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.

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.