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.’ 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. 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. 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,

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. There were isolated sceptics, scoffers and freethinkers.

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.

‘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. 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.

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. 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. A second important trend has been an emphasis on London.