,
2010), Chapter 5, quotation at 166.

50 P. Willmott, Community Initiatives: Patterns and Prospects

(London: Policy Studies Institute, 1989), 2–5; D. Lee and H.
Newby, The Problem of Sociology: An Introduction to the
Discipline (London: Routledge, 1983), 57–8; B. Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991).

51 TNA, ADM 106/313.

52 P. Rushton, ‘The poor law, the parish and the community in

north-east England, 1600–1800’, Northern History, 25 (1989) 152.

53 H. French, ‘Living in poverty in eighteenth-century Terling’, in

Hindle, Shepard and Walter, Remaking English Society, 314.

54 R. Scribner, ‘Communities and the nature of power’, in R.

Scribner (ed.), Germany: A New Social and Economic History, Vol.
I: 1450–1630 (London: Hodder, 1996), 317.

55 G. Baldwin, ‘The “public” as a rhetorical community in early

modern England’, in Shepard and Withington, Communities, 212.

56 C. Muldrew, ‘From a “light cloak” to an “iron cage”: Historical

change in the relation between community and individualism’, in
Shepard and Withington, Communities, 163; P. Withington,
‘Citizens, community and political culture in Restoration England’,
in Shepard and Withington, Communities.

57 A. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country,

1550–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 194.

58 B. H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, AHR,

107 (2002); J. Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 67–74.
 Part II
◈

Currents of Change
 5
Reformations
◈

Alec Ryrie

The Reformations of the 1530s and thereafter were the most

significant extrinsic shock experienced by English society between
the Black Death and the Civil Wars of the 1640s. The magnitude of
the shock has never been in doubt. What is now clear, however, is
the extent to which it was genuinely extrinsic. England’s religious life
until the late 1520s was remarkably stable. Naturally there were
points of stress, and when the earthquake came, they were where
the cracks first appeared. Yet they did not cause it. This crisis came
on England unawares, and it came in two distinct forms: a political
and an intellectual assault, often but not always in alliance. Between
them, they remade English society. This chapter will survey how they
did so, and how the English responded to, adapted to and resisted
the new world in which they found themselves.
Pre-Reformation English religion has been a playground for modern
prejudices. It is easily caricatured either as a swamp of superstitious
corruption or as a bucolic paradise of communal faith. We do not
need to accept either view to recognise that, in its own terms, it was
working fairly well. By European standards, the English Church was
unusually well disciplined and well led. Its sacramental, pastoral and
practical service to its people was generally adequate. There were
frictions over predictable matters of land, money and law, but they
did not coalesce into the sort of more widespread anticlerical
prejudice that was common in contemporary Germany, Scotland or
elsewhere. Instead, the Church drew on – and replenished – a deep
well of legitimacy and affection. The signs of this cycle of loyalty can
be seen in the consistent support that the living and the dying of all
classes provided for all manner of local ecclesiastical services,
whether in money, in kind or in effort.
It is hard to gauge the balance among love for this
establishment, contented conformity to it, disgruntled compliance
with it and alienated withdrawal from it. Clearly, however, open
dissent was rare. Since the expulsion of the English Jews in 1291,
England had been religiously uniform in law, and nearly so in fact. A
few foreign Jews apparently found a discreet home in London at
times.1 There were isolated sceptics, scoffers and freethinkers. A
rather more substantial irritant for the Church was the loose
movement of dissidents who called each other ‘brethren’ or ‘known
men’, but who were known to their orthodox neighbours and are still
known to historians as Lollards. This scabrously anti-ceremonial and
anti-hierarchical movement was vaguely attached to the memory of
the fourteenth-century Oxford theologian John Wyclif, but retained
little of his particular doctrines beyond a passionate commitment to
the English Bible. Lollards’ religion consisted chiefly in clandestine
meetings to read the Bible and other English texts aloud. Otherwise,
they generally conformed outwardly to the public Church, albeit with
misgivings and with occasional outbursts of scorn at its practices.
Periodically a bishop took it upon himself to root out these heretics,
whereupon most of those arrested readily recanted their errors and
returned home to carry on. Only a handful of repeat offenders were
sentenced to death by burning. Lollardy was numerically tiny, a low-
level, endemic presence in London, Bristol, Coventry and some rural
areas of southern England – in particular the Chiltern hills, the
closest thing it had to a heartland. Its chief significance was indirect.
It primed the English Church and people to be aware of heresy, one
simple sign of which is that ‘heretic’ and ‘Lowler’ were widely used
as all-purpose insults almost devoid of specific meaning.
This was not the most promising terrain for the Protestant
Reformation. As everywhere in Europe, certain small but important
social groups showed an early interest in the religious novelties
coming out of Germany after 1517: merchants whose travels
exposed them to foreign ways, scholars struck by the appeal of
Luther’s ideas. The persistent Lollard minority showed some interest
too. But that hardly made the new heresies dangerous. As the
formidable machinery of the English Church and state began to
mobilise behind orthodoxy in the late 1520s, it made sense to expect
that this movement would at worst become another annoying
heretical minority, and at best would be squelched altogether.
 In the event, however, the state threw its weight on the other
side of the balance. King Henry VIII’s marital and dynastic crisis, and
his bloodily quixotic solution to it, merged improbably with the new
religious movement to take England into unexplored territory. A
ratchet of legislation between 1529 and 1536 successively restricted
the privileges of the English clergy; broke the legal ties connecting
the English Church to Rome; and asserted that the king was
supreme head, immediately under Christ, of the Church of England:
a sententious title, made more ominous by the regime’s refusal
clearly to define what it meant.
The assertion of that title in 1534 is usually taken to be a
decisive turning point, and sometimes counted as the foundation-
date of the independent Church of England, but at first relatively few
English subjects took much notice. The first changes actually to
affect the parishes were some amendments to the liturgy. Hitherto
the pope had been prayed for daily at mass, both in Latin and in
English: now he was not to be mentioned, and scratched out of the
service books. In the canon of the mass, the prayer for pope, bishop
and king often became a prayer for king and bishop. These were on
one level minor tweaks, but, given the familiarity of liturgy, impossible
not to notice.2
Following close behind was a more momentous imposition.
Royal commissioners required all adult males in England to swear
an oath acknowledging the king’s new marriage and disavowing his
first, on pain of treason. (A second oath, acknowledging the king’s
newly discovered supremacy over the Church, was administered
much more sparingly.) Virtually no-one resisted. It was not a matter
to die for. But the sheer oddity of the policy – subjects were not
normally required to consent to a royal marriage – was a sign that
England was in uncharted waters. The entire population was being
conscripted to, and implicated in, forging a new religio-political
identity. Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell did not see themselves as
enfranchising the population, but they were creating, or
acknowledging, an unprecedented variety of popular politics.3
Other clues began to materialise in the parishes. Old taxes
(‘Peter’s Pence’) ceased; new, more arduous dues took their place.
Preachers (a rare breed) obediently extolled the king’s supremacy.
Some, more daringly, questioned the value or even the legitimacy of
the old ceremonies and sacraments. Royal commissioners nosed
into every church, tallying incomes and recording goods. Rumours of
all kinds began to canter.
In 1536 some of them came true, in what was, for most English
people, the defining episode of the Reformation: the dissolution of
the monasteries. No other event of the sixteenth century was carved
so deeply into popular memory.4 For generations to come, the
division between ‘abbey time’ and the emptier years since would
remain a reference point, and for good reason. The seizure of all
monastic property by the crown in 1536–40 was, and remains, the
largest single transfer of landed wealth in English history. It also
remains weirdly under-researched. The roots of the policy have been
much discussed: in short, greed sauced with humanist and
evangelical distaste for monks, and political fears for their loyalty. Its
effects, however, remain much less clear. This was partly because
‘the dissolution of the monasteries’ was a composite event made up
of hundreds of local dissolutions, in which institutions whose local
significance had varied hugely were destroyed in different ways and
were succeeded by different arrangements. A few of the greatest
abbeys became secular cathedrals; some became parish churches.
More were sold by a king who burned through this unprecedented
windfall so fast that he was facing bankruptcy again before the
monasteries were five years gone.
Two effects stand out. First, the destruction of the monasteries
probably damaged England’s structures for social welfare more than
any other single event has ever done. Most of the hospitals,
education, employment and charity that the monasteries had
provided simply disappeared. Royal promises to use parasitic
monks’ wealth to aid the poor turned out to be worthless. In upland
regions, where parishes were large and the monasteries’ role had
been that much more vital, the effect was catastrophic.
Archaeological research on childhood mortality suggests that it leapt
in the years around 1540 and remained high thereafter.5 And if the
dissolution only served to accentuate adverse economic trends that
were already under way, it also became a by-word for them and the
perceived injustices they represented. It is no coincidence that the
largest and most dangerous mass rebellions of the age, the northern
risings in the autumn of 1536 known collectively (and misleadingly)
as the Pilgrimage of Grace, were sparked by the dissolution. As the
regime had taught them, the Pilgrims bound themselves to their
cause by means of an oath.6 Only now was England waking up to
the fact it was in a new world.
 Secondly, once the out-manoeuvred Pilgrims had been
suppressed and the futility of further resistance was plain, the
monasteries’ lay neighbours began to be drawn in. The greatest
winners were the gentry, who ended up holding not only most of the
former monastic lands, but also a series of legal rights that went with
them. The majority of English advowsons – the legal rights to present
priests to rectories, vicarages and other benefices – had belonged to
monasteries. Now, almost by accident, these rights were transferred
to the new owners of the land. Even more bizarrely, this arrangement
endured, and endures even to the present. To many it was a mere
scandal, but it also fitted the new owners’ sense of their emerging
social position. They were often longstanding patrons and
benefactors of the religious houses they now owned, and sometimes
saw some continuity between these two different forms of
stewardship. And many of them professed to see their new duties to
parish churches as a solemn charge, to be executed faithfully. It at
least justified their sudden enrichment.7
However, as it became clear that the monasteries were doomed,
others too rushed to snatch what they could from the communal ruin.
Unless royal commissioners managed to intervene, fabrics and
furnishings were spirited away and roofs stripped of lead. Even the
building-stones of the abbeys themselves disappeared in the night.
In some cases, this was intended as pious salvage. Relics, images,
vestments or other precious items were stored away in hope that the
world would turn and normality would return. But more often it was a
matter of scavenging from the old Church’s corpse. Were such
scavengers imbruing their hands, too, in the blood, and so making
themselves stakeholders in Henry’s Reformation? Or were they
merely making pragmatic use of objects that the royal
commissioners’ depredations had already desacralised? We do not
know, but whether willingly or not, they were helping to ensure that
the old world could not easily be restored.8
The monasteries were not all that vanished from England’s
inherited religious landscape in the late 1530s. Pilgrimages were
suppressed: all relics were now classed as idols, and England’s
premier shrine, that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, was pulverised
for memorialising a man now vilified as a traitor. Pardons and
indulgences, the small change of the Catholic economy of salvation,
were prohibited. The Lenten fast was relaxed by royal proclamation.
The English Bible, long banned because of its association with the
Lollards, was not only legalised but, in 1538, ordered to be placed in
every parish church so that all comers might read it. Rumours spoke
of more to come. Would priests be allowed to marry? Would parish
churches be seized like the monasteries had been? Surely the new
royal order to make a record of all baptisms, marriages and burials
could only portend onerous taxes?
Instead, in 1539–40, Henry VIII made it clear that his
Reformation was not going to go much further. An illusory stability
appeared. In many parish churches, not much had changed. The
mass continued in all its Latinate glory, albeit that a new English-
language litany was introduced in 1544. Heretics continued to suffer
reassuringly traditional deaths. It only took a little effort for many
English people to convince themselves that England’s religion was
basically unscathed. When Henry VIII made an emotional appeal for
religious unity before Parliament at Christmas 1545, lamenting that
his subjects were quarrelling about religion and labelling one another
heretics and papists by turn, it was possible to hope that the unity of
which he spoke might materialise. For whatever else had been
shaken, one feature of England’s unofficial religion had been
powerfully reinforced: the king’s own authority. Henry VIII had given
his subjects ample reason to doubt his good faith and piety, but not
enough to outweigh the deeply entrenched national faith in good
lordship, a faith that the regime bolstered with a canny mix of
idealistic propaganda, nationalist drum-beating and well-calibrated
bursts of exemplary violence.
In fact, the quarrelsome nation that Henry described was going
to become England’s new reality. The most fundamental change
wrought by the Reformations that he started was one neither he nor
anyone else wanted: a nation that had been unified in religion
became divided by it. The remainder of the story of the Reformations
is one of how those divisions were negotiated and how the lives of
the men and women who took the different paths now open to them
were changed in the process.

The imaginary peace of Henry VIII’s last years gave way to a

decade-and-a-half of bewildering, switchback religious lurches, a
string of crises that made clear how much had in fact already
changed.
The chaos of Edward VI’s short reign (1547–53) owed less to
his regimes’ radical religious policies than to the strains of a
catastrophic war in Scotland and deeper, ongoing shifts of social and
economic power. The social significance of religious change in this
context was twofold. First, this was the period when religious change
became impossible for even the wilfully uninformed to ignore. The
mass was progressively replaced with a series of English liturgies
that changed the daily and weekly rituals of Church life almost
beyond recognition. The Tudor state’s insatiable hunger for
ecclesiastical property reached the parishes in earnest, stripping
churches of their imagery, plate and furnishings, and closing the
chantries that had maintained thousands of priests in parishes
across the country. The resulting religious vacuum was filled,
amongst other things, by officially approved homilies that all parish
clergy were required to read aloud to their people, a way of ensuring
that all English subjects were exposed to the new doctrines – if they
listened, and if their priest read them in a manner that made it
possible for them to do so.
We might expect that such an unheralded revolution would
provoke fury, and in one of England’s most traditionally rebellious
regions it did. In the summer of 1549, much of Devon and Cornwall
rose in rebellion against religious change in general and the new
Book of Common Prayer in particular. Remarkably, however, the
south-westerners were alone. Elsewhere, very few of those who
loathed what was being done to their Church did anything about it.
Although print censorship nearly collapsed in 1547–9, very few
religious conservatives published anything. There was a degree of
foot-dragging and passive resistance, but precious few had the
stomach for confrontation. Some had already been bought off, or
compromised. Most of those who had reconciled themselves to
Henry VIII’s changes had already gone too far to turn back. Some
evidence hints at a lethal fatalism settling onto English conservatism.
Nothing could now be done, except wait for the young king to come
of age, hoping and trusting that he would put things right. The truth –
that the Tudor kings were the root of the problem, not part of the
solution – was so unwelcome that most of their subjects shied away
from it.9
Many of them, instead, interpreted the combination of social and
religious change in a second, surprising way. A major theme of
evangelical preaching was the state of the ‘Commonwealth’:
lamenting the growing economic woes of the age, and diagnosing
them as moral failings. This rhetoric had started outside the state
establishment, with the many evangelicals who felt the waves of
seizures of Church property to be somewhere between a missed
opportunity and mere robbery. With the new reign, some of those
same evangelicals had come into the regime but had not softened
their views. Whether sincerely or cynically, they managed to stake
out a decent claim to the moral high ground. As a result, when, in the
desperate summer of 1549, there was unrest driven by enclosure
and other socio-economic grievances across most of southern
England and the Midlands, many of the ‘campers’ who assembled to
press their demands aligned themselves with, not against, reforming
religion. They borrowed its language to appeal to the regime, and
they heard its preachers at their encampments. Again, how sincere
any of this was is beyond our knowing, but it is the first tangible sign
of what would come. The English, or many of them, would find a way
of building a new identity around this religion and of making it work
for them.10 This is not to say that the English now welcomed the
Reformation, but they were sufficiently inured to and divided by it
that the chance to present a united front against it was gone. The
comparison with the wall of opposition that the Tudor Reformations
were already meeting in contemporary Ireland is instructive.11
First, however, a new set of crises brought a tantalising
alternative. For all the emerging enthusiasm for the new religion and
the helpless confusion of the old, there is little doubt that the
restoration of Catholicism under Mary I (1553–8) was both popular
and on course to succeed. A huge effort to rebuild the material fabric
of parish Catholicism achieved an extraordinary amount in a short
time, especially given that these were years of dearth, war and
epidemics. But the clock could not simply be turned back. There had
been too much looting and destruction, and the new owners of the
monastic lands would only consent to the Catholic restoration once
their right to keep their ill-gotten gains had been protected. For that
and other reasons, English Catholicism was not so much restored as
recreated in this reign, with the new spiritualities and disciplines of
what would become the Counter-Reformation beginning to make
themselves felt.12
The sudden end of the restoration and the return to
Protestantism, with the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth
I in 1558, cut this process short. Yet the Marian interlude had lasting
consequences. Although it did not restore a Catholic England, it
ensured there would be no united Protestant England either. The
religious conservatives who had been left voiceless and bewildered
by Edward VI’s Reformation had now rediscovered their steel. Those
who had once been lured into abandoning the papacy by intertia and
loyalty to the Tudor crown would not make the same mistake again.
A small but self-confident minority of determined Roman Catholics
now remained in England, and for all that subsequent centuries of
persecution, discrimination and prejudice could throw at them, they
would persist. Around them and to some extent sustaining them was
a larger periphery of sympathisers whose outward conformity to the
established Protestant Church was half-hearted or, indeed, wholly
cynical.
A similar splintering was emerging at the other end of the
spectrum. The Marian regime had tried to deal with England’s
stubborn minority of Protestant converts by intimidating its leaders
into recantation or driving them into exile. The policy half worked.
Some prominent Protestants did recant, but many more stuck to their
guns: for them, too, the battle-lines now seemed far clearer than
before. The regime was eventually compelled to follow through on its
threats, and between 1555 and 1556 a swathe of imprisoned
bishops, clerics and theologians were executed. Those who had
escaped to exile, meanwhile, organised an impressive campaign of
printed propaganda that the regime struggled to stifle. In the
pressure-cooker of exile, exposed to the heat of Protestant
Reformations more full-blooded than England’s, they were also fired
with new zeal. All this ensured that the purge did not end with the
leaders. From 1556 to 1558, the regime was rounding up and
burning underground congregations of clandestine Protestants from
London, Kent, Essex and elsewhere. Some 300 died in all.
 Given a few more years, these policies might well have bled
English Protestantism to death, but in the event they only angered it.
The memory of the persecutors’ cruelty and of the martyrs’ heroism
was cherished and burnished until it became the centrepiece of an
emergent national myth of Catholic cruelty. As an ever-loyal nation
swung behind the lead of its new queen, it learned that murdering
good English men and women was what Catholics did: a lesson that
it was slow to forget. It has been said that although England became
a Protestant nation under Elizabeth I, it did not then, or indeed ever,
truly become a nation of Protestants.13 It did, however, become and
long remain a nation that hated and feared Catholics.
Not that even the anti-Catholic majority was united. If the Marian
regime did not succeed in exterminating the Protestants whom it
exiled and persecuted, it did succeed in splitting them. The exiles
divided bitterly between those who were determined to remain in
lockstep with each other and with the orderly Reformation of Edward
VI, and those who wished to dash to a more complete renewal of
their religious lives without waiting for the laggards to catch up. In
1558–9 they brought this unresolved quarrel home with them, where
it became overlaid on another: what was to be done about those who
had conformed to Mary’s restoration, but who now claimed to be
good Protestants? Surely those who had faced death or exile for
their faithful witness could not simply keep company with such
fainthearted turncoats as if nothing had happened? Did they not
need to repent of their complicity, and demonstrate their good
earnest by pressing the Reformation forward?14 Hence the split
between the new would-be centrist establishment Protestants –
‘moderate’ in the sense that they were as keen to bridle enthusiasm
as to spur on laggards – and those who quickly came to be labelled
‘puritans’, whose determination to purge the English Church of its
popish remnants was fuelled by their distrust of an establishment
whose religion, they feared, was not sincere or reformed at all. The
battle-lines thus formed would divide English religion for generations
to come.

The quarter-century of turmoil from 1534 to 1559 was followed by

eighty years of formal religious stability, which only broke down with
the political crisis of 1640 and the subsequent Civil Wars. The social
history of the Reformations during this long period of supposed
peace is, therefore, a matter of how the religious divisions that
opened up in the preceding era worked their way through English
society at large, and what effect they had on the way.
It has been traditional to see the great drama of this period as
the struggle between ‘Puritans’ and an establishment Protestantism
that has sometimes been labelled Anglicanism. This is a myth
created by partisans who claim their descent from both parties, and
like most myths it has some truth to it. From the 1560s onwards, a
broad party of self-consciously ‘advanced’ Protestants pressed with
increasing urgency for Elizabeth’s Reformation to be purged of its
remaining popish structures and rituals, only to be stymied at every
turn. The regime – above all the queen herself – refused to yield an
inch to opponents who, if they could, would plainly have taken a
mile. Petitions and policy proposals were stonewalled. Attempts at
further reformation from the ground up in regions like East Anglia, by
bringing groups of like-minded ministers together to support one
another and to build (informally) the kind of structures of collective
self-governance typical of Calvinism, were blocked and at times
fiercely suppressed. In 1588, Puritan impatience boiled over with a
published set of viciously satirical, populist attacks on the alleged
hypocrisy and corruption of episcopacy, under the pen-name ‘Martin
Marprelate’. This provoked a determined counter-attack in which
Puritanism was effectively stamped out as a public presence within
the Elizabethan Church. It remained, however, as a stubborn and
vocal, though contained, minority of malcontents through the 1590s
and the reign of James I (1603–25). His son Charles I pushed for a
more thoroughly Anglican discipline, enforcing this policy with more
zeal than discretion. This, and secular discontent with Charles’s
(mis)rule, stirred up a hornet’s nest of opposition in both England
and Scotland that eventually brought England’s unprecedentedly
long civil peace to an end.
The difficulty with this narrative is that no such clearly defined
parties existed. Many who clearly had puritan tendencies liked to
think of themselves as a small, persecuted minority at odds with the
mass of the godless around them, but this was a theological rather
than a sociological opinion. These people were doctrinally primed to
see themselves as a faithful remnant, a little flock of God’s elect
amongst a reprobate mass.15 In fact, the evidence increasingly
suggests that some puritan characteristics spread themselves very
widely in English society, at least by the end of the sixteenth century.
‘Anglican’, by contrast, is an anachronistic category that virtually all
historians of the pre-Restoration period now take care to avoid. How
we should think about the obedient, conformist Protestantism that
became England’s default is not so clear.
The traditional category of ‘puritan’ can only be used to define
the earnest, Calvinistic Protestantism that became firmly rooted in
England by the late sixteenth century if we broaden its membership
considerably.16 For at the same time as puritan agitators were
banging their heads against the brick wall of royal intransigence,
others were quietly cultivating their own godly gardens. Richard
Greenham, vicar of Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire from 1570 to 1591,
was a puritan of another kind. The further Reformation he had in
mind was not institutional but pastoral and spiritual: changing
ordinary Christians’ lives through painstaking parish ministry. A
generation of earnest, idealistic but clear-sighted ministers, many of
them Cambridge graduates who had served informal
apprenticeships with Greenham, set out to complete England’s
Reformation retail, soul by soul, rather than wholesale through
changes to its laws. If Greenham was the morning-star of this quiet
second Reformation, its brightest ornament was William Perkins, a
Cambridge theologian who, at his premature death in 1602, left both
a small library of succinct, humane guides to Christian living that
were translated across Protestant Europe, and also a cohort of
enthusiastic students and successors who turned his message into
Jacobean England’s public orthodoxy.
The most recent studies of both Greenham and Perkins have
both denied that their subjects were Puritans at all, on the grounds
that they largely conformed to and were undoubtedly loyal to the
established Church of England.17 Whatever labels we choose to
apply to them, it is clear that their kind of religion seeped deep into
English life. And if idealistic ministers always saw the glass of
popular religion as half-empty, booksellers knew there were fortunes
to be made selling anthologies of prayers, printed sermons and
handbooks to pious living that inculcated a Calvinistic ‘practical
divinity’ of Greenham and Perkins’s kind. Bishop Lewis Bayly’s The
Practise of pietie, for example, consists of over 800 pages of earnest
practical advice on Christian living, printed in cramped type on tiny
pages so as to keep the price as low as possible. Between 1612 and
the Civil War it ran through over fifty editions.18 Other popular
imprints that failed to match Bayly’s volume of sales made up the
difference in variety and accessibility: moralising ballads imbued with
Protestant principles, stirring tales of the Protestant martyrs,
collections of prayers that used Protestant doctrines as their
framework, advice on household management that presumed a self-
consciously Protestant piety. Insofar as we can reconstruct lists of
best- and steady-selling religious imprints, unabashedly Protestant
texts dominate them.19
Other evidence points in the same direction. The sermon,
advanced Protestantism’s chosen medium of religious change,
became widespread, carefully constructed and rhetorically effective
in the post-Reformation era, and valued by parishes that saw
learned preaching as a point of local prestige.20 Protestant
scepticism drove traditional polyphonic church music to a few
traditionalist redoubts (mostly cathedrals and collegiate churches), to
be replaced by the singing of metrical Psalms, ‘Geneva style’ (that
is, men and women in unison). This practice turned out to be not
only hugely popular but also a Trojan horse for sometimes
aggressively Protestant presumptions.21 Although we have long
believed that English Protestantism’s rejection of religious imagery in
worship extended to a general suspicion of all visual images, we are
increasingly aware that biblical and other explicitly Protestant visual
imagery pervaded domestic decoration and public spaces such as
inns.22 In religious practice itself, what we know about the patterns of
public, family and solitary prayer belies any sharp division between
Puritan and conformist Protestants. ‘Conformists’ fasted, wept for
their sins, and pursued fervour and zeal in their religious exercises.
‘Puritans’ embraced such traditional-seeming practices as making
pious vows; used set forms of prayer, including the Book of Common
Prayer, in their private devotions; and found spiritual comfort in the
ministry of the established Church.23 Undoubtedly many English
Protestants were, sometimes, either puritans or anti-puritans. But
rather than attempting to divide the nation into these parties, we
would do better to acknowledge that ‘zealous Protestantism could …
be a popular religion’.24
Not all zealous Protestantism, however, tended towards
puritanism. A small avant-garde of ceremonialist clerics and
traditionalist laypeople persisted throughout the period and
discovered new verve, and royal encouragement, from the late
1610s onwards. Some such people were, as their opponents
alleged, undoubtedly flirting with Catholicism, whose rich spirituality
continued to have an appeal and which both won and lost converts
throughout this period.25 But generally, this was a libel. The new
English Church had built up a genuine mass allegiance from people
who were not drawn by the Calvinist doctrines that had become their
preachers’ orthodoxies: an allegiance built above all on loyalty to the
new English liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, which puritan
campaigners wanted so badly to reform. If England cannot be
divided into puritans and conformists, it can perhaps be divided into
Bible Protestants and Prayer Book Protestants. Certainly, when the
Church of England was dismantled by the wartime Parliament in the
1640s, its defenders found that the Prayer Book was their most
popular cause, and its use (though formally illegal throughout the
later 1640s and 1650s) continued to be widespread.26
What this religion meant to its adherents remains the great
mystery. Conformity, by its nature, does not leave much mark on the
record, and a religion that is almost defined by praying in set words
tends not to speak for itself. We may see a glimpse of it from outside
in a jaundiced but sharply observed portrait painted by Arthur Dent,
in his 1601 bestseller The plaine mans path-way to heauen.27 The
book consists of a lengthy dialogue between idealised types: a
Protestant minister in the Greenham–Perkins mould (backed up by a
zealous layman), an ‘ignorant man’ of good will but of corrupt
religion, and a ‘caviller’ or malicious fault-finder. After nearly 400
pages of conversation, the ignorant man is converted and the caviller
departs, contemptuous and evidently hell-bound.
The ignorant man, however, initially jibs at the religion his more
self-consciously pious neighbours recommend:
 If a man say his Lords praier, his Ten Commandements, and his
Beliefe, and keepe them … no doubt he shall be saued, without
all this running to Sermons, and pratling of the Scripture … As
long as I serue God, and say my praiers duly, and truely,
morning and euening, and haue a good faith in God, and put my
whole trust in him, and doe my true intent, and haue a good
minde to God-ward, and a good meaning; although I am not
learned, yet I hope it will serue the turne for my soules health.

Working men who lack the leisure or inclination to bury themselves

in the Bible ‘cannot liue by the scriptures: they are not for plaine
folke, they are too high for vs’. In any case, he adds almost in
passing, he cannot read.28 Two decades earlier another zealous
pastor, George Gifford, had produced a similar sketch of what he
called ‘the Countrie diuinitie’. Gifford’s plain man liked a modicum of
preaching, but also believed that the Prayer Book service and the
official Homilies were ‘as good edifying’ as any sermon.29
‘This age’, Dent’s minister commented, ‘is full of such carnall
Protestants’, and although we might prefer the designation Prayer
Book Protestants, we might well agree.30 Indeed, what else could
the religion of the illiterate have been? Again, however, we should
beware of the Calvinist instinct to divided the world sharply between
the godly and the ignorant: this is preachers’ rhetoric, not
sociological analysis. And whereas in 1581 Gifford’s country-divine
rejected his godly neighbour’s entreaties, in 1601 Dent’s ignorant
man eventually embraced the teaching he was offered. Along with
the affection that many undoubtedly zealous Bible-Protestants
continued to feel for the Prayer Book, this is a sign that, if we must
draw lines here, we should not do so too sharply. Zealous
Protestantism, of the kind that was often labelled puritan, was a
diverse and expansive – not to say quarrelsome – category. By the
turn of the century, it had become the most readily available model of
what Christian piety meant for most English people. Ministers
wanted their people to define their entire lives by it, and so naturally
were disappointed. But its reach into national religious life was
pervasive.

This establishment Protestant–puritan continuum dominated English

religion as nothing since has done, but even so, significant minorities
lay outside it. The most obvious were the Catholics – whether
‘church papists’, who compromised and concealed their faith to
various degrees,31 or recusants, who refused to conform to the
established Church and faced a series of consequences ranging
from fines, discrimination and civil disabilities to, in extremis, exile or
execution. England was openly at war with Spain from 1585 to 1604,
and unofficially so for a decade or more before, and during this
period Catholics were readily seen as foreign agents. Most of the
executions of missionary priests or their lay protectors fell during
those years. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, however, ensured that
peace did not bring an outbreak of tolerance. The struggle for
England’s Catholic community was not merely to negotiate these
dangers, but to forge a sense of what its own identity might be. Its
exiled leaders, training and sending back missionary priests into
terrible danger, were naturally inclined to confrontation, pressing for
Catholics to rebel. In 1569, some of them had done so, supporting
the northern earls who proposed to replace the queen with her
Catholic cousin Mary, queen of Scots. But the revolt was a fiasco,
which crumbled at the first show of strength from the regime, and
was followed by a bloody programme of exemplary reprisals. After
that, rebellion was a dream.
For most Catholics who actually remained in England, therefore,
the exiles’ purism seemed self-defeating. A slice of England’s
nobility and gentry remained stubbornly but discreetly Catholic. They
and their affinities pioneered what would eventually become the
mainstream view of English Catholics, that their political loyalty to the
English throne and state was compatible with their spiritual
allegiance to Rome. In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, James I
attempted to exploit this by imposing a new oath of allegiance on
Catholics, which disavowed any belief that popes may depose or
excommunicate kings. Since it was theologically almost impossible
for Catholics to accept this, the oath was in one sense a success: it
made the Catholic clergy look extreme, while expressing a view that
many lay Catholics already tacitly held. However, as the sense of
immediate danger receded, the project of splitting, isolating and
exposing English Catholicism no longer seemed so urgent. A new
reality was becoming clear: English Catholicism was going neither to
surge back to retake the country, nor to die out. In some regions,
such as the north-west, it was deeply entrenched. And as is often the
case with stable religious minorities, once a generation or two of
both fears and hopes have turned out to be groundless, both sides of
the divide relax and adapt themselves to a new normal.
There was no such relaxation towards a smaller minority:
Protestant radicals and separatists. Since the reign of Henry VIII,
England had been subject to periodic panics about ‘Anabaptists’,
who would supposedly tear up all godly society and sound doctrine
to replace them with profanity, polygamy, common ownership of
goods, rebellion and slaughter. The bloody disaster of the
apocalyptic Anabaptist kingdom established in Münster in 1534–5
remained a staple of alarmist English thought right through the
seventeenth century, and a handful of supposed Anabaptists, most
of them foreigners, were burned as heretics by successive regimes:
the last two in 1612. There was a panic in the early 1580s about a
secretive, mystical sect of Dutch origins, the Family of Love, which
had certainly built up networks of sympathisers in Cambridgeshire
and elsewhere, but which paranoia began to spot everywhere.32 The
significance of these episodes is not the presence of tiny numbers of
sectarians, but the fear that they generated in the rest of society.
With hindsight we can see that this fear was excessive, but the far
boundary of the Calvinist settlement was less clearly defined than it
can look in retrospect. As would become clear in the mid
seventeenth century, the possibility of the Reformation dissolving
into a welter of chaotic radicalism was very real.
For the present, however, the threat came not from exotic sects
but from just beyond the establishment’s boundaries. The repeated
puritan disappointments of the 1570s and 1580s drove a handful of
unblinking radicals to abandon hopes for a comprehensive national
Reformation and instead to press ahead on their own. These
separatists, often named Brownists for one of their most prominent
early leaders, remained few in number, and tended to slip into exile
in the Netherlands and elsewhere. It was such a group of Dutch
exiles who took the lead in establishing a colony in Massachusetts in
1620. Tellingly, they chose the hardships and risks of an ocean
crossing to a potentially hostile environment over the danger that
they might ‘lose our language and our name, of English’.33
These formal separatists, however, were the tip of a much larger
iceberg. The phenomenon of what Patrick Collinson has called
‘semi-separatism’ was pervasive in puritan circles by the end of
Elizabeth’s reign. Like church papists, such people’s formal loyalty
to the established religion was belied by a subculture of voluntary
structures, meetings and disciplines alongside it, which was often the
real heart of their religious practice.34 They tended to maintain not
only that this was compatible with conformity to the Church of
England, but also that they were truer to its avowed principles than
most others. Their neighbours, and the hierarchy, found their excess
of enthusiasm subversive. Who was right is a matter of opinion, and
partly depends on how the denouement is interpreted. As the
definition of conformity was narrowed and its enforcement was
stepped up in the late 1620s and 1630s, the dilemmas of the semi-
separatists became sharp. Possibly as many as 20,000 emigrated to
New England in that period, as the only way of remaining faithful to
both their consciences and their king.35 Many of those who remained
at home heard the siren call of open opposition. Small conventicles
of Baptists, antinomians and other radical groups emerged in
London and elsewhere in the 1630s.36 And when the established
Church’s discipline collapsed after the 1640s, an array of
Independent and then other, more radical groups took shape. Did
this prove that the establishment was right to use a degree of
repression to keep order, or that, in the end, the repression had been
counter-productive?
One question that remains unsolved is how, and whether, the
alarms about separatism and radicalism connect with another,
bloodier phenomenon. England’s involvement with the great witch-
hunt of the early modern period was marginal. As was the case in
many large, law-governed states, bureaucratic procedures tended to
prevent local rumours and temporary panics translating into large-
scale purges. Our records of witch-prosecutions are poor, and give
us systematic coverage only of the Home Counties. Some fifty
convicted witches were hanged in Essex, with cases peaking in the
1580s, and with four times as many acquittals as convictions. The
numbers are much smaller but the pattern similar in other counties.
So perhaps a few hundred died across the country as a whole,
overwhelmingly women. For the most part, this seems primarily to
reflect long-established patterns of popular belief in, and fear of,
malign magic. The novelty, both in England and elsewhere, was that
suspected witches were now being put on trial, with new laws
passed to criminalise various magical acts in 1542, 1563 and 1604.
For some theologians – Catholic and Protestant alike – this
piecemeal approach, focusing on witches who had used magic to
inflict tangible harm, was profoundly mistaken. Witches’ fundamental
crime was devil-worship, and they should be punished as heretics
and blasphemers, not as common felons.37 Recent scholarship on
the far bloodier witch-hunts in central Europe has suggested that this
view arose from the experience of hunting down and rooting out
Anabaptists and other radicals, who, like witches, were seen as
having been in league with the devil.38 Whether the same connection
was made in England is a question that has, as yet, scarcely been
asked. One intriguing straw in the wind is that the most robustly
sceptical contribution to the Continent-wide debate over witchcraft in
this era came, strangely enough, from an Englishman. Reginald
Scot’s Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584) argued bluntly that witchcraft
was a fiction, a product of credulous fears and, implicitly, popish
superstition. The book was roundly condemned on all sides.
Intriguingly, Scot has been linked – suggestively, not decisively – to
the Family of Love.39
If, as Scot argued, the contemporary preoccupation with witches
was no better founded than the parallel fear of English Anabaptists,
the same is not necessarily true of a final category of religious
dissidents, who were the focus of equally vivid fears: atheists. The
English word ‘atheist’ was coined in 1553, and entered common
parlance so quickly that it was clearly filling a need. Anti-atheist
polemic became a distinct genre by the early seventeenth century.
Whether the phenomenon it was attacking existed is less clear. A
few outspoken freethinkers, or blasphemers, can be identified, but
there is no real hint of consistent or serious atheism, or even deism,
in England before the mid seventeenth century. There were certainly
committed believers who found themselves tempted to doubt such
core Christian doctrines as the inspiration of scripture, the
immortality of the soul and the incarnation of Christ, though we tend
to hear of such private struggles with doubt only once the doubters
had resolved them in favour of orthodoxy.40 The most widespread
form of ‘atheism’, however, was what William Perkins called ‘the
common Atheisme that is in the world’, meaning those who lived ‘as
if there were no God’.41 Such people might profess orthodox
Christianity; even sincerely regard themselves as believers. Yet their
actions, clerics warned, told another story.
Much of this is simple moralising, but it should be taken
seriously at least to this extent. If some of England’s carnal
Protestants were like Arthur Dent’s ‘ignorant man’ – that is, willing at
times to be pious according to their own lights – others clearly were
like his ‘caviller’, whose main interest in religion was that it leave
them alone. Perhaps it is always so. But in post-Reformation
England the social environment was unprecedentedly friendly
towards ‘cavillers’. The formal requirements that the English Church
laid on its people were not onerous, compared either to the medieval
past or to confessional states elsewhere in Europe. The English no
longer had to fast rigorously in Lent, nor was there social pressure to
support the Church with substantial gifts of money, goods and time
as once there had been. The Church’s disciplinary structure was not
intrusive. All that was needed was occasional physical presence at
church, which need not involve ever attending a sermon. An
unprecedented space for mere withdrawal from religious life had
opened up. The ferocious religious quarrels of the age did not
necessarily convince all observers that one party was right and the
others wrong. If there was no open and avowed ‘atheism’, the
authors of diatribes were perhaps right that a creeping secularisation
and irreligion were beginning to pervade England’s spiritual life.
Perhaps that is how such change always comes: as a social reality
before, a generation or two later, the theorists arrive to catch up with
and to justify what has already begun to unfold.

The long ‘Jacobethan’ religious peace ended during the reign of

Charles I, a new king thoroughly entranced by a ceremonial revival
led by a coterie of brilliant, divisive churchmen. What began as a
daring insurgency quickly became a new orthodoxy under its most
pugnacious proponent, William Laud, bishop of London and then,
from 1633, archbishop of Canterbury. Laud and his allies
progressively sought to squeeze puritan practices out of the
established Church: imposing ceremonial changes that puritans
found intolerable, questioning the previously uncontentious doctrine
of predestination and raising misplaced but widespread fears of a
slide towards ‘popery’. Those who opposed the new agenda found
themselves deprived or silenced. A minority chose exile, but a far
weightier body were now reluctantly persuaded by their experience
of ‘tyrannical’ bishops that England’s Reformation needed at last to
be finished. And so, when Charles’s regime collapsed in 1640 under
the weight of multiple crises – above all, the Scottish rebellion
against his religious policies – it quickly became plain that returning
to the Jacobethan status quo ante would not restore religious peace.
Fears of popish tyranny mixed with long-cherished hopes of
reformation to make the Civil War that followed, at least in part, ‘the
last of the wars of religion’.42
Perhaps a swift parliamentary victory, or a negotiated peace,
would have produced the outcome sought by the largest and most
vocal parts of the Protestant-puritan establishment: a national
Church shorn of bishops and ceremonies. Or perhaps that was
already impossible, and the Dutch model – an established Reformed
Church but with widespread non-conformity – was a more realistic
hope. In the event, however, the trauma of a long war, and of the
drawn-out politicking that followed it, created a space for impatient
separatism to burgeon into florid radicalism and angry dissent. The
Protestant establishment that had kept radicals at the margins was
now overwhelmed, not least because London, centre of the
parliamentarian cause, and the victorious New Model Army, proved
themselves the most fertile incubators of sectarianism. The era’s
taxonomists of heresy were kept busy inventing labels for the jungle
of antinomian, apocalyptic, spiritualist, messianic, pantheistic and
utopian movements that sprang up across the country. A few of them
achieved durable form, notably the Baptists and the Quakers. Others
merged, transformed, withered or gave way to new green shoots
appearing in their place.43 The total numbers of people involved
remained small, but the army-dominated republican regimes of
1649–60 were persistently unwilling to suppress them. Some of their
leaders, notably Oliver Cromwell himself, were openly sympathetic.
They also had no wish to hand the spiritual government of the nation
to an intolerant Presbyterian clique.
 That clique’s hopes slowly crumbled. It was not simply the
encroachment of radical sects and the rejection of national
Presbyterian structures by self-governing ‘Independent’
congregations. They also found themselves unable to bring the
Prayer Book Protestants with them. The old Prayer Book was
supposedly banned, the old bishops expelled from office. But the
republican regimes generally only took action against these people –
whom we can now, cautiously, begin to call ‘Anglicans’ – if their
religious practice strayed into open royalism. Only around a quarter
of the old parish clergy were ever expelled from office. Remarkably,
the majority of men ordained during the Republic were ordained
illegally, by deprived bishops, rather than by the new presbyteries.44
Anglicans experienced these years as persecution, but they also
brought opportunities. Freed of the need to be a comprehensive
national Church and of the constraints of legal uniformity, these
believers began to experiment with their traditional religion in
untraditional ways. Some adhered to the old Prayer Book rigidly.
Some adapted it, whether from political prudence or religious
adventurism. Either way, this emergent Anglicanism was something
new: not a domineering national Church, but the largest of the new
sects. And, ironically, the least frightening of them – a fact which
became crucial when the republican regime itself tottered in 1658–60
and a Stuart restoration beckoned. The rump Presbyterian
establishment was now more alienated from the army and alarmed
by the radical sects than it was scared of resurgent Anglicanism.
Blithely promising religious inclusion, Charles II was welcomed back
to his throne.
 It turned out that Anglicanism had some bite left to it, after all.
For all his promises, the new king restored the old Church of
England’s structures almost unchanged, and once again a quarter of
England’s parish ministers, over 2,000 men, were ejected from their
churches in 1662 for failing to conform to it. But while the
Presbyterians, Independents and sectarians of the war years could
be expelled and discriminated against, they could not be wished
away. The ‘Great Ejection’ confirmed that the Church by law
established was, despite its name, no longer truly the Church of
England; and the ‘Great Persecution’ that followed (in truth, a matter
of discrimination and imprisonment rather than of mass execution)
proved futile. One of the ironies of the revolution of 1688–9 is that
both James II and William III’s regimes were, for very different
reasons, committed to instituting a fair measure of tolerance for
Protestant dissenters.
The Toleration Act of 1689 has, in retrospect, acquired some of
the glory traditionally attributed to the 1688–9 revolution. At the time,
in an age when ‘toleration’ was an admission of failure, it did not
seem so. It was a truce, born of pragmatism and exhaustion. This
was not how anyone had expected the Reformation would end. But it
turns out that the Reformation had not, after all, been a matter of
replacing Catholic England with Protestant England, much less of
forging one of the various godly commonwealths of which
successive reformers had dreamed. Its enduring achievement was,
instead, to ensure that the English would never again be a nation
united under the same God.
Notes

1 D. S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

2 A. de Mezerac-Zanetti, ‘Liturgical developments in England

under Henri VIII (1534–1547)’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Durham
University (2011).

3 J. Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2013); E. Shagan, Popular Politics
and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).

4 A. Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular

Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).

5 B. J. Penny-Mason and R. L. Gowland, ‘The children of the

Reformation: Childhood palaeoepidemiology in Britain, AD 1000–
1700’, Medieval Archaeology, 58 (2014).

6 Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, 145–53.

7 L. Kaufman, ‘Ecclesiastical improvements, lay impropriations,

and the building of a post-Reformation Church in England, 1560–
1600’, HJ, 58 (2015); B. Lowe, Commonwealth and the English
Reformation: Protestantism and the Politics of Religious Change in
the Gloucester Vale, 1483–1560 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
8 Shagan, Popular Politics, 162–96; D. MacCulloch, M. Laven and
E. Duffy, ‘Recent trends in the study of Christianity in sixteenth-
century Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 725–6.

9 A. Ryrie, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart

Realms, 1485–1603 (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 162–7.

10 E. Shagan, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 rebellions: New

sources and new perspectives’, EHR, 114 (1999); A. Wood, The
1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

11 H. Jefferies, ‘Elizabeth’s Reformation in the Irish Pale’, Journal

of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (2015).

12 E. Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

13 C. Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society

under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 280.

14 R. Harkins, ‘Elizabethan puritanism and the politics of memory

in post-Marian England’, HJ, 57 (2014).

15 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1982), 189–205.

16 A process ongoing ever since the publication of P. Lake,

Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982).
17 K. L. Parker and E. J. Carlson, ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works
and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998);
W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

18 I. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 348–51.

19 T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991); A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

20 A. Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their

Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).

21 A. Ryrie, ‘The Psalms and confrontation in English and Scottish

Protestantism’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 101 (2010).

22 T. Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in

Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2010). Cf. P. Collinson, ‘From iconoclasm to iconophobia:
The cultural impact of the second English Reformation’, in P.
Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation (London:
Routledge, 1997).

23 A. Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2013).

24 Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, 325.

25 M. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England,
1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

26 J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early

Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

27 An argument made in C. Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to

Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–
1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

28 A. Dent, The plaine mans path-way to heauen (London, 1607),

25–8.

29 G. Gifford, A briefe discourse of certaine pointes of the religion,

which is among the common sorte of Christians (London, 1581),
fols. 2r, 3r, 18v–19r, 24v, 50r–v, 65v.

30 Dent, The plaine mans path-way, 125.

31 A. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and

Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 1993).

32 C. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); C. Carter, ‘The
Family of Love and its enemies’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 37
(2006).

33 K. L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of the English and

Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 139.
34 Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 242–83; P. Collinson, ‘Night
schools, conventicles and churches: Continuities and
discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesiology’, in P. Marshall and
A. Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

35 S. Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call

of Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

36 D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence

of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004).

37 J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England,

1550–1750 (London: Penguin, 1996).

38 G. K. Waite, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and

Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525–1600 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007).

39 D. Wootton, ‘Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/the Family of

Love’, in S. Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative,
Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2001).

40 L. Dixon, ‘William Perkins, “atheisme”, and the crises of

England’s long Reformation’, JBS, 50 (2011).

41 W. Perkins, A godly and learned exposition of Christs Sermon

in the Mount (Cambridge, 1608), 233; J. Dod and R. Cleaver, Ten
sermons tending chiefely to the fitting of men for the worthy
receiuing of the Lords Supper (London, 1611), 3.
42 J. Morrill, ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’,
TRHS, 5th series, 34 (1984).

43 J. F. McGregory and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the

English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); B.
Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1985); A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for
the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); A.
Hessayon and D. Finnegan (eds.), Varieties of Seventeenth- and
Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

44 K. Fincham and S. Taylor, ‘Episcopalian conformity and

nonconformity 1646–60’, in J. McElligott and D. L. Smith (eds.),
Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2010); K. Fincham and S. Taylor,
‘Vital statistics: Episcopal ordination and ordinands in England,
1646–60’, EHR, 126 (2011).
 6
Words, Words, Words:
Education, Literacy and Print
◈

Adam Fox

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.
(W. Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601), II.ii.195)

Among the greatest changes to come over English society

between 1500 and 1750 were the expansion of educational
provision, the growth in literacy levels, and the increased use of the
written word in both manuscript and print. The consequences of
these developments were profound and wide-ranging, and taken
together they transformed the experience of almost everyone in
England. By the mid eighteenth century, the ability to read the
printed word had become a normal part of adult life; the capacity to
wield a pen was an increasingly familiar accomplishment; and in
books, pamphlets, single-sheets and all manner of printed ephemera
people found the words that expressed their mental worlds and the
ideas that structured their lives.
These changes were neither linear in their progress nor even in
their effects. They were experienced in different ways by different
people, in different times and places, and their selective impact
provides graphic illustration of some of the fundamental distinctions
that defined English society. In many ways there is no more powerful
demonstration of the basic divisions – of wealth, rank and gender –
that characterised the early modern period than the extent to which
people had access to education and its fruits. In other ways it may
be said that the proliferation of the written word and the diffusion of
print culture contributed to the gradual reconfiguration of these
hierarchies. New avenues of social mobility opened up; novel forms
of information and opinion became available to more people; and all
English men and women were, at some level, incorporated into a
national culture founded upon text.

For the social elite education began at home under the guidance of a
private tutor. The great families of the land could afford to employ the
best: the philosopher Thomas Hobbes acted as tutor to the
Cavendish family, earls of Devonshire; Lady Anne Clifford, daughter
of the third earl of Cumberland, was mentored by the poet and
historian Samuel Daniel. For the gentry, domestic instruction was no
less the initial stage of a child’s career. In the 1560s the future Lord
Chancellor, Francis Bacon, was educated on the family estate in
Norfolk before being sent to Cambridge at the age of twelve. Edward
Hyde, the future earl of Clarendon, ‘was bred up in his father’s
house’ in Wiltshire, under the guidance of the local clergyman.1
For some well-to-do boys education started at the ‘petty’ school
kept by a local schoolmaster or a parish clerk. George Villiers, son of
a Leicestershire squire and the future duke of Buckingham, began
and ended his formal instruction at the village school in Billesdon;
John Evelyn’s first educational experience was at the age of four
when he attended class in the church porch on his father’s estate at
Wotton in Surrey. The main function of these petty schools was to
teach pupils to read English, and they could be quite inclusive,
accepting girls as well as boys and the children of labourers
alongside those to the manor born. Thereafter, however, experience
diverged. At the age of eight Evelyn moved on ‘to learn my Latin
rudiments and to write’, before going to the grammar school at
Southover, at which point other boys were sent to work and girls
were taught to spin, weave and sew.2
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced
considerable expansion in the number of grammar schools like that
at Southover. This was a result in part of the stimulus to classical
learning given by the Renaissance, the drive to found new
educational establishments in the wake of the Reformation, and the
growth of charitable giving to secular bodies. Between the accession
of James I and the outbreak of the Civil War, private philanthropy
contributed almost £400,000 to institutions of learning in England. As
a result the numbers of grammar schools doubled between the
reigns of Elizabeth I and Charles II, and when Christopher Wase
surveyed them in 1673 he found a total of 704, or roughly one for
every market town. They varied in size and prestige, from long-
established endowments such as Eton or Westminster, and large
urban foundations like Shrewsbury or Merchant Taylors’, which had
several hundred scholars, to small country establishments of no
more than a few dozen pupils. Some of the latter might teach English
and even admit girls in the lower forms, but in essence their purpose
was to instruct boys of upper and middle rank in Latin, and some of
the older ones in Greek. The social composition of a typical
provincial grammar school is illustrated by the surviving registers of
that at Colchester in Essex, under the mastership of William Dugard,
between 1637 and 1642. During these five years, 165 boys enrolled,
of whom only 18 received ‘free’ places, the reminder paying 10s per
quarter in tuition and other charges. Thirty-one per cent were the
sons of knights or gentlemen, 20 per cent from clerical or
professional backgrounds, 37 per cent the offspring of merchants or
tradesmen, and 12 per cent the sons of yeomen farmers.3
The grammar school curriculum was relatively consistent. Lily’s
Latin Grammar was a standard text between its introduction in 1547
and its replacement by the Eton Grammar in 1758. Once boys had
mastered Latin vocabulary, accidence and syntax, and could
translate both into and from English, they moved on to the study of a
corpus of ancient texts that included the histories of Caesar, Livy and
Sallust and the poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid; the orations of
Cicero and the plays of Terrance; the fables of Aesop and the
precepts of Cato. This regimen helped to develop a common cultural
repertoire and consolidate a set of shared mental reference points
among its beneficiaries. It drove a wedge of classical language and
learning between the social elite and the lower orders. Into the
eighteenth century, many gentlemen continued to regard those who
could not read Latin as ‘illiterate’. It also contributed to the sense of
intellectual and cultural distance between elite men and women.4
Like the grammar schools, the two universities of Oxford and
Cambridge experienced considerable expansion up until the mid
seventeenth century. Eight colleges were founded, or refounded, at
Oxford between 1509 and 1624, and seven at Cambridge between
1505 and 1596. By the 1630s some 2 per cent of all seventeen-year-
old males were in attendance. Some were ‘gentlemen commoners’
seeking the varnish of learning and the social connections that would
fit them to take their place as governors of the realm or leaders of
county society. But the majority were mere commoners, or ‘plebs’,
who frequently waited upon their betters as servitors or ‘sizars’.
They more often undertook the four-year course of study that led to
the degree of Bachelor of Arts and might prepare them for careers in
the Church, teaching or government service. The extant admissions
records of four Cambridge colleges from the seventeenth century
reveal that 33 per cent of matriculands were of gentle status, of
whom less than one-third were likely to graduate; 22 per cent came
from clerical or professional families, of whom more than two-thirds
became graduands; however, of the 16 per cent that hailed from the
ranks of merchants and tradesmen and 15 per cent from the
yeomanry, around 80 per cent took a degree.5
For some able and fortunate boys of humbler birth a ‘free’ place
at the grammar school and the scholarship to a university college
could open up the possibility of a career in Church or state,
pedagogy or the professions, and thus represent a route to
economic and social advancement. At the end of this period
Archbishop Moore was the son of a butcher just as Cardinal Wolsey
had been at its beginning. In the seventeenth century, Bishop
Richard Corbett of Norwich was the son of a Surrey gardener, and
Archbishop Samuel Harsnett of York the son of a Colchester baker.
The father of the lawyer and scholar John Selden had been a village
fiddler from West Sussex, and the step-father of the famous poet
and playwright Ben Jonson a London bricklayer. But these
beneficiaries of the edifice of classical learning in endowed
institutions were exceptions. For the most part this was a system that
reflected the social order as it was, and it may have done more to
ossify the rigidities of rank than to provide a vehicle for their
dissolution.6
Meanwhile, traditional education at home remained the lot of
most well-to-do women. Learning to read English, and perhaps
French, together with the skills of household management and other
‘feminine’ accomplishments, were its chief intention. Writing was
considered to be less important, and knowledge of Latin generally
regarded as irrelevant or inappropriate. Typically Margaret
Cavendish, daughter of an Essex gentleman, was tutored at home in
the 1630s by an ‘ancient decayed gentlewoman’, learning ‘singing,
dancing, playing on music, reading, writing, [needle]working, and the
like’. By this time, however, boarding schools for young ladies and
daughters of the comfortable middle ranks were appearing,
particularly around London at Deptford, Stepney and Hackney. In the
early 1640s the future poet Katherine Philips, daughter of a
prosperous cloth merchant, was educated at Mrs Salmon’s in
Hackney. Such private academies for girls soon sprang up in cities
such as Oxford and Exeter, and towns like Shrewsbury, Manchester
and Leeds. After the Restoration, the daughter of Lancashire
minister, Adam Martindale, was ‘bred at home, to her booke and
pen, and in Warrington and Manchester, to her needle and musick’.
The Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin spent roughly £6 per year on
the education of each daughter, as compared with £10 annually in
supporting each son, but this included sending Mary and Elizabeth to
a Hackney boarding school in 1675.7
The growth of these girls’ establishments benefited from a
general elaboration and diversification of educational provision in the
century after the Restoration. Following the disruptions of the Civil
War a long period of stagnation began to overtake both the grammar
schools and the universities. The regimented grounding in the
classics on which they were founded began to lose some of its
appeal among the elite, while the mercantile and professional ranks
increasingly questioned its relevance and purpose. Entrants to
Oxford, who had numbered 460 per annum in the 1660s, had fallen
to below 200 a year by the 1750s. When various ‘neare relations’
tried to persuade Henry Martindale to take his son Adam away from
St Helens grammar school in the early 1630s, and set him ‘to
somewhat that might be me a subsistence; alledging too many
instances of such as made no advantage of their learning, though
they had been brought up so long to it as to be fit for nothing else’,
they expressed a scepticism about the value of such education that
was common among middling families and becoming more
widespread. Whereas some 55 per cent of entrants to Oxford in the
years 1577–9 had been non-gentle, or ‘plebeian’, this figure had
fallen to 37 per cent in the late 1630s, and just 17 per cent by 1760.8
One manifestation of changing attitudes was the increase in
domestic tutors: a rough estimate suggests that by the eighteenth
century perhaps a quarter of the peerage, a third of the gentry, a
quarter of the clergy and a fifth of the professions were being
educated at home. Another consequence was the growth of private
academies offering an alternative to the classical curriculum of
grammar school and university. Some were founded by dissenting
ministers ejected from their livings after 1662, such as that at
Newington Green, north of London, established by Charles Morton,
or the Rathmell Academy opened at Settle, North Yorkshire, by
Richard Frankland in 1670. Others were established subsequently
by non-conformist denominations and congregations, like
Northampton Academy launched by the Revd Robert Jennings in
1715. They were joined by numerous small private schools,
sometimes short-lived, offering a more technical or vocational
training and aimed at the sons of the urban commercial classes.
Such academies placed more emphasis on mathematics and some
even offered elementary science, or ‘natural philosophy’: practical
subjects such as surveying, navigation and accounting held an
important place alongside emerging disciplines like geography,
history and modern languages. When Bathsua Makin opened an
academy for girls at Tottenham High Cross in 1673, offering Latin,
arithmetic and astronomy alongside more traditional ‘female’
subjects, it prefigured gradually changing attitudes, as did the few
properly co-educational grammar schools that first appeared in the
1680s. From the second quarter of the eighteenth century, provincial
newspapers became full of advertisements for private tutors, new
schools for boys and girls, and dozens of lecture courses on all
manner of subjects aimed at an adult audience. Between 1726 and
1760 about 200 teachers from seventy-eight towns across the West
Country placed notices in the pages of the Salisbury Journal.9
Thus, the century after the Restoration transformed the
opportunities for learning open to boys, and to a lesser extent girls,
of the ‘middling sorts’. New educational provision was both cause
and effect of the development of religious pluralism, the changing
face of the English economy and the more fluid nature of the social
order that are such features of this period. Even for those lower
down in society this rapidly evolving scene was not without impact.
For poorer children education was no less likely to begin at home.
For centuries it had been incumbent upon Christian mothers, when
they could, to instruct their children in letters, and one legacy of the
Reformation was the conviction among ardent Protestants that an
ability to read the Word of God was necessary for salvation. This is
what inspired the godly Alice Heywood, wife of a fustian weaver from
Bury in Lancashire. Her son Oliver later recalled that in the 1630s
‘she was continually putting us upon the scriptures and good bookes
and instructing us how to pray’. Moreover, ‘it was her usual practice
to help many poore children to learning by buying them bookes,
setting them to schoole, and paying their master for teaching,
whereby many a poore parent blessed god for help by their childrens
reading’.10
 Many women clearly helped the children of others by becoming
school dames themselves. From 1555 all teachers required a licence
from the Church, but the records are full of those minded to ignore
this: like Grace Coates of Baseford in Nottinghamshire, prosecuted
in 1625, who ‘sayeth that all such as cannot read are damned’. But
there were many others like the woman at Reculver, Kent, who in
1619 ‘with the minister’s consent teacheth two or three children their
hornbooks’, or the ‘two poor, honest, sober, and well meaning
persons’ from the Yorkshire village of Bilton who in the early
eighteenth century were said to ‘teach children to read, and instruct
them in ye Church catechism’. An ecclesiastical survey of Eccleshall
in Staffordshire between 1693 and 1698 found that, together with
one man, there were five women acting as teachers in the parish,
four of whom were the wives of day-labourers and local craftsmen.11
The extent of such offerings varied greatly across the country
and over time, but they often formed part of quite extensive networks
of licensed establishments. Even in the Elizabethan period, 258 out
of the 398 parishes in the county of Essex had a school at some
point, as did fully forty-four of the fifty-three parishes in Hertfordshire.
In adjacent Cambridgeshire, meanwhile, roughly 20 per cent of
villages had a continuously licensed schoolteacher in the fifty years
between 1570 and 1620. In Kent, half the towns and villages had a
school running for some period during the first four decades of the
seventeenth century: thirty-four of these lasted for at least two
decades and twenty-four continued for three decades or more. It
may be that at this time the more prosperous and densely populated
counties close to London were better served than the regions with
poorer ecclesiastical livings, larger parishes and scattered
settlements further to the north and west. If this was so, however, the
balance was to some extent being redressed by the later
seventeenth century. Thus in Cheshire, while there were licences
granted to just 53 schoolmasters in the period 1555–1600, this figure
rose to 79 between 1601 and 1650, and increased again to 105 in
the half-century before 1700.12
It was also the case after the Restoration that the number of
endowed schools under the supervision of the parish vestry began to
increase, often presided over by the curate and meeting in the
church. Bishop William Nicolson would discover many of them when
he held his primary visitation of the diocese of Carlisle in 1703. In
addition, the 1680s saw a pioneering initiative in London to establish
‘charity schools’, on the basis of subscriptions. By 1705, there were
54 operating in the city, and in 1723 as many as 123 were catering
for 5,223 pupils. This model was taken up by the Society for the
Promotion of Christian Knowledge, founded in 1699 to provide free
education for the poor nationwide. The impact of these
developments was beginning to be seen in the returns to Archbishop
Herring’s visitation of the large diocese of York in 1743: it revealed
that of 645 responding parishes, 379 had a school of some kind,
variously described as either ‘English’, ‘petty’, ‘free’, ‘endowed’,
‘private’, ‘public’ or ‘charity’.13
Attendance at all schools was usually from the age of about five
or six, and the ability to read print could be instilled within a year or
even a few months. ‘When I was about six years of age’, recalled
the timber merchant’s son Oliver Sansom, brought up at Beedon,
Berkshire, in the early 1640s, ‘I was put to school to a woman, to
learn to read, who finding me not unapt to learn, forwarded me so
well, that in about four months’ time, I could read a chapter in the
Bible pretty readily’. Writing, which required a quill pen and knife and
the ingredients to mix ink, together with costly paper and blotting
equipment, could take up to two more years to learn. Girls were far
less likely to be taught this skill than boys, and poor lads less liable
than wealthier ones. The age of about seven, when instruction in
writing might begin, was also that at which a youngster could start
work. Typically, Thomas Tryon, the son of a Gloucestershire tiler and
plasterer, was put to school at the age of five in 1639 but had
‘scarcely learnt to distinguish my letters, before I was taken away to
work for my living’. He was unusual only in that at the age of
thirteen, when working as a shepherd, he began ‘thinking of the vast
usefulness of reading’ and bought himself a primer, ‘and now got
now one, then another, to teach me to spell, and so learn’d to read
imperfectly, my teachers themselves not being ready readers’. Even
more exceptionally he was then ‘desirous to learn to write’. Although
‘at a great loss for a master, none of my fellow-shepherds being able
to teach me’, he finally found ‘a lame young man who taught some
poor people’s children to read and write’ and ‘agreed with him to
give him one of my sheep to teach me to make the letters, and joyn
them together’.14
In consequence it was quite common for poorer children,
especially girls, to leave school with some reading capacity but
without being able to write, or even to decipher script. For this
reason, the concept of ‘literacy’ in early modern England is difficult
to define. Being able to sound out a simple printed text in English
represented the lowest threshold of attainment, although even here
the gothic, or black letter, typeface of simple didactic and devotional
texts remained easier for most people to manage than the roman, or
white letter, font of other works. Furthermore, the majority of those
contemporaries who understood ‘print hand’ still struggled to fathom
‘written hand’. And handwriting itself came in a variety of forms,
some of which were less intelligible than others: from the widespread
but very difficult secretary hand, through a variety of arcane legal
styles, to the somewhat more recognisable italic script. Thus when it
was said of a Lancashire timber merchant in the 1590s, or a Suffolk
yeoman’s wife in the 1620s, that they could ‘not write or read a
written hand’ these limitations were familiar, but did not preclude the
ability to comprehend some print. A poor Kentish seaman made this
explicit in 1633 when claiming that he could not ‘writte or read anie
other hande then printed hande’. One late-seventeenth-century
Yorkshire woman was clearly noteworthy in that ‘she reads also
written-hand as well as print’, but Thomas Highway, the parish clerk
of Myddle in Shropshire around 1700, was far more typical: ‘hee can
read but litle’ of the printed word, and ‘can scarce write his owne
name, or read any written hand’.15
Calculating the extent to which people could write their own
name, as opposed simply to making a mark, on formal documents
such as legal depositions, marriage registers or subscriptions to
oaths, provides some measure of the expansion of educational
provision over these centuries. The relative infrequency with which
girls were taught to use a pen is confirmed by the estimation that in
1500, perhaps 10 per cent of adult males but only 1 per cent of adult
females could form a signature. On the accession of Elizabeth I in
1558, these figures had risen to 20 per cent of men and 5 per cent of
women; at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 they stood at 30 per
cent and 10 per cent, respectively; and by the time George I came to
the throne in 1714 an average of 45 per cent of men and 25 per cent
of women could sign, or more than one-third of the total adult
population. The evidence yielded by Hardwick’s Marriage Act of
1753, which required brides and grooms to sign a specially printed
register, reveals that between 1754 and 1760, fully 64 per cent of
men and 39 per cent of women were able to write their names, or
just over half of all people.16
Predictably enough, the evidence of signatures also betrays the
ways in which educational opportunity was the product of social
status. Thus in the counties of East Anglia over the period 1580–
1700, all those of clerical and professional status could sign their
names, as could 98 per cent of aristocracy and gentry. At the same
time, however, this skill extended to 65 per cent of yeomen, 56 per
cent of tradesmen and craftsmen, 21 per cent of husbandmen, and
15 per cent of labourers. A sample of depositions made across
northern England during the period 1700–70 indicates that whereas
three-quarters of both craftsmen and tradesmen, and yeomen
farmers, were able to sign their names, only one-third of labourers
could do so.17
To some extent, there was also a hierarchy of signing ability in
terms of environment. As might be expected, cities evince higher
levels of penmanship than market towns and, in turn, small urban
centres betray greater capacity than rural areas. The evidence from
four London parishes in the 1640s suggests that even at this date as
many as two-thirds of adults could sign their names; by the 1720s,
some three-quarters of the metropolitan population were so
equipped. Between 1754 and 1762, male signing ability had also
reached 74 per cent in the university city of Oxford, 66 per cent in
the major port of Bristol and 60 per cent in the textile town of Halifax.
Out in the countryside, meanwhile, there could be marked
differences in levels of signing between neighbouring parishes at any
given time, explained perhaps by the capricious availability of local
schooling or any number of contingent factors. In mid-seventeenth-
century Surrey, for example, the spectrum ranged from one parish
where 71 per cent of people could sign, down to another in which
only 9 per cent were so able; in Nottinghamshire the parameters
were similarly between 73 per cent and 7 per cent.18
Although making a signature might be only the most basic form
of writing ability, what these statistics suggest is just how widespread
the ability to wield a pen was becoming. Whereas in 1500 writing
had been a particular skill, largely confined to a narrow cadre of the
social, clerical and professional elite, by 1750 it was a relatively
common accomplishment, diffused at every level and found in every
part of English society. Moreover, if most of those who managed the
quill had already learned to read, and very many people, especially
women, learned to read without ever picking up a pen, the
implication of these figures is that the great majority of the population
could understand words on the page by the close of the early
modern period.19
 A number of changes flowed from these developments. As
writing was ‘democratised’, simple italic script became the common
mode and the old gothic cursive and stylised legal hands were
gradually outmoded. By the late seventeenth century, black letter
type was being replaced even in popular texts with white letter. A
greater uniformity between script and print thus ensued and the
distinction between ‘print hand’ and ‘written hand’ reading ability
was undermined. English completed its triumph over Latin as a
learned medium: after 1733 all legal proceedings moved into the
vernacular, and over the eighteenth century a decreasing proportion
of books were published in classical languages. Use of the very word
‘publication’ gave insight into another triumph: that of print culture
over manuscript. In the seventeenth century, ‘publication’ was still
used in the sense of simply ‘to make public’, for which scribal
circulation was often sufficient and sometimes preferable: in the
eighteenth century, its conflation with ‘printing’ was completed.

The rise of print was a phenomenon that was both cause and effect
of the expansion of education and literacy in early modern England.
Both processes were also inseparable from the progress of the
English Reformation. A large part of the market for print was for
basic devotional and didactic texts such as the officially sponsored
ABC with the Catechisme and The Primer and Catechisme. From
the 1560s to the 1630s, The ABC was selling anything between
20,000 and 100,000 copies every decade, while the records of the
Stationers’ Company of London suggest that something like 2 million
copies of the ABC and the Primer were produced between 1677 and
1700 alone. Their consumers were people like Hannah Gifford,
teacher at the borough school in Dorchester, who was supplied in
May 1666 with a parcel of twelve hornbooks at 1d each and thirteen
primers at 3d a piece, together with eleven psalters, used for
teaching Latin, and eight New Testaments.20
These centuries produced the standard texts of Christian
doctrine, worship and edification that entered popular consciousness
and became embedded in the national culture. Chief among them, of
course, was the English Bible. Between William Tyndale’s rendition
of the New Testament in 1526 and the Authorised Version of 1611,
there were eight major translations of all or part of the scriptures into
English. By 1729 at least 664, and possibly as many as 732,
different editions of the complete vernacular text had been
published. Its greater issue in smaller formats over time is indicative
of an expanding market down through society. In the 1630s, an
unbound octavo cost 6s or 7s in London, and a duodecimo between
3s 4d and 4s; in the reign of George II, octavos were being sold for
3s and duodecimos for 1s 9d. By this time the family Bible had
become a familiar object even in the households of husbandmen and
labourers.21
Another text that became increasingly familiar to the English
people was the Book of Common Prayer. Whereas in 1549 a folio
edition unbound cost 2s 2d, by 1600 it was just 10d; a century later it
could be bought for between 5d and 9d in quarto or duodecimo, and
for only 3d in abbreviated form for binding up with small Bibles.
Equally canonical were the metrical psalms. Thomas Sternhold and
John Hopkins began translating them in the late 1540s and a
complete edition of all 150 appeared in the vernacular in 1562. Over
the next century-and-a-half, ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’ went through
some 790 editions. Perhaps 400,000 copies were published in the
last quarter of the seventeenth century, by which time prices were as
low as 3d for the smallest sizes.22
These foundational texts permeated the imaginations of all men,
women and children in England: they articulated the rites of passage
that punctuated their lives, they supplied the parables and lessons
that informed their moral compass, and they coined the words and
phrases that entered their linguistic currency. Thanks to print and
collective repetition these works came to provide the foundation of a
national culture. To them were added a supporting cast of popular
devotional works that became the ‘best sellers’ of their day, the
kinds of works of which most people had at least heard. Arthur
Dent’s A Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) was, in abbreviated
form, said to be in its fifty-third edition by 1675; Lewis Bayly’s The
Practice of Piety (1612) had entered its fifty-seventh English edition
by the 1720s; and Richard Baxter’s A Call to the Unconverted (1658)
was already in its twenty-eighth incarnation by 1696. In due course
even these old favourites were overtaken by John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), of which 160 editions would be printed
by 1792, in additon to numerous bowdlerised versions. It was,
thought Dr Johnson, one of the three works written by ‘mere man’
that we wish was longer.23
Religious and didactic works were just one part of the market for
print. These centuries witnessed an increasing profusion of works
published on almost every conceivable subject. Philosophical
treatises took their place alongside political tracts; plays and poems
mingled promiscuously with prose narratives and picture books;
practical guides and self-help manuals poured out on everything
from midwifery to manners, and gardening to gastronomy. As a
result the printed word entered the fabric of daily life in English
society and the period saw the emergence of something like a
national literary canon.
Yet for most of this period printing was closely controlled.
Licensing of the press began under Henry VIII, and from 1557 the
Stationers’ Company of London exercised the power to inspect all
works before issue. Their authority lapsed during the tumultuous
years of the Civil War and Interregnum but a new Printing Act came
into force in 1662, operating with interruptions until 1695, after which
pre-publication censorship came to an end. Within this oscillating
regulatory framework, the production of texts burgeoned. Fifty-nine
surviving works are known to have been printed in England in 1500,
rising to 401 by 1600; 4,198 remain from the spectacular year of
1642, falling back to 2,756 from 1700, and increasing again to 3,383
by 1750. In total, almost 210,000 separate domestically produced
titles are now extant from the period 1500 to 1750, and many more
were imported from abroad. It has been suggested that only around
two-thirds of seventeenth-century publications have come down to
us. Assuming actual output of 300,000 works, and print runs of 1,000
copies each, both of which are conservative estimates, there was a
total of 300 million individual items printed in the country between the
beginning of the sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth
century.24
One reflection of this growth in production is the increasing size
of the libraries built up by individuals over time. The selection of
about 2,000 learned volumes assembled by Thomas Bodley in
November 1602 to refound the university library in Oxford might be
compared with the 50,000 eclectic works that the physician Sir Hans
Sloane bequeathed as one of the founding collections of the British
Museum in 1753. The greatest aristocratic library of the Elizabethan
and Jacobean period, that left by John Lord Lumley in 1609,
amounted to 3,600 books and manuscripts; by contrast, when the
library of Richard Maitland, fourth earl of Lauderdale, came to
auction in 1689 it totalled some 20,000 items.25
Perhaps even more telling in terms of the role of books in
society at large are the expanding, if more modest, stocks accrued
by the provincial gentry across the period. Typically, when Sir William
More of Loseley House near Guildford, Surrey did an appraisal in
1556, he found that he had about 140 manuscripts and 100 printed
works. When the bibliophilic Derbyshire gentleman Sir William
Boothby died in 1707, however, his collection was said to number
‘near six thousand books’ and occupy at least 122 shelves of the
‘inner library’ at Ashbourne Hall. Meanwhile, the emergence of
women as distinct consumers in the market is suggested by the
closet of Frances Wolfreston, wife of a country squire from Statfold
near Tamworth in Staffordshire. By the end of her life in 1677, she
had over 100 of her own books, 92 per cent of which were in the
vernacular with about half comprising imaginative literature.26
 No less striking is a propensity both to buy and to retain books
that extended down to the middle ranks of urban society. A sample
of the probate inventories of almost 3,000 Kentish townsfolk reveals
that by the early seventeenth century as many as 40 per cent of men
and 25 per cent of women possessed books of some kind. Another
analysis of inventories indicates that whereas 18 per cent of London
households owned books in 1675, as many as 56 per cent did so by
1725. Even in the small towns of east Kent and Hampshire 42 per
cent of sampled inventories listed books by the later date. The
mason from Coventry who was said in the 1570s to own more than
sixty volumes, including romances and histories, jests and riddles,
almanacs and poems, together with ‘a bunch of ballets & songs all
auncient’, was probably exceptional. A century later the library of the
non-conformist preacher and sometime town clerk of Rye, Samuel
Jeake, which then amounted to some 2,100 items, was no less
extraordinary. But such examples demonstrate the limits of
possibility for the prosperous urban ‘middling sorts’.27
At the same time, many cases of more modest bookishness
across society illustrate just how deeply the reading habit was
penetrating rural life. In the middle years of the seventeenth century,
the Yorkshire yeoman Adam Eyre was avidly buying books on his
visits to Wakefield and Sheffield. Among his prizes were copies of
Foxe’s edifying Acts and Monuments, Raleigh’s inspiring History of
the World and Dalton’s practical Country Justice. But he also had
sermons and treatises by puritan divines that were borrowed by his
neighbours around Hazlehead in the West Riding, from whom he
received similar material in return. In the decades following, Leonard
Wheatcroft, a craftsman from Ashover in north-east Derbyshire,
established a remarkable lending stock of religious, educational and
miscellaneous works. By the time his son Titus finished the
catalogue that he began in 1722 it contained 392 titles. Meanwhile, a
villager from Charlton, near Pewsey in Wiltshire, who had been in
service in London and begun to buy books there, was building up a
collection of two or three dozen works for sharing. Classics such as
Ovid, Seneca and Epictetus were set alongside staples of the
emerging English canon – Shakespeare’s plays; Dryden’s Virgil;
Butler’s Hudibras; the poetry of Milton, Waller and Prior – and were
leavened by the topical commentary on metropolitan manners of
Tom Brown, Ned Ward and Joseph Addison.28
Or consider the experience of John Cannon, born in 1684 in the
Somerset village of West Lydford. Although his farming parents said
that ‘buying books was beyond their circumstances’, their teenage
son managed to have ‘always, some book or other in my pocket’. He
‘delighted’ in works tracing ‘the lives and actions of great men and
worthy heroes’, and in ‘books of divinity … (a thing not common in
many)’. He bought Aristotle’s Masterpiece for a shilling, ‘which I got
to pry into the secrets of nature especially of the female sex’; a copy
of Culpepper’s Directory for Midwives served the same purpose,
until his mother caught him in the act. Cannon scrimped and saved
to acquire such titles from a bookseller on market days in the little
textile town of Bruton. It was here, in 1701, that he met Philip
Whitacre, a local gardener ‘who had in his house the large history of
that learned and warlike Jew, Josephus Ben-Gorion’, which he
allowed Cannon to read. A couple of years later he befriended John
Read, a self-taught shepherd who ‘gave himself to know English
learning, figuring, poetry, and a smack of astronomy’. Read ‘had a
good store of valuable books, which he would bear about him in his
daily employments, & when we met, he would not only read, but lend
me some of them’. By the turn of the seventeenth century, therefore,
it was possible to find, in the small towns and villages on the edge of
the Somerset levels, farm boys reading erotica, gardeners owning
esoteric histories, and shepherds sharing their vernacular libraries.29
Clearly both the geographical range and the social depth of the
book trade were growing all the time. London remained the centre of
the industry. In 1586 it was already home to 25 printers operating
some 53 presses. By the mid eighteenth century it supported 120
printers, who were still producing some 86 per cent of the national
output, and about 70 bookshops mostly clustered around St Paul’s
Churchyard and Paternoster Row, along Fleet Street and the Strand,
on London Bridge and in Little Britain. With the lapse of the Printing
Act in 1695, however, presses began to spring up beyond London
and the small university enterprises in Oxford and Cambridge. This
gave a boost to the book trade across the country: one
contemporary source suggests that by the mid 1740s there were 381
individuals involved in some aspect of the business in 174 towns
nationwide.30
From an early date certain centres of education and cathedral
cities had been well served by retailers of the printed word. During a
period of less than ten months in 1520, the Oxford stationer John
Dorne sold fully 1,850 works. In 1585 the stock of the Shrewsbury
bookseller Roger Ward amounted to 546 separate titles in more than
2,000 individual copies. Michael Harte held in excess of 4,500
volumes ready for sale from his Exeter premises in 1615; and Eden
Williams’s ‘great shopp’ in Lincoln contained over 2,000 books and
pamphlets in 1671. During the seventeenth century, however, such
premises were also springing up in the rank and file of county
centres. In 1644 John Awdley’s shop in Hull was carrying a stock of
832 copies; the inventory of a Warrington bookseller listed over
1,200 volumes in 1648. And by the end of this period weekly stalls in
small country towns, like the one patronised by John Cannon at
Bruton, were a familiar sight. Up until his death in 1736 the
prominent Lichfield bookseller Michael Johnson also maintained
market stands in Birmingham, Uttoxeter and Ashby-de-la-Zouch.31
In addition, itinerant sellers had, from the first, taken portable
texts out into the countryside, connecting even the most isolated
communities to a national print network. Before the Reformation,
John Dorne had 170 broadside ballads for sale at ½d each, but the
fact that he was also offering batches of seven at 3d, or twelve for
5d, suggests that they were already destined for the carrier’s pack.
In 1578 we find a man ‘sellinge of lytle bookes’ in the churchyard of
the remote Cambridgeshire village of Balsham. In the early 1620s, a
‘poor pedlar came to the door’ of the Baxter family in the Shropshire
community of Eaton Constantine offering ‘ballads and some good
books’: he sold a copy of Richard Sibbes’s Bruised Reed. In 1696 a
basket containing about 200 ballads, probably belonging to a
hawker, was stolen from the marketplace in Kirby Lonsdale,
Westmorland. One broadside ballad produced by William Dicey of
Northampton in about 1730 listed no fewer than thirteen printers and
booksellers in neighbouring counties from whom ‘chapmen and
travellers may be furnish’d with the best sort of old and new ballads,
broadsheets, &c.’.32
Indeed, there is no more graphic evidence of the growing depth
of the market for print over these centuries than the proliferation of
the kind of cheap, unbound and often ephemeral works that were the
stock-in-trade of such vendors. Some 3,000 distinct ballads are
estimated from the second half of the sixteenth century alone which,
assuming print runs of 1,250 copies each, would mean total
production of 4 million sheets. Small wonder that in the 1590s one
Suffolk preacher witnessed them ‘bought up a pace’ in markets,
discovered them in ‘the shops of artificers, and cottages of poore
husbandmen’, and found that people had them ‘set up in their
houses, that so they might learne them, as they shall have
occasion’. At this time about one-third of the themes of these
popular songs were religious or didactic, but during the seventeenth
century, when they came to sell for 1d each, they peddled an eclectic
mix of news and politics, romance and bawdry, stories and jests.
Sung in the streets and plastered on alehouse walls, they were one
of the most ubiquitous and familiar sources of the printed word in
English society: despite their extreme fragility some 15,000
specimens printed before 1700 still survive.33
In the second and third decades of the seventeenth century
ballad publishers also began reissuing popular titles in octavos or
duodecimos of twenty-four pages or less at a cost of 2d, as well as in
twenty-four-page quartos (later known as ‘double-books’) costing 3d
or 4d. Some of these were ‘small godlies’ containing morality tales
or simple works of edification; others were ‘penny merriments’
featuring collections of jokes or comic tales; and still others were
‘pleasant histories’ including the legends of medieval heroes or
abridged adaptations of more recent fiction. What came to be known
by the second half of the eighteenth century as ‘chapbooks’ were a
foundation of English popular reading from the reign of James I to
that of Queen Victoria. Generations of well-to-do boys were
introduced to them in their nurseries and swapped them at their
grammar schools. Working youngsters, no less, found in them their
first introduction to literature and a powerful formative influence. The
poor brazier’s son from Bedfordshire, John Bunyan, grew up in the
1630s bewitched by such works as George on Horsehack or Bevis of
Southampton. Sixty years later the young John Cannon spent all his
spare money on ‘pamphlets & small historys of low price’, such as
‘The Seven Champions, Fortunatus, Parismus, Dr. Faustus, The
Wars of England, Extraordinary Events, & the like’. Around 1750 the
first reading of the Berkshire shoemaker’s son Thomas Holcroft was
chapters from the Old Testament together with two of the same
‘delightful histories’ that ‘men called chapman’s books’, namely
Parismus and Parismenes and The Seven Champions of
Christendom.34
Nor was such literature only for children. It could form a staple of
edification and entertainment for readers of all ages and stations.
The Staffordshire lady Frances Wolfreston owned fifty of these small
‘godlies’, together with about sixteen little ‘merry’ books mostly
published between the 1640s and 1660s. The admiralty official
Samuel Pepys acquired 193 such works during the last two decades
of the seventeenth century. Lower down in society, his contemporary
John Bunyan noted how his Bedfordshire ‘brethren’ remained as
devoted to such cheap print as he had been in his youth. A century
later, the Northamptonshire thresher Parker Clare, ‘the lame man of
Helpstone’, was no different: he ‘could read a little in the Bible, or
Testament, and was very fond of the superstitious tales that are
hawked about the streets for a penny, such as Old Nixon’s
Prophecies, Mother Bunches Fairy Tales, and Mother Shipton’s
Legacy, etc., etc.’.35
Just as popular were almanacs. Part astrological predictions, or
‘prognostications’; part calendar and diary; and part digest of useful
information; they were being been produced from at least the early
sixteenth century. By the 1660s they sold at the rate of 400,000 per
year, and a century later Moore’s almanac alone was vending
82,000 copies annually. The last decades of the sixteenth century
saw the emergence of the ‘pamphlet’, made from a single sheet in
folio or quarto format. Selling for anything between 1d and 4d,
pamphlets became a common vehicle for topical comment and
polemical opinion in both prose or verse. Quick to run off, cheap to
buy and easy to distribute, they were one of the most potent
weapons and influential vehicles of the printed word. During the two
remarkable decades between the beginning of the Long Parliament
and the return of Charles II, when the nation was plunged into
political chaos and censorship broke down, the London stationer
George Thomason managed to collect some 14,942 separate
examples. In the reign of Queen Anne, Jonathan Swift found them
so numerous that ‘it will very well employ a man every day from
morning till night to read them’.36
Alongside the pamphlet came the serial publication of news.
The year 1620 saw the appearance in London of the first folio
‘newsbook’, and from October 1621 ‘corantos’ in quarto format were
produced intermittently over the following twenty years. They were
highly regulated and dealt only with foreign affairs, but with the
collapse of licensing at the Civil War the first newspapers carrying
domestic content burst onto the scene. By 1644 a dozen of them
were appearing in London every week, some with a circulation of
over 500 copies. In total, no fewer than 350 separate news titles
came and went in the revolutionary years between 1641 and 1659:
Thomason gathered up 7,216 specimens. After the reimposition of
licensing the long-lived London Gazette became the official
government mouthpiece in 1666, and before the end of the century it
had been joined by rivals such as the Post Boy, Post-Man and
Flying-Post. By 1712 there were ten single-sheet newspapers
appearing in the capital every week, selling 25,000 copies between
them. ‘All Englishmen are great newsmongers’, observed a foreign
visitor to London in 1725. ‘Workmen habitually begin the day by
going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often
seen shoeblacks and other persons of that class club together to
purchase a farthing paper.’37
The eighteenth century saw the arrival of the provincial
newspaper. The first was the Norwich Post, around 1701, and early
followers were the Bristol Post-Boy, the Exeter Post-Man and the
Worcester Post-Man. By 1760 such publications were being
produced in thirty-five centres across the country with total sales of
200,000 copies a week.38 A parallel innovation was the periodical
magazine, carrying topical commentary, correspondence from
readers and essays on all manner of subjects. John Dunton’s
Athenian Mercury was an early example in the 1690s, but the reign
of Queen Anne saw the periodical come of age with Daniel Defoe’s
Review (1704–13), Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709–11) and Steele’s
collaboration with Addison on the Spectator (1711–14). The last
came out daily, sold for just 1d and went through a remarkable 635
numbers. Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, launched in 1731,
was perhaps the most successful periodical of the eighteenth
century, and in 1744–6 Eliza Heywood edited what was the first
women’s magazine in England, the Female Spectator. By the 1760s
more than thirty periodicals were being published in London alone.39
This remarkable literary efflorescence in early Georgian England
brought with it the novel in its fully fledged form. Scarcely have so
many enduring classics been produced in such a short period:
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722); Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726); Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa
(1747); Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749);
Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751);
and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), to name only some of the best
known. Their sales were prodigious – Fielding’s Amelia (1751)
shifted 5,000 copies within a week – and like other popular works
they benefited from some of the marketing innovations of the period:
the advent of serial publication, where large works were issued in
weekly instalments to stagger the costs; the issuing of cheap
editions of popular works; the ‘remaindering’ of overstocks; and the
advent of the circulating library from which books could be borrowed
for a small fee. All of these initiatives helped to transform people’s
access to the printed word.40
In the process, the whole business of literature – production,
distribution and reception – was placed on a different footing. A new
breed of hack-writer emerged – Johnson’s ‘drudges of the pen’:
journalists and essayists, critics and reviewers, who lived by their
words and fed off those of others. The stereotypical image of the
‘Grub Street’ scribbler in his garret reflected the changing social
profile of the author. A new gender profile was also emerging. The
published female of modest origins was a legacy of the seventeenth
century – in Restoration England the poet and playwright Aphra
Behn had been the daughter of a Kentish barber; the prolific cookery
writer Hannah Wolley was a widow in straitened circumstances; and
the author of one of the best-known manuals on childbirth, Jane
Sharp, was a practising London midwife. But the early Georgian age
saw ordinary women forcing their way into the male-dominated world
of letters to an unprecedented degree. The contributions of Eliza
Haywood, Penelope Aubin and Delarivier Manley to the development
of the novel, for example, were significant. Among other things, they
created both the demand for and the supply of literature among an
ever-growing feminine readership.41

In so many senses the England of 1750 would have been

unrecognisable to the English of 1500. This was no more so than in
relation to the availability, form and content of words in script and
print. By the reign of George II, tens of thousands of sheets were
scribbled, and pages published, every year, in ways and for
purposes that would have been difficult to conceive of in the days of
Henry VIII. They were both produced and consumed by a diversity of
people, in a range of circumstances, and for a variety of reasons that
were equally unimaginable to previous generations. To some extent,
this process of transformation not only expressed, but also
elaborated, the essential cleavages and fissures of the social order:
it added a new level of cultural differentiation to economic divisions
and gender inequalities. Only gentleman and ‘scholars’ were fluent
in learned languages; fewer women could write than men; the
‘middle sorts of people’ had a greater ability to read than the
labouring classes; and urban dwellers were more likely to own books
than their rural neighbours. Yet, for all this, something more positive
had happened. Information and communication on paper had the
potential to liberate the mind and empower the subordinate in
altogether new ways. Apprentice shopkeepers kept diaries, and farm
boys composed autobiographies; workers left threatening squibs for
their employers, and the poor sent petitions to their betters;
daughters addressed letters to their fathers, and servant girls wrote
notes to their lovers. Country people perused newspapers alongside
shoeblacks; cookmaids read novels after their mistresses; and
seamstresses bought magazines no less than ladies. All this enabled
them to broaden their mental horizons, to imagine new possibilities,
and to claim some share of a cultural repertoire that could belong to
everyone.
Notes

1 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2004); J. Lawson and H. Silver, A Social
History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973), 136.

2 ODNB; J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6

vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), Vol. II, 6.

3 J. Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1966); W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in
England 1480–1660 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 283; W. A. L.
Vincent, The Grammar Schools (London: Murray, 1969); R.
O’Day, Education and Society, 1500–1800 (London: Longman,
1982), Chapter 4; D. Cressy, ‘Educational opportunity in Tudor
and Stuart England’, History of Education Quarterly, 16 (1976).

4 F. Watson, The Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1908).

5 Cressy, ‘Educational opportunity in Tudor and Stuart England’,

311–13; O’Day, Education and Society, Chapter 5.

6 J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1898), Vol. I, 184; Vol. II, 11, 219, 308; ODNB.

7 ODNB; A. Martindale, The Life of Adam Martindale, Written by

Himself, ed. R. Parkinson Chetham Society, 4 (Manchester:
Chetham Society, 1845), 207; O’Day, Education and Society,
186–8.
8 Martindale, Life, 24; O’Day, Education and Society, 196–208.

9 N. Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century

(London: Routledge, 1951), 26–7; O’Day, Education and Society,
208–16; R. Porter, Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 78.

10 M. Spufford, ‘First steps in literacy’, SH, 4 (1979), 435.

11 A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46; Lawson and Silver,
Social History of Education, 113; T. Laqueur, ‘The cultural origins
of popular literacy in England 1500–1850’, Oxford Review of
Education, 2 (1976), 257–8; Spufford, ‘First steps in literacy’, 435.

12 B. Simon, ‘Leicestershire schools 1625–40’, British Journal of

Educational Studies, 3 (1954); M. Spufford, Contrasting
Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974),
183–91; P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation
to the Revolution (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977), 199–203; K.
Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson,
1982), 186; K. Charlton and M. Spufford, ‘Literacy, education and
society’, in D. Lowenstein and J. Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 26.

13 Lawson and Silver, Social History of Education, 181–92.

14 Spufford, ‘First steps in literacy’, 410, 415–16.

15 K. Thomas, ‘The meaning of literacy in early modern England’,

in G. Baumann (ed.), The Written Word (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 100; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 47–
8, 91–2.

16 D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979), 176–7; Lawson and Silver,
Social History of Education, 192–3; R. S. Schofield, ‘Dimensions
of illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History, 10
(1973).

17 D. Cressy, ‘Levels of illiteracy in England, 1530–1730’, HJ, 20

(1977); Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 136; R. A. Houston,
‘The development of literacy: Northern England, 1640–1750’,
EcHR, 2nd series, 35 (1982); R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and
the Scottish Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), Chapter 2.

18 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 73, 191–201; Lawson

and Silver, Social History of Education, 194.

19 S. E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers

1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

20 I. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 183–4; D. Underdown,
Fire from Heaven (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1992), 247; M. Spufford, Figures in the Landscape (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2000), 258–9.

21 Green, Print and Protestantism, Chapter 2.

22 Ibid., Chapters 5 and 9.

23 Ibid., Appendix I; Laqueur, ‘The cultural origins of popular
literacy’, 262–3; Johnsoniana; or, Supplement to Boswell (London,
1836), 91. (The other two were Don Quixote and Robinson
Crusoe.)

24 F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1475–1776

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952); The English Short Title
Catalogue, available at http://estc.bl.uk (accessed 13 October
2016).

25 W. D. MacRay, Annals of the Bodleian Library Oxford, 2nd edn

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1890), 29; M. Hunter, A. Walker
and A. MacGregor (eds.), From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans
Sloane and His Collections (London: British Library, 2012), 11; L.
Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1965), 705–7; J. Lawler, Book Auctions in
England in the Seventeenth Century (London: Stock, 1906), 170–
5.

26 H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1475–1557, 2nd

edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xiii–xiv; P.
Beal, ‘“My Books are the great joy of my life”: Sir William Boothby,
seventeenth-century bibliophile’, Book Collector, 46 (1997); P.
Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “hor bouks”: A seventeenth-
century woman book-collector’, Library, 6th series, 11 (1989).

27 P. Clark, ‘The ownership of books in England, 1560–1640: The

example of some Kentish townsfolk’, in L. Stone (ed.), Schooling
and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); L.
Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain
1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988), 88; R. Laneham, A Letter
(London, 1575), 34–6; M. Hunter, G. Mandelbrote, R. Ovenden
and N. Smith (eds.), A Radical’s Books: The Library Catalogue of
Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1623–90 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999).

28 Wrightson, English Society, 199; M. Bell, ‘Reading in

seventeenth-century Derbyshire: The Wheatcrofts and their
books’, in P. Isaac and B. McKay (eds.), The Moving Market (New
Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2001); J. Spence, A Full and Authentick
Account of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire Poet (London, 1731), 7–8.

29 J. Money (ed.), The Chronicles of John Cannon, 2 vols.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Vol. I, 28, 30, 35–6, 37,
42–3.

30 J. Raven, The Business of Books (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press, 2007), 47; J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the
Imagination (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 137; J. Feather, The
Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 29.

31 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 15–16; J. Barnard and M. Bell,

‘The English provinces’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. IV: 1557–1695
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 674; Wrightson,
English Society, 198; M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant
Histories (London: Methuen, 1981), 75.

32 T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11; Spufford,
Contrasting Communities, 208; R. Baxter, The Autobiography of
Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: Dent, 1974), 7;
Spufford, Small Books, 121; Feather, Provincial Book Trade, 108.
33 Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 11–12; P. Fumerton and
A. Guerrini (eds.), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

34 Spufford, Small Books, 7, 72–5; J. Fergus, Provincial Readers

in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 161–79; Money, Chronicles of John Cannon, Vol. I, 30, 35;
E. Colby (ed.), The Life of Thomas Holcroft, 2 vols. (London:
Constable, 1925), Vol. I, 10–11.

35 Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 315–17; Spufford, Small

Books, 3, 7, 131.

36 B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (London: Faber &

Faber, 1979), 23; Raven, Business of Books, 134; J. Raymond,
Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Catalogue of the
Pamphlets … Collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661, 2 vols.
(London: British Museum, 1908); Porter, Enlightenment, 93.

37 G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society from Caxton to

Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978), Chapter 1; Catalogue of the
Pamphlets … Collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661; M.
Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole (London:
Associated University Presses, 1987); M. Van Muyden (trans. and
ed.), A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I &
George II (London: Murray, 1902), 162.

38 G. A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper

1700–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); R. M. Wiles,
Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965).

39 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 141–4; Porter,

Enlightenment, 79–82; K. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture
(London: Routledge, 1989).

40 R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1957), 49; R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in
England before 1750(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1957); P. Kaufman, Libraries and Their Users (London: Library
Association, 1969); J. Raven, ‘Libraries for sociability’, in G.
Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.), The Cambridge History of
Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II: 1640–1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).

41 P. Rogers, Grub Street (London: Methuen, 1972); P. Crawford,

‘Women’s published writings 1600–1700’, in M. Prior (ed.),
Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985);
C. Turner, Living by the Pen (London: Routledge, 1992).
 7
Land and People
◈

Jane Whittle

Robert Loder was a prosperous Berkshire farmer who made over £100 a
year selling malted barley, which was shipped down the Thames to
London. His account books for 1610–20 record his concerns for the
business and profits of farming: issues such as the balance between
wheat and barley in his fields and the expense of feeding his live-in farm
servants. The Loder household consisted of Robert, his wife, their children
and five farm servants – three men and two women. All the adults were
actively engaged in farming. While the men worked in the fields and
transported grain to market, the female servants malted the barley, milked
cows, and picked and marketed fruit from the orchards. Mrs Loder and the
female servants baked bread, brewed beer, made cheese and cured
bacon, providing all the basic foodstuffs for the household from the
products of the farm. Everyone helped in the fields at harvest time.1 In the
same decade of the seventeenth century, Alice Le Strange, the wife a
gentleman with an income of over £2,000 a year, began running the home
farm on his estate in Hunstanton, Norfolk. Among her employees were the
Wix family. Richard Wix, his wife Anne and their son were all occasional
agricultural labourers for the Le Stranges, but they also had other means
of making a living. Richard’s main occupation was as a thatcher, while
Anne earned an income from knitting stockings. She also spun wool and
made butter and cheese. They had a smallholding; grew a small amount
of grain; and kept cows, pigs and poultry. When Richard died in 1628 their
moveable goods and livestock were worth £11 12s.2 A century later,
another account keeper, Richard Latham of Scarisbrick, Lancashire, spent
his whole adult life living on a 19-acre life-leasehold farm inherited from
his father. He rented out some land but also grew wheat, oats and
occasionally barley, and kept cows. His wife and daughters spun linen and
cotton, both for income and to make household textiles. This farm
economy provided them with enough to get by but they were far from self-
sufficient. Richard worked for wages and employed others on his farm; the
family purchased grain, other foodstuffs such as sugar, and textiles. The
Lathams were deeply enmeshed in a local economy of informal loans and
exchanges of money, goods and labour.3
Up until the 1980s the history of rural England was dominated by two
grand narratives of revolutionary change told from different ideological
viewpoints. On the one hand, economic historians described ‘agricultural
revolutions’ led by the likes of Robert Loder and the Le Stranges. They
argued that profit-orientated farmers and landlords led increases in farm
productivity, made possible by the modernising institutional changes of
engrossing, enclosure and the spread of leasehold tenure. On the other
hand, social historians focused on the proletarianisation of rural
population, describing how small farmers like Richard Wix and Richard
Latham were torn from the land and forced to become impoverished wage
labourers. There is no doubt that between 1350 and 1850 the English
countryside was transformed from a society of small family farmers to one
based predominantly on large farms employing wage labourers. But the
issues of when and where these changes took place, let alone why and
how they occurred, are far from resolved. Recent research has
undermined many of the grand narratives’ assumptions. Change was not
as clear-cut as was once thought. Medieval agriculture could be highly
productive: crop yields on Norfolk’s manorial demesnes in the early
fourteenth century were not exceeded there until after 1700.4 The idea of
a peasantry being transformed into wage-earners between 1500 and 1750
has been qualified by the realisation that the rural population was already
strongly proletarianised at the start of the period: it is estimated that ‘both
in 1381 and in 1522–5 those who depended on wages for most of their
income accounted for a little below half of the population in most of the
country, but more than half in the eastern counties, from Kent to
Lincolnshire’.5
This chapter examines the disputed claims about the changing nature
of rural society between 1500 and 1750. It aims to identify what changed
most during the period and what the possible causes of those changes
were. The next section focuses on enduring features: structures that
formed the backdrop to the change. This is followed by a section
examining those aspects of rural society that experienced most change
between 1500 and 1750. Finally, the possible mechanisms of change,
such as demography, class conflict and commercialisation are explored.

Enduring Features
Throughout the early modern period England remained a rural society: 95
per cent of the population lived outside large urban centres in 1520 and
79 per cent in 1750.6 More than that, land remained deeply embedded
within the social structure and culture of English society. It was of course
the most important means of production. Agriculture usually fed the
population without significant imports of grain,7 and the land also provided
the raw materials for the other basic consumer necessities: clothing, fuel
and shelter. In the era before formal banking, land was the most secure
means of investing and storing wealth. It generated wealth through
farming, selling such resources as timber or pasture, or being rented to
tenants, and provided security for loans via mortgaging. Land was the key
indicator of status. Ownership of manorial land allowed entry into the
gentry. Village society was stratified partly according to the size of
landholdings and types of tenure. Rural inhabitants who lacked rights to
land – wage-workers, most women, the young – also lacked status.
Finally, land was the world within which people lived, in a landscape
created by generations of human actors: cleared, drained, ploughed,
planted, hedged, walled, built upon, argued over, looked at and
remembered. The land and landscape both were shaped by people and
shaped the way people could lead their lives.
In early modern England, landownership was a system of overlapping
rights. All land was owned and used, but almost always by more than one
person. The roots of this system were medieval and feudal. Lords held
units of land, manors, from the monarch. In turn, lords granted land to
manorial tenants, while those tenants sometimes leased their land to
subtenants. Serfdom, whereby many tenants had unfree status, had
largely disappeared by the sixteenth century, but the manorial system
remained. The classic manor divided land into the manorial demesne,
tenanted freehold and customary land, and common pasture shared by
lords and tenants. The demesne belonged to the lord and was either
managed directly as a home farm or leased out. Freehold was a privileged
tenure, originally held by free tenants. Its terms were usually clear-cut,
with rents low and fixed. Customary land had been unfree during the
medieval period. It was held ‘according to the customs of the manor’,
which varied widely in terms of the rents, fines and rights assigned to
tenants. By the sixteenth century the most common types of customary
tenure were copyhold of inheritance and copyhold for lives. Copyhold of
inheritance gave the tenant the right to pass land on to an heir, or to sell it,
without the lord’s interference as long as the transfer was reported and
rents and fines paid. Copyhold for lives was held for the lives of three
named people (normally the tenant, his wife and one of their children),
and the tenant had no right to the land beyond this. As well as rents,
customary tenants paid entry fines when a new tenant took possession of
a holding, and sometimes a heriot or death duty when a tenant died.
There had been an active market in all these types of land since at least
the late fourteenth century. Manors, freeholds, customary land and
leaseholds were not only rented out, but were bought and sold between
tenants. Thus land could be acquired by grant of a landlord, by inheritance
or by purchase, or sometimes by a mixture of methods. The inheritance
custom of primogeniture, inheritance by the eldest son, dominated for all
types of land, but often the heir had to pay cash bequests to his siblings
as soon as he acquired the land.
Lords had the right to hold manorial courts, which recorded the
transfer of land between tenants and regulated the agricultural system of
the village. Across much of England systems of ‘open field’ agriculture
operated, requiring forms of co-operation among tenants. Arable was held
as strips of land in large fields. When land rested fallow, or between
harvest and new sowing, the village livestock grazed these fields.
Meadow land was also often held jointly by tenants who took an agreed
share of the hay and grazed animals in the meadow after haymaking.
Most manors had ‘commons’: areas of rough pasture used by lord,
tenants and other inhabitants. It was this complex system of grazing
rights, or use rights, as well as the complexity of different types and layers
of tenure, that was so characteristic of early modern landholding in
England. It meant that in many cases, neither lords nor tenants had an
absolute right to decide what to do with their land, leading to many bitter
disagreements about who owned what and what they could do with it.
Viewed from a global perspective, early modern England had one
basic system of agriculture: mixed farming, which combined grain crops
(primarily wheat, barley and oats) with raising sheep and/or cattle and
relied on plough cultivation. Less significant in terms of land use, but vital
to diet, were the fruit, vegetables, pigs and poultry raised on small plots
close to the farm house. The ideal farm was an integrated, self-contained
and sustainable system. It included arable and pasture and raised crops
and livestock. The plough was pulled by horses or oxen, which were fed
with fodder crops from the farm. Livestock provided manure, which
recycled nutrients into the soil. Rotations of crops and fallow kept the land
in good heart. Peas and vetches were grown for fodder, but also had the
characteristic of fixing nitrogen in the soil, providing extra nutrients for the
next crop. Farm buildings were constructed of timber from hedges and
copses, and either stone or mud and straw. Fuel was cut and collected
from hedges, copses and rough pasture land. The waste products of
dairying, brewing and kitchen scraps were fed to the pigs and poultry.
The variety of rural society came not only from differing property
rights and social structures but also from regional and local differences in
landscape, farming types and settlement patterns. Farming types reflected
differences in climate, topography and soil. The lower rainfall of eastern
and midland England made these areas more favourable for arable
farming, while the high rainfall in the west provided rich pasture for
livestock. Upland areas had a shorter growing season and poorer soils
suitable only for less intensive forms of livestock farming. Clay soils were
fertile but difficult to cultivate, requiring more animals to draw the plough.
Lighter sandy or chalky soils were easier to cultivate, but lost fertility
easily: here arable farming was often combined with keeping large flocks
of sheep, grazed on rough pasture by day but folded on the arable at night
to provide dung for the fields. Joan Thirsk’s mapping of the farming
systems in early modern England shows both the extent of local variations
in farming systems, and the degree to which they changed over time.8
Perhaps of even greater significance are the persistent regional
differences in settlement patterns and landscape between the ‘champion’
and ‘wood pasture’ regions of England. The champion landscape
dominated in a broad central band of England stretching from east
Yorkshire in the north to Dorset and Hampshire in the south.9 It was
characterised by large nucleated villages; carefully regulated open-field
systems; and a lack of hedges, woodland or extensive pasture. This
region saw the largest number of deserted villages in the fifteenth century
and the most extensive parliamentary enclosures after 1750. To the east
and west of this area lay wood pasture regions with more scattered
settlements of small villages, hamlets and isolated farms; irregular field-
systems that incorporated small enclosed fields; and a greater abundance
of trees and pasture. Rural industry was more common in wood pasture
regions, and the communal regulation of agriculture and village life
weaker. These regional differences had their origins before the Norman
Conquest, were recognised by sixteenth-century observers such as John
Leland and William Harrison, and are still apparent in the English
landscape today.

Patterns of Change
Both economic and social historians begin their accounts of the
transformation of rural society with institutional changes in the structure of
landholding. For economic historians these were the prerequisites for
increased agricultural productivity, which in turn allowed the non-
agricultural population in towns and industries to grow, laying the
foundations for the Industrial Revolution. For social historians they were
the means by which the peasantry was dispossessed. Therefore, this
section begins by exploring institutional changes before moving on to
consider productivity and farming methods, and then wage-earning and
non-agricultural occupations in the countryside. In each case it is
necessary to consider the quantitative data available in some detail. Such
data has the potential to reveal the general trends across the whole
country over long periods of time, but its reliability needs to be carefully
established.
Together the institutional changes of engrossing, enclosure and the
spread of leasehold had by the mid nineteenth century transformed a
medieval system of landholding into a capitalist one: replacing small farms
with large farms of over 100 acres; multiple-use rights with clearly defined
proprietors; and manorial land tenures with contractual leaseholds based
on market-determined rents. Engrossing, the enlargement of farms, is
often seen as a prerequisite for enclosure, and leasehold as a
consequence of enclosure, but the three processes were not necessarily
closely connected. Of all three, engrossing had the most direct
relationship with landlessness and depopulation: increasing farm size
tends to reduce the number of farmers. Large farms of 100–300 acres, in
the form of manorial demesnes, had long existed, but as the system of
labour services by unfree tenants broke down by c. 1450, manorial lords
leased out these farms. The presence of these large leasehold farms in
sixteenth-century England was one the reasons why R. H. Tawney, in his
classic account of agrarian change in the sixteenth century, mistakenly
concluded that lords were evicting customary tenants and engrossing their
holdings into large leasehold farms. In fact, there is no evidence of
widespread evictions to support this theory.
Nonetheless, quite apart from demesne farms, a myriad of local
studies do suggest that tenant numbers decreased and the land area of
individual tenancies increased throughout the period from 1500 to 1750,
as well as before and after those dates. But the tracing of changes in farm
size over time has been obstructed by one important issue: the amount of
land sublet also increased rapidly over the same time period. Plentiful
documentation survives recording the amount of land manorial tenants
held from their lords. If those tenants had all farmed the land themselves,
this would reveal the size of farms. However, this often was not what
happened. Some tenants sublet their land, and thus the size of farms
could be quite different from the size of manorial tenancies. Records of
subtenures are rare. C. J. Harrison, in a ground-breaking study of
Cannock, Staffordshire, found that in 1554 two-thirds of the 1,400 acres of
manorial land was sublet. Some tenants sublet all their land and did not
farm; others sublet parts of holdings or rented land from others. The real
structure of farms was quite different, and more polarised, than the
structure of manorial tenancies: there were more farms over 200 acres in
size and more smallholdings of less than ten acres.10 Recent research by
Joseph Barker using evidence from poor rates and tithe accounts from
fifty communities in four different regions of England demonstrates that
subtenure was widespread and significant from at least the late sixteenth
century: Cannock was the norm rather than a peculiarity.11
The difficulty of documenting subtenures in order to measure farm
size has been ingeniously side-stepped by Leigh Shaw-Taylor. He
suggests the most important issue in the modernisation of farming, the
development of agrarian capitalism, is not the acreage of farms, but
whether farmers had to rely on employing wage labour. Rather than
reconstructing the exact size of farms, he suggests we should examine
the ratio of male farmers to male wage labourers (adequate records for
women are lacking). By the time of the 1851 census all the counties of
south and east England recorded seven or more hired workers per farmer,
showing that the great majority of farms were large capitalist enterprises
by that date. Occupational data from early-eighteenth-century parish
registers reveals that the ratio was 2.8 hired workers per farmer. This is
considerably less than in 1851, but still indicates a capitalist system of
farming in which hired agricultural workers outnumbered farmers.12
Similar types of data can be gathered for earlier dates. In Gloucestershire
in 1608 the ratio was 0.6 hired workers per farmer,13 while in sixteenth-
century Norfolk it was 0.8.14 These figures suggest that in the period
before 1650 farms worked with family labour alone were considerably
more common, and that the number of wage workers employed in
agriculture increased over time.
Enclosure was the physical process of placing a hedge, wall or ditch
around a piece of land; but it was also a legal process by which common
rights, such as seasonal grazing by other people’s animals, over a piece
of land were extinguished. In the sixteenth century the Tudor government
was alarmed by both engrossing and enclosure, fearing they would
undermine England’s ability to feed its population. Tawney took his cue
from sixteenth-century commentators, assuming engrossing and
enclosure were closely connected to each other and reached a peak in
the mid sixteenth century. In fact, engrossing and enclosure could be quite
independent: small pieces of land were often enclosed and many large
farms were open, and attempts to track the chronology of enclosure by
Wordie and Allen both suggest that the sixteenth century was a low point
in enclosure, as shown in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1 The chronology of enclosure: percentage of land enclosed

during each period.

Time period Wordie Allen (south Wordie

(Leicestershire) Midlands incl. (national
Leicestershire) estimates)

Pre-1550 9.1% 10.0% c. 45.0%

(W)/pre-1524
(A)

1500–99 8.4% 2.1% c. 2.0%

(W)/1525–74(A)

1600–99 33.7% 16.7% c. 24.0%

(W)/1575–1674
(A)

1675–1749 (A) — 5.0% —

1700–99 42.2% 54.8% c. 13.0%

(W)/1750–1849
(A)

1800–1914 6.7% 3.0% c. 11.4%

(W)/1850+ (A)

Sources: (A) R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1992), 31; (W) J. R. Wordie, ‘The chronology of
English enclosure, 1500–1914’, EcHR, 36 (1982), 498 and 502.

Enclosure varied strongly by region. Some English counties, such as

Cornwall, Devon, Essex, Kent and Cheshire, had always been very
largely enclosed and saw little extra enclosure in the early modern period.
Other predominantly wood pasture regions, such as Norfolk and Suffolk,
had open but flexible field systems in the medieval period. Regions such
as this experienced substantial piecemeal enclosures by individual
initiative or local agreements from the fifteenth century onwards. Taking
these broad trends into account, J. R. Wordie estimated that for the
country as a whole, perhaps 45 per cent of land was already enclosed by
the mid sixteenth century. The situation in the champion region of central
England was different. Here, stricter open field systems meant it was
difficult for lords or tenants to enclosure small pieces of land. Robert
Allen’s ‘south Midlands’ and Wordie’s Leicestershire, shown in Table 7.1,
fall within this region. Here enclosure occurred later, with less than 50 per
cent of land enclosed by c. 1700, compared to more than 70 per cent
nationally. Unfortunately Wordie’s national estimates of the amount of
land enclosed in different periods are little more than informed guesses:
the variety and intricacy of local patterns of landscape change have
discouraged regional studies of enclosure outside the Midland region.
Engrossing and enclosure were associated with a third type of
institutional change, the spread of leasehold tenures. Tenure mattered
because it determined what proportion of the profits of farming were kept
by the farmer, and what proportion were paid to the landlord as rent.
Customary tenures such as copyhold and freehold normally had fixed
rents that could not be increased. Table 7.2 shows the extent to which
land values increased over time (that is sale values and market rents, not
manorial rents). Copyhold rents were fixed by custom at around 8d per
acre: this was slightly above the market value of land in the early sixteenth
century, but by the early seventeenth century it was approximately a tenth
of the market value. This transformation over time made customary rents
extremely favourable to the tenants and problematic for landlords. Robert
Brenner followed Tawney in his influential account of English agrarian
change by arguing that landlords attempted to recoup their losses by
converting customary tenures to leaseholds or by raising entry fines on
customary tenures. Some customary tenures were converted to leasehold
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the change was often
resisted by tenants making it legally complicated and expensive. In
addition, the new leasehold tenures were often a form of customary
leases known as ‘beneficial’ leases, which were actually very similar to
copyholds for lives and not equivalent to modern contractual leaseholds.
Entry fines on customary tenures could not always be raised, as some
were fixed by custom; variable entry fines were increased over time, but
not enough to compensate fully for the steeply rising land values. Table
7.2 shows that land values rose very rapidly in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century, a period when the degree of tension between lords
and tenants was particularly high, judging by disputes brought to the
central courts. While some tenants lost the legal battle to protect their
tenures, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries royal courts
upheld customary tenants’ rights if they were clearly documented.

Table 7.2 Land values, wheat prices and men’s wages compared.

Land values Wheat prices Male labourers’

wages

d per index s per index d per day index

acre qtr

1500–24 5.9 100 6.4 100 4.0 100

1550–74 10.1 171 14.6 228 7.3 183

1600–24 86.5 1466 36.6 572 8.6 215

 Land values Wheat prices Male labourers’
wages

d per index s per index d per day index

acre qtr

1650–74 106.8 1810 41.4 646 11.3 283

1700–24 133.0 2254 33.1 517 10.7 268

Sources: Land values are market rents per acre for the south
Midlands from R. Allen, ‘The price of freehold land and the interest
rate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, EcHR, 41 (1988),
43. Grain prices from J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture
and Prices in England, Vol. IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1882), 292 (for 1500–74); J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of
Agriculture and Prices in England, Vol. V (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1887), 276 (for 1600–1674); and W. G. Hoskins, ‘Harvest
fluctuations and English economic history’, Agricultural History
Review, 16 (1968), 30 (for 1700–24). Day wages from G. Clark, ‘The
long march of history: Farm wages, population and economic growth,
England 1209–1869’, EcHR, 60 (2007), 100 (raw wages).

Customary land tenures that during the medieval period had served
to subjugate the population to manorial lords, had, by the early
seventeenth century, become a privileged form of tenure that offered low
returns to landlords in comparison to demesne land, which could be
leased at market-determined rents. Not all customary tenants were poor
farmers; some were gentlemen or lawyers themselves, and collectively
tenants often had the wealth and resources to mount legal resistance to
manorial lords. Additionally, customary tenants increasingly became
landlords themselves. The lack of correspondence between manorial
rents and actual land values meant they could choose either to make a
living from farming or to follow another occupation and rent out their land
for extra income. In many communities it was subtenures let at market
rates, rather than the conversion of customary tenures, that led to the
spread of contractual tenancies and market-determined rents.
Established accounts of the transformation of early modern rural
England from widely differing ideological viewpoints were based on the
assumption that institutional changes such as increased farm size,
enclosure and leasehold tenures were a necessary prerequisite for
increased agricultural productivity. Yet a direct relationship between
institutional change and increased productivity has never been
established, and a number of recent studies challenge the existence of a
close connection. Robert Allen argues that significant productivity
increases in the early modern period were achieved on medium-sized
yeoman farms in the open fields.15 Pushing improvements back in time,
Bruce Campbell’s work on the productivity of manorial demesnes in
medieval Norfolk demonstrates that agricultural innovation and high crop
yields were possible without enclosure or leasehold.16
The most detailed information about early modern crop yields comes
from probate inventories, which survive in their thousands for the period
from c. 1560 to 1750, but have never been studied comprehensively.
Campbell and Overton’s most recent estimates for the whole of England
are based on inventories from eight English counties, weighted to
represent the country as a whole.17 Their findings show that for England
as a whole, yields of all the main crops except rye exceeded medieval
levels by the 1600s, improved gradually across the seventeenth century
and increased more rapidly after 1700 (see Table 7.3). Norfolk was
exceptional in its medieval productivity.
 Inventories can only be used to calculate gross yields: that is, how
much grain was harvested from a particular area. This is a crude
measure. Gross yields can be increased in many ways that do not
indicate new and improved agricultural methods. Sowing crops only in the
best soils would increase yields, as would sowing a crop more densely,
but neither of these strategies would necessarily increase a farmer’s
profits. Yields can also be raised by using more labour to intensify
cultivation, but this reduces the labour productivity of agriculture. It is
labour productivity (the amount of crop yield that can be produced with a
given number of days’ labour) that is most important for the development
of the economy as a whole: increased labour productivity releases a
higher proportion of the population from agriculture to work in industry or
live in towns. Moreover, it should also be emphasised that grain yields
reveal nothing about the other farm products – most importantly, livestock.
Early modern agriculture was more pastoral than earlier or later
periods: more land was put down to pasture rather than ploughed.
Pastoral agriculture requires less labour than arable, but produces fewer
food calories per acre. The technical improvements in agriculture that
were introduced or became more widespread in England between 1600
and 1750 were all concerned with improving fodder for livestock. These
included the floating of water meadows to improve hay production, the
increased sowing of ‘improved’ grasses such as vetches and clover, and
the introduction of turnips and clover into crop rotations. While livestock
numbers held fairly steady over the early modern period, the meat and
milk produced per animal increased.18
Estimates of the growing proportion of the population not working in
agriculture and the absence of any severe subsistence crises in early
modern England do suggest that the labour productivity of agriculture
increased between 1500 and 1750. It is possible that the increased
reliance on wage labour, rather than unpaid family labour, encouraged
farmers to be more efficient in their use of labour as a resource. However,
labour is not just another ‘input’ into the farm economy, it is a way of life.
Transforming the nature of agricultural labour meant transforming the
nature of rural society.
To what extent did this transformation take place in early modern
England? Shaw-Taylor’s ratio of 1 farmer to every 2.8 labourers in the
early eighteenth century translates into a farming population where 26 per
cent were farmers and 74 per cent wage labourers. The ratio for
sixteenth-century Norfolk, one of the most highly commercialised
agricultural regions at that time, of 0.8 hired workers per farmer translates
into a farming population of 56 per cent farmers and 44 per cent hired
workers. Dyer uses tax returns to estimate that in 1522–5 around 50 per
cent of the population were dependent on wages for a living.19 For the
early eighteenth century, Muldrew estimates that 70 per cent of the rural
population were dependent on wages.20 All these figures suggest the
increase over time is not as dramatic as some earlier commentators
assumed, but nonetheless indicate a tipping of the balance away from
small family farms towards large farms that relied on wage labour during
the seventeenth century.21
As well as the numbers of wage workers, the nature of wage labour,
and its relationship to landholding, were also important to the nature of
rural society. In early modern England, wage earners were a mixture of
servants and day labourers. Servants were mostly young, unmarried
people who lived with their employers, receiving around three-quarters of
their wages in the form of board and lodging. In contrast, day labourers
tended to be married householders who were paid by the day or task.
They too often received food and drink with their wages, but it rarely made
up more than one-third of the payment. Servants outnumbered day
labourers in rural England throughout the early modern period. Muldrew
found that there were 1.9 male servants per male labourer in
Gloucestershire in 1608, and 1.7 servants per labourer (of both sexes) in
various village censuses dating from 1688 to 1750.22
The growing gap between land values and wages altered the
structural role of wage earning. Wage earning was transformed from a
predominantly life-cycle phase to a lifetime condition. In the early
sixteenth century it was possible for young men and women who had not
inherited land to pool their earnings from years in service to purchase a
landholding. After the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century rise in
land values this was no longer possible. Instead, they could only hope to
rent a house and continue to make a living from wage-earning or industrial
work. That is not to say that labourers were always landless. Probate
inventories, despite being likely to record only the better off, reveal that
even in the early eighteenth century, 44 per cent of labourers owned
cows.23 The examples of Richard Wix and Richard Latham at the start of
this chapter illustrate how households combined a number of ways of
making a living, including earning wages. Muldrew’s detailed
reconstruction of labourers’ household budgets, which factors in home
production and the work of wives and children, suggests that there were
significant fluctuations in standards of living over time. The household
surplus, once food, clothing, fuel and rent are allowed for, stood at £8 10s
in 1568, but deteriorated markedly to a deficit of –£11 6s in 1597 and was
still in deficit at –£1 8s in 1625, largely as a result of high grain prices. This
indicates that such households were failing to make ends meet in the
early seventeenth century, and may well have had to sell capital assets
such as land, livestock or tools to purchase food. But incomes recovered
in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, to a positive balance of £4
1s in 1690 and £19 2s in 1760. An important contribution to this upturn in
fortunes was women’s increased earnings from spinning, a consequence
of the expanding textile industry.24
This last point is a reminder that the agricultural and industrial
economies were not separate in early modern England, but intertwined
within rural households. Wrigley makes a rough estimate that the ‘rural
non-agricultural population’ grew almost as fast as England’s urban
population between 1520 and 1750, from 18.5 per cent to 33 per cent of
the national population.25 Wrigley’s assumptions about increased non-
agricultural employment in the countryside are supported by other studies.
Men’s occupational descriptions in East Anglian wills demonstrate
significant increases in the number of rural parishes supporting common
trades such as tailors, carpenters, shoemakers and butchers between
1500 and 1700. The number of parishes with retailers also increased from
1.6 per cent to 8.6 per cent, while the biggest increase was found in
occupations associated with the linen industry, found in only 1.1 per cent
of parishes in the sixteenth century, but 23.0 per cent by 1650–99.26 With
regard to women’s employment, it is possible that the proportion of
women and girls across England employed in spinning increased from
11.5 per cent in 1590 to 22.6 per cent in 1750.27
Research over the last forty years indicates that social and economic
change in early modern rural England was less dramatic than had
previously been assumed: farm size grew, more land was enclosed,
leasehold became more common, agricultural productivity increased, the
proportion of wage labourers increased and non-agricultural employment
became more important, but in many cases significant change had
already occurred by 1500, and more rapid changed occurred after 1750.
However, it is nonetheless clear that an important tipping point in rural
society, from one dominated by small farmers to one in which wage
labouring was the main occupation for men, did occur between the late
sixteenth and early eighteenth century. It is also clear that the period
between c. 1580 and c. 1640 was one of particularly rapid change and
social distress, during which land prices rose beyond the means of wage
earners and small farmers, and wages failed to provide an adequate
living.

Table 7.3 Estimates of crop yields: gross yields per acre.

Year Wheat Barley Oats

Norfolk England Norfolk England Norfolk England

1300–48 15.6 7.8 17.2 11.7 15.0 9.9

c. 1550 — 9.99 — 9.0 — 10.6

c. 1600 11.7 11.1 11.7 12.4 15.4 13.2

c. 1650 — 13.5 — 17.9 — 12.1

c. 1700 14.7 14.1 15.3 19.7 20.0 10.8

1750–70 25.5 15.5 30.9 26.5 38.3 23.3

1800 20–24 18.7 36 29.7 40.0 25.2

Sources: B. M. S. Campbell and M. Overton, ‘A new perspective of

medieval and early modern agriculture: Six centuries of Norfolk
farming c. 1250–c. 1850’, P&P, 141 (1993), 70; S. Broadberry, B.
Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton and B. van Leeuwen, British
Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), 97.

Mechanisms of Change
There are a number of competing models of economic development in
pre-industrial societies: demographic models stress the consequences of
population growth and decline; Marxist models emphasise the importance
of property rights and conflict between classes; neoclassical models
prioritise market forces and commercialisation in determining change over
time. While demography, class conflict and commercialisation are often
seen as separate models, the most effective explanations of change over
time combine elements of all three approaches.
The contours of population change in early modern England are
shown in Table 7.4. From a high point of perhaps 4.8 million in 1348 on
the eve of the Black Death, England’s population levels fell significantly
before beginning to grow again sometime between 1450 and the early
sixteenth century.28 From 2.4 million in the 1520s, the total had doubled
by the 1620s, and continued to grow to a peak of 5.4 million in the 1650s.
The late seventeenth century brought a slight decline to 5.0 million in the
1680s, followed by renewed growth to 5.4 million in the 1710s and 6.0
million by the 1750s. Thereafter, population grew rapidly to 8.7 million by
1801.29 Thus the high point in England’s medieval population before the
Black Death was not significantly exceeded until the mid eighteenth
century.

Table 7.4 Population totals, age at marriage and proportion never

married, 1524–1751.

Year Population Average age at Percentage of population

totals first marriage for aged 40–4 but never
(millions) women married

1524 2.4 — —

1551 3.1 — —
 Year Population Average age at Percentage of population
totals first marriage for aged 40–4 but never
(millions) women married

1576 3.4 — —

1601 4.2 — 6.7

1626 4.8 25.2 17.4

1651 5.3 25.6 23.6

1676 5.2 26.2 20.8

1701 5.2 26.0 24.9

1726 5.6 25.9 14.7

1751 5.9 25.0 10.7

Sources: E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S.

Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 134 and 614; E. A.
Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England
1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 260 and 568.

In relatively self-contained, organic economies, like that of early

modern England, population change is intimately connected to agricultural
production. As Thomas Malthus observed in his Essay on the Principle of
Population (1798) population levels could not exceed the supply of food
necessary to support that population. If the population began to outstretch
the food that could be produced by the agrarian economy, a ‘positive’
check of increased mortality via malnutrition, increased susceptibility to
disease or starvation resulted. This situation could be avoided by
‘preventative’ checks, which reduced fertility levels. In early modern
England, a powerful preventative check operated via marriage
conventions. A ‘north-west European household formation system’
existed in which couples married relatively late and set up a new
household at marriage, once they had acquired the wealth and skills
necessary to live independently from their parents.30 Late marriage and
the accumulation of wealth were facilitated by the fact young people
circulated between households, working as live-in servants and earning
wages before marriage. Ann Kussmaul estimates that 60 per cent of the
15-to-24 age group were employed as servants in early modern
England.31 As the population grew, real wages fell and property prices
increased, making it more difficult for young people to acquire the
necessary resources to marry and set up a household. This caused the
average age at first marriage to increase, and encouraged a larger
proportion of the population not to marry. As social conventions strongly
discouraged births outside marriage, the birth rate fell. This mechanism
can be seen in operation in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries when the average age at first marriage for women was as high
as twenty-eight in many parishes, and by 1701 a quarter of the population
reached their early forties without marrying.32
Robert Brenner’s Marxist account of England’s economic
development observes that population growth (or decline) can have
opposite effects depending on the nature of property rights and the
balance of class forces. He pointed out that in the medieval period
population growth led to the fragmentation of farms, as landholdings were
split to accommodate more people, whereas in the sixteenth century,
population growth led to engrossing, with farms increasing in size. Karl
Marx argued that in feudal, pre-capitalist societies the two main classes –
lords and tenants – were locked in conflict over the level of rent. It was this
conflict or ‘class struggle’ that determined who accumulated the profits of
farming, the main form of wealth produced by the economy, and it was
this, Brenner argues, that determined the course of economic
development. Class conflict between lords and tenants over the level of
rents and other payments, and land-use issues such as enclosure,
certainly existed in early modern England. And the consequences of the
(mostly) legal battles fought by lords and tenants over those issues were
of great significance for particular communities. However, Brenner argued
that tenants were the overall losers of these conflicts in the sixteenth
century, and this allowed landlords to create large leasehold farms worked
with wage labour. This account, borrowed from Tawney, has been shown
to be largely erroneous: on the whole customary tenants were quite
successful in defending their use-rights and terms of tenure, as argued
above.
Significant though it was, over-emphasis on the conflict between
manorial lords and tenants risks overlooking other types of conflict that
were inherent in early modern rural society. Subtenants (the tenants of
manorial tenants) suffered higher rents and less security of tenure than
manorial tenants, and their numbers swelled from the mid sixteenth
century onwards. Large farmers sought to keep labour costs down while
agricultural workers sought a living wage. When actual disputes over
enclosure or rents are studied, there is very rarely a clear division
between ‘modernising’ landlords on one hand, and impoverished tenants
on the other. Sometimes lords sided with the majority of tenants against
individual tenants who sought to enclose. In other cases, the tenants who
opposed higher rents or new tenures included wealthy gentlemen who
had purchased customary land. The shared resources and conflicting
economic interests of rural society created multiple tensions and alliances.
 Looking more closely at how the prices for different elements of the
agrarian economy changed over time in relation to each other can be
surprisingly informative (see Table 7.2). A combination of population
growth and monetary inflation is one explanation of why the price of grain
and land rose during the sixteenth century: with the population doubling,
less was available per person. But population growth does not explain
why land values had increased so much more steeply than wheat prices
by the mid seventeenth century. Instead, it is necessary to consider who
was participating in the land market, and what resources they had. In the
medieval period, the unfree status attached to peasant landholdings
discouraged gentlemen and townsmen from purchasing them. This placed
a ceiling on the price of land, and ensured land circulated only within the
peasantry. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, customary land no
longer held this taint, and was increasingly purchased and accumulated
by wealthy landowners. As land values outpaced the customary rents paid
to manorial lords, customary land became an increasingly attractive
investment, pushing land values still higher.
It is also important to note that variations in grain prices affected
different sections of the rural population very differently. It is clear enough
that when grain prices rose faster than wages, the standard of living of
wage labourers, who relied on purchasing bread, was adversely affected.
What is less commonly realised is that fluctuations in grain prices caused
by harvest quality had varying effects on different-sized farms. Good
harvests caused the price of grain to fall, and bad harvests caused it to
rise steeply. A small farmer with 10 acres might make a profit of £2 10s in
a normal year, after grain had been put aside for next year’s seed and
household consumption. If the harvest was 50 per cent better than
normal, profits increased slightly to £3, because although prices fell the
farmer had more to sell. If the harvest was 50 per cent worse than normal,
however, the small farmer fell into debt, making a loss of £13 17s. Not
only did he have no surplus to sell, wiping out his profits, but he also
lacked enough grain to feed his family, and therefore had to purchase
grain at very high prices. A large farmer with 100 acres might make a
profit of £70 in a normal year by selling grain. In a year with a very good
harvest and low grain prices, this profit fell to £48. However, in a year with
a bad harvest, when small farmers fell into debt, the large farmer could
still feed his household and make bumper profits of £110 12s by selling
his reduced surplus at very high prices.33 Bad years provided the
incentive and means for small farmers to abandon farming, and large
farmers to accumulate more land. Historians have struggled to find
widespread examples of manorial lords evicting small customary tenants.
The effects of bad harvests and rising land values combined offer an
alternative mechanism by which small tenants abandoned farming, farm
size grew over time, and the proportion of wage earners and those with
non-agricultural occupations increased.
In a subsistence economy the incentive is for farmers to raise as wide
a range of crops and livestock as possible in order to spread the risk of
crop failure and animal disease and provide varied consumption.
Elements of this strategy are evident in medieval England, with crops
grown in every locality. The switch towards a more pastoral economy in
early modern England was a movement towards greater specialisation.
Farmers in upland and western England, and other areas with poorly
drained soils, increasingly abandoned arable farming.34 To do so they
must have been sufficiently confident that they could buy the grain they
needed, and thus that England had an effective internal grain trade. In
some cases this confidence may have been misplaced: parts of north-
west England suffered from severe dearth and some deaths from food
shortage in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.35 On the
other hand, the great famine of 1315–18, in which an estimated 15 per
cent of the population of southern and eastern England died, was never
repeated.
Another way of viewing the extent of commercialisation is to consider
geographical scales of self-sufficiency. Peasant households are often
presented as self-sufficient; however, this mode of existence had already
died out by the date of the first detailed documentation of English rural
society in the thirteenth century. Instead medieval England was
characterised by a high degree of self-sufficiency within localities, defined
as village communities grouped around particular market towns, although
some foodstuffs and fuel were traded beyond this scope, for instance to
supply London. Wool was the main export. By the period 1500–1650 the
English economy was more regionally integrated, with a long-distance
internal trade in grain and livestock well established. Trade with
continental Europe increased: England exported growing quantities of
woollen cloth, while the majority of imports were also agricultural products,
most significantly linen and silk cloth, wine, dried fruit, and sugar.36 After
1650 there was another qualitative change in the nature of trade. England
became integrated into global networks importing calicoes from India and
sugar from the Americas, as well as expanding exports of woollen cloth.
These changes permeated rural England. Shops were rare outside
urban centres before 1600. Yet it is estimated that by 1750 there was one
shop for every 41.4 people in England, with almost as many shops per
person across rural southern and eastern England as there were in
London.37 Small rural shops sold local foodstuffs such as butter and
cheese, and English textiles, but also foreign goods that had rapidly
become everyday necessities: sugar, tea and tobacco. Many rural
inhabitants depended for their living on producing goods from the
international economy, particularly spinning and weaving textiles.
Agricultural profits benefited from the growing number of non-farmers
needing food. The self-contained English economy dependent on the
products of the land, as presented by Malthus and others, was further
undermined by the increased use of coal. English coal production
increased from 177,000 tons in the 1560s, to 24 times that amount in the
1750s (over 4 million tons). Coal replaced fuel such as wood and charcoal
which took up land, freeing land for other uses. Wrigley estimates that in
1700, when English coal output stood at 2.2 million tons, ‘to have
provided the same heat energy from wood on a sustained yield basis
would have required devoting 2–3 million acres to woodland’.38
The changing nature of rural society underpinned the increased
commercialisation of early modern England. In the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century the class of prosperous farmers, wealthy yeomen
and gentry, like Robert Loder and the Le Stranges, grew in size. They
rebuilt their houses, furnished them with an increasing range of goods,
and ate and dressed well. The number of wage earners also grew as
many small farmers lost access to land (or failed to acquire land in the first
place) and relied more heavily on wages. Out of necessity, rural
households with little land, such as that of Richard Wix, were heavily
dependent on the market. While many rural workers in the early
seventeenth century suffered the dire consequences of low real wages
and barely scraped a living, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century industrial production and foreign trade combined to improve
employment prospects and reduce the cost of purchased goods.

While it is almost impossible to measure changes in farm size over time,

the attitude towards small farms certainly changed. For late-eighteenth-
century commentators like Arthur Young, farms of 4 acres or less were not
farms at all, they were an irrelevance to the business of agriculture. For
Elizabethan legislators, 4 acres was the amount of land a cottager needed
to retain a degree of independence and avoid reliance on charity or crime.
In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Norfolk 4 acres was a peasant
landholding: on many manors the average size of landholding was
between 2 and 6 acres – having such a smallholding was the majority
experience. The old stories of social and economic change in rural
England between 1500 and 1750 stressed either the forcible
dispossession of the peasantry to create a new class of wage labourers or
triumphalist economic improvements in which enclosure removed feudal
inefficiencies and agricultural yields rose paving the way for England’s
industrialisation. New accounts are less clear-cut, and the fragility of the
evidence means that much is still open for further investigation. Rather
than landlords evicting tenants, the role of the land market and subtenure
loom large. Enclosure was not closely linked with agricultural
improvement, and the scale and motivations of enclosure before 1750
need careful reconsideration. While there is evidence of increased
agricultural productivity, it is less spectacular and more uneven than was
once supposed. The same can be said about the increasing number of
wage earners in rural England. Changing patterns of waged work in
agriculture and the growth in non-agricultural forms of rural employment
demand further research attention. The spread of village shops in the
eighteenth century demonstrates the emergence of a new form of
consumerism, dependent in part on imported goods, but the exact
progress of commercialisation, measured as the increased dependence of
rural households on purchased goods over time, is still unclear. After
1750, as Wrigley has convincingly argued, came the biggest rupture of all:
reliance on coal as an energy source meant that England ceased to be an
organic economy. From the 1790s England became a net importer of
food, and by 1841 the majority of England’s population was urban: it was
no longer an agrarian society and agriculture was just one type of industry
among many.

Notes

1 G. E. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts 1610–1620,

Camden Society, 3rd series, 53 (London, 1936).

2 J. Whittle, ‘The house as a place of work in early modern rural

England’, Home Cultures, 8 (2011).

3 C. Foster, Seven Households: Life in Cheshire and Lancashire 1582–

1774 (Northwich: Arley Hall, 2002), 142–71.

4 B. M. S. Campbell and M. Overton, ‘A new perspective of medieval

and early modern agriculture: Six centuries of Norfolk farming c. 1250–
c. 1850’, P&P, 141 (1993), 70 and 74.

5 C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in

the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 220.

6 E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1987), 170.

7 M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of

the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 75.

8 J. Thirsk, England’s Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History, 1500–

1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
9 T. Williamson, Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society,
Environment (Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2003).

10 C. J. Harrison, ‘Elizabethan village surveys: A comment’,

Agricultural History Review, 27 (1979).

11 J. Barker, ‘The emergence of agrarian capitalism in early modern

England: A reconsideration of farm sizes’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
Cambridge University (2013).

12 L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline of

family farming in England’, EcHR, 65 (2012).

13 A. J. Tawney and R. H. Tawney, ‘An occupational census of the

seventeenth century’, EcHR, 5 (1934), 47.

14 J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and

Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
236.

15 R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992), 208; R. C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in
Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
59.

16 Campbell and Overton, ‘A new perspective’.

17 S. Broadberry, B. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton and B. van

Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 84 and 97. The counties are
Cornwall, Durham, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk,
Worcestershire.

18 Ibid., 100–10.
19 Dyer, An Age of Transition?, 220.

20 C. Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness:

Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 283.

21 For national estimates of the number of wage labourers see Chapter

14 in the present volume, 317–318.

22 Muldrew, Food, 222.

23 Ibid., 250.

24 Ibid., 215, 217, 257.

25 Wrigley, People, Cities, Wealth, 168–71.

26 J. Patten, ‘Changing occupational structures in the East Anglian

countryside, 1500–1700’, in H. S. A. Fox and R. A. Butlin (eds.),
Change in the Countryside: Essays on Rural England, 1500–1900
(London: Institute of British Geographers, 1979).

27 Calculated from C. Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient distaff” and “whirling

spindle”: Measuring the contribution of spinning to household earnings
and the national economy in England’, EcHR, 65 (2012), 518.

28 Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth, 20. Other estimates put

the medieval high point at 5–6 million; see J. Hatcher, Plague,
Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan,
1977), 71.

29 E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield,

English Population History from Family Reconstitution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 614.
30 J. Hajnal, ‘Two kinds of pre-industrial household formation system’,
in R. Wall (ed.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).

31 A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3.

32 Wrigley et al., English Population History, 134 and 184–5; E. A.

Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–
1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 255 and 260.

33 Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 21.

34 Thirsk, England’s Agricultural Regions.

35 A. B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 1978).

36 C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England

1500–1700, Vol. II: Industry, Trade and Government (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 125.

37 H. Mui and L. H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century

England (London: Routledge, 1989), 40.

38 E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010), 37–9. The total area devoted to
arable agriculture in 1700 is estimated at 9.56 million acres; Broadberry
et al., British Economic Growth, 74.
 8
Urbanisation
◈

Phil Withington

In 1621 Robert Burton moaned that ‘The Low countries have three cities at least for one of
ours, and those far more populous and rich’, singular in their ‘industry and excellency in all
manner of trades’. England, in contrast, had ‘swarms of rogues and beggars, thieves,
drunkards and discontented persons, many poor people in all our Towns, Civitates ignobiles
as Polydore calls them, base cities, inglorious, poor, small, and rare in sight, and thin of
inhabitants’. In sum, ‘England … (London only excepted) hath never a populous city, and [is]
yet a fruitful country.’1
Until recently this depiction of English towns and cities has resonated with English urban
historians of the early modern period in at least three respects. First, just as Burton invoked a
depleted urban culture haunted by the spectre of poverty, so the prevailing interpretative
paradigm has been ‘crisis’.2 The thriving communities of the medieval era are understood to
have experienced cultural decline, economic trauma, and pronounced social stratification and
conflict during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.3 It was only after 1660 that an
English ‘urban renaissance’ is thought to have seen the rejuvenation of many older
settlements and the emergence of new industrial centres that broke the mould of the
traditional urban system.4 Secondly, just as Burton singled out London as the exception to
this rule, so historians have viewed the metropolis as an English urban anomaly – a place
that experienced its own problems but also had a distinct and, indeed, positive impact on
English society and economy more generally.5 The division of labour between metropolitan
and provincial historiography has only served to compound this sense of London’s
uniqueness.6 Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, just as Burton described a relative urban
deficit in England so ‘the urban’ is a less than conspicuous feature of English social
historiography. Peter Laslett did not regard towns and cities as a prominent part of ‘the world
we have lost’, describing early modern England as ‘a rural hinterland attached to a vast
metropolis through a network of insignificant local centres’. Even metropolitan London was
less ‘a civic site’, than a landscape of ‘village communities’.7
This chapter argues, in contrast, that early modern England was a more urban society
than has generally been acknowledged and that it became more so over time. As Burton
intimates, towns and cities undoubtedly faced challenges over the period. However, more
recent studies suggest that there were fair amounts of economic opportunity and affluence as
well as cultural fecundity and innovation.8 More to the point, while English towns and cities
themselves underwent considerable expansion over the period, they were also implicated in,
and often integral to, a wide range of practices, processes and identities that are not
generally recognised as especially ‘urban’. As a result, the full importance and burgeoning
extent of urbanism in early modern England is less appreciated than in the Low Countries or
Italy, where, as both Burton and Laslett note, cities were much more prominent as places and
urban culture more celebrated.
The argument takes its cue from Jan de Vries’s observation that urbanisation can be
understood in three ways: as ‘demographic’, or increased numbers of people living in cities
and towns; as ‘structural’, or the kind of institutions and activities situated in urban centres;
and as ‘behavioural’, or the kinds of attitudes and practices associated with urbanism
whether situated in towns and cities or not.9 In demographic terms alone, urbanisation was a
defining feature of the era: by 1700 the number and size of English urban settlements was
growing faster than in any country in Europe, and London, at the centre of a national and
international urban system, had become the continent’s largest city. But the structural and
behavioural aspects of urbanisation mean that its significance in England extended far
beyond the city walls. This is because many of the historical processes now associated with
early modernity depended on institutions that were primarily – if not uniquely – urban. This is
as true of commerce and the emergence of the early modern market economy as it is of
schooling, literacy, print technology and the communication of knowledge and ideas; of law
and litigiousness; of governance and the growth of the state; of transatlantic colonialism and
empire. All of these processes were rooted in and articulated through the English urban
system, even as they had national and international ramifications; but rarely is the urban
dynamic of these more general social developments recognised.
What follows suggests that these wider ramifications can be understood in three,
interrelated ways. First, the urban system played a connective role in English society that was
altogether more than the sum of its individual or collective parts. Secondly, the proliferation of
urban institutions – both ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ – was constitutive of more general social
and economic processes to a degree that belies their historiographical neglect. Thirdly, urban
culture was congruent with some of the key cultural trends and characteristics of the era, so
much so that the urban provenance or antecedents of these trends are often lost. These
connective, constitutive and congruent aspects of English urbanism were mutually reinforcing
and therefore difficult to disaggregate: people visited or lived in cities because of the
institutions and resources they provided; they learned and disseminated urban-based habits
and goods as a result. The connective, constitutive and congruent consequences of English
urbanisation nevertheless reveal the wider social, economic, political and cultural importance
of towns and cities long before the ‘urban renaissance’. They also point to a particular kind of
urbanism that is different from the Dutch and Italian models: one that is not distinct from other
kinds of social organisation, in the manner of the autonomous city state, so much as integral
to regional, national and imperial life – so integral, indeed, that it can often be invisible to
either the contemporary or the historical eye.

In 1500 just over 3 per cent of English and Welsh people lived in cities of over 10,000 people
or more – a larger proportion than in Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia; a similar proportion
to the much more populous France; a much smaller proportion than northern Italy, Belgium
and the Netherlands (Table 8.1 and Figure 8.1). By 1600 that figure had risen to almost 6 per
cent; by 1700 it was over 13 per cent; by 1800 it was over 20 per cent – this when the
national population rose from just under 3 million people to above 6 million people over the
same period. This rate of urbanisation remained similar to France until 1700, when the
French urban population reached a plateau of 9.2 per cent, declining slightly thereafter; it was
much higher than Scotland until the second half of the eighteenth century, and it completely
eclipsed rates of urbanisation in Scandinavia and Ireland. Comparison with urbanised regions
offers a different perspective again. Northern Italy and Belgium retained relatively large and
stable urban populations throughout the period; but England was proportionally more
urbanised than northern Italy by 1750 and Belgium by 1800. Indeed, of the countries grouped
here, only the Netherlands surpassed English and Welsh rates of urbanisation over the
period, and even these regressed in the eighteenth century.

Table 8.1 Urban percentage of total population, 1500–1800 (cities over 10,000).

1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800

England/Wales 3.1 3.5 5.8 8.8 13.3 16.7 20.3

Ireland 0 0 0 0.9 3.4 5.0 7.0

Scotland 1.6 1.4 3.0 3.5 5.3 9.2 17.3

 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800

Scandinavia 0.9 0.8 1.4 2.4 4.0 4.6 4.6

Netherlands 15.8 15.3 24.3 31.7 33.6 30.5 28.8

Belgium 21.1 22.7 18.8 20.8 23.9 19.6 18.9

Northern Italy — 15.1 16.6 14.3 13.6 14.2 14.3

France 4.2 4.3 5.9 7.2 9.2 9.1 8.8

Source: J. de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1984), 38–

40.

Figure 8.1 Population in towns over 10,000 as a percentage of entire population.

These figures show that the British Isles were unusual in their constant urbanisation
across the entire period. Moreover, in England and Wales this trajectory coincided both with
rapid national increases in population(between the 1520s and 1640 and again after 1750)
and periods of national stagnation and decline (most notably in the fifty years after 1650). Of
course, the threshold of 10,000 or more is a crude index of urbanism. Even if urbanisation is
understood purely in demographic terms then many urban settlements, especially in this
period, were much smaller than this. Neither does it give any sense of the hierarchy of
settlement within England and Wales, nor the proportion of population living across the urban
system. Table 8.2 attempts to provide some nuance by dividing urban settlements by
population size and showing the number of types, their aggregate population, and their
proportion of the national population between 1520 and 1750. Immediately striking are the
importance of London to English and Welsh urbanisation, particularly during the sixteenth
century, and the increasing prominence of smaller settlements, especially settlements of over
10,000 inhabitants, after 1600. Even as late as 1800 the metropolis accounted for almost half
the urban population of England and Wales.

Table 8.2 Cities in England and Wales by size of settlement, 1520–1750 (population figures
in 000s).

1520 1600 1700 1750

(no.) pop. % (no.) pop. % (no.) pop. % (no.) pop. %

London (1) 55 1.9 (1) 200 4.5 (1) 575 10.6 (1) 675 11

10,000+ (4) 40 1.4 (5) 55 1.3 (10) 143 2.6 (20) 346 5.7

5–9,999 (5) 30 1.1 (14) 85 1.9 (22) 145 2.7 (30) 210 3.0

2.5–4,999 (15) 45 1.0 (37) 120 2.2 (79) 245 4.0

Total 2,850 4,400 5,400 6,100

population
(no.) = number of settlements; pop. = population estimates; % = proportion of national
population.
Source: J. de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1984), 64.

E. A. Wrigley demonstrated long ago that the importance of the metropolis extended far
beyond its urban and suburban boundaries. Wrigley argued not only that England was unique
in sustaining demographic urbanisation throughout the early modern period, but that this
growth precipitated a host of economic, demographic and sociological changes that together
point to the deep urban roots of the Industrial Revolution. Economically these included the
formation of a national market, a doubling of agricultural production, greater demand for and
provision of raw materials (like coal and lead), the better provision of credit and commercial
facilities, improved transport networks, and higher real wages. Demographically, the realities
of urban morbidity insured a balanced regime in which population did not expand too rapidly
beyond available resources. Sociologically, it institutionalised what he styles ‘rational’ rather
than ‘traditional’ attitudes and behaviour, allowed new kinds of social mobility and social
groupings, and encouraged more fluid and emulative patterns of consumption. For Wrigley,
all of these urban-induced or urban-related changes help to explain England’s industrial ‘take
off’ in the second half of the eighteenth century.10
Wrigley’s ‘simple model’ is the obvious starting point for any consideration of the wider
significance of English urbanisation. The aim here is not to engage with its central hypothesis
– the deep urban origins of English industrialisation – so much as to backdate and historically
situate his story. Wrigley focuses on demographic urbanisation after 1650 because it is the
concentration of large populations in both London and the northern industrial cities that
precipitates economic modernity. What this focus misses, however, is that in the hundred or
so years before 1650 the metropolis was already becoming the burgeoning hub to an
increasing number of cities and towns within this system: that early modern urbanisation
involved the revivification, invigoration and expansion of medieval urbanism as well as the
emergence of what Ann Kussmaul styled new urban ‘agglomerations’.11
The geography of the medieval urban system is nicely captured by Charles Phythian
Adams’s depictions of ‘pre-modern’ England and Wales as fourteen ‘cultural provinces’.
These ‘cultural provinces’ were amalgamations of counties and ‘local societies’ that shared a
common cultural inheritance based on their ecology and environment; customs and dialects;
spatial propinquity; and, most importantly, water-borne transport networks by which goods
and people moved. According to Phythian Adams, rivers, estuaries and coastlines
‘orientated’ these provinces in particular directions and gave them their primary
characteristics, and he named them accordingly (see Figure 8.2).12 Far from being static and
immemorial organic entities, however, these provinces and local societies were defined by
geographical mobility both internally, in terms of quotidian movement and settlement over
short distances, and externally, in terms of regularised long-distance commerce, exchange
and migration according to their geographical orientation. Moreover, each cultural province
possessed an urban hierarchy that included provincial capitals, such as Norwich and
Chester; county towns and specialised urban centres, such as Yarmouth and Ipswich, or
Preston and Liverpool; and market towns and townships, such as Thetford and Wigan.
 Figure 8.2 The ‘cultural provinces’ of pre-modern England and Wales.
From C. Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural
Provinces and English Local History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), xvii. ©
C. Phythian-Adams 1996. Reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing plc.

Each of these types of settlement performed important roles within their locale and
together formed provincial urban systems that structured the mobility and commerce that
defined local and provincial life. On the one hand, therefore, cultural provinces formed distinct
‘countries’ in which towns and cities were integral to a local sense of identity and belonging.
On the other hand, local and provincial urban networks also connected with the national
urban system, through London, and also international trading systems, via both the
metropolis and the provincial ports.
The connective role and power of cities and towns that this suggests is most clearly
evidenced by the economic structures and developments that underpinned the early modern
growth of London. As Keith Wrightson argues, circa 1500 ‘the market’ already existed as
‘four overlapping spheres of commercial activity’. At the most basic level was ‘the intensive
small-scale dealing which took place among the inhabitants of an immediate locality’,
whether a lordship, village or town. A second sphere of activity ‘comprising rural–urban and
inter-urban trade at the level of the district, ‘country’ or sub-region’ centred on larger and
smaller market towns. These ‘market areas’ fed into a ‘third level of interconnection’: ‘trading
networks’ based first and foremost on provincial capitals that ‘tied particular countries into
regional and interregional systems of interdependence, and on occasion connected them
further with international networks of exchange’. It was through these networks that domestic
foodstuffs, raw materials, manufactured goods and luxury products circulated around the
country, and foreign luxury goods like wine, spices and fine finished fabrics were imported
and distributed inland. Finally, at the apex of these networks was London: like other capital
cities it was by far the largest market for domestic goods and services and the principal hub
for international trade.13
In the early sixteenth century, cities and towns experienced challenges precipitated by
the ‘ruralisation’ of certain industries – in particular cloth – whereby manufacturing began to
be concentrated in deregulated rural settlements rather than urban craft economies. This
trend itself represented a new kind of urban connectivity, as urban-based merchant capitalists
took advantage of cheap labour and the lack of regulation in rural pastoral areas to establish
new cloth-manufacturing districts. Certain towns and cities suffered as a result. In Yorkshire it
was West Riding townships like Leeds rather than established cities like York that became
centres of the textile industry. Elsewhere conglomerations of small towns and villages that
were incorporated into ‘putting out’ or ‘domestic’ systems of production engendered new
kinds of urban/rural interpenetration and relationships: in eastern Somerset and western
Wiltshire, in south-east Lancashire and the Kentish weald, on the uplands of north-central
Wales, and in the Stour Valley between Suffolk and Essex. By the middle of the eighteenth
century agglomerations of industrial townships – for example around Leeds, Halifax,
Sheffield, Birmingham, Sunderland and Manchester – had become as important as old and
new imperial ports like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow in reshaping the scale, weight and
culture of the English and Scottish urban systems.14
While this preference for deregulated rural manufacture over traditional craft production
set an important precedent for subsequent industrial development, it did not mark the demise
of the traditional urban system. On the contrary, from the middle of the sixteenth century it
began the sustained period of demographic growth outlined above, despite the pronounced
problems of both ‘background’ and ‘crisis’ mortality – always present and sometimes
catastrophic – that inevitably characterised urban living.15 Urban migration could be seasonal
or permanent, desperate or opportunistic, reactive or part of household strategies. It also
involved the thousands of immigrants who settled in London and the cities of the south-east
after the onset of Europe’s religious wars, bringing with them new skills and production
techniques. In the meantime the intensification of agricultural production and the
specialisation of urban manufacture saw the need for larger and more integrated markets.
Market towns were busier with goods and people, their hinterlands wider, their consumers
more sociologically diverse, their reach into the country deeper. In the meantime the greater
volume of long-distance transactions saw the popularisation of fiscal practices, such as inland
bills of exchange, and a proliferation of litigation in Westminster and urban courts when
transactions went wrong.16
The traffic and commerce of provincial capitals and the metropolis likewise intensified.
They facilitated the growing integration of regional economies and the more gradual but
cumulatively transformative expansion of overseas trade: first with the ports and entrepôts of
the Baltic, Iberia and the Levant from the 1570s; then with Asian cities and markets from the
early 1600s; and finally with the establishment of the American colonies from the 1610s.17
Urban centres connected and constituted each sphere of commercial expansion and
colonisation; and it was through the metropolis, provincial capitals and market towns back
home that the increasing volume of new commodities reached consumers.18 Moreover, the
emergence of the joint stock company as the preferred institution of global commerce
connected city and country in new financial webs of inter-dependency. Rather than citizen-
merchants forming regulated companies and undertaking to trade themselves, as was
customary in Europe and the Levant, stockholders from disparate backgrounds increasingly
invested in a company organisation, like the East India Company, which then oversaw the
business of salaried employees.19 In the meantime, ‘interlopers’ or non-company members
sought to trade independently of these corporate monopolies. Either way, traditional urban
communities were unable to dominate the profits of empire in the same way that they were
unable to control and exploit modern manufacturing.
Two modes of urban-based communication epitomised the connective importance of the
urban system. From the 1560s postal routes and towns created ‘corridors of inter-urban
communication and contact’ between the provinces and metropolis: whereas in 1566 two
postal roads connected London to Dover in the south and Berwick in the north, by 1605
Portsmouth, Penryn and Padstow (Cornwall), Barnstaple, Holyhead (via Birmingham),
Carlisle, Penrith, Dale (via Bristol and Swansea), Ludlow, Margate, and Sandwich were final
destinations. In the seventeenth century the system was formalised and timetabled, and was
‘crucial in shaping the social, political, and economic geography of England and Wales’.20
Equally indicative of the connective nature of early modern urbanisation are the coastal trade
and ports. Their increasing business is retained in port books: customs records for domestic
and overseas trade that were introduced for 122 maritime centres in 1565.21 Diachronically
these records show the steady increase in both the volume and the variety of domestic and
overseas trade before 1650 and the rapid proliferation of both thereafter.22 They also suggest
that while London remained the primary urban hub – as both the main destination and point
of redistribution for domestic and overseas goods – provincial urban systems like the Bristol
Channel could also be transformed by the burgeoning weight of traffic.23
Witness statements from a probate dispute in the city of York in 1681 illustrate the extent
and social depth of urban connectivity by the second half of the seventeenth century. The will
was that of Elizabeth Smith and the dispute centred on whether her son, William, was alive to
inherit her modest fortune. William’s existence was in doubt because nearly twenty years
earlier, in the 1660s, he had been transported at the instigation of his parents to ‘Barbados or
Virginia’ on account of his ‘Extravagant and riotous ways of living’. That the colonies should
already be somewhere for the Smiths to send their profligate son is one indication of
England’s extended urban connections: William was accordingly shipped from York to Hull to
London and so on to Bridgetown. The ship, however, never arrived; and a second intimation
of England’s urban reach is the account of the York mariner Peter Buttery spending the next
ten years enquiring after William in the many ports he visited – from Bordeaux to La Rochelle
to Stockholm.
But it was the provenance of the rumour that William had in fact survived his journey that
really brings home the quotidian mobility of early modern lives. Catherine Beckwith recalled
that in 1678, ‘being then at London on board a vessel on the River Thames at Billingsgate
designed for York … she heard one by the name of William Ellis of Kingston-Upon-Hull call of
one William Smith saying “What cheer?’’’. Intrigued, Beckwith ‘made enquiry (hearing Smith
answer) what Smith he was and where he was born’. Smith answered ‘I am William Smith
son of York and was born in St Andrew Gate’, and ‘he inquired how his father and mother did
and desired this examinant to present his duty to them and told her if time permit he would
send a token to his father and mother by her but being at some distance could not … being
then bound for Virginia’. Beckwith did, however, take note of the mark that confirmed, for her,
his identity as her friend’s son: a scar on his cheek accidently given him as a child by his
mother.
This casual description of an ordinary woman waiting to sail back to York from London
points to the everyday impact of maritime traffic. Even more striking is what William allegedly
did next. Dorcas Semore deposed that Elizabeth had visited her house three years earlier
and asked her to read a letter that ‘she had lately received from her son William’. It transpired
that he was ‘married and very well and desired his said mother to make much of herself and
withal had sent her a five shilling piece’. Whether the letter was sent from Jamestown or
London is unclear. What it does show is that the prospect of ordinary householders
exchanging letters and tokens nationally or internationally was well within the bounds of
possibility, even when the recipient had to ask a neighbour to read it for her.24

The connective impact of urbanisation stemmed from the intensification of inherited practices
and technologies – to do with markets, for example, or shipping – as well as the development
of newer configurations and infrastructures such as industrial agglomerations and postal
routes. This mutable continuity also characterised English structural urbanisation and the
manner in which urban institutions came to shape and constitute ostensibly national
processes and developments. This is particularly true of the early modern state, which
appropriated medieval urban institutions in order to regulate manufacture and commerce
nationally, and also to cope with the social consequences of capitalisation and
commercialisation intimated by Burton.25
Early modern people inherited a very clear sense of the urban based on medieval
notions of corporatism, citizenship, freedom and commonweal. Conceptually this legacy
involved independent householders participating in the formal urban community: becoming a
burgess, freeman or citizen, and undertaking public roles and responsibilities in return for
economic liberties, such as the right to practice a trade and access to common lands.
Institutionally, medieval urbanism centred on the councils, assemblies, courts and offices in
which public decision-making was organised and implemented and communal resources
protected.26 Before the Reformation, associational bodies like guilds, chantries and
fraternities supplemented the formal community: these were often powerful and wealthy
institutions that could exert decisive power in a town. Moreover, townsmen often shared
urban space or were subordinate to powerful institutions outwith their formal and informal
communities: for example, bishoprics, abbeys and monasteries; colleges and universities;
royal and noble lordships.
An important assumption of the ‘crisis’ interpretation of early modern urbanism is that
over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century this medieval inheritance was
denuded and destroyed. Not only did the Reformation hit towns badly, leaving them
institutionally threadbare and culturally bereft, but the political powers, autonomy and
community of townsmen were compromised both by external encroachments and by new
oligarchic hierarchies of power.27 More recently, however, an alternative narrative of structural
urbanisation, as opposed to degradation, has emerged. This centres in the first instance on
the surprising fate of the formal urban community: the institutions upon which urban freedom
and citizenship traditionally depended. First, from the early decades of the sixteenth century
burgesses and citizens increasingly petitioned for charters of incorporation from the Attorney
General in London. These expensive and valuable documents enhanced the power and
status of citizens by formally recognising in law urban communities and the corporate
institutions, resources and powers they claimed. In so doing, they also acknowledged the
inter-dependency of urban and central authority and the lines of communication upon which
this relationship rested. This facilitated, secondly, the systematisation of the institutions,
procedures and offices of urban citizenship. Over time the nomenclature of mayor, aldermen
and common councilmen became standard; the appointment of legal officers like recorders,
clerks and high stewards became normal; elective and bureaucratic procedures were
regularised; and the extension of governmental responsibilities was accepted. The result,
thirdly, was an amplification of public powers within the urban community. On the one hand,
citizenship became a palimpsest for state power: it became standard for aldermen and
mayors to serve as magistrates, and the number of cities and towns able to elect
parliamentary representatives increased significantly over the period. On the other hand, the
associational diversity and material wealth that characterised the late medieval town were not
so much destroyed by the Reformation as repositioned within the body of what
contemporaries styled ‘city commonwealths’. Indeed, as Robert Tittler has shown, one of the
main reasons behind incorporation was the need for citizens and freemen to ratify and
guarantee this transfer of resources.28
This resulted, fourthly, in a certain homogenisation of urban space and association. Just
as the urban corporation increasingly formed an umbrella institution under which guilds,
companies and other citizen bodies legitimately functioned, so the dissolution of religious
institutions and liberties gave citizens the opportunity to exert greater authority over the urban
environment (indeed, by the seventeenth century only the bishoprics survived as serious
governmental rivals).29 But this process also led, fifthly, to social reconfigurations and conflict
within urban communities. Affluent elites – especially merchants, wholesalers and wealthier
artisans – exhibited ‘aristocratic’, ‘patrician’ or ‘oligarchic’ pretensions that justified their
monopoly of civic governance and enhanced their claims to social status and superiority.
Others resisted and in some instances espoused a ‘plebeian’, ‘popular’ or ‘democratic’
position in order to defend what they presented as ‘customary’ rights, liberties and access to
resources.30 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was a huge proliferation in the
number of towns and cities that became formally incorporated or experienced at least some
of the infrastructural developments associated with ‘city commonwealths’ – a process that
Tittler nicely associates with the rise of the town hall.31 Far from witnessing the death of
medieval corporatism, that is, the early modern period saw its revitalisation and expansion
into a national corporate system of city commonwealths with London as its hub. The scale
and extent of this process is suggested by Figure 8.3, which shows not only how intensive
English incorporation was compared to Scotland after 1500, but also how it became a tool of
colonisation in the Ulster plantations in the 1610s. Thereafter the reproduction of chartered
and incorporated settlements across the Atlantic became a crucial dynamic of English
colonial settlement.32

Figure 8.3 Rates of incorporation in England, Wales, Scotland and Ulster, 1540–1640.
From P. Withington, ‘Plantation and civil society’, in É. Ó Ciardha and M. Ó Siochrú
(eds.), The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2012), 70.

The revitalised structures of medieval urbanism were a constitutive feature of the early
modern state and political economy. Some of the key parliamentary statutes of the era
originated in governmental practices and experiments in larger cities like London and
Norwich.33 The procedures of apprenticeship as outlined in the definitive 1563 Statute of
Artificers marked one such translation from the urban to the national; the series of acts
establishing parochial poor-relief between the 1570s and the 1600s another.34 That these
traits of urban citizenship were successfully inscribed in statute reflected, in turn, the
burgeoning presence of MPs representing urban constituencies in the House of Commons.
The proportion of urban MPs was four-fifths by 1641. Likewise, the implementation of
legislation provincially depended in large part on the corporate system. Although historians of
early-modern state-formation have almost entirely neglected its urban dimensions,
contemporaries did not. The Council of Ireland in Dublin rehearsed a familiar argument in
1552 when it explained to the Privy Council in London that it was ‘Cities and towns from
whence all Civil and good orders sprang: and thereby doth chiefly continue through the
universal world where any Commonwealth remains’.35 More prosaically, Michael Dalton
observed in The Country Justice that there were three types of justice of the peace (JP): a
small number of senior clerics appointed by ‘act of Parliament’; the large number of county
justices who were commissioned by the Lord Chancellor (and who have monopolised
historiographical attention); and the significant number of JPs appointed ‘by Grant made by
the king by his Letters Patent’: ‘as Mayors and chief officers in diverse corporate towns’.
Dalton explained that the crucial difference between county and corporate JPs was that while
the former could be relieved of their office by simply having their commission removed, the
king was unable either to select or to discharge the latter ‘at his pleasure’. Indeed, once an
urban community was granted the right to select its magistrates no rival authority could be
commissioned to serve within its jurisdiction until the charter was legally revoked.36 That the
Tudor and early Stuart regimes proceeded to empower urban communities despite this
remarkable discrepancy reflects the symbiotic relationship between city and state in the
century after 1540 – a degree of trust and reciprocity reflected in the proliferation of urban
parliamentary constituencies. Equally revealing is the chronic instability and partisanship that
overtook the state after 1640, when urban communities were politicised and consecutive
regimes challenged the magisterial autonomy and parliamentary influence of citizens by
attacking their charters.37 No ruler distrusted or attacked the privileges of citizens and
freemen more than James II; his eventual abdication suggests, among other things, just how
integral their place in the commonwealth and state had become.38
Urban apprenticeship was likewise fundamental to the political economy of the period,
not least because the 1563 Act applied the rules practiced in London nationwide. Apprentices
were contracted to a master for seven years, during which time they worked in exchange for
instruction and could not marry. In urban communities, successful completion after the age of
twenty-four gave apprentices access to freedom and the right to establish their own working
households. Stephan Epstein and others have accordingly argued that by effectively
providing skills, knowledge, and human capital the institution contributed to the technological
innovation and economic growth that precipitated industrialisation.39 In contrast, Sheilagh
Ogilvie claims that apprenticeship and the guilds more were generally protectionist,
exclusionary and an economic hindrance: it was the relative weakness of English corporatism
compared to the Continent that explains its economic success. The answer probably lies
somewhere between. On the one hand, it is incontrovertible that guild organisations in
general and apprenticeship in particular remained foundational economic institutions in
England until the second half of the eighteenth century. As late as 1700, ‘over 9 per cent of
English males became apprentices’ in London alone and provincial centres continued to
serve their hinterlands.40 Whatever its consequences, apprenticeship structured economic
training either in the regular contracts recorded in urban archives or as a template for the
innumerable unrecorded arrangements made outwith the corporate system.41 On the other
hand, recent work suggests that, in terms of its practice, apprenticeship was a much more
open, fluid and flexible institution than its formal rules suggest. Urban apprenticeships were
characterised by trial periods and early terminations; absenteeism was common, as was
movement between masters, trades and cities in the course of an indenture. Completion
rates were surprisingly low, with four years an alternative preferred period of training to
seven; and in London and Bristol at least, only 40 per cent of apprentices progressed to
citizenship.42 All this suggests that, like early modern magistracy, apprenticeship was
characterised by discretion and the need to make the institution work for all parties involved:
apprentice, family, master, craft. Perhaps more importantly, it also points to the cumulative
creation of a mobile and skilled labour market of journeymen and servants capable of working
for others or setting up house beyond the boundaries of the corporate system – not least in
the newer manufacturing agglomerations that characterised the period.43

In important respects the story of the English state was also one of urbanisation: it developed
through, rather than despite, the structures of medieval urbanism. This was concurrent with a
second set of changes involving not so much traditional urban citizenship as the
efflorescence of cultural and professional services – in education, in law, in communications,
in sociability – that were located primarily, if not uniquely, in cities and towns. The urban
system inculcated the massive expansion of England’s urban educational infrastructure: in
the petty schools; in ‘free’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools; and in the university colleges,
academies and legal Inns that proliferated from the late fifteenth century.44 It facilitated the
well-documented increase in legal provision and legal business that made England in the
later sixteenth and early seventeenth century a more litigious society than the contemporary
USA: in the borough courts, in the central courts in London and their provincial outlets
meeting in county towns (quarter sessions, assizes and extraordinary commissions), and in
the ecclesiastical courts centred in cathedral precincts and the universities.45 It was integral
to transformations in communication and representation: most obviously in the establishment
of the metropolitan-based print trade but also in the emergence of professional theatre
companies and a vernacular literary and playing tradition.46 Finally it was in the urban system
that the less-heralded expansion of licensed and commercial sites of consumption and
association occurred. This latter development – sometimes known as the ‘town’ in
contradistinction to the traditional ‘city’– involved at once the growing nexus of traditional
venues such as alehouses, taverns and inns, and the opening, from the middle of the
seventeenth century, of newer establishments like coffeehouses, assembly rooms and gin-
houses.47 From the 1590s in London, and subsequent decades in provincial capitals and
market centres, these institutions structured new modes of urbane (and not so urbane)
behaviour.48 It is for these reasons that Peter Borsay describes an ‘urban renaissance’ by the
last quarter of the seventeenth century, whereby provincial urbanity had become intrinsic to
the formation of polite and civil society for the gentry and middling sorts more generally.49
Viewed in these terms it is not difficult to see how urban culture was congruent with
cultural patterns and trends more generally. Institutional intensification and innovation across
the urban system were the most obvious marker of these developments: more schools and
colleges; busier law courts and taverns; new theatres, booksellers and coffeehouses: districts
outwith the traditional city known for their cultural and legal services. There were sociological
ramifications, too. On the one hand, the producers and professionals who manned and ran
these institutions, and who were versed in the skills and expertise associated with them,
formed a growing and influential section of the urban populace. Schoolteachers, clerics and
academic fellows; the host of legal occupations, from clerks and solicitors to barristers and
judges; publishers, translators, authors, hawkers; impresarios, victuallers, vintners, cooks –
together they formed an emergent social grouping that did not fit at all easily in the
established social order, and that demarcated the interface between town and country in new
ways. On the other hand, the groups attracted to use or visit the institutions – whether as
students and apprentices, litigants and readers, groundlings or gallants, visitors and shoppers
– not only made for more heterogeneous urban environments. The wider appropriation of
urban services and resources could not help but impact on the generations of rural
inhabitants attending schools, bringing suits, reading almanacs, listening to sermons or
visiting a tavern. In this respect it was not just the urbane gentry and intelligentsia who
embodied, as it were, the emergence of the town, but also the host of urban and non-urban
inhabitants who appropriated the services and expertise located in the urban system.
Literacy rates are perhaps the most obvious marker of urban congruency, with
literariness and legalism not far behind.50 Whether they corroborate Wrigley’s model of a
move from ‘traditional’ to ‘rational’ society is much less obvious. Certainly the career of a
man who in many respects personifies the extent of English urbanisation by the middle of the
seventeenth century was no harbinger of Weberian modernity. John Lilburne hailed from a
lesser gentry family in Durham with interests in Sunderland industry; attended the free
grammar schools in the market town of Bishop Auckland and provincial capital of Newcastle;
was apprenticed to a London wholesale clothier with extensive trading and religious
connections; imported illegal books from Amsterdam into London and became a polemicist
himself (encountering the wrath of the law in the process); was set up as a London brewer by
his Sunderland uncle while keeping company with London separatists and marrying Elizabeth
Dewall, daughter of a London merchant; was involved in the ‘apprentice’ riots against
Strafford in 1641 and a year later enlisted to fight for Parliament. Even before he became a
propagandist of that quintessential London movement – the Levellers – Lilburne was formed
and empowered by the urban system.51
The resonance among urbanism and the two cultural tendencies with which this chapter
concludes likewise suggests a more complicated story than Wrigley tells. The first of these
was the associational basis of urban life and the proliferation – rather than diminution – of
associational possibilities within urban environments over the course of the period. Such
possibilities included the formal corporate organisations of city commonwealths: the common
councils, assemblies, guilds and companies that provided the institutional basis of urban
citizenship. They included the proliferation of informal sociability and more formal clubs,
societies and voluntary associations that gathered in the drinking places and other social
spaces of the town. They encompassed parochial communities and, over the course of the
seventeenth-century, the proliferation of dissenting churches, congregations and ‘parties’. By
the eighteenth century they also included working men’s combinations and middle-class
subscription groups. In a very real sense, that is, early modern urbanism was defined by the
capacity for collective action and agency, or what contemporaries came to describe as
‘society’; and urbanisation marked the proliferation of this capacity both within urban
environments and as a template for purposeful association elsewhere.52 But these
associational habits were also rooted in the more perennial webs of relationships and
emotional ties – the friendships, enmities, kinship, neighbourliness and reciprocities – that
were simply inherent to the propinquity of urban living. Such bonds were never better
revealed than when they were most challenged. As Wrightson has found, ‘the response to
the plague of 1636 in Newcastle confirms the power and resilience of the associational life of
the city’. Rather than a disintegration into the kind of apocalyptic dystopia envisaged by
plague treatises, the catastrophe prompted the ‘refusal of people who shared a space,
knowledge of one another (good and ill), and obligations to one another (reluctant or willing)
to renege upon those commitments’.53 The same sense of society was revealed by the host
of witnesses drawn into the dispute over Elizabeth Smith’s estate. In the course of their
respective testimonies they described a range of behaviours – relating to commerce, retail,
literacy, travel and litigation – characteristic of, though not unique to, urban living. Elizabeth’s
female friends in particular also demonstrated a palpable sense of neighbourliness rooted in
everyday propinquity, familiarity and reciprocity.
The second congruence is that between urbanism and the assortment of social values
and skills known as ‘civility’ or ‘honesty’.54 The appropriation of classical norms of behaviour
and conduct is one of the defining characteristics of the early modern period and has been
well charted by Anna Bryson, who uses behavioural handbooks to trace the gradual shift from
a culture of medieval courtesy to early modern civility and politeness.55 Yet what is missing
from Bryson’s account is the role of English urbanism in popularising these norms and
translating them into practice. While this absence is unsurprising given English urbanism’s
more general historiographical neglect, it is historically incongruous given the urban
provenance of civility. As Bryson points out, in classical texts ‘civil’ was primarily a term of
political description associated with the ‘city’ and ‘citizen’, carrying connotations that have
subsequently been applied to ‘civic’. These semantics made sense to the Italian
Renaissance writers who first introduced the concept into European vernaculars, as it ‘fitted
easily enough with the predominantly urban context of their own culture’. But Bryson
suggests that it was nonsense in a place like England, which, ‘like France, was a country
dominated by a rural aristocracy’. Indeed so convinced is Bryson that there was no aspect of
English society that could ‘in any concrete sense, be defined as “civic”, still less
“bourgeois’’’, she is forced to contradict the claims of the first English proponents of civility
that she cites.56 However, subsequent work on everyday notions of ‘honour’, ‘credit’ and
‘civility’ has shown that permutations of these values were widely promulgated, enforced and
appropriated in the century or so after 1550. The codes of conduct and discourse that
characterised the institutions of urban citizenship have been found to be expressly civil in
nature: the expansion of the corporate system standardised and disseminated these norms.57
The civil sociability of the town and the urban renaissance were likewise predicated on
emulating classical conventions.58 But perhaps most strikingly, the increasing recourse of
ordinary male and female householders to urban-based courts of civil and ecclesiastical law
in order to protect and contest their honour, credit and reputation was one of the defining
features of the age.59 Not only were these courts situated in cities, and so drew thousands of
plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses into the urban system, but urban inhabitants were also
much more likely to become embroiled in legal business than their rural counterparts.60 The
widespread and complicated appropriation of these legally enforced norms has been found to
be fundamental to social relations and economic exchange and ‘is likely to have informed
processes of identity-making rather than simply recorded them’.61 It also encapsulates the
centrality – and invisibility – of urbanisation to early modern English society.

When Robert Burton described the pauperism and paucity of England’s urban culture in 1621
he was looking to answer a specific question: ‘Our land is fertile we may not deny, full of all
good things, and why doth it not then abound with Cities, as well as Italy, France, Germany,
the Low Countries?’ For Burton the answer was simple: ‘idleness is the malus Genius of our
nation’. Drawing on classical authorities, Burton argued that ‘fertility of a country is not
enough, except art and industry be joined unto it’. And for Burton urbanism – or the lack of it
– was the proof of the pudding.62
In certain respects Burton was not far off the mark. In crude demographic terms, England
was much less urbanised that either the Low Countries or Italy in 1621. Nor is there any
doubt that just as English towns and cities had faced significant economic and social
challenges over the last hundred years, so Italian, Dutch and Flemish cities were the cradles
of the most advanced political economies in Europe. What Burton could not appreciate is that
the absence of many large, populous and autonomous cities did not reflect the lack of ‘art
and industry’ so much as their national distribution by other means. On the one hand,
manufacturing and extractive industries were increasingly concentrated in agglomerations of
households that were outwith the traditional urban system. On the other hand, this system
had itself been revitalised as a hub for local, national and international commerce and
services, as a constitutive feature of the early modern state, and as a cultural crucible. Burton
himself was educated at the grammar school in the market town of Nuneaton (founded 1552)
and lived his adult life in Oxford; but like John Lilburne, his persona is taken to be English
rather than urban. Economically connective, politically constitutive, culturally congruent: it
was not the decrepitude of English urbanism so much as the integrative power of English
urbanisation that characterised early modern English society. In this respect it is perhaps best
to leave the last word to William Smith. The York merchant William Bell deposed in 1676 that
he was drinking at York River in Virginia ‘in one Mrs Leake’s house there’ when ‘one William
Smith by name came into his company’. Bell recalled that when he asked this forced migrant
‘what Smith he was [Smith] told him he was a Yorkshire man born and was born at York’.63
Like the childhood scar observed by Catherine Beckwith, the city lived with him still.

Notes

1 R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 52–3.

2 P. Clark and P. Slack (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Coventry
and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979).

3 P. Clark, ‘“The Ramoth-Gilead of the Good”: Urban change and political radicalism at
Gloucester’, reprinted in J. Barry (ed.), The Tudor and Stuart Town (Harlow: Longman,
1988).
4 P. Clark and P. Slack (eds.), English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in
the Provincial Towns, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

5 E. A. Wrigley, ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and

economy, 1650–1750’, P&P, 37 (1967); I. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations
in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); P. Griffiths, Lost
Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City 1550–1660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).

6 P. Griffith and M. Jenner (eds.), Londonopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History
of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

7 P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost – Further Explored (London: Taylor and Francis,
2000), 56–7.

8 J. Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort’, in J. Barry
and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England
1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant
England: Religious Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988), 28–60; R. Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English
Urban Community, 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); R. Tittler, The
Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth:
Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).

9 Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1984), 10–17.

10 Wrigley, ‘A simple model’, 65–8; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change:
England and the Continent in the early modern period’, reprinted in P. Borsay (ed.), The
Eighteenth Century Town (Harlow: Longman, 1990), 79–80.

11 A. Kussmaul, A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 138–40.

12 C. P. Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and

English Local History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), 9–23.

13 K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 93–7.

14 Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth’, 78–9; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 107–8.

15 P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990); K. Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 28–42; Wrightson, Earthly
Necessities, 164.

16 C. W. Brooks, ‘Interpersonal conflict and social tension: Civil litigation in England, 1640–
1830’, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J. M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 357–99; C. Muldrew, The Economy of
Obligation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), Chapter 8, 338–44.

17 Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 176–7.

18 N. Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy 1660–
1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); D. Hussey, Coastal and River Trade
in Pre-Industrial England: Bristol and Its Region 1680–1730 (Exeter: Exeter University
Press, 2000).

19 Thanks to William Pettigrew for discussions on this point.

20 M. Brayshay, ‘Royal post-horse routes in England and Wales: The evolution of the
network in the later-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries’, Journal of Historical
Geography, 17:4 (1991), 377, 387.

21 Hussey, Coastal and River Trade, 7.

22 T. S. Willan, The Inland Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 26–41;
T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1959), esp. Chapter 3.

23 Hussey, Coastal and River Trade, 78–99.

24 Borthwick Institute, CPH 3497, 1681, Mabson C. Richardson and Saltmarsh.

Depositions of Grace Harrison; Richard Moore; Peter Buttery; Catherine Beckwith; Dorcas
Semore.

25 The main accounts almost entirely ignore the urban. See M. Braddick, State Formation
in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2000).

26 Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 85–99.

27 Collinson, Birthpangs, 56–9.

28 Tittler, Reformation, 57–103.

29 Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism?’, 108–9.

30 For a nice example see ‘Government and politics in Ludlow, 1590–1642’, Transactions
of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, 56 (1957/8), 282–94; Withington, Politics of
Commonwealth, 66–75.

31 Tittler, Architecture and Power, 14–16; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 18–24.

32 M. Peterson, ‘Boston pays tribute: Autonomy and empire in the Atlantic world, 1630–
1714’, in A. I. Macinnes and A. H. Williamson (eds.), Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–
1714: The Atlantic Connections (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

33 J. Bishop, ‘Utopia and civic politics in mid-sixteenth century London’, HJ, 54 (2011).

34 Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 156; C. Minns and P. Wallis, ‘Rules and reality:
Quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern England’, EcHR, 65:2 (2012),
556.

35 TNA, SP 61/4/5, Council of Ireland to the Privy Council, 27 January 1552 (Dublin). I’d
like to thank Jennifer Bishop for this reference.

36 M. Dalton, The Country Justice (1619), 10.

37 P. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns 1650–
1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

38 P. Withington, ‘Public discourse, corporate citizenship and state-formation in early

modern England’, AHR, 112:4 (2007).

39 S. R. Epstein, ‘Craft guilds, apprenticeship, and technological change in preindustrial

Europe’, Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998); J. Humphries, ‘English apprenticeship: A
neglected factor in the first industrial revolution’, in P. A. David and M. Thomas (eds.), The
Economic Future in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); J. van
Zanden, ‘The skill premium and the “Great Divergence’’’, European Review of Economic
History, 13 (2009), 139–40.

40 C. Minns and P. Wallis, ‘Rules and reality: Quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in
early modern England’, EcHR, 65:2 (2012), 559; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 165; C.
Galley, The Demography of Early Modern Towns: York in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 134–6.
41 T. Leunig, C. Minns and P. Wallis, ‘Networks in the pre-modern economy: The market
for London apprenticeships, 1600–1749’, Journal of Economic History, 71:2 (June 2011),
421.

42 Minns and Wallis, ‘Rules and reality’, 562, 567, 570, 574–6.

43 Thanks to Patrick Wallis for talking about these issues.

44 L. Stone, ‘The educational revolution in England, 1560–1640’, P&P, 28:1 (1964).

45 C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The Lower Branch of the
Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 79.

46 E. S. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1980); T. Rutter, ‘Issues in review: Dramatists, playing companies, and
repertories’, Early Theatre 13:3 (2011).

47 I. W. Archer, ‘Social networks in Restoration London: The evidence of Samuel Pepys’s

diary’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); P. Withington, ‘Intoxication and the early
modern city’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013); B. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The
Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005).

48 M. O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); P. Withington, ‘Intoxicants and society in
early modern England’, HJ, 54 (2011).

49 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 311–20.

50 Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer, 66–7, 176; D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order:
Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 119–22; C. Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship, social mobility and the middling sort,
1550–1800’, in Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort; C. Brooks, ‘Professions, ideology and the
middling sort in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries’, in Barry and Brooks,
Middling Sort.

51 Withington, Politics of commonwealth, 13, 80, 122; A. Sharp, ‘Lilburne, John (1615?–
1657)’, ODNB, online edn, October 2006, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16654
(accessed 8 December 2014); P. Withington, ‘Urban citizens and England’s civil wars’, in
M. Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 323–4.

52 Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, 85–8; P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800:
The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); P.
Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful
Ideas (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 102–34.

53 Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer, 160–1.

54 Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship’, 77–8; P. Withington, ‘Honestas’, in H. Turner (ed.), Early

Modern Theatricality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

55 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); A. Bryson,
From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).

56 Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 60–1.

57 Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism?’, 106–7; J. Barry, ‘Civility and civic culture in early
modern England’, in P. Burke, P. Harrison and P. Slack (eds.), Civil Histories (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); Withington, ‘Public discourse’, 1028–34.

58 O’Callaghan, English Wits, 6, 29; Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 257–63.

59 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation; L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and

Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); A. Shepard,
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

60 A. Shepard, Accounting for Self: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16–17.

61 Ibid., 23–4.

62 Burton, Anatomy, 52–3.

63 Borthwick Institute, CPH 3497, 1681, Mabson C. Richardson and Saltmarsh, deposition
of William Bell.
 9
The People and the Law
◈

Tim Stretton

Introduction
During the sixteenth century, surprising numbers of English men and
women fell under the spell of the law. By the early eighteenth century
the love affair was fading, but the attachment and habits of mind
remained strong, and it is difficult to overemphasise the law’s
influence on the nation in the decades and centuries following 1500.
Law courts, legal agents, legislation and proclamations
constituted the main sinews of the emerging centralised state, and
the willingness of ordinary English women and men to engage with
the law, seen in record levels of criminal prosecutions and an
explosion of civil litigation, proved central to the success of the whole
state-forming process. Inter-personal litigation and a growing
reliance on legal instruments contributed to a rise in contractual
thinking that altered conceptualisations of personal and professional
interactions and relationships. In literature, legal subjects saturated
English Renaissance drama and developing courtroom concepts of
proof and probability helped shape new narrative forms. Most
obviously of all, laws and lawyers were at the centre of the great
constitutional upheavals of the age, from the legally engineered
reformation of religion and Henry VIII’s and Edward VI’s attempts to
appoint their successors, to the lawyer-dominated parliaments that
challenged and then executed King Charles, and later framed the Bill
of Rights that supposedly made the Glorious Revolution glorious.
Participants in these and other political dramas drew heavily from a
deep well of legal language and concepts that resonated in the
public imagination, including Magna Carta, habeas corpus, the
ancient constitution and the true liberties of the freeborn citizen.
Scholars used to examine each of these parts of the law in isolation.
Now – thanks to decades of pioneering work in a range of related
fields – social, as well as cultural, political, economic and gender
historians are beginning to realise the astonishing extent to which
law in all its varied forms permeated early modern society and acted
as a key determinant of change.

Legal Structures
Almost all of the defining elements of the English justice system
were already in place in 1500. The monarch presided at the apex of
the legal system, as the font of justice, supposedly protecting the life,
liberty and property of English subjects and dispensing mercy to
temper the harshness of the criminal law. The Privy Council
regulated the nobility and sought to shape behaviour through
proclamations and prosecutions. Parliament passed statutes to
supplement the existing common law and the largest central courts
in London’s Westminster Hall, King’s Bench and Common Pleas;
administered those laws; and heard appeals from the vast array of
lesser courts that operated on manors and in cities, towns and
boroughs all over the country. Judges went on circuit twice a year to
hear common law actions at the assizes held in major urban centres
and market towns, alternating venues year by year to deliver justice
to as many communities and districts as possible. Supporting this
fusion of regional and central justice, ecclesiastical authorities
operated their own elaborate jurisdiction dealing with marriage,
property inheritance and matters of sin, and local magistrates held
quarter sessions four times a year. For matters that ecclesiastical
and common law courts could not adequately address, the other
court in Westminster Hall, Chancery, engineered equitable solutions
tailored to individual circumstances. This framework altered little over
the period, but the structures it supported and the roles it played
underwent significant transformations between 1500 and 1750.

Litigation Growth and Its Effects

The sixteenth century witnessed a number of innovations, including
the development of new prerogative courts: such as Star Chamber,
which provided subjects with relief against misuses of power and the
crown with a means of controlling its political enemies, and the court
of Requests, which sought to extend equitable relief to the less
powerful. However, the major catalyst for change during this century
was a quickening of flows of legal business in existing jurisdictions.
Beginning in earnest around 1550, the English experienced the
fastest and largest growth in levels of litigation in recorded history.
The number of cases initiated in the two largest common law courts
grew from just over 2,000 cases a year in 1500 to over 23,000 cases
a year by 1600, and continued expanding in the decades prior to the
disruptions of the 1640s. The drop during the civil wars was
temporary and litigation levels remained high until the last decade of
the seventeenth century, when they fell away sharply. Surveying
central court litigation from the year 1200 to the present day, 1640
appears to have been the high point, in terms of per capita litigation,
and 1750 the low point.1
An even greater number of legal actions proceeded through
England’s local jurisdictions: the customary courts of rural manors,
and the borough and mayors’ courts in towns and cities (in addition
to the criminal prosecutions that will be discussed later). In Kent, for
example, in the year 1602 at least 183 residents participated in legal
actions in Queen’s Bench and 117 in Chancery, but 1,208 or more
involved themselves in legal actions in local hundreds and manors or
urban boroughs and liberties. The cathedral city of Canterbury alone
had six different courts, hearing over 580 cases in that year. Yet in
per capita terms, this caseload was actually below average for the
period. Courts in Shrewsbury in Shropshire at this time heard around
1,100 cases a year when the population was approximately 5,500,
the equivalent of one case for every five residents. The borough
court of Romney Marsh in Kent heard 52 suits in 1602 when the
town’s population was only about 400 – the equivalent of one case
for every four residents – and the average for the whole of Kent in
1602 was at least one case for every five inhabitants.2 One
speculative estimate puts the total number of lawsuits in England
and Wales towards the end of the sixteenth century at over 1 million
cases a year when the population had not yet reached 4 million.
Given that each case required at least two parties, and often
involved multiple plaintiffs or defendants, it soon becomes apparent
that almost everyone in the country had direct experience of the law,
whether as litigant, witness, juror or curious observer.3
The reasons for this dramatic expansion were social and
economic more than legal. From about 1520, slow but steady
population growth after a century of stability produced a rise in
demand for goods and foodstuffs that produced inflation and helped
fire an expansion of credit. Sales of interests in land also increased,
especially after the dissolution of the monasteries, placing an even
greater premium on capital and credit. More and more people
formalised financial, property and sales agreements through legal
means, both written and unwritten, and went to court if these
arrangements or interactions went wrong.
In purely economic terms, an escalation in sales and extensions
of credit produced a proportionate growth in defaults and lawsuits,
but the relationship was not simply arithmetical. The majority of suits
in the seventeenth-century Chancery, for example, represented not
new causes or quarrels, but complaints about existing suits
proceeding at common law. In other words, rising litigation levels
helped to produce a culture of law, as knowledge of the law spread,
aided by the rapid expansion of the legal profession, and as one
outraged defendant after another became an adamant plaintiff in
another lawsuit. Commentators throughout the period frowned on
legal actions for breaking Christian codes of neighbourly charity, but
as going to law increasingly became an acceptable response to
dissension, litigation and the rule of law cemented themselves at the
heart of the English psyche.
Church court defamation and common law slander actions also
reached record levels between 1580 and 1620 (the majority of the
former brought by women), revealing concerns about honour and
reputation and the fragility of personal credit during a time of large-
scale migration from rural areas to urban centres. Neighbours who
sued each other for verbal slights almost invariably knew each other,
but many of those who felt driven to defend their credit had an eye to
their economic standing and honest character in a world where
markets and marketing were becoming increasingly anonymous.
The cultural effects of recourse to law on such an
unprecedented scale spread far and wide. In terms of governance, a
significant proportion of local court activity was administrative in
nature, dealing with the election of officers, the regulation of trades,
the maintenance of infrastructure and responses to poverty. On a
more central level, the assize justices on their twice-yearly circuits
schooled local populations through their charges or instructions to
grand and trial juries, highlighting current crown concerns and driving
home the principles and ideological importance of obedience to law.
They then reported local problems and disaffections back to their
superiors and royal officials in Whitehall and Westminster. This
process proved as essential to the maintenance of good
governance, centralised power and the growth of civil society as the
reading of proclamations in town and village markets and squares, or
of sermons from the pulpit.
The linkages between law and politics became even stronger
with the dramatic expansion of the legal profession and a growing
recognition in intellectual circles of the ‘scientific’ qualities of legal
reasoning. Critics were quick to lambast lawyers as ‘pettyfoggers
and vipers of the commonwealth’ but men with legal training soon
became influential figures in local and central circles of governance,
serving as stewards on manors, as sheriffs and Justices of the
Peace (JPs), and making up the largest single grouping in the House
of Commons. It is telling that at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, of the sixty Kentish men acting as JPs, mayors and jurats,
forty-two had served as MPs.4
Sheriffs, messengers and litigants helped consolidate the law’s
power and reach as they criss-crossed their counties and braved the
roads to and from London, carrying and serving the parchment writs
that signalled court proceedings. Courts issued writs to get parties
into court; to proceed to the issue, amend the proceedings or have a
cause transferred from one court to another; to call jurors, ensure
their attendance or find replacements; to ensure the losing party
accepted a court’s decision; to attach the defendant’s pledges; and
to collect the damages the court awarded. The officials, litigants and
allies carrying these writs discussed their legal burdens in alehouses
and turnpike taverns, adding yet more links to the spreading chains
of legal communication.
The diffusion of legal parchment and paper had other effects, as
more and more individuals employed legal instruments to organise
their lives and transactions. Increasing numbers of apprentices put
their signatures or marks to indentures that set out the terms of their
apprenticeships, especially after the 1563 Statute of Artificers
mandated apprenticeships or service for unmarried adolescents
‘living at their own hand’. In response to changes in land
conveyancing, growing numbers of married couples arranged
jointures rather than rely on customary widow’s rights to dower, and
many chose to set down these arrangements in marriage
settlements drawn up by scribes or lawyers. The elites had long
been accustomed to creating ‘uses’, the forerunners of trusts, to
control the descent of their lands, but after the passing of the Statute
of Wills in 1540 individual choices set out in wills and testaments
further displaced traditional customs of inheritance. The single most
pervasive instrument, however, was the conditional bond, made
famous by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice: a sealed
document in which parties set down their agreement with a money
penalty for default that could be sued for as a debt. Hundreds of
thousands of English women and men turned to bonds to secure all
manner of transactions and activities, and the penalties could be
severe – typically double the amount of a loan, even if the term was
only a few weeks or months. Liability was strict, meaning that
penalties could be claimed even if payment was only a day late, or if
the bondholder had repaid the loan in full but had neglected to have
the bond cancelled. Equity courts could intervene to provide relief in
severe cases, but for a growing number of bondholders, failure to
pay the penalty resulted in imprisonment for debt – a severe enough
result to evoke, if not to mirror, the pound-of-flesh penalty in
Shakespeare’s play.

The Rise of Contract

Reliance on all of these legal instruments familiarised whole
generations of English men and women with the effects of legal
terms and conditions, and of the dangers that could lurk in lawyers’
fine print. These were early days in the evolution of the modern law
of contract, but it is possible to argue in the broadest terms that the
English were becoming accustomed to thinking contractually, a point
brought home by the emergence in the seventeenth century of the
concept of the social ‘contract’ that borrowed heavily from ideas and
vocabulary associated with marriage contracts. In inheritance, the
customary practice of primogeniture increasingly gave way to
personal choice (in the form of bequests in wills, and terms and
conditions in family settlements), and provision for widows relied less
on dower (a life interest in a third of a husband’s property) and more
on jointures (specified interests in land or annual payments during
widowhood). Dower was a customary right that applied universally,
whereas jointures were contractual interests that had to be arranged,
a shift with varied effects depending on a woman’s resources,
knowledge and access to legal representation.
 The nature of litigation also tended to shift focus away from
customary practices and community habits of mind towards
individuals. Although many unprincipled litigants used legal process
to dominate opponents with fewer resources, lawsuits could also
undermine hierarchies of status and wealth, and challenge unfair
uses of power and authority. In terms of social status, the majority of
plaintiffs sued their equals or social superiors. Some apprentices
sued their masters and mistresses; middling-sort property owners
sued members of the gentry; and tenants on manors brought suits
against lords, ladies and stewards, challenging exploitative practices
and so weakening local powerbases.
Litigation could also confront patriarchal divisions. Around a
third of legal actions in most English jurisdictions involved at least
one woman, and women made up between 10 and 15 per cent of
litigants in most courts, a proportion that rose as the sixteenth
century gave way to the seventeenth. Female litigants challenged
male adversaries in court in ways that had previously been
unthinkable. In a direct blow to ‘coverture’, the common law principle
that a husband’s legal identity and property rights ‘covered’ or
subsumed his wife’s, some married women even managed to sue
their husbands in equity courts, seeking assurances of their personal
safety during periods of estrangement and asserting control over
property that coverture customarily gave to their husbands.
Observers rightly identified litigation as a symptom of the failure
of neighbourly relations, but the opportunities it gave people from all
but the poorest backgrounds to protect their interests contributed to
an emerging notion of individual rights. Resources remained key –
the litigant with the most financial, social and legal assets enjoyed a
huge advantage – but a rhetoric that placed the virtue of the legal
cause above the status of the contestants provided a significant
alternative to existing hierarchical registers of power.
Alongside this capacity to act as a solvent against tradition,
interpersonal litigation also brought huge pressure to bear on
conceptions of personal trust, during an age when financial credit
and moral or personal credit were inextricably intertwined. What
might be characterised as a legal loss of innocence proved to be
painful for many parties, but as Craig Muldrew has shown, despite
the unprecedented number of personal clashes at law, and the
resulting erosion of friendships and professional relationships, the
commitment to the values of Christian neighbourly charity and the
ideal of personal trust they supported held firm. And while criticism of
lawyers and of legal officials was common, the target of the near
constant chorus of angry voices was the corruption or failings of
particular lawyers or judges rather than the shortcomings of the
system itself. Virtually no-one shared the desire of Dick the Butcher
in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II to ‘kill all the lawyers’ and pull
down and replace the whole legal structure.5
As the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth,
disillusionment with the heartache and cost of litigation led to a
precipitous drop in the number of lawsuits that still has not been
adequately explained. It appears that growing numbers of people
sought alternative ways of conducting business and dealing with
indebtedness and disagreements that did not require frequent
confrontations in court. Credit instruments emerged that offered
greater flexibility than conditional bonds and a means of transferring
debt without recourse to court. Falling demand led lawyers to
increase their fees, and the contracts, documents and pleadings they
framed became increasingly technical and more expensive. A typical
Chancery bill from 1500 includes a single paragraph, whereas those
from 1800 fill multiple tabletop-sized pages. The combination of
these effects created barriers that made the law less and less
accessible to ordinary people, in terms of its alien nature as well as
its costs.

Crime and Criminal Justice

Alongside the rise in interpersonal litigation, the century from 1540 to
1640 witnessed a dramatic focus on regulation, with law-making
bodies intensifying efforts to influence or control the behaviour of the
general population. Parliamentary statutes, royal proclamations and
an avalanche of regulations sought not only to combat crime through
statutory extensions to the common law, but also to license all
manner of trades and occupations and clamp down on disruptive or
immoral behaviours including drunkenness, vagrancy, profanity,
blasphemy, gambling and idleness. These further expressions of the
state- (and Church-) building impulse met with varied success, but
rarely fulfilled their makers’ ambitions. Attempts to impose
restrictions on dress and diet based on social status, for example,
soon revealed the limits on law as a mechanism of social
engineering. In this and other instances, the co-operation of the
community proved vital, in particular the sheriffs, magistrates,
mayors, aldermen, churchwardens and constables charged with
putting orders and regulations into practice. These officials proved
adept at using legal means to maintain order in their communities,
and while some favoured harsh enforcement, others moderated their
zealousness according to local conditions and the mood of the
community. From the regulation of alehouses and drunkenness to
the policing of profane oaths, the will and desires of central
authorities were ‘tempered by the realities of local social relations’.6
These realities proved particularly complex and fraught in
London during its long history of sustained population growth
beginning in the mid sixteenth century. Aldermen, JPs and parish
officials shared a strong impulse to maintain order, or at least to
contain disorder, but the sheer scale of the problems attending high
migration and mobile populations in the jumbled streets of this port
capital produced dramatic variation from ward to ward and
magistrate to magistrate. Local efforts to reform and increasingly to
regulate the city’s vagrant poor filled the hospitals of Bridewell and
Bethlem, transforming them into houses of correction where
punishments included whipping and hard labour, while the vast bulk
of legal charges – for petty theft and other misdemeanours – were
dealt with without recourse to criminal trials.7 The interplay between
residents and under-resourced local and central authorities could
resemble a loud and at times chaotic dance, as individuals and
groups shifted their civic allegiances and made choices based on the
acceptance, appropriation, modification or rejection of elite orders,
aspirations and values. The same neighbours who fought Church
court battles over defamation informed on or covered for each other
as they used, evaded or fell victim to the law.
London represents a unique case, but the reactive nature of the
public policing initiatives in the capital that had to be responsive to
local conditions and concerns can be detected in other attempts by
state and Church authorities to control behaviour. A good example,
to set against blunter attempts to impose elite power, is the evolution
of penal laws targeting Catholics, which occasioned fraught
conversations about personal responsibility and public order. The
Elizabethan regime famously prioritised political obedience over rigid
religious conformity and introduced fines for non-attendance at
divine service. The problems created by the peculiar status of
married women, however, tied parliamentarians in knots. The original
legislation targeted heads of household, on the assumption that they
were responsible for the conformity of their families and servants, but
staunchly Catholic elite women who organised celebrations of mass,
aided and abetted seminary priests, and helped the ‘old’ religion not
just stay alive but grow, became a thorn in the side of lawmakers.
Attempts to extend existing legislation to apply to married women
came up against practical problems created by the common law
rules of coverture. These automatically transferred a wife’s money
and moveable property to her husband, leaving her no means of
paying a fine.
From at least the 1570s, the solution of the Commissions for
Ecclesiastical Causes, tasked with enforcing the reformation of
religion, was to issue recognisances against the husbands of
Catholic wives. These bonds put the onus on husbands to exhort
their wives (or their whole families) to conform, on pain of a money
penalty for non-compliance. This use of ‘binding over’ raised
significant revenues, but husbands protested that it amounted to
punishing one person for the crimes of another and complained that
they could not be held responsible for their wives’ beliefs. Recusant
wives, meanwhile, played upon their diminished status to evade
prosecution, as Elizabeth Moninge did in the early 1590s when she
declared that ‘she is a wife and under subjection and therefore of
noe abilitie to give ayde’ to Catholic priests. In seeking a long-term
statutory solution, some members of Parliament favoured
imprisonment as the punishment for married women recusants, but
as one MP objected when debating the 1610 bill, ‘I hold this remedy
as bad if not worse than the disease.’ Final resolution only came
when Parliament retained imprisonment for married women but
introduced the possibility of a husband paying a fee of £10 a month
to purchase her freedom.8 This measure increased the crown
revenues resulting from recusancy, but as with the use of
recognisances, the laws failed in their objective of having
Catholicism die on the vine.

Criminal Prosecutions
Where royal and ecclesiastical authorities met with greater success
was in the accommodation of private prosecutions of crime and
antisocial actions that could be labelled sinful. As the civil courts
filled with litigation, so criminal and ecclesiastical court caseloads
swelled during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In
political circles the maintenance of order was of paramount
importance, reflected in the breathless language of the burgeoning
statutes outlawing the supposed catalysts of disorder. Statutes not
only created new felonies, but limited the application of the
increasingly anachronistic legal fiction of benefit of clergy, which
allowed convicted male felons to escape the death penalty if they
could ‘prove’ they were members of the clergy by passing a literacy
test. The English legal establishment also fulminated against the
dangers of crime and disorder in published judgments,
commentaries and charges to juries. Yet state officials, such as the
Attorney General, initiated a relatively small proportion of criminal
prosecutions, and the record levels of prosecutions witnessed
between 1580 and 1620 did not result from elite campaigns against
criminal activities. Once again, the drivers of this growth were
ordinary subjects seeking remedies or relief, either as victims of
crime or as temporary local officers charged with the presentment of
offences. Royal and Church officials took seriously the obligation to
provide legal services, but it was the people of England, from all but
the lowest social ranks, who sought out those services in record
numbers.
The ideological underpinnings of the criminal law are well
known, laid bare in the common law’s identification of the theft of
goods worth more than a shilling as a felony, attracting forfeiture of
property and the death penalty, while violent physical assault was
merely a misdemeanour attracting a fine. However, the changing
patterns of criminal prosecutions over time are revealing. For the
reasons John Walter highlights in the next chapter on ‘Authority and
Protest’, the same population growth that produced economic
change and inflation prompting the rise of civil litigation also created
a significant growth in poverty. This helped inspire various forms of
social protest and it also appears to have contributed to the rise in
criminal prosecutions, reflecting both a growth in the commission of
certain crimes, such as thefts, especially during desperate times
brought on by harvest failures, and heightened anxiety about the
threat of crime. The precise extent of crimes committed is impossible
to discern, but it is undeniable that during these years of social,
economic and religious upheaval more offences of all descriptions
came before the courts in the decades leading up to the 1640s,
peaking sharply in the 1620s.

Homicide, Violence and the Emergence of

Manslaughter
Looking at long-term trends, it is clear that prosecutions for homicide
declined between the medieval and modern periods. However, that
decline was neither steady nor even, and indictments for homicide
rose from the closing decades of the sixteenth century, reaching
significant peaks in the 1590s and especially the 1620s. State
executions of guilty felons followed a similar path, and in Cheshire in
the 1620s there were on average 110 homicide indictments and 166
executions a year, when the population was probably no more than
80,000.9 Killing during these unsettled years, in the form of murders
and executions, was more frequent than during any decade of the
preceding century or any time since.
After the 1640s there was a perceptible decline in prosecutions
for homicide and for almost every other category of serious crime
and offence. The Devon assizes, for example, heard around 250
cases a year between 1598 and 1640, but fewer than 40 cases a
year between 1700 and 1710. In seventeenth-century London,
homicides and other crimes against the person fell faster than crimes
against property, which then began to rise again in the eighteenth
century, suggesting shifts in sensibilities and behaviour in an
increasingly commercial world of production and consumption.
However, this increase in the prominence of property crime has not
been so clearly detected in the rest of the country and it appears that
growing political stability, state resources and levels of policing
together produced a world in which fewer crimes were prosecuted
and perhaps one in which fewer crimes were actually committed.
Questions remain, however, about the relationship between
decreasing prosecutions for assault and homicide and how violence
was (and should be) defined. There is no conclusive evidence, for
example, that incidents of domestic violence declined over this
period, but as the inflicting of physical harm became more
unacceptable, greater numbers of husbands resorted to confining
their wives against their wills, whether at home or in institutions, and
refusing them necessities, a process that broadened the behaviours
that we would label abuse.10 Over the whole period the percentage
of homicides that occurred within households rose – a trend that has
continued to the present day. It is tempting to read this rise as clear
evidence of an intensification of emotional attachments within
marriages and families over time, but the totals these percentages
are based on tell a more complicated story. Actual numbers of
domestic homicides declined over time; it is just that homicides
between unrelated parties declined faster, suggesting a change in
attitudes to casual violence and advances in medical science that
prevented victims of violent assaults from dying from their injuries
more than a pronounced deepening of the emotional intensity of
familial relationships. Overall, physical acts of violence did diminish,
but further investigation is required of the shifting boundaries
between violence and violation, and of changing attitudes to different
manifestations of aggression, hostility and cruelty.
Alongside a growth and then subsidence in the number of
indictments for inexcusable killings, there was a cultural as well as a
legal shift in conceptions of homicide as a crime, seen most clearly
in the formalisation in the sixteenth century of the categories of
manslaughter and murder. The penalty for manslaughter remained
death, but the sentence could more easily be evaded, whether by
seeking a pardon, or by claiming benefit of clergy or pregnancy; or
on the grounds that the accused killer had acted spontaneously, ‘in
hot blood’, rather than with malice aforethought. In the seventeenth
century this process of delineating differing categories and severities
of homicide continued, with the addition of various provocation
defences. Intervening when a family member was under attack,
responding to assaults that compromised a person’s honour, fighting
off someone unlawfully depriving another person of their liberty, or
killing a man caught engaging in adultery with one’s wife all came to
be recognised as extenuating circumstances that could be taken into
account at sentencing. None of them justified homicide, but they
provided courts with grounds to excuse killers from the death
penalty, and they did so by shifting attention from the state of mind of
the accused to the contributory behaviour of the victim.

Gender and Crime

The categories of manslaughter and provocation described above all
bear interesting signs of gender difference, grounded as they are in
conceptions of masculinity and male honour. In Galen’s model of the
human body, which dominated medical understanding until the
seventeenth century, females were considered colder than males,
making it harder for women to claim they acted out of ‘hot-
bloodedness’. In fact, courts, and the population at large, usually
associated female murderers with ‘cold-blooded’ killings that
attracted the severest penalties. Similarly, the sexual double
standard and gendered conceptions of honour ensured that the
provocation defence a husband might claim if he killed his wife’s
lover did not apply to a wife if the roles were reversed. In these and
other instances, focusing attention on gender is transforming
understandings of the experiences of men and women both as
perpetrators and as victims of crime. Women, then as now, made up
smaller proportions of accused criminals, but long-held suppositions
about the characteristics of female offenders when compared with
their male counterparts have recently been called into question.
Research on London after the Restoration reveals that women made
up at least a third of Old Bailey defendants accused of property
crimes, rising to a majority between 1690 and 1713.11 Evidence from
seventeenth-century Cheshire suggests that female criminals did not
restrict themselves to petty theft and proportionately were just as
likely as men to be indicted for committing grand larceny. Females
also figured prominently in assault cases, often using knives and
fists as weapons, belying long-held assumptions that women
preferred verbal to physical violence.12
The classifications some historians employ help to explain a
tendency to under-report the number and seriousness of indictments
for crimes committed by female offenders. Homicide statistics, for
example, regularly exclude deaths resulting from witchcraft and
infanticide. This exclusion is understandable, for the purpose of
comparing early modern with modern crime rates, but it is a
distinction that does not exist in the records and would have made
little or no sense to people living at the time. To early modern eyes
female murderers were female murderers, and they figured large in
the popular imagination through crime pamphlets that
sensationalised female killers as monsters.
The idea that judges and juries showed lenience to female
offenders, acquitting them in greater numbers than men and sparing
more of them the death penalty out of paternalistic (and patronising)
notions of chivalry, also appears misguided. Women may have been
indicted less often than men for committing homicide, but those
indicted were far less likely than men to have their killings defined as
manslaughter, and in Cheshire a greater proportion of women than
men indicted for homicide received death sentences. As Krista
Kesselring affirms, ‘women were vastly overrepresented amongst
cold blooded killers’.13
Some women escaped conviction for felonies, and more female
than male offenders received pardons, in part because benefit of
clergy was unavailable to them for most of the period. However, if
there is a pattern to be found it is in marital status or life situation
rather than gender. The Old Bailey Sessions Papers reveal that
mothers with dependent children evaded execution more often than
single women (just as later in the eighteenth century married women
might be transported with their guilty husbands). The thinking was
predominantly pragmatic rather than sexist or sympathetic and the
chivalry thesis appears to be largely an invention of twentieth-
century historians.
Instances of leniency or compassion also need to be set against
the parts of English law that betray raw discrimination, such as the
1650 law that made adultery a felony carrying the death penalty, but
only for women, and the 1624 ‘Act to prevent the murdering of
bastard children’ that made it a crime to conceal the death of an
illegitimate child. This law produced a rare and blatant reversal of the
presumption of innocence that lies at the heart of English criminal
law by presuming guilt unless the concealers (almost invariably
unmarried women) could prove their innocence. More complex
undercurrents of gender bias can be detected in the law of rape.
Authorities consistently regarded rape as one of the most heinous
felonies and took it very seriously – in 1602 Sir Edward Coke and his
colleagues doggedly pursued a rape prosecution through Star
Chamber over the course of many months – but indictments were
rare and successful prosecutions rarer still, with only around 10 to 12
per cent producing guilty verdicts.14 The problem was the rigid
standard of evidence the law demanded and a reluctance to send
accused rapists to the gallows unless their guilt was unequivocal. It
is hard not to conclude that the failure of these cases resulted in part
from a privileging of men’s word over women’s, yet at the same time
community members and judges did not always equate acquittals
with innocence. In a trial at the Old Bailey in 1675, for example, the
court acquitted Edward Coker of raping an eleven-year-old girl
because of the lack of the ‘evidence the law requires’, but then
convicted him of assault and fined him the substantial sum of £16
13s 4d.15

Exemplary Justice, Exemplary Mercy and

Popular Participation
The paradox of English justice in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was that a growth of offences attracting the death penalty
produced not a rise but a fall in the number of successful
prosecutions and executions. The more that MPs railed against the
dreadfulness of particular crimes, the more that constables,
magistrates, witness, judges and juries worked to spare the lives of
individuals accused of committing those crimes.
Parliamentarians and commentators observing this divergence
between prescribed justice and actual practice lamented the
inefficiencies of the system. Douglas Hay, however, has argued quite
elegantly that this slippage was in fact a key element in the system’s
success. A regime lacking the resources required to solve crimes,
capture perpetrators and maintain order through armed force had
always made deft use of its control of three interrelated levers: terror,
majesty and mercy.16 The brutality of the justice meted out at public
executions – especially the hanging, drawing and quartering
reserved for treason convictions – was intended to act as a powerful
deterrent to others in the crowd and the community. The
orchestrated majesty of the occasion, and of the assizes and trials in
Westminster Hall that produced the verdicts, harnessed rituals,
symbols and speeches to imbue the justice system with an aura of
power, mystery and divine authority far exceeding the actual
resources at the state’s disposal. Finally, the selective application of
penalties and the pardoning of selected convicted felons provided an
alchemy that could give the crown a reputation for mercy and
fairness, draw gratitude from convicted felons and (ideally)
transmute rebelliousness into deference. The theatricality of
pardoning, seen in reprieves delivered at the gallows, heightened the
majesty of the law, and the need for pardons grew as the number of
statutory felonies expanded in and after the sixteenth century, as
many of them excluded the possibility of claiming benefit of clergy.
The provision of mercy therefore constituted a flexing of the royal
prerogative that enhanced royal power and authority, through the
deployment of the crown’s dispensing power to override statutes that
sought to ensure that sentences of death were carried out.
 This application of available resources by elite officials was
shrewd rather than simplistic, couched in the rhetoric of good order,
obedience and deference as an antidote to chaos. Assize justices
used their charges to juries to encourage the transformation of elite
ideology into universal norms out of their desire to maintain a
bulwark against violence, theft and disorder. The coercive goals of
the Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian regimes did not result from a crude
conspiracy hatched by men of property, but from a coalescing of
interests that could ebb and flow between elite groups or over time,
as the deep divisions of opinion over law and judicial independence
during the 1640s, and 1670s and 1680s, make clear. Their efforts
proved successful because of the numbers of English men and
women who acknowledged the extent to which the system delivered
what it promised, bringing suspected offenders to justice and
maintaining a semblance of order in uncertain times.
Popular acknowledgement of the benefits of the rule of law was
crucial, given the reliance of the justice system on community co-
operation. People from all backgrounds reported and prosecuted
crimes and appeared as witnesses at trial; members of the
community acted as constables; yeomen and gentlemen served on
grand and trial juries in the complex process that governed the path
from accusation to verdict and sentencing. Each of the individuals
involved could exercise discretion, observable in witnesses who
chose to turn a blind eye to certain offences or offenders, constables
and magistrates who decided not to assist a prosecution, and jurors
who reduced the value of stolen goods to attract a lesser penalty or
risked judicial sanction by voting to acquit an offender they thought
was guilty.17
Individuals who exercised their discretion in these ways showed
their own support for exemplary justice and exemplary mercy,
achieved through unofficial as well as official means. It was not just
crown officials, in other words, who conspired to execute recalcitrant
repeat offenders and the ringleaders of rebellions, while letting other
accused felons or traitors go free. Jurors played a role in many of
these decisions and they joined other members of society in seeing
the merits of inconsistent prosecution and sentencing in a range of
different settings. The fates of women accused of felonies at the Old
Bailey, for example, appear to have depended on the women’s life
circumstances, marital status and demeanours as much as on their
supposed crimes. Those that showed remorse and exhibited humility
were more likely to go free than women who showed defiance, and
as pointed out above, courts often proved more willing to execute a
felon without a spouse or children than those with dependants. In
these cases the sympathies of jurors and judges aligned, in not
wanting to leave hungry widows and orphans to burden poor-relief,
or indirectly to punish wives or husbands for the sins of their
spouses.18
The vital role that non-elites played in sustaining the criminal
justice system, especially by pursuing prosecutions, does not
diminish the importance of the three levers of terror, majesty and
mercy in maintaining legal as well as political order. This can be
discerned from those instances where authorities misapplied them.
In 1685, for example, James II and his justices made a series of
decisions in the aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion that
undermined rather than reinforced popular commitment to the rule of
law. First of all army officers promised troopers 5s or the forfeited
goods of each rebel they apprehended, with the result that ‘the
militia hunted their quarry like game’, implicating over 1,300 rebels.
Chief Justice Jeffreys and his colleagues then set out to try these
suspects in less than four weeks, in the infamous ‘Bloody Assizes’.
Regular trials would have taken months to complete so Jeffreys and
his colleagues encouraged those accused to plead guilty and to give
confessions implicating their accomplices, implying that they would
receive mercy. However, that mercy never came. In the first weeks
81 were hanged, drawn and quartered, and most of the rest were
sentenced to the same fate. Around 170 of these were executed and
a further 70 or so died in prison awaiting execution. Only a handful
received a full pardon and the king marked 850 or more of the
remainder for transportation to the West Indies, parcelling them out
to royal favourites to be sold to planters for £10 to £15 a head.
This was brutal rather than exemplary justice. Executioners
performed the hangings and mutilations in thirty-seven different
localities across Devon and adjoining counties, and revolted the local
populations rather than ensuring their loyalty and obedience,
especially given the absence of exemplary mercy.19 The aftermath of
these callous prosecutions helped to hasten the demise of King
James II and contributed to procedural changes that permitted
offenders accused of treason to be represented by legal counsel for
the first time, a move that led eventually to the introduction of
defence counsel for all felonies.
 James II’s mercenary impulse was hardly new. The crown had
long been accustomed to selling pardons not simply to encourage
loyalty but also to raise revenue, sometimes for astonishing amounts
of money.20 Nor was this impulse confined to the elites. The speed
with which neighbours descended on and spirited away the personal
possessions of an accused felon could be breathtaking, as they
anticipated the forfeiture of all property to the crown that would follow
a guilty verdict. The crown also ‘farmed’ out criminal forfeitures,
allowing individuals to bid for the right to collect forfeited property in
a certain jurisdiction to sell for a profit, leading to predatory practices
and contests between greedy neighbours. Infighting, profiteering and
the common refusal to return property if the accused was found
innocent all reveal the nasty underbelly of community relations and
belie visions of apparent cohesion.21 While it is possible to posit two
discrete conceptions of criminal justice – what rulers wanted and
what the ruled would put up with – examples of greed and
expediency from monarch and subject alike suggest a more dynamic
and fluid mix of interests that overlapped or competed with each
other depending on circumstance and the sway of pragmatism.
The ability of criminal prosecutions to fracture community
solidarity can also be seen in witchcraft accusations. In England a
substantial number of accused witches were not isolated figures
living on the margins of society, but well-established and productive
members of their communities who had known their accusers for
years or even decades. Regardless of social status, most
accusations of witchcraft emerged from broader, longstanding
interpersonal conflicts of myriad kinds, stemming from property
disputes, religious difference, master–apprentice or employer–
servant relations, or attacks on honour, and represented a last resort
in the midst of deteriorating personal relations. Those accused often
mounted robust defences and some brought counter suits or sued
for damages on the grounds of defamation occasioned by false
accusations. These prosecutions therefore blurred the boundaries
between criminal and civil actions, exposing complex reactions to
breaches in customary expectations of sociability.22

Change over Time

The undulating patterns of litigation levels and criminal and
ecclesiastical prosecutions between 1500 and 1750 reveal only part
of the history of popular interactions with systems of justice. English
law also embodied or inspired wider cultural shifts in society, such as
the slow move away from religion as the bedrock of all legal pursuits.
In civil litigation the effectiveness of sworn oaths diminished as fears
of eternal damnation lost some of their purchase on the minds of the
unscrupulous. Complaints of perjury grew shrill and produced
statutory interventions. The central courts ceased to allow the
defence of compurgation or wager of law – where the sworn oaths of
twelve acquaintances could be used to confirm not the innocence of
defendants, but the integrity of their sworn oaths – because of the
rising incidence of complete strangers charging money to swear to
the honesty of defendants they had never met. Jacobean comedies
foreground these and other cynical attempts to thwart justice at any
cost, providing alternative visions of justice to set beside the
idealised versions advertised by magistrates and assize justices.
In the criminal sphere the displacing of God’s justice by crown
justice can be detected in a turning away from Christian providence
as a central explanatory motif. Crime pamphlets from the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries emphasised how divine intervention
would reveal or expose guilty criminals, even if earthly investigations
did not. In this earlier period judges and juries appeared more
interested in the moral guilt of individuals than in evidence of the
crimes they were alleged to have committed, paying closer attention
to local testimony of character and past reputation than to objective
assessments of fact. By the later seventeenth century this was
changing, with legal authorities raising the standards of acceptable
proof, seen most clearly in the dramatic decline of successful
witchcraft accusations after courts began demanding physical
confirmation of harm caused rather than relying on hearsay
evidence.
Crime went from something that anyone could commit, if they
succumbed to sinfulness, into something criminals commit – a
change that is apparent in the etymology of the word itself.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first use of ‘criminal’
as a noun dates from 1626. The move from sinner to criminal can
also be sensed in the growing tendency to criminalise vagrancy and
poverty more generally, as observers increasingly blamed the poor
for their condition. This process was not helped when Parliament
began to make crimes of longstanding customary practices the poor
relied on, such as rights to gleaning, grazing livestock on the
commons or gathering firewood from forests.
The same secularising impulse is also discernible in the
trajectories of specific crimes such as rape. Depictions of rape in the
sixteenth century focused on moral weakness and the corrupting
power of sin, seeing the potential for any man to become a rapist. By
the eighteenth century, the figure of the evil and depraved rapist had
emerged, no longer an ‘everyman’ but now a ‘monster’, a
characterisation that helped many guilty rapists who did not appear
to fit this new stereotype escape conviction.23 To make matters
worse, the admittance of legal counsel for accused rapists led to a
new focus on the character of victims and began the insidious
process of shifting blame and attention from the indicted attacker to
his accuser.
Focusing attention on the motivations of offenders produced
other more positive changes, as we have seen with the emergence
of manslaughter from a growing recognition that some homicides
were more morally or socially abhorrent than others. New
sensitivities to human motivation also led to a drop in successful
prosecutions for the murder or concealment of newborns. By the
eighteenth century juries regularly used loopholes in the 1624 statute
to acquit women who had community support, almost regardless of
their guilt, setting infanticide, as it was coming to be labelled, on its
eventual course from being regarded as an unforgivable heinous
crime to a human tragedy. The same kind of shift in sensibilities
slowly transformed the crime of suicide.
 Other changes resulted from the increased centralisation of
state and legal authority, such as a ‘growing awareness’ from the
early decades of the seventeenth century ‘of a distinction between
the private interests of individuals and the public interests of the
state’.24 As justice became more centralised it also became more
impersonal, the conviviality of local manor and borough courts
displaced by increasingly anonymous urban jurisdictions.
Centralisation and an expanding commitment to law as a ‘rational
science’ also encouraged further professionalisation, and the growth
of legal formalism and reliance on established rules. These
developments left less room for exceptions and for the employment
of discretion by jurors, who became increasingly passive participants
in the trial process.
The unique character and conditions of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century London produced a number of innovations that
professionalised policing and prosecution and transformed the
evolving criminal justice system. A new breed of active stipendiary
magistrate dealt summarily with petty offenders without resort to trial,
and used incentives to reward thief-takers and encourage
prosecutions in the Old Bailey. The same court hosted the
emergence of public prosecutors and the first appearance of
solicitors acting as defence counsel.25
All of these various improvements and developments, from the
reduced reliance on community testimony in felony trials and the
growing importance and cost of lawyers, to the shrinking autonomy
of trial jurors and the emergence of professional policing, came at a
price in terms of popular engagement with the law. In 1500
community members from a range of backgrounds participated in the
criminal process, as accusers, constables, witnesses, grand and trial
jurors, and audience members at trials and executions. By 1750 a
process of exclusion from these processes was well under way, with
constables less answerable to their communities; paid informers and
thief-takers hunting for criminals; imprisonment and transportation
increasingly replacing public executions; and secularised, scientific
approaches to justice privileging the word and work of professionals.
On the civil, or non-criminal, side, sixteenth-century depictions of
Westminster Hall show throngs of curious onlookers and even a few
dogs crowding the public courts of Common Pleas, Chancery and
Queen’s Bench that operated alongside booksellers and market
stalls. By the eighteenth century these courts had become more
private, and the world of law had retreated into the studied decorum
of the wood-panelled lawyer’s office and judge’s chamber.
Traditional admirers of the common law praised it as rational
and to a large extent democratic, shaped and fired by the community
in the organic kiln of custom and through the deliberations of juries.
Modern historians are less optimistic, recognising the hierarchical
nature of traditional justice and its vulnerability to corruption,
prejudice, and class- and gender-bias, but there is no disputing that
the displacement of common law by statute lessened its organic
character. In all these different ways the law arguably was becoming
more and more detached and distant from the populations it
served.26
Notes

1 C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth:

The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 77–8; C.
W. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1540
(London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1998), 29.

2 L. Knafla, Kent at Law 1602, Vol. II: Local Jurisdictions: Borough,

Liberty and Manor, List and Index Society, Special Series, 45–6
(Kew: List and Index Society, 2011), xvii–xxii; W. A. Champion,
‘Litigation in the boroughs: Shrewsbury’s Curia Parva 1480–1730’,
Journal of Legal History, 15 (1994).

3 C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit

and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1998), 236.

4 L. Knafla, Kent at Law 1602, Vol. I: The County Jurisdiction:

Assizes and Sessions of the Peace, List and Index Society,
Special Series, 45–6 (Kew: List and Index Society, 2009).

5 W. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, IV.ii.73.

6 S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern

England, c. 1550–1640 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 202.

7 P. Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the

Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).
8 K. Peddle, ‘In the name of the Father: The Elizabethan response
to recusancy by married Catholic women, 1559–1586’, Feminist
Legal Studies, 15 (2007).

9 C. B. Phillips and J. H. Smith, Lancashire and Cheshire from AD

1540 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 7.

10 E. Foyster, ‘At the limits of liberty: Married women and

confinement in eighteenth-century England’, C&C, 17 (2002).

11 J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750:

Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001).

12 G. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

13 K. J. Kesselring, ‘Bodies of evidence: Sex and murder (or

gender and homicide) in early modern England, c. 1500–1680’,
Gender and History, 27 (2015); Walker, Crime, Gender and Social
Order.

14 L. Knafla, Kent at Law 1602, Vol. III: Star Chamber, List and
Index Society, Special Series, 51 (Kew: List and Index Society,
2012), xxv–xxvi, 30–67; G. Walker, ‘Rape, acquittal and culpability
in popular crime reports in England, c. 1670–c. 1750’, P&P, 220
(2013), 126.

15 Walker, ‘Rape, acquittal and culpability’.

16 D. Hay, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law,’ in D. Hay, P.

Linebaugh, J. G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and C. Winslow, Albion’s
Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England
(London: Allen Lane, 1975).

17 C. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal

Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).

18 M. Caswell, ‘Mothers, wives, and killers: Marital status and

homicide in London, 1674–1790’, in R. Hillman and P. Ruberry-
Blanc (eds.), Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain:
Literary and Historical Explorations (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2014).

19 R. Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of

1685 (London and New York: Maurice Temple Smith and St
Martin’s Press, 1984).

20 K. J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

21 K. J. Kesselring, ‘Felony forfeiture and the profits of crime in

early modern England’, HJ, 53 (2010).

22 M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

23 G. Walker, ‘Everyman or a monster? The rapist in early modern

England, c. 1600–1750’, HWJ, 76 (2013).

24 C. W. Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 423.
25 Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London.

26 D. Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the

Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
 10
Authority and Protest
◈

John Walter

Early modern government, conscious of its limited powers of

repression and of the potential consequences of social and
economic change, subscribed to the image of the people as ‘the
many-headed monster’, ‘likely to mutiny and rebel on the least
occasion’.1 Many historians, noting the grievances of the victims of
change and subscribing to an economically determinist reading of
the causes of protest, have shared this belief in the ubiquity of
popular disorder. But the reality of protest was, nevertheless, rather
different. Awareness of the limited coercive powers at their disposal
meant that in their handling of the people and protest early modern
governments and their local officers were capable of a more
nuanced approach. The theoretical acceptance of a commercial
society lagged behind the realities of economic change, and in
consequence both Church and government could share popular
hostility to the consequences of an increasingly capitalist economy.
In turn, popular protest often defied the contemporary stereotype of
collective violence unleashed in riot and rebellion. That protesters
employed a broader range of tactics and strategies has encouraged
more recent studies to emphasise the negotiative politics that lay
behind protest and to talk of a popular political culture informing
protest. And finally, and paradoxically, in the longer run the
restructuring of society that economic change sponsored in this
period helps to explain some marked changes in the pattern of
collective protest, including the disappearance of large-scale
rebellions and (arguably) the eventual ‘pacification’ of much of the
countryside.

Authority
Early modern governments lacked a substantial bureaucracy,
professional police force and standing army. To govern the country,
they were therefore forced to rely on the unpaid service of landed
and civic elites such as sheriffs and magistrates, and parochial elites
of farmers, traders and craftsmen as constables and churchwardens.
Where rulers and ruled agreed about the proper priorities of
government, this could be a very effective means of maintaining
order – the gentry and middling sort lending their authority and power
to implementing the orders of royal government. But early modern
governments were aware that where class interest cut across
consensus then a dependence on propertied elites could itself cause
disorder.
 In the early part of this period a landed class, dependant largely
on wealth from its estates to maintain appropriate patterns of
consumption and material display, sought to meet the challenge of
inflation by appropriating more of the farmers’ and smallholders’
surplus. Seeking to achieve this either through changes to rents and
tenures and/or the enclosure and engrossing of holdings in pursuit of
direct farming and increasing rent rolls, the landed class might have
to be persuaded to support the government’s attempts to inhibit
enclosure or to police the marketing of grain. This explains the
government’s recurring emphasis on the threat posed to the social
order by ‘the many-headed monster’. Similarly, the attitudes of
‘middling-sort’ parish officers were also critical. This was the group
on which successive governments depended as local officials and
members of juries and special commissions to present infringements
of the laws relating to enclosure and the marketing of grain. But in
periods or places where their own interests were threatened, they
might use their local standing and the authority of manorial or royal
office to lead protesting crowds. Lacking a standing army, early
modern governments were forced to rely on locally recruited ‘trained
bands’. However, in regions where the causes of popular discontent
were widely shared, members of the trained bands might side with
rebels and rioters, or prove reluctant to suppress protests. From the
rebellions of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the 1530s to the last agrarian
rebellion in this period, the Midlands Rising of 1607, successive
governments had the misfortune to realise the force of R. H.
Tawney’s observation that ‘the reluctant militia of yesterday’ might
become ‘enthusiastic rebels’.2 Significantly, it was the presence of
foreign mercenaries, assembled to fight in Scotland, which made
possible the bloody suppression of the 1549 rebellions.
An important consequence of early modern government’s
potential weaknesses in repressing collective protest was its
recognition of the importance of preventing it by anticipating and
averting the causes of popular disorder. But early modern
governments tended to mistake consequences for causes. Unaware
of the dynamics of demographic and economic change, they
believed that engrossing, enclosure and associated changes in
farming practice – notably the conversion of arable to pasture – were
the main causes of growing landlessness, scarcity and famine.
Successive governments therefore introduced laws to regulate
enclosure and engrossing. They also attempted to ameliorate prices
by regulating the export of grain and policing the activities of
middlemen in the grain trade and market, to regulate employment
and to fix wages. All of these measures would be cited, and
sometimes selectively (and knowingly) mis-cited, by protesters to
legitimise their protests.
Lacking an extensive bureaucracy, but enjoying a united realm
subject to royal law, the English crown also made important use of
the law and law courts to publicise and prosecute its policies. This
helps to explain the popular legalism that often shaped early modern
protests. Collective protests were sometimes preceded or paralleled
by the collection of common purses and the pursuit of remedy by
waging law. But while knowledge of government policy might offer
legitimation for popular protest, it might also help to contain the
actions that protesters allowed themselves in an attempt to avoid
charges of treason, riot or theft. And that popular grievances might
also be pursued through the courts perhaps helped to moderate
actual levels of disorder.
Early modern governments also made use of the Church,
especially after the Reformation, to promote ideas about the social
responsibilities of property-owners and power-holders. The
Edwardian prayer book, for example, contained a prayer for ‘good’
landlords. At times of harvest failure, ‘tuning the pulpits’ to have
sermons preached on the Christian duty of charity to neighbours and
the poor, and the sinfulness of seeking to profit from scarcity, was
common. Underlying these efforts was a continuing belief, reinforced
by Renaissance civic humanism, in society as a commonweal or
commonwealth. This was a protean concept in which the monarch
had responsibility for the well-being of his or her subjects, and what
would later be seen as purely economic relations should be guided
by a shared responsibility for the good of fellow men and women.
These ideas were always ideals, and they were increasingly
challenged by the realities of economic change, which pitched the
profits of commodity against the moral imperatives of commonweal.
However, they continued to be important in the mental world of the
people and, especially at times of economic crisis, received periodic
restatement by government.
Despite the limitations they faced, early modern governments
were capable of bloody repression, sometimes enforced by the more
dependable private retinues of the landed class. Captured rebels
could be subjected to the gory punishment of being hanged, drawn
and quartered as traitors, or returned alive to their home towns or
villages to be hanged on their doors. But in the absence of readily
effective forces of repression, royal governments promoted a culture
of obedience. This was preached from the pulpit and promulgated in
royal proclamations. It stressed that the monarch ultimately derived
his or her authority from God, that obedience was a God-given
obligation and rebellion a sin. Repression might be tempered by the
judicious dispensation of mercy to publicly penitent rebels. But the
public display of dismembered bodies preserved in pitch, such as the
heads of rebels that greeted travellers crossing London bridge,
offered a powerful reminder that within this culture of obedience
there was no right to protest against an authority ultimately derived
from God. If anything, even worse for men and women who believed
in the physical reality of heaven and hell was the message that even
dissent by those who escaped detection and detention would be
known to an omniscient God and punished at death by
condemnation to the everlasting torments of hell. Within the belief
system of the early modern world, these were heavy threats, to
which the annual reading in the parish church of government-
sponsored homilies – on obedience, on rebellion – and the scripted
(and often printed) ‘last-dying speeches’ on the scaffold of convicted
rebels gave repeated emphasis.3
Taken together, all these measures were designed to persuade
the people that monarchs used their power to protect the lives and
livings of – especially the poorest – subjects. In creating this ‘public
transcript’ of the good king and loyal subjects, early modern
governments sought to secure popular consent to their exercise of
power as an authority legitimised by God (a relationship that of
course imposed further obligations) and exercised in defence of its
subjects. Royal protection, therefore, assumed popular obedience.4
But, as will be seen, the creation of this transcript and the
elaboration of laws and policies, whose explicit justification was the
defence of commonwealth and people, also opened up a space (at
least in the eyes of the people and protesters) for legitimate protest
against the enemies of commonwealth and people. This helps to
explain why protest often took the form of negotiating with, rather
than trying to overthrow, authority, and of enforcing rather than
opposing royal policies. The evidence of sedition utterances
suggests that there were always those willing to ground their
grievances in the language of class, but there was a discrepancy
between the full-blooded actions projected within these rhetorics of
violence and the recoverable pattern of collective protest.5

Protest
A series of factors appeared to make such protest more likely in this
period. Population growth between the early sixteenth and mid
seventeenth centuries created, both directly and indirectly, a
significant growth in poverty. Directly, it led to the growth of a
landless or land-poor population, while indirectly the pressures of a
growing population on a pre-industrialised agriculture sector were
the major cause of an inflation that saw the prices of basic foodstuffs
increase perhaps eightfold in a little over 100 years. In turn, inflation
and oversupply of the labour market saw real wages perhaps cut by
half over a similar period. The impact of this inflation was all the
greater on an early modern population that had been accustomed to
a sustained period of lower prices, higher real wages and more
plentiful land after the fall in population triggered by the Black Death
and subsequent endemic plague.
Definitions of poverty vary, but by the mid seventeenth century
close to half the population might be classified as poor. This was an
alarming figure and reflected the structural weaknesses of a pre-
industrialised economy. Nonetheless, it fails to register the even
larger numbers who lived within the penumbra of poverty and who
might find themselves plunged into poverty by conjunctural crises. Of
these, the most threatening was harvest failure. When the harvest –
the heartbeat of the economy – failed, which it did with worryingly but
unpredictable regularity, there was a much larger group of ‘harvest-
sensitive’ poor. Moreover, harvest failure was often symbiotically
linked with trade depression, since high food prices diminished
demand for cloth and other manufactures. While trade, and with it
manufactures, experienced significant growth in this period, the
nature of these sectors produced further instability. Overseas trade
was vulnerable to the political dislocations, caused by currency
manipulation and wars, over which the government had limited
control. Manufacturing took place either in guild-controlled urban
workshops or usually guild-free rural cottages, the latter notably in
the major textile industries, which were located in pastoral rural
economies with a surplus labour supply, with major centres in East
Anglia, the West Country and West Riding of Yorkshire. Given the
relative absence of fixed capital on which merchants organising the
trade had to secure a return, a slump in the market saw them
refusing to buy up the finished product, leading to the withdrawal of
circulating capital. Thus, densely populated communities dependent
on the state of the market for both work and food quickly became
vulnerable to collective unemployment whenever the harvest failed
or overseas markets were disrupted.
It is, then, easy to see why governments were quick to assume
that economic change would produce growing disorder. But in reality
there was a striking disparity between both the volume and nature of
protest and those projected by a reading of the economic indices.
Clearly, in the broadest terms, the map and pace of economic
change determined where collective protests were likely to take
place. Since it was the highly visible phenomenon of enclosure that
generated riots in the countryside, such collective acts of protest
were unlikely to be found in areas where enclosure was absent or
took place either before or after this period. By contrast, grain riots,
which in this period were almost entirely targeted against the export
or internal movement of grain, were absent from upland pastoral-
woodland areas that did not generate grain surpluses. In areas like
the Lake District, harvest failure might produce famine but not crowd
actions over food. This underlines the fact that it was not economic
problems per se but popular understandings of the causes of those
problems that determined whether or not grievance would lead to
collective protest. For that to happen crowds needed to feel that any
actions they took were not only strategic but also legitimate.
Collective protest therefore, though frequent, was always exceptional
and not everyday.
 Protests took a variety of forms. These might run from seditious
individuals giving voice to their grievances in anonymous written
threats; through collective grumbling in the alehouse and market and
the petitioning of the authorities; to collective crowd actions in riot
and, in the sixteenth century, rebellion. They might also take the form
of street theatre or of highly ritualised and symbolic adaptations of
popular cultural and festive forms like the skimmington ride or
Rogationtide procession.6 In their uneven geography and
discontinuous chronology, crowd protests also reflected the fact that
change in early modern England was experienced locally and
regionally, rather than nationally. Yet local and national sources of
discontent could sometimes intersect. For example, the largest
rebellion of the sixteenth century, the Pilgrimage of Grace, was a
protest against the impact of royal policies and the Henrician
Reformation, but in some areas, notably in the north-west, agrarian
grievances help to explain why the rebel hosts were able to recruit
crowds numbered in their thousands.7 Popular memory might, with
justice, associate the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries
with the seizure and exploitation of Church lands by crown and
landed class.8 Later, as England became a nation of protestants,
anti-popery could licence attacks on Catholic members of the landed
class who were unpopular, and enclosing lords of the manor. But
most protests had their roots in economic and social grievance and
operated within the politics of subsistence.
At the beginning of the period, in what was still a largely
agrarian economy, it was access to land that prompted most
protests. Later, as the proportion of the harvest-sensitive population
dependent on the market for both employment and food increased,
the emphasis began to shift to food riots, which by the harvest crises
of the later seventeenth century had replaced enclosure riots as the
most common form of collective protest. By the eighteenth century,
the politics of the trade in which producers sought to defend the
customs of their trade had become more important, anticipating their
later predominance in the Industrial Revolution era.

Agrarian Protest, Common Rights and Access

to Land
With renewed population growth putting increased value on land,
lords of the manor attempted to exploit their full range of rights over
their tenants, seeking in particular to alter customs and tenure to
raise rents and entry fines and so to appropriate more of their
tenants’ surplus. Given the variety and varying strength of tenures
this was almost invariably a slow process and one that varied in
success. At the same time, lords sought a return to direct farming by
resuming their demesnes, which they had let out in the fifteenth
century in response to late medieval population stagnation. This
might involve enclosure, but it could also involve the intensification of
other seigneurial rights. For example, in the sheep–corn region of
East Anglia lords had the right, under a system known as foldcourse,
to pasture (fold) their sheep flocks on the open fields, a right that
they sought to exploit to profit from the buoyant market for wool.
Such ‘seigneurial reaction’ had consequences for the authority of
lordship. Whereas the aristocratic leaders of the 1536 Pilgrimage of
Grace could mobilise many thousands, by the Northern Rising of
1569 their own estate policies had driven a wedge between such
men and their tenants: they were able to recruit fewer and could
more easily be suppressed by the government. It led to a series of
mid-sixteenth-century rebellions, of which the best known is Kett’s
Rebellion, centred in the eastern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.9 In
these rebellions, protesters took to direct action, throwing down
enclosures and menacing unpopular landlords. But they also drew
up articles of grievances and petitioned royal government for
redress, expecting that the government under Protector Somerset
would be sympathetic to grievances that both preachers and royal
proclamations had attacked as destructive to the commonwealth.
Although an argument has been made that these rebellions
could be seen as the last in the line of medieval risings by the
commons, they also exhibited patterns of popular thought and
behaviour that were to characterise much early modern protest.
Despite their numerical superiority and rhetoric of violence,
destruction was directed against property, not persons. In turn, this
reflected the fact that although such large-scale gatherings doubtless
encompassed a variety of opinions, the degree of leadership and
control that the protesters achieved challenged the elite’s stereotype
of the violent and irrational ‘many-headed monster’. Drawing on
representations of the monarch as the fount of justice, the protesters
sought to negotiate with, rather than oppose, royal government.
They envisaged an alliance of the true commons with the just king
against a landed class whose policies both threatened the
commonwealth and challenged their own self-image as the good lord
whose estate policies (supposedly) balanced the interests of lord
and tenant.
The 1549 rebellions represented the largest outbreak of popular
rebellion since the English revolt of 1381. But in many ways they
were also the high water mark of agrarian rebellion. Kett’s Rebellion
ended in bloody suppression. The mid-century rebellions, especially
when rewritten by government-authorised histories as bloody and
violent expressions of class conflict, helped to further a change in the
English landed class’s attitude to their lands that contributed to the
decline of rebellion as a form of protest. Increasingly, lords of the
manor shifted from a traditional seigneurial policy of seeking to
appropriate more of a limited tenant surplus to one in which they
began to recognise the possibilities of securing a greater income
through co-operation with their (larger) tenants in the more efficient
farming of their lands. This was the beginning of a momentous
change, since it signalled the transformation of the English landed
class from seigneurs to agrarian capitalists and created an alliance
of landlords and wealthy farmers that was to dominate much of the
English countryside.
Since co-operation was increasingly between lords of the manor
and their wealthier tenants in common pursuit of the profits of the
market, this also contributed to a process of internal differentiation
that saw middling-sort tenants switch from being the leaders of
rebellion to the promoters of state authority in local society.
Consequently, by the end of the sixteenth century, another attempted
popular rising that sought consciously to draw on the legacy of 1549
– the so-called Oxfordshire Rising of 1596 – failed to mobilise those
affected by enclosure. Nevertheless, this episode also reflected
another striking characteristic of the relationship between
government and protesters. Such was the government’s fear of the
threat of disorder in the hungry 1590s that knowledge of the
attempted rising persuaded it to renew legislation policing
enclosure.10 This sensitivity to the threat of popular violence meant
that government economic policy would continue to lag behind
economic realities, prohibitive, rather than permissive, of economic
change. In turn, this meant that government policy continued to
provide protesters with legitimation for their protests.
Change to tenures was a long-term process that continued to
generate conflicts in defence of custom, a potent but protean
concept registering the (past and present) balance of power between
lords and tenants. These could be fought out in both manorial and
royal equity courts, the latter an arena where tenants, if they could
meet the costs of legal action and produce written records for the
claimed rights (both large ifs), might enjoy some success. But it was
the visibility of enclosure, and popular belief in its damaging effects,
that produced open collective protest. After the mid sixteenth
century, the patchwork geography and chronology of enclosure
meant that continuing protests would take the form of riots, rather
than rebellions. The only exceptions to this were where the scale of
enclosure might pose an acute regional problem – as was the case
with the Midlands Rising of 1607 – or be imposed in a way that
challenged the local interests of middling-sort farmers and even local
lords of the manor.11 Thus, in the 1620s attempts by a financially
strapped crown to drain the fens of eastern England and to enclose
the extensive royal forest in the West Country both produced large-
scale protests.12
With the withdrawal of wealthy men with natural authority like
the prosperous tanner and landowner Robert Kett, leadership for
these later large-scale protests was provided by men in a tradition of
the charismatic leader. In the Midlands Rising, the leader Captain
Pouch claimed to be sent by God and to have in his great pouch the
power and authority to protect his followers. His claim to have
authority from the king to pull down all enclosures from Coventry to
York was taken up by his lieutenants in the destruction of particularly
notorious enclosures throughout the Midland counties. The protests
in the West Country against royal deforestation and enclosure were
led by the anonymous (and male) Lady Skimmington. This was a
name derived from the popular custom used to police the gender
order, by which crowds shamed and punished men for failure to
control wives who refused to obey their husbands. A ritual intended
to signify a world turned upside down, the skimmington was clearly
thought an appropriate symbol in actions intended to turn the world
right side up again by resisting those (often strangers to the local
community) who disrupted its economic and social order.
Riots against enclosure might occur wherever enclosure took
place. Enclosers who had purchased land from the profits of
commerce, or who sought to impose, rather than negotiate,
enclosure (on both counts not ‘proper gentlemen’) made protest
more likely. Crowds sought to defend common rights in the enclosed
lands by means that suggested they better represented the interests
of commons, community and commonwealth: they were ‘good
commonwealthsmen’. Protesters did not necessarily resort
immediately to destruction of the enclosures, but deployed tactics
that sought to avoid punishment for riot. Nevertheless, these hinted
at the violence that would follow if enclosure continued. Libels were
circulated, sometimes in rhyming verse, denouncing the enclosure.
Graves were dug on the disputed lands, or gallows erected, from
which would be hung a recognisable effigy of the encloser.
Protesters adopted and adapted popular cultural forms to shape their
actions. In the early seventeenth century, protesters in Lincolnshire
adopted the text of the traditional play – the death of the summer lord
– which ended May Day celebrations there. This helpfully
incorporated a mock sermon and the execution of an effigy of a lord,
which enabled them to act out a denunciation and symbolic
decapitation of the deeply unpopular enclosing earl of Lincoln. In the
north-west, where a form of the medieval miracle play persisted,
protesters in the early 1620s staged a play in which enclosing
landlords were depicted in hell’s mouth, an essential prop of the
miracle play, as a reminder of the punishment God might inflict on
landlords for their greedy attempt to change tenurial customs.
When protesters turned to pulling down the hedges used to
enclose land, they made good use of the licence afforded by
significant moments in the traditional festive calendar. May Eve saw
young unmarried males and females allowed to go into the fields to
gather greenery to decorate church and houses on May Day. In
areas where there was locally unpopular enclosure, the young of the
community might prove hard to please, throwing down yards of
enclosure hedges in search of the perfect branch. It was not by
chance that the Midlands Rising began on May Eve. Similarly,
Rogationtide, an event beginning with a sermon denouncing those
who encroached on their neighbours’ land and involving a
procession to mark out the parish’s boundaries, provided a ready-
made text for an enclosure riot. Often, a popular legalism informed
the actions of enclosure rioters. Contemporary definitions of riot
stipulated that it was the act of three or more, so on occasion
protesters were careful to go two by two to pull down the enclosure.
Direct action was often accompanied by the collection of a common
purse and the initiation of legal action in the manorial or royal courts.
In early modern society, pulling down (a portion of) a hedge was the
first step in a legal action to claim disputed lands.
Exploiting contemporary constructions of women as the weaker
sex and the popular belief that women were ‘without the law’,
women were often to the fore in protests over enclosure,
complaining that the denial of common rights threatened their
gendered responsibility to provide for their families. One encloser in
moorland Yorkshire found himself surrounded by 100 or so women,
on their knees and in tears, beseeching him to stay an enclosure that
threatened their families’ livelihoods. The noise they made with
scraping their nailed boots hinted at the latent violence in this
episode. Workers erecting enclosures found themselves threatened
by women who offered, in mockery of the gendered division of
responsibilities, to cut them ‘as small as herbs to the pot’. The
exhilaration and laughter that accompanied such exchanges
between crowds and the targets of their hostility reflected the psychic
relief and satisfaction that usually subordinated groups savoured in
getting one over on their betters. Masculinity too was used to
organise crowd actions. Called on to act the man and defend the
community, young men and poor labourers were offered a chance to
stake their claim to full manhood.
Protesters against enclosure could also derive legitimation from
their belief that the government shared their hostility to a process
that depopulated communities and, where it involved converting
arable to pasture, increased the threat of dearth and harvest failure.
Increasingly, however, enclosure represented a response to regional
specialisation. For example, in the classic open field areas arable
land was temporarily converted to pasture to improve soil fertility and
increase grain yields. And, while the government’s response to the
Midlands Rising had been to issue further commissions to enquire
into enclosure in the troubled areas, its policy had always been
designed to police, not prohibit, enclosure.13 Finally, existing
discussions of enclosure riots have failed to recognise that their
common form might conceal very different objectives. For the
middling sort, whose office, wealth and status made them important
leaders of opposition, the objective increasingly was not to oppose
enclosure outright, but to negotiate concessions that recognised their
interests in the land. Production for the market made yeomen
farmers enclosers themselves and therefore increasingly willing to
negotiate enclosure – by (their) agreement. In contrast, cottagers
and smallholders with little or no hope of compensation for the loss
of common rights were committed to resisting enclosure. But in
forest and fen, middling-sort farmers and cottagers retained an
interest in keeping these areas unenclosed. Under regional
specialisation, the extensive wastes and commons served the
interests of the capitalist farmers, while allowing the cottagers a
reasonable subsistence and an independence that made their
communities notorious as sites of what the propertied classes
(mis-)characterised as idleness and disorder. The strength of this
alliance of convenience meant that protests against enclosure in
forests and fens, and in regions with similar social relations, could
flare up again and again to the end of this period and well beyond.
But increasingly in the seventeenth century, would-be leaders of
open protest in the countryside failed to secure support, their
appeals to others to rise being prosecuted as sedition. While the
political instability of the mid-century English revolution saw an
increase in riots against enclosure and emparkment carried out by
king, bishops and courtiers, the Midlands, previously the heartland of
agrarian protest, saw little activity.14 As this suggests, this temporary
blip masked an underlying decline in the number of enclosure riots
(and the authorities now had a standing army that it used to put them
down). Thereafter, they were far fewer. But growing co-operation
between gentry and middling sort did not signal an end to agrarian
protest. The development of agrarian capitalism was gradual, rather
than sudden. Even in 1700 there were areas of England, like
Cumbria in the north-west, where lords and tenants were still locked
in conflict over who would profit most from the product of the land.
Nevertheless, in areas characterised by the consolidation of the
tripartite structure of (often absentee) landlord, middling farmer and
landless labourer, the labouring poor’s dependence on their ‘betters’
for employment and poor-relief made them vulnerable to
victimisation for any open shows of defiance. Hence, continuing and
hard-felt grievances had to be expressed through the ‘crime of
anonymity’ in the form of the anonymous threatening letter, poaching
and animal maiming.15

Moral Economy, Grain Riots and Access to

Food
Crowd actions over food long pre-dated this period. This reflected
the early development of both an urban system and ‘grain-deficient’
rural areas dependent on a market in grain. Interestingly, most
medieval food riots, although directed against merchants and
middlemen in the grain trade, had been triggered by the action of the
crown in siphoning food from the local economy to feed troops
engaged in its overseas military adventures.16 The fragility of a pre-
industrialised economy and the frequency of harvest failure meant
that isolated protests were always possible. But it was only in the
early modern period that crowd actions became prominent in the
politics of subsistence. Their increasing incidence reflected the
collision between a sharp increase in the vulnerable, harvest-
sensitive population and the weak points in a developing national
market in grain. Nonetheless, until the eighteenth century the
number of recorded crowd actions over food was significantly less
than the fears of early modern governments predicted, and they
were absent throughout the period from many regions.
 Despite its mushrooming growth, London experienced less than
a handful of protests over food, with the last recorded episode taking
place in the hungry 1590s. That the capital was largely free of
protests over food was a reflection of the willingness of the
government to risk disorder in the counties by licensing the transport
of grain to the city in order to keep the capital fed. In rural areas, the
labouring poor might secure access to food from employers,
neighbours or parish authorities, and many were locked into forms of
dependency that inhibited the possibility of collective protest.17 Once
again, it was not scarcity and absolute levels of deprivation that
explain the pattern of protest, but popular understandings of the
causes of scarcity and a strategic reading of the possibility and
benefits of crowd action. Once again, a shared moral economy
between government and people over the highly emotive and
sensitive issue of the marketing of grain, the basic food staple in this
society, helped to fashion protests.
From the harvest crisis of the 1580s onwards there was a well-
established geography to crowd actions over food.18 Riots occurred
when grain was being moved out of the local economy, thereby
threatening local subsistence, and where the social groups most
affected by this were able to organise collective action. The export of
grain triggered protests at port towns. The movement of grain
required to feed England’s cities, and above all London, provoked
more protests, at ports in the south-east and East Anglia and in
small towns in areas like the Thames Valley that served as bulking
centres for the movement of grain to the cities by urban middlemen.
Bristol’s demands had a similar effect in the south-west. In these
small towns and ports it was artisans and the labouring poor – those
most at risk when the harvest failed and prices rose sharply – who
formed the crowd. But their suspicions of, and sense of grievance at,
the actions of outsiders might be shared by their employers and by
local magistrates, who found themselves stuck with the
consequences of a central government prepared to license
contraventions of the marketing laws in order to feed and pacify the
larger cities.
In the countryside, there were food riots, but these took place in
areas of proto-industrialisation, above all in the textile districts. Here
clothworkers and their families were the victims of a vicious
combination of factors. Located in areas where the cloth industry had
developed to absorb the surplus landless or land-poor labour in a
predominantly pastoral, and therefore naturally grain-deficient, rural
economy, clothworkers were dependent on the market for both food
and employment. When the harvest failed, high food prices led to a
slump in demand for both their product and labour and it left them
without the money to feed themselves and their families. To add
insult to injury, local middlemen on whom they depended for the
supply of food now moved grain through their region in pursuit of
higher urban prices. Finally, the absence of a resident magistracy
where the industry was located meant they were forced to protest in
order to alert the authorities to their plight and to try to stop the
movement of grain.
In food riots, crowds acted in ways that suggest that, though
driven by anger and desperation, there was a politics to their
protests. The people thought hoarding by farmers and middlemen
was one of the causes of dearth, driving up prices by creating an
artificial scarcity. This was a belief to be found in popular ballads,
and publicly endorsed from the pulpit and in royal proclamations
issued in years of harvest failure that denounced hoarders as
‘greedy cormorants’. But while individuals might be driven by hunger
to steal food, with criminal courts showing a sharp increase in such
crimes in years of dearth, crowds did not attack barns and granaries
(with the partial exception of where grain was known to be stored for
export). This again reflected popular knowledge of the law, for theft
was a crime that could (and did) result in execution. But it also
reflected a popular belief that the transport and, especially, export of
grain in years of harvest failure were against the law. Since at least
the early sixteenth century the government had issued measures to
police the marketing of grain, requiring the licensing of middlemen,
prohibiting the export and regulating the internal movement of grain
when prices were high.
By the 1580s, administrative practice had been codified in
Books of Orders, printed and distributed in years of dearth to the
local magistrates. These required them to undertake surveys of grain
stocks, and to order farmers to bring grain weekly to market where
the magistrates were to see the poor served first and – a
controversial measure – at below market prices. Outside years of
dearth, these rules were only partially enforced, and even in such
years the government was driven by fear of disorder in the capital to
license their evasion to feed London. But the evidence suggests that
in many counties they were dutifully enforced by magistrates, who
also ordered local financial collections to purchase grain stocks that
the poor might purchase at below market price or, on occasion,
receive free.
Given that there was a public transcript that both Church and
state publicly endorsed highlighting the corruption believed by the
poor to have caused dearth, crowd actions over food were less an
exercise in self-help than an appeal to the authorities to take the
measures and enforce the laws that were intended to prevent dearth
and starvation. While small amounts of grain might be taken, crowds
more often mimicked the actions to be found in the Book of Orders.
They did so in the knowledge that unless their actions triggered
intervention by either the local or central authorities they would be
self-defeating, frightening away the dealers upon whom grain-
deficient communities depended. The politics of the crowd was,
therefore, necessarily triangulated: they targeted middlemen, but
their actions were designed to trigger intervention from authority
(whose inactivity they also criticised). Crowds did not seize grain in
the market, but waited until the grain had been sold and was being
moved out of the local community. Then they might either ‘stay’ its
transportation, or return it to market and organise its sale at a ‘just
price’ – that is below the famine prices in the market. At Harwich in
the early 1640s a crowd that had invaded a ship loaded with grain
contented themselves with removing the sails, mimicking the action
taken to impound vessels suspected of being involved in smuggling.
In Kent, crowds who had seized grain shouted out that they had
stayed it for the king and claimed half, the prescribed reward for
those who prevented the illegal export of grain. In Somerset, crowds
waited until grain was being moved by barge to the sea before
hauling it back to where it had begun its journey, dumping the sacks
of grain outside the houses of the local officials in a pointed criticism
of what the crowd saw as their failure to enforce the law.
In protests like those at Norwich in 1532, or Maldon in Essex in
1629 led by ‘Captain’ Ann Carter, a butcher’s wife, it was women
who took the lead. This reflected their role as petty dealers and
purchasers in the marketplace, responsible for buying the food the
family needed and therefore sensitive to any malpractices there. But
it also reflected, again, popular knowledge of the law. Married
women turned their inequality before the law to their advantage,
claiming, as their sisters in agrarian protest did, that that they were
‘without the law’ and that if they acted without their husbands’
knowledge they could not be punished, a belief for which
contemporary law manuals offered some support.19
After the mid seventeenth and into the eighteenth century,
crowd actions over food became the most common form of collective
protest within the politics of subsistence. This reflected the fact that
government policy over dearth had shifted, loosening regulation of
the market in grainand, increasingly, encouraging its export. What
had been a shared understanding between government and people
was now becoming, in Edward Thompson’s striking phrase, ‘the
moral economy of the eighteenth century crowd’.20 By the 1690s the
geography of food riots had also changed, shifting further west and
north. With urban middlemen invading further markets in order to
feed not only the capital but also growing industrial populations,
areas like Worcester and Shrewsbury also experienced riots directed
against middlemen buying up grain for the industrial population in the
west Midlands.21 Until the end of this period, high food prices saw
groups like weavers, tinners and miners at the centre of crowd
actions over food. Participation by these industrial groups in such
crowd actions reflected not just their dependence on the market for
food (increasingly in the form of milled flour or bread) and the
sensitivity of demand in their trade to harvest failure. It also reflected
their own belief in their status as independent artisans, a belief
increasingly challenged by economic realities, but central to a third
strand within the politics of subsistence: the politics of the property of
skill.

The Property of Skill and the Politics of the

Trade
Before the advent of full-blown industrialisation, most production took
place in urban workshops, in the mining villages of areas of coal,
lead or tin extraction, or in the producers’ own cottage households in
regions of textile production or metal-working. The relationships of
production were not easily reduced to a simple division between
employer and employee and they continued to obscure the growing
reality that workers in many industries were selling their labour
power for a wage. When demand was high, for example, small
masters could weave in their own right. And the importance in many
trades of subcontracting and a preference for payment by piece rate
blunted recognition of the underlying loss of independence. All this
helps to explain why many still thought of themselves as
independent producers, able to achieve control over the means and
relationships of production – a control that varied both over time and
by type of industry. Nevertheless, in many rural industries, it was the
merchants or middlemen who played a controlling role in the trade.
In the skilled urban trades and, increasingly, rural industries it was
the wealthier masters who played a dominant role. In the extractive
industries, it was the owners of mining leases. Over time, the
growing control exerted by mercantile capital produced increasing
points of conflict. Fluctuations in the state of the trade might induce
attempts by employers to reduce piece rates, alter the terms of
employment, challenge customs in the workplace, or employ more
journeymen for whom the chances of setting up as their own masters
became progressively harder. Wherever and whenever such
changes occurred, there could be conflict. They challenged industrial
workers’ artisanal status as skilled and independent producers who
controlled their work and the terms of employment. And it was that
continued sense of their independence and rights as ‘freeborn
Englishmen’ that helps to explain the forms that industrial protests
took.22
If economic conditions provided the context for these outbreaks
of collective action, it was the case, as in the other forms of protest
within the politics of subsistence, that it was the workers’ sense of
their status and rights and their own explanation for their problems
that determined the occasion and form that their protests took.
Protests might take a wide variety of forms, including petitioning
employers and authority and pursuing their rights through both the
state’s courts and, in areas such as Derbyshire lead- or Devon tin-
mining, special courts particular to their industry.23 The persistence
and sophistication shown in these campaigns reflected the
solidarities of mono-occupational industrial communities and the
organisation that everyday patterns of working in the trade created.
Where collective protests occurred they too might adapt popular
cultural forms, for example subjecting unpopular employers or
‘blacklegs’ to shaming sanctions like ‘riding the stang’, a version of
the skimmington ride in which targeted individuals were carried
around the local community astride a pole. But while protesters in
industrial disorders usually focused on the destruction of property,
rather than persons, increasingly what set them apart into the
eighteenth century was a level of violence against both that reflected
their collective anger at underlying changes threatening their control
of their working conditions.
As in other forms of protest within the politics of subsistence,
industrial producers subscribed to a moral economy in which their
customs should be respected and their rights to a wage reflecting
their skill and needs acknowledged. Thinking of themselves as
artisans and the holders of customary rights, they expected
employers to recognise and respect this, and magistrates, and if
necessary Parliament, to protect their ‘property’ in their skill. Thus,
although wages (in whatever form) lay at the heart of industrial
protests, they were always about more than this. Producers sought
to retain a degree of control of the workplace. In the skilled trades of
the urban workshops, the opacity of the workplace makes it harder,
for this period, to recover a continuous history of the negotiations
that took place and the intimidatory tactics that were used there.
Occasionally, there are reports of secret combinations in a particular
town and trade. But there were occasions when conflict in a trade
became so general that the urban authorities were forced to take
notice and to intervene. In areas of rural industry, the control that
skilled workers could negotiate in the workshop, especially where the
guilds retained some force, was harder to achieve. The dispersed
nature of production in the putting-out system of the textile industries
helps to explain why here protests often resorted to collective
violence. Protesters attacked and destroyed the property of
employers, and physically attacked and intimidated both employers
and employees – blacklegs – who refused to join in their withdrawal
of labour. Groups like the pitmen of the northern coalfield enjoyed a
particular notoriety as disorderly and violent.24 But behind such
representations was the dislike propertied contemporaries had for all
groups who continued to enjoy a measure of independence from the
encroaching ties of labour discipline.
In reality, violence in industrial disputes represented a
negotiating strategy. Angered by employers’ attempts to reduce
wages, to pay workers by ‘truck’ (payments in kind that took the
form of food at prices determined by the employer), to increase the
amount to be produced under the customary piece rate or to destroy
controls on entry into the trade, groups like weavers and pitmen
resorted to violence. But this was, or attempted to be, a controlled
violence that, as in other forms of protest, was accompanied by the
petitioning of magistrates and Parliament in which groups of workers
made reference to the customs of the trade, to the protection of the
statutory setting of wages and the famous statute of 5 Elizabeth, the
Statute of Artificers, which they held guaranteed their status and
skills. Violence in industrial disorders was then also an exercise in
negotiation. In Hobsbawm’s famous phrase, this was ‘collective
bargaining by riot’.25
By 1750 much had changed. Changes in the social relationships
of production in agriculture and industry polarised communities,
making the earlier potential for collective action across social groups
harder to find. Government policy was now permissive, rather than
prohibitive, of economic change, challenging the legitimation that
protesters had earlier been able to derive from the ‘public transcript’.
The government was now more willing and able, with a standing
army, to repress collective protests. The criminal law, with a
reinvigorated Riot Act (1714), Combination Act (1721) against
collective actions for better wages, and a string of capital statutes
made it easier to criminalise and punish protest with transportation,
imprisonment and the gallows. The experience of a world turned
upside down in the English revolution of the 1640s challenged the
wisdom of elites – landed or local – seeking to mobilise the people,
and after 1660 refashioned the idea of the ‘many-headed monster’
into the new language of the mob.26 Nevertheless, the authorities,
both local and central, were selective in their use of these policies
and, in the face of recurring crises, continued to be willing to mix
repression with negotiation and accommodation. These changes,
and with them the unmaking of an earlier tradition of protest, were
ultimately to contribute to the making of an English working class.
But to what extent they had, by 1750, created patterns of protest
based on the politics of class remain problematic. The earlier
evidence of sedition utterances suggests that there were always
those willing to ground their grievances in the language of class.27
There remained, however, an important discrepancy between those
full-blooded rhetorics of violence and the recoverable pattern of
social protest.

Notes

1 C. Hill, ‘The many-headed monster’, in C. Hill, Change and

Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1974).

2 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

(London: Longman, Green, 1912), 322.

3 Ronald B. Bond (ed.), ‘Certain Sermons or Homilies’ (1547) and

‘A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’ (1570): A
Critical Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).

4 J. Walter, ‘Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of

subsistence in early modern England’, in M. J. Braddick and J.
Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order,
Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).

5 A. Wood, ‘“Pore men woll speke one daye”: Plebeian

languages of deference and defiance in England, c. 1520–1640’,
in T. Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); A. Wood, ‘Fear, hatred and the
hidden injuries of class in early modern England’, Journal of Social
History, 39 (2006).

6 For a fuller discussion of the forms of protest to be found in the

politics of subsistence, see Walter, ‘Public transcripts’.

7 R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the

1530s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 209–55. For an
introduction to protests against the politics of Church and state,
not discussed here, see A. Fletcher and D. MacCulloch, Tudor
Rebellions (London: Longman, 1997); J. Walter, ‘Crowds and
popular politics in the English Revolution’, in M. J. Braddick (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015).

8 For this argument, see A. Wood, The Memory of the People:

Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

9 A. Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10 J. Walter, ‘“A rising of the people”? The Oxfordshire rising of

1596’, in J. Walter (ed.), Crowds and Popular Politics in Early
Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006).

11 J. E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in

English Agrarian Development (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983); R.
B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular
Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988).

12 K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London:

Heinemann, 1982); B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural
Artisans and Riot in the West of England 1585–1660 (Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 1980).

13 J. Thirsk, ‘Changing attitudes to enclosure in the seventeenth

century’, in The Festschrift for Professor Ju-Hwan Oh on the
Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (Taegu, Korea: Kyungpook
National University 1991).

14 B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution

(London: Heineman, 1976), 112–227; J. Walter, ‘The English
people and the English revolution revisited’, HWJ, 61 (2006).

15 E. P. Thompson, ‘The crime of anonymity’, in D. Hay, P.

Linebaugh, J. G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and C. Winslow (eds.),
Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century
England (London: Allen Lane, 1975).

16 B. Sharp, ‘The food riots of 1347 and the medieval moral

economy’, in A. Charlesworth and A. Randall (eds.), Moral
Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict, and Authority
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

17 J. Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern

England’, in J. Walter and R. Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease
and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
18 J. Walter, ‘The geography of food riots, 1585–1649’, in Walter,
Crowds.

19 J. Walter, ‘Faces in the crowd: Gender and age in the early

modern English crowd’, in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds.), The
Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).

20 E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in

the eighteenth century’, P&P, 50 (1971).

21 M. Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances 1660–1714

(London: Oxford University Press and H. Milford, 1938), 79–80; J.
Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy
and Market Transition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

22 J. Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century

Industry (London: Croom Helm, 1981); J. Rule, ‘The property of
skill in the period of manufacture’, in P. Joyce (ed.), Work: The
Historical Meaning of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987); A. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom,
Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–
1809 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

23 A. Wood, ‘Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free

Miners and Their Law, c. 1550–1800’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S.
Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern
England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); A. Wood, The Politics of
Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
24 D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial
Society: Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), 375–427.

25 E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of

Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), 7.

26 For a parallel study of these religious and political protests, see

Walter, ‘Crowds and popular politics in the English Revolution’.

27 See, e.g., the works cited in n. 5, above.

 11
Consumption and Material
Culture
◈

Adrian Green

Introduction
Human cultures generally revolve around food, clothing, shelter,
work and worship. Associated activities form the routines of
everyday life and entail acts of consumption that involve material
artefacts. Material culture is core to creating and sustaining any
given group. It rarely remains static over time, but goes through
cyclical stages of development. Moreover, it regularly accrues
symbolic value. In consequence, it can be understood as a form of
communication, but the messages embodied in things may be
implicitly coded as well as explicitly stated.
Objects deemed to be special tend to communicate their
symbolic value explicitly – in art, court rituals or religious settings –
and are often subject to overt rules. More everyday aspects of
material culture communicate their significance implicitly, and are
more likely to be structured by unspoken social codes, invariably
understood by contemporaries but not always commented upon.
Nevertheless, it is this configuration of materiality and coded
behaviour that gives meaning to material culture as an aspect of
social communication. The structuring role of material culture is
embedded in the use of utensils, layout of rooms, choice of
furnishings, distinctions in dress and experience of the built
environment. Interpreting the world of things can provide profound
insights into social behaviour and cultural values as well as
economic production and exchange. This chapter focuses on the
ways in which the consumption of special and everyday material
culture was integral to social life in England between 1500 and
1750.1

Methodology
The historical study of material culture is best based on two
premises. Firstly, material culture needs to be studied as pattern, at
a variety of scales. Only by studying the patterns in material culture
can we make evidence-based historical claims about the role of
materiality in cultural behaviour. Pattern applies not only to particular
types of artefact but also to linked sets of artefacts that together
constitute a material culture. For example, the material culture of the
kitchen, dining table or bed chamber, through to the entire
household’s materiality including the house itself, were related to
other households and formed larger sets. Patterns in defined sets of
material culture may be discerned from documentary sources, such
as inventories of household goods. Secondly, material culture needs
to be interpreted in context. Only by establishing the significance of
an artefact can scholars discover the ways in which objects were
created and used. We should focus not only on objects but also on
the contextual information provided by documentary and printed
sources. In establishing pattern, scale and context, there are benefits
to integrating the various categories of material culture traditionally
the province of separate subdisciplines. Art and architecture were
related to dress, diet, domestic life and the world of work. Art and
craft were not a neat division, and objects occupied a spectrum from
the special to the everyday. It was the users and consumers of
objects as well as their producers that determined their symbolic and
practical value. Connecting material culture together in context
enables scholars to reconstruct historical behaviour. Such study may
be applied at the scale of a single household or community, and to
regional, national and trans-national patterns.2

Consumption Cycles
Consumption is cyclical. ‘Household stuff’ and other goods are worn
out and eventually return to dust. Yet man-made artefacts often
outlasted the human life span, and material goods were too highly
valued and too hard won to be easily disposed of, even at death.
Consequently, goods were circulated within households and across
generations. Clothing was frequently passed on within the family to
children and servants, while goods identified as heirlooms were
passed on to descendants, or handed over before death, particularly
on the occasion of children leaving home or marrying. Beyond this
circulation of goods within the family, clothing and artefacts were
circulated via the market. There was a voracious trade in second-
hand clothes, some of them stolen, while the probate inventories
compiled at death were valued and then advertised for sale. This
was an especially important mechanism, as second-hand household
goods were inevitably purchased by somewhat lower-status couples
embarking on marriage and setting up house. For moveable goods,
the cycle of household formation and dissolution was central to their
circulation, enabling a process of downward social diffusion as
goods purchased new for more affluent households were used in
time by the less affluent. The end for many goods is revealed by
archaeological excavation, where middens and trash pits were
informatively filled with food waste, broken ceramics and glass,
tobacco clay pipes, and lost coins. Textiles rarely survive, except in
water-logged conditions, and only clothing kept for best usually
enters museum collections. Many items of clothing were recirculated,
and the poor had worn and patched clothes until their raggedness
disintegrated, with the rags sold to become paper or rugs.3
Grades of goods and clothing had a great deal to say about the
status and standing of the household and person, both in small face-
to-face communities, and in the somewhat more anonymous
environment of towns. Poorer and smaller households were far from
entirely reliant on hand-me-downs, however, and country folk
purchased new goods at both traditional fairs and from the pedlars
and chapmen who increasingly criss-crossed the realm. Pedlars
started from wholesalers in the town at which they were licensed and
took their ponies and baskets along regular routes, such that all of
England potentially had access to the same consumer goods.
Responding to the demand for clothing and accessories, carriers
also provided mercer’s wares to order and carried speculative stock.
The cloth pieces, pins, handkerchiefs and ribbons that these carriers
supplied led Margaret Spufford to identify a ‘great reclothing’ of the
rural population, equivalent to the ‘great rebuilding’ of houses
identified by W. G. Hoskins. Chapmen also provided a host of
affordable items for the house, and took orders from country folk to
bring specific goods on the next circuit through the village. The rapid
expansion of the carrier network was symptomatic of a restructuring
of England’s economy around new centres of specialist production,
and England’s marketing system was transformed over the
seventeenth century, as its fixed sites transmogrified into the county
and market towns of late Stuart and Georgian England. Retail shops
also emerged during the seventeenth century – most spectacularly in
London, but also in provincial towns, such as Lancaster, where
William Stout set up shop with the help of kin and credit links to
London. Carriers and retail shops were the beginnings of a cycle that
would lead to department stores, delivery vans and shopping malls.4
Material culture was also circulated by gift, including servants
receiving clothing from their master or mistress and treasuring their
own few possessions in locked boxes. In an age when the
aristocracy frequently spent more on their head-dress than a servant
might earn in several years, the inequalities in wealth were manifest.
In some districts the parish also circulated goods among its settled
poor, providing household equipment to aged pensioners that upon
their decease was given out to another widow or widower. These
goods for the deserving poor belonged to the parish and were
documented in churchwardens and overseers’ accounts. The
undeserving poor, fallen into debt, prison or drunkenness, might lose
their household goods as forfeit for unpaid rent and fines. Families
that held on to their material assets either willed these to their
descendants, or dispersed them to realise a cash bequest at death –
or simply to clear outstanding debts and pay the funeral expenses. It
was common for probate inventories to list furniture as ‘old’, while
items identified as heirlooms, particularly silver and inscribed objects
(including large pieces such as court cupboards or best beds as well
as snuff boxes or portrait miniatures), did not feature in the probate
valuation but were designated as bequests in the will. Even these
vessels of family memory were valued not as antiques but as
symbolic of the family. The lineage-conscious aristocracy and gentry
frequently valued classical antiquities over the material antiquity of
their own culture, and across society most of the material culture
created further back than the previous reign became obsolete.
Consumption cycles of material culture circulating through
households in a process of accumulation and dispersal, along with
the rebuilding and redecoration of the house and its fittings, typically
involved only a couple of generations, so that the material culture of
English houses in Good Queen Bess’s day was a world away from
George II’s England.5
 Economic Expansion and Cultural Behaviour
English society was primarily orientated around the household and
family. In the early sixteenth century it was common to grow food,
keep livestock, make and mend furniture and clothes; coin was
mainly reserved for rent and occasional expenditure on new
livestock, crafted furniture or payments of parish dues. From the mid
sixteenth century the commercial economy, orientated on the
production and distribution of a widening range of consumer goods,
underwent a decisive step-change. Dependency on wages increased
exponentially over the period and cash or credit became vital to
sustaining businesses and supplying material needs. Initially, this
change in living habits was most prominent in south-east England.
But the ‘amendment of lodging’ noted by William Harrison in
Radwinter, Essex in 1577 was not equally spread across
communities. Only the affluent yeoman class participated in the first
wave of Hoskins’s ‘great rebuilding of rural England’, and Harrison
comments that ‘lodging’ was ‘not very much amended as yet in
some parts of Bedfordshire, and elsewhere, further off from our
southern parts’.6 Yet those with equivalent means might by the end
of Elizabeth’s reign aspire to live in a comparable manner in the
North Country and West Country. Stone-built statesman houses in
Cumbria, or cob-and-thatch farmhouses in Devon, were ultimately
comparable to a timber-framed Wealden in Kent, with local materials
and craft traditions moulding the dwellings of the big yeomanry and
parish gentry across England. Those of lesser means occupied ‘clay
dabbins’ on the Solway plain or built cruck-framed cottages with mud
walls in clay parts of the Midland shires, while looming over them
were new houses for the gentry, such as Quenby Hall, built in brick
between 1618 and 1636, for George Ashby and his London bride
Elizabeth Bennett. To a large extent wealth as well as geography
determined the new pattern of consumption. Documented
consumption habits in Kent reveal a closer participation in London-
based fashions, as location and wealth placed much of Kent in the
orbit of the London economy, while remote Cornwall was less
‘advanced’, though no less interesting.7
Underpinning the commercial economy and spread of consumer
goods for the home was an expansion in the volume and velocity of
exchange, which required more coin. Whereas most folk in early-
sixteenth-century England had limited access to cash and limited
need for it, by the later sixteenth century cash or credit was
necessary to maintain a household in which a new range of material
goods was required. Increasingly over the seventeenth century, most
aspects of life were supplied from afar, on the basis of monetary
exchange or its equivalent in credit. England’s economy, moreover,
became regionally specialised, as goods produced in one place were
marketed nationally. As Daniel Defoe observed in The Complete
English Tradesman (1727), ‘all our manufactures are used and
called for by almost all the people, and that in every part of the whole
British dominion, yet they are made and wrought in several distinct
and respective Counties of Britain, and some of them are at the
remotest distance from one another’.8
Defoe is among the best guides to the economy and culture of
consumption in early-eighteenth-century England, with his novels
offering acute insights into the social role of clothing. Novels,
themselves among many innovations of commercial print in the
period, enabled contemporary readers to imagine themselves in new
ways in relation to material consumption: print was fundamental to
the altered place of material culture in society. But well ahead of the
‘explosion of print’, the consumption of goods necessitated an
expansion in the use of credit. For commercial households with their
own craft or farming enterprise, and for lower-status households
dependent on smaller-scale marketing of produce alongside waged
income, credit became pervasive, with the consequence that debts
had to be settled at death. This explains the increased practice of
taking itemised probate inventories during this period. The goods of
the deceased were listed in probate inventories valuing then selling
the household goods so as to clear outstanding debts on the estate.
As litigation over credit declined so too did the incidence of making
probate inventories, such that the boom in inventories from the later
sixteenth century through to around 1720 reflects the emergence
then normalisation of credit. By the mid eighteenth century almost all
acts of consumption and exchange involved money, in cash or its
equivalent, and the fear of debt haunted eighteenth-century novels.9
For all the protean qualities of commercial innovation over this
period, especially in London and other ports with continental links,
the rigidity of England’s settlement pattern and the persistence of its
household forms meant that consumption practices very largely
occurred within structures established earlier. The nuclear-family-
with-servants household form was well established in fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century England. Consumerism was already a feature
of life in the Middle Ages, but neither as large in scale nor as socially
spread as in later sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England. Importantly, the sixteenth century witnessed a phase of
product innovation, and improved techniques of production that, as
Joan Thirsk argues, laid the basis for England’s ‘consumer society’.
Jan de Vries points to the population increase of the sixteenth
century as the trigger for this market-orientation on the part of
producers, enabling profits to be orientated on household
consumption: a phenomenon that occurred across north-western
Europe, of which England – especially southern and eastern England
– was only a part. Thirsk also shows the role of government in
sponsoring economic improvement through ‘projects’ – a theme
more recently amplified for policy-makers in seventeenth-century
England by Paul Slack – by which time western England’s
commercial economy was being invigorated by Atlantic trade. The
role of the state – or, more often, wealthy individuals close to the
levers of power acting in their own interest as well as for the good of
the ‘commonwealth’ – was critical to the expansion of the
economy.10
Economic activity, however, remained very largely driven by the
decisions of individual households to engage in production and
consumption via the market. Jan de Vries formulates an ‘Industrious
Revolution’ to explain the ways in which commercial households,
especially housewives, produced craft and farming produce for the
market so as to maximise household purchasing power and enable
them to participate in the consumption of goods. This in turn
generated a new relationship between work and leisure, as work was
orientated towards the purchase of material things and leisure,
potentially, for their enjoyment. All of this was achieved within the
household structure established in the Middle Ages, where nuclear
kin mattered most and servants were a subservient addition to the
family rather than a separate class. The second structural continuity
from late medieval England was the significance of urban places.
These provided the infrastructure for short- and long-distance trade,
in which England’s commercial economy developed. What changed
between 1500 and 1750 was the regional character of the economy,
as certain districts specialised in particular goods or foodstuffs for a
larger regional or national market. The urban hierarchy underwent
change, as new proto-urban-industrial regions emerged – notably
Newcastle and Sunderland for coal; Sheffield for steel; Leeds and
the West Riding for cloth; Birmingham for metal goods; and Bristol,
Whitehaven and Liverpool for the Atlantic trade. From these regional
centres licensed carriers distributed consumer goods to the furthest
reaches of the realm.
The carrier network gradually brought the whole of rural England
– including upland districts – into the consumer society that Thirsk
and de Vries identify as emerging from the mid sixteenth century. In
the towns, meanwhile, shopkeepers switched from selling craft
products from their workshops, to wholesaling goods to carriers and
retailing to shoppers. Towns remained central to marketing, but the
actual concept of the market underwent change. Over the
seventeenth century, the term ‘market’ no longer referred
necessarily to a fixed place of exchange, as it had since early
medieval times, but now embraced the abstract notion of potential
consumers anywhere. As Joyce Appleby demonstrates, a century
and more before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), economic
thought in seventeenth-century England already acknowledged the
advantages of the unfettered market. Print was fundamental to this
revolution in understanding and experience of the market, as printed
advertisements emerged during the seventeenth century as the
basis for reaching anonymous consumers. Auctions were another
innovation, especially for art and real estate; although widespread in
ancient Rome, auctions were not used to establish price in the
Middle Ages, when prices fixed by custom were the norm. By the
later seventeenth century the commercial techniques for England’s
market society were fully in place. According to Neil McKendrick this
set the scene for a ‘consumer revolution’, in which the culturally
driven demand for goods provided the trigger for the supply-side
Industrial Revolution later in the eighteenth century. For McKendrick
the ‘birth of a consumer society’ only fully emerged with Wedgwood
pottery and Manchester cotton factories after 1750. Yet, the making
of a market society in the later sixteenth and seventeenth century
through regional specialisation in production (including early
industrialisation), product innovation, print, advertising, retailing, new
systems of distribution and purchase on credit were at least as
important as the further elaboration of commercial activity in the
eighteenth century.11

Material Culture and the Life-Cycle

While households formed the basic units of consumption and
production, individual life experiences passed through stages of
birth, childhood, adolescent subservience, youthful freedoms, adult
householding, widowhood, death. Most aspects of material culture
were geared to this life-cycle. Many individuals were subservient to
the interests of the family, which remained central to the
consumption of material goods throughout this period. Marriage and
the establishment of an independent household formed the social
ideal for most men and women, who spent their childhood and
adolescence in a state of expectation, in training for adult life as
masters and mistresses of a household.
Although toys and dolls were a feature of children’s play in the
sixteenth century they were heavily geared towards inculcating adult
behaviour. Only in the eighteenth century did childhood become
celebrated as a discrete episode in life, rather than being primarily
regarded as a preparation for maturity. The commercialisation of
childhood was an immediate manifestation of this cultural change.
New forms of books and toys were evident from the later
seventeenth century, as the print trade and particularly the metal
trades around Birmingham responded to the childhood market,
though it remained one highly attuned to conventional gender
roles.12
Between childhood and adult independence, most men and
women went through the service stage of the life-cycle, and some
even enjoyed a period of youth relatively free of structures of
authority and household responsibility. Apprentices were taught to
learn the tools of their trade, and the material culture of work
deserves as much attention as the domestic side of life. Sons
inheriting farm-holdings underwent a parallel training in running a
commercial enterprise. The material culture of workshop and farm
was in part about rationalisation and improvement, with innovations
in utensils and techniques, but also powerfully retained and
recreated regional traditions in tools and craft techniques that would
persist beyond 1750. While youths in stable households underwent
some form of training, young maids often worked in the household of
a family of somewhat higher status than their birth. For men and
women alike, being placed in a household of higher stratus than their
childhood home was an important mechanism for the diffusion of
manners. This dynamic is too easily dismissed as social emulation.
Common folk were wary of self-consciously aping the manners of
their social superiors; masters and parents were concerned about
servants getting above themselves. There were real thresholds that
silently policed social stratification and its material expression.
Cultural diffusion is not the same as social emulation. The closely
stratified character of English society was a mechanism for both the
diffusion and the differentiation of cultural practices, which in turn
created tiers within society. The experience of higher-status
households through domestic service and apprenticeship, and its
elite equivalent in the patronage offered to well-placed youths in
noble households, the universities and London Inns of Court, was an
important mechanism for the diffusion of cultural habits. Direct
experience early in life was required to inculcate new habits, with
upbringing and education more important than indirect exposure via
print or observation from a distance. The social capital acquired in
childhood and youth mattered as much as cash and credit to the
material culture of households. In this way, households of differing
status and means, with different cultural trajectories behind them,
created and consolidated class boundaries on the basis of material
possessions and how to handle them. In his account of The Birth of
a Consumer Society in eighteenth-century England, Neil McKendrick
recognised the importance of this closely stratified society but
overstated the role of emulation. Rather than following sociological
attempts to model emulation, historians would be better advised to
pay close attention to how contemporaries conceptualised
consumption, in relation to keywords such as ‘taste’, ‘politeness’,
‘property’ and articulations of class.13
Preparation for marriage involved men and women accruing the
resources to equip an independent household. Although most men
and women only slowly accumulated the goods that would appear in
the inventories made at the dissolution of their union at death, the
need to save up and furnish a starter-home was sufficiently
demanding to delay the average age of marriage until after the mid
twenties. Marriage and the establishment of an independent
household marked entry into full adult status as householder and
housewife. The material form of the house itself embodied the social
stratification of the community and nation – from a cottage or a
husbandman’s small house (with one or two hearths) to a yeoman’s
large house (with perhaps three or four hearths), to gentry and
merchant families in well-heated homes with many more hearths. In
rural and urban communities house size, and the resources on which
the household was based, were tightly associated with social
position.14
Houses embodied the household in a society of householders
where companionate marriage was the avowed ideal, and where
commercial enterprise involved co-operation between marriage
partners. In courtship, while the educated might craft a poem or
letter, country folk composed their love tokens by hand. They often
followed regional traditions (such as carved love spoons), and this
indicates the continued importance of self-made objects involving no
money. In this context, well into the eighteenth century and beyond,
there was a resistance to commodification and maintenance of a
material culture not reliant on expenditure. For those from families of
even small property, financial assistance from parents was often
forthcoming at marriage, as were minor bequests from relatives: so
much so that the high levels of mortality in the period would have
been a blessing for some. Poorer couples with more fragile
resources and no family safety net might be discouraged from
marrying altogether and prohibited from setting up house in the
village, lest they become a burden to the parish by claiming poor-
relief. The problems of poverty and increasing dependence on
waged income notwithstanding, the cultural ideal in early modern
England was for the independence of the married couple. As a
consequence, both relative and absolute poverty were increasingly
defined in material terms, against the benchmark of the industrious
commercial household earning a living through craft or farming
enterprises.15
 The union of the married couple found expression in the
materiality of the marital home, with inscribed initials and date of
marriage on ceramics, silver or pewter plate, and oak furniture. Many
of these artefacts were given as wedding gifts, while goods acquired
later often continued to commemorate the year of marriage,
reinforcing its structural role in cementing the household as the
primary arena for life. Even the fabric of the house might be
inscribed with the dates and initials of marriage. These inscriptions
announced the successful marriage to visitors and passers-by.
Gentry families commemorated marriage in plaster ceilings and
over-mantels, with heraldic devices enshrining the entwining of
lineages. From the later seventeenth century, however,
demonstrating learned taste rather than family lineage became the
ideological basis for elite hegemony. Although aristocratic families
continued to deploy heraldry as an emblem of family ties, the
material culture of gentry households altered to express taste. The
architecture of gentry houses shifted from an emphasis on markers
of inherited status to the expression of classical taste. While the
external façade received a classical makeover, the symbolism of
lineage was often retained in the older fabric of the house,
particularly where the core of the house remained the ancient hall, or
a treasured piece of heraldic window glass was kept. Old England
went together with a taste for the exotic, and imported porcelain from
China was commissioned as gentry wedding gifts: demonstrating
wealth and taste, but sustaining the emphasis on lineage and
marriage by incorporating heraldry on dinner services and tea sets.
 At both elite and middling social levels the material culture of
marriage was ultimately an affirmation of patriarchy. This was subtly
emphasised in the layout of heraldry and inscribed initials, where the
standard form was the husband’s initial on the left, with the surname
initial raised in the centre, and then the wife’s to the right. The habit
of placing date and initial inscriptions on household goods, especially
ceramics or plate for display; on expensive oak furniture; and on
door lintels, fireplaces and plaster ceilings was distinctive to this
period. It first emerges in the sixteenth century among the gentry,
often with Latinate inscriptions, and spread to the middling sorts in
the seventeenth century, increasing in frequency in the later
seventeenth and early eighteenth century before tailing off as a
cultural practice around the mid eighteenth century. Related to rising
rates of literacy and mimetic upon print, the late-seventeenth-century
peak coincides with the decline in the proportion of couples marrying
across England. One way to interpret this pattern is to suggest that
the force of inscriptions gained greater meaning when marriage and
security of tenure were a rarer achievement. Cary Carson links dated
inscriptions to ‘possessive individualism’, though community context
was probably more critical.16
Not everyone, of course, married. Yet, the material culture of
spinsters and bachelors was not markedly different from that of
married couples. Spinsters usually lived as companions to other
women, and frequently in occupations that created spinster-clusters
in certain towns and neighbourhoods. Bachelors often lived as
lodgers or wards in larger households, with only their chamber
defined as personal space, and poorer lodgers shared access to
cooking facilities with their landlady. While single folk may have had
the opportunity for greater discretionary expenditure – on books and
pictures, clothing or going out – in general the driver for the form and
availability of material culture was the married household-based
couple, which formed the main market for goods. Unmarried maids
and bachelors were nevertheless an important subsection of the
market for manufacturers and wholesalers, with cheap items
consumed by single servants and wage-labourers. Manufacturers
responded to demand, and England underwent a ‘consumer
revolution’ on the basis of an expanding demand for household
goods rather than consumerism centred on the self.
Wives led consumption, particularly in the purchase and care of
textiles, especially window curtains, cushions, napkins for the table,
and the hangings of the bed. As Carole Schammas has observed,
dressing the bed and table was a strong female preference,
exercised as part of both duty and fulfilment within the home. De
Vries suggests this female agency encouraged women to maximise
household purchasing power for the consumption of certain goods.
Men were more involved in major purchases of expensive items,
particularly furniture or plate, while men and women together mostly
agreed on the installation of panelling, plaster and wall hangings, in
conjunction with the recommendations of craftsmen and
shopkeepers. By the eighteenth century the painted cloth hangings
and painted wall decoration ubiquitous in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England were being overlaid with wallpaper and
fresh paint. Whatever their views on interior decoration, men usually
had most say in the choice of the house itself, from starter-home on
marriage to established middle age, and possibly a retreat in
retirement to a smaller dwelling. There was, it seems, no separation
of spheres before 1750, and men and women were both involved at
home. For single men and women their material culture was an
intensification of the preferences of the husband and wife; as with
folk before marriage, they were able to exercise greater discretion in
expenditure – pursuing interests in books, engravings or clothing –
beyond what was expected to conform to the married household
ideal. The materiality of the single life merits further research. John
Styles found among the less affluent sections of the population that
expenditure on clothing was higher before marriage than
immediately after, when spending on the house and bringing up
children took up more resources. Widows were similarly defined by
the material culture that related to their former married status, which
was often a visceral decline from the prime of life.17
Legally, the law of coverture made women’s property the
subject of their husband’s authority, although the material culture of
the wife – especially goods brought to the union at marriage – could
be marked out as her own. Husbands and wives regarded certain
possessions as relating to their side of the family, and distinct from
goods assembled during marriage. Gender was subtly re-enforced
through women’s engagement with textiles, through sewing and
mending as well as by purchase, reflecting a centuries-old culture of
women engaging with fabrics. Cushions and curtains, and
upholstered furniture for the wealthy, all heralded greater domestic
comfort. For affluent men the comforts of home involved books,
pictures, furniture and, by the eighteenth century, a dressing room in
place of the closet. Piety was also an important element in
household decoration and material culture, though only the godly
had extensive scriptural decoration, and many people only gave a
nod to biblical inscriptions on the chimney-piece, or preferred to
observe older superstitions by burning marks onto the fireplace
bresumer and banishing bad dreams with candle-marks on the
ceiling. Further research is required to determine the relationship
between household decoration and religion, which should embrace
superstition as well as confessional differences. Potentially, Catholic
houses had closer connections to the Continent, while Puritans and
later Quakers were supposed to employ ‘plain style’ decoration in
preference to the gaudy enrichment of Elizabethan and Jacobean
interiors. While women as well as men led household prayers or
withdrew to their closets, and larger houses had chapels, it can be
difficult to identify a strongly gendered relationship in the use of
religious space. Male and female spaces might seem apparent in the
increasing specialisation of room use from the later seventeenth
century. But the easy ascription of gender to household space is
problematic, as in the Spectator magazine article on ‘A lady’s
library’, which satirises both the female taste for juxtaposing books
and china ornaments, and male reactions to it. Even more
problematic is the persistent misogynistic assumption that women
have an innate appetite for consumption, related to an often unstated
perception of female sexuality. McKendrick suggested that the
‘consumer revolution’ in eighteenth-century England was strongly
associated with a female propensity to consume, which had hitherto
been checked by historical circumstance, while de Vries offers a
more compelling account of female agency. Consumerism and
sexuality as a topic merits further research. Assuming an innate
tendency among women to prefer shopping is unconvincing, and
belies the evidence that affluent men enjoyed town as much as the
ladies. Men nevertheless tended to hold a veto over expenditure,
enforceable at law, especially noticeable when marriages unravelled
and men issued advertisements to stop women’s credit at the
shops.18
Marriage was not the only life event marked out by material
culture. Births and baptisms were commemorated: including,
significantly, those of infants who died. Youngsters leaving home
often made a gift or crafted a token for their parents. High levels of
geographical mobility in early modern England (and beyond to New
England and elsewhere) encouraged the marking of departure,
especially the maintenance of kin-based relationships at a distance,
with material culture.
Death was commemorated with memorials. External grave
markers were a feature of pre-Reformation England, but were largely
proscribed by the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century. The
habit resurfaced in the seventeenth century, as markers of the
middling sorts proliferated on headstones in churchyards throughout
England. Those unable to afford a carved stone had wooden grave
boards, or simply planted flowers, to mark the spot. The gentry and
upper-middling-sort professionals and merchants were buried inside
the church, and a culture of material commemoration developed
from the later sixteenth century that witnessed the installation of
elaborate memorials mounted on the walls. These internal
monuments, often with Latin inscriptions, proclaimed the
achievements and character of the deceased as well as their family
ties. Those buried outside in the churchyard more often had a simple
epitaph drawn from scripture – which invariably emphasised mortality
– and their family relationships recorded. As with the habit of
inscribed initials on furnishings and buildings, the culture of erecting
permanent grave memorials had a distinct period feel, beginning with
the elites in the sixteenth century and spreading to the prosperous
middling sorts in the seventeenth century; gravestones were a
common aspiration after 1750. In the seventeenth century this
culture of commemoration reflected in part the rising status – and
literacy – of middling-sort families; it was the ‘chief inhabitants’ of
each place who tended to be the first to erect a stone memorial
amidst a churchyard of wooden grave boards. From the later
seventeenth century it became increasingly common for such
families to commemorate the dead with permanent memorials.
Different in form from the lavish monuments to the gentry inside the
church, the middling sorts had adopted aspects of elite
commemoration (and employed the same craftsmen), but made this
material practice their own. Memorials were about status, but they
were also about mourning and memory, and it was not uncommon
for survivors to commemorate their spouse or parent even decades
after their death. They may also relate to expectations of resurrection
among the religious. These monuments were created in a context of
belief in an afterlife for the soul, yet reflect also an inclination to
commemorate mortal remains and ensure enduring memory among
the living. Movingly, many memorials were created to commemorate
the married couple and their children, with names added over time
as children predeceased their parents, and widows remembered
their spouses.19
The material culture of the funeral and bereavement involved far
more than just the gravestone, with mourning clothes, gloves and
rings provided for in wills and commensality at funerals. The elite
fashion for nocturnal funerals in the later seventeenth century was
expressive of social relations – holding the community at a distance,
while not wishing the gentry’s death ritual to be a public spectacle.
Institutions were also involved, with guild funerals as well as Church
of England rites. Some of the deceased marked their piety by
founding or endowing charitable institutions, particularly almshouses.
The changing style of gravestones is, however, indicative of a further
shift in sentiment. Seventeenth-century gravestones placed
enormous emphasis on mortality, and this preoccupation with
mortality was also a feature of contemporary art. This eased in the
eighteenth century, as new forms of sentiment made it more
appropriate to represent death indirectly – with urns, broken
columns, weeping willows or representations of mourning female
figures replacing the skulls, cross-bones, hour glass and scythe of
‘Old Father Time’ and Death himself. The English way of death, like
the change in attitude towards childhood noted above, became more
commercialised in the eighteenth century, but the changing forms of
material culture still bear testimony to shifting cultural values.20

Consumption and Class

Diet, furnishing and dress distinguished one class from another. As
Adam Smith observed, this was not so much about differential
access to resources as the quality of social distinction through taste.
Smith’s counter-intuitive observation that ‘the rich consume little
more than the poor’ was based in part on the rising living standards
of the lower ranks over the preceding century. Whereas Gregory
King, in his social tables created in the 1680s, could point to those
‘increasing the wealth of the kingdom’ and those ‘decreasing the
wealth of the kingdom’ through their consumption, Smith commented
in The Wealth of Nations on the ‘improvement in the circumstances
of the lower ranks of the people’ – observing that the common
complaint ‘that the labouring poor will not now be contented with the
same food, clothing and lodging which satisfied them in former
times, may convince us that it is not the money price of labour only,
but its real recompense, which has augmented’.21 Smith was writing
before the miseries of the Industrial Revolution. The rich, we may
add, also had a habit of extending their consumption to the limits of
their income, in ways that could make their consumption as
precarious as that afforded by the more meagre wages of the poor.
Madame de Bocagradane, visiting Oxfordshire in 1750, observed
that ‘people of this class have their houses well furnished, are well-
dressed and eat well; the poorest country girls drink tea, have
bodices of chintz, straw hats on their heads and scarlet cloakes upon
their shoulders’.22 But historians should be wary of complacency in
taking the testimony of the affluent as an adequate guide to the
prevalence of cheer through material consumption; for all that
Georgian swains and milk maids enjoyed colourful handkerchiefs
and fresh bonnets as part of plebeian fashion, they were the object
of an aristocratic perspective that saw them as pastoral figures in the
landscape, preferably beyond the garden fence. Historians should be
hesitant about taking material improvements in the standard of living
as an index of happiness. Given the exploitation and exclusion active
in England’s economy and society there is arguably little to celebrate
about the prevalence of poor-quality tea and cheap trinkets in
English homes by 1750.
During the seventeenth century, England became a post-courtly
society, orientated on London as a city rather than the location of the
court, but this merely enabled the aristocracy (who preferred to shop
in Paris) to reinvent themselves rather than cede power to the
eagerly consuming middling ranks. Only in the 1740s, when Britain
was at war with France, did English gentlemen’s dress take
inspiration from the plain style of servants (a far from unique
instance of upward diffusion in fashion). Nevertheless, London’s
‘post-courtly’ function as a city was a crucial feature of England’s
commercial society, which it shared with the Dutch, and contrasted
England with France, where elite consumption by the court was
more of a cultural focus. Sumptuary legislation governing status
distinctions in dress, which had been repeatedly refined in
Elizabeth’s reign, was undone in the first English Parliament of King
James in 1604, and Parliament came to prefer protectionist
measures applied to manufactured goods rather than to police who
was wearing what. London, with Paris beyond, was the focus of
consumption for English people throughout the British world, and for
metropolitan and provincial society alike. But this was still not fully a
consumer society, and not everyone in the British Isles or the British
Empire had an equal chance at eating a slice of the cake. Some
could only pick at the crumbs. This was certainly not ‘modern’ mass
consumption where objects are easily obtained and casually
disposed of.23
Nevertheless, the relatively poor were participating in the same
cultural changes as the affluent. And in many respects the later
seventeenth and early eighteenth century was a time in England
when there was a relative absence of acute poverty – compared to
the poverty crises that triggered the Elizabethan poor law or its
‘reform’ in 1834. The poor in Georgian England took up tea-drinking,
and came to eat with knives and forks, just as their wealthier
neighbours adopted new modes of eating and drinking – with shared
sets of cutlery, white china (or white glazed earthen-wares), cuts of
meat for each place rather than a common pot dipped into with
bread, and new cooking technologies associated with the adoption of
new meals: notably the innovation of hobs and saucepans
(introduced from France) in the later seventeenth century. All of
which points to a change in the larger sets of material culture
involved in consumption, which Jim Deetz described as the creation
of ‘the Georgian Order’ in ways of living.24 This was a deeply
conformist culture, in which many people participated in the same
trends for their own individual ends but avoided ‘singularity’.
Conformity and communal regulation may explain the particular
prominence of public sociability, much of it commercialised, in
framing consumption activities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century England – from shopping arcades to coffee shops; theatres
and assembly rooms; as well as public promenades and ticketed
pleasure gardens. Occupation and status continued to govern
people’s clothing and behaviour, as well as life-cycle and place.
Rare figures led taste, notably Beau Nash at the assemblies in Bath
and Lord Burlington with William Kent at York. Most folk followed,
and this was the logic of eighteenth-century ideas about taste, with
intellectuals such as David Hume merely putting into words the
codes of behaviour expressed more mutely through the consumption
of material culture as core to social behaviour.25 Dress, particularly,
was not only about individual flair but also about being appropriately
decked out for one’s station in life, and many occupations were
made visible through dress. Status and employment were embodied
in clothes. Despite the elaboration of plebeian dress with buttons,
bonnets, pins and ribbons, or men’s hats and handkerchiefs, let
alone the emergence of high fashion, with an annual London season
from the seventeenth century and the arrival of the first fashion
magazines from Paris by 1750, dress remained a conformist as well
as a constructivist activity. So important was dress in eighteenth-
century society that the poor had pieces of mirror in their homes to
check their appearance before venturing into public, while affluent
gentlemen and ladies had bedroom suites with adjacent dressing
rooms in which to prepare themselves for the day. Ultimately, every
group policed consumer behaviour. People were quick to detect
when their social peers were acting without authenticity, and
imaginative literature held lessons for those who stepped out of
line.26
 Ideologies of Consumption
Innovation and a belief in progress – what contemporaries called
‘improvement’ – along with an increasingly materialist understanding
of the world, defined what may be described as an ideology of
consumption in England over the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
This ethic of improvement – manifest in new foodstuffs, new utensils,
newly rebuilt houses, newly hedged fields and changes of clothes –
differentiated early modern English culture from the commercial
economy of the Middle Ages. After all, England’s expanding
commercial economy involved no drastic alteration in the basic
parameters of household and kinship structure. To differentiate the
early modern household’s culture of consumption from that of its
medieval forebears we must look to the impact of other cultural
influences, and their imperfectly understood relationship to material
culture.
England’s Reformation of religion was one. It had a direct
bearing on how contemporaries understood materiality, and the
importance placed upon material culture. The Protestant reform of
worship focused on its material setting. It encouraged a change from
contributing spare funds towards the fabric, furnishings and internal
decoration of the parish church, to prioritising spending on one’s
own domestic comforts, including godly decoration of the dwelling.
More profoundly, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-
Reformation both indirectly sponsored a greater emphasis on the
materiality of this world (including among the clergy) by contributing
to a raised consciousness of the place of materiality in historical
change, and ultimately to a process of secularisation. Witness the
new interest of clerical antiquarians in the materiality of church
architecture, such as Thomas Staveley’s History of Churches in
England (1712). Similarly, the seventeenth century witnessed an
intensified engagement with the natural world, increasingly shorn of
its magical qualities, pursued for its own sake, and fostered by the
circulation of both manuscripts and print.27
Defined by its relationship to the household economy and the
greater emphasis on materiality sponsored directly by expanding
consumerism and indirectly by the Reformation, early modern
consumption and material culture practices were quite distinct from
both what came before in the Middle Ages, and what emerged later
with further industrialisation. Early modern conceptions of materiality
were different from those prevailing in later centuries. Material things
were more directly related to their sources than is the case with
modern alienated mass consumerism. This direct understanding of
the creation of material things from the earth was still related to
biblical conceptions of man’s place in nature. As philosophers,
notably Francis Bacon and John Locke, well understood, human
artefacts were wrought from the earth. They were at once a product
of nature and artificial. Common folk shared this perception, being
necessarily familiar with the ways in which timber-and-brick houses
with glass windows were created from carefully selected trees, earth
and sand. Everyone was aware of the plant and animal source of the
fibres that made up their clothing, the leather on their shoes or
wooden clogs, the animal fat that produced the tallow for their
candles, local sources of rushes cut for lights by those unable to
afford tallow, and the laboriously collected wood and water used to
fuel and clean the house. This places early modern perceptions of
material culture in a different context from late modern capitalism,
where the relationship among the natural sources for artefacts is
generally much more attenuated and less familiar to consumers, and
increasingly a source of anxiety over humanity’s relationship to
nature.
For most early moderns, God had endowed man with the
capacity to make things, and Bacon believed that a total knowledge
of the manmade and natural worlds would lead to man’s recovery
from the Fall, and perfection of the world. Bacon’s influence is
manifest in Randle Holme’s Academy of Armory (1688), devised in
the 1650s, with most of the artefacts illustrated by Holme having
been invented in the preceding 100 years. Holme’s encyclopedic
documenting of the manmade and natural world was only published
as part of the Royal Society’s project on trades, directed at
improving knowledge of man’s manufacture of artefacts. Joseph
Moxon’s how-to manual Mechanick Excercises (1683) was part of
the same enterprise, and a burgeoning ‘how-to’ literature in print.
For Locke, man’s capacity for crafting objects from the earth was the
basis for man’s property in things, and the basis for early modern
conceptions of property rights in land and assets. Property’s
increasing importance in the seventeenth century (replacing an
earlier emphasis on multiple use rights) went hand-in-hand with the
increasing materialism of English culture. The eighteenth-century
‘luxury debate’ was about coming to terms with that change, in
which religion was increasingly on the back foot, with economic
expansion and household consumption widely recognised as the
route to England’s happiness. Print was central to this
reconceptualisation of material culture, and Bernard Mandeville’s
The Fable of the Bees (1705) was the most prominent polemic to
make the case for the public benefits of pursuing material interests
and appetites.28

Conclusion
The protean character of human materiality is specific to the context
in which it is created, and thus for historians becomes a key
diagnostic of periodisation. Material culture in England points to
three sub-periods between 1500 and 1750, with an early-to-mid
Tudor, then an Elizabethan–Jacobean phase before the civil war,
and a later Stuart into Georgian ‘style’ thereafter. Particular political
situations could give rise to particular moments in architecture and
the decorative arts, and regnal labels are appropriate when
considering material culture in this era, for even though England was
increasingly focused on metropolitan London rather than upon the
court, contemporaries still defined themselves and their material
prosperity as reflecting the state of the realm under particular
monarchs. They seldom thought in terms of decades or centuries,
but were often aware of regional cultures and local traditions.
Specialist scholars can readily identify the place and date of an
artefact and distinguish an original from a later reproduction. This
specificity of materiality is central to our historical imagination; we
can picture Henry VIII’s court, and how this contrasts with the world
of George II’s London, or how a Cornish farmhouse differed from a
Cumbrian. Across the period 1500–1750 the materiality of England
changed several times. This stadial quality of material culture is
usually referred to as ‘style’, but it is possible to be more direct and
regard materiality as the expression of culture. Material culture does
not alter at an even rate; although there is often a strong
generational dynamic to the rhythms of change, similarities can be
carried over more than one generation and more than one political
ideology, as in the architecture and furnishing for parliamentarians
and royalists before and after the Civil Wars, or the persistence of
Georgian furnishings and fashions well beyond 1750. At differing
scales, recognised through the emergence of distinct patterns,
related sets of material culture metamorphosed from one way of
doing things to another.
Diet, dress, housing and furnishings all altered as part of an
expanding commercial economy linked to seaborne trade, and
provided the material frame for an increasingly post-courtly and
segregated society, with poverty defined by an acute or relative lack
of material things. Yet it was unwittingly encouraged in the post-
Reformation era by a greater concentration on the materiality of this
world – what Max Weber called the ‘Great Disenchantment’.29
Consumerism, for all its techniques of rationalisation and
opportunities for exuberance, may ultimately be motivated at the
deepest level by a refusal to think about death. The culture of
seventeenth-century England was certainly preoccupied with
mortality – in art and commemoration – as the nation recoiled from
the wars of religion in Europe and endured a civil war in Britain that
appeared to many to herald the last days. The entrenchment of
consumerism in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century
may in part have been a reflex against religious extremism. What
certainly continued up to 1750 and after was the focus on the family
as the basis for society and the household as the primary unit of
production and consumption. In making themselves a home, at work,
or enjoying themselves at leisure, English men and women ensured
that material consumption was central in every sense to England’s
transformation and trajectory. Many aspects of material culture were
also generated and consumed in ways that relied directly upon
commercial print culture, and there is considerable scope for further
research on both the linkages between material and print culture,
and their trans-national character. As the diffusion of production
techniques and consumption practices testify, southern and eastern
Britain was directly engaged in a shared commercial culture with
north-western Europe, particularly the Netherlands. The origins of a
consumer economy were less tied to the genius of the English nation
than to their geographical good luck to occupy a relatively
prosperous part of the region of Europe that witnessed the
emergence of a dignified and industrious trans-national culture.30
The challenge for historians is to explain how and why their
materiality changed over time.

Notes
1 M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an
Anthropology of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1979).

2 I. Hodder (ed.), The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); I. Hodder (ed.),
The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression
(London: HarperCollins, 1989); I. Hodder, Entangled: An
Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things
(Chichester: Wiley–Blackwell, 2012).

3 B. Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing

Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1997);
T. Arkell, N. Evans and N. Goose, When Death Do Us Part:
Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early
Modern England (London: Leopard’s Head, 2000).

4 M. Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty

Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London:
Hambledon Press, 1984); W. G. Hoskins, ‘The rebuilding of rural
England, 1570–1640’, P&P, 4 (1953); A. Everitt, ‘Country, county
and town: Patterns of regional evolution in England’, TRHS, 5th
series, 29 (1979); J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds.), Seventeenth-
Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

5 A. Vickery, ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle? Thresholds,

boundaries and privacies in the eighteenth-century London
house’, P&P, 199 (2008); P. King, ‘Pauper inventories and the
material lives of the poor in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe (eds.),
Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English
Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); A. Green,
‘Heartless and unhomely? Dwellings of the poor in East Anglia
and north-east England’, in J. McEwan and P. Sharpe (eds.),
Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements
of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011); M. Spufford, ‘The limitations of the probate
inventory’, in J. Chartres and D. Hey (eds.), English Rural Society,
1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6 W. Harrison, ‘Of the manner of building and furniture of our

houses’, in The Description of England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1968), originally published in 1577 and 1587; C.
Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England
during the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

7 A. Green and R. T. Schadla-Hall, ‘The building of Quenby Hall,

Leicestershire: A reassessment’, Transactions of the
Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 74 (2000); M.
Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean and A. Hann, Production and
Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London:
Routledge, 2004).

8 D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman in Familiar Letters

(1727), 2 vols. (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969), Vol. I, 257; K.
Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern
Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).

9 In addition to Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and

Roxana (1724), see P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle
Class: Business, Society and Family in London, 1660–1730
(London: Methuen, 1989); C. Muldrew, The Economy of
Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early
Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

10 J. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a

Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978); P. Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information
and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015); J. de Vries, ‘The industrial
revolution and the industrious revolution’, Journal of Economic
History, 54:2 (1994).

11 J. O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-

Century England (Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 1978); N.
McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer
Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England
(London: Hutchinson, 1982), critiqued by B. Fine and E. Leopold,
‘Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution’, SH, 15 (1990); and
J. Brewer, ‘The error of our ways: Historians and the birth of
consumer society’, Cultures of Consumption Working Paper no.
12 (Royal Society lecture, London, September 2003),
www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/working_papers/Brewer%20talk.doc
(accessed 17 October 2016).

12 L. Trusler, ‘“In play is all my mynde”: Children and their toys in

Renaissance England’, Things, 13 (2001); J. H. Plumb, ‘The new
world of children in eighteenth-century England’, P&P, 67 (1975);
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London: Cape, 1962),
criticised in A. Wilson, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood: An
appraisal of Philippe Ariès’, History and Theory, 19 (1980); C.
Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the
West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
13 McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer
Society, 1–33; T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New
York: Macmillan, 1899); C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the
Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); R.
Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London:
Fontana, 1983).

14 See www.hearthtax.org.uk (accessed 17 October 2016).

15 D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual and the Life-Cycle

in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997); S. Hindle, ‘The problem of pauper marriage in seventeenth-
century England’, TRHS, 6th series, 8 (1998); L. Stone, The
Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977); W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties
(1622).

16 R. Machin, ‘The great rebuilding: A reassessment’, P&P, 77

(1977); C. Carson, ‘The consumer revolution in colonial British
America: Why demand?’, in C. Carson, R. Hoffman and P. J.
Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth
Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994).

17 C. Schammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and

America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. de Vries,
‘Between purchasing power and the world of goods:
Understanding the household economy in early modern Europe’,
in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of
Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); A. Vickery, Behind Closed
Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2009); J. Styles, The Dress of the People:
Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

18 A. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England

(London: Routledge, 1993); M. Pointon, Strategies for Showing:
Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); T. Hamling, Decorating the
‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010); A. Green, ‘“A
clumsey country girl”: The material and print culture of Betty
Bowes’, in H. Berry and J. Gregory (eds.), Creating and
Consuming Culture in North-East England (Farnham: Ashgate,
2004), discussing ‘A lady’s library’, Spectator, 37 (1711); J. Bailey,
Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England,
1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

19 R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England,

1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); S. Tarlow, Ritual,
Belief and the Dead Body in Early Modern Britain and Ireland
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

20 J. Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral

since 1450 (London: Hale, 1991); N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death:
Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500–c. 1800
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991).

21 A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Cambridge

Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 215; A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Oxford World
Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 70–2.
22 Cited in A. Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England
(London: Batsford, 1979), 130.

23 A. Ribiero, Dress in Eighteenth Century Europe, 1715–1789

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984); A. Hunt,
Governing the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); D. Miller, Material Culture and
Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

24 J. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early

American Life (New York: Anchor, 1996); M. Johnson, An
Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

25 D. Hume, ‘Of the standard of taste’ (1757), in David Hume:

Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133–54;
J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the
Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

26 T. Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771)

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). For the scene at Newcastle see
A. Green, ‘The polite threshold in seventeenth and eighteenth
century Britain’, Vernacular Architecture, 41 (2010); and H. Berry,
‘Creating polite space: The organisation and social function of the
Newcastle assembly rooms’, in Berry and Gregory, Creating and
Consuming Culture.

27 C. Hill, ‘The spiritualization of the household’, in Society and

Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1964); M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity:
Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005); K. Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson,
1971); K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes
in England (London: Allen Lane, 1983); K. Thomas, The Ends of
Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009); C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

28 L. Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-

Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994);
P. Slack, ‘The politics of consumption and England’s happiness in
the late seventeenth century’, EHR, 122:497 (2007); J. Brewer
and S. Staves (ed.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property
(London: Routledge, 1995); J. M. Stafford (ed.), Private Vices,
Publick Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard
Mandeville (Solihull: Ismeron, 1997); J. Sekora, Luxury: The
Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. O. Hirschman, The Passions
and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its
Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

29 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

(London: Routledge, 1992 [English trans. London: HarperCollins,
1930]); C. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).

30 E. A. Wrigley, ‘A simple model of London’s importance in

changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, P&P, 37
(1967); E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth in early modern England:
Food, fuel and transport’, P&P, 225:1 (2014); D. McCloskey,
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern
World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010); J. de Vries, The
Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household
Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
 Part III
◈

Social Identities
 12
‘Gentlemen’: Remaking the
English Ruling Class
◈

Henry French

‘Gentlemen’ have been a problematic group in English social history,

not least because they often elude easy definition in terms of their
membership or common attributes.1 These problems are
compounded by contemporaries’ willingness to use the term
‘gentleman’ in two, overlapping but distinct, ways: as an inclusive
category, applied to all those of gentle birth and status (including the
titular aristocracy); and as a term reserved specifically for ‘lesser
nobles’, below the rank of ‘baron’ (baronets, knights, esquires and
‘mere’ gentlemen). This chapter will focus on the latter group,
because non-titular landed gentlemen (the group referred to from the
mid eighteenth century as ‘the gentry’) formed the core of the
English landed elite from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Although the titled aristocracy expanded from 60 families in 1600 to
over 600 by 1800, and accumulated a disproportionate share of
wealth, status and power in Britain and Ireland, they shared many of
their essential social and cultural characteristics with the wider
swathe of landed society that will be considered here.
Social historians’ problems with landed society reflect deeper
ambivalences created by the inception and evolution of social history
itself over the last century. This has produced a situation in which we
know a huge amount about lives, experiences, opinions, actions and
dynamics within this group, but where much of its social history still
remains to be written. This chapter will consider three dimensions of
this unfinished social history. Firstly, it will reflect upon the reasons
why the group has proved problematic to social historians. Secondly,
it will review the main conclusions that can be abstracted from the
voluminous literature on the lives and activities of the gentry through
the early modern period. Thirdly, it will suggest ways in which future
studies might pursue the social history of this group, and, in
particular, to integrate it further into the mainstream of analyses of
early modern society.

For a century a simple, axiomatic question has bedevilled historical

understandings of the English gentry – should social history concern
itself with a group of 10,000–20,000 families who constituted the
ruling elite through the early modern period? Any possible answer
bears directly upon the composition of the ‘society’ that social
history professes to study, and on the nature of the ‘history’ that it
seeks to write. There are three reasons why English social history
has been very ambivalent about the gentry. Firstly, the late-
nineteenth-century professionalisation of historical study, and its
institutionalisation through university faculties, created a split
between political/constitutional history and economic history (with
some interest in ‘class’ formation) within academic circles. As Adrian
Wilson has observed, the emergent academic economic and social
history defined itself, in part, against the study of political history: ‘the
history of a people with the politics left out’.2 The gentry were
casualties of this split, because in the history of periods before the
mid nineteenth century, the working assumption was that the most
important political actors were usually members of the landed elite.3
Secondly, as members of the historical section of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, such as A. L. Morton, H. N.
Brailsford, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E. P.
Thompson, George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm, brought an
ideological and methodological rigour in the two decades after 1945
to subjects previously studied as ‘people’s history’, the evolving
social history became construed very much as ‘history from below’.
This was institutionalised as academic social history in the 1960s. If
social history had a duty, in Raphael Samuel’s words, to be
‘oppositional’, and embedded in experience rather than ideology,
then its practitioners argued that it should be concerned with
‘ordinary people’, not the social elite.4 While the gentry featured
extensively in Thompson’s work on the law, poaching and riot; in
Hill’s explorations of the social context of the English Revolution;
and in a host of other studies of popular protest, politics, and
subversion; they did so primarily as ‘class enemies’.5 They were
also included in the first generation of social history primarily either in
the context of crime and social control,6 or where their substantial
archives allowed insights into topics that were difficult to study
among other social groups, such as ‘histories of family structure,
marriage and childhood, adolescence, old age and death … gender
relations and sexuality’,7 sometimes with mixed results.8
Thirdly, and more prosaically, the heyday of this ‘new social
history’ also coincided with a massive upsurge between 1960 and
1980 in research on the early modern English gentry, through the
historiographical golden age of the ‘county community’ study of
gentry politics, economic fortunes and social organisation in the
century before 1640.9 There was little need for social historians to
work on this group, because so much research was already going
on, even if much of it was on gentry politics. Conversely, since 1980
the rise of revisionist interpretations of the Civil War, and the
tendency of detailed county studies to complicate rather than confirm
the debates that initiated them, has led to a decline in regional
studies of the group.10
The social history of the gentry – that is, the holistic
consideration of the social and cultural identity, ideas, experiences,
practices and power relationships of small, medium and large rentier
landowners – really rests on three studies that complement a couple
of older monographs.11 These are the works of Felicity Heal and
Clive Holmes, James Rosenheim, and Amanda Vickery.12 While
these studies provide a comprehensive overview of some of the
most important attributes, influences and dynamics within the gentry,
they also leave open some quite substantial thematic gaps for future
researchers.
In the last two decades research into the composition, attributes,
identity and dynamics within the gentry has been strongest among
historians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It has revealed
some of the very long-term continuities that characterised the gentry
as a status group in English society, but also allows us to identify
new developments in the early modern period.
Surprisingly, it has demonstrated that the term ‘gentleman’ and
the idea of a collective group of ‘gentlemen’ or ‘gentlewomen’ came
into currency in historical sources quite suddenly in the years
between 1420 and 1440.13 Christine Carpenter found that in
Warwickshire, although ‘by the 1420s esquires were beginning to be
designated on private deeds with reasonable frequency’, the term
‘gentleman’ was employed relatively infrequently until the 1440s to
‘signal separation from the peasantry’, and was rare in government
documents until the 1460s.14 She suggests that this descriptive
change was triggered by the 1413 Statute of Additions, which ‘finally
produced the extrapolation from gentil for all well-born people to
‘gentleman’ for the lowest of the well born’.15
It is clear, too, that the group long preceded the term. Research
by Coss has shown that by the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
century non-titular landholders were increasingly able to assert their
independence as minor territorial lords (firstly the esquires, then the
gentlemen), and distinguish their authority from that conferred
through their position as household officials or followers of the major
aristocracy.16 Even so, such minor landholders continued to derive
much of their authority, status and patronage from their positions
within larger aristocratic ‘affinities’. Their clientage continued into the
sixteenth century, with Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk (d.
1572), perhaps being the last English noble to command ‘a neo-
feudal loyalty from a tenantry which included many East Anglian
gentry’, by placing them on the bench, drawing them into his military
retinues and requiring their votes for his parliamentary candidates.17
The territorial power of magnates such as Edward Stafford, third
duke of Buckingham, Thomas Percy, seventh earl of
Northumberland, and Thomas Howard did not survive their fall. After
its destruction, their gentry clients acquired more political and social
autonomy, at the cost of greater local factionalism and competition
for office.
From its origins, the gentry was a ‘status’ group rather than a
more tightly knit social entity. Its members were united in the shared
adoption of status-bearing social, cultural, economic and political
characteristics, based on income derived primarily (but never
exclusively) from the rents and services drawn from land. Yet, this
status always encompassed a series of paradoxes. From the
fourteenth century, gentlemen and -women constantly revered
families of long lineage, but the gentry was always open to
newcomers with sufficient wealth to acquire and sustain the status-
bearing attributes sanctioned by the group.18 ‘Porosity, like
adaptability, is a characteristic of the gentry which can certainly be
traced to the period of origin.’19 Gentility was portrayed as a
fundamental status threshold, separating its possessors from all
social groups beneath them, but gentry had only the heralds’
visitations and their coats of arms to defend their status in law. As
serfdom declined, it was more difficult for minor gentlemen and
women to buttress their status by reference to the feudal
prerogatives stemming from manorial lordship. Lordship remained
important, but more as the means of access to demesnes to be
rented out, than to bondmen who could be ordered about.20
This entrenched a further paradox, apparent until the end of the
nineteenth century, in which landlords constantly traded the social
prestige, power and influence of paternalist relations with tenants
against the ever-present desire to maximise income.21 In addition,
while the extraction of unearned income from land remained the
dominant status-bearing template among the gentry and aristocracy,
the group was never averse to placing younger sons into learned
professions (particularly the law) or higher-status distributive trades,
or to receiving influxes of dowry income from marriages of daughters
into such occupations, despite enduring snobbery about such
connections. ‘Studies of family settlements among the landed
aristocracy from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries reveal a
remarkably consistent pattern, in which the heir’s prospects take a
normally unchallenged precedence.’22
If these concerns about lineage, arms, lordship, profit and
primogeniture remained constants in the lives of all landowners from
the central Middle Ages to Victorian England, what changed? We
can identify four substantial developments: two of them, price
inflation and religious reform, had their principal impact in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth century; two others, changing social
horizons and shifts in the bases of their social authority, began in
that period but gathered pace after 1650. Price inflation began in the
1520s, and accelerated with population increases and coinage
debasements in the 1540s and 1550s, with another sharp upturn
triggered by harvest failures and wartime expenditure in the 1590s.
More importantly, such rises came after 150 years in which rents,
incomes, food prices, raw and manufactured materials had
stagnated, particularly in rural areas. When landlords moved to
increase rents, undermine long or perpetual tenures, secure higher
prices and convert from arable to pasture or plough up commons,
such activity violated the ‘customs’ established by tenants during
three or four generations of low pressure. This explains why the
apparent rapaciousness of ‘rack-renting’ landlords generated so
much comment in the 1540s and 1550s, and so much real, and
serious, popular unrest.23
At the same time as landlords awoke to the need to extract
more rent from their land, the dissolution of the monasteries
undoubtedly also increased the supply of land available for purchase
by lesser families. Before this time, Carpenter’s study of
Warwickshire suggests that although some new families bought their
way into the ranks of the county’s gentry, most were ‘royal or noble
servants, lawyers, justices/judges’, not rising yeomen. After 1480,
most purchases were made by existing families, not by newcomers,
in a land market that was increasingly fluid.24 The dissolution
brought ‘fully a quarter of manors’ in the county onto the land
market, and opened up opportunities for new, as well as established,
families.25 By 1640, perhaps only 18 per cent of the county’s gentry
could claim to have held the status since the fifteenth century, which
might explain why Carpenter found that by the early seventeenth
century they exhibited ‘often abysmal ignorance’ of their late
medieval ancestors.26 By contrast, 27 per cent had achieved the
status during the period 1500–59, and another 30 per cent during
Elizabeth’s reign.27
What was the net effect of this influx? The ‘rise of the gentry’
thesis that defined scholarly debate about the group between 1940
and 1965 revealed the heterogeneity of the gentry’s composition
and, consequently, no clear link to any patterns of allegiance during
the Civil War, with social mobility and diversity within the group
varying considerably among counties. In Kent and Cheshire, there
appears to have been relatively little turnover of gentry families
between 1500 and 1640. By contrast, 60 per cent of the gentry in
Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Norfolk were newcomers since 1500,
70 per cent of those in Suffolk and Northamptonshire, and 85–90 per
cent in the London hinterland counties of Essex and Hertfordshire.28
The dissolution of the monasteries and chantries, and the sale and
exchange of diocesan and dean-and-chapter lands into Elizabeth’s
reign transferred perhaps 10–20 per cent of the land area in England
into private hands. While the hands at the front of the queue for royal
largesse were usually those of courtiers (like Sir Thomas Audley or
Sir Richard Rich) and aristocrats, the gentry featured heavily in the
second tier of purchasers. Church land was used primarily to ‘round
out’ existing holdings, and ‘in no sense did the crown sales call into
existence a new class of landowner’.29 In Norfolk the gentry moved
from holding 67 per cent of manors in 1535 to 78 per cent in 1565,
where most other categories of landowners (the crown; aristocrats;
and the Church, excluding monasteries) remained broadly stable.30
In Yorkshire, over 25 per cent of Cliffe’s 679 gentry families
eventually owned some monastic land.31 As Alan Simpson wrote in
1960, when the gentry debates still raged, ‘as for “impoverished
landlords” or “declining gentry”, we do not doubt that they existed,
but we cannot see why the agrarian history, per se, should have
produced them in any great numbers’.32 In an era when grain prices
increased sixfold between 1500 and 1600, and rents increased
perhaps six- to tenfold, while wage rates barely doubled, it was
difficult not to increase profits on an estate of at least 500–1,000
acres.33 Just as in more recent research on the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, there is little evidence that smaller estates were
more market-oriented, exploitative or grasping than larger ones, or
that there were marked north–south variations or ideological
differences between market-inclined ‘puritans’ and ‘traditional’
paternalists.34 If the gentry got into financial difficulties, it was often
more because they were unable to restrain increases in expenditure
(on houses, jewels, clothes, household possessions, travel, dowries
and jointures), rather than because they were unable to increase
their rents.35
How intensive was such exploitation? Recent research by
Richard Hoyle, Christopher Brooks and Andy Wood has illustrated
how effective tenants could be in launching collective legal defences
against acquisitive, profiteering or extortionate landlords, particularly
in securing their own, favourable understandings of manorial
custom.36 Although examples abound of vindictive, grasping
landlords, like Henry, Lord Cromwell in North Elmham, Norfolk,
discussed in detail by Richard Hoyle, other cases support Wood’s
view that ‘the gentry also bought into custom, seeing it as a legal
and cultural expression of a kind of social contract’.37 Sometimes
this emollient behaviour was inspired by the desire to avoid
expensive legal proceedings initiated by their tenants, as in the case
of Henry Jernegan of Painswick, Gloucestershire, ‘a gentle man well
inclined to a peaceable end’, but only after receiving the symbolically
‘dutiful and submissive’ deference of his tenants.38

From their origins, the gentry had always acted as brokers between
localities and regional or national authorities, whether this was in the
form of connection to an aristocratic affinity, or involvement in royal
administration or office, such as the commission of the peace.39 The
gentry gained and maintained their importance to the Tudor polity by
acting as reliable, trusted agents in the localities, as sheriffs, justices,
militia captains, hundred constables, and manorial lords.40
‘Localism’, Anthony Fletcher has written, ‘… was by and large
mastered and subsumed by the country gentry for the purposes of
government. This in a sense was the very essence of their
achievement.’41 The centrality of local office to the gentry’s self-
identity is emphasised by the alienation and anger created by their
exclusion from power during the Civil War and the Cromwellian
era.42 At such times, gentry on the wrong side probably agreed with
Sir John Oglander that, ‘If thou hast not Somm Commande in thy
cowntery, thou will not be esteemed of the Common Sort of people,
whoe hath more of feare, then love in them.’43 The deprivation of
such supports turned many royalist and moderate parliamentarian
gentry into political recusants, who focused their efforts on protecting
their landed interests, social networks and cultural capital in the
localities.44 The ostentatious celebration of Christmas became both
a symbolic oppositional act, and a demonstration that the gentry still
mattered in counties in which they had been deprived of other
significant authority.
The focus on the localities during the Interregnum was a volte-
face, after sixty-to-eighty years in which the gentry had begun to
orient themselves more towards London, and as a political, social
and cultural centre, and increasingly sought to educate sons at
distant schools, the two universities and the Inns of Court.45 The
resort to institutions of educationrather than household tutors may
have been more important socially than intellectually. The late
medieval gentry were probably already possessors of a literate,
learned and socially distinctive culture, but it was one acquired
locally.46 The expansion of the numbers at public and grammar
schools, and at university (after 1560), was driven as much by
parents’ desire for sons to leave behind their local roots as it was in
the belief that social elevation demanded educational excellence.47
This development also raised their social horizons, and in particular
widened the geographical breadth of the ‘pool of eligibles’ from
which they sought marriage partners. In the fifteenth and early
sixteenth century, even in a relatively open county such as
Warwickshire ‘the lesser esquires and gentlemen, even heirs and
heiresses, married locally, sometimes positively parochially’.48 By
the early seventeenth century, at least half the Warwickshire gentry
looked outside the county for marriage partners. One-third of the
county’s more substantial gentry, and almost 20 per cent of its minor
gentry, now sought partners from beyond the Midlands.49 The
development of the mature London ‘season’ after 1660 (already
anticipated in the 1610s and 1620s),50 and the concentration of elite
sociability within regional centres such as York, Chester, Exeter,
Gloucester or Winchester,51 and emergent resort towns like Bath,
Buxton, Tunbridge Wells and Scarborough, widened these horizons
for less wealthy or well-connected landowners, too.52
At the same time, between c. 1600 and 1640, there was a
growing emphasis on travelling as part of the gentleman’s
education.53 Previously, the Reformation had exposed English
travellers to danger, particularly after Elizabeth’s excommunication in
1570, and hostilities with Spain between 1585 and 1604 made travel
difficult for those not included in a diplomatic entourage.54
Thereafter, a steady flow of gentry joined the higher nobility in
travelling to Paris, and then on to the centres of classical and
humanist scholarship and arts (as well as less licit activities) – Rome,
Florence, Padua, Verona, Bologna and Milan – plus commercial and
artistic centres such as Genoa and Venice.55 Until the early
eighteenth century, such gentry travellers tended still to be a fairly
self-conscious avant garde of aesthetes, would-be courtiers and
collectors.56 However, they personified the more general emphasis
on humanist cultural education, attributes and appreciation among
the elite, which included a broadening of cultural horizons
irrespective of actual patterns of travel.
 There were other shifts in this period. In the 1620s and 1630s
many English gentry persisted with customs of hospitality – of times
of ‘open house’ to tenants and neighbours.57 By the seventeenth
century, such hospitality was increasingly discriminating, and tended
to focus on feast days such as Christmas or Shrovetide, harvest-
homes, or family events.58 It was much less common for gentry to
maintain an open hall, in which all their servants and any visitors or
local paupers might be fed.59 Some still fed the needy at their gates,
but the gravitation of the gentry to London for part of the year, and
the formalisation of relief through compulsory poor rates, diminished
the symbolic and material significance of hospitality as an integral
component of gentry identity. The Civil War accelerated these trends.
Heavy taxation and sequestration of royalist families diminished the
funds available for open hospitality. Once these values were
disturbed and interrupted among the wartime generation, they were
harder to revive organically after 1660.
As a status group, the gentry’s economic fortunes tended to
revive after 1660, even in the face of significant long-term declines in
agrarian income in the period 1670–1730.60 Similarly, they regained
their control of the institutions of county, militia and national
government, and held on to them determinedly until at least the late
1860s.61 However, Rosenheim argues that in the century after 1660,
there was a growing tendency for the landed elite to regard their
estates more as places of leisure, recreation, peer-based sociability
and artistic self-expression than as sacred trusts, seignieurial
powerbases or governmental responsibilities. In particular, he
suggests that through the eighteenth century, the gentry retreated
from involvement in the magistracy and business of county
government.62 In their place came more minor local gentlemen, plus
(as other studies have indicated) greater specialisation, with a few
highly active magistrates acting as semi-permanent chairs of the
county bench over many years, leading a larger group of justices
who attended only once or twice a year.63 This was compounded by
changes in educational fashion. Falling gentry incomes, rising
educational costs, the diminished reputation of the two universities
and restrictions on the accessibility of tuition at the Inns of Court
after 168064 meant that gentry sons (especially younger sons) were
less likely to receive tertiary education, or even to be sent to a public
school.65 While a lack of legal knowledge was no bar to acting as a
magistrate, a general decline in exposure to such training may have
reduced the gentry’s familiarity with, and appetite for, the role. Many
more gentlemen participated in the expanded bureaucracy of the
emergent ‘fiscal-military’ state, notably the 13,000 land tax
commissioners in 1723 (perhaps triple the number of justices of the
peace at the same time), or (open-field) enclosure commissioners, or
as trustees of local charities, and eventually canal and turnpike
trusts.66 These roles were much narrower than the all-encompassing
activities of the magistrate, and many who held them were inactive
time-servers. Rather than rekindling gentry activism, these posts
enabled aspirant lawyers, physicians, manufacturers and wholesale
merchants, higher-status retail trades, and others among the
‘middling’ to lay claim to the status of gentlemen and to rub
shoulders with landed society.67
 Indeed, ‘elite withdrawal’ may have been exacerbated by a
decline in the size of the landed gentry per se. As Clay has
remarked, ‘well before 1700 … the multiplication of the gentry, which
had been so marked a feature of English society between 1540 and
1640 had ceased’.68 This decline in numbers was the result of
several concurrent trends: smaller completed family sizes and fewer
male heirs in the three generations after 1660;69 substantial
increases in the value of marriage portions;70 a decline in the volume
of land for sale; and absolute declines in the value of returns on land,
as well as their declining yield relative to an increasing range of other
financial opportunities (government bonds, joint-stock companies
and mortgages).71 While a drop in the numbers of heirs tended to
concentrate property in fewer hands, historians have been wary of
linking this to the new, more prescriptive legal forms of inheritance
that emerged after 1650. ‘Strict settlements’ allowed a landowner to
specify, and thus control, the descent of his property at the time of
his marriage, and to bind his as-yet unborn children into this legal
agreement.72 However, it is unclear whether their effect was to
funnel landed property into fewer and fewer hands. As the Stones
put it, ‘The central significance of the strict settlement was that it was
in practice not very strict.’73 The rising proportion of surviving female
heirs was probably of equal or greater importance in the
amalgamation of gentry estates.74
At the same time, there are signs of greater social exclusivity in
the lives of the gentry. While they sometimes maintained certain
social set-pieces (notably feasting their tenants at harvest, at the
heir’s majority and at patriotic celebrations), and spectated at
pastimes or spectacles attended by diverse audiences (cock-fighting,
theatre, public executions, elections and parades), elite sociability
was often within a bubble.75 Literary societies, clubs of all kinds,
hunts and masonic lodges were often joined by co-option.76
Libraries, assemblies, balls, horse races, and other places or events
were often policed by membership fees and rules to exclude the
socially undesirable.77 While this offered an access route for urban
‘gentlemen-tradesmen’, it created the powerful, but invisible, social
thresholds that came to characterise English society into the
twentieth century.78 As Lawrence Klein, Peter Clark, and Markku
Peltonen have demonstrated, it also enhanced concepts of social
and personal civility or ‘politeness’ – manners that determined social
acceptance, political organisation, economic worth and cultural
standards, and controlled and policed interactions between those
who ‘belonged’ and excluded the ‘vulgar’, who made up most of the
rest of society.79 The landed elite had always been marked out by
diet, dress, equestrian culture, enhanced access to literacy and
literate culture, the scale and permanence of their houses, their
retinues of servants, and their brokerage functions in political and
social networks. These remained, but were now buttressed by
accent, manners, early adoption of metropolitan fashions, greater
cultural cosmopolitanism and membership of a status group whose
gatherings were national in scope (the London season, winter in
Bath, racing at Newmarket, summer bathing at Scarborough or
Weymouth).80
This change also affected the function and purpose of the
landed estate. The growth of the London season and of the resort
towns transformed its function into a centre of leisure and recreation,
rather than of business, government or authority. The remodelling of
parks and the rebuilding of houses reflected this. Influenced first by
French and Dutch formality, and then by new notions of the
picturesque, parks became heavily designed landscapes that
embodied elite values (such as the classically informed grottoes of
Stowe, or parks designed to look like the landscapes of Claude
Lorrain).81 Increasingly, country houses were designed for set-piece
entertaining of peer-groups, particularly during parliamentary or legal
vacations, including the late summer–autumn hunting season, rather
than year-round habitation. Their large, regular sash windows, high
ceilings and open rooms made these houses lighter, and
accentuated views into the park, but often at the expense of
rendering their public quarters virtually uninhabitable in winter.82 The
double-pile houses favoured by the late-seventeenth-century author
Sir Roger Pratt, and incorporated into the eighteenth-century
explosion of English Palladianism, did away with the central dining
hall, and instituted a separate ‘servants’ hall’ below stairs, and
servants’ accommodation in garrets served by back stairs.83 While
servants remained, in George Savile’s words, ‘the Wheels’ of an
elite household, increasingly the fashion was for these workings to
be concealed.84 In addition, after the Restoration these servants
were uniformly of non-gentry origin, and (therefore) outside the
social sphere of their employers.85 While retained ‘professionals’,
such as tutors, governesses, land agents and surveyors, possessed
education, and at least ‘middling’ origins, there was no continuation
of the training accorded to the sons of minor gentry and local
yeomen as servants in elite households in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.86 In this sense, the earlier ‘great household’ of family,
personal servants, household servants, tenants and retainers broke
down, and the nuclear family and its social orbit were separated from
all those who served it and generated its income.
As families were more often absent, in London, Bath, York or at
a subsidiary property, they depended increasingly on local
intermediaries: both professional estate stewards, and local
attorneys and farmers who acted as rent collectors and local
managers on outlying properties.87 Full-time stewards tended to be
confined to the larger gentry estates, but they offered a
comprehensive service, in collecting rents, letting properties,
bookkeeping, and corresponding with providers of goods and
services. They wrote frequently to their employers, relating local
news, but also details of ‘best practice’ in estate management,
husbandry techniques, animal and crop varieties, and ‘improvement’
schemes (such as enclosure, drainage and crop rotations).88 In this
respect, while elite influence (or interest) in the localities did not
decline in absolute terms, the more frequent absences of the gentry
from their estates meant that the steward or bailiff became their most
visible representative, and came to exercise much of their political,
social, economic and cultural authority. The rule of the gentry
remained a constant in English society from the fourteenth century
until almost the beginning of the twentieth, but increasingly it was a
rule by proxy, based on paternalist precepts that were remarkably
consistent, but more and more hollowed out by market-based
practices.
There are two substantial fields in which future research would be
especially welcome: the social construction of gentry authority, and
(as part of this) the detailed investigation of the functioning of gentry
households and estates. There has been some excellent initial
research on both subjects, but it has been conducted surprisingly
recently, and points the way for more to be done.89
Existing research tends to assume that gentry power and
authority were self-evident. The gentry were landholders, so they
exerted control over tenants. They occupied various governmental
offices, so they discharged the responsibilities that went with them.
They were located within national-level networks of political, religious
and cultural patronage, so they exploited them to bolster their own
importance. However, although political and religious (and, to a
lesser extent, cultural) patronage networks have been investigated in
some depth, gentry power remains ‘normalised’ – the gentry were
powerful because they were the gentry. Instead, this power deserves
to be anatomised more carefully.90
In some respects, social history has treated gentry identity as
either intrinsic to the social role of the group or best studied as it
impacts other social groups. However, it is evident that this identity
can be studied more effectively by disarticulating aspects of gentry
power from the identity of the group. There is an obvious analogy
with gender history. Histories of masculinity have interrogated male
identity and norms by understanding them as social constructions,
which have been depicted as ‘natural’ by being embedded deeply
into assumptions about other valorised social concepts (honour,
virtue, fraternal co-operation, fatherhood and so on). They have
investigated maleness as a problematic, fractured and contradictory
category, in the same way that the previous generation of gender
historians split open patriarchy, and broader concepts of gender per
se. The same process is beginning to be applied to gentry identity
and authority – as a formulation that was always potentially unstable,
needed constant reinforcement and was always in action against
competing social formulations, at the same time as it was presented
as permanent, inevitable and unchallenged.
This approach was pre-figured, slightly, by the Warwick School
of historians of crime in the 1970s, particularly Douglas Hay’s idea of
a hegemonic ‘elite conspiracy’, as the basis for the wider social
acceptance of a class-biased legal system in the eighteenth century.
The benefit of this interpretation was that it interrogated the bases of
elite power, and tried to show how it was constantly created and
asserted in action. Subsequent research, notably by Peter King, has
demonstrated that the criminal law and its institutions were
dependent upon decision-making by a much wider section of the
population – the top 40 per cent, at least, rather than the top 3 per
cent – and involved constant negotiation of competing interests
among a variety of different interest groups.91
Recently, Andy Wood’s study of popular understandings of
custom, rights and legality has identified a much subtler and more
fruitful approach. The focus of Wood’s study remains, broadly,
‘history from below’, and the investigation of mechanisms by which
non-elite groups accessed the law, understood and articulated their
rights, and defended or assimilated them in relation to the interests
of propertied groups. Instead of a simple binary model of ‘custom’,
which pits custom based on popular, oral memory against ‘elite’
rights determined by written records, he emphasises the overlap of
interests and approaches. He shows that custom was a ‘discursive
field’, in which socially (and legally) disadvantaged social groups
could assert and prove their rights by working within and
manipulating assumptions about property, resource entitlement, and
precedent-based access-rights that were shared between propertied
and property-less.92 His study provides a template for how such an
analysis could be read the other way, to think much more deeply
about the ways in which the elite constantly fretted about, and
worked hard at, the projection, justification and acceptance of their
authority.93 It highlights that there are other, as yet under-
researched, ‘discursive fields’ in which the gentry struggled to assert
their interpretations against those of other social groups, and through
which some of the constituent elements of their identity might be
revealed. These include socially inflected contests over the meaning
of concepts such as honour and duty, leadership, cultural or
intellectual authority, service, motherhood, family and household,
landscape and spatial affinities.
Given the volume of research on gentry families, lives,
marriages, inheritance, houses, estates, politics, religion, business
interests, metropolitan connections and cultural horizons, what else
can we study in order to develop our understanding of gentility as a
socially constructed identity? Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths
have provided one answer. Their systematic and exhaustive study of
the remarkable (but not unprecedented) family and estate accounts
kept by Alice Le Strange reveals new interpretative dimensions.94
They demonstrate that historians’ concentration on ostentatious, big-
ticket purchases by the elite is misleading, because it ignores the
wider web of small-scale household and estate production,
exchange and reciprocity in which such purchases were situated.95
These tie the gentry household much more deeply to its economic
root-stock, and imply that the gentry, or their agents, needed to
remember, service and manipulate hundreds of different social
relationships, containing many subtle gradations of status, simply in
order to supply a single, moderately large household.96 Whittle and
Griffiths’s reconstruction of the human infrastructure of the gentry
household provides a model for thinking about power and authority
as they were embedded within day-to-day practices and ongoing
relationships. It enables us to reconstruct the identity of a family who
were socially distinctive, paternalist landlords and magistrates, but
also debtors to their tenants, buyers in the local market, suppliers of
goods and services, employers of labour, and consumers of
specialist skills and knowledge – clients as well as patrons. By
revealing the detail of resource-allocation within the family, it also
allows us to say more about the other concealed mechanism of
gentry survival through the period – provision for younger children
(particularly wayward sons like Roger Le Strange) for lives at the
margins of, or outside, the group – and its consequences in terms of
social relations.97
Further closely observed analyses of social practices year-in,
year-out would allow us to contextualise, recover and interpret the
deeper ‘discursive fields’ of shared and contested understandings of
power, identity and authority. Allied to recent studies of elite
education, particularly through the medium of classical reception
studies, research of this kind might supply a more detailed social
history of gentility – that is, the active processes by which the landed
elite conceived of their identity, and attempted to perpetuate it
socially, economically, politically and culturally within immediate
relationships, between centre and periphery, across generations and
within six centuries of British (and Irish) history from 1300 to 1900.
This change of focus does not imply either that this group, or its
values, should revert to being the primary focus, or the norm, for
historical research. However, a better appreciation of the discourses
and social practices that supported the gentry, and sustained an
unequal distribution of power, authority and resources, is essential if
we are fully to understand processes of causation and patterns of
consequences, from whatever vantage point we choose, in early
modern England.

Notes

1 See P. C. Maddern, ‘Gentility’, in R. L. Radulescu and A.

Truelove (eds.), Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); J. P. Cooper,
‘Ideas of gentility’, in G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill (eds.), Land,
Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early Modern History (London:
Hambledon, 1983); P. Corfield, ‘The rivals: Landed and other
gentlemen’, in N. Harte and R. Quinault (eds.), Land and Society
in Britain, 1700–1914: Essays in Honour of F. M. L. Thompson
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). For historians’
efforts to define the group, see G. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise
and Fall of a Ruling Class (London: Longman, 1976); M. L. Bush,
‘An anatomy of nobility’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and
Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social
Stratification (London: Longman, 1992); F. Heal and C. Holmes,
The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994), 7, 14; L. Stone and J. C. F. Stone, An Open
Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986); J. Cannon, ‘The British nobility, 1660–1800’, in H. M. Scott
(ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, Vol. I: Western and Southern Europe (London:
Longman, 2007); F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in
the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1963), 1–25, 109–50.

2 As described by G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History

(London: Longman, 1973), vii.

3 A. Wilson, ‘A critical portrait of social history’, in A. Wilson (ed.),

Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its
Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

4 S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter, ‘The making and remaking

of early modern English social history’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard
and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society: Social Relations
and Social Change in Early Modern England (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2013), 8.
5 Classic expositions of this approach are found in E. P.
Thompson, ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’, Journal of Social
History, 7 (1974); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The
Origins of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975); D. Hay, P.
Linebaugh and E. P. Thompson, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and
Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane,
1975); and C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary
England (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964). Other studies include
K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London:
Heinemann, 1982); B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural
Artisans and Riot in the West of England 1586–1660 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980); P. Clark, ‘Popular protest
and disturbance in Kent, 1558–1640’, EcHR, 2nd series, 29
(1976); D. Rollison, ‘Property, ideology and popular culture in a
Gloucestershire village 1660–1740’, P&P, 43 (1981).

6 Again, E. P. Thompson’s contribution was particularly important,

codified in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin,
1991), Chapter 2. See also P. King, ‘Edward Thompson’s
contribution to eighteenth-century studies: The patrician–plebeian
model re-examined’, SH, 21 (1996).

7 K. Wrightson, ‘The enclosure of English social history’, in

Wilson, Rethinking Social History, 60.

8 The most controversial result was Lawrence Stone’s ‘trickle-

down’ theory of marital love in The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977).
Later, more nuanced and successful studies of gentry household
and family structures have included L. Pollock, ‘“Teach her to live
under obedience”: The making of women in the upper ranks of
early modern England’, C&C, 4 (1989); V. Larminie, Wealth,
Kinship, and Culture: The Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of
Arbury and Their World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995); A. Fletcher,
Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008); J. Whittle
and E. Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early
Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

9 A. Everitt, ‘Suffolk and the Great Rebellion’, Suffolk Records

Society, 3 (1960); A. Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry, 1540–
1660: East Anglian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961); T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1628–1640: A County’s
Government during the ‘Personal Rule’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1961); A. Everitt, The Local Community and the
Great Rebellion (London: Historical Association, 1969); J. T. Cliffe,
The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War
(London: Athlone Press, 1969); J. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660:
County Government and Society during the English Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); A. Fletcher, A County
Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1640–1660 (London:
Longman, 1975); B. G. Blackwood, ‘The Lancashire gentry and
the Great Rebellion’, Chetham Society, 3rd series, 25 (1978); C.
Holmes, ‘The county community in Stuart historiography’, JBS,
19:2 (1979–80); A. Hughes, ‘Warwickshire on the eve of the Civil
War: A county community?’, Midland History, 7 (1982); W. Hunt,
The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution to an English
County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); A.
Hughes, Politics, Society and Government in Warwickshire 1620–
1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); P. A.
Duffin, Faction and Faith: The Politics and Religion of the Cornish
Gentry before the Civil War (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1996); M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War: The Gentry
Governors of Devon in the Early Seventeenth Century (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1997).

10 Increasingly, interest in the internal coherence and attributes of

the gentry has shifted to the fifteenth century. See C. Carpenter,
Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society,
1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); E.
Acheson, A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth
Century, c. 1442–1485 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992); M. Aston and R. Horrox (eds.), Much Heaving and Shoving:
Late Medieval Gentry and Their Concerns. Essays for Colin
Richmond (Chipping: Aston and Horrox, 2005); Radulescu and
Truelove, Gentry Culture; E. Noble, The World of the Stonors: A
Gentry Society (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009); P. R. Coss, The
Foundations of Gentry Life: The Multons of Frampton and Their
World, 1270–1370 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); M.
Mercer, Medieval Gentry: Power, Leadership and Choice during
the Wars of the Roses (London: Continuum, 2010).

11 The older studies are Mingay, The Gentry; and Thompson,

English Landed Society.

12 Heal and Holmes, Gentry; J. M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of

a Ruling Order. English Landed Society 1650–1750 (Harlow:
Longman, 1998); A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter:
Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1998).

13 Maddern, ‘Gentility’.
14 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 45–7.

15 Ibid., 45.

16 Coss, Foundations of Gentry Life, 4–5.

17 A. Hassall Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics

in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974),
36–43.

18 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 255.

19 Coss, Foundations of Gentry Life, 4.

20 Ibid., 115.

21 Ibid., 106.

22 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 248.

23 A. Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21–69.

24 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 123–30.

25 Hughes, Politics, Society and Government, 28.

26 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 255.

27 Hughes, Politics, Society and Government, 29.

28 C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change:

England 1500–1700, Vol. I: People, Land and Towns (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 154–5.

29 Ibid., 146.

30 M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The

Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168–9.

31 Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry, 15–16.

32 Simpson, Wealth of the Gentry, 212.

33 Clay, Economic Expansion, 147.

34 Coss, Foundations of Gentry Life, 106; see also n. 7 above.

35 Heal and Holmes, Gentry, 136–65.

36 R. W. Hoyle, ‘Redefining copyhold in the 16th century: The

case of timber rights’, in Bas J. P. van Bavel and P.
Hoppenbrouwers (eds.), Landholding and Land Transfer in the
North Seas Area (Late Middle Ages–19th Century) (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2004); R. W. Hoyle, ‘Cromwell v. Taverner: Landlords,
copyholders and the struggle to control memory in mid-sixteenth-
century Norfolk’, in R. W. Hoyle (ed.), Custom, Improvement and
the Landscape in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011);
C. W. Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 285–93, 322–51;
A. Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses
of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 156–87.
37 Hoyle, ‘Cromwell v. Taverner’; Wood, Memory, 289.

38 Wood, Memory, 293.

39 Coss, Foundations of Gentry Life, 3; Carpenter, Locality and

Polity, 85–6.

40 Heal and Holmes, Gentry, 166–89; A. Fletcher, Reform in the

Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1986), 3–5, 31–42, 87–115, 282–
316; M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.
1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27–
46; S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern
England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 3–15.

41 Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 368.

42 Heal and Holmes, Gentry, 221–6.

43 A. Nicholson, Gentry: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly

English Class (London: Harper, 2011), 117.

44 Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 11–19.

45 Ibid., 140–1, 243–75, 307–18; F. Heal, Hospitality in Early

Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 142;
Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, 191–4.

46 N. Orme, ‘Education and recreation’, in Radulescu and

Truelove, Gentry Culture, 81.
47 This was the intention of some families. See Larminie, Wealth,
Kinship and Culture, 142–51. On curriculum developments, see F.
Cox Jensen, Reading the Roman Republic in Early Modern
England (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

48 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 99.

49 Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, 38–9.

50 Heal, Hospitality, 141–2; I. Warren, ‘London’s cultural impact

on the English gentry: The case of Worcestershire, c. 1580–1680’,
Midland History, 33:2 (2008).

51 P. Clark, “‘The Ramoth-Gilead of the good”: Urban change and

political radicalism at Gloucester, 1540–1640’, in J. Barry (ed.),
The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in Urban History 1530–1688
(Harlow: Longman, 1990); A. Rosen, ‘Winchester in transition,
1580–1700’, in P. Clark (ed.), Country Towns in Pre-Industrial
England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981).

52 See P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and

Society in the Provincial Town, c. 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989). Much of the activity that Borsay
emphasises among the ‘middle sort’ post-1660 was pre-figured by
smaller numbers of gentry in towns before 1640. Heal and
Holmes, Gentry, 307–11.

53 E. Cheney and T. Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour: Early

Stuart Travellers in Europe (London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).
54 E. Cheney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian
Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Cass, 1999),
203–5; J. Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667: Their
Influence on English Society and Politics (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1989), 165–6.

55 J. Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth

Century (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), 12–50.

56 Cf. Cheney and Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour, 25–57.

57 Sir Peter Leicester, Bt, of Tabley Hall, Cheshire, appears to

have stopped feeding workers visiting his estate after 1642. C. F.
Foster, Seven Households: Life in Cheshire and Lancashire 1582
to 1774 (Northwich: Arley Hall, 2002), 75.

58 Heal, Hospitality, 148, 172, 187.

59 Ibid., 172–4.

60 Clay, Economic Expansion, 158–63; Rosenheim, Emergence of

a Ruling Order, 50–3.

61 Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 19–30, 316–48.

62 Rosenheim, Emergence of a Ruling Order, 117.

63 D. Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and

Transformation in Local Government 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 77–8; C. Chalklin, English Counties and
Public Building 1650–1830 (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon,
1998), 28–36.
64 Rosenheim, Emergence of a Ruling Order, 36–7, 230.

65 Stone and Stone, Open Elite?, 170.

66 Rosenheim, Emergence of a Ruling Order, 113; W. E. Tate,

The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movement
(London: Gollancz, 1967), 173; J. R. Ward, The Finance of Canal
Building in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1974); D. T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London
Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 71–3; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 302, 303,
346.

67 For one example, see H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People

in Provincial England 1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 212–23. For the extent of movement in the other direction,
see R. Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-
Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
145–8, 150, 153–170.

68 Clay, Economic Expansion, 163.

69 The Stones note that ‘between 1650 and 1740, just as

nuptiality was declining and mortality, especially among children,
was rising, marital fertility was falling to an all-time low, to judge
from the mean number of children born per married couple’. Stone
and Stone, Open Elite?, 61.

70 Rosenheim, Emergence of a Ruling Order, 54.

71 Clay, Economic Expansion, 163.

72 J. Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English
Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 16–
30; L. Bonfield, Marriage Settlements, 1601–1740: The Adoption
of the Strict Settlement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 93–121.

73 Stone and Stone, Open Elite?, 51.

74 Ibid., 64.

75 Thompson, ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’.

76 E. Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 128.

77 See Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 332–49.

78 French, Middle Sort, 201–61.

79 L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British

eighteenth century’, HJ, 45:4 (2002); P. Clark, British Clubs and
Societies 1580–1880: The Origins of an Associational World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); M. Peltonen, The Duel in
Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See Vickery,
Gentleman’s Daughter, 209–23 for Elizabeth Shackleton’s
adherence to such distinctions.

80 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 117–73; J. Brewer, The

Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth
Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 1–51.
81 T. Mowl, Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English
Landscape (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 149–62; J. Dixon Hunt, The
Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gardening during
the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), 194–5; T. Richardson, The Arcadian Friends:
Inventing the English Landscape Garden (London: Bantam, 2007),
306–28.

82 M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven

and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 181–212, 245–66.

83 Heal, Hospitality, 154–63.

84 G. Savile, The Complete Works of George Savile, First

Marquess of Halifax, ed. W. Raleigh (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1912), 24.

85 Heal, Hospitality, 165–7.

86 The late-sixteenth-century Lancashire judge and landowner Sir

Richard Shuttleworth of Gawthorpe was attended by a number of
gentry sons, placed in his household to learn the law. Foster,
Seven Households, 53–5; Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and
Gender, 213.

87 D. R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate

Steward and His World in Later Stuart England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6–22; G. E. Mingay, ‘The
eighteenth-century land steward’, in E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay
(eds.), Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution
(London: Arnold, 1967).
88 See D. R. Hainsworth and C. Walker (eds.), ‘The
correspondence of Lord Fitzwilliam of Milton and Francis Guybon
his steward 1697 to 1709’, Northamptonshire Record Society
Publications, 36 (1990).

89 See n. 13 above. See also Corfield, ‘The rivals’; Vickery,

Gentleman’s Daughter, 13–36, 127–61.

90 For example, although the volume of essays edited by P.

Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle, The Experience of Authority
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), demonstrated comprehensively
that social historians now regarded power as a concept that was
constantly negotiated in early modern society, its focus was on
those who experienced authority, rather than those who
experienced its exercise.

91 P. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740–1820

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 357–67.

92 Wood, Memory, 286–97.

93 For a preliminary study of these processes of normative

reproduction see H. French and M. Rothery, Man’s Estate:
Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660–1900 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).

94 Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, 14–18.

95 Ibid., 49–85.

96 Ibid., 72–84, 97–111, 156–82, 210–38.

97 J. Thirsk, ‘Younger sons in the seventeenth century’, History,
54:182 (1969); Grassby, Business Community, 145–60; A. Dunan-
Page and B. Lynch (eds.), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of
Restoration Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–5.
 13
The ‘Middling Sort’: An
Emergent Cultural Identity
◈

Craig Muldrew

Oh, what a pleasure is business! How far preferable is an active

busy life (when employed in some honest calling) to a supine
and idle way of life, and happy are they whose fortune it is to be
placed where commerce meets with encouragement and a
person has the opportunity to push on trade with vigour …1

Much of the work on ‘sorts’ of people and their place in the social
order has focused on contemporaries’ language of definition and
identity – what individuals and groups meant by referring to
themselves and others as ‘middling’, or as the ‘better sort’, ‘chief
inhabitants’ or ‘vestrymen’.2 This reflected the so-called ‘linguistic
turn’ of the 1980s, which focused on the importance of contemporary
language to understanding the contours of society in the past, in
reaction to anachronistic categorisations of people based on
functionalist socio-economic groupings, or on modern concepts of
class. The most comprehensive work on the nature of the middling
sort, by Henry French, has concluded that there was most definitely
a group of households upon whom we can look back and see that
their relative wealth, material possessions, reputation and power in
their communities marked them out. In contrast to their poorer
neighbours, the middling sort resided in houses with more rooms,
fireplaces and furniture, wore more expensive clothes, and occupied
positions of authority. But despite these similar ways of living, and
the associational business of involvement in local government and
hospitality, French could find little evidence of a national as opposed
to locally contingent self-identification.3
Contemporaries were in fact mostly uninterested in defining
themselves as members of national social groups below the level of
ethnicity. They were far more concerned with keeping a sharp eye
out for a wide range of forms of behaviour among people they knew,
which indicated, among others, noble, genteel, fine, pleasing, brave,
honest, painstaking, laborious, industrious, poor, mean, roguish or
base qualities. (All of these characteristics being further refined, on
occasion, with such descriptions as vain, quarrelsome, self-
interested, idle or beggarly.) In terms of collective designation,
phrases like ‘the better sort’ or ‘chief inhabitants’ were more
common usages than ‘middling sort’.4 This was because the
economic world they lived in made their status relatively precarious
and difficult to maintain over time, and adjectives like ‘chief’ or
‘better’ defined current inclusivity more effectively.
The term ‘middle’, or ‘middling’, sort was used by writers when
they wanted to distinguish and characterise those who were neither
the richest merchants or gentry, nor the poor: first in urban contexts,
and then, especially from the civil war period, at county and even
national level.5 Historians have followed suit because we need to
summarise and condense when describing change over time, and so
the term ‘middling sort’ has stuck as a way to describe those who
sought to differentiate themselves from the poor and who were in
turn differentiated from the elites. Here, however, I intend to focus
less on the group profile of such people than upon their emergent
cultural identity: on the adoption among them of ethical positions that
helped to form a distinctive identity, and that also facilitated social
communication, providing a means of identifying similarities with
others through the definition of acceptable behaviour. It will be
suggested that these were initially developed in response to the
combined effects of religious and demographic change, and
subsequently the great disruption of the Civil War era. They helped
people to deal with the challenges of changing social relations and
governance created by those processes. But at the same time, and
crucially, they justified household profit. It was the successful
achievement of such profit that gave the middle sort their social
identity, whatever name they chose to give themselves. They also
acted together, in older urban bodies such as town councils and in
newly established rural vestries, to decide how their wealth could be
used and taxed to address social problems, in a way that was
identifiably different from both the county gentry, and those too poor
to be taxed. They participated extensively in governance, holding
subordinate but vital offices as members of petty sessions,
constables, churchwardens, overseers of the poor, tax collectors,
councilmen and wardmote jurors. But if they exercised authority as
the ‘chief inhabitants’ of their communities, they often remained
dependent on the patronage of the titular gentry families for their
offices. They were subordinate to those who lived in manor houses;
socialised with other members of the gentry; derived income from
rent; expected their deference; and, as magistrates, scrutinised their
decisions.

In the early modern period the major historical change that

contributed to the formation of middling-sort identity was the
adoption of a new set of ethics to deal with the expansion of profit-
oriented households created by the rapid growth of
commercialisation after c. 1550. While there had been wealthier
peasants in medieval vills, seigniorial control over village life, the
communalism sustained by the common field system and a unified
Church structure made for a local society based on hierarchy and
reciprocity with less commercial development in the countryside.6
Within this landscape, there were also, of course, important towns
whose freemen and merchant elite already had an urban identity
based on trading wealth. The middling identity that would develop
from the later sixteenth century, however, was different in its nature.
It was the result of a very distinct symbiosis with an emergent
national trade system based on water transport – both coastal and
on navigable rivers – and on London as a huge metropolitan entrepôt
serving much smaller provincial towns.
 Once population began its general rise from around 1530, a
continually growing number of mouths to feed and bodies to clothe
and house created more demand for goods than in any period
hitherto. The price of grains rose sixfold between 1500 and 1640,
creating an incentive for farmers to produce more. Networks of
distribution and marketing became more complex as traders took
advantage of the profits that could be made by shipping goods to
places where prices were high because demand was greatest. This
involved in particular the development of commercial agriculture in
the south and coal production in the north-east to feed and fuel
London, which had reached a population of 300,000 by the early
seventeenth century. Larger farmers and yeomen who had sizeable
crops became wealthier by selling on the market to townsmen, rural
artisans and agricultural labourers, and used their new wealth to
increase the size of their holdings. Much of this land was purchased
from smallholders or other farmers who were unable to survive as
independent producers. This led to a reduction in the size and
number of smallholdings, and also in turn increased the number of
agricultural labourers. This, then, led to a growing cycle of demand,
as profits made from the increased sales of basic commodities such
as food and clothing were invested in the purchase of more refined
goods by wealthier individuals, in turn opening up more opportunities
for employment in local manufacturing trades. It also created a
widening social divide between an increasingly large body of poor
who sold their labour on the market, and whose earnings were
principally devoted to simply surviving, and yeomen, artisans or
professionals like lawyers who profited by selling goods or services
on the market.

Because commercialisation was so important to this process it

makes sense to look first at the development of the middling sort in
the towns where markets and shops were located and new goods
imported and sold. Most larger towns were also incorporated
boroughs, or became so during the sixteenth century. Corporations
provided the status of freedom, or citizenship, which was not
available in the countryside, and urban government, which provided
an institutional structure for association. Jonathan Barry has argued
that the associational institutions of urban life created what he has
termed ‘bourgeois collectivism’. The corporate identity of self-
governance was expressed in the architecture of town halls, and in
ritual processions of corporation members in their liveries during
elections or celebrations. Guilds and companies, where they existed,
added a further layer of inclusion and mutual support. In the
commensality celebrating both, civic behaviour was practised and
defined by wit in conversation, feast songs, and the consumption of
wine in company halls, mayor’s parlours or taverns. Towns also
protected their rights at law against others, and developed corporate
identities reflected in parliamentary representation. Citizenship of a
borough also gave its members a cultural status based on republican
ideas learned from classical texts such as Cicero or descriptions of
Italian city states. Elections based on merit and esteem bred ‘mutual
trust’.7
 But, the actual experience of being a successful citizen was that
of a minority, and heavily concentrated in London and major
provincial cities. As a percentage of England’s total population, that
of London rose from 2.5 per cent to over 11 per cent between 1520
and 1700, while the larger incorporated towns together only grew
from 3 per cent to 7–9 per cent over the same period.8 Also, within
boroughs freedom was generally quite restricted to being earned
through seven-year apprenticeships in a trade, purchase by those
migrating into a town, or inheritance by the son of a freeman. The
number of freemen was small in Bristol and Exeter – less than a fifth
of adult males – and in Ludlow and Cambridge less than a tenth. In
York and Norwich it was higher, approaching half. In the city of
London it was as high as three-quarters of adult males (though a
huge number of people lived outside the jurisdiction of the city).
Increasingly urban government became more oligarchic and the high
cost of the entertainment involved in office-holding made it possible
only for those with money to spare. Trade identity centred on the
guilds also underwent change. In London, as early as the late
sixteenth century, the livery companies became less inclusive and
more ‘hierarchically oriented’. Elsewhere they might survive into the
eighteenth century, but principally as associations of masters rather
than as embodiments of a trade.9
In a landscape where the older institutional sources of urban
identity were becoming more restricted and exclusive, the formation
of an alternative social identity – the means of thinking about being
‘middle’ – was a process of justifying the social good of one’s own
and one’s family’s profits. This involved much anxiety about grace,
public credit and success. It ran counter to older Christian ideas,
derived from Aristotle through St Thomas Aquinas, that profit was a
dangerous temptation to self-interest, corroding the common social
bonds, reciprocal duties and obligations of a Christian community of
both rich and poor. It was in towns, especially London, that
prosperous merchants and tradesmen, such as the draper William
Scott, turned to writing pamphlets to give moral justification to trade
as a form of material improvement. They argued that increased trade
would lead to more wealth for the nation, which would then be
available to be used in beneficial ways. As Scott put it, senators
ought to be rich … ‘Wealth is a pledge … of their care of the
Commonwealth … he that hath done well for himself, will know how
to do well for the public good.’10 This argument shifted the meaning
of commonwealth from the idealisation of an organic society, as in
Edmund Dudley’s The Tree of Commonwealth, to the social utility of
household wealth gained from application to business. This was
done by using the word as a translation of res publica to mean
’public’, referring as much to the collective profit, in the sense of the
common advantage of its individual members.11 As the cloth
merchant Edward Missleden put it, ‘Is it not lawfull for Merchants to
seeke their Privatum Commodum in the exercise of their calling? Is
not gaine the end of trade? Is not the publique involved in the
private, and the private in the publique? What else makes a
Common-wealth, but the private-wealth … of the members therof in
the exercise of Commerce …?’.12 In this way ‘tradeful merchants’
and ‘gainful tradesmen’ justified themselves as a group defined by
the activity of selling on the market for profit, which produced the
social good of monetised wealth, which, they argued, was every bit
as advantageous to the common good as older notions of
hierarchical gentry stewardship of land and local community.13 They
adopted the values of good credit and trust as opposed to
aristocratic profligacy and martial honour. Creditworthy behaviour,
temperance, moderation and quietness were the common
aspirations for the first generations of those who began to think of
themselves as achieving something new with their wealth. Also,
most crucially, it was in towns first that the idea of institutional
redistribution of wealth was introduced. This involved assessing
proportionate rates of taxation on the wealthiest part of the
population, and was justified by being directed only towards those
deemed deserving.14 This was wealth not to be shared
indiscriminately and wilfully, but to be used proportionately and with
a moral purpose to improve lives and create work. It was a way of
defining and using wealth that would become enshrined in national
poor law legislation by 1598, and then taken up with great social
effect in rural parishes. But, at the same time, since many tradesmen
remained unsuccessful or failed, the successful adopted the
terminology of sorting from town grain markets – which commonly
distinguished three sorts or qualities: better, middle and worst – to
define those with wealth and credit from those without.
For R. H. Tawney the moral justification of profit and material
wealth marked a fundamental change by which theology came to
accommodate capitalism, following Max Weber’s ideas about the
Calvinist doctrine of profit and hard work and profit as justifiable
evidence of salvation. Subsequent historians have developed this
thesis to show how poverty without disability increasingly began to
be stigmatised as a sign of sinfulness to be dealt with punitively. In
contrast, being successful was seen as a sign of grace.15 As we
shall see below there is much truth to the contested adoption of
these values when describing how the middling sort emerged in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth century, but just considering them
fails to do enough justice to the value of trust as a way of maintaining
community and social bonds. This also contributed to the formation
of middling identity through what we might call ‘sorting’. Competitive
households had to rely on one another to pay for goods sold on fairly
long-term credit, and anxiety of loss led to households being classed
according to their reliability, with the poor being most worrisome. All
this is relevant to the relationship between identity and ideology as
there is clear evidence in diaries that middling individuals thought
about their financial success or lack of it. They did not abandon
hospitality and concern for the poor, or the value of neighbourly
activities such as attending funerals and christenings, but there was
now a world of goods to be purchased by all classes, although in
greatly differing amounts, and they were purchased on credit. Thus,
a concurrent emphasis on household thrift developed as a support to
good credit, and this had to temper hospitality.
The sheer complexity of chains of credit meant that there was a
huge rise in litigation over unpaid credit from the mid sixteenth
century, involving hundreds of thousands of suits per year.16 This led
to the rise of the attorney as a distinct profession whose income was
based on fees earned by applying specialist training learned at the
Inns of Court in London to process litigation through the many local
and central courts.17 The clergy, being trained at university and
given livings supported by tithes and glebe land, were also a sort of
profession, although they did not, of course, market their pastoral
duties. Many, however, supplemented their earnings through local
schools. In this way, the professions were closely related to the
middling sort. Although not all attorneys were successful and
wealthy, and many church livings were relatively poor, professional
qualifications gave individuals the added security of a more regular
income. This security was needed to ensure that litigation could
proceed in a rule-based fashion, and that ethics could be preached
in the parish church.18
Material social display was also considered to be part and
parcel of a middling identity that reflected an Aristotelian mean
between thrift and hospitality. A certain sobriety in dress reflected a
household that was not overextended and at risk of going broke and
endangering chains of credit in the community. But, at the same time
a warm hearth, window curtains, comfortable chairs, pewter plates,
candlesticks, knives and other tableware (made of silver if it could be
afforded), and later porcelain tea services, together with the quality
and amount of food served, were all necessary for reciprocal
hospitality, upon which reputation also depended. This consisted of
both arranged dinners, and the provision of food and lodging for
neighbours and more distant tradesmen and farmers when travelling
on the business that played an almost daily role in the lives of the
middling sort. The inability to offer this was termed ‘meanness’, and
while the ‘meaner sort’ could offer each other perfectly
commensurable hospitality of plain fare or a drink at the alehouse, it
was marked out as being different by its lower material value.
This can be clearly witnessed in the diary of Samuel Pepys, kept
from 1660 to 1669. It is clear that Pepys was socially ambitious, and
the entries in his diary show how he, and others in his estimation,
judged his credit by the standards of his business diligence, and how
this dramatically increased his success. Certainly one reason why
Pepys kept the diary was to record the progress of his wealth, which
he did often as in the following example from 1662: ‘My mind is now
in a wonderful condition of quiet and content, more than ever in all
my life – since minding the business of my office … For now my
business is a delight to me and brings me great credit, and my purse
encreases too.’19 He is quite clear about the fact that he wanted a
good reputation to achieve social status and to be accepted both at
court as a loyal servant to the crown under his patron the earl of
Sandwich, and amongst others working at the Navy office. He also
socialised with many citizens and he clearly desired to rise to equal
them in status. He wrote many times about the finery and material
well-being of London citizens, and was quite clear about the material
consumption needed to fit into this world: ‘We had a very good and
handsome dinner, and excellent wine. I not being neat in clothes,
which I find a great fault in me, could not be so merry as otherwise,
and at all times I am and can be, when I am in good habit.’20 This
was the cause of most of his extended descriptions of the goods he
owned. Ordinary household objects such as cooking equipment or
chairs were mentioned infrequently, but tableware and its social
function is something that gets mentioned quite often, as on an
occasion where he entertained his friends including Lord Brouncker,
the Commissioner of the Navy; Sir William Batten, the Surveyor of
the Navy; and William Penn:

Anon comes our company … I did make them all gaze to see
themselves served so nobly in plate, and a neat dinner, indeed,
though but of seven dishes. Mighty merry I was and made them
all, and they mightily pleased … at night to sup, and then to
cards … they full of admiration at my plate, particularly my
flaggons (which, endeed, are noble), and so late home, all with
great mirth and satisfaction to them, as I thought, and to myself
to see all I have and do so much out-do for neatness and plenty
anything done by any of them.21

Urban practices and writings were influential because of both the

higher level of literacy in towns, and the overwhelming national
influence of London. But if the development of an urban middling-
sort identity can be quite clearly traced through an ideology of
common profit, citizenship and success in business, with its
institutional support, physical space and architecture, the experience
of change in rural parishes and villages was much less unified. Andy
Wood has characterised the contours of the rural practices and ideas
that existed before the development of a middling-sort identity with
great subtlety. This involved local identification of farming practices
with environment under the paternalistic lordship of the manor. Here
fields, pasture, woods, hedges, streams and hills were identified as
both places of emotional significance and as common resources.
While differences in wealth, status and occupation existed, as did
many forms of social conflict, Wood argues that there was a unified
culture of commensality and remembrance to deal with difference
and dispute. This facilitated a slow process of use, adjustment and
alteration that could accommodate much enclosure and
consolidation of common fields while population and pressure on
resources were low. It generated much of what was thought of as
‘commonwealth’ in rural society. There were well-developed moral
guidelines of ‘good lordship’ and hospitality for wealthier farmers in
which charity and common rights were exchanged for deference and
the opposite behaviour was characterised as ‘churlishness’.22
Commercialisation was not a process that could co-exist with
this way of organising society. When it sat down at the village feast,
it might have offered more exotic fare, but it had a price – a higher
price that some were happy to pay, while others were not, and many
could not. Food grown on smallholdings or fed by masters to
servants might have been a more stable, less tempting, even
Arcadian ‘good’, but it could not be monetised in a way that could
purchase coal from Newcastle or tea from China. Inevitably success
became in effect an aspect of identity, and ‘honest profit’ made
without cheating or hard dealing towards the poor became a moral
attribute to add to good neighbourliness and hospitality. While the
rise in the price of basics like beer and bread was inevitable, given
the rise in population, the extent of market purchase was not, as
most labourers before the late sixteenth century were still hired as
live-in servants, while smallholdings and access to commons could
limit exposure to rising prices in the countryside. But, as explained in
Chapter 7 of this volume, selling crops to towns led to wealth, and
wealth led to a desire for new goods, and elaborating transportation
links eventually led to the increased availabiity of things like textiles,
metalwares, ceramics and coal, and imports such as oranges,
raisins and tobacco, all of which came to be consumed extensively
across the country.
A wide range of landholders availed themselves of growing
market opportunities in the mid and late sixteenth century, helped in
making a profit by such advantages as low and secure customary
rents on manorial copyhold; access to the urban markets, especially
that of London; and the possession of large sheep flocks to supply
wool to the cloth industry. They came to be termed ‘yeomen’ in
documents such as parish registers and probate records, in
distinction from ‘husbandmen’ below them and the ‘gentlemen’
above. This was a term that also had connotations to national good,
as its medieval origins referred to military service as archers.
However, the practices they adopted were those of tradesmen.
Yeomen also profited from selling on the market, and as long as food
prices continued to rise, which they did until the mid seventeenth
century, they were at much less risk of business failure. Increasingly
also wealthier yeomen began to style themselves ‘gentlemen’ or
even ‘esquire’ to denote the expansive lifestyles and civil behaviour
that gave them acceptability among county elites as non-titled
gentry. In Lancashire, for example, there were 763 gentle families in
1600, but in 1642 only 13 members were knights or baronets.23
The ideology of agrarian business and profitmaking also found
expression in the new moralising language of ‘improvement’.24 It
arose specifically not only to justify trade and creditworthiness, but
also to challenge custom by arguing that the latter preserved poverty
and created unemployment and vagrancy by preventing increased
agricultural production. Instead of focusing on a morality that
stressed paternalism and the responsibility of landlords to provide
land and resources for the poor, improvement aimed to change the
landscape to increase the common ‘wealth’.25 Improvement
developed in a more Ciceronian vein of utility than the landscape
farming described by Wood. Advocates of improvement saw land in
terms of a productive resource given to mankind to be acted upon
with industry to increase its productivity, rather than a space to be
lived in and accessed through a complicated set of customary rights
and agreements over its use mediated by law. By creating more
produce for towns, and more employment for the poor, improvement
justified profit just as wealthier townsmen had argued their wealth
did. As one of the most widely read works on good farm
management, Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good
Husbandry, put it, ‘to follow profit earnestlie’ resulted in ‘treasure
and pleasure’ being richly acquired.26
Enclosure and its effects became the symbolic battleground
between custom and improvement, and the ideological battle lines
were nowhere more clearly drawn than in the pamphlet debate in the
1650s between the two ministers John Moore and Joseph Lee. On
one side was Moore, who saw improvement as covetousness, and a
means to take away land that gave sustenance to poor smallholders,
and on the other Lee, who saw it as a way of producing more food to
support employment in industry, thus creating more employment for
the poor through growth and prosperity.27 By the Restoration it was
the latter discourse that had won out, having been promoted by the
radical thinkers associated with the Hartlib circle, and taken up by
philosophers such as John Locke and jurists like Mathew Hale, but it
certainly did not go uncontested. Sermons continued to be made
against covetousness, and even while industry advanced and the
stock market was born in the 1690s, harvest shortages could still
lead to criticism of capitalist farming.28 Such disagreement continued
because in truth there was little way of determining how far each
case of engrossment or enclosure was motivated by personal profit,
as compared to social good; they were supposed to go together.
Recent work has provided clear evidence that by the early
seventeenth century the majority of land in most of southern England
was being farmed by larger farmers on farms of 75 acres or more,
which were clearly too large to have been worked without hiring
labourers or servants.29 Farms of such size had to be operating to
make a profit, so most farmers must have come to believe in the
ideology of profit, improvement, thrift, good credit and employment
rather than older ideas of sufficiency. In the end there must have
been few who could fully resist the pressures of the market and new
spending patterns. These ideas all needed the promotion of wealthy
households as desirable ends, but it was a different ethic than that of
great and especially titled landlords, who frequently preferred to
maintain paternalistic postures from a distance. The result was the
creation of a distinctive middling sort in a rural society in which
selling grain became like selling beer or drapery, and the poor were
sorted from the rich in the sieve of reputation. Improvement took
some time to increase employment, and the loss of rights and land
by the poor created dependence on more variable and competitive
day labour markets, adding pressure to abandon the ‘idleness’ of
the cottage economy and become ‘industrious’.30 But, this was not a
system of class interests ranged against older feudal social relations.
It was a belief in the future and of change for the better to deal with
problems, rather than an attempt to maintain the old, though the
emotional power of ‘social harmony’ as a memory remained. It was
in reaction to this language that custom came to be used by the poor
to defend rights to common pasturage, gleaning, wood-gathering
and other use-rights, which further accentuated differences in
communities between the middling and labouring poor and
smallholders.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that a divide was opening
up between the farming regions of southern and northern England.
In the north many smallholders and unimproved landholders
remained; far fewer new multi-hearth houses were constructed.31
The north had a different climate ecology in which rye and especially
oats grew better and were cheaper than wheat, and attracted less-
profit-oriented farmers. The difference between the experience of a
farmer like Peter Walkden in northern Lancashire in the 1720s and
that of Thomas Turner described below is striking. In terms of the
amount of tax he paid, Walkden was undoubtedly middling sort. But
the networks of credit he describes, and his material purchases,
were much more basic and limited than in contemporary rural
Sussex.32 It was in the north, however, that an industrial society
would flourish in the eighteenth century, with an urban middle class
that did not develop around the workings of the vestry, but through
the large-scale employment of labour in the cloth and mining
industries.33
Meanwhile, one of the most decisive changes that moved the
emphasis of middling-sort morality away from paternalistic relations
to servants and hospitality to the poor was the establishment of the
institutional structure of the poor law laid down in national legislation
after 1598. In a landscape in which the older institutional securities
like monastic charity had been disbanded almost overnight, this and
subsequent statutes gave parish churchwardens and the newly
created overseers of the poor the ability to enforce the collection of
local taxation with the threat of fines. As a result, groups of
householders deemed economically ‘sufficient’ were charged a tax
to be redistributed according to a local need determined at the
discretion of the aforesaid officers. Since most parishes were small
enough for most leading householders to know each other, they
banded together into bodies that became known as vestries to
oversee this distribution, and increasingly, as expenditure rose, to
contain or reduce it. This system increased the funds available for
the dependent poor, but it also created a measured relationship of
redistribution of monetised wealth to replace unequal participation in
a common resource. ‘Commonwealth’ became the creation of
abundance for redistribution. Moreover, this development further
distanced the members of the middling sort from the dependent
poor. The laws of settlement could be used to exclude potential
‘charges’ from other parishes, and some paupers were forced to
wear badges as marks of their dependent identity. Their children
could also be forced to take up apprenticeships elsewhere at the
discretion of overseers.
The poor laws have been much studied, but we still need to
know more about how large-scale estates interacted with the
inhabitants of the parishes they dominated. Estate owners and
manorial lords provided rental land and patronage. They hired many
labourers. They sat on the local Bench as justices of the peace
where appeals by poor appellants about vestry decisions were
taken. The management policies of great estates, the degree to
which they provided employment in a parish and the authority
exercised by their owners could certainly affect the composition and
attitudes of the middling sort. The parish commonwealth as a form of
social/institutional organisation was most notable in the wealthier
arable parishes of southern England. In Richard Gough’s account of
his Shropshire parish of Myddle, in contrast, the vestry and operation
of the poor laws are almost entirely absent. Perhaps because it
remained in 1701 a largely pastoral community with fairly abundant
woodland, situated on the periphery of England, one does not get
the sense from Gough of a parish divided between a middling elite
and dependent poor.34
The best source for obtaining a sense of what it was like to
participate in the social world of the rural middling sort in the
wealthier, profit-oriented south can be found in the diary of the
shopkeeper Thomas Turner of East Hoathly in Sussex. The diary
dates from 1754 to 1765, and Turner’s comments on others’
behaviour show that he was part of the new eighteenth-century world
of sentimental rather than puritan self-examination. However, he still
had constant worries about the liquidity of his shop and the long
credit he had to extend to his customers. And most importantly he
was continually involved in parish government, especially that of the
poor law. Every year he kept parish accounts and distributed charity
money, and he served three years as a churchwarden, four as an
overseer of the poor, and six as collector of the land and window
taxes.35 This meant that both he and his wife Peggy were engaged
in an almost daily round of socialising in which hospitality and local
governance were mixed, and Turner commented on the morals and
practices of this world.36
Although his accounts do not survive, the financial information in
the diary indicates that Turner’s retail trade was small and local, and
his profit limited. His wife had to work at hop-picking to make extra
money, and he continually worried about his financial stability. In
August 1756 he fretted about the precariousness of trade in his small
country town and estimated that, while previously his trade had been
worth £15–30 a week, it had dropped to £5–10 in 1756. If this weekly
estimate was roughly the same over the whole course of the year
this represents average sales of £1,170 in a good year, which at a
rate of profit of 10 per cent would have yielded Turner an annual
income of about £117. However, in 1756 his sales would only have
been £390, providing a profit of £39, which would have been
earnings only £10 more than a well-off labouring family.37
The parish was under the lordship of Thomas Pelham, duke of
Newcastle, and his estate was run by the steward Christopher
Coates, who was styled a gentleman, and was clearly important in
parish affairs, but whose character was less commented on than
others, possibly because of his status and the importance of his
patronage.38 The three wealthiest families in East Hoathly were the
farmers Jeremiah French and William Piper, together with the
farming rector of the parish, Thomas Porter.39 Elizabeth Browne was
also a substantial landowner who owned the mill. Turner did her
accounts and treated her with respect but did not socialise with
her.40 Then there was a group of tradesmen including Thomas
Davey, a shoemaker who was Turner’s best friend in the early years
of the diary, and Charles Diggens, a tailor who was another close
associate. In addition Joseph Fuller, a butcher, and Thomas Fuller,
tallow chandler, were active in parish affairs and part of Turner’s
round of hospitality. Then there were somewhat less wealthy
tradesmen such as Thomas Durrant, the younger son of the village
blacksmith, whom Turner taught to read and write, and Robert Hook,
a shoemaker, with whom Turner placed his nephew apprentice, and
whose daughter he hired as a servant for a single month.
Turner described many dinners shared with various
combinations of these individuals, with French, Piper, Porter and the
Fullers being his most common companions. On each occasion he
recorded his meals, perhaps as a record of hospitality, but probably
also as a way of being paid shop debts, as he ate out more often
than others ate at his house.41 The busiest round of socialising took
place in January as part of the Christmas season, and on many
occasions the group also played at cards. In addition to this, tea and
coffee were offered as hospitality, and cricket games were often
played.42 Alehouses were almost always frequented as places of
business rather than relaxation, especially when travelling to
neighbouring parishes. The vestry, rather ironically, was generally
held at the crown tavern, and accompanied by drinking or eating.43
On many occasions Turner took his wealthier neighbours to
task. In Jeremiah French’s case it was for his heavy drinking, which
led him to become quarrelsome – ‘the noise of his clamour with the
hoarse and grating sound of his huge big oaths almost deafens the
ears of any of his audience’ – and he was also given to ‘obscenity
and raillery’. But Turner also criticised his lack of charity because he
continually attempted to avoid paying his proper share of the poor
rates, and tried to remove paupers from the parish without proper
regard to their character or circumstances.44 Turner also commented
on William Piper’s meanness in offering hospitality, and lending to or
doing favours for others, and the Revd Porter’s acquisitiveness
regarding land and recycling of old sermons.45 He clearly enjoyed
the socialising and especially the drinking with the local middling sort
and took the laws of settlement for granted, but he was more at ease
with other tradesmen and became friends with those who were not
middling sort. When regarding the local wealthy farmers he was
generally censorious of them in some way or another. Overall he
was a critical, and self-critical, member of the middling sort, who
portrayed the parish elite as self-interested and uncharitable, at the
same time that he also enjoyed the pleasures of hospitality and
conversation. Thus, in terms of a middling-sort experience, continual
socialising around food and drink, together with the administration of
the poor laws, also largely done in the context of eating and drinking,
were the glue that permitted aspects of people’s behaviour and
character such as charity, honesty and hospitality to be assessed.
 Turner also sympathised with the plight of the poor, often
identifying more with them than with those he dined with, albeit
through a prism of eighteenth-century writings on sensibility. He was
also a close friend of Samuel Jenner, a bachelor who was poor
enough to receive the Pelham charity when it was distributed in
1756, and who did odd jobs and ran errands for Turner. After the
death of Turner’s wife Peggy in June 1761, Jenner became perhaps
Turner’s closest friend. He often drank tea with Turner, stayed over
at his house for dinner and slept in his bed, and accompanied him
when he was looking for a new wife in 1764.

Fri. 9 Mar. … Sam. Jenner at work for me all day, dined with me
on a light pudding, a piece of beef boiled and some Savoy
greens. At home the whole day … A very cold day. Sam. Jenner
went away in the even. Perhaps it may appear odd, Sam.
Jenner’s being so much at my house, but he is a good-natured
willing person and oft does my gardening etc. for nothing, and
he is undoubtedly a worthy companion.46

A second example is James Merchant and his family. He first came

to East Hoathly from the parish of Ticehurst 15 miles distant as an
apprentice tailor to his uncle, but left because of a disagreement
before his seven-year term was up. He too did odd jobs for Turner
and always had dinner with his family on Christmas Day, together
with the widow of his uncle and his sister Hannah, who became
Turner’s servant in 1758. However, when he married Elizabeth
Mepham, who came from another poor family of the parish,
members of which often did work for Turner and his wife, East
Hoathly removed him back to his parish of birth as a pauper. Turner
was involved in this, but did not make any comment on it. He
presumably did not think it unjust. Thus, Turner is an interesting
character who shows the range and nuances of middling emotional
identity by this time. He certainly accepted the workings of the parish
commonwealth as a normative way of dealing with poverty, but he
was aware of his dependency compared to the wealthy farmers, and
he felt that they acted too often out of self-interest and not charitable
spirit.

Here I have traced the rise of a group of frequently insecure,

commercially oriented families against the dissolution of older local
hierarchies. These families created a new moral security for
themselves through an ideology of profit earned by honest dealing
and good credit, leading to improvement, which in turn led to
employment and the relief of the poor. Although this process was
driven by commercialisation, it was affected by such contingencies
as the dissolution of the monasteries, by shifts in religious identity, by
the elaborating local infrastructure of the English state, and by the
survival of older values and the memory of former patterns of social
relations. The experience of Richard Gough and the opinions of
Thomas Turner show this was not by any means a unified process.
But, although there may have been little sense of national
experience and identity among England’s middling sort, there was a
general belief in profit and commercialisation as a dynamic, ethically
justifiable social system, even while there was a wide range of
comfort or discomfort with how aggressive or disruptive such change
should or could be.
The beginning of the eighteenth century witnessed a further
move to a middling-sort ethics based more on financial security
gained through greatly improved numeracy; the expansion of
financial paper instruments such as stocks, bonds and promissory
notes; and the increasing use of conveyancing to raise money on
mortgages.47 This allowed the development of a morality where
wealth was seen as something to be used to help achieve individual
happiness and security. This replaced much of the emphasis on
litigation to enforce trust and credit. Although this change was a
subtle one, it was bound up with the development of a sense of a
self engaged in virtuous behaviour learned through reading and
reflection on society, as opposed to expressions of anxiety about
grace or public credit and success. This type of behaviour became
easier to self-identify with as middling. Such was the case with the
fictional father of Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s novel, published in
1719: ‘I should always find … that middle station … were not
subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses either of body or
mind … that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle
fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all
agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings
attending the middle station of life.’48 Another example can be found
in the diary of an aspiring professional, the young Dudley Ryder, the
son of a successful London linen draper of a dissenting background,
who eventually became Attorney General under Walpole, and Chief
Justice of the King’s Bench in 1754.49 In 1715 he had an allowance
of £80 as well as extra money and clothes from his father’s shop.
Ryder’s diary demonstrates a frame of thinking in which obligation
remained important, but what was now stressed was that both
parties should act to make each other happy, rather than to keep a
legally binding contract. From the point of view of a philosopher or
preacher, this was something open to all conscious beings, but in
reality it was a behaviour particular to individuals with the time and
money to read books and periodicals as a source of learning, and to
engage in self-evaluation. Such self-identity could also be joined
together in the many flourishing voluntarily societies, or periodicals
could be used to create ‘imagined’ solidarity among disparate
individuals.
Ryder’s diary was an instrument of a new culture of self-
reflection, sensibility and politeness that emerged in the early
eighteenth century. Certainly he engaged in a very definite process
of self-examination of his behaviour, not in relation to election or a
desire to explicate sinfulness, but rather to create behaviour that
would be pleasing to others and therefore also to himself. He read
John Locke and Bishop Berkeley, and the Spectator and Tatler.50 He
continually analysed his own behaviour, especially when in the
company of women, and talked about conquering his passions and
feelings of resentment in conversation with others. After reading
some of his own letters he noted directly that ‘It is the most
agreeable state of mind a man can be in to be pleased with his own
performances.’51 His concern was with the expression of feeling and
behaviour towards others in conversation rather than with worries
about how much he was trusted, or whether he would be paid what
he was owed, and his judgement on others was about their
politeness. Even a small shopkeeper like Thomas Turner, who never
mentioned holding company stock as an investment, and had to
worry continually about customers paying their debts, read the
Spectator and Tillitson’s sermons, and continually examined his own
feelings. His comments on others’ behaviour shows that he was part
of the new eighteenth-century world of sentimental self-examination.
He was also a member of a friendly society, a new eighteenth-
century institution into which collective payments were made to help
members in times of sickness and old age, which held an annual
club feast. He formed part of a middling sort that by the mid
eighteenth century had become a group of both wealthy farmers and
lesser gentry families together with the wealthier urban tradesmen
and merchants who had sufficient secured income financially to
support sentimental education and polite behaviour in voluntary
associations, at dinner, and at tea tables.

Notes

1 T. Turner, The Diary of Thomas Turner, ed. D. Vaisey (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 238 [from 1761].

2 K. Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’,

in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People:
Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London:
Macmillan, 1994).
3 H. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England
1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Chapter 4.

4 Henry French, ‘Social Status, Localism and the “Middle Sort of

People” in England, 1620–1750’, P&P, 166 (2000).

5 Wrightson, ‘Sorts’, 44–8.

6 C. Muldrew, ‘From a “light cloak” to an “iron cage”: An essay

on historical changes in the relationship between community and
individualism’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.),
Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), 156–59.

7 P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and

Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 51–74, 79.

8 Between 1520 and 1600 London grew from a size of 55,000 to

200,000 people, while larger incorporated towns of over 5,000
people grew from nine towns containing just 70,000 individuals to
nineteen towns with 135,000 people. Over the course of the next
century London added another 375,000 people, while towns of
over 5,000 rose in number to thirty. E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth
and agricultural change: England and the Continent in the early
modern period’, in E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 159–63.

9 I. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan

London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 111ff.; P.
J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 86–90; R. King, ‘The sociability of
the trade guilds of Newcastle and Durham, 1660–1750: The urban
renaissance revisited’, in H. Berry and J. Gregory (eds.), Creating
and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830
(Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 58 and passim.

10 Withington, Commonwealth, 67.

11 C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit

and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1998), 130–7.

12 E. Misselden, The Circle of Commerce (London, 1623), 17.

13 J. McVeagh, Tradeful Merchants: Portrayal of the Capitalist in

Literature (London: Routledge, 1981).

14 P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England

(London: Longman, 1985), 148–54.

15 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1926), Chapter 4.

16 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, Chapter 8.

17 C. W. Brooks, ‘Professions, ideology and the middling sort in

the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, in Barry and
Brooks, Middling Sort of People, 113–40.

18 Physicians trained by universities and approved by the College

of Physicians could similarly earn substantial fees with their
professional qualification; ibid.
19 S. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W.
Matthews, 9 vols. (London: HarperCollins, 1970–83), Vol. III, 125.

20 Ibid., Vol. II, 198–9; Vol. IV, 343.

21 Ibid., Vol. VIII, 4.

22 A. Wood, ‘Deference, paternalism and popular memory in early

modern England’, in J. Walter, S. Hindle and A. Shepard (eds.),
Remaking English Society: Social History and Social Change in
Early Modern Society (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 233–34. A.
Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of
the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).

23 B. G. Blackwood, The Lancashire Gentry and the Great

Rebellion 1640–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press for
the Chetham Society, 1978), 4–11, 21. In Yorkshire the proportion
was higher: 89 out of 649 families had titles. J. T. Cliffe, The
Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London:
Athlone Press, 1969), 6.

24 See J. Whittle, Chapter 7 of the present volume.

25 R. W. Hoyle, ‘Introduction’, in R. W. Hoyle (ed.), Custom,

Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 17–19.

26 A. McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of

Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1996), Chapters 1 and 5, and 145–51.
27 For a discussion see C. Warner, ‘Enclosure, poverty and the
public good in England, 1600–1660’, unpublished M.Phil. thesis,
Cambridge University (2012).

28 P. Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and

Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), Chapters 4, 7; B. Waddell, God,
Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), Chapter 1.

29 J. Barker, ‘The emergence of agrarian capitalism in early

modern England: A reconsideration of farm sizes’, unpublished
Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University (2012).

30 Growing industrial production and agricultural improvement

increased employment in the period from 1660 to 1770. This
created a category of the ‘honest’, ‘industrious’ or ‘painful’ poor
who earned wages and were not middling or better, but who were
no longer labelled with the opprobrium of derogatory
characterisations like ‘mean’. See C. Muldrew, Food, Energy and
the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in
Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 298–308.

31 L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline

of family farming in England’, EcHR, 65 (2012).

32 R. W. Hoyle, ‘Farmer, nonconformist minister and diarist: The

world of Peter Walkden of Thornley in Lancashire 1733–34’,
Northern History, 48 (2011).
33 J. Smail, The Origins of Middle Class Culture: Halifax,
Yorkshire, 1660–1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994),
Chapters 5–6.

34 R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1981).

35 Turner, Diary, xxii.

36 N. Tadmor, ‘Where was Mrs Turner? Governance and gender

in an eighteenth-century village’, in Hindle, Shepard and Walter,
Remaking English Society.

37 Turner, Diary, 31, 61, 137, 169.

38 Ibid., 305–6.

39 Ibid., Appendix B, ‘Principal persons figuring in the diary’.

40 Ibid., 223.

41 Ibid., 131.

42 Ibid., 173.

43 Ibid., 302–3.

44 Ibid., 67–8, 82–3, 91, 130–1, 176, 318–19.

45 Ibid., 24, 45, 47, 50, 221–2, 271.

46 Ibid., 287.
47 C. Muldrew, ‘From credit to savings? An examination of debt
and credit in relation to increasing consumption in England, c.
1650 to 1770’, Quaderni storici, 137 (2011).

48 D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London:

Penguin, 2001), 3–4.

49 D. Ryder, The Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715–1716, ed. W.

Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 21–2, 326–7, 369–70; D.
Lemmings, ‘Ryder, Sir Dudley (1691–1756)’, ODNB, online edn,
May 2009, www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/24394 (accessed 25
July 2014).

50 Ryder, Diary, 38, 40, 223.

51 Ibid., 31.
 14
The ‘Meaner Sort’: Labouring
People and the Poor
◈

Jeremy Boulton

Who exactly were those whom contemporaries categorised as ‘the

meaner sort of people’? These were those people whom educated
contemporaries such as William Harrison (1535–93) thought had
‘neither voice nor authoritie in the common wealthe, but are to be
ruled and not to rule other’: day labourers, poor husbandmen,
artificers and servants.1 A more statistical account of the bottom of
English society was devised by the political arithmetician Gregory
King (1648–1712). King classified those who were, in his notorious
phrase, ‘decreasing the wealth of the nation’ – by which he meant
that their expenditure exceeded their income – into five groups:
common seamen, labouring people and outservants, cottagers and
paupers, common soldiers, and vagrants.2 Such people are often
grouped together as ‘the labouring poor’ – a term apparently coined
by the prolific writer and (failed) businessman Daniel Defoe (1660?–
1731). However, that phrase, which only came into general use in
the late eighteenth century, should not be used in this period, since it
conflates two overlapping social groups, labouring people and the
poor, who really should be treated separately.

The key distinguishing feature of all labouring people was that they
and their families earned part or all of their living by working for
wages (usually money but sometimes wholly or partly in kind). For
the majority, work started early in life. Where there was suitable
industry, children as young as four could contribute to household
income. The Norwich Census of the Poor (1570) listed 330 children
and youths aged between four and twenty who worked to
supplement household income. Many worked in the city’s large
textile industry, but a few helped their parents, such as the tinker’s
son who carried his father’s bag.3 Children could also work in the
fields, scaring birds or picking up stones. Most children of the
labouring sort would expect to leave home in their mid teens to go
into service or apprenticeship; for many, being fed and housed as
part of the family of a substantial farmer or middling artisan might
well have been the material high point of their working lives. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between a third and a half of
all hired agricultural labour was supplied by unmarried ‘servants in
husbandry’. It is supposed to be during this relatively long, perhaps
ten-year, period of servitude that labouring people saved up money
to provide the start-up ‘entry costs’ to marriage and an independent
life – although some have argued that for many of the labouring sort
the prospect of steady employment at reasonable wages was
enough to prompt a departure from service into marriage. All women
in this social group worked, although their ‘participation rate’
(conventionally reckoned at 30 per cent of that of an adult male) was
reduced significantly by the demands of childrearing. In Norwich in
1570 almost all women worked, mostly in the textile industry; petty
retail; or ‘domestic’ tasks such as washing, cleaning or nursing.
Because their ability to work partly depended on physical strength
and their health status (including age-specific physical deterioration
in eyesight and manual dexterity) exactly how (and how much)
labouring people earned varied over the life course. In late-
seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century London, for example,
‘charring, washing, nursing, and hawking tended to be the preserve
of older women whose declining eyesight and arthritic fingers
prevented them from maintaining themselves “by their needle”’.4
Labouring work may have been part of a career that included a
range of entirely different occupations. John Cannon (1684–1743), a
member of the lower middling sort, recalled his career as a ‘tennis
ball of fortune’, ‘from a schoolboy to a ploughboy, and from a
ploughboy to an excise man, and from an excise man to a maltster
and from a maltster to an almost nothing except a schoolmaster’.5
This reliance on money wages has one huge advantage for
historians. It is an odd fact that, although much of the social history
of the wage-earning population is hidden from view, more is known
about their earnings than for any other social group. Since the
payment of money wages is often recorded in institutional accounts,
historians have been able to construct time series based on wage
rates paid by the day or week over very long periods. Henry Phelps
Brown and Sheila Hopkins – to take the best known and still most
useful dataset – constructed ‘seven centuries’ of daily wage rates of
building craftsmen and their labourers paid by institutions in the
south of England. This showed that a building craftsmen was
receiving 6d a day in the early decades of the sixteenth century,
compared to 4d received by a labourer. Between 1580 and 1629 the
craftsmen were receiving 12d per day, compared to a labourer’s 8d,
and this had risen to 18d and 12d, respectively, between 1655 and
1687. By 1736–73 craftsmen received 24d per day and labourers
16d.6 Wages varied regionally and were notably higher in London,
partly reflecting differentials in the cost of living. Agricultural
labourers seem to have been paid at the same rate as building
labourers, although the former were paid at higher rates for
specialised seasonal tasks such as mowing and haymaking. There
are, of course, many problems with these wage rates: they tell us
nothing about the number of days worked, so estimates of income
depend wholly on assumptions about levels of employment.
Labouring work could also be intermittent and highly seasonal: the
philanthropist Thomas Firmin (1632–97) wrote in 1678 of ‘a poor
woman that goes three dayes a week to wash or scoure abroad, or
one that is employed in nurse-keeping three or four months in a year,
or a poor market-woman who attends three or four mornings in a
week with her basket, and all the rest of the time these folks have
little or nothing to do’.7 Wage-rate data, moreover, do not cover the
earnings of women and children; whether families owned animals; or
had access to land, grazing rights or other sources of support such
as charitable handouts. Very, very occasionally censuses of poor
drawn up by local officials reveal how the total earnings of labouring
households were composed. Thus, Thomas Underhill, a sixty-six-
year-old weaver living in Salisbury in 1635, was said to be earning
3s a week. His fifty-four-year-old wife Judith – despite her ‘lame
hand’ – earned 10d a week. Their twenty-year-old daughter Eleanor
earned 14d a week making bonelace; her sister Elizabeth (aged
sixteen) earned 4d spinning. Three younger children (one aged
seven who was at school, a five-year-old and one whose presence is
likely but was not named) did not earn anything. Of the total family
weekly income of 64d per week, therefore, Thomas’s contribution
was just 56 per cent. Even this income must have been thought
insufficient to maintain three adults and two or three children, since
the family was also receiving 6d per week in poor-relief.8
The labouring sort working in the countryside depended only
partly on money wages to make ends meet. Their ability to earn a
living depended on ownership of land and livestock (particularly
cattle) and possession of common rights of grazing, gleaning
(gathering corn left in the fields after harvest), fishing and fuel-
gathering. Cattle were probably the single best guarantee of getting
by: in the late eighteenth century the produce of one dairy cow kept
on common land was supposedly equivalent to 40 per cent of an
agricultural labourer’s income. Possession of livestock was crucial.
On the manor of Hartest near Lavenham (Suffolk) in 1608 it was
reported that there were ‘40 small and poor copyholders, the best of
them not having above two acres, the most of them being cottingers,
and 35 other poor households that have no habitation of their own,
nor cow nor calf’ – a miserable experience that was diametrically
opposed to that of fifty-two fortunate cottagers of Nassington
(Northamptonshire), each allowed to pasture three cattle and ten
sheep on common land, and thus supposedly able to ‘live in such
idleness upon their stock of cattle [that] they will bend themselves to
no kind of labour’. Everitt has left the best description of this variety
of experience:

The lives of farmhands who lived with their master in the

farmhouse bore little resemblance to those of labourers who
lived with their wives and children in cottages in the village
street. The economic standing of a skilled farmworker with a
holding of his own and unstinted pasture rights on the common
waste was altogether different from that of a disinherited day-
labourer with no property but his wages, and a mere hovel of
sticks and dirt to live in.9

All this means that to understand the history and fortunes of

labouring people we need to know something (or guess) about levels
of employment, access to land, customary rights and livestock,
payments in kind (servants were paid wages that included board and
lodging), and the earnings of women and children, as well as
comparing the movement of wages to the prevailing cost of living. In
general, however, the fortunes and life chances of the wage earner
in this period were connected closely to trends in economic
development and the movement of population.
Since wage earners formed a substantial and growing
proportion of the total workforce, it is worth starting with modern
estimates of the ‘sectoral breakdown’ of the English economy.
Particularly influential have been E. A. Wrigley’s estimates. He
divided the English workforce according to whether it was employed
in the urban, rural agricultural or rural non-agricultural (i.e. industry
located in the countryside, cloth-making, mining etc.) sectors. In
1520 only 5.5 per cent of England’s population lived in substantial
towns, 18.5 per cent followed rural non-agricultural occupations and
the remaining 76 per cent were rural agricultural. Thereafter the
proportion of the population engaged in agriculture declined. By
1670, 13.5 per cent lived in towns and cities, 26 per cent were rural
non-agricultural and the remaining 60.5 per cent in the rural
agricultural sector. By 1750, 21 per cent of the population were
urban, 33 per cent rural non agricultural and 46 per cent rural
agricultural. Particularly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, then, there was a substantial move away from agricultural
occupations: in absolute terms there were more people working in
agriculture in 1600 than there were in 1750. It thus seems a
reasonable supposition – if these estimates are anything like
accurate – that more of the labouring sort were living in towns or
worked in rural industries in the last half of our period.10 This is vitally
important. It means that a growing proportion became dependent
solely on wages for a living and did not have access to land on which
to grow their own food or keep livestock. The ‘meaner sort’, as a
result of England’s economic development, thus became more
‘market sensitive’ and (at least in theory) more vulnerable to periods
of dearth and economic depression.
 The fortunes of labouring people were ultimately determined by
population trends. Broadly speaking the two-and-a-half centuries
between 1500 and 1750 are best seen as two distinctive periods.
The first, between 1500 and 1650, represents a period of rapid
population growth. England’s population grew very rapidly in the
sixteenth century, from perhaps 2.4 million in 1520 to 4.11 million in
1600, and had reached around 5.23 million in 1650. The second
period, 1650 to 1750, looks completely different: there was then
demographic stagnation and even modest contraction until 1700,
when the population stood at 5.06 million with only a modest
recovery to 5.77 million by 1750.
Labouring people were at the sharp end of these demographic
forces. This was a society in which productivity in both agriculture
and industry was relatively low. As a result, the economy could not
respond quickly – produce enough food and employment – to feed or
employ extra mouths beyond very modest rates of population
growth. Population growth thus produced rapid food-price inflation in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that drove down the
purchasing power of money wages, since the overstocked labour
market meant that wages did not rise as fast as food prices. For this
reason ‘real wages’ – that is money wages deflated by a notional
basket of prices representing the cost of living – fell, albeit unevenly
from the early sixteenth century. The Phelps Brown–Hopkins real
wage index shows a catastrophic fall in the purchasing power of
building craftsmen whose money wages by the first decade of the
seventeenth century had lost half of their purchasing power since the
early sixteenth. A similar collapse in purchasing power is seen in the
real wages of agricultural labourers. In addition to depressing the
purchasing power of labour, rapid population growth also meant the
emergence in the sixteenth century of serious (and noticeable) levels
of under- and unemployment, in both the agrarian and industrial
economies. This also greatly increased rates of migration in the
economy: rather than eke out a living in such circumstances,
increasing numbers of the labouring sort moved to areas of
perceived economic opportunity such as towns and cities
(particularly London), or agrarian regions with plentiful commons
(such as wood pasture regions of England) or industry (such as
mining or textiles). Long-distance ‘subsistence’ migration was
therefore a feature of this period. It is no coincidence, either, that
huge numbers of people emigrated in the seventeenth century,
which further reduced rates of population growth. Emigration to the
New World from all parts of the British Isles was something like
378,000 between 1630 and 1699. Large numbers may also have left
England for Ireland: Carew Reynell (1636–90), writing in 1674,
thought the ‘want of people’ at that time was also due to the fact that
‘two hundred thousand more have been wasted in repopulating
Ireland’.11 Rapid population growth in an economy of low productivity
and limited room for expansion meant increased competition for
finite resources. This in turn meant that the period between 1550 and
1640 tends to see more attempts by parishes to regulate the
behaviour of the poor; less tolerance to petty theft, bastardy and so
on. It is also in this period that historians see the emergence of a
new ‘class’ of landless wage labourers and rootless vagrants. It is
also, of course, one of the reasons that poverty emerged as an
urgent social problem. The relative position of the labouring sort vis-
à-vis other groups was at its worst in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century: dramatic social polarisation was the end result
of rapid population growth, food price inflation and an overstocked
labour market.
The period between 1650 and 1750 has a different character
from the previous century. In the absence of population growth and
with falling food prices, the purchasing power of money wages
improved. The Phelps Brown–Hopkins real wage index stands at 39
for the difficult decade 1620–9, 49 in 1670–9 and 67 for the decade
1740–9 – which represented a recovery to levels not seen since the
1520s.12 In real terms the median worth of labourers may have
doubled between 1625 and 1649 and between 1657 and 1681,
although this was subject to considerable geographical variation. It is
not surprising, therefore, that it was after 1650 that contemporary
writers increasingly condemned the English labourer for preferring
leisure (‘idleness’) to working flat out for higher wages. Because
there was more purchasing power for non-essentials, this period also
saw more urban growth outside London – even a provincial ‘urban
renaissance’ – and more demand for the products of industry.
Generally speaking, for the labouring sort, it also meant that areas of
economic opportunity were likely to be closer to home, so that the
volume of long-distance ‘subsistence’ migration declined and
anxiety about vagrants lessened.
Although such underlying trends are now reasonably clear, they
are complicated by other distinguishing features of the early modern
economy. Because only a proportion of corn harvested reached
market (the rest being retained to feed the family of the producer) the
price of grain sold was extremely volatile. This was especially
serious for the market-sensitive labouring sort because the vast bulk
of their household expenditure was spent on food, much of it on
bread and grain. Notable years of high grain prices occurred in 1556,
1586, 1596, 1608, 1622, 1647, 1673, 1693 and 1697. Hardship,
hunger and (at least until the mid seventeenth century) famine were
particularly likely when poor harvests followed each other, such as in
the mid 1590s, 1647–50 and the mid 1690s, or when they coincided
with industrial depression, as in the 1620s.
If price shocks sometimes obscure or muddy underlying trends
(and there were, of course, periods when prices were unusually
depressed), one should also note that the experience of the wage
earner was subject to huge regional variation. There were in England
in this period about 9,000 parishes, ranging from huge, remote
upland pastoral communities to small, compact settlements
specialising in growing grain. Urban parishes could range from tiny,
wealthy inner-city parishes to suburban giants. The process of
economic development, increasing agricultural specialisation,
developing rural industries and growing urbanisation also meant that
parishes could change radically over this 250-year period. The social
structure of Whickham (Co. Durham), for example, was literally
turned upside down by the dramatic development of the coal industry
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, which led to the
immigration of hundreds of miners. At the national level, population
pressure on limited resources, and the difficulty of maintaining viable
holdings in a period of rising rents, also meant that many rural
labourers and small husbandmen lost out, as enclosure eliminated
and encroachment nibbled away cherished (and sometimes
vigorously defended) common rights. A survey of the holdings of
agricultural labourers from before 1560 and after 1620 found that the
percentage who possessed only a cottage and garden nearly
quadrupled from 11 to 40 per cent. It should also be noted that
geographical location and settlement type dramatically affected the
mortality experience of wage earners. Those moving to towns, and
particularly to London, in search of employment and better prospects
often paid the ‘urban penalty’ of much higher death rates caused by
diseases to which they had not previously been exposed, such as
tuberculosis, typhus and smallpox. The poor in overcrowded
suburban tenements, as contemporaries observed, were also
peculiarly likely to die in the frequently savage bubonic
plagueepidemics that were a regular feature of urban life until 1679.
Even in the countryside, death rates varied hugely between remote,
well-drained upland parishes and low-lying areas – particularly those
in the malaria-ridden marshes on the south-east coast.
Recent research has highlighted other welfare implications of
population change. Thanks to the work of the Cambridge Population
Group we can now construct a ‘dependency ratio’: a comparative
measure of the size of the productive age groups (conventionally
those aged between fifteen and fifty-nine) to the rest of the
population. This should not be pushed too far (since children and the
elderly both produced something and consumed less than adults)
but generally speaking this ratio was at its most unfavourable when
the fertility of the population was high and population growth rapid in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and most
favourable in the late seventeenth century when the fertility of the
population was relatively low, and when there were more elderly
people. This suggests that being overburdened with children would
have been more common in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
century, and, in crude terms, that the ‘problem’ of the elderly might
have baulked larger as a welfare issue after 1640. Changing fertility
also altered the number of close kin that people possessed.
Computer modelling has demonstrated, for example, that a man
born in 1550 and living to the age of sixty-five would have had more
children and especially more grandchildren alive than a man born in
1650. The welfare implications of this are easier to model than to
demonstrate from the historical record, however.
What proportion of the English population were wage earners in
this period? Most historians would argue, given the development of
rural industry, agricultural specialisation and substantial urban
growth, that the absolute proportion must have been significantly
higher in 1750 than it had been in 1500. Reasonable estimates have
been made for particular communities, but for the national picture
readers should be aware that we enter the realm of (highly)
educated guesswork. There are very real problems of evidence. To
begin with it is not a simple matter even to find out how most early
modern people earned a living. The first national population census
was held only in 1801, and the first that provides solid, reliable
occupational information is usually held to be 1851. The labouring
sort, too, rarely made wills or left probate inventories (both of which
often contain occupational information) because they did not
possess enough property and those that did were probably atypical.
There are occasional sources that record occupations, but they tend
to be one-off snapshots covering only particular counties (famously a
muster roll for Gloucestershire in 1608, three from Coventry, Rutland
and part of Suffolk in 1522) or are based on records that might cover
only taxpayers and that, anyway, more commonly survive in towns,
particularly in the later seventeenth century. Parish registers,
especially from the latter period, and again most often in urban
settlements, can also sometimes contain illuminating occupational
information. It goes without saying that none of the sources above
says anything useful about female or child occupations. Alan Everitt
thought that in the period 1500–1640 the labouring population made
up about a quarter or a third of the rural population and argued that
the proportion was certainly increased over the seventeenth
century.13 It is also exceptionally difficult to measure changes in the
distribution of wealth, either nationally or at the local level, without
very large margins of error. Two national taxes (the lay subsidy of
1524/5 and the late-seventeenth-century hearth taxes (1662–90) can
provide a reasonable picture of the distribution of wealth – for those
parts of the country where usable returns survive. At the local level it
is possible to compare these sources to measure changes in the
social structure over time, most notably in Wrightson and Levine’s
study of Terling (Essex), which concluded, after a comparison
between the 76 taxpayers listed in the lay subsidy and the 122
households listed in the 1671 hearth tax, that the parish – in the early
sixteenth century one of the wealthiest in Essex, itself one of
England’s wealthiest counties – ‘filled at the bottom’. Their social
group IV (labourers and cottagers) grew from 27.6 per cent of
taxpayers in 1524/5 to 50.8 per cent of householders in 1671.14
Unfortunately, their pioneering work has not been followed up at a
national level, although there has been some (not terribly conclusive)
work on the changing spatial distribution of wealth using these
sources. Historians interested in England’s social and occupational
structure have been drawn to – and greatly influenced by – tables
constructed by Gregory King in 1696 and Joseph Massie (d. 1784) in
1759. Although the content of both was shaped partly by the agenda
of their authors, they purport to contain unique information about
England’s social structure, including the average income and family
size of all social groups. King’s estimate that common seamen,
labouring people and outservants, cottagers and paupers, common
soldiers, and vagrants made up about half the English population
has been particularly influential. King probably overestimated the
number in these groups but even if revised downwards his estimates
still suggest a significant increase in the proportion of the population
working for wages since the early sixteenth century.15

Who were the poor? Contemporaries who attempted social

classifications came up with different definitions. Daniel Defoe’s
sevenfold depiction of English society in 1709 thought that group VI
should be ‘The Poor that fare hard’, and below them at the bottom
‘The Miserable, that really pinch and suffer want’.16 Gregory King’s
enumeration of those ‘decreasing the wealth of the nation’ is
sometimes equated with all those in at least intermittent poverty, but
in fact King himself only labelled two groups explicitly as poor:
‘cottagers and paupers’ with an average income per head of just £2
per year (less than half that of labouring people and outservants
whose per capita income was estimated to be £4 10s), and vagrants,
who were also assumed to ‘earn’ just £2 per year per head.17 The
true importance of King’s late-seventeenth-century guesstimates are
that they demonstrate that ‘the poor’ were very far from being a
homogeneous social group. Contemporaries agreed, however, that
poverty was the condition of anyone unable to maintain him- or
herself by their own labour. ‘Those generally are to be deemed
poore, which cannot live without reliefe of the lawe’, it was stated in
1601: ‘so long as there is any naturall or necessarie meanes left to
live, none must depend upon the helpe of the lawe’.18
Classically the poor were also divided into the ‘deserving’ and
the ‘undeserving poor’ a division that pre-dated the sixteenth
century. The deserving poor were, from the mid sixteenth century at
least, further divided into the poor ‘by casualty’ and poor by
‘impotency’. The latter were the ‘lame ympotent olde blynde and
such other amonge them being poore and not able to worke’. The
former were those cast into poverty by accident and sickness. By the
end of the sixteenth century, the poor by casualty were also
understood to include those willing to work, but unable to do so
through want of employment, something that, as we have seen, was
then an increasing problem. The ‘undeserving’ poor were those able
to work but who chose not to: the wilfully idle and vagrant – mobile
labouring people on the road who were encountered with increasing
frequency and who were feared (and mythologised) as ‘masterless
men’ with no social ties to any particular place. By the early
seventeenth century the undeserving ‘thriftless’ poor were thought to
contain a wide range of undesirables: including those increasingly
subject to puritan campaigns to impose a ‘reformation of manners’:
drunkards, prostitutes and petty thieves.
That lawmakers and writers focused increasingly on the poor is
partly because of local policy responses to the demographic and
economic developments of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. In a sense, the period between 1500 and 1700 saw the
discovery of the poor. One response to local political upheavals,
economic and social dislocation, or perceived local increases in
vagrancy or poverty was that a number of towns and cities took
detailed censuses or listings of their poor. These included Worcester
(1557), Norwich (1570), Warwick (1587), Ipswich (1597),
Huddersfield (1622) and Salisbury (1635).19 These were one-off
snapshots. A unique series of detailed listings survives only for the
town of Bolton (1674, 1686, 1699). Such counting was encouraged
by the introduction of the Elizabethan poor laws – a 1601 manual
contained a specimen template census. These counts revealed the
extent of under- and unemployment produced by rapid population
growth. The Norwich census found that one-third of poor men were
unemployed, such as thirty-year-old Henry White, a ‘laborer out of
work’ who lived with ‘Margaret, his wyf, that spyn white warpe, &
dwell together; and 2 sons, the eldest 9 yers that spin white warpe,
the other 3 yere; & hir mayde, Elizabeth Stori of 16 yeris that spyn
also’.20
 The poor were not, however, a permanent underclass. Since the
1980s, historians have insisted on the predominance of ‘life-cycle
poverty’. The aged, sick, orphaned, widowed and those
overburdened with children experienced poverty more frequently –
rather as one might expect. Actually identifying the life-cycle
component of poverty is technically difficult. There can be no doubt
that widowhood and old age contributed disproportionately to those
in poverty: old age was responsible for 16 per cent of poverty in
Norwich in 1570 and no less than 39 per cent in Salisbury in 1635. In
Hedenham, Norfolk, in the later seventeenth century most paupers
fell onto regular relief in their fifties and sixties. Families
overburdened with children seem to have been a more common
feature of poverty in the early seventeenth century – precisely as
predicted by the then prevailing demographic regime. That said,
however, the actual contours of life-cycle poverty in any one
community were shaped by demographic conditions and the nature
of the local economy.
How many poor were there? If poverty varied over the life
course, it also varied hugely across both time and space. The
proportion of the total local population who were thought to be ‘poor’
in urban listings varied considerably, and, since such censuses
coincided with particular periods of need, may not necessarily have
been typical. In urban censuses the percentage ranged from as low
as 5 per cent (Salisbury, 1635) to 12–13 per cent (Warwick, 1587;
and Ipswich, 1597) to as high as 20–5 per cent (Norwich, 1570;
Huddersfield, 1622). Such listings also show that the extent of
poverty could vary considerably within towns and cities. In Norwich,
which was divided into thirteen wards, the percentage of the
population considered poor in 1570 ranged from as low as 7–8 per
cent to as high as 36–41 per cent.21 The Bolton listings demonstrate
how problematic such statistics can be, since they vary considerably
over a very short time period: the percentage of poor in Bolton was
no less than 27 per cent in 1674, but only 12–14 per cent in the
censuses of 1686 and 1699. What also now seems very clear is that
exemption from national taxation is a misleading guide to levels of
indigence. Recent studies have demonstrated, for example, that
those exempted from the hearth tax were considered too poor to
pay, but were unlikely to be in receipt of parish relief. In Bolton no
less than 73 per cent of householders were exempt from the hearth
tax, compared to the percentages of poor reported above. Although
most people who experienced poverty were members of the
labouring sort, this was a society that lacked safety nets: destitution
could happen to almost anyone. A pamphlet attacking the peculiarly
grim pauper burials in early-eighteenth-century London noted that
those so interred ‘died poor, tho perhaps part of their Time they lived
plentifully, and served several Parish-Offices reputably, and to
Satisfaction’.22 The incidence of poverty also varied over the year,
being higher in the winter months when employment was scarcer
and illness more common. Poor-relief should ‘somewhat be retained
and reserved in sommer, that their releefe may be more liberall in
winter’.23 The last point that should be understood is that poverty is
a relative, not an absolute, concept. Contemporaries unconsciously
applied their own value judgements as to what poverty consisted of,
what level of deprivation it implied and how much should be given to
relieve perceived want. This means that over time more people
might be considered as worthy of relief, not because absolute levels
of need were greater, but because what was considered worthy of
relief had expanded.
The social position of the English poor was dramatically altered
by the Elizabethan poor laws. This legislation was introduced partly
in response to the observable deterioration in the position of
England’s poor in the second half of the sixteenth century and often
followed periods of extreme hardship after runs of bad harvests,
such as the 1590s. The poor laws were also designed to fill the
welfare gap created by the dissolution of the monasteries and
hospitals, the abolition of chantries, and the supposed dilution of the
charitable imperative (i.e. the switch from Catholicism espousing
‘justification by good works’ to a Protestant creed based on
‘justification by faith alone’) as a direct consequence of the English
Protestant Reformation. Historians now believe that the loss of the
charity of religious institutions was very serious – they are thought to
have distributed £10,216–11,696 per year in alms in 1535, a sum not
made good in real terms by the poor law until the early seventeenth
century. The Elizabethan poor laws, too, were superimposed on an
existing ‘mixed economy of welfare’, consisting of aid from hospitals
and almshouses; and also informal private charity; neighbourly credit
and support; and charitable doles of food, fuel or cash. It should also
be noted that the poor laws were part of a larger package of welfare
measures, which included legislation to encourage and protect
charitable endowments (notably the Statute of Charitable Uses,
1601).
 What then were the English poor laws? The term refers to a
series of Acts of Parliament that by 1601 had introduced a system of
parish-based poor-relief, funded by a compulsory local taxation on
property (the poor rate); administered by local officials called
overseers; and supervised, enforced and audited by local
magistrates. The money raised was to be used to set the poor on
work, apprentice their children, pay a select group of paupers a
weekly cash pension and make less regular ‘extraordinary’ one-off
payments. Statutes were passed in 1536, 1547, 1552 (this latter
considered by some to be the real foundation of the Elizabethan
poor law), 1555, 1563, 1572 and 1576. The two statutes that
underpinned the poor law until 1834 were passed in 1598, confirmed
with slight amendments in 1601. The poor law is sometimes known
as the Old Poor Law, to distinguish it from the New Poor Law (which
replaced it in 1834). The poor laws also included a sequence of
clauses, and some separate statutes, directed against vagrants and
beggars (dedicated Acts were passed in 1531, 1550, 1598, 1714,
1740 and 1744), which reflected the then perceived level of threat
that such individuals were supposed to pose. The influential 1598
Act ‘for the punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars’
prescribed that vagrants should be whipped and passed back to their
place of birth or last place of long-term residence with a special
passport. Begging for food within one’s home parish, allowed in
1598, was forbidden in 1601, although the prohibition was widely
ignored. The Act of 1576 ‘for setting of the poor on Work, and for the
Avoiding of Idleness’ ordered the erection of houses of correction in
every county to punish those refusing to be set on work (this was
strengthened by another Act in 1610).
Although the basic Elizabethan framework remained until 1834,
later legislation dealt with questions of eligibility and attempted to
limit the rising costs of parish relief. Firstly, in the later seventeenth
and eighteenth century, the poor became subject to what is known
as the law of settlement. Although the poor law enshrined in law the
notion that the parish was the basic unit of welfare responsibility, it
had failed to define the criteria of belonging. This meant communities
had a strong motive for ejecting those non-parishioners likely to be a
welfare burden (such as pregnant single women): they sometimes
appointed officials dedicated to the task of physically removing such
people. The settlement laws (1662, 1692, 1697) attempted to fix this
problem. The founding 1662 Act allowed the legal removal of
newcomers ‘likely to become chargeable’ on complaint to two
justices of the peace within forty days, if they rented houses worth
less than £10 per annum. The Act also created a new legal class of
poor – the ‘certificate man’. Certificates allowed mobility between
parishes: migrants were granted documents that confirmed they
were the legal responsibility of their home parish. An Act of 1692
allowed newcomers to earn a settlement by paying parish rates, or
serving an apprenticeship, or going into service for a year; and a
clause in an Act of 1697 forbade the removal of certified poor unless
they had actually become ‘chargeable’. A lot of time and ink were
spent at the time (and have been spent by historians since) on the
mechanics of settlement law. Essentially parishes became engaged
in a sometimes hectic ‘zero sum game’, examining those likely to
need poor-relief, removing the unsettled and appealing removal
decisions. The only sure winners were lawyers, since an arcane
body of case law quickly built up, with some luckless paupers being
transported back and forth, sometimes over quite long distances, as
parishes disputed their legal responsibility to relieve them. Concern
with rising costs at the end of the seventeenth century underlay the
last really significant additions to the Old Poor Law. The Act of 1692
attempted to limit the ability of parishes to grant pensions without the
authority of a justice, and one of 1697 sought to identify recipients of
poor-relief by compelling the wearing of badges. The ultimate
deterrent, however, was introduced by the so-called ‘Workhouse
Test Act’ (1723), which encouraged the erection of parish
workhouses and allowed parishes to deny poor-relief to any pauper
who refused to enter them, foreshadowing a key feature of the New
Poor Law. Only a minority of parishes, however – notably in London
and its hinterland – had erected such institutions by 1750.24
What impact did the poor laws have on the lives of the poor?
The poor laws delivered a potentially powerful administrative tool into
the hands of local ruling elites, who sometimes used it to impose
social and religious reform on the poor. Exactly how the poor were
relieved under the poor laws was subject to huge variation. There
was considerable local experimentation. This was particularly
marked in some towns and cities, notably in the textile towns of
south and eastern England before 1640, who attempted usually
short-lived experiments in centralised systems. The wealthy Suffolk
cloth town of Hadleigh, for example, ran a workhouse to discipline
and train up to thirty of its poor children in the later sixteenth century.
Salisbury opened a municipal brewery, a workhouse and a
storehouse as part of an elaborate scheme of poor-relief between
1623 and 1628. Such initiatives were often devised by urban puritan
elites seeking to reform the manners of their poor. London, whose
poor-relief systems were always precocious, ran a partly centralised
system of poor-relief based on large public hospitals in the second
half of the sixteenth century, and constructed a city-wide London
Workhouse in the 1640s, revived again in the later seventeenth
century, a period when a number of other towns and cities attempted
centralised poor-relief schemes based on municipal workhouses. In
the end, however, such schemes broke down in the face of the
inherent parochialism of the English poor law.
Many of England’s parishes were initially slow to put the poor
laws into operation, finding that customary welfare mechanisms were
enough to support their local poor. Historians have, however, found
more widespread and earlier implementation the harder they look.
Implementation of the poor law is now thought to have been much
more common, particularly in southern and central England in the
second half of the sixteenth century, than thought previously, and it
has been argued recently that, in contrast to previous estimates,
most rural parishes had appointed overseers and introduced rates by
the Civil War. By the 1690s almost every parish in the country was
participating in this unique welfare system.
As far as it is possible to judge, the poor law played an
increasing part in the household economies of the poor in the
seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Most parish relief was
delivered as a cash pension to the poor in their own homes. The
amounts given varied widely according to the local cost of living, size
and wealth of the parish tax-base and the life-cycle stage and
circumstances of recipients. Although pensions could fall, on the
whole the trend seems to have been upwards throughout the
seventeenth century: in rural areas the most commonly paid pension
in the first half of the seventeenth century was 6d per week, rising to
12d in the later part of the century, which suggests that pensions
were then rising faster than money wages. By the end of the
seventeenth century the poor rate in England and Wales was
yielding some £400,000 per year, rising to an average of £689,971 in
1748–50 – a doubling in real terms. These figures suggest that the
percentage of the total population who could have been maintained
could have risen from 3.6 per cent to 7.9 per cent between 1700 and
1750. Local studies often find that the proportion of the population
receiving regular pensions rose across the seventeenth century. The
numbers relieved and the size of pensions paid, however, varied
regionally, with significantly stingier poor-relief in northern counties of
England. Unfortunately very few sources record the total incomes of
those in receipt of poor-relief. The few censuses that do (as, for
example, Salisbury in 1635, and Bolton in 1686 and 1699) confirm
the assumption of most historians that poor-relief was intended to
supplement household income rather than provide total maintenance
(see above for the case of Thomas Underhill of Salisbury). It also
seems likely that an increasing proportion of the elderly population
were being supported in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
century.
 The increased spending on the poor and the growing numbers
on relief in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century are
paradoxical, since we know that the period 1650–1750 was one
when the living standards of wage earners improved significantly.
Some of the increased spending may have derived from the fact that
the relative size of the wage-dependent population was bigger, and
that there were more elderly people who were most likely to need
(and need more) poor-relief with fewer close kin to support them. It is
also possible that the ‘poverty line’ – the minimum acceptable
standard of living – had shifted upwards. Lastly, it might be that
public poor-relief was actually taking a larger share of total welfare
spending – that is that private charity and neighbourly support were
diminishing as more and more people thought it not only ‘needless
but foolish to do that which is parish business’.25 More work is
needed on this question.

How were the meaner sort and the poor perceived by the rest of
society, and how did they see themselves? Their social superiors
certainly recognised the fundamental part played in the social and
economic order by the meaner sort: ‘the rich cannot stand without
the poor’, pointed out the antiquary Robert Reyce in 1618.26 Until
the Protestant Reformation, too, the prayers of the poor (known to be
especially efficacious) represented a considerable spiritual resource
– most pre-Reformation funerals included a charitable dole of cash
or food to attract as many poor as possible to pray for the soul of the
departed in purgatory. Ultimately, however, this was a society in
which manual labour of any description was considered a mark of
inferiority: after all, university-educated physicians looked down on
surgeons precisely because they worked with their hands. John
Cannon, another educated man, did not look back on his period of
agricultural work with pride: it was when he had ‘become a mere
clod hopper for a time’.27 Most historians would argue that the social
and cultural distance between the labouring sort and the ‘better sort’
increased over our period – by the end of the seventeenth century
Richard Baxter (1615–91), the Presbyterian divine, could famously
label ordinary villagers as ‘the rabble that cannot read’.28 Social
superiors expected ‘hat honour’ from inferiors and would expect
those in lowly social positions to dress appropriately and sit in the
poorest and most humble pews in church. Social position was even
reflected in the sort of food eaten. The meaner sorts had ‘stomackes
like ostriges, that can digest hard iron’; ‘country persons and hard
laborers’ ate ‘more gross, tough, and hard’ foods – ‘grosse meat is
meete for grosse men’, agreed the physician Thomas Cogan (c.
1541–1607).29 The poor were dangerous, too, since it was widely
recognised that they were especially prone to disease, notably
plague. Social distance, snobbery and fear, however, did not
eliminate paternalistic obligation and the need to exercise Christian
charity, or remove the imperative to be a considerate master. In 1601
overseers of the poor – usually members of the middling sorts –
when dealing with the poor were supposed to remember that poverty
itself was a punishment from God: ‘tender the poore but doe not
tyrannize over them: for it is no more glorie to triumph over the
poore, then to tread of a worm’.30
 Recovering the attitudes and self-identity of the ‘meaner sort’ is
complicated by the fact that their public utterances often conformed
to their superiors’ expectations of social relations (sometimes
theorised as the ‘public transcript’) and may have masked very
different private sentiments (the ‘hidden transcript’). For this reason
the deference and obsequious expressions of gratitude commonly
found in petitions and requests for poor-relief and charity may well
be misleading. That said, those whose livelihood depended solely on
wages seem to have been (at least in what might have been the
intimidating atmosphere of a Church court) conscious of their lowly
position, like the Salisbury servant in husbandry (1590) who
described himself as a ‘poore hired servant & liveth onely by his
hard labour not being otherwise any thing worth’.31
What is certain is that acceptance of alms or charitable aid of
any description was the ultimate mark of poverty and dependence.
Those reliant on alms were believed to be corrupted easily and
lacked credit, authority and reputation. It is even possible that those
in poverty internalised such values: ‘If he be poore he will not be
respected: for commonly the poore despise him that is poore.’32
Acceptance of poor-relief or charity might also result in the public
stigmatisation of distinctive clothing, a badge or, increasingly, a
demeaning pauper funeral. Although poor people accepted charity,
begged in the street (often using theatrical and even threatening
behaviour) and applied for poor-relief, labouringpeople attempted to
avoid such damaging dependency for as long as possible: witness
the Wiltshire tailor in 1674 who ‘thank’s God that he Never yet
received releife from the parish, & so long as he is able to work at his
trade he hopes he shall not & also that he hath somthing of his owne
to help to Maintaine him’. The poor seem to have valued a
reputation for honesty and industriousness. In court they often
stressed their ‘honest endeavour’: witness the poor wheeler who
‘laboreth as a trewe poor man getting his lyving from hand to
mouth’, or the widow who admitted she was ‘a poore woman but
liveth in an honest way by her owne labour’.33 Unsurprisingly,
therefore, the poor were especially hostile to total dependency: many
refused – despite losing their pensions – to enter the new parish
workhouses in the early eighteenth century.
Many historians argue that those at the bottom of the social
heap were far from powerless – that is they possessed some
‘agency’, an ability to negotiate with social superiors over the terms
of their support or employment. There is some truth in this. Those
asking for charity might threaten and curse those who refused them
– something that is thought to have been behind many witchcraft
accusations. Servants and apprentices, too, were sometimes far
from deferential, relatively independent and quite capable of taking
abusive employers to court. In particular historians have noted the
skill and persistence with which individual applicants navigated their
way through the poor laws, repeatedly appealing decisions made by
overseers and magistrates and shaping testimonies to match the
requirements of the law of settlement. In the end, however, such
agency was limited: many applications were turned down and
petitions and appeals were ignored or rejected. The poor laws,
moreover, did not confer a ‘right to relief’ as some have argued –
merely a right to apply for relief. Any agency exercised by the poor
failed to mitigate their lowly social position significantly. What
essentially happened to the labouring people of England between
1500 and 1750 was that a large proportion of them lost their ability to
live independently, to ‘make shift and mend’, without the support of
charity and public poor-relief.

Notes

1 K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson,

1982), 19.

2 J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds.), Seventeenth-Century

Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 780–1.

3 J. F. Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570

(Norwich: Norfolk Record Society, 1971), 17.

4 P. Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, EcHR, 42:3 (1989),
343.

5 T. Hitchcock, ‘Cannon, John (1684–1743)’, ODNB, online edn,

www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66791 (accessed 24 July 2014).

6 E. H. Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of

building wages’, Economica, 22:87 (1955), 205.

7 Earle, ‘Female labour market’, 342.

8 P. Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury (Devizes:
Wiltshire Record Society, 1975), 77.

9 A. Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian

History of England and Wales, Vol. IV: 1500–1640 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967), 402, 404, 396.

10 E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of

Traditional Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 170.

11 Thirsk and Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic

Documents, 758.

12 E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of

the prices of consumables, compared with builders’ wage-rates’,
Economica, 23:92 (1956), 312–13.

13 Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, 398–9.

14 K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English

Village: Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 31–6.

15 For the growth and development of wage labour in the

countryside, see Jane Whittle’s chapter in the present volume,
163–165.

16 P. J. Corfield, ‘Class by name and number in eighteenth-

century Britain’, History, 72:234 (1987), 50.

17 Thirsk and Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic

Documents, 781.
18 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore: Abstracted from the
Statutes … as a necessarie Directorie for Imploying, Releeving,
and ordering of the poore (Cambridge, 1601), 22–3.

19 P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England

(Harlow: Longman, 1988), 73.

20 Pound, Norwich Census, 28.

21 Ibid., 11, 107.

22 Some Customs Consider’d, Whether Prejudicial to the Health

of this City (London, 1721), 11.

23 An Ease for Overseers, 4.

24 P. Slack, The English Poor Law 1531–1782 (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1990), 59–64.

25 Dudley North (1641–91), quoted in S. Hindle, On the Parish:

The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144.

26 Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, 396.

27 Hitchcock, ‘Cannon, John (1684–1743)’.

28 Wrightson, English Society, 221.

29 A. Fox, ‘Food, drink and social distinction in early modern

England’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking
English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early
Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 166.
30 An Ease for Overseers, 28.

31 A. Shepard, ‘Poverty, labour and the language of social

description in early modern England’, P&P, 201 (2008), 63.

32 An Ease for Overseers, 9.

33 A. Shepard, ‘Language of social description’, 58, 80, 89.

 15
Gender, the Body and Sexuality
◈

Alexandra Shepard

Gender constituted a fulcrum of difference in early modern English

society, structuring identity and agency in myriad ways. The
pervasive significance of gender as a category of identity did not,
however, create a stable set of meanings associated with either
masculinity or femininity. Gender difference, as understood by early
modern people, was highly fluid, fluctuating in conjunction with other
variants such as age, social status and marital status. It was also
subject to change over time. According to some historians, concepts
of gender difference, as well as categories of sexuality and attitudes
towards sex, were fundamentally redrawn towards the end of the
early modern period. One unchanging dimension, however, was the
extent to which understandings of gender, the body and sexuality
served patriarchal interests – through privileging men and
masculinity – albeit not without multiple caveats and contradictions.
The gendered body and sexuality have only relatively recently
become subjects of historical investigation. Of primary importance in
stimulating exploration of these themes were, on the one hand,
second-wave feminism (and its commitment to historicise patriarchy)
and, on the other hand, the publication of the first volume of Michel
Foucault’s History of Sexuality in 1976, which argued that the very
concept of sexuality is a construct of modern western scientific
discourse. Challenging essentialist assumptions that sex, gender
and sexuality are biologically produced, feminist and cultural
historians have instead approached gender difference, sexual
behaviour and related categories of identity as culturally created, in
service to relations of power, and therefore subject to significant
variation among societies and over time. More recently, scholars
have begun to express caution against attributing categories of
gendered identity entirely to cultural production, on the grounds that
such an approach risks neglecting the agency of the body in shaping
the experience and conceptualisation of gender difference and
sexual desire.1 Despite varied opinion as to the extent and nature of
change over the course of the early modern period, as well as a
more fundamental divergence over the somatic significance of the
body, perhaps the most striking finding of research in this area is the
central importance of concepts of sex and gender to the mental
furniture of early modern people. Besides contributing vital
components to the personal experience of difference,
understandings of gender and sexual behaviour informed political
and religious discourse and were extensively utilised, for example, in
the conceptualisation of the state in terms of familial authority, in the
demarcation of confessional boundaries disputed in the wake of the
Reformation, and in response to cultural encounters with foreign
‘others’. Sex and gender were deployed to make sense of a vast
array of other differences, which in turn affected the ways in which
they were experienced, and in that sense concepts of gender take
on a double resonance in narratives of change associated with ‘early
modernity’.

The Patriarchal Order

Early modern society was indisputably patriarchal in character.
Patriarchal expectations were shored up by biblical injunction,
enshrined in law, elaborated in medical theory and enmeshed in
social practice. But the ‘patriarchal edifice’ was not without cracks
and complexities.2 It was founded upon the agency of some women,
as well as undermined by varieties of female resistance; it did not
privilege men either uniformly or unequivocally; and it depended on
hierarchical distinctions within each sex as well as between men and
women. Perhaps one of the explanations for ongoing ‘patriarchal
equilibrium’, whereby men have consistently been privileged above
women of comparable age and status, is the extent to which the
patriarchal order left room for exceptions and contradictions as much
as its enduring adaptability.3 It is important, therefore, that our
accounts of early modern patriarchy are alert to women’s agency as
well as their disadvantages, and mindful of men’s varied access to
patriarchal privilege, on the basis of age, social status, marital status
and ethnic identity.
 Although Protestant reform was in part founded upon ideals of
spiritual equality, patriarchal norms nonetheless permeated early
modern religious discourse. Clergymen continued to idealise
femininity in terms of silence, chastity and obedience, in contrast to
normative masculinity, which was associated with men’s rational
self-government, thrifty restraint and control of others as well as
themselves. Despite their more positive attitudes to marriage as a
public good (in response to Catholic approaches to marriage as a
necessary container for sexual sin), Protestant reformers and puritan
proselytisers remained heavily invested in maintaining distinct
gender roles for spouses. The clergymen John Dod and Robert
Cleaver outlined a clear division of labour between spouses in their
‘how-to’ guide to domestic harmony when they itemised the duties of
a husband to ‘get goods’ to ‘travell abroade, to seeke [a] living’; to
‘get money and provision’; and to ‘deal with many men’, ‘be
entermedling’, and ‘skilful in talke’ – in contrast to the duties of the
wife to ‘save’ goods and ‘keepe the house’, and to ‘talke with few’
men and remain ‘solitary and withdrawne’, boasting of silence.4 The
flourishing genre of domestic conduct literature from the mid
sixteenth to the mid seventeenth century to which Dod and Cleaver’s
tract belonged was nonetheless heavily preoccupied with the
precariousness of husbandly authority and the limits of wifely
subordination, and as a result its authors also conjured a range of
negative male and female stereotypes as they elaborated patriarchal
ideals. The domineering shrew (also a feature of the period’s plays
and ballads) who donned the breeches and overruled her husband
at every turn, rendering him a cuckold through her sexual
incontinence, is one such example. The uxorious husband, whose
reason was imperilled by excessive affection for his wife, was
caricatured as ‘effeminately bewitcht’, and risked becoming a ‘milke-
sop’.5 At the other extreme, conduct writers disagreed about whether
or not a husband’s use of force was permissible, with most
condemning heavy-handed tyranny as brutish and (perhaps more
importantly) an ineffectual strategy for securing wifely obedience.
Finally, the profligate wastrel (comparable to the spendthrift wife)
was deemed a dangerous threat to his household’s credit and his
dependants’ well-being.
This spectrum of deviation from patriarchal ideals represented
by conduct writers can be placed alongside the even more varied
range of social practice adopted by spouses. Conduct writers were
ambivalent about the degree to which wives should exercise
authority as joint or deputy governors of their households, but it is
clear that in economic matters wives performed essential functions
to keep households afloat (in contradiction to the neat gendered
division of labour envisaged by Dod and Cleaver). Pragmatism and
patriarchy were not always compatible. While in agricultural settings
there was a greater spatial division of work, in both urban and rural
settings there were many occasions on which spouses were
necessarily interchangeable. Depending on local labour markets and
the social status of the couple, husbands and wives might be
involved in joint enterprise, contribute wage labour or establish a
‘double business household’.6 It is becoming increasingly evident
that marriage (rather than widowhood), far from diminishing their
economic agency, was the point at which women undertook more
varied and independent forms of work, and that wives’ participation
was essential to the provision of their households and a contributory
factor to the economic growth discernible from the early seventeenth
century.7 Despite a hostile legal context, in which women’s trading
rights and property ownership were curtailed by common-law
dictates of ‘coverture’ (which assigned both marital property and
liability for household debts to husbands), many wives nimbly took
advantage of all available legal loopholes, undertaking wage labour
and a wide range of productive enterprise, providing many services,
and being responsible for a good deal of marketing. This was not
simply craftily connived resistance (although there are certainly
examples of wives undertaking clandestine measures to divert
resources from their husband’s control), but often part of carefully
worked-out spousal strategies to maximise resources and diversify
risk. It has even been hypothesised that an increase in wives’
commercial production and wage labour contributed to an
‘industrious revolution’ from the mid seventeenth century that was a
necessary precursor to industrialisation, and it is clear that in urban
contexts at the very least married women’s productive capacity
remained significant into the nineteenth-century despite a growing
discursive emphasis on female domesticity and separate spheres.8
This does not, of course, mean that women and men enjoyed equal
access to resources or economic opportunities. It does, however,
debunk assumptions of female economic dependence, and it points
to the necessity of a gender-inclusive approach to early modern
economic development.
 That marital relations figured so centrally in early modern social
commentary is reflective of the importance of marital status in
shaping gendered agency. Just as marriage involved the negotiation
of authority and divisions of labour between spouses, so it was
founded on varied forms of differentiation within each sex. Especially
for women, age (and for many the associated marital status) figured
prominently in establishing profound divisions, creating a ‘gulf’
between the ‘never married’ and ‘ever married’.9 Unmarried women
were expected to remain firmly under the authority of their married
counterparts, either in service or within their household of origin.
While most young men were also temporarily denied the ‘patriarchal
dividends’ associated with heading a household and governing
others within, they nonetheless enjoyed a far greater degree of
tolerance when they departed from the normative codes of behaviour
expected of them with flamboyant displays of what might be
described as ‘anti-patriarchal’ masculinity. Old age appears to have
carried greater burdens and stigma for women than for men. Social
status additionally contributed to distinctions within each sex,
restricting the extent to which the growing population of labouring
men from the early seventeenth century could aspire to normative
manhood, and contributing in the longer term to the articulation of
distinct working-class identities.10 The patriarchal order was
therefore founded on several axes of difference, the conjunction of
which could create (and depended upon) substantial pockets of
agency for some women as well as the subordination of some men,
no matter how great the emphasis on the general principle of male
privilege.
 The Gendered Body
Male privilege was equally central to, yet also complicated by, early
modern approaches to the body. The social roles ascribed to men
and women were underpinned by notions of what we would call
‘biological determinism’, albeit based on very different
understandings of bodily difference. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, a ‘one-sex’ model dominated medical theory. With roots in
the ancient world, it was a product of humoral theory that originated
with the Greek philosopher Hippocrates (460–371 BCE) but that was
most commonly associated with the Roman physician Galen (130–
200 CE). According to humoral theory, human bodies – like all matter
– were composed of the four elements (air, water, earth and fire).
These elements corresponded to the four humours represented in
the body as blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, and the
balance of these four humours determined a person’s temperament
in relation to the combination of qualities associated with each of the
humours. Different conjunctions of qualities – hotness, dryness,
moistness and coldness – produced the temperamental
characteristics labelled as sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and
choleric. Humoral theory provided the framework for understanding
illness and health, the temperamental differences among people,
and the anatomical differences between men and women. Like most
things in early modern culture, humoral differences were understood
in hierarchical terms. Heat and moisture were life-giving, while
coldness and dryness were life-sapping. When contrasted with
women, men were characterised by their superior qualities of heat
and dryness, whereas women were relatively cold and wet.
Humoral theory lent weight to male privilege in many ways.
Men’s claims to a superior rational capacity, for example, found
justification in their humoral endowment with greater heat than
women. By contrast, women were represented as victims of their
cold, moist qualities, which rendered them sluggish, in thrall to their
passions, and lacking control of their bodies. Men’s aptitude for
bodily self-government was one of the justifications for their
advantageous political position. Men’s capacity for self-control
licensed them to control others – as household heads and in
positions of wider authority. Analogies between the household and
the state that elided kingship with ‘fatherly rule’, as well as
metaphors that represented government in terms of taming the body
politic, all proceeded from logic that gendered reason as male. More
particularly, humoral theory provided an explanation for the
anatomical variation between men and women. The premise of the
‘one-sex’ model was genital homology: that is, men and women
possessed the same genitals. The anatomical basis of gender
difference, then, was merely that men’s genitals were on the outside,
whereas women’s reproductive organs remained inside their bodies.
The vagina, ovaries and womb corresponded to the penis, testicles
and scrotum. In fact, no distinct term existed for ovaries until the
eighteenth century, before which point they were referred to as
female testicles. Derived from Galen’s On the Usefulness of the
Parts of the Body, and circulated in diverse medical and anatomical
tracts, the representation of male and female genitals as essentially
the same, just differently located, was commonplace. Once again, it
was heat that distinguished men above women. The womb, vagina
and female testicles (ovaries) were an imperfect version of male
genitalia because women lacked sufficient heat to push them out of
their bodies.
Despite assumptions of male superiority, gender difference as
medically categorised in terms of degree rather than kind was
inherently unstable, admitting potentially fluid boundaries between
the sexes. The consequent possibilities were sensationalised in
stories recounting the sudden transformation of women into men,
often following a moment of intense exertion that generated sufficient
heat to push their inverted genitalia out of their bodies. Fears arising
from notions of bodily mutability and the insecure boundary between
female and male have been cited by some historians as a source of
male anxiety in the early modern period. (Tellingly, this has not been
explored as a cause of concern for early modern women.) Perhaps
more profound, however, were assumptions that women were
naturally sexually voracious and that sexual pleasure was necessary
to their health and well-being. Unmarried women were deemed
vulnerable to ‘greensickness’, a set of symptoms arising from an
unfulfilled sexual appetite. Whether or not women experienced
greater sexual pleasure than men was also the subject of learned
medical theorising as well as popular debate. In a more sinister
branch of thought, female sexuality was accorded dangerous
potency in early modern witchcraft beliefs. More routinely, the female
‘chastity’ on which a successful marriage depended, in terms of a
wife’s exclusive sexual relations with her husband, hinged on her
spouse’s capacity to satisfy her desires, and a man could be
vulnerable to humiliation if deemed incapable of taming his wife’s
lust.
Depictions of women as the lustier sex can be linked to
reproductive theories that assumed that female as well as male
orgasm was necessary for conception. Another product of Galenic
notions of genital homology, the representation of conception in
these terms reflected the parity between male and female testicles,
both of which were assumed to produce ‘seed’, which then
commingled to create an embryo. The Galenic version of the ‘one-
sex’ model was therefore associated with a ‘two-seed’ theory of
conception, which accorded women relative agency in the process. It
contrasted with a model of conception derived from Aristotle, also in
circulation in the early modern period, which ascribed generative
agency to the male seed alone, depicting women’s contribution in
terms of providing the matter on which the male seed worked.
Despite the co-existence of both theories, the Galenic version had
gained greater currency among English medical writers by the end of
the sixteenth century. We need to exercise caution, however, before
assuming that the ‘two-seed’ model, with its allowance of
comparable male and female pleasure and generative agency,
represented a relatively favourable chapter in the history of female
sexuality. We should not presume that orgasm – principally
associated with the release of seed – meant the same in early
modern medical discourse as it represents today in terms of a
woman’s experience of pleasure. Even in the Galenic model, male
seed remained privileged above female seed, ascribed greater
potency on account of its comparative heat, and the successful
conception of an (implicitly superior) boy child was often credited to
men’s greater generative capacity. The gender parity implied by the
‘two-seed’ theory did not deliver uniform significance to generative
partners, but rested on assumptions of inequality, which has led the
cultural historian Patricia Simons to redub it the ‘unequal two-seed
theory’.11
The humoral economy was not meritocratic but sufficiently
elastic to serve and compound the entrenched gender hierarchy. The
cases of women who had apparently turned into men, or who (less
sensationally) simply displayed levels of heat uncharacteristic for
their sex, were not celebrated for achieving perfection but were
represented as monstrosities. The ascendancy of the ‘two-seed’
theory during the early modern period did not preclude changes in
the representation of reproductive agency that limited the role
accorded to women. The civil wars that ravaged Britain in the 1640s
had a significant impact on how the female body was represented in
English health tracts over the course of the seventeenth century. A
shift can be traced from a model of reproduction that afforded the
female some agency, to the construction of conception in more
masculinist terms. In response to the social and political turmoil
associated with war, women’s bodies were increasingly depicted in
metaphorical terms as landscapes to be worked by men, such as
fields to be ploughed and planted with seed, or fruit trees to be
tended. And rather than being represented as the neck of the womb,
the vagina became redescribed as a sheath for the penis in imagery
that, it has been argued, served to reinscribe male authority after a
period of social and political instability.12
The temptation to represent the ‘one-sex’ model of the body,
with its associated ‘two-seed’ theory, in relatively positive terms has
largely arisen from its significance as the backdrop in accounts of a
fundamental transition in the eighteenth century to ‘modern’
concepts of bodily difference. In a pioneering work of cultural history,
Thomas Laqueur argued that there was a fundamental turning point
in western scientific discourse whereby the ‘one-sex’ model of
gender difference was eclipsed during the eighteenth century by the
ordering of men and women into two essentially ‘opposite’ sexes.
When contrasted with the sexually passive female that Laqueur
argues was a product of modernity, constructed as essentially
different from the male in a biology of incommensurability, the
characterisation of a shift from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model of
difference in terms of its negative impact on women is undeniably
beguiling – not least since it counteracts triumphalist notions of
progress so often associated with the Enlightenment. The shift from
a vertical ordering of male and female bodies differentiated by
degree to a horizontal ordering of difference in terms of kind is
attributed by Laqueur to the development of political theories of
natural rights. The recasting of women as essentially different from
men provided the necessary justification for their continued exclusion
from the widening political arena. The denial of female sexual
agency was therefore linked to the denial of female political
agency.13 Laqueur’s claims have in turn been incorporated by
several historians into accounts of the eighteenth century as a
turning point in gender relations more generally, associated with a
separation of the private and public spheres, the withdrawal of
women from the workplace, and a subsequent closing down of
possibilities for ‘play’ and overlap in gender roles.14
Many historians, however, have argued that early modern
notions of reproductive biology, approached in terms of the ‘before’
to this development, have been over-simplified by Laqueur’s
investment in the profundity of the transition he strove to document.
There are grounds for arguing that a shift towards a ‘two-sex’ model
of bodily difference occurred much earlier than the eighteenth
century. Many leading physicians were already insisting on the
uniqueness of the female skeleton as well as the specificity of the
female genital organs by the beginning of the seventeenth century.
While such evidence does not dispute that a fundamental transition
took place, it uncouples it causally from the Enlightenment, and
resituates it in relation to new views of marriage and motherhood
that became idealised by social elites in the wake of religious reform.
More profoundly, it is questionable whether the argument that a
shift from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model is sustainable at any point
during the early modern period in the face of contradictory evidence.
If a broad source base is consulted, beyond Latin treatises for elite
medical practitioners, to include genres such as erotic texts as well
as regimens and health manuals for more popular consumption,
representations of the gendered body become considerably more
complex. A detailed study of erotica suggests that conflicting
representations of sexual difference co-existed throughout the
eighteenth century, which was characterised as much by persistence
as by change. Entirely focused on bodies and sex, and often
parodying the medical writing to which they were deeply indebted,
erotic texts deployed bodily models constructed around similarity and
difference selectively and interchangeably, depending on whether
the emphasis was on pleasure or reproduction.15 One-sex and two-
sex versions of difference were not, it appears, mutually exclusive.
Focusing on novelty at the expense of continuity has a distorting
effect on narratives of change – a point reinforced by evidence for
the longevity of humoral understandings of gender difference in
popular opinion well into the nineteenth century.
Nor was the ‘one-sex’ model entirely watertight. Rather than a
summation of a systematic theory of ‘one-ness’, the genital
homology on which it rested was often only a starting point for more
complex thinking about the bodily differences between the sexes. It
served as a loose analogy, a device informing visualisation and
memorisation exercises. Inclusion of references to a ‘one-sex’
model in a medical work did not rule out other theories, and
inconsistent approaches regularly co-existed within the same
treatise. James I’s physician, Helkiah Crooke, for example, produced
an encyclopedic work on the body that drew eclectically on a range
of works representing several traditions.16 Despite including images
of generative homology, Crooke also questioned its basis by noting
the many anatomical differences between men and women. Women
do not have a prostate; the vagina is structurally different from the
penis, and Crooke suggested that accounts of vaginas converting to
penises through inversion were not credible. Discussions
emphasising difference became more pronounced from the sixteenth
century, as medical writers became more preoccupied with the newly
‘discovered’ clitoris and as gynaecology developed as an
increasingly distinct branch of medicine.
Notwithstanding the commonplace inclusion of genital homology
as a starting point for discussion of reproductive processes, medical
writing more generally took a utero-centric approach to the female
body that lacked any sustained male equivalent. Uterine disorders
were accorded enormous influence over women’s health and well-
being more generally in medical discussion ranging well beyond
reproductive issues. The assessment of women’s mental health, for
example, involved speculation about ‘wandering wombs’, a notion of
uterine displacement that jeopardised women’s entire bodily
capacity. Menstrual irregularities were also deemed to have severe
consequences for women’s health in general. The assessment of
reproductive functioning was much more central to appraisals of
female than of male well-being. Reproductive capacity also
undoubtedly loomed much larger in female rather than male
embodied experience at a time when the majority of women spent as
much as a third of their adult lives pregnant, when childbirth carried
relatively high risks of maternal mortality, and when anxieties about
controlling fertility abounded. For all the apparent parity between the
uterus and the scrotum in models of genital homology, it must have
been crushingly obvious to early modern people that the uterus
exercised an influence on female health and the female life-cycle
without any male parallel.
By contrast, in the representation of male sexual function, early
modern authors adopted a ‘semen-centric’ framework. This is
suggestive of a more profound difference between early modern and
modern approaches to sexual difference than apparently
represented by the one-sex and two-sex models of the gendered
body. In a post-Freudian age, phallo-centric approaches to bodily
difference have become the norm, and have arguably produced
anachronistic assessments of pre-modern mindsets. As Patricia
Simons has recently argued, the primary source of male virility in
early modern culture was the seed or semen located in the testicles,
not the phallus. Not without considerable significance, the penis
nonetheless derived its potency as the delivery system for seed
rather than in its own right. It was male seed, not sex per se, that
was accorded healing properties in the treatment of ‘greensick’
women. Whereas the uterus was accorded primacy in discussions of
the female body, the testicles – not the penis – occupied prime
position in approaches to the male body, not just in medical writing
but in broader cultural representations of male fertility more
generally.17
Such arguments serve as a caution against adopting an
anachronistically phallo-centric approach to early modern concepts
of the gendered body, focusing exclusively on shifting explanations
regarding genital anatomy and more particularly the
presence/absence of a penis. Not only was the penis arguably
accorded secondary importance in early modern culture compared
with the testicles; the gendered differences associated with humoral
theory also concerned a far broader range of attributes than genital
anatomy. Facial hair, for example, was another central signifier of
adult masculinity, similarly attributed to men’s greater levels of heat.
Heat pushed beards from male bodies, just as it made some men
bald by forcing out the hair (understood as a form of excretion) from
their heads. Facial hair not only established anatomical markers
differentiating men from women, it also separated men from boys.
Beards were associated with the social roles of fathering and
soldiering, as well as with male wisdom, and they also functioned to
signify a man’s generative capacity. On the basis of the distinction
lent to adult males by beards, Will Fisher has argued that boys, in
fact, constituted a ‘third gender’ in early modern England.18
The categorisation of boys as a separate gender from men
perhaps takes the significance of other anatomical markers a step
too far. Boys shared some aspects of maleness with adult men, at
the very least in anticipation of their maturation which led to their
treatment as incipient men. The ritual practice of breeching – when
boys around the age of seven discarded the petticoats worn by
children of both sexes in order to assume specifically male attire that
distinguished them from girls – was but one manifestation of
expectations that placed them firmly on the pathway to adult
masculinity. That boys appearing on stage could don false beards in
order to play the man, as well as dresses to assume female roles, is
suggestive of the fluidity of gender identities for young males rather
than their fixity in terms of a separate category. Attending to the
distinction between men and boys, however, nonetheless serves as
an important reminder that humoral theory contributed as much to
the elaboration of difference within the male sex as to the differences
between men and women.
 Medical theorists actually devoted more attention to the
differences separating men than those distinguishing male from
female. Medical writers normally assumed a male body as their
subject, only rarely introducing explicitly gendered comparisons of
men and women, usually inspired by the more specific discussion of
conception and reproduction. The ideal male body, therefore, was
most commonly imagined through comparisons with other kinds of
men rather than in discussions of the differences between the sexes.
Humoral theory was preoccupied as much with the temperamental
differences among men as with the anatomical differences between
men and women. The assumption of a male norm meant that the
elaboration of the temperate ideal – the perfectly balanced body –
proceeded through a series of comparisons with male deviations
from it. Whereas men’s superior capacity for rational self-control, for
example, was straightforwardly claimed in male–female contrasts,
the male ideal of reasoned self-governance unravelled in medical
discussions of the many difficulties associated with achieving the
requisite temperate moderation.
Men’s superior propensity for bodily control was therefore
repeatedly represented as being under threat from humoral
imbalance associated not only with temperamental differences but
also with age, diet, climate and environment, as well as the extremes
of emotion produced by falling in love or experiences of grief, for
example. Levine Lemnius, a Dutch physician, whose works
circulated in Latin and in translation across Europe in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, elaborated many of the consequent
dangers in his Touchstone of Complexions, which was first published
in Antwerp in 1561, and which circulated in at least three English
editions between 1576 and 1633. Lemnius depicted men’s bodies as
being in constant flux, and emphasised the difficulties associated
with achieving the perfectly balanced temperate ideal. Age
disqualified young men on the grounds of their surfeit of heat and
moisture, which incited them to hasty, impetuous and lustful
behaviour, and old men on account of their lack of heat and
moisture, which rendered them weak, cautious and lacking vigour.
Manhood itself – the pinnacle of the life-cycle during which men were
most capable of achieving humoral balance – was restricted to a
mere fifteen-year period between the ages of thirty-five and fifty.
Even adult masculinity, however, was no guarantor of the bodily
ideal, owing to men’s temperamental differentiation. A hierarchy of
‘complexions’ divided men according to their humoral categorisation
simply as hot, dry, cold or moist, or in compound form as sanguine,
choleric, melancholic or phlegmatic. A hot complexion was deemed
the healthiest, manifested by a hairy body and a courageous
temperament, and was associated by Lemnius with ‘manly dignity’,
whereas men with a cold complexion were represented as defective.
Fat and sluggish, cold men possessed ‘faltering tongues, and
nothing ready in utterance, a nice, soft, and womanish voice, weake,
and feeble faculties of nature, ill memory, blockish wit, doltish minde,
courage (for lacke of heat and slendernesse of vitall spirit) fearefull
and timorous, and at the wagging of every straw afraid’. Additionally
portrayed as ‘sleepy, slothfull, weaklings, [and] meycockes’, such
men were condemned by Lemnius as ‘not apt nor able to beget any
children’.19
 The humoral differentiation of male bodies in such terms also
proceeded along ethnic lines, traditionally attributed to the effect of
climate on national character, and increasingly serving the incipient
racial stereotyping attendant on colonial expansion in the British
Atlantic world and on trading relations further afield. Humoral theory
provided the justification for categorising indigenous men as either
voraciously over-sexed or pathetically effeminate, and cultural
encounters in the ‘New World’ no doubt contributed to the growing
categorisation of men in terms of their sexual inclinations. Humoral
theory thereby validated the superiority of European men, while also
serving hierarchies of masculinity among them, implicitly eliding the
characteristics of a hot or sanguine temperament with the attributes
of social elites that no doubt established a satisfying set of norms
with which the gentry readers of such texts could identify. However,
the elaboration of humoral theory was nonetheless replete with
images of men’s bodily failings, with admissions that some men
lacked the heat necessary to achieve manhood, while others lacked
the ability to control it, undermining the claims made for men’s
powers of rational discretion and betraying expectations that not all
men were capable of achieving the bodily control expected of them.
When uncoupled from explicitly gendered comparisons, men’s
bodies (like women’s bodies) were unpredictable, fluid and difficult to
command.
The relationship between such representations of bodily
mutability and men’s experiences of masculinity is difficult to gauge.
It might credibly be argued that the male bodily instability conceded
by humoral theory was a further source of acute anxiety for at least
some early modern men who may have felt insufficiently in control of
their bodies or unable to match the physical expectations of
manliness. There is some evidence, however, that some of the
chaos associated with embodied masculinity – the bloodshed,
vomiting, pissing and ejaculation – was actively celebrated in the
riotous rituals that were vividly threaded through fraternal youth
culture and that could also unite adult males. While the idealisation
of the vigorous yet rationally self-governed man that proceeded
through derision of the weak, soft and ‘womanish’ deviant clearly
served hierarchies among men as well as the gender hierarchy, it is
important to avoid creating false equivalences between these two
forms of hierarchical ordering, not least since it was a function of
male privilege that differences between men were so heavily
elaborated. Gender saturated the representation of women, who
tended to be lumped together as a sex, constructed in terms of the
extent to which they differed from a male norm. Men, on the other
hand, far from being reduced to their sex, could be represented in
terms of the infinite variety of humankind. The representation of cold
men as womanish also served to restate expectations of male
superiority, which were not at all undermined by discussions that
questioned the capacity of all men to achieve the ideal that was
automatically assumed in male/female comparisons. Just as the
early modern emphasis on female sexual agency should not inspire
undue celebration, so we should remain cautious about the extent to
which we depict men as the victims of early modern medical
thinking. Irreducible to the ‘one-sex’ model, early modern models of
gendered embodiment were profoundly shaped by patriarchal
inflection. While involving potentially crippling distinctions among
men, the consequent hierarchies of masculinity were firmly coupled
to, and indeed served, more general assumptions that men were the
superior sex.

Sex and Sexuality

Medical representations of the gendered body entailed numerous
assumptions about normative sexual behaviour associated with men
and women’s desire for each other. Generalising about sexuality in
the past is notoriously difficult because of the partial quality of the
available evidence on which we must base our conclusions.
Quotidian sexual practices left little documentation. Samuel Pepys’s
coded allusions to sexual improprieties in the diary he kept in the
1660s were unusual in an age in which the confessional practices
associated with diary keeping were in their infancy and highly
socially restricted. Most of our evidence of sexual behaviour comes
from disciplinary records kept by various jurisdictions that were
empowered to punish sex and even speech about sex that occurred
beyond prescribed boundaries. Charting the regulation of sex, while
instructive, does not amount to the recovery of early modern sexual
practices, licit or illicit. There are grounds nonetheless for
investigating whether certain important changes took place in the
regulation of sexual behaviour and the construction of sexual
identities over the course of the early modern period.
 According to the Christian morality that dominated approaches
to sex until the later seventeenth century, having received renewed
emphasis in the wake of the Reformation’s focus on marriage as one
of its battlegrounds, sexual relations outside marriage and without
procreative potential were deemed sinful. The extent to which such
prescriptions were taken seriously by those with prosecuting powers
appears to have varied among places and over time, and often
entailed different consequences for women and men. Pre-marital
sexual relations appear to have been subject to harsher regulation
from the later sixteenth century in Church courts, local borough
courts and regional quarter sessions. That proscriptions against pre-
marital sex had some impact on behaviour is suggested by the
decline in illegitimacy ratios between the later sixteenth and the mid-
seventeenth century, during which period there was also a reduction
in the proportion of brides whose pregnancy at marriage can be
confirmed from the timing of the subsequent baptism of their first
child. Whether such trends, and their regional variation, should be
related either to a more widespread internalisation of restrictive
codes of sexual behaviour or to greater regulative zeal on the part of
parish officials and those informing them (or both) is more
debateable. It is also impossible to discern the extent to which
heightened vigilance surrounding pre-marital sex was a product of
hostile economic circumstances (rather than deepening piety) that
were making it harder for young men and women to be confident of
attaining the economic independence necessary for marriage, which
in turn meant pre-marital pregnancy carried far greater risks of the
economic burdens of illegitimacy. This did not, however, dampen
expectations of sexual compatibility that informed judgements about
a good ‘match’, since sexual pleasure retained its significance as
one of the foundations of a stable marriage. To this end, the ritual of
‘bundling’ was customary in some regions, whereby future partners
simulated a night in bed together (with each appropriately ‘bundled’
to restrict improper access) in order to confirm their suitability as
partners. Rather than depending on repressive mechanisms
associated with models of female sexual passivity, the containment
of extra-marital sexual activity proceeded through communal
vigilance of appropriate boundaries. At a time when long periods of
sexual abstinence were theoretically demanded by a relatively late
age at first marriage and a relatively high proportion of the population
never marrying, female bodies were particularly vulnerable to the
regulative touch of older women as well as to the predatory sexual
advances of men.
As we have already seen, sexual desire on the part of women
as well as men was readily admitted. However, the consequences of
illicit sex between men and women were often much graver for the
latter. Most obviously, the risks of an illegitimate birth were higher for
women than for men, even if justices of the peace could and
occasionally did require putative fathers of ‘bastard’ children to
shoulder the practical as well as financial burdens of care. Mothers
of illegitimate offspring were more likely to experience childbirth as a
punitive ritual than their married counterparts, threatened with divine
judgement against their unborn infant, and denied help by midwives
and matrons until they had confessed its father’s identity. Fathers of
illegitimate children often sought to escape public responsibility for
their offspring when they had sufficient resources and inclination to
remain unburdened. One Norfolk curate even attempted to ‘suffer’ a
boy who was only seven or eight years old ‘to answere’ for the
illegitimate child the curate was suspected of fathering.20 While
some nonetheless privately acknowledged some pecuniary liability,
others managed to flee or evade accountability altogether,
sometimes enabled by the patronage of other men, and sometimes
through exploiting their own position of authority to pass the blame.
Stories of male servants being framed for the sexual exploits of their
masters, often involving a fellow maidservant, abounded in litigation
over disputed paternity. The options available to both men and
women faced with illegitimate parenthood were therefore socially
varied, depending on age and status as well as gender, but the
physical realities of pregnancy, childbirth and (for many) feeding an
infant must have served to confirm assumptions that the women
concerned were much less likely than the men ever to shed the
identity of a ‘bastard-bearer’.
More generally, women in early modern England were
vulnerable to the rich language of insult that labelled them as
whores, ‘jades’ or ‘queans’, which lexicon was another
manifestation of a deeply rooted double standard that rendered
women more culpable for (hetero-)sexual licentiousness. Although
the use of such labels was highly complex, and did not always
function as a direct comment on a woman’s sexual morality, the fact
that there was no comparable term for a man is instructive. Men
might be discredited as ‘whoremongers’, and later as ‘libertines’, but
there was no explicit label to refer to a man who contravened
expectations that sex should be contained within marriage. Such a
divergent approach might be part of the explanation for why the
prosecution of rape was relatively rare, and why convictions were
largely restricted to cases in which the victim was a child. In terms of
the labels attached to illicit sex between men and women, the most
potent parallel for a man was to be stereotyped as a cuckold.
Suspected cuckolds were subject to ridicule and some became
targets of ‘skimmingtons’, which brought public humiliation through
rough music, the parading of horns (the symbol of the cuckold) and
effigies of befuddled husbands facing backwards on a horse. Such
shaming rituals served to comment as much on the behaviour of a
man’s wife as on his failure to govern her, and derived some of their
power from the fact that ‘whore’ was the most recognisable category
of sexual deviance.
Women’s adulterous behaviour was for the most part therefore
treated much more seriously than men’s in a further manifestation of
the sexual double standard. Just as men were less likely to shoulder
the burdens of illegitimacy than women, husbands also appear to
have enjoyed more sexual licence than wives, with less at stake if
discovered. Married men were much less likely than married women
to seek legal redress against defamatory accusations of sexual
wrong-doing. Wives who sought formal separation from a husband
had a greater chance if they could prove his cruelty in addition to his
infidelity, whereas husbands were better able to justify a suit for
separation on the grounds of a wife’s adultery alone. While moral
commentary on adultery condemned it in either sex, reaching a fever
pitch in the mid seventeenth century with the passage of legislation
prescribing the death penalty for adulterers ‘as well the man as the
woman’, the extent to which it exercised a prohibitive influence on
men’s behaviour is questionable.21 The limits of moral discourse
condemning sexual licence became increasingly evident from the
later seventeenth century, alongside a sustained decline in formal
regulative activity, albeit briefly punctuated by local campaigns for
the ‘reformation of manners’. As a ‘culture of discipline’ receded in
the wake of religious toleration, Faramerz Dabhoiwala has argued
that a ‘sexual revolution’ ushered in modern attitudes towards
consensual sex between adult men and women as a matter of
private conscience rather than public morality.22 Approaches to
adultery as a sin that universally threatened communal well-being
gave way to a diversity of opinion that even included the celebration
of adulterous behaviour by elite men as a form of gallantry, a shift
aided by an expansion of print culture that sensationalised lurid
details of cases of ‘criminal conversation’ whereby wronged
husbands pursued their wives’ lovers for substantial pecuniary
damages in court. Such trends depended on shifting sexual norms,
whereby female sexuality was recast in terms of passivity, requiring
protection from the naturally predatory impulses assigned to men
who were more definitively represented as the lustier sex. Whether
all this constituted a revolutionary sexual ‘liberty’ (as Dabhoiwala
has claimed), certainly for any beyond the propertied elite, remains
questionable.
When same-sex relations were concerned, however, it was men
rather than women who were at greater risk of both prosecution and,
in a few cases, stigmatisation. This did not, though, rule out a far
higher degree of tacit acceptance of sexual relations between men
than of (‘heterosexual’) behaviour deemed to compromise female
chastity. Sodomy was a capital offence in early modern England, and
great symbolic significance attached to the image of the sodomite
who was represented as a harbinger of disorder, corruption and
divine wrath. Accusations of sodomy punctuated the anti-clericalism
of Protestant propaganda, for example, which routinely represented
the pope and Satan as sexual partners. Yet despite, and indeed
perhaps because of, such negative imagery and the harsh penalties
attached to penetrative sex between men, same-sex relations were
arguably a routine part of male interaction, particularly in all-male
settings such as schools and universities. Provided sexual behaviour
between men was structured by hierarchies of age, which dictated a
passive role for adolescents and an active, penetrative, part for adult
males, it met with little resistance. This mismatch between the
damning image of the sodomite and more permissive attitudes
towards men’s same-sex relations is in line with Foucault’s assertion
that the conceptualisation of sexuality as a category of identity is a
distinctly modern phenomenon. Norms of ‘heterosexuality’ and its
implied opposite ‘homosexuality’ were a product of nineteenth-
century medical discourse, and, according to Foucault, were
preceded by approaches to sex as a range of acts to which anyone
might be drawn rather than as the foundation for differentiating
between fixed identities.23 Same-sex behaviour between men did not
therefore preclude sexual relations between the men involved and
women. The image of the sodomite derived its potency as a symbol
of systematic depravity rather than as a category of sexual identity.
The second earl of Castlehaven, for example, one of the few men
actually prosecuted for sodomy in early modern England, was
condemned as much for his failure to govern himself and his
household in proper patriarchal fashion as for his specific indulgence
in a range of extra-marital sexual practices that included rape as well
as buggery.24
While the potential for very harsh treatment existed (and was
occasionally applied), it appears that in practice the negative
stereotype of the sodomite impinged less on the behaviour of men
than the more damning figure of the whore shaped the possibilities
available to women. For the most part, especially when approached
in terms of acts, rather than as symptomatic of alternative identities,
men’s same-sex relations were an accepted part of a wider fraternal
culture that tolerated and even expected a degree of intimacy
between men that could rival conjugal ties. Ranging from the
collective bonding characteristic of men’s homosocial relations that
facilitated fleeting bodily intimacy, to the longer-term partnerships
that bound certain men together for the best part of their lives,
homoerotic relations between men defied neat categorisation and
met with varied responses. The concept of friendship was as
important as the categorisation of sexual intimacy to the ways in
which early modern people made sense of relationships between
men. Friendship was celebrated as equivalent to marriage and
kinship. Friends were mates, second selves and other halves. It was
the reverence inspired by ideals of friendship that gave dignity to the
long-term partnerships of certain men who chose to commemorate
their relationships through joint burial. The monument to Sir John
Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, for example, erected in Christ’s
College, Cambridge, celebrated their life-long partnership –
described by Finch as a ‘marriage of souls’ – with reference to
conjugal imagery that placed the depth of feeling between them on a
par with marital intimacy.25
However much the idealisation of ‘entire’ friendship in such
terms usually imagined relationships between men, women also
pursued comparable emotional attachments as well as a range of
behaviours that might usefully be described as ‘lesbian-like’ – in
terms of departing from heteronormative expectations rather than
reductively tied to the specifics of same-sex relations.26 The tomb of
Mary Kendall in Westminster Abbey, dated 1710, commemorates the
‘close Union & Friendship, In which she liv’d with The Lady
Catherine Jones’ and Kendall’s desire that ‘even their Ashes, after
Death, Might not be divided’. The figure of the ‘female husband’ was
readily imaginable in early modern culture, providing the subject of a
play by Henry Fielding (1746) and of numerous tales of women who
‘passed’ as soldiers or sailors. Court records detailing a marriage
breakdown involving two women in London in 1680, as well as
letters documenting romantic friendships between women who
referred to each other as spouses, are further suggestive of a
relatively flexible approach to concepts of conjugal relations. Such
flexibility made for a complicated relationship between sexual acts
and identities, which defy neat plotting on a linear, chronological
trajectory. Nor was it without limits. Like the figure of the sodomite,
the ‘tribade’ – a woman with an unusually large clitoris who sought
to penetrate other women – could be conjured up in condemnation of
female same-sex intimacy. Women who sought sex with other
women might also be represented as ‘hermaphrodites’, medical
anomalies of indeterminate sex whose sexual organs were neither
properly inside nor sufficiently out of their bodies.27
The relatively commonplace ordering of same-sex relations
along the lines of age therefore did not preclude the existence of
identities associated with same-sex desire (largely expressed as
negative stereotypes) or the possibility of long-term relationships
between partners of the same sex, not least because such
partnerships were more likely to be characterised – and
characterised positively – as symbolic of faithful friendship rather
than of sexual identities based on specific types of desire. It has
nonetheless been argued that the period between 1700 and 1750
witnessed the emergence of categories of sexuality that
fundamentally reordered approaches to same-sex relations.
According to Randolph Trumbach, this transition was more broadly
symptomatic of a shift from a ‘traditional’ to a ‘modern’ sexual
system that increasingly treated sexual relations between the sexes
and same-sex relations as mutually exclusive. Whereas adult men’s
desire for youths was traditionally treated as one of many
alternatives to the only form of officially permissible sex – that is,
within marriage – male–male desire became increasingly stigmatised
as the characteristic of a minority of men whose sexual preferences
precluded their entitlement to claim normative masculinity.
Effeminacy began to take on new meanings associated with objects
of sexual desire rather than deployed more generally to signify any
man’s lack of control over his appetite, sexual or otherwise. Most
evident in London’s ‘molly-houses’, a new sexual subculture
emerged that placed ‘mollies’ (adult men whose sexual interests
were restricted to men) in adversarial opposition to the male majority
who were increasingly represented as desiring only women. This
shift was mirrored by the slightly later emergence of a Sapphist
identity for women who adopted masculine attributes and sought out
more conventionally female partners. It may also have been
accompanied by a heightened emphasis on penetrative sex and the
privileging of male sexual agency in models and practices of
‘heterosexual’ intercourse.28
Growing rigidity in the categorisation of sexual desire can also
be detected in the representation of prostitutes and in responses to
cultural encounters with indigenous peoples in the wider world. The
representation and treatment of prostitutes increasingly set them
apart from other women. Partly a product of concerns about syphilis,
and associated with the expansion of state-sponsored regulation,
prostitution was gradually criminalised. As a result the prostitute’s
body was demarcated as essentially different, thereby separating her
from other women. Categorising the differences that separated
Europeans from non-European ‘others’ also involved the delineation
of fixed sexual identities. Native American ‘berdaches’, for instance,
who dressed and behaved as if they were women, were represented
by European observers as effeminate sodomites, exclusively
penetrated by other men. The cultures of China, India and the
Ottoman empire were portrayed as sexually degenerate, while
African men were characterised as hypersexual. Deviant sexualities,
not just sexual acts, were readily attributed to non-Europeans in
ways that are likely to have informed metropolitan understandings of
sexual norms. A shift of emphasis from acts to identities was
therefore at least partly born of the processes of differentiation
inspired by global influence.
Just as a clear-cut shift from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model of
the body is debateable, so a linear transition whereby sexual acts
were superseded by sexual identities risks being over-schematic.
This is especially the case if a search for coherent sexualities
focuses anachronistically on identities that are recognisably modern
rather than the sexual identities that may have resonated for early
modern people. This is not to rule out fundamental changes in
approaches to the gendered body and sexual relations over the
course of the early modern period, but to recognise both their
complexity and their partial character. Sex and gender were ever-
present categories in early modern thought: of central importance in
their own right; shaping hierarchies between men and women as
well as within each sex; and threaded through the articulation of an
infinite variety of differences founded on confessional identity, race
and ethnicity, and informing the conceptualisation of power. Sex and
gender were also embodied experiences, producing as well as
reflecting understandings of difference in ways that require greater
accommodation in our narratives of change.

Notes
1 L. Roper, ‘Beyond discourse theory’, Women’s History Review,
19:2 (2010).

2 B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and

Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 3–14.

3 J. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of

Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006),
Chapter 4.

4 J. Dod and R. Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde

Government (London, 1612), 167–8.

5 F. Lenton, Characterismi; or, Lentons Leasures (London, 1631),

sig. B9; W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), 286.

6 A. L. Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-

century London’, C&C, 23:2 (2008), 276.

7 J. Whittle, ‘Enterprising widows and active wives: Women’s

unpaid work in the household economy of early modern England’,
History of the Family, 19:3 (2014); A. Shepard, ‘Crediting women
in the early modern English economy’, HWJ, 79:1 (Spring 2015).

8 J. de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour

and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).

9 L. Gowing, ‘Ordering the body: Illegitimacy and female authority

in seventeenth-century England’, in M. J. Braddick and J. Walter
(eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order,
Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61; J. M. Bennett and A. M.
Froide, ‘A singular past’, in J. M. Bennett and A. M. Froide (eds.),
Singlewomen in the European Past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

10 A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

11 P. Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural

History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 142.

12 M. Fissell, ‘Gender and generation: Representing reproduction

in early modern England’, Gender & History, 7:3 (1995).

13 T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to

Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

14 R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The

Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998); D.
Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2004).

15 K. Harvey, ‘The substance of sexual difference: Change and

persistence in representations of the body in eighteenth-century
England’, Gender & History, 14: 2 (2002).

16 H. Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of

Man (London, 1615).

17 Simons, Sex of Men, Chapter 4.

18 W. Fisher, ‘The Renaissance beard: Masculinity in early
modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54: 1 (2001).

19 L. Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions Expedient and

Profitable for All such as be Desirous and Carefull of their Bodily
Health, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1633), 61, 97, 104, 130.

20 Norfolk Record Office, DN/DEP30/32, fols. 54v–55v.

21 An Act for Suppressing the Detestable Sins of Incest, Adultery

and Fornication (1650).

22 F. Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual

Revolution (London: Penguin, 2013).

23 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. (New York:

Pantheon, 1978–88).

24 C. B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the

2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

25 A. Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2003).

26 Bennett, History Matters, Chapter 6.

27 L. Gowing, ‘Lesbians and Their Like in Early Modern Europe,

1500–1800’, in R. Aldrich (ed.), Gay Life and Culture: A World
History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

28 R. Trumbach, ‘From age to gender, c. 1500–1750: From the

adolescent male to the adult effeminate body’, in S. Toulalan and
K. Fisher (eds.), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body 1500
to the Present (London: Routledge, 2013).
 16
The English and ‘Others’ in
England and Beyond
◈

Alison Games

The English set themselves in opposition to a variety of European

‘others’ with the ebb and flow of European politics: first the Spanish
in the sixteenth century, then the Dutch in the seventeenth century
and finally the French in the eighteenth century. This protracted
European quadrille coincided with a conceptual shift from a world
divided between Christians and ‘infidels’, as Christians dubbed
Muslims, to one of Christians and ‘heathens’, or ‘savages’, or
‘pagans’, as Europeans labelled the people they encountered in this
era in America, Africa and Asia. England’s global transition in these
centuries created the conditions that defined English interactions
with people around the world. Between 1500 and 1750 the English
confronted an increasing number and variety of non-English people
within and beyond England because of three factors: national
consolidation, commercial and territorial expansion, and continental
wars and the Protestant refugees they displaced. National
consolidation shoved English, Welsh, Scots and Irish into sometimes
uncomfortable proximity. Global expansion and continental warfare
brought distant people to England, as refugees, traders, diplomats,
slaves and curiosities, while hundreds of thousands of English
people travelled overseas, as soldiers, mariners, traders and
colonists, and as a result found themselves in face-to-face
encounters with a wide array of foreign people. There were new
spaces for interactions with others, and new kinds of others to be
met. Places like the American continents, barely grasped in 1500,
had become by 1750 both alluring places of settlement and cultural
cauldrons where the English lived embroiled with other Britons,
continental Europeans, Africans and Amerindians. These encounters
produced new people, children of mixed race, whose existence
fostered the emergence of new categories and laws to legislate as
‘other’ those children born of English parents in English domains.
Four trends have distinguished historical scholarship on
‘others.’ Firstly, scholars have tended to study these populations as
discrete groups, exploring English interactions with single ethnic
communities. One by-product of this attention to single populations is
a tendency among some scholars to make claims for the exemplary
‘otherness’ of the population under study.1 Edited compendiums on
multiple populations compensate in some respects for this tradition
of discrete historical enquiry, as do studies of single places, whether
cities or colonies, with varied inhabitants.2 A second important trend
has been an emphasis on London. Both historical and literary
scholars have tended to focus on the capital, historians because the
city has some of the best extant sources and contained such large
and significant foreign communities; literary scholars because of
their concern with metropolitan culture produced in and for English
consumers.3 How the English reacted to strangers in other locales
within England, especially in rural areas, is more difficult to discern,
and is a fertile area for future research.
Thirdly, historians interested in the English and ‘others’ have for
the most part focused on single geographic regions. Scholarship on
‘alien’ and ‘stranger’ communities in England, for example, rarely
intersects with scholarship on the English beyond England (in
Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas); on stranger communities and
non-English inhabitants in English territory overseas (in the British
colonies of North America and the West Indies, for example); or on
English interactions with the Welsh, Scots and Irish inhabitants of the
British Isles. These separate treatments make it difficult to get a
sense of whom, exactly, most English people encountered, and
where, and how these experiences varied. English and Scots outside
England, Nabil Matar has argued, were more likely in the
seventeenth century to encounter a Muslim than an Amerindian or
sub-Saharan African, largely because of the extent of Mediterranean
trade and travel.4 By 1750, the most numerically common other in
territory claimed by the British state was African or Amerindian.
Unfortunately, historians’ knowledge of others sometimes tends to
be in inverse proportion to their numbers, so that the minuscule
numbers of Muslims or Africans who ended up in London in the
sixteenth or seventeenth centuries are more familiar to scholars than
the 2 million Africans ensnared in the slave trade to British colonies
during the eighteenth century. This essay integrates these diverse
populations and regions. Finally, over the past four decades
historians have deployed different terms to describe non-English
people, looking at ‘others’ and at ‘difference’ to talk about these
populations, and shifting from a language of encounters to one of
interaction, all inflected by contemporary scholarly interests in such
overlapping categories as gender, class, status, religion, the body
and race.

The English and Others in the British Isles

The first ‘others’ that most English encountered were each other. A
‘foreigner’ in this period meant someone alien to a given locale.
Profound regional differences in attributes including dialects, building
practices, agricultural customs, dress and popular beliefs (to name
only a few) characterised England. So John Smyth of Nibley
believed when he made a record in 1639 of phrases unique to
Berkeley Hundred (Gloucestershire), and that he would not expect to
hear from the lips of a ‘forraigner’, by which he meant someone
beyond the hundred.5 These regional particularities, however, were
only some of the many markers of difference that were important
within England. After Henry VIII’s separation from the Roman
Catholic Church, religious differences severed friends and families,
meaning that the ‘other’ might have resided in one’s own family,
whether a grandparent adhering to older practices or a sibling with
the zeal of a convert to one of the new Protestant paths. Many
converts deliberately set themselves apart from those around them,
as the Quakers did when they adopted new habits of speech and
manners. Religion might provide an English dissenter with greater
affinity with a non-English person, turning the ethnic ‘other’ into a
spiritual ally. Religious minorities sometimes fled England to find
more sympathetic spiritual communities abroad, as about 800
Calvinists did during the reign of Mary; or as thousands of other
Protestants did in the early seventeenth century, when they
established English congregations in the Low Countries; or as
Catholics did, when they left England to live and study and marry on
the European Continent. In the western Atlantic, English Catholics
relied on non-English priests for sacraments and succour.6
Although these examples of localism and religious difference
intimate some of the many ways in which the English perceived each
other as ‘other’, England was also inhabited by people born outside
the kingdom, many of whom were defined legally as ‘aliens’ or
‘strangers’. English subjects did not have to look far beyond the coin
of the realm to see the visage of such people, including those who
belonged to ethnic groups such as the Dutch, Scots and Germans,
about which the English often had strong and disparaging
sentiments. Nor did they have to look beyond that coin’s face to
understand how lineage linked England to Europe, and how England
assimilated non-English people in a wide variety of ways, whether as
the head of state, an urban artisan or at the lowest rung of newly
emerging racial hierarchies. Between 1500 and 1760, five foreign-
born monarchs governed the kingdom and reigned for a total of 105
years, or 40 per cent of the era. James I was a Scot, James VI of
that kingdom; his son, Charles I, was also born in Scotland, although
raised primarily in England. William III, James I’s great-grandson,
the Prince of Orange, was born in Holland. The Hanoverian George I
came to the throne in 1714; his German-born son George II
governed until 1760. The Scots, German and Dutch monarchs
reflected some of the major non-English communities found within
England.
By far the largest number of ‘strangers’ in England were other
Protestant Europeans, primarily French, Dutch and German-
speaking refugees from continental conflicts. While London and
other important towns had long had communities of stranger
merchants, in 1550, Edward VI established a ‘Strangers’ Church’ in
London to tend to the needs of foreign Protestants. This act reflected
the rising number of Protestant refugees who poured into England,
escaping in most cases a combination of religious persecution,
wartime dislocation and economic reverses. Throughout the
Elizabethan period, London’s stranger population numbered about
8,000–10,000, and by the 1590s, the total population of ‘strangers’
in England may have totaled 23,000–24,000.7
The composition of this continental migration changed between
1500 and 1750. The sixteenth century saw high levels of migration
from the Low Countries; such a large flow of refugees from the
tumult of the Eighty Years War that people said that one-third of the
people in the provincial town of Norwich were Dutch. Between 1660
and 1700, some 50,000 French Protestants settled in England, the
largest cohort of European migrants, of whom about three-quarters
settled in London. Second to the French population was that of
Germans. Both the Dutch and German migrants assimilated to the
extent that the number of congregations serving them declined as
members shifted to the Anglican Church. As aliens, all suffered a
variety of disadvantages, including being unable to own real
property, or inherit or pass on property; they did not have political
rights, could not trade overseas in English territory, and had to pay
special customs. Aliens thus faced powerful incentives to acquire the
rights of natural-born Englishmen, although most newcomers
remained unnaturalised. They could achieve rights through two
mechanisms: naturalisation, which required a private Act of
Parliament, or denization, secured through a patent, or grant, from
the monarch. Naturalised subjects possessed the same rights,
theoretically, as natural-born subjects, while denizens had fewer
privileges, but in both instances the status enabled the alien to buy
and transfer real property.8
While continental wars produced large stranger populations in
England, internal wars and national consolidation highlighted other
non-English populations: Welsh, Irish and Scots. All three
populations gained legal status equal to that of English subjects in
this era. The Welsh were incorporated into the kingdom with the Acts
of Union between 1536 and 1543. As for the Scots, in 1608, the
Court of Exchequer determined in Calvin’s Case that place of birth
determined nationality, and thus (in the particulars of this case) that
Scots born in Scotland after 1603 were English subjects. The case
had implications for the Irish, who were also considered English
subjects under its provisions.9 In England, therefore, people such as
the Welsh, Irish or Scots theoretically possessed the same legal
rights as the English, as long as other impediments, particularly
religion, did not disqualify them.
Distinctive social and political structures and cultural norms in
the Gaelic and border regions of Britain and Ireland diverged enough
from English norms that English observers readily dubbed their
inhabitants as wild, barbarous and in dire need of a forced dose of
English civility.10 They justified incorporation of the Welsh into the
English state in the sixteenth century because they decried them as
a barbarous and murderous people who required the civilising
process of the state. By the seventeenth century, the English no
longer regarded the Welsh as foreign, but found them highly
deficient, encumbered with peculiar customs, mired in poverty, and
inhabitants of a ‘repellent landscape of hills and mountains’.11
English attitudes towards Gaelic Scots and Irish when they
encountered them shared many of these features, in that the English
perceived both populations as similarly barbarous, but with the
added complexity that the English often faced them during times of
war, as part of ‘civilising’ missions, during invasions and conquests,
and often across a barrier of religious difference and
incomprehension. Conquest and colonisation shaped and deepened
English pejorative assessments of the Irish, especially between 1560
and 1641, when 100,000 English and Scots emigrated to Ireland.
English soldiers and colonists tended to be ardent Protestants who
regarded Irish practices as incomprehensible. Fynes Moryson, who
served as a colonial official there from 1600 to 1603, found nothing
to admire in Ireland apart from the whiskey. Common in all of these
English perceptions was a model of social progress in which
barbarous people might be yanked towards civility, a settled way of
life, English laws and language, commerce, and Protestantism.12
English settlement schemes often relied on English proximity to non-
English people to provide models of civility, as was tried in places as
diverse as Ireland and Acadia.
Welsh, Scots and Irish migrated to England, especially, like most
English migrants, to the economic engine of London. Unlike
communities of continental strangers, however, they lacked an
institutional focus such as a separate church. Without legal or
economic barriers to their participation in the institutional and
economic life of England, for example, the Welsh left little evidence
of collective presence. Migration enabled boys pursuing
apprenticeships in London both to assimilate and to Anglicise,
especially because most served English masters. The Welsh
intermarried with English in London, and they adopted English
naming practices, shifting from Welsh patronymics: David ap John
ap Edward was also known in London as David Jones.13
The extent to which the English continued to regard the Welsh –
the longest-allied unit in the kingdom – as alien suggests the
challenges non-English groups faced in their assimilationist goals.
Sons of Welsh gentry attended English universities, where they were
derided for their accents and broken speech. From 1550 to 1750, the
Welsh were ridiculed in English caricatures, mockery embodied in
the character of ‘Poor Taffy’, a Welshman so impoverished that he
rode a billy goat; was too poor to afford meat, so instead dined on
Welsh rarebit or rabbit (a concoction of bread and cheese); and
remained encumbered by his broken English. Not until 1750 did this
disparaging image of the Welsh fade, replaced instead by a more
admiring view connected to the rise of Romanticism and the resulting
celebration of the remote and rugged landscapes abundant in
Wales.14

People from beyond the Seas

People from around the world appeared in England for reasons
connected primarily to overseas trade, exploration and colonisation.
The earliest English voyages to North America returned with
Amerindian captives and visitors, a total of 175 altogether between
1500 and 1776. Many became celebrities wherever they went,
presented at court; feted by prominent political figures; their
likenesses captured by engravers and painters; their activities
reported in newsletters and, later, newspapers. Amerindian visitors
enabled interested Englishmen to study their languages, as Thomas
Hariot did at Durham House in the late sixteenth century, and to
promote overseas investment. In September 1603, fascinated
Londoners thronged the banks of the Thames to watch Amerindians
paddle their canoe in the river. Amerindians also came to England on
diplomatic missions, some with real power, others with feigned
authority. ‘Four Indian Kings’ enjoyed a sojourn in London in 1710,
causing such a commotion when they attended Macbeth that the
players could barely proceed. For their part, Amerindian visitors
hoped to gather useful information about the English, especially in
the early days of English efforts to occupy North American territory. A
Powhatan delegation in 1608 included one man whose purpose was
‘to know our strength’, Captain John Smith recalled, ‘and Countries
condition’.15 This accumulated knowledge shaped indigenous
responses to the English in North America. The Powhatan leader
Wahunsonacock, for example, insisted in 1610 that the English in
Virginia show him the respect enjoyed by the ‘great werowances [or
leaders] and lords in England’ by bringing him a coach and horses,
to enable him ‘to ride and visit other great men’. So he had been told
by those who had been in England.16
When Amerindians arrived in such small numbers, they were
oddities, curiosities, their cultural differences a source of fascination,
not a threat to English customs. Similarly ‘rare and costly objects’
were lascars, or seamen from India, who travelled to London on East
India Company vessels in the early seventeenth century. As early as
1667, however, these lascars seemed less precious to enterprising
merchants, who sold them to America as slaves.17
The trade routes and territorial aspirations that brought visitors
and captives from North America and mariners from India to England
also created circuits through which sub-Saharan Africans travelled.
These routes were invariably linked to the slave trade. Some visitors
struck English hosts and observers as elite figures, men worthy of
respect because of the class status the English projected on them.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was one such visitor. A member of an elite
family from Bondu, in Senegambia, Ayuba was captured in 1731 by
slave traders, who sold him to an English merchant, who in turn
shipped him to Maryland. He proved a hopeless agricultural worker,
unaccustomed to such labour, and needing to withdraw regularly to
pray. He ran away, was captured and demonstrated his ability to
write before intrigued observers, who recognised the words
‘Mahommad’ and ‘Allah’ when Ayuba spoke and concluded he was
Muslim. They assisted Suleiman in writing to his father asking to be
redeemed. The letter found its way into the hands of James
Oglethorpe, an English MP and philanthropist, who founded the
colony of Georgia for debtors and who organised Ayuba’s trip to
England. During his journey Ayuba mastered English, and after he
arrived in April 1733, he met Hans Sloane, who arranged his
presentation before the royal family. Thanks to the interest of the
Royal African Company, which hoped to expand its trade and
believed Suleiman might assist them in that endeavour, Suleiman
travelled to Gambia in July 1734, completing his picaresque
adventure.18
Apart from such visitors, small numbers of Africans and people
of African descent lived in England, and, like so many other aliens,
they dwelled primarily in cities. By the 1770s, they numbered
between 3,000 and 15,000 in London.19 Many of the people of
African descent in Britain were free; others were enslaved. Slaves in
Britain were often valued as prestige goods, adorned in meticulous
livery, and young boys especially were featured prominently in
portraits of the era, accompanying the women who were the
paintings’ subjects, including in multiple works by Anthony Van Dyck.
As the law shaped the experience of Britons and European strangers
in England, so too did it affect the status of slaves: the 1772
Somerset decision recognised them as free on British soil. Despite
the small numbers of Africans in Britain, British people encountered
their images everywhere, in shop signs and on stage, in novels such
as Aphra Behn’s popular Oroonoko (1688), and on textiles and tea
trays. African characters, normally detached from any plantation
context, often lone figures, occasionally costumed in Amerindian
headdresses, also adorned tobacco advertisements.20
Aside from the Irish, Scots and Welsh, all of the ‘others’
discussed above were primarily urban residents. English people in
rural areas were likely to encounter different kinds of strangers. Most
were ‘foreigners’, people from other parishes, who could be required
under laws governing vagrancy and poor-relief to return to their
home parishes. Wanderers were suspect, none more so than
‘Gypsies’, as they were called in that era, a people whose first
documented appearance in England dates to 1504 and who
composed the tail end of a diaspora from India that reached England
either from the Scottish north or across the channel. The case of the
Gypsies exposes three key features of English encounters with
others in this era. Firstly, migratory habits demarcated ‘others’.
Secondly, identities could change. One could become a Gypsy
through garb and habits. And, thirdly, English-born Gypsies posed
legal problems, since these subjects could not be deported. In 1563,
Parliament decreed that it was a felony to look or act like a Gypsy, a
status that one could cast off by promising to reform one’s ways.
Their services as entertainers and helpful tinkers made Gypsies
useful to the people whose towns and villages they passed through,
revealing the gap between multiple laws criminalising and disdaining
their conduct, and local tolerance and appreciation for their
services.21
 The English beyond England
English experiences with non-English people in England shaped in
some – but not all – ways how they made sense of those they met
beyond the kingdom. Evidence from the first decades of English
activity in North America, for example, suggests that the English
expected Amerindians to occupy a category similar to that of the
Welsh, Irish and Scots. The illustrations of Picts in the final pages of
Hariot’s Brief and True Report of the new found land of Virginia
(Frankfurt, 1590) conveyed this attitude: ancient Britons had become
civilised, and so too could the people of Roanoke. But in many
respects experiences within England were not portable. Strangers
encountered by the English at home were primarily Protestant, town-
dwelling Europeans, people interested in making a new home in
England or benefiting financially there. The English met these people
in a position of cultural, legal and political superiority, since English
laws shaped the opportunities these strangers found to forge viable
economic lives for themselves.
Beyond England it was the English who had to conform to the
worlds others had made. Three variables shaped this culture of
accommodation: diplomatic and commercial imperatives, curiosity,
and physical vulnerability. Thousands of men left England, for
example, as travellers and collectors. Students on the Grand Tour
learned new languages; studied law, dancing, fencing and art; and
mastered different national styles of sociability.22 Their curiosity was
echoed in the exploits of collectors and scholars, who studied
languages and gathered manuscripts and art and ancient artefacts
for English patrons. Oxford established a chair in Arabic in the
seventeenth century, a reflection of this new kind of English
engagement with the eastern Mediterranean.23
Travellers and collectors circulated through English merchant
communities overseas. Small clusters of English traders lived
together in European trading centres from Moscow to Lisbon. By the
beginning of the seventeenth century, new locations, with more
unfamiliar cultural settings, introduced more English traders to
remote places, including Algiers, Istanbul, Aleppo, Surat, Cape
Coast Castle, Hirado, Bantam, Hudson’s Bay and Banda.24 Traders
pursued spices, gold, fabric, furs and slaves. Foreign polities gave
English trading companies formal rights (known as capitulations) that
permitted them to trade. These privileges included access to
commodities, the right to residence in stipulated places, freedom to
trade in restricted areas, permission to worship freely (although
privately) in their own faith and the retention of legal rights (for
punishing their own malefactors according to English law, for
example).
In some posts, English merchants lived gently and discreetly,
both a part of and apart from the dominant host culture. In early-
seventeenth-century Lisbon, the Inquisition required Protestant
English traders to demonstrate their public respect for Catholic
rituals, doffing their hats even from inside buildings as processions
passed.25 Elsewhere, the English sought to immerse themselves in
the varied opportunities of foreign ports, socialising with competitors.
In 1616, when the wife of the Levant Company ambassador died in
Istanbul, her funeral was attended by ‘Most Nations under the
Sunne’, including people of different faiths – Christian (Protestant,
Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox), Muslim and Jewish.26 Some
traders were drawn to join these foreign societies through religious
conversion: to Catholicism in some locales, to Islam in others.
English vulnerability was especially acute in the Mediterranean,
the first region where the English acquired familiarity with long-
distance trade. Their travels in the Mediterranean gave the English
experience living as outsiders, symbolised no more vividly than at
the gate of Jerusalem, that most holy city which Christians could not
enter without permission. The English in the region also risked
enslavement, a status perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 English endured
between 1600 and 1800 thanks to the raids of pirates based in North
Africa, who seized ships and crews in the Mediterranean and
launched raids on the English coast by 1625.27
In contrast to the legal, diplomatic, commercial and cultural
dynamics of trade and travel, which often required the English to
accommodate local mores, English officials had greater legal
authority in territories the English claimed and governed. But this
legal authority was not accompanied by an uncomplicated assertion
of English cultural practices, nor an easy dominion over ‘others’.
Instead, it was others who defined the contexts within which the
English established territories in the Americas. French, Spanish and
Dutch activities and aspirations dictated the location of English
settlements, and above all Amerindians often determined these
settlements’ initial geography and economy. Even after catastrophic
epidemics, Amerindians still made up the majority of most colonies,
especially those vast colonies with European-imposed political
borders that stretched imaginatively from the Atlantic coast to the
Pacific.28 Roanoke’s history symbolises how others shaped English
experiences abroad in the 1580s: the English selected Roanoke’s
location to facilitate preying on the Spanish silver fleet, while the
disappearance of Roanoke’s English settlers signalled problematic
relations with Amerindians. English inhabitants in some regions
depended for their prosperity on tobacco, an Amerindian plant, while
another New World plant, corn, kept colonists from starvation.
Almost everywhere one looked, English settlements overseas
perched on and prospered from the expertise and goods of others,
even as the presence of others constrained these settlements.
Although some historians have suggested that the English
replicated local English customs in some regions of North America,
especially in the New England colonies, others have scrutinised the
variety of English people, from all over the realm, who settled in new-
found proximity overseas. English people from some thirty different
English counties, for example, travelled from London to New
England in 1635.29 Moreover, even those from the same English
region had trouble replicating their home cultures when confronted
with the varied circumstances of life overseas. Buildings in the
seventeenth-century Chesapeake resembled the kinds of huts built
on wasteland and commons in England rather than the housing
styles of the regions from which most migrants came.30
English migration comprised only one of many flows of people to
English territory. In the seventeenth century, about 300,000 English
people migrated to the Americas, primarily as bound labourers. They
were accompanied by about 20,000 to 40,000 Irish and 7,000 Scots.
After 1700, this migration from the British Isles shifted, becoming
less English and more British, with about 70 per cent of some
270,000 migrants either Irish or Scots. In that century, about 100,000
German-speaking people also emigrated from the European
Continent to American destinations in British territory. The colonies
attracted the same refugee populations that reached England,
although in much smaller numbers: some 1,500 to 2,000 Huguenots
settled in British America from 1680 to 1700, compared to about
20,000 to 30,000 in that same period in England.31 Altogether,
before 1750, approximately 1,305,900 Africans and approximately
562,200 Europeans emigrated, or were forcibly transported, to
English – later British – territory in the western Atlantic. As these
figures suggest, the challenges for the English of understanding and
living with others were particularly acute beyond England itself.32
Britons played a significant role in overseas activity. Overseas
companies were under English control for the most part, but there
were exceptions: the Scot William Alexander, who received a charter
for Nova Scotia from James I; the Welshman William Vaughan’s
settlement in Newfoundland in 1616–25; the Scots proprietors of
East New Jersey in the 1680s; and the Scottish Darien Company’s
settlement in the Isthmus of Panama in the 1690s.33 Scots and Irish
circulated through English colonies as traders, servants, agents and
soldiers. Thanks to these migration patterns, the colonies were
precociously British. This heterogeneity enabled the English
governor of Providence Island (off the coast of Nicaragua) to attend
a feast hosted by the island’s Welshmen in January 1640.
 Sometimes this ethnic diversity was a direct result of colonial
strategies. The Virginia Company undertook reforms in 1620 that
diversified the colony’s economy and its population alike, recruiting
glassblowers from Italy, silk experts from France, and millwrights
from Hamburg.34 Officials also sought non-English populations to
help secure their borders: so the Trustees of Georgia did, in their
recruitment of Highland Scots and Salzburgers in the 1730s.35
In many locales, the English were actually a minority population.
The few English who lived in the English colony of Montserrat in the
seventeenth century were surrounded by a Gaelic-speaking Irish
majority.36 By the late seventeenth century, English inhabitants of
plantation societies generally lived as minority populations,
outnumbered by African-born and African-descended enslaved
labourers. Barbados had a slave majority by 1670, Jamaica by 1680,
the Leewards by 1690 and South Carolina by 1708. In 1713, 89 per
cent of Jamaica’s population was enslaved.37 In other colonies
where the majority of the white population was European or of
European descent, the English were nonetheless a minority. The
English acquired a Dutch colony when they conquered New
Netherland in 1664. The English remained a minority in New York
City (outnumbered by Dutch-descended inhabitants) until the early
eighteenth century, when they surpassed the Dutch, but were still
outnumbered by all non-English whites.38 Pennsylvania attracted
such a diverse array of settlers – English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Scots-
Irish, German – that historians characterise it as anglophone
America’s first pluralistic society.39 Some ethnic groups settled in
separate enclaves, as many German-speaking migrants did in the
eighteenth century and as the Scots did in New Jersey, and some
ethnic ties intensified. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the
German-language press in Pennsylvania increased, suggesting a
different pattern of assimilation from that of continental migrants in
England.40

Contexts
This panorama of the wide variety of ‘others’ within and beyond
England points to the centrality of some key themes, including local
contexts, disease environments and gender, for assessing these
English encounters with others in this period. The considerable
diversity of English responses to any single alien group in different
geographic, economic, cultural, religious and demographic contexts
emerges clearly through an analysis of English–Jewish interactions.
Before the 1650s, most English people who encountered Jews did
so beyond England, since Jews had been expelled from England in
1290. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, English
travellers remarked on the Jewish populations they saw. Their views
of Jews varied depending on the status of the English and the
relative privileges afforded Jews in different locales. In general, they
demonstrated more sympathy for Jews in Catholic countries, where
Jews suffered a range of legal and social penalties and, at worst,
terrifying deaths in autos-da-fé, than in the Ottoman empire, where
the privileges afforded Jews were the same as those given
Christians. No monolithic anti-Semitism shaped English
assessments; rather, responses ranged from compassion to jealous
hostility.41
In 1656, although Jews were still officially banned from England,
the state relaxed the longstanding prohibition, and a few Sephardic
Jews emigrated from Holland. By 1695, the Jewish population of
London was less than 1,000, and by 1750, there were perhaps 6,000
to 8,000 Jews in England, almost exclusively in London, and divided
into Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, with their own distinct
languages and cultures.42 Their legal status was uncertain, because
the official ban had not been lifted, thus permitting governments to
impose a variety of restrictions. Unable to become freemen of
London, which required taking a Christian oath, Jews were
consequently barred from certain trades, including opening shops
within the city. By 1750, half of the Jews in England had been born
there, so were no longer aliens, but they continued to suffer
disadvantages because of their religious status. They could not be
naturalised, for example, without performing Christian rituals.43
Conditions for Jews in the English colonies were measurably
more advantageous. There, they were recruited by colonial officers
eager for men with useful skills. The Suriname colonial government
sought to attract Jewish immigrants in August 1665 by granting them
a variety of rights, guaranteeing them all of the privileges and
liberties other English inhabitants of the colony enjoyed. They were
to be ‘considered as Englishborn’.44 Jamaica’s government also
recruited Jews in 1672 to bolster the colony’s population. Jewish
populations and synagogues existed in scattered ports, in Newport,
Philadelphia, New York, Savannah, Charleston, Kingston and
Bridgetown. Anti-Semitism endured – an unthinking part of a
gentile’s cultural baggage, William Pencak has suggested – but anti-
Semitic stereotypes were less virulent than colonial hostility towards
several other groups, including Catholics, French, Germans and
Scots-Irish.45 Their legal status in the colonies eased considerably in
1740, when Parliament passed a bill permitting foreigners who had
lived in the American colonies for seven years to naturalise. The law
exempted Quakers and Jews from receiving the sacrament and
taking the oath of abjuration, which immediately facilitated the
naturalisation of Jews, although Jews continued to face a range of
legal and economic impediments in several colonies, including a ban
on voting in New York and limitations on testifying in court.46
A second important context in which the English encountered
others was disease environments. In North America, the English
confronted an unexpected circumstance: the catastrophic deaths of
Amerindians as endemic Eurasian diseases, such as measles,
smallpox, mumps or diphtheria, became epidemic diseases among
virgin-soil populations. English observers concluded not only that
God intended them to occupy this territory, but also that the people
of the Americas were weak. The tropics, too, posed challenges, this
time for the English, especially on Africa’s west coast. Mosquito-
borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, killed high
numbers of English – diseases to which some Africans who dwelled
in regions where malaria and yellow fever were endemic possessed
partial or complete resistance.47 As the English assessed their own
bodily infirmities in the tropics, and the relative salubrity of Africans,
they concluded that Africans were unnaturally strong and hardy
people – individuals well suited to labour, in contrast to the frail
inhabitants of North America.48 English encounters with others, in
the specific disease environments of North America and coastal
Africa, accelerated English reliance on Africans as slaves.
A third crucial context is gender. Most of the English people who
travelled outside England were men: soldiers, mariners, fishermen,
merchants, ministers, collectors and indentured labourers. English
migration to the colonies was overwhelmingly dominated by male
labourers: as high as 75 per cent of all migrants in the seventeenth
century. English men derided Amerindian societies for what they
regarded as perverse gender roles, with women performing
agricultural labour while Amerindian men engaged in sporadic
activities such as hunting that the English associated with
recreational and noble pursuits.49 The gendered assessments were
mutual: on the battlefield, English and Amerindian men taunted each
other about their manhood.50
The gender frontier was a place of sexual encounters, especially
between English men and non-English women.51 In the seventeenth
century, overseas trading companies sometimes banned wives, with
a variety of consequences for English social and sexual practices in
overseas enclaves. Levant Company employees spoke frankly of
prostitutes in their midst: in 1600 one merchant referred to the
traders in Istanbul as a company of ‘whoremongers’.52 Some
merchants formed long-term connections with indigenous women
overseas. Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, lived with an
unnamed female companion and their three children for many years
until he died in 1693.53 The East India Company merchants who
traded in Japan (1613–23) quickly established long-term liaisons with
Japanese women, who not only offered companionship, but also
helped traders learn about the culture they had joined and taught
them Japanese.54 Even places where such informal sexual alliances
are difficult to trace in extant records seem to have contained such
unions. Surviving sources for Virginia, for example, contain few
references to sexual or romantic relations with indigenous women
(aside from the celebrated union of John Rolfe and Pocahontas), but
one colonist’s vocabulary list from the 1610s offers a clue: one
Algonquin phrase he included was ‘to lye with a woman’.55 Sexual
violence was often part of these interactions, especially for enslaved
women, and there was a spectrum of sexual encounters, ranging
from marriages between the English and non-English, to informal but
long-term alliances, to transitory encounters, to gang rapes.56
One consequence of such sexual relations was mixed-race
children. These children were, for the English, a new population, an
unanticipated new ‘other’ that emerged in the early modern period
because of England’s new global orientation. They occupied a
variety of statuses. In commercial entrepôts, many of these children
stayed with their mothers, and became important in commercial and
diplomatic ties between English traders and officials and indigenous
people. The ‘mulatto’ population of the Gold Coast, for example,
grew over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and these children became a vital part of the work force. Mixed-race
men at the British trading forts on the Gold Coast occupied ‘a
semiprofessional middling sort’ that facilitated relations between
Europeans and Africans.57
 Many such children found their way to England. One of the
earliest was Thomas Rolfe, son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, who
was two when his mother died in England in 1617. Another early
arrival was William Eaton, whose father had been an employee of
the East India Company in Japan. The six-year-old child journeyed
to England in 1623. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and in
1639 he secured the legal status of denizen.58 As his denization
suggests, these mixed-race children challenged the English to
determine their legal and social status. Colonial governments passed
a variety of laws to ensure that mixed-race children of English and
African descent did not gain rights equal to children of European
descent. The contrast with English-born children of ‘strangers’ in
England is stark. Those children acquired the same legal rights as
other English subjects. Over the course of the seventeenth century,
English colonial polities with sizeable slave populations rejected
patriarchal lineage and determined, gradually, that the children of
enslaved women acquired the status of the mother. In December
1662, for example, ‘Whereas some doubts have arisen whether
children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be
slave or Free’, the Virginia colonial assembly determined that all
children would follow the condition of the mother, whether slave or
free.59
The complex manoeuvres undertaken to determine a child’s
status are particularly evident in the laws passed to govern free
mixed-race people (often called ‘people of colour’ in the parlance of
the time). These were generally the children of men who were
European or of European descent and women who were African or
of African descent. Colonial governments – composed of the white
kin of free mixed-race people – ensured that freedom did not
promise legal equality. Colonial assemblies passed no laws to
govern the sexual conduct of white men, which was what produced
this mixed-race population, but erected a variety of impediments to
both manumission and full participation in colonial societies for their
offspring. Jamaica banned ‘mulattoes’ (anyone with one African
great-great-grandparent) from holding office in 1711. By 1733,
mixed-race people could not vote, and within a decade, they could
not testify against whites. Barbados passed comprehensive
legislation in 1721 that imposed similar constraints. Many
restrictions, including a cap on inheritance, hindered economic
activity. In Jamaica, free people of colour had to wear a badge
proclaiming their status; in Antigua, free people of colour needed a
white sponsor, without which they risked re-enslavement. Legally,
economically and socially, free people of colour in British slave
colonies faced substantial barriers by the early eighteenth century to
equal participation in colonial societies, and these impediments
increased over the course of the century.60
Mixed-race children put pressure on early modern European
ideas about identity, whether it was mutable or fixed. In the early
modern period, English people understood identity as something
easily changed by external factors. The line between English and
other was not a clear border, but a space of transition, a zone easily
crossed. English-born people became ‘Gypsies’ in the sixteenth
century by choosing a wandering life; the English traveller Fynes
Moryson returned from his continental travels in 1597 in a long
traveling gown, and the nightwatchman at Gravesend thought he
might be a Catholic or a priest until he heard Moryson speak English;
English captives in the Mediterranean converted to Islam, becoming
‘renegades’; English authorities in Virginia mistrusted their English
child-interpreters who acquired Algonquian language skills and
knowledge of Amerindian practices.61
If some people lost English identity through garb, habit, faith,
language and demeanour, others could acquire or deepen it with
similar external shifts. Those who aspired to royal patronage or office
or to local power learned to adopt English dress, language and
architecture. Irish lords invested vast sums in the seventeenth
century in grand edifices in the English style with which to impress
others and to demonstrate their attachment to English values and
mores.62 By the eighteenth century, prosperous white inhabitants of
American settlements consciously aped and emulated English
fashion, architecture and design, setting slaves and servants to work
copying style books, erecting great houses, and filling them with
European-made furniture and goods.63 This surge of Anglicisation, in
manners, law, fashion, sociability, religion and architecture, revealed
that by 1750 English people and others of European descent in the
western Atlantic self-consciously sought closer cultural ties with
England, prodded in part by the presence of those many ‘others’ –
essential manpower, free and enslaved, African and Amerindian –
who had made English territories overseas so foreign from England
itself. Those others were especially African or of African descent,
people defined by law through slave codes and restrictions
governing free people of colour as subordinate in their rights and
privileges, with neither wealth nor English parentage sufficient to
purchase the new identities available to prosperous white men;
neither were they able to alter their identity as easily by donning new
clothes, building a Palladian mansion or purchasing a Chippendale
cabinet.
By 1750, ideas about identity – transformed slowly into ideas
about race – became more fixed, and the encounters of English and
others had played a vital role in this transition. It was an
unimaginable and unforeseen transition from the English world as it
had existed in the sixteenth century, where the other was likely to be
a Protestant European artisan in a market town, someone whose
children could be assimilated. The unassimilable other was a product
of new environments and hierarchies and of choices English people
made between 1500 and 1750 as they circled the globe and
encountered new people.

Notes

1 J. Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London

(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 7.

2 For edited collections, see B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan (eds.),

Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British
Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991);
M. Daunton and R. Halpern (eds.), Empire and Others: British
Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); R. Vigne and C. Littleton
(eds.), From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant
Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750
(London: The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland,
2001); N. Goose and L. Luu (eds.), Immigrants in Tudor and Early
Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). For
exemplary studies of single places, see Selwood, Diversity and
Difference; or J. D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society
and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).

3 See E. Bartels’s comprehensive survey of this scholarship in

‘Shakespeare’s “other” worlds: The critical trek’, Literature
Compass, 5:6 (2008), 111–38.

4 N. Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998), 2.

5 D. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society:

Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1992), 67.

6 S. H. Johnston, ‘Papists in a protestant world: The Catholic

Anglo-Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century’, unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, Georgetown University (2011), 99–101, 103, 108.

7 N. Goose, ‘Introduction’, in Goose and Luu, Immigrants, 14–18.

8 D. Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over

Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1995), 29, 37, 31, 33.
9 Ibid., 32–3.

10 J. H. Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those rude partes”:

Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s-1640s’, in N. Canny
(ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), Vol. I, 127.

11 P. Morgan, ‘Wild Wales: Civilizing the Welsh from the sixteenth

to the nineteenth centuries’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack
(eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 270.

12 N. P. Canny, ‘The ideology of English colonization: From

Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 30
(1973), 575–98.

13 K. W. Swett, ‘“Born on my land”: Identity, community, and faith

among the Welsh in early modern London’, in M. C. McClendon,
J. P. Ward and M. MacDonald (eds.), Protestant Identities:
Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation
England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 252–5.

14 Morgan, ‘Wild Wales’, 269–70, 274, 276.

15 A. T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in

Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), xi, 42, quotation 55; E. Hinderaker, ‘The “Four Indian
Kings” and the imaginative construction of the first British empire’,
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53:3 (July 1996), 499.

16 L. B. Wright (ed.), A Voyage to Virginia in 1609. Two Narratives:

Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Jourdain’s Discovery of the
Bermudas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 92.

17 M. H. Fisher, ‘Bound for Britain: Changing conditions of

servitude, 1600–1857’, in I. Chatterjee and R. M. Eaton (eds.),
Slavery and South Asian History, 189–90 (quotation 189).

18 P. D. Curtin, ‘Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu’, in P. D. Curtin

(ed.), Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the
Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1967), 17–59; for a slightly later period, see R. J. Sparks, The Two
Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

19 The range in these numbers reflects the problems historians

face both defining this population and grasping its size.

20 C. Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic

Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012), esp. Chapters 1 and 5.

21 D. Cressy, ‘The trouble with Gypsies in early modern England’,

paper presented to the Huntington Early Modern British History
Seminar, November 2013.

22 B. Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1996); A. Games, The Web of Empire: English
Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter 1.

23 Games, Web of Empire, 231–2.

24 On merchant diasporas, see P. D. Curtin, Cross Cultural Trade
in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
See also D. Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998).

25 Games, Web of Empire, 101–2.

26 W. Ford, A Sermon Preached at Constantinople (London,

1616), sig. A2v.

27 M. Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the

Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 268 n. 12; R. C. Davis, ‘Counting
European slaves on the Barbary Coast’, P&P, 172 (2001), 106,
118; R. C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery
in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3.

28 J. H. Merrell, ‘“The customes of our countrey”: Indians and

colonists in early America’, in Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers within
the Realm, 152–6.

29 A. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic

World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 28–9,
245 n. 15.

30 J. P. Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the

Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early
American History and Culture, 1994), 302–3.
31 J. Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New
World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983),
27, 47.

32 A. Games, ‘Migration’, in D. Armitage and M. Braddick (eds.),

The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002), Chapter 2.

33 The Jersey colony was the most enduring. See Ned C.

Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

34 K. O. Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2007), 288, 301.

35 A. W. Parker, Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia: The

Recruitment, Emigration, and Settlement at Darien, 1735–1748
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

36 D. H. Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–

1730 (London and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1997).

37 R. S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in

the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, 1972), 312.

38 Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 62, 75, 156–7.

39 S. Schwartz, ‘A Mixed Multitude’: The Struggle for Toleration in

Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press,
1987).

40 A. S. Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration,

Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 82–3, 149.

41 Games, Web of Empire, 55–7.

42 Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen, 30.

43 J. Roitman, ‘Creating confusion in the colonies: Jews,

citizenship, and the Dutch and British Atlantics’, Itinerario, 36:2
(August 2012), 57.

44 ‘Privileges granted by the British Government to the Jews of

Surinam’, 7 August 1665, Appendix VII, in E. H. Lindo, A History
of the Jews of Spain and Portugal (London: Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans, 1868), 381–3 (quotation 382).

45 W. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3–4.

46 Roitman, ‘Creating confusion’, 58. On these impediments, see

H. Snyder, ‘English markets, Jewish merchants, and Atlantic
endeavors: Jews and the making of British transatlantic
commercial culture, 1650–1800’, in R. L. Kagan and P. D. Morgan
(eds.), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in
the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009), 74.

47 On the importance of yellow fever in shaping colonial, military

and commercial activities, see especially J. R. McNeill, Mosquito
Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

48 J. Chaplin, ‘Race’, in Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic

World, 161–2.

49 K. O. Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of

English and Indian Cultures in the Americas, 1580–1640 (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 60–2.

50 A. M. Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial

New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007), Chapter 1.

51 On gender frontiers, see K. M. Brown, ‘Brave new worlds:

Women’s and gender history’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
series, 50 (1993), 311–328.

52 Games, Web of Empire, 104.

53 D. Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of

Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 246.

54 On such relationships in other places, see, for example, for

Africa, G. E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce,
Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the
Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2003); for North America, S. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties:
Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1983).

55 Games, Web of Empire, 131–2.

56 On sexual violence, see especially (for a slightly later period) T.
G. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood
and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

57 S. P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of

Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 133.

58 Games, Web of Empire, 107.

59 W. W. Heninge (ed.), The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection

of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the
Legislature, in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), Vol. II, 170.

60 D. A. Livesay, ‘Children of uncertain fortune: Mixed-race

migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750–1820’,
unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan (2010), Chapter
2.

61 Games, Web of Empire, 25, 72–4, 130, 137.

62 Ohlmeyer, ‘Civilizinge’, 142.

63 P. W. Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World:

Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2001); R. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia,
1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982).
 Coda
History, Time and Social
Memory
◈

Andy Wood

The dangers of writing history in twenty-first-century Britain are not

profound. The academic historian might incur a stinging book review,
find it hard to place articles in leading journals, fail to attract research
funding or, worst of all, find a secure teaching position. These things
can be disappointing. But, there are no government spies leaning
over our shoulders, no overt political scrutiny of our work, no
conviction on the part of the state that, as Nikita Khrushchev
observed, ‘Historians are dangerous, and capable of turning
everything topsy-turvy. They have to be watched.’1 Yet it was not
always so.
John Hayward discovered the ideological limits of historical
writing the hard way. When he published his history of the reign of
Henry IV in 1599, he dedicated it to the earl of Essex. The following
year, when Essex launched his attempted coup against Elizabeth I,
Hayward found himself in the Tower, accused of sedition. The affinity
between Elizabeth I and Richard II, whom Henry had deposed, was
too great to be ignored. Over and again Hayward’s interrogators –
leading members of the Privy Council – returned to his authorial
intentions, especially the possibility of a link to Essex and to his
apparent intention to stir trouble amongst what they called the
common people.2 What Hayward failed to recognise was that, when
writing about certain historical subjects, he had to be very cautious.
The next time that he wrote a study of a reign – this time that of
Edward VI – he trod carefully. In particular, his presentation of the
popular rebellions of 1549 was markedly hostile, depicting the rebels
as irrational, base and senseless.3 This time, Hayward uncritically
reproduced the dominant values of his age, scripted into the
historical past.
Richard Grafton’s Chronicle (1569) provided a blunt statement
of the intended effects of reading history. From the study of the past,
Grafton wrote,

Kings maye learne to depende upon God, and acknowledge his

governance in their protection: the nobilitie may reade the true
honor of their auncestours: The Ecclesiasticall state maye
learne to abhorre trayterous practices and indignities done
against kings by the Popishe usurping clergie: high and lowe
may shonne rebellions by their dreadfull effectes, and beware
how they attempt against right, how unhable soever the person
be that beareth it.4
In an economy that remained fundamentally rural, the common
people of the countryside – ‘country clowns’ – were regarded within
this paradigm as the epitome of crude, senseless vulgarity. The Latin
history of Kett’s Rebellion written by Alexander Neville in 1575, for
example, denounced the brutish violence of those whom he called
plebs and agrestes.5 Reading such works sustained a broader elite
sense that allowing the commons a space within the political order
would usher in an age of chaos. These anxieties found clear voice in
the months preceding the Civil War, as supporters of the crown and
episcopacy argued that their puritan opponents – backed by
threatening crowds of ordinary Londoners – were heirs to the rebel
leaders of 1381, 1450 and 1549. In November 1641, the bishop of
Exeter, Joseph Hall, warned the House of Lords:

My lords, if these men (sectaries and mechanical preachers)

may, with impunity and freedom, thus bear down ecclesiastical
authority, it is to be feared they will not rest there, but will be
ready to affront civil power too. Your lordships know, that the
Jack Straws, and Cades and Wat Tylers of former times, did not
more cry down learning than nobility.6

The representation of history could therefore be highly political. Yet

ideas are hard to nail down. For all the one-dimensional emphasis
upon order, obedience to the crown and plebeian senselessness,
there was no single tradition of early modern historical writing.7
Importantly, the period saw a flowering of learned historical work that
was dynamic, creative and ideologically unpredictable. Translations
of classical works helped to underwrite a middling-sort participation
in the English Renaissance. In works dealing with the classical past,
for instance, William Shakespeare made extensive use of Sir
Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives. The feeling of a
cultural and political inheritance from the classical past fed into a
civic humanism emergent amongst urban propertied groups.
Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577 and 1587), a massive collaborative
work that told the story of British history from its mythical foundations
to the present, represented not just a landmark achievement in
historical writing, but also another important foundation of a sense of
citizenship amongst urban middling people. The collaborative team
behind the Chronicles represented an emergent antiquarian
movement that in its urban form provided a sharpened sense of the
past, but also grew out of a longer-established tradition of town and
city chronicles, manuscripts that were often carefully locked away in
muniment boxes in guildhalls across the country.8 Similarly, William
Lambarde’s history of Kent (1576) helped to spawn a tradition of
county antiquarianism that was intimately interwoven with ‘country’
gentry identity.9 Antiquarianism had its practical applications too. On
the one hand, it could provide the basis for questioning the antiquity
of their tenants’ customary rights; on the other, an awareness of
legal history served in the early seventeenth century to buttress the
defence of parliamentary privilege against the crown.10
Much of the historical literature concerning early modern
perceptions of the past has dealt with political philosophy,
antiquarianism, historical scholarship and state-sponsored works on
the protestant Reformation. Two things have flowed from this: firstly,
the focus has been on the highly educated, leaving unaddressed the
reception of this work by poorer and middling people; secondly, there
has been a heavy dependence upon printed texts. It is only quite
recently that historians have begun to study popular memory,
drawing in particular on antiquarian writings and the depositions
made by older people in legal cases. As yet this work remains
patchy. There has been considerable interest in the use of memory
as a legal resource in conflicts over customary law.11 The
interactions between oral and written tradition with regard to senses
of the past have been explored.12 The key subject of the relationship
between landscape and memory has been addressed.13 The study
of early modern popular memory, then, is finally opening up. Nor has
the ‘popular’ been seen as hermetically sealed: there has been an
interest in the dynamic interchanges of ideas about the past between
ordinary people and their lettered superiors – for instance, in the
study of antiquarian writers who initially drew heavily upon local
folkloric traditions.14
As a result, it is possible to illustrate two centrally important
points about the popular sense of historical change in this period that
constitute a distinctly early modern sense of the past. Firstly, by the
early seventeenth century many English people felt that the past was
slipping away from them, generating a sense that the fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries formed a separate world from that inhabited
by the people of later Elizabethan and early Stuart England.15
Secondly, the distinct and traumatic experience of the English
Revolution came to create a sense of continuity between the later
Stuart and early Georgian periods, as the women and men of that
time constructed memories and representations of the 1640s that fed
directly into the political struggles of later times. It was within this
combined sense of change and continuity, I argue, that early modern
English women and men came to understand themselves in time.

Like so much else in early modern England the popular sense of the
past could be highly variable and localised. One way of remembering
was plotted in the landscape. Writing around 1622, the
Leicestershire antiquarian William Burton visited the location of the
Battle of Stoke (1487) and was shown ‘a little Mount cast up, where
by common report is, that at the first beginning of the battaile, Henry
Tudor made his Pataeneticall Oration to his Armie’. He was also
shown a great store of the weapons, armour and arrow heads that
every year were turned up by the plough.16
Popular rebellion also left its memories upon the land:
Blackheath had been the location of rebel camps in 1381, 1450 and
1497; so had Mousehold Heath in 1381 and 1549. When an
anonymous cartographer arrived in Norwich around 1590 in order to
map Mousehold Heath, one of the historic landmarks he was shown
was ‘The Oke of Reformation so callyd by Kett the Rebell’ – that is,
the oak tree under which Kett’s rebel council had met in 1549.17 In
Cumberland, Lord Howard noted in 1621 that, in the course of the
struggles over tenant right, Cumberland tenants had gathered in an
armed crowd at Geltebridge, the same place ‘where themselves or
there ancestors as rebells and before that tyme fought a sett battle
againste the forces of the s[ai]d late Queene Elizabethe’.18
 Events of national historical importance were of course known,
but were often used by the common people as a temporal marker for
events of distinctly local significance. In Queen Mary’s reign, the
seventy-three-year-old James Herdman remembered how,
immediately after ‘Kinge Ricards Field’ (the Battle of Bosworth,
1485), the tenants of Bury (Lancashire) heard that the earl of Derby
and a multitude of Welshmen were coming to plunder them, and so
they brought their cattle into land held by the lord of Ashworth, who
offered them ‘savegard’.19 The Battle of Flodden (1513), England’s
greatest victory over Scotland, was so widely remembered that it
came to form a sharp point in otherwise local temporal
measurements. Speaking in 1563, the sixty-year-old Gloucestershire
labourer Walter Potter felt that the time of his remembrance (that is,
his awareness of local affairs) coincided with ‘the tyme of Skottyshe
feld’.20 A century later, the arrangement of the parish church of Lea
(Lancashire) remained set by local participation at Flodden. Ellen
Brabin recalled in 1664 how her father’s place in church had been
challenged, and ‘upon inquirie was told (as he said) by auncient
people that at flodden feild some of his Ancest[or]s who lived at
Pinington Hall had furnished the then L[or]d of Atherton with eight or
tenn men & horses against that battall and for that consideracion had
leave given him to sitt & bury there.’21 In 1612, a seventy-nine-year-
old Lancashireman retained vivid memories of the return of his lord
from Edward VI’s later wars with the Scots:

aboute threescore yeares since imediately after… S[i]r Thomas

Talbott came home from Barwick hee uppon a Sondaie or
 hullidaie came to Blackbourne church and broughte w[i]th him a
greate companie of his souldiers w[i]th syde coats some in
blewe, some in white wi[th] red crosses on, the backe and
breste and saith upon the said S[i]r Thomas his comeinge in to
the saide Chappell there sate some people there amongste
whome as this dep[onen]t hath heard was one of the Talbotts
Lords of Sailsburie … all the w[hi]ch people that were in the said
Chapell the said S[i]r Thomas upon his comeinge discharged
sayeinge there was noe [to sit] … there butt for himselfe and his
souldiers & whereupon all the people went awaie[.]

Still in his armour, Sir Thomas knelt and prayed, giving thanks for the
safe return of his company. This was a memory that had a purpose:
it allowed local inhabitants to identify their lord’s ownership ‘tyme
past memorie of man before him’ of the side chapel within which Sir
Thomas had knelt.22
Memory, then, performed a function: it was what H. S.
Commager calls a ‘usable past’.23 Such memories could be as
varied and idiosyncratic as the local identities they enshrined and the
local claims they legitimised. A common pattern that emerges,
however, is that, by the late sixteenth century, there had emerged a
popular sense of historical change that identified the Reformation
and social and economic change as linked historical processes that
fundamentally reshaped English society.24
The pre-Reformation church had its own memory culture. In its
treatment of local saints, veneration of the memories of the founders
of chantries, perambulation of parish boundaries, or the recitation of
its bede rolls, pre-Reformation belief was highly localised.25 The
Henrician reformation picked away at some of this; the more
aggressive Edwardian reformation swept away much more. During
Elizabeth’s long reign, a moderately Calvinist church succeeded in
implanting a new religious culture in the minds of two generations of
English people. The old religion seemed, by the end of the sixteenth
century, to be as much part of the past as was the cosy paternalism
of good lordship.
As we have seen, this was a slow process and there were those
who clung onto the old ways. At the height of the Northern Rising of
1569, the old services were re-established in Durham Cathedral,
hidden altar stones were dug up and re-established, and crowds
gathered to hear the old services. One woman recalled that she
could not find a seat in the nave, for ‘the throng of people was so
moch’. Witness statements taken in the aftermath point towards the
continued affection of many people for the old ways. This memory
was focused upon personal and parochial artefacts and upon old
rituals. Many people mentioned their use of ritual objects that –
under the Elizabethan settlement – were meant to have been set
aside. Elizabeth Watson admitted that ‘she used hir beads’ during
the service in the cathedral. Agnes Mixston had done the same, and
while ‘sorye for the offenc[e]s’ confessed that ‘she hath hir beads
still’. Yet in emphasising those parts of the old service they had not
followed, witnesses usually managed to imply an only partial
commitment to the old religion. Agnes’s husband, Gilbert Mixston,
was also in the cathedral, heard the priest deliver a sermon to the
effect that ‘the old s[er]vys was the right waye’ and admitted that ‘he
toke holly wayter’. Ralph Stevenson, however, ‘toke holly water but
no holly bred nor was shreven’. William Watson said that he took
part in the celebration of mass out of fear, and that he ‘bowed then
downe of his knees but kno[c]ked nott & he toke holly water’.
Members of the cathedral clergy were similarly selective and all
denied knowledge of any old copes, relics, books or other objects
that might sustain the supposedly vanished faith.26
Memories of the old religion, then, could in many places be
fiercely retained – yet, when confronted by officialdom, be still
capable of careful modulation. The important point was that the
success of the English Reformation, in Durham as elsewhere,
represented a triumph over local patterns of remembrance and the
social organisation of ritual and local meaning. Yet there were those
who, despite the steady wash of Elizabethan amnesia, still sought to
communicate the memory of the old church to succeeding
generations. As late as 1593 the author of the manuscript ‘Rites of
Durham’ provides the fullest description that has survived of a pre-
Reformation cathedral and the services that it sustained. As his
mind’s eye moved around the great romanesque cathedral, the
author recalled the services and rituals that had once occurred there.
His memories were deeply coloured, yet resonant of a sense of
place and attachment that had been ruptured.27 He was no
antiquarian, recording a dead world as if it were some desiccated,
empty entity. Rather, the ‘Rites’ remains full of vitality. The object, no
less, was to provide a textual basis for the recreation of a lost
world.28
The gradual transformation of religious identity and of the forms
of worship that it entailed was perhaps the most obvious
manifestation of the extent to which the mid sixteenth century
represented a watershed. But the Reformation also broadly
coincided with other forms of change (and directly contributed to
them through the redistribution of former church property). And
subsequent early modern memories of forms of rebellion against, or
resistance to, such changes encapsulate memories of former ways
of living and perceptions of what were conceived of as deleterious
developments in both economic and social relations.
In 1573, aged witnesses from Middleham (Yorkshire)
remembered that enclosing walls were established across their
common some two years ‘after the Scottishe felde called Floddam
felde’.29 In the last years of the sixteenth century, the tenants of
Worsley (Lancashire) remembered that they had retained their rights
of common on Walkden Moor until ‘soone after Scotts Field, when
their was a bickeringe betwixt the lords of worsley and the lords of
Boothes upo[n] walkden moore’.30 In 1554, witnesses from the
Lancashire ‘country’ of Blackburnshire dated their ejection from the
commons of Horelaw and Hollinhey by the powerful magnate Sir
John Towneley to ‘iiii years after the Scottes Feyld’ or to ‘aboute iiii
or v years after Flowden Feyld’.31
In the Elizabethan West Country, there were sharp memories of
the rebellions of 1549. The ninety-year-old yeoman Richard
Clannaborough of Lustleigh (Devon) recalled in 1602 the customs he
had known ‘ever synce the Commotion in the tyme of the Raigne of
the late Kinge Edward the Sixth’ in the course of a dispute
concerning the lord of the manor’s claim to a monopoly over corn
mills in the village.32 In 1583, the Cornish yeoman Thomas Toser –
‘borne about Christmas … twelve months after Blackheeth field [in
1497]’ – remarked that a struggle over manorial boundaries in his
home village of St Mellion had commenced shortly ‘before the
Comosyon in Cornewall last’.33 In Norfolk, one way of recalling the
events of 1549 was as an outright attack upon seigneurialism. In
1601, the eighty-year-old husbandman John Crosse remembered
how, around 1540, Sir Edmund Bedingfield had constructed a lodge
on the lordly rabbit warren (much hated by tenants because of the
depradations of the lagomorphic inhabitants amongst their crops). As
Crosse recalled things, the ‘lodge was pulled downe in the comotion
tyme’: this was a direct attack upon the landscape of lordship.34
Such memories recorded not only grievance and subsequent
resistance, but also repression. Kett’s Rebellion, with its
comprehensive indictment of landlord abuses, also entered local
memory as a time of bloodshed. The Norwich authorities went out of
their way to mark the city’s relief from plebeian disorder, ordaining in
1550 that each year on 29 August (‘Kett’s Day’ – the anniversary of
the rebel defeat) the bells of all the parish churches should be rung
and prayers said, followed by a special sermon against rebellion
preached at the cathedral.35 In this way, the suppression of popular
rebellion was scorched into official remembrance. Similarly, in 1537,
the main urban centres of Norfolk – Norwich, King’s Lynn and
Yarmouth – were chosen as key sites at which rebels from
Walsingham (Norfolk) who had plotted to murder the local gentry and
to restore the monastic houses were to be hanged, drawn and
quartered. A generation later, when the official chronicles of Norwich,
Lynn and Yarmouth came to be written, the annihilation of these local
opponents of Henry VIII’s Reformation was given due prominence.36
The Northern Rising, like those of 1549, provided a marker in
time according to which local events might be recorded. Powerful
storms in Lincolnshire coincided with its suppression in 1570; local
remembrance of the two events worked together.37 Memories of the
cruel aftermath of the rising were still strong in the Yorkshire
‘country’ of Kirkbyshire in 1601. In the course of large-scale crowd
action against the enclosing landlord Sir Stephen Proctor, locals
were called out in the queen’s name to break down enclosures.
Some warned their neighbours that ‘we [were] commanded in the
Rebell tyme in Gods name and the Queenes name, but we had like
to have bene hanged in the devylls name at wch speches the people
murmured saying then to themselves howe sholde we knowe when
to obey in the queens name’. Yet despite these dark memories,
some 300 or 400 Kirkbyshire folk gathered to break down enclosures
on Thorpe More, ‘the like whereof hath not there bene seene since
the late rebellion in the North’.38
In 1620, giving evidence in a tithe dispute before the consistory
court of Durham, the seventy-five-year-old Robert Darlinge recalled
how ‘he this ex[aminan]t was servant to and did dwell w[i]th one Mr
Franckland att Cocken in the yeare of the insurreccon or rebellion in
the north that last was’. Rebellion, Darlinge seemed to imply, might
revisit the north: 1569 was the ‘rebellion in the north that last was’.39
In some places, the changes in landownership that followed the
sequestration of rebel lords’ estates following the ‘last rebellio[n] in
the north’ formed as important a marker in time as the rebellion
itself.40
In the Anglo-Scottish borders the militaristic culture of earlier
times, fostered by the custom of ‘tenant right’, which ensured low
rents and dues in return for the men’s military service on the
borders, was remembered into the seventeenth century as a past
that had vanished, together with the social relations that had
sustained it. The antiquarian Isaac Gilpin noted the ‘Theevish’
nature of the mid-Tudor border folk, observing that ‘although they
were amongst themselves very brutish and much addicted to
robbing, stealing and so many other rude & disorderly Qualities, yet
because of the name [of their landlords] they so loved their Landlord
that they would unanimously rise’ upon being so bidden.41
That sense of an ending was at its most powerful when the
crown turned against tenant right following the union of the crowns in
1603.42 Old Westmorland men giving testimony in support of tenant
right in 1622 retained clear memories of their former service. One
remembered how he had been called out by the warden on six
occasions to fight the border reivers, ‘furnished with a horse bowe
and arrowes, steele cappe, a jacke and sword and dagger’. An
eighty-year-old topped this: he remembered serving on the borders,
a red cross stitched on his coat, on some twenty occasions.43 Old
John Askrigg looked back fondly on his warlike youth, a time when
the crown protected the northern tenants; his neighbours
remembered how he used to say that ‘he hoped yet to see the
border againe, & he stroakinge his beard he saide he hoped that
gray beard shold once serve at Carlile again & Ryde before his
master as of his white horse he was wont to do’.44 These memories
endured for generations, long after the border reivers had departed
into the mist. In 1651, the ninety-seven-year-old James Taylor of
Askgarth (Yorkshire) explained how, like the other men of his village,
he had come to the borders when needed, riding his light horse and
equipped with a coat of mail, a spear, dagger, sword and steel cap.
He remembered that, early in Elizabeth’s reign, when he and John
Harth of Swaledale had served together against the Scots, fourteen
of their neighbours had been killed and he was himself wounded.
This was an old man looking back on the bloody skirmishes of youth.
The struggles of John Harth, James Taylor and their neighbours had,
by the end of Taylor’s life, become part of local tradition. George
Metcalfe explained that same year how he had been told by his
grandfather about his service on the borders, the old man showing
Metcalfe his withered arm, the use of which he had lost in the
struggles with the reivers. Metcalfe’s neighbour, the seventy-five-
year-old John Kettlewell, well remembered how ‘he heard his father
name diverse of the said tenants who did goe in p[er]son to fight
against the Scots, some of w[hi]ch said Ten[a]nts lost their lives there
some others came wounded and lame home and some others never
came home againe’.45
In the northern borders after 1603, then, there was a sense of
an ending: of an old world passing away. Yet these memories were
no mere whimsies; nostalgic they may have been, but as the
contemporary historian Ben Jones reminds us, nostalgia can
represent a form of agency.46 In recalling their border service, the old
men of the north both reasserted a distinctly martial masculinity that
had been lost following the Union of the crowns and reminded their
younger neighbours of the bargain that had once existed between
crown and border tenant: wartime service for secure copyhold
tenures. Every time that northern women and men saw the scars on
the bodies of their aged menfolk, they were reminded of that service,
and how the bargain had been broken after 1603. In all these ways,
ordinary people constructed a sense of change, one that carried with
it distinct warnings for the future.

If the events and transformations of the sixteenth century retained

their place in local memory, for the people of later Stuart and early
Georgian England, the civil wars represented a profoundly traumatic
body of memories. They remained divisive: recollections of violence,
repression, destruction and atrocity committed by one’s neighbours
proved hard to forget.
Social historians have tended to avoid direct engagement with
the historiography of the English Revolution, with far too many
studies arbitrarily finishing in 1640.47 Yet the civil wars and
Interregnum were so powerful a force as to impose themselves on
temporal registers across the country. They marked another
watershed in time. The widowed Ellinor Sergeant of Harrogate
(Yorkshire) recalled in 1669 how her husband had been the Forester
of Knaresborough ‘sev[er]all yeares before the Warrs began’.48
Many were more impassioned in the terminology they used about
the 1640s. One correspondent to John Walker, who was collecting
memories of the sufferings of royalist clergy in the 1640s, referred to
that decade as the ‘wickedly wicked times’.49 A Cambridgeshire
witness of 1674 referred to the 1640s as ‘the troublesome tymes’, as
did Elizabeth Fisher of Canterbury in the same year, and the aged
Cheshire husbandman William Horton in 1701.50 In some places,
specific engagements – plunder, siege warfare, a skirmish or major
engagement – stuck in local memory. In 1679, when William
Stephenson gave evidence concerning a disputed watercourse in
Hull, the clerk noted that he ‘speaks to eight or nine years before the
late siege’.51 In 1697, a number of witnesses from Malmesbury
(Wiltshire) dated local events in relation to the Restoration. One had
a sharp memory of the most traumatic event of the English
Revolution, dating an agreement about parish tithes to ‘about the
time that King Charles the first was beheaded’.52 Derbyshire
witnesses of the 1680s referred simply to the ‘Late warr tyme’;
others spoke of ‘the souldering tymes’; the village gentleman
George Hopkinson, whose home had been plundered by
parliamentary soldiers, spoke pointedly of the ‘late unhappy
warres’.53
The intrusion of the wars into temporal registers that were
otherwise profoundly local points to the significance of the English
Revolution to ordinary people, being sufficiently powerful to stand as
markers in time.54 In this respect, they helped to validate individual
and collective claims to local memory. One clear instance of this
came in 1656, when a group of Weardale tenants recalled how they
had served, under colour of their obligations to the crown under the
custom of tenant right, for fourteen days on the Scottish border at the
time of the Bishops’ Wars. The effect was to legitimate claims to
tenant right at a time when they were coming under threat from the
local parliamentarian magnate, Sir Arthur Hesilrige.55
The 1640s were scorched into popular memory for good
reasons. The wars brought with them slaughter, disease, plunder,
impoverishment, hunger and atrocity. The records of quarter
sessions administration are full of petitions from maimed soldiers or
war widows seeking relief. Up until 1660, that relief was restricted to
the injured men who had fought for the Parliament, and to
parliamentarian soldiers’ dependants. After the Restoration, it was
the turn of former cavaliers and their wives and children.56 The terms
according to which parochial and county relief were administered to
the victims of war, then, helped to perpetuate wartime divisions for
generations to come. The disease and dearth that came with the
disruption of trade and passage of marching armies was also
burnted into people’s memories. In the history that he wrote around
1700 of his home village of Myddle (Shropshire), Richard Gough
recalled how the common had been

cutt, and burnt, and sowed with corne in the later end of the warr
time, temp. Car. I. The first crop was winter corne, which was a
very strong crop; the next was a crop of barley, which was soe
poore, that most of it was pulled up by the roote, because it was
too short to bee cutt. That time there was a great dearth and
plague in Oswaldstree.57

All of this mattered to ordinary people’s experience of the wars,

perhaps more so than the great issues of state that had provoked
them.
 For generations after the wars, their material destruction
remained everywhere to be seen. In a set of notes that repeatedly
reference the impact of the civil wars, the Lincolnshire antiquarian
Abraham de la Pryme recorded in the 1690s that ‘It was the L[or]d
Kimbolton, Earl of Manchester’s Regiment that defaced the Ch[urch]
of Hatfield, they were exceeding rude people.’58 He knew that he
was traversing an ancient landscape. Some of the wayside crosses
that de la Pryme passed denoted the bounds of land that had once
been held by monastic houses; this landscape had been disrupted
by the wars. De la Pryme noted two such crosses, one of which was
still standing in 1697; the other had been ‘a stately cross [of] great
height like a markate cross … calld … St Katherines – which was
standing until Cromwell’s days & then the soldiers pull’d it down to
the bare ground’.59
Within a culture that understood the material world as a way of
plotting local memory – in church seating plans, parish bounds,
wayside crosses – the effects of wartime damage could be sharply
felt. In 1705, the minister of Otton Belchamp (Essex) wrote an
account of the parish boundaries, his intention being ‘To describe the
Bounds and limits of our Parish which are very obscure and to
prevent encroachings of others’. This was a matter of special
concern to him because ‘in the times of the long Rebellion the
landmarks of our Parish were cut downe, and it would be difficult for
posterity to find out the proper precincts which our parish are
incompassed withal’.60 On the other hand, the civil wars might be
commemorated within the landscape. In 1674, it was recorded that in
Wigan (Lancashire) there had been a battle at the northern end of
the town in 1651 that ended in the death of the royalist Sir Thomas
Tildersley, ‘and as a memoriall of the place where S[i]r Thomas did
fall … a great Heap of stones [was] soon after laid together, by well
affected persons’.61
Changes to parish churches – another memory site in local
communities – were also keenly felt. The shock of the destruction of
their parish church remained powerful to the people of Pontefract in
1667. William Gates recalled how ‘the p[ar]ish Church of Allhallowes
was burnt and pulled downe in the late time of rebellion & that the
steeple thereof onely is in part repaired’.62 In 1686, William Walker,
who had been a servant at Holford Hall for twenty-six years,
remembered how he, his fellow servants and his masters –the
Cholmondeleys, who had fought for the king in the 1640s – had
always sat in the chancel of the church of Lower Peover (Cheshire).
The chancel, Walker was sure, was the property of the
Cholmondeleys. His seventy-year old neighbour, Richard Litter, was
able to provide some historical context to the reflected pride that
Walker seems to have felt in being a part of so prominent a
household. He remembered how, back in 1625, one of the
Cholmondeleys had passed away and was buried under ‘a white
gravestone in the same chancel’. Fifty years ago, he recollected,
‘before the late unhappy warrs’, the Cholmondeleys had financed
the repair of the chancel and had renewed their heraldic arms, ‘but
in the s[ai]d warrs the same Coates were taken down by the soldiers
(as this depo[nen]t hath heard) and were aft[e]r that … preserved by
Peter Frodsham de[c]e[as]ed who was a tenant to the Lords of
Holford’.63
 Moreover, the social event that underwrote this reading of the
landscape – the yearly Rogationtide custom that saw the
perambulation of parish bounds, which many puritans saw as pagan
– had in many parishes been discontinued during the Interregnum. In
Kirkby-in-Ashfield (Nottinghamshire), there was a deep sense of
landscape that reached back to before the dissolution of the local
priory of Newstead: it was general knowledge before the wars came
that certain fields had been held by the priory until its dissolution in
the 1530s. These fields were taken in by the parish perambulation,
and old folk would call out to their younger neighbours to take note of
the boundaries and field names, ‘and desired them to remember itt
for the tyme to come’. All of this ceased when war came, after which
the Rogationide processions were discontinued. Now, in 1664, the
parishioners were attempting to recover their collective memories of
the bounds.64
The land itself was also a bearer of memory: local inhabitants
possessed an often intricate knowledge of the tenure that attached
to different fields, to their prior occupancy, and to the entitlements
and responsibilities that came with that occupancy. The English
Revolution disrupted this too, not just with the seizure of the great
estates of royalist gentry, but also with the sequestration of lands
held by relatively humble people. William Shakespeare of Rowington
(Warwickshire), for example, recalled in 1675 how ‘in the time of the
late warrs in the kingdome many of the coppyhold tenements’ of
Rowington ‘were under sequestracon’; all of this led to confusion as
to the precise pattern of tenure.65
 In all of these ways, then, the civil wars proved highly disruptive
of local ways of remembering. There is a certain irony to the searing
of the English Revolution into popular memory. The Act of Indemnity
and Oblivion (1660) enjoined subjects to erase the Interregnum from
their recollections.66 But both sides found this hard to achieve. One
former cavalier, John Hague of Aston (Derbyshire), couldn’t let go of
his anger, finding himself in trouble for having ‘tooke upon him to
speake of the act of oblivion & said the Kinge was a foole & a knave
if he made it not voyde & Hanged not upp all the Roundheads’.67
Another Derbyshire man, Henry Alsibrooke of Church Broughton,
wished that a local meadow ‘were full of souldiers & he amongst
th[e]m & th[a]t he should never be light at heart till th[a]t they may
pull downe the higher powers (meaning the kinge)’.68 The
commemoration of Civil War struggles underwrote continued
opposition to the Stuarts. The inhabitants of Restoration Taunton
(Devon), who had withstood a prolonged siege in the first Civil War,
enjoyed a three-day festival to celebrate the defeat of their royalist
besiegers. Beginning with drums sounding reveille in the dawn,
pious sermons were followed by bonfires, drinking and dancing, at
which members of the crowd chanted ‘Rejoice you dogs, ’tis the
eleventh of May, the day the cavaliers ran away.’ In 1671, it was
reported to the Privy Council that the people of Taunton performed
this commemoration ‘by which they glory in their rebellion (so far are
they from repentance for it). This course they do also entail to their
posterity’. Inter-generational continuity had already taken hold: the
correspondent noted that the ‘rejoicing’ was ‘kept by men, women
and children throughout the whole town, many of which were not
then born when the siege was raised’.69
The politics of later Stuart and early Georgian England were
fought out under the shadow of the English Revolution. The 1640s
represented as powerful a force in the politics of late-seventeenth-
and early-eighteenth-century England as would the events of 1789,
1848 and 1871 in Third Republic France.70 The Exclusion Crisis of
1678–81 was fought as if the party labels Whig and Tory represented
synonyms for roundhead and cavalier. In the turbulent year of 1715,
a Cheapside crowd marched behind effigies of Cromwell, William III
and the duke of Marlborough, crying out ‘Down with the Rump’ and
‘No Hanoverian, No Presbyterian Government’.71 A similar set of
analogies occurred to a Coventry crowd, who in 1736 cried out
‘Down with the Rump, down with the Roundheads, no Hanover,
down with the King’s Head’.72 Pursuing the same point, a
Lancashire carpenter found himself in trouble in 1722 for having
cried out during a riot ‘Down with the Rump’.73 Meanwhile, a rioting
crowd at Harwich (Essex) in 1724 delighted in mocking George I: an
outraged witness reported that the crowd was ‘drumming a
ridiculous Tune of Roundheaded Cuckolds &c’.74 In a slippage that
was indicative of the instability of straightforward party narratives,
George Cleeve was presented to the assizes in 1716 for warning
that ‘King George must have a care what he did otherwise he would
lose his head as King Charles had done.’75
The civil wars, then, represented a nightmare that loomed over
later generations. But reconstructing those memories represents a
methodological as well as an empirical challenge. There is no single,
authoritative source that allows the historian entry into early modern
popular memory. Perhaps more so than any other field in the social
history of the 1500–1750 period, the evidence is both partial and
fragmentary. Yet there are points of consistency and cohesion within
the flux of remembrance. This chapter has tried to illuminate some of
those points, especially where they help to mark out a distinctly early
modern sense of time and place. All of this reminds us that popular
memory is a field that is constantly ‘crossed by competing
constructions, often at war with each other’.76 The study of social
memory takes us into a contested, protean field. Understanding the
constantly unpredictable eddies within popular memory will require
the next generation of early modern social historians to transcend
subdisciplinary boundaries and to rethink the nature of the social
history project. There is everything to be gained, bringing us ever
closer to the world we have lost.

Notes

1 M. Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History; or, How the Past Is
Taught (1981; English translation London: Routledge, 1984), 114.

2 J. Hayward, The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s ‘The

Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII’, ed. J. J. Manning, Camden 4th
series, 42 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society,
University of London, 1991). For Hayward’s interrogation, see
TNA, SP12/274/58–62.
3 J. Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth by
John Hayward, ed. B. L. Beer (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1993).

4 F. Smith Fussner, Tudor History and the Historians (New York:

Basic Books, 1970), 256.

5 A. Nevylli, De furoribus Norfolciensium Ketto Duce (London,

1575), 35, 42.

6 B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 2nd

edn. (London: Book Marks, 1991), 99. For an example, see BL,
Add. MS 70520. Also anon., The rebellious life and death of Wat
Tyler and Jack Straw (London, 1642); B. Stirling, ‘Shakespeare’s
mob scenes: A reinterpretation’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 3
(1945).

7 The foundational work is K. Thomas, The Perception of the Past

in Early Modern England, Creighton Trust Lecture (London:
University of London, 1983).

8 R. Tittler, ‘Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in

English provincial towns’, Urban History, 24:3 (1997). For an
overview, see A. Dyer, ‘English town chronicles’, Local Historian,
12 (1977).

9 For notable examples of county studies, see W. Lambarde,

William Lambarde: A Perambulation of Kent, ed. R. Kent
(Trowbridge: Adams and Dart, 1970); R. Carew, The Survey of
Cornwall (1602; repr. Trowbridge: Adams and Dart, 1969); J.
Norden, Speculi Britaniae: The description of Hartfordshire (1598;
repr. New York: Da Capo, 1971). For the more fragmentary genre
of county chorographies, see D. MacCulloch (ed.), The
Chorography of Suffolk, Suffolk Record Society, 19 (Ipswich:
Suffolk Record Society, 1976); C. M. Hood (ed.), The Chorography
of Norfolk (Jarrold: Norwich, 1938).

10 D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); G. Parry, The
Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); D. R. Kelley, The
Writing of History and the Study of Law (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1997); J. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and
the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); R.
Cust, ‘Catholicism, antiquarianism and gentry honour: The writings
of Sir Thomas Shirley’, Midland History, 23 (1998); R. B. Manning,
‘Antiquarianism and seigneurial reaction: Sir Robert and Sir
Thomas Cotton and their tenants’, Historical Research, 63:152
(1990).

11 A. Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular

Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); N. M. Whyte, ‘Landscape,
memory and custom: Parish identities c. 1550–1700’, SH, 32:2
(2007); R. W. Hoyle (ed.), Custom, Improvement and the
Landscape in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); S.
Sandall, ‘Custom, memory and the operations of power in
seventeenth-century Forest of Dean’, in F. Williamson (ed.),
Locating Agency: Space, Power and Popular Politics (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars, 2010).
12 A. Fox, Oral and Literate Cultures in England, 1500–1700
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For early work on the
neglected subject of popular senses of time, see K. Wrightson,
‘Popular senses of past time: Dating events in the North Country,
1615–31’, in M. J. Braddick and P. Withington (eds.), Popular
Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016).

13 N. Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and

Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2009); A. Walsham, The
Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in
Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).

14 D. Woolf, ‘The “common voice”: History, folklore and oral

tradition in early modern England’, P&P, 120 (1988).

15 C. Brooks, ‘Contemporary views of “feudal” social and political

relationships in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England’, in N.
Fryde and P. Monnet (eds.), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus
(Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); M. Aston, ‘English
ruins and English history: The dissolution and the sense of the
past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973).

16 W. Burton, A description of Leicestershire (London, 1642), 47.

17 TNA, MPC/2787. One Restoration antiquarian was shown

Kett’s Oak, but garbled its significance. See R. Blome, Britannia
(London, 1673), 169. I hope to write more fully about the
Mousehold map in the future.
18 TNA, STAC8/161/16.

19 H. Fishwick, ‘Disputed boundary in Ashworth’, Transactions of

the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 15 (1897). For
other mid-Tudor Lancastrians’ mention of ‘Kinge Ricards Field’,
see TNA, DL1/55/H2-3. See also P. Schwyzer, ‘Lees and
moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485–1635’, Renaissance
Quarterly, 63 (2010).

20 TNA, E134/7Eliz/East1.

21 Cheshire Record Office, EDC5 (1664), 69.

22 Cheshire Record Office, EDC5 (1612), 28. For other memories

of Edward’s Scottish wars, see TNA, E134/5JasI/Mich8.

23 H. S. Commager, The Search for a Usable Past (New York:

Knopf, 1967).

24 Wood, Memory, 43–93.

25 Eamon Duffy has captured this localised memory with the

greatest clarity. See, in particular, The Voices of Morebath:
Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2001).

26 DUL, DDR/EJ/CCD/1/2, fols. 177r, 178v, 200v, 201r, 201v–202r.

27 DUL, Cosin MS B.ii.11, p. 50. The earliest complete copy is

DUL, Cosin MS B.ii.11. For an earlier copy, some sections of
which have been lost, see Durham Cathedral Library, MS C.iii.23.
For a good nineteenth-century copy, see DUL,
CCB/B/175/57144/6. A definitive version of the ‘Rites of Durham’
is currently being prepared. For authorship, see A. I. Doyle,
‘William Claxton and the Durham chronicles’, in J. P. Carley and
C. G. C. Tite (eds.), Books and Collectors, 1200–1700 (London:
British Library, 1997). I am grateful to Adrian Green for advice on
this subject.

28 For the parochial equivalent of the ‘Rites of Durham’, see D.

Dymond and C. Paine (eds.), The Spoil of Melford Church: The
Reformation in a Suffolk Parish (Ipswich: Salient Press, 1989).

29 TNA, E134/17Eliz/East6.

30 Henry E. Huntington Library, Egerton MS, Ellesmere 5698f.

31 TNA, DL44/196. I hope to write more fully about this dispute.

32 C. Torr (ed.), Wreyland Documents (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1910), 92.

33 Cornwall Record Office, CY/7189. For further mid-sixteenth-

century memories of the Battle of Blackheath as an event around
which to organise time, see M. McGlynn, ‘Memory, orality and life
records: Proofs of age in Tudor England’, Sixteenth Century
Journal, 40:3 (2009).

34 TNA, DL4/43/12.

35 A. Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter
6.
36 NRO, Y/D41/104, fol. 37r; NRO, NCR17A, ‘Mayor’s book’, fol.
19r; BL, Add. MS 8937, fol. 2r; C. E. Moreton, ‘The Walsingham
conspiracy of 1537’, Historical Research, 63 (1990).

37 TNA, E178/4036.

38 TNA, STAC5/P14/21; TNA, STAC5/A57/5.

39 DUL, DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fol. 75v (my emphasis). I am grateful

to Megan Johnston for this reference.

40 TNA, E134/26Eliz/East4.

41 A. Bagot, ‘Mr Gilpin and manorial customs’, Transactions of the

Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological
Society, 2nd series, 57 (1962), 231.

42 R. W. Hoyle, ‘Lords, tenants and tenant right in the sixteenth

century: Four studies’, Northern History, 20 (1984); R. W. Hoyle,
‘An ancient and laudable custom: The definition and development
of tenant right in north-western England in the sixteenth century’,
P&P, 116 (1987). For a regional study, see J. L. Drury, ‘“More
stout than wise”: Tenant right in Weardale in the Tudor period’, in
D. Marcombe (ed.), The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and
Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 1494–1660 (Nottingham:
University of Nottingham Press, 1987). For a description of tenant
right dated 21 March 1582, based upon ‘The reports & sayings of
sundry aged persons touching the customarie service of the
Inhabitants of the countie of Duresme & as they have seen it used
in their tymes’, see DUL, DCD/S/LP32/5(a).

43 TNA, STAC8/34/4.
44 TNA, STAC8/34/4.46; see also piece 54.

45 TNA, E134/1651/Mich17.

46 B. Jones, ‘The uses of nostalgia: Autobiography, community

publishing and working-class neighbourhoods in post-war
England’, Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010).

47 The social history of the English Revolution remains to be

written.

48 TNA, DL4/111/15. See also TNA, E134/28ChasII/East20;

Borthwick Institute for Archives, CP/H/3344.

49 F. McCall, ‘Children of Baal: Clergy families and their memories

of sequestration during the English civil war’, Huntington Library
Quarterly, 76:4 (2013), 618. See also A. Laurence, ‘“This sad and
deplorable condition”: An attempt towards recovering an account
of the sufferings of northern clergy families in the 1640s and
1650s’, in D. Wood (ed.), Life and Thought in the Northern
Church, c. 1100–1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999). The Walker Manuscripts deserve
systematic study.

50 Cambridgeshire Archives, P109/28/4; TNA,

E134/35ChasII/Mich9; Cheshire Record Office, EDC5 (1701), 7.

51 East Riding of Yorkshire Archives and Records Services,

DDBL/10/14.

52 TNA, E134/9WmIII/Trin9.
53 TNA, DL4/123/1685/2, DL4/123/1684/4, DL4/122/1683/1,
DL4/109/8. For the interest displayed by William Hopkinson
(father) in local history, see BL, Add. MS 6668, fol. 430r.

54 For the localism of temporal registers, see A. Wood, ‘Popular

senses of time and place in Tudor and Stuart England’, Insights,
6:3 (2014).

55 DUL, WEC.145/12, 15; J. L. Drury, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the

Weardale Chest’, Transactions of the Architectural and
Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland, new
series, 5 (1980).

56 M. Stoyle, ‘“Memories of the maimed”: The testimony of

Charles I’s former soldiers, 1660–1730’, History, 88:290 (2003);
G. L. Hudson, ‘Negotiating for blood money: War widows and the
courts in seventeenth-century England’, in J. Kermode and G.
Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern
England (London: UCL Press, 1994). Andy Hopper is currently
engaged on a major study of this subject.

57 R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (London:

Penguin, 1981), 63.

58 BL, Lansdowne MS 897, fol. 71r.

59 BL, Lansdowne MS 897, fol. 52v.

60 Essex Record Office, D/DU 441/96, 22–4.

61 Cumbria Record Office, DLONS/L12/2/18.

62 Borthwick Institite for Archives, CP/H/2836.

63 Cheshire Record Office, EDC5 (1686), 1.

64 Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/2P/24/5, 7.

65 TNA, E134/26ChasII/Mich32.

66 P. Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil

War in the Transition to Democracy (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002).

67 Derbyshire Record Office, Q/SB2/630.

68 Derbyshire Record Office, Q/SB2/631.

69 R. Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of

1685 (Hounslow: Martin Temple Smith, 1984), 44–5.

70 R. Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1994).

71 N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31.

72 D. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society:

Gloucestershire, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1992), 219.

73 D. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical

Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 341.

74 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991),

69.
75 Rogers, Crowds, 57.

76 Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular memory: Theory, politics,

method’, in R. Johnson, G. McLennan, B. Schwarz and D. Sutton
(eds.), Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1982), 207.
 Further Reading

1 Crafting the Nation

Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism, new edn (London: Verso, 2006).

Brayshay, M., ‘Royal post-horse routes in England and Wales: The

evolution of the network in the later-sixteenth and early-seventeenth
century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 17 (1991).

Bailey, J., ‘Waits, musicians, bearwards and players: The inter-urban

road travel and performances of itinerant entertainers in sixteenth
and seventeenth century England’, Journal of Historical Geography,
31 (2005).

Colley, L., Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1992).

Collinson, P., Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994).

Fox, A., Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000).
Helgerson, R., Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Keenan, S., Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Lake, P. and S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early

Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006).

McMillin, S. and S.-B. MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

McRae, A., Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Peacey, J., Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Seton-Watson, H., Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of

Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977).

Shrank, C., Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Vallance, E., ‘Loyal or rebellious? Protestant associations in

England, 1584–1696’, Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002).

Watt, J., ‘“Common weal” and commonwealth”: England’s

monarchical republic in the making, c. 1450–1530’, in A. Gamberini,
A. Zorzi and J.-.P. Genet (eds.), The Languages of Political Society
(Rome: Viella, 2011).

Watt, T., Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Withington, P., Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular

Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).

Woolf, D., The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical

Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

2 Surveying the People

Burke, P., A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot

(Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

Cassedy, J. H., Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the

Statistical Mind, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1969).

Coleman, O., ‘What figures? Some thoughts on the use of

information by medieval governments’, in D. Coleman and A. H.
John (eds.), Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial
England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).

French, H., The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–

1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Griffiths, P., ‘Inhabitants’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds.),
Norwich since 1500 (London: Hambledon, 2004).

Griffiths, P., ‘Local arithmetic: Information cultures in early modern

England’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking
English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early
Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013).

Harkness, D. E., ‘Accounting for science: How a merchant kept his

books in Elzabethan London’, in M. C. Jacob (ed.), The Self-
Perception of Early Modern Capitalists (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).

Innes, J., ‘Power and happiness: Empirical social enquiry in Britain

from “political arithmetic” to “moral statistics”’, in Inferior Politics:
Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Kent, J., ‘The rural “middling sort” in early modern England circa
1640–1740: Some economic, political, and socio-cultural
characteristics’, Rural History, 10 (1999).

McCormick, T., Wiliam Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

McRae, A., God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Rural

England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
Robertson, J. C., ‘Reckoning with London: Interpreting the bills of
mortality before John Graunt’, Urban History, 23 (1996).

Rusnock, A. A., Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in

Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).

Scott, J. C., Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve

the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1998).

Shurer, K. and A. Arkell (eds.), Surveying the People: The

Interpretation and Use of Document Sources for the Study of
Population in the Later Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Leopard’s
Head, 1992).

Slack, P., ‘Government and information in seventeenth-century

England’, P&P, 184 (2004).

3 Little Commonwealths I: The Household

and Family Relationships
[Works published since 2000]

Household Formation

Griffin, E., ‘A conundrum resolved? Rethinking courtship, marriage

and population growth in eighteenth-century England’, P&P, 215
(2012).
McNabb, J., ‘Ceremony versus consent: Courtship, illegitimacy, and
reputation in northwest England, 1560–1610’, Sixteenth Century
Journal, 37 (2006).

O’Hara, D., Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of

Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000).

Sharpe, P., Population and Society in an East Devon Parish:

Reproducing Colyton, 1540–1840 (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 2002).

Stephens, I., ‘The courtship and singlehood of Elizabeth Isham,

1630–1634’, HJ, 51 (2008).

Marital Relations

Bailey, J., ‘‘‘I Dye [sic] by inches”: Locating wife beating in the
concept of privatization of marriage and violence in eighteenth-
century England’, SH, 31 (2006).

Bailey, J., Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in

England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).

Barclay, K., ‘Negotiating patriarchy: The marriage of Anna Potts and

Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk, 1731–1744’, Journal of Scottish
Historical Studies, 28 (2008).
Barker, H., ‘Soul, purse and family: Middling and lower-class
masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester’, SH, 33 (2008).

Foyster, E. A., ‘At the limits of liberty: Married women and

confinement in eighteenth-century England’, C&C, 17 (2002).

Bailey, J., Marital Violence and English Family History, 1660–1857

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Gowing, L., ‘‘‘The manner of submission”: Gender and demeanour

in seventeenth century London’, Cultural and Social History, 10
(2013).

Hunt, M. R., ‘Wives and marital “rights” in the Court of the

Exchequer in the early eighteenth century’, in P. Griffiths and M.
Jenner (eds.), Londonopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social
History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000).

Hurl-Eamon, J., ‘Domestic violence prosecuted: Women binding

over their husbands for assault at Westminster quarter session,
1685–1720’, JFH, 26 (2001).

Keenan, S., ‘“Embracing submission”? Motherhood, marriage and

mourning in Katherine Thomas’s seventeenth-century
“Commonplace Book’’’, Women’s Writing, 15 (2008).

Kugler, A., ‘Constructing wifely identity: Prescription and practice in

the life of Lady Sarah Cowper’, JBS, 40 (2001).
Perry, R., Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English
Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).

Pollock, L. A., ‘Anger and the negotiation of relationships in early

modern England’, HJ, 47 (2004).

Shepard, A., Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Stretton, T., ‘Marriage, separation and the common law in England,

1540–1660’, in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds.), The Family in Early
Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Tague, I., ‘Love, honor, and obedience: Fashionable women and the
discourse of marriage in the early eighteenth century’, JBS, 40
(2001).

Bailey, J., Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of

Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002).

Parents, Children and Siblings

Bailey, J., ‘“A very sensible man”: Imagining fatherhood in England

c. 1750–1830’, History, 95 (2010).

Ben-Amos, I. K., ‘Reciprocal bonding: Parents and their offspring in

early modern England’, JFH, 25 (2000).

Crawford, P., Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Foyster, E., ‘Parenting was for life, not just for childhood: The role of
parents in the married lives of their children in early modern
England’, History, 86 (2001).

French, H. and M. Rothery, ‘“Upon your entry into the world”:

Masculine values and the threshold of adulthood among landed
elites in England 1680–1800’, SH, 33 (2008).

Harris, A., Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England:

Share and Share Alike (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2012).

Bailey, J., ‘That fierce edge: Sibling conflict and politics in Georgian
England’, JFH, 37 (2012).

Levene, A., The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-

Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Newton, H., ‘“Very sore nights and days”: The child’s expereince of
illness in early modern England, c. 1580–1720’, Medical History, 55
(2011).

Kin

Ben-Amos, I. K., The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-

Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).

Botelho, L. A., Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).
Bailey, J., ‘“The old woman’s wish”: Widows by the family fire?
Widows’ old age provisions in rural England, 1500–1700’,
Pergamon, 7 (2002).

Lynch, K. A., ‘Kinship in Britain and beyond from the early modern to
the present: Postscript’, C&C, 25 (2010).

Tadmor, N., ‘Early modern English kinship in the long run:

Reflections on continuity and change’, C&C, 25 (2010).

Bailey, J., Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England:

Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).

Wall, R., ‘Beyond the household: Marriage, household formation and

the role of kin and neighbours’, IRSH, 44 (1999).

Family Economy and Servants

Boulton, J., ‘“Turned into the street with my children destitute of

every thing”: The payment of rent and the London poor 1600–1850’,
in J. McEwan and P. Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty: The
Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Erikson, A. L., ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century

London’, C&C, 23 (2008).

Healey, J., ‘Poverty in an industrializing town: Deserving hardship in

Bolton, 1674–99’, SH, 35 (2010).
Hindle, S., ‘Below stairs at Arbury Hall: Sir Richard Newdigate and
his household staff, c. 1670–1710’, Historical Research, 85 (2012).

Bailey, J., ‘“Without the cry of any neighbours”: A Cumbrian family

and the poor law authorities, c. 1690–1730’, in H. Berry and E.
Foyster (eds.), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Hurl-Eamon, J., ‘The fiction of female dependence and the makeshift

economy of soldiers, sailors, and their wives in eighteenth-century
London’, Labor History, 49 (2008).

McIntosh, M. K., ‘Women, credit and family relationships in England,

1300–1620’, JFH, 30 (2005).

Muldrew, C., ‘“Th’ancient distaff” and “whirling spindle”: Measuring

the contribution of spinning to household earnings and the national
economy in England, 1550–1770’, EcHR, 65 (2012).

Bailey, J., ‘“A mutual assent of her mind”? Women, debt, litigation
and contract in early modern England’, HWJ, 55 (2003).

4 Little Commonwealths II: Communities

Bossy, J., ‘Blood and baptism: Kinship, community and Christianity

in Western Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries’,
in D. Baker (ed.), Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
French, K. L., The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late
Medieval Diocese (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001).

Halvorson, M. J. and K. E. Spierling (eds.), Defining Community in

Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

Heal, F., Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1990).

Hindle, S., On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural

England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Hindle, S., A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English

Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern
England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013).

Kümin, B. A., The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and

Reformation of the English Parish, c. 1400–1560 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1991).

Macfarlane, A., S. Harrison and C. Jardine, Reconstructing Historical

Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

McIntosh, M. K., A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty

of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).

Muldrew, C., ‘The culture of reconciliation: Community and the

settlement of disputes in early modern England’, HJ, 39 (1996).
Rosenwein, B. H., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

Sharpe, J. A., ‘“Such disagreement betwyxt neighbours”: Litigation

and human relations in early modern England’, in J. Bossy (ed.),
Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Shepard, A. and P. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern

England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000).

Short, B., ‘Images and realities in the English rural community: An

introduction’, in B. Short (ed.), The English Rural Community: Image
and Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Smith, R. M., ‘“Modernization” and the corporate medieval village

community in England: Some sceptical reflections’, in A. R. H. Baker
and D. Gregory (eds.), Explorations in Historical Geography:
Interpretative Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984).

Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991).

Waddell, B., God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life,

1660–1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012).

Walsham, A., Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in

England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006).
Wrightson, K., ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in
P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority
in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).

Wrightson, K. and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village:

Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995).

5 Reformations

Collinson, P., The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1982).

Duffy, E., Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

Durston, C. and J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

Green, I., Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000).

Haigh, C. The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of

Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).

Hamling, T., Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in

Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2010).
Hunt, A., The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their
Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).

MacCulloch, D., Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant

Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 1999).

Maltby, J., Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Marshall, P., Reformation England 1480–1642 (London: Arnold,

2003).

Patterson, W. B., William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant

England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Prior, C. W. A. and G. Burgess (eds.), England’s Wars of Religion,

Revisited (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

Ryrie, A., Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013).

Bailey, J., The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms,
1485–1603 (Harlow: Pearson, 2009).

Shagan, E., Popular Politics and the English Reformation

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Spurr, J., The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in

Britain, 1603–1714 (Harlow: Longman, 2006).
Walsham, A., Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).

Wood, A., The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses
of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).

6 Words, Words, Words: Education, Literacy

and Print

Bernard, J. and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the

Book in Britain, Vol. IV: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).

Charlton, K. and M. Spufford, ‘Literacy, society and education’, in D.

Loewenstein and J. Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early
Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002).

Cranfield, G. A., The Development of the Provincial Newspaper

1700–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

Cressy, D., ‘Educational opportunity in Tudor and Stuart England’,

History of Education Quarterly, 16 (1976).

Bailey, J., Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in
Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980).
Fergus, J., Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Fox, A., Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000).

Green, I., Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000).

Harris, M., London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole (London:

Associated University Presses, 1987).

Houston, R. A., Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy

and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Laqueur, T. W., ‘The cultural origins of popular literacy in England

1500–1850’, Oxford Review of Education, 2 (1976).

Lawson, J. and H. Silver, A Social History of Education in England

(London: Methuen, 1973).

O’Day, R., Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social

Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London:
Longman, 1982).

Porter, R., Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern

World (London: Allen, Lane, 2000).
Raven, J., The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book
Trade (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

Spufford, M., ‘First steps in literacy: The reading and writing

experiences of the humblest seventeenth-century spiritual
autobiographers’, SH, 4 (1979).

Bailey, J., Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and
Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen,
1981).

Thomas, K., ‘The meaning of literacy in early modern England’, in G.

Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986).

Watt, T., Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Whyman, S. E., The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers
1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

7 Land and People

Allen, R. C., Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992).

Brenner, R., ‘The agrarian roots of European capitalism’, P&P, 97

(1982).
Campbell, B. M. S. and M. Overton, ‘A new perspective of medieval
and early modern agriculture: Six centuries of Norfolk farming c.
1250–c. 1850’, P&P, 141 (1993).

Dyer, C., An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in

the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

French, H. R. and R. W. Hoyle, The Character of English Rural

Society: Earls Colne, 1550–1750 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007).

Muldrew, C., Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness:

Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England 1550–1780
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Overton, M., Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation

of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).

Shaw-Taylor, L., ‘The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline of

family farming in England’, EcHR, 65 (2012).

Tawney, R. H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New

York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1912]).

Thirsk, J., England’s Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History,

1500–1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).

Whittle, J. (ed.), Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660:

Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013).
Whyte, N., Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory
1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2009).

Williamson, T., Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society,

Environment (M acclesfield: Windgather, 2003).

Wrigley, E. A., Energy and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Yelling, J. A., Common Field and Enclosure in England 1450–1850

(London: Macmillan, 1977).

8 Urbanisation

Barry, J. (ed.), The Tudor and Stuart Town (Harlow: Longman, 1988).

Barry, J. and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture,

Society and Politics in England 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1994).

Barry, J., ‘Civility and civic culture in early modern England’, in P.

Burke, P. Harrison and P. Slack (eds.), Civil Histories (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).

Borsay, P., The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in

the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989).
Borsay, P. (ed.), The Eighteenth Century Town (Harlow: Longman,
1990).

Clark, P. (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II: 1540–
1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Clark, P. and P. Slack (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns,

1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London: Routledge, 1972).

Collinson, P., The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious

Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988).

De Vries, J., European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London: Methuen,

1984).

Griffiths, P., Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital
City 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Halliday, P., Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in

England’s Towns 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).

Horner, C. (ed.), Early Modern Manchester (Lancaster: Carnegie,

2008).

O’Callaghan, M., The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early

Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Phythian Adams, C., Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850:
Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1996).

Tittler, R., Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English
Urban Community, 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991).

Bailey, J., The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and
Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998).

Withington, P., ‘Intoxication and the early modern city’, in S. Hindle,

A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013).

Bailey, J., The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in

Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).

Bailey, J., ‘Public discourse, corporate citizenship and state-

formation in early modern England’, AHR, 112 (2007).

Wrightson, K., Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the
Plague (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011).

Wrigley, E. A., ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing

English society and economy, 1650–1750’, P&P, 37 (1967).
 9 The People and the Law

Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Brooks, C. W., Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Bailey, J., Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450

(London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1998).

Bailey, J., Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The

‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Dolan, F. E., Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic

Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1994).

Gaskill, M., Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Green, T. A., Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the

English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985).

Halliday, P., Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge,

MA: Belknap, 2010).

Herrup, C. B., The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal

Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).

Hindle, S., The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.
1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press,
2000).

Ingram, M., Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–

1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Kesselring, K. J. ‘Felony forfeiture and the profits of crime in early

modern England’, HJ, 53 (2010).

Bailey, J., Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Knafla, L. A., Kent at Law 1602, 6 vols (London: List and Index
Society, 2009–2016).

Muldrew, C., The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and

Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998).

Sharpe, J. A., Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London

and New York: Longman, 1999).

Shoemaker, R. B., Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and

the Law in London and Rural Middlesex c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Walker, G., Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern

England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Bailey, J., ‘Everyman or a monster? The rapist in early modern
England, c. 1600–1750’, HWJ, 76 (2013).

10 Authority and Protest

Braddick, M. J. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English

Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Braddick, M. J. and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early

Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and
Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Fletcher, A. and D. MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (London:

Longman, 1997).

Harris, T. (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850

(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001).

Levine, D. and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society:

Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Lindley, K., Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London:

Heinemann Educational, 1982).

Manning, B., The English People and the English Revolution

(London: Heinemann Educational, 1976).

Manning, R. B., Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular

Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988).

Martin, J., Feudalism and Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in

English Agrarian Development (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983).

Rule, J., The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century Industry

(London: Croom Helm, 1981).

Sharp, B., In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the
West of England 1585–1660 (Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1980).

Walter, J., Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

Wood, A., The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Bailey, J., The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses
of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).

Bailey, J., The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–
1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

11 Consumption and Material Culture

Berg, M., Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005).
Brears, P., Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England
(Totnes: Prospect Books, 2015).

Brewer, J., The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the

Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

Brewer, J. and R. Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of

Goods (London: Routledge, 1993).

De Vries, J., The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and

the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Dyer, C., An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in the Later

Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Hamling, T., Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-

Reformation Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2011).

Howard, M., The Buildings of Elizabethan and Jacobean England

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

Johnson, M., An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell,

1996).

Lemire, B., Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the

Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991).
Llewellyn, N., The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death
Ritual c. 1500–c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991).

McKendrick, N., J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a

Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century
England (London: HarperCollins, 1982).

Overton, M., J. Whittle, D. Dean and A. Hann, Production and

Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London:
Routledge, 2004).

Peck, L. L., Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in

Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).

Sekora, J., Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to

Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

Spufford, M., The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty

Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London:
Hambledon, 1984).

Stobart, J., Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial

England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Styles, J., The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-

Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2007).
Trentmann, F., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Thirsk, J., Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a

Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978).

Weatherill, L., Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain,

1660–1760, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1996 [1988]).

12 ‘Gentlemen’: Re-making the English

Ruling Class

Bush, M. L., ‘An Anatomy of Nobility’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Social

Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social
Stratification (London: Longman, 1992).

Cannon, J., ‘The British nobility, 1660–1800’, in H. M. Scott (ed.),

The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, Vol. I: Western and Southern Europe (Basingstoke:
Longman, 2007).

Carpenter, C., Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed

Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992).

Cooper, J. P., ‘Ideas of gentility’, in G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill

(eds.), Land, Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early Modern History
(London: Hambledon, 1983).
Corfield P., ‘The rivals: Landed and other gentlemen’, in N. Harte
and R. Quinault (eds.), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914:
Essays in Honour of F. M. L. Thompson (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996).

French, H. and M. Rothery, Man’s Estate Landed Gentry

Masculinities, 1660–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Girouard, M., Life in the English Country House (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1978).

Habakkuk, J., Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English

Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Hainsworth, D. R., Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward

and His World in Later Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).

Heal, F. and C. Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–

1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

Larminie, V., Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The Seventeenth-Century

Newdigates of Arbury and Their World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995).

Maddern, P. C., ‘Gentility’, in R. L. Radulescu and A. Truelove

(eds.), Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005).

Mingay, G., The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class
(London: Longman, 1976).
Nicholson, A., Gentry: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English
Class (London: Harper, 2011).

Pollock, L., ‘“Teach her to live under obedience”: The making of

women in the upper ranks of early modern England’, C&C, 4 (1989).

Rosenheim, J. M., The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English

Landed Society 1650–1750 (Harlow: Longman, 1998).

Stone, L. and J. C. F. Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Thompson, F. M. L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth

Century (London: Routledge, 1963).

Vickery, A., The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian

England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

Whittle, J. and E. Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early

Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

13 The ‘Middling Sort’: An Emergent

Cultural Identity

Barry, J. and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture,

Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London: Macmillan,
1994).
Blackwood, B. G., The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion
1640–60, Chetham Society, 3rd series, 25 (1978).

Campbell, M., The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early
Stuarts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942).

Earle, P., The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society
and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989).

French, H., The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–

1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

French, H. and J. Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England,

1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Hunt, M., The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in
England 1680–1780 (Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 1996).

Kent, J. R., ‘The rural “middling sort” in Early Modern England, c.

1640–1740: Some economic, political and socio-cultural
characteristics’, Rural History, 10 (1999).

McVeagh, J., Tradefull Merchants: Portrayal of the Capitalist in

Literature (London: Routledge, 1981).

Muldrew, C., The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and

Social Relations in Early Modern England. (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998).
Muldrew, C. and J. Maegraith, ‘Consumption and material life’, in H.
Scott (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Prest, W. (ed.), The Professions in Early Modern England

(Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987).

Slack, P., The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material

Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).

Smail, J., The Origins of Middle Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire,

1660–1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Weatherill, L., Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain

1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988).

Withington, P., The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen

in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).

Wood, A., The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses
of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).

14 The ‘Meaner Sort’: Labouring People and

the Poor
Arkell, T., ‘The incidence of poverty in England in the later
seventeenth century’, SH, 12 (1987).

Barry, J. and H. French (eds.), Identity and Agency in England,

1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Braddick, M. J. and J. Walter. (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early

Modern Society. Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and
Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Clark, P. and D. Souden (eds.), Migration and Society in Early

Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

Crawford, P., Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Everitt, A., ‘Farm labourers’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History

of England and Wales, Vol. IV: 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1967).

Healey, J., The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in
Lancashire 1620–1730 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014).

Hindle, S., On the Parish: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural

England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Hitchcock, T., P. Sharpe and P. King (eds.), Chronicling Poverty: The

Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997).
Jordan, W. K., Philanthropy in England 1480–1660: A Study of the
Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1959).

Lees, L. H., The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws

and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).

McIntosh, M. K., Poor Relief in England 1350–1600 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Pelling, M. (ed.), The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations

and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London and New
York: Longman, 1998).

Phelps Brown, H. and S. V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and

Prices (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).

Pound, J. F. (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570 (Norwich:

Norfolk Record Society, 1971).

Rushton, N. S. and W. Sigle-Rushton, ‘Monastic poor relief in

sixteenth-century England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32
(2001).

Shepard, A. Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social

Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015).
Bailey, J., ‘Poverty, labour and the language of social description in
early modern England’, P&P, 201 (2008).

Slack, P., The English Poor Law 1531–1782 (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1990).

Bailey, J., Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Harlow:
Longman, 1988).

Bailey, J., (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury (Devizes: Wiltshire

Record Society, 1975).

Snell, K., Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian
England 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985).

Wales, T., ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: Some evidence
from seventeenth-century Norfolk’, in. R. M. Smith (ed.), Land,
Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984).

Walter, J. and R. Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease and the Social

Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).

15 Gender, the Body and Sexuality

Adair, R., Courtship, Illegitimacy, and Marriage in Early Modern

England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
Bennett, J., History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of
Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

Bray, A., The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Bailey, J., Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay

Men’s Press, 1982).

Capp, B., When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood

in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Dabhoiwala, F., The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual

Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013).

Donoghue, E., Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture,

1668–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993).

Fisher, K. and S. Toulalan (eds.), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the
Renaissance to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).

Bailey, J., (eds.), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body 1500
to the Present (London: Routledge, 2013).

Fisher, W., ‘The Renaissance beard: Masculinity in early modern

England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001).

Fissell, M., ‘Gender and generation: Representing reproduction in

early modern England’, Gender and History, 7:3 (1995).
Bailey, J., Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Fletcher, A., Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).

Foyster, E. A., Manhood in Early Modern England (London:

Longman, 1999).

Gowing, L., Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in

Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2003).

Bailey, J., Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early

Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Bailey, J., ‘Lesbians and their like in early modern Europe, 1500–
1800’, in R. Aldrich (ed.), Gay Life and Culture: A World History
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

Gowing, L., M. Hunter and M. Rubin (eds.), Love, Friendship and

Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005).

Harvey, K., ‘The substance of sexual difference: Change and

persistence in representations of the body in eighteenth-century
England’, Gender and History, 14 (2002).
Herrup, C. B., A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd
Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Hitchcock, T., English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1997).

Hubbard, E., City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early
Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Ingram, M., Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–

1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Laqueur, T., Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

McKeon, M., ‘Historicizing patriarchy: The emergence of gender

difference in England, 1660–1760’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28
(1995).

Mendelson, S. and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Park, K., Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of

Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006).

Paster, G. K., ‘The unbearable coldness of female being: Women’s

imperfection and the humoral economy’, English Literary
Renaissance, 28 (1998).
Phillips, N., Women in Business 1700–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2006).

Probert, R. (ed.), Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and

Wales, 1600–2012 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Roper, L., ‘Beyond discourse theory’, Women’s History Review, 19

(2010).

Shepard, A., ‘Brokering fatherhood: Illegitimacy and paternal rights

and responsibilities in early modern England’, in S. Hindle, A.
Shepard and J. Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society: Social
Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2013).

Bailey, J., ‘Crediting women in the early modern English economy’,

HWJ, 79 (2015).

Bailey, J., Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2003).

Shoemaker, R. B., Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The

Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998).

Simons, P., The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Stolberg, M., ‘A woman down to her bones: The anatomy of sexual

difference in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, Isis, 94
(2003).
Toulalan, S., Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).

Trumbach, R., Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1998).

Turner, D., Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England,

1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Wahrman, D., The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in
Eighteenth Century England (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2004).

16 The English and ‘Others’ in England and

Beyond

Bailyn, B., and P. D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers within the Realm:

Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991).

Daunton, M. and R. Halpern (eds.), Empire and Others: British

Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

Games, A., The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of

Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Ghosh, D., Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of
Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Goffman, D., Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1998).

Goodfriend, J. D., Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in

Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992).

Goose, N. and L. Luu (eds.), Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart

England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005).

Guasco, M., Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early

Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2014).

Johnston, S. H., ‘Papists in a Protestant World: The Catholic Anglo-

Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
Georgetown University (2011).

Kidd, C., British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and

Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Landsman, N. C., Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–

1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Matar, N., Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998).
McClendon, M. C., J. C. Ward and M. MacDonald (eds.), Protestant
Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation
England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Molineux, C., Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery

in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Selwood, J., Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London

(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

Statt, D., Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over

Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1995).

Vigne, R. and C. Littleton (eds.), From Strangers to Citizens: The

Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial
America, 1550–1750 (London: Huguenot Society of Great Britain and
Ireland, 2001).

Coda: History, Time and Social Memory

Fentress, J. and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1992).

Fox, A., Oral and Literate Cultures in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000).

Misztal, B., Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open

University Press, 2003).
Thomas, K., The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England,
Creighton Trust Lecture (London: University of London, 1983).

Tittler, R., ‘Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in

English provincial towns’, Urban History, 24 (1997).

Walsham, A., The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity

and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).

Whyte, N., Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory,

1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2009).

Wood, A., The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses
of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).

Woolf, D., The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical

Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
 Index
accounting, 47, 152, 302, 311
Additions, Statute of, 271
advertisements, 248
advowsons, 110
affinities, 272
Africa, 352, 353, 361, 365, 366
Africans, 352, 353, 358, 359, 362, 363, 365, 367
age, 60, 333, 340, 347
agricultural revolution, 153
agriculture, 154, 155, 171, 292
open field, 155
productivity, 153, 161–163, 171, 299
regions, 156, 169, 300, 315
alehouses, 49, 88, 190, 206, 226, 303
aliens and strangers, 51, 353, 354–356, 360, 364
Allen, Robert C., 159, 161
almanacs, 145
America, 182, 352, 353, 360, 362, 363, 365
Amerindians, 352, 353, 357–358, 360, 361, 365, 366, 368
Anabaptists, 121, 122
Anderson, Benedict, 20, 21, 97
Anglicanism, 116, 125, see also Church of England
Anglicization, 357, 368
Anne, queen of Great Britain, 145
anti-clericalism, 107
antiquarianism, 375
Appeals, Act in Restraint of, 22
Appleby, Joyce, 248
apprentices, 60, 89, 191, 203, 204, 249, 327
apprenticeship, 75, 188–189, 293, 301, 310
Aquinas, St Thomas, 294
archives, 43, 45
Arendt, Hannah, 79
aristocracy, 87, 120, 129, 140, 244, 245, 257, 269, 272, 274, 294
Aristotle, 294, 336
arithmetic. see accounting; political arithmetic
Armada, Spanish, 19, 30
army, 222, 232, 238, 383
articles of enquiry, 40, 50, 51
artificers, see industrial workers; craftsmen; tradesmen
Artificers, Statute of, 187, 203, 238
Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 50
Ashley, W. J., 4
Asia, 352, 353
assembly rooms, 190, 258
assimilation, 357, 363
assizes, 92, 200, 202, 209, 213, 214
Association, Instrument of, 34
atheists, 123
auctions, 248
Austria, 363
authority, 68, 90, 221–224, see also gentry

bachelors, 252
Bacon, Francis, 130, 260
ballads and broadsides, 29, 30, 31, 32, 90, 143
Baptists, 98, 122, 124
Barbados, 183, 363, 367
Barker, Joseph, 158
Barnstaple, 48, 183
Barry, Jonathan, 293
Bath, 258, 276, 279
Baxter, Richard, 139, 326
Bayly, Lewis, 117, 139
Becket, St Thomas, 111
Bedfordshire, 96, 246
Behn, Aphra, 147, 359
benefit of clergy, 208, 210, 211, 213
Berkeley, George, 306
Berkshire, 135, 152
Berwick-upon-Tweed, 183
Bible, English, 108, 111, 139
Bideford, 48
Bill of Rights, 199
bills of mortality, 43
Birmingham, 182, 183, 248, 249
Bishops’ Wars, 383
Black Death, 107, 166, 225
Bolton, 320, 321, 325
book ownership, 140–142
book trade, 142, 143, 249
Books of Orders, 40, 234, 235
border reivers, 381
borders, Anglo-Scottish, 380–382
Borsay, Peter, 190
Bossy, John, 85
Boston (Massachusetts), 96
Bosworth, Battle of, 376
Brailsford, H. N., 270
Brenner, Robert, 160, 167
Bridewell, 206
Briggs, Robin, 94
Bristol, 108, 137, 182, 183, 189, 233, 248, 293
Brooks, Christopher, 274
Brownists, 121
Bryson, Anna, 192
Bunyan, John, 139
Burke, Peter, 39, 86
Burton, Robert, 174, 193, 194
Buxton, 276

Caesar, Julius, 20, 131

Calvinism, 116, 119, 121, 295
Calvin’s Case, 356
Cambridge, 50, 51, 54, 117, 130, 131, 293, 367
Cambridge Group, 317
Cambridgeshire, 24, 91, 116, 121, 134, 143, 382
Campbell, Bruce, 161, 162
Camping Time (1549), 113
Cannon, John, 311, 325
Canterbury, 111, 201, 382
capitalism, 4, 157, 158, 181, 221, 228, 232, 236, 260, 295, 299
Carew, Richard, 42
Carlisle, 19, 183, 381
Carpenter, Christine, 271, 273
carriers, 244, 248
Carson, Cathy, 252
Carter, 'Captain' Ann, 235
cash, 246
cathedrals, 117
Catholicism, 107, 113, 118, 120, 321, 361, 377
Catholics, 53, 115, 119, 120, 207, 226, 254, 354, 365, see also
recusants
Cavendish, Margaret, 132
Cecil, William, 34
census, 317
Chancery, 200, 201, 202
chantries, 112, 377
chapbooks, 144–145
charities, 256, 322
charity, 93, 95, 96, 223, 298, 303, 322, 325, 326
Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, 94, 116, 124, 199,
355, 382
Charles II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, 125, 130, 145
Chesapeake Bay, 362
Cheshire, 135, 159, 209, 211, 274, 382, 384
Chester, 41, 44, 45, 49, 179, 276
chief inhabitants, 291, see middle sort of people
childhood, 71, 249
children, 61, 71–72, 76, 255, 317, 320, 340, 352, see education;
parenting; siblings; youth
mixed-race, 366–367
work, 310
Chiltern Hills, 108
China, 252
church courts, 90, 200, 202, 343
Church of England, 22, 33, 94, 109, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 223,
see also Common Prayer, Book of; Homilies, Book of;
worship
Churchill, John, duke of Marlborough, 386
churchwardens, 87, 92, 222, 245, 291, 301, 302
Cicero, 24, 131, 293
citizens, 86, 185
citizenship, 293, 374
Civil War, 26, 31, 107, 115, 117, 124, 130, 132, 137, 140, 201, 261,
271, 274, 275, 277, 291, 324, 336, 374, 386
memories of, 382–386
civility, 97, 192, 278, 356
Clark, Peter, 278
class, 97, 98, 99, 153, 165, 167, 222, 224, 228, 239, 250, 256, 270,
300, 315, see also consumption; gentry; middle sort of
people; labourers; poverty
classical literature, 131, 374
clergy, 84, 99, 117, 118, 120, 125, 131, 137, 295, 378
Cliffe, J. T., 274
Clifford, Lady Anne, 130
clothing, 243, 244, 246, 257, 258, 296, 340
second-hand, 243
coffeehouses, 190, 258
Colchester, 42, 47, 49, 131, 132
collectors, 360, 365
Colley, Linda, 20, 21
Collinson, Patrick, 34, 35, 121
colonies, 353, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 367
colonisation, 357, 361
Combination Act, 238
combinations, 191, 238
Commager, H. S., 377
commerce, 182
commercialisation, 153, 165, 169, 170, 185, 245, 261, 292, 293, 304,
305
common land, 87, 154, 155, 185
common law, 23, 91, 200, 218
common people, 373, 376
Common Pleas, court of, 200
Common Prayer, Book of, 26, 112, 118, 125, 139, 223
common rights, 158, 230, 298, 300, 312, 316, 379
commonwealth, 24, 25, 84, 97, 113, 223, 224, 230, 294, 297, 301
communications, 25, 147, 183, 189
communities, 84, 85, 90, 96
community, definition, 84, 85, 86, 96, 97, 294
complexity theory, 12–13
Compton Census, 40
compurgation, 216
conditional bonds, 203
conduct books, 10, 62, 73, 78, 332
congregationalism, 96, see also Independents
Connecticut, 96
constables, 91, 213, 218, 222, 275, 291
consumer society, 248, 257
consumerism, 247, 253, 259, 261
consumption, 170, 242, 243, 246, 250, 258, 274, 292, 298
and class, 256–258
and gender, 253–254
ideologies, 259–260
Cornwall, 159, 183, 246, 379
corporatism, 185, 186, 188
Coss, P. R., 271
counties, 87
county community, 271
Court of Requests, 200
Coventry, 108, 141, 229, 318, 386
craftsmen, 311
credit, 77, 201, 202, 205, 245, 246, 247, 294, 295, 296, 300, 302,
322
crime 
and gender, 210–212
death penalty, 208, 209, 211, 212–215
homicide, 208–210, 211, 217
infanticide, 212, 217
 prosecutions, 208, 209
rape, 212, 217, 345
criminal justice, 207–216, 281
Cromartie, Alan, 23
Cromwell, Oliver, 125, 386
Cromwell, Thomas, 35, 109
Crooke, Helkiah, 338
cultural differentiation, 147
cultural diffusion, 250
cultural history, 3, 7
cultural provinces, 179
Cumberland, 376
Cumbria, 24, 232, 246
Cunningham, William, 4
custom, 99, 160, 186, 227, 229, 281, 299, 300, 375, 380

Dabhoiwala, Faramerz, 346

Dale, 183
Dalton, Michael, 187
Daniel, Samuel, 130
Darien Company, 363
de la Pryme, Abraham, 383
de Vries, Jan, 175, 247, 248, 253, 254
dearth, 40, 88, 169, 231, 234, 314, 316, 383, see prices
death, 61, 261
commemoration, 255–256
funerals, 256
debt, 247
Deetz, Jim, 258
Defoe, Daniel, 246, 305, 310, 318
denization, 355, 367
Dent, Arthur, 90, 96, 118, 123, 139
Derbyshire, 74, 99, 141, 237, 382, 385
Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex 183
Devon, 159, 209, 215, 237, 246, 379, 386
dialect, 87
Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman, 358
Directory for Publique Worship, 26
disease environments (colonial), 365
dissenters, Protestant, 126, 191
Dobb, Maurice, 270
Domesday Book, 54
domestic violence, 70, 209
Dorchester, 138
Dorset, 44, 77, 156
double standard, sexual, 210, 345
Dover, 183
Dudley, Edmund, 294
Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 28
Durham, 191, 316, 377, 378, 380
Durham, Rites of, 378
Dyer, Christopher, 163

early modern period, 1–9

dynamics, 11–13
East India Company, 358, 366
eating and drinking, 258, 296, 303
Eaton, William, 366
economic history, 3, 4, 5, 6, 157, 270
education, 24, 129, 189, 275, 276, 277, 283, see also schools;
school curricula
female, 130, 132, 133, 136
for the poor, 135
Edward VI, king of England and Ireland, 27, 34, 112, 114, 115, 199,
355, 373, 377
elderly, 317, 320, 325
Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland, 19, 34, 98, 114, 115, 130,
137, 245, 246, 274, 276, 373, 376, 377
Ely, 40
emigration, 94, 95, 315, 356, 362
enclosure, 91, 113, 153, 156, 157, 158–160, 168, 171, 222, 226,
297, 299, 316
enclosure laws, 223, 228
English Revolution, 375, 382, 383, 386, see also Civil War;
Interregnum
engrossing, 153, 157, 158, 222, 292, see also farm size
entry fines, 155, 161, 227
Epstein, Stephen, 188
esquires, 269, 271, 298
Essex, 77, 91, 114, 122, 131, 132, 134, 159, 182, 235, 245, 274,
318, 384, 386
earl of 373, see Devereux, Robert , earl of Essex
estate stewards, 280, 302
ethnic diversity, 362–363
ethnic identity, 367
evangelicals, 113
Evelyn, John, 130
Everitt, Alan, 313, 318
Exclusion Crisis, 31, 386
Exeter, 46, 47, 50, 132, 143, 276, 293
exiles, religious, 94, 115, 120, 121, 122, 354

family, 60, 61, 79

reconstitution, 63
Family of Love, 121, 123
famine, 316
farm size, 171, 299
farmers, 153, 158, 228, 302, see also husbandmen; yeomen
Faversham, 49
feminist history, 330
festive calendar, 230, 277
Fielding, Henry, 348
Firmin, Thomas, 312
Fisher, Will, 340
Fletcher, Anthony, 275
Flodden, Battle of, 376, 379
foreigners, 352, 354
Fortescue, John, 23
Foucault, Michel, 330, 347
Foxe, John, 34
France, 21, 176, 257, 352, 355, 361, 363, 386
freemen, 293
French, Henry, 290
friendship, 347–348
fuel, 170
Galen, 334, 335, 336
gender, 60, 71, 350, 364, 365, see also consumption; crime;
education; marriage; masculinity; patriarchy; sexuality;
women
bodily difference, 334–343
category of difference, 330–331
gentlemen, 269, 271, 298, see also aristocracy; esquires; knights;
landlords; manor, lords of; gentry
gentry, 84, 87, 110, 120, 130, 131, 137, 140, 154, 170, 190, 222,
232, 245, 246, 251, 252, 255, 269, 270, 272, 291, 294, 298,
342, 375, 385
absentee, 280
characteristics, 272–273
household management, 282
local government, 275, 277
numbers, 278
rise of, 274
social authority, 280–282, 301
social exclusivity, 278–279
George I, king of Great Britain and Ireland, 137, 355, 386
George II, king of Great Britain and Ireland, 139, 147, 245, 261, 355
Georgia, 358, 363
Germany, 107, 108, 355, 362, 363
Gifford, George, 119
gifts, 244
Glasgow, 182
Gloucester, 46, 48, 54, 276
Gloucestershire, 135, 158, 164, 275, 317, 354, 376
Goodman, Christopher, 33
Gough, Richard, 301, 383
Grafton, Richard, 373
grain markets, 222, 223, 232, 235
Graunt, John, 43
Great Subsidy, 40
Great Yarmouth, 45, 49, 50
Greenham, Richard, 116
Griffiths, Elizabeth, 282
guilds, 185
craft, 86, 188, 238, 293
religious, 86
Gunpowder Plot, 34, 98, 120
Gypsies, 359, 368

Hakluyt, Richard, 27
Hale, J.R., 25
Hale, Matthew, 299
Halifax, 137, 182
hamlets, 156
Hampshire, 88, 156
Hardwick’s Marriage Act, 137
Hariot, Thomas, 53, 357, 360
Harman, Thomas, 50
Harris, Amy, 74
Harrison, C. J., 158
Harrison, William, 156, 245, 310
Hartlib, Samuel, 299
harvest failure, 225, see also dearth
Harwich, 235
Hay, Douglas, 212, 281
Hayward, John, 373
Heal, Felicity, 271
Helgerson, Richard, 26
Henry IV, king of England and lord of Ireland, 373
Henry VIII, king of England and Ireland, 22, 40, 108, 109, 111, 113,
120, 140, 147, 199, 261, 354, 380
heraldry, 251
Hereford, 51
Herefordshire, 33, 45
Hertfordshire, 134, 274
Heywood, Oliver, 134
hierarchy, 129, 137, 204, 244, 250, 292, 293, 304, 334, 342, 350,
369
Hill, Christopher, 4, 270
Hilton, Rodney, 270
Historical Economists, 4
historical periods, 1, 2, 261
historical writing, 373–375
Hobbes, Thomas, 84, 130
Hobsbawm, Eric, 238, 270
Holinshed, Raphael, 27, 374
Holme, Randle, 260
Holmes, Clive, 271
Holyhead, 183
Homilies, Book of, 26, 32, 112
Hopkins, Sheila V., 311
Hoskins, W. G., 244, 246
hospitality, 93, 97, 276, 295, 296, 297, 302
hospitals, 324
household, 60, 78, 89, 243, 247, 249, 262
household economy, 68, 153, 164, 168, 295, 324
dependency ratio, 317
household goods, 243, 245, 250, 252, 253, 296
second-hand, 243
houses, 251, 252, 253, 362
country houses, 279–280
rebuilding, 170, 244, 246, 300
houses of correction, 206, 322
Howard, Thomas, duke of Norfolk, 272
Hoyle, Richard, 274
Huddersfield, 320
Huguenots, 355, 362
Hull, 143, 183, 382
humanism, 2, 3, 276, 374
Hume, David, 258
humoral theory, 334, 336, 338, 340
Hunt, Margaret, 66
husbandmen, 137, 168, 251, 298, 310
Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon, 130

illegitimacy, 344
illness, 72
immigrants, 182, see also aliens and strangers; naturalisation
improvement, 247, 259, 299
incorporation, 185, 186, 293
Indemnity and Oblivion, Act of, 385
Independents, 122, 125
indexes, 48
India, 366
indulgences, 111
Industrial Revolution, 157, 249
industrial workers, 236, 237, see combinations; protest
‘Industrious Revolution’ (de Vries), 248
industry 
coal, 170, 292, 316
rural, 156, 164, 170, 181, 225, 233, 236, 238, 313, 315, 317
urban, 236, 237
inheritance, 75, 155, 204
strict settlements, 278
inmates, 41, 49, 53
inns, 190
Inns of Court, 250, 295
Interregnum, 31, 32, 140
Ipswich, 179, 320
Ireland, 21, 113, 176, 315, 352, 356, 362, 363
Italy, 176, 276, 363

Jamaica, 363, 367

James I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, 94, 98, 116, 120,
130, 355, 362
James II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, 125, 214, 215
Japan, 366
Jeffreys, George, Chief Justice, 214
Jews, 108, 361, 364–365
Johnson, Samuel, 139
Johnson, William, 3
Jones, Ben, 382
Jonson, Ben, 132
Josselin, Ralph, 132
juries, 213, 216, 217, 222, 291
justices of the peace, 23, 91, 92, 188, 202, 275, 301

Kent, 48, 63, 114, 134, 136, 141, 153, 159, 182, 201, 235, 246, 274,
375
Kesselring, Krista, 211
Kett, Robert, 229, 376
Kett’s Rebellion, 227, 228, 374, 379
King, Gregory, 43, 256, 310, 318, 319
King, Peter, 281
King, Steven, 64
King’s English, 27
King’s Lynn, 380
King’s/Queen’s Bench, court of, 200
kinship networks, 25, 77, 86
kinship ties, 76, 78
Klein, Lawrence, 278
knights, 269, 298
Knox, John, 33
Khrushchev, Nikita, 373
Kussmaul, Ann, 167, 179

labourers, 87, 137, 152, 153, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 168, 170,
171, 231, 232, 233, 257, 292, 300, 301, 310–311, 314, 315,
 316, 321, 325, 326, 327, 334, 362, 365, see wages
family earnings, 312
household economy, 313
labour market, 314
underemployment, 312, 314, 320
unemployment, 314, 320
labouring poor, 310
Lambarde, William, 41, 375
Lancashire, 132, 134, 136, 152, 182, 298, 376, 379, 384, 386
Lancaster, 244
land market, 155, 171
landlords, 153, 160, 161, 171, 222, 230, 272, 273, 275, 299, 300,
301
landownership, 154
landscape, 154, 156, 299, 375, 376, 384, 385
landscape parks, 279
Laqueur, Thomas, 337
lascars, 358
Laslett, Peter, 174
Latham, Richard, 152
Laud, William, 124
law of contract, 204
law, culture of, 202, 203, 212–214, 216–217, 218, 223, 230, 234,
281, 375
law, rule of, 202, 213
Le Strange, Alice, 152, 282
Lee, Joseph, 299
Leeds, 132, 181, 182, 248
legal profession 202, 218, 272, 295, 305 see professions
legal system, 23, 25, 189, 200
Leicester, 47, 49
Leicestershire, 130, 159, 274, 376
Leland, John, 156
Lemnius, Levine, 341
Levant Company, 361, 366
Levellers, 191
Levine, David, 91, 318
licensing of the press, 140
Lichfield, 143
life-cycle, 249
Lilburne, John, 191, 194
Lincoln, 143
Lincolnshire, 153, 230, 380, 383
lineage, 252, 272
literacy, 129, 134, 135–138, 191
extent of, 136–137
litigation 
decline of, 205
growth of, 200–202, 295
Liverpool, 179, 182, 248
Locke, John, 260, 299, 306
Loder, Robert, 152
Lollards, 108
London, 19, 25, 28, 42, 43, 77, 87, 88, 108, 114, 122, 124, 132, 133,
135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 152, 169, 174, 175,
178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191, 206, 209, 211,
 218, 233, 234, 244, 246, 247, 257, 258, 261, 275, 276, 279,
292, 293, 311, 312, 315, 321, 324, 353, 355, 357, 359, 364,
374, 386
Loughborough, 51
Lowe, Roger, 64
Ludlow, 183, 293
Luther, Martin, 108

magistrates, 41, 42, 45, 52, 200, 216, 218, 221, 233, 234, 237, 238,
291, 322, see justices of the peace
Maidstone, 42, 46, 47, 50
Maldon, 235
Malthus, Thomas, 166, 170
Manchester, 132, 182, 249
Mandeville, Bernard, 260
manor, 86, 154
courts, 90, 155
customs of, 154
demesnes, 154, 157, 161, 227
lords of, 41, 87, 154, 157, 161, 168, 227, 228, 272, 275, 297, 379
manor house, 88
subtenants, 158, 161, 168
tenants, 87, 154, 168, 204, 275
many-headed monster, 94, 221, 222, 228, 239
maps, 25
Margate, 183
marital fertility, 71
market areas, 181, 182, 244
marketing, 248, 292
Marlborough, 48
Marprelate tracts, 116
marriage, 61, 63, 244, 250, 273, 311
age at first, 62–63, 167
choice, 62, 63–65, 251
divisions of labour, 331–333
marital relations, 65–71, 252–254, 332, see also domestic
violence
marriage Duty Act, 40
marriage law, 203, 204, 333
Martindale, Adam, 132, 133
martyrs, 114
Marx, Karl, 4, 167
Mary I, queen of England and Ireland, 32, 33, 34, 113, 354, 376
Mary, queen of Scots, 120
Maryland, 96, 358
masculinity, 68, 69, 231, 281, 331, 333, 340–343, 365, 382, see also
gender; patriarchy; sexuality
mass, 111, 112, 378
Massachusetts, 94, 96, 121
Massie, Joseph, 318
Matar, Nabil, 353
material culture, 242–243
of work, 249
materiality, 259, 261, 262
McKendrick, Neil, 249, 250, 254
meaner sort of people, 296, 310, 314, see also labourers; poverty
perceptions of, 325–326
 self-identity, 326–327
Mediterranean, 360, 368
memory 
popular, 375–387
sites, 384
merchants, 108, 131, 183, 186, 251, 255, 272, 292, 294, 361, 365,
366
middle sort of people, 47, 48, 65, 92, 97, 133, 134, 141, 190, 222,
228, 231, 232, 252, 255, 278, 290, 291, 300, 301, 374, see
also professions; legal profession
identity, 292, 294, 295, 297
ideology, 304–305
material culture, 296–297
Midlands Rising, 222, 229, 230, 231
migration, 182, 314, 315, 323, 355, 357, 362, 363, 365
Mildmay, Lady Grace, 60
missionary priests, 120
Missleden, Edward, 294
mobility 
geographical, 25, 77, 91, 179, 255
social, 91, 129, 131, 132, 272, 273
modernisation, 2, 8, 12, 85, 158, 349
monarchy, 21, 30, 32, 33, 34, 111, 200, 224, 261
monasteries, dissolution of, 109, 110, 186, 201, 226, 273, 274, 304,
321
Monmouth rebellion, 214
monuments, 87, 255
Moore, John, 299
moral economy, 90, 233, 236, 237
mortality, 182, 256, 316
Morton, A. L., 270
Moxon, Joseph, 260
Mulcaster, Richard, 23
Muldrew, Craig, 163, 205
Münster, 121
Muslims, 352, 353, 361
muster lists, 51, 317

Nash, Beau, 258

national consolidation, 356–357
national identity, 20, 28, 34
national stereotypes, 21
naturalisation, 355, 364, 365
Nef, J. U., 4
neighbourhood, 86, 88, 192, 295
neighbours, 86, 87, 141, 215
Netherlands, 176, 262, 352, 355, 361, 363
New England, 94, 96, 122, 362
New Jersey, 362, 363
New Model Army, 124
New York, 363, 364
Newbury, 51
Newcastle upon Tyne, 191, 192, 248
Newdigate, Sir Richard, 61, 73
Newfoundland, 362
Newmarket, 279
newspapers, 133, 145–146
Norden, John, 42
Norfolk, 94, 96, 130, 152, 153, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 171, 227,
274, 275, 320, 379
Northampton, 47, 50, 51, 133, 143
Northamptonshire, 274, 313
Northern Rising, 30, 32, 120, 227, 377, 380
Norwich, 44, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 87, 94, 179, 187, 235, 293, 310, 311,
320, 355, 376, 379
Nottinghamshire, 137, 385
Nova Scotia, 362
novels, 146, 246

office-holders, 47, 222

Ogilvie, Sheilagh, 188
oligarchy, 185, 186, 293
Ottoman Empire, 361, 364, 366
overseers of the poor, 93, 245, 291, 301, 302, 322, 326
Overton, Mark, 162
Oxford, 46, 131, 132, 133, 137, 140, 143, 360
Oxfordshire Rising, 228

Padstow, 183
pamphlets, 145
pardoning, 213, 224
parenting, 71, 74–76
parishes, 40, 43, 46, 48, 85, 86, 91, 99, 109, 117, 245, 301, 315,
316, see also Poor Laws
parish chest, 46
parish church, 87, 88, 111, 255, 259, 384
parish registers, 318
Parliament, 22, 23, 31, 34, 187, 199, 200, 202, 217, 238, 359, 365,
383
patriarchy, 330, 335, 342
patriarchal norms, 331–334
patronage, 250, 291, 301, 302
Peacey, Jason, 31
pedlars, 143, 244
Pelham, Thomas, duke of Newcastle, 302
Peltonen, Markku, 278
Pennsylvania, 363
Penrith, 183
Penryn, 183
Pepys, Samuel, 61, 296, 343
perambulation, 377, 385
Percy, Thomas, duke of Northumberland, 272
periodicals, 305
perjury, 216
Perkins, William, 117, 123
persecution, 114, 124, 125
petitioning, 226, 227, 237, 238
Petty, Sir William, 43, 54
petty treason, 89
Phelps Brown, E. H., 311
Philadelphia, 364
philanthropy, 130
Philip II, king of Spain, 34
Phythian-Adams, Charles, 179
Pilgrimage of Grace, 110, 222, 226, 227
pilgrimages, 111
plague, 40, 41, 50, 51, 192, 316, 326
players, 19, 29, see also Queen’s Men
plays, 27, 29, 140, 230
history plays, 28
pleasure gardens, 258
Pocahontas, 366
politeness, 190, 192, 279, 306
political arithmetic, 43, 47, 54
political history, 270
Ponet, John, 33
Poole, 44
Poor Laws, 40, 45, 63, 93, 245, 258, 295, 301, 302, 320, 322–323,
327
impact of, 323–325
implementation, 324
poor rate, 93, 277, 303, 322, 324
population, 165–167, 176, 201, 292, 314
rural, 154, 313
urban, 176–178, 313
Portsmouth, 183
Portugal, 361
postal system, 25, 183
Pouch, Captain, 229
poverty, 41, 45, 64, 75, 77, 97, 208, 225, 258, 261, 295, 299, 310,
315
and the life-cycle, 320
 censuses of the poor, 52–53, 319
classifying the poor, 319
defining the poor, 318
incidence, 320–321
stigmatisation, 326
preaching, 117
prejudice, ethnic, 356–357
Presbyterians, 125
Preston, 51, 179
prices, 160, 168, 201, 225, 248, 273, 274, 292, 298, 314, see also
dearth
print, 26, 27, 31, 117, 129, 136, 138, 190, 246, 260, 262, 346
market for, 138–142
printers, 33
privacy, 89
Privy Council, 22, 92, 187, 200, 373, 386
probate inventories, 162, 164, 243, 245, 247, 317
proclamations, 224
professions, 255, 272, 292, 296
profit, 291, 292, 294, 295, 298, 299, 300, 302
protest, 88, 90, 221, 222, 224, 225, 379
agrarian, 227–232, 379–380
food prices, 232–236
forms, 226–227
industrial, 236–238
leadership, 229
Protestantism, 33, 34, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 259
Providence Island, 363
Psalms, metrical, 117, 139
puritans, 88, 94, 95, 96, 98, 115, 116, 118, 119, 254

Quakers, 49, 74, 98, 124, 254, 354, 365

quarter sessions, 200, 344, 383
Queen’s Bench, Court of, see King’s/Queen’s Bench, Court of
Queen’s Men, 19, 28, 29, 35

race, 342, 354, 366–367, 368

Reading, 46, 54
rebellion, 221, 222, 226, 227–228, 373, 374, 376, 379, 380
recusants, 49, 120
female, 207
Reformation, 86, 92, 93, 107, 108, 113, 116, 117, 121, 126, 130, 134,
138, 143, 185, 186, 223, 226, 259, 321, 325, 331, 343, 375
memories of, 377–379
refugees, religious, 355, 362
regional differences, 354
regulation, social, 205
relics, 111
religious differences, 354
Renaissance, 192
rents, 154, 157, 160, 167, 168, 222, 227, 274, 298
repression, 223, 239, 379
reputation, 65, 84, 89, 202, 296, 300
Restoration, 125, 132, 211, 279, 299, 382, 383
Reynell, Carew, 315
Richard II, king of England, 373
riot, 221, 223
 enclosure, 229–232, 380
food, 233–236
Riot Act, 238
Roanoke, 360, 361
Rolfe, John, 366
Rosenheim, James, 271, 277
Royal African Company, 359
Rudé, George, 270
Rutland, 318
Ryder, Dudley, 305–306
Rye, 50, 141

Salisbury, 41, 44, 52, 312, 320, 323, 325, 326

Samuel, Raphael, 270
Sandwich, 183
Savile, George, 279
Saxton, Christopher, 25
Scarborough, 276, 279
Schofield, R. S., 63
schools, 296
academies, dissenting, 133
charity, 135
curricula, 24, 131
grammar, 130–131, 132
numbers of, 134
petty, 130
Scot, Reginald, 122
Scotland, 20, 21, 107, 112, 124, 176, 186, 222, 352, 356, 362, 363,
376
Scott, James C., 49
Scribner, Robert, 98
seamen, 310, 365
secrecy, 47
secularisation, 259
Selden, John, 132
sense of the past, 375, 376, see historical writing; memory, popular
separatists, 120, 121, 124
serfdom, 154
sermons, 223, 230
servants, 60, 61, 66, 73, 89, 152, 163, 167, 244, 248, 249, 250, 279,
300, 310, 311, 327, 345, 363
Seton-Watson, Hugh, 21
settlement laws, 40, 301, 303, 322–323
settlement patterns, 156
sexuality, 330, 343–349
adultery, 345–346
colonial sexual encounters, 366
erotica, 338
female, 335–336, 346
non-Europeans, 349
pre-marital, 343–345
prostitution, 349
regulation of, 343, 346
reproductive theories, 345
same-sex relations, 346–349
sexual identity, 347, 348–349, 350
sexual reputation, 345
Seymour, Edward, duke of Somerset, Lord Protector, 227
Shagan, Ethan, 92
Shakespeare, William, 21, 203, 205, 374
Shammas, Carole, 253
Sharpe, J. A., 85
Shaw-Taylor, Leigh, 158, 163
Sheffield, 141, 182, 248
sheriffs, 203, 221, 275
shops, 248, 258
rural, 170, 301
urban, 244
Shrewsbury, 132, 143, 201, 236
Shropshire, 47, 91, 136, 143, 201, 301, 383
siblings, 73–74
Simons, Patricia, 339
Simpson, Alan, 274
Skimmington, Lady, 229
skimmington ride, 237, 345
Slack, Paul, 247
slavery, 359, 363, 365, 366, 367
Smith, Adam, 248, 256
Smith, Captain John, 358
Smith, Sir Thomas, 25, 35
Smyth, John, of Nibley, 354
sociability, 88, 89, 190, 191, 258, 276, 277, 303
social emulation, 250
social history, 5–9, 14, 85, 157, 269, 270, 271, 387
social networks, 61, 91
social polarisation, 94, 315
social welfare. see Poor Laws; poverty
Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 135
soldiers, 310, 363, 365, 383
Somerset, 142, 182, 235
Somerset decision (1772), 359
sorts of people, 10, 290, 295 see also gentry; meaner sort of people;
middle sort of people
South Carolina, 363
Southampton, 41, 42
Spain, 120, 276, 352, 361
spas, 276
spinsters, 252
Spufford, Margaret, 244
Stafford, Edward, duke of Buckingham, 272
Staffordshire, 141, 158
Star Chamber, 200
state formation, 39, 40, 48, 51, 91, 99, 184, 187, 189, 199, 304
Stoke, battle of, 376
Stone, Lawrence, 85
Stout, William, 244
Stow, John, 42
Styles, John, 253
Suffolk, 136, 143, 159, 182, 227, 274, 312, 318, 323
suicide, 217
Sunderland, 182, 191, 248
Surrey, 130, 132, 137, 141
surveying, 25, 39, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54
surveyors, 41, 49
Sussex, 300, 302
Swansea, 183
Swift, Jonathan, 145

taste, 251, 256

Tawney, R. H., 157, 158, 160, 167, 222, 295
taxation, 294, 301
Hearth Tax, 40, 318, 321
Lay Subsidy of 1524/5, 318
tea, 258, 303, 304
teachers, female, 134, 135, 138
tenant right, 380
Tenterden, 48
tenures, 154, 222, 227, 229, see also entry fines; landlords; rents
copyhold, 154, 160, 382
freehold, 154
leasehold, 153, 157, 160, 161
Tewkesbury, 47
theatres, 258
Thetford, 179
Thirsk, Joan, 156, 247, 248
Thomason, George, 145
Thompson, E. P., 236, 270
Thorold Rogers, James, 4
thrift, 296
Tichborne dole, 88, 98
Tittler, Robert, 186
tobacco, 362
Toleration Act, 126
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 85
town halls, 88, 186, 293
toys, 249
trade, 40, 170, 182, 183, 247, 294, 357, 361
coastal, 183
internal, 292
trade depression, 225, 314, 316
tradesmen, 47, 131, 137, 294, 298, 302
trading companies, 183, 360, 366
trained bands, 222
travellers, 360
treason, 212, 215, 223
Trumbach, Randolph, 348
trust, 294, 295
Tunbridge Wells, 276
Turner, Francis, 40
Turner, Thomas, 301–304, 306
Tusser, Thomas, 299
tutors, private, 129, 133, 276
Tyndale, William, 139

Union, Act of, 20

Union of the Crowns, 381, 382
universities, 131, 133, 250, 357
urban institutions, 184–188, 190, 193, 291, 293
urban renaissance, 174, 176, 190, 315
urban system, 179–181, 248
urbanisation, 175–176, 316
vagrants, 45, 50, 93, 206, 299, 310, 315, 319, 322
Valor Ecclesiasticus, 40
Van Dyck, Anthony, 359
vestry, 53, 87, 92, 93, 135, 291, 300, 301, 303
Vickery, Amanda, 271
villages, 156
Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham, 130
Virginia, 95, 183, 194, 358, 368
Virginia Company, 363
voluntary associations, 191, 278, 305, 306

wages, 160, 164, 167, 223, 225, 237, 238, 245, 274, 310, 311–312,
314
real wages, 314, 315
wage-earning population, 317–318
Wakefield, 141
Wales, 21, 176, 182, 352, 356, 362
Walsingham, Sir Francis, 28, 35
Walter, John, 208
Warrington, 143
Warwick, 320
Warwickshire, 271, 273, 276, 385
Watt, John, 24
Weber, Max, 85, 261, 295
West Indies, 353, 363, 364, 367, see also Barbados; Jamaica
Western Rebellion (1549), 112, 379
Westminster, 43, 49, 53, 92, 182
Westmorland, 53, 143, 381
Wheatcroft, Leonard, 74
Whitehaven, 248
Whittle, Jane, 282
widows, 204, 253, 320, 383
Wigan, 179
William III, king of England, Scotland and Ireland,, 126, 355, 386
Wills, Statute of, 203
Wilson, Adrian, 270
Wilson, Thomas, 27
Wiltshire, 92, 130, 141, 182, 327, 382
Winchester, 42, 49, 276
Winstanley, Gerard, 95
Winthrop, John, 95, 96
witch trials, 96, 215, 216
witchcraft, 89, 90, 92, 94, 122, 327
Wolsey, Cardinal, Thomas, 40, 132
women, 89, 90, 122, 134, 230, 235, 333, 335, 339, 349, see also
education; gender; household; marriage; parenting;
sexuality; widows; writers
litigants, 204
work, 69, 152, 164, 165, 302, 311, 332
Wood, Andy, 274, 281, 297, 299
Worcester, 236, 320
Wordie, J. R., 159
workhouses, 323, 327
worship, 26, 27, 32, 378
Wren, Matthew, bishop of Norwich, 94
Wrightson, Keith, 25, 86, 91, 181, 192, 318
Wrigley, E. A., 7, 63, 164, 170, 171, 178, 179, 191, 313
writers, 146
female, 147
Wyclif, John, 108

Yarmouth, 179, 380

yeomen, 131, 137, 161, 169, 170, 231, 246, 251, 273, 292, 298
York, 87, 181, 183, 194, 229, 258, 276, 293
Yorkshire, 63, 94, 133, 136, 141, 156, 181, 194, 225, 231, 274, 379,
380, 381, 382
Young, Arthur, 171
youth, 72–73, 231, 249, 250, 341, 342