Chapter 1 examines demographic ideas in early Tudor England, centering on connections between the mobility and mutability of particular groups of people. It first delineates sources for demographic ideas, in particular the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics, and emphasizes the centrality of qualitative concerns about multitudes of people as a factor in the health of the polis. It then turns to a major context for English demographic thought, the enclosure of land from the late fifteenth century. It delineates a key theme in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of agrarian complaint, detailed in More’s Utopia: causal links between enclosure and depopulation (the removal of a functional multitude from a specific locale) and between mobility and degeneration (here, of ploughmen displaced by enclosure into criminals). The final section looks at the development – in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal, and an anonymous set of “Polices” – of an idea of policy centered on restricting mobility to prevent degeneration and maintain proportions and relations between functional multitudes as components of the body politic.

The events of the Henrician Reformation served to put pressure on the problem of counsel and especially on its proposed timely solution. A second generation of English humanists took on this question, thinking more deeply about what the opportune moment was and how it related to the question of frank counsel. Thomas Starkey makes this issue central to his Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, criticizing More’s approach, though he never resolves the problem fully. It is Thomas Elyot, in his works published in 1531 and 1533, who writes at length on the issue of right-timing and counsel, like Starkey coming to a critique of the ‘silence until kairos’ strategy espoused by Erasmus and More. These writers are also directly concerned with the relationship between counsel and command. In the context of the late 1520s and 1530s, theirs is a concern that counsel does not have enough authority over command, and that it will need to be supported or bolstered in some fashion to have its proper influence.