The search for the 'middle sort of people' in England, 1600-1800

Historical Journal

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 277-293

  French, H R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0003105008     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X99008985     Document Type: Article

References (164)

1. C. Hill, Society and purilanism in pre-revolutionary England (London, 1964), p. 134;
2. idem, Change and continuity in seventeenth-century England (London, 1974), p. 208;
3. idem, The collected essays of Christopher Hill, 11: Religion and politics in seventeenth-century England (Brighton, 1986), p. 135;
4. idem, A nation of change and novelty: radical politics, religion and literature in seventeenth-century England (London, 1990), p. 10 and comments, p. 99.
5. R. B. Manning, The English people and the English revolution, 1640-1649 (London, 1976), p. 154.
6. See A. MacLachlan, The rise and fall of revolutionary England: an essay on the fabrication of seventeenth-century history (Hampshire, 1996).
7. R. S. Neale, Class in English history, 1650-1850 (New Jersey, 1981), p. 96.
8. K. Wrightson, 'The social order of early-modern England: three approaches', in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith, and K. Wrightson, eds., The world we have gained: histories of population and social structure (Oxford, 1986), p. 191.
9. D. Cressy, 'Describing the social order of Elizabethan and Stuart England', Literature and History, 3 (Mar. 1976), pp. 29-44.
10. Smith's De republica anglorum was published posthumously in 1583, some twenty years after it was written, and after the appearance of Harrison's Description of England in 1577:
11. P. Laslett, The world we have lost (2nd edn, London, 1971), p. 31.
12. Chamberlayne's Angliae notitia appeared in 1669, and was reprinted regularly until 1702. He regarded trade as corrosive of gentility, and a means by which younger sons of the gentry were 'debased', and gave it an even lower ranking than Harrison or Smith, between copyholders and day labourers:
13. see L. Stone and J. C. F. Stone, An open elite? England, 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 20, 23.
14. W. Camden, Remains concerning Britain (1st edn, London, 1611; London, 1870).
15. W. Harrison, The description of England, ed. G. Edelen (Washington and New York, 1994), P. 118. While maintaining the legal distinction between free and non-freemen, Harrison proclaimed that 'as for slaves and bondmen, we have none'. Here, he opted for contemporary social practice, rather than legal accuracy:
16. see D. MacCulloch, 'Bondmen under the Tudors', in C. Cross, D. M. Loades & J. J. Scarisbrick, eds., Law and government under the Tudors: essays presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on the occasion of his retirement (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 91-110.
17. G. S. Holmes, 'Gregory King and the social structure of pre-industrial England', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 27 (1977), p. 51.
18. Ibid., p. 56.
19. King's 'social table' formed the centrepiece of textbook discussions of the social order at the time of Holmes's piece.
20. See, for example, J. D. Chambers, Population, economy and society in preindustrial England (Oxford, 1972), pp. 38-9;
21. P. Mathias, The first industrial nation (London, 1970), pp. 23-31;
22. and Laslett, World we have lost, pp. 32-3;
23. H. Perkin, The origins of modern English society (London, 1972), pp. 20-1;
24. D. C. Coleman, The economy of England, 1450-1750 (Oxford, 1977), p. 6.
25. Holmes, 'Gregory King', p. 41.
26. K. Wrightson, English society, 1580-1680 (London, 1982), p. 37;
27. idem, 'The social order of early-modern England', p. 183;
28. idem, 'Estates, degrees and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England', in P. J. Corfield, ed., Language, history and class (Oxford, 1991);
29. idem, '"Sorts of people" in Tudor and Stuart England', in J. Barry and C. Brooks, eds., The middling sort of people: culture, society and politics in England, 1550-1800 (London, 1994), pp. 28-51.
30. Wrightson, '"Sorts of people"', p. 34.
31. Ibid., p. 41.
32. Ibid., p. 45.
33. Wrightson, English society, pp. 64-5.
34. P. J. Corfield, 'Class by name and number in eighteenth-century Britain', History, 72 (1987), pp. 38-61;
35. idem, Language, history and class, pp. 101-30.
36. Idem, 'Class by name and number', p. 60.
37. D. Rollison, The local origins of modern society: Gloucestershire, 1500-1800 (London and New York, 1992), p. 150.
38. J. Rule, Albion's people: English society, 1714-1815 (London, 1992), p. 55;
39. W. A. Speck, Stability and strife: England, 1714-1760 (London, 1977), p. 34;
40. C. Herrup, 'The counties and the country: some thoughts on seventeenth-century historiography', in G. Eley and W. Hunt, eds., Reviving the English revolution: reflections and elaborations on the work of Christopher Hill (London, 1988), p. 300;
41. P. Earle, The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London, 1660-1730 (London, 1989), p. 3.
42. J. J. Looney, 'Cultural life in the provinces: Leeds and York, 1720-1820', in M. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim, eds., The first modern society: essays in English history in honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), p. 489.
43. E. P. Thompson, 'Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without the class?', Social History, 3 (1978), p. 143.
44. Speck, Stability and strife, p. 34.
45. P. Borsay, The English urban renaissance: culture and society in the provincial town, c. 1680-1750 (Oxford, 1989), p. 172.
46. Earle, English middle class, p. 3.
47. P. Langford, Public life and the propertied Englishman, 1689-1798 (Oxford, 1991), p. 10.
48. J. H. Hexter, 'The myth of the middle-class in Tudor and Stuart England', in Reappraisals in history (London, 1961), p. 74.
49. Corbet's 'middle rank' were as much a polemical construct as a social category. He saw the possession of economic independence by the 'middle rank'-and their religious zeal-as the foundation for their political role, giving them a financial bulwark against clientage, and a desire to preserve the social order. Therefore, Corbet's 'middle rank' had to be composed of men of financial independence, copyholding yeomen, smaller freeholders, and clothiers managing their own trade, rather than the equally numerous tenant-farmers, non-freeholding retailers, and master-weavers.
50. D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford, 1991), p. 2.
51. Ibid., p. 3.
52. D. Defoe, The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders (Oxford, 1991), p. 60. His description of'middling' values is highly prescriptive, static, and defined against aspects of social mobility that he regards as inimical to these values. In The complete English tradesman (2nd edn, London, 1727) he equates the 'middle station' with industry, application, sobriety, and a lack of pretence; the individual who steps outside it, by aspiring to become 'gentlemen-tradesmen' is viewed as 'brass wash'd over with silver and no tradesman will take him for current', p. 117.
53. The best study of these earlier definitions is L. C. Stevenson, Praise and paradox: merchants and craftsmen in Elizabethan popular literature (Cambridge, 1984).
54. D. Wahrman, 'National society, communal culture: an argument about the recent historiography of eighteenth-century-Britain', Social History, 17 (1992), pp. 43-72.
55. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
56. Ibid., pp. 64-5.
57. P. Langford, A polite and commercial people: England, 1727-83 (Oxford, 1989), p. 61.
58. J. R. Kent, 'The rural "middling sort" in early modern England, circa 1640-1740: some economic, political and socio-cultural characteristics', Rural History, 10 (1999), pp. 19-54-
59. Wrightson, 'The social order', p. 178.
60. J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1987), p. 135;
61. S. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds: structures in life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989), p. 284. Rappaport's 'middle sort', based on livery company levies, includes the top two social strata omitted from Boulton's subsidy-based hierarchy.
62. V. Brodsky-Elliott, 'Mobility and marriage in pre-industrial England: a demographic and social structural analysis of geographic and social mobility and aspects of marriage, 1570-1690, with particular reference to London and general reference to Middlesex, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire' (Ph. D. thesis, Cambridge 1979).
63. R. Houston, 'Aspects of society in Scotland and north-east England, c. 1550-1750: social structure, literacy and geographical mobility' (Ph. D. thesis, Cambridge 1981).
64. Mobility 'closures' are discussed in A. Giddens, The class structures of the advanced societies (London, 1973), p. 107.
65. Giddens argues that such 'closures' are constrictions on opportunities for social mobility, caused not merely by narrow economic relationships to the Marxian 'means of production', but also by inequalities in skill levels, education, or labour relations. These 'closures' help produce the structure, or internal composition, of 'classes'.
66. Ibid., p. 106.
67. Ibid., p. 94.
68. Earle, Middle class, p. 36.
69. Ibid., p. 292.
70. Ibid., p. 331.
71. Herrup, 'The counties and the country', pp. 293-4.
72. K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling, 1525-1700 (ist edn, New York and London, 1979;
73. nd edn, Oxford, 1995).
74. S. D. Amussen, An ordered society: gender and class in early modern England (Oxford, 1988).
75. G. Nair, Highley: the development of a community, 1550-1880 (Oxford, 1988).
76. N. Alldridge, 'Loyalty and identity in Chester parishes, 1540-1640, ', in S. J. Wright, ed., Parish, church andpeople: local studies in lay religion, 1350-1750 (London, 1988), pp. 85-124.
77. 55J. S. Craig, 'Co-operation and initiatives: Elizabethan churchwardens and the parish accounts of Mildenhall', Social History, 18 (1993), pp. 357-80.
78. I. \V. Archer, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991).
79. P. Seaward, 'Gilbert Sheldon, the London vestries, and the defence of the church', in
80. T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie, eds., The politics of religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), PP. 49-74.
81. D. Underdown, Fire from heaven: the life of an English town in the seventeenth-century (London, I992).
82. S. Hindle, 'Power, poor relief, and social relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600-1800', Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 67-96.
83. See particularly pp. 78-80.
84. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 71.
85. J. S. Cox, Churchwardens' accounts from the fourteenth century to the close of the seventeenth century (London, 1913), p. 13.
86. Wrightson and Levine, Terling, p. 161.
87. D. Hey, The fery blades of Hallamshire: Sheffield and its neighbourhood, 1660-1740 (Leicester, 1991), p. 238.
88. 64Amussen, Ordered society, p. 139.
89. Seaward, 'Sheldon', pp. 59, 63.
90. M. Spufford, 'First steps in literacy: the reading and writing experiences of the humblest seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers', in
91. H. J. Graff, ed., Literacy and social development in the west: a reader (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 146-7.
92. R. S. Neale, 'Bath: ideology and Utopia', in P. Borsay, The eighteenth-century town: a reader in English urban history, 1680-1820 (London, 1990), p. 266.
93. J. Smail, 'The Stansfields of Halifax: a case study of the making of the middle class', Albion, 24 (1992), P. 43.
94. Nair, Highley, p. 129.
95. P. Borsay, Urban renaissance, p. 209. The same terminology occurs between 1600 and 1650 in petitions to the Essex quarter sessions against ale houses. Wrightson found that these 'originated from and bear the names of small groups of parishioners referring to themselves as "the inhabitants", or in such terms as "the better sort", "the honest neighbours", the "principall" or "chief inhabitants", "good and well disposed Christians", or those "well affected to religion and the publique good"'.
96. K. Wrightson, 'Alehouses, order and reformation', in E. and S. Yeo, eds., Popular culture and class conflict, 1590-1914: explorations in the history of labour and leisure (Brighton, 1980), p. 18.
97. Keith Lindley also found that the commissioners for sewers made the same dichotomous distinction between the 'better' and 'baser' sorts in fenland society in the early seventeeth century.
98. K. Lindley, Fenland riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982), pp. 28, 75.
99. Defoe, English tradesman, pp. 117-19.
100. A. Everitt, 'Social mobility in early-modern England', Past and Present, 33 (1966), p. 71.
101. Langford, Commercial people, p. 66.
102. Ibid., p. 67.
103. Kent, 'Rural "middle sort'", p. 42.
104. Ibid., p. 42.
105. Ibid., p. 41.
106. Wrightson and Levine, Terling, pp. 172-85.
107. For illustrations of the formation of this 'chief status, through office holding, wealth, and length of residence, and the differences with other 'inhabitants'
108. see H. R. French, 'Social status, localism and the "middle sort of people" in England, 1620-1750', Past and Present (forthcoming).
109. J. Barry, 'Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort', in Barry and Brooks, Middling sort, pp. 84-112.
110. J. Barry, 'Introduction', in ibid., p. 20.
111. Ibid., p. 85.
112. Ibid., p. 95.
113. Ibid., p. 98.
114. Ibid., p. 103.
115. Ibid..
116. Ibid., p. 104.
117. Ibid..
118. Ibid., 'Introduction', p. 24.
119. Smail, Origins, ch. 5, pp. 121-63;
120. ch-6, PP-164-87.
121. Ibid., p. 127.
122. Ibid., p. 130.
123. Ibid., p. 138.
124. Ibid., p. 145.
125. Ibid., p. 174.
126. Ibid., p. 176.
127. Ibid., p. 185.
128. Ibid., pp. 195-6.
129. Hexter, 'Myth', p. 75. Significantly, perhaps, Barry offers support to Wright's idea of a 'bourgeoisie' defined by 'bourgeois' values. Barry, Middling sort, p. 18.
130. Earle, Middle class, pp. 157-8.
131. Langford, Commercial people, p. 67.
132. Borsay, Urban renaissance, p. 207.
133. Ibid., p. 175.
134. It also contrasts strongly with the life experiences of many 'middling' autobiographers. Michael Mascuch notes that most of the consumption and accumulation among these individuals was directed towards economic survival. 'In the subjective perspective of reality framed by the middle sort, the openness of the abyss of poverty, into which providence might at any moment cast whole families, was more awesome than the openness of the elite into which individuals might climb', M. Mascuch, 'Social mobility and middling self-identity: the ethos of British autobiographers, 1600-1750', Social History, 20 (1995), p. 61.
135. L. Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material consumption in Britain, 1660-1760 (2nd edn, London, 1996) p. 169.
136. Weatherill's analysis of gentry probate inventories is compromised by the absence of (more wealthy) Prerogative Court of Canterbury materials in her samples.
137. Hunt, Middling sort, p. 15.
138. Ibid., p. 178.
139. Ibid., pp. 197-202.
140. Ibid., p. 213.
141. Kent, 'Rural "middle sort'", pp. 31-8.
142. Ibid., p. 31.
143. Cf. J. Rule, The experience of labour in the eighteenth century (London, 1981). Rule notes the importance of 'independence' to labour identity in the eighteenth century, defining it as the individual workman's 'capability of supporting himself and his family at a proper standard without having recourse to charity or the poor law', p. 202.
144. P. Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London and New York, 1988), pp. 162-82, 188-200.
145. Ironically, the growth in the legislative burden on parish government is also well described in J. R. Kent, 'The centre and the localities: state formation and parish government in England, circa 1640-1740', Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 363-404.
146. Hindle, 'Holland Fen', pp. 80-95. Hindle shows that parish administration changed over time, policy acquired different emphases, and expenditure increased between 1600 and 1800. However, he suggests that attitudes remained the same mixture of paternal provision and regulation of the 'settled' poor, with harsh exclusion and prosecution of interlopers. As legislation altered, so did the mechanisms by which this policy was executed.
147. D. Wahrman, '"Middle-class" domesticity goes public: gender, class and politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria', Journal of British Studies, 32 (1994), pp. 396-432.
148. See also idem, Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 1995).
149. Wahrman, '"Middle-class" domesticity', p. 401.
150. Ibid., p. 401.
151. Ibid., p. 423.
152. Ibid., p. 431.
153. Corfield demonstrates how these other characterizations persisted in social description of society into the second half of the eighteenth century. Corfield, 'Class by name and number', pp. 47-52.
154. D. Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven and London, 1998).
155. Ibid., pp. 50-1.
156. Ibid., p. 18. Cannadine employs W. G. Runciman's four 'systactic' sociological categories, 'a small elite', 'managers, businessmen and professionals', 'wage workers' and 'a deprived...sometimes criminalised underclass'.
157. J. C. D. Clark, English society, 1688-1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien regime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 70-1.
158. E. P. Thompson, Customs in common (London, 1991), p. 71.
159. See also P. King, 'Edward Thompson's contribution to eighteenth-century studies: the patrician-plebeian model reexamined', Social History, 21 (1996) pp. 215-28.
160. Peter Laslett's 'one-class' society may have found few advocates, but his understanding of the strength and pervasiveness of notions of gentility in the period deserves to be restated. See P. Laslett, The world we have lost: farther explored (London, 1983), pp. 22-52.
161. For an illustration of this tendency see John Brewer's consideration of the engraver Thomas Bewick and his Newcastle circle. J. Brewer, The pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century (London, 1997), pp. 499-530.
162. For example, Thomas Bewick joined Swarley's Club in Newcastle where 'every member should behave with decorum and like a Gentleman', Brewer, Pleasures, p. 508. In the wider world, he cultivated the 'simple dress, direct manners and rustic appearance' of the 'son of nature', ibid., p. 519. For further consideration of this point
163. see also H. R. French, '"Ingenious and learned gentlemen": social identity and self-fashioning among parish elites in Essex, 1680-1740', Social History (forthcoming).
164. Earle, Middle class, p. 336.