Social Change and Continuity

England 1550-1750

Barry Coward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317886488
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Barry Coward has revised his wide-ranging text which outlines the major social changes that occurred in England in the two hundred years after the Reformation. He examines the religious and intellectual changes resulting from revolutionary pressures, as well as considering the impact of rapid inflation and population expansion in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Overall he stresses that social change combined with social continuity to produce a distinctive early modern English society.

PART ONE: THE STRUCTURE OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH SOCIETY

1 THE SOCIAL ORDER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

The first major problem facing social historians of early modern England is to find ways to describe its social structure. One possible solution is to apply concepts and terminology used to describe either the industrialised society of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, like ‘class’, or the societies of traditional, Third World countries, like ‘peasantry’. This is tempting, since early modern England was not a ‘pre-industrialised’ society, and recent writing has weakened the idea that in a few decades after 1780 English society was suddenly and fundamentally transformed by ‘The Industrial Revolution’ [29]. Furthermore, early modern English society had characteristics in common with some present-day underdeveloped countries: a fragile agrarian economy, widespread underemployment and a massive poverty problem. Yet these similarities ought not to obscure some basic differences between early modern English society and other societies both at the time and later that will become apparent in what follows. A central feature of early modern English society that this book seeks to underline is its distinctiveness.

So, how should one describe a society that was different in many respects from both modern industrialised and underdeveloped societies? Contemporary descriptions – what people of early modern England thought their society was like – are the best guides. When using the writings of contemporaries, however, it is essential to make clear a distinction between those who described their society as they wanted it to be and those who described society as they saw it. A recurrent literary theme from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is the superiority of an idealised fixed society in which people remained in the ‘degree’ into which they had been born, rather than a fluid, changing society. It was essential for good social and political order, it was believed, that the rich should remain rich and the poor remain poor. This state of affairs was held to be ordained by God as an indispensable part of a unified and ordered universe. In the sixteenth century this ‘world picture’ was most frequently expressed by the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which has received widespread attention from both historians and specialists in the literature of Elizabethan England [23]. Less widely studied, but equally important, is the persistence of this idea in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when writers like Nathaniel Crouch in 1681 [Doc, 2] and Robert Moss in 1708 elaborated on the same theme as that developed by the anonymous author of The Homily of Obedience in 1547.

Nor was this ideal expressed only in print. The perceived necessity of an hierarchical, fixed society as a precondition of social stability [Doc. 1] accounts for the many elaborate devices used to emphasise the existing social order. Much more so than in modern times extraordinary care was taken to ensure, for example, that where people stood in ceremonial processions, where they sat in church, the order in which they were listed in official documents, and the ways they were addressed all accorded with their perceived ranking in society. Attempts were even made in the sixteenth century to force people to wear the type and quality of cloth and ornaments appropriate to their status in order to make plain the distinctiveness of social ‘degrees’ [16]. Yet, the frequent emphasis on an ideal ‘world picture’ and the importance of precedence reflects (and was a reaction to) the fact that in reality early modern English society, though highly stratified, was not rigidly fixed; rather, it was more fluid, open and characterised by more upward and downward mobility than many conservative-minded contemporaries would have liked, for reasons that will be discussed in Chapter 2.

Fortunately, there was a second group of writers in early modern England who attempted to describe society as they saw it and who laid less stress on society as they would have liked it to be [13]. For that reason the writings of sixteenth-century social commentators like Sir Thomas Smith [Doc, 3], William Harrison and Thomas Wilson and the more elaborate statistical analyses of William Petty, Gregory King and others published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provide the best starting-point for an understanding of the structure of early modern English society [339; 342; 348; 350; 354].

There are two features of their analyses that are especially valuable. First, they recognised, not always approvingly, that social changes were taking place. Sir Thomas Smith’s comment that ‘gentlemen be made good cheap’ [Doc, 3] illustrates that even the biggest gulf in early modern English society, that separating gentlemen from the rest, could be bridged [Doc, 17], Secondly, they provide a good basis on which to build an acceptable working description of the social order of early modern England. Their methods of classifying individuals into social groups vary, but most of them recognised that social status was decided by a mixture of determinants: blood ties, marriage, the type of office held or lifestyle adopted and especially by wealth. The resulting social framework (as they saw it) was an hierarchical one with a class of ‘gentlemen’ at its apex. Gentility had lost its military function by the sixteenth century and what now bound all gentlemen together was not the freedom to bear arms, but the possession of sufficient wealth to enable leisure and free time to be devoted to the service of the commonwealth. There were differences of wealth and status between gentlemen, a fact which contemporaries recognised by detailed discussions of the differences between those who held titles of peerages (dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons and, from 1611, baronets), knights, esquires and mere ‘gentlemen’. But contemporary commentators were (rightly) quick to emphasise that these differences were less important than the gulf which separated this premier social group in English landed society from those who were not ‘gentlemen’. These were those who did not possess enough wealth to give them leisure and independence, and in the strict hierarchy of landed society the most wealthy of these non-gentlemen were usually called ‘yeomen’ and the less wealthy ‘husbandmen’. The use of these terms by social commentators and also by others in official documents and in letters is too frequent for them to be ignored and suggests that they accorded with social reality. The differences between yeomen and husbandmen were great, although, unlike gentlemen, both had to work with their hands for a living as farmers. Yeomen might be owner-occupiers or tenants of others but the basic determinant of their social status was the amount of land they farmed; yeomen were large farmers. Husbandmen, on the other hand, were much poorer and often farmed little more than smallholdings. Sometimes they are difficult to distinguish from labourers and servants, the social groups at the base of the pyramid of society. As will be seen, recent work has shown that these dependent people were not an undifferentiated social mass, but the contemporary practice of treating them as one broad group does seem to be a useful one.

The more one reads the writings of contemporary commentators, however, the more it becomes clear that their classifications do not provide a complete description of the social order. What gaps in their analyses need to be filled? The first and largest is the omission of women. All contemporary social commentators were men and they describe an adult, male society. This is not surprising given the patriarchal nature of early modern society and the subservient position women were expected to have in it. As will be seen, the household was the basic unit of society, and women, like children and servants, were dependants of the male heads of households – their roles and status were not considered worthy of separate treatment. Such an omission obviously vitiates the usefulness of contemporary analyses, leaving a wide gap in the social history of the period that is only slowly being filled.

Most contemporary descriptions are similarly uninformative about regional variations. William Harrison’s vital qualification that improved living standards in his own day (the later sixteenth century) were limited to ‘these southern parts’ [352 pp. 69–70] is a rare reference in this type of writing to the enormous regional disparities in the distribution of wealth between the poorer northern and western counties and the more prosperous south and east, which is illustrated in subsidy assessments [20]. Nor do these writings reflect regional variations in economic and social structures that cut across the basic north west/south east division. Again it has been left to social historians to devise ways of describing and analysing regional differences in social structures and the nature of social change.

Perhaps the most important amendment of all that needs to be made to the contemporary descriptions of the social order already mentioned is to clarify the position of those social groups that do not fit easily into an hierarchy of landed society. The most important attempt by other contemporaries to deal with this problem is by what K. Wrightson (in [10]) has called ‘the language of sorts’, used at first in a simple two-part model (‘the better sort’ and ‘the poorer sort’), to which many commentators later added a third group, ‘the middling sort’. Faced with the task of describing a period of rapid social change, ‘the language of sorts’ has as many attractions for social historians of early modern England as it had for contemporaries. Not the least of these is the use of ‘the middling sort’ as a means of identifying the unprecedented expansion in early modern England of the numbers of merchants, craftsmen and professional people, as well as substantial farmers, that do not fit easily into analytical models based on ‘rank’ and ‘degree’. It has consequently been enthusiastically adopted by historians who see a need to write the social history of early modern England not from above or below but from the middle [10]. However, given the different senses in which contemporaries used it, as well as the major differences in wealth and political and religious views that divided ‘the middling sort’, ‘the language of sorts’ can hardly be seen as a totally satisfactory solution to the problem of classifying people who lived in towns and who did not earn their living on the land.

Nor is this surprising; the problems are difficult ones. Although some professional people (doctors, lawyers, and so on), great officeholders and important merchants had wealth at least equal to that possessed by great landowners, ought one to treat them together in the same category as ‘gentlemen’? Similarly, although some tradesmen and craftsmen were as wealthy as yeomen and husbandmen farmers, were they of equal status? There can be no simple answers to these questions. The distinctions between landed and non-landed social groups were much less clear-cut before 1750 than in British society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As will be seen, much manufacturing was carried on in the countryside by people who were also farmers and farmworkers; dual (sometimes multiple) occupations were common. Clearly there are also dangers in exaggerating the distinction between landowners, farmers, merchants, officeholders and professional people. The sons of yeomen farmers were often apprenticed to merchants. Landowners frequently invested money in trade and industry and allowed their younger sons to become lawyers, doctors and clergymen. Successful merchants and professional people, in turn, bought country estates and adopted the life-styles associated with gentlemen landowners.

However, there are good reasons for classifying landed and non-landed groups separately. To do otherwise would be to obscure the growing social importance of the latter. Among the mass of people the dual economy was by no means ended by 1750, but it is highly likely that in the preceding two centuries there was a slow but persistent trend for dual occupations to become less common and for tradesmen and craftsmen to emerge in society as distinct groups. Similarly, the ties between land, trade and the professions remained significant, but landed gentlemen sought (increasingly) to differentiate themselves from those whose wealth was not primarily landed. Whether merchants could become gentlemen was a matter of debate even in the sixteenth century. By the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries hostility between the ‘landed interest’ and ‘monied interest’ had major political repercussions and the term ‘squire’ evolved to distinguish landowners from the ‘pseudo-gentry’ of the towns [14]. Landowners felt themselves to be a distinct social group and it would be unwise of historians to overlook that perception, which was a symptom of the growing importance of mercantile, financial and professional groups in English society by the mid-eighteenth century.

2 GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY

As the most perceptive contemporary social commentators, like Smith, Harrison and Wilson, realised early modern England was characterised by much upward and downward social mobility. It is only relatively recently, however, that historians have discovered that this was paralleled by a high degree of geographical mobility. Villages in pre-industrialised England were not close-knit communities inhabited by people who rarely moved from their place of birth. In the centuries before the Industrial Revolution most English men and women migrated from their homes at least once during their lives. That this was not a phenomenon particular to certain regions only became clear in the 1960s when those attempting a large-scale exploitation of parish registers with the aim of reconstructing the population history of the whole country, came across a major problem: in many parishes when baptismal registers were compared with marriage and burial registers, it was found that individuals and often whole families had ‘disappeared’. This was a symptom of large-scale internal migration and historians working on a wide range of source material have confirmed the picture of the population of early modern England continually on the move [25–7].

This is by itself an important feature of English society, but it raises numerous historical questions. How far did people move? Where did they move to? Why did they move? Were there any changes in the pattern of population mobility over time? At present it is possible to answer the first two of these questions with more confidence than the last two. Short-distance migration was more common than long-distance. The bulk of the people looked at in all local studies moved only five or ten miles [149]. Long-distance migration did take place but was mainly restricted to the social groups at each extreme of the social spectrum, the very rich and the very poor. Land-owning gentlemen, merchants and professional people frequently travelled to London to pursue their legal, educational, political and social ambitions. Landless labourers and young people travelled long distances in search of work. Not all of this second group moved long distances – adolescent ‘servants in husbandry’ for example [210] – but some did, especially when hired as day-labourers at hiring fairs. Indeed some labourers spent much of their lives travelling and were separated by a very thin line from the vagrants, who tramped many miles throughout the length and breadth of the country [Doc. 26]. Twenty-two per cent of the vagrants who passed through early seventeenth-century Salisbury had already covered at least 100 miles [349]. Some poor migrants even went beyond the shores of England and emigrated to Ireland and the new southern colonies of North America as indentured servants, a step which was merely a logical extension of the mobile life-style of many of the labouring classes of early modern England [27].

The focus of most migration, however, was not the colonies. There were three more important directions of population movement. The first was rural-urban migration. All pre-industrialised towns relied on immigration to maintain and increase their populations, since none had birth rates higher than death rates. By virtue of its size, London was the most powerful magnet for migrants. In the 1550s, 1,060 men whose places of origin are known became citizens of London. Of these only 17 per cent were born in the capital [276]; while in the seventeenth century about one in eight English people visited London at some time in their lives [278]. The second main direction of movement was from ‘fielden’ to ‘forest’ areas, the explanation of which lies in the differing characteristics of these areas which will be explained later [pp. 14–18]. Finally, overlying these patterns, was a general movement from the north and west of England to the south and east. There is a slight possibility that this is an optical illusion resulting from the fact that most studies have been done of communities in the south and east of England. Studies of northern towns and villages might show migrants originating from the south and east. Until these are done, however, the present evidence is of a drift to the south and east, a trend which fits the unequal geographical distribution of wealth in England that has been commented on above.

It is harder to generalise about the motives for migration than it is to establish the patterns of population mobility, partly because motives for moving surely varied from individual to individual and the vast majority of these are unrecorded. It must be assumed that at least some of the reasons people moved are rooted in other characteristics of early modern English society, which will be discussed in due course. Three of these at least can be mentioned here. The first is the instability of the English agrarian economy (which will be discussed in the next section) which failed to provide sufficient constant employment opportunities and forced some people to tramp in search of work. The second is the attractions of town life, whether in the form of urban poor-relief schemes or cultural and social opportunities. The third is the pattern of marriage and family customs in early modern England, which ensured that a common feature of the lives of ordinary people was a period during their adolescence which was spent away from the family home. For at least ten years of their lives from the age of about fourteen, many people worked away from home and frequently found marriage partners and a new home there. Sixty per cent of the brides married in the Devon parish of Hartland in the first half of the seventeenth century had been born and baptised in another parish [153]. In Bottesford, Leicestershire, only 6.3 per cent of marriages between 1600 and 1679 were between couples who had been born in the village [90].

The boldest general hypothesis that attempts to explain the scale, type and changes in the pattern of migration is that which begins with the assumption that migrants can be divided into two groups [25]. ‘Subsistence’ migrants moved because they were compelled to do so by the need to find work and other means of subsistence. ‘Betterment’ migrants moved, not out of sheer necessity but because of a desire to better themselves. For the period before 1640 subsistence migrants were drawn mainly from the poorer social groups and travelled long distances, often alone. (Bands of masterless people roaming the country begging and thieving were a figment of the frightened imaginations of men of property and authority.) Betterment migrants came from more wealthy families and usually travelled short distances, typically often only to the nearest town to serve as apprentices. After 1660 it may be that this pattern changed and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• An introduction to the series
• Note on referencing system
• PART ONE: THE STRUCTURE OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH SOCIETY
• PART TWO: CHANGING MATERIAL CONDITIONS
• PART THREE: CHANGING IDEAS
• PART FOUR: ASSESSMENT
• PART FIVE: DOCUMENTS
• Bibliography
• Index