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’. 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 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.’

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’. 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. 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. 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. The division of labour between metropolitan and provincial historiography has only served to compound this sense of London's uniqueness. 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’.

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. 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’.

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.

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’. 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’. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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’. 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.

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’. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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’.

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. 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’. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.