The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600-1750

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The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600−1750 H. R. FRENCH

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  H. R. French 2007

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–929638–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To my parents

Preface T book has been a long time in the making. During its extended gestation, two things have happened to make it a rather different scholarly exercise than it appeared when I began my Ph.D. in 1989. The ﬁrst of these is the rash of books on, or around, the subject in the late 1980s and early 1990s, notably those by Peter Earle, Peter Borsay, and Paul Langford, the essays edited by Barry and Brooks, and the monographs of Wahrman, Smail, and Hunt. These seemed not only to deﬁne the ‘middle sort of people’, but then also to ﬂesh out their lives, experiences, and values. The second development is the ﬂowering of the ‘cultural turn’ in English social history, from the mid-1990s. This had two consequences. First, it shifted attention away from ‘structural’ concerns like the nature and inﬂuence of the social order, and preceding debates about ‘class’. Secondly, it emphasized the formative power of ‘cultural’ phenomena, notably discourse and material life. In relation to the present work, the former development appears to offer less of a challenge than the latter. I have argued in a number of articles that the existing literature on the ‘middle sort’ tends too readily to assume the existence of the social group, without exploring how its putative members understood their social position. Similarly, despite Smail’s detailed study of Halifax, and the wide-ranging surveys of Borsay and Langford, there have been no detailed studies of ‘middling’ identity in the provinces, particularly in rural England. The present study is therefore intended as an exploration of this identity within three (reasonably) representative, extra-metropolitan localities. In this sense, the volume is principally an attempt to plug a gap in the existing literature about the nature and bases of ‘middling’ social identity. Had I begun my research in the last ﬁve years, I would probably have devoted more attention than I have to three more overtly ‘cultural’ aspects. The ﬁrst of these is the construction of a printed discourse of the ‘middle sort’, and the ways in which this articulated assumptions about the identity, coherence, and visibility of the group in early modern society—although Wrightson and Corﬁeld have already made preliminary surveys of this in their depiction of the wider ‘language of sorts’ in this period. The second would have been to follow the lead of Alex Shepard, and explore how the contours of gender and patriarchy were mapped onto ‘middling’ status, particularly the extent to which the status conferred power on women as household managers, independent traders, and instructors of servants—although, again, Margaret Hunt has already covered this in some depth for the eighteenth-century ‘middle sort’. The third would be to delve further into the formative power of consumption, and the question posed by Earle of whether the ‘middle sort’ was shaped by their possession of ‘vaguely middle-class

Preface

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things’—although most recent studies of eighteenth-century ‘material culture’ take this for granted. The pursuit of such questions would have produced a book with different emphases, but not necessarily one with radically different conclusions. I remain unpersuaded about the reception and acceptance of a ‘middling’ or ‘bourgeois’ discourse among the groups discussed in this volume, and I also have my doubts about the formative power of ‘middling’ consumption. There is certainly room for a volume that extends Hunt’s research on ‘middling’ women’s business life from metropolitan equity records and printed sources to the English regions, but again, I am not sure that it would modify her conclusions signiﬁcantly. Therefore, although this volume exhibits an unfashionable interest in local institutions, and a slightly old-fashioned wariness about the causal autonomy of ‘culture’, I hope that it has become a much richer and better-considered volume than it might have been had it appeared a decade ago. The long gestation of this work has been due, primarily, to the vagaries of the job market, and my rather crab-like trajectory through it in the last decade-and-a-half. That delayed progress on this book, but it also gives me a considerable number of people to thank for their help along the way. First, my greatest intellectual debt is to my Ph.D. supervisor, Keith Wrightson, whose example I have (at least) tried to imitate, particularly his unrivalled skill in matching painstaking archival research to equally methodical, rigorous, and lucid conceptual analysis. I also have a considerable debt of thanks to Margaret Spufford, who supervised part of my postgraduate research, and whose enthusiasm for the discipline proved as contagious as her knowledge about it was instructive. Tuition by the authors of Poverty and Piety and Contrasting Communities is a privilege for which I remain very grateful. I was able to translate this postgraduate research into publications as the result of the opportunities offered to me by the University of Central Lancashire, and by Richard Hoyle in particular. If Keith Wrightson and Margaret Spufford gave me an unrivalled education in History, Richard Hoyle taught me how to be a historian—particularly the mysterious arts of writing for publication, working on research projects, and combining research with teaching. I learned a great deal about land, land holding, and change in rural society from him, too. While at Preston, I also beneﬁted intellectually and socially from the company of Steve King, Andy Gritt, Debbie Brain, Linda McGhie, and the late Alan Weaver, mainly (but not exclusively) in the Lamb & Packet. My time at Preston was also punctuated by spells teaching at the universities of Manchester and Essex, and through these I accumulated further debts of gratitude to Colin Phillips, John Walter, and Joan Davies. There then followed a year at the University of East Anglia, where I quickly incurred many further causes to be grateful, through the scholarly company of Andy Wood, Mark Knights, Colin Davies, Edward Acton, and Vic Morgan. I also beneﬁted hugely

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from the equally stimulating, but not wholly intellectual, delights of the ‘Tea Club’, supplied by Richard Deswarte, Adri Van der Colff, Rhodri Hayward, Edward Bujak, Andrew Hopper, and Clive Wilkinson. Finally, and slightly by accident, I arrived at Exeter, through the efforts of Jane Whittle, Mark Overton, and Jonathan Barry. They showed a faith in my abilities that was greater than my track record merited at the time, and I remain very grateful to them for this, and the friendly, supportive working environment that they and all my other colleagues at Exeter continue to foster. In addition to the National Archives and the British Library, this research has taken me to a great many county archives, notably those of Essex, Lancashire, and Dorset, and I would like, in particular, to thank the staff at these archives for their prompt and courteous service, in the face of another historian wanting the impossible. The same thanks are due also to the county archives of Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, and Suffolk, and the staff of Cambridge University Library, Manchester Central Library, the Royal College of Surgeons’ Library, and Lincoln’s Inn Library, who have assisted this research. H.R.F. University of Exeter February 2006

Contents List of Tables Introduction: Deﬁnitions

x 1

1. The Local Context

30

2. Parish Ofﬁce and the Formation of Social Identity

90

3. ‘Chief Inhabitants’ and ‘Material Culture’

141

4. The Language of Social Authority

201

Conclusion Bibliography Index

262 268 295

List of Tables 1.1a Household Hearth Tax assessments in Essex and Suffolk parishes, 1671 and 1674 37 1.1b Household Hearth Tax assessments in Lancashire Parishes, 1673 38 1.1c Household Hearth Tax assessments in Dorset Parishes, 1662 – 1664 39 1.2 Overseers’ disbursements in Essex and Suffolk parishes, 1655 – 1720 40 1.3a Household wealth and trade stock, Essex and Suffolk clothiers, 1625 – 1740 42 1.3b Household wealth of Essex and Suffolk weavers by ownership of looms, 1625 – 1740 43 1.4 Household and total inventory valuations compared with Hearth Tax assessments, by region, c. 1660 – 1695 45 1.5a Differences between household goods and total inventory valuations, Essex and Suffolk, 1625 – 1740, by quartiles 46 1.5b Differences between household goods and total inventory valuations, Lancashire, 1640 – 1740, by quartiles 46 1.5c Differences between household goods and total inventory valuations, Dorset, 1640 – 1740 47 1.6 Probate inventories including farm produce and stock, by region, 1620 – 1740 (%) 53 1.7 Distribution of copyhold land ownership, Earls Colne, Essex, 1600 – 1750 55 1.8 Households with female heads, ofﬁcers, or servants, by household size, Lyme Regis, 1697 83 2.1 Rate assessments of ofﬁcers and vestry members, Essex – Suffolk and Dorset parishes 113 2.2 Hearth Tax assessments for parish ofﬁcers and vestry members, by region 114 2.3 Assessment levels of parish ofﬁcer, Newport Pond, Essex, 1661 – 1705, by quartiles (parish mean = 100) 116 2.4 Hearth Tax assessments for borough ofﬁcers, 1642 – 1675 (all payers’ mean = 100) 117 2.5 Attendances in ‘open’ vestries, Essex – Suffolk and Dorset parishes, 1640 – 1720 122

List of Tables

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2.6 Attendances in ‘select’ vestries, Essex and Lancashire parishes, 1626 – 1720 123 2.7 Ratepayers in Beaminster and Newport Pond after datum points at 5-year intervals (%) 133 2.8 Hearth Tax payers and non-payers in Beaminster and Newport Pond after 1662 at 5-year intervals (%) 135 2.9 Hearth Tax payers in Beaminster and Newport Pond: all ratepayers and ofﬁcer and vestry groups after 1662 at 5-year intervals (%) 136 2.10 Ratepayers in Earls Colne, 1722 – 1750: all ratepayers in 1750 compared to ofﬁcers and vestrymen before 1750 (%) 137 3.1 Household items in Essex and Suffolk wills, by category, 1620 – 1720 152 3.2a Median number of household items in inventories per household and % for ofﬁceholders and non-ofﬁceholders, by region, 1625 – 1679 154 3.2b Median number of household items in inventories per household and % for ofﬁceholders and non-ofﬁceholders, by region, 1680 – 1740 156 3.2c Median number of household items in inventories per ofﬁceholder household and % of all households, by region, 1625 – 1740 160 3.2d Median number of household items in inventories per non-ofﬁceholder household and % of all households, by region, 1625 – 1740 162 3.3 Median inventory valuation of household goods for ofﬁceholders compared to valuations for all inventories, by region, 1625 – 1679 and 1680 – 1740 (£) 164 3.4 Households possessing items: ofﬁce-holding groups compared to average number of items for all inventoried households, Sudbury and Preston, 1650 – 1730 166 3.5 Items per inventory and % of ofﬁce-holding and non-ofﬁce-holding households possessing them, Sherborne and Lyme Regis, Dorset, 1640 – 1720 171 3.6 Items per inventory and % of ofﬁce-holding and non-ofﬁce-holding households possessing them, Goosnargh, Lancs., and Beaminster, Dorset, 1625 – 1720 177 3.7a Colour-coordinated households: % possessing items and number of items per inventoried household, East Anglia and north-west England, 1625 – 1740 181 3.7b Median number of items per inventory of £50+ households and % possessing them, by region, 1620 – 1740 184 3.8a Median number of items and % of quartile 1 households possessing them, by region, 1625 – 1740 189 3.8b Median number of items and % of quartile 2 households possessing them, by region, 1625 – 1740 191

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List of Tables 3.8c Median number of items and % of quartile 3 households possessing them, by region, 1625 – 1740 3.8d Median number of items and % of quartile 4 households possessing them, by region, 1625 – 1740

193 195

Introduction: Deﬁnitions If the proof of the class pudding is in the explanatory eating, perhaps the chef needs to be ﬁred.¹ To use ‘class’ terminology is always, and in the nature of things, to engage in a social transaction. Thus if you assign someone to a ‘class’ you are thereby and ipso facto assigning yourself and your listeners to some ‘class’ also.² we should not allow our reverence for social categories as analytical tools to mislead us into assuming that a well-deﬁned sociological referent of social terminology is a prerequisite for its meaningful deployment or for its argumentative impact.³

O, it was clear who the ‘middle sort of people’ were, and what they were. In 1976 Brian Manning explained that they were ‘peasants and craftsmen’, family farmers working their own land, and small masters working at home, making and selling their own products.⁴ Their economic activity was directed primarily towards subsistence, and they retained control over the means of production. For Manning this meant that ‘these ‘‘middle sort of people’’ were a distinct economic class’,⁵ distinct from ‘a class of rentiers … and ﬁnanciers’, who lived on unearned income and ‘the manipulation of money and credit’, and ‘the class of wageearners’, particularly labourers. Yet, the ranks of the ‘middle sort’ concealed an entity that was of greater social, economic, and historical signiﬁcance, ‘a ‘‘middle class’’ or capitalist class’. Its members were ‘the bigger farmers (or yeomen) who produced primarily for the market … and employed wage-labourers’, and ‘the greater craftsmen who relied … on hired labour’ and whose economic control stretched ‘towards supervision of all the stages of production and … marketing’. Although their capitalist expansion pushed them into conﬂict with some of these smaller farmers and craftsmen, these two ‘middling’ groups buried their differences in the ﬁght against Charles I. In fact, the emergent ‘middle class’ ‘assumed the leadership of ‘‘the middle sort of people’’ in opposition to king, lords and bishops’. ¹ J. Pakulski and M. Waters, The Death of Class (London, 1996), 151. ² P. N. Furbank, Unholy Pleasure or the Idea of Social Class (Oxford, 1985), 14. ³ D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), 16. ⁴ B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1976), 153–4. ⁵ Ibid. 154.

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This account supplied an historical identity and purpose for the ‘middle sort’, which was entirely (and consciously) congruent with Marxist theory. The ‘middle sort’ was depicted as a group with the potential for capitalist development. Manning was careful to describe them as non-capitalist subsistence producers, but left the door open to subsequent capitalist expansion by emphasizing their continuing control of the means of production. Most did not seek signiﬁcant proﬁts, but those that did found that this control of resources ensured that the rewards accrued to them. Eventually, the logic of capitalism would cause the ‘middling’ alliance to fracture in two directions. The better-off would generate proﬁts and accumulate capital, but only by exploiting others through wage labour. The less fortunate would lose the means of production and their economic autonomy, being forced into waged employment and ever-growing degrees of exploitation. Manning acknowledged that this process had begun by 1640, as he stressed the ‘ambivalence and latent antagonism’ between these sections.⁶ Yet, in deﬁning this small ‘capitalist class’, he had also identiﬁed the vanguard of the revolutionary ‘bourgeoisie’, who would lead the charge of the small producers against the existing, bankrupt ‘feudal’ aristocratic state. All the elements of orthodox Marxist theory were in place in this depiction of society on the eve of ‘Revolution’. The ‘middle sort’ was an ‘economic’ class deﬁned by its relationship to the means of production. It existed alongside other ‘economic’ interest groups, organized around common productive relations that did not yet embody the fundamental historic or ‘political’ alignments in society dividing labour and capital.⁷ For these to be exposed, the ‘middle sort’ had, eventually, to split between ‘capitalists’ in the ‘middle class’, and ‘proletarians’ in the ‘working class’.⁸ The ‘bourgeois’ revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was a necessary step along that road, even if the monarchy was restored, the Anglican Church revived, and the ‘freeborn Englishmen’ among the Levellers and radical sects excluded ﬁrmly from post-Restoration settlement.⁹ The ‘middle sort’ did not win, but it had performed its historic mission by nudging England onto the path of capitalist development, without which further revolution was impossible.¹⁰ As Christopher Hill wrote in 1980: ‘The English Revolution … was brought about neither by the wishes of the bourgeoisie, nor by the leaders of the Long Parliament. But its outcome was the establishment of conditions far more ⁶ B. Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (London, 1996), 62. ⁷ Furbank, Unholy Pleasure, 40. Marx referred to these as ‘intermediate or transitional stages’, see R. S. Neale, Class in English History 1680–1850 ( Totowa, NJ, 1981), 21, 77–80. ⁸ Neale, Class, 21. ⁹ C. Hill, ‘A Bourgeois Revolution?’, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), 109–39. ¹⁰ See Neale, Class, 38. ‘Rather, it should be an axiom of classical Marxism that: no bourgeoisie, no real proletarians; no real proletarians, no proletariat; no proletariat, no redemption for mankind. Therefore, no bourgeoisie, no redemption’.

Introduction: Deﬁnitions

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favourable to the development of capitalism than those which prevailed before 1640.’¹¹ Thus, in such usages, the identity and purpose of the ‘middle sort of people’ was immediately apparent. They were not so much the precursors of the ‘middle class’, as its raw material—the ore that the dialectical processes of capitalism would split to create ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletarians’. As such, their identity was bound up intrinsically with their historical destiny. The existence of these people, and this process, was asserted with greater conﬁdence, because there were many contemporary tracts and sermons in which the ‘middle sort’ was named and described explicitly. Manning cited its use by such luminaries of the 1640s as Richard Baxter, John Milton, John Corbet, William Prynne, and William Lilly, and in other anonymous contemporary pamphlets.¹² So Richard Baxter described parliament’s supporters as ‘the smaller part … of the gentry … and the greatest part of the tradesmen, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures’.¹³ Hill and Manning assumed an unproblematic link between this contemporary term, and the group it described. Its use indicated that observers had identiﬁed a ‘middle sort of people’, who corresponded closely to the economic ‘class’ deﬁned by historians. This correspondence was regarded as sufﬁcient ‘proof ’ of the existence of this social entity, and further justiﬁcation for the deeper historical dynamic that these historians were seeking to describe. Obviously, in the three decades since the publication of Manning’s study the intellectual framework in which it was located has all but disappeared.¹⁴ ‘Revisionist’ histories of the English Civil War jettisoned social-change explanations of political events, Marxist interpretations fell out of fashion, and the recent revival of historical interest in ‘popular politics’ has concentrated more on ‘print culture’ than ‘class warfare’.¹⁵ These dramatic changes have also affected the ¹¹ Hill, ‘Bourgeois Revolution?’, 111. ¹² Examples cited by Manning include M. Sylvester (ed.), Reliquae Baxteraniae (London, 1696) [Wing/B1370] 30; J. Corbet, ‘An Historical Relation of the Military Government of Gloucester (London, 1645)’, in J. Washborn (ed.), Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1823), 8–10; J. Milton, A Sovereign Salve to Cure the Blind (London, 1642) [Wing/M2179], 26; W. Prynne, An Humble Remonstrance to his Majesty Against the Tax of Ship-Money (London, 1641) [Wing (2nd edn./P3983], 23; E. Coke Considerations touching trade (London, 1642) [Wing (2nd edn./C5921], 11–14; W. Lilly, Monarchy or No Monarchy in England (London, 1651) [Wing (2nd edn./L2228], 106–7. ¹³ Manning, Aristocrats, 67–8. ¹⁴ An exception is J. Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London, 2000), 85–140. On the decline, see A. MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay in the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (Basingstoke, 1996). ¹⁵ On revisionism see J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), 24–44; J. C. Davies, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and Historians (Cambridge, 1986); J. Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, in ibid. (ed.), The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), 33–44; C. Russell, Unrevolutionary England 1603–1642 (London, 1990); on print culture, see D. Zaret,

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position of the ‘middle sort of people’ as a historical entity. While there remains a general consensus in favour of their existence as a social entity within early modern England, the destruction of the clear ‘class’ paradigm has left historians uncertain about how to regard them. We still believe we know who they were, but we have tended to gloss over the potentially difﬁcult question of what they were in this society.¹⁶ The reason for this uncertainty is a loss of conﬁdence in the kind of methodological omniscience envisaged by R. S. Neale, as recently as 1981: ‘Historians … have new concepts such as capitalism, class, class consciousness, ideology, utopia, as well as insights generated by Marx and others … Consequently, in many ways historians can see more clearly than their subjects could what was happening to them.’¹⁷ Without Neale’s conﬁdence in ‘a methodology which makes a priori claims about the unity of the past and … points to the nexus or the nature of the connections between experience and perception’, it becomes more difﬁcult to sustain his unproblematic divisions between observation and observer, or his elisions between past and present social concepts.¹⁸ As a result, in the last two decades historians have become much more circumspect in their attempts to categorize the ‘middle sort’. In general, they have followed the lead offered by Keith Wrightson.¹⁹ Writing as Neale’s methodological certainties crumbled, Wrightson was prepared to admit the existence of classes in early modern England, but only when they Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, 2000); M. J. Mendle, ‘News and the Pamphlet Culture of Mid-seventeenth-Century England’, in B. Dooley and S. A. Baron (eds.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London, 2001), 57–79; J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); J. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil War and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004); M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2004). ¹⁶ For two extensive reviews of interpretations of ‘middle sort’ in early modern England, see J. Barry, ‘Review and Commentary: The State of the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (1991), 75–86; H. R. French, ‘The Search for the ‘‘Middle Sort of People’’ in England, 1600–1800’, Historical Journal, 43/1 (2000), 277–93. This Introduction is not intended to restate their conclusions. ¹⁷ Neale, Class, 94. ¹⁸ Ibid. 9. ¹⁹ In general the ‘middle sort’ has been accepted as a social category. Historians have concentrated on identifying membership and potentially deﬁning characteristics. See J. Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), 84–112; 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), 19–54; P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730 (London, 1989); J. Smail, The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660–1780 (Ithaca, NY, 1995); M. R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1996); M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005), 199–246.

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were deﬁned in broad, Weberian terms.²⁰ For him social class implied ‘a loose aggregate of individuals of varied though comparable economic position, who are linked by similarities of status, power, lifestyle and opportunities, by shared cultural characteristics and bonds of interaction’.²¹ Here, economic ‘position’ was merely one element within a much wider array of attributes by which individuals might identify common interests. Although his classes were less heavily prescribed or prescriptive affairs than those of Manning or Hill, Wrightson was prepared to suggest that ‘their existence is certainly implied by contemporary terminology … though they spoke not of classes but of ‘‘sorts’’ ’.²² ‘Sort’ implied ‘class’, but ‘class’ now meant something much less rigid, less likely to involve nationwide groupings or consciousness, more susceptible to local variation and something that was certainly devoid of any inherent ‘revolutionary’ potential or destiny.²³ If ‘class’ was a much more hedged and problematic concept, language was still treated as a fairly reliable indicator of the state of social development. Both Wrightson and Corﬁeld analysed the terminology of social description as a marker of group formation and change. Echoing David Cressy, Wrightson emphasized that ‘conventional vocabularies of social description’, such as the neat arrangements of ‘rank, order and degree’, were slow to reﬂect ‘social and cultural change’.²⁴ As Penelope Corﬁeld put it, over time these older formulations seemed to become ‘increasingly generic and decreasingly precise’.²⁵ In their place emerged ‘a speciﬁc vocabulary of informal social description’, the ‘language of ‘‘sorts’’ ’.²⁶ Wrightson traced the shifts in the usage of such a language, as it spawned ‘a variety of resonant adjectives’, and moved from ‘an essentially dichotomous perception of society’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to a tripartite one by the 1640s, via the insertion of a further division (the ‘middle ²⁰ This is implied by the range of non-economic criteria that Wrightson applies to the production of class afﬁnities, although he does not use explicit Weberian formula of relating economic ‘position’ to the market, rather than the means of production. See R. Holton, ‘Has Class Analysis a Future? Max Weber and the Challenge of Gemeinschaftlich Accounts of Class’, in D. J. Lee and B. S. Turner (eds.), Conﬂicts about Class: Debating Inequality in Late Industrialism (Harlow, 1996), 26–41. ²¹ 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), 196. ²² Wrightson, ‘Social Order’, 196. ²³ Ibid. 197–202. ²⁴ K. Wrightson, ‘Estates, degrees, and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in P. J. Corﬁeld (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), 32. See D. Cressy, ‘Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England’, Literature and History, 3 (1976), 29–44. ²⁵ P. Corﬁeld, ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, History, 234, (1987), 60. ²⁶ Wrightson, ‘Estates’, 45.

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sort of people’).²⁷ Thus, through its ‘very resonant imprecision’ the ﬂexible ‘language of sorts’ was able to capture ‘the process of social change’ in ways that the rigidities of hierarchy could not.²⁸ It embodied ‘one form of realignment in England’s social ﬁelds of force’, to such an extent that the emergence of the term ‘middle sort’ ‘and above all its use as a means of self-identiﬁcation, involves … a further modiﬁcation of the principal dividing lines within the English social structure’.²⁹ Corﬁeld carried forward the same idea as she explained how the ‘powerful organising concept’ of ‘class’, ‘glided into the language’, and spawned ‘a new set of qualifying adjectives’ such as the familiar tripartite categories of ‘upper, middle and working’.³⁰ Both historians were at pains to stress that this linguistic evolution was slow and messy, and not a matter of sudden step-changes. Wrightson noted the continued presence of the ofﬁcial language of ‘rank, order and degree’, but highlighted its increasing irrelevance to popular conceptions of status. Corﬁeld emphasized the ‘competing interpretations’ of the social order in the eighteenth century, particularly the rivalry between dichotomous and tripartite models.³¹ Yet both also identiﬁed clear trends, towards the appearance of a tripartite vision of the social order, hardening deﬁnitions of the nature of the categories and the stereotypes that determined their contents, and the gradual predominance of ‘class’ as the mode of public discourse about society. Linguistic formulations were born out of debate, but they still represented actual trends in the underlying social order. This interpretation of a gradual but consistent shift from tripartite ‘sort’ to tripartite ‘class’ taxonomies has been challenged by David Cannadine’s account of the English social vocabulary between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.³² Cannadine sought to explain the continuing English obsession with social differences and distinctions. In doing so, he trod a careful path, on the one hand rejecting the view that social descriptions necessarily represented ‘real social knowledge’, but on the other, contesting the idea that all such description was merely ‘a subjective rhetorical construction’.³³ Instead, he suggested that three distinct, but intersecting, ways of describing the social order had persisted through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ﬁrst of these was ‘the hierarchical view of society as a seamless web’, which previous historians had depicted as a concept in decline by the eighteenth century.³⁴ The second was ‘the triadic version with upper, middle and lower collective groups’, which Wrightson and Corﬁeld suggested was in the ascendant. The third was ‘the dichotomous, adversarial picture, where society is sundered between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ ’, the favoured perspective on the eighteenth century of both E. P. Thompson and J. C. ²⁷ K. Wrightson, ‘ ‘‘Sorts of People’’ in Tudor and Stuart England’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People, (Basingstoke, 1994), 32, 34, 41, 45–7. ²⁸ Wrightson, ‘Estates’, 51. ²⁹ Wrightson, ‘ ‘‘Sorts of People’’, 48. ³⁰ Corﬁeld, ‘Class’, 39. ³¹ Ibid. 60. ³² D. Cannadine, Class in Britain (London, 1998). ³³ Ibid. 19, 17. ³⁴ Ibid. 19.

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D. Clark.³⁵ Rejecting notions of terminological evolution, Cannadine asserted that all three taxonomies continued to provide conceptual models by which Britons (both in Britain and its colonies) understood the social order, well into the nineteenth century at least. In so doing, he denied the dynamic of terminological evolution and its role as a marker of underlying social change. He suggested that actual social change had been limited, emphasizing instead the persistence of the four broad ‘systactic categories’ identiﬁed by the sociologist W. G. Runciman. These consisted of ‘a small elite; … a larger group of managers, businessmen and professionals; … the general body of wage workers; and … a deprived, impoverished and sometimes criminalized underclass’.³⁶ Such categories could be identiﬁed in eighteenthcentury Britain, and, in different proportions, in the twentieth century, too. Social descriptions ﬂowed over these relatively static categories rather than being connected ﬁrmly to them. As a result, ‘sociological meldings and taxonomical glissades were made increasingly easy as the languages of ranks and class were used interchangeably for all three of the prevailing models of society’.³⁷ For example, Cannadine observed that in eighteenth- (and nineteenth-) century usage ‘class’ could mean hierarchy, synonymous with ‘rank, order and degree’, and without ‘connotations of collective social categories … still less of deeply rooted social antagonisms’.³⁸ Meanwhile, hierarchical models could be collapsed into the dichotomy of ‘the e´lite versus the people’.³⁹ He also gave added emphasis to the rhetorical function of such taxonomies, which earlier accounts had often downplayed in their efforts to identify a terminology that conveyed ‘real social knowledge’. This meant that more attention had to be paid to the social imperatives of the observers who had provided such descriptions. So Cannadine detected a social bias among those employing ‘the triadic model’. They did so ‘not as an objective description of the social order’ but as a means of constructing ‘favourable ideological and sociological stereotypes of those in the middle’.⁴⁰ Conversely, as Cressy had noted in 1976, those who insisted upon the vertically arranged pigeon-holes of the hierarchy of ‘ranks’ often aligned themselves with the social elite, and sought by this means to reimpose ‘order’ on the ‘chaos’ of mobility and change.⁴¹ As has been suggested, Cannadine was attempting to strike an interpretative balance. He acknowledged the polemical or ideological nature of all modes of social description to a greater extent than in previous studies, and drew attention to the importance of the observer’s perspective. In this respect, he was undermining the unproblematic search for ‘real social knowledge’, and indications ³⁵ Ibid. 19–20. For Thompson the division of interest was, primarily, economic, for Clark ‘cultural’. See E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), 71; J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), 70–1. ³⁶ Cannadine, Class, 18. ³⁷ Ibid. 34. ³⁸ Ibid., 27. ³⁹ Ibid. 34. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 32. ⁴¹ Ibid., 26; Cressy, ‘Describing the Social Order’, 30–3.

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of real social change, within descriptive taxonomies. However, for Cannadine the social structure remained reasonably coherent, and could be conceived of through Runciman’s four generic categories. This coherence explained the continuities that he detected in the forms of social description through the ‘modern’ era. There may have been three distinct and competing forms of description, but he believed that there were only three, because they all sought to describe the same social order. In stressing the restrictions in this vocabulary, he resisted the atomizing tendencies of linguistic analysis, and the possibility that it was difﬁcult (or impossible) to generalize about social experience or identity. ‘Hierarchic’, ‘dichotomous’, and ‘triadic’ taxonomies represented three possible ways of describing the same thing, and simply reﬂected varying political and social viewpoints. The primary mistake of earlier studies had been to prefer, and then generalize upon, the familiar tripartite terminology of ‘class’ as the only, or most signiﬁcant, version. In stressing the formative power of political rhetoric, but attempting to balance it against the continuing variations in social taxonomies, Cannadine attempted another interpretative compromise.⁴² This was with studies like those of Wahrman and Maza that gave primacy to the role of political discourse in creating social vocabularies, and producing new forms of social ‘consciousness’, independent of economic or social change.⁴³ Marxist historians had once regarded such notions as the heresy of ‘idealism’ (that ideas or ideology shaped social reality, not vice versa as in orthodox interpretations), and had lambasted early proponents of this view, such as Gareth Stedman Jones.⁴⁴ The primacy of economic determinants was undermined, however, so politics could be viewed as an autonomous process. This meant that political rhetoric could be treated as a means of explaining social experience, because its terminologies may actually have helped to identify and inspire new constituencies or active groupings in society. This rhetoric could only be effective if it appeared relevant to, and descriptive of, social ‘reality’, but its ﬁctive dimension made its relationship to that ‘reality’ extremely complex and problematic. Wahrman has been the strongest proponent of this interpretation. He dismissed as teleological the conventional perspective that social change went hand-in-hand with terminological evolution in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, he disputed the view that by some process ⁴² Cannadine, Class, 35–44. ⁴³ See Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 223–72; S. Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 1–13. ⁴⁴ See G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983), 1–24; for debate about his interpretation see D. Mayﬁeld and S. Thorne, ‘Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language’, Social History, 17/2 (1992), 165–88; J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, ‘The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language—a Reply’, Social History, 18 (1993), 1–15; P. Joyce, ‘The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayﬁeld and Thorne, and Lawrence and Taylor’, ibid. 81–5; D. Mayﬁeld and S. Thorne, ‘A Reply to ‘‘the Poverty of Protest’’ and ‘the Imaginary Discontents’’ ’, ibid. 219–33.

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of linguistic osmosis the processes of industrialization and urbanization caused a ‘shift from non-class terminologies, such as ‘‘middle ranks’’, ‘‘middle station’’ or ‘‘middling orders’’, to the more ‘‘modern’’ term ‘‘middle class’’ ’.⁴⁵ Like Cannadine, he stressed that ‘different formulations of the social ‘‘middle’’ were by and large interchangeable’.⁴⁶ Going further than Cannadine, though, he emphasized the ‘degree of freedom … between social reality and its representation’.⁴⁷ Although he admitted that ‘the social process’ imposed constraints on how society could be represented and understood—it would have been difﬁcult to depict Manchester in the 1780s as a bucolic rural idyll, for example—‘there still remains considerable space for different representations and interpretations of this social reality’. As far as he was concerned ‘the choice between a ‘‘middle-class’’-based or a ‘‘middle-class’’-less conceptualisation of society fell precisely into this space’.⁴⁸ What determined this choice of social idiom? If Wahrman denied any oneto-one relationship between ‘reality’ and representation, he was also careful to avoid linguistic determinism—an accusation previously levelled at Stedman Jones.⁴⁹ While he was clear that social taxonomies were only bounded rather than dictated by social circumstances or discourses, and could evolve autonomously, he highlighted the impact upon them of another rhetorical process, ‘the effects of politics’.⁵⁰ He argued that the political process ‘invested choices between particular conceptualisations of society with poignant meaning and force’, and ‘made such choices matter’. Not only that, in order to be effective, this process had to publicize these choices, make them seem real, and weave them into meaningful narratives of society and visions of change. ‘Political language’ was, therefore, ‘a key site for the shaping of the social consciousness of large groups of people’.⁵¹ He suggested that the spread of these messages, and their success in shaping ‘social consciousness’ could best be determined by examining how often they were repeated by a series of commentators, sometimes unconsciously. Repetition indicated that these polemical formations were in the process of being transformed into rhetorical staples, and (eventually) descriptive stereotypes. In the case of the concept of the ‘middle class’ in English politics, Wahrman dated the moment in which this transition occurred to the years around the Great Reform Act of 1832. These ‘speciﬁc political circumstances’ were crucial in promoting ‘this particular vision of society with such force that it came to be seen so widely as real objective truth’.⁵² As this happened, its polemical origins ‘as merely one possible way of representing society’ were forgotten, and it assumed the status of ‘an uncontested and unproblematic statement of fact’, for contemporaries, and for most subsequent historians. Wahrman’s belief ⁴⁵ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰

Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 14. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 15. Ibid., 6 [italics in original]. ⁴⁸ Ibid. 7. Mayﬁeld and Thorne, ‘Stedman Jones’, 165–88. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 9. ⁵¹ Ibid., 12.

⁵² Ibid. 18.

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in the agency of political debate in shaping social vocabularies and (eventually) consciousness, led him to reverse the conventional causal process of the formation of the industrial ‘middle classes’. He concluded that ‘it was not so much the rising ‘‘middle class’’ that was the crucial factor in bringing about the Reform Bill of 1832; rather, it was more the Reform Bill of 1832 that was the crucial factor in cementing the invention of the ever-rising ‘‘middle class’’ ’⁵³ If political discourse was so important in effecting this transformation, did this mean that without it the ‘middle class’ might not have existed as a political force? Sarah Maza asserted exactly this point in her parallel study of the effects of political rhetoric in Revolutionary France. Maza stated baldly that her central thesis was ‘that the French bourgeoisie did not exist’.⁵⁴ By this she meant that during the period 1780–1830 ‘no group calling itself bourgeois ever emerged in France to make claims to cultural or political centrality and power’. Such rhetorical claims were important, because as far as she was concerned ‘classes only exist if they are aware of their own existence, a knowledge which is inseparable from the ability to articulate an identity’.⁵⁵ She thought that these articulations were most often to be found in political narratives, because ‘in order for a group to claim a role as actor in society and polity it must have a story or stories about itself … that links memories of the past to desires for the future’. As with Wahrman, this view derived from the understanding that ‘language is not passive, but performative; people’s identities are constructed by the cultural elements they absorb and then articulate as individual and collective stories’.⁵⁶ If this was so, ‘why should the bourgeoisie, if it existed, refuse to name itself?’ Like Wahrman, too, Maza suggested that ‘politics is probably the most important source of social imagery in public life’, because politicians invoked social groups, in order to claim to represent them, and derive power from these imagined constituencies.⁵⁷ The object of Maza’s study was, therefore, ‘the social imaginary’, or ‘understandings of, and polemics and fantasies about, the social world’, and the way that these were rendered routine in public debate.⁵⁸ In France, though, this meant examining ‘those many instances when the discourse about society does not seem to reﬂect what we historians see as the reality of a social landscape … for it is precisely the disjuncture between what they saw and what we think we know that is most illuminating’.⁵⁹ There was no longer much room for Neale’s conﬁdent assertion that historians could see what was happening far better than the subjects themselves! Now the objective was to explain why contemporary discourses resolutely disappointed our expectations, however immanent the ‘bourgeoisie’ appeared as a social and political entity. Interpretations like those of Cannadine, Wahrman, and Maza that stressed the rhetorical nature of social description owed an intellectual debt to the work of the ⁵³ Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 9. ⁵⁴ Maza, French Bourgeoisie, 5. ⁵⁵ Ibid., 6. ⁵⁶ Ibid. 6–7. ⁵⁷ Ibid. 9–10. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 10. ⁵⁹ Ibid. 11.

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literary critic Philip Furbank. Furbank’s 1985 study Unholy Pleasure or the Idea of Social Class received little attention from historians at the time of its publication, because of its literary focus, and perhaps also because it belaboured their attempts to locate ‘objective’ descriptions of the social order.⁶⁰ The work advanced an argument about the inherently normative nature of social language, particularly the language of ‘class’, that was more sophisticated than those being employed in historical scholarship at that time. Furbank was clear that ‘the terms ‘‘middle class’’, ‘‘upper class’’, ‘‘working class’’ ’ were ‘essentially, rhetorical concepts’.⁶¹ This led him to assert that: We have to forget any idea that ‘classes’ really exist. They are not that sort of thing, but rather ﬁctions or imaginary frames that people project upon others, and these will differ of necessity according to who is doing the projecting and why; moreover the same people will construct these frames differently in different contexts and under the pressure of different circumstances.⁶²

As Cannadine was later to emphasize, this meant, therefore, that these forms of social description could never amount to ‘real social knowledge’, because they could never be divorced from the perspective and preconceptions of the observer. This led Furbank to be critical of the efforts of social historians to deﬁne and reﬁne ‘a puriﬁed and redeemed terminology of ‘‘class’’ ’, by which the study of the underlying historical ‘reality’ could be achieved.⁶³ He regarded this as problematic in two respects. First, it was impossible to divest ‘class’ concepts of the value judgements of the historian using them. Rather, the only possible subject for analysis was ‘the ways in which ordinary people apply, and have applied, social categories to themselves and others’. Secondly, ‘having analysed the contemporary ideas about them’, it was untenable to ‘go on to explain what the truth of the matter ‘‘really’’ was. This would be a delusion, for there is no reality of this kind’.⁶⁴ Instead, the only thing that remained for study were the ethical assumptions underlying contemporary social usages, in the space identiﬁed by Wahrman between the experience of reality and its representation. The main difference between Furbank and those who followed him was that he used the nineteenth-century novel as his source for these ethical judgements about society rather than the rhetorical categories of political polemic.⁶⁵ All these works complicate the nature of the relationship between ‘representation and reality’. In particular, they obstruct the previously open channel between ‘structure’ and ‘consciousness’, where the former (whether Marxist ‘classes’, Weberian ‘status groups’, or any other social formation) conditioned or set the parameters for the latter (whether represented in group identity, political beliefs, or ideological preferences). This has two consequences. If the concepts from which social ‘consciousness’ is constructed have a life of their own, ⁶⁰ Furbank, Unholy Pleasure, 51–62. ⁶¹ Ibid. 5. ⁶³ Ibid. 52. ⁶⁴ Ibid. 53. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 94–143.

⁶² Ibid. 13.

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determined not by the ‘material base’ of human experience but by the immediate ﬂux of political debate or literary taste, then their history needs to be explored in order to understand it. In addition, it also becomes much more difﬁcult to trace the process by which social experience inﬂuences understandings of society. None of the advocates of this ‘discourse analysis’ deny that such experience inﬂuenced the ways people thought about their position in society. Even so, all regard this inﬂuence as so uncertain that they prefer to restrict their attention to the discursive elements that can be shown to have affected the language of social description. The remainder of this introduction will consider whether any of this relationship can be reconstructed, question whether any of these existing studies have actually identiﬁed ‘popular’ discourse about society and social position, and assess the methodological consequences of this. The interpretative synthesis developed by the sociologist Richard Jenkins offers one possible route through some of these methodological dilemmas.⁶⁶ In particular, Jenkins supplies a new perspective on the problem perennial to all investigations of social groups—the relationship between group and consciousness, or between Marx’s categories of ‘class in itself ’ and ‘class for itself ’. Past interpretations suggested a causal relationship between these two elements, with a progression from one to the other. So, as has been shown, the ‘orthodox’ Marxist hypothesis was that economic relations create classes ‘in themselves’, and that these become conscious classes ‘for themselves’ as they develop an awareness (particularly a political understanding) of their interests and position in society compared to those of other classes. In this case the causal relationship takes the form of a clear movement, from ‘structural’ creation of class, to the emergence of social, and eventually political, consciousness. This sequence exposes the hypothesis to all of the objections rehearsed above. Jenkins seeks to avoid such pitfalls in two ways. First he posits a ‘uniﬁed model’ of identity formation that works similarly at the level of the individual, the social (in face-to-face interaction between individuals) and the societal (in the formation of collective, impersonal identities).⁶⁷ Secondly, at all three levels he collapses together ‘structure’ and ‘action’.⁶⁸ He suggests that identity is formed by a constant ‘dialectic’ between internal and external perspectives. For the individual it is in the difference between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ self—between ‘I’ and ‘me’.⁶⁹ At the level of social interaction between individuals there is a distinction between personal self-image, and the perspective of others or the wider ‘public’ image(s) relating to that person.⁷⁰ At the level of collective identity, Jenkins distinguishes between external categorization (the group as it is deﬁned by others) and group identiﬁcation (the group as it is experienced or known from within).⁷¹ ⁶⁶ R. Jenkins, Social Identity (2nd edn., London and New York, 2004). ⁶⁷ Ibid. 18–23. ⁶⁸ In this he echoes Anthony Giddens’s ideas of ‘structuration’, see A. Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London, 1973), 107–11. ⁶⁹ Jenkins, Identity, 18–19. ⁷⁰ Ibid. 19–21. ⁷¹ Ibid., 21–3.

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He suggests that at all levels these two modes of identiﬁcation occur concurrently, and denies that they exist in any sequential relationship to each other. ‘Both processes are routine everyday practices, and neither is more signiﬁcant than the other’.⁷² Normally, for a group to form, both processes must occur—only a secret society would have a group identity but no public face, while a category whose members had no awareness of their shared characteristics could hardly be said to ‘act’ together. Similarly, each process normally implies the other.⁷³ The formation of a group through the recognition of afﬁnities of experience, interests, responsibilities, or attitudes implies some degree of matching external categorization, particularly the labelling of such an entity. At any given moment, the two elements may not always be entirely up-to-date with each other, but they will (broadly) keep pace with one another.⁷⁴ ‘Group identiﬁcation always implies categorization. The reverse is not always the case. Categorization, however, at least creates group identiﬁcation as an immanent possibility.’⁷⁵ While the groups created are ‘imagined’ constructs, their members experience them as ‘real’ entities, possessed of observable consequences in daily life. In early modern England, for example, the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor was often located in the eye of the parish overseer, but the consequences attached to these two ‘imagined’ categories ensured that they were experienced as real by those to whom the distinction was applied, and by those drawing such distinctions. This means that although categorization, in particular, may often appear an artiﬁcial or bureaucratic exercise, Jenkins observes that ‘collectivities and collective identities do not just exist ‘‘in the mind’’ or ‘‘on paper’’ ’. They have also to be experienced. Jenkins posits that such categorization and group identiﬁcation require a ‘symbolic language’ in order to provide the ‘mask of similarity’ beneath which individuals can gather, be collected, or differentiate themselves from others.⁷⁶ While for the purposes of this discussion we might think of this primarily as the language of social description, it can also be represented by non-verbal means. These might include symbols of loyalty and identiﬁcation (ﬂags, coats of arms, knowledge of local culture, or landmarks), as well as values expressed in dress, manners, speech patterns, or dialect. In all its forms, this language is necessarily reductive, so as to cope with ‘the interactional and cognitive demands placed upon individuals’ by the difﬁculties ‘of information management in a complex human world’.⁷⁷ Individuals can be dealt with individually, but groups have to be assessed by a range of apparently common criteria. Sifting out such criteria requires the selection, ascription, and generalization of supposedly ‘typical’ attributes—that is, their reduction to a series of social stereotypes that can then be applied to others. Jenkins regards these as essential to the formation of groups in society. ‘Individuals, in using stereotypical categories to deﬁne ⁷² Ibid. 25. ⁷⁶ Ibid. 110.

⁷³ Ibid. 88. ⁷⁷ Ibid. 128.

⁷⁴ Ibid. 25.

⁷⁵ Ibid. 88.

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themselves … bring into being human collective life’.⁷⁸ Thus, ‘stereotypes are extremely condensed symbols of collective identiﬁcation’.⁷⁹ Stereotypes are particularly important in arbitrating identity near social boundaries. They provide reservoirs of information about typical, appropriate, and ‘correct’ behaviour among particular groups, which allow individuals to assess whether or not they, or those they encounter, belong there. In this respect, Jenkins suggests that social stereotypes function like Weber’s ‘ideal types’, artiﬁcial syntheses of features encountered in actual experience (but not necessarily present in any particular case) that act as mental reference points, enabling the individual to make comparisons or formulate ‘working hypotheses’.⁸⁰ These reference points allow individuals to evaluate unknown newcomers, or deal with complicated social situations, so that they make complex human experience appear more predictable and consistent.⁸¹ In order to achieve this consistency, such stereotypes have themselves to be stable and reliable. A social categorization or identiﬁcation is of little use as a diagnostic shortcut if it has to be qualiﬁed every time it is applied. These stereotypes are also ‘political’, in as much as they result from social interaction between people, particularly across group boundaries, and because they tend to reﬂect the distribution of power and authority within society.⁸² Jenkins is at pains to stress that this embeds the process of identity formation within the organization and experience of everyday life, instead of leaving it outside as a cultural or normative ‘superstructure’ somehow divorced from routine human interaction.⁸³ This means that the formation and stereotyping of identity depends, to some extent, on the power of individuals, groups and institutions to enforce their collective identiﬁcations and classiﬁcations. Jenkins follows Weber in suggesting that this reﬂects ability either to secure compliance through coercion (power), or the capacity to obtain conformity to, or identiﬁcation with, established forms of government (authority).⁸⁴ Either way, this ‘political’ dimension ensures that those in positions of social or governmental authority frequently have the chance to give these categorizations consequences for the bulk of the population, and ensure that it is their ‘deﬁnition of the situation’ that counts.⁸⁵ The categories themselves then become ‘real’, because they form the basis for decisions about the allocation of resources or penalties for others in society—as in the distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.⁸⁶ In these ways, the group identities or categories created on the back of these stereotypes embody distributions of authority in society, and acquire social meaning as the result of rhetorical contests about these distributions. Although Jenkins’s research is focused on modern society, his conclusions are relevant to the issue of ‘middling’ identity in the early modern period. ⁷⁸ Jenkins, Identity, 90. ⁷⁹ Ibid. 128. ⁸⁰ Ibid. 120. ⁸¹ Ibid. 128–30, 166. ⁸² Ibid. 126. ⁸³ Ibid. 106–7. ⁸⁴ Ibid. 127–8. ⁸⁵ Ibid. 103. ⁸⁶ Ibid. 162–8, 169.

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His ideas locate language as part of a wider social process, but allow it a high degree of autonomy. He demonstrates the essential role of social descriptions or external categorization in group-formation.⁸⁷ As Wahrman and Cannadine suggest, these elements are often shaped by the exigencies of political debate and rhetorical opportunism. However, Jenkins’s idea of the ‘dialectic’ between internal identiﬁcation and external categorization emphasizes that language alone is not sufﬁcient to summon social groups into existence, even if it is very important in sustaining identity and formulating stereotypes. Jenkins’s interpretation insists that there has to be some interior identiﬁcation in order for a social group to exist; otherwise it is merely someone else’s category. As a result, he restates the signiﬁcance of social experience, that is, the effects of ‘life-chances’, inherited position, economic constraints, social status, and personal ‘capital’, as they are mediated through individual perceptions and linguistic conventions. Symbolic language can shape social perceptions, but it has to have some material to work with in the ﬁrst place. Jenkins’s model also displaces the ‘chicken-and-egg’ causal conundrum of ‘structure’ versus ‘consciousness’. In common with more overt ‘structuration’ interpretations, it suggests that both elements are implicated inextricably in experience, and can only be distinguished hypothetically rather than in practice. While this appears messy, it pushes the two interpretative extremes (of economic and linguistic determinism) out of bounds. The internal–external dialectic removes the temptation to posit a progression between the two elements, or risk the distortions inherent in the search for ‘underlying’ elements of structure, or ‘formative’ linguistic concepts. It also tends to tie effective social discourse to the limits of plausibility and predictability, because it insists that there needs to be something to explain. For example, no description of the early modern social order disputed the existence of the English nobility. Such a statement would have been implausible, because it stood to be contradicted by social experience, and therefore offered a poor basis on which to predict it—even if most people generally encountered the nobility as names on deeds, rather than in the ﬂesh. The constraints of plausibility and predictability explain why David Cannadine is able to distinguish only three signiﬁcant modes of describing the social order. The hierarchic, dichotomous, and triadic modes dominated printed social discourse because they were sufﬁciently consonant with the lived experience of the literate public to appear to offer reliable characterizations of society, despite their many variations and inconsistencies. As a result, their repeated use ensured that they developed into established rhetorical tropes, and became routine symbolic shorthand in social description and polemic. Undoubtedly, therefore, these modes provide us with the main ways in which public, printed discourse categorized the social order. They represent the external categorization of individuals in whom contemporary observers saw ⁸⁷ Jenkins, Identity, 87.

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similarities—of origins, occupation, income, authority, status, and ‘life-chances’. It is evident, too, that by the eighteenth century these ‘symbolic languages’ of social description had evolved into literary conventions. By this time, these conventions included the commonplace of the ‘middle sort’, ‘station’ or ‘classes’. Jenkins’s hypothesis suggests that for this to be more than a rhetorical device we should expect some accompanying internal identiﬁcation within this category. Certainly, Wahrman’s account of the political mobilization of the ‘imagined’ constituency of the ‘middle class’ in the years prior to 1832 may illustrate a critical conjunction of external categorization and internal identiﬁcation, even if other historians have questioned whether this shift was permanent.⁸⁸ The existence of a ‘middling’ social category in public discourse from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century demonstrates that this putative social entity was undoubtedly conceivable and plausible, and therefore capable of providing a social reference point. Similarly, as has been suggested elsewhere, there has been abundant research into the distinctive activities of those within this category.⁸⁹ So far, though, less attention has been devoted to the processes by which these individuals might come to identify with this category, and might abstract and habituate a series of ‘middling’ characteristics so as to create a diagnostic set of social values. In this respect, we need to establish how far ‘middling’ individuals actually identiﬁed with the ‘middle sort’, before we can employ it as a meaningful collective term in this society. Although the ‘language of sorts’ was used intermittently in unpublished sources between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there is extraordinarily little evidence of ‘middling’ people laying claim to this identity themselves. As noted in Chapter 2, among 1,110 petitions from parishes to the Warwickshire Quarter Sessions in 1625–35, 1655–65, and 1690–95, written in the name of the ‘inhabitants’ of these settlements, only 5 per cent even distinguished between types of ‘inhabitant’.⁹⁰ None of these identiﬁed, or spoke on behalf of, the ‘middle sort’ of inhabitants within these communities. David Underdown cites an example from the Wiltshire Quarter Sessions in 1620, where villagers from Wooton Bassett demanded to know ‘where were the middle sort of men from neighbouring Tockenham Wick’?⁹¹ Yet there are almost no other examples ⁸⁸ S. Gunn, ‘Class, Identity and the Urban: The Middle Class in England, c.1790–1950’, Urban History, 31/1 (2004), 29–47. ⁸⁹ French, ‘Search’, 281–90; Barry, ‘Review’, 75–80. ⁹⁰ Warwick County Records, i. Quarter Sessions Order Book: Easter, 1625 to Trinity, 1637 ed. S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (Warwick, 1935); iii. Quarter Sessions Order Book: Easter, 1650 to Epiphany, 1657 ed. S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (Warwick, 1937); iv. Quarter Sessions Order Book: Easter, 1657 to Epiphany, 1665 ed. S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (Warwick, 1939); ix. Quarter Sessions Order Records: Easter, 1690 to Michaelmas, 1696 ed. H. C. Johnson and N. J. Williams (Warwick, 1964). ⁹¹ D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), 85. In this deposition, taken by John Hungerford JP, a ‘tithingman’ of Tockenham reported that his beating was in revenge for William Lane of Wootton Bassett being cited to the

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of the use of this category in local society among those who it purported to describe, in the voluminous secondary literature on the ‘middle sort of people’ in this period.⁹² Nevertheless, it is evident from the work of Wrightson, Corﬁeld, and Cannadine that by the end of the seventeenth century the category of the ‘middle sort’ was entrenched ﬁrmly within one mode of describing the social order, at least. It did function as a symbolic device, to condense, simplify, and aggregate the disparate individuals of moderate prosperity who peopled this category. The central question is whether, as Wrightson has suggested, the term really functioned as ‘a means of self -identiﬁcation’ among the ‘middling’ with all the consequences that might have for their collective identity and agency in this society.⁹³ If it did not, can we explain why did it not become appropriated and internalized by them as part of the normal vocabulary of social thought? While it is difﬁcult to demonstrate that the ‘middling’ thought of themselves as the ‘middle sort of people’, it is possible to begin to explain why there is so little evidence of such a perspective. In doing so, we can also suggest the existence of an alternative scale on which ‘society’ was conceived. Again, Jenkins’s arguments provide a conceptual starting point, particularly his consideration of the role of organizations in shaping social identity. His focus is on modern society, which he notes ‘perhaps before anything else, differs from other eras in the extent to which everyday life is framed within and by complex organisations, and by the number and heterogeneity of those organisations’.⁹⁴ These bodies depend upon categorizations in order to distinguish members from non-members, manage their own internal power structures, and render their decisions consequential to those both inside and outside their ranks.⁹⁵ The pervasiveness of organizations in modern society, the degree to which their categorizations are enforced through the allocation resources and punishments, and the extent to which these categories contain common elements have a number of implications. Jenkins observes that ‘It is in the consistency over time and across organisations of (stereo)typiﬁcations of identiﬁcation and patterns of allocation that ‘structure’—an organized pattern of relationships between relatively stable collective identiﬁcations and conditions of individual life—can be discerned in the human world.’⁹⁶ Thus the increasingly consistent application of stereotypical categories in all kinds of decisions taken by organizations renders those categories meaningful in next Quarter Sessions. The Wootton men came to Tockenham asking ‘where the men of Tocknam were, and where were the middle sort of men in Tocknam’? Did this refer to those of the rank of ‘tithingman’ who had cited Lane? Wilts. RO A1/110/1620M, no. 197, information of John Skull, Tockenham Wick, tithingman, 3 Sept. 1620. ⁹² For example, it is also quoted in Wrightson’s survey of the language of ‘sorts’. The same study cites only four instances of the term being used in non-printed sources, by John Winthrop in 1623, Lucy Hutchinson’s memoirs of her husband, Sir Edward Nicholas (secretary to the Privy Council) in 1661, and Gregory King in 1697. None of these writers could be described as socially ‘middling’. Wrightson, ‘ ‘‘Sorts of People’’ ’, 45, 46, 49. ⁹³ Ibid., 48 [italics in original]. ⁹⁴ Jenkins, Identity, 163. ⁹⁵ Ibid. 145–6, 163–8. ⁹⁶ Ibid., 174.

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society. As these are employed more often, so they become the usual terminology for such internal classiﬁcations, and reﬂect a more consistent body of ascribed attributes. As they are used more routinely, so they are more likely to become the usual and universal currency for social evaluation and identiﬁcation in the wider world. Obviously, in early modern England formal institutions were much less well developed or pervasive, with correspondingly less power to shape identity through their administrative categories. The only real ‘governmental bureaucracy’ was in military organization and supply, and revenue collection, and only after 1650.⁹⁷ Medicine had a core of university-trained physicians, but they were outnumbered greatly by ‘empirical’ practitioners, making ‘professional’ boundaries and status attributes very difﬁcult to sustain.⁹⁸ The church and the law supplied quasigovernmental occupational hierarchies, but such organizations recruited and promoted primarily via personal patronage networks, rather than the application of stereotypical criteria about individual attainments or attributes. Who you knew, rather than what you were, or had achieved, remained decisive. Governmental and legal administration in the localities was institutionalized through the posts of JP and the ofﬁces of the parish, but outside boroughs the former was restricted to the ranks of the landed gentry, while recruitment to the latter remained in the hands of the rate-paying elite.⁹⁹ Meanwhile, although formal social bars were not imposed in most institutions of male education, the direct and opportunity costs of schooling restricted secondary (Latinate) education to the ranks of the prosperous, and tertiary education to those of the gentry, along with a constant trickle of poorer scholars. While none of these organizational facets diminished the impact of social difference or distance, all of them retarded the necessity, utility, and signiﬁcance of abstract status categories and stereotypes, particularly as the basis for the allocation of resources or penalties. For those categorized by some social commentators as members of the ‘middle sort’, there were few social or administrative transactions in which such a classiﬁcation was meaningful or consequential, or in which it served as a banner for identiﬁcation. Of these, Peter Earle’s work suggests that the teeming, heterogeneous, and anonymous streets of London may have been the most fertile ‘institution’ for the creation of a new and discrete ‘middling’ identity.¹⁰⁰ Here there existed the greatest need for reductive stereotypes, to ⁹⁷ G. E. Aylmer, ‘From Ofﬁceholding to Civil Service: The Genesis of Modern Bureaucracy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 (1980), 91–108; M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), 177–286; J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), 25–134. ⁹⁸ R. Porter and D. Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989); R. Porter and D. Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650–1850 (London, 1988). ⁹⁹ A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), 3–86. ¹⁰⁰ Earle, Middle Class, 3–16.

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discriminate between the jumble of competing signiﬁers of status with which the capital’s residents were confronted every day. Not surprisingly, the metropolis spawned numerous new social categories. Some were speciﬁc to London, such as the distinction between ‘cits’ and ‘wits’.¹⁰¹ Others had a wider appeal, even if they were particularly appropriate to metropolitan society (and may have originated there), such as the term ‘fop’.¹⁰² Similarly, while the category of the ‘middle sort of people’ (or, for that matter, Defoe’s idea of the ‘gentleman-tradesman’) could be applied more widely, it was most applicable and resonant in the capital simply because of the sheer concentration of prosperous households there.¹⁰³ By the early eighteenth century, Earle estimates his London ‘middle station’ (those worth more than £50 per annum) at 20,000 to 25,000 households, ﬁgures that help to explain why the capital’s writers thought up and applied abstract social categories with such alacrity.¹⁰⁴ Elsewhere, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century the prosperous ‘middle sort’ may have been increasingly visible as a distinct social group in provincial centres such as Bristol and Norwich, growing manufacturing centres and port cities such as Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham, and possibly in the larger county and resort towns, notably York and Bath.¹⁰⁵ However, in smaller provincial towns and rural settlements, abstraction, generalization, and stereotyping became less necessary, as social discrimination and evaluation occurred largely between known individuals, within the institutional setting of the unit of local administration—the ecclesiastical parish.¹⁰⁶ Outside the parish, the main administrative activity to impinge upon this social segment was jury service at Assizes and Quarter Sessions, which drew together parish rulers in the service of the county. As such, Roberts suggests that these juries were ‘nearly a parliament of the middling sort’, although there is little evidence that they fostered overt collective identiﬁcation of ‘middling’ interests, afﬁnities, or values.¹⁰⁷ If this was the case, then the parish functioned rather as it does in John Clare’s eponymous poem, as the ‘parish state’, a petty kingdom that was important for ¹⁰¹ M. S. Dawson, Men and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge, 2005), 27–92. ¹⁰² Ibid. 145–204. ¹⁰³ D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (Gloucester, 1987), 81–92. Wrightson suggests that the term ‘middle sort of people’ may have originated in London in the sixteenth century. Wrightson, ‘ ‘‘Sorts of People’’ ’, 41–2. ¹⁰⁴ Earle, Middle Class, 81. A review of the ﬁrst edition of the Merchant’s Magazine (1695) emphasized its relevance to ‘the middling sort of People, and not a few of the Gentry’. N. Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, 2006), 108. ¹⁰⁵ P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, c.1660–1760 (Oxford, 1989), 199–256. ¹⁰⁶ M. Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Ofﬁceholding in Early Modern England’, in T. Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 153–94; S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), 204–30. ¹⁰⁷ S. K. Roberts, ‘Juries and the Middling Sort: Recruitment and Performance at Devon Quarter Sessions, 1649–1670’, in J. S. Cockburn and T. A. Green (eds.), Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Jury in England, 1200–1800 (Princeton, 1988), 184.

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its rulers and subjects alike.¹⁰⁸ This was as an imagined community, but one possessed of deﬁned spatial bounds, effective authority over its members, and a pervasive internal hierarchy. Its decisions also had real consequences, particularly over the allocation of the resources of work, poor relief, and personal care, and the imposition of penalties. As will be shown in Chapter 2, this socio-political entity set the boundaries of the social perspectives of its rulers, and provided the administrative context in which those perspectives were enacted, habituated, and recorded. As the chapter also demonstrates, such local rulers depicted their social position in relation to ‘the parish’, even in contexts where they did not attempt to speak on its behalf. In this sense, the concept of ‘the parish’ provided what Jenkins has termed the ‘symbolic umbrella’ under which members of the ‘middle sort’ formulated their proximate social identity, but also the centrifugal force that prevented these members from coalescing into a broader entity in society. This does not mean that the ‘middling’ lacked other possible forms of extraparochial identity or identiﬁcation. It merely suggests that they generally did not express these through the idiom of the ‘middle sort of people’. As Chapter 4 indicates, at least one powerful form of extra-parochial identiﬁcation was available to the wealthiest ‘chief inhabitants’—the ideal of gentility. Gentility was signiﬁcant as a social model for other groups for several reasons. While polemical debates raged throughout the period about the nature of gentility and the identity of the gentleman, the category itself was regarded as a universal one.¹⁰⁹ ‘Gentility’ represented a social archetype that embodied wealth and power, even on occasions when this inspired resistance rather than deference.¹¹⁰ It was judged by reference to apparently abstract and absolute criteria, although there was persistent rhetorical dispute about whether gentlemanly qualities were innate (from birth and breeding) or could be acquired (by virtue and education).¹¹¹ Either way, their possessor had crossed a threshold beyond the relative evaluations of rate paying, credit, and moral repute on which ‘middling’ status in the parish were founded. Gentility also embodied social and political authority. The status was a prerequisite for many executive positions in civil and military administration, because it was seen to convey the inherent capacity to command, as well as ﬁnancial independence (and less temptation to accept bribes). While many parishes had resident gentlemen, most experienced this template of power and ¹⁰⁸ J. Clare, The Parish, ed. with intro. by E. Robinson (Harmondsworth, 1985), 63. ¹⁰⁹ P. J. Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals: Landed and Other Gentlemen’, in N. Harte and R. Quinault (eds.), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914: Essays in Honour of F. M. L. Thompson (Manchester, 1996), 1–33. ¹¹⁰ This was true even when they were expressing their hostility to the gentry in general. See A. Wood, ‘ ‘‘Poore men woll speke one daye’’: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Deﬁance in England, c.1520–1640’, in Harris, Politics of the Excluded, 73–7. ¹¹¹ Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 4–18.

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responsibility through their contact with the ofﬁces of the JP and (by the eighteenth century) the Land Tax commissioners.¹¹² By 1700, both carried minimum property qualiﬁcations, designed respectively to restrict the Land Tax administration to men who were economically independent, and the magistracy to landowners of some substance—who would, ideally, in both instances be ‘gentlemen’.¹¹³ The same social preconception lay behind the introduction of landed property qualiﬁcations in the Game Laws of the late seventeenth century.¹¹⁴ These efforts had two consequences. On the one hand they demonstrated an idealized conception among legislators at the turn of the eighteenth century about the ‘proper’ income, and income stream, of the ‘gentlemen’ who represented central government in the localities.¹¹⁵ On the other, they reﬂected deeper assumptions about the putative moral qualities associated with ‘gentlemen’, as commanding, impartial, and incorruptible ﬁgures, in whom social and administrative authority combined.¹¹⁶ These elements illustrate how ‘gentility’ functioned as a powerful and enduring social stereotype, and encapsulated notions and norms of autonomy, power, and respect in society. As Chapter 4 suggests, for the highest echelons among the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’ this autonomy and authority was symbolized by ‘gentility’, and offered a route out of the endlessly contingent local pecking orders. Thus, the concept of gentility had more potential than the category of the ‘middle sort of people’ as an organizing principle for an extra-parochial collective identity, in several respects. First, those marked out as ‘gentle’ were incorporated into a social category that was recognized nationally, tied to organizations (such as parliament and the evolving London season) that had a national constituency and proﬁle, and thus invested with an identity that was unifying, highly visible, and very consequential.¹¹⁷ Secondly, there is abundant evidence that ‘gentility’ was a social category that contemporaries understood, and identiﬁed with, even when they were just outside the bounds of ‘genteel society’. As a result, Chapter 4 shows how there is far more evidence of the inﬂuence of the ideal of ‘gentility’ on the ¹¹² Rosenheim notes that there were 3,500 JPs in 1702, and 13,000 Land Tax commissioners in 1723. J. M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order English Landed Society 1650–1750 (Harlow, 1998), 113. ¹¹³ The property qualiﬁcation to become a JP was landed property worth £100 per annum, G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), 119; for Land Tax Commissioners it was £50 per annum, J. V. Beckett, ‘Land Tax Administration at the Local Level, 1693–1798’, in M. Turner and D. Mills (eds.), Land and Property: The English Land Tax, 1692–1832 (Gloucester, 1986), 163. ¹¹⁴ Rosenheim, Ruling Order, 194. Legislation in 1671 (22 and 23 Chas II c. 25) restricted hunting rights to those possessed of annual incomes in excess of £100 of freehold land, and £150 of leasehold. ¹¹⁵ D. W. Hayton, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690–1715: i (Cambridge, 2002), 260. ¹¹⁶ See S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London, 1994), 42–125. ¹¹⁷ P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (2nd edn., London, 1971), 28.

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‘middling’ than there is for any comparable generalized group identity. Thirdly, as has been suggested, the status harked back to an ‘order’-based conception of authority, implying that gentlemen had certain innate characteristics that ensured they, and only they, were ﬁt to govern the rest of the social order. By contrast, it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd such consequential attributes being associated with the ‘middling’ social category. This is not to deny that authors identiﬁed behavioural traits and associated them particularly with this category of people. There are clear rhetorical continuities between Richard Baxter’s extolling of the ‘sober sort of men of the middle rank, that … are more equal to religion than the highest or lowest usually are’ in 1673, and Vicesimus Knox’s praise of the ‘middle classes’ a century later as ‘for the most part attached to their religion … temperate, frugal, and industrious. In one particular … they greatly excel the great, and that particular is sincerity’.¹¹⁸ While Cannadine may be correct to suggest that these commentators shared a common rhetorical strategy, of contrasting the virtue of the ‘middling’ with the corruption of the elite, the fact that this characterization remained plausible implies that these associations retained polemical signiﬁcance. Indeed, if N¨unning, Hunt, and Carter are correct, the volume of praise for ‘middling’ virtue, and criticism of noble ‘vices’, may have grown in the eighteenth century, particularly after the publication of Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Letters in 1774, and their apparent approval of polite dissembling—hence Knox’s assertion of middling ‘sincerity’.¹¹⁹ Again, though, there is little direct evidence that these characterizations either drew on, or helped to shape, the social identiﬁcations of those within this category.¹²⁰ Even so, some of the moral assumptions of the ‘middling’ and the elite suggest that this published discourse may have resonated with them, whether or not they identiﬁed themselves in this way. Craig Muldrew and Alex Shepard have emphasized recently that attributions of morality and immorality followed social contours quite closely in this period.¹²¹ Shepard shows how ‘there was a sliding scale of importance attached to different people’s words’, and their truthfulness. The ‘honesty’ of poor witnesses had to be proved before the court, whereas that of gentlemen could not be questioned without giving offence.¹²² These ¹¹⁸ Wrightson, ‘Sorts of People’, 49; V. N¨unning, ‘From ‘‘Honour’’ to ‘‘Honest’’: The Invention of the (Superiority of the) Middling Ranks in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 2 (1995), 36. ¹¹⁹ N¨unning, ‘From ‘‘Honour’’ to ‘‘Honest’’ ’, 29–31; Hunt, Middling Sort, 193–215; P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), 76–80. ¹²⁰ The difﬁculty in demonstrating this link weakens Hunt’s attempts to connect her valuable surveys of ‘middling’ activity (particularly of trading women) and her extensive survey of contemporary comment literature on the ‘middle ranks’. See Hunt, Middling Sort, 125–71, compared with 172–215. ¹²¹ C. Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit: Social Identity, Wealth and the Life Course in Early Modern England’, in H. R. French and J. Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 149. A. Shepard, ‘Honesty, Worth and Gender in Early Modern England, 1560–1640’, Ibid. 97–101. ¹²² Shepard, ‘Honesty’, 98.

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equations of material wealth and moral worth were also evinced in Muldrew’s multi-facetted notion of ‘credit’, calculated by ‘the continual moral evaluation of the success or failure of familial competition’ within parishes.¹²³ Muldrew analyses Richard Gough’s History of Myddle and the memoirs of a Somerset exciseman, John Cannon, to show how parishioners linked material success to personal virtue, and failure to vice, in an economy that was, in many respects, unpredictable.¹²⁴ Given such judgements, it is not surprising that opprobrium was heaped on ‘the poor’ as a group, because their material straits were sometimes taken as indications of their moral failings. However, in the works of Cannon or Gough, which described ‘the parish’ from within, success or failure was judged by reference to universal categories, but these were moral, rather than social, and applied to assess individuals, rather than to typify groups.¹²⁵ In Myddle, William Watkins was regarded as a successful yeoman because of his personal ‘skill, care and industry’, assisted by his ‘prudent, provident and discreet wife’, rather than because he had joined the ranks of a ‘middle sort’ typiﬁed by industrious, skilful, prudent, and provident members.¹²⁶ The translation of people like William Watkins and his wife into the ranks of a virtuous ‘middle sort’ was made by outside observers like Richard Baxter or John Corbet, writing with a polemical purpose in mind. As with all such stereotypical generalizations, if readers were to believe it, they had to be able to point to individuals to whom it applied. We may therefore agree with Jenkins that although the ‘middle sort’ was imagined, it was not necessarily imaginary. The increasingly frequent assertions of the moral superiority of the ‘middle sort of people’ mark the emergence of an important rhetorical category, that echoed the moral elevation felt by many such people when they looked around their own communities. However, to date, the available evidence suggests that this process occurred through a process of translation from the language, concepts, and stereotypes of ‘the parish’ (and the experience of ‘middling’ status) to the linguistic tropes of social discourse on a national scale (and the category of the ‘middle sort’ itself ). So far, there is little evidence that ‘middling’ people were ﬂuent interpreters themselves. In terms of the formation of ‘middling’ identity, therefore, it may be difﬁcult to support Wrightson’s claim that the growth of the category of the ‘middle sort’ also signiﬁed the self -identiﬁcation of the group. Certainly, it is clear that the ‘middle sort’ existed as an ‘immanent possibility’ in the social order, and that the category formed an increasingly routine component of social and polemical taxonomies. Yet the present study proceeds on the idea that the link between category and consciousness remained weak among the ‘middling’ because the category itself had few immediate social consequences for them. There is little evidence to suggest either that it shaped their social experience, ¹²³ Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit’, 156. ¹²⁵ Ibid., 170. ¹²⁶ Ibid., 156.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 155–6, 157–70.

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or that it held meaning for them as an imagined social category by which they understood their own identity or their boundaries with other groups. The nearest we get to such boundaries is in the equations of wealth and worth that formed both dimensions of the evaluation of ‘credit’. Through these, persons of greater material ‘substance’ were accorded moral authority over their lesser neighbours, and elevated above ‘the poor’ as a whole. However, the personal nature of such ascriptions makes it difﬁcult to base generalizations about the social identity of the ‘middling’ upon them. It also emphasizes the most fundamental barrier to the formation of a wider, national ‘middling’ identity—the parish-centred, parish-dependent nature of the actual expressions of this status. By and large, the ‘middling’ seem to have conceived of themselves as ‘inhabitants’ not of the imagined communities of ‘society’ or ‘the middle sort of people’, but rather of a smaller ﬁctive entity, ‘the parish’ or ‘the town’. As has been noted, this had concrete spatial and administrative boundaries, but it also contained the organizational and social mechanisms by which this status was rendered consequential for all ‘inhabitants’ dwelling there. This meant that it also functioned as the power base, primary social resource, and central reference point for ‘middling’ identity. Of course, even if we accept this assertion, we should not assume that this identity precluded others. These included the personal honoriﬁcs and nicknames illustrated recently by Dave Postles, which tell us much about the interface between personal and group identiﬁcation and status within village life.¹²⁷ They also involved those normative evaluations of ‘credit’, ‘honesty’, and ‘reputation’ emphasized by Muldrew, Shepard, and Gowing, in which moral estimation and gender identity also interacted.¹²⁸ Increasingly, these estimations relied on other distinctions, such as that between ‘polite’ and ‘impolite’ manners and values.¹²⁹ From this came the appropriation and reinvention of notions of ‘gentility’, which linked the contingent local status of the aspiring ‘chief inhabitant’ to a ¹²⁷ D. Postles, ‘The Politics of Address in Early Modern England’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 18 (2005, 99–121. ¹²⁸ L. Gowing, ‘Women, Status and the Popular Culture of Dishonour’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996), 225–34. ¹²⁹ P. Langford, ‘The Progress of Politeness’, in id., A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 59–122; L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes: Consumption and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York, 1995), 362–82; Carter, Polite Society; H. Berry, ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s Coffee House and the Signiﬁcance of ‘‘Flash Talk’’ ’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11, (2001), 65–81; P. Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 311–32; P. Carter, ‘Polite ‘‘Persons’’: Character, Biography and the Gentleman’, ibid. 333–54; L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 45/4 (2002), 869–98; P. Borsay, ‘Politeness and Elegance: The Cultural Re-fashioning of Eighteenth-Century York’, in M. Hallett and J. Rendall (eds.), Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society, Borthwick Texts and Calendars, 30 (York, 2004), 1–12.

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powerful external referent of social authority.¹³⁰ By the mid-eighteenth century, particularly in London and other cities, we might also add a consciousness of the position and manifold virtues of the ‘middle sort of people’ itself, made manifest in the printed praise of their thrift, industry, sobriety, domesticity, and prudence in the face of patrician excesses and plebeian disorders.¹³¹ Since these were all components of ‘middling’ identity, it should not be surprising that different elements were emphasized by different categorizations and conceptions of this stratum. This helps explain the presence or absence of the ‘middle sort’ within social taxonomies. For some purposes they could be conceived of as a group, for others they could be merged into other categories. This variation does not mean, necessarily, that we should follow Maza in suggesting that ‘middling’ identity can only exist as, and when, it is ‘imagined’ as a stable social category or mode of group identiﬁcation. Instead, it entails the reconciliation of ‘middling’ activity, attributes, and attitudes with the apparent paucity of evidence of an overt, shared identity or common social perceptions. The best evidence for these comes from ‘the parish’ as administrative and imagined social entity, and this study concentrates its attentions there. It also seeks to show that during this period some among the ‘middling’ did begin to deﬁne their identity by appropriating extra-parochial social categories but, as has been indicated, it argues that these were found in the concept of ‘gentility’ rather than in the virtues of the ‘middle sort’. None of this amounts to a neat conceptualization of the social middle, and all of it is assembled in the face of refractory source materials in which social difference is routinely downplayed and euphemized. It almost makes one wish for a return to the days when historians knew more than their subjects did about what was happening to them. This study explores parochial and extra-parochial conceptions of ‘middling’ social identity through a series of overlapping analyses. These are based on three local case studies—of the cloth-producing region straddling the Essex–Suffolk border; of a swathe of central Lancashire, between Clitheroe, Lancaster, and Preston; and a section of western Dorset, extending south from the Somerset border to the sea at Lyme Regis. These areas were very different in terms of climate, topography, agrarian regimes, economic activity, and social organization. They were far enough apart to exist as discrete social ‘regions’, with little interchange of population between them. They were also relatively unremarkable in social terms—they lacked the heavily skewed social characteristics of ‘niche’ settlements, such as fenland villages, mining communities, or industrial centres. Only the clothing towns of Essex and Suffolk exhibited a distinct social ‘signature’, created by the large numbers of households largely dependent upon (and relatively unrewarded by) weaving and spinning. ¹³⁰ H. R. French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’: Social Perceptions and Self-fashioning among Parish Elites in Essex, 1680–1740’, Social History, 25/1 (2000), 44–66. ¹³¹ Earle, Middle Class, 3–16; Hunt, Middling Sort, 172–92, 193–218.

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Subsequent chapters examine the position and identity of ‘middling’ people in these locations in several ways. Chapter 1 concentrates on tracing the impact of the different farming, economic, and geographic regimes on the social experience of the rate-paying ‘inhabitants’ that formed the core of this stratum in parish society. In particular, it focuses on the effects of two important elements. The ﬁrst is the relationship between the agrarian economy—the backbone of preindustrial subsistence and wealth creation—and status in these three localities. The chapter assesses the impact in all three regions of declining security of tenure for agricultural producers, and examines how this changed evaluations of standing in the community. As it indicates, while absolute levels of inequality probably increased in all three areas, changes in relationships to the means of production had relatively little impact either on the kinds of hierarchies evident in parishes, or the forms of ranking employed within them. The second element identiﬁed in this chapter follows as a consequence of the ﬁrst. This is that, at all levels, the ‘middling’ became increasingly integrated within, and dependent upon, market mechanisms by the end of the seventeenth century. Not only were farmers now heavily dependent on producing for the market, they were also more and more reliant on the rental market for access to land. Networks of supply and credit meant that while small-scale producers and retailers often retained ownership of their ﬁxed capital assets (house, shop, workshop, warehouse), much of their working and circulating capital (trade stock, raw materials, operating capital) was supplied on credit, and belonged to others. In this respect, the chapter suggests that in this period it is difﬁcult to sustain the careful distinction drawn by Manning, between the thrusting, acquisitive, rentier-capitalist ‘middle classes’, and the craft-based, small-scale, subsistence-producing ‘middle sorts’. The chapter follows other recent research in suggesting that by the seventeenth century rural society was already heavily saturated by the market-based economic practices and relationships of ‘small-scale capitalism’.¹³² It did not need to be jolted in the appropriate direction by the shock of the ‘bourgeois revolution’. In fact, this chapter and the next suggest that within the parish few practical distinctions were drawn between types of land tenure (free versus copyhold, ownership versus leasing), relations to capital (craft production versus ‘protoindustrial’ employment), or types of activities (production and retail within local markets, versus those for distant markets). These differences offer useful analytical models to historians, but seem to have been ignored by the inhabitants of local society, in favour of a single signiﬁcant status indicator—annual income. Chapter 2 illustrates the social and organizational ramiﬁcations of this method of evaluation. It shows how annual income was conceived of primarily in terms of rate-paying capacity, which, in turn, carried connotations of residence, ¹³² C. f. J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000); H. R. French and R. W. Hoyle, The Character of English Rural Society 1550–1750: Earls Colne Revisited (Manchester, 2006).

Introduction: Deﬁnitions

27

acceptance, and belonging. This research emphasizes that status as one of the ‘inhabitants’ of a parish signiﬁed far more than the simple geographical fact of residing there. Instead, it meant recognition that the individual possessed a material stake in the ‘imagined community’ of ‘the parish’, was entitled to be represented within it, participate in its deliberations, and pay towards their implementation. If the parish was the all-powerful petty republic envisaged by John Clare, rate-paying ‘inhabitants’ were its enfranchised citizens, where its dependent poor sometimes found themselves treated as its voiceless slaves. Income and rate paying were not merely tokens of belonging, however. They were also a fundamental component of the double-edged estimations of the ‘repute’, ‘credit’, and ‘worth’, through which the parochial hierarchy was created. The chapter emphasizes the relative uniformity of these distinctions across all three localities, and shows that those who described themselves as the ‘chief inhabitants’ of their parishes, and who dominated positions of authority within them, were almost always assumed to possess greater annual income than those outside among the ‘inhabitants’ at large. The repetition of this pattern, and this language, in these three very different (and largely unconnected) locations demonstrates a similarity of experiences and responses among the ‘middling’ even if it does not prove that they possessed or perceived a shared social identity. Chapter 2 concludes that ‘middling’ status was understood primarily within the conﬁnes of the ‘imagined’ parish, through status as an ‘inhabitant’ or a ‘chief inhabitant’ achieved by reference to relative, competitive scales of ‘worth’. While rate-paying capacity may have been favoured by these ‘inhabitants’ as the simplest shorthand for equating material prosperity, moral superiority, and parochial authority, it was not the only indicator of economic substance. Chapter 3 examines another measure of wealth, the goods and value of the personal estate at death. In doing so, it explores the cultural, as well as the ﬁnancial, thresholds of ‘middling’ status, and the position of the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’. Two contrasting trends emerge from this research. The ﬁrst is the difﬁculty in discerning distinct ‘middling’ patterns of ‘conspicuous consumption’ and display—contrary to most of the burgeoning literature on ‘consumption’ in the century after 1660. Generally, the households of ordinary ratepayers and ‘inhabitants’ exhibited modest levels of ownership of newer, status-conferring furnishings and belongings. While it is probable that these households were furnished more comfortably and completely than those of the un-inventoried majority, it is difﬁcult to distinguish social ambition from routine practicality in the rooms described in most ‘middling’ inventories. However, this was not the case for a minority, often those who, in other contexts, described themselves as the ‘chief inhabitants’ of their settlements. Some of these individuals had constructed households in which a deﬁnite social purpose can be distinguished. This can be detected in colour-coordinated decoration, a preference for new, informal modes of sociability (around the tea table, the purpose-built dining room, and the privacy of upstairs chambers), and their conspicuous display

28

Introduction: Deﬁnitions

of new goods (china, chests of drawers, clocks, pictures, and new styles of furniture). These developments have been identiﬁed in a number of other, often urban, studies, and have usually been cited as further evidence of a burgeoning ‘middle-class’ identity.¹³³ Chapter 3 suggests that it is premature to draw such a conclusion about provincial England in the late seventeenth century, whatever its merits for the metropolis and the growing industrial centres after 1750. It argues that at this earlier date these trends reﬂect the desire among the upper echelons of the parish to adapt notions of gentility in order to ﬁt both their aspirations and their circumstances. Their material preferences indicate a desire to display objects and perform social rituals that denoted leisure, learning, and ‘polite’ sociability, and which signalled that they shared the personal, social, and moral gravitas associated with the concept of gentility. Chapter 4 develops this theme. Through a series of individual case studies, it establishes the link between the rhetoric of gentility and the desires for extra-parochial identity among the ‘chief inhabitants’. It also illustrates the wider signiﬁcance of the concept of gentility as a symbol of social authority and autonomy even for those who were not, and would never become, ‘chief inhabitants’ themselves. It develops the theme mentioned above, that gentility supplied abstract, universal status attributes with a currency beyond the inwardlooking processes of estimation prevalent within ‘the parish’, and the ability to act as a route out of such parochial evaluations. The chapter illustrates how some ‘chief inhabitants’ believed that gentility marked a social threshold that rendered the gentleman ‘a better man, and more excellent’ than his un-genteel neighbours, but that also projected him into a group in which members had the right to be accorded equal worth. Both aspects were very attractive to those used to negotiating the constantly shifting parochial scales of ‘credit’, ‘honesty’, and ‘repute’. Indeed, the chapter shows that they were sufﬁciently attractive for one family to engage in extensive dynastic planning and the investment of educational and material resources in order to propel an eldest son into the ranks of gentlefolk. However, the chapter also emphasizes two other aspects of gentility among the ‘middling’. The ﬁrst of these was that such aspirations carried social risks. Stepping outside the conﬁnes of the parochial pecking order exposed would-be gentlemen to processes of categorization over which they could exert little inﬂuence. Their status depended on acceptance into new social circles—a process that often became more difﬁcult as aspirants moved further away from their origins and social locales. Acceptance depended upon an acute sensitivity to such social contexts, to avoid embarrassing transgressions and rejections. Secondly, as has been suggested, for other sections of the ‘middling’ there is evidence that gentility was more than merely a social trump card. The chapter shows how one Essex craftsman seems to have reached for the concept to describe his peers, because it embodied deeper notions of personal freedom, responsibility, ¹³³ Earle, Middle Class, 336–7; Langford, Commercial People, 68–76; Berg, Luxury, 199–246.

Introduction: Deﬁnitions

29

and judgement, and (ironically) a sense of equality among those so described. In this sense, gentility seems to have offered a powerful symbol of social autonomy and dignity, even for those with slim prospects of attaining the status themselves. By these means, the study seeks to reconcile two apparently contradictory propositions—that we can identify distinctive ‘middling’ behaviour, experiences, attributes, and modes of identiﬁcation; but that we cannot translate this into self -identiﬁcation within the contemporary category of the ‘middle sort of people’. It suggests this grouping possessed an immanent social identity that was expressed primarily through the language, practices, and organizations of the parish. These delimited the spatial and status boundaries of this ‘imagined’ social territory, but (in aggregate) amounted to a distinctive, even deﬁning, social experience. Contemporary social commentators could perceive these similarities, and generalize upon them, to produce plausible, meaningful categories that ﬁtted their rhetorical purposes. The study does not seek to deny or underestimate the signiﬁcance of this categorization, but rather to explain why this viable, available mode of identiﬁcation was eschewed in routine self-descriptions by the ‘middling’. In doing so, it makes two conscious interpretative decisions that stand to be revised by future research. The ﬁrst of these is that the borders of the social territory of the parish were more apparent and consequential to those who lived within them than the afﬁnities they shared with the community of their peers in the wider ‘imagined’ construct of society as a whole. The second is the further assertion that there is more evidence that the ‘middling’ breached these borders in the garb of gentility, by building upon their status as parochial ‘chief inhabitants’, rather than by fashioning a collective identity out of values and experiences potentially common to them all. Better evidence might overturn both these judgements. Until it does, however, this study suggests that it is more appropriate for historians to employ the phrase ‘the middle sort of people’ not as a synonym or surrogate for ‘class’, but rather in the manner that contemporary commentators used it. This was as a means of drawing together individuals and groups whose similarities are evident to the eye of the beholder, rather than as a way of describing how these people thought about themselves.

1 The Local Context T study is based on three very different localities, the cloth-producing region of southern Suffolk and northern Essex, townships in central and eastern Lancashire, and parishes in western Dorset, extending south from Sherborne to the port of Lyme Regis. Of the three, the Essex and Suffolk cloth towns stood out most, because they were united in the production of worsted cloth, which in turn gave them a sharply divided social proﬁle. Western Dorset lay outside the distinctive agrarian economy of the chalk downs, but had some speciﬁc social characteristics derived from its specialization in dairy production. In the north-west, the large parishes north and west of Preston formed part of the mixed pastoral economy of the Lancashire plain, less dominated by large estates than the area south of the Ribble, but not a clear economic or social entity in its own right. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how these characteristics of agriculture, industry, and settlement inﬂuenced the social proﬁle of the ‘middle sort’ within these three areas. Historians have long debated the inﬂuence of social and economic regions in early modern England.¹ Overton has warned of the methodological problems inherent in the deﬁnition of regions, and accompanying assumptions about their social effects: Analysis of the relationships between the various elements of the rural economy and society may be seriously misrepresented if they are forced to share the same spatial framework. For example, if soil type, farming system, settlement pattern, landownership and rural industries are all incorporated into the same regional framework, the implication is that they are linked together in some way at a particular scale of analysis.² ¹ J. Thirsk, ‘The Farming Regions of England’, in ead. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, iv. 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967); J. Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, v. 1640–1750, i. Regional Farming Systems (Cambridge, 1984); ead. The Agrarian History of England and Wales, v. 1640–1750, ii. Agrarian Change (Cambridge, 1985). See criticism by M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge, 1996), 46–62, and by N. Davie, ‘Chalk and Cheese? ‘‘Fielden’’ and ‘‘Forest’’ Communities in Early Modern England’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4/1 (1991), 2–14. On the debate about the inﬂuence of agrarian regions on social relations and political allegiance c.1600–42 see Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 44–105, and D. Underdown, ‘A Reply to John Morrill’, Journal of British Studies, 26/4 (1987), 468–79; J. Morrill, ‘The Ecology of Allegiance in the English Revolution’, ibid. 451–67. ² Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 47.

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31

He questions the consistency of those agrarian regions, to which other historians have tied particular propensities in social structure, social control, religious dissent, and political radicalism, disorder, and cultural difference (team games versus individual pursuits).³ In Norfolk and Suffolk, for example, he distinguishes at least thirteen distinct clusters of farming enterprise within the ﬁve general agrarian ‘regions’ identiﬁed by Thirsk.⁴ This might make us wary of the assumptions inherent in David Underdown’s contention that ‘there were indeed important differences between the cultures of the wood-pasture regions and the arable downlands’, with ‘traditional festivals’ in the latter continuing ‘to reﬂect an older notion of community’.⁵ Clearly, the physical environment affected the distribution of wealth, social interaction, and cohesion in a village, hamlet, or township. The geography of settlement, land quality, access to common resources, the consequent proﬁtability and stratiﬁcation of farming and farm sizes, the authority of landlords and institutions (of manor and parish), and the demographic experience of a community all inﬂuenced the speed and trajectory of its social and cultural development. The problem is to determine how they did so. Given that the taxonomy of this physical environment is much more complex even than the regions identiﬁed in the Agrarian History of England and Wales, it is likely that its effects will be equally complicated. It is dangerous simply to ‘read off’ assumptions about social structure or notions of community from generalizations about agrarian region and settlement characteristics.⁶ There are parallels here between the difﬁculties faced by historical geographers in determining the effects of different settlement types and historians’ struggles with notions of ‘class’. While both concepts have value as ‘ideal types’—that is, as diagnostic models of proximate attributes—this is reduced as they become self-fulﬁlling social deﬁnitions. Despite David Underdown’s careful stress on local variations in his Dorset, Somerset, and Wiltshire study, his ‘sheep-corn’ and ‘wood-pasture’ archetypes begin to create conformist, communal and dissenting, radical communities respectively.⁷ In making such judgements, topographical, economic, and social elements are elided with ‘cultural’ differences, as represented by parish customs. So, for example, Underdown attributes the persistence of festivities such as perambulations in the downlands to ‘the outlook of the inhabitants’ and their ‘sense of communal identity’.⁸ However, this ignores the topographical realities of ³ A. Everitt, ‘Nonconformity in Country Parishes’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Land, Church and People: Essays Presented to Professor H. P. R. Finberg, Agricultural History Review suppl. 18 (Reading, 1970), 178–99; R. B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), 9–30, 255–83; M. Ingram, The Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), 70–83; D. Underdown, ‘The Chalk and the Cheese: Contrasts among the English Clubmen’, Past and Present, 85 (1979), 25–48; ibid., Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 44–105. ⁴ Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 53. ⁵ Ibid. 103. ⁶ Davie, ‘Chalk and Cheese?’, 14–15. ⁷ Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 72–105. ⁸ Ibid, 90–1.

32

The Local Context

such communities. Common ‘sheep-walks’ blurred boundaries between parishes, compared to the delineated borders of an enclosed landscape. Consequently, perambulation remained necessary to establish the administrative jurisdictions of these settlements, irrespective of the cultural preferences of their inhabitants. If instances of perambulation form part of our index of cultural conservatism, downland settlements will score higher than wood-pasture districts. However, this does not demonstrate a link between topography and culture, but rather the a priori assumption that one type of agrarian organization is more conducive than another to such conservatism. These problems of evidence and interpretation imperil all such efforts to recover local or parochial ‘cultures’, and this difﬁcult task will not be undertaken here. No attempt has been made to depict these areas either as functioning, deﬁned social ‘regions’. Instead, this chapter will simply chart the potential effects of topography, settlement patterns, agriculture and farm size, industrial activity, and wealth levels on ‘middling’ identity in three discrete analyses of Essex and Suffolk, central Lancashire, and west Dorset. This will provide the social and economic context, against which subsequent analyses of the size, cohesion, identity, and material cultures of the ‘chief inhabitants’ of these parishes can be viewed.

I While none of the three localities studied was situated in extreme or dramatic terrain, in all of them topography exerted an inﬂuence on patterns of settlement and the social order. The landscape was least dramatic in the Essex–Suffolk border region, where, according to one early nineteenth-century observer, in respect of ‘cattle, sheep, soils and other distinguishments, Northeast Essex naturally and agriculturally unites with the County of Suffolk’.⁹ Further south, the gentle undulations of the Stour and Colne river valleys gradually gave way to the ﬂat expanses of central Essex. The alluvial soils, loams, and patches of sand of these river valleys also broke up the monotony of the Essex clay, which, as William Hunt remarks, ‘lends itself admirably to the production of bricks and oak trees’, but was difﬁcult to till, and baked hard in summer.¹⁰ Above all, though, northern Essex and southern Suffolk were rendered distinctive by industry, rather than topography—by their specialization in cloth production, and the social signature inscribed by this activity onto the towns and villages involved. Contemporaries were unanimous in emphasizing the local dominance ⁹ W. Marshall, The Review and Abstract of the County Reports to the Board of Agriculture—Eastern (London, 1811), 525. ¹⁰ W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution to an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 6.

The Local Context

33

of the cloth trade, and its distinctive social proﬁle. Defoe noted that ‘the whole County large as it is, may be said to be employ’d, and in part maintain’d, by the spinning of Wool for the Bay Trade of Colchester, and its adjacent towns’.¹¹ These included ‘Kelvedon, Wittham, Coggeshall, Braintree, Bocking’, places that Defoe observed sarcastically were ‘noted for the Manufacture of Bays … and for very little else’.¹² This economic pays stretched into Suffolk, and was shown repeatedly in the seventeenth century by the joint petitions of Essex and Suffolk clothiers, weavers, and spinners to the Privy Council in response to adverse trade cycles. This manufacturing was well established by the sixteenth century. Signiﬁcant cloth production was already taking place in Colchester, Braintree, Coggeshall, Sudbury, and other smaller centres in the 1350s.¹³ Through the late fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries these towns specialized in the production of heavy broadcloths, with capital and control becoming concentrated among the larger clothiers.¹⁴ The broadcloth industry peaked in the 1520s, suffering repeatedly thereafter from the disruptions of war and slumps in continental markets. However, war and dislocation in the Netherlands and Flanders also produced an unprecedented inﬂux of cloth workers with new skills and new products, who set up a community in Colchester.¹⁵ The ﬁrst refugees arrived in Colchester in 1565, and by 1622 there were 1,535.¹⁶ Their cloths sold well in southern European markets because they were much lighter and cheaper than English broadcloths. In Colchester they soon established a separate church congregation, and a new ‘Dutch’ Bay Hall, which maintained rigorous standards of quality control.¹⁷ This authority, and the apparently ‘closed’ nature of the town’s settler community—concentrated near the Bay Hall in St Martin’s and St Peter’s parishes, with its own language and customs ¹⁸—excited xenophobia among ¹¹ D. Defoe, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (facsimile edn., London, 1968), 15. ¹² Ibid, 37. ¹³ R. H. Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester 1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), 79. ¹⁴ In 1477–8 the top quarter of all sellers in Lavenham, Suffolk sold 79% of all cloths recorded, whereas in Colchester, this group sold only 36%. Ibid. 184. ¹⁵ L. F. Roker, ‘The Flemish and Dutch Communities in Colchester in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 21 (1965), 15–30; 103 out of 996 individuals in the town’s Lay Subsidy of 1524–5 were identiﬁed as aliens. N. Goose, ‘The Dutch in Colchester in the 16th and 17th Centuries: Opposition and Integration’, in R. Vigne and C. Littleton (eds.), From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Brighton, 2001), 89. ¹⁶ N. Goose, ‘The ‘‘Dutch’’ in Colchester: The Economic Inﬂuence of an Immigrant Community in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Immigrants and Minorities, 1/3 (1982), 265; Goose, ‘Dutch’, 88. ¹⁷ J. E. Pilgrim, ‘The Rise of the New Draperies in Essex’, Birmingham Historical Journal, 7 (1959–60), 41. Bays weighed 44 lb. ﬁnished, Say weighed anything from 3 to 13 lb. ﬁnished; an English broadcloth could weigh as much as 91 lb. ﬁnished. ¹⁸ In 1616 approximately half the Dutch population (c.750 people) lived in St Peter’s parish. Goose, ‘Dutch’, 95.

34

The Local Context

Colchester’s English cloth producers, expressed in at least ten hostile petitions to the Privy Council between 1580 and 1663.¹⁹ After an abortive attempt to establish another Dutch Congregation to the north-west of Colchester at Halstead in the 1580s, the skills required to produce the ‘New Draperies’ spread quickly among the wider population in Braintree, Bocking, Coggeshall, Sudbury, Lavenham, Long Melford, Clare, Cavendish, Stoke–by–Nayland, and East Bergholt.²⁰ These towns tended to produce poorer-quality cloths for market niches priced below those of Colchester. Sudbury specialized in the production of Says, a woollen-worsted cloth lighter than Bays, which sold well in Spain and Portugal as material for clerical robes—an ironic fate for the product of such a strongly Puritan area!²¹ The trade was always cyclical, weathering serious recessions in the years 1629–32, 1637–8, and the early 1640s. Colchester’s trade was halved by the siege of the borough in 1648, and by the Plague of 1665 and 1666 when the town lost almost half its total population.²² Bocking petitioned the Privy Council in 1651, and Colchester experienced a weavers’ riot in 1675, but in general the period after 1660 saw solid prosperity return to the area.²³ This continued into the 1690s, to some extent counterbalancing the poor harvests and increased food costs of that decade. However, the declaration of war on France in 1702, and Spain in 1705, took away the two major export markets for Bays and Says. The industry entered a prolonged decline in 1707, with persistent unrest among the Colchester weavers, as well as a major riot in March 1715.²⁴ Although the manufacture of the ‘New Draperies’ remained signiﬁcant in Colchester, Braintree, Bocking, Coggeshall, and Sudbury until at least the 1750s, the prolonged crisis of 1707-15 materially weakened the trade. In Colchester, the Dutch Bay Hall went bankrupt and was taken over by the Corporation in 1716, ﬁnally disappearing, along with the separate Dutch congregation in ¹⁹ Roker, ‘Flemish and Dutch Communities’, 18, 25, 26, and 28; see petitions from the Wardens and Commonality of Bay and Saymakers in Colchester against the Dutch and strangers and Privy Council Report 1631 CSP (Dom.), Charles I, 1631–33, CCVI, No. 58, 238–9. ²⁰ Essex RO (Chelms.), Microﬁlm T/A 278, Letter Book of the Deputy-Lieutenants of Essex, 1608–39, transcript in Essex Review, 18 (1908), 203–6. ²¹ In this region the term ‘clothier’ really refers to a producer of broadcloth, rather than the ‘New Draperies’. Contemporaries referred to manufacturers of the latter as ‘Baymakers’ or ‘Saymakers’. For simplicity, all cloth producers will be referred to here as ‘clothiers’. ²² N. Goose and S. Cooper, Tudor and Stuart Colchester: An Extract from the Victoria County History of Essex, Volume IX: The Borough of Colchester (Chelmsford, 1998), 68. Between 8 Sept. 1665 and 21 Dec. 1666 4,526 people died from plague in the town ²³ For Bocking see CSP (Dom.), Interregnum, 1650, XI, No. 1, 10, 26 Oct.1650, Bocking petition; ibid. 1651–2, XXV, nos. 51 and 52, 480–1, Coggeshall clothiers’ petition 1652; for Colchester Riot 1675, see Essex RO (Col.), D/B5 Sb 2/9 Colchester Quarter Sessions Examination and Recognizance Book 1647–87. ²⁴ Essex RO (Col.), Colchester Quarter Sessions Roll D/B5 Sr 86, Mids.1708; 95, Epiph.1711; 101, Mids.1712. For the 1715 Riot, see NA C. 1/14/101, Privy Council miscellaneous bundle, ‘Riot in Colchester’ (Mar. 1715). See K. H. Burley, ‘A Labour Dispute in Early Eighteenth-Century Colchester’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 29 (1956), 230–40.

The Local Context

35

1728.²⁵ At the same time, many clothiers diversiﬁed into land holding, and the trade declined in the lesser centres.²⁶ Increasingly, the poor proﬁts drove out the smaller clothiers who had proliferated before 1700, concentrating production among the more highly-capitalized, larger-scale employers. The trade entered a terminal decline, punctuated by bursts of post-war prosperity, which echoed the fate of its forebear, the broadcloth industry.²⁷ While the trade ﬂourished, however, it dominated the economies of these towns. In Colchester, Nigel Goose has estimated from apprenticeship indentures that by the late seventeenth century as many as 38 per cent of the workforce was directly involved in cloth production.²⁸ The nearest competing trades were tailoring, which commanded between 12 and 17 per cent of apprentices between 1600 and 1630, and victualling, which held about 14 or 15 per cent in the same period. Thus the cloth industry might have accounted for as much as a third of the town’s workforce in the seventeenth century, with a further 15 to 20 per cent involved in ancillary trades. In Sudbury the concentration was even more pronounced. Among 756 apprenticeship indentures registered in the borough’s ‘Cocket Books’ between 1656 and 1689, textile trades comprised 59 per cent, followed by the food and drink trades with 14 per cent, and leather-working trades with 9 per cent.²⁹ The dominance of cloth production explains the frequent petitions and obvious signs of distress exhibited by these towns during trade slumps. Contemporary observers also remarked on another distinctive feature of these cloth-towns. Defoe noted the local phenomenon at its sharpest in Sudbury when he stated that ‘I know nothing for which this town is remarkable, except for being very populous and very poor. They have a great Manufacture of Says and Perpetuanas; and multitudes of poor people are employ’d in working them; but the Number of the Poor is almost ready to eat up the Rich’.³⁰ Over ninety years before Defoe’s observation, the deputy-lieutentants of Essex had reported on ‘the state of the manufacture’ in Essex.³¹ They noted that Bocking ‘abound[s] with poore whereof many are very unrulie’. Unemployment among them would ‘make the place verie hazardous for men of better Ranke ²⁵ See A. F. J. Brown, Essex at Work 1700–1815 (Chelmsford, 1969), 17–24; T. Sokoll, Household and Family among the Poor: The Case of two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Bochum, 1993); P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 1996), 19–37, for the eighteenth-century trade decline. ²⁶ For the trade in one smaller Essex centre, see J. Gyford, Witham 1500–1700: Making a Living (Witham, 1996), 143–72. ²⁷ See K. H. Burley, ‘An Essex Clothier of the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 11 (1958), 289–301. ²⁸ N. Goose, ‘Economic Aspects of Provincial Towns: A Comparative Study of Cambridge, Colchester and Reading, c.1500–1700’ (University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1984), 94; see also tables, 159–60, 161–13; for proportions involved in the cloth trade, 164, 172–3. ²⁹ Suffolk RO (Bury St Edmunds), Sudbury Cocket Book 1656–88, E.E.501/4/1. ³⁰ Defoe, Tour, 48. ³¹ See Essex Review, 18 (1908), 203.

36

The Local Context

to live’ there.³² The deputy-lieutenants lamented the fate of ‘this Multitude of people which live by these Manufactures’, observing that ‘few or none that can subsist unlesse they bee paied every night’.³³ Defoe understood that this problem was a function of the boom–bust nature of the trade. In the post-war boom of the late 1710s demand had been ‘so high that the poor women in Essex could earn one shilling to one shilling and six pence per diem by spinning’.³⁴ Such wage levels provoked a rush to the cloth-making areas. The poor farmers could get no dary maids, the wenches told them then in so many words they would not go to service for twelve pence a week when they could get nine shillings a week at their own hands as they called it. So they all run along to Bocking, to Sudbury, to Braintree, and to Colchester and other manufacturing towns in Essex and Suffolk.

When demand eventually collapsed, the effects were equally dramatic. With typical hyperbole, Defoe lamented, ‘the parishes were thronged with bastards … Nothing followed but confusion; the demand stopped, [and] … baymakers broke by dozens’. In times of trade expansion, the large numbers of ‘poor people’ formed a highly desirable pool of labour, and were ‘poor’ only in the sense that they possessed no other visible means of support. In the subsequent inevitable depressions, though, they had few alternatives to parish relief. Roger North condemned the Baymakers of late seventeenth-century Colchester, the ‘cheife of the town’, who paid ‘starving wages’ to the poor, and made ‘amends in [poor rate] collections’.³⁵ Obviously, therefore, contemporaries associated these weaving towns with high levels of overall poverty and large general populations. The hearth tax allows this assumption to be quantiﬁed. While the tax is problematic as a precise measure of wealth, Tom Arkell has suggested that exemption from it was a reasonably reliable indicator of poverty.³⁶ In his study of Warwickshire, almost none of the exempt contributed to poor relief in their parishes. Very few inhabited a house worth more than £1 per annum, ‘a criterion which appears to provide the closest match’ to the threshold of exemption.³⁷ Certainly, exemption from the hearth tax in Essex and Suffolk cloth parishes appears plausible as an indicator of ‘marginal poverty’. Arkell found that the average level of exemption across Essex’s twenty hundreds was 35 per cent.³⁸ K. H. Burley showed that in the cloth-producing hundreds of Hinckford and Lexden exemption levels were much higher, with 59 ³² See Essex Review, 204. ³³ Ibid. 205. ³⁴ D. Defoe, The Plan of English Commerce (London, 1728), 267–69. ³⁵ R. North, A Discourse of the Poor … (London, 1753) [STC T008466], 77; Suffolk minister Thomas Carew cited 4d. per day as a starvation wage c.1600. See J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), 247 n. 30. ³⁶ T. Arkell, ‘The Incidence of Poverty in England in the Later Seventeenth Century’, Social History, 12 (1987), 30. ³⁷ Ibid, 35. ³⁸ T. Arkell, ‘Identifying Regional Variations from the Hearth Tax’, Local Historian, 33/3 (2003), 157.

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and 50 per cent respectively of householders being exempt in the 1671 hearth tax.³⁹ His aggregate ﬁgures suggested that the textile region had perhaps 35 per cent of all households in the county, but contained 48 per cent of households exempt from the tax. Table 1.1a depicts the proportion of householders exempt in this area of Essex and Suffolk in 1671 and 1674. In general, exemption levels were 20 per cent higher in these cloth parishes than in the rest of Essex. There was also a great Table 1.1a. Household Hearth Tax assessments in Essex and Suffolk parishes, 1671 and 1674. Essex Braintree∗ Coggeshall∗ Colchester† Dedham Earls Colne Finchingﬁeld Halstead∗ Newport Pond Witham∗

Exempt (%)

>3 Hearths (%)

Total Households

66 60 53 44 56 61 60 54 60

25 20 31 41 28 25 20 34 24

286 458 2,209 265 303 160 265 103 272

M

60

25

North and west Essex∗ Essex centre and east∗

48 29

26 34

Suffolk East Bergholt Stoke-by-Nayland St Peter’s Sudbury Lavenham Long Melford

58 38 43 53 47

33 30 42 32 33

M

47

33

32 35

39 34

south-east∗

Suffolk Suffolk centre south∗

267 173 197 261 222

Note: Parishes compared using 1671 Essex Hearth Tax and 1674 Suffolk Hearth Tax. Source: Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/RTh5 Essex Hearth Tax 1671; ‘Suffolk in 1674: The Hearth Tax’, Suffolk Green Books, 11, 13 (Woodbridge, 1905) ∗ Figures abstracted from T. Arkell, ‘Identifying Regional Variations from the Hearth Tax’, Local Historian, 33/3 (2001), table 8. † Figures from N. Goose and J. Cooper, Tudor and stuart Colchester, an Extract from the Victoria History of the County of Essex volume IX: The Borough of Colchester (Chelmsford, 1998), 97.

³⁹ K. H. Burley, ‘Economic Development in Essex in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’ (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1957), 335.

38

The Local Context

deal of variation between individual parishes. Goose ﬁnds that in Colchester the populous, poor weaving parishes of St Botolph and St Giles, south of the town walls, had 63 and 66 per cent of their householders exempt in 1674.⁴⁰ However, in the prosperous central parishes of St Runwald and St Peter, clustered next to the Moot Hall and the Dutch Bay Hall, exemption levels were 25 and 35 per cent respectively. Meanwhile, in Dedham and East Bergholt, similar-sized clothing villages on opposite sides of the River Stour, exemption ran at 44 and 58 per cent respectively. As Tables 1.1b–c indicate, these levels of exemption were signiﬁcantly higher than in Lancashire and Dorset, where median levels of exemption tended to be around one-third of all those assessed. The prevalence of marginally independent households in this area meant that overseers’ rates were very high, and rose continually through the period. William Hunt observed this trend in the yarn-spinning town of Finchingﬁeld, where the average annual rate increased from approximately £30 between 1610 and 1619, to £52 between 1630 and 1639.⁴¹ In this period more Essex parishes recorded rates, and levied them more often during the year.⁴² These upward trends continued into the early eighteenth century. In Finchingﬁeld the 60 per cent increase in disbursements between the 1610s and the 1630s paled beside the increases between 1690 and 1711.⁴³ Although the national population was static or falling in the later seventeenth century, payments in the parish had Table 1.1b. Household Hearth Tax assessments in Lancashire Parishes, 1673 Lancashire

Exempt (%)

>3 Hearths (%)

Total households

Preston Lancaster Wigan∗ Blackburn∗ Clitheroe

33 26 41 47 39

23 33 22 13 14

413 211 458 234 135

Goosnargh and Whittingham Tatham-cum-Ireby

31

6

315

19

2

126

M

36

14

(Lancashire: most∗ )

33

6

Source: TNA E.179/250/11 Lancashire Hearth Tax 1673. ∗ Figures abstracted from Arkell, ‘Identifying Regional Variations’, table 8.

⁴⁰ Goose and Cooper, Colchester, 97. ⁴¹ Hunt, Puritan Moment, 236. ⁴² Ibid, 249. ⁴³ Essex RO (Chelms.), D/P 14/8/1a Finchingﬁeld Vestry minutes 1605–1752, overseers’ accounts.

The Local Context

39

Table 1.1c. Household Hearth Tax assessments in Dorset Parishes, 1662–1664 Dorset

Exempt (%)

>3 Hearths (%)

Total households

Lyme Regis Sherborne

0 0

40 63

163 259

Beaminster Yetminster Mosterton Broadwindsor South Perrot Sydling St. Nicholas

0 0 0 0 0 0

34 18 29 36 27 28

312 229 21 87 30 53

0

31.5

M (Dorset: most∗ ) (Dorset: north∗ )

34 30

19 29

Source: C A F. Meekings, Dorset Hearth Tax Assessments 1662–1664 (Dorchester, 1951). ∗ Figures abstracted from Arkell, ‘Identifying Regional Variations’, table 8.

remained at more than £100 per annum since the 1660s.⁴⁴ Between 1695 and 1699 annual disbursements exceeded £200, or four times the level of the 1630s. They peaked in 1710, at £330 3s. 4d. (ten times the level of a century before), but averaged more than £200 for the rest of the decade. The 1690s were years of bad harvests, bread riots, and virulent and disruptive smallpox epidemics.⁴⁵ The years around 1710 were even worse, with these existing problems compounded by wartime depression in the cloth trade. Defoe was referring to this period when he remarked that the number of poor was almost sufﬁcient to consume the rich. As Table 1.2 shows, this pattern of distress was repeated across the cloth region. Although Braintree seems to have fared better than most parishes in the 1690s, poor rates had already doubled, from an annual mean of approximately £150 in the 1630s, to £320 in the late 1680s. In the difﬁcult years between 1709 and 1714 the average annual rate reached £499, one and a half times the level of the early 1690s.⁴⁶ Elsewhere, Table 1.2 shows wide local variations. The smallest ⁴⁴ E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schoﬁeld, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981), 471. The only year in which disbursements fell below £100 was 1682. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 14/8/1a Finchingﬁeld Vestry minutes 1605–1752. ⁴⁵ See Essex RO (Chelms.) m/f T/A 156, Joseph Bufton’s Almanacs, unfol., 18 May 1692 Coggeshall bread riot; Essex RO (Col.), Colchester Quarter Sessions Roll D/B 5 Sr 57, Easter 1693, Grand Jury presentment, Colchester market riot, 20–2 Apr. 1693; Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/SBb 1 Quarter Sessions Bundles, order made 18 Apr. 1698 to churchwardens of Colne Engaine, Wakes Colne, Markshall, Earls Colne and Copford to assist parish of Coggeshall, where ‘a great and violent contagion of the small pox … hath utterly (for want of Trade) Impoverished many familys’. ⁴⁶ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/8/5a Braintree Vestry minutes 1655–1712, D/P 264/8/2, and Parish Accounts audit 1685–1742.

Table 1.2. Overseers’ disbursements in Essex and Suffolk parishes, 1655–1720 Parish

County 1655–9 1660–4 1665–9 1670–4 1675–9 1680–4 1685–9 1690–4 1695–9 1700–4 1705–9 1710–14 1715–20

Stoke-bySuffolk Nayland Lavenham Suffolk East Suffolk Bergholt Braintree Essex Finchingﬁeld Essex Black Notley Essex Toppesﬁeld Essex

0

0

0

117

86

94

104

100

133

149

101

154

150

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

97 99

100 100

148 126

143 110

123 82

185 106

98 0

0 64 110 243

0 73 66 181

0 74 81 140

0 67 35 159

0 91 135 165

0 80 112 110

98 79 54 115

100 100 100 100

102 148 221 345

112 144 224 287

120 126 212 339

164 201 367 378

127 160 384 485

Note: Indexed medians, where median for years 1690 − 4 = 100 Source: Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB 80/A1/1 Stoke-by-Nayland parish book 1670–97; FB 80/A1/2, 1697–1739; Suffolk RO (Bury St. Edmunds) FL 508/7/1/1 Lavenham overseers’ account book 1688–1720; Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB 191/A1 East Bergholt parish book 1617–1934; Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/8/2 Braintree vestry minutes 1655–1712; Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 14/8/1a Finchingﬁeld vestry records, overseers’ accounts 1605–1752; Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 150/12/0 Black Notley overseers’ accounts and rates 1644–1774; Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 163/8 Toppesﬁeld vestry minutes 1622–1723.

The Local Context

41

parishes in the sample experienced the greatest proportionate increases in rates during these crisis years, notably Black Notley (immediately south of Braintree) and Toppesﬁeld (some 10 miles to the north). Here, although disbursements were lower, their smaller tax bases struggled to cope with the crises. In Black Notley, for example, although in absolute terms payments in 1711 were less than one-ﬁfth of those of its larger neighbour, they were nine times higher than the median levels of spending in the parish in the late 1680s.⁴⁷ The favoured response to these sudden increases in disbursements was to found a parish workhouse, where the poor could be maintained, regulated and controlled more closely, as a means of limiting expenditure.⁴⁸ Colchester Workhouse Corporation was established in 1698 to centralize relief collection so that richer parishes would subsidize poorer ones. In 1748 Morant noted sadly that partisan rivalry had soon undermined the scheme, leaving the town ‘in a very uneasy situation’.⁴⁹ This ‘uneasy situation’ prevailed in most of these cloth towns during the period. After 1730 an upturn in the cloth trade, and a run of good harvests, made such emergency measures less necessary, although parishes such as Earls Colne maintained workhouses into the 1740s.⁵⁰ Their net effect was to restrain rather than to reduce the expenditure levels, and to supplement rather than replace outdoor relief systems. Evidently, then, many households here were dependent on the cloth trade, and vulnerable to its ﬂuctuations. Did this create a distinctive ‘class’ polarization, between ‘capitalist’ clothiers and their ‘proletarian’ workforce? Recently, John Walter’s sophisticated analysis of the political crisis in the area in the early 1640s has questioned such assumptions.⁵¹ He sees ‘no simple divide between rich clothier and poor weaver’. Instead, clothiers varied, from the ‘small producer working on his own account’ to ‘the controller of circulating capital who set weavers directly on work and coordinated the division of labour’. Similarly, weavers extended from poor men ‘with only one loom’, up to ‘master weavers’ with several, who were branching out into the organization of production.⁵² ⁴⁷ Essex RO (Chelms.), D/P 150/12/0 Black Notley Overseers’ Accounts and Rates 1644–1774. The median annual expenditure in the years 1700–4 was £45.3, while in the years 1685–9 it was £10.8. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 163/8 Toppesﬁeld Vestry Minutes 1622–1723. The median annual expenditure 1700–4 was £73.3, and in the period 1685–9 it was £29.3. ⁴⁸ This pre-empted Knatchbull’s Act of 1723, allowing parishes to erect workhouses. See S. Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), 186–90. ⁴⁹ P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the most Ancient Town and Borough of Colchester (London, 1748), 3, 20. ⁵⁰ In Earls Colne, in 1722–9 the median annual disbursement in poor relief was £121.8; 1740–50 it was £131.9. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 209/12/1 Earls Colne Overseers’ Accounts 1741–50; D/P 209/8 Earls Colne Poor Rate Book 1722–50. ⁵¹ Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, 260–84. See also E. Kerridge, Textile Manufacturers in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1985), 193–5. Walter does not share Kerridge’s optimism that ‘there was no ‘‘class division’’, no classes, only … the pursuit of careers open to the talents’. Kerridge, Textile Manufacturers, 204. ⁵² Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, 266.

42

The Local Context

Walter also emphasizes the effects of the cloth trade’s cycles on these relationships. During periods of sustained expansion (such as the late sixteenth century, or the period 1660-85) or short-term booms, weavers had more opportunities to become ‘master’ subcontractors, and less highly capitalized smaller clothiers could enter the industry. During periods of bust, and the protracted phases of terminal decline (1707-15, 1754-63), only those with the largest capital reserves survived.⁵³ Even when weavers worked consistently for piece rates, Walter argues that this did not dictate a ‘proletarian’ identity: ‘The weavers’ relationship to the means of production, controlling it if not owning it and being paid by the piece, meant that it was still possible for them to see themselves as selling the product of their labour, and not just the labour’.⁵⁴ Opportunities for independence may also have varied between the larger and smaller centres, with the latter offering more opportunity, less competition and fewer regulatory restraints for smaller masters during boom periods, but also tending to experience sharper retrenchments during downturns. Walter is also adamant that economic relations do not, in themselves, determine ‘class’ identity or allegiance, because this also depends upon ‘a common understanding of that relationship through a shared interpretation of lived experience’.⁵⁵ This experience tended to produce a dichotomous perception of the social order, expressed in ‘the language of rich and poor’. While this ‘might lack the speciﬁcities that would encourage us to talk of the language of class’, its resonance among contemporaries came from its ‘menacing inclusiveness’, because everyone in society was either on one side of the divide, or the other.⁵⁶ Inventory evidence conﬁrms this picture of diversity in the scale of operations in the area’s cloth industry through the seventeenth century. Table 1.3a illustrates the size of clothiers’ businesses. Since the bulk of a clothier’s working capital Table 1.3a. Household wealth and trade stock, Essex and Suffolk clothiers, 1625 –1740 Stock quartiles

Median £HHG∗

Median £TIV†

Median £Trade Stock

Med. No. Cloths

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q3

23.2 35.3 41.4 67.8

70.6 251 569.2 1,304.9

25.9 194.4 459.5 1,001

8.5 29 34 59

Total N = 85 ∗ †

£HHG = Value of Household Goods (in £). £TIV = Total Value of Household Goods.

⁵³ Burley, ‘Essex clothier’, 289–301. ⁵⁵ Ibid, 273. ⁵⁶ Ibid. 279.

⁵⁴ Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, 267.

The Local Context

43

Table 1.3b. Household wealth of Essex and Suffolk weavers by ownership of looms, 1625–1740 No looms

% in Group

Median £HHG∗

Median £TIV†

1 2 3 4

17 32 23 17

12.9 17.2 11.1 21.8

25.8 34.7 17.6 62.2

Total N = 30 ∗ †

£HHG = Value of Household Goods (in £). £TIV = Total Value of Household Goods.

was invested in moveable goods, their value indicates the scale of his trade at his decease. Obviously, though, market conditions and the extent of testator’s economic activity at his demise will inﬂuence these sums. Some broad disparities emerge when we divide the monetary value of trade stock into quartiles. At the bottom were individuals comparable to the four-loom weavers in Table 1.3b, only two of whom had their trade stock valued, at £17 and £59 respectively.⁵⁷ The remaining clothiers operated on a much larger scale. In the top three quartiles, only four inventories had trade stock worth less than £150, and the number of unsold cloths at their deaths suggests that all were engaged in commercial production.⁵⁸ None of the top two quartiles had trade stock worth less than £250, while none of the top quartile had stock worth less than £500, and eleven possessed more than £1,000 in stock.⁵⁹ None of the bottom quartile had more than 20 cloths in stock at their deaths, whereas eighteen of the other clothiers had more than 50 cloths in stock, and seven had more than 100 when they died.⁶⁰ ⁵⁷ Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory 1C/500/3/2/41 Robert Bailey, Sudbury, weaver, 1647; 1C/500/3/34/93 Thomas Ley, Lavenham, weaver, 1707. ⁵⁸ Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FE 1/3/23 Probate Inventory, Robert Fenn, East Bergholt, clothier, 1685; Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory 1C/500/3/22/20 John Negus, Lavenham, clothier, 1686; Essex RO (Chelms.) D/APbWb Thomas Bridge, Bocking, 1733; Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory 1C/500/3/21/14 John Barwicke, Sr., Sudbury, clothier, 1682. ⁵⁹ NA PROB 4/7906 Thomas Keble, Coggeshall, clothier, 1692; NA PROB 4/9101 John Sampson, Sr., Coggeshall, clothier, 1667; NA PROB 4/9171 Francis Hall, Sudbury, clothier, 1665; NA PROB 4/788 John Cockerell, Coggeshall, clothier, 1662; Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory 1C/500/3/12/23 James Hasell, Sudbury, wool and cloth merchant, 1665; NA PROB 5/3769 John King, Long Melford, clothier, 1681; Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory 1C/500/3/12/30 William Wiles, Sr., Lavenham, clothier, 1667; NA PROB 4/11398 John Winnock, Colchester, clothier, 1685; NA PROB 4/9579 Daniel Wall, Stratford St Mary, clothier, 1667; NA PROB 4/7805 John Barker, East Bergholt, 1669; NA PROB 4/25277 Edmund Peers, Braintree, clothier, 1701. ⁶⁰ The seven with more than 100 cloths in stock were: NA PROB 4/7809 Isaac Tayspill, Colchester, clothier, 1684; NA PROB 4/694 Anthony Appleby, Colchester, clothier, 1679; Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory 1C/500/3/25/91 John Tarver, Lavenham,

44

The Local Context

These differences in scale relate to dramatic disparities in the accumulation of capital. The total trade stock of the bottom quartile amounted to £578.3, or the approximate value of the trading goods of one of the smaller members of the top quartile. By contrast, their total capitalization was £26,539.6. Thus, the total value of the trade stock of the bottom quartile amounted to only 2 per cent of that possessed by the top quartile in the sample. Of course, the social bias in inventory samples under-represents the bottom quartile as a proportion of all testators, while the top quartile is seriously over-represented. The ﬁgures for the number of looms recorded in weaving households, shown in Table 1.3b are less convincing, but there seems little difference in material prosperity between those possessed of one, two, or three looms. Only those with four looms might be categorized as ‘master weavers’, and (possibly) stood the greatest chance of joining the ranks of the minor clothiers. It is difﬁcult to determine whether or not the ranks of the ‘middling’ were deeper here than in the other two areas. Tables 1.1a–c indicate that the proportion of hearth taxpayers assessed on more than three hearths in Essex and Suffolk was distinctly greater than in Lancashire (a median of 34 per cent in the former, compared to only 14 per cent in the latter). However, when compared with Dorset parishes, the differences were much less pronounced. Indeed urban Dorset had proportions that matched or exceeded industrial Essex. Even so, other evidence indicates that although the proportions of hearth taxpayers were broadly similar, their levels of personal wealth were not. Table 1.4 matches the hearth tax payments with the inventory valuations of 539 testators in the three areas. This comparison is problematic, because of the inevitable time lag between assessment for the hearth tax and the taking of the inventory—both appraisals are snapshots of relative prosperity, but they might (in fact) be taken ten or twenty years apart. As a consequence, the correlation between them is not always strong, and their results must be treated with caution.⁶¹ The table has three signiﬁcant features. First, as might be expected, it indicates the social bias of the inventory samples. In Essex and Suffolk, more than two-thirds of the testators had three or more hearths, compared to only a quarter of the general taxpaying population. In north-west and south-west England, the proportions were 43 to 6.4 per cent and 42 to 20 per cent, respectively. Secondly, the Essex and Suffolk sample had household goods of higher value at all levels of hearth tax assessment than the other two areas, except clothier, 1696; NA PROB 4/2686 Thomas Shortland, Colchester, clothier, 1676; NA PROB 4/1822 Peter Johnson, Colchester, clothier, 1680; NA PROB 4/2913 Thomas Brooksby, East Bergholt, clothier, 1666; NA PROB 4/9101 John Sampson, Sr., Coggeshall, clothier, 1667. ⁶¹ Husbands notes that there is a relatively low statistical correlation between the inventoried personal estate values and testators’ hearth tax assessments. C. Husbands, ‘Hearths, Wealth and Occupations: An Exploration of the Hearth Tax in the Later Seventeenth Century’, in K. Schurer and T. Arkell (eds.), Surveying the People: The Interpretation and Use of Document Sources for the Study of Population in the Later Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1992), 70.

The Local Context

45

Table 1.4. Household and total inventory valuations compared with Hearth Tax assessments, by region, c. 1660–1695 Hearths

No.

Essex % N and W %

Mean £HHG∗

Med. £HHG∗

Mean £TIV†

Med. £TIV

East Anglia Exempt 1 only 2 only 3 to 4 5 to 9 10+

199 9 9 35 78 66 2

5 5 18 39 33 1

[48] 57 17 16 8 1

20.1 15.8 31.7 44.9 54.6 0

16.7 15.7 23.2 38.6 47.6 0

83.7 39 120 383.2 558.8 0

32.3 20 77.8 232.7 234.2 0

1 38 18 28 14 1

Lancashire (most) % [33] 81 12.6 5 1 0.4

3.6 13 31.6 32.5 72.7 0

3.5 9.8 15 27.2 51.4 0

35.9 71.9 80.9 116.8 264 0

32.9 37.4 44.3 60.4 100.9 0

2 22 34 29 13 0

Dorset (most) % [34] 62 19 14 5 1

2.4 16 21.8 23.5 44.8 0

2.3 12.9 14 16.6 28.6 0

11.1 70.9 92.8 127.7 168.2 0

6.8 52.1 35.5 62.2 122.8 0

NW England Exempt 1 only 2 only 3 to 4 5 to 9 10+

208 3 79 37 58 29 2

SW England Exempt 1 only 2 only 3 to 4 5 to 9 10+

140 3 31 47 40 19 0

∗

£HHG = Value of Household Goods £TIV = Total Inventory Value Source: Percentages abstracted for comparison from T. Arkell, ‘Identifying Regional Variations from the Hearth Tax’, Local Historian, 33/3 (2003), 166–7, table 4. †

for the wealthiest payers in Lancashire. The median value for the household goods of most categories of hearth taxpayers in Lancashire and Dorset was only approximately two-thirds of their Essex–Suffolk counterparts. Thirdly, this may have been a function of the lower value of their entire personal estate, compared to the Essex–Suffolk cohort—although, as noted above, clothiers’ trade stock inﬂated their total inventory valuations compared to those of landholders. The same trends are evident in Table 1.5a, which compares ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ inventory cohorts. The table emphasizes two things. First, the valuations of household goods in ‘rural’ parishes were very similar to those in ‘urban’ ones in Essex and Suffolk. This may reﬂect the impact of rural manufacturing, but is also strongly inﬂuenced by the difﬁculty in distinguishing between truly rural or urban settlements in this landscape of ‘big’ villages

46

The Local Context

Table 1.5a. Differences between household goods and total inventory valuations, Essex and Suffolk, 1625–1740, by quartiles Quartile Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Number

Rural† £HHG∗

£TIV†

9.6 19.1 33.7 65.5

25 80.3 138.6 361.9

374

Urban§ £HHG £TIV 10.3 21.1 42.3 81.4

Rural as % urban £HHG

23.3 66.5 210.1 303

93 91 80 80

280

∗

£HHG = Value of household goods in £. £TIV = Total value of household goods. ‡ Rural = Long Melford, Cavendish, East Bergholt, Nayland, Bures St Mary, Cavendish, Clare, Dedham, Writtle and Roxwell. § Urban = Colchester, Sudbury, Lavenham, Stoke-by-Nayland, Coggeshall, Braintree, Bocking. †

Table 1.5b. Differences between household goods and total inventory valuations, Lancashire, 1640–1740, by quartiles Quartile Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Number ∗ †

Rural (Goosnargh) £HHG∗ £TIV† 2.7 7.4 13.8 32.5

17.7 36 60.9 127.6

167

Urban (Preston) £HHG £TIV

Rural as % Urban £HHG

5.6 13.8 28.8 61.5

48 54 48 53

12.2 25.6 61.8 131.7

265

£HHG = Value of household goods in £. £TIV = Total value of household goods.

and ‘small’ towns. The distinction may have been greater if larger numbers of inventories had been available from Colchester and Sudbury. Secondly, the wealth disparities with the two other regions are demonstrated once again. The bottom quartile of the Essex–Suffolk rural cohort had personal effects valued higher than the bottom half of the Lancashire and Dorset cohorts. Each quartile of the rural sample in Essex and Suffolk had personal effects valued at approximately twice those of their peers in the other two areas. There were even larger disparities between the urban samples for Essex–Suffolk and Dorset, but urban Lancashire was not so far behind the south-east. These analyses can only be indicative, but they imply that while the cloth trade did not, necessarily, swell the ranks of the ‘middling’ dramatically, it may have made them substantially more prosperous per capita than their peers in Lancashire and Dorset.

The Local Context

47

Table 1.5c. Differences between household goods and total inventory valuations, Dorset, 1640–1740 Quartile Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Number ∗ † ‡ §

Rural† £HHG

£TIV

Urban§ £HHG

£TIV

Rural as % Urban £HHG

2.9 7.1 13.2 33.6

25.3 20.7 68.7 118.8

3.7 9.1 17.2 40

11.8 17 44 108.8

78 78 77 84

322

395

£HHG = Value of household goods in £. £TIV = Total value of household goods. Rural = Beaminster, Netherbury, Leigh, Chetnole, and Yeominster. Urban = Sherborne and Lyme Regis.

The cyclical nature of the cloth industry and the steady immiseration of its workforce during its protracted decline in Essex and Suffolk after 1700 may have sharpened social cleavages in this area. Certainly, the years of acute depression, between 1707 and 1715, conform quite closely to the stereotypical division between exploitative, capitalist clothiers, and exploited, pay-dependent weavers, particularly in the largest centres of production—Colchester, Braintree, and Sudbury. In Colchester clothiers sought to restrict competition, reduce piece rates, make payments in kind, and avoid accepting completed work.⁶² At the same time, weavers attempted trade combinations, objected to ‘truck’ payments, and eventually organized a general labour dispute in March 1715.⁶³ In such disputes the relationship between clothier and weaver was now often depicted in the language of employer and employee, of ‘master’ and ‘workman’.⁶⁴ Yet Colchester was not ‘Coketown’, and its clothiers were not industrial capitalists on the scale, or with the control, of nineteenth-century mill owners.⁶⁵ Despite their obvious sufferings, and their dependency on the clothiers, Colchester’s weavers were not a homogeneous ‘community of fate’ like mill-town proletarians, either. They were not tied to a single manufacturer, and they retained control of their looms and their working day. A proportion of them had by-employments, ⁶² NA PC 1/14/101 Minutes and letters of the Privy Council, relating to the Colchester weavers’ riot, Mar. 1715. See also Burley, ‘Labour Dispute’. ⁶³ Essex RO (Col.) Colchester Quarter Sessions Roll D/B5 Sr 93, Mich. 1710, attack on ‘a company of weavers drinking’; D/B 5 Sr 101, Mids. 1712, complaint by William Pollard, weaver, against James Lawrence ‘esq.’ payment in kind, rejected by the magistrates; D/B 5 Sr 104, Mich. 1713, indictment of Bishop Filbrick, weaver, for publishing a ‘seditious paper’, calling on weavers of Headward and Southward to assemble, 24 June. 1713; NA PC 1/14/101 Letter from Mayor, Aldermen, Justices, and Governors of the Dutch Bay Hall to Lord Townshend, 16 March 1715, reporting assembly of 700–800 people in the streets. ⁶⁴ NA PC 1/14/101 Depositions taken after the Mar. 1715 riot. ⁶⁵ See C. Dickens, Hard Times, Book 1, ch. 5.

48

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particularly supplying labour to local market gardeners and smallholders.⁶⁶ However, as the industry declined, so pay rates fell, with underemployment in the cloth trade being compounded by excess labour competition for other non-skilled jobs. Obviously, by this time there were sharp divisions of economic interest, social standing, and local authority between ‘masters’ and ‘workmen’, and these were perceived and articulated forcefully in moments of crisis, at least. In some respects, therefore, this amounted to episodic ‘high ‘‘classness’’ ’ of the kind perceived by Walter in the 1640s.⁶⁷ These patterns seem to have been deﬁned rather less sharply in the smaller, de-industrializing, centres of production, even if the legacy of high population levels, underemployment and heavy poor rates continued to be felt into the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century.⁶⁸ Compared to Lancashire or Dorset in the early eighteenth century, Essex and Suffolk cloth towns exhibited some sharp social and economic polarities. Yet, this was the result of a handicraft form of manufacturing, embedded within a predominantly rural economy (and society), rather than a product of industrial capitalism, and urban societal alienation. Clothiers were often also farmers, weavers often smallholders or farm labourers. As such, the area’s manufacturing economy (and society) needs to be viewed in the context of its agriculture. Did the agrarian economy work to accentuate, or ameliorate, the social divisions of ‘proto-industrial’ manufacturing? The borough of Sudbury provides an insight into the relationship between agrarian and industrial activities, and its social consequences. Sudbury lay on the north bank of the river Stour, in Suffolk, with its suburb of Ballingdon on the southern (Essex) side of the river. As noted above, by the late seventeenth century the town depended heavily on cloth production, with almost two-thirds of apprentices entering trades associated with the industry. Yet Sudbury was also enmeshed in the agrarian economy. Its commons consisted of riverside meadows, and provided approximately 50 acres of pasture for horses and cattle belonging to the borough’s freemen.⁶⁹ The parish of St Gregory also contained at least 338 acres of arable, pasture, and meadow within the conﬁnes of the town, and along the Stour. These resources allowed diverse patterns of cultivation, and the opportunity for urban craftsmen or traders to practise agrarian by-employments. ⁶⁶ Colchester clothiers generally laid off weavers during August, to ‘play’ as it was put in 1715. NA PC 1/14/101 Privy Council minutes, 20 Apr. 1715. This might also explain the timing of the Stour Valley riots in August 1642. ⁶⁷ Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, 281. ⁶⁸ Brown, Essex at Work, 1–26. In the mid-nineteenth-century the last days of the baize trade were described as ‘Scenes of vice, ﬁlth and ignorance closely combined | When the head of the house was too often a sot | Who sacriﬁced all to his Pipe and his Pot’. C. Ward-Jackson, A History of Courtaulds: An Account of the Origin of the Industrial Enterprise of Courtaulds Limited and of its Associate the American Viscose Corporation (London, 1941), 23–4. ⁶⁹ H. R. French, ‘Urban Agriculture, Commons and Commoners in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Case of Sudbury, Suffolk’, Agricultural History Review, 48/2 (2001), 171–99.

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Predictably, clothiers and wealthier trades exerted considerable inﬂuence over the town’s commons and its other landed resources. Among 183 out of 383 commoners whose occupations can be identiﬁed between 1710 and 1728, 69 (38 per cent) were from clothing trades, with 15 per cent described as clothiers and 17 per cent as weavers. Food producers, leatherworkers, and woodworkers were the next most frequent users of the commons. However, this apparently even usage by ‘masters’ and ‘workmen’ in the cloth trade concealed some signiﬁcant disparities. In addition to allowing freemen to depasture animals, the corporation also distributed the money charged for the exercise of this right among other freemen who ‘were poor and were not able to keep any cattle of their own’.⁷⁰ In most years between 1710 and 1728, there were approximately 130 commoners and 240 recipients of money. Of the 108 recipients of commons money whose occupations can be identiﬁed, 64 per cent were cloth workers, and 52 per cent were weavers. Only 8 per cent were clothiers. In addition, when weavers exercised their commons’ rights, they did so differently to most other trades. Most trades were twice as likely to depasture horses rather than cattle. Weavers, other cloth workers, and woodworkers were the only trades (apart from a few medical professionals) who were more likely to keep cattle than horses. Presumably, these crafts had more need of the supplementary income to be derived from a cow, than they did of the traction available from horses. The 52 commoners who were widows also exhibited this preference, probably for the same reason. Although a small proportion of the town’s weavers and craftsmen were able to supplement their income by cow-keeping, use of the commons seems to have followed, rather than blurred, the distinction between clothier and weaver, or (for that matter) between higher-status retail and distributive crafts and manual occupations (like weaver or carpenter). This outcome may have been the longterm (and intended) consequence of a decision taken by the corporation in 1654, to restrict common rights only to those who paid a full ﬁne of £5 for their freedom, instead of a lesser payment of £2.⁷¹ To what extent did the wider urban and suburban agrarian economy compensate for restricted access to this corporate resource? Agrarian activity is recorded relatively infrequently in Sudbury probate inventories in this period. Only 14 out of 94 inventories contain evidence of landholding, or arable and livestock production, although a further 7 testators owned one or two cows.⁷² Testators with agrarian by-employments had higher median personal estates valuations than those in the town as a whole—household goods valued at £41.4 compared ⁷⁰ NA E. 134, 11 Anne, Mich. 5, Buxton Underwood v. Lawrence Gibbon, Robert Sparrow, Roger Voice and Roger Snelling, 1712, deposition of John Christmas, Acton, cordwainer. ⁷¹ Suffolk RO (Bury) Sudbury Town Book 1639–72, EE 501/2/7, order and decree 30 Oct. 1654. ⁷² M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean, and A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (Abingdon, 2004), 74. Over 50% of weavers in Kent and Cornwall engaged in commercial farming activity.

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to £31.1 for all testators, and total valuations (including agricultural goods) of £209.8 compared to £77.8. The inventory sample may under-record such activity, either because it occurred beyond the conﬁnes of the household, or because appraisers were reluctant to include it as part of the personal estate. The inventory of at least one Sudbury testator, Jonathan King, a weaver who died in 1705, exhibited no sign of agrarian activity, yet we know King rented an acre of meadow in St Gregory parish in 1696.⁷³ That year, King and 34 other individuals held land in St Gregory’s. Most of the plots were small, with the median being only 5 acres, and a division existing between functioning farms of 20–40 acres, and smallholdings of less than 10 acres. The larger farms were investment properties, owned by successful clothiers, such as William and Samuel Hazell, who held farms of 21 and 41 acres respectively, or Oliver Andrewes, the landowning son of a wealthy woollen draper. These holdings were often in the hands of tenants, such as James Hurrell, who had paid £85 per annum for Bartholomew’s Farm (28 acres) between 1690 and 1705. Other arrangements included the ‘farming-to-halves’, practised in the early 1690s by Samuel Warner, and one Stephen Carter. Warner provided the ﬁxed and working capital, while Carter cultivated the 13 acres, for a share of the proﬁts.⁷⁴ Many of the smaller plots were owned by prosperous Sudbury tradesmen, such as the apothecaries William Cock and William Fothergill, who owned 0.75 acres of meadow and 2 acres of arable, the mercer Daniel Cook, and grocer Samuel Abbott, who both had holdings in ‘Windmill Field’, or the clothier Thomas Dansie, who rented 11.5 acres in Friar’s meadow, from two different owners.⁷⁵ For richer tradesmen, these relatively modest holdings seem to have functioned as a means to invest industrial or commercial proﬁts, generate real estate income, and acquire assets that could be liquidated, in times of need. The owners of fractional smallholdings may have sought secondary income strands, or even to develop a subsistence by-employment. This may have been the purpose of the estate of William King, a prosperous haberdasher who died in July 1685, possessed of 2.75 acres of barley, the same area of wheat, 1 acre of leased meadow land, 3 seams of peas, 3 bushels of oats, 3 seams of malt, and half a bushel of meal.⁷⁶ These assets amounted to only £24 out of King’s £313 personal estate, ⁷³ Suffolk RO (Bury) Archdeaconry of Sudbury Probate Inventory, 1C/500/3/32/43 Jonathan King, Sr., Sudbury, weaver, 1705; Suffolk RO (Bury), St Gregory’s Parish Book, 1661–1829, F.L. 634/1/1, account of lands lying in the parish, 1696. ⁷⁴ NA E. 134, 4 Wm. and Mary, Mich 43. Luke Leake v. Samuel Warner, 1692, depositions of John Smyth, Great Cornard, husbandman, and Daniel Cook, Sudbury, gent. See also E. Grifﬁths, ‘Responses to Adversity: The Changing Strategies of Two Norfolk Landowning Families, c.1665–1700’ in R. W. Hoyle (ed.), People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture: Essays for Joan Thirsk, Agricultural History Review suppl. ser. 3 (Exeter, 2004), 74–92. ⁷⁵ Occupations identiﬁed by cross-referencing with Suffolk RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Sudbury Cocket Book 1656–88, E.E.501/4/1. ⁷⁶ NA PCC Inventory PROB 5/4385 William King, Sudbury, gent., 1685.

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but may have supplied much of his household needs. However, it is noticeable that it was individuals of King’s prosperity who were able to take advantage of such resources, rather than poorer craftsmen and weavers. As deponents, the latter describe employment as harvesters and tithe gatherers, rather than experience as sub-tenants or smallholders indicating that few enjoyed any signiﬁcant access to landed resources.⁷⁷ There were, undoubtedly, dense connections between the industrial and agrarian sectors in cloth towns such as Sudbury. There were, probably, more opportunities for weavers and craftsmen to develop agrarian by-employments, and access land through sub-tenancy or sharecropping arrangements than is suggested by the surviving evidence.⁷⁸ Despite these, though, agriculture seems to have offered few opportunities for individuals to transcend their position within the manufacturing economy. Some property owners diversiﬁed between industrial production, commercial stock, and real estate, while many craftsmen sought paid by-employment rather than property in the agrarian economy. Although each could move with relative ease between the two sectors, social mobility from handicraft producer to signiﬁcant property owner seems to have been uncommon, because neither tenant farming nor small-scale manufacturing offered spectacular opportunities for capital accumulation. These relatively severe economic and social restrictions may reﬂect the level of productive specialization achieved in the later stages of the Essex and Suffolk cloth industry, where there were very few examples of the owner-occupying artisan-producer weaver-farmer prevalent in the West Riding woollen zone at this time.⁷⁹ Instead, while clothiers could acquire tenancies or smallholdings, weavers were likely to slip into seasonal agricultural labour on others’ behalf.⁸⁰ How far was this stratiﬁcation replicated in the wider agrarian economy of the area? This economy was undoubtedly diverse, both in the range and the scale of farming activities it fostered. The Agrarian History of England and Wales typiﬁes all of central Essex and southern Suffolk as a farming region engaged in corn and cattle production, with substantial dairying and a range of ‘other enterprises’.⁸¹ This caution is because the diverse soil types of the river valleys made a wide variety of agrarian activities possible, even within the same parish. ⁷⁷ NA E. 134, 11 and 12 Anne, Hil. 2, Buxton Underwood v. Anthony Sparrow, 1713, depositions of Robert Haxall, Melford, husbandman, Jonathan Lee, Sudbury, sayweaver, and Samuel Jones, Sudbury, sayweaver. ⁷⁸ NA E. 134, 1 Wm. and Mary, Mich. 15, Edmund Hickeringill v. Peter Clarke, Anne Clarke, John Merriton, and Dorothy Merriton, 1689, deposition of Peter Richardson, Colchester, labourer. ⁷⁹ P. Hudson, ‘Capital & Credit in the West Riding Wool Textile Industry c.1750–1850’ in ibid. (ed.), Regions & Industries: A Perspective in the Industrial Revolution in Britain (Cambridge, 1989), 72–4. ⁸⁰ See n. 64 above. ⁸¹ B. Holderness, ‘East Anglia and the Fens: Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Ely, Huntingdonshire, Essex and the Lincolnshire Fens’, in Thirsk (ed.), Agrarian History, v. 1640–1750, i. Regional Farming Systems, 211, 214–15.

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Table 1.6 illustrates the disparate range of farming activities in a sample of 146 probate inventories of Suffolk (and a few Essex) yeomen and husbandmen. Most farmers, whatever the scale of their operation, were generalists, engaging in both the production of cereals and the raising of cattle, particularly dairy herds. Much of this dairy production was converted into cheese—three-quarters of yeomen in the sample had quantities of cheese or cheese-making equipment in their inventories. Despite the characterization of the area as a dairy one, though, sheep featured in more than two-thirds of yeomen’s inventories in the sample, but generally only in relatively small numbers (a median number of 22 per inventory among yeomen). Larger farmers were most likely to be growing wheat and barley, although oats and rye were grown on poorer soils, in combination with wheat and rye (‘maslin’), or fodder crops such as ‘bullimong’. One-third of husbandmen and two-thirds of yeomen possessed horses as draught animals (which relates directly to the proportions owning their own ploughs). The proﬁtability (or the scale) of arable farming in this area was also emphasized by the greater propensity of Essex and Suffolk yeomen to possess larger, more expensive four-wheel wagons, compared to the continuing use of two-wheel carts in the other two regions. As the evidence from all these regions will suggest, the natural impulse of most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century farmers seems to have been to diversify, unless local conditions favoured specialization. This also allowed them to spread risk across different types of cultivation when grain prices declined and agricultural incomes fell in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.⁸² For example, in 1692 Edward Stammers, the tenant of a large farm called Ashwell Hall in Finchingﬁeld testiﬁed that he had rented this 130-acre holding for seven or eight years.⁸³ During this time, it had been divided up between 10 acres of meadow, 18 acres of pasture, 85 acres of arable and 5 12 acres of hops, at the annual rent of £66 per annum. In 1689 the farm had supported 66 sheep, 26 scotch cattle, plus 22 dry bullocks. This was a sizeable enterprise, but in good years the gross yield from the cash crop of hops alone would have been sufﬁcient to pay the rent on the property.⁸⁴ ⁸² J. Thirsk, ‘Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change’, in ead. (ed.), Land, Church and People Essays Presented to Professor H. P. R. Finberg, Agricultural History Review, suppl. 18 (Reading, 1970), 148–77. For the debate about whether the period 1660–1750 featured prolonged rent and commodity price declines, or institutional and productivity change amounting to an ‘agricultural revolution’, see G. E. Mingay, ‘The Agricultural Depression, 1730–1750’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 8 (1956), 323–38; J. V. Beckett, ‘Regional Variation and the Agricultural Depression, 1730–50’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 35 (1982), 35–51; M. Overton, ‘Depression or Revolution? English Agriculture 1640–1750’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 344–52. See price series in Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 64. ⁸³ NA E.134 4 William and Mary Mich. 10, Mark de la Pla, clerk v. Sir Martin Lumley Bt., 1692, deposition of Edward Stammers, Wethersﬁeld, yeoman. ⁸⁴ Ibid, deposition of Richard Morgan, Finchingﬁeld, husbandman. In 1688 the hop garden yielded 6–7 cwt of hops per acre, valued at £3–£3 10s. per cwt., or a total gross value of at least £99.

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Table 1.6. Probate inventories including farm produce and stock, by region, 1620 –1740 (%) Essex and Suffolk Husb. Yeoman

North-west England Husb. Yeoman

South-west England Husb. Yeoman

Wheat Barley Oats Rye Maslin Other Cereals

17 9 9 9 4 35

58 51 38 25 22 57

17 26 29 0 0 33

26 23 40 0 0 36

30 19 5 0 3 11

44 28 15 1 3 19

Malt Peas/Beans Hemp Hay Wood Turf Coals Apples Other Fruit

0 13 0 22 52 0 4 17 0

33 44 0 68 37 0 12 5 0

33 8 0 53 12 53 36 0 1

35 11 0 60 4 53 45 0 0

5 19 5 32 19 0 0 14 0

16 28 2 39 26 0 1 25 0

Bulls Cows Oxen Calves Bullocks Heifers Sheep Pigs Horses Mares Colts

9 48 0 0 26 0 22 43 35 0 22

15 79 1 38 41 6 69 81 66 37 36

3 73 12 44 29 38 6 35 33 49 24

5 81 31 55 50 46 4 54 56 54 36

3 51 3 14 16 27 27 38 35 27 16

10 58 7 13 26 30 47 44 40 22 14

Wagons Carts Tumbrels Ploughs Cheese Butter Pork/Bacon Beef Honey Wool Spinning Weaving

4 17 17 30 39 4 4 0 0 9 17 9

44 50 67 68 79 23 14 0 2 14 9 3

0 49 0 27 28 31 19 19 0 1 31 1

0 65 0 44 32 21 26 36 0 3 28 2

3 22 0 19 27 8 16 0 0 11 5 0

3 37 0 35 41 23 24 3 0 15 2 0

Number of inventories

23

118

78

114

37

144

Note: The total number of records in the sample was 514.

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This ﬁts the model outlined a century later in the ﬁrst edition of The Complete Grazier (1767).⁸⁵ It calculated the proﬁts of a 100-acre stock-rearing enterprise at £290 per annum, after payment of rent, or £319 per annum for a dairy farm, keeping pigs and wintering sheep.⁸⁶ The proﬁt on a 50-acre leasehold was calculated at £133 6s. 8d.⁸⁷ Although proﬁts might not have been so high in the seventeenth century, nor the supply of bought-in animals so extensive, this example illustrates the returns possible under this agrarian regime to large tenant-farmers like Stammers. Obviously, not all farmers operated on such a scale, and so not all beneﬁted equally in the inﬂationary era before 1660, or suffered equally during the deﬂationary period of the 1670s and 1680s or the 1730s and 1740s. These effects were also accentuated by the disposition of land ownership. Unlike the Suffolk heath lands 20 miles to the northwest, between Bury St Edmunds and Newmarket, which saw a concentration of country house and estate building in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, manors in the clothing district remained very small and ownership dispersed. Even the ancient estates of the earls of Oxford, comprising more than 40 manors in north and north-west Essex in the early 1570s, were sufﬁciently spread out to dilute their immediate seigneurial power. When these were sold off in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, they were bought piecemeal by smaller gentry families. The Riches, earls of Warwick, owned 64 manors in 1630, but their inﬂuence was greatest over the southern cloth parishes of Braintree, Bocking, Finchingﬁeld, and Coggeshall, rather than in the north of the county.⁸⁸ Subsequent purchasers of substantial estates in the area tended to be successful London merchants, such as Paul, Viscount Bayning, Josiah Child, and John Olmius.⁸⁹ They existed alongside small- to medium-sized gentry estates created in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries by families such as the Mildmays or Wisemans, and medieval survivors such as the Waldegraves across the Suffolk border.⁹⁰ If manors were small in this locality, landholdings within them were also a patchwork of different forms of tenure, created from a variety of small fenced or hedged ﬁelds, farmed ‘in severalty’. The villages of Earls Colne and Stanway, in the agrarian hinterland of Colchester, provide illustrations of these trends in landholding, although it is difﬁcult to establish their typicality. Two principal ⁸⁵ The Complete Grazier: or, Gentleman and Farmer’s Directory (London, 1767) [STC T129052], 73–9. See also Holderness, ‘East Anglia and the Fens’, 234–6. ⁸⁶ The Complete Grazier, 73. ⁸⁷ Ibid, 76. ⁸⁸ Hunt, Puritan Moment, 15. ⁸⁹ Ibid, 20; P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (Wakeﬁeld, 1978), II, Bayning estate, 32, 49, 51, 93, 95, 96, 132, 238, 240; Olmius estate, 12, 15, 76, 77, 84, 97, 100, 114, 122, 173, 395. ⁹⁰ D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.), An Historical Atlas of Suffolk Revised and Enlarged Edition (Ipswich, 1999), 92–3, 98–9.

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Table 1.7. Distribution of copyhold land ownership, Earls Colne, Essex, 1600–1750 Holdings acres

1600

1650

1700

1750

<5 5–14.9 15–24.9 25–49.9 50+

56 14 15 7 4

62 22 14 9 3

39 18 11 5 6

40 18 9 7 4

Note: Figures based on automated ‘rentals’ generated by database of copyhold land transfers in manors of Earls Colne and Colne Priory, for 1 January in each of the years mentioned.

types of property holdings were evident in Earls Colne in this period. First, there were holdings that ranged from cottage plots, up to houses and lands of 15 acres. Even in 1600, 15 acres was too small to be a commercially viable farm sufﬁcient to support its owner. Usually such properties, whether freehold or (more often in Earls Colne) copyhold, were held either by those who were engaged in other economic activities, such as cloth-production, rural crafts, or retail trades, or by those who rented additional land to create a viable farming acreage. These types of holding were always the most numerous. Table 1.7 shows that in 1600 there were at least 70 such copyholds (56 under 5 acres). By 1650 they had increased to 84 (with 62 under 5 acres), in line with the population rise, and despite efforts to police subdivision of cottages. By 1700 there were only 57 such copyholds recorded and ﬁfty years later there were 58 (40 under 5 acres). The other category of land ownership was of viable farming units, of more than 15 acres, with ‘yeoman-sized’ holdings beginning at 25 acres. Table 1.7 suggests that over time the viability of holdings between 15 and 24.9 acres weakened, while smaller and larger holdings grew at their expense. The lack of dramatic movements was due to the absence of any aggressively acquisitive purchaser, and the disproportionate cost of these smaller holdings compared to the larger farms. While Chapter 2 shows that the turnover of these yeomen families remained relatively brisk, the size of the farms they acquired did not change signiﬁcantly. In fact, the unit of ownership remained largely unchanged for holdings in excess of 5 acres, oscillating between 15 and 20 acres per holding throughout the period.⁹¹ This stasis was because, increasingly, the owners of these properties were letting them to tenant farmers. By the 1740s approximately 40 per cent of holdings in excess of 5 acres in Earls Colne were in the hands of tenants. In addition, half ⁹¹ It breached this band only in 1625–9, 1710–30 when it just exceeded 20 acres, and 1675–85 when it fell just below 15 acres.

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the land in the two manors within the parish was the lord’s demesne (much of it sold off to neighbouring landowners in the 1630s), and tenants held most of this, including three holdings of more than 140 acres that dwarfed most of the largest copyholds.⁹² A similar pattern is evident in the nearby parish of Stanway, on the western outskirts of the borough of Colchester.⁹³ Here there were 25 farms (excluding holdings that intruded from outside). Four were of between 10 and 24 acres, supplemented by common grazing rights on the parish’s heath until its enclosure in 1791. There were nine farms of between 25 and 79 acres, and twelve of between 80 and 300 acres, seven of which were between 100 and 149 acres, and only three were in excess of 250 acres. In the period 1700–60, only three of these twenty-ﬁve farms appear to have been cultivated by their owners.⁹⁴ All the others were in the hands of tenants at some point in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, with three of the largest farms, Bellhouse Farm (304 acres), Old House Farm (177 acres), and Street Farm (159 acres) being let directly by the lord of the manor.⁹⁵ This adds some extra weight to the idea that the increase in farm-sizes and the growth of output and rents that occurred in the locality may have been due to the spread of tenancy at market-level rents, rather than by extensive sales among the smaller copyholders. Certainly, in Earls Colne and Stanway, some tenants amalgamated several rented properties to create larger, unitary holdings, allowing them to increase their scale of cultivation, or to diversify their activities. The farming career of Thomas King of Earls Colne provides an example of this. He was born in 1701, and apprenticed as a woollen draper. He married in 1725, and paid rates for the ﬁrst time the following year.⁹⁶ He served as a constable in 1731, and in 1732 took a lease of Loveland, 9 12 acres held of Benjamin Fletcher.⁹⁷ The same year he rented the George Inn from the Cressener family, absentees who had been copyholders in Earls Colne since at least the sixteenth century.⁹⁸ In 1737 he ⁹² French and Hoyle, English Rural Society, ch. 3. ⁹³ Information on Stanway abstracted from C. Edwards, The Parish of Stanway People and Places c.1700–1840 (Colchester, 2001), cross-referenced with Essex RO (Chelms.) D/DEI/T 299 Round Family deeds, 1748–91, and D/DEI/T267 Harrison Family deeds, 1731–1846. ⁹⁴ Beacon Farm, 146a of copyhold, held by George Hunt, Sr. and Jr., Edwards, Stanway, 50; Judd’s farm, 40 acres of copyhold, held by Peter Osborne until 1749, then James Miller, ibid, 74; Wellhouse Farm, approximately 52 acres of copyhold (although Wellhouse was a holding of only 8 acres), held by Abraham Richmond, resident in Stanway, but who sub-let these 8 acres to four individuals in 1723, ibid. 100. ⁹⁵ Ibid. 54, 85, 95. ⁹⁶ www.alanmacfarlane.com [document reference numbers given in square brackets] Earls Colne marriage licence, 1725 [10300598], marriage register, 1725 [9200829]; rate 11 Apr. 1726 [800245]. ⁹⁷ EC Court Rolls, 23 Apr. 1731 [41900363], election of Thomas King and William Benson as constables, rate 26 Mar. 1733 [11000383]. ⁹⁸ John Cressener received land in a transfer in May 1532, Essex RO (Chelms.) D/DPr 91 Earls Colne Manor Court Roll, 21 May 1532 [626000237, 62600283, 62600320, 62600354]; a descendant of the Cressener family, Samuel Towle, ﬁnally sold out in 1810–11. Rental of

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rented a part of Loweﬁelds (32 acres in total) also from the Cressener family.⁹⁹ The next year his lease on the George ended.¹⁰⁰ In 1742 King changed all his holdings. He rented the adjoining ﬁelds in Loweﬁelds, a total of 10 acres, and took on another inn, the White Lion, held of another vestryman Joseph Bott.¹⁰¹ He held these two properties until 1750, supplementing them in 1744–5 with the Fens, 7 acres of freehold land, and (suggesting vertical integration) he rented a maltings in 1749.¹⁰² By this means he increased his rate assessment from 4d. in 1731 to 2s. 3d. in 1750.¹⁰³ King reacted quickly to new opportunities, and was prepared to juggle his leases until he got what he wanted, amalgamating the holdings of other copyholders into larger units of cultivation, and engaging in a diverse range of agrarian and complementary non-agrarian activities. Similarly, in Stanway, James Miller held the copyhold of Judd’s farm (40 acres), between 1749 and 1759, but supplemented it with tenancies of Foakes’s farm (28 acres), between 1758 and 1762, and the Cocks (an inn plus 12 acres) between 1750 and 1762.¹⁰⁴ These tenancies doubled Miller’s acreage, increased an income that might otherwise have been marginal for someone of yeoman status, and allowed economic diversiﬁcation with an inn on an arterial route to the capital. Individuals such as King and Miller were probably more common in the rural economy of this area in 1750 than they had been in 1550. They existed because the lack of effective manorial controls on the subletting of copyhold land allowed the unit of cultivation to be decoupled from the unit of ownership. By 1750 in Earls Colne almost all ‘farms’ were different in size and shape to the units of property from which they were assembled—a fact that, over time, weakens all studies of agricultural change based primarily on the abundant records of ownership. Although our evidence is patchy outside Earls Colne, this process seems to have created a tripartite split in the scale of farming enterprises in this area. At the bottom were the smallholdings, of 5–15 acres, usually operated in conjunction with a trade or craft, and often specializing in the production of foodstuffs (milk, butter, cheese, eggs, poultry, honey, soft fruit, and possibly market garden produce), and fodder crops. Above them were the holdings of 25–75 acres, that may have been sufﬁcient for a sixteenth-century yeoman, but which were too small to support his eighteenth-century counterpart in a similar relative social position. Increasingly, such units may have been leased out Manors of Earls Colne and Colne Priory, 1854 [80000205, 80000600, 80000615, 80000730, 80000740, 80000745]. ⁹⁹ Rate 20 Sept. 1737 [11101775], ‘Thomas King for Lowelands and Loveland’. ¹⁰⁰ Rate 20 Sept. 1738 [11103041]. ¹⁰¹ Rate, 30 Mar. 1742 [11300005], ‘Thos. King for The Lyon, Lowﬁelds and Lovelands’. ¹⁰² Rate, 8 Oct. 1744 [11301735], ‘same for the Fens’; rate, 25 Sept. 1749 [11401819] ‘same for the Malting’. ¹⁰³ Rate, 6 Sept. 1731 [10904039], ‘Thos. King 4d.’ rate, 1 Oct. 1750 [11402520], ‘Thos. King for The Lion 11d., same for Lowﬁelds 1s., same for The Malting 4d.’ ¹⁰⁴ Edwards, Stanway, 73, 69, 33.

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whole, to tenants unhindered by the burden of ﬁxed capital costs, to the larger neighbouring farmers, or let in pieces to the smallholding fraternity. At the apex of rural society stood full-size, commercial farms, of 80–300 acres. By the end of the period, their cultivators were increasingly unlikely to own these enterprises. In social terms, land ownership in this area may have become increasingly irrelevant as an indicator of status among the rate-paying half of the parish, compared to farmed acreage and income (or income-generating potential). At the level of cultivation, there may not have been the marked polarization of holding size or the decline of the small producer so prominent in conventional accounts of the agrarian economy of this period. Instead, this change was more apparent at the level of ownership. The small owner-occupier began to disappear, perhaps off to town while in continued possession of the family copyhold, or after selling up, either to pursue better opportunities or to stave off worse ones. There may have been an upward drift in the size of ‘farms’, as these became detached from ownership, and the largely subsistence family economy vanished (if it had ever existed here, even in 1500).¹⁰⁵ However, considerable variety remained in the scale of agrarian enterprises. Participants swapped a (perhaps overestimated) degree of freedom from dependence on the market, for engagement with the cash economy, and the (perhaps underestimated) freedom to chop-and-change ﬁelds and farms to suit their immediate requirements. This had mixed social consequences for the ‘middling’. They continued to pursue agrarian by-employments on subsistence-level plots. Yet they were increasingly unlikely to own these holdings, or (perhaps) to be joined in such endeavours by labourers and the lower-status manual crafts (such as weavers). On more viable commercial farms market-oriented production (and rents) predominated. Even in an area where most estates were relatively small in extent, it appears that a majority of owners were no longer engaged directly in cultivation. Although subtenancy, sharecropping arrangements, and by-employments shaded the edges of the classic tripartite division between capitalist landlords, tenant farmers, and landless labourers, this distribution nonetheless predominated in Essex and Suffolk. It reinforced the division between those with capital resources, and those without. These resources did not have to be extensive, and might now include just the working capital of the tenant farmer, or perhaps the craftsmen’s access to sufﬁcient ‘credit’ to take on a smallholding. However, in urban and rural areas it may have been increasingly difﬁcult for those without such relatively modest resources ever to gain temporary control of such assets—even, in Sudbury, to supplement wages by owning a cow. Instead, their opportunities came in the form of waged work at harvest time, or casual labour at other times of year. Their ¹⁰⁵ P. R. Schoﬁeld, Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200–1500 (Basingstoke, 2003), 131–57; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991), 32–57.

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compensation, such as it was, for the loss of such supplements increasingly took the form of a wider range of payments by the overseers, and ever-higher parish rates. While the eventual extinction of the area’s cloth trade ended the sharp early eighteenth-century distinction between ‘master’ and ‘workman’, it did nothing to alleviate the hurdle between those with access to even modest capital and real assets, and those reliant on wages. As Chapter 4 shows, at the other end of the ‘middling’ bracket there was also a growing distance between those who could afford the material trappings and social accomplishments of gentility, and those who could not do so, or feared the ridicule that awaited an unconvincing attempt to display them.

II Regional characteristics created in the early modern period tend to contradict those formed during the industrial era. Before 1750 the relatively polarized manufacturing society of the south-east contrasted strongly with the largely rural and less stratiﬁed social order of the north-west. While Lancashire did not lack towns, contemporary travellers drew a sharper distinction between urban and rural life here than they did in some other parts of England. Southern, metropolitan observers were surprised by the rapid growth and prosperity of Liverpool, ‘London in miniature’ according to Celia Fiennes, but found little to engage their attention in an otherwise agrarian and underpopulated county. Fiennes remarked on Preston’s shopping facilities, noting that it was ‘a very good market town … with all sorts of things leather corn coales butter cheese and fruite and garden things’.¹⁰⁶ Visiting around 1698, she also saw reassuring signs of contemporary cultural norms, praising a lawyer’s house in the town that followed the latest London fashion.¹⁰⁷ Twenty years later, Defoe depicted this county town as a legal centre and a genteel resort, even if there was ‘no manufacture’ to impress him: ‘The town is full of attorneys, proctors, and notaries … it being a dutchy and county palatine … The people are gay here, though not perhaps the richer for that; but it has by that obtained the name of Proud Preston.’¹⁰⁸ If the town seemed oriented more towards consumption than production, Defoe saw that it attracted ‘a great deal of good company’, although he hinted that their numbers had been depleted by the 1715 Rebellion.¹⁰⁹ North of Preston, the terrain and the diet became less familiar, and perhaps less welcoming. Defoe described the northern part of the Lancashire plain vividly, ‘lock’d in between the hills on one side high as the clouds, and prodigiously higher, and the sea on the other’, sea that ‘seemed desolate and wild, for it was a sea without ¹⁰⁶ C. Morris, (ed.), The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (London, 1947), 184. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid, 187. ¹⁰⁸ Defoe, Tour, ii. 268. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid.

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ships’.¹¹⁰ Fiennes’s preoccupations were more prosaic, but nonetheless revealing. She complained about the length of Lancashire miles, and recorded her ﬁrst experience of oat-bread, ‘Clap Bread’, which she tasted at Garstang, 10 miles north of Preston.¹¹¹ This was the ﬁrst hint that she had entered the upland agrarian economy. These observers did not venture far off the main roads, or see sights that outweighed the impression of the distant, looming Pennines. To what extent did society in central Lancashire conform to their impressions? Were its towns isolated reservoirs of services and sophistication, surrounded by an underdeveloped and unfamiliar rural hinterland? Despite Defoe’s forebodings, the countryside between Preston and Lancaster presented little that would have seemed alien or remarkable to these southern observers. The terrain was level, the countryside was enclosed, and dispersed townships and non-nucleated settlements were common, but not heavily populated.¹¹² As Fiennes’s observations at Preston market suggest, the agrarian economy was diversiﬁed, with both arable and pastoral production, and some concentration on the making of butter and cheese. The Agrarian History typiﬁes the northern half of the Lancashire plain as concerned with subsistence arable crops, cattle, and sheep.¹¹³ Certainly, Table 1.6 shows that in comparison with their peers in Essex and Suffolk, yeomen in this district possessed smaller stocks of arable crops, and favoured oats rather than wheat. However, the survey of the agrarian regions of Lancashire in the sixteenth century by Rodgers suggested that arable production outweighed pasture in a tongue of land that extended either side of the Preston–Lancaster road, and extended east up the Ribble valley to Clitheroe.¹¹⁴ Both areas were sandwiched by pastoral farming zones. This arable bias is less evident by the seventeenth century, either because inventories under-record crops, or because regional grain markets supplanted subsistence production, and allowed specialization in livestock-rearing for national markets. Dairy herds were common, but so were animals kept for meat (bullocks and steers). In addition, oxen appeared in almost one-third of yeomen’s inventories as draught and plough animals—even though a large proportion of inventories also featured horses. This orientation towards livestock production and dairying left the area vulnerable to the failure of fodder crops and serious outbreaks of ‘cattle plague’ (rinderpest). The former occurred in the early 1620s and 1682-3, and the latter in 1714-15 and the late 1740s.¹¹⁵ The smaller scale of arable production, and ¹¹⁰ Defoe, Tour, 269. ¹¹¹ Morris, Fiennes, 188. ¹¹² Thirsk, ‘Farming Regions’, 86. ¹¹³ Thirsk, Agrarian History, v: i, 59–67. However, few sheep were recorded in probate inventories in Goosnargh or Clitheroe. ¹¹⁴ H. B. Rodgers, ‘Land Use in Tudor Lancashire: The Evidence of the Final Concords, 1450–1558’, Transactions and Papers [Institute of British Geographers], 21 (1955), 84–9. ¹¹⁵ Thirsk, Agrarian History, v: i, 63–4; R. W. Hoyle, ‘Famine as Agrarian Catastrophe: The Crisis of 1622–3 on the Walmesley Estates in Lancashire’, research paper; J. Broad, ‘Cattle Plague in Eighteenth-Century England’, Agricultural History Review, 31/2 (1983), 104–15.

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(as will be shown below) the smaller farm sizes also meant a complete absence of four-wheeled wagons, despite the ubiquity of carts.¹¹⁶ The area was divided up into huge parishes, which Celia Fiennes noted with approval, because of its positive effects on clerical incomes.¹¹⁷ For example, the parish of Goosnargh and Whittingham contained 3,703 acres, with almost 40 miles of roads linking its dispersed hamlets.¹¹⁸ It was organized as a series of ten ‘tithings’, six in Goosnargh and four in Whittingham, reﬂecting the scattered settlement patterns within.¹¹⁹ Manorial structures were also weak on the Lancashire plain, as sub-manors and freeholds had been carved out of larger jurisdictions. The manorial lord often did little more than levy chief and fee farm rents.¹²⁰ This contrasted with the stronger administrative legacy in the Duchy of Lancaster’s Pennine manors in the honour of Clitheroe and the Forests of Pendle and Rossendale.¹²¹ Despite these contradictory trends, the net result was the same. While individual estates in this central region of the county could sometimes be quite extensive (such as those of the Sherburn family of Stonyhurst), they were also scattered, rarely leading to dominance within a single location. Within its boundaries Goosnargh had at least nineteen small and medium-sized estates based around a hall or farmstead, in addition to the holdings of outside landowners.¹²² The Agrarian History suggests that units of ownership and cultivation were quite small, generally less than 50 acres, with a relatively large number of smallholdings under 10 acres.¹²³ While this contrasts with the size of commercial farms in Essex and Suffolk, in some respects it resembles the continued buoyancy of the market in leased smallholdings, noted above. The difference was one of tenure. In Lancashire, the ownership of these units seems to have remained more diffuse, and the persistence of three-life leases allowed farmers, rather than ¹¹⁶ Morris, Fiennes, 194. See also, J. Holt, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lancaster (London, 1795), 34, who observed ‘a greater variety of carts in this county than … any other part of the kingdom’. ¹¹⁷ Morris, Fiennes, 188. ¹¹⁸ Holt, General View, 186. ¹¹⁹ Thirsk, ‘Farming Regions’, 86. ¹²⁰ For example, although Goosnargh fell under the jurisdiction of the manor of Catforth Hall, held by the Warren family, it also included another, smaller manor of Bulsnape, held by the Fishwicks. H. Fishwick, The History of the Parochial Chapelry of Goosnargh in the County of Lancashire (Manchester, 1871), 150–5; Lancs. RO DDSt Box 113 Stonyhurst Estate, chief rents and fee farm rents payable to Mr. John Warren, Goosnargh 1685. ¹²¹ M. Brigg, ‘The Forest of Pendle in the Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 113 (1961), 65–96; G. H. Tupling, The Economic History of Rossendale (Manchester, 1927), 72–94; H. R. French and R. W. Hoyle, ‘The Land Market in a Pennine Manor: Slaidburn, 1650–1780’, Continuity and Change, 14/3 (1999), 349–83. ¹²² Fishwick, Goosnargh, 141–95. ¹²³ Thirsk, Agrarian History, v: i, 59–67. This is also emphasized by two recent case studies, see C. Foster, ‘Farms and the economy of Cheshire and Lancashire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 101 (2005), 25–38; J. S. Holt, ‘Hornby Town and the Textiles of Melling Parish in the Early Modern Period’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 101 (2005), 39–70.

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owners, to enjoy the bulk of the immediate returns from land, providing that the lives on the lease experienced a degree of demographic good fortune.¹²⁴ In 1727 on the 248-acre Townley estate in Goosnargh, there were thirteen farms, let as three-life leases in the seventeenth century, but at market rents by this time.¹²⁵ Only ﬁve were above 20 statute acres, the biggest being a 73-acre farm held by the Parkinson family. Of the remainder, ﬁve were holdings of less than 10 acres. The Sherburn estate in Goosnargh in 1734 was much larger, at 477 statute acres, but it also possessed only two farms of more than 50 statute acres (both held by individuals described as ‘Mr.’), out of twenty-ﬁve properties in total.¹²⁶ Twelve of these holdings were of less than 10 acres, and six of less than two acres. Nine of the remaining farms were less than 35 acres. Without parish-wide land surveys, it is difﬁcult to establish whether the occupiers of these apparently fragmentary holdings supplemented them with other leases. At the lower end of the farming hierarchy, there are indications of more complicated tenancy arrangements and by-employments. When Thomas Hornby died, in March 1701, he held three closes called Threlfall Heys (approximately 10 acres), by virtue of an assignment his father had received during the life of one of those named in the original lease.¹²⁷ He possessed two cows, one heifer and a calf, large quantities of hay, straw, and oatmeal, plus 30 ‘lea’ of yarn, valued in total at £31 11s. 10d.¹²⁸ In 1687 the entry ﬁne on this property had been £18 15s., but the annual rent was only 2s. 6d.¹²⁹ Obviously, the scale of operation was larger on more substantial holdings. George Turner, who died in 1669, farmed approximately 30 acres under a lease obtained by his father in 1621, at an annual rent of 15s. 10d.¹³⁰ At his death, Turner possessed a mare and two colts, four heifers, three white ‘stirks’, one ox ‘stirk’, four cows and a calf, along with three swine troughs.¹³¹ He had a cart, ploughs and harrows, ¹²⁴ For the three-life lease system south of the Ribble, see A. J. Gritt, ‘The Operation of Lifeleasehold in South-West Lancashire, 1649–97’, Agricultural History Review, 53/1 (2005), 1–23. Gritt notes that in Altcar on the Molyneux estate in 1697, 52 out of 110 leases (47%) had existed for 10–29 years. ¹²⁵ Manchester Central Library (MCL) Farrer Collection L1/12/16/43 ‘William Taylor’s survey of the estate of Mr. Townley in Goosnargh, April 1727’. The total annual rental of this estate was £99.9. ¹²⁶ Lancs. RO DP 440 Box 1, Survey of the Estates of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, 1734, Goosnargh, 52. This compares with the estate of George Farington at Fox Denton in 1727, where 10 people held less than 5 acres, 9 people held 5–9 acres, 12 people held 10–19 acres, 5 people held 20–29 acres, and 11 people had 30–56 acres. Thirsk, Agrarian History, v: i, 60 n. 8. ¹²⁷ MCL Farrer Coll. L1/12/16/12 Schedule of Mr Townley’s leases, 1 Sept. 1670 Richard Townley esq. and Wid. Anne Townley to Thomas Beesley. ¹²⁸ Lancs. RO WRW/A, Thomas Hornby, Goosnargh, tailor, 1701 ¹²⁹ MCL Farrer Coll. L1/12/16/16 Abstract of tenements belonging to Mr Townley of Carr, 26 Mar. 1687. ¹³⁰ Lancs. RO DDSt Box 81 Sherburn estate, ‘A Survey of the Tennants Leases in Yorkshire and Lancashire By Richard Shirburne esq. Anno 1668’. ¹³¹ Lancs. RO WRW/A, George Turner, Goosnargh, yeoman, 1669. A ‘stirk’ was a one-year old heifer. W. Self Weeks, Clitheroe in the Seventeenth Century (Clitheroe, 1927), 25.

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a cheese press, and butter-making equipment. His total inventory valuation was £55 9s. 8d., of which his livestock comprised £27 10s. In comparison with Essex and Suffolk, the availability of land under three-life leases (despite large entry ﬁnes), tenants’ low capitalization, and the importance of the family as a source of labour, helped to perpetuate smallholdings in Lancashire.¹³² This sustained husbandmen and smallholding craftsmen to a greater extent than in southern England, even if the high ﬁnes levied for new lives could saddle these smaller farmers with substantial and enduring debts.¹³³ Despite this, though, Goosnargh also supported quite large numbers of labourers, whose access to land would have been more limited, although probably greater than that of their southern counterparts. Unusually, the 1642 Protestation Return for the parish is annotated with occupations, providing a snapshot of the occupational proﬁle of the parish on the eve of the Civil War.¹³⁴ Of the 383 males listed, 114 were husbandmen (30 per cent of the total). The next-largest category was ‘labourer’, with 103 men (27 per cent), while no other designation exceeded 10 per cent of the total. There were 36 yeomen (9 per cent), 37 individuals engaged in clothing production, and 20 practitioners of largely rural crafts (coopers, sieve makers, butchers, tanners, blacksmiths, and a gunsmith). Only 31 individuals escaped classiﬁcation (8 per cent). Parish government reﬂected this numerical preponderance of husbandmen. Between 1620 and 1644, 75 individuals had served as churchwardens in Goosnargh, and 41 can be found on the Protestation Return. Of these, over half were husbandmen, a further 24 per cent being yeomen. These proportions would probably have been reversed in the two southern sample areas.¹³⁵ The era before the Civil War may mark the furthest proliferation of husbandmen in Lancashire, as the number of smallholdings followed the population peak in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. As yet, there is little evidence from the Lancashire plain, but in the Pennines this period saw smallholding expand to its furthest extent, before retreating markedly thereafter.¹³⁶ The enclosure of commons had similar consolidating effects for cottagers and smallholders in the other area of marginal land in the county, the mosses of the Fylde.¹³⁷ ¹³² Although three-life leases tended to disappear by the turn of the nineteenth century, these other traits remained. See A. J. Gritt, ‘The ‘‘Survival’’ of Service in the English Agricultural Labour Force: Lessons from Lancashire, c.1650–1851’, Agricultural History Review, 50/1 (2002), 25–50. ¹³³ Gritt, ‘Lifeleasehold’, 8. ¹³⁴ Lancs. RO Microﬁlm 1/25 Goosnargh and Whittingham Protestation Return, 20–27 Feb. 1641/2. ¹³⁵ J. Pitman, ‘Tradition and Exclusion: Parochial Ofﬁceholding in Early Modern England, A Case Study from North Norfolk, 1580–1640’, Rural History, 15/1 (2004), 33. Only in the Warehams and Wighton were there more husbandmen than yeomen chosen as churchwardens. ¹³⁶ French and Hoyle, ‘Slaidburn’, 362–3, 365–7. The same trends were noted in Pendle and Rossendale, where the number of copyholders increased from 55 and 200 in 1608 to 129 and 314 in 1662. Brigg, ‘Forest of Pendle’, 72; Tupling, Rossendale, 76. ¹³⁷ G. Rogers, ‘Custom and Common Right: Waste Land Enclosure and Social Change in West Lancashire’, Agricultural History Review, 41/2 (1993), 137–54.

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These trends, and the decline in three-life leases after 1660, might also have thinned out of the ranks of the small, subsistence-oriented cultivator in central Lancashire by the early eighteenth century.¹³⁸ Although towns in this district seemed familiar to Defoe and Fiennes, the absence of a substantial manufacturing sector meant that the agrarian economy exerted a larger inﬂuence over urban life than in Essex and Suffolk. Agricultural production remained an integral part of the urban economy in Preston and Clitheroe, supplementing their role as distributors of agrarian produce. Among the ninety-four resident defendants in cases in Clitheroe’s borough equity court between 1589 and 1668, 31 per cent were described as yeomen and 26 per cent as husbandmen.¹³⁹ No other trade comprised more than 6 per cent, with the processors of livestock (chandlers, tanners, shoemakers, and butchers) forming the next largest grouping, of 23 per cent of occupations. Even so, the diminutive borough did possess a rudimentary service sector, indicated by a schoolmaster, a physician, two chapmen, and an innkeeper in the sample. The dominance of agriculture in Clitheroe is also emphasized by the amount of land devoted to farming. Within its boundaries the borough possessed 1,378 statute acres, 335 acres of which was common pasture available to its burgage holders.¹⁴⁰ By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, access to these commons was relatively restricted. Although 127 properties (burgages) in the town possessed rights of common, by the period 1764-79 only approximately 75 people actually used these grazing rights each year. During each of these years, they turned out twice as many cattle as horses, which reﬂected the structural importance of stock rearing in the agrarian economy of the area.¹⁴¹Although most of the main occupational categories within the town’s economy made some use of the commons, poorer occupations such as labourers or tailors were low users, whereas textile workers, food producers (particularly butchers), leather workers, carpenters, and blacksmiths put out livestock more regularly. Property owners tended to depasture larger numbers of animals, particularly cattle, than those who leased rights (many of whom were labourers), but both groups together comprised only about one-third of the householders in the town by the 1770s.¹⁴² Agricultural holdings in Clitheroe were small, as elsewhere in the county. In a survey of 1781, 40 per cent of farms were between 5 and 25 statute acres, while 37 per cent were above 25 acres, with only four farms having an area of more ¹³⁸ See n. 124 above. By contrast, Winchester emphasizes the persistence of long tenures and ‘yeoman’ farmers in the Lake District at this time. A. J. L. Winchester, ‘Regional Identity in the Lake Counties: Land Tenure and the Cumbrian Landscape’, Northern History, 42/1 (2005), 29–48. ¹³⁹ Lancs. RO MBC 485–504 Clitheroe Court of Pleas Proceedings, 1589–1668. ¹⁴⁰ H. R. French, ‘Urban Common Rights, Enclosure and the Market: Clitheroe Town Moors, 1764–1802’, Agricultural History Review, 51/1 (2003), 40–68. ¹⁴¹ French, ‘Clitheroe Town Moors’, table 3, 49. ¹⁴² Ibid, 54–8.

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than 60 acres.¹⁴³ While a majority of the town’s population no longer exercised rights of common, access to these rights, and to land tenancy more generally, may have been more open than in eighteenth-century Sudbury. In the seventeenth century some of the commons users left inventories, which illustrate the continuing signiﬁcance of small-scale farming activity to household economies in the borough. For example, Thomas Paitﬁeld, a saddler, was ﬁned for overstocking the commons in 1659, but at his death nine years later he possessed extensive agrarian interests, in addition to his shop and tools valued at £2.¹⁴⁴ He had a lease of 4 acres for two lives (worth £5), and four oxen, one young ox, three cows, a heifer, a steer, three calves, and ﬁve horses and two foals, in addition to poultry, pigs, and bees. He also possessed a plough, a harrow, and a wain. These goods were valued at £42 2s. 1d. (58 per cent of the total inventory valuation), far outweighing his saddler’s wares. While they may reﬂect an investment strategy for the proﬁts of a skilled craft, this agrarian involvement also illustrates the close integration of this small market town, and its ‘middling’ inhabitants within the surrounding rural economy. Clitheroe acted as the principal market for the upper Ribble Valley, and the administrative capital for the scattered townships of the Forest of Bowland that comprised the honour of Clitheroe. Meanwhile, Preston served a much larger purpose, as the market, administrative, and service centre for a swathe of central Lancashire, and the home of a larger ‘middling’ spectrum. Rodgers suggested that Preston’s reach extended beyond the immediate hinterland bounded by a day’s journey on foot.¹⁴⁵ Its function as a market for grain, livestock, butter, cheese, and processed agrarian goods (leather, ﬂax, yarn and cloth),¹⁴⁶ and its distribution of manufactured goods, iron wares, groceries, clothing, wine, and books drew in customers from a 15-mile radius.¹⁴⁷ These connections are illustrated by the probate inventory of the Preston grocer James Garton, who died in 1661. Of the 159 individuals who owed him money 71 per cent lived within 5 miles of the borough, with 30 per cent living in the town and its neighbour, Walton-le-Dale;¹⁴⁸ 13 per cent lived between 5 and 10 miles distant; 8 per cent lived between 10 and 20 miles away; and 7 per cent lived further away, mostly in ¹⁴³ Ibid. table 9, 63. These ﬁgures have been converted from customary to statute acres. Contemporaries described the customary acre in Clitheroe as 1.27 times larger than the statute acre. Lincs. RO BNL Brownlow Estate, Box ‘Curzon and Lister BQ 23’ Assheton Curzon v. Thomas Lister, 15 Mar. 1784. ¹⁴⁴ Lancs. RO DDX 19/181 Clitheroe Court of Inquiry, Animals impounded by the Pinders, 1659; Lancs. RO WCW, Thomas Paitﬁeld, Clitheroe, saddler, 1668. ¹⁴⁵ H. B. Rodgers, ‘The Market Area of Preston in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in A. R. H. Baker, J. D. Hamshere, and J. Langton (eds.), Geographical Interpretations of Historical Sources (Newton Abbot, 1970), 103–16. ¹⁴⁶ On the function of Preston as, primarily, a marketing centre for cloth see J. Stobart, ‘Textile Industries in North-West England in the Early Eighteenth Century: A Geographical Approach’, Textile History, 29/1 (1998), 3–18. ¹⁴⁷ Rodgers, ‘Market Area’, 105. ¹⁴⁸ Lancs. RO WCW, James Garton, Preston, grocer, 1661.

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Furness and the southern Lakes. The town’s inﬂuence was affected by the terrain, and extended further east–west onto the Fylde and up the Ribble valley than it did north–south, where the Pennines to the south-east and the mosses in the south-west created a geographical barrier to travel. As Manchester and Liverpool began to expand rapidly after 1660, older centres such as Preston were relegated to a secondary role, as retail, service, and entertainment centres.¹⁴⁹ As Borsay notes, though, these secondary functions remained considerable, and Preston acted as a hub of elite sociability, consumption, theatre, printing, and bookselling, horse-racing, hunting, bowling, and cock-ﬁghting.¹⁵⁰ This pattern changed only with the spread of large-scale cotton manufacture to the town in the 1770s.¹⁵¹ These developed market functions extended the occupational proﬁle of the town, and deepened its middle ranks. The Preston Guild Rolls outline the town’s occupational diversity in the seventeenth century. In 1642 the Guild Roll records the occupations of 136 in-burgesses (between a quarter and one-ﬁfth of the total number), which can be gathered into thirteen categories.¹⁵² The two largest were clothing production (tailors, hatters, and drapers), and—like Clitheroe—leather-working (tanners, skinners, glovers, and shoemakers), each comprising 14 per cent of the total. The next-largest category was gentlemen and esquires, accounting for 13 per cent, reﬂecting either the spread of these titles among the urban elite, or the prevalence of attorneys and legal ofﬁcials in the town. Their number included the Lancaster Herald at Arms. Twelve of these gentlemen had their servants enrolled in the Guild, making this the next largest grouping. Clerics, clerks, schoolmasters, and the Governor of the House of Correction made up a category of ofﬁcials, who comprised 8 per cent of the total. Those involved in agriculture (primarily as husbandmen), and metalworkers constituted 7 per cent of occupations. The latter included two spurriers, a watchmaker, a locksmith, and a gunsmith, reﬂecting Preston’s function as a source of luxury goods to the yeomen and gentry of the area. The numbers of those concerned with construction also reﬂected the character of the urban economy, including individuals described as carpenters, joiners, thatchers, and plasterers. The town also contained examples of retailers, such as grocers, medical specialists such as apothecaries, and three musicians, who may have been drafted in (along with a cook) speciﬁcally for the Guild festivities. ¹⁴⁹ J. Stobart, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Urban Revolution? Investigating Urban Growth in North-West England, 1664–1801’, Urban History, 23 (1996), 26–47; id., ‘In Search of Causality: A Regional Approach to Urban Growth in Eighteenth-Century England’, Geograﬁska Annaler, 82 (2000), 149–63. ¹⁵⁰ Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 128–32, 143, 155, 162–3, 174–5, 178–9. ¹⁵¹ B. Lewis, The Middlemost and the Milltowns Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 312–13. ¹⁵² W. A. Abram (ed.), ‘The Rolls of the Burgesses at the Guilds Merchant of the Borough of Preston, 1397–1682’, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 9 (1883), 94–102. The Preston Guild Merchant occurs at 20-year intervals. In the seventeenth century festivities were funded primarily by burgesses’ subscriptions.

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This was a much more diverse occupational structure than that recorded in the same year in the Goosnargh Protestation Return, where agricultural occupations and labourers predominated. Labourers are a notable omission from the Guild Rolls, suggesting a strong social bias among burgesses towards the more prosperous crafts and trades, who could afford to fund the event. In comparison with rural Goosnargh, the size of the retail–manufacturing sector was also much larger and more specialized, reﬂecting the concentration of demand and the much wider catchment area of businesses in the town. These enterprises could sometimes be quite extensive. In 1690 the inventory of a Preston ironmonger, Thurston Darwen, listed plough irons, scythes, shears, saws, spades, axes, frying pans, horse gear such as girdles, bridles, and bits, ﬁre irons, coal rakes, locks, knives and combs, wire, nails, and even cords for clock weights.¹⁵³ The town was also a centre for grocery provision. The inventory of William Blackledge, a grocer who died in 1685, contained £58-worth of sugar, and stocks of gunpowder and lead shot, brandy, prunes, pepper, hemp, ﬂax and linen, pins and thread, paper, starch, and linseed oil, each valued at more than £1.¹⁵⁴ Blackledge also offered a range of spices, preserved citrus fruits, dyes, spectacles, tobacco, and even curtain rings. Preston also functioned as a source of information and knowledge. The bookseller William Lambert died in 1688, with a stock of over 2,200 books.¹⁵⁵ The scale of these shops emphasizes two things. First, it suggests the concentration of retail services and wealthy shopkeepers in the town, and helps to explain why southern travellers might ﬁnd much to recognize there. Secondly, though, the fact that such facilities were concentrated in Preston, rather than distributed in parishes like Goosnargh, or small towns like Clitheroe, implies that rural demand (and surplus income) was relatively limited in the seventeenth century. Despite its more extensive retail sector, agriculture remained important in Preston, even if it involved perhaps only 15–20 per cent of households directly. The town had large areas of enclosed ﬁelds within its boundaries, plus 240 acres of common pasture north of the town, and common grazing on the marshes beside the Ribble.¹⁵⁶ Agriculture also formed a signiﬁcant by-employment for urban tradesmen. Between 1660 and 1720 122 out of 271 Preston probate inventories (45 per cent) contained evidence of agrarian activities, with 65 of these testators having non-agrarian occupations. As in Sudbury, those with agrarian by-employments were slightly more prosperous than the group as a whole, the median for household goods being £24.2, compared to £19.6 for all testators, and median total inventory valuations of £65.4 compared to £49. The higher proportion of agrarian by-employment in Preston seems to reﬂect the ¹⁵³ Lancs. RO WRW/A, Thurston Darwen, Preston, ironmonger, 1690. ¹⁵⁴ Ibid. William Blackledge, Preston, grocer, 1685. ¹⁵⁵ Ibid. William Lambert, Preston, bookseller, 1688. ¹⁵⁶ Reports from the Commissioners on the Municipal Corporations in England and Wales (1835), appendix, III, 1690, 1693.

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greater access to, and lower specialization away from, the agrarian sector there. This was illustrated strikingly by the goods of John Lawson, who died in October 1689, described as a ‘yeoman’.¹⁵⁷ On the basis of his agricultural possessions, this designation seems to have been appropriate. He owned 120 sheep, 10 oxen, 5 cows, 9 horses, and £12-worth of hay, plus 15 acres of oats, 8 acres of barley, 6 acres of beans, and 3 acres of wheat. However, Lawson also possessed a shop in Preston, in which there were kerseys, serges, and stuffs valued at £177 8s., ribbons and haberdashery wares worth £30 15s., and groceries appraised at £30 10s., as well as ‘book’ debts totalling £120. Lawson’s inventory had a total value of £872 10s. 6d., in which agrarian and lime burning activities made up 33 per cent of his total personal estate, while his shop and goods comprised 56 per cent.¹⁵⁸ Lawson’s example indicates the diversity of income sources exploited by some of the richer members of Preston society—as well as the perils of relying on single occupational designations. The breadth of this stratum of craft and retail prosperity in Preston, compared with the surrounding countryside, was reﬂected in the hearth tax. The evidence depicted in Tables 1.1a–c implies some stratiﬁcation of personal wealth, but also lower valuations than in southern England. Table 1.1b emphasizes the prevalence in rural settlements of the one-hearth ‘ﬁrehouse’ (with its multi-functional hall), and, consequently, the hearth tax’s weakness as an indicator of relative prosperity in the county.¹⁵⁹ As noted above, Table 1.4 illustrates that this prosperity may itself have been substantially lower in Lancashire than for the same categories of hearth-tax assessment in Essex and Suffolk, or the South-west. Only among the wealthiest testators (many of whom lived in Preston) were values closer to their southern counterparts. However, although valuations were lower than in southern England, levels of poverty were also much reduced. Although Table 1.1b indicates that while Wigan and Blackburn had slightly higher levels of exemption, Preston, Clitheroe, and Lancaster were closer to the county median exemption rate of one-third of all those assessed. The rate in rural parishes was often lower, notably in Tatham-cum-Ireby, a small village at the foot of the Pennines, where only 19 per cent of inhabitants were exempt from the tax, and only a tiny minority of payers (11 out of 126 households) had more than one hearth. ¹⁵⁷ Lancs. RO WRW/A, John Lawson, Preston, yeoman, 1689. See also ibid. James Moss, Preston, currier, 1691. ¹⁵⁸ Lawson’s farming and lime burning activities were valued at £285 17s., and his shop, trade goods, debts, and ready money totalled £488 2s. ¹⁵⁹ M. W. Barley, ‘Rural Housing in England, 1500–1640’ in J. Thirsk (ed.), Chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1750, v. The Buildings of the Countryside, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 66–7; S. Pearson, Rural Houses of the Lancashire Pennines 1560 to 1760 (Royal Commission on Historic Monuments, suppl. ser. 10, 1985); A. J. Gritt, ‘ ‘‘For want of reparation’’: Tenants and the built environment on the estates of south-west Lancashire, 1750–1850’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 150 (2000), 33–55.

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In general multiple-hearth households seem to have been conﬁned largely to Lancashire’s towns in the later seventeenth century. Across the sixty-ﬁve townships that comprised the Hundred of Amounderness, 79 per cent of households (whether charged or exempt) were assessed on one hearth, and only 6 per cent paid on three or more hearths.¹⁶⁰ This indicates that Lancashire town houses possessed a distinctly different style of building and heating to that found in the countryside, reﬂecting the greater concentrations within them of craftand trade-based prosperity. Table 1.5b examines the differences between town and country areas, by contrasting quartiles of the value of inventoried household goods from urban Preston and rural Goosnargh. This shows that although total inventory values did not vary greatly between these two locations, the value of household goods in Goosnargh was generally only half that of Preston inventories in the same quartile. While differences in market access or the capitalization requirements of crafts and agriculture could have inﬂuenced this distribution, it may also reﬂect the greater disposable income (and more monetarized household economies) of urban tradesmen. Given the close geographical proximity of these two settlements, it seems unlikely that a lack of information or access to markets prevented householders in Goosnargh from acquiring similar household goods. This divergence echoes the variations in the hearth tax, implying that differences in consumption patterns and choices among the ‘middling’ were greater here than in the ‘suburban’ countryside of the Essex–Suffolk border. The social order of central Lancashire contains a number of contrasts. In the seventeenth century the area lacked wide disparities of wealth, or a landless manufacturing population compared to those it would experience by 1800. Small family-run, subsistence farms of 5–20 acres persisted, often in considerable numbers. These were interspersed with larger enterprises, of between 20 and 60 acres. Tenures remained lengthy, either copyholds of inheritance, or leases for lives, until well into the eighteenth century.¹⁶¹ These small farming enterprises may have survived because of a fortuitous combination of subsistence corn production, cash-generating by-employments, below-market rents, and the buoyancy of the stock-rearing trade after 1666.¹⁶² However, as the evidence from Goosnargh suggests, rural Lancashire was not simply a republic of husbandmen, because it also housed a substantial rural labouring population. In this lowpressure agrarian regime, these labourers may have had greater access to land and ¹⁶⁰ I am grateful to the late Nigel Morgan for the use of summary totals from his unpublished analysis of the 1664 Lancashire Hearth Tax, NA E.179/250/11. ¹⁶¹ A. J. Gritt and J. M. Virgoe (eds.), ‘The Memoranda Books of Basil Thomas Eccleston, 1757–1789’, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 139 (2004), pp.xxvi–xxviii. ¹⁶² Thirsk, ‘Agriculture and Social Change’, 150.

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livestock than their southern peers, but they represented a substantial, largely wage-dependent social segment nonetheless. Social differentiation did exist in rural Lancashire, as did a recognizable middle stratum, but both aspects were less pronounced than in the manufacturing economy of the Essex–Suffolk borders. A rural economy of small, subsistence-oriented family farms generated limited amounts of disposable income, and only very modest levels of material consumption. Therefore, it is unsurprising that per capita estate values were perhaps only half or two-thirds those recorded in Essex and Suffolk. It is more surprising that quite signiﬁcant differences in per capita valuations could exist between rural and urban Lancashire. Rural Lancashire could sustain only a limited number of towns, most of them small, partly agrarian market centres like Clitheroe. Even so, there was also sufﬁcient demand for the deeper concentration of services, and ‘middling’ households, evident in Preston. It is here that we, like contemporary travellers, ﬁnd groups of people who conform best to the template of a polite, conspicuously consuming ‘middle sort of people’.¹⁶³ To some extent, the existence of such groups should belie any attempt to depict Lancashire as irredeemably ‘backward’ in terms of its economy, its services, or its social functions. An apparently convivial but seemingly un-commercial leisure town was entirely compatible with, and even an essential feature of, a rural economy characterized by crude carts and clap-bread. However, it should also be seen as a relatively isolated peak of prosperity, resting on a low, ﬂat economic and social base. III The third area covered by this study is western Dorset, primarily those settlements west of a line drawn from Sherborne, near the border with Somerset, south to the port of Lyme Regis. It included larger villages, such as Beaminster and Yetminster, smaller settlements such as Broadwindsor, South Perrott, and outlying parishes such as Sydling St Nicholas, halfway between Dorchester and Sherborne, and the coastal parish of Abbotsbury. These parishes encompassed three of the county’s ﬁve agrarian regions.¹⁶⁴ Sherborne and Yetminster bordered the vale of Blackmoor, the most productive arable and pastoral region, located in the northern corner of the county. Sydling St Nicholas was situated in the chalk downs that lay across the middle of the county, and formed the southern extremity of chalk measures extending across Salisbury Plain, up to the vale of the White Horse in Wiltshire.¹⁶⁵ Parts of the large parish of ¹⁶³ Of the kind found on Preston’s Avenham Walks, or Clitheroe’s racecourse. Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 162–3, 360. ¹⁶⁴ C. C. Taylor, Dorset (London, 1970), 22–3; B. Kerr, ‘The Dorset Agricultural Labourer 1750–1850’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 84 (1962), 160–2. ¹⁶⁵ J. H. Bettey, Rural Life in Wessex 1500–1900 (Gloucester, 1987), 12.

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Beaminster were on the western fringes of these chalk downs, but the area was primarily a mixture of clay vales and sandstone and limestone hills. Here soils could be quite variable, but except in the river-drained vales between Beaminster and Bridport, they were often waterlogged clays of restricted arable potential.¹⁶⁶ In fact, geology largely determined both the nature of the farming enterprises and the settlement patterns of the county. The vale of Blackmoor was particularly suited to stock rearing, both beef and dairy cattle, and sheep, although much arable cultivation was also practised there.¹⁶⁷ The chalk downs had a dual economy of sheep grazing and corn production, but the soil was relatively unproductive and depended on extensive sheep grazing for its fertility—a function that was more important than wool production.¹⁶⁸ The extensive, rather than intensive, land use on these unenclosed sheep downs also dictated that villages were scattered widely, but the communal organization of the sheep ﬂocks preserved manorial institutions on the chalk to a greater degree than in the clay vales.¹⁶⁹ There was considerable population contraction in these downland villages from the late fourteenth century, and the geographical distribution of settlement remained attenuated even after the resumption of population growth in the early sixteenth century.¹⁷⁰ The western clay vales concentrated on dairy farming, with some arable, and (around Bridport and Beaminster) production of hemp and ﬂax, for use in sacking and sail cloth.¹⁷¹ They lacked nucleated settlements, or the population densities that characterized east Devon in this period, again because of inferior land quality.¹⁷² This also reﬂected the breakup of manorial jurisdictions, with farms and sub-manors being carved out of them, many dating from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.¹⁷³ Meanwhile, Defoe commented on the lack of urban development, despite the county’s seven boroughs, and the urban functions of Shaftesbury, Blandford, and Bere Regis.¹⁷⁴ Urban growth remained sluggish through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹⁷⁵ ¹⁶⁶ Kerr, ‘Dorset Agricultural Labourer’, 163. ¹⁶⁷ J. Claridge, General View of the Agriculture in the County of Dorset with observations on the means of its improvement (London, 1793), 13, 16–17. ¹⁶⁸ Bettey, Wessex, 10, 12. ¹⁶⁹ Kerr, ‘Dorset Agricultural Labourer’, 162–3. This distinction in settlement patterns and communal organization is central to David Underdown’s ‘Chalk and Cheese’ hypothesis. See Underdown, ‘Chalk and the Cheese, 26–48; Davie, ‘ ‘‘Chalk and Cheese’’?’, 18–21. ¹⁷⁰ Bettey, Wessex, 112–18. ¹⁷¹ Claridge, General View, 18. ¹⁷² B. K. Roberts and S. Wrathmell, Region and Place: A Study of English Rural Settlement (London, 2002), 6–12, 29. ¹⁷³ Taylor, Dorset, 100. ¹⁷⁴ D. Defoe, Tour, i. 218; J. H. Bettey, Dorset (Newton Abbot, 1974), 62–73. These boroughs were Lyme Regis, Bridport, Dorchester, Melcombe Regis and Weymouth, Corfe Castle, and Poole. ¹⁷⁵ P. Clark, ‘Small Towns in England 1550–1800: National and Regional Population Trends’ in id. (ed.), Small Towns in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1995), 115.

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Table 1.6 illustrates the variety of agrarian assets recorded in the inventories of yeomen and husbandmen in this area. Wheat was the predominant cereal crop, while rye or oats were grown less often than in north-west England. Peas, beans, and vetches were recorded more frequently here than in the north-west, but less so than in Essex and Suffolk. Claridge noted that beans sometimes replaced barley in the crop rotations practised in the enclosed parts of the county.¹⁷⁶ The other notable feature was evidence of cider production, possibly the ‘Good masculine cider rather of the rough sort’, noted in east Devon in the eighteenth century.¹⁷⁷ The cattle featured in these inventories were generally dairy or meat producers rather than draught animals. The frequent mention of sheep illustrates the dual-husbandry of these farms, and husbandmen in this region were more likely to possess them than their counterparts in north-west England or Essex and Suffolk. Unlike Essex, but like parts of Lancashire, Dorset was a county of large estates, both institutional and personal. The Crown was a large landowner, through its own estates and those of the Duchy of Cornwall.¹⁷⁸ So was the Church, via the deans and chapters of Salisbury and Wells, and the bishopric of Salisbury. Collegiate foundations also held extensive acreages, notably King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton and Winchester colleges. The Luttrells, Arundells, and Strangways had amassed large private estates in the western portion of the county, while newcomers such as the Welds and Digbys bought lands on the fringes of this western area in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this period, Bettey has suggested that absentee institutional lordship tended to result in demesnes being granted out as copyholds, without the imposition of market-oriented leasehold rents. This conservative estate management prevailed particularly on the ecclesiastical manors of Yetminster, Netherbury, and Beaminster, allowing ‘middling’ estate tenants to maintain copyholds for lives, often on advantageous terms.¹⁷⁹ These larger estates were interspersed with smaller freehold farms, the decayed remnants of former manors. Beaminster provides an example of this cascade of ownership and tenancy. Although the two ecclesiastical manors of Beaminster Prima and Secunda encompassed most of the land in the parish, there were other, smaller, manors such as East Axnoller, which had dwindled to a farm called High Axnoller, and the manor of Wellwood, dismembered in 1586.¹⁸⁰ The only resident ¹⁷⁶ Claridge, General View, 16–17. ¹⁷⁷ P. Sharpe, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish Reproducing Colyton 1540–1840 (Exeter, 2002), 132. ¹⁷⁸ J. H. Bettey, ‘Land Tenure and Manorial Custom in Dorset, 1570–1670’, Southern History, 4 (1982), 34. ¹⁷⁹ Bettey, ‘Land Tenure’, 35, 37, 42. ¹⁸⁰ J. Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, ii (London, 1863, facsimile edn., Wakeﬁeld, 1973), 125–6, 133.

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gentry family were the Strodes of Parnham, who possessed a house and park and at least 198 acres, but most of it was copyhold of the two ecclesiastical manors.¹⁸¹ Their own manors of Slape and Strode were in the neighbouring parish of Netherbury, as sub-manors to the two larger ecclesiastical manors of Netherbury-in-Ecclesia and Netherbury-in-Terra.¹⁸² Their holdings seem to have been matched by the Henley family of Colway (near Lyme Regis), who were the largest ratepayers in 1649, but whose estate was not held of the Dean and Chapter.¹⁸³ Immediately beneath the Strodes and Henleys came the tenants of the 39 large ‘tenements’ identiﬁable on the 1649 Parliamentary Survey of the Salisbury Cathedral estate.¹⁸⁴ These yeomen included individuals such as William Tucker, who occupied one of the two large farms in the hamlet of Mapperton, valued in 1649 at £60 per annum,¹⁸⁵ or the 155-acre holding of Gregory Gibbs at Chappel Marsh, reputedly good dairy land, and in the hands of tenants.¹⁸⁶ Below the principal farmers in these outlying hamlets were individuals such as John Gudge. In 1649 his estate (held in right of his wife) consisted of two farming tenements in the hamlet of Shatcombe, valued at £20 and a house in Hogshill Street in Beaminster, valued at £1 10s. per annum.¹⁸⁷ The Churchwardens’ rates show that Gudge and his wife paid rates on these properties from 1646 until 1678, when Gudge died. Between 1657 and his death, though, one of these two tenements in Shatcombe was rented out, with John Mintern being listed as the other ratepayer between 1660 and 1678.¹⁸⁸ In all, in 1649 there were 26 such fractional holdings valued at between £4 and £9 per annum. However, 176 out of the 245 copyhold tenants in these two manors in 1649 (or 72 per cent) occupied properties valued at less than £4 per annum. Clearly, although approximately 60–70 out of these 245 copyholders held sizeable farms, or farm-sized parcels, most property holders possessed little more than a cottage and a couple of acres of land. Some may have beneﬁted from the remaining common pastures while others rented dairies, but none could have been cultivators on the scale of the larger copyhold tenants.¹⁸⁹ ¹⁸¹ Hutchins, Dorset, 128–9. ¹⁸² Ibid, 108, 111–12. ¹⁸³ Dorset RO MIC/R/1335 Beaminster Churchwardens Account book 1646–1712. In the Churchwardens’ Rate of 1649, Robert Henley paid 11s. compared to John Strode’s 10s., when the parish median was 3d. ¹⁸⁴ Dorset RO Ph. 379 Photocopy of the Parliamentary Survey of Dean and Chapter of Salisbury’s Prebends and manors of Beaminster Prima and Secunda, Aug.–Sept. 1649. Hutchins, Dorset, 125–35 distinguishes at least 22 farms within the 15 separate hamlets in the parish, and these formed at least 39 sizeable farms in 1649. ¹⁸⁵ Dorset RO Ph. 379; Hutchins, Dorset, 128. ¹⁸⁶ Hutchins, Dorset, 126–7. For tenants see Dorset RO MIC/R/1335 Churchwardens’ Rate 1649. ¹⁸⁷ Dorset RO Ph. 379; MIC/R/1335 Churchwardens’ Rate, 1649. ¹⁸⁸ Dorset RO MIC/R/1335. ¹⁸⁹ These commons were located at Coombe and Beaminster Downs in Coombe and Merehay, and in the common arable ﬁeld at Shatcombe. Hutchins, Dorset, 127, 128, 133.

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The Parliamentary survey of another Prebendial manor in 1649, Yetminsterin-Terra, supports this pattern of distribution. It contains acreages, and shows that two-thirds of the 109 copyholders possessed less than 11 acres, with 51 (47 per cent) holding less than six acres.¹⁹⁰ Only 11 tenants (10 per cent) held more than 30 acres. This was more polarized than the distribution depicted in Bettey’s surveys of the Clay vales in the period 1570–1670. In these, only one-third of tenants occupied holdings below 11 acres, while a quarter held more than 30 acres.¹⁹¹ Bettey’s ﬁgures are a composite of manorial surveys across the period of maximum population growth and economic difﬁculty, and may mask changes over time, whereas the 1649 surveys depict the end result of these trends. By the mid-seventeenth century, therefore, the farming landscape of the dairying districts of west Dorset consisted of three distinct strata. At the top were the large farms of 50–200 acres or more, split between sheep-corn and dairying enterprises. Unsurprisingly, these larger owners and tenants were central to the administration of the parish. In the Beaminster survey of 1649, of the thirty-nine ‘yeoman-sized’ tenements assessed at an annual value of more than £9, only four were held by families who did not supply one or more ofﬁcers to the parish in this period. Large copyholders like the Coxes, Hoskins, Halletts, Hillarys, Horsfords, Keats, and Mills each supplied ﬁve or more ofﬁcers, while ten other substantial farming families provided two or more ofﬁcers.¹⁹² Below them were the medium-sized farms of 20–50 acres, split between full-time farmers, who may have concentrated on dairying, while supplementing their income with sheep on the remaining common pasture downs, and tradesmen pursuing agrarian by-employments. Below them there were dairymen, some perhaps waiting to inherit the parental holding, and smallholders, holding 5–10 acres and supplementing their agrarian activities with a craft or trade (sometimes carried on in Sherborne or Dorchester).¹⁹³ As in Essex and Suffolk, subtenancy was entrenched among farming enterprises of all sizes, so that by the second half of the seventeenth century local status depended more on cultivated acreage and proﬁts than on forms of tenure. ¹⁹⁰ ‘Survey of the Prebendial Manor of Yetminster-in-Terra’, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, 12 (1911), 245–9. ¹⁹¹ Bettey, ‘Land Tenure’, 38, table 3, percentages in categories summed to produce totals quoted. ¹⁹² Of the 39 persons assessed in 1649 on tenements and lands worth £9 or more, 24 were ofﬁcers or the widows of ofﬁcers, while all the others bar four came from families who did supply ofﬁcers. Dorset RO Ph. 379; MIC/R/1335. Larger copyhold families who supplied two or more ofﬁcers included the those of Brain, Burgis, Clare, Chick, Daniel, Hitt, Ireland, Newman, and Painter, plus the substantial (freehold?) families of Conway and Mintern. Ibid. ¹⁹³ See e.g. Dorset RO D/SHC KG 2633 Sherborne Castle Estate, survey of estates in Yetminster, Leigh and Chetnole, 1677. Thomas Cooper, Sr., aged 62, was a copyholder with 12a 2r meadow and 9a pasture in Leigh, but was living in Dorchester. Thomas Cooper, aged 32, was of Sherborn, and held 19a pasture and 4a 2r arable in Chetnole, while Thomas Meech als. Deering of Beaminster held 32a in Chetnole, inherited from his father Luke.

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Probate inventories illustrate these different strata. In the parish of Yetminster, John Gast of Leigh tithing died in April 1677, and represented the larger yeomen, with an estate totalling £319 8s. 8d.¹⁹⁴ Gast held a copyhold of 31.5 acres from the Digby family, lords of the Sherborne Castle estate. In addition, his inventory listed a (life-) lease in the next parish of Lillington valued at £100, suggesting a sizeable acreage.¹⁹⁵ Gast possessed six plough steers, worth £25, ‘young animals’ valued at £40, horses appraised at £16, plus two cows, 40–50 sheep and two pigs.¹⁹⁶ Even at the end of winter, he retained substantial stocks of corn and wheat. He also possessed a cider press, butter- and cheese-making equipment and malt. The inventory of John Hussey of Chetnole, taken in 1693, illustrates the personal estate of a large tenant farmer.¹⁹⁷ His probate account details annual rent payments totalling £39 4s. to three different individuals.¹⁹⁸ Hussey must have rented a substantial acreage, because at the time of his death he owned a bull, fourteen cows, two plough steers, twenty-three bullocks and heifers, three horses, and nine sheep, implying he had access to perhaps 120–160 acres.¹⁹⁹ These animals were valued at £90 12s. Despite this, though, at the time of his death Hussey owed £219 9s. 6d., almost £70 more than the value of his personal estate. Below this spectrum of large copy- and leasehold farms, was a layer of more marginal farmers. For example, when William Taunton, a Yetminster husbandman, died in 1692, he possessed a copyhold cottage valued at £4, on a 99-year lease, another rented cottage and land worth £6 9s. 4d. per annum.²⁰⁰ Taunton possessed a mare, a heifer and calf, and a pig, plus hay valued at £2, but no other livestock, and his personal possessions (a bed and some cooking utensils) amounted only to a meagre 19s. William Gillingham, of Lillington, husbandman, reported farming in a similar manner to this. In 1681 he had hired a farm worth £10 per annum, plus a house and orchard worth £2 10s., and held these for two years. During that time he kept three cows and four ¹⁹⁴ Dorset RO MIC/R/386 Dean of Sarum, Peculiar of Yetminster and Grimston Probate Inventories, John Gast, Leigh, 1677. ¹⁹⁵ Ibid; Dorset RO D/SHC KG 2633 Sherborne Castle Estate Survey, 1677. ¹⁹⁶ This is based on the assumption that sheep were worth approximately 6s. each in 1677. In the inventory of William Davies, yeoman, taken in October 1677, 17 sheep were valued at £4 10s., or approximately 5s. 4d. each. Dorset RO MIC/R/386 Dean of Sarum, Peculiar of Yetminster and Grimston Probate Inventories, William Davies, Chetnole, yeoman, 1677. ¹⁹⁷ Dorset RO MIC/R/386, John Hussey, Chetnole, yeoman, 1693. ¹⁹⁸ Ibid. probate account, 1694. Hussey owed Edward Miller esq. £27 rent; Haines Ryall, £3 10s., and William Hewlett, £9 4s. 6d. The Miller and Hewlett families were listed in the 1677 Sherborne Castle Survey. Damaris Miller held Miller’s tenement, a copyhold of 32 acres, while Abraham Miller, Sr., held part of the freehold farm called Luttrell’s, of 32 acres. William Hewlett held the other portion of the freehold of Luttrell’s, of 30 acres. D/SHC KG 2633 Sherborne Castle Estate Survey, 1677. Haines Ryall was an overseer of the poor in Sherborne in 1663 and 1685. Dorset RO D/BSS/2 Sherborne Overseers’ Accounts, 1659–1836. ¹⁹⁹ At 4 acres of pasture per cow. Claridge, General View, 53–4. ²⁰⁰ Dorset RO MIC/R/386, William Taunton, Yetminster, husbandman, 1692; D/SHC KG 2633 Sherborne Castle Estate Survey, 1677.

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horses, plus some poultry. He grew an acre of hemp in both years, and wintered twenty sheep.²⁰¹ The small scale of such agrarian activities indicates that they were directed towards household consumption, in order to supplement market purchases, rather than for any signiﬁcant commercial purpose. Contemporary observers noted the products of this countryside, even if they devoted less attention to describing the landscape.²⁰² However, John Claridge’s 1793 report to the Board of Agriculture highlighted one unique agrarian and social phenomenon—the organization of the dairies in the west of the county.²⁰³ These depended on landless dairymen and their wives, who hired cows from local farmers on annual contracts. The farmer ﬁnds the dairy-man a certain number of cows for one year, commencing at Candlemas, at a ﬁxed sum agreed on. He feeds, fodders and supports the speciﬁc number throughout the year; he ﬁnds a house for the dairy-man and his family to live in, and allows them to keep as many pigs and poultry as he thinks proper, and the keep of a mare to carry out his butter & c., which by producing a foal yearly, is considered a material advantage to the dairy-man, who perhaps sells it when weaned in November.²⁰⁴

As John Broad has noted recently, in many ways this system was akin to sharecropping.²⁰⁵ The landholder retained complete control of the ﬁxed and working capital, and hived off the risk of the dairy business to a subcontractor, in return for a sum that (presumably) reﬂected not only the value of the animals, but also a proportion of their annual output. So, for example, in September 1662 John Strode of Parnham recorded an agreement made with Nicholas Hardy of Beaminster ‘to take of me 20 cows to lease in my Parke and Wansley for £59 p. ann.’. Strode was to allow Hardy £5 for looking after the animals, making hay and clearing the park grounds of furze.²⁰⁶ This instance supports Pamela Horn’s ﬁndings that some of these dairies were quite large enterprises, even in the seventeenth century.²⁰⁷ Such subcontracting allowed the landholders to ²⁰¹ NA E.134, 4 Jas. II Mich. 1, John Mintern, clerk v. John White, clerk and William Snook, 1688, deposition of William Gillingham, Lillington, husbandman, aged 50. ²⁰² Defoe reported (not wholly reliably) ‘that there were 600 Thousand Sheep fed on the Downs, within Six Miles of the Town’. Defoe, Tour, i. 210. ²⁰³ Claridge, General View, 14–15; see also P. Horn, ‘The Dorset Dairy System’, Agricultural History Review, 26, II (1976), 100–7. ²⁰⁴ Claridge, General View, 14–15. ²⁰⁵ J. Broad, ‘Regional perspectives and variations in English dairying, 1650–1850’, in Hoyle (ed.), People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture, 98. ²⁰⁶ Dorset RO D/BUL/M5 Strode of Parnham Account Book, 1648–68, 15 Sept. 1662. The park at Parnham comprised approximately 70 acres. Hutchins, Dorset, 128–9. In 1664 Hardy received a pension as a former Royalist soldier. ‘Dorset Royalist Roll of Honour 1664’, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, 18, (1917), 165–7. ²⁰⁷ She cites an agreement on the Lulworth Castle estate in 1714, in which 30 cows and 1 bull were rented at £2 5s. per animal, or an annual rent of £69 15s., on perhaps 125 acres of land. Horn, ‘Dorset Dairy System’, 101. Claridge estimated that each animal required almost 4 acres to be pastured throughout the year. Claridge, General View, 53–4.

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concentrate on sheep-corn production, and seems to have been perennial in the county, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.²⁰⁸ While these arrangements offered an extra niche to the non-landed within the agrarian economy, they did not convey many of the commonly accepted markers of ‘middling’ status. In 1635 a dispute arose in Yetminster about whether or not George Edwards was ﬁt to be chosen as churchwarden. Edwards had hired a dairy, but was described by one (hostile) witness as ‘a poore man and of noe estate, and one that lyveth by sellinge of butter’.²⁰⁹ His only land was ‘so much ground … as will kepe a nagge or two at the most’, used to transport the butter to market. Others had taken exception to Edwards, ‘by reason he was noe paymaster to the Church nor had any liveinge of his owne in the parishe but what he rented’.²¹⁰ Although hiring a dairy of any size required a signiﬁcant stock of capital (perhaps £40-60) for the lease of the cows, it conveyed no real estate, nor any of the attributes of rate paying or land holding on which rural ‘middling’ status depended. Among the inventoried population, drawn from the large parishes (and ecclesiastical liberties) of Beaminster and Netherbury, Yetminster, Leigh, and Chetnole, ‘yeoman’ was by far the most frequent occupation designation, applied to 44 per cent of testators.²¹¹ The second most common occupation was husbandman, which was applied to a further twenty-seven testators, so that the agrarian sector comprised 54 per cent of the occupations in the group. Food-processing trades such as butchers, bakers, and victuallers, woodworkers (primarily carpenters), and cloth or leatherworkers (notably tanners and shoemakers) were numerous, but none accounted for more than 10 per cent of testators.²¹² The dominance of yeomen reﬂects the social biases inherent in the probate inventory, and the sample under-represents the rural crafts, itinerant petty chapmen, shepherds, and labourers. It also ignores the property-less Dorset dairyman. Table 1.1c illustrates that in terms of their prosperity indicated by hearth tax and inventoried wealth, the ‘middling’ population of Dorset stood between the poorer north-west and the wealthier south-east. While one-hearth dwellings were the most numerous, they did not predominate to the same extent as in rural Lancashire. There were some disparities in inventoried personal estate, with the higher hearth taxpayers not possessing personal estates equivalent to those of their peers in the other two areas. As mentioned in Chapter 3 below, this may reﬂect the fact that the local probate courts, which provide the bulk of the ²⁰⁸ Horn, ‘Dorset Dairy System’, 101–7. ²⁰⁹ Wilts. RO D5 21/5/2, Dean of Sarum Miscellaneous Court papers, 28 Apr. 1635. ²¹⁰ Wilts. RO D5 22/13 fo. 15r Dean of Sarum Deposition Books 1637–40, deposition of John Keat, Leigh, yeoman, aged 34. ²¹¹ That is, to 119 out of 268 testators. See Ch. 4 for a breakdown of the Dorset inventory sample. ²¹² Kerridge notes serge production in the West Dorset ‘Butter Country’ after 1660, in Beaminster, Yetminster, and Sherborne. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures, 116.

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Dorset sample, tended to capture the lower end of the inventoried population, while richer testators had their wills proved in higher courts. Table 1.1c suggests that the proportion of households with more than three hearths was similar to Essex and Suffolk, and generally above the level found in rural Lancashire. The thoroughfare and market town of Sherborne possessed remarkably high numbers of multi-hearth houses—163 out of the town’s 262 assessed households possessed more than three hearths, while 38 possessed six or more in 1662. As in Lancashire, too, the county’s towns acted as focal points of commercial, retail, and distributive activity in a largely agrarian countryside, despite being relatively small and few in number. Poole was the major port, due to its natural harbour. The centre of legal administration in the county was Dorchester, whose turbulent seventeenth-century history has been depicted so vividly by David Underdown.²¹³ In the west, though, Sherborne was the largest town, compared to Lyme Regis, which was only two-thirds its size.²¹⁴ While it was not a borough or an administrative centre, Sherborne was situated on arterial routes between London and the West Country, and between Weymouth and Bath. In this period, it possessed two weekly markets and three annual fairs, including the great sheep fairs held in July and after Michaelmas, regarded ‘as a great holiday for the inhabitants’.²¹⁵ Defoe noted the town’s involvement in the cloth trade, observing ‘here begins the Wiltshire Medley clothing, tho’ this Town be in Dorsetshire’.²¹⁶ As a consequence, the town contained a distinct stratum of prosperous inhabitants. Table 1.5c shows that the differences in personal estate valuations between testators from ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ locations in Dorset were less pronounced than in Lancashire. Personal estates in the relatively populous but largely agrarian parishes of Beaminster, Netherbury, Leigh, Chetnole, and Yetminster had valuations that were over 75 per cent of those in the small towns of Lyme Regis and Sherborne. However, the reason for this convergence seems to be that urban personal estates had lower valuations in Dorset than in Lancashire, while rural valuations were very similar. This may be a function of the larger numbers of ‘poorer’ urban testators recorded in minor ecclesiastical courts in Dorset, compared to Lancashire. This might also explain why the total estate valuations of rural Dorset testators were noticeably higher in each quartile than those of their urban counterparts. There was also relatively little difference in population, services, and market facilities between large villages like Beaminster or Yetminster, and small towns like Sherborne. ²¹³ D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992). ²¹⁴ Sherborne had 262 households in 1662, while Lyme had 163. C. A. F. Meekings, Dorset Hearth Tax Assessments 1662–1664 (Dorchester, 1951), 43–45, 91. ²¹⁵ G. E. Fussell, ‘Four Centuries of Farming Systems in Dorset, 1500–1900’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 73 (1952), 123; Hutchins, Dorset, iv. 209. ²¹⁶ Defoe, Tour, i. 218. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures, 39.

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Even so, the inventory samples do suggest that there was a greater occupational diversity among the ‘urban’ middle ranks. There were 52 different occupational designations among the 161 Sherborne inventories that recorded testators’ trades between 1660 and 1740, compared to 33 among 114 Beaminster testators. The Sherborne testators included a butter mould maker, cabinetmaker, edge tool maker, goldsmith, locksmith, parchment maker, tobacconist, white baker, and writing master.²¹⁷ Unlike the East Anglian manufacturing towns, no sector comprized more than 20 per cent of the total. Yeomen and husbandmen made up the largest group, but accounted for only 18 per cent of all occupations, with some holding strips in the town’s surviving common arable ﬁelds.²¹⁸ The service sector was represented in 16 per cent of the inventories, and included seventeen innholders, who reﬂect the town’s position on the trunk route to London. The cloth producing trades made up 9 per cent of the inventories, which may under-represent their importance, even if there were only ﬁve clothiers in the sample. There were also three silk weavers or silk twisters, indicating a local speciality.²¹⁹ More signiﬁcant, in terms of their presence in this sample, were clothing producers, with seven tailors and a hatter representing a 12 per cent share of the inventory total. Among the testators 10 per cent were involved in leather processing, reﬂecting the abundance of raw materials and a concentration of demand for shoes, gloves, saddles, tallow, and parchment. Once again, this sample under-represents the unskilled occupations that must have proliferated in such a wayside town, and who served its inns, or worked as weavers, spinners, silk throwers, and button makers for piece rates. Three trends are apparent among the inventories of Sherborne’s middle ranks. First, agricultural investments accompanied urban commercial activities frequently, although not as often as they did in Preston. Of the 238 probate inventories 60 (25 per cent) mentioned agricultural activities or assets, while 32 were those of non-agrarian testators. There was a modest difference in personal estate between those with, and those without, agrarian by-employments. The former had a median valuation for household goods of £12.6, while the latter matched them, at £12.1. Total estates were slightly larger, by-employed testators being valued at a median of £59.1, compared to £38.2 for the group as a whole. ²¹⁷ Wilts. RO Dean of Sarum Sherborne Wills P5/1712/16 Philip Busie, butter mould maker, 1712; P5/1694/23 Lawrence Stafford, cabinetmaker, 1694; P5/1695/9 William Brittain, edge tool maker, 1695; P5/1684/1 Oliver Arden, goldsmith, 1684; P5/1681/59 John Watts, locksmith, 1681; P5/1691/2 Richard Awse, parchment maker, 1691; P5/1684/70 Richard Toogood, tobacconist, 1684; P5/1698/4 Elizabeth Bennett, white baker, 1698; P5/1694/19 John Painter, writing master, 1694. ²¹⁸ Wilts. RO P5/1668/77 Thomas Thorne, 1668, possessed 33 acres of corn and 1 acre of hemp in several parts of the common ﬁelds; P5/1683/30 John Horne, Jr., apothecary, 1683, possessed 3 acres in the common meadow; P5/1706/36 William Watts, yeoman, 1706, possessed 45 acres of crops in Harbour Field, Old Down, and Dymore ﬁelds. Hutchins noted that there were three commons, Lenthay, the Mead, and the Moor, containing about 500 acres. Hutchins, Dorset, iv. 210. ²¹⁹ Kerridge, Textile Manufactures, 131, 171.

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The inventory of John Horne, Jr., an apothecary, illustrates the dual interests of these more prosperous occupations. Horne died in 1683, with shop goods valued at £80, as well as books appraised at £5.²²⁰ However, in addition to the mare he used as business transport, he possessed two cows, three pigs, an acre of wheat, and 80 bushels of barley in the barn. He also had a lease of the plot next to the churchyard, valued at £15, and 4 acres in the common meadow, worth £40. His agrarian possessions totalled £90, exceeding his shop goods. As Overton and have demonstrated, such diversiﬁcation was commonplace, but it emphasizes the agrarian basis of the provincial economy, and (perhaps) the seasonal employment opportunities available in this market and fair town.²²¹ The second element evident in these inventories is Sherborne’s hidden manufacturing activity, the making of buttons in industrial quantities.²²² The trade was divided between master manufacturers who organized, controlled the capital, and sold to distant markets, and the craftsmen who manufactured the buttons.²²³ Henry Bonnell’s inventory of 1692 indicates the scale of this activity.²²⁴ He possessed buttons and button moulds worth £103 7s., 45 lb. of mohair and 87 lb. of silk valued at £125 10s., and other buttons and silk remnants appraised at £60 6s.; he had debts in his shop book of £237 9s. 2d., and his estate totalled £663 16s. 8d. This manufacturing was on a scale comparable to the Essex and Suffolk cloth trade, and was clearly for distant wholesale markets, rather than merely local consumption. In 1716, for example, another button maker, Christopher Symonds, died possessed of 35 parcels of buttons, one of which alone amounted to 57 gross (that is, 8,208 buttons).²²⁵ However, only two of the remaining ten button makers had estates that exceeded £50 in total, which suggests that the ultimate control (and rewards) of the trade was vested in only a few hands.²²⁶ The town’s position on the London road may be why the trade ﬂourished there, but it might also have beneﬁted from colonial demand, via Bristol and the Devon and Dorset ports.²²⁷ ²²⁰ Wilts. RO P5/1683/30 John Horne, Jr., apothecary, 1683. See also, P5/1668/44 John Lockett, blacksmith, 1668. ²²¹ Overton and colleagues Production and Consumption, 65–78. ²²² Kerridge mentions this trade brieﬂy. Ibid, 139, 199; Hutchins noted that ‘before 1700, making of buttons, haberdashery wares, and bone lace, employed many hands’, but he thought the town’s manufactures, fairs, markets, and population had been in decline since the turn of the eighteenth century. Hutchins, Dorset, iv. 209. ²²³ P. Knight, ‘The Macclesﬁeld Silk Button Industry: The Probate Evidence’, Textile History, 35/2 (2004), 157–77. Knight observes that the cost of silk as a raw material meant that button making entrepreneurs were highly capitalized and relatively few in number compared to cloth producers, whose raw materials were relatively cheap. ²²⁴ NA PROB 4/5509, Henry Bonnell, Sherborne, button maker, 1692. ²²⁵ Wilts. RO P5/1716/79 Christopher Symonds, button maker, 1716. ²²⁶ Wilts. RO P5/1695/44 Samuel Harbyn, 1695, valued at £53 13s. 5d.; P5/1685/77 Christopher Port, 1685, valued at £65 9s. ²²⁷ Dorset RO DC/LR N2 Burridge Family Account Book, accounts rendered 1703–31, entry dated 6 Dec. 1705.

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The ﬁnal aspect apparent from these inventories is the variety of goods and services available in this market town in the period. For example, Thomas Rapson was a mercer and cloth-producer. In addition to the eight looms in his workshop at his death in 1686, he possessed silk, taffeta, and ribbons valued at £220 12s. 8d., with shop debts of another £88.²²⁸ Clearly, Rapson was either a wholesalerproducer, or, like other provincial mercers, drapers and haberdashers, had a sufﬁcient custom to carry a large inventory of retail trade stock.²²⁹ Sherborne also offered higher-quality products. As noted above, it possessed at least one cabinetmaker, Lawrence Stafford.²³⁰ Stafford’s stock was valued at £104 10s. 2d., and indicates that he worked extensively in walnut. Similarly, while the goldsmith Oliver Arden offered 114 rings and 31 silver spoons, the three books of heraldry beside his workbench suggest that he customized these standard items, with (real or imaginary) coats of arms.²³¹ Sherborne was a market and thoroughfare town of substantial prosperity in the late seventeenth century, a centre of small-scale craft, and larger-scale manufacturing production, and an important retail and distribution hub for a rich agrarian hinterland in the vale of Blackmoor. This prosperity was reﬂected in the high proportion of multi-hearth houses in the town, and the diversity of retail and service provision offered there. This generated a substantial ‘middling’ stratum, but one that was not, necessarily, much more prosperous than its rural counterpart, or signiﬁcantly wealthier than its northern peers. In fact, Sherborne may have reached its post-Reformation zenith sometime late in the seventeenth century. Although silk manufacture expanded in the town in the eighteenth century, markets, fairs, button making, and retailing functions all seem to have declined, under the pressure of regional specialization and price competition.²³² If Sherborne entered a shallow, but protracted, economic decline in the eighteenth century, so did Lyme Regis, the area’s only other signiﬁcant town. Even so, as Murphy has pointed out recently, this occurred only after half a century of relative, even increasing, prosperity.²³³ Certainly there was a decline in Lyme’s sixteenth-century French trade, of cloth exports and wine and linen or canvas imports.²³⁴ However, by 1700 the port was exporting grain, earthenware, ironware, haberdashery goods, pipes, soap, and kersey cloth, often to the West Indies or Virginia, in return for sugar, molasses, tobacco, and animal skins from the American colonies. The town’s merchants also engaged in a trade in salt from the Cape Verde Islands to Newfoundland, preserved ﬁsh from Newfoundland ²²⁸ NA PROB 4/3211 Thomas Rapson, Sherborne, 1686. ²²⁹ See e.g. NA PROB 5/1829, Henry Potter, Colchester, woollen draper, 1717; Lancs. RO WRW/A, Robert Loxam, Preston, mercer, 1675. ²³⁰ Wilts. RO P5/1694/23 Lawrence Stafford, cabinetmaker, 1694. ²³¹ Wilts. RO P5/1684/1 Oliver Arden, goldsmith, 1684. ²³² Hutchins, Dorset, iv. 209. ²³³ F. J. Murphy, ‘Lyme Regis: Trade and Population 1575–1725: A Period of Decline?’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 120 (1998), 1–18. ²³⁴ Ibid. 4–7.

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to Oporto or Malaga, and the import to England of Portuguese or Spanish wines and spirits, olive oil, raisins, and cork. Many of these goods then entered the town’s coastal or re-export trade.²³⁵ The geographical extent of these trade networks is illustrated in a letter from William Bragge in Montserrat in the West Indies to his parents in Lyme in July 1682.²³⁶ He had left on a ship heading for New York, but had transferred to one that was returning to London. Now, he was waiting to get to Nevis with his brother Nicholas, who was bound for Barbados, en route home. Meanwhile, he reported that another brother, Matthew, had sailed for the Coast of Guinea in West Africa! The town declined in the eighteenth century not so much because its merchants became uncompetitive, but because it was strangled by its topography.²³⁷ The town’s famous Cobb would only accept ships of up to approximately 100 tons, and was disadvantaged in the eighteenth century when even coastal vessels began regularly to exceed this displacement.²³⁸ Lyme’s precarious position, perched on steep cliffs, required all goods to be carried inland by packhorse, preventing geographical expansion, and weakening its ability to compete with Exeter, Plymouth, or Southampton.²³⁹ None of these problems diluted Daniel Defoe’s enjoyment in the 1720s, however. He observed that Lyme was ‘a Town of good ﬁgure’, with ‘several eminent Merchants’ conducting continental, Mediterranean, and American trade, which ensured that it could ‘pass for a place of Wealth’, despite its small size.²⁴⁰ He then exclaimed at length upon the beauty of the town’s women and the easy good manners of the inhabitants, particularly ‘their generous friendly way of living … as if they were all Relations’.²⁴¹ Table 1.8 provides an insight into the social and household structure of the town at the end of the seventeenth century. Using the Marriage Duty Act return for Lyme in 1697, it depicts differences in household structure according to the ofﬁce holding status of the 1,300 householders and 376 households in the town.²⁴² The table divides the households into quartiles based on the total number of members, including ‘inmates’ and servants. It shows some ²³⁵ F. J. Murphy, ‘Lyme Regis: Trade and Population 1575–1725: A Period of Decline?’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 6–7. ²³⁶ Dorset RO DC/LR A4/4 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Bundles, 1685–99. The reverse of Bragge’s letter had been used to record information about unlicensed brewing in the town, which ensured its preservation. ²³⁷ Murphy, ‘Lyme Regis’, 9–10. Table 6 notes that customs revenues at Lyme increased 75% between 1614 and 1687, but total revenue generated fell behind competing ports. In 1607 Exeter had generated customs revenues 1 12 times those of Lyme; by 1687, its revenues were 4 times the value of Lyme’s. Bristol’s, which had been similar to Lyme’s in 1607, were now 9 times greater. ²³⁸ Ibid, 12. ²³⁹ Ibid. 2. ²⁴⁰ Defoe, Tour, i. 216. ²⁴¹ Ibid, 216–17. ²⁴² Dorset RO DC/LR H2 Lyme Regis Marriage Duty Act Assessment, c.1697. Arkell notes that Marriage Duty Act assessments may also be subject to error. In 1695 Gregory King found an error rate of 10% in the listing for St Benet Paul’s Wharf and St Andrew Wardrobe, London. T. Arkell, ‘Illuminations and Distortions: Gregory King’s Scheme Calculated for the Year 1688 and the Social Structure of Later Stuart England’, Economic History Review, 69/1 (2006), 37.

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Table 1.8. Households with female heads, ofﬁcers, or servants, by household size, Lyme Regis, 1697

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

% Households Poor

Female head

16 5 9 5

64 36 23 14

Ofﬁcers 14 22 38 54

With servants

Household Size Mean Median

1 7 16 30

1.5 2.5 3.8 6.1

1 3 4 6

Source: Dorset RO DC/LR H2 Lyme Regis Marriage Duty Act Assessment, c. 1697.

quite marked stratiﬁcation. In particular, over half the largest household quartile contained ofﬁcers, with almost one-third of these households also containing servants. By contrast, the smallest households were the most likely to be described as ‘poor’ and to be headed by a woman, but were the least likely to contain borough ofﬁcers or household servants. In total women headed 34 per cent of households, a very high proportion compared to the mean of 20.3 per cent in Richard Wall’s analysis of 100 household listings between 1662 and 1705.²⁴³ Maritime activities may have removed a large number of the male household heads, either through temporary absence, or because of the risks of seafaring. When allied to the signiﬁcant proportions of female children, inmates, and servants, these features skewed the sex ratio heavily in favour of women, with 72 men per 100 women, even if the town’s power structures did not reﬂect this.²⁴⁴ Overall, Lyme households were small by national standards. The mean household size was only 3.45, compared to Laslett’s mean of 4.75 in 41 listings between 1662 and 1705.²⁴⁵ This may reﬂect the under-recording of a proportion of the male population at sea, but it also makes the larger households stand out from the 55 per cent that contained fewer than four persons. Domestic servants can be identiﬁed in only 13.5 per cent of Lyme households in 1697, but predictably they were concentrated among the wealthy. Between them, the 41 households who provided borough or parish ofﬁcers and jurors in 1697 housed 32 servants (10 male and 22 female). Of these households, 13 were those of the Chief Burgesses of the town, whose mean household size was 5.8, inﬂated by the 20 servants in their midst—indeed, only two of the Chief Burgesses lacked servants in 1697. By contrast, the 23 Free Burgess households had a mean size of only 3.7 persons, and housed just eight servants between them. In this respect, the size of households and the distribution of servants reﬂected the relatively ²⁴³ Calculated using ﬁgures abstracted from P. Laslett, ‘Introduction: the history of the family’ in id. (ed.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972), 78, table 1.8. ²⁴⁴ In the 1697 listing there were 754 women and 546 men recorded. ²⁴⁵ Laslett, Household and Family, 76, table 1.6.

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narrow apex of the social order of the town, and echoes Defoe’s remark about Lyme’s elite behaving like a close-knit family. Lyme’s probate inventories reﬂect both its seafaring character, and some of this concentration of wealth. There were twenty-three mariners among the 174 inventories from the town in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, plus seven merchants, two shipwrights, one ship’s carpenter, one barrel maker, and ﬁve other carpenters, who may well have been engaged largely in maritime work. There was a clear difference in scale between the town’s mariners and merchants, with the latter possessing household goods to a median value of almost double that of mariners (£21.3 compared to £11.4), and total inventory valuations four times higher than those of the former group.²⁴⁶ Mariners ranged from ordinary seamen, whose possessions amounted to little more than the clothes on their back, through to ship’s captains, whose wealth might incorporate a share in the cargo or even the ship itself. Richard Bacon, Sr., appeared to represent the former group, when he died aboard the Lark in the English Channel in March 1684. His possessions comprised ‘clothes in a bundle sowed up in his white capp’, and the inventory recorded his hasty burial at sea, noting laconically, ‘could keep him no longer he began to smell’.²⁴⁷ In fact, when his inventory was taken the following June Bacon also possessed a house lease valued at £12, and household effects valued at £9 18s. 10d.²⁴⁸ Robert Read, Sr., exempliﬁed the more prosperous type of mariner, dying in 1692 possessed of a comfortably furnished house, and £166 15s. 8 12 d. in cash.²⁴⁹ He owned newer items, such as a chest of drawers, a round table in his kitchen chamber, and a looking glass, plus silver plate and twelve pairs of linen sheets. This was solid prosperity, with household goods totalling £52 14s. 7d. Only Ferdinand Lacy, who died in 1697, provides some indication of the prosperity of the town’s larger merchants in the later seventeenth century.²⁵⁰ While Lacy’s household goods were valued at a modest £46, debts due to him added another £1,250 at least, giving some sense of the scale of his business activities. The Burridge family’s accounts in the early eighteenth century show that the returns from mercantile activities could be considerable. In December 1705 a single voyage by the ‘John’ to Virginia brought dividends of £313, distributed among ﬁve owners.²⁵¹ Despite Defoe’s depiction of Lyme’s decorous sociability, less genteel behaviour was rife, and gives an insight into the transient, disorderly social base of this port town. Unsurprisingly, inns and their proprietors featured heavily in the ²⁴⁶ That is, £99.5, compared to £24.2 for the mariners. ²⁴⁷ Dorset RO Dean of Sarum, Peculiar of Lyme Regis and Halstock wills, MIC/R/381, Richard Bacon, Sr., 1684. ²⁴⁸ Dorset RO MIC/R/381, Richard Bacon, mariner, 1684. ²⁴⁹ Ibid. MIC/R/381, Robert Read, Sr., mariner, 1692. ²⁵⁰ NA PROB4/3264, Ferdinand Lacy, Lyme Regis, merchant, 1698. ²⁵¹ Dorset RO DC/LR N2 Burridge Family Account Book, accounts rendered 1703–31, entry dated 6 Dec. 1705. John and Robert Burridge received £98 and £49 respectively.

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borough Quarter Sessions. James Tovery kept several during the period 1703-22, and was cited repeatedly. His ﬁrst mention was in April 1703 for his part in an affray involving his sister Elizabeth and a journeyman clockmaker from Liverpool.²⁵² In subsequent years he was accused of being drunk in public,²⁵³ fathering two bastards,²⁵⁴ housing suspected fornicators and other ‘suspicious persons’,²⁵⁵ stealing personal effects from a ship,²⁵⁶ receiving stolen goods,²⁵⁷ and playing ninepins.²⁵⁸ The authorities’ efforts to control these establishments could elicit a virulent response from their clientele. In November 1700, Richard Denning of Axminster was arrested for drinking at unseasonable hours at the Bowling Green inn, later kept by Tovery. Denning exclaimed bitterly that he was unable to ‘come into Town to drink a glass of liquor’, because the Mayor and Justices were ‘a parcel of Fanatic Toads’.²⁵⁹ These small disputes could escalate into larger disturbances. When Thomas Templeman, innkeeper of the Sun Inn, was arrested for debt in December 1702, a riotous crowd, including Ando, the Negro servant of Richard Hallett, succeeded in releasing him. ²⁶⁰ Other riots were reported in 1679, 1680, and 1724.²⁶¹ Clearly, then, society in Lyme Regis was not always genteel, friendly, or well behaved.²⁶² The town housed a signiﬁcant number of highly mobile young ²⁵² Ibid. A4/5 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Rolls 1700–9, information of Elizabeth Tovery, Lyme Regis, spinster, and James Tovery, Lyme Regis, innkeeper, 5 Apr. 1703. ²⁵³ Dorset RO DC/LR A4/6 Quarter Sessions Rolls, presentment 14 Jan. 1712. ²⁵⁴ Ibid. A4/5 Quarter Sessions Rolls, complaint from Surrey JPs, about unpaid maintenance for child of Sarah Brasier of Mortlake, single woman, 14 Sept. 1705; judgement that Tovery was father of the child of Sarah Swayne, Lyme Regis, single woman, 2 Apr. 1706. ²⁵⁵ Ibid. information of Anne Carleton, Lyme Regis, huckster, 6 Aug. 1704, who claimed she was married to Christopher Carelton, Hackney, gardener, who had been living as servant to Tovery; DC/LR A 4/7 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Rolls 1710–19, examination of Elizabeth Turner, Lyme Regis, single woman, 22 Dec. 1718 who admitted being impregnated in Tovery’s inn on 12 July; DC/LR A 4/8 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Rolls, 1720–29 examination of Mary Clift, Cullomstock, single woman, 20 June 1724, who admitted lying with Thomas Courtess, Lyme Regis, sailor at Tovery’s inn during Michaelmas fair, 1723; DC LR 4/6 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Presentments, 13 Jun. 1713. ²⁵⁶ DC/LR A 4/6 Quarter Sessions Rolls 1710–19, indictment of James and Turlington Tovery, 3 July 1714, for stealing a featherbed, blanket, and rug on 14 June. from the ship John and Thomas of London. ²⁵⁷ Dorset RO DC/LR A32b transcript of DC/LR 3/1 Lyme Regis Borough Misdemeanour book, 1683–1719, examination of Susanna, wife of John Richards, Honiton, watchmaker, aged 42, examination of Elizabeth Tovery, Lyme Regis, spinster, aged 20; examination of James Tovery, Lyme Regis, innholder, aged about 52 years. ²⁵⁸ Dorset RO DC/LR A7/2 Quarter Sessions Presentments, 15 July 1706. ²⁵⁹ Ibid. A4/5 Quarter Sessions Rolls, information of William Pyke, constable, 18 Nov. 1700. ²⁶⁰ Ibid, information of John, Samuel and Thomas Fowler of Uplyme, Devon, 8 Dec. 1702. ²⁶¹ Ibid. A4/3 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Rolls, indictments 20 Aug. 1679, 14 Jan. 1680; DC/LR A3/2b Lyme Regis Borough Misdemeanour Book, 1683–1719, information of Giles Lawrence, 12 Nov. 1724. ²⁶² Another 18th-century novelist (and staunch defender of law and order), Henry Fielding, fell foul of its provocations in 1725, being bound over with his servant to keep the peace towards Andrew Tucker, gent. (mayor of the borough in 1727). Dorset R. O. DC/LR A3/26 allegation by Andrew Tucker, Lyme Regis, gent., 14 Nov. 1725; Hutchins, Dorset, ii. 49.

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men and women. Its numerous inns and alehouses were magnets for this rootless population, as well as providing opportunities for illicit entertainment. As Richard Denning’s drunken outburst also shows, the religious and political legacy of the Civil War remained very divisive.²⁶³ The Marriage Duty Act return indicates Lyme also contained signiﬁcant social distinctions, and was under the control of a relatively narrow, but commercially powerful, economic elite. While the town’s merchants prospered, they exerted a considerable economic inﬂuence over commerce and employment prospects in the town, and consequently they dominated the higher reaches of borough government, and its parliamentary representation. Lower down the social order, there was greater population turnover with a more diverse and volatile social mix than in many settlements in the Dorset interior. Lyme’s geography ensured that it was connected better to the outside world, via its shipping routes to Exeter, London, Bordeaux, Oporto, the West Indies, or the Chesapeake, than to this interior. In these respects it does not integrate easily into the largely pastoral economy of the clay vales that extended northwards from Lyme Bay to the Somerset border, despite the constant circulation of population within this agrarian hinterland.

IV As has been suggested, it is one thing to identify and explore ‘regions’, but another to explain how the patterns identiﬁed actually affected the individuals exposed to them. Of the three areas discussed in the preceding survey, only one, the cloth-producing district of Essex and Suffolk, had a clear economic base that rendered it socially distinct from surrounding, largely agricultural zones. It is more difﬁcult to detect the social effects of aspects of topography, agriculture, industry, settlement, or communal organization in central Lancashire or west Dorset. Unlike these other two areas, the industrial economy of the Essex–Suffolk cloth towns and villages relied upon and generated large, pay-dependent populations, many of whom possessed few assets other than their property of skill.²⁶⁴ Although the preceding discussion has emphasized their lack of resources and by-employments, these weavers and spinners were not entirely reduced to an industrial proletariat. They might lease smallholdings or garden plots, hire themselves in agriculture, control their own businesses (if not their wider economic fate), and ﬁnd their own ‘masters’. Yet, collectively, they ensured that ²⁶³ Dorset RO DC/LR A4/3 Lyme Regis Quarter Sessions Rolls, 1660–84, examination of Mr Thomas Taylor, Lyme Regis, merchant, 20 July 1667; examination of Joseph Taylor, Lyme Regis, mariner, 16 July 1681. ²⁶⁴ For the ‘property of skill’, see J. Rule, ‘The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture’, in P. Joyce (ed.), Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987), 99–118.

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this manufacturing economy was more stratiﬁed, and perhaps more polarized, than central Lancashire or west Dorset, and most other parts of the country besides. Put simply, in these cloth-producing parishes the rich were richer, and the poor were poorer and more numerous than in surrounding districts. While there is some evidence that the ranks of the modestly prosperous were also deeper (and certainly more prosperous) than elsewhere, analysis of exemption rates from the hearth tax supports the contemporary fear that in bad years the poor were ready to eat up the rich of these communities. These were levels of inequality found only in some of the towns of the two other areas, and even here it is difﬁcult to identify groups with the same economic dominance as the clothiers of Sudbury or Braintree. Perhaps only the merchants of Lyme Regis came close to matching this power. These rather stark economic and social disparities were the result of a concentration of production, capital, and population characteristic of the English cloth industry prior to the factory system. The experience of the Devon, Cotswolds, and Norfolk cloth towns was similar, and by the second quarter of the eighteenth century was matched by that of the Shefﬁeld cutlers, Birmingham tinplate workers, and Stafford potters.²⁶⁵ The social order of these areas diverged from that in most other parts of provincial England, where perhaps only onethird, rather than a half, of the inhabitants were considered too poor to pay the hearth tax and parish rates. So, while the picturesque countryside of the Stour and Colne valleys in Essex looked rural, its population density, economic networks, and wealth disparities in the early modern period seemed ‘urban’. By contrast, although Manchester and Liverpool were growing fast by 1700, Lancashire was still a county of scattered rural settlements, punctuated infrequently by modest urban populations. Parishes may have been large, and lists of inhabitants relatively long, but settlement was often dispersed around outlying hamlets and farms. The same was true of west Dorset. Consequently, despite extensive migration, there may have been greater qualitative difference between rural and urban life in these two counties, than on the Essex–Suffolk borders. As is emphasized by the analyses of probate inventories in Tables 1.5a–c and in Chapter 3 below, into the eighteenth century towns in Lancashire and Dorset remained relatively self-contained reservoirs of goods and services—and of the prosperous, consuming ‘middle sort of people’ propounded by existing historical deﬁnitions. Even so, despite their shared lack of urban or industrial development, there was considerable divergence in soils, climate, agriculture, and settlement patterns between west Dorset and central Lancashire, and this inﬂuenced the social ²⁶⁵ D. G. Hey, The Fiery Blades of Hallamshire: Shefﬁeld and its Neighbourhood, 1660–1740 (Leicester, 1991); W. H. B. Court, ‘Industrial Organisation and Economic Progress in the Eighteenth-Century Midlands’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 28 (1946), 85–99; L. Weatherill, The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire, 1660–1760 (Manchester, 1971).

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structure of these two areas. While the larger farmers controlled parish government and positions of authority in both locations, ‘large’ farms in Lancashire might be 40–60 acres, while in Dorset they could be 120–300 acres. This was a direct reﬂection of their different agrarian economies. As has also been suggested, a greater proportion of small, subsistence farmers may have survived into the eighteenth century in Lancashire, despite the relatively secure tenures on ecclesiastical manors in west Dorset. The evidence of small subtenancies in Dorset indicates, however, that although subsistence agriculture may have declined, small farms did not. Indeed, in all three areas by the early eighteenth century forms of land tenure may have been increasingly irrelevant in the determination of local status, because ownership and cultivation were increasingly divorced at all levels in the farming hierarchy. This trend was least obvious in north-west England because low population levels reduced the pressure on landed resources, and perpetuated relatively non-intensive estate management practices, such as the three-life lease. This security may have allowed more small, family-run, farms to survive because their proprietors were partly insulated from the full economic costs of market rents and wage payments, and had little need to resort to subtenancy. However, after the population increases of the early seventeenth century, even where land was more abundant, there may have been greater numbers of people unable to access it on any terms. Outside the north-west, while we see (unsystematic) indications that subtenancy had become endemic, it is difﬁcult to determine its social consequences. There is little evidence in Essex, Suffolk, or Dorset that market rents, and disciplines, effected automatic increases in farm sizes, or that subtenancy destroyed smallholding. However, they may well have ﬁnished off cash-poor subsistence cultivators. At market rents, small farms no longer ‘kept’ families, but merely provided them with an income, or a living wage. Freed of the burdens of inheritance and the expectation of family self-sufﬁciency, smallholdings might remain viable as a by-employment, but only those with at least moderate prosperity from a craft or trade. The perils of failure became more immediate, but also (perhaps) of less consequence, providing working capital could be preserved after an eviction. This change occurred at the expense of small, owneroccupying husbandmen, and under-capitalized crafts such as weavers, who were denied access to these resources at market prices. In this respect, the study points to the emergence of another subset among the ‘middling’ in rural society. We are familiar with the growth of the wagedependent, farm labouring population in the century after 1560. Perhaps, we should also recognize the emergence of a group immediately above these labourers—the market-dependent. They had access to resources wholly or partly because they paid market prices for them, and therefore needed to charge market rates for their products and services in return. We might visualize these people as being, ﬁrst and foremost, tenant farmers, or perhaps even Dorset dairymen.

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However, they could also include ‘independent’ craftsmen in the cloth trade, working with their own equipment, but dependent upon the supply chains and capital formations of large-scale clothiers, or of button makers, or of export merchants. They might also be those country retailers—whose trade stock we ﬁnd recorded in probate inventories in this period—whose assets were the shop, and its stock, but not the means to manufacture it. At their lower end, there was little practical distinction between a small tenant farmer, and a craftsman who rented a smallholding—in terms of income, status, and life chances. At the upper end, we see well-capitalized grocers and shopkeepers sitting alongside yeomen-farmers on the parish vestry. They form a section in a social continuum within the parish, because many of the distinctions and deﬁnitions that historians have applied to them seem to have been ignored in practice. If we seek to encompass these market-dependent individuals within a deﬁnition of the ‘bourgeoisie’ or ‘middle class’ of yore, based on the formal ownership or control of capital assets, their ranks are decimated.²⁶⁶ If we insist, as contemporaries such as Gregory King did, on the divide between free and servile land tenures, then a division needs to be inserted between types of farmer who appear in other respects to have enjoyed equal status as ratepayers or ofﬁcers.²⁶⁷ If, instead, we look at these lists of ratepayers and ofﬁcers in the parish, as we shall in the next chapter, one element stands out from the jumble of occupations, land tenures, and forms of control over property. They are ordered according to an implicit hierarchy, based on the level of assessments paid to the parish. This itself was founded on some conception of annual income, which formed the root of social estimations in local society. This is hardly surprising, given the decline in outright land ownership, and the need to ﬁnd a common denominator between the value of landed and non-landed assets. Wealth estimates and social evaluations based on perceived income glossed over the otherwise complicated economic foundations of material prosperity and status in local communities. In fact, as the next two chapters suggest, in some respects the similarities in the form, language, components, and methods of estimation of ‘middling’ identity in these three regions are more striking than the differences created by manufacturing, or terrain. The common element in the formation of this identity was the social institution of the parish, and the administrative reality of its government. ²⁶⁶ Manning, English People, 170. ²⁶⁷ See Gregory King’s ‘Scheme of the income and expense of the several families of England calculated for the year 1688’, in Laslett, World We Have Lost, 36–7.

2 Parish Ofﬁce and the Formation of Social Identity A historians it is axiomatic that early modern English society privileged both wealth and age in its distributions of power. Authority was exercised ‘properly’ when it was in the hands of those who were older and ‘more substantial’, because age brought maturity, and wealth indicated soundness of judgement and conferred responsibility.¹ As the researches of Craig Muldrew and Alexandra Shepard have demonstrated recently, such assumptions also embody preconceptions about moral worth and gender.² Muldrew has shown that ‘substance’ indicated not only material wealth, but also greater moral worth—the social dimension of Muldrew’s multifaceted notion of ‘credit’. Those able to deploy greater ﬁnancial credit did so, literally, because their word was worth more than that of their neighbours, in economic and moral terms. Similarly, as Shepard has observed, among men such assumptions were biased towards those who fulﬁlled the ‘patriarchal’ ideal as heads of economically independent households, and maintained their social repute through self-discipline and the right ‘ordering’ of subordinate members. Those on the margins of economic independence, or those unable to attain or maintain patriarchal authority, tended to be dismissed as of ‘little worth’ or ‘slight credit’. It was regarded as ‘natural’ that those charged with the exercise of authority should be more prosperous, established more ﬁrmly in society, and of greater moral worth than those over whom they wielded power.³ These assumptions are articulated openly in contemporary advice to parish ofﬁcers. Gardiner’s Compleat Constable of 1692 noted that these ofﬁcers: ¹ K. Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 72 (1976), 205–48; P. Grifﬁths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996); I. K. Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, 1994). ² C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998); A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003). ³ For an interesting discussion about the extent to which ‘a divinely ordained hierarchical order was perceived by most people as an absolute and unquestionable truth’, see C. Marsh, ‘Order and Place in England, 1580–1640: The View from the Pew’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 3–26.

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ought to be men ﬁt for the Execution of their Ofﬁce, and therefore to be chosen out of the honestest ablest and most understanding men, not Feeble with old Age, nor otherwise Weak, Sick, Poor or Impotent … This Ofﬁce ought not to be put upon the Poorer sort, for they are usually most Ignorant and Fearful, and less able to attend this Ofﬁce; their Necessity requiring them to mind their own Trade and Imployment … Also Women, whether Maids or Widows ought not to be chosen; neither Madmen, or Ideots, nor Infants under 21 Years of Age, nor Men above Seventy.⁴

Gardiner’s advice is a mixture of implicit and explicit preconceptions. His assumptions about the debilitating effects of poverty on soundness of judgement, and the evident proximity of femininity, youth, and old age to unreason are clear enough. Judgements about the effects of wealth and ‘credit’ on the ﬁtness to hold ofﬁce are more implicit, obscured behind the imprecise terms ‘honestest ablest and most understanding men’. If we compare them to the categories of person that Gardiner suggests lack these qualities, we might infer that his distinction is based on intellectual capacity—between those most, and those least, likely to be ‘understanding men’. Yet, the words ‘honesty’ and ‘ability’ also contain implicit judgements about the wealth and social credit of those who possessed these qualities. An honest, able man was a desirable candidate for the ofﬁce of constable because he was sufﬁciently prosperous to preserve a degree of social autonomy. Freedom from economic necessity reduced his susceptibility to petty bribery, and limited the possibility that he would be overawed by those more powerful in the community. The need to possess ‘understanding’ also indicated that some level of educational attainment, and possibly some legal knowledge, was also desirable. This was in stark contrast to the likely inattentiveness, partiality, and ignorance that Gardiner thought was likely among candidates of the ‘poorer sort’. This chapter is concerned to identify, illustrate, and quantify some of these underlying contemporary assumptions about the role of ofﬁce in the recognition and conferral of status in the parish and beyond. As with Gardiner, these assumptions are a mixture of the implicit and the explicit, and frequently hidden beneath the evasive banality that characterizes the language of status employed in parish sources. Steve Hindle has remarked of such sources that ‘the political culture they reveal is in some ways covert, consisting rather of unstated premises than of measurable attitudes’, or (in fashionable historical parlance) a ‘hidden transcript of power’ within the ofﬁcial record.⁵ This is nowhere more evident than in the language of social description found in such parish sources. In part this is, as Hindle has suggested, because of the administrative function of the records generated by the parish vestry, ⁴ R. Gardiner, The Compleat Constable (London, 1692) [Wing/G238B], 7. ⁵ Hindle, State and Social Change, 228; J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); see also M. J. Braddick and J. Walter, ‘Introduction. Grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society’, in Ieid. (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society. Order: Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 1–42.

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churchwardens, constables, overseers of the poor, surveyors of the highways, or trustees of charity lands or schools.⁶ This was, primarily, to demonstrate a united front to the wider parish (in whose name they governed) and the local magistracy and central authorities (to whom they might have recourse). Division and the impression of factiousness implied a weak grip on power—if those in authority could not govern themselves, how could they be trusted to control anybody else? Yet the social judgements and distinctions that underlay such apparently bland descriptions were often more acute than they might ﬁrst appear. Occasionally we encounter terminology and divisions that are red in tooth and claw. As Hindle has also demonstrated, this language is often most acute in the petitions by parishes to establish ‘Select’ vestries, or about matters of poor relief. So at Orsett, Essex, in 1618 ‘the ancientest and better sort of the parish’ petitioned for a vestry limited to ten of ‘the most sufﬁcient parishoners’, because ‘the dissent of the inferior and meaner sort’ was a constant ‘hinderance to the good proceedings which they desire’.⁷ After the Civil War, the leading parishioners of St Bartholomew-the-Great, London, sought to reimpose (Anglican) order by petitioning the Bishop of London for a ‘select’ vestry, reminding him that: during the late unhappy times of wilfulness and disorder in this kingdom … [there was] … so much irregularity in the managing and dispatch of your business and affairs … by the meaner sort of people who have least interest in the same … who taking upon them to impose upon such in your said parish who are of far better rank and condition, have carried all things tumultuously by number rather than worth.⁸

In these instances, it was to the petitioners’ advantage to highlight social differences, because they wished to secure their own power in the parish by playing on the perpetual concerns about disorder evident among ecclesiastical and central authorities in the early modern period. Hence they stressed their own material substance, intrinsic moral worth, and commitment to ‘order’, by dissociating themselves from those they represented as the antithesis of these values—that is, literally by ‘discrediting’ them. Social and ‘political’ division could now be represented without penalty, because it emphasized that the wrong people were in charge, and that good order would only return through the permanent institution of a vestry restricted to the petitioners. The question is whether this rhetorical ploy was an accurate description of a social fault-line by an excluded parochial elite, or a linguistic strategy by one section of the normal ofﬁce-holding stratum in a parish to secure the exclusion of their rivals by representing their dispute as a ‘crisis of order’. As will be shown below, some examples support the latter interpretation, but the signiﬁcant point is that the ⁶ Hindle, State and Social Change, 210. Hindle, On the Parish?, 117–18, 125, 139, 367. ⁷ Hindle, State and Social Change, 213. ⁸ P. Seaward, ‘Gilbert Sheldon, the London Vestries, and the Defence of the Church’, in T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), 55.

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assumption in such depictions was that those of higher status possessed a greater ‘natural’ entitlement to rule. Such petitions are fascinating, but rare. Among petitions to the Warwickshire Quarter Sessions only four out of 257 petitions between Easter 1625 and Easter 1635 (2 per cent) distinguished between ‘sorts of people’ or types of ‘inhabitants’. Between Epiphany 1655 and Epiphany 1665 only 45 out of 655 petitions (7 per cent) described petitioners as the ‘chief’, ‘substantial’, ‘ablest’, or ‘principal inhabitants’ of their settlements, while none employed the terminology of ‘sorts’. Between Easter 1690 and Easter 1695, only four out of 198 orders made by the Quarter Sessions in responses to petitions separated the ‘chief ’, from the other ‘inhabitants’.⁹ In most other circumstances it was not in the interests of parishioners to depict divisions among themselves. Certainly, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century parish sources employ the phrase ‘the inhabitants’ routinely to depict the collective will of an undifferentiated body of rate-paying residents. For example, The Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer offered samples of the appropriate language to be used in drafting of petitions and rates. When the vestry scrutinized the overseers’ rate, it advised the following formula: We whose Names are under-written, being Inhabitants of the Parish of A. aforesaid, have perused the above Rate and Assessment, and do hereby declare, that the several Sums above-mentioned are, by our approbation, rated upon the respective Persons concerned; and that the same is an equal Rate, according to our best Judgements. P.Q., RO, J.L., A.M. parishoners.¹⁰

This usage was also institutionalized in printed pro-formas for many petitions and bonds, on which only the names of the persons concerned had to be inserted. Where social distinctions were drawn between local residents, the dichotomous division between ‘chief’ and other ‘inhabitants’ is the most common form encountered in most parish records across the country.¹¹ It may represent the primary social perspective of the people who used it, as well as showing the limits of what it was politic to say about the social order of the parish. Supporting this latter assertion is even more difﬁcult than quantifying the former one. The best ‘insider’s view’ of the social perspectives of parish rulers in this period comes from the writings of Richard Gough. Gough was a yeoman, of long lineage in his village of Myddle, Shropshire. He was also a parish ofﬁcer, and sufﬁciently concerned about parish affairs to write his ‘History’—in form, a description of the rights by which the parishioners held their pews in church: in practice, a litany of the accidents and indiscretions befalling their forebears. ⁹ Warwick County Records: i. Quarter Sessions Order Book 1625 to 1637 ; iii. 1650 to 1657 ; iv. 1657 to 1665; ix. 1690 to 1696. ¹⁰ Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer, 61. ¹¹ H. R. French, ‘Social Status, Localism and the ‘‘Middle Sort of People’’ in England 1620–1750’, Past & Present, 166 (2000), 75–8.

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Gough’s social perspective is highly distinctive. First it is personal, focused on the particular and the individual, rather than an attempt to describe people by reference to extra-parochial categories or social classiﬁcations. So Elinor Buttry was described as a young woman with a marriage portion of £100, not as someone of ‘middling’ status.¹² Secondly, because it is personal and speciﬁc, Gough’s judgements are cast primarily in moral terms, assessing individual behaviour by universally applicable precepts of right and wrong, rather than in relation to social stereotypes. Elinor’s marriage, under-age, to the son of the ‘covetous’ John Hussey was judged in moral, not social terms, of ‘our old English proverbe, which sayes, that to marry children together, is the way to make whoremongers and whores’. Thirdly, therefore, Gough’s social lexicon is less pungent than the adjectives he applies about his neighbours’ moral behaviour. He distinguished between ‘good substantiall persons’ or ‘the best of the parish’, and ‘comon people’, those ‘in a decaying condition’, those who ‘lived meanly’ and who constituted a group of social ‘inferiors’.¹³ Gough was discussing real social differences with sharp economic edges, but his categories depend on local inference and inﬂection, on understanding the context in which they were employed, rather than equating them immediately with clear or widely applicable social categories. Elsewhere, others sometimes employed a slightly more systematic vocabulary through which to analyse the social order in their parishes. In June 1676 Timothy Wilcocks, incumbent of the parishes of Hermitage and Alton Pancras, Dorset, described the absentees from church using the language of ‘sorts’, albeit not as we might expect.¹⁴ He divided the parishes between the ‘richer’ and ‘poorer sort’, but went on to divide the latter into ‘the severall degrees of poore, poorer and poorest of all’: ‘By the poore we meane, such who have each of them an house and a very little plot of ground … Amongest these may be reckon’d, such as have no meanes at all but what they rent … [then] The poorest of all and such as want releife’.¹⁵ Wilcocks’s primary social distinction was between those who never required poor relief (his ‘richer sort’), and those who were in different depths of poverty. The latter were divided according to their capacity to maintain economic independence. Owners might possess enough to minimize this dependence, those who rented were more vulnerable, but those without property had nothing to prevent their dependence on poor relief. Interestingly, the economic threshold of dependence–independence loomed larger in Wilcocks’s functional social divisions than the possible distinctions between those who were more prosperous. In other administrative contexts he may have been able to identify the superlatives of the ‘richer sort’ in a similar manner. ¹² R. Gough, The History of Myddle ed. D. Hey (London, 1981), 124. ¹³ French, ‘ ‘‘Middle Sort of People’’ ’, 66. ¹⁴ Wilts. RO Dean of Sarum Visitation Records: Churchwardens’ Presentments D5 28/54/38 and 60 1 Jun. 1676. ¹⁵ Wilts. RO D5 28/54/38.

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Lower down the social scale (and at the very end of our time period), the Wakeﬁeld cloth worker John Brearley deployed an equally contingent, localized, and imprecise social vocabulary. His social lexicon incorporated ‘gentlemen and better sort of people’, ‘the richer sort of cloathiers’, ‘tradesmen’, ‘verry hard working and industerous people’, ‘common working men’, ‘poor working people’, and ‘servants’.¹⁶ As can be seen, this terminology contained its most coherent set of social stereotypes towards the upper end of the social scale. Brearley observed how the larger manufacturers exploited the social attributes and privileges of gentility for business purposes: ‘Some merchants wich drives country trade will go to gett orders and look has grand has possible and will wear a gold laced hatt to shew theire worth money and gentleman like and can bye goods in att best hand and can give credditt’.¹⁷ Clearly, these merchants fashioned an image of ‘gentility’, based on the display of material prosperity through a lavish style of dress that was designed to strike a chord with their rural customers. This could only have been effective if the latter shared these social preconceptions about the appearance, wealth, and probity of a gentleman. In other instances, though, Brearley’s language does not invoke such well-deﬁned social images or stereotypes, although it is evident that he understood that the difference between employer and workman marked a fundamental difference in economic rewards and life-chances.¹⁸ In fact, he provides us with much better evidence for the existence of regional stereotypes than social ones in this period, in his comments that: ‘Yorkshire men are not loved in no part of England … [in] London or to the west part of England the[y] seldom will employ him as journiman if hee says hee is Yorkshire and if hee says not and is the[y] can tell bye his speech. Yorkshire men are noted for bites and sharpars’.¹⁹ He made similar sweeping (and damning) generalizations about the dishonesty of Presbyterians and the lustfulness of Methodists, but made no allusions to the social characteristics of the ‘middling’ or ‘working men’.²⁰ Again, he seems either to have lacked the requisite social concepts, or lived in a social context in which they were unnecessary. What mattered to him was not ‘gentility’ in general, but the fact that ‘the gentlemen around Wakeﬁeld are of a covetous carefull niggardly sort of men’.²¹ Wider society was accessed through trade connections, and social consciousness was framed primarily by experience of the employment hierarchy in the cloth trade rather than by reference to more abstract notions ¹⁶ J. Smail (ed.), ‘Woollen Manufacturing in Yorkshire. The Memorandum Books of John Brearley, Cloth Frizzer at Wakeﬁeld, 1758–1762’, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 155, (1999–2001), 111, 17, 56, 54, 62, 56, 97. ¹⁷ Smail, ‘Brearley’, 123. ¹⁸ He observed that ‘aney man wich is in trade and can vent his goods itt is much better then working att aney business and 10 times better then working servant lett his wages bee never so good’. Ibid., 97. ¹⁹ Ibid., 40. ²⁰ Ibid., 62, 77. ²¹ Ibid., 62.

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of ‘sorts of people’. When he did travel further aﬁeld he was more aware of his regional identity as a Yorkshireman than his social identity as a ‘working man’—because he had exceeded the boundaries of the former, but not the latter. The same conceptual imprecision can be seen in the descriptions of a much larger group of observers, the clergy of the dioceses of Winchester and Lincoln. In Winchester the diocesan questionnaire of 1725 asked (among other things) ‘what noblemen, Gentlemen or Persons of Note of each Sex live in your parish?’ In Lincoln in 1709, William Wake enquired after ‘any Persons of Quality, or Gentlemen of Estates’. In response, the parochial clergy produced varied, but essentially dichotomous social descriptions.²² In general, they distinguished between two social categories. First, as the bishops requested, they attempted to identify ‘persons of Note’. Secondly, they distinguished these from residents they described as those of ‘little’ or ‘no consequence’ (in Cheriton, East Woodley and Ashmanshurst, Hartley Witney, and Holdenhurst, Hants),²³ those in ‘mean condition’ or ‘low circumstances’ (the parishes of St Mary’s Southampton, Send in Surrey, and St Olave’s Southwark, Surrey),²⁴ ‘mean people who live by their labour’ (Cranﬁeld, Beds.),²⁵ and less often the ‘poorer sort’ (Pewton Mewsey, Hants),²⁶ or people ‘of all sorts’ (Stratﬁeld Turgis, Hants).²⁷ No one imitated the example of the uninhibited William Hyde of Eversholt, Bedfordshire, who condemned the dissenters in his parish in 1720 as a ‘very Common Ignorant and Scoundrel People’.²⁸ Elsewhere in Bedfordshire, some clergy made a distinction between ‘Persons of Quality’ (those with titles) and ‘Gentlemen’.²⁹ William Barbour of Farndish was unable to distinguish persons of quality or gentlemen, but noted ‘one William Lamb that goes for a Gentleman’ in that part of Bedfordshire.³⁰ Other clergy preferred the language of rank, order and degree, so that Joseph Ward, curate of Fawley, Hampshire, responded that ‘there are neither noblemen, gentlemen or any above the degree of yeoman of either sex’, as did George Duncomb, rector of Shere, Surrey.³¹ Ambrose Webb, vicar of Kingsclere, noted that the parish’s Grammar School had generated ‘great strife’ ²² W. R. Ward (ed.), ‘Parson and Parish in Eighteenth-Century Hampshire: Replies to Bishop’s Visitations’, Hampshire Record Series, 8 (Winchester, 1995), 2. ²³ Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 35–6, 49, 68, 72. ²⁴ Ibid., 124; W. R. Ward (ed.), ‘Parson and Parish in Eighteenth-Century Surrey: Replies to Bishop’s Visitations’, Surrey Record Society, 34 (Guildford, 1994), 54, 57. ²⁵ P. Bell (ed.), ‘Episcopal Visitations in Bedfordshire 1706–20’, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 81 (2002), 28–9; The ‘meaner sort’ featured in Harlington, 1706, and Steppingley, 1720, 43, 236. ‘Mechanick’ preachers were identiﬁed in Arlesley and Astwick, and Wilden, 1720, 198, 245. The ‘younger sort’ of parishioners was mentioned in Eaton Bray 1712 and Marston Moreteyne, 1706, 33, 60. ²⁶ Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 107. ²⁷ Ibid., 128. ²⁸ Bell, ‘Bedfordshire’, 206. ²⁹ John Bolton, vicar of Shambrook, stated in 1706 that ‘no Persons of Quality have any Estate here’ but identiﬁed ‘Two Gentlemen’, one a Kent baronet, worth £ 200 and £ 400 p.a. respectively. Ibid., 77. ³⁰ Ibid., 38. ³¹ Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 58; id., ‘Surrey’, 55.

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between him and the ‘chief of the parish’, the same terminology employed by Timothy Stileman, curate of Lingﬁeld, Surrey, and Philip Ayscough, rector of St Olave’s, Southwark.³² John Burbank, vicar of Longstock, noted that the ofﬁcers ‘and chief inhabitants’ distributed a parish charity,³³ while in George Favell’s parish of Wilden, Bedfordshire, disbursements were made by ‘two or three of the principal inhabitants’.³⁴ Only Hugh Grifﬁth, vicar of Betchworth, wrote in terms more familiar to historians, when he observed that there were ‘but two middling families of Presbyterians’ in his parish.³⁵ Meanwhile Nathaniel Hough replied with scrupulous accuracy (and possibly also with tongue-in-cheek) that St George-the-Martyr in Southwark contained ‘1 lord, 1 baronett, 2 ladys, several gentlemen, all prisoners in the rules of King’s Bench’.³⁶ Apart from Hugh Grifﬁth, none of the clergy of the diocese answered the question about the social proﬁle of their parish by employing a tripartite division. A number found it difﬁcult to answer the question effectively, because, as George Cheynell, rector of Cranleigh, expressed it, ‘there are no noblemen, nor gentlemen, nor persons of note in the said parish, the inhabitants thereof being yeomen, farmers, tradesmen and day-labourers’.³⁷ This inability to respond was echoed by the incumbents of Pyrford, Reigate, Rotherhithe, Send, Bletchingley, Christchurch Southwark in Surrey; St John Winchester in Hampshire: St Cuthbert Bedford, Cranﬁeld, Farndish, and Ravensden in Bedfordshire.³⁸ The relatively precise terms of the question may have inhibited the parochial clergy from responding as we might have expected, by employing the tripartite model of ‘sorts’. However, the variety of their responses, and their difﬁculties in describing those who did not ﬁt the bishop’s categories of potential patrons and donors, is interesting and perhaps signiﬁcant. They, like Richard Gough, tended to estimate and describe the social hierarchy of their parish by reference to internal and relative marks of status, rather than by reference to general attributes or categories that were external to the parish. In view of this, it is worth returning to the apparently unremarkable distinction between ‘chief ’ and other ‘inhabitants’, to consider some of the hidden inﬂections within descriptions of parochial status. It is easy to assume that the ‘inhabitants’ of a community, in whose name many actions were taken, were simply the undifferentiated mass of people who lived there. In some instances, the term was used in this inclusive manner. In 1616, for example, the corporation of Preston warned that ‘If anie person or persons which nowe doth or hereafter shall come to inhabite or be an owner, or owners of anie house or houses within this Towne … shall Receive admitte or take into his her or theire house or houses anie fforyner or stranger to inhabite within the same’, these newcomers were to ³² Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 77; id., ‘Surrey’, 43, 57. ³³ Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 83. ³⁴ Bell, ‘Bedfordshire’, 245. ³⁵ Ward, ‘Surrey’, 8. ³⁶ Ibid., 56. ³⁷ Ibid., 21. ³⁸ Ibid., 51, 53, 54, 9, 17; Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 145; Bell, ‘Bedfordshire’, 11, 28–9, 38, 72.

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be removed forthwith, or obtain security from ‘two sufﬁciente persons’. ³⁹ In this instance, ‘inhabitant’ was synonymous with resident, since even ‘strangers’ could be regarded as ‘inhabitants’ merely by virtue of lodging in the town. However, often this inclusive understanding of the term was restricted in practice. The Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer provides the ﬁrst clues. The wording of a specimen settlement certiﬁcate is instructive: ‘that A.B. Labourer, the Bearer thereof, is an Inhabitant legally settled in our said parish of, & c., And we do hereby oblige ourselves and Successors, to receive the said A.B. and his Family, whenever he shall become chargeable to the Parish.’’⁴⁰ In line with the Settlement Acts, the certiﬁcate noted that even if A.B. moved to another parish ‘for his better Support and Employment’, his parish of settlement would be required to support him—that is, the parish in which he was an ‘inhabitant’. Similarly, a meeting in the name of ‘the major part of the tithing of Yetminster’ in Dorset in March 1712 agreed that widows were to be housed by the overseers and churchwardens only if they could prove, by the exhibition of settlement certiﬁcates, that they were ‘legall inhabitants’ of the parish.⁴¹ This construction was echoed in 1670 by the parson of Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire, when he advised the parish to object to a woman migrant caring for her sick sister in the village, so ‘that she steal not in as an inhabitant’, by gaining a settlement through length of residence.⁴² In some cases, therefore, to be described as an ‘inhabitant’ was to have passed an important threshold of ‘eligibility’, and to have obtained a legal settlement in a particular parish. This inﬂection derives directly from the 1598 and 1662 Poor Law legislation. Should we assume, as a consequence, that all those decisions recorded as having been taken in the name, for the beneﬁt, and with the approval of ‘the inhabitants’, refer just to people settled legally in a parish? Can we detect any other assumptions about the composition and interests of this group? An order by the Lambeth Vestry in 1635 illustrates some of these implicit distinctions, in its complaints about the practice of landlords ‘placeinge poore beggarlye Tennantes in theire saide lands’.⁴³ This threatened to burden the parish with ‘an inﬁnite sorte of poore people Most whereof are either constrained to take releife of the parish, or are not able to beare scott and lott as becometh parishioners to the great impoverishing of the rest of the Inhabitantes’. The meaning of ‘inhabitant’ is ambiguous in this example. On the one hand, these ‘poore people’ are thought likely to impoverish the ‘rest of the inhabitants’, but (by implication) are regarded ³⁹ Lancs. RO CNP 3/1/1 Preston Borough Council Order Book, 1608–1781, order dated 21 Oct. 1616 (order no. 4). ⁴⁰ Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer, 75. ⁴¹ Dorset RO PE/YET VE1/1 Yetminster Vestry Minute Book, 1697–1792. ⁴² J. Broad, Transforming English Rural Society: The Verneys and the Claydons, 1600–1820 (Cambridge, 2004), 165. ⁴³ C. Drew (ed.), ‘Lambeth Churchwardens’ Accounts 1504–1645 and Vestry Book 1610’, part 3, Surrey Record Society, 44 (London, 1943), 230–1.

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as part of them nonetheless. On the other, only those able to contribute to parish rates are assumed to be fully legitimate ‘parishioners’. Further clues about this unspoken connection between rate-paying ability and a voice in parish affairs are provided by a complaint in the vestry minutes of Goosnargh, Lancashire in 1625. Here, ‘the Inhabitants of the Townshipp of Goosenarghe’ complained about the cost of parish rates, set arbitrarily ‘at the taxors discretions’.⁴⁴ The petitioners complained that this inequality was compounded by the expense to which ‘the better sort of Inhabitants’ was put ‘in Regard of the non solvency of the Worser Sort’. These disproportionate assessments resulted in the ‘disorder’ of the ‘better sort’ being subject to the ‘worser sort of inhabitants’—of those who paid the most being denied the largest say in parish affairs. Once again, as with the petitioners of St Bartholomew-the-Great, it was expedient in these circumstances for the parish rulers to depict social difference, in order to seek external assistance to restore the ‘correct’ positive equation between local prosperity and power. The same assumption of a link between wealth, authority, and ‘discretion’ can been seen in the terse stipulation in Hareﬁeld, Middlesex, in 1710, that ‘some of the most substantial inhabitants of the Parish shall make the rates and settle the expenses’, rather than any other group in the settlement.⁴⁵ Occasionally these conﬁdent assertions of administrative authority and ﬁnancial probity by the parochial ‘better sort’ could be undermined by objections from the wider body of ‘inhabitants’ in whose name they governed. In Braintree in 1658, for example, ‘dyvers of the inhabitants’ complained to the Quarter Sessions that ‘the rates for the poor of the sayd p’ish are unequally made for that severall of the principall of the Inhabitants … are not rated for their full visible abillitye’.⁴⁶ Here, those ‘able’ to take a lead, ﬁnancially, socially, and morally were not living up to the social expectations that legitimized their rule, and were presented as furthering their own interests at the expense of the parish as a whole. However, in both cases the implication was that ‘inhabitants’ were not simply the settled population, but the section of it that contributed to the parish rates. A petition in October 1671 of the ‘Inhabitants of the Towne of Coggeshall’ to the Essex Quarter Sessions on behalf of William Everett ampliﬁes this. Everett was ‘an Inhabitant of our Towne [who] hath beene always accounted a person of honest behaviour And hath formerly paid Scott and Lott in our Towne. But now through his age and disabilitie of bodie is no waye able to bring in a livelyhood’.⁴⁷ In this instance, the ‘inhabitants’ claimed Everett as one of their own because of his ‘honesty’ as a householder, and because of his previous ability both to support himself and to contribute towards the parish rates. Until age had rendered him unable ⁴⁴ Lancs. RO PR 644 Goosnargh Vestry Minute Book, 1634–1939. ⁴⁵ W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration (3rd edn., Cambridge, 1969), 165. ⁴⁶ Essex RO D/P 264/8/2 Braintree Vestry Minute Book, 1655–1712, meeting dated 1 Mar. 1657–8; D. H. Allen, Essex Quarter Sessions Order Book 1652–1661 (Chelmsford, 1974), 107–8. ⁴⁷ Essex RO Q/SBa 2/110 Essex Quarter Sessions Bundles, Mich. 1671.

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to provide for himself, he had been not merely a resident, but a legally settled, rate-paying, socially enfranchized ‘inhabitant’. Of course, payment of the poor rates in a parish for a year itself was sufﬁcient to confer an automatic right of settlement there.⁴⁸ This suggests that within the blanket term ‘the inhabitants’, denoting all who were legally settled in a parish, there was a distinction between those who were merely resident, and those whose opinion actually counted in parish deliberations because they were independent householders who contributed to the poor rates. Such an assumption was apparent in the complaint from East Bergholt, Suffolk, that one John Clarke, labourer, was able to ‘Eat and Drinke as well and wear as good habit, as many of the Eminent Inhabitants (that pay very considerably to the Poor) of our said parish’.⁴⁹ In the same way that population growth and pressure on resources narrowed the legal deﬁnition of manorial ‘tenants’ increasingly to principal copy- or leaseholders rather than squatters or subtenants, so ‘inhabitants’ often became synonymous with ‘ratepayers’ in the language of parochial government. As Hindle has argued, this may emphasize the institutionalization of the Poor Law through the seventeenth century, and the creation of the functional social distinction (and administrative reality) between those who paid for the poor, and those who did not. This rate-paying, house-holding identity was expressed in other ways. Perhaps the most frequent, and least remarked upon, is the notion of ‘the town’. In village society this was a phrase that embodied the collective opinion of the house-holding residents of a settlement, rather than a claim to urban status deﬁned by a certain population size or type of government structure. John Broad’s research into the Buckinghamshire estate village of Middle Claydon provides an example of this usage. In the mid-seventeenth century Middle Claydon had a total population of approximately 220, under the omniscient gaze of its squire, Sir Ralph Verney.⁵⁰ In 1654 Verney advised his steward to warn off a potential inmate in the village by telling him that ‘the Town will expect security’ so that ‘neither he nor the Town be burdened by him’.⁵¹ In this case, ‘the Town’ consisted of Verney’s larger tenants, whose opinions he expected to be in line with his own, rather than any wider social or geographical entity. Such euphemistic use illustrates that this term was subject to a range of inﬂections, from self-evident references to the undifferentiated population of a settlement, to instances that imply more discriminating understandings of ‘belonging’.⁵² An intermediate meaning might be Benjamin Allen’s experience as a physician in Braintree in the early eighteenth century. He alleged that during an outbreak of smallpox his less-educated medical rivals had ‘so leaven’d the evil nature of the ⁴⁸ Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer, 74. ⁴⁹ Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB 191/A1/2 East Bergholt Town Meeting Minute Book, 1650–1712, meeting dated 18 July 1694. ⁵⁰ Broad, The Verneys and the Claydons, 252, table 9.4. ⁵¹ Ibid., 167. ⁵² Hindle, State and Social Change, 217.

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Town’ about his treatment methods that he was unable to help a patient, because ‘they would have say’d I killed him & would have assaulted me’.⁵³ In this case, ‘the town’ meant popular opinion within Braintree, both potential patients and the unnamed group of likely assailants. Allen was imprecise about social identities of those who constituted his ‘town’, but the ‘Select’ vestry of Finchingﬁeld provides a more exact delineation of the term. In October 1627 they recorded their intention to prosecute Thomas Cragg for taking an inmate ‘contrary to the mynde of the towne’.⁵⁴ In this instance, the opinion of the ‘town’ was clearly synonymous with that of the ‘Select’ vestry of 24 members, rather than a direct expression of the wishes of the approximately 50 other ratepayers outside the vestry.⁵⁵ Similarly, when the ‘Select’ vestry was constituted in the village in 1626, it was in the name of ‘us the inhabitants’—the 24 vestry members. At other times, they employed the even-more euphemistic term ‘the neighbours’ to describe themselves and their intensive scrutiny of the poor, as did their contemporaries in Braintree.⁵⁶ The parish meeting of Sherborne, Dorset, in 1670 made the same kinds of assumption, when serious objections were raised about the Overseers’ Accounts. The vestry book contains an entry stating that the accounts were ‘set downe (contrary to the consent of the substantiall persons of the towne)’.⁵⁷ The accounts were only passed ‘after a long debate’, but, again, there is no indication that ‘the town’ extended any further than the ranks of the usual vestry attendees. Ultimately, like most other terms of social description (notably ‘sorts of people’) the ‘inhabitants’ and ‘the town’ were reﬂexive social groupings. Their composition and social boundaries were formed by the polemical or rhetorical imperatives of the observer. If petitioners wished to present a united front, then the ‘inhabitants’ represented all settled residents of a parish. If they wanted to highlight a particular problem, most frequently the burden of the improvident poor, then the ‘inhabitants’ constituted the responsible body of ratepayers, who were being forced to subsidize these undeserving individuals. Similarly, the ‘mind of the town’ might represent the prejudices of the majority of householders, or could be restricted to the often narrow opinions of its vestry. These inﬂections are frustrating if we seek an exact social taxonomy within the parish, but their ⁵³ Royal College of Surgeon’s Library MSS 275 e. 13, Casebook of Dr Benjamin Allen, Braintree, Essex, 1700–22, 190. ⁵⁴ Essex RO D/P 14/8/1a Finchingﬁeld Vestry Minute Book, 1605–1752, meeting dated 2 Oct. 1627. ⁵⁵ An estimate based on the 1636 Ship Money Return for Finchingﬁeld. Of 82 resident payers, 32 were neither vestrymen nor ofﬁcers, 29 had attended the vestry in the previous decade, while a further 21 had been ofﬁcers but not vestrymen. Essex RO T/A 42 microﬁlm Ship Money Assessments, 1636. ⁵⁶ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 14/8/1a, meeting dated 17 Oct. 1636. See also Essex RO D/P 264/8/3 Braintree Vestry Minutes, 1619–55, meeting dated 2 Sept. 1639, when it was proposed that Richard Skinner be invited to join ‘with his neighbours in towne government’. ⁵⁷ Dorset RO D/BSS/2 Sherborne Overseers’ Account Book, 1659–1836, meeting dated 21 Apr. 1670.

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imprecision is signiﬁcant. Although parish elites could resort to a plethora of divisive and demeaning adjectives to distinguish various ‘sorts of inhabitant’, the fact that they only tended to do so in extremis says something about the forms of power in parish government. As noted above, to highlight division was to indicate failures in government, by indicating that there was a group of opponents who would not accept the authority of the ‘better’ or ‘wiser sort of inhabitants’. In the rhetorical strategies employed within the parish, it may have been politically sensible to employ an inclusive language of social description to avoid conveying the impression of deep or irreconcilable differences, while applying it with varying degrees of inclusiveness in practice. As Jonathan Barry has suggested, it may also have reﬂected a preference among this social segment for ‘association’ and corporate agency as the most effective form of action.⁵⁸ It certainly does not demonstrate that social differences were non-existent or insigniﬁcant. As has been observed, there were occasions when parish rulers did choose to identify and name social differences, primarily through the distinction between ‘chief ’ and other ‘inhabitants’. While this usage was sometimes employed to differentiate between the parties in parish disputes (and often to sanction the socially superior among them), it was also used in a less controversial sense, simply to label those of higher ‘quality’, and to emphasize their social signiﬁcance. So, in St Peter’s Parish, Sudbury, in 1701, it was recorded routinely that the ‘present Churchwardens, Overseers and Chief Inhabitants of the parish’, had agreed that Henry Pleasance, bell founder, should provide the parish church with a clock, of ‘rather better’ quality than usual.⁵⁹ While this distinction between ‘chief ’ and other ‘inhabitants’ was the common form of social description in many parishes, there were other variants. In Yetminster, Dorset, and Stoke-byNayland, Suffolk, decisions were almost always taken on behalf of ‘the major part of the parish’—which was certainly not true, in numerical terms, if the numbers of signatories to each decision indicate total attendance.⁶⁰ So, in March 1707 the Yetminster Vestry minutes began with the pro forma: ‘we the major part of the Parishioners of the Tything of Yetminster met in a Vestry at Church’; while in Stoke-by-Nayland in September 1699 order were made by ‘the major part of the parishioners then present’.⁶¹ The same disjunction occurred in the vestry of ⁵⁸ Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, 84–112. ⁵⁹ Suffolk RO (Bury St Edmunds) FL 635/1/1 St Peter’s, Sudbury Parish Vestry Book, 1674–1764, meeting dated 31 Mar. 1701. See also Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/SBb 1 Easter 1694, petition dated 17 Apr. 1694. ⁶⁰ In 1707 there were 15 persons who attended the Yetminster Vestry. There are no precise numbers of residents or ratepayers at this time, but there had been 51 Hearth Tax payers in the tithing in 1674. Dorset RO PE/YET VE1/1 Yetminster Vestry Minute Book, 1697–1792; Meekings, Dorset Hearth Tax, 60. In Stoke-by-Nayland only 22 people attended the vestry in the years 1684–5, where 151 were assessed in a rate of 3 Jan. 1685. Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB80/A1/2 Stoke-by-Nayland Parish Book, 1697/8–1739. ⁶¹ Dorset RO PE/YET VE1/1 meeting dated 3 Mar. 1707; Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB80/A1/2 meeting dated 5 Sept. 1699.

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St Albans, Hertfordshire, where ‘the major part of the inhabitants’ amounted to eight signatories in August 1670.⁶² In all instances, ‘major’ indicated social rather than numerical preponderance, and served as a euphemism for wealth—which contemporaries often envisaged as size of ‘estate’ or ‘ability’, as demonstrated by contribution to poor rates or seating position in church. There are numerous instances of such equations. In Dorset in 1637, Dorothea Dawes was asked to assess the relative standing of two men involved in a rating dispute at Halstock.⁶³ This gave her greater difﬁculties than the framers of the interrogatory may have intended. She knows not which is the better of birth but Owens meanes is more worth p. ann. in Halstock then Hodges is & Owens father was servant to Mr. John Strangways & he was (neither [sic] is his sonne) but an yeoman & ’tis true Giles Hodges is called Mr. Hodges & soe was his father … ’tis true the said Owen hath a tenant at Connington … besides the renting of that lyeving hath ten or twelve pound a yeere of his owne … but Hodges is the better man in countenance.

Her confusion was caused by the mismatch between each individual’s social identity, and her knowledge of its ﬁnancial basis. Owen seemed to enjoy a higher income per annum, but Hodges had a better social reputation, and the look of a gentleman. Dawes’s wish to determine social ‘magnitude’ by reference to annual income was deﬂected in this instance by the contradictory evidence of appearances. Among the Winchester diocesan clergy, William Banaster, rector of St Mary-the-Virgin and Holy Trinity, Guildford, also thought of the social order of his parish primarily in terms of estate. He responded to the question about ‘persons of Note’ in the following terms: Noblemen none. Persons of note of either sex, none. The chief persons are Mr. Child, attorney and town clerk, reputed worth £ 400 p.a. Mr. Anthony Allyn, late fellow of King’s College, Cambridge about £ 300 p.a. during the life of his wife. Mr. Richard Ind, brewer, about £ 200 p.a. Mr. James Clifton, shopkeeper, about £ 200 p.a.⁶⁴

In Banaster’s view, none of these individuals were ‘Gentlemen’, and in the absence of another appropriate social term he simply ranked them according to his understanding of their annual (and rateable) income. The incumbents of Twyford, Hampshire; Lingﬁeld and Wonersh, Surrey; and Houghton Conquest, Milton Bryant, and Shambrook, Bedfordshire, also resorted to such ﬁnancial estimates, rather than using any more general descriptions.⁶⁵ John Moody of Portsmouth made the same connection between rateable value and social status, albeit not in such measured terms. In November 1671 he ⁶² J. T. Smith and M. A. North (eds.), St Albans 1650–1700: A Thoroughfare Town and its People (Hatﬁeld, 2003), 75. ⁶³ Wilts. RO Dean of Sarum Deposition Books, 1633–37, D5 22/12 fo. 307. ⁶⁴ Ward, ‘Surrey’, 31. ⁶⁵ Ward, ‘Hampshire’, 132; id., ‘Surrey’, 43, 73; Bell, ‘Bedfordshire’, 50, 64, 77.

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was cited in Borough Sessions for complaining ‘that he was rated more than Mr. Mayor and added that if he paid more his wife should sit above Mrs. Mayoress [in church] and he would pull her out by her shoulders’.⁶⁶ Six years earlier, this equation of wealth and ‘worth’ had undercut the moral distinction imposed by a ‘chief inhabitant’ in the Colchester parish of St Peter’s. There, when John Woodruffe, one of the borough’s High Constables, investigated ‘tipling’ at unseasonable hours in Edward Whiting’s alehouse, Whiting called him a ‘Shackbagly Rascall and said he was as good a Man as he or better’. Woodruffe had replied complacently, ‘com, com we know you well enough you are a Rogue’, which had been met with the retort that ‘the said Whitinge did say he paid as much to the Towne or poore as Mr. Woodruffe did’.⁶⁷ Evidently, ‘worth’ contained different components for Whiting and Woodruffe, and their meaning was contested. The best example of the way in which this detailed knowledge of wealth was translated into the understanding of the local pecking order embodied in the distinction between the ‘chief ’ and other ‘inhabitants comes from Great Yeldham, Essex.⁶⁸ In 1629 Robert Purcas built a pew in the church of the small rural community, by demolishing three seats right in front of the minister’s reading desk where ‘sexteene or seaventeen of the better sorte of inhabitants wives of Yealdham … doe usually sett’.⁶⁹ This disruption was bad enough, but in the process Purcas had elevated himself in the visible seating order in the parish: above ‘Mr. John Symonds, Mr. William Glascocke and Mr. Edmund Plumb [who] have noe peculiar pewes in the Church … and are men of good esteeme, qualitie and estate and are owners of lands and Tenements in the said parish’. Thomas Purcas quantiﬁed the wealth of Symonds, Glascocke, and Plumb, stating that they were worth £ 120, £ 110, and £ 60 per annum respectively, which entitled them to be ‘esteemed and accompted to be of better qualitie and condition then the said Robert Purcas’. Thomas Purcas also observed that John Glascock, the plaintiff in the case, had been elected as churchwarden, ‘by the generall voice of the principall inhabitants’ because he was ‘one of the Chefe Inhabitants of the said parish’. Robert Plumb noted that Glascocke had begun the suit against Purcas ‘with the consent and approbation of the better parte of the Chefe Inhabitants’. Humphrey Freeman agreed with the description of Glascocke, but qualiﬁed it slightly, stating that he was ‘one of the Chiefe Inhabitants of the parish … for a farmor’. While John Glascocke’s lack of freehold did not give him the same ⁶⁶ A. J. Willis, ‘Borough Sessions Papers 1653–1688’, Portsmouth Record Series, 1 (Portsmouth, 1971), 47. ⁶⁷ Essex RO (Colchester) Colchester Quarter Sessions Examination and Recognizance Book, 1646–87, deposition dated 28 Dec. 1665. ⁶⁸ Marsh suggests that parish elites may have been more willing to contest their social placement than their poorer, more accepting neighbours. Marsh, ‘Order and Place’, 16–17. ⁶⁹ Essex RO (Chelms.) D.ABD 5–10 Bishop of London’s Commissary Court 1628–41, depositions dated 20 Nov. 1629.

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unequivocal position among the ‘best of the parish’ as that enjoyed by Symonds, William Glascocke, and Plumb, he was of sufﬁcient ‘substance’ to be chosen as churchwarden, and enjoyed the support of the other ‘Chefe Inhabitants’ in the parish. Three further examples illustrate the contemporary assumption that standing as a ‘Chief Inhabitant’ was tied explicitly to perceived annual income or annual rateable wealth. The ﬁrst echoes the judgements made in Great Yeldham. In 1692 Josiah Joy of Great Clacton Essex was asked what he remembered about one William Reeve, who had died eleven or twelve years earlier. Joy stated that ‘he accounted him to be an able and sufﬁcient man and the ablest in that parish, and occupied about foure score pounds a yeare lying in Great and Little Clacton as tenant and occupied of his owne about fourteene or ﬁfteene pounds per annum lying in Greenstead’.⁷⁰ It is signiﬁcant that Reeve was a leaseholder, whose standing was determined wholly by his annual income, rather than the acreage that he owned—which was located elsewhere, and was not particularly extensive. This implies that ‘sufﬁciency’ could be tied to impermanent assets, that could be accumulated, but that were also susceptible to loss or decline, together with the status that they conveyed. In 1706 the Essex Quarter Sessions made an order specifying the route of the highway through Wormingford, north of Colchester, after three JPs had ‘heard the Testimony of severall Ancient persons formerly Cheife Inhabitants of the said Parish’.⁷¹ Presumably age, in addition to conferring long memories, had also reduced the economic activity and rateable wealth of these ‘ancient persons’ to the point where they were no longer regarded as ‘Chief Inhabitants’, taxed and required to serve in ofﬁce alongside the ‘best men’. Therefore, this was a status that one could retire from, as well as lose by economic imprudence or misfortune.⁷² These examples, in which observers tied social worth straightforwardly to annual income, also hint at the de facto acceptance of the distinction between ‘chief’ and other ‘inhabitants’ among those who were not among the self-proclaimed rulers of the parish. While this does little to blunt the rhetorical or political edge inherent in the application of such a distinction, it also suggests that these expressions of social difference cannot be dismissed simply as the rhetoric of the locally powerful, as Postles has implied.⁷³ A ﬁnal, and more systematic illustration of the link between local status and rateable value comes from Swindon, Wiltshire. In 1674 the parish authorities compiled a list of the names of the ‘Chief and most substantial parishioners’, ⁷⁰ NA E.134 4 and 5 William and Mary Hil. 21, John and Mary Damond v. George Field, 1692, deposition of Josiah Joy, Great Clacton, yeoman, aged 44. ⁷¹ Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/SBb 35, Mich. 1706, order dated 16 May 1706. ⁷² Examples of this occur most vividly in Essex cloth industry, in CSP (Dom.) SP 16/355/163 Petition on behalf of Thomas Reynolds, Colchester, Baymaker [1637]; NA E.134 3 and 4 Jas. II Hil. 30, Francis and Susanna Grimwade v. Thomas Munne and William Cater, 22 May 1687, depositions of John Kingsbury and John Carter. For ‘credit’ more generally, see Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 121–96. ⁷³ Postles, ‘Politics of Address’, 99–100.

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deemed ﬁt to serve as constables, churchwardens, overseers, surveyors of the highway, or rate assessors and collectors, ‘or to procure sufﬁcient persons’ in their place.⁷⁴ Forty-two individuals were listed, including three widows. Of these, forty occurred among the eighty-eight ratepayers listed in the parish the previous year (making up 45 per cent of all ratepayers).⁷⁵ Why was this section of the parish regarded as ‘sufﬁcient’ to hold ofﬁce where their neighbours were not? The 1673 rate gives the nominal annual rateable values of the properties on which it was levied. The median annual valuation for the forty ‘chief inhabitants’ was £24.5, whereas it was only £6 for the remaining forty-eight ratepayers. The ‘chief inhabitants’ included men such as John Goddard, lord of the manor, rated on property worth £35 per annum, but landlord for an estate worth £347 10s., Arthur Vilett, ‘gent.’, owner and tenant to lands valued at £334 per annum, John Hughes, Sr, whose estate was valued at £157, or Richard Lawrence, rated on property worth £142. However, individuals like William Arden or Henry Sharples, who paid on a property worth just £4 per annum, also punctuated their ranks, together with eight others whose valuations did not exceed £10 per annum. While Swindon’s ‘chief inhabitants’ were a mixed bunch, possessed of markedly different amounts of property, their ‘substance’ was encapsulated in their rateable value. Indeed, this may have served as the shorthand by which Swindon’s house-holding residents evaluated their status relative to each other. Although it will be shown below that ofﬁcers and vestry men among the ‘chief inhabitants’ tended to be more established residents of their communities compared to the bulk of ratepayers, this connection between rateable ‘worth’ and local status allowed for easy, and sometimes speedy admission to the parish elite. This ready acceptance of geographical mobility and status acquisition is exempliﬁed by an example from Earls Colne, Essex, where Thomas Pascall arrived in 1747 as a tenant to a very large leasehold farm, held of the lord of the manor. On the strength of its 140 acres, Pascall attended his ﬁrst vestry in September that year, and was elected overseer of the poor the following April.⁷⁶ He appears not to have possessed any previous landholding or obvious familial links with the parish before 1747, yet his tenure of one of the largest farms in the village propelled him straight into the ranks of the ‘chief inhabitants’ as a matter of course. This analysis of the language of social description at parish level reveals a number of facets. It shows that the often bland and routine terminology employed by the rulers of the parish needs to be explored and placed in context before it can be understood fully. Often, perhaps in most cases, the phrases employed were meant to suggest as little about social difference as they convey ⁷⁴ Wilts. RO 1461/1267 Goddard Estate, Swindon Borough, 1674. ⁷⁵ Wilts. RO 1461/1265 Goddard Estate ‘A Rate made May the 6th 1673’. ⁷⁶ www.alanmacfarlane.com Earls Colne Poor Rate Book, 1722–50, entries from 20 Apr. 1747 [11400039] to 1 Oct. 1750 [11402520], and entries 29 Sept. 1747 [11400386] and 11 Apr. 1748 [11400736].

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to the cursory modern reader. Such usage may simply reﬂect the common form on which a clerk or institutional tradition settled in order to express the corporate purpose of the parish meeting. In such cases, ‘the inhabitants’, ‘the chief inhabitants’ or ‘the major part of the inhabitants’ referred just to the vestry, to those who took it upon themselves to represent the settled residents of their community. Such language was hardly inclusive, but may not have been particularly contested either. There were other occasions, though, when even the apparently neutralsounding ‘the inhabitants’ or ‘the town’ carried a greater polemical charge. We can begin to detect two possible social fault-lines in their usage. On the one hand, the imperatives of the Elizabethan Poor Law made parish ofﬁcers much more determined to distinguish between ‘inhabitants’ and ‘strangers’, ‘inmates’ or ‘vagabonds’—between those with, and those without, a demonstrable right of legal settlement. This inserted one distinction within this term, dividing temporary or unsanctioned residents from those with more clearly deﬁned rights to remain in the community. Since it favoured all ‘inhabitants’, whatever their status, over all non-inhabitants, it may have been a distinction acknowledged and applied by the bulk of the settled residents of a parish. On the other hand, those in power in the parish sometimes also distinguished between those who paid rates and those who did not, and regarded the former as more fully ‘enfranchised’ members of the community than the latter. Those who paid rates possessed a number of social attributes that were deﬁned openly for all to see. These included a right of settlement, a public indication of ﬁnancial worth, a ﬁnancial stake in the disposition of parish funds, and (as a result) some formative inﬂuence on the opinion of ‘the town’, or the counsels of ‘the inhabitants’. These terms also rested on another implicit assumption, that ‘inhabitants’, and particularly ‘chief inhabitants’ comprised the male heads of ﬁnancially independent households in the settlement. Men were regarded as the natural public representatives of their households, and their status tended to determine the social position of the women in their families. As was shown above, John Moody thought that the size of his rate payments entitled his wife to occupy a pew of greater eminence than the wife of the Mayor, ‘Mrs. Mayoress’. Yet, although female involvement in the deliberations of the ‘chief inhabitants’ was exceptional, it did occur. Women served as parish ofﬁcers in at least four of the parishes in this study (Alphamstone in Essex, East Bergholt in Suffolk, and Mosterton, South Perrott, and Broad Windsor in Dorset) although always in tiny numbers. All those selected were widowed householders, that is, women with the greatest ﬁnancial and personal autonomy in the community. In every instance bar one, they were chosen to be overseers of the poor, and appear to have served in person, rather than delegating this responsibility.⁷⁷ Although ⁷⁷ In Alphamstone, Widow Smith served as overseer in 1693, while Widow Mary Gibbon served in 1705 and 1712. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 221/8/1 Alphamstone Town Book, 1617–1719; in

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this position carried substantial ﬁnancial responsibility, it corresponded best with existing gender roles, in which prosperous women were expected to visit and dispense charity to their poorer neighbours. As Alex Shepard has also suggested, patriarchal norms in early modern England bent to the contours of wealth and status, which may have enabled wealthy women to exercise authority (as employers or donors) over adult, but dependent, male householders without being regarded as anomalous.⁷⁸ By the seventeenth century many such women would have possessed the requisite accounting skills learned through their experience of keeping household accounts, or their independent business activities.⁷⁹ In contrast, although female householders were picked as constables, none in the sample appears actually to have served in this more ‘masculine’ (and physically perilous) role.⁸⁰ Hannah Case of Mosterton was the only woman to serve as a churchwarden, and normally women seem to have been excluded entirely from all formal lay administration in the Church of England. While some of these women also attended the parish vestry, they did so either ex ofﬁcio, or because these were ‘open’ vestries, which all ratepayers were free to attend. No woman was co-opted onto a ‘select’ vestry in this study, or appointed as a trustee to a parochial school or charity. In addition, the parishes in which women served had small populations, and a limited choice of qualiﬁed ratepayers. While a few exceptional women carved out a niche in parochial administration, the impression is that women ofﬁcers were chosen as a stopgap measure, rather than because they were regarded routinely as members of the usual pool of eligible house-holding ‘inhabitants’. In sum, this terminology points to some common assumptions about the social hierarchy of the parish, and the distribution of ‘political’ power within it, from the perspective the administrative elite, at least. There were two thresholds of ‘entitlement’ in the parish. Steve Hindle has explored one extensively, the threshold of entitlement to poor relief. The other, the subject of this chapter and the next, was the threshold of entitlement to rule the parish—the property and social qualiﬁcations that allowed some of the enfranchised rate-paying male East Bergholt, Widow Elizabeth Marlow served as overseer in 1690. Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB 191/A1/1 Parish Ofﬁcers 1617–1934; in Mosterton, Hannah Case attended the vestry 9 times between 1702 and 1724, served as churchwarden in 1704, and overseer in 1708; Elizabeth Bryant attended the vestry in 1717, Elizabeth Banger served as overseer in 1729, and Joan Kettle served as overseer in 1711 Dorset RO PE/MSN OV 1/1 Mosterton Overseers’ Accounts, 1699–1753; in South Perrott, Bathsheba Farnham attended the vestry 9 times between 1703 and 1721, while Bathsheba Grey attended the vestry once in 1703, but served as overseer twice, in 1702 and 1708 Dorset RO PE/SPT OV 1 South Perrott Overseers’ Accounts 1696–1740; in Broad Windsor, Joan Watts served as overseer in 1703, and Mary Wills in 1716, Dorset RO PE/BDW OV 1/1/1 Broad Windsor Overseers’ Accounts 1700–1817. ⁷⁸ Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 195–213. ⁷⁹ Hunt, Middling Sort, 125–46; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 195–205. ⁸⁰ In Clitheroe, Lancs., for example, constables were chosen in rotation from among the holders of borough burgage properties, leading to the selection of three women, all of whom delegated their service. Lancs. RO MBC 180–259 Clitheroe Court Leet Rolls, 1645–1700.

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‘inhabitants’ to ascend to the ranks of the ‘best men’, among the ‘chief inhabitants’ of the settlement. As this discussion has demonstrated, such people were judged closely on the perceived value of their estates (and their consequent social ‘credit’). Their social position and societal status seems to have been described largely in parish-speciﬁc terms, rather than by reference to more widely applicable social stereotypes. Robert Purcas was inferior to John Symonds, William Glascocke, and Edmund Plumb, because he was worth less per annum than they were, in a named pecking order of ‘worth’, which was made visible in the parish church, until Purcas blocked the view. Doubtless, his neighbours regarded him as a social interloper who did not ‘know his place’, but they described him in terms that were relative and conﬁned to their parish, not as ‘middling’ man-on-the-make, or even (less anachronistically) as ‘un-gentlemanly’ in trying physically to insert himself among the ‘parish gentry’. The relative, and highly variable, nature of such judgements has also been demonstrated in Jan Pitman’s closely focused study of ofﬁcers in seven north Norfolk parishes.⁸¹ Pitman stresses the local variations that could occur in the selection of churchwardens, questmen, and overseers. For instance, he shows marked differences in the standing of those judged suitable to serve as churchwardens in the neighbouring coastal parishes of Stiffkey and Warham All Saints.⁸² In the former, yeomen (of between 32 and more than 100 acres) comprised 62 per cent of these ofﬁcers. In the latter, they made up only 21 per cent, whereas husbandmen (of between 5 and 32 acres) accounted for 53 per cent of wardens.⁸³ These differences resulted, in part, from the divergent course of agrarian change in these communities, as smallholders disappeared from Stiffkey in the early seventeenth century, but remained in Warham. Pitman suggests that these variations can best be explained by ‘well established ideas about who should participate and who should not’, that were manifested in differing forms of parochial government, and differing degrees of inclusion within it.⁸⁴ These local disparities at the turn of the seventeenth century may have been a consequence of acute, short-term ﬂuctuations in the fates of smallholders, and a reconﬁguration of parish power structures in response to the introduction of the overseers’ ofﬁce.⁸⁵ Even so, these ﬁndings demonstrate the signiﬁcance of local judgements about ﬁtness for ofﬁce in shaping the proﬁle of the parochial rulers. However, it is important to remember that the sources that frame our historical perspective can also limit our view. Vestry minutes and overseers’ accounts relate to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical parish, and yield a social viewpoint circumscribed by its boundaries. Admittedly, for Purcas, Gough, and their ilk the parish provided the main administrative opportunity, and set the limits for many of their ofﬁcial powers. Yet such men might also serve in extra-parochial ofﬁce, as high constables or hundred jurors, and clearly lived within social and ⁸¹ Pitman, ‘Tradition and Exclusion’, 27–45. ⁸⁴ Ibid., 38 ⁸⁵ Ibid., 30–3, 34–5.

⁸² Ibid., 33.

⁸³ Ibid., table 1, 31.

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economic worlds that were not restricted to the parish. It is difﬁcult, therefore, to determine exactly what the records of their main administrative activity tell us about their social perspectives, perceptions, and terminology—particularly when there are so few other sources relating to the opinions of this group. The fact that Richard Gough regarded his native parish as worthy of a ‘history’, visualized the community as it assembled together in church, and knew the rights (and wrongs) by which its members held their pews indicates a distinct parish-centred perspective, even if Gough was exceptional in recording it. Undoubtedly, the ﬁnancial responsibilities imposed by the Poor Law fostered a strong awareness of jurisdictional boundaries and territorial loyalties among parish elites. This core administrative experience may also have highlighted the parish as the main arena for the determination of status, and the poor rates as the most signiﬁcant instrument in this determination.⁸⁶ As a consequence, while it is evident that the perspective offered by parish sources is not the only possible angle from which to view the social attitudes, attributes and lexicon of the ‘middle sort’, it is nonetheless an important one, despite its restrictions. One of the organizing principles of this volume is that social descriptions are always responsive to, and generally inﬂuenced by, the context in which they are written. The government of the parish was one such context, and undoubtedly it inﬂuenced the social descriptions produced by participants. It is striking that parishes as disparate geographically, economically, and socially as Goosnargh, in Lancashine, Stoke-by-Nayland in Suffolk, and Yetminster in Dorset produced such similar social descriptions and assumptions among their ruling parishioners. This suggests either that the early modern polity had achieved a level of administrative homogeneity beyond that implied by recent historical notions of Tudor and Stuart ‘state-formation’,⁸⁷ or that the common task of parish government had produced similar understandings of the distribution of authority and status within different communities. If the latter, then it should not be surprising that this shared task produced introspective social descriptions, in the same way as it accentuated concerns about jurisdictions and boundaries. The common experience impelled parish administrators to regard the problems of poverty, disorder, and the allocation of resources in territorial terms, so their measurement of social status according to the dimensions of the parish may also be a function of the same imperative. Such an atomized conception of power and responsibility in the face of the perennial problem of poverty may also explain why the ‘middling’ almost never described themselves as a group, even though they were happy to complain about the collective failings of the ‘poorer sort of people’. ⁸⁶ See Kent, ‘Rural ‘‘Middling Sort’’ ’, 31–8; S. Hindle, ‘Civility, Honesty and the Identiﬁcation of the Deserving Poor in Seventeenth-Century England’, in H. R. French and J. Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 38–59. For alternative interpretation, see below, 250–3 ⁸⁷ See Braddick, State Formation, 9–46.

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If the social perceptions of the parish rulers were similar, but fragmented, can we assess how far they were based on a series of common, if unacknowledged, criteria? Did patterns exist in the wealth of ‘chief’ versus other ‘inhabitants’? Were there general trends towards the monopolization of ofﬁce and power in parishes? Did such movements reﬂect underlying differences in the life histories of the parish rulers compared to the bulk of the rate paying ‘inhabitants’? Finally, if we can detect such patterns, what were their signiﬁcance in determining social identity and perceptions within parish life? As has been shown, assumptions about the ‘proper’ status of parish rulers appear to have been understood quite widely, and uniformly. Ideally, to be ﬁt to act as ‘chief inhabitants’, individuals were to be of greater ‘ability’, ‘substance’, and ‘credit’ than most of their neighbours. While none of these evaluations depended solely on material wealth, the example from Great Yeldham suggested that they were based ﬁrmly on local knowledge of such prosperity. The Yeldham example, Richard Gough’s History, and the many estimations of worth cited in the equity cases studied by Shepard illustrate that knowledge of other people’s ﬁnancial standing was widespread within parishes.⁸⁸ Among ratepayers it was made even more manifest by the rating lists, which they were usually free to inspect and in which the community’s estimations of the ﬁnancial ‘ability’ of each ratepayer were evident. In this respect, then, such rating lists provide a sensitive measure of the social perception of ‘substance’ and ‘ability’, even if they may not have conformed to the actual topography of wealth with any great precision. How were such rates calculated? In practice, there was considerable variation between parishes, and even between particular years (and overseers), depending on the size of the total sum needed, the method of distributing the rate burden between payers, and the basis on which rateable value was calculated—and, as Hindle has demonstrated, the extent to which disputes could be avoided.⁸⁹ The Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer enjoined that ‘all assessments ought to be made according to the visible Estate the Party hath or possesseth in the Parish … and not elsewhere’, thereby revealing the ﬁrst deﬁciency of parish rates as a measure of an individual’s total wealth.⁹⁰ It also stipulated that rates should be levied ‘in Proportion to the yearly Value, and not the Quantity of Land’, because the rental value was a better indication of tax-paying capacity than the acreage cultivated (which might be of variable quality). This advice reﬂected a shift in actual rating practice from acreages to annual values in the century after 1598.⁹¹ In all cases, too, the occupier of the property should pay, whether or not he or she was the owner, to preclude non-payment by absentee landlords. Assessment of land was relatively easy, whereas calculations of non-landed assets, working capital, and trade proﬁts were much more difﬁcult. However, if a farmer was assessed on land, he was not also to be liable for the value of his livestock or other goods rated ⁸⁸ Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 188–205. ⁸⁹ Hindle, On the Parish?, 365–78. ⁹⁰ Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer, 60. ⁹¹ Hindle, On the Parish?, 372.

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in the valuation of his land. If he had another, non-landed income source (for example, cloth production), he could be assessed on that as well.⁹² Similarly, if a clothier had both land and trade stock, he could be rated on both, as they were separate sources of income. The rating of both income sources was to be at the same nominal value in the pound. Occasionally, overseers’ accounts tell us that the rate was calculated at, say, 3d. in the pound, but such accounts generally do not explain how the nominal values of estates or stock were determined. In this sense they offer indications of perceived value, not precise measures of wealth or the means to reconstruct it.⁹³ Despite these serious methodological difﬁculties, Tables 2.1 and 2.2 indicate that all ofﬁcers and vestry members in our twenty-one sample parishes were assessed at rate levels at, or above, the median assessment of all ratepayers in their parishes. At the very least, this indicates an assumption that parish rulers should be drawn from those of greater-than-average ‘substance’. Table 2.1 is calculated using parish rate assessments from Essex and Suffolk in comparison with Dorset (plus Clitheroe, as the only available Lancashire example). In order to compare rates from different parishes, calculated according to a variety of criteria, the ﬁgures are expressed as percentages of the parish median, because unlike the mean it is not distorted by the larger values in the data set. So, for example, in the Overseers’ Rate for Broad Windsor in 1712, Philip Adams paid a rate of 1/2d., where the median assessment for the whole parish was 21/4d., so that his assessment was only 22 per cent of the parish median.⁹⁴ Adams’s 22-per cent rate level is now comparable to the assessment levels for all other payers that year, between years, and with the other parishes in the sample, because they are all calculated on the same indexed basis. Table 2.1 shows that, in general, churchwardens, overseers, surveyors, and vestry members in the seventeen parishes included in the analysis were normally assessed in excess of the parish median, sometimes at double or triple that ﬁgure. In Earls Colne, Essex and Abbotsbury, Dorset a few very prosperous individuals dominated the ofﬁce of churchwarden, assessed out of all proportion to the rest of the parish.⁹⁵ Even allowing for these exceptions, the churchwardens in St Leonard’s and All Saints’, Colchester, East Bergholt, Suffolk, and Broad Windsor, Dorset were assessed at double the parish median, as were the overseers in Toppesﬁeld, Black Notley, and ⁹² Recent research on the economy of rural England emphasizes this possibility, see Overton and colleagues Production and Consumption, 65–86. ⁹³ As Hindle has noted recently, we know little about the balance of assessments between large and small ratepayers, or about their relationship to other indicators of wealth. Hindle, On the Parish?, 286–7. ⁹⁴ Dorset RO PE/BDW OV1/1/1 Broad Windsor Overseers’ Account Book, 1700–1827, overseers’ rate 1712. ⁹⁵ Between 1722 and 1750 only 5 individuals served as churchwardens of Earls Colne, so can be regarded as an atypical clique. This is not the case for Abbotsbury, where assessments survive for approximately half the 35 churchwardens and 25 overseers, almost all of which are at three or four times the parish median.

Table 2.1. Rate assessments of ofﬁcers and vestry members, Essex–Suffolk and Dorset parishes Parishes Colchester, St Leonard’s Colchester, St Runwald’s Colchester, All Saints’ Toppesﬁeld Black Notley Braintree Earls Colne† Newport Pond† Stoke-by-Nayland East Bergholt Clitheroe Abbotsbury Broadwindsor Beaminster† Lyme Regis Mosterton South Perrott Sydling St Nicholas Median index rate assessment ∗ †

County

Years

Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Suffolk Suffolk Lancashire Dorset Dorset Dorset Dorset Dorset Dorset Dorset

1655–65 1677–84 1686–90 1710–20 1654–99 1690–5 1722–50 1661–1705 1683–8 1690–4 1675–85 1683–1730 1702–20 1630–1720 1625–1725 1699–1730 1696–1729 1691–1720

Ofﬁcers∗ c/w

o/s

s/u

c/o

s/d

225 125 200 0 140 175 504 179 163 257 141 413 244 150 116 143 116 0

150 100 100 230 240 225 130 180 306 243 0 389 172 225 116 163 99 191

75 0 100 0 141 163 0 125 344 229 0 685 0 0 55 0 0 0

0 0 0 140 160 138 23 75 106 105 36 0 0 0 116 0 0 0

50 0 0 0 0 63 0 0 162 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 100 100 180 405 200 125 147 194 400 0 231 189 200 0 141 143 182

169

180

141

106

63

182

c/w = churchwarden; o/s = overseer; s/u = surveyor; c/o = constable; s/d = sidesman; vestry = vestryman. ‘Lifetime’ median rate assessment.

vestry

Table 2.2. Hearth Tax assessments for parish ofﬁcers and vestry members, by region Parishes East Bergholt Stoke- by-Nayland Sudbury, St Gregory’s Lavenham Colchester, St Leonard’s Newport Pond Dedham Black Notley Toppesﬁeld Great Coggeshall Finchingﬁeld Little Horkesley Braintree Goosnargh Tatham Fell Lancaster Clitheroe Preston Lyme Regis Sherborne Beaminster Median index assessment ∗

County

Years

Suffolk Suffolk Suffolk Suffolk Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Essex Lancashire Lancashire Lancashire Lancashire Lancashire Dorset Dorset Dorset

1670–5 1670–5 1669–75 1665–75 1670–83 1659–70 1665–75 1665–75 1665–75 1665–75 1665–75 1663–75 1668–75 1658–80 1671–80 1671–86 1663–75 1658–75 1660–65 1659–70 1660–70

Ofﬁcers∗ c/w

o/s

s/u

c/o

s/d

88 50 200 167 100 200 158 100 120 200 133 67 100 100 100 150 100 75 125 133 150

100 250 400 0 100 225 167 150 160 200 100 114 125 100 100 0 0 75 100 133 150

100 100 200 0 100 150 0 100 267 117 117 181 100 100 0 0 0 100 0 0 0

75 150 200 0 0 0 0 200 100 0 100 114 0 0 100 0 75 0 150 133 0

75 100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100 0 0 50 0 0 0 0 75 0 0 0

120

129

100

114

75

c/w = churchwarden; o/s = overseer; s/u = surveyor; c/o = constable; s/d = sidesman; vestry = vestryman.

vestry 163 225 0 200 0 200 0 0 0 0 0 0 150 200 0 250 0 125 0 133 150 181.5

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115

Braintree, Essex, Stoke-by-Nayland and East Bergholt, Suffolk, and Abbotsbury, Dorset. Surveyors in East Bergholt, Stoke-by-Nayland, and Abbotsbury, and vestry members in Black Notley, Braintree, and East Bergholt also had median assessments that were at least double the level of the parish as a whole. By contrast, constables, and the few available examples of sidesmen were rated at levels nearer to, or even well below, the parish median. Table 2.2 examines the status of parochial ofﬁcers by locating them within the Hearth Tax returns. The Hearth Tax’s advantages are its uniform method of assessment (on ﬁreplaces), its relatively narrow chronological concentration in the 1660s and 1670s, and its much more frequent survival than parish rates—hence the larger sample of parishes. However, there are many well-known difﬁculties in using the Hearth Tax as a measure of wealth, which have been the subject of a number of books and articles.⁹⁶ Ultimately, all the Hearth Tax tells us is the total number of operational ﬁreplaces possessed by the householder, which contemporaries assumed (or hoped) was a reﬂection of wealth, and thus ability to pay tax. Beyond that, these numbers indicate tendencies rather than certainties in relation to material wealth. So those assessed on more than six hearths do appear to be more prosperous than those assessed on one, when this assessment is compared to another indicator of ‘wealth’.⁹⁷ Similarly, those exempt from the tax do seem more likely to be at, or near, the margins of economic dependence (as indicated by the lists of poor relief recipients) than those required to pay on one or two hearths.⁹⁸ However, Table 2.2 depicts relative position in the parish assessments, rather than making any claims for the accuracy of these levels as a reﬂection of personal wealth. It shows that ofﬁcers and vestry members tended to be assessed on higher numbers of hearths than the parish median. Not only that, but the trend follows that shown in Table 2.1. In general, churchwardens, overseers, surveyors, and most constables had assessments that were above the indexed parish median (except in East Bergholt, Stoke-by-Nayland, Little Horkesley, Preston, and Clitheroe), while in most instances sidesmen were below it. Similarly, all vestry members were assessed above the indexed parish median, sometimes more than double it (in Stoke-by-Nayland, Lavenham, Newport Pond, Goosnargh, and Lancaster). So, despite both tables depicting relative, rather than absolute measures of personal, trading or real estate, and despite the opaque relationship between these assessments and underlying wealth levels, certain trends are apparent. In all cases, under both types of assessment, vestry members (as a group) were ⁹⁶ See e.g. Husbands, ‘Hearths, Wealth and Occupations’, 65–77; Arkell, ‘Regional Variations’, 148–74; T. Arkell, ‘A Student’s Guide to the Hearth Tax: Some Truths, Half-Truths and Untruths’, in N. Alldridge (ed.), The Hearth Tax: Problems and Possibilities (Conference of Teachers in Regional and Local History in Tertiary Education, 1983; Hull, 1985), 23–44; M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), 37–45. ⁹⁷ Husbands, ‘Hearths, Wealth and Occupations’, 66–7, 70–7. ⁹⁸ Arkell, ‘Incidence of poverty’, 23–47.

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Table 2.3. Assessment levels of parish ofﬁcer, Newport Pond, Essex, 1661–1705, by quartiles (parish mean = 100) Ofﬁcers∗ c/w Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Skew Number

25.2 64.8 115.5 263.1 3.12 40

o/s

s/u

c/o

28.5 58.6 107.6 459.1

15.3 33 76.9 180.3

15.3 28.1 39.8 142.9

17.9 45 79.6 246

2.5

2.6

1.8 41

4.04 62

35

vestry

109

∗ c/w = churchwarden; o/s = overseer of poor; s/u = surveyor of highways; c/o = constable; vestry = vestryman.

drawn from among those with above-average valuations. In most cases sidesmen were assessed at levels beneath the parish median. Other ofﬁcers, notably the important administrative posts of churchwarden and overseer, tended to be the preserve of ratepayers at, or slightly above, the median assessment levels in their parishes. Their ‘substance’ was sufﬁcient to place them among the ‘best men’ in the pecking order of their settlement, because it endowed them with the social credit, economic independence, and personal autonomy to police the parish, its poor, and its church. Of course, while median ﬁgures are not distorted upwards by the payments of a few individuals subject to heavy assessments, they do conceal the wide variations in perceived wealth between individual ofﬁcers. Table 2.3 illustrates these in Newport Pond, Essex. As is explained more fully below, Newport contains parish rates for each year between 1661 and 1705. These enable individuals’ entire rate-paying histories to be tracked, so that an index ﬁgure can represent the entire range of their lifetime assessment levels, both high and low. When these are matched to ofﬁce-holding cohorts they illustrate the range of ratepayers involved in parish ofﬁce. The table divides these ofﬁcers into assessment quartiles, to indicate the relative position of each group of ofﬁcers. It also provides a ﬁgure for the statistical ‘skewness’ of the assessment levels in each ofﬁce-holding cohort, to establish the degree of variation within the samples.⁹⁹ As the table suggests, across the range of participants, churchwardens and overseers’ assessments were slightly higher than those of surveyors, constables, and the ‘open’ vestry in general. In each of the latter three groups, three-quarters of the cohort had median ‘lifetime’ assessments that were lower than for the parish as a whole, particularly in the case of constables. By contrast, the top quartile of all ofﬁces was assessed at ⁹⁹ The skewness of a distribution is a statistical characterization of the degree of asymmetry of a data set around its mean. Positive skewness, as found in Newport Pond, indicates an asymmetric distribution in favour of the larger positive values in the series.

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Table 2.4. Hearth Tax assessments for borough ofﬁcers, 1642–1675 (all payers’ mean = 100) Borough ofﬁcers∗ Aldermen Ass/CB

Councillors Freemen

Q/S

Leet/Bor. J

Median Hearth Tax

Suffolk Sudbury, 1670–75

250

200

0

150

150

0

2

Essex Colchester, 1642–61

450

350

300

0

200

200

2

Lancashire Preston, 1658–75

0

200

200

0

0

150

2

Dorset Lyme Regis, 1660–75

0

200

0

150

150

150

2

∗

Ass = assistant; CB = capital burgess; Q/S = quarter sessions’ juror; Leet/Bor. J = leet or borough juror.

disproportionately high levels compared to the whole parish, and (as the ﬁgures for ‘skewness’ suggest) in relation to the other ofﬁcers as well. Among parish ofﬁcers, therefore, a few highly rated individuals threatened to inﬂuence the ‘wealth’ proﬁle of the groups as a whole. Table 2.4 extends these analyses to borough ofﬁce holding in the urban parishes of St Leonard’s, Colchester, St Gregory’s, Sudbury, Preston, and Lyme Regis. Of these boroughs, only Colchester was a substantial urban centre, of perhaps 9,000 residents in the 1660s.¹⁰⁰ In this period Sudbury, Preston, and Lyme Regis were much smaller, with populations of between 1,000 and 3,000 people.¹⁰¹ As the table suggests, in all cases senior and other members of the corporations (down to Freemen) had assessments well in excess of the parish average. In Colchester it is clear that aldermen were drawn from among the very richest householders in this wealthy (and socially polarized) manufacturing town, with medians of nine hearths per person in 1662, an indication of considerable wealth however cautiously we choose to interpret the Hearth Tax. All the senior members of these corporations had hearth tax assessments double the parish median, and ¹⁰⁰ E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford, 1987), table 7.1. Colchester had 1,027 Hearth Tax payers in 1662, a ﬁgure that does not include exemptions (which ran as high as 57% of all those recorded in the 1671 tax). ¹⁰¹ In 1663 Preston had 260 Hearth Tax payers; in 1674 Sudbury possessed 408 households (308 payers and 100 exempt—the latter apparently subject to some under-recording); in 1664 there were 163 payers recorded. Lancs ROE. 179/250/6 Preston Hearth Tax Assessment 1663; Suffolk in 1674, Being the Hearth Tax Returns, Suffolk Green Books, 11, vol. 13 (Woodbridge, 1905); Meekings, Dorset Hearth Tax.

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(except in Sudbury) noticeably above the level displayed by the parish elite of churchwardens and overseers. Those who served as jurors in the borough Quarter Sessions and the courts Leet or civil courts seem to have been drawn from a wider group of ‘inhabitants’, who were (not surprisingly) closer to the assessment levels of ofﬁcers in their parishes. In Colchester in particular, the 117 Quarter Sessions jurors and 103 civil court jurors assessed on a median of four hearths in the 1662 tax, appear representative of the town’s wider ‘middling’ population. Their assessment levels may also indicate that the 31 Assistants (median seven hearths) and 52 Common Councillors (median six hearths) were drawn from a different, and higher, stratum of material wealth. As the table shows, though, all were well above the two-hearth median for the 1,038 householders assessed in the borough in 1662. While such assessments are indicative, they present one other problem, which is rarely acknowledged. This is the question of how far any single ‘snapshot’ measure can represent a lifetime’s attainment in terms of material prosperity. The example of James Vince, overseer of Earls Colne 1735–6, illustrates the potential difﬁculties.¹⁰² Between 1722 and 1750 Vince owned no property in the parish, but was (variously) a subtenant to an inn in this thoroughfare village, and three farm-size holdings totalling more than 60 acres. In 1722 Vince was due to pay 1s. 5d. for an inn, and a share of 23 acres rented with Samuel Burton, when the parish mean was 1s. 5d.¹⁰³ A decade later, though, Vince was renting the inn and the three large holdings, and assessed at 2s. 5d., when the parish mean was still 1s. 5d. A decade after this high-water mark, Vince was assessed at only 9d. when the parish average was 1s. 7d., having given up the inn, and two of the holdings. He left the parish the following year.¹⁰⁴ Such movements can be traced in unusual detail in Earls Colne, but they make it difﬁcult to assess which of these decadal ‘snapshots’ is most representative of Vince’s wealth, or the trajectory of his estate. One answer would be to get a ‘lifetime’ measure of his relative ‘wealth’ by calculating the mean of means—that is, calculating his position in relation to the parish average in each year in the manner shown for Philip Adams of Broad Windsor, and then taking the mean of these for all the years in which he paid rates.¹⁰⁵ Parish sources rarely allow such a detailed analysis, but Beaminster in Dorset, and Newport Pond in Essex possess suitable series of Rates. Beaminster ¹⁰² www.alanmacfarlane.com Earls Colne Vestry Minutes, 7 Apr. 1735 [11002848] ¹⁰³ Ibid., Overseers’ Rate, 17 Dec. 1722 [10700005]; Overseers’ Rate, 27 Mar. 1732 [10903690]; Overseers’ Rate, 30 Mar. 1742 [11300005]. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., Settlement Certiﬁcate between Overseers of Earls Colne and those of Great Coggeshall, 5 Jun. 1741 [12202649]; Vince pays rates in Earls Colne 1742, but not thereafter. ¹⁰⁵ This approach requires the transcription of all rates in the series, and the calculation of the indexed mean ﬁgure for each person in each year of the sample. While this is a simple process electronically, the amount of data produced by the entry of these rates is considerable. The Beaminster and Newport Pond rate series contain approximately 12,000 entries each.

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has an annual series of Churchwardens’ rates between 1647 and 1720, with few interruptions.¹⁰⁶ Newport Pond has an exceptional collection of parish rates, numbering between 3 and 6 per year, beginning in 1661 and analysed here up to 1705.¹⁰⁷ In Beaminster churchwardens, overseers, and vestry members had ‘lifetime’ rate assessments well above those of the parish as a whole, with vestry members being assessed at more than 1 1/2 times the average assessment of all ratepayers. Newport Pond offers even more detail. In the ﬁrst place it contains information about a greater variety of ofﬁcers. This conﬁrms the distinctions in assessment levels found in the wider parish sample. Through their rate-paying careers in the parish, churchwardens and overseers as a group were assessed at levels well above the average, whereas surveyors and constables came from a category of payers who averaged lower assessments. Meanwhile, the vestry (which was ‘open’ rather than ‘select’) reﬂected those who served as churchwardens and overseers rather than the constables or surveyors. Secondly, such listings illustrate the proportion of ratepayers who became ofﬁcers and vestrymen. In Beaminster, there were 819 ratepayers listed between 1630 and 1719. Of these, 608 were male, and therefore eligible in this society to be ofﬁcers or vestrymen, and 139 men actually did serve in either of these capacities, that is, 23 per cent of the total number of male ratepayers. In Newport Pond between 1661 and 1705 there were 429 ratepayers, of whom 362 were male. Of these, 134 (plus one woman, Rebecca Day) served as ofﬁcers or vestry members, that is 37 per cent of the male ratepayers. There were also a further 14 ofﬁcers and vestrymen who could not be identiﬁed on these rates. So the contemporary desire to restrict positions of authority to ‘able’, sufﬁcient’ men ensured that only a quarter to a third of all ratepayers held ofﬁce in these two diverse parishes. However, some of these ratepayers might not have been resident in the parish, making it impractical for them to be selected as ofﬁcers or vestrymen. The Newport Pond ‘parish book’ includes the Poll Tax of 1692.¹⁰⁸ This indicates that the parish contained only 92 households (and 279 residents), yet there were 127 ratepayers in 1692! Of these 92 households, 58 were headed by men who served in parish ofﬁce at some point between 1661 and 1705 (63 per cent), with 75 of the 92 paying the parish rate in 1692 (82 per cent). Newport was a small parish and may have been forced to rotate ofﬁce more widely among the ratepayers to avoid the burdens becoming intolerable. The only other settlement in this study with comparable data on the total number ¹⁰⁶ Dorset RO MIC/R/1335 Beaminster Churchwardens’ Account Book, 1646–1719. ¹⁰⁷ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 15/8/1 Newport Parish Book, 1659–1706. For a more detailed consideration, see H. R. French, ‘ ‘‘Ancient Inhabitants’’: Mobility, Lineage and Identity in English Rural Communities, 1600–1750’, in C. Dyer (ed.), The Self-Contained Village? Migration, Land-holding, Identity and Economy in Rural Communities, 1250–1900 (Hatﬁeld, 2006), 72–95. ¹⁰⁸ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 15/8/1, Poll Tax dated 9 Apr. 1692.

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of households is the port town of Lyme Regis in Dorset. This was larger than Newport, with a much more extended (and unequal) social hierarchy, and a distinct concentration of power in the hands of a restricted number of ratepayers. In 1697 there were 376 households in Lyme, containing 1,300 inhabitants.¹⁰⁹ Of these, 121 households (or 32 per cent) contained a member who served in parish ofﬁce in the years before or after 1697, a ﬁgure inﬂated by the inclusion of 24 future ofﬁcers who were not yet householders. This matches Nick Alldridge’s ﬁndings for the parish of St Oswald’s Chester where in the early seventeenth century over one-third of the people eligible to serve in parish ofﬁce actually did so.¹¹⁰ The remaining 255 households in Lyme seem never to have provided a churchwarden, overseer, or surveyor, nor a borough ofﬁcer (Chief Burgess, Freeman Burgess), or Quarter Sessions or Leet juror. Since these two sample parishes may well reﬂect the extremes of the spectrum of participation in local administration, it is difﬁcult to base generalizations upon them. We might guess that 40–50 per cent of resident male householders served in parish ofﬁce at some point in their lives, most of whom were drawn from among the more prosperous rate-paying ‘inhabitants’. In Newport, the 58 resident householders who served in parish ofﬁce paid on a lifetime mean that was 111 per cent of the average assessment level, compared to the mean for all the resident householders of 1692 of only 96 per cent. So not all those that we might regard as eligible for parish ofﬁce actually served. Similarly, service or attendance was not distributed equally among those who did participate. In the case of the ofﬁces of the parish rotation was desirable, particularly in the important and onerous posts of overseer of the poor and constable. Indeed, in 1638 the Braintree vestry recognized such burdens implicitly by punishing any ofﬁcers who failed to submit their accounts by making them serve another year!¹¹¹ The patterns of rotation of ofﬁces indicate that some were more demanding, or less desirable, than others. In Sherborne, Dorset, for example, between 1659 and 1730 no one served more than two years as constable (and only 7 out of 103 constables served twice), and in all instances that service was either separated by a decade, or concentrated in consecutive years.¹¹² Among overseers the same dispersed pattern emerged: 217 individuals served in this period, but only 47 (22 per cent of the total) served twice, with ¹⁰⁹ Dorset RO DC/LR H2 Lyme Regis Marriage Duty Act n.d. [c.1697]. There are a series of six returns for Lyme between 1695 and 1703, but the c.1697 return has been used because it provides the clearest demarcation between households. ¹¹⁰ N. Alldridge, ‘Loyalty and Identity in Chester Parishes 1540–1640’, in S. J. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988), 105. ¹¹¹ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/8/3 Braintree Vestry Minutes, 1619–55, meeting dated 6 Aug. 1638. ¹¹² Dorset RO D/BSS/2 Sherborne Overseers’ Account Book, 1659–1836. A Reynold Pond was listed as constable twice within a decade, in 1675 and 1681, but this seems to refer to two different people of the same name (one died in 1681). Wilts. RO Dean of Sarum Wills P5/1681/45 Reynold Pond, Sr., Sherborne, shoemaker, 1681.

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121

just 7 (3 per cent) serving three or more times. Repeated service seems to have been a function of longevity, rather than enthusiasm. Samuel Napper served as overseer in 1688, 1704, 1717 and 1727, while Baruch Fox served in 1681, 1714, and 1728. By contrast, the role of churchwarden seems to have been slightly more prestigious or desirable, because repeated service was much more common. Out of 55 churchwardens 21 (38 per cent) served more than once, and Samuel Napper undertook the role six times between 1693 and 1711, while Robert Avoke ofﬁciated four times between 1675 and 1713. Out of the 21 churchwardens who served more than once 17 did so in consecutive years, 9 of them for three years in a row. Perhaps such men were similar in their outlook to William Parker of Myddle, whose ambitions in the parish were described by Richard Gough: hee was a person that affected to be somebody in this parish … [and] had a great desire to bee made Churchwarden of this parish, which att last hee obtained … and afterwards hee made that yeare the epoch of his computation of all accidents, and would usually say such a thing was done soe many yeares before or after the yeare that I was Churchwarden.¹¹³

Given the slightly elevated position of churchwardens and overseers in relation to the rates paid by the rest of the parish, as shown in Tables 2.1 and 2.2, we can begin to see why Parker thought that he had become ‘somebody in the parish’ by being chosen as churchwarden. His opinion was embodied in the orders of the Lambeth Vestry in 1610, where it was stipulated that churchwardens ‘shalbe of the Substantiallest and discreetest persons of the parishe … for howe muche the more credittes of the persons that are Chosen thereunto: soe much the more the people will Reverence them in theire Ofﬁce’.¹¹⁴ This may have been written more in hope than expectation, but it illustrates how contemporaries regarded the respect accorded to the ofﬁce as a function of the ‘credit’ possessed by its holder as a private individual. This is conﬁrmed by the machinations against George Edwards of Yetminster in 1635, ‘a poore man … of noe estate’ whose position as churchwarden we saw being dismissed in the previous chapter.¹¹⁵ The ecclesiastical authorities shared the parish’s concern about Edwards’s lack of ‘credit’, and required him not to act without the consent of two other, more ‘substantial’ churchwardens. Not only did Edwards’s lack of ‘estate’ run contrary to the usual contemporary preconceptions about economic ‘credit’ and moral worth, but it raised the fear that he had no ﬁnancial stake in the proper execution of his ofﬁce. Without this, Edwards was unlikely to be trusted by the ratepayers, despite the vicar’s assertion that he would rather take Edwards’s word for £40 than a bond from one of his accusers for half that sum!¹¹⁶ The appointment of those of ‘small credit’ was ¹¹³ Gough, Myddle, 239. ¹¹⁴ Drew, ‘Lambeth Churchwardens’, 209. ¹¹⁵ Wilts. RO Dean of Sarum Misc. Court Papers, 1634–7, D5 21/5/2. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., Deposition Book 1637–40, D5 22/13 fo.4v.

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Table 2.5. Attendances in ‘open’ vestries, Essex–Suffolk and Dorset parishes, 1640–1720 Parish

County

Years

1

2

3

4

5

Colchester, All Saints’ Bocking Earls Colne∗ Newport Pond∗ Stoke-by-Nayland South Perrott Sydling St. Nicholas Mosterton Broad Windsor Beaminster∗

Essex Essex Essex Essex Suffolk Dorset Dorset Dorset Dorset Dorset

1686–1719 1675–1719 1722–50 1661–1705 1670–85 1696–1729 1691–1720 1699–1730 1702–20 1630–1719

5.3 2 22.9 9.3 3.2 5.7 4.9 4.8 2.6 4

11.8 4.4 71.1 22.1 8.4 11.3 9.1 10.2 4.5 8.3

33 33 26 31 25 42 42 38 41 35

74 53 82 73 65 82 77 82 71 74

67 329 256 273 250 104 240 197 299 301

16.12

34.6

73.3

231.6

Mean of means

6.47

Note: 1 = Mean number of attendances (all vestrymen); 2 = Mean number of attendances by > average group; 3 => Average attendees as percentage of all vestrymen; 4 = Percentage of all attendances by > average group; 5 = Median rate payment by > average group as percentage of parish median. ∗

Lifetime median rate assessments.

bad both for their authority in the post, and for the dignity of the ofﬁce itself. As William Parker illustrates, however, there were also those who saw the other side of the equation, and believed that status would rub off on them from their occupation of positions commonly associated with ‘substantial’ and ‘discreet’ men. If the parish ofﬁces show some concentrations of service, vestries demonstrate more pronounced trends towards domination by an active minority. As has been observed already, there were two principal forms of vestry—the ‘open’ vestry, in theory open to all ratepayers, and the ‘select’ vestry, restricted to a group of elected or co-opted members, often twelve or twenty-four. We might expect the latter to operate as ‘oligarchies’, but similar patterns are evident among the ‘open’ vestries as well. Table 2.5 illustrates the pattern of attendance (and relative ‘wealth’) of vestry attendees at ten ‘open’ vestries in Essex, Suffolk and Dorset. In almost all cases, those who attended more often than average, attended twice as often as the average vestryman. Yet these groups of assiduous attendees comprised under half, and generally only one-third, of the total number of participants, but their attendances comprised more than two-thirds of all attendances in all parishes except in Bocking, Essex. Similarly, there was a marked tendency for vestrymen to be rated distinctly above the parish median, and at more than double the average for all ratepayers in ﬁve of the ten parishes studied. Comparison of the indexed assessments in Tables 2.5 and 2.1 shows that the median level of assessment of the most assiduous attendees was higher than for all vestry members in all the parishes in both samples, except in All Saints’ Colchester. The differences

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Table 2.6. Attendances in ‘select’ vestries, Essex and Lancashire parishes, 1626–1720 Parish

County

Years

1

2

3

4

Braintree Braintree Braintree Finchingﬁeld Preston Goosnargh

Essex Essex Essex Essex Lancashire Lancashire

1630–45 1685–90 1711–14 1626–31 1650–1719 1672–1719

38.7 15.3 23.9 23.2 6.2 13

74.7 31 34.4 31.7 12.4 23.4

30 37 55 43 37 41

73 74 82 86 70 76

20.05

34.6

40.5

76.83

Mean of means

Note: 1 = Average number of attendances (all vestrymen); 2 = Average number of attendances by > average group; 3 => Average attendees as percentage of all vestrymen; 4 = Percentage of all attendances by > average group.

between the two assessment levels are particularly pronounced in Bocking and Earls Colne in Essex, and Sydling St Nicholas and Broad Windsor, Dorset. Where our rating evidence is fullest, across the ‘lifetime’ of the payer (in Beaminster, and Newport), the disparity in assessment between average and more-than-average attendees is particularly pronounced. Frequent attendance is clearly a function of length of residence in a parish, because a longer term of residence offers more chances to attend the vestry. Such geographical stability also allows these ‘lifetime’ medians to embody the period of highest assessment (and maximum prosperity?) better among these ratepayers than among more transient ‘inhabitants’. These two points may explain why frequent attendees, among the long-term ratepayers, often ended up with higher lifetime medians. The relationship between length of residence and status in the parish will be pursued more fully below. ‘Select’ vestries had a restricted membership, and a distinct ‘corporate’ identity. This was expressed most forcefully by the Braintree Vestry, which referred to itself repeatedly through the seventeenth century as ‘the company of four and twenty’,¹¹⁷ but was also echoed by the ‘four and twenty’ of Goosnargh,¹¹⁸ the ‘24-tie’ of Lancaster,¹¹⁹ or ‘the twelve’ of Lewes, Sussex—the latter described in the seventeenth century as ‘a society of the wealthier and discreeter sort of

¹¹⁷ See e.g. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/8/3 Braintree Vestry Minute Book, 1619–55, meeting dated 7 Mar. 1631; Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/9/9 Printed Quarter Sessions’ Order dated 3 July 1680 referring to ‘an ancient constitution by a vestry, which formerly did consist of Four and Twenty chief inhabitants of the said Town’ and ‘their Company’. ¹¹⁸ Lancs. RO PR 644 Goosnargh Vestry Minute Book, meeting dated 16 Apr. 1677. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., PR 3262/5/1 Lancaster Select Vestry Minute Book, 1671–1768, order dated 1693, if any vestryman refused to render his accounts he was ‘to be degraded of being a 24-tie man and never after to any of the 24-tie’.

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Townsmen’.¹²⁰ However, as Table 2.6 shows, they were also dominated by groups of assiduous participants. The main difference between the two forms of vestry was the regularity with which they met. Most ‘open’ vestries record meetings only annually, the exception in Table 2.5 being Earls Colne, Essex. Here, as in most of the ‘select’ vestries in the sample, meetings were monthly, which explains the high mean attendance level of 22.9 meetings, although this represents less than 10 per cent of the 265 meetings between 1722 and 1750. In general, though, ‘open’ vestries met much less often than ‘select’ vestries, with average attendance levels being three times lower than the select vestries in the sample, and the attendance of even the most assiduous members being under half that of the assiduous ‘select’ vestrymen. Despite this, both types of vestry came under the control of a minority of participants, with the same pattern of one-third of members providing two-thirds of attendances. There were some regional differences. The two Lancashire ‘select’ vestries in the sample tended to meet less often, which may reﬂect the different administrative function that they performed. Their purpose was to unite the separate ‘chapelries’ within large, dispersed parishes, rather than to cope with burgeoning populations, as in the nucleated Essex cloth towns.¹²¹ However, the imposition of Presbyterian church government in both counties in the 1640s may also have inﬂuenced the spread of this form of parish administration.¹²² In seventeenth-century Lancashire, such vestries did not merely exclude the ordinary ‘inhabitants’ or the ‘ungodly’, they also ensured Protestant rule in parishes containing signiﬁcant numbers of Catholics.¹²³ Even though they met less frequently, the Lancashire vestries exhibit the same dominance by a core group of regular participants. They also projected their power in similar ways to their East Anglian counterparts. As in Braintree and Finchingﬁeld, the Goosnargh ‘select’ vestry acted as assessors for parish rates and auditors of the ofﬁcers’ accounts, effectively regulating their income and expenditure, without having to monopolize the posts themselves.¹²⁴ ¹²⁰ L. F. Salzman (ed.), ‘The Town Book of Lewes 1542–1701’, Sussex Record Society, 48 (1945–6), 122, from the ‘remarques concerning the Burrough of Lewes by Mr John Row, formerly steward to the Lord Abergaveny for his part of the Barony of Lewes … ’. ¹²¹ French, ‘Social Status’, 84–5. ¹²² Essex and Lancashire were the only two counties organized formally under the Presbyterian system. Lancashire was divided into 9 ‘classis’ in October 1646, with the 7th ‘classis’ made up of the ‘select’ vestries of Preston, Garstang and Kirkham. Although the records of the Preston vestry survive only from 1644–5, under the incumbency of Isaac Ambrose, the Kirkham vestry, like its offshoot in Goosnargh, was active from at least the 1620s. R. Cunliffe Shaw and H. G. Shaw, The Records of the Thirty Men of the Parish of Kirkham in Lancashire (Kendal, 1930). The ‘select’ vestries of Braintree and Finchingﬁeld may have functioned as ‘shadow’ meetings of lay ‘elders’ in the 1620s and 1630s. In the 1580s the famous Dedham ‘classis’ was accompanied by vestry orders reconstructing parish government by the ‘ancient inhabitants’. Hunt, Puritan Moment, 82–3. ¹²³ In Goosnargh in 1642, 74 of the 383 persons listed in the return were labelled ‘recusants’. Lancs. RO microﬁlm 1/25 Goosnargh Protestation Return, 1642. ¹²⁴ In Goosnargh between 1670 and 1720 while vestry members contributed only 16% of the churchwardens, 6% of the overseers, 8% of surveyors and 12% of constables, they supplied 90%

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While in practice the same kind of self-important ‘somebodies’ often controlled ‘open’ and ‘select’ vestry meetings alike, these two forms of parish government were different. As the Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer warned, ‘select’ vestries were sometimes regarded as ‘oppressive and injurious’, because of their exclusivity and lack of transparency. These dangers were particularly apparent in Braintree in the early eighteenth century. Here the vestry had struggled to recruit new members as the religious consensus underpinning the ‘puritan project’ of ‘godly rule’ dissolved after 1660. By 1680, the vestry’s authority fell into question, because its numbers had dropped below the customary twenty-four. In 1686 the company’s new ‘constitutions’ hinted that religious division was hindering recruitment. They stipulated, ﬁrst, that the parish minister should always be a member (previously taken for granted) and secondly, that ‘no differint oppenion in matters of religion of any Member of the said Company should be an objection for his not remaineing a Member’.¹²⁵ This was a particularly pressing concern, because many of its members were (at best) ‘occasional conformists’, including Samuel Dale, in whose handwriting these orders are recorded, and who was also one of seven vestrymen among the seventeen trustees of the Braintree Presbyterian chapel listed in 1707.¹²⁶ In Braintree these divisions ensured that there were times when the ‘select’ vestry proved unsustainable, because agreement could not be reached on the appointment of new members. The ‘company’ opened up to a wider membership in the early 1680s, before being revived under a new group of ‘low church’ or ‘nonconformist’ members, exempliﬁed by the assiduous Dale.¹²⁷ It broke down again between 1692 and 1705, before being revived in a particularly exclusive form, in which it operated until its ﬁnal, rowdy demise in 1713. These oscillations had a considerable impact on the coherence and group identity of the vestry. In ‘open’ periods individual attendance was lower, and the number of participants was larger than when the vestry became ‘select’. In three ﬁve-year periods of ‘open’ vestries (1695–9, 1700–4, and 1716–20), the mean number of attendances per person were 5.1, 5.5, and 5.2—that is, about once a year. In three comparable ﬁve-year periods of ‘select’ vestries (1685–9, 1705–9, and 1710–14) these mean levels were 15.3, 17.6, and 23.9 respectively—that is, between three and four times per person per year. At the same time, the size of the total membership of parish rate assessors and all 46 of the account auditors. Lancs. RO PR 644 Goosnargh Vestry Minute Book, 1634–1939. ¹²⁵ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/8/2 Braintree Vestry Minute Book, 1655–1712, meeting dated 3 Dec. 1687. ¹²⁶ A further ﬁve trustees were members of the neighbouring ‘open’ Bocking vestry, and one was an overseer in Braintree but never a vestryman. Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FR 501/1/1 Friar St., Sudbury Congregational Chapel, copy of deed of settlement of Braintree Presbyterian Meeting House, 29 Mar. 1707. ¹²⁷ For a fuller discussion, see H. R. French, ‘Chief Inhabitants and their Areas of Inﬂuence: Local Ruling Groups in Essex and Suffolk Parishes 1630–1720’ (University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1993), 150–62.

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pool decreased. In ‘open’ periods, 50 to 70 people attended in a ﬁve-year period. During times when the ‘select’ vestry operated, the total was between 20 and 40 over ﬁve years. As we have seen, however, these totals conceal core groups of more enthusiastic members. In the ‘open’ period 1700–4 only 26 of the 72 participants had attended more frequently than average, and had dominated proceedings, attending 72 per cent of meetings. With the reintroduction of the ‘Company of Four-and-Twenty’ in 1705, the total number of participants fell, so that between 1705 and 1709 there were only 44 members, with a core of 17 accounting for 78 per cent of all attendances. In the years immediately preceding the Company’s demise, between 1711 and 1714, disagreements about recruitment meant that there were only 22 members of the ‘four-and-twenty’ in these ﬁve years, 12 of whom attended 82 per cent of all meetings—this to govern a town of approximately 2,000 residents. While the language of parish government contained within it a ‘hidden transcript’ in which it was understood that authority exercised in the name of all ‘inhabitants’ was not to be wielded by all, this exclusivity provoked loud protests. Clearly, the Braintree ‘select’ vestry had lost its mandate to rule on behalf of the ‘best of the parish’ because it no longer represented them in any sense. In the summer of 1713 this was exposed when the parish constables rebelled, refusing to render their accounts to a body they described as not founded on custom and no longer quorate. The matter was taken to Quarter Sessions, where an order was made in an attempt to settle the situation.¹²⁸ This stated that in future instead of membership being by co-option, the ordinary ratepayers should elect the vestry, from among ‘the most substantiall and ﬁtting persons, and best and chiefest of the inhabitants’. Election proved the fatal ﬂaw in this compromize, because it required the bulk of the ‘inhabitants’ to consent to put themselves under the authority of an otherwise unaccountable oligarchy. When a new election was called, ‘some other of the parishioners being some of the 48 as they call themselves alsoe mett and had gotten a pretty great number of some other parishioners among them whome they seduced by making them believe the Society had done very ill things.’¹²⁹ This alternative meeting ended when ‘the said 48 and their Company … in a very confused and disorderly manner cryed out with loud voices noe four and twenty noe four and twenty’. Their disorder seems to have been in how they made this demand, rather than in any uncertainty about the form of parish government they preferred. The symbolic size of their ‘Company’ is an indication of their dissatisfaction with the unrepresentative nature of the atrophied ‘fourand-twenty’. Finally, after a two-year break in the vestry records, an ‘open’ ¹²⁸ Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/SBb 55/39 Quarter Sessions’ Order respecting Braintree vestry, 13 July 1713. ¹²⁹ Essex RO (Chelms.) microﬁlm T/A 242 account of proceedings at vestry election, by Joseph Mann, Braintree, attorney, n.d. [1713?].

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vestry reconvened in 1716, with a nucleus of eleven ‘select’ vestry members (including the ever-present Samuel Dale), surrounded by 41 other participants in the years to 1720. The Braintree ‘select’ vestry was never revived, having appeared ‘oppressive and injurious’ because it excluded the majority of the ‘best and chiefest of the inhabitants’ who would have been regarded in other systems of parish government as ‘substantiall and ﬁtting persons’ to exercise authority. The vestry was the most obvious forum in which those with power and position in the parish coalesced into a visible group of ‘chief inhabitants’, in control of most aspects of government and welfare provision. Even so, the vestry was not the only platform for such groups, and they could exist and exert inﬂuence in similar ways, even in parishes under nominally ‘open’ parish meetings. Such groups coalesced around other parochial institutions, notably charitable foundations such as schools, almshouses, or trusts established for poor relief. Unlike the ‘open’ vestry, these bodies usually had a limited number of trustees or governors, and (like ‘select’ vestries) membership was usually by co-option. They inﬂuenced parish affairs primarily through their contributions to poor relief, or by their inﬂuence over religious policy and moral order. In the latter case, grammar schools and almshouses could be useful sponsors of un-beneﬁced clergy enabling them to ﬁll the post of master, and bolster the local preaching capacity in line with the religious persuasions of the ‘chief of the parish’.¹³⁰ Three examples illustrate this process—the grammar school trustees of Dedham, Essex; the trustees of the town lands in East Bergholt, Suffolk; and the governors of the school and almshouses in Sherborne, Dorset. Dedham Grammar School had been incorporated in 1575 under 23 trustees, plus the vicar. The trustees administered the two pieces of land that funded the master’s stipend, and they were drawn from the same pool of ‘chief inhabitants’ who ruled the parish. Of the 99 trustees 85 served as parish ofﬁcers at some point between 1630 and 1720. They made up 45 per cent of the churchwardens, 32 per cent of the overseers, 32 per cent of the surveyors, and 21 per cent of the constables in this period—a progression that may again indicate the relative status of these ofﬁces. However, these trustees were also frequent attendees at ‘open’ vestry meetings at which the parish ofﬁcers were selected—74 per cent of vestry attendees between 1630 and 1648 were also trustees, and they attended 2.8 times on average, compared to the 1.8 times for non-trustees. The Grammar School was a focal point for the rulers of the parish, and they perpetuated their inﬂuence through several generations. During the seventeenth century among its ¹³⁰ In Earls Colne, Essex, there was a protracted struggle between 1595 and 1612 for control of the master-ship of the Grammar School between the new, ‘godly’ lords of the manor, the earls of Oxford (former lords and patrons of the school) and the distinctly ‘ungodly’ vicar. See French and Hoyle, English Rural Society, 91–5.

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trustees there were three generations of men named George Cole, John Crosse, John Cockerell, and Bezaliel Angier. There were two generations of men named John Mason, John Hudson, Samuel Cockerell, Henry Fenn, Robert Freeman, John Blomﬁeld, Samuel Sherman, and Edward Firmin, and several collateral branches of other members of the Blomﬁeld, Lewes, Alefounder, and Larrett families. The Grammar School records register the existence of Anne Mitson’s ‘dynastic families’ within a single parish, perhaps because trusteeship gave their sons preferential access to the school and perhaps also because it conferred control over a source of social prestige among the ‘middling’ in this corner of north-east Essex.¹³¹ Just over the River Stour that marked the border with Suffolk was another straggling cloth town, East Bergholt. Here the parish meeting appointed an array of ofﬁcers, including the four usual posts (churchwarden, overseer, surveyor, and constable) plus sidesmen, questmen (to assist the constable), and the ostensibly manorial and potentially rewarding post of ale-taster. In addition, the parish possessed a number of lands and properties, administered by a group of between ten and twelve feoffees. These trustees were self-selecting, and administered this signiﬁcant communal resource largely outside the control of the parish as a whole, and its ‘open’ vestry in particular.¹³² The twelve trustees displayed the usual seventeenth-century willingness to euphemize their exclusivity, referring to themselves as ‘the townsmen’, the ‘town meeters’, or ‘the neighbours’, phrases redolent of their claims to represent the wider community.¹³³ At one meeting, in August 1683, the relationship between the trustees and the parish was described in more explicit terms, when it was noted that the treasurer was ‘to be accountable to the chief Inhabitants of the Town of East Bergholt, viz. to three or four of the feoffees’.¹³⁴ The two groups elided into one another, as far as the trustees were concerned. This assumption was also supported in 1694 by the parish response to the case of John Clarke, mentioned above. There, a wider ‘town meeting’ petitioned the justices and ‘caused this defence to be written in our Town Booke and the names of several of our Cheife Inhabitants to be subscribed’. Twenty-ﬁve names were added beneath the petition, ten of which belonged to people who were, or would become, trustees, whose mean rate payment (4s. 9d.) was almost ¹³¹ A. Mitson, ‘The Signiﬁcance of Kinship Networks in the Seventeenth Century in SouthWest Nottinghamshire’, in C. Phythian-Adams (ed.), Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester, 1993), 24–76. ¹³² Suffolk RO (Ipswich) FB 191/A1/2 Disbursements and Minutes of Trustees of Town Lands, 1650–1722. At a meeting dated 23 May 1681, 10 new trustees were selected. Elections were to take place when only 3 survivors remained. ¹³³ Ibid.; for examples of ‘townsmen’ see meeting dated 22 July 1678; ‘town meeters’, 8 Jan. 1665; ‘neighbours’ 4 Apr. 1659. ¹³⁴ Ibid., meeting dated 6 Aug. 1683.

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three times the mean paid by all ratepayers in the town.¹³⁵ All but two of the twenty-ﬁve were (or would become) ofﬁcers, including nine of the ten trustees. Given this level of participation in the affairs of the parish, it is easy to understand why the trustees should have thought of themselves as the embodiment of the collective will of the town’s ‘chief inhabitants’. In practice, their position was similar to the narrow oligarchy of the Braintree ‘select’ vestry, because East Bergholt was a populous parish in the seventeenth century, in which other ofﬁces were dispersed quite widely among its ratepayers.¹³⁶ Between 1630 and 1720 at least 426 people served as ofﬁcers in the parish, but only 51 of these individuals were named as trustees, although gaps in the records in the 1660s and 1710s mean that the list of trustees is incomplete. So, despite the conﬁdent equation of this group with the ‘chief inhabitants’ of the parish, as a group the feoffees may have exerted less inﬂuence than the Dedham Grammar School trustees. They were much less dominant in the vestry, accounting for only 41 per cent of total attendance, compared to 74 per cent in Dedham. However, they contributed the similar proportions of years served as churchwardens (45 per cent) and overseers (30 per cent), but a lower percentage of years served as surveyors and constables. As with Dedham, though, they tended to serve more often than ofﬁcers in general, attending an average of 4.3 meetings of the vestry, compared to 3 for all ofﬁcers, and serving more often than non-trustees as churchwardens, overseers, and surveyors. At the same time, however, trustees served marginally less often as constables (1.1 times compared to 1.2 times overall), suggesting once more that this post was less desirable for the ‘most substantial inhabitants’. Despite their relatively limited control of parish ofﬁce as a group, trustees were rather more likely, as individuals, to serve in a range of ofﬁces in East Bergholt than were non-trustees. Among the 375 non-trustees, 20 per cent served in two different parish ofﬁces, 15 per cent served in three, and 5 per cent attended the vestry and served in more than one ofﬁce. Among trustees the proportions were 12 per cent, 27 per cent, and 29 per cent respectively, putting these individuals closer to the centre of administrative authority in the parish than non-trustees. Many trustees may also have been integrated into family networks in the parish, although there is less evidence than in Dedham of the direct succession of trusteeship from father to son—out of a dynasty of three William Lynches, only the second appears as a trustee, as does Abraham Newton, Sr., but not his son. Even so, fourteen of the ﬁfty-one trustees recorded were drawn from families ¹³⁵ Suffolk RO (Ipswich) EG3/A2/1 East Bergholt Parish Rate 1694—these ﬁgures are at variance with those given in French, ‘Social Status’, 86, because one further member of the trustees has been identiﬁed on this petition. ¹³⁶ The parish suffered population decline from 1,400 in the 1675 to c.760 in 1725, caused by endemic mortality and sustained depression in the cloth trade after 1700. See F. R. Grace, ‘The Population of East Bergholt, Suffolk, 1653–1836’, Suffolk Review, 3/8 (1970), 262.

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who supplied more than one parish ofﬁcer in the seventeenth century.¹³⁷ In these respects, while the trustees did not embody the vestry in quite the same way as the Dedham Grammar school trustees did, they tended to come from the most active families in parish administration, across several generations. Sherborne, in Dorset, provides a further example of non-parochial institutions offering a focal point for the ‘chief inhabitants’ of a parish. Its almshouses and its school were ancient foundations associated with the town’s Benedictine Abbey and attached to the cloisters of the Abbey Church, with surviving records dating from the early ﬁfteenth century. After the dissolution these two institutions were refounded under Edward VI, each under the government of ﬁfteen or sixteen governors, drawn from the town’s rulers, as well as other ofﬁcers such as a master of the almshouses and a warden of the school (who were usually clerics). They met, on average, three or four times per year in the century between 1630 and 1729, allowing for minor gaps in the records in the 1630s, in the aftermath of the siege of the town by parliamentarian forces in 1642 and in the late 1660s. In all, there were 100 governors of the almshouses and the school recorded at meetings between 1630 and 1729. Only ﬁve of the hundred were governors of one rather than both of these institutions.¹³⁸ In the parish, between 1659 and 1729 there were 301 ofﬁcers recorded (churchwardens, overseers, and constables), 73 of whom were also governors—in the absence of earlier parish records, we cannot discover if any of the remaining 27 governors also served as ofﬁcers. Although the governors comprised a minority of all the ofﬁcers in the parish, like the Dedham trustees they dominated the ofﬁce of churchwarden. Thirty-one governors served as churchwardens (nearly half the ofﬁce-holding governors), whereas only 55 non-governors (approximately a quarter of the group) held the post. The governors made up 69 per cent of all years served in the ofﬁce, and served an average of 2.2 years each, compared to 1.8 years for non-governors. As in Dedham and East Bergholt, their participation as overseers and constables was much more limited, and their involvement comprised only 22 and 26 per cent of the years served in these two posts. The range of ofﬁces in which they served was also different to that of the non-governors. Of the 201 non-governors 69 per cent are recorded as serving in one parish ofﬁce only, although this ﬁgure may be affected by under-recording of some ofﬁces. However, only 27 per cent of the 73 ofﬁce-holding governors served in one ofﬁce, while 21 served in two ofﬁces and 21 in all three ofﬁces during their careers (compared to 24 and 6 per cent of non-governors). Once again, ¹³⁷ These families were those of Branston, Clarke, Hardy, Hayward, Lewes, Lynch, Marlow, Mitchell, Newton, Parker, Partridge, Richardson, Skinner, and Woodgate. ¹³⁸ George Morgan and George Star were governors of the school only, while Thomas Star, Robert Eyves, and Thomas Dunham were governors of the almshouses only. See Dorset RO D/SHA D1 Sherborne Almshouse Assembly Minute Book, 1590–1756; S. 235 A2/1/1 Sherborne School Governors Minute Book, 1591–1850.

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individually governors were often involved deeply in parish government, even when collectively they only dominated the (apparently prestigious) position of churchwarden. They may also have been wealthier than the other ‘inhabitants’ of the town. Although there are no usable parish rates for Sherborne in this period, eighteen governors can be identiﬁed on the 1664 Hearth Tax, paying on a median of six hearths, or 1 1/2-times the parish median, an assessment that was slightly higher than the levels for ofﬁcers and members of the vestry, shown in Table 2.2.¹³⁹ As in Dedham and East Bergholt, there were also some indications of a dynastic element, with two generations of governors bearing the names Richard Avoke, John Chetnol, John Fisher, Hugh Hodges, John Oak, and three men named William Sansom, while thirteen other surnames occur repeatedly in these records.¹⁴⁰ No doubt the oligarchic tendencies of these quasi-parochial charities and institutions could be multiplied by other examples. Even so, it is difﬁcult to determine whether such bodies exercised a formative power over the identity of the rulers of these parishes. Our perspective is circumscribed by these institutional sources, which largely exclude other forms of identiﬁcation. None of these three charitable foundations encompassed all of the potential ‘chief inhabitants’ in their settlements. Their membership was always restricted, possibly by familial and friendship networks that are difﬁcult for us to reconstruct.¹⁴¹ Nevertheless, these analyses have also demonstrated why those who attended such meetings, or their ofﬁcial equivalents in the parish, felt able to speak for the other ‘chief inhabitants’, and in the name of the wider rate-paying community. In almost all cases, it is clear that those at the centre of involvement and power in the parish were perceived to be wealthier than the bulk of their neighbours, and that this wealth (as well as their personal inclinations) helped propel them into the most prestigious ofﬁces and institutions. This explains why William Parker believed that as churchwarden he had become a ‘somebody’ in the parish of Myddle, even if neighbours like Richard Gough retained their doubts. As has also been demonstrated, the division between ‘chief ’ and ‘other’ inhabitants was one that implied a difference in ‘substance’—that is, in perceived wealth. However, this was not the only distinction between these groups, or the only way in which suitability for position might be evaluated. If we return to the language of social description used by the rulers of the parish, we ﬁnd that it contains another implicit distinction. The faculty order that conﬁrmed the establishment of the Braintree ‘select’ vestry spoke of the ‘auntientest and better ¹³⁹ The median assessment for the 262 payers in the 1664 Sherborne Hearth Tax was 4 hearths. See Meekings, Dorset Hearth Tax, 43–5. ¹⁴⁰ They were Cooth, Durnford, Fox, Hearn, Lambert, Martin, Oldis, Saunders, Star, Thornton, Whetcombe, Wickham, and Williams. ¹⁴¹ For a preliminary attempt to reconstruct these, see S. D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People (Basingstoke, 1994), 181–207.

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sort of inhabitants’ of the parish,¹⁴² that is the most substantial men, but also those who were ‘well established’ or with deepest roots in the town. The ‘ordinances and constitutions’ of Godalming in 1620 stated that ‘no man shall set up and use any trade … unless he be an Ancient Inhabitant’ or had served his apprenticeship there.¹⁴³ Julia Merritt has noted that in early modern Westminster the phrase ‘ancients of the parish’ became synonymous with membership of the parish vestry.¹⁴⁴ Certainly, a petition against London ‘select’ vestries in 1696 complained that such vestrymen often assumed ‘to themselves the name of Ancients’.¹⁴⁵ As Adam Fox has illustrated, the term was employed most often in depositions to describe and legitimate the testimony of elderly witnesses to events long ago.¹⁴⁶ So in 1632 George Armond, a 69-year old weaver from Coggeshall, Essex, was able to testify that he knew the custom of the manor in respect of copyhold ﬁnes, because he remembered his father and father-in-law telling him about it thirty years before, when they were both ‘ancient men’.¹⁴⁷ Steve Hindle has illustrated how length of residence was also used as a component in the overseers’ constructions of the ‘deserving poor’, as at Layston, Hertfordshine, where these were deﬁned as ‘auntient poor … such as have byne a good tyme dwellers’ in the parish.¹⁴⁸ However, just as immediate need sometimes overrode deep roots in decisions over poor relief, long residence was not an essential component of ‘chief ’ status in the parish, as we saw with the example of Thomas Pascall who entered Earls Colne and the ranks of its ofﬁce holders all in one year. Yet, it could be invoked as another dimension of ‘substance’, as shown by another facet of the dispute that ended the Braintree ‘Company of four and twenty’ in 1713. In responding to the complaints of the ‘48’, the company singled out William Powell as one of their tormentors. They attacked him as the ‘cheife Ring leader of this great disorder’. Not only that, but he was just ‘a person that lately went about the County selling stockins’ and had only ‘lately obtained a settlement’ in Braintree. This interloper had possessed the temerity to challenge their decision to appoint Peter Peers as a member of the company. They reported that, in contrast to Powell, Peers was ‘very well knowne to be one of the most antient and substantiall Inhabitants and parishioners’—a convenient match with the membership criteria set by the Bishop of London a century before.¹⁴⁹ Not only was Peers worthy because he was wealthy, he also possessed deep roots in, and (by inference) an afﬁnity with, the parish that Powell simply could not muster. ¹⁴² F. G. Emmison, Early Essex Town Meetings (London and Chichester, 1970, 5. ¹⁴³ R. Nevill, ‘The Corporation of Godalming’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 19 (1904), 132. ¹⁴⁴ J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), 137, 213. ¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 137. ¹⁴⁶ A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 275–9. ¹⁴⁷ NA E.134 7 and 8 Chas. I Hil. 5., Attorney General v. James Bartell, Henry Johnson, Robert Cooke and others, deposition of George Armond, Sr. ¹⁴⁸ Hindle, On the Parish?, 335. ¹⁴⁹ Essex RO (Chelms.) microﬁlm T/A 242.

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Table 2.7. Ratepayers in Beaminster and Newport Pond after datum points at 5-year intervals (%) Index mean Number Rate Beaminster Newport Pond

All ratepayers O + V† All ratepayers O+V

106 58 138 39

200 187.5 80 139

Years after datum∗ 5 10 15 20 76 93 73 95

61 76 59 74

46 60 50 69

37 50 38 54

25

30

35

40

24 36 33 44

18 31 28 33

13 24 18 28

11 19 15 13

1655–65 ∗ datum points: Newport Pond = 1661–5 rate-paying cohort; Beaminster = 1661 rate-paying cohort. † O + V = ofﬁcers and vestrymen.

In this instance, substance and residence were invoked in a slightly desperate attempt to justify the Company’s continuing control over its membership. Was this all merely rhetoric, or is there any underlying evidence to suggest that parishes generally were under the control of groups who represented the settled minority, as well as those of greatest ‘credit’? Table 2.7 compares the residential experiences of the general body of ratepayers and those who were also ofﬁcers or vestrymen in the parishes of Beaminster in Dorset and Newport Pond in Essex. As noted above, these parishes have rates surviving at least at annual intervals for the second half of the seventeenth century. This allows us to examine the length of time over which individuals paid rates, and therefore to get some idea of their length of residence in the community. The table focuses on ratepayers who paid rates in the two parishes in the year 1662, and illustrates how many of them continued to pay rates in subsequent years. It compares this general experience with that of two ofﬁce-holding cohorts—ofﬁcers and vestrymen in Beaminster between 1655 and 1665, and their peers in Newport Pond between 1661 and 1665. Table 2.7 shows two trends. First, by the end of the period under observation, similar (and small) proportions of both groups remained in their parishes, generally around 10–20 per cent of those paying rates 40 years earlier. Even this ﬁgure may overstate the extent of continuity if, for example, a father was succeeded by a son of the same name, without any gap or change in assessment. Secondly, though, in the intervening years the experiences of the two groups diverged. By the early 1670s, ten years after the datum points, about 75 per cent of ofﬁcers and vestrymen remained paying rates compared to around 60 per cent among the general body of ratepayers. In the following ten years 15–20 per cent more ofﬁcers and vestrymen remained on the rate lists compared to the general body of ratepayers. In Newport Pond the gap dropped below 10 per cent only after 22 years, and in Beaminster it took 33 years for the two groups to get within 10 per cent of each other. In both parishes more than half the ofﬁcers and vestrymen of the early 1660s continued to pay rates in the ﬁrst years of

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the 1680s (in Newport one-third continued into the early 1690s, reﬂecting the greater apparent population stability there). These ﬁgures are interesting, but potentially ﬂawed. As was noted above, while rates were to be levied on ‘occupiers of lands’ within a parish, this is no guarantee that such occupiers lived in that parish. Particularly in the small parishes of southern England, that were often packed tightly together, individuals might own or rent ﬁelds in several neighbouring parishes, but live elsewhere. Their patterns of occupation on these extraneous lands may have been different (and of shorter duration) than for the properties where they lived as well as farmed. It is difﬁcult to test this hypothesis without conducting a full family reconstitution to establish all those who were actually living, and registering vital events, in the parish. In the absence of this, it is possible to compare the residential proﬁle of the rate-paying cohort of 1662 with the Hearth Tax payers in these parishes. Whatever the other limitations of the Hearth Tax, it was at least levied on resident householders, and usually within jurisdictions that corresponded to the parish, in lowland England at any rate. Obviously, if the property threshold for paying Hearth Tax was signiﬁcantly different from the thresholds employed in determining eligibility to pay local rates, then we may not be comparing exactly the same social segments. However, given that Hearth Tax collectors were enjoined to exempt those from the tax who did not pay local rates due to the ‘smallness of their estate’, the difference between the groups should not be large, at least in theory.¹⁵⁰ Table 2.8 depicts the results of a comparison between those ratepayers who were and were not also recorded on the Hearth Tax in Beaminister and Newport. There is a dramatic difference between residential longevity of the two groups, with one-third more Hearth Tax payers remaining in these two parishes after 15 years than nonHearth Tax-paying ratepayers, and more than a quarter of all Hearth Tax payers remaining after thirty years, compared to just 11 and 13 per cent of non-Hearth Tax payers. This suggests signiﬁcant differences in the residential behaviour of the two groups, with those who paid rates in 1662–4 but who were not also householders having a much smaller propensity to remain resident for any length of time. We can now set the residence patterns of the ofﬁcers and vestrymen of both parishes in the context of the more stable, Hearth Tax-paying groups of ratepayers. Table 2.9 again shows contrasting trends. In the twenty years after 1662 ofﬁcers and vestrymen in Newport tended to be more likely to remain as ratepayers in the two parishes than the hearth tax paying group in general. However, in the longer term they seem to have been slightly less likely to remain for thirty or forty years—although the chances of anyone remaining resident in ¹⁵⁰ T. Arkell, ‘Printed Instructions for Administering the Hearth Tax’ in K. Schurer and T. Arkell (eds.), Surveying the People. The Interpretation and Use of Documment Sources for the Study of Population in the Later Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1992), 50.

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Table 2.8. Hearth Tax payers and non-payers in Beaminster and Newport Pond after 1662 at 5-year intervals (%) Index mean Number Rate Beaminster Newport Pond ∗

All ratepayers O + V∗ All ratepayers O+V

120 67 30 73

67 200 41 98

Years after 1662 5 10 15 20

25

30

35

40

72 88 70 80

16 36 13 37

11 27 13 29

8 22 7 18

5 13 7 14

52 72 43 69

37 67 27 60

24 51 13 47

O + V = ofﬁcers and vestrymen.

the parish that long were not much better than 1:10. However, in Beaminster, it seems that 10–25 years after the datum point (1663) ofﬁcers were less likely than Hearth Tax payers to remain in the rating lists, but a larger proportion of ofﬁcers continued paying rates into the 1690s. This was due in part to the lifecycle, because 25 of the 58 ofﬁcers and vestrymen entered the lists of ratepayers in the 1630s, and died between the 1670s and early 1690s—implying that ofﬁcers and ratepayers were generally older than the bulk of the ratepayers at any given time. Tables 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9 give us a different perspective on the ﬁgures for the average number of years served, shown in Tables 2.5 and 2.6. Ofﬁcers and vestrymen seem to have been drawn from the more stable section of the rate-paying householders, a group that was in itself still quite mobile (or short-lived). In fact, stability may have been more signiﬁcant in explaining their participation than prosperity per se. In Beaminster while 52 per cent of the 139 vestrymen between 1630 and 1719 paid assessments that were higher than the parish averages across these years, 92 per cent of them paid rates for longer than the parish average of twelve years. The situation was similar, if less extreme, in Newport, with 38 per cent of the 135 ofﬁcers and vestrymen between 1659 and 1705 paying higher than average rates, but 70 per cent paying rates for longer than the average of ten years. Clearly ofﬁcers and vestrymen occupied more secure ‘ecological niches’ that enabled them to remain longer in the parish than many of their neighbours. For a proportion, at least, this stability may have been a function of greater-than-average levels of wealth, which protected them from the routine, short-range geographical mobility that punctuated the lives of many of the less prosperous village inhabitants. This stability (and prosperity) allowed them more time to accumulate responsibilities, so that they became the acknowledged ‘ancient and better sort of inhabitants’ of their community, and the obvious choice as its rulers (in their own eyes, at least). One ﬁnal example can add further detail to this picture. This comes from another Essex parish, Earls Colne. Elsewhere it has been noted that ofﬁcers and vestrymen in Earls Colne were more likely to have owned land in the parish,

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Table 2.9. Hearth Tax payers in Beaminster and Newport Pond: all ratepayers and ofﬁcer and vestry groups after 1662 at 5-year intervals (%) Index mean Number Rate Beaminster Newport Pond ∗

All ratepayers O + V∗ All ratepayers O+V

68 58 73 39

67 187.5 98 139

Years after 1662 5 10 15 20

25

30

35

40

88 93 80 95

36 36 37 44

27 31 29 33

22 24 18 28

13 19 14 13

72 76 69 74

67 60 60 69

51 50 47 54

O + V = ofﬁcers and vestrymen.

and for longer than those ratepayers who were never ofﬁcers.¹⁵¹ This suggests that some of the former group possessed deeper roots in the community than the latter. While some ofﬁcers and vestrymen did have longer family histories in the village, in other respects the picture was mixed by the mid-eighteenth century. Table 2.10 depicts the previous rate-paying history of those ratepayers taxed in 1750, compared with ofﬁcers and vestrymen among this cohort. Although conﬁned to a more limited chronological span than the analyses of Beaminster and Newport Pond, this table illustrates the same pattern, with a gap opening up between the two groups in the ﬁve to twenty years prior to 1750, and narrowing among those who ﬁrst paid rates before 1730. Among this 1750 cohort, the 33 individuals who had served as ofﬁcers and vestrymen paid rates on average for sixteen years, where non-ofﬁcers in 1750 had paid them for an average only ten years. This was not the whole story, though. The Earls Colne materials amassed by Alan Macfarlane allow us to uncover more details about the possible length of residence of the two groups. Searching the Macfarlane website, it is possible to identify the ﬁrst documented mention of each of these 68 ratepayers in the parish records. This produces some interesting inconsistencies with the analysis of rate paying, but broadly similar trends overall. Most signiﬁcantly, this approach doubles the length of time that the individual can be shown to have been resident in, or connected with, Earls Colne. For ofﬁcers and vestrymen it increases the average length of time in which they had some connection to the parish from sixteen years to thirty-two years, for non-ofﬁcers it increases from ten to twenty-one years, on average. It also illustrates that only 25 out of the 68 ratepayers (37 per cent) in 1750 can be identiﬁed as having been born in the parish (14 ofﬁcers and 11 nonofﬁcers), a ﬁgure that may be representative of the wider adult population of the village.¹⁵² ¹⁵¹ French, ‘Social Status’, 88–93. ¹⁵² See www.alanmacfarlane.com Earls Colne sources, John Brasier (b. 1718) [7402280], Thomas Brewster (b. 1708) [7302615]; Thomas Hales, Jr. (b. 1699) [7204563], Thomas King (b. 1701) [7300620], John Leaper, Jr. (b. 1705) [7301826], John Newton (b. c.1690) [23900570], John

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Table 2.10. Ratepayers in Earls Colne, 1722–1750: all ratepayers in 1750 compared to ofﬁcers and vestrymen before 1750 (%) Number

All ratepayers Ofﬁcers and vestrymen

68 33

Index mean

5

24 90

76 91

Parish Years before 1750 10 15 20 59 76

44 64

26 36

25 15 21

In part, this lengthening of the period of residence in or association with the parish is merely a corrective to the relatively short period of time for which rates are available in Earls Colne. However, it also illustrates some potential inconsistencies in basing estimations of length of residence on rate paying. William Harvey, a Quaker born in Earls Colne in 1690, seemingly never paid rates on any property in the parish until 1744. His was the most extreme example, but for those not born in the parish the median time lag between their ﬁrst recorded appearance in the parish and ﬁrst rate payment was 9 1/2 years. This was despite another 12 individuals emulating the pattern of Thomas Pascall and paying rates the ﬁrst year they entered the parish.¹⁵³ Clearly, therefore, using rates to calculate length of residence contains problems, but when corrected by other evidence the Earls Colne materials continue to show a clear pattern, with those serving in parish ofﬁce having resided longer by 1750 than those who had not done so. In Earls Colne, there is sufﬁcient evidence to explain these trends in individual terms. Although the owner-occupying yeomen-farmers were in decline here, as Tifﬁn (b. 1690) [7202301], all of whom were ofﬁcers and vestrymen. William Benson (b. c.1700) [10400165], Samuel Hales (b. 1708) [7302692], William Harvey (b. 1690) [9300313], John Osborne (b. 1701) [7300471], Richard Pratt (b. 1719) [7402728], John Williamson (b. 1707) [7302442], Jarvis Williston (b. 1686) [7201555], all of whom were ofﬁcers, but not vestry men. Benjamin Crabb (b. c.1687) [7202200]—father of Edward Crabb (b. 1715) [7401361] and brother of William Crabb (b. 1696) [7203997], William Ellis (b. 1693) [7203249], Samuel Guyon, Jr. (b. 1712) [7400508], Edward Marvil (b. 1718) [7402470], James Rayner (b. 1722) [7500677], John Smith (b. 1702) [7300921], Plampin Wenden (b. 1718) [7402250], John White, Jr. (b. 1717) [7401891] and Thomas Williston (b. 1707) [7302431], all of whom were neither ofﬁcers nor vestry men. For levels of population mobility at this time, see R. Tinley and D. Mills, ‘Population Turnover in an Eighteenth-Century Lincolnshire Parish in Comparative Context’, Local Population Studies, 52 (1994), 36; G. Nair, Highley: The Development of a Community 1550–1880 (Oxford, 1988), 149; B. Stapleton, ‘Family Strategies: Patterns of Inheritance in Odiham, Hampshire, 1525–1850’, Continuity and Change, 14 (1999), 387; L. Boothman, ‘Mobility and Stability in Long Melford, Suffolk in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Local Population Studies, 62 (1999), 38; M. Escott, ‘Residential Mobility in a Late Eighteenth-Century Parish: Binﬁeld, Berkshire, 1779–1801’, Local Population Studies, 40 (1988), 23. ¹⁵³ That is, Jeffrey Cook (1735) [1102954], George Fromont (1735) [1102954], Thomas Man (1733) [11000685], Edward Wash (1722) [10700005], Samuel Smith, surgeon, (1740) [11200594], Francis Martin (1747) [11400039], John Fincham (1750) [11402186], Samuel Fitch (1726) [10800245], Rev. Mr Fournier (1750) [11402186], Matthew Mole (1741) [11201671], and Jehu Shave (1738) [11102991].

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elsewhere by the mid-eighteenth century, a core remained, and their presence was felt in parish ofﬁce and on the vestry.¹⁵⁴ They included Thomas Hales, Oliver Johnson, John Newton, John Osborne, and George Wall. Hales’s family had held their copyhold since 1611, Johnson’s (wife’s) since 1637, Newton’s since 1624, Osborne’s since 1649, and Wall’s since 1690. John Harrington, from neighbouring Great Tey, joined them in 1716, when he bought 140 acres from the diarist Ralph Josselin’s grandchildren. Between them, they owned 441 acres out of the total copyhold acreage of 1,079 acres, which was an important reason for their heavy involvement in running the parish. By the 1740s, though, their ranks were swelled by large leasehold farmers. These included John Leaper, Jr. (husband of the niece of John Harrington), who succeeded his father as tenant to one of the large (140-acre plus) farms on the former manorial demesne. Thomas Pascall was tenant to another 140-acre farm there called Newhouse. John Tifﬁn leased a 95-acre freehold farm called Prucknetts, while Thomas Sewell, an attorney, leased the 88 acres of copyhold from his ‘cousins’ the Cressener family, and owned 114 acres of free and copyhold elsewhere. There was also an assortment of tradesmen and retailers who held some land, but who were not primarily farmers. These included the maltster John Unwin, who leased 13 acres, and the clothier George Wall, who owned 14 acres of copyhold. Meanwhile, John Brasier, a fellmonger or tailor, did not own or rent any land in the parish, and Thomas Brewster, a wheelwright, owned just a half-acre copyhold plot. Jeffrey Cook a carpenter arrived from neighbouring Halstead in 1723 and owned two tiny holdings amounting to 13 perches until his death in 1755, while the shopkeeper Abraham Dugard held a 3/4-acre copyhold that came via his marriage. This pattern reﬂected the increasing polarization in land ownership (if not access to land) in the village, suggested in the previous chapter. Even in a largely agrarian community such as Earls Colne, by the mideighteenth century the parish rulers were a diverse group, no longer merely representing the larger ‘yeomen’ farmers, or reﬂecting a ‘static’ population tied to the land. Instead, they illustrate the transformation of the agrarian economy and the replacement of land and acreage by wider estimations of ‘wealth’ in the determination of ‘substance’ and ‘ﬁtness’ to exercise authority. The acceptance of geographic mobility was also intrinsic to this process. Despite contemporary preferences for and prejudices about the superiority of land over other forms of ‘substance’, and despite the assumption that the ‘ancient’ families would (and should) rule, newcomers had to be incorporated, provided they ﬁtted the appropriate social criteria. This is the fundamental feature of these patterns exhibited by the parish rulers. The foregoing analyses have identiﬁed several important common elements, ¹⁵⁴ See H. R. French and R. W. Hoyle, ‘English Individualism Refuted—and Reasserted: The Land Market in Earls Colne (Essex), 1550–1750’, Economic History Review, 56/4 (2003), 595–622.

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across many disparate parishes in provincial England. Those who exercised authority tended to be of greater-than-average perceived wealth, which was reﬂected in their tendency to remain in the lists of ratepayers longer than many of their neighbours. Once in ofﬁce, they coalesced into ‘core groups’ of the active, surrounded by a wider circle of occasional participants. Sometimes, in the absence of formally restricted institutions, they adapted other, semi-ofﬁcial charities or corporate bodies into ad hoc ‘vestries’, so as to concentrate ﬁnancial scrutiny and social authority in their hands. These trends are apparent only when one works painstakingly through lists of attendances and engages in extensive exercises of nominal record linkage. They are also trends that appear, from the language of social description employed by contemporaries, to have been perfectly obvious, accepted and regarded (by those who beneﬁted from them) as utterly desirable. Beneath the euphemism and evasion of the terminology of ‘inhabitants’, ‘the better inhabitants’, the ‘major part of the parish’, or those of ‘greatest ability and substance’, there lay this common understanding. It was an understanding based, like estimations of credit, on ill-deﬁned and often unarticulated notions of ‘worth’—in terms of ﬁnancial attainment, social integration, and moral authority. These were matters of unwritten understandings or ‘gut-instinct’, rather than explicit hierarchies of deﬁned status criteria. In this sense, then, contemporary illustrations of status, such as the income-based criteria employed in 1629 by the disgruntled parishioners of Great Yeldham, only ever tell us part of the story. They indicate differences in ‘substance’, but do not encapsulate them, because substance was a matter of social consequence as well as ﬁnancial magnitude. While these two facets were related, they were not necessarily connected in direct proportion to each other. The fact remains, though, that across a wide variety of geographically dispersed settlements the rulers of the parish seem to have occupied a similar position in relation to the bulk of the other rate-paying and non-rate-paying residents. The similarity of these results implies the operation of some common forms of social estimation. The problem is that all the measures of ‘wealth’ employed so far have been relative rather than absolute, depicting prosperity in relation to a parish mean. Obviously, these could vary enormously between parishes. For example, the median overseers’ rate paid per month by the 207 largely wealthy ratepayers of the Essex cloth town of Braintree in 1692 was 6s. 8d., whereas two years later in rural Sydling St Nicholas, Dorset, it was only 1s. 3d. per head per month among the 42 assessed residents.¹⁵⁵ Those who exceeded the median in each of these parishes were of greatly differing wealth despite their common relationship to that median, and may not have regarded themselves as part of the same social group, even though they were likely to have undertaken similar ¹⁵⁵ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/11/3 Braintree Overseers’ Rate 16 Aug. 1705; Dorset RO Pe/MSN OV 1/1 Mosterton Overseers’ Accounts, 1699–1753, rate dated 6 Apr. 1706. This variation is also emphasized by Pitman, ‘Tradition and Exclusion’, 35–43.

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administrative responsibilities. Despite the shared administrative imperatives, social perspectives, and terminology of ‘inhabitants’, it is not clear that these experiences created a group identity among those who participated in them—to the exclusion of all the elements of material, cultural, and social difference that existed between the ‘inhabitants’ of particular settlements and within or between regions. We can gain a better sense of some of these similarities or differences by substituting ﬁxed indicators of ‘wealth’ for the variable, proportionate measures used so far, in order to compare the rulers of the parish against a common scale of material prosperity. If shared relative prosperity was matched by parallels in the style of life experienced by these groups, we can move from identifying common forms of social estimation to exploring the shared material and cultural foundations of such judgements. This raises two contrasting propositions—either, that the patterns of authority in the parish were an expression of underlying ‘middling’ social norms, seen within the material culture of the home; or, that this common administrative experience actually concealed different, even divergent, social values and groupings within the ranks of the ‘middling’. The next chapter explores these propositions by comparing the patterns of material consumption (as revealed in probate inventories) between ofﬁce-holding and non-ofﬁce-holding groups—that is, between ‘chief’ and other ‘inhabitants’.

3 ‘Chief Inhabitants’ and ‘Material Culture’ H of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have focused many of their efforts to deﬁne the existence of a ‘bourgeoisie’ or a ‘middle class’ on explorations of the ‘material culture’ and consumption patterns of those who left probate inventories.¹ In doing so, they have made a number of assumptions about who belonged to this group, and what types of object denote the emergence of a ‘middle-class’ style of life. This chapter sets out to illustrate these assumptions, and then to examine them in the light of the social hierarchies uncovered in the preceding examination of ofﬁce holding and local status, in order to modify our understandings of social identity and material culture in this period. As Sarah Pennell has noted, one of the main difﬁculties we face in assessing the economic or social signiﬁcance of ‘consumption’ and ‘material culture’ is the divergence between the conclusions of qualitative and quantitative analyses.² The former have tended to give prominence to the role of ‘middling’, in creating an eighteenth-century ‘consumer revolution’, primarily through the medium of the ‘English Urban Renaissance’.³ The latter, particularly recent studies, have been much more cautious in their conclusions about the extent of eighteenth-century ‘consumerism’, and less willing to single out the ‘middle sort’ or ‘class’ as the catalyst for it.⁴ In part this divergence is due to differences of methodology. Qualitative studies rely on impressionistic evidence, and are ¹ In the following discussion, the study of ‘material culture’ is deﬁned as the attempt to reconstruct the social meaning or signiﬁcance in patterns of the possession or absence of material objects in early modern households. These objects do not convey this social meaning simply by their presence or absence, and this has to be inferred by investigating the social proﬁle and activities of the people that owned them. See M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London, 1996), 48–9. ² S. Pennell, ‘Consumption and Consumerism in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 42/2 (1999), 551–2. ³ On the eighteenth-century ‘consumer revolution’, see N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1983); J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York, 1993); Earle, Middle Class; Langford, Commercial People, 59–122; Berg, Luxury, 199–246. For the ‘English Urban Renaissance’, see Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 311–20. ⁴ Carole Shammas identiﬁed a link between ‘wealth’ and levels of consumption, but did not locate that wealth exclusively in the pockets of the ‘middling’. C. Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990); Lorna Weatherill gave prominence to the consumption

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sensitive to the ﬁrst documentary mention of a new social event, fashion or consumption good, and to descriptions of the range of such activities or items. They can be inﬂuenced by the rhetorical imperatives of the social commentaries on which they rely, and tend not to quantify such activities, or the likely proportion of participants in the population. Quantitative studies have tried increasingly to demonstrate signiﬁcant statistical relationships between patterns of consumption, and a range of possible causal inﬂuences, such as wealth, social status, urban location, and proximity to markets or to the metropolis, without being able to single out any one of these as the prime factor. They tend to focus on sources—notably probate inventories—that indicate patterns of ownership, but which are intrinsically incapable of explaining them. As a consequence, while quantitative studies have been unable to verify the signiﬁcance of the ‘middle sort’ as consumers, or conﬁrm the importance of consumption in deﬁning the ‘middle sort’ neither have they been able to refute or replace this hypothesis. There is a long and well-known intellectual genealogy concerning the connections between consumption, the ‘bourgeoisie’ and English commercialization extending back through the work of Christopher Hill and R. H. Tawney to Weber and Marx.⁵ More recently, as the ‘relations to the means of consumption’, have been reinstated alongside those of production in historical analyses, so consumption patterns and processes have been accorded an increasingly formative role in social identity, particularly where the English ‘middle classes’ are concerned.⁶ Peter Borsay has articulated the causal elements of this argument. He has asserted that ‘the really dynamic element in post-Restoration England’ was ‘the rapid expansion of the ‘‘middling’’ groups in society’.⁷ In these he includes lawyers, doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, military and naval ofﬁcers, the London mercantile elite, munitions manufacturers, and prosperous tradesmen and craftsmen. They were important in the expansion of consumption and display in patterns of urban ‘middling’ consumers in her monograph study of probate inventories, L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1720 (2nd. ed., London and New York, 1996). More recently, she has downplayed the signiﬁcance of ‘wealth’ or urban residence, in L. Scammell, ‘Town versus Country: The Property of Everyday Consumption in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in J. Stobart and A. Owens (eds), Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700–1900 (Ashgate, 2000), 26–49. Overton and colleagues have also identiﬁed multiple causes behind the patterns of ownership in probate inventories, and questioned the extent to which they indicate the process of ‘consumption’. Overton and colleagues, Production and Consumption, 137–69. ⁵ See e.g., C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964), 121–40; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1922), 179–96. In both studies, the material prosperity of the ‘rising middle classes’ was, to some extent, an unintended consequence of their capitalist accumulation and not the main focus of research. In this they followed Weber and Marx. See M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (London, 1930), 155–84; K. Marx, Capital, i, chs. 26–9. ⁶ See D. Miller, ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History: A Polemic by Way of Introduction’, in id. (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London, 1995), 1–57. ⁷ Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 197.

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towns in this period not just because they enjoyed increasing prosperity, but also because they engaged in social competition. He insists that: the possession of surplus wealth is … the key to a different style of living. Above all, surplus wealth allows entry to what may be called the world of social competition. Therefore, given an increase in the numbers of people holding surplus wealth, one would also expect a growth in that part of society engaged in ‘‘the pursuit of status’’.⁸

Towns were arenas in which this pursuit was conducted, because they concentrated settlement within a limited area, putting the socially competitive in close physical proximity to one another, and providing the stage and the audience for their performances. As many ‘county’ towns developed the social amenities of resorts, so they attracted and retained the rural gentry beyond the duration of the Assizes or the Fair. These incomers provided social targets for the aspiring ‘middle ranks’, intensifying this competition still further. Thus, towns were crucial to the process of the creation of the ‘middling’, because their concentrations of demand fostered the trading, retail and manufacturing functions that in turn generated the surplus wealth to fund the social aspirations of the pursuers of status. The relationship was mutually reinforcing: towns created the ‘middling’; the ‘middling’ (re-)created towns. Borsay states categorically that the socially competitive ‘middle ranks’ were created by these urban crucibles: ‘however ﬁne a man’s mind and clothes, they are of little use in the pursuit of status unless displayed amongst those people willing and able to compete with him. The village could hardly provide this competition’.⁹ In these ways, Borsay identiﬁes ‘consumption’ as an integral component of ‘social competition’, and argues that this can ﬂourish effectively only within a large-enough constituency of potential participants. Since social competition involves ‘conspicuous’ spending, ‘surplus wealth’ is a prerequisite for involvement, as are social aspirations. The main possessors of these qualities, the urban ‘middle ranks’, are therefore creators of, and created by, this process. As this happens, they slide between the two historic conjugations of the term ‘bourgeois’, as noun and adjective—they change from being mere town dwellers, to becoming the inventors of a distinct social and material culture that was speciﬁc to them. Studies by Earle, Hunt, Barry, and Smail have regarded this culture and the social bonds it created as the deﬁning element of the group, and have depicted the century after 1660 as the time of its formation.¹⁰ The main question in relation to this interpretation is whether it actually amounted to the creation of a distinctive ‘middle-class culture’ and thus a distinct ‘middle class’, at this time rather than during any other epoch? The problem is that these developments appear less original when viewed in a longer historical perspective. In particular, historians of the late medieval period have ⁸ Ibid., 172. ⁹ Ibid. 176–7. ¹⁰ Earle, Middle Class, ch. 1; Hunt, Middling Sort, ch. 2; Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, 84–112; Smail, Middle Class Culture, 93–106, 164–87.

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questioned whether the formation of an urban ‘middling’ identity was unique to the early modern era. Anthony Pollard has argued that ‘The ﬁfteenth century also witnessed in the town and country the emergence of a distinctive middling sort, the mediocres, as they were identiﬁed in some towns, with their own culture and values. The symbolic rank of this middling sort is the yeoman’.¹¹ Not only that, but ﬁfteenth-century towns also contained a stratum of urban ‘gentry’, who exhibited the trappings of gentility in their households, but who derived the bulk of their income from non-landed sources. Indeed, Rosemary Horrox suggests that ‘one should be wary of talking too readily of an urban elite ‘copying’ the culture and attitudes of the land-owning gentry of the shires. Similarities may well be a matter of shared outlook rather than conscious emulation’.¹² So, a distinct urban ‘middling’ identity may not be unique to the post-1660 period, and the urban ‘pseudo-gentry’ might not originate at this time either. In fact, Horrox suggests that ‘such men may not have been new’ even in the ﬁfteenth century.¹³ Clearly, the late medieval population was much smaller than its seventeenthcentury counterpart, as was the number of urban residents equipped to participate in the ‘world of social competition’. This would undoubtedly have affected their cumulative impact as consumers, and as the creators of a distinct culture of urban ‘gentility’. However, the available evidence suggests one of two alternatives. Either these prosperous urban dwellers may already have been ‘bourgeois’ in both senses of the term, or the post-1660 era witnessed the extension of this stratum to a wider group of people, via a greater range of objects, activities and values, but not as part of the creation of a new social entity. If we choose the latter interpretation, then instead of identifying an ‘urban renaissance’ or the ‘making of the middle class’, we might be illustrating a further stage in the appropriation or reinvention of gentility in the urban context—part of the enduring appeal to urban dwellers of this social model from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This theme will be addressed more fully below. Qualitative studies that have chosen to depict material consumption after the Restoration as an expression of a new and distinctive ‘middle-class’ culture have emphasized the upper echelon of this group as leaders in this process of social formation. Peter Earle’s multifaceted study of prosperous London tradesmen highlights a social division among such people. He notes that ‘what one might call class as well as wealth affected the level of domestic consumption’.¹⁴ In particular, occupational groups exhibited different patterns in the furnishing of ¹¹ A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England 1399–1509 (Harlow, 2000), 189. Tripartite social divisions between the ‘potentiores’, ‘mediocres’, and ‘inferiores’ were evident in King’s Lynn and Lincoln in the early ﬁfteenth century. See D. M. Palliser, ‘Urban Society’, in R. Horrox (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1994), 140. ¹² R. Horrox, ‘The Urban Gentry of the Fifteenth Century’, in J. A. F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1988), 37. ¹³ Ibid. 38. ¹⁴ Earle, Middle Class, 292.

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the socially conspicuous ‘best bedroom’, even when they possessed inventoried estates of similar size. Thirty-eight of Earle’s sample of 162 estates valued at more than £2,000 had best bedrooms worth less than £15, when the usual ﬁgure among testators possessed of such estates was £20–30. Earle argues that the difference marked an occupational and status divide, between what David Cressy has described as ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ trades—between those whose practitioners were or were not required to get their hands dirty:¹⁵ ‘most merchants, mercers and drapers made very sure that they would not be found dead in a bedroom worth less than £15, a fear not shared by such ungenteel tradesmen as builders, wine coopers, cheesemongers, coal mongers, soapmakers, distillers, printers and cloth ﬁnishers’.¹⁶ Earle suggests that the former group was most likely to be at the forefront of new trends in domestic furnishing. He asks ‘who were the people who had already abandoned serge bed curtains before 1680, who already had cane chairs in the 1670s, china before 1690 or tea-making equipment before 1700?’ Such items were not in themselves particularly expensive, and were available to all those within his sample of prosperous tradesmen, but only certain sections within this group were ‘early adopters’ of these goods. These were, primarily, ‘very wealthy men who might well have had the entrée to West End houses’ or ‘tradesmen with an aristocratic business who would see the new fashions when they delivered goods to their clients’ houses’.¹⁷ The implication is that these social aspirations inﬂuenced their patterns of domestic furnishing and caused them to emulate the fashions of the aristocratic elite, and that eventually the bulk of the London ‘middle class’ followed them. This led to ‘striking similarities’ in the consumption patterns of ‘those who had accumulated a few hundred pounds and those who were worth ten times as much’, and contributed to a shared sense of social identity, despite marked differences in income, authority, and connections.¹⁸ Earle’s study has many dimensions, and for him the metropolitan ‘middle class’ was created in a social milieu that was itself an amalgam of many different symptomatic experiences, of ‘vaguely middle-class things … such as clocks, laudanum, ﬁre insurance, street-lighting, novels, newspapers, tea-drinking, and the three-piece suit’.¹⁹ It shares some of the problems of qualitative studies highlighted above, particularly its concentration on the most vivid or extensive examples, as well as the question of whether the experience of London society is representative of the country as a whole. Nevertheless, some of the trends identiﬁed by Earle have received support from more recent quantitative analyses. While Carole Shammas emphasized the importance of wealth in determining the value and variety of household ‘consumption goods’, and Lorna Weatherill downplayed the inﬂuence of emulation, their ﬁndings have been questioned by ¹⁵ D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 130. ¹⁶ Earle, Middle Class, 292. ¹⁷ Ibid., 299. ¹⁸ Ibid. 332. ¹⁹ Ibid., 336.

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the most recent, most extensive study of probate inventories, by Overton and colleagues.²⁰ Their comparison of Kent and Cornish inventories suggests that while the propensity to own new or fashionable items increased with the value of household goods, this had less of an effect than geographical location. For example, ‘an increase in the material wealth of the inventory by £50 will change the odds of a mirror being present by 1.13 times. On the other hand an inventory is 4.2 times more likely to include a mirror in this period if it is in Kent rather than Cornwall’.²¹ In line with Earle’s ﬁndings in the metropolis, they identify a social trend in the ﬁrst appearance of goods in inventories. Generally speaking those households involved in service, retail or maritime activities were much more likely to include new material goods. However, it was the gentry (especially in Kent) who were the pioneers with these items … with the highest adoption rates in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century. This is evident with mirrors, jacks and upholstered furniture, but it is also the case with clocks, chests of drawers, new tables and window curtains.²²

This is slightly at odds with Weatherill’s observations that the gentry tended to lag behind the higher-status urban trades in the possession of these goods.²³ However, they note that despite possessing such items earlier ‘the gentry were not necessarily pioneers of new forms of social behaviour associated with new ways of cooking and eating, and with the presence of tea or coffee’.²⁴ Here they lagged behind the retail, service, and maritime sectors, but were consistently ahead of those engaged in farming, except in the possession of clocks. These differences lead Overton and colleagues to emphasize a three-stage process of social and material distinction. New items appear ﬁrst in the inventories of the gentry in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century, perhaps as a result of their greater disposable income and closer connections with London fashions. They occur next in the inventories of prosperous urban dwellers between 1660 and 1700 (particularly retail and service occupations). Finally, in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century items such as mirrors, chests of drawers, and upholstered ²⁰ Shammas, Pre-Industrial Consumer, 173; Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, 211. Overton and colleagues point out a deﬁciency in Shammas’s analysis, where she uses the total value of the inventory as an indicator of wealth, but then assesses consumption patterns on the value of goods in the inventory. This causes two possible distortions. The higher total value of the inventory (i.e. its ‘wealth’ in Shammas’s measure) may well be a function of the higher value of household goods (‘consumption goods’ in Shammas’s analysis), so the two elements are dependent on each other. Secondly, inventories for different occupations tend to have varying degrees of trade stock or capital goods included, ensuring that their position in the ‘wealth’ hierarchy will be affected arbitrarily. For example, the total value of a farmer’s inventory will depend on when it was taken in the agrarian cycle, and he will appear ‘wealthiest’ at harvest time, when the bulk of his trade stock will be recorded in the inventory. Overton et. al., Production and Consumption, 138–9, 165. ²¹ Overton et al., Production and Consumption, 147. ²² Ibid. 151. ²³ Weatherill’s sample of gentry inventories may be unrepresentative because it excludes wealthier gentry inventories proved in the Prerogative Courts of Canterbury and York. See Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, 202. ²⁴ Overton et. al, Production and Consumption, 151.

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furniture become distributed more widely among the moderately prosperous in urban and rural areas alike. This raises important questions about what is represented by this pattern of development. Does it illustrate emulation and social competition rippling outwards from the gentry, in the process creating a ‘middle-class’ material culture? Is it merely an example of existing social distinctions being reinforced by new trends in material culture? Overton and colleagues’ subsidiary ﬁnding that ‘changes in behaviour and social rituals, such as utensils for hot drinks, saucepans and forks … appear to originate with those involved in the professional services, often, but not exclusively in an urban setting’, implies that these trends show more than just a process of simple social emulation.²⁵ Their continued identiﬁcation of an ‘urban factor’ inﬂuencing the possession (and possibly the supply) of these new goods also provides some support to the notion of a ‘bourgeois’ material culture in this period, contrary to the recent conclusions of Scammell.²⁶ However, such ﬁndings do not, in themselves, demonstrate that these patterns of ownership reﬂect the conscious creation of Earle’s ‘middle-class style of life’ in the provinces, or that urban dwellers outside London were also fashioning a distinct, ‘bourgeois’ material culture that represented their burgeoning sense of a common identity and identiﬁcation with each other. Instead, they may reﬂect the distinction observed by Earle, between ‘genteel’ and ‘ungenteel’ trades, and mark a social boundary deﬁned by aspirations to gentility, rather than the manifestation of a more conscious ‘middling’ identity. Such aspirations, and the resultant ‘pseudo-gentility’ have been the subject of considerable historical research.²⁷ Through the period from 1660 to 1760 these studies have illustrated the working of two parallel trends. First, there was the continued transformation of ‘gentility’ from a social phenomenon that depended upon the possession of innate qualities of birth, breeding, and broad acres, to one comprised of a series of status signiﬁers that could be attained by those with sufﬁcient wealth. Secondly, and connected inherently to this, it appears that a wider segment of society was appropriating these signiﬁers, extending into the ranks of the ‘middling’ in both urban and rural areas alike. The ﬁrst of these trends has featured in a number of studies, notably those concerned with changing deﬁnitions of gentility, and those seeking to chart ²⁵ Ibid., 166. ²⁶ Scammell, ‘Town versus country’, 35–9. ²⁷ A. Everitt, ‘Social Mobility in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 33 (1966), 56–73; ibid, Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century, Department of English Local History, occasional papers, 2nd ser., 1 (Leicester, 1969), 44–9; A. Bryson, ‘The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, in L. Gent and N. Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London, 1990), 136; Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 1–33; French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and learned gentlemen’’ ’, 44–66; Langford, ‘Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, 311–31; H. Berry, ‘Polite Consumption: Shopping in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), 375–94; H. Berry, ‘Sense and Singularity’, in H. R. French and J. Barry (eds), Identity and Agency in England 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 178–99.

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the spread of ‘politeness’ in eighteenth-century society. By the mid-eighteenth century, artists and writers had developed a shorthand by which to depict ‘gentility’, that allowed them to reduce it to the possession of a series of symbols indicating the requisite accomplishments. In this vein, plate two of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress of 1735 depicts the rake in the process of acquiring gentility, having inherited his father’s commercial wealth. He is surrounded by a dancing master, a fencing master, a landscape gardener, a poet, a tailor, a harpsichordist, and a jockey, who symbolize the various accoutrements of gentility—deportment, duelling, design, letters, fashion, music, sporting sociability, and gambling. Similarly, Daniel Defoe was able to depict such ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ in a few pen strokes: We scarce now see a Tradesman’s apprentice come to his ﬁfth year, but he gets a long wig and a sword, and a set of companions suitable … the meanest tradesmen … treat their friends with wine, or punch, or ﬁne ale; and have their parlours set off with the Tea-table and the chocolate-pot; treats and liquors all exotick … very ordinary tradesmen in London keeping at least two maids, and some more, and some a footman or two besides.²⁸

Whether or not it was an accurate description of this metropolitan milieu is less signiﬁcant than the fact that Defoe could embody urban gentility in symbols like the wig and sword, and participation in the social rituals of the hunt, the tea table, and attendance by a liveried footman.²⁹ Gentility itself did not consist of the mere acquisition of these elements, but their deployment in the enactment of this status. As most social commentators were forced to admit, gentility was ‘performative’, and gentlemen could be judged only by appearances and behaviour, rather than innate or ancestral qualities. This meant that the status was stretched to include any man ‘that looks gentleman-like (whether he be so, or not) and has wherewithal to live freely and handsomely’.³⁰ Not surprisingly, by the second half of the eighteenth century, the numbers and occupational proﬁle of those claiming to be ‘gentlemen’ had expanded considerably. Corﬁeld records that in sixteen trade directories from the 1770s and 1780s, 1,375 town dwellers were styled as gentlemen or esquires, of whom 774 (56 per cent) also gave a profession or occupation.³¹ Recently, Paul Langford has pursued these themes further in the guise of ‘politeness’.³² While he extends this theme to include the general reform of public behaviour and cultural change within urban society, he also emphasizes that the distinction between the ‘polite’ and the ‘impolite’ contained an inherent ²⁸ D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (2nd. ed., London, 1727) [STC T071961], 98–9, 106, 114, 115–16. ²⁹ Defoe’s equivocal opinions about ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ are illustrated in M. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), chs. 10–12. ³⁰ G. Miege, The State of England (London, 1691), quoted in Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 9. ³¹ Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 11. ³² Langford, ‘Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, 314–15.

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social threshold. However, he suggests that this was something other than the boundaries implicit in ‘older notions of gentility’, because the distinctions between the polite and impolite ‘could vary to reﬂect localized patterns of wealth. What was polite in Berkeley Square was not necessarily what was polite in Finsbury or Hammersmith, let alone in Shadwell or Wapping’.³³ So politeness was contextual, and the same norms did not apply equally everywhere, yet the distinction between the polite and the impolite was one that was widely understood. The same can be said of ‘gentility’, which was reinvented in the image of its aspirants in many different social settings.³⁴ Individuals sometimes presented themselves in different ways depending on the setting. As the next chapter will demonstrate, the Essex butcher-turned-land agent John Morley presented himself as a plain, uneducated but lucky man to his aristocratic patrons, but projected a more ‘genteel’ ﬁgure in his home parish.³⁵ Whether or not we understand these as two dimensions of ‘gentility’ or ‘politeness’, he presented himself both as genteel and ungenteel, polite and impolite, as it suited his purposes, and with an understanding of how he might be accepted in each context. This was the secret of all successful social chameleons, but it means that the same status description or social bracket may contain within it different, divergent, or even contradictory norms and signiﬁers. This can also be seen in the example of John Marsh, explored by Helen Berry.³⁶ Marsh was a lawyer, and a member of the urban provincial ‘pseudo-gentry’, as well as an enthusiastic and knowledgeable participant in the musical assemblies that characterized the ‘urban renaissance’ in his corner of eighteenth-century Kent. On inheriting a small country estate at the age of 30, he was propelled into ‘county’ society, and into a different form of gentility that he was quick to discover was not to his taste. It consisted of hunting, cards, feasting the tenants and servants, and (most grievously) the opinion that music was a polite entertainment, but not a serious art form. After enduring such philistinism for two years, Marsh retreated to Chichester and safety within the conﬁnes of urban gentility. He had encountered an unfamiliar form of gentility, and had found it impossible to adapt. Signiﬁcantly, though, in the end he decided to abandon the country gentry, but not the concept of gentility itself. He simply moved to a social setting in which he could express his identity in the manner that suited him. The divergent interpretations of gentility expressed by different social groups, and the increasing tendency to judge the status by reference to a variety of signiﬁers illustrate the ﬂexibility of this concept. They also begin to explain the continuing attraction of the concept to this society. As Peter Laslett and Steven Shapin have noted, however it was deﬁned, the rank of gentleman carried assumptions about the probity, authority, and honesty of the person ³³ Ibid., 314. ³⁴ French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 65–6. ³⁵ See also Ibid. 60–3. ³⁶ Berry, ‘Sense and Singularity’, 180–7.

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who occupied it.³⁷ This amounted to a sense of social enfranchisement, by which the gentleman’s word was sufﬁcient, requiring no support from anyone else, and not being subject to qualiﬁcation by anyone else.³⁸ The different deﬁnitions of the status ensured that there were a variety of routes to this goal, but that this was the common objective on which they converged. This was the attraction of ‘gentlemanly’ status particularly for those among the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’ who, as we have seen, were constantly judging and being judged by reference to localized pecking orders and contingent social categories. To be accepted as a ‘gentleman’ was to enter the world of the social elite as a moral equal, at least, while establishing a permanent distance from those who could not be regarded as ‘genteel’ or ‘polite’. In practice this involved a good deal of complex social positioning, and very careful judgement about how far and in what contexts such claims could be made, to avoid the powerful scorn accorded to the parvenu in English society. As such, the reality diverged markedly from the ideal. While writers such as Steele and Addison drafted deﬁnitions that were morally elevated and universally applicable, in fact ‘gentility’ was as dependent on context as any other social category, hence the disparity in who, or what, passed for ‘polite’ in Berkeley Square and Wapping. The only common feature of the concept in these two locations was a shared aspiration for untrammelled social authority, and perhaps also the understanding that those who sought it in the latter area were very unlikely to receive it in the former. As noted above, these impulses to gentility among the upper ranks of urban society were nothing new. They also provide a key to reconciling the historical depictions of material consumption among the ‘middling’. As Earle, Weatherill, and Overton and colleagues have emphasized, differences in patterns of consumption indicate different choices by these consumers. For those within the wide wealth bracket of Earle’s ‘middle class’ or Borsay’s possessors of ‘surplus wealth’ few of the new, fashionable items of household furnishing were priced out of reach. Given this, we can infer that soap boilers without elaborately equipped ‘best bedrooms’ had different consumption priorities, and possibly also different understandings of social status than grocers or drapers who did, despite having similar total inventory valuations. These priorities may reﬂect their differing relationship to the concepts of ‘politeness’ or ‘gentility’, or the differences in the symbols and signiﬁers that these concepts possessed within each of these groups. Either way, this is a more complex process than the emulation postulated by Borsay, or denied by Weatherill. The fact that some urban tradesmen possessed goods found frequently in the inventories of rural gentry does not prove the process of emulation, any more than the absence ³⁷ P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored (London, 1983), 22–52; Shapin, Truth, 42–125. ³⁸ On the signiﬁcance of this in a legal context, see Shepard, ‘Honesty, Worth and Gender’, 99.

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of teapots and forks from some of these Gentry families’ houses refutes it. As has been observed already, goods can be social signiﬁers, but not in and of themselves, only as part of a wider social ‘performance’. In the same way as Defoe’s ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ appropriated certain symbols of gentility, such as the wig and sword, and invested them with social meaning in displays and activities that deﬁned their urban ‘pseudo-gentility’, so some of these household items were also woven into larger social constructs of ‘gentility’ or ‘politeness’. Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether or not the landed gentry originated such uses or participated in them. What matters is whether the sociability of the tea table or the reﬁnement of the fork, W. G. Hoskins’s culture of ‘cushions and conversation’, symbolized genteel behaviour in a particular social context.³⁹ If so, then ‘gentility’ was being emulated, even if the goods or behaviour of the landed gentry were not. This process is easier to assert than it is to demonstrate. What objects were markers of social status, or (in some respects at least) connected to it? This is difﬁcult to determine, because probate inventories generally do not provide evidence about the social meaning of objects, or the motives behind their possession. They merely indicate that the appraisers recorded the presence of a particular item, an action that was not always entirely automatic.⁴⁰ How do we infer such social meaning and motives from these sources? The identiﬁcation of items correlated with ‘wealth’ is relatively straight forward, as long as ‘wealth’ itself is not derived in a circular fashion from inventory valuations. Overton and colleagues have shown how certain items of furniture were new in the period 1600–1750, and have illustrated how they spread from upper to lower ‘wealth’ groups, and how they are (to some degree) correlated positively with material wealth.⁴¹ These items include mirrors, clocks, upholstered furniture, jacks, chests of drawers, new oval or drawing tables, and plates, and to a lesser extent window curtains, knives and forks, utensils for hot drinks, and saucepans.⁴² Scammell has also demonstrated similar positive correlations for most of these ‘new’ items.⁴³ Overton and colleagues emphasize, though, that the presence of ‘new’ items should be seen as part of a cyclical process, which was accompanied by the ³⁹ W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (London, 1957), 199. ⁴⁰ M. Spufford, ‘The Limitations of the Probate Inventory’, in J. Chartres and D. Hey (eds), English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1990), 139–74; Overton and colleagues, Production and Consumption, 14–18. For a sceptical postmodern interpretation of the probate inventory as discourse, see L. C. Orlin, ‘Fictions of the Early Modern Probate Inventory’, in H. S. Turner (ed.), The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York and London, 2002), 51–83. ⁴¹ Spufford, ‘Limitations’, 138–47. ⁴² Ibid. 141–3. The higher the value of an individual item of furniture, the greater its contribution to the total value of the household goods, and so the greater its likely correlation to ‘wealth’ as measured by the latter. Hence upholstered furniture and chests of drawers are likely to register more strongly than relatively inexpensive items like knives and forks. ⁴³ Scammell, ‘Town versus country’, 30–9.

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disappearance of ‘old’ items over time, such as carpets as coverings for tables, cauldrons, and court cupboards.⁴⁴ In this sense, ‘new’ items conveyed social status as long as their novelty was associated with possession by the wealthy, a function that diminished as their distribution spread and their novelty wore off. This might cause us to question the assumption that possession of such goods necessarily marks the owner’s entry into the conspicuously consuming ‘world of social competition’. In addition to these status-bearing novelties, we might also consider the frequency of, and propensity to own, the essential building blocks of the independent household. These included beds, bedsteads, tables, benches, chests, cupboards, and linen. While such items were found in the households of the majority of the inventoried population, they were important and relatively expensive possessions. They formed part of the ‘stock’ from which new households were constructed, and were items of sufﬁcient material and symbolic value to feature frequently in bequests to children. As will be shown below, despite their apparent ubiquity, their frequency and the numbers per household can be correlated positively to prosperity and status. Table 3.1 indicates the occurrence of such items in a sample of 1,131 Essex and Suffolk wills, between 1620 and 1720. As can be seen, while most wills did not make speciﬁc bequests of household items, children and relatives received beds and bedding, cupboards and cooking utensils of various kinds in 10–20 per cent of the wills sampled. Obviously, such goods were signiﬁcant in the formation of households, even if it is difﬁcult to infer much about their status-bearing attributes from these bequests. ‘New’ items occurred much less frequently. Overton and colleagues also emphasize the importance of linen in early modern households, as an expensive ‘consumer Table 3.1. Household items in Essex and Suffolk wills, by category, 1620–1720 ∗

Household item categories 4 5 6

1

2

3

7

1620–79 Percentage N† = 531

101 19.02

59 11.11

80 15.07

45 8.47

1 0.19

2 0.38

3 0.56

2 0.38

1680–1720 Percentage N = 600

113 18.83

62 10.33

107 17.83

42 7.00

2 0.33

2 0.33

7 1.17

12 2.00

∗

8

1 = Feather beds, bedsteads and bedding; 2 = Cupboards, chests and chests of drawers; 3 = Silver /pewter/copper and brass utensils; 4 = Tables and chairs; 5 = China; 6 = Window curtains; 7 = Looking glasses; 8 = Clocks and watches. † : N = Number in sample.

⁴⁴ Overton and colleagues, Production and Consumption, 117–18.

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good’, as a growing presence in inventories, and as a signiﬁcant ‘marriage good’ transferred to children in this period.⁴⁵ The following analyses are based on the incidence and the propensity to own these groups of household items. The main category is items that comprised the basic building blocks of independent households, such as beds, tables, seating (benches, stools, or chairs) and storage furniture (cupboards, chests, and chests of drawers). These have been divided further into sub-categories, to distinguish the prevalence of goods of different values, (feather versus ﬂock or chaff beds, for example), or to track the presence of new furniture (oval tables and upholstered chairs or stools instead of ‘long tables’ and benches). These sub-categories are supplemented by some of the newer, or decorative items often correlated positively with wealth—china, tea and coffee utensils, clocks, pictures, books, silverware, and guns. In total, twenty-seven different items have been identiﬁed, and analysed in the sample of 2,246 probate inventories, drawn from the three geographic sample areas. The south-western sample is the largest, with 953 inventories. Most relate to Dorset, and the Archdeacon of Sarum’s Peculiar Courts for the parishes of Lyme Regis, Beaminster and Netherbury, Yetminster, Leigh and Chetnole, and Sherborne. The remainder come from a published sample of 140 inventories from Uffculme, Devon, between 1660 and 1740.⁴⁶ The north-western sample comprised 642 inventories in the Archdeaconry of Richmond and the Diocese of Chester, for the parishes of Preston, Goosnargh, and Clitheroe, plus a sample of 160 from the manor of Slaidburn (part of Yorkshire until 1974).⁴⁷ The Essex and Suffolk sample amounted to 651 inventories from the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, the Norwich Consistory Court (for Suffolk), and the Prerogrative Court of Canterbury. Most of these inventories derived from the parishes of Sudbury, Stoke-by-Nayland, East Bergholt, Long Melford, and Lavenham in Suffolk, with a further 90 Essex inventories identiﬁed in the PCC. This sample has been supplemented by 135 inventories from F. W. Steer’s published collection for Writtle and Roxwell in mid-Essex.⁴⁸ Tables 3.2a and 3.2b compare groups of parish and borough ofﬁcers with non-ofﬁcers in the three inventory samples.⁴⁹ The tables compare the median numbers of items recorded per household and the percentages of households ⁴⁵ Ibid., 108–11. ⁴⁶ P. Wyatt (ed.), ‘The Uffculme Wills and Inventories’, Devon and Cornwall Record Society,  40 (1997). ⁴⁷ Slaidburn inventories at York were transcribed by Ms. L. Howarth as part of Prof. R.W. Hoyle’s ESRC-funded research project ‘The Workings of an English Peasant Land Market: Slaidburn, 1520 − 1780 (award no. R 0000236134). I am grateful to Prof. Hoyle for access to this material. ⁴⁸ F. W. Steer (ed.), Farm and Cottage Inventories of mid-Essex 1635–1740 (Essex Record Ofﬁce publications no. 8, 1950). ⁴⁹ ‘Ofﬁceholders’ include only those who can be identiﬁed positively as having served in parish or borough ofﬁce in this period.

Table 3.2a. Median number of household items in inventories per household and % for ofﬁceholders and non-ofﬁceholders, by region, 1625–1679 Items

Beds Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/drawing tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Turkey-work/upholstered Chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass Keep Chest Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

Essex and Suffolk Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

NW England Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

SW England Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

4.5 3 3 4 1

18 76 76 96 11

3 2 2 3 1

17 69 71 94 7

3 4 2 3 1

22 73 43 82 16

2 2 1 2 1

26 60 45 72 13

1 2 2 2.5 0

42 81 69 69 0

1 1 2 2 0

34 62 58 71 0

1 17.5 1 6

13 95 31 31

1 12 1 4

6 94 22 13

2 9.5 1 5

2 92 13 46

1 9 1 5

1 87 9 30

5 9 2.5 5

23 73 15 15

7 5 2 3

10 71 8 5

8 1 1 2 1 9 2 0 0 5.5 1 1 2

31 5 56 67 29 56 22 0 0 40 29 15 5

10 1 46 69 10 44 9 0.3 0.3 51 16 8 2

8 1 1 4 1 9.5 2 0 7 6 1 1 5

5 11 17 89 2.5 87 9 0 1 49 24 12 20

13 1 1 3 0 7.5 2 0 0 6 2 1 12

4 5 13 84 0 74 9 0 0 52 14 6 15

7 1 3 2 4.5 6 1.5 0 4 4 1 1.5 0

4 8 31 77 23 42 8 0 19 77 23 15 0

5 1 3 2 2.5 5 1.5 0 6.5 3 1 1 2

6 1 13 59 6 19 3 0 7 42 10 1 5

6 1 1 2 1 6 2 1 6 6 1 1 3.5

Table 3.2a. (continued ) Items

Hangings Musical instruments Books Silver/spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Value Number

Essex and Suffolk Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds 2 2 2 4.5 2 52.9 285.3 55

2 5 44 18 35

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

NW England Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

SW England Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

1.5 2 2 4 1 23.3 88.4 329

3 2 2 4 1 25.6 64.8 120

1.5 2 2 4 2 12.4 38.8 97

2 1 2 5 1.5 22.7 62.8 26

3 1 1 3 1 12.8 39.9 145

2 2 24 15 18

2 6 18 12 5

2 7 18 4 4

4 12 50 35 15

1 5 30 18 4

Table 3.2b. Median number of household items in inventories per household and % for ofﬁceholders and non-ofﬁceholders, by region, 1680–1740 Items

Beds Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/drawing tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Turkey-work/upholstered Chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keep Chest Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets Looking glasses Clocks

Essex and Suffolk Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds 3 2 2 4 1 1.5 15 5 6

33 65 58 90 10 19 88 31 31

6 1 1 2 1 6 3 1 2 6 2 1

29 17 44 40 42 31 19 2 2 23 38 17

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

NW England Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

3 2 2 4 1 1 13 6 5

4 3 1 3 1 1 11 1 3

6 1 1 2 1 5 2 1.5 2 6 1 1

18 68 67 91 3 17 90 34 15 20 6 33 48 36 22 19 5 3 46 35 27

8 1 1 3 1 6 2 1 0 6.8 1 1

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

SW England Ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

Non-ofﬁcers Med. % no. HHlds

21 67 23 80 5 9 84 6 23

3 2 1 3 1 1 9 6 2

31 61 19 78 10 8 86 1 18

2 2 2 2 1 5 10 3 6

51 61 48 87 7 18 86 11 9

2 1 1 2 1 7 6 4.5 6.5

41 44 51 63 8 21 59 9 5

12 7 16 76 18 66 9 1 0 35 33 22

4 1 1 33 1 6 5 2 4 4 1 1

7 6 11 83 15 58 4 1 1 31 26 13

10 1 3 2 1 3 2 1 8 4 1 1

13 3 9 76 28 23 7 33 7 59 36 10

3.5 1 3 1 1 3 2.5 2 4 3 1 1

5 1 18 61 17 7 3 2 12 39 16 7

Table 3.2b. (continued ) Items

Essex and Suffolk Ofﬁcers Non-ofﬁcers Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

NW England Ofﬁcers Non-ofﬁcers Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

SW England Ofﬁcers Non-ofﬁcers Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

Pictures/maps Hangings Musical instruments Books Silver/Spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Value Number

6 1 2 2 5 1 26.5

8 0 2 2 5.5 1 15.6

6 0 1 2 2.5 1 19

148.4 52

10 2 6 23 17 21

4.5 3 1.5 2 4 1 27.4 98.8 218

8 3 1 25 22 15

60.8 147

22 0 5 19 5 3

7 2 2 2 6 1 13.1 34.6 72

17 1 1 24 1 4

64.7 97

13 0 6 30 31 6

5.5 1 1 2 5 1.5 9.3 26.2 333

5 0.3 9 24 11 2

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in the group possessing such items.⁵⁰ The tables also give details of the total inventory value, and the value of the household goods alone (that is excluding trade stock, livestock, and obvious ‘production’ goods and equipment).⁵¹ This latter ﬁgure provides a uniform basis on which to compare inventories, unlike total valuation ﬁgures, which could vary dramatically according to how much of the testator’s trade stock fell within appraisers’ remit. The sample also depicts the presence or absence of 27 different types of goods in the household, selected according to the criteria outlined above.⁵² The tables present two time periods, before and after the year 1680, to illustrate the arrival of ‘new’ objects, such as chests of drawers or clocks in the later seventeenth century. Table 3.2a, for the period before 1680, suggests, in general, that ofﬁceholders had a greater propensity to own many of these items than non-ofﬁceholders, and to own more of them. They tended to own more of the basic building blocks of the household (beds, tables, and chairs), and a greater tendency to possess ‘new’ items, like round or oval tables, upholstered chairs, chests of drawers, window curtains, looking glasses, or clocks, as well as books, silver spoons, or guns. Both these facets were reﬂected in the median values of their household goods, which were almost double those of the non-ofﬁce holders in each of the three regions. These points imply that ofﬁce holders possessed houses that were, in general, furnished more richly and perhaps a little more fashionably than those of non-ofﬁce holders, reﬂecting a difference in the accumulation of material wealth between the two groups. The table also hints at some regional variations. ‘Glass keeps’ were an Essex and Suffolk speciality, recorded there to a greater extent than elsewhere. Cushions were much more prevalent in north-west England, compared to either of the two southern regions, although the north did not lag far behind in the possession of upholstered furniture. Pictures were more common in households in the north-west, but books less so, compared to either of the southern samples, which might indicate differences in religion as well as in material culture between these areas. When all three regions are considered, it is evident that the inventoried population in the cloth-producing region of Essex and Suffolk enjoyed higher levels of material prosperity than those in the other ⁵⁰ These two modes of analysis have different objectives. Counting the frequency of items can reveal differences in the extent of ownership for items that were found in a majority of inventories (such as beds, tables, chairs, and chests). For other goods, such as newer tables and upholstered furniture, this frequency also indicates how far these items had replaced the more traditional staple goods in the household. Calculating the percentage of households possessing particular items is a more sensitive measure of their diffusion, and can reveal which groups displayed the highest propensity to own the newer, decorative goods within a deﬁned time period. ⁵¹ This category equates closely to the ‘consumption goods’ identiﬁed by Overton et. al., Production and Consumption, 140–1. As the authors also point out, it is very difﬁcult to differentiate between production for use and production for exchange in many probate inventories, Ibid. 33–86. ⁵² All of these categories of object are mutually exclusive. The category of ‘beds’ is separated from those of ‘featherbeds’ and ‘ﬂockbeds’, because it is a residual group for all beds not described under these other headings.

‘Chief Inhabitants’ and ‘Material Culture’

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two regions, whether or not they were ofﬁcers. Lancashire and Dorset seem to have exhibited similar levels of household furnishing and inventory valuations.⁵³ The same patterns are evident in the later period, as illustrated in Table 3.2c and Table 3.2d although by this time only the south-west preserved a noticeable distinction between household furnishings of the ofﬁce-holding and non-ofﬁceholding groups. In Essex and Suffolk and in the north-west both groups were just as likely to possess similar numbers of basic items (beds, tables, and chairs), even if ofﬁce holders remained a little more likely to have upholstered chairs, chests of drawers, cushions, curtains, looking glasses, and pictures. They tended to possess more chairs, upholstered furniture, and pictures than non-ofﬁce-holding groups, but in other respects the gap had narrowed. The falling value of household goods among the ofﬁce-holding and some of the non-ofﬁce-holding groups is a puzzle. It may simply reﬂect the observations of Overton and colleagues and Shammas, that the value of such household goods decreased as less durable items superseded older, more substantial furnishings (particularly fabrics).⁵⁴ It may also indicate greater supply of such products, and thus lower second-hand prices recorded in inventories. However, it is curious that the rate of decrease should have been greater for ofﬁcers than non-ofﬁcers. None of the possible explanations is particularly plausible. Ofﬁcers may have had a higher propensity to own cheaper goods, resulting in a greater proportionate devaluation of their inventories—an unusual symptom of ‘wealth’, to say the least. The ‘wealth’ distinction between ofﬁcers and non-ofﬁcers may have narrowed, but this is at odds with the rate assessments of the two groups. Perhaps the social proﬁle of the inventoried population changed, although it is unclear why wealthier estates should have ceased to be recorded. The drop in second-hand values and subtle shifts in the sample populations are probably the most likely explanations, although the prosperity of testators in Essex and Suffolk may also have been depressed by sustained recession in the cloth trade after 1700. Despite these variations, those who served in parish ofﬁce had material possessions that were at least on a par with those of the inventoried population as a whole, and sometimes in advance of it—particularly in the ﬁrst half of our period. They lived in houses with 3–6 beds, many of them the more expensive feather beds. They possessed a long table and ‘forms’ (benches) before about 1670, and a greater propensity to acquire octagonal, round, and ﬁnally oval tables thereafter. This smaller-scale and more informal style of dining required ⁵³ Inventory valuations are subject to possible discrepancies by region and by probate court. In addition, because the Dorset inventories were drawn exclusively from the Peculiar Courts, they may have included a less wealthy segment of the population than appeared in the larger probate courts of Lancashire or the Essex and Suffolk archdeaconries. Only 8/655 Essex and Suffolk inventories had household goods valued at less than £3 (or 1 per cent), 28/637 north-western inventories did (or 4 per cent), while 71/934 south-western inventories did (or 8 per cent). ⁵⁴ Shammas, Pre-Industrial Consumer, 86–100; Overton and colleagues, Production and Consumption, 141–3.

Table 3.2c. Median number of household items in inventories per ofﬁceholder household and % of all households, by region, 1625–1740 Items

Essex and Suffolk 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

NW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

SW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

Beds Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/drawing tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Turkey-work/upholstered Chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keep Chest Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

4.5 3 3 4 1 1 17.5 1 6

18 76 76 96 11 13 95 31 31

3 2 2 4 1 1.5 15 5 6

33 65 58 90 10 19 88 31 31

3 4 2 3 1 2 9.5 1 5

22 73 43 82 16 2 92 13 46

21 67 23 80 5 9 84 6 23

1 2 2 2.5 0 5 9 2.5 5

42 81 69 69 0 23 73 15 15

2 2 2 2 1 5 10 3 6

51 61 48 87 7 18 86 11 9

8 1 1 2 1 9 2 0 0 5.5 1 1 2

31 5 56 67 29 56 22 0 0 40 29 15 5

6 1 1 2 1 6 3 1 2 6 2 1 6

29 17 44 40 42 31 19 2 2 23 38 17 10

8 1 1 4 1 9.5 2 0 7 6 1 1 5

5 11 17 89 2.5 87 9 0 1 49 24 12 20

12 7 16 76 18 66 9 1 0 35 33 22 22

7 1 3 2 4.5 6 1.5 0 4 4 1 1.5 0

4 8 31 77 23 42 8 0 19 77 23 15 0

10 1 3 2 1 3 2 1 8 4 1 1 6

13 3 9 76 28 23 7 33 7 59 36 10 13

4 3 1 3 1 1 11 1 3 8 1 1 3 1 6 2 1 0 6.8 1 1 8

Table 3.2c. (continued ) Items

Hangings Musical instruments Books Silver/spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Value Number

Essex and Suffolk 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 2 2 2 4.5 2 52.9 285.3 55

2 5 44 18 35

1 2 2 5 1 26.5 148.4 52

2 6 23 17 21

NW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 3 2 2 4 1 25.6 64.8 120

2 6 18 12 5

0 2 2 5.5 1 15.6 60.8 147

0 5 19 5 3

SW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 2 1 2 5 1.5 22.7 62.8 26

4 12 50 35 15

0 1 2 2.5 1 19 64.7 97

0 6 30 31 6

Table 3.2d. Median number of household items in inventories per non-ofﬁceholder household and % of all households, by region, 1625–1740 Items

Beds Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/drawing tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Turkey-work/upholstered Chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keep Chest Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps Hangings

Essex and Suffolk 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 3 2 2 3 1 1 12 1 4 6 1 1 2 1 6 2 1 6 6 1 1 3.5 1.5

17 69 71 94 7 6 94 22 13 10 1 46 69 10 44 9 0.3 0.3 51 16 8 2 2

3 2 2 4 1 1 13 6 5 6 1 1 2 1 5 2 1.5 2 6 1 1 4.5 3

NW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

SW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds

18 68 67 91 3 17 90 34 15

2 2 1 2 1 1 9 1 5

26 60 45 72 13 1 87 9 30

3 2 1 3 1 1 9 6 2

31 61 19 78 10 8 86 1 18

1 1 2 2 0 7 5 2 3

34 62 58 71 0 10 71 8 5

2 1 1 2 1 7 6 4.5 6.5

41 44 51 63 8 21 59 9 5

20 6 33 48 36 22 19 5 3 46 35 27 8 3

13 1 1 3 0 7.5 2 0 0 6 2 1 12 1.5

4 5 13 84 0 74 9 0 0 52 14 6 15 2

4 1 1 33 1 6 5 2 4 4 1 1 7 2

7 6 11 83 15 58 4 1 1 31 26 13 17 1

5 1 3 2 2.5 5 1.5 0 6.5 3 1 1 2 3

6 1 13 59 6 19 3 0 7 42 10 1 5 1

3.5 1 3 1 1 3 2.5 2 4 3 1 1 5.5 1

5 1 18 61 17 7 3 2 12 39 16 7 5 0.3

Table 3.2d. (continued ) Items

Musical instruments Books Silver/spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Value Number

Essex and Suffolk 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 2 2 4 1 23.3 88.4 329

2 24 15 18

1.5 2 4 1 27.4 98.8 218

1 25 22 15

NW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 2 2 4 2 12.4 38.8 97

7 18 4 4

2 2 6 1 13.1 34.6 72

1 24 1 4

SW England 1625–79 1680–1740 Med. % Med. % no. HHlds no. HHlds 1 1 3 1 12.8 39.9 145

5 30 18 4

1 2 5 1.5 9.3 26.2 333

9 24 11 2

164

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family and guests to sit round these new tables, and necessitated the acquisition of stools, and then chairs. At the same time, these households accumulated upholstered furniture (dispensing with cushions), switched from chests to chests of drawers, and often gained some window curtains (particularly in urban or ‘sub-urban’ settlements). They were also the most likely to obtain newer goods such as looking glasses, clocks, tea and coffee sets (although these remained rare), and had the greatest tendency to own books, silverware, and guns. This is an indication of solid material prosperity, whatever the variations in rateable value, and whatever their actual level of indebtedness at the time of their deaths. This prosperity is also indicated by the position of these ofﬁce-holding testators in relation to the inventoried group as a whole. Table 3.3 places the median value of the ofﬁce-holding group’s household goods in the context of the wider sample, expressed as quartiles of median value within the three areas, before and after 1680. This emphasizes the slightly mysterious downward trend in the inventory values of the ofﬁce holding group, compared to the sample as a whole. In the earlier period, the median valuation for ofﬁce holders put them between the second and top quartiles in Essex and Suffolk and the south-west, and in the second quartile in the north-west. After 1680, ofﬁce holders from Essex and Suffolk and north-west England had slipped into the mid-range of inventory valuations, while only those in the south-west remained near to the top quartile ﬁgure. Again, this indicates more about the potential ﬂaws in the inventory samples than it does about general trends in material prosperity, or the wealth of the ofﬁce-holding cohort in particular. These are general surveys, and while they suggest differences in levels of material possession between ofﬁcers and non-ofﬁcers, they are devoid of the contextual information that might help us explain such trends. Apart from Earle’s account of the London ‘middle class’, large-scale studies of inventories have not tried to locate their samples in a wider social context, or link them to other groupings or activities in which they participated, because such correlations Table 3.3. Median inventory valuation of household goods for ofﬁceholders compared to valuations for all inventories, by region, 1625–1679 and 1680–1740 (£) 1625-79: Essex and Suffolk Northwest England Southwest England 1680–1740: Essex and Suffolk Northwest England Southwest England

Bottom 25%

Next 25%

Next 25%

Top 25%

19.9 10.03 9.8

37.95 25.55 17.4

70.3 57.3 40.7

Bottom 25%

Next 25%

Next 25%

Top 25%

10.5 4.9 3.2

19.85 12.6 7.5

36.05 23.1 14.2

67.8 45.1 32

9.4 3.9 4.1

Ofﬁcers 52.9 25.6 22.7 Ofﬁcers 26.5 15.6 19

‘Chief Inhabitants’ and ‘Material Culture’

165

are difﬁcult. Although the initial sample of inventories might be large, attempts to correlate these with participants in parish ofﬁce or with ratepayers will inevitably reduce sample sizes, often to levels in which random variations have a disproportionate effect. Despite this difﬁculty, the following analyses attempt to explore the differences between categories of ofﬁce holders and non-ofﬁcers in a number of individual parishes in the study areas, both urban and rural. By setting these groups in their immediate social context, we can see how far patterns in material possessions corresponded to the variations between the groups identiﬁed in the last chapter. We can also investigate whether these earlier differences help to explain the diversity in patterns of consumption. Table 3.4 depicts the hierarchy of household consumption in the borough of Sudbury. The production of ‘says’ or light, worsted cloth dominated Sudbury’s economy in the seventeenth century. More than 59 per cent of apprenticeship indentures recorded in the borough between 1656 and 1688 were in textile trades.⁵⁵ As was shown in Chapter 1, the textile trade brought wealth to the ‘middling’, but at the expense of endemic marginal poverty among those employed in this production.⁵⁶ Like wealth, power within the borough was also highly stratiﬁed. Civic government consisted of six aldermen, twenty-two chief burgesses, and a body of forty-eight free burgesses,⁵⁷ representing the six or seven hundred enfranchised males resident, or possessed of rights, in the borough.⁵⁸ Table 3.4 shows that the higher ofﬁcers in Sudbury tended to possess personal estates of greater value, their household goods having a median value twice that of free burgesses and the wider burgess population. This was based, once again, on much larger total personal estates, of more than double the median value for either of the other two groups. Similarly, aldermen and chief burgesses were most likely to possess (newer) dining tables, upholstered chairs, leather chairs, couches, glass keeps, chests of drawers, cushions, window curtains, looking glasses, pictures, and guns. The difference was most pronounced between chief burgesses and free burgesses, rather than with the wider non-participating group. This is because the ⁵⁵ Suffolk RO (Bury St. Edmunds) Sudbury ‘Cocket’ Book 1656–88, E.E. 501/4/1, 257/436 apprenticeship indentures were in textile trades; 59 in food and drink retailing; 34 in leather working; 21 in tools and arms production; 17 in clothes and clothes retailing; 16 in building and construction; and 14 in shops and services. In Colchester, in the ﬁnal quarter of the seventeenth century, 40 per cent of apprentices were in clothing trades. N. Goose and J. Cooper, Tudor and Stuart Colchester: Extract from VCH Essex, ix (Chelmsford, 1998), 77; on the accuracy of such lists, see J. F. Pound, ‘The Validity of the Freemen’s Lists: Some Norwich Evidence’, Economic History Review, 34 (1981), 48–59. ⁵⁶ For other aspects of the town’s economy at this time, see French, ‘Urban Agriculture’, 171–99. ⁵⁷ Suffolk RO (Bury St Edmunds) Sudbury Corporation Order and Decree Books, 1640–58, E.E. 501/2/7 and 1658–85, E.E. 501/2/8. ⁵⁸ In 1703 a parliamentary commission found that Sudbury possessed 700 enfranchised burgesses, of whom 138 were resident elsewhere. Suffolk RO (Bury St Edmunds) Sudbury Corporation ‘Cocket’ Book, 1750–71, E.E. 501/4/3 fos. 8–50, alphabetical register of freemen, 1703.

Table 3.4. Households possessing items: ofﬁce-holding groups compared to average number of items for all inventoried households, Sudbury and Preston, 1650–1730 Items

Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/Round Tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

Sudbury Aldermen and Chief burgesses % Med. HHlds no.

Preston Free burgesses % Med. HHlds no.

Parish Ofﬁcer and GCL Non-burgesses All ofﬁceholders GCL Jurors only Jurors only % Med. % Med. % Med. % Med. HHlds no. HHlds no. HHlds no. HHlds no.

19 56 56 94 31

4 4 4 5 3

20 55 80 85 55

3 3 2 3 2

28 59 56 69 47

2 3 2 4 2

21 72 31 82 26

19 81 44 38 31 25 50 69 50 56 56 6 0 19 44 19 13

1 23 9 5.5 8 4.5 1 2 2 9 4 2 0 12 2 1 4.5

5 55 70 10 20 5 4 65 45 45 10 0 0 15 25 15 5

1 21 4.5 3.5 3.5 4 1 1 2 6 6 0 0 1.5 1 1 2

9 59 66 25 22 6 34 53 44 31 25 0 0 13 31 16 13

1 15 6 6 6 1.5 1 1 1 7.5 4.5 0 0 11 2 1 4.5

18 90 23 69 28 21 41 67 28 79 18 0 3 38 64 33 59

4 5 2 5 1.5 2 18 1 7 9 1 1 4 1 12 2 0 7 15 2 1 6

Non-Ofﬁcers % Med. HHlds no.

25 68 39 93 15

5 3 2 5 1

15 83 52 90 12

3 3 2 3 1

20 70 44 85 17

3.5 2 1 3 1

10 88 14 34 15 14 31 78 25 78 17 3 0 46 56 29 34

1 20.5 1 6 8 1 1 3 1 10 2 1 0 7 1 1 8

0 96 12 52 6 13 19 88 8 88 12 0 0 65 25 8 23

0 14 1 3 12 1 1 3 1 12.5 2 0 0 7 1 1 8

6 88 8 35 8 8 17 8 9 72 10 1 1 48 28 12 23

1 12 1 5 6 1 1 3 1 9 2.5 2 4 6 1 1 8

Table 3.4. (continued ) Items

Wall hangings Musical instruments Books Silver spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Valuation Number

Sudbury Aldermen and Chief burgesses Free burgesses % Med. % Med. HHlds no. HHlds no.

Preston Non-burgesses All ofﬁceholders % Med. % Med. HHlds no. HHlds no.

Parish Ofﬁcer and GCL GCL Jurors only Jurors only Non-Ofﬁcers % Med. % Med. % Med. HHlds no. HHlds no. HHlds no.

0 6

0 1

5 0

8 0

0 0

0 0

5 15

3 2

0 7

25 6 43 251.7

2 8 2

25 10 10 54.3

2 2.5 2.5

22 16 31 83.8

2 2 2

33 21 3 40.2

2 6.5 1

25 2 3 28.8

0 1.5 2 7 1

0 6

0 1

2 7

2 2

12 8 4 17.1

2 2 1

25 3 5 15.1

2 6 2

463.2

110.3

235.4

116.7

65.9

35.2

16

20

32

39

59

52

Note: GCL = Great Court Leet.

36.1 118

168

‘Chief Inhabitants’ and ‘Material Culture’

constricted nature of town government in the borough excluded many burgesses whose wealth was comparable to that of the higher members of the corporation. The non-participants included nine clothiers, and eight weavers, a lawyer, a cloth merchant, a merchant-tailor, and an apothecary as well as two husbandmen, a carpenter, and an alehouse keeper. This explains the intermediate median valuations for this group, since it consisted of both the very wealthy and the (relatively) poor. However, within the artiﬁcial conﬁnes of borough government, chief burgesses and free burgesses were representative of different segments of the wider community. Testators among the chief burgess sample contained ﬁve clothiers, a cloth merchant, a draper, a dyer, a grocer, a hatter, and two ‘gentlemen’. By contrast the free burgess sample was more diverse, containing three weavers, a shearman, a brasier, a glover, and a husbandman, as well as six clothiers, a merchant, a surgeon, and a grocer. All groups were at or above the level of the moderately prosperous. All free burgesses possessed most of the main items of household furniture. Differences between the higher and lower ofﬁcers were conﬁned to the number of items possessed, rather than to the range of items owned. In this instance, it appears that wealth was the main inﬂuence on differences in consumption patterns. On average, aldermen and chief burgesses lived in larger houses than free burgesses, with a median of eleven rooms, while free burgesses had eight. The Hearth Tax echoes this ﬁnding. In 1674, ﬁve aldermen had a median of ﬁve hearths, fourteen chief burgesses paid on a median of four, and thirty-eight free burgesses paid on a median of three hearths. The average assessment for all payers of the tax that year in the borough was 2.9.⁵⁹ So, although ‘wealth’ was stratiﬁed quite sharply, consumption preferences show few clear social traits. Those at the top of the civic hierarchy tended not to use their wealth to project them into consumption on a different, and wider scale. Table 3.4 compares the household goods and inventory values from a larger sample of ofﬁcers in the borough of Preston with the hierarchy in Sudbury. Although Preston lacked a dominant industry in this period, and was located far outside the metropolitan economic hub, it showed the same hierarchy of material property and local power as in Sudbury. Preston contained three overlapping administrative bodies, which reﬂected the town’s multiple administrative functions. It was a parliamentary borough, with a famously open franchise, headed by a corporation of common councillors and aldermen. It was a large parish, extending beyond the borough boundaries, into three extra-mural townships. It was also a manor, and its manorial functions were administered by a Great Court Leet which met four or ﬁve times a year to deliberate on nuisances, encroachments and on administration of the extensive urban commons. ⁵⁹ ‘Suffolk in 1674’, 273–7. There were 308 individuals who paid the Hearth Tax in Sudbury in 1674.

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169

As a consequence of these multiple jurisdictions administration in Preston was both inclusive and exclusive. Participation at the lowest level, on the Leet juries, was open to any of the town’s 1,000 burgesses.⁶⁰ Between 1653 and 1701, 583 individuals served as Leet jurors.⁶¹ Parish ofﬁce was open to a similar extent, with 352 individuals serving as ofﬁcers between 1650 and 1705.⁶² Service in the higher manorial post of capital burgess was more restricted, with 119 individuals serving between 1653 and 1701. Similarly, 122 men served as borough council members between 1650 and 1705.⁶³ However, executive power was restricted to a small oligarchy. The parish’s closed vestry was another self-selecting body of twenty-four, again as a means of ruling a large, dispersed parish of several townships. Ninety individuals served for the town of Preston between 1650 and 1705. The borough was also under the control of an elite of twelve aldermen, although in the seventeenth century their names are lost.⁶⁴ Ease of access to the lower rungs of power allowed a large proportion of the Preston inventory sample to participate in some aspect of administration in the town. In the sample 56 per cent (150/268) served in one or more of these posts between 1650 and 1705. Table 3.4 suggests that those who held parish ofﬁce were drawn from a different wealth segment to those who were only Great Court Leet jurors, or who were never participants in local administration. Parish ofﬁcers had a median household inventory valuation that was £10 higher than those of jurors or non-ofﬁcers, based on a median total personal estate that was almost twice as large. A similar wealth divide existed between those at the centre of power in the borough, parish, and manor, and those who were merely parish or manorial participants. The former had median household goods valued at £12 more than the latter, and once again based this consumption on total personal estates of almost twice the size. This progression meant that those at the centre of power were likely to have household goods valued at more than double those of the Leet jurors and non-ofﬁcers, based on personal estates at least three times larger. Table 3.4 also demonstrates the source of this increase in valuations. Those at the centre of power in parish, borough, and manor had a median of two more beds, two more tables, four more chairs, four more upholstered chairs, one more chest, and twice as many sheets as the jurors and non-ofﬁcers. They were also more than twice as likely as non-ofﬁcers to own dining tables, wicker, upholstered, or leather chairs, couches, glass keeps, chests, ⁶⁰ Mullett, ‘Preston politics’, 65. The 1662 Guild Roll contained 1,100 free burgesses, but Mullett notes that the average electorate ‘was around 550’ 1689–1712. ⁶¹ Lancs. RO CNP 3/2/1 Preston Great Court Leet Book, 1653–1673; CNP 3/2/3, 1673–1701 (187 juries sat in this period). ⁶² Lancs. RO PR 1840 Preston Vestry Book 1645–1750. Only ofﬁcers from within the bounds of the borough have been analysed. ⁶³ Lancs. RO CNP 3/1/1 Preston Borough Council minutes, ‘The White Book’, 1608–1781. ⁶⁴ Lancs. RO CNP 3/1/1 does not distinguish routinely between aldermen and other councillors, 1650–1705.

170

‘Chief Inhabitants’ and ‘Material Culture’

chests of drawers, looking glasses, clocks, pictures, musical instruments, and silver spoons. Those who were parish ofﬁcers tended to have a median of one more of the basic building blocks of the household (tables, chairs of all sorts, chests of drawers, and linen), compared to those who were only Leet jurors. However, they were twice as likely to own the ‘new or decorative’ items in the lower half of the table. The same patterns emerge from an analysis of ofﬁce holders and the non-ofﬁce-holding group in Dorset, in the non-corporate town of Sherborne, and the small borough of Lyme Regis. These two towns represented the two poles of political allegiance in the seventeenth century, with royalist Sherborne being besieged by the parliamentary army, and parliamentarian Lyme coming under attack by the royalist navy. As was demonstrated in Chapter 2, in Sherborne the trustees of the almshouses and the school represented the higher echelons of society in this small, thoroughfare town. Table 3.5 illustrates the patterns of material possessions of those 13 testators who were trustees, the 45 who were ofﬁcers but not trustees, and the remaining 180 who cannot be linked to any ofﬁce. While the median number of beds, tables, chairs, sheets, and clocks possessed by the small group of trustees was higher than the ﬁgure for ofﬁcers in general, the two groups owned similar numbers of the newer types of furniture and decorative items. However, trustees were distinctly more likely to possess most items than both ofﬁcers and nonofﬁcers, whether the household building blocks or the newer, more fashionable items—although the tiny sample size renders all such ﬁndings suspect. This difference may also be reﬂected in the large disparity in the median valuation of trustees’ household goods, compared to the other two groups. While these inventory descriptions do not indicate signiﬁcant quality variations, their higher total valuation may show the differences concealed in the appraisers’ generic descriptions. In other respects, there were parallels between ofﬁce- and non-ofﬁce-holding groups. While both displayed similar propensities to own most of these items, ofﬁcers tended to possess slightly higher median numbers than the non-ofﬁcers—more chairs, upholstered furniture, leather chairs, chests, cushions, looking glasses, and pictures. Yet ofﬁcers and the general inventoried population tended to be equally likely to own a similar range of inventoried goods, which implies that it was from the latter group that most of the former were drawn. Those who acquired positions of higher authority or greater social prestige tended to come from among the most prosperous of this group in these parishes, despite the variations in regional economies and administrative hierarchies. The Lyme Regis inventory sample does not exhibit marked disparities of personal wealth and material possession, despite the dominance of the town’s economy by a relatively small clique of wealthy merchants—notably the Burridge,

Table 3.5. Items per inventory and % of ofﬁce-holding and non-ofﬁce-holding households possessing them, Sherborne and Lyme Regis, Dorset, 1640–1720 Items

Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

Sherborne School trustees

Ofﬁcers only

Non-ofﬁcers

Lyme Regis Burgesses and freemen

Ofﬁcers and jurymen

Non-ofﬁcers

Med. no.

% HHlds

Med. no.

% HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. no.

% HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds

4 3 1 4.5 1 1 16 1.5 4 11 0 0 2 1 4.5 2 0 0 9.5 1 1.5 3

46 69 54 92 8 8 100 15 15 31 0 0 77 31 62 38 0 0 77 38 15 31

2 2 2 2 1.5 1 9 3.5 3.5 11.5 1 0 2 1 4.5 4 0 0 3.8 1.5 1 7.5

29 46 37 66 3 5 64 7 3 3 2 0 58 8 14 3 0 0 51 17 5 3

2 1 1 2 1 1 6 3.5 2.5 4 0 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 1 1 3

3 1 1 3 1 2.5 10 6 4 10 1 1 2.5 1 4 1.5 1 0 6 1 1 8

47 68 37 95 21 21 95 32 16 47 11 16 95 53 68 11 16 0 74 79 26 47

2 1 2 2 3 0 9.5 1 0 5 0 0 3 1 2 3 0 0 5.5 1 1 8

2 1.5 1 2 1 1 7 3.5 4 7 1 1 3 1 4 3 1 2 4.5 1 1 4.5

36 56 43 77 5 4 74 10 1 6 0 2 68 6 13 5 1 1 43 16 3 7

36 79 50 100 7 0 100 7 0 29 0 0 100 36 36 7 0 0 86 43 7 14

33 59 42 82 10 4 81 10 8 10 3 1 77 13 27 4 1 4 49 35 6 13

Table 3.5. (continued ) Items

Sherborne School trustees Med. no.

Ofﬁcers only

Non-ofﬁcers

% Med. % Med. HHlds no. HHlds no.

Hangings 2 8 Musical instruments 0 0 Books 1 46 Silver spoons 1 62 Guns 1 8 Median £Household Goods 53 Median £Total Valuation 194.1 Number 13

0 0 2 2 1 20 3 25 2 5 16.7 60.3 45

Lyme Regis Burgesses and freemen Ofﬁcers and jurymen Non-ofﬁcers

% Med. % HHlds no. HHlds.

0 0 0 0 1 21 3 12 2 3 10.5 28.3 180

0 0 0 0 2 63 5 42 1 21 23.8 32.9 19

Med. % no. HHlds.

Med. % no. HHlds.

0 0 0 0 2 57 4.5 14 2 4 14.6 31.8 14

2 1 2.5 3 2 29 4 31 1 9 10.2 25.2 78

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Andrews, Bowditch, Tucker, West, and Whetcombe dynasties.⁶⁵ They exerted economic and social power because in organizing trade with Spain, the Caribbean, and Virginia, they employed or engaged the services of a large section of the town’s crafts and its seafarers.⁶⁶ This prosperity and dominance can be seen in the borough records where many of the town’s capital burgesses were styled ‘merchant’.⁶⁷ Few in the inventory sample reﬂect the assets possessed by some of these international traders, although Ferdinand Lacy, a merchant who died in 1697 with household goods valued at £43.5, had a total estate of £1,650.95, which indicates the scale of some of the larger businesses.⁶⁸ The inventory samples are perilously small, only 19 capital burgesses, and 14 ofﬁcers and jurymen, compared to 78 other non-ofﬁce-holding male testators. Even so, the patterns revealed appear consistent with the previous examples. The civic elite exhibited the most pronounced tendency to possess (newer) dining tables, upholstered and leather chairs, couches, glass keeps, chests of drawers, cushions, window curtains, looking glasses, pictures, and guns. They also owned the highest median number of basic household building blocks, such as tables, chairs or stools, and sheets. There was less of a distinction in terms of the median numbers of items owned and the propensity to own them between ofﬁcers or jurors in the borough and the wider non-participating group. Although in Lyme Regis at any point in time there were only 8 capital burgesses and 28 freemen, turnover rates were such that the ranks of the borough elite were quite open over time.⁶⁹ In all, 283 people served as capital burgesses or free burgesses between 1625 and 1725, of whom 180 were also parish ofﬁcers or jurymen, indicating the extent of the overlap between the two positions.⁷⁰ In both Dorset towns, as elsewhere in this analysis, those in the highest positions of authority in local government showed the greatest tendency to ⁶⁵ The Burridge family were MPs for the borough between 1689 and 1727. See B. D. Henning (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1660–1690, i (London, 1983), 216–18; E. Cruickshanks, S. Handley, and D. W. Hayton (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690–1715, ii (Cambridge, 2002), 162–4; R. Sedgwick (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754, i (HMSO, 1970), 234–5. Solomon Andrews Sr. and Jr., were capital burgesses 1656–87; the Bowditches provided 2 capital burgesses 1696–1725; 5 members of the Tucker family were capital burgesses 1627–94; 4 members of the West family served 1649–1713; and 2 members of the Whetcombe family 1667–1725. ⁶⁶ Murphy, ‘Lyme Regis’, 1–18. See Dorset RO DC/LR N2 Burridge Family, Accounts Rendered 1703–31. ⁶⁷ Dorset RO DC/LR B1/9 Court Leet and Court of Hustings, 1647–70, see for example entry dated 30 Aug. 1647, where the mayor and 4/8 capital burgesses were titled ‘merchant’, with two others called ‘gent.’, and two more ‘esq.’ ⁶⁸ In 1717 the borough’s MP, John Burridge forfeited his estate to the Crown because of unpaid duties on wine amounting to £2,600. Sedgwick, Commons 1715–1754, i, 509. ⁶⁹ Dorset RO DC/LR B1/9 Lyme Regis Court Leet and Court of Hustings, 1647–70; DC/LR B1/10 Court Leet and Court of Hustings, 1672–92; DC/LR B1/11 Court Leet and Court of Hustings, 1692–99; DC/LR B1/12 Court Leet and Court of Hustings, 1699–1724. ⁷⁰ Dorset RO DC/LR A6/1 Lyme Regis Grand Inquest Jury Lists, 1694–1725; records of court leet juries and parish ofﬁcers recorded in DC/LR B/9–12.

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possess a majority of these items, to have a larger number of the basic building blocks of the independent household, and to display the highest propensity to possess newer goods. There is evidence to suggest that these differences were linked to other aspects of household life that were inﬂuenced by their superior wealth. In Lyme Regis, the records of the Marriage Duty Act taxes of the 1690s provide an insight into household structures within the town.⁷¹ The listing for 1697 indicates that among the 376 households, and 1,300 people of Lyme, those 121 families who provided ofﬁcers in parish and borough had households that were larger than those 222 families who never supplied ofﬁcers, with medians of 4 persons for ofﬁcers’ households and 3 for non-ofﬁcers.⁷² Although there were slightly more children remaining in the houses of ofﬁcers compared to those of non-ofﬁcers, much of the difference in household structure between the two groups was accounted for by the greater propensity of ofﬁcers to house servants. Servants appeared in 32 per cent of ofﬁcers’ households, but only 5 per cent of non-ofﬁcers’. Male servants were evident in 13 per cent of ofﬁcers’ households, but only 1 per cent of non-ofﬁcers’, while female domestic servants were more abundant, occurring in 24 per cent of ofﬁcers’ houses, but still only in 5 per cent of non-ofﬁcers’ ones. While it is likely that the number of servants employed was largely a function of the wealth of the householder, their presence suggests that these families were living a style of life different to those without such assistance. In particular, the presence of servants may have allowed female family members to realize the ideals of gentility, by affording them greater leisure time and freedom from direct involvement in domestic chores. Even so, it is worth reiterating that servants featured in only a third of ofﬁceholders’ households, and that they were most prevalent among those of greatest prominence in the borough. Two-thirds of the 44 ofﬁcers’ households with servants contained a head or another member who was, or would become a Capital Burgess of the town, while 57 per cent of them contained someone who had been or would become an overseer of the poor. These trends suggest that those at the very top of provincial borough society had households and furnishings that were, in some respects, distinct from those of the bulk of the ofﬁce holding and inventory populations. These two latter groups appear to have shared common patterns of furnishing, similar propensities to own such goods, and the same levels of household ‘wealth’. These ﬁndings tend to conﬁrm the conclusions of Chapter 2 in respect of their similar rateable worth. Does this indicate that the administrative elite—the ‘chief inhabitants’—were participating in a ‘world of social competition’ from which those lower down the hierarchy of material possessions were excluded? This is possible, and it will be ⁷¹ The historical background to this assessment is explained fully in J. Ford, ‘The Marriage Duty Act Censuses for Lyme Regis 1695–1703’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 25 (2003), 1–12. ⁷² Dorset RO DC/LR H2 Lyme Regis Marriage Duty Act Assessment, c.1697.

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shown below how only the highest-value estates contained a wide variety of these items in this period. However, there is a difference between the importance of the patterns obvious among the top 5 per cent of small town and village society, and the proposition that the competitive expansion of consumption drove a ‘consumer revolution’ and created a ‘middle class’ in this period. The inventories of most of the ofﬁcers and non-ofﬁcers in this sample certainly indicate modest increases in material prosperity, the acquisition of some new furnishings, and the possible substitution of a variety of semi-durable for durable goods. Yet, while even these relatively sparsely furnished homes were far removed from the material discomfort and deprivation of the poor, there is scant evidence that such acquisition was being driven by urban social competition, or the desire to express ‘bourgeois’ values. As ever, these ‘respectable’ ofﬁcers and ratepayers provide very few illustrations of their social values, and their inventories do not supply many indications of an identity or material aspirations speciﬁc to it. There is a danger that we ﬁll this interpretative void with generalizations based on the more marked patterns exhibited by the most prosperous consumers. Do we interpret the behaviour of this group as merely representing the attainment of the aspirations shared by the whole of the ‘middle sort’, or a conscious effort to differentiate themselves from them, by the deployment of notions of ‘gentility’? The evidence, such as it is, seems to support the latter alternative, rather than the former. Without setting these ‘gentleman-tradesmen’ in the context of the wider inventoried population, their historical visibility in such samples can lead us to accord them a disproportionate social and economic signiﬁcance in this period. Outside the larger East Anglian cloth towns, there is not much evidence in this sample of the existence of a group of very prosperous ‘conspicuous consumers’ to rival (or emulate?) the London ‘middle class’, distinguished by Peter Earle. Any review of the inventoried population of provincial England serves to emphasize how unusual the wealth and material culture of these London tradesmen was, compared to the bulk of tradesmen and craftsmen elsewhere in England at this time. The situation in rural parishes emphasizes this further. The small populations of rural parishes rarely provide substantial inventory samples, but these have been accumulated for Goosnargh in Lancashire and Beaminster in Dorset. Between 1625 and 1720, Goosnargh was administered by a vestry, which met three or four times a year, on average. This was self-selected oligarchy of twenty-four, formed from representatives of the parish’s three separate ‘townships’—Goosnargh, Whittingham, and Newsham.⁷³ Beyond the ranks of the vestry (but often included in its members) were the parochial ⁷³ Goosnargh was actually divided into six ‘tithings’ from which the 24 ‘chief Inhabitants’ were chosen. See F. R. Raines, ‘Notitia Cestriensis or historic notices of the diocese of Chester by the Right Rev. Francis Gastrell D. D., Lord Bishop of Chester’, Chetham Society, 1st ser., 22(1850), 420–1; Fishwick, Goosnargh.

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ofﬁces, of churchwarden, overseers, surveyors, and constables. Through the seventeenth century, there evolved the posts of (rate) assessors and auditors, which remained largely the preserve of the vestry. Beyond these administrators and functionaries were the bulk of the householders, who paid rates, but who did not serve. In the 1673 Hearth Tax, only the vestry group paid on a mean assessment of more than two hearths, where the parish mean was 1.3 hearths. This distinction was also evident in parish ofﬁcers’ household goods. Those who were vestrymen were the most likely to own the ‘new or decorative’ items in the lower half of Table 3.6. Similarly, on average they tended to own more of the basic items of household furniture—tables, chairs, chests, cushions and sheets—than churchwardens, the other ofﬁcers, and the non-ofﬁcer group. This was because their household goods had a median value double those of ofﬁcers outside the vestry, and almost three times the median of the non-ofﬁcer group. As with the analyses in Tables 3.4 and 3.5, differences between the ofﬁce holders outside the vestry and those who never held ofﬁce are evident, if not dramatic. Ofﬁcers had a few more of the basic items of household furnishing in their houses, greater variety in their household goods, and an increased propensity to own decorative items, compared to non-ofﬁcers. Consumption was more ‘conspicuous’ among the vestry, primarily because of their greater propensity to possess most of these twenty-seven items, although few goods common among this group were not also possessed (in some form) by the non-ofﬁcers. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 2, these vestrymen were anxious to distinguish themselves as ‘the better sort of the Inhabitants’ as distinct from the ‘worser sort’ of the parish.⁷⁴ In addition, as early as 1639, ten out of the twenty-four were using the title ‘gent.’⁷⁵, the rest opting for ‘yeoman’—even if four of the latter only merited the title ‘husbandman’ in the 1642 Protestation Return.⁷⁶ Table 3.6 illustrates some aspects of these social aspirations, but it is difﬁcult to sustain the separation of the groups into different status categories based on divergent material consumption alone. In some respects Beaminster in Dorset was similar to Goosnargh, in terms of its settlement patterns and its social structures. As observed in Chapter 2, it was also made up of several dispersed hamlets, sandwiched between the dairy zone in the extreme west of the county and the sheep–corn agriculture of the central chalk ⁷⁴ Lancs. RO PR 644 Goosnargh Vestry minutes 1634–1939, copy of parish rate levied 10 July 1625. ⁷⁵ Only two of these, Alexander Rigby of Middleton Hall, and Thomas Whittingham of Whittingham Hall were distinguished as ‘esq.’. Rigby’s son Edward was MP for Preston after 1660 (and the wealthiest man in the Preston inventory sample). M. Mullett, ‘ ‘‘To dwell together in unity’’: The Search for Agreement in Preston Politics, 1660–1690’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 125, (1975), 61–81; Fishwick, Goosnargh, 185–8. ⁷⁶ Lancs. RO PR 644 Goosnargh Vestry, meeting 16 Apr. 1639; Lancs. RO Microﬁlm 1/25 Goosnargh Protestation Return 1642.

Table 3.6. Items per inventory and % of ofﬁce-holding and non-ofﬁce-holding households possessing them, Goosnargh, Lancs., and Beaminster, Dorset, 1625–1720

Items Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps Hangings

Goosnargh Vestry and Ofﬁcers Med. % No. Hlds. 4 3 1 2 1 1 6 1 2 0 1 0 3 0 3.5 1 0 0 4 1 1 8.5 0

15 76 21 67 3 3 82 3 15 0 3 0 79 0 61 3 0 0 27 15 9 6 0

Ofﬁcers Only Med. % No. Hlds. 3 2 2 1.5 0 1 5 0 2 1 0 1 4 0 2 0 0 0 3.3 1 1 0 0

28 59 21 74 0 1 83 0 12 1 0 1 87 0 67 0 0 0 30 2 10 0 0

Non-Ofﬁcers Med. % No. Hlds. 2 2 1 2 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 2 0 0 0 3 0 1 0 1

33 31 6 33 0 0 69 0 0 0 0 0 71 0 47 0 0 0 25 0 2 0 2

Beaminster Vestry and Ofﬁcers Med. % No. HHlds. 2 2 2 2 1 0 9 2 0 2.5 0 1 2 1 2 0 0 0 4.5 1 1 0 0

58 67 46 96 13 0 100 8 0 8 0 4 83 17 21 0 0 0 33 33 4 0 0

Ofﬁcers Only Med. % no. HHlds.

Non-Ofﬁcers Med. % No. HHlds.

2 1.5 2 2 1 0 13 1 2 14 0 1 1 0 7 1 0 0 2 1.5 1 0 0

2 1 2 2 1 1 6 3 0 11 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 3 1 1 0 0

33 53 47 80 7 0 73 7 7 7 0 7 67 0 20 7 0 0 33 13 13 0 0

27 44 60 84 6 1 79 5 0 1 0 1 79 6 7 0 0 0 26 11 4 0 0

Table 3.6. (continued )

Items

Vestry and Ofﬁcers Med. % No. Hlds.

Musical instruments Books Silver spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Valuation Number

2 2 5 1.5 20.3 84.5 33

3 15 15 12

Goosnargh Ofﬁcers Only Med. % No. Hlds. 0 2 1 1 10.5 58.5 92

0 13 4 1

Non-Ofﬁcers Med. % No. Hlds.

Vestry and Ofﬁcers Med. % No. HHlds.

Beaminster Ofﬁcers Only Med. % no. HHlds.

Non-Ofﬁcers Med. % No. HHlds.

0 2 1 1 6.9 35.6 43

0 1 4 1 15.1 73.7 24

0 2 7 2 9.7 59.4 15

0 2 6 2 7.2 31.7 85

0 6 2 2

0 25 33 13

0 27 13 7

0 21 9 4

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downs.⁷⁷ In the seventeenth century both communities contained substantial numbers of yeomen and husbandmen, many of whom enjoyed considerable security of tenure.⁷⁸ Beaminster vestrymen and ofﬁcers exhibited similar patterns of ownership to those displayed by their counterparts in Goosnargh. Vestrymen were the most likely to own the new or decorative items, and had the highest propensity to own the basic items of household furnishing. Again, however, in terms of the range and number of items possessed, there was no clear distinction between the two groups of ofﬁcers, or any sharp divergence from those who did not serve. As in earlier examples, this suggests that the ‘chief inhabitants’ were positioned further along a common scale of material consumption, and that they did not differentiate themselves by entirely different forms of display, or symbolic markers of status. Matching consumption to ofﬁce appears to conﬁrm the previous correlations of taxation and ofﬁce or other manifestations of social status. Yet the pattern of consumption was not entirely linear, and increases in consumption were not simply a function of ‘surplus wealth’. Other elements can be detected, even if their presence in probate inventories is shadowy. The ownership and display of household items, particularly expensive furniture that denoted status, occurred within rooms. These rooms and their decoration can provide clues about the possible social intent behind the display of such material furnishings. Sadly, room decorations were ﬁxtures and were rarely mentioned in inventories.⁷⁹ As a result, surveys of consumption are based on objects devoid of spatial context, like ﬁgures in a painting where the landscape background has been erased. However, inventories do provide some information. The best of these is the title or description of the room. Generally these follow the generic pattern of ‘hall, parlour, kitchen, buttery, best chamber, nearer chamber, and further chamber’. Occasionally, however, rooms coordinated by colour are mentioned. For example, William Hodgkinson of Preston, who died in 1662, possessed a ‘Blue Chamber’, with a posted bed, blue curtains, white cushion covers with blue embroidery, three blue and white cups, and a pair of blue and white curtains and valence. Similarly, in Colchester, Andrew Fromanteel died in 1673 possessed of a Red Wainscot Chamber and a Blue Wainscot Chamber, each with appropriately furnished beds and their hangings, chairs, and window curtains. Such colour coordination did not occur in inventories at random, but rather followed wealth and status. Hodgkinson had been a bailiff ⁷⁷ Fussell, ‘Farming Systems’, 119, 127–8; Bettey, ‘Land Tenure’, 33–54. ⁷⁸ Bettey, ‘Land Tenure’, 49–50; Farrer Coll. L1/12/16/9 Townley Estate Schedule of Rents, Goosnargh 1679; L1/12/16/43 Townley Survey, Apr. 1727; Lancs. RO D/P 440 Box 2 Stonyhurst Rental c. 1718. ⁷⁹ N. C. Cox and J. J. Cox, ‘Probate Inventories: The Legal Background,’ Local Historian, 16 (1984), 139, 217. Appraisers tended to exclude wainscoting, wall decorations, windows and built-in seating. Certain ﬁxtures could be heirlooms, excluded from the inventory, but included in the deed or lease of the testator’s property. Ibid., 217.

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of Preston,⁸⁰ while Fromanteel was an alderman of Colchester;⁸¹ the former left household goods worth £61, the latter £234.⁸² Signiﬁcantly, both were described in their inventories as ‘gentlemen’. In general, those who possessed colour coordinated rooms and furnishings also left personal estates of greater than average value. In Essex and Suffolk, the thirty testators who possessed such rooms had a median valuation for their household goods of £73, and a median total personal estate of £222. In north-west England forty-ﬁve testators possessed goods whose medians were, respectively, £43.5 and £113. In both regions these valuations were in excess of the medians for the highest group of ofﬁce holders in Tables 3.4 and 3.5. These groups had other peculiarities. They were predominantly urban, or from the ‘suburban’ cloth towns, rather than from exclusively agrarian areas. In Essex and Suffolk, only one of the thirty testators lived in rural mid-Essex (out of a possible 128), while in north-west England, thirty-seven out of forty-ﬁve of the testators lived in Preston. A signiﬁcant minority of these urban residents were also innkeepers, six (13 per cent) of the north-west sample, and nine (30 per cent) of the southern one. This pattern is even more striking in the Dorset and Devon sample. Here, such room descriptions are extremely rare, occurring only in 8 instances (out of 953 inventories), but six of these relate to innkeepers in the wayside town of Sherborne. The scarcity of such colour coordination elsewhere in this sample may be due to its rural bias and (perhaps) the absence of many inventories for the wealthier merchants of Lyme Regis. Even so, this pattern tends to reinforce the link between this fashion and urban or ‘suburban’ life, particularly as it was reﬂected in the provincial inn. Table 3.7a compares the household furnishings of this group with those of the wealthiest testators in the East Anglian and north-west samples only. In these two regions the colour coordinated group were as likely to own a similar variety of items as the wealthiest testators, possessed of household goods worth more than £50. In Essex and Suffolk, the two groups were almost identical, with the colour coordinated group tending to exceed the wealthiest testators in terms of the median value of their household goods, and in the median numbers of beds, tables, and chairs. Both groups were distributed quite widely among the dense network of small manufacturing towns and villages that straddled the county boundary. In the north-west, the wealthiest testators seem to have exceeded the median household wealth of those largely urban tradesmen who favoured ⁸⁰ Lancs. RO CNP 3/1/1 Preston ‘White Book’, 1608–1781. Hodgkinson was town’s bailiff (in charge of judicial functions in the borough) in 1656. See also Mullett, ‘Preston Politics’, 68, 70. ⁸¹ Essex R.O. (Colchester) DB5 Gb. 4 Colchester Assembly Minute Book 1647–66; V.C.H. Essex, 9, 379. Fromanteel was appointed as an Assistant in the Council in 1659, becoming an Alderman in 1660, and Mayor in 1667. See also J. H. Round, ‘Colchester during the Commonwealth’, English Historical Review, 15, (1900), 641–64. ⁸² Lancs. R.O. WCW/A William Hodgkinson, Preston, gent., 26 Jan. 1662; R.O. PROB4/19654 Andrew Fromanteel, Sr., Colchester, gent. 28 Jan. 1673.

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Table 3.7a. Colour-coordinated households: % possessing items and number of items per inventoried household, East Anglia and north-west England, 1625–1740 East Anglia Med. no.

Items Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps Hangings Musical instruments Books Silver spoons Guns ∗

Median £HHG Median £TIV† Number ∗

†

3 4 3 5.5 1 2 25.5 1.5 12 5 1 1 2 2 8 4 2 11 8.5 2 1 5 2 2 2 7 2 73.1 221.8 30

% HHlds. 16 77 73 100 20 30 100 53 43 40 17 63 63 50 57 43 13 7 47 43 27 23 10 10 37 27 43

NW England Med. no. 7 5 2.5 5.5 1 1 21 1 8 12 1 1 4 1 15 2 0 7 12 1 1 12 3 2 2 6.5 1

% HHlds. 22 78 44 93 24 7 96 22 51 20 27 31 87 18 84 24 0 2 47 58 33 47 4 20 31 9 9

68.3 1591.5 29

£HHG = Household goods. £TIV = Total value household goods.

colour coordination. There was less variation between the groups in the range and median number of items owned. Although there was an urban bias to the £50+ wealth group, with 23 out of the 38 north-west inventories relating to residents of Preston and Clitheroe, 12 came from the relatively remote, upland Pennine parish of Slaidburn—of whom two also had colour coordinated rooms. In both regions the presence of furnishings coordinated by colour provides a good indication of the likely wealth of the testator. While this trend was more apparent among the inventories of the wealthier urban dwellers, both samples

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indicate that it was not absent from prosperous rural manufacturers’ or farmers’ households either, implying that the countryside might also sustain a material ‘world of social competition’, contrary to Borsay’s expectations. Rooms coordinated by colour had a social signiﬁcance that ran deeper than merely indicating wealth. In this respect, the presence of colour co-ordination in provincial inns (as well as in the houses of the parochial elite) has an important social resonance. Before the construction of purpose-built assembly rooms, inns were the focus of fashionable sociability. In Preston, the diary of the Bury gentleman Lawrence Rawsthorne’s sojourn in the town is a litany of visits to the houses of the leading inhabitants, and entertainment in its inns.⁸³ Most of the coordinated inns in the sample possessed furnishings of greater value than the houses of even the wealthiest urban tradesman.⁸⁴ This was partly because they were larger than private houses, but it was also a consequence of their social (and commercial) aspirations. For example, when Richard Woods of Preston died in 1695, his inn contained household furnishings worth £117.⁸⁵ The inn had, among other rooms, a Red Chamber, a Sealed (wainscoted) Chamber, ‘The Exchange’, the ‘Roob’d Room’ (with wall hangings?), and the Great Parlour. The latter room displayed intellectual as well as social pretensions, having images of Suetonius’ twelve ‘Cesars’,⁸⁶ as well as a map, an escutcheon, two large pictures, and window curtains for privacy. In Sherborne, Dorset, we can examine change over time, in two inventories of the same inn, taken in 1684 and 1719. In the ﬁrst of these, Thomas Woodward’s property contained 4 public rooms, 10 bedrooms (including the ‘Squirrel’, ‘Swan’, ‘Lion’, ‘Sheriff’s’ and ‘Crown Chambers’) and 13 beds.⁸⁷ There was a dining-room, decorated with 10 pictures and a map, 14 leather chairs and window curtains, while the Cellar Chamber contained new items such as a ⁸³ Lancs. R.O. Transcript, H. W. Clemensha (ed.), Diary of Lawrence Rawsthorne of Hutton, May 1687-Dec. 1689 (c.1900). In May 1687, Rawsthorne (High Sheriff of the county in 1681), attended 9 gatherings at inns in the town, in addition to visiting sixteen other individuals including Thomas Winckley (3 times mayor). ⁸⁴ Two of the Preston innkeepers with colour coordinated rooms had household goods worth under £20, but the other three all exceeded £55. In Essex and Suffolk, three had such goods worth less than £35, while the remaining six exceeded £50, three with more than £100 of household goods. ⁸⁵ Lancs. R.O. Archdeaconry of Richmond WRW Richard Woods, Preston, innkeeper, 20 Nov. 1695. Woods served once as a churchwarden, overseer and surveyor, attended the common council 18 times between 1684 and 1692, served as a juror in the Great Court Leet 12 times 1672–89, and sat as a capital burgess 1688–95. He was also bailiff to the mayor in 1684. Lancs, R.O. CNP 3/2/3 Preston Great Court Leet Book, 1673–1701; CNP 3/1/1 Preston Borough Council ‘White Book’, 1608–1781; PR. 1480 Preston Vestry Book, 1645–1750. ⁸⁶ Philemon Holland translated Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’ lives of the twelve Caesars into English in 1606. See Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Caesars tr. R. Graves, rev. with intro. by M. Grant (London, 1979), x. ⁸⁷ NA Prerogative Court of Canterbury PROB 4/8807 Thomas Woodward, Sherborne, innholder, 5 Jan. 1683/4. Woodward was an overseer of the parish in 1678, and constable in 1679. Dorset R.O. D/BSS/2 Sherborne Overseers’ Account Book, 1659–1836.

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press (cupboard) with drawers, and a couch, and there were ﬁve leather chairs and silverware valued at £25 in the parlour. The total value of these household furnishings was £143.6, putting Woodward’s establishment in the top three household valuations in the town’s inventory sample. Eight out of the seventeen inventories in Sherborne with household goods valued in excess of £50 belonged to innkeepers. In 1719, the same inn was the subject of another inventory, this time relating to the estate of a later keeper, Thomas Girle.⁸⁸ The furnishings had kept pace with changing fashions. The dining-room now contained three oval tables, twelve chairs, a looking glass, ﬁve window curtains, and six framed pictures, but also now housed a bed. The Squirrel chamber had also acquired an oval table, 6 chairs, and two window curtains, and such items also appeared in the Crown and Sheriff’s chambers, along with looking glasses. Even the garrets now housed little oval tables and ‘mill puffe’ [mille pouffe?] beds. The inn had also now been equipped with a billiards room, although the table itself seems to have evaded the appraisers. The silverware had been reduced to one tankard and a dozen spoons valued at £14, but the total value of the household goods of the inn was £182.6, the highest valuation in the south-west sample. In these ways, such multipurpose buildings fulﬁlled the varied social, economic, and cultural functions observed among such establishments by Alan Everitt.⁸⁹ Clearly, their furnishings are not a mere reﬂection of the range, quantity, and value of the household goods even of the ‘chief inhabitants’ of these small provincial towns. In general, inns were larger than the houses of such people. Their furnishings cannot simply be regarded as ‘domestic’, because investment in them represents part of the trade stock of the innkeeper. Yet these inns and their keepers also provide an important insight into the operation of the stereotype of gentility at this time (see Table 3.7b). Their luxurious ﬁttings were not merely accidental accumulations of random items of furniture or decoration. Richard Woods surely had an image of the kind of clientele he wished to attract with his pictures of the twelve Caesars. These customers were likely to have been individuals with, or with pretensions towards, a classical education, and those to whom colour coordinated rooms were either a reminder of home, or a taste towards which to aspire. The presence of such fashionably decorated inns in thoroughfare towns such as Preston or Sherborne suggests that these institutions had a multiple social signiﬁcance as well as a multiplicity of functions. In order to act as focal points for the visiting gentry on law or market days and to entice the more prosperous through-travellers, inns had to employ the signiﬁers of gentility. These included furnishings with connotations of leisure, luxury, and learning, creating a physical fabric designed to be familiar to the social elite, and perhaps implying that the establishment was exclusive to them, and therefore justiﬁably expensive. As a consequence, inns may also have possessed another signiﬁcance. ⁸⁸ Wilts. R.O. Dean of Sarum P5/1719/31 Thomas Girle, Sherborne, innholder, 1 May 1719. ⁸⁹ Everitt, ‘Social Mobility’, 70; Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 210–12.

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Table 3.7b. Median number of items per inventory of £50+ households and % possessing them, by region, 1620–1740 Items Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps Hangings Musical instruments Books Silver/spoons Guns Median £Household Goods Median £Total Valuation Number

Essex and Suffolk % HHlds Med. no. 5 3 3 5 1 1 23 1 6 6 1 1 2 1.5 7 3 2 2 11 1 1 5 2 2 2 6 2 70.3 354 156

17 79 71 94 17 24 94 39 32 39 13 57 72 45 62 34 5 3 46 42 35 15 8 5 44 32 37

NW England % HHlds Med. no. 6 6 3 5.5 1 1 21 1 8 9 1 1 4 1 15 2 1.5 5.5 16 2 1 11 2 2 2 5.5 2 65.9 181.7 79

27 61 34 86 28 20 86 19 58 25 23 34 73 18 68 23 3 3 38 62 41 47 4 16 41 10 13

SW England % HHlds Med. no. 3 4 2.5 5 1 12 15 6 12 8 1 2.5 2 2 5 3 4 10.8 9.5 1 1.5 5 1.5 1 2 6 2

52 80 71 80 11 30 80 25 23 27 9 39 79 41 55 21 5 18 71 39 29 18 4 16 48 63 14

68.8 189.7 56

They may have been one of the receivers through which new (metropolitan) ideas of interior decoration were transmitted to the provinces, and one of the ﬁrst places in which such fashions were seen. Certainly innkeepers were likely to be among the ﬁrst to hear of such new items or tastes, and to be engaged in a world of social (and business) competition with their counterparts in the same town, and those elsewhere along the road. In this respect, then, the symbolic furnishings of the inn offer some support to the contemporary representations by Hogarth and Defoe, in which gentility was increasingly being expressed by reference to a series of symbols, denoting the desired authority, integrity, independence, norms, and behaviour of the

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‘gentleman’. While it is difﬁcult to link such coordination explicitly to notions of gentility, the origins of the trend (and its prevalence among the wealthiest testators) imply a process of social appropriation. Peter Thornton notes that the trend for colour coordination became ‘a dominant feature of fashionable French interior decoration’ after about 1625 and the inventory samples employed in this analysis show that it had percolated to the English provinces by the 1660s.⁹⁰ In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that inns, at least, had long been furnished in elaborate style, possibly with a view to attracting higher-status customers. Richard Britnell quotes the example of the inventory of John Pool’s inn in Colchester, made in 1458. The hall, his main living room, had wall hangings of Flemish manufacture, and the seats had coverings and cushions. There was a large folding table, a cupboard, and a cage for a pet bird. This room was warmed from an open hearth with an iron fender … his house contained two parlours, one large and one small … in both rooms the seats had cloth covers and cushions … upstairs the chamber contained the best bed, with hangings of white linen, powdered with ermine … and yet Pool was not a man of high standing in Colchester, and there were many who were wealthier than he.⁹¹

While the styles had altered between the ﬁfteenth and the seventeenth centuries, medieval urban historians may be correct to suggest that they denoted a shared social concept—of ‘gentility’ indicated by a series of costly, luxurious or novel items associated with wealth and those in authority. As an innkeeper, Pool did not enjoy high status in the town, a situation that may not have changed radically two hundred years later. However, what mattered was not the innkeeper, but the quality of the inn, and the associations that its furnishings invoked. These associations are evident in our inventory sample, where almost all of those able to furnish their houses in such a thematic manner emanated from the wealthiest practitioners of the higher-status trades. Of the Essex and Suffolk sample, eleven were clothiers or cloth merchants, while they also included a grocer, an attorney, an apothecary, a physician, two bakers, and three yeomen. The northern sample contained nine who were described as gentlemen (all lived in Preston), plus a goldsmith, a mercer, an attorney, a surgeon, a physician, two grocers, and a draper. Of the thirty-seven Preston residents, only seven had not served in any ofﬁce in the town, while 24 had been Leet jurors, 13 had been chief burgesses and ten had been borough councillors. At the same time there were other signs of the creeping gentriﬁcation of the administrative elite in Preston. At Easter 1664 the select vestry acquired a new clerk. The previous one, Thomas Mawdesley, had usually been content to record its business as having been transacted on behalf of the ‘twenty-four men’ of the ⁹⁰ P. Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (New Haven and London, 1978), 8. Thornton notes that ‘it remained exceptional until early in the seventeenth century to have uniformity in the décor of a room as a whole’. ⁹¹ Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 212–13.

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parish.⁹² By contrast, his successor, John Clifton, referred consistently to the ‘twenty-four gentlemen and vicar’ of the vestry.⁹³ The inﬂation of honoriﬁc titles also extended to the town’s aldermen, who were now usually accorded the title of ‘gent.’, ex ofﬁcio.⁹⁴ Such urban gentility affected only a tiny elite, but it was this group who were largely responsible for the disproportionate consumption noted by Weatherill, or the ‘urban renaissance’ charted by Borsay. They sought to create a form of gentility appropriate to their ﬁnancial and social circumstances, in which the tokens of leisure, sociability, and education were allied to the realities of earning a living by trade. Colour coordinated rooms, urban walks, or ‘genteel’ places of assembly and more formal social institutions were manifestations of this trend. They were the means by which urban ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ and rural gentry could mix, if not on equal terms, at least in the same surroundings.⁹⁵ The household of a Colchester apothecary, Henry Lamb, provides the best illustration of how these elements linked together. When Lamb died in 1719 he was probably in his late sixties, and had achieved the rank of alderman of this sizeable borough.⁹⁶ When she exhibited his inventory, his wife Elizabeth testiﬁed that Henry ‘had for some years before his death but a small trade’, and the few commercial debts remaining unpaid at his death suggest that effectively he had retired.⁹⁷ Henry and Elizabeth lived in a house redolent of fading urban gentility, with household furnishings valued at £128.45. The Great Kitchen contained an old mohair bed lined with silk, the front bed chamber had a Camblet bedstead with a Persian featherbed, the dining-room had eight old-style upholstered ‘Turkeywork chairs’, and an old virginal, but also more modern items such as two chests of drawers and a tea table and furniture. It was also decorated with a large looking glass, one large and two small pictures, and ⁹² Lancs. R.O. PR 1840 Preston Vestry Book, 1645–1750. Mawdesley did once slip into the form ‘the gent. of the 24’ on fo. 27r. ⁹³ Lancs. R.O. PR 1840 Preston Vestry Book 1645–1750, fos. 37–8. ⁹⁴ This title was awarded purely due to status. For example, William Lemon Jr. became an alderman, bailiff and mayor of Preston, and was habitually described as ‘gent.’ His father, William Sr. never became an alderman and was never described as ‘gent.’, even though he served along side his son in council meetings 1662–82. Lancs. R.O. CNP 3/1/20 Deed between Thomas Winckley, Roger Sudell, Jr., and Joseph King, Preston, gents. and Mayor, Bailiffs and Burgesses of Preston, 19 Sept. 1697. Lemon, Jr., extended his gentle status, and the town’s, in 1697 by selling 0.5 acres to the council to create Avenham walk, a fashionable resort noted in Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 162–3. ⁹⁵ This phrase is Daniel Defoe’s. See D. Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Oxford, 1991), 60. ⁹⁶ He was admitted as a freeman of Colchester on 20 Feb. 1673, putting his date of birth at approximately 1650. Essex R.O. (Col.) D/B 5 Cb 2/24 Colchester Thursday Court Book, 16 Nov. 1671–4 Dec. 1673. He served ﬁrst as a common councillor in 1675–6, was admitted as an assistant in 1683–4, excluded under the new charter 1685–93, readmitted as an assistant in 1692 and made an alderman in 1702. He served until 1712. At the Borough Quarter Sessions at Easter 1716, he was ﬁned £50 for saying ‘that he hoped to see the Rightfull King on the throne in a Months time, him that they call the Pretender’. Essex R.O. (Col.) D/B 5/Gb 5 and 6 Colchester Assembly Minute Books, 1667–92, 1693–1712; Colchester Quarter Sessions Roll D/B 5 Sr 109 Easter 1716. ⁹⁷ NA C.C. PROB3/18/275 Henry Lamb, apothecary, alderman, 12 and 13 Oct. 1719. His shop goods were valued at £22 16s. 4d.

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two brass helmets. Lamb’s parlour, where witnesses testiﬁed he had signed his will at the end of June 1719, contained a couch and squab, a looking glass, a corner cabinet, two cane and two upholstered chairs, a large brass stove, an ‘old dial’ (clock?), ‘an old weather glass’, and a pair of blue stuff window curtains.⁹⁸ The building also housed two other important symbols of ‘gentility’. The ﬁrst of these was the billiards room, complete with table and cues (valued at £3 5s.), denoting leisure, male sociability, and (possibly) the desire to gamble. The second was more overt, the footman’s bedchamber. Clearly, the civic elite of Colchester added a little provincial veracity to Defoe’s sweeping claims about metropolitan tradesmen, that ‘’tis an ordinary thing to see the tradesmen and shopkeepers of London keep footmen, as well as the gentlemen; witness the inﬁnite number of blue liveries, which are so common now, that they are called the tradesmens liveries; and few Gentlemen care to give blue to their servants for that very reason’.⁹⁹ Yet, Lamb’s gentility coexisted with the physical reality of his trading livelihood, because his house incorporated his apothecary’s shop, which was next door to his well-appointed parlour.¹⁰⁰ In this sense, he exempliﬁed the ‘gentleman-tradesman’ described by Defoe, and illustrated how the exalted ranks of the aldermen of Colchester seem to have been on a par with Earle’s wealthy London ‘middle class’. Lamb’s style of life was certainly not unique in the town. Two years before, the estate of Henry Potter, a wealthy woollen draper, was inventoried.¹⁰¹ Potter’s total estate was valued at £2,047, with household goods worth £269.3—the highest valuation in the Essex and Suffolk sample. Potter’s house was furnished with all the latest items of furniture and decoration. The parlour contained an oval table, a card table and stand, a stove, ten cane chairs, window curtains, a peer glass, a tea table, a coffee pot and six cups and saucers, with twelve more in the ‘buffet’, together with three wine decanters. The Best chamber alone contained goods worth £100, that is, more than the total value of household goods for 94 per cent of the Essex and Suffolk sample, and 97 per cent of all 2,246 inventories. It contained, among other items, a bed valued at £30, two easy chairs, a screen, a chest of drawers, a looking glass and dressing case, a brass fender, chinaware and glasses, and a gold watch valued at £30. While such extensive displays of material possessions are encountered most frequently among the richer inventories of the Essex and Suffolk sample, they are not unique to them. In Preston, the inventory of alderman Thomas Martin in 1669 reveals a house containing 6 leather-backed chairs, 4 leather covered ⁹⁸ NA C.C. PROB 28/580 Lamb v. Rogerson, 12 Oct. 1719, cause papers about the will of Henry Lamb. ⁹⁹ Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, 115–16. ¹⁰⁰ NA PROB 28/580 deposition of Jacob Johnson, St Mary-at-the-Walls, Colchester, plumber, aged 60. ¹⁰¹ NA PROB 5/1829, Henry Potter, Colchester, woollen draper, 27 Mar. 1717. Potter was not a senior corporation member, but served as a Grand Juror of Head Ward at Michaelmas Quarter Sessions 1709. Essex R.O. (Col.) Colchester Quarter Sessions Roll D/B 5 Sr 90.

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stools, 4 cloth upholstered stools, 20 pictures, a ‘playing table and [chess?] men’, 11 cushions.¹⁰² Upstairs in the ‘Great Chamber’ there was a canopy bedstead, looking glass, 8 upholstered chairs and stools, 9 cushions, 5 more pictures, and a window curtain, among other goods. The total value of Martin’s household goods was £105, as beﬁtted his status in the borough, having been a capital burgess since 1654, a common council member since 1650, a Great Court Leet juror seven times, twice a surveyor, and a member of the parish vestry.¹⁰³ Meanwhile, in Lyme Regis in 1694, the inventory of John Jones, gent., shows a similar level of furnishing.¹⁰⁴ Jones’s parlour contained 15 leather chairs, 12 ‘paper pictures’, a bass viol, a musket and two pairs of pistols, and an old map. In the hall there were 6 old (fashioned) ‘Turkeywork’ chairs, 12 escutcheons, and 7 joined stools, while the parlour chamber contained 2 chests of drawers, 2 looking glasses, 6 chairs, 3 pictures, a feather bed, and window curtains. The house also had a ladies’ ‘withdrawing room’ next to the dining-room. The total value of these household goods was £127.85, a fraction of the £963 that was due to the deceased in bills, bonds, annuities, and mortgages.¹⁰⁵ While few of the deceased in Lancashire and Dorset rivalled the levels of material comfort and display apparent in the inventories of the Colchester elite, it seems that in all three regions position as a ‘chief inhabitant’ or ‘gentleman-tradesman’ was expressed through, and bolstered by, extensive assemblies of household goods. We could, perhaps, close our analysis at this point, using these few colourful examples of elaborate material furnishings to exemplify a wider, growing ‘middleclass culture’ based upon urban ‘social competition’, and deﬁned by the possession of a range of ‘vaguely middle-class things’. The problem is that these individuals were not representative of the mass of the inventoried population in each of these three areas. In fact, they stood very much above them in terms of wealth and apparent social aspirations. Such individuals, appraised on household goods worth more than about £50, represent only 13 per cent of the total sample (291 out of 2,246 inventories), with over half of these coming from Essex and Suffolk. Most of those wealthy enough to leave inventories, and even most of those who were prosperous enough to serve in parish or borough ofﬁce, did not live in this style, and appear not to have manifested these aspirations. Tables 3.8a–d allow us to locate the most extensive owners of these goods within the inventoried population. They divide the sample into four quartiles, based on the valuation of household goods within the inventory. This allows two elements of comparison between the three regions. First, these valuations ¹⁰² Lancs. R.O. WRW Thomas Martin, Preston, alderman, 1 July 1669. ¹⁰³ Lancs, R.O. CNP 3/2/1 Preston Great Court Leet Book, 1653–1701; CNP 3/1/1 Preston Borough Council ‘White Book’, 1608–1781; PR. 1480 Preston Vestry Book, 1645–1750. ¹⁰⁴ NA PROB 5/1097 John Jones, Lyme Regis, gent., 16 Mar. 1693/4. ¹⁰⁵ There is no evidence that Jones served in either borough or parish ofﬁce in Lyme Regis but his estate remained in administration until 1717 implying that he died leaving young children. See PROB 5/1097.

Table 3.8a. Median number of items and % of quartile 1 households possessing them, by region, 1625–1740 Items Essex and Suffolk Med. no. Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

2 1 2 2 1 1 7.5 1 3 2 0 1 2 4 3 0 0 6 3 1 1 0

% HHlds 19 46 67 91 4 1 91 14 3 1 0 26 51 1 16 0 0 1 48 5 1 0

1625–79 NW England

SW England

Med. no.

Med. no.

2 1 1 1 1 0 5.5 1 2 0 1 0 2 0 3 0 0 0 3 2 1 0

% HHlds 30 43 30 45 3 0 80 3 15 0 2 0 82 0 63 0 0 0 53 2 2 0

2 1 1.5 1 0 3 2 1 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 2 2 1 0 0

% HHlds. 39 16 36 58 0 1 60 1 0 0 0 3 57 0 0 0 0 1 19 3 0 0

Essex and Suffolk Med. no. 3 1 2 3 1 1 10 3.5 5 1 0 1 1.5 1 2.5 3 1 0 4 1 1 1

% HHlds 21 55 67 90 1 4 85 18 4 1 0 30 33 12 9 3 1 0 36 12 4 4

1680–1740 NW England

SW England

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. no.

2 2 1 2 1 0 4 0 2 0 0 1 3 1 3 0 0 0 3 1 1 2

34 46 11 58 1 0 72 0 5 0 0 2 83 2 45 0 0 0 30 8 4 3

1 1 1 1 1 3.5 3 4 0 0 0 2 1 1 1 3 0 2.5 1 1 1 6

% HHlds 43 17 32 57 1 4 54 1 0 0 0 5 51 2 1 1 0 2 19 2 1 2

Table 3.8a. (continued ) Items Essex and Suffolk Med. no. Wall hangings Musical instruments Books Silver spoons Guns Median £HHG Median £TIV

0 0 2 1 1 9.3 23.8

% HHlds 0 0 8 1 4

1625–79 NW England

SW England

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds.

0 0 2 10 1.5 3.9 16.5

0 0 3 2 3

0 0 2 2.5 1 4.1 20.7

Note: £HHG = Value of household goods in £; £TIV = Total inventory value in £.

0 0 7 6 1

Essex and Suffolk Med. no. 0 2 2 0 1 10.5 26.4

% HHlds 0 1 7 0 9

1680–1740 NW England Med. % no. HHlds 0 0 2 0 0 4.9 19.5

0 0 8 0 0

SW England Med. % no. HHlds 0 1 1.5 3 2 3.2 16.7

0 4 14 5 1

Table 3.8b. Median number of items and % of quartile 2 households possessing them, by region, 1625–1740 1625–79 Essex and Suffolk Items

Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

Med. no. 4 1 2 3 1 1 12 1 4 7 0 1 2 1 5 1 1 0 4.8 1 1 2

% HHlds 16 68 69 93 1 1 95 19 14 4 0 47 72 3 42 1 1 0 57 16 3 1

NW England

SW England

1680–1740 Essex and Suffolk

NW England

SW England

Med. no.

% HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds.

Med. no.

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. no.

% HHlds

3 2 1 2 1 0 6 2.5 3 16 1 1 3 0 7 2 0 0 5 1 1 6

28 65 47 75 10 0 95 3 32 2 2 12 90 0 87 3 0 0 58 7 5 10

2 1 2 1 1 5 5 1 3 2 1 3 1 1 2 0 0 2.5 2 1 1 4

46 43 52 79 6 12 70 6 1 4 1 12 79 7 2 0 0 6 31 11 4 2

2 1 1 1 0 5 4 4 0 7 0 4 1 2 3 0 0 5 2 1 1 1

49 49 51 90 0 7 85 3 0 3 0 7 58 1 10 0 0 1 34 4 3 1

3 2 2 3 1 1 11 5 3 5 1 1 1 1 6 2 1 1 6 1 1 2

% HHlds 25 75 75 96 1 9 97 33 12 13 3 31 43 30 19 9 3 1 36 28 12 1

3 2 1 2 1 1 7 1 2 2 1 1 3 1 5 3 0 0 6 1 1 5

41 50 22 84 5 3 88 2 16 3 2 6 83 10 59 2 0 0 27 16 8 8

Table 3.8b. (continued ) 1625–79 Essex and Suffolk Items

Wall hangings Musical instruments Books Silver/spoons Guns Median £HHG Median £TIV

Med. no. 0 1.5 2 2 1 19.9 77.2

% HHlds 0 2 22 12 8

NW England

SW England

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds.

1 2 2 2 1 10.03 33.6

3 2 10 7 2

0 1 2 2 1.5 9.8 30.1

Key: £HHG = Value of household goods in £; £TIV = Total inventory value in £

0 1 21 13 3

1680–1740 Essex and Suffolk Med. no. 0 0 2 3 1 19.9 82.1

% HHlds 0 0 18 15 6

NW England

SW England

Med. % no. HHlds

Med. % no. HHlds

0 1 2 3.5 1 12.6 76.5

0 2 8 2 2

0 1 2 1 2 7.5 19.3

0 3 20 6 3

Table 3.8c. Median number of items and % of quartile 3 households possessing them, by region, 1625–1740

Items

1625–79 Essex and Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds

Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered Chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

4 2 2 3 1 1 15 1 3 6 0 1 2 1 5 2 0 0 8 1 1 4

20 79 68 96 3 7 96 22 15 11 0 53 73 13 51 13 0 0 51 21 4 2

NW England Med. % no. HHlds 4 3 2 2.5 1.5 0 11 1 5 0 1 1 4 2 8 2 0 0 7 1 1 2.5

18 73 48 93 10 0 92 10 40 0 2 13 90 2 87 8 0 0 62 10 5 10

SW England Med. % no. HHlds

1680–1740 Essex and Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds

NW England Med. % no. HHlds

SW England Med. % no. HHlds

2 1 2 2 0 5.5 5 1 2 4 0 1.5 1 2 5 1.5 0 4 3 1 0 2

3.5 3 2 4 1 1 15 6 5 6 1 1 2 1 4 2 2 2 9 1 1 4

3 3 1 2 1 1 8 1 3.5 7 1 1 3 1 6 2 1 0 5 1 1 8

2 1 2 2 1 8 7 2 5 4 1 2 2 1 4 1.5 1.5 3 3 1 1 4

49 73 60 79 0 9 87 7 1 1 0 18 82 4 19 3 0 7 42 7 0 3

15 72 66 90 3 25 85 37 15 28 6 34 56 40 22 18 1 1 46 43 34 6

42 38 16 78 4 12 78 3 16 5 4 10 75 11 47 9 1 0 25 16 26 13

40 59 59 81 7 14 79 6 2 3 1 14 77 11 7 1 1 9 43 20 5 4

Table 3.8c. (continued )

Items Wall hangings Musical instruments Books Silver spoons Guns Median £HHG Median £TIV

1625–79 Essex and Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds 0 2 2 3.5 1 36.8 140.7

0 1 33 17 26

NW England Med. % no. HHlds 2 2 2 1.5 1.5 25.6 67

2 10 28 13 3

SW England Med. % no. HHlds 3 1 1 2 1 17.4 64.5

Note: £HHG = Value of household goods in £; £TIV = Total inventory value in £.

3 9 37 16 12

1680–1740 Essex and Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds 6 1.5 2 3 1 36.1 174.8

1 3 28 40 21

NW England Med. % no. HHlds 2 2 2 2 1 23.1 76.5

1 1 19 3 6

SW England Med. % no. HHlds 0 1.5 2 3 1 14.2 58.1

0 7 23 12 3

Table 3.8d. Median number of items and % of quartile 4 households possessing them, by region, 1625–1740

Items

Beds (unspeciﬁed) Featherbeds Flockbeds Long/square tables Octagonal/round tables Oval/dining tables Joined stools/chairs Rush/wicker chairs Upholstered Chairs Leather chairs Couches Glass keeps Chests Chests of drawers Cushions Window curtains Tea/coffee sets China Sheets (pairs) Looking glasses Clocks Pictures/maps

1625–79 Essex & Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds 5 3 3 5 1 1 23 1 6 6 1 1 2 1 8 2 0 0 11 1 1 3

14 85 84 98 22 20 98 36 30 36 6 64 81 31 74 29 0 0 45 29 25 7

NW England Med. % no. HHlds

SW England Med. % no. HHlds

4 6 3 7 1 1 21 1 9 10 1 1 5 1 18 2.5 0 7 16.5 1 1 9.5

3 2 2 3.5 0 12 11 2 3.5 6 1 1 2 5.5 5.5 1.5 0 7 7 1 1 3.5

9 88 60 95 31 5 95 24 67 16 26 31 90 3 93 24 0 2 41 59 29 48

52 79 68 85 0 14 86 17 15 11 5 32 80 15 42 6 0 12 59 18 9 6

1680–1740 Essex & Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds 5 3.5 2 5 1 2 21.5 6 6 6 1 1 2 1.5 6 4 2 3 10.5 2 1 6

22 71 53 90 10 31 91 47 40 44 24 47 60 68 44 46 10 9 50 60 49 25

NW England Med. % no. HHlds

SW England Med. % no. HHlds

4 4 2 3 1 1 14 3.5 6 8 1 1 3 1 6.5 2 1.5 4 8 1 1 8

3 2 2 3 1 7 11 5 6 10 1 3 2 1 3 3 2 9.5 4.5 1 1 6

56 31 12 79 10 22 79 6 24 15 9 19 66 20 49 9 2 1 32 38 34 24

57 62 55 86 11 25 86 17 14 12 2 22 77 34 24 9 4 12 55 34 19 11

Table 3.8d. (continued )

Items

Wall hangings Musical instruments Books Silver spoons Guns Median £HHG Median £TIV

1625–79 Essex & Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds 2 2 2 6 2 69.6 356.7

7 5 45 33 41

NW England Med. % no. HHlds 3 2 2 6 2 57.3 129.5

3 14 38 16 16

SW England Med. % no. HHlds 2 1 1 5 1 40.7 150.2

Note: £HHG = Value of household goods in £; £TIV = Total inventory value in £.

2 6 47 45 14

1680–1740 Essex & Suffolk Med. % no. HHlds 2 1.5 2 6 1.5 67.8 322.8

9 3 46 31 29

NW England Med. % no. HHlds 2 2 2 5.5 1 45.1 125.2

1 5 23 8 7

SW England Med. % no. HHlds 1 2 2 3.5 1 32 109.8

1 11 43 40 12

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of household goods mean that we are comparing the value of the same types of goods in all inventories, rather than using total inventory valuations, which will vary depending on the amount of trade stock falling within the appraisers’ remit. Secondly, by dividing the sample into quartiles, we are analysing people in the same relative position within each of the samples. By this means, we can analyse both the extent of regional difference, and the inﬂuence of wealth on the propensity to possess each of the 27 items selected in these analyses. The tables show that newer decorative items were commonplace only in the fourth (top) valuation quartile, with more than 25–30 per cent of households owning items such as oval tables, chests of drawers, looking glasses, or clocks. Only a small minority (10 per cent or less) owned fashionable chinaware or tea and coffee utensils. Admittedly, by the second half of our period the top two quartiles tended to own a wide variety of these 27 different items, but even so, only the top quartile had a signiﬁcant propensity to possess tea/coffee sets, china and wall hangings. Figures for some of these items can be compared directly with those given by Overton and colleagues.¹⁰⁶ For mirrors (looking glasses) the Essex and Suffolk inventories matched the top quartile of Kent inventories, with 29 per cent possessing them before 1680 (31 per cent in this quartile in Kent, 1650–99), and 60 per cent after 1680 (53.1 per cent in Kent, 1700-40). However, upholstered furniture and hot drinks utensils were more common among this inventory stratum in Kent than among those north of the Thames. Similarly, while there were fewer Dorset and Devon inventories with these items than equivalent groups in Essex, Suffolk, or Kent, they were generally on a par with or slightly ahead of Overton and colleagues’ Cornish sample. After 1680, 34 per cent of the top quartile in Dorset and Devon possessed mirrors, compared to only 9.4 per cent of the Cornish inventories, but just 4 per cent possessed hot drinks utensils in Devon and Dorset, compared to 5.1 per cent in Cornwall’s highest household goods quartile. The lower quartiles in both regions were very unlikely to own upholstered furniture, mirrors, and tea or coffee equipment. Of the three regions in this study, only in Essex and Suffolk were the third quartile group in regular possession of most of these goods after 1680. Given the difference in the value of the household goods possessed by this group, compared to its peers in the other two areas (£36.1, compared to £23.1 in the north-west, and £14.2 in the south-west), this is not particularly surprising. In Essex and Suffolk even the second quartile owned items such as rush or wicker chairs, chests of drawers, and looking glasses with relative frequency (that is, in more than 25 per cent of households). So, it seems that only the top two quartiles in these samples displayed a tendency to own anything other than the basics of household furnishing. In fact, all the households in the inventory sample may have been relatively prosperous and furnished comfortably compared to the bulk of the population. We get the best sense of this wider social context by ¹⁰⁶ Overton and colleagues, Production and Consumption, 144, table 7.3.

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examining the lowest quartile in the least prosperous samples, in the north-west and south-west. Here, while most had some kind of bed (usually of straw or ﬂocks), only just over half the group had tables and chests, with generally more than two-thirds possessing stools or benches. The remainder may have rented such items as furnishings in their houses, lived in shared accommodation possessed of ‘incompletely’ furnished households, or simply have done without. As a consequence, a household that was furnished adequately, albeit with pieces of furniture of varying age and states of repair, may represent as much of a ‘status achievement’, in relative terms, as did the consciously ‘fashionable’ household of Henry Potter. The trouble is that it is difﬁcult to translate such incremental, make-do-andmend ‘consumption’ into a coherent ‘bourgeois’ material culture. There are two reasons for this. First, we have almost no information about the social intentions behind the patterns of ownership displayed by the bulk of this inventory sample. Secondly, as a consequence of this silence, where there were high levels of ownership of basic items, but a correspondingly low propensity to possess ‘new, decorative items’, it is difﬁcult to establish what this signiﬁed in social terms. Among the ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’, it is possible to link the social (and wealth) differentials in ownership patterns with the expressed identity of such individuals, as aspirant ‘gentlemen’ or ‘chief inhabitants’ in parish or borough government. These patterns represent a step-change in levels of consumption, even if we might continue to argue about their cause—the growth of ‘middle-class’ values, versus aspirations to ‘gentility’. Differences between the bottom two quartiles (and even the ﬁrst three quartiles in Lancashire and Dorset) are more difﬁcult to determine, because they represent consumption extending along a continuum. Is the tendency to have more of the same kinds of goods merely a function of moderate increases in disposable income, or does it represent a gathering desire to be admitted to the ‘world of social competition’, and indicate the accumulation of wealth in order to do so? Does the inventory actually obscure these differences, by concealing considerable variation in the quality or style of objects beneath its laconic descriptions? Neither question is easy to answer, because any attempt to penetrate the identity of the ‘ordinary’ ratepayers, minor ofﬁcers, and ‘honest’ householders is frustrated by the paucity of evidence. In the same way that it is difﬁcult to decode the euphemistic language of the parish to understand the social criteria underlying the blanket term ‘the inhabitants’, so it is hard to invest the general distribution of household objects with deep social meaning. Ultimately, in both instances we are left with a group of ratepayers and inventoried householders who show some signs of having become more prosperous through our period, but whose social identity remained in many respects as undifferentiated and disarticulated in the 1740s as it had been a century before. In village society, outside the south-east in particular, it is very difﬁcult to discern the glimmers of a socially speciﬁc ‘bourgeois’ pattern of domesticity, sociability, and competition in the ‘material culture’ espoused by their propertied inhabitants. There is evidence

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of distinctive social attitudes, reinforced through patterns of ownership, among some of the rural ‘chief inhabitants’ and among the wealthier tradesmen in provincial towns and regional centres. The interpretative problem is whether or not this represented the formative stirrings of the English ‘middle class’ or ‘classes’. Two issues of historical perspective accompany this problem. First, the above analyses illustrate just how unrepresentative the experience of the London ‘big bourgeoisie’ was in relation to the lifestyles, consumption behaviour, and spending power of all but the most prosperous of the provincial elite. The capital’s ‘middle class’ (that is the rich and super-rich mercantile and trading households) may well have represented a distinct, growing, and highly visible section of society in the metropolis. They may also have had obvious but less numerous echoes in Bristol, Norwich, and among aldermen and their peers in the larger county towns. Yet, in the period for which probate inventories are extant (to approximately 1740), they seem to have had few imitators among the economically independent, and modestly prosperous households who comprised the ofﬁcers and ratepayers of small-town and village England. Secondly, there is the danger of viewing this elite and their activities through the prism of the nineteenth-century urban ‘middle class’. Drinking tea, wearing a three-piece suit, eating too much sugar, reading newspapers, following fashion, and living in houses stuffed with bric-a-brac may be activities that convey associations to us of the slightly suffocating domesticity of the Victorian ‘middle class’ in the new suburbs of industrial conurbations. However, as is hinted at by Defoe and Hogarth’s depictions of ‘trade’ cloaking itself in the garments of gentility, these activities may represent the expression of a different social aspiration among a much smaller, and comparatively much wealthier section of the population in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. This appropriation of the signiﬁers of gentility, and the modiﬁcation of their meaning to suit the circumstances and attributes of the higher urban trades and professions may have had ﬁfteenthand sixteenth-century precursors, but was on a new scale in the later seventeenth century. It involved aspects that would percolate into the ‘middle class’ of the early industrial age, notably the ideal of gentility itself, but it was neither a direct ancestor of it, nor the ﬁrst move in a process that would culminate in it. Instead, this study argues that it represented a conscious attempt at social distancing across a fault-line or threshold in parish life. This was represented broadly by the distinction seen between ‘chief’ and other ‘inhabitants’, between the ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ trades, or between those who ensured they had a best bedroom or a fancy parlour, and those who either could not afford it, or to whom it did not matter. This division ran through those trades or wealth categories that historians have tried to gather together as the ‘middle sort of people’ or have suggested were on their way to becoming the ‘middle class’. What motivated these attempts at social distancing? The key to this seems to lie within the conﬁnes of the parish, and the relentless ﬁnancial scrutiny

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and constant status comparisons to which the ‘chief inhabitants’ were subjected within it. As we saw in the previous chapter, such ‘chief inhabitants’ established their position through their wealth as ratepayers and their position in parish ofﬁce. As was also demonstrated, they held this position as long as their personal, social, and business credit endured among their peers. Some had the misfortune of ﬁnding that it expired before they did. We have also seen that gentility was mutable, that it meant different things in different social contexts, and was represented by different signiﬁers, and espoused by a variety of groups in society—of whom, not all conformed to conventional deﬁnitions of the group. Yet, while gentility and its adherents varied according to context, the ideal of gentility remained as a social benchmark within the contingent and constant status estimations within the parish. Contemporaries’ lack of agreement on a single deﬁnition of gentility was less important than their continued faith in its existence as a social category. This category seems to have appealed to the parochial ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ because it symbolized their elevation above the ordinary ratepayers and inhabitants, and because it offered potential equality with other claimants of the status of ‘gentleman’.¹⁰⁷ This is surely part of the reason why such individuals invested their ‘surplus’ wealth in the types of items found in their inventories, as part of their attempt to recast ‘gentility’ in their own image. In this respect, while these values and lifestyles seem to embody the hallmarks of ‘middle-class values’ or ‘bourgeois domesticity’, the intent behind their display may have been antithetical to such notions. Instead of illustrating the earliest stages in the formation of a ‘middle-class’ social consciousness, these patterns of ownership appear to represent attempts by these people to escape ‘localist’ systems of estimation, by appropriating (and redeﬁning) the material signiﬁers of gentility. This suggests a greater desire to assimilate and modify the existing structures of political power, social authority, economic control, and cultural discourse—associated with the landed gentry—than to formulate new ones that reﬂected overt ‘bourgeois’ roles or values. By default, this may have created one of the elements that constituted the socially and politically conscious nineteenth-century ‘Middle Class’, as described in detail by Dror Wahrman.¹⁰⁸ Even so, we should not anticipate this process in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, or succumb to the temptation of extending the experience of these localized elites to all those we label the ‘middle sort of people’ at this time. ¹⁰⁷ The latter notion of moral equivalence assisted the spread of the term through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a form of public address among groups who would not otherwise have been regarded as ‘gentlemen’. See Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 22; J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), 508. ¹⁰⁸ Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 328–76. See also D. Wahrman, ‘National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, 17/1 (1992), 43–72.

4 The Language of Social Authority T preceding chapters have presented a paradoxical picture of the ‘middle sort of people’. On the one hand, they have shown that across the country local administration was in the hands of men of similar relative social standing. Such individuals were, in aggregate, more prosperous than the bulk of the other inhabitants of their settlements. In almost all parishes, their ranks concealed a core of more active, involved participants, who sometimes, perhaps increasingly, coalesced into open or closed vestries through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These parish rulers provide us with a de facto ‘middle sort’, which, if it does not represent this social group in its entirety, nonetheless suggests the outlines of a coherent entity within early modern society. On the other hand, there is distressingly little evidence that these people shared this perception of themselves. Extant evidence leads away from this conclusion, in two different directions. First, numerous examples testify to the perception of relative local status embodied primarily in the distinction between ‘chief’ and other ‘inhabitants’ within the parish. However, the locally speciﬁc basis of these comparisons meant that such status resisted generalization beyond the parish. Each parish contained its ‘chief inhabitants’, but contemporaries seem to have lacked the conceptual tools to thread them together. Secondly, though, analysis of probate inventories pointed to a different route out of such contingent, restricted social perspectives. This was via the concept of gentility, an identity that embodied social distinction, political autonomy, intellectual authority, and material independence, and which was accorded universal (if not always positive) recognition. Traces of such a selfimage can be detected among the household possessions of the more prosperous ofﬁce-holding ‘chief inhabitants’, particularly in goods denoting fashion, leisure, learning, and sociability. Unfortunately, this social identity cuts across our ‘chief inhabitants’, inserting a potential social threshold between those who manifested these aspirations, and those who did not. Such a division also appears antithetical to the existence of a single, broad-based ‘middle sort’ brought together by a common culture of ‘diligence, thrift, chastity, domesticity … and rationality in the face of … ‘‘fashion’’ ’.¹ In response to such a paradox, this chapter undertakes two related analyses. The ﬁrst examines why ‘gentility’ was an attractive social concept for a portion ¹ Hunt, Middling Sort, 196.

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of the ‘chief inhabitants’ in this period. The second searches for alternative conceptions of ‘middling’ identity in the provinces, and seeks to explain why these remained weak into the mid-eighteenth century. It does so primarily by a qualitative study of expressions of social identity among a number of ‘middling’ individuals in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through an examination of personal memoranda, correspondence, and court cases. This is an impressionistic mode of investigation, and it is difﬁcult to establish whether such individuals were representative of their peers, either among their immediate neighbours or the ‘middling’ more generally. However, the purpose of this focus on individual attitudes and experience is to bridge a gap in the existing literature, which has concentrated on general surveys either of the advice literature about gentility, ‘civility’, or ‘politeness’, or of ‘genteel’ material culture, without always being able to demonstrate clearly how the former inﬂuenced the latter.² As Bryson has put it, ‘to use didactic writing on manners as a guide to practice is to be in the position of an art historian trying to reconstruct a lost painting not from a straightforward description of the picture but only from accounts of how it ought to have looked’.³ A focus on the social experience of a handful of individuals reveals some fragments of this lost work, and allows us to explore the ways in which the norms of gentility were translated into practice, in a few speciﬁc instances at least. Given the burgeoning literature on these themes, it is necessary ﬁrst to deﬁne the parameters of this chapter. As Bryson, Burke and colleagues, and Klein ² Civility as a mode of self-presentation, code of political, social, sexual, and intellectual interaction is the subject of much on-going research, notably: L. E. Klein, ‘Coffeehouse Civility, 1660–1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59/1 (1996), 30–51; A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998); P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays in Honour of Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000); J. Gillingham, ‘From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 267–91; D. M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2002); M. J. Braddick, ‘Civility and Authority’, in D. Armitage and M. J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002), 93–112; J. Richards (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke, 2003); M. Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, 2003), to which might be added V. Wayne, ‘Assuming Gentility: Thomas Middleton, Mary Carleton and Aphra Behn’, in J. Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot, 2004), 243–56; Dawson, Comic Theatre; ‘politeness’ as a form of (primarily) genteel self-presentation and material consumption has been analysed in Langford, Commercial People, 59–122; Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes’, 362–82; Carter, Polite Society; Berry, ‘Rethinking Politeness’, 65–81; Langford, ‘Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, 311–32; Carter, ‘Polite ‘‘Persons’’ ’, 333–54; Klein, ‘British Eighteenth Century’, 869–98; Borsay, ‘Politeness and Elegance’, 1–12; the literature on material aspects of gentility has been dealt with already in Ch. 3 above, but might also include N. Cooper, ‘Rank, Manners and Display: The Gentlemanly House, 1500–1750’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 291–310; R. H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of Politeness’, ibid. 355–74; H. Berry, ‘Polite Consumption’ ibid. 375–94; E. Foyster, ‘Creating a Veil of Silence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the Eighteenth-Century Household’, ibid. 395–416; A. Fletcher, ‘Courses in Politeness: The Upbringing and Experiences of Five Teenage Diarists, 1671–1860’, ibid. 417–30; ³ Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 6.

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have emphasized, the concepts of ‘civility’ and ‘politeness’ resonate deeply in the history of early modern culture, and seem to have affected many aspects of life—from language to architecture, from perceptions of smell to intellectual authority, from social organization to protest and punishment, from the conduct of borough government to that of imperial expansion.⁴ This was because ‘civility’, ‘politeness’, and (to an extent) ‘gentility’ were cultural norms, that is, ways of understanding, imposing order upon, and re-fashioning oneself and one’s immediate social environment. These overlapping concepts were used most powerfully as arbiters or referents of behaviour, organization, or values. For example, Vickery notes that ‘ ‘‘the polite’’ and ‘‘the genteel’’ ’ were the main social concepts utilized by female correspondents among minor landed families in the eighteenth-century Pennines, who expressed themselves consistently without ‘recourse to a vocabulary of ‘‘upper’’, ‘‘middle’’ and ‘‘lower class’’ ’.⁵ As all recent studies have emphasized, there was no single agreed standard or deﬁnition of ‘civility’, politeness’, or ‘gentility’, but each application of these concepts seems to have been made on the assumption that there was. In this respect, these norms inspired powerful social stereotypes of appropriate behaviour or ‘manners’, even if these were never entirely coherent or consonant. These stereotypes and their inﬂuence are the focus of interest in this chapter, because the implication from the previous chapter is that they acted not merely as reference points for moral conduct or political organization, but as social ideals and signiﬁers of status, most notably among the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’. In order to emphasize this social dimension, preference will be given to the term ‘gentility’ rather than to ‘civility’ or ‘politeness’, even though the latter were integral to gentility, and gentility was itself regarded as the natural repository of civil or polite behaviour. This preference for discerning social distinctions and signiﬁers within such broad cultural phenomena has been questioned by Klein. He has observed that ‘cultural traits do not inhere in individuals by virtue of their social location but ⁴ P. Burke, ‘A Civil Tongue: Language and Politeness in Early Modern Europe’, in Burke et al., Civil Histories, 31–48; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 151–92; T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1998); Cooper, ‘Rank, Manners and Display’; M. S. R. Jenner, ‘Civilization and Deodorization? Smell in Early Modern English Culture’, in Burke et al., Civil Histories, 127–44; C. Brant, ‘Fume and Perfume: Some Eighteenth-Century Uses of Smell’, Journal of British Studies, 43/4 (2004), 444–63; Langford, ‘Eighteenth-Century Politeness’; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 75–106; B. Capp, ‘Arson, Threats of Arson, and Incivility in Early Modern England’, in Burke et al., Civil Histories, 197–214; J. A. Sharpe, ‘Civility, Civilizing Processes, and the End of Public Punishment in England’, ibid. 215–30; J. Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: The Meanings of Urban Freedom’, ibid. 181–96; P. Withington, ‘Two Renaissances: Urban Political Culture in Post-Reformation England Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 41/1 (2001), 250–64; P. Morgan, ‘Wild Wales: Civilizing the Welsh from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, ibid. 265–84; J. G. Darwin, ‘Civility and Empire’, ibid. 321–36; A. Hadﬁeld, ‘Tacitus and the Reform of Ireland in the 1590s’, in Richards, Civil Discourses, 115–30; K. Chedgzoy, ‘The Civility of Early Modern Welsh Women’, ibid. 162–82. ⁵ A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), 13.

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rather are kinds of competence or capacity which individuals may or may not master and of which they may or may not avail themselves … depending on their abilities, needs and interests’.⁶ To some extent, this is incontestable. For example, the work of Weatherill and Overton and colleagues has refuted the notion of simple social emulation, where the ‘middling’ copied the manners, modes, and material possessions of the ‘gentry’ because of some innate craving for ‘status’ that could be satisﬁed only by adopting the behaviour of the group immediately above them in the hierarchy. Klein, Bryson, and Dawson all emphasize that their preferred terms, ‘politeness’, ‘civility’, and ‘gentility’ were culturally rather than socially determined, and therefore subject to appropriation and reinterpretation by a variety of social groups.⁷ However, the ‘abilities, needs and interests’ of individuals within these groups also had some bearing on their capacity to adopt particular cultural forms. Such ‘cultural’ phenomena were unlikely to have been available equally, or of equal signiﬁcance, to all social groups. It was much easier to appropriate the traits of gentility if you could afford them, even if this ability did not necessarily determine the individual’s propensity to do so.⁸ As a result, in order to assess the relative weight of such social considerations we have to try to reconstruct the intentions of those who appropriated these cultural forms. To quote Klein again, ‘the sort of cultural interpretation that is called for … is therefore not a correlation of cultural traits with levels in a social hierarchy but rather an account of what people think they are doing and expressing when they perform actions’.⁹ This is the purpose behind the detailed case histories outlined below. Why was ‘gentility’ a powerful social concept and stereotype in this society? Steven Shapin has provided the most acute analysis of the signiﬁcance and the attraction of this cultural label. He notes that ‘few boundaries in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England were at once as substantial, as consequential, and as contested as that dividing society into its gentle and nongentle portions’. In his view, this division was second only, perhaps, ‘to that between Christian and heathen’.¹⁰ He echoes Peter Laslett in arguing that gentility possessed social power because it symbolized political authority, economic independence, and personal autonomy. Alone among social groups, gentlemen ‘were the people who acted upon a national stage’.¹¹ Landed gentlemen, in particular, were the unquestioned political agents and leaders of the period, sitting in parliament and on the judicial bench, and exerting control over the militia.¹² Rental income from land ensured that ‘the gentleman was (and was supposed to be) free of want and that he was under no mundane necessity to labor’.¹³ Wealth allowed idleness, but it also conferred independence of mind and judgement. ‘Gentlemen ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ¹⁰ ¹²

Klein, ‘British Eighteenth Century’, 873. Ibid., 872–3, 896–8; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 276–83; Dawson, Comic Theatre, 261–2. See Earle, Middle Class, 292. ⁹ Klein, ‘British Eighteenth Century’, 873. Shapin, Truth, 43–4, 46. ¹¹ Ibid., 47; Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 28. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 43–62, 116–42, 282–348. ¹³ Shapin, Truth, 49.

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were truth-tellers because nothing could work upon them that would induce them to be otherwise’.¹⁴ This was why contemporaries regarded gentlemen as most suited to the exercise of political power—their independent means reduced the likelihood that they would be corrupted by a single source, and in any numbers.¹⁵ This was also the basis of their social and moral authority because it allowed them to be ‘disinterested’, supposedly standing above the webs of clientage and obligation created by employment, tenancy, debt, poverty, and neighbourly intrigue, and thus able to act as impartial arbiters upon them. Wealth was not the only source of gentlemanly elevation. As Shapin and Corﬁeld have argued, the inability of courtesy writers to pin down gentility to a speciﬁc group in the social order (such as the armigerous, or the landed) meant that many emphasized individual virtue as the litmus test of this status, rather than birth, wealth or power.¹⁶ Corﬁeld quotes Steele’s observation in The Tatler of 1710, that ‘The Appellation of Gentleman is never to be afﬁxed to a Man’s Circumstances, but to his Behaviour in them’.¹⁷ Shapin and Bryson also note the effects of the Reformation, in emphasizing the importance of (Reformed) Christian morality rather than pagan ‘virtu’; that is, of spiritual self-control and self-examination, rather than Stoic self-restraint and disdain for emotion or fear.¹⁸ This meant that the image of the gentleman contained elements that denoted personal, not just material, authority and superiority over the bulk of the population, and thus emphasized his ﬁtness to exercise power.¹⁹ While gentility was constantly contested, and multiple ‘gentilities’ existed,²⁰ the ideal of gentility remained a status stereotype that was recognized across the country, and up and down the social order. Indeed, Corﬁeld suggests that ‘it was the social ﬂexibility of usage around a constant moral ideal’ that explains the longevity of this concept as an archetype of societal and cultural power from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.²¹ Shapin has also identiﬁed another aspect of this moral component of gentility that may have appealed to aspiring ‘chief inhabitants’. Once entered, ‘gentle society was considered to be fundamentally a society of equals’.²² Gentlemen were to be honoured with equal respect, trustworthiness, and veracity, and were free (according to the conduct literature, if not the common law) to defend that honour by force if it was impugned.²³ While social commentators, such as William Harrison or Edward Chamberlayne, lavished considerable attention on the ‘degrees’ of titular nobility above the ‘mere’ gentleman, ‘it was not accepted ¹⁴ Ibid., 84. ¹⁵ Shepard, ‘Honesty, Worth and Gender’, 99. ¹⁶ Ibid., 56–64; Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 12–18. ¹⁷ Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 13. ¹⁸ Shapin, Truth, 63–4; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 212–42. ¹⁹ Shapin, Truth, 77–8; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 132–4, 176–92. ²⁰ Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 18–23. See also, N¨unning, ‘From ‘‘Honour’’ to ‘‘Honest’’ ’, 32–4. ²¹ Corﬁeld, ‘The Rivals’, 21. ²² Shapin, Truth, 102. ²³ Ibid., 107–14; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 232–3, 236–42; M. Peltonen, ‘ ‘‘Civilized with Death’’: Civility, Duelling and Honour in Elizabethan England’, in Richards, Civil Discourses, 51–67.

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that there was any inequality in the authentic bases of gentility’.²⁴ On formal occasions a duke might take precedence over an esquire, but both were gentlemen, where a yeoman was not. As Bryson notes, this equal entitlement to respect and the potentially lethal perils of its denial led contemporary commentators to suggest that gentlemen should always err on the side of caution, crediting people with status based on their appearance, in the absence of knowledge about their ancestry. In ‘genteel’ social gatherings in towns (and later in fashionable spas), participants often lacked the contextual knowledge available to ‘county’ families, or, for that matter, to parochial ‘chief inhabitants’. Bryson quotes the anonymous author of The Art of Complaisance, who averred that, amongst those who pretend to no more than being Gentlemen, there appears no difference in quality, for every one is not presumed so much a Herald, as to know how antient every man’s family is with whom he converses, and indeed there are few who will not take it as an affront, that any should presume to be better Gentlemen than themselves.²⁵

This desire to avoid offence could give the beneﬁt of the doubt to individuals whose provenance as gentlemen was otherwise dubious. Providing a person was able to carry off the manners of a gentleman or woman the rules of gentlemanly honour and ‘politeness’ ensured that they had to be treated accordingly, temporarily and in public at least. However, as will be discussed below, there could be a sharp distinction between admittance and acceptance among the ranks of the ‘genteel’, and the backbiting, ridicule, and ostracism that awaited the unsuccessful parvenu inhibited the social aspirations of some ‘chief inhabitants’. Bryson and Shapin suggest that in presenting themselves gentlefolk had to be acutely sensitive to social context.²⁶ Gentlemanly ‘civility’ or ‘politeness’ was about maintaining honour, dignity, and self-control by striking the right social note in every environment: deferential but not servile to superiors; respectful but not submissive or competitive with equals; and authoritative but not overbearing to inferiors. Bryson observes that the gentlemanly code of ‘good manners is not only a code in the sense of providing a coherent series of standards, but … [also] in the sense of providing a symbolic language whose elements may be symbolically varied according to place, time and the social message which the individual wishes to communicate’.²⁷ So, even for the landed gentry, gentility was a set of manners that was applied according to context. Such variations were even more apparent among those on the lower edges of gentility, who were trying to span both local and national systems of estimation. This constant juggling emphasizes that gentility was both a social performance and a cultural construction, not just for those anxiously trying to take on the status. Recent literature on gentility has suggested that this had two important ²⁴ Shapin, Truth, 45. ²⁵ Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 137. ²⁶ Ibid., 96, 104–5, 123–4, 134–8; Shapin, Truth, 101–7. ²⁷ Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 86.

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consequences. First, although gentility marked a fundamental divide in early modern society, it was also a social category which was unstable and about which there was much unease. Secondly, this instability meant that the category underwent both mutation and subdivision, as members sought to preserve distinctions in the face of social mobility and the appropriation of genteel values. Dawson’s research into the problematic nature of ‘gentility’ within Restoration comedy highlights some of the potential fault-lines of this social category. He notes that the pivotal ﬁgure of these comedies was the ‘fop’ or the ‘beau’. ‘Fops were, ﬁrst and foremost, ﬁctive creations’, or comic stereotypes, satirizing notions of gentility by reducing them to a series of mannered (and therefore ridiculous) gestures, garments, phrases, and ideas.²⁸ In contrast to existing interpretations, however, Dawson asserts that the fop was not a social upstart or newcomer, but was generally depicted either as the heir of a landed family waiting to inherit, or as the younger son of such a family, rather than as an example of Defoe’s ‘gentlemantradesman’.²⁹ This was signiﬁcant, because it meant that the comedy focused on the ‘integrity of the ‘‘gentleman’’ as a social identity per se’, rather than on the comic faux pas of a ‘middling’ interloper who failed to carry off an otherwise legitimate identity.³⁰ ‘It was the task of the comedic staging of foppery to … ask how we tell the gentleman apart from common mortals’.³¹ Dawson argues that the fop made evident two discordant elements of gentility. On the one hand, he emphasized his ‘blood’, lineage, and family connections—his innate qualiﬁcations for gentle status. On the other hand, he showered himself in the visible symbols of gentility—wig, sword, frock coat, ‘steenkirk’ neckerchief, fancy waistcoat, and fashionable shoes, as well as the mannerisms of the urban gentleman. These were the very qualities of gentility that might be adopted most easily by newcomers. For Dawson this tension reﬂects the instability of notions of gentility, because it was impossible deﬁnitively to prove lineage, and perhaps (we might add) because it was feared that this was itself no guarantee of gentlemanly virtue.³² Given that in some circumstances gentility could be reduced to a series of readily accessible signiﬁers, how could existing possessors of this status distinguish themselves from potential interlopers? If foppery was a satirical depiction of one possible solution, Bryson has suggested another, in the persona of the rake. She highlights two motives for the growth of libertine behaviour among courtiers and landed aristocrats and gentlemen after the Restoration, resulting from external and internal competition over status. External competition came not so much from the ‘inﬁltration into gentry society by men of the middling ranks’, but from the increased appropriation among them of ‘gentry manners’.³³ Rakish behaviour was ‘a further move in the game of fashion’, involving ‘an actual assault on the pretensions’ of these middling mimics. ‘The code of libertinism gloriﬁed a lawless ‘‘nature’’ to counteract middle rank ability to project a ‘‘civil’’ ²⁸ Dawson, Comic Theatre, 148. ³¹ Ibid. 161. ³² Ibid. 160–3.

²⁹ Ibid., 150–63. ³⁰ Ibid., 160. ³³ Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 265.

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control of the natural equal to that of the ‘‘masters of civility’’ ’. Rakishness was thus one more move in the social ‘arms race’. If ‘civility’ was the basic behavioural mode of the gentleman, those who wished to distinguish themselves further had either to heighten their manners (foppery), or engage in a conscious rejection and subversion of such norms (libertinism). Internal competition came from the peer group, who tried to outdo the proponents of each of these forms of distinction, leading to ever-greater displays of these essentially ‘performative’ characteristics. ‘Libertine manners … were also encouraged and elaborated as part of the social competition between cliques and groups within gallant society, as the development of rakishness through clubs suggests’.³⁴ The same is true of other modes of gentility, notably those based around learning and learned societies, and the same intent is visible in the ﬁnancial thresholds imposed on entry to fashionable events, or subscriptions to fashionable causes or institutions.³⁵ If gentility became a cultural norm in late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury society, then, like other cultural forms, it could become subject to the currents of fashion. This explains the some of the ‘ﬂexibility of usage’ identiﬁed by Corﬁeld above. In abstract, therefore, the constituent values of gentility were almost as varied and fragmented as contemporary opinions about who qualiﬁed as a gentleman. Gentility contained within it fundamental tensions. There was a disparity between its role as a signiﬁcant social threshold, and the moral equality accorded to those who shared the status. There was also the perennial debate about whether it should be based on acquired or innate characteristics, that is, whether gentlemen were made or born. In these respects, it could be a highly problematic concept. It could throw up social anomalies, notably (in the early eighteenth century) the ‘gentleman-tradesman’, with wig and sword, but also shop counter and apron, or the raking ‘born-gentleman’ whose behaviour violated most of the principles on which social interaction within the group was based. Cracks in the fac¸ade of gentility were most apparent in the location in which it was under greatest strain—London. The scale of ‘genteel’ society in the capital and its multiple sites and bases made it ever more necessary to take newcomers at face value. Consequently, it was more difﬁcult here to sustain the importance of lineage, or restrain the upstart. Even so, it is easy to exaggerate the ﬂuidity within the upper reaches of metropolitan society. Newcomers still required introductions, and acceptance within (and veriﬁcation by) social networks. London sustained different formulations of gentility—roguish, shop-keeping, mercantile, learned, legal, landed, clerical, aristocratic, and courtly—and housed various institutions and gatherings in which they collided. The ﬁndings of Dawson and Langford ³⁴ Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 265. ³⁵ P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1880 The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 78, 79, 85; Smail, Middle Class Culture, 130, 145; Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 154, 179, 190, 202, 210, 219–21, 251–2, 332–49.

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imply that these forms overlapped, sometimes uncomfortably, rather than necessarily merging seamlessly to create a single, homogenoeus ‘genteel’ social world.³⁶ Gentility was not a status that offered entirely open entry, limitless opportunity for personal reinvention, or the possibility of adoption without risk. The titled, those from well-known (often parliamentary) families, the mercantile elite, and individuals with a reputation for learning, bravery, rhetoric, or artistic skill might pass easily between these sites of gentility.³⁷ Others had to work harder to be accepted, and tended to identify the limits of such acceptance and stay within them, rather than risk exposure as an upstart. It might have used them politely, but gentility still had teeth. Was this also the case in the provinces? Vickery’s research into polite society in the Pennines in the mid–late eighteenth century is less pessimistic about the degree of social interchange that occurred between representatives of these different modes of gentility. She detects a cohesive ‘local elite’ comprised of ‘landed gentry, polite professionals and greater commercial families’.³⁸ The men in these families were often educated together at ‘northern grammar schools’ rather than southern public schools. They shared administrative responsibilities, as justices or in other civil and military commissions. More importantly, ‘landed gentlemen, professional gentlemen and gentlemen merchants stood shoulder to shoulder on the grouse moor and riverbank’.³⁹ They, and their wives and daughters, socialized together, corresponded, shared family news, local gossip, and information on ‘prices, fashions, recipes and remedies, child-bearing and child-rearing’. Vickery identiﬁes similar networks elsewhere in England, and asserts that ‘the social cohesion of landed, professional and gentry families was … widespread’ in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁴⁰ Ironically, this social mingling seems to have resulted from the relative narrowness of this stratum in provincial society. Here, the bounds of ‘politeness’ might, of necessity, be deﬁned with less social precision than in conurbations that offered a greater choice of suitable companions. While this could instil greater variation among the ranks of the ‘genteel’, it could also bring the past into play. Helen Berry has illustrated this in her account of the social experiences of the late eighteenth-century diarist John Marsh, who recorded the case of the unfortunate Mr Day of Romsey, Kent. Although he appeared as ‘something of a Beau & … a very well behav’d Man’, Day was excluded from several assemblies, because in local memory he was recalled as ‘the Shoemaker’s Son’.⁴¹ Such judgements suggest that although provincial ‘gentlemen’ were often a heterogeneous bunch, because small town ³⁶ Langford, ‘Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, 314. ³⁷ N. Rogers, ‘Money, Land and Lineage: The Big Bourgeoisie of Hanoverian London’, Social History, 4 (1979), 453. ³⁸ Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 31–2. ³⁹ Ibid, 31. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 35. ⁴¹ H. Berry, ‘Sense and Singularity’: The Social Experiences of John Marsh and Thomas Stutterd in Late-Georgian England’, in H. R. French and J. Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 183.

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society possessed fewer institutional ﬁlters than county towns or the metropolis, acceptance into their ranks was based on a broad equivalence of wealth, ‘credit’, authority, and origins. In addition, as Chapter 2 illustrated, the greater geographical stability of these parochial rulers often ensured that they were important arbiters of local repute, and that it was their long memories that aspirants had to outﬂank. While Vickery is surely correct to emphasize that there were fewer formal barriers and greater interaction between the ranks of the landed and the wealthier ‘chief inhabitants’ in the countryside, ironically this relative freedom may have resulted from the continued existence and continual policing of the threshold of gentility. The diversity of the group it created does not, necessarily, undermine the continuing social and cultural power of the concept itself. How did the ‘chief inhabitants’ of provincial parishes actually understand these norms? Very little evidence survives to illustrate their understandings of any social norms, never mind those speciﬁc to gentility. In the settlements covered by this study, only one individual, Benjamin Allen of Braintree, Essex, supplied a deﬁnition of the ‘gentleman’, in the miscellaneous jottings at the back of his medical casebooks. Allen was not a native of the town, and was never wholly comfortable in local society. He had been educated at St Paul’s School, and Queens’ College, Cambridge, and regarded himself as a gentlemanly practitioner of physic, a cut above the apprenticed apothecaries and self-taught ‘empirics’ with whom he competed in this community.⁴² Allen was probably at the peak of his career and prospects immediately after his arrival in Braintree in the early 1690s. He married the daughter of the town’s other university-educated physician, and quickly befriended the renowned natural historian John Ray, who was living in scholarly retirement at his birthplace in the neighbouring parish of Black Notley.⁴³ Thereafter, Allen experienced a series of personal and professional disappointments and settled into provincial obscurity. His religious nonconformity largely excluded him from parish ofﬁce.⁴⁴ He lost Ray’s conﬁdence, after failing to save his daughter’s life.⁴⁵ His scientiﬁc reputation was eclipsed by one of the competing medical ‘empirics’, Samuel Dale.⁴⁶ Allen published little after his arrival in Braintree.⁴⁷ He struggled to translate his superior education into professional respect or social authority in ⁴² Sir M. MacDonnell, The Register of St Paul’s School (London, 1977), 283; J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, i (Cambridge, 1922), 16; Allen referred to two of his competitors, John Barnard and John Firmin, as ‘empirics’. RCS Lib. MSS 275 e. 13, vol. 1 (1700–22), 190. ⁴³ Venn, Alumni, i. 65; J. Miller Christy, ‘Dr Benjamin Allen (1663–1738), of Braintree: A Forgotten Essex Naturalist’, Essex Naturalist, 16 (1911), 149–50. ⁴⁴ Allen attended the vestry 11 times between 1685 and 1720, when the average attendance per person was 18 times. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 264/8/2 Braintree Select Vestry Minute Book, 1655–1712, 1705–26. ⁴⁵ J. Lankester, ‘The Correspondence of John Ray’, Ray Society (London, 1848), 313. ⁴⁶ See French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 55–9. ⁴⁷ He ﬁnally published his undergraduate account of the medicinal properties of English mineral spas in England in 1699. B. Allen, The Natural History of the Chalybeat and Purging Waters of England (London, 1699, 2nd edn. 1711).

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the town.⁴⁸ Over time, his casebooks became a repository for his unpublished natural and medical observations, and his increasingly alienated thoughts about politics, religion, and society.⁴⁹ Some of this personal baggage was carried over into his deﬁnition of a gentleman. It privileged exactly those qualities he found it most difﬁcult to exercise within the conﬁnes of his daily life. He wrote that a gentleman should be distinguished from the crowd by ‘his Elevation of mind & state & character’, in order to preserve himself ‘from sinking into meanness [,] distraction by vice & ill manners’.⁵⁰ Allen’s ideal of a gentleman was someone who was virtuous and willing to do good, but who also maintained a certain social distance from his neighbours, in order to preserve his intellectual detachment and vigour. A gentleman should not, he thought, ‘be carry’d away with heat, or hurry’d by Passion of his own & Tumult (which makes a Mob in its essence)’.⁵¹ Instead, he should remain ‘candid & keeping Temper from suddainness or severity … he is gentle & Tender & it is one part not to say anything offending’.⁵² In line with Shapin, Allen placed ‘Truth & keeping his word’ high on the list of qualities that distinguished the gentleman from the ‘Mob’.⁵³ He should maintain this self-control, even in the face of offensive behaviour, ‘acting coolly without disorder … shewing a dislike of what is ill or wrong by reservedness from too much freedom or approbation of what is ill … withdrawn from the Crowd & others manners’, and ‘to ceas from familiarity where he dislikes without falling out’. By contrast, in his local etymology he recorded the antithesis of such behaviour, ‘to retort words and word it out and insult contrary to your place’.⁵⁴ As he reported elsewhere in his casebooks, such restraint was all the more difﬁcult in a town where he could be tempted into disputes about medical competence, or politics and religion.⁵⁵ As has been suggested, many of these strictures seem to have resulted from Allen’s inability to establish an undisputed intellectual, professional, and social authority over his neighbours.⁵⁶ His deﬁnition reﬂected unattainable ideals of social power, as well as a code of manners by which Allen attempted to live. It also illustrated his determination to make the qualities of gentility ﬁt his social circumstances. For him, the professions were compatible with this status, because they involved education, ‘elevation of mind’, and implied possession of intellectual prowess, to which others ought to defer (even if they often did ⁴⁸ Ibid., 53–4. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 55. ⁵⁰ RCS Lib. MSS 275 e. 14 (1722–36), 308 ⁵¹ Ibid. 13 (1700–22), 290. ⁵² Ibid. 14, 308. ⁵³ Ibid.; his failure to treat Ray’s daughter ‘bred a Distance without falling out’ between them. Ibid. 13, 357. ⁵⁴ Ibid. 14, 319. This etymology was in imitation of John Ray. See J. Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs … (London, 1670) [Wing/R386]. ⁵⁵ See above, pp. 100–1. He also recorded a warning dream ‘a Gentleman discours with me about Government affair or Whig and Tory interest’. Meeting him next day, Allen ‘used this caution to avoid the controversial discourse’. RCS MSS 275 e. 14, 205. ⁵⁶ See also, French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 52–5.

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not): ‘There are becoming Employs, in the law, Physic a noble and usefull study, also of Mathematic discoverys … employing the Poor, helping Familys, better charity, putting out youth and assisting them, propagating goodness, brightening throughout, correcting Errors and fals courses in the world.’⁵⁷ In some ways, this was quite an open list of ‘becoming Employs’. Although his emphasis was on professional and educational attainments, in a cloth-town like Braintree ‘employing the Poor’ and apprenticing their children was primarily the business of local clothiers, of whom the wealthiest dominated the town’s select vestry, and undoubtedly exhibited signs of gentility.⁵⁸ The gentleman’s enlightened and dispassionate ability to correct error also required a receptive and compliant audience, which was clearly not the case among Allen’s ‘erring’ medical competitors. Similarly, his emphasis on social distance is a function of his insistence on gentlemanly self-restraint, of not getting involved in others’ disputes, and not descending to their level.⁵⁹ He illustrates how norms of gentility could be employed to create a social threshold, where the gentleman kept apart from his neighbours by deploying a studied, polite but reserved demeanour, and where he might expect recognition of, and deference to, his elevated personal qualities. Allen was striving to employ gentility as a signiﬁer of a universal status category, something that trumped the aces of the local ‘chief inhabitants’, because it invoked qualities that transcended contingent parochial power based on rate-paying, church-seating or credit-worthiness. Ultimately, Allen concluded, ‘to be a Gentleman’ was ‘to be a better man and more excellent’ than these local worthies, by exhibiting accomplishments that they could not match.⁶⁰ It is interesting to examine how far Allen’s deﬁnition conforms to the characteristics distinguished by Shapin, Bryson and Dawson in reviews of the contemporary literature on the subject. For Allen, gentility was conferred by the public acceptance of the validity of virtuous personal, internal attainments or behaviour. This was particularly true of educational attainments, which were the qualities that most distinguished him from his neighbours. Conversely, he placed much less emphasis on external trappings that might more easily be acquired, such as wig and sword, polite gestures, or mannered speech. His deﬁnition also used emotional self-discipline to create a social distance from the verbal battles of everyday small-town life. Surprisingly, perhaps, he says nothing about the equality between gentlemen, or gentility by association with superiors. Allen’s focus is on differentiating himself from those he saw as beneath him, rather than about aligning himself with equals or superiors. The suspicion remains that his notions of gentility were connected ⁵⁷ See also, French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 52–5. ⁵⁸ See above, p. 125–7 ⁵⁹ For the theme of genteel self-regulation in eighteenth-century advice literature, see Carter, Polite Society, 64–5. ⁶⁰ RCS Lib. MSS 275 e. 14, 308.

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inherently to his desire to obtain personal respect, which he visualized primarily in terms of deference to his professional abilities from his neighbours and competitors. For a knowledge-based practitioner, social status seems to have been bound up with the attainment of intellectual authority, more than with material possessions or social contacts per se. He also exhibits little uncertainty about the elevation of the status itself, or the fact that gentlemen should be regarded as ‘better’ than their non-gentle neighbours. Clearly, therefore, Allen’s understanding of gentility was tailored quite carefully, if perhaps unconsciously, to his social circumstances and personal experiences, and to his own advantage. Allen’s Latinate education at St Paul’s under the well-known master, Thomas Gale, and his subsequent medical training gave him the intellectual foundations and social experience necessary to mix comfortably with local gentry or scientiﬁc ‘virtuosi’.⁶¹ This marked him out from his medical and scientiﬁc contemporary, Samuel Dale, who struggled with non-botanical Latin, but who nevertheless established a higher reputation, and more intellectual contacts, than Allen managed in later life.⁶² Such an education was also a life-cycle entry point into gentility that other aspirants among the ‘chief inhabitants’ sought to obtain for their children. We can get a sense of how important this educational process was in launching children into a different social trajectory to that of their parents, by examining in detail the experience of the Barcroft family, of Noyna near Colne, Lancashire, in the later seventeenth century. Amanda Vickery’s excellent study has illuminated the social careers and networks of the female descendants of this family in the late eighteenth century.⁶³ A century earlier, the family was in the midst of a long, slow ascent from its yeoman-trading origins. William Barcroft established a cadet branch at Noyna, outside Colne, in 1575. Barcroft was a prosperous Pennine yeoman who bought a 75-(customary) acre holding, one-ﬁfth of the dissolved royal manor of Foulridge, to set up his two younger sons Thomas and Henry.⁶⁴ Thomas’s descendants then possessed Noyna into the early nineteenth century. His great-grandson, Ambrose (II), provides clear evidence of the family’s dual sources of income in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1647 Ambrose had been apprenticed to his uncle Paul, a York wool merchant, and was dealing in wool on his own ⁶¹ N. Doggett, ‘Gale, Thomas (1635/6–1702)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004). ⁶² French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 55–6. ⁶³ Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 21–2, 365–8. ⁶⁴ See H. R. French, ‘Accumulation and Aspirations among the ‘‘Parish Gentry’’: Economic Strategies and Social Identity in a Pennine Family, 1650–1780’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 149 (1999), 19–49. Lancs. RO DDB 62/178, feoffment to uses of property in Foulridge, 28 Apr. 1575; DDB 62/139 demise of one-ﬁfth of manor of Foulridge, 20 Aug. 1575. All acres quoted here are customary ‘Lancashire’ acres (1.4 to 1.7 times larger than statute measure). See E. H. Smith, ‘Lancashire Long Measure’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 110 (1958), 5–6.

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account with a London merchant by the 1650s.⁶⁵ At the same time, the family retained Noyna, which Ambrose’s father had augmented with another 8 acres in 1648.⁶⁶ Ambrose continued to deal in wool and yarn until his death in 1694.⁶⁷ From 1677 he spent at least £545 on land, more than doubling his acreage in Foulridge and nearby Trawden to 176 acres.⁶⁸ His son Thomas also bought 40 acres in his own right before his father’s death.⁶⁹ This may have been part of a conscious strategy to plough working capital from the wool business into ﬁxed assets, perhaps to hedge against risk, augment the familial patrimony, or provide a ‘retirement’ income for Ambrose.⁷⁰ By his death, the family possessed almost three times the acreage on which it had been founded, even if, in the short term, the new purchases only increased rental income from £43 to £69 9s.⁷¹ This prosperity was soon translated into local authority. In 1680 Ambrose was chosen as High Constable of Blackburn Hundred. In the Hundred Rate drawn up that year on all lands worth more than £4 per annum, he was assessed on a notional annual income of £40 from land, with his son Thomas assessed on £10 per annum—an undervaluation of approximately 30 per cent compared to his actual landed income.⁷² It is noticeable that Ambrose retained these accounts of his time as High Constable, possibly as a reminder of his service. Even so, the taxation list described him as ‘yeoman’ (as it did his sixteen assessed neighbours), rather than ‘gent.’, although a land transfer of 1684 used that epithet to describe him.⁷³ Ambrose had achieved solid ‘parish gentry’ status. While he was not a university-educated ‘professional’ like Benjamin Allen, he had received a Latinate education at Colne Grammar School,⁷⁴ alongside the children of the local gentry, yeomen, and clothiers, including John Tillotson, the son of a Sowerby clothier ⁶⁵ Lancs. RO DDB 56/1 Apprenticeship indenture between Ambrose, son of Thomas Barcroft of Noyna, and Paul Barcroft, York, merchant, 24 May 1647; DDB 61/1–3 letters from Lawrence Smith, London, merchant to Ambrose Barcroft, Jan.–Dec. 1654. ⁶⁶ Lancs. RO DDB 62/162 Sale of Noynoe Field by John Mancknowles, Foulridge, yeoman to Thomas Barcroft, Noyna, yeoman, 1 Apr. 1648, for £40. ⁶⁷ Lancs. RO DDB 65/2 Barcroft memoranda and accounts, 1689–1732, particularly those between 22 Sept. 1689 and 21 Sept. 1692. ⁶⁸ Ambrose Barcroft paid £300 for Foulridge Hall (54 a.) in 1679, £245 for houses and at least 9 a. in Foulridge the following year. Lancs. RO DDB 62/100; DDB 62/169 and 171. ⁶⁹ French, ‘Accumulation’, 31, table 1. ⁷⁰ In 1677, when Ambrose began buying land, he was aged only 48, his son was 23, and his father, Thomas, was still alive, aged 70. This demographic stability implies Ambrose was acting to plough back business proﬁts rather than planning ‘retirement’ or investing a legacy. ⁷¹ That is, 217 a. French, ‘Accumulation’, 31. ⁷² Lancs. RO DDB 64/3 memorandum book of Ambrose Barcroft as high constable of Blackburn Hundred, 1680–1. ⁷³ Ibid.; Lancs. RO DDHCl Honour of Clitheroe Court Roll 3/217 Easter 1684, copyhold surrender dated 9 Apr. 1684 between Roger Hartley of Redimore and Nicholas Cunliffe, Wycoller and Ambrose Barcroft, Noyna, gents. ⁷⁴ Vickery shows that the local gentry continued to be educated at local grammar schools into the mid-eighteenth century. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 31.

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and later archbishop of Canterbury.⁷⁵ Ambrose’s education was reﬂected by the family’s library, which numbered 112 volumes in 1712.⁷⁶ Despite living in an apparently remote locality, Ambrose Barcroft had acquired works by Boyle, Donne, Grotius, Locke, Mun, North, Pascal, and Petty.⁷⁷ He also displayed a considerable interest in the outside world, owning several books on the English colonies, Holland, and Turkey,⁷⁸ and a couple of English–Dutch and English–French dictionaries and vocabularies. Even so, many of the works were practical, relating to land tenures (notably copyhold and church land), legal duties (acting as an executor), or parish and other administration.⁷⁹ These reﬂected Ambrose’s responsibilities as an educated property-holder and businessman in the township. In contrast, other volumes indicate a less functional understanding ⁷⁵ In 1691 Barcroft declined to contact ‘so great a person’ to secure a clerical appointment for a neighbour, even though Tillotson had been ‘my ancient acquaintance and lesson-fellow at Colne School’. Lancs. RO DDB 65/2 Barcroft memoranda and accounts, 19 June 1691. Tillotson described his own parents as ‘honest and religious, tho’ of low and obscure condition’. I. Rivers, ‘Tillotson, John (1630–1694)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004). ⁷⁶ Lancs. RO DDB 64/17 ‘8th Sept. 1712 An Account of Books on the upper shelfe in the Parlour’. Of these volumes 107 occur in Early English Books On-line/Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line, only 6 had dates of ﬁrst publication after Ambrose’s death. ⁷⁷ R. Boyle, Medicinal Experiments, or, A Collection of Choice Remedies … (London, 1692) [Wing/A3989]; J. Donne, Paradoxes, Problems, Essayes, Characters (London, 1652) [Wing (2nd edn.)/B1867]; H. Grotius, De veritate religionis Christianae (Oxford, 1639) [STC (2nd edn.)/12399]; J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690) [Wing/L2766]; T. Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade … (London, 1664) [Wing/M3073]; D. North, Observations and Advices Oeconomical (London, 1669) [Wing/N1286]; B. Pascal, The Mystery of Jesuitism Discovered … (London, 1679) [Wing (2nd edn.)/P642A]; Sir W. Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland … (London, 1691) [Wing/P1931]. ⁷⁸ F. Aglionby, The Present State of the United Provinces of the Low-Countries … (London, 1669) [Wing/A766]; R. Blome, The Present State of His Majesties Isles and Territories in America … (London, 1687) [Wing/B3215]; T. Gage, A New Survey of the West-Indies … (London, 1655) [Wing/G113]; J. Gailliard, The Present State of the Republick of Venice … (London, 1669) [Wing/G126]; E. Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed … (London, 1661) [Wing (2nd edn.)/H1817]; J. Howell, Instructions and Directions for Forren Travell … (London, 1642) [Wing/H3082]; H. Marsh, A New Survey of the Turkish Empire, History and Government (London, 1664) [Wing/M731]; F. Osborne, Politicall Reﬂections upon the Government of the Turks … (Oxford, 1660) [Wing/O520]. ⁷⁹ Anon., The Young Clerk’s Companion … (Edinburgh, 1664) [Wing/Y98]; Sir E. Coke, The Compleat Copy-Holder … (London, 1650) [Wing/C4914]; Sir A. Fitzherbert, In this Boke is Contayned ye Ofﬁces of Sheryffes, Bailliffes … Coroners (London, 1552) [STC (2nd edn.)/10988.5]; J. Harrington, The Art of Law-giving in III books … (London, 1659) [Wing/H806]; Sir E. Henden, The Perfect Conveyancer … (London, 1650) [Wing (2nd edn.)/P1478]; J. Herne, The Modern Assurancer … (London, 1658) [Wing (2nd edn.)/H1573]; J. Hill, The Young Secretary’s Guide … (London, 1687) [Wing (2nd edn.)/H1991B]; Sir R. Hutton, The Young Clerk’s Guide … (London, 1673) [Wing (2nd edn.)/H3854]; N. Johnston, The Assurance of Abbey and other Church-lands in England to the Possessors … (London, 1687) [Wing/J872]; G. Meriton, A Guide for Constables, Churchwardens or Overseers of the Poor (London, 1669) [Wing/M1793]; S. Monteage, Debtor and Creditor Made Easie (London, 1675) [Wing (2nd edn.)/M2487]; C. Saint German, An Exact Abridgement of that Excellent Treatise Called Doctor and Student (London, 1658) [Wing/S315]; W. Sheard, A Grand Abridgement of the Common and Statute Law of England Alphabetically Digested … (London, 1675) [Wing/S3188]; Ibid. The Ofﬁces of Constables, Churchwardens, Overseers of the Poor… (London, 1650) [Wing/S3202]; T. Wentworth, The Ofﬁce and Duty of Executors (London, 1676) [Wing/W1362].

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of the family’s social position and concerns about self-presentation, notably some of the standard collections of model letters such as those by Balzac and Loveday, as well as Henry Care’s more humorous Female Secretary.⁸⁰ In addition, the family library contained a copy of Richard Allestree’s The Gentleman’s Calling, another standard piece of advice literature, which went through at least seventeen editions between 1660 and 1693.⁸¹ Like his even more ubiquitous Whole Duty of Man (which the Barcrofts also owned), Allestree’s advice to gentlemen was ‘ﬁrmly pious’.⁸² It attempted to reconcile Christian duty and morality with the social prestige, exigencies of power, and temptations of gentility. Allestree deﬁned ﬁve components of the gentleman’s calling—education, wealth, time, authority, and reputation—and detailed the beneﬁts of each, as well as the sins deriving from their misuse. Education was ‘the Potters hand and wheel that forms them into vessels of honor or dishonor’, and was beyond the pocket of ‘the meaner sort’, who had to concentrate on ‘subsistence’.⁸³ Wealth brought freedom from want and work, because the gentleman’s unearned income ‘seems to be, as it were, rained down from the Clouds’, but this also exposed him to numerous vices that might befall the unoccupied mind.⁸⁴ Thus, the gentleman was obliged to ﬁnd ‘worthy and ingenuous’ ways of occupying himself.⁸⁵ Wealth also conferred authority, not just in public ofﬁce but also through ‘more private inﬂuence’ exerted on ‘Dependents’.⁸⁶ This elevated social position heightened the gentleman’s concern with his reputation, ‘which, as the world goes, is a shadow that waits onely on the greater Bodies’.⁸⁷ Pre-empting Benjamin Allen, Allestree enjoined the gentleman to make ‘his Words … temperate and decent, the product of judgement, not of rage’, and also not to behave arrogantly to his inferiors, or fawn to his superiors.⁸⁸ He emphasized the power of emulation, the ‘natural aspiring the lower sort have to approach to the condition of their Betters’, and thus the obligation of these ‘betters’ to set a good example.⁸⁹ ‘For what temptation is it to the vulgar to run to all excess of Riot, when they see their Superiors have beaten a path before them[?]’.⁹⁰ It is impossible to discern whether these strictures had any effect on the personal behaviour of Ambrose (II). Nevertheless, we can identify in his actions a long-term ‘dynastic’ interest in elevating his family socially, by investing in land, concentrating resources on the eldest son, and (in particular) by making very careful provision for the education of his grandson and namesake, Ambrose (III), born in 1681. He entrusted lands worth £35 16s. 8d. per annum so that his grandson might be brought up as a gentleman, rather than being apprenticed ⁸⁰ J.-L. Guez, seigneur de Balzac, The Choyce Letters of Monsieur de Balzac … (London, 1658) [Wing/B613]; R. Loveday, Loveday’s Letters, Domestick and Foreign … (London, 1659) [Wing (2nd edn.)/L3225]; H. Care, The Female Secretary … (London, 1671) [Wing/C519]. ⁸¹ Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 221 n. 113. ⁸² Ibid., 221. ⁸³ R. Allestree, The Gentleman’s Calling (London, 1660) [Wing/A1116], 13. ⁸⁴ Ibid. 14. ⁸⁵ Ibid., 28. ⁸⁶ Ibid., 16. ⁸⁷ Ibid. ⁸⁸ Ibid. 26, 35. ⁸⁹ Ibid. 133. ⁹⁰ Ibid. 137.

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to a prosperous trade.⁹¹ Accounts of this expenditure survive between 1696 and 1701, that is, between Ambrose (III)’s 16th and 21st years.⁹² At the beginning of the accounts, Ambrose was still at school in Skipton, and in late 1696 and early 1697 payments were made for Cicero’s De Ofﬁciis,⁹³ Curtius’ life of Alexander the Great, Virgil’s Aeneid, and (apparently) Octavianus Mirandula’s Renaissance compendium Illustrum poetarum ﬂores … ⁹⁴ These texts formed part of the standard grammar-school curriculum for ﬁfth-form students learning Latin literature, composition (including poetry), and oration.⁹⁵ By April 1697 Ambrose had begun to learn Greek, as was usual among fourth- or ﬁfth-form boys.⁹⁶ Obviously, this tuition was designed not merely to exercise linguistic or rhetorical skills, but also to inculcate moral commonplaces and the generic classical norms of virtue and civility.⁹⁷ Cicero, Quintus Curtius, and Virgil all provided examples and instruction on the character and behaviour of the virtuous ruler, and how to maintain authority and exercise power justly.⁹⁸ As such, they may have provided Ambrose (III) with the notions of pagan ‘virtu’ that supplied part of the intellectual foundation for early modern gentility. Yet this was an education that Ambrose (III) shared with his grandfather, who was then apprenticed into a trade, and whose gentlemanly status was equivocal. By contrast, when Ambrose (III) left school, probably in the spring of 1698, he was sent to York to acquire a range of ‘genteel’ accomplishments.⁹⁹ On 24 April 1698 he set off, equipped with a new riding coat, and a waistcoat (made the previous December) refurbished with gold ‘twist’ buttons.¹⁰⁰ On arrival, he enrolled with a writing master, and £1 was paid in May for tuition in fencing and dancing.¹⁰¹ This required the making of another coat, breeches, and waistcoat, a pair of fencing shoes, and some new linen. At the same time, his father gave Ambrose a ⁹¹ NA Duchy of Lancaster PL 6/46 fo. 113 Bill of Complaint of Thomas and Ambrose Barcroft, 4 Apr. 1699. This states that Ambrose (III)’s intention was that his grandson should be educated in a manner ‘suitable to his degree and condition’. ⁹² Lancs. RO DDB 65/2 Expenses of upbringing of Ambrose Barcroft (b. 1681), 1696–1701. ⁹³ The English title suggests that this may have been Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tully’s Ofﬁces in Three Books … by Sir Ro. L’Estrange (London, 1681), [Wing/C4310]. ⁹⁴ O. Mirandula, Illustrum poetarum ﬂores (London, 1651), [Wing 1996/M2219]. See F. Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (London, 1968), 483. The 1611 edition consisted of nearly 300 headings, under which were listed Latin verse quotations from various authors. ⁹⁵ See P. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), 12–14; W. A. L. Vincent, The Grammar Schools: Their Continuing Tradition 1660–1714 (London, 1969), 76–7; Watson, English Grammar Schools, 371–2. ⁹⁶ ‘Greek was normally introduced into the curriculum after the scholar had been at Latin for about three years’. Vincent, Grammar Schools, 79. ⁹⁷ Mack, Rhetoric, 23. ⁹⁸ Ibid, 22–3, 29–30, 35, 44. ⁹⁹ The ﬁnal payment for school fees was on 26 Feb. 1698, with a further journey to Skipton on 25 July 1699. Lancs. RO DDB 65/2. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid, 30 Dec. 1697, it cost £1 5s. to make; 24 Apr. 1698. The gold buttons cost 3s. 9d., but he was allowed 1s. 9d. for the old brass ones. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., 11 May 1698. On the same date, Thomas Barcroft gave Ambrose 10s. pocket money, ‘not knowing of the 10s. given him by my wife’.

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walking cane. Already, Ambrose was pursuing other gentlemanly pleasures, with payments being recorded for powder and shot.¹⁰² By January 1699 Ambrose was sporting a powdered wig, and later in the year began socializing at cockﬁghts in the locality, keeping his own birds.¹⁰³ Eventually, his interest seems to have shifted from ﬁghting cocks to songbirds, possibly because his parents realized that the latter were more difﬁcult animals on which to gamble, although they still needed birdseed.¹⁰⁴ Socializing required transport, and his father bought him his ﬁrst horse in 1700, for the relatively high price of £7 5s., plus a saddle and bridle, as well as the cost of its keeping and shoeing.¹⁰⁵ The same year, Ambrose took up his ﬁrst ofﬁcial appointment, as a Land Tax collector.¹⁰⁶ This was a mark of status, because collectors were required by parliament to possess a landed estate worth £50 per annum, an income bracket that was sometimes taken as the minimum ﬁnancial threshold for a gentleman.¹⁰⁷ Presumably, entry to such a position required assistance from his father or other relatives, given that Ambrose was not long out of school, and had not held any other administrative post. Signiﬁcantly, between leaving school at 18 and marrying at 21, he appears to have received no further vocational training or education, and the accounts record no attempt by the family to send him to university. This left Ambrose with a problem. Unlike his grandfather, or his own brothers John and Thomas, he had not been apprenticed to a trade.¹⁰⁸ Nor, unlike his brother William, apprenticed as a legal clerk, had he gained a ‘professional’ training.¹⁰⁹ As a consequence he lacked any means of obtaining an income independent of the family estate, and was simply waiting to inherit, without sufﬁcient means to live in true gentlemanly style in the mean time. There is also no evidence that his gentlemanly manners allowed him to marry to great social advantage, and certainly no better than his grandfather’s marriage to the daughter of a knighted York alderman.¹¹⁰ This dependence was a break from ¹⁰² The ﬁnal payment for school fees was on 29 Jan. 1698. ¹⁰³ Ibid. Jan 1699, 11 Oct. 1699; the following year, Ambrose attended matches at Barrowford on 8 Mar., Padiham on 1 Apr., and Burnley on 25 Jun. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid. 28 Aug. 1700, 7 May 1701. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid. 12 Nov. 1700, 23 Dec. 1700, 30 Dec. 1700, 3 May 1701, 7 May 1701, 5 July 1701. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid. 17 May 1700. ¹⁰⁷ Beckett, ‘Land Tax Administration’, 163. ¹⁰⁸ In the 1730s John Barcroft engaged in wool dealing, travelling to Lincolnshire. Lancs. RO DDB Acc. 6685 Box 148, Bundle 2 Financial accounts of John Barcroft, d. 1742; Thomas Barcroft was described as a tanner of Bradford in his father’s will of 1728. Lancs. RO DDB 62/153 Will of Thomas Barcroft, Noyna, yeoman, 11 Nov. 1728. ¹⁰⁹ In Thomas Barcroft’s will, William was described as dwelling with Christopher Jackson, merchant, in Nansemund County, Virginia. He was granted a legacy of £8 p.a. providing he remained abroad. The will also made provision for £2 10s. p.a. to Mary Boulton of Foulridge, mother of an illegitimate son, William, fathered by William Barcroft, and £30 on his majority. Lancs. RO DDB 62/153. He was still writing to ‘beseech’ prompt annual payment of this legacy in 1752. Lancs. RO DDB 61/25 William Barcroft, Nansemund, Virginia, to William Barcroft, Noyna, 30 Sept. 1752. ¹¹⁰ He married Mary, daughter of Henry Walshman of Whalley on 23 Jun. 1702. E. Ten Broek Runk, Barcroft Family Records (Philadelphia, 1910), 133; The Walshmans appear to have been

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earlier family practice. In each previous generation, demographic good fortune had ensured that fathers lived to see their sons reach adulthood, and establish an independent household (and second income stream) that could eventually be merged with, and augment, the paternal estate. Ambrose (III) would never achieve this. There is little surviving information about his ﬁnal years in Lancashire. He married in 1702, and two sons were born prior to his wife’s death in 1705. Until 1710, he lived at Foulridge Hall (purchased by his grandfather in 1679), while his father, Thomas, lived nearby at Noyna, the main family residence.¹¹¹ Thereafter, Ambrose left Colne, and his address was given, variously, as ‘Deptford, Kent’ in June 1711 and ‘Canterbury’ in July 1713, while in 1714 he was appointed as a surveyor and gauger in the excise.¹¹² This was signiﬁcant because the post carried an annual salary (of £50 or more), which may have been important given Ambrose’s lack of alternative sources of income or skills.¹¹³ Excise men were to be between 21 and 30 years of age, write ‘a good Hand’, understand ‘the four ﬁrst Rules of Vulgar Arithmetick’, be ‘ingenious’, ‘of sober Life and Conversation’, without debts, and with no more than two children.¹¹⁴ Certainly Ambrose ﬁtted this description in 1710, in terms of his age, accomplishments, and family. In one sense, the post was ‘professional’, because it demanded a degree of educational and administrative competence, and offered a career with regular rotations and the possibility of promotion.¹¹⁵ However, appointment also required patronage, via a certiﬁcate of recommendation from ‘some of the principal Gentlemen in the Neighbourhood’ in support of the initial application,¹¹⁶ followed by inﬂuence with the Excise Commissioners to ease progress after the unpaid probationary stage.¹¹⁷ Obviously, Ambrose obtained this support, although evidence of it does not survive. Perhaps it was the fruit of his education and socializing among the dancing, cock-ﬁghting gentry of Lancashire in his later teenage years. In this respect, he ﬁtted the pattern of appointments that angered the later eighteenthcentury Excise Commissioner, Sir William Musgrave, who complained that most candidates seemed to be ‘Country Fox-hunters, Bankrupt Merchants, & Ofﬁcers minor landowners in Shorrock Green and Blackburn Hundred, W. Farrer and J. Brownbill (eds.), VCH Lancashire, vi (London, 1911), 237 n. 26, 311; Farrer and Brownbill, VCH Lancashire, vii (London, 1912), 112 n. 46. Ambrose (II) married Martha, daughter of Sir Henry Thompson, York, merchant. See Lancs. RO DDB 62/145 Grant from Thomas Barcroft, Foulridge, gent., to Ambrose Barcroft, York, merchant and wife Martha, 8 Nov. 1650. ¹¹¹ Runk, Barcroft Family, 157. ¹¹² Ibid.; Lancs. RO DDB 62/107 Appointment of Ambrose Barcroft, gent., 27 Dec. 1714. ¹¹³ C. Leadbetter, The Royal Gauger: or, Gauging Made Easy … (London, 1739) [STC T069871], 286. ¹¹⁴ Ibid. 207. ¹¹⁵ W. J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford, 2003), 118. ¹¹⁶ Ibid, 205. ¹¹⁷ C. Brooks, ‘Interest, Patronage and Professionalism: John, 1st Baron Ashburnham, Hastings and the Revenue Services’, Southern History, 9 (1987), 54, 57, 62–4.

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of the Army & Navy—without the least personal knowledge of the Business of the Revenue and too late in Life to acquire it’.¹¹⁸ The role of excise ofﬁcer was troublesome, difﬁcult, and increasingly dangerous in the eighteenth century.¹¹⁹ Ambrose endured it until 1722, before taking the radical step of uprooting to Pennsylvania. In practice, this amounted to burning his bridges with the parental estate, because he would have inherited it had he remained. This was emphasized by the fact that he left his eldest son, William, in England, in the care of his grandfather as the intended heir of the property, while his younger son, Ambrose (IV), would eventually join him in the colony. In some respects, Ambrose was trying to repeat the moves made by William Barcroft in 1575 in buying Noyna, or a later William Barcroft who emigrated to King’s County in Ireland in 1658, in setting up a new branch of the family on cheap, available land.¹²⁰ As the English population expanded, so that land was located at ever-greater distances from the Lancashire Pennines. Ambrose (III) established himself in Solebury, Pennsylvania, on a tract of approximately 450 acres. This was larger than the patrimonial holding in Lancashire, which had now been augmented by additional purchases to approximately 350 acres.¹²¹ This preponderance of acres did not propel Ambrose (III) into the life of gentility for which he had been so carefully prepared. Instead, he was engaged in subsistence farming, having built a reasonably spacious clapboard house, with a shingle roof, located in an area he thought ‘resembles Craven’, and was ‘every wit as healthy’.¹²² Although he emphasized its potential for growing corn and for iron and coal mining, it had cost more than expected. In addition, he had already parted company with two of his four indentured ‘servants’, and expected he would have to barter gunpowder for venison from the local Indians. Sadly, despite being appointed as a JP the following year, his hopes came to naught when he was drowned in the swollen Delaware River in December 1724.¹²³ Thereafter, the fortunes of the two families diverged. The English Barcrofts, under Ambrose (III)’s son, William, attained unspectacular but comfortable gentility as minor landowners. Meanwhile, blighted by his father’s early death, Ambrose (IV)’s life oscillated between modest farming independence, and ¹¹⁸ Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 142. ¹¹⁹ Ibid, 117–53. ¹²⁰ William’s wife and 5 children were drowned in crossing the Irish Sea. He remarried and became a Quaker, founding a dynasty of Irish Quakers who maintained slight contact with their Lancashire cousins into the 1770s. Lancs. RO DDB 61/14 William Barcroft, Balylakine, King’s County, to Margaret Barcroft, 12 Sept. 1682; DDB 61/31 Joseph Barcroft, Dublin, to John Barcroft, Clitheroe Castle, 5 Jan. 1778; A Brief Narrative of the Life … of that Worthy Servant of Jesus Christ, John Barcroft (Dublin, 1730) [STC T088061]. ¹²¹ Coal pits in Colne boosted his income, despite conﬂicts between the farmer and the colliers. Lancs. RO DDB 60/4 Letters concerning Carryheys coal pits, 1721–4. ¹²² Lancs RO DDB 61/20 Ambrose Barcroft, Solebury, Penn., to Thomas Barcroft, Noyna, 1 Mar. 1723. ¹²³ Runk, Barcroft Family, 156.

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dependence on the £8 annuity paid to him under his grandfather’s will.¹²⁴ Over time, he became an irritation to his brother, and a distant and largely forgotten relative to the next generation in Lancashire. In 1754 he wrote to William, admitting that ‘I am a little under my business which you’l think is all together my fault’.¹²⁵ He also reﬂected that ‘if my fortune have not been so good as you could wish for I hope you’l not slight me so much as not to write to me’. Unfortunately William died before the letter was received.¹²⁶ Ambrose (IV) lived on until 1784, continuing to draw his annuity through the War of Independence.¹²⁷ The fate of Ambrose (III) and his two sons reﬂects the problems and costs of gentility to a family whose wealth brought them to the lower threshold of the landed gentry. The increase in the family’s status over time depended on strict adherence to primogeniture. While junior siblings might receive annuities or lump sums charged on the estate, landed resources were concentrated decisively on the eldest male heir.¹²⁸ The resources channelled towards the eldest son had increased in every preceding generation, because these sons had also established independent households before inheriting the paternal estate. However, as yeomen-merchants, they were not fettered by the need to do this in a manner compatible with gentility. By his removal to Pennsylvania Ambrose (III) almost managed to establish a second landed estate but died before its potential could be realized. Even so, emigration involved a conscious decision to forfeit the paternal estate, and (temporarily at least) status as a gentleman. Ambrose’s problem was that his father and grandfather seem to have been more concerned that he behaved like a gentleman than they were to provide him with the means to live like one. He was not prepared for a trade, or a profession, and would have been 51 years old had he lived to inherit his father’s estate. His circumstances resembled those of the ‘fop’ in contemporary comic theatre, because he was equipped with the airs and graces of gentility, but was still waiting to inherit the resources to give them a material foundation. By contrast, his son William was a more fortunate heir, beneﬁting from the family lifecycle by gradually taking over the running of the estate from his ageing grandfather, and succeeding to it at thirty. It was noticeable ¹²⁴ Lancs. RO DDB 62/153 Thomas Barcroft will. Thomas left Ambrose (IV) £100. Ambrose Barcroft remarried in 1723, and had another son, John, b. 1724. Ibid, 174–5. ¹²⁵ Lancs. RO DDB 61/26 Ambrose Barcroft, Solebury, Penn. to William Barcroft, Noyna, 16 Nov. 1754. ¹²⁶ Lancs. RO DDB 62/207 Will of William Barcroft, Noyna, gent., 27 May 1747, proved by 13 June 1754. ¹²⁷ His last letter to the family was in May 1780 was addressed to his niece Elizabeth, even though she had died in the early 1770s. Lancs. RO DDB 61/32 Ambrose Barcroft, Philadelphia, 27 May 1780 to Elizabeth Barcroft. His will was proved in 1784. Runk, Barcroft Family, 174. ¹²⁸ In his generation, Ambrose’s sister Martha was the only one to achieve unequivocal minor gentility, by marrying Richard Townley, Esq. of Carr Hall. VCH Lancashire, vi. 250, 543; T. D. Whitaker, A History of the Original Parish of Whalley and the Honor of Clitheroe, ed. J. G. Nicols and A. Lyons (London, 1872–6), ii. 395; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 26.

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that the two subsequent male heads of the family combined the estate with a ‘honourable’ profession—law and the army—rather than depending on it alone to support their status.¹²⁹ Both were lucky in not having to wait long to inherit it, either.¹³⁰ The Barcrofts were an unremarkable family of small-scale landowners, distinguished from other minor gentry in the Pennines only by the quality of their surviving family papers. They and their immediate milieu appear to refute Borsay’s assumption that social competition and aspirations were not really possible, or impossible to exhibit properly, in the countryside. While the Pennine townships were certainly not cut off from the outside world, they were seen to be distant and quite inaccessible. Writing without obvious irony from rural Virginia about the payment of his annuity, even William Barcroft objected to his nephew that the intermediary ‘makes great complaint … that you live in such a remote part of the Country’.¹³¹ Yet it provided a social setting of fairs, cockﬁghts, shooting parties, and rush-bearings at which Ambrose (III) could practise his ﬂedgling gentility, a century before it accommodated Vickery’s world of polite female sociability. Such events were obviously rather more bucolic than urban assemblies, balls, theatres, clubs, and coffee houses. However, they bear out Helen Berry’s ﬁndings that gentility was inﬂuenced by geographical as well as social location.¹³² Although norms of ‘politeness’, ‘civility’, and ‘fashion’ were supposed to be universal, in practice what was considered polite, civil, or fashionable varied, particularly between urban and rural society. The absence of urban manners or amusements deep in the Pennine hills does not necessary render this area ‘un-genteel’, particularly if its inhabitants set their notions of gentility within speciﬁc local gatherings or modes of behaviour. The difﬁculty, and the social comedy, lay in the disjunction between the two ‘spheres’, and the problems that the inhabitants of each experienced in negotiating the path between them. As has been suggested, the Barcrofts’ family history also emphasizes the degree of dynastic planning required simply to preserve social status, let alone to enhance it. Steady accumulation was easier when modest, but secure, land tenure was ¹²⁹ John Barcroft was a lawyer. However, he was the son of John Barcroft, brother of Ambrose (III), and inherited the estate only by marrying his cousin Elizabeth (daughter of William Barcroft) in 1756. He continued his legal career, becoming steward of the honour of Clitheroe from 1770. His son, Ambrose William Barcroft, was commissioned into the local regiment, the 63rd foot, in 1775 aged 16. He died at sea with his troops in 1795. French, ‘Accumulation’, 42–6; E. Boult, Christian’s Fleet: A Dorset Shipping Tragedy (Stroud, 2003), 33–4, 61, 81, 100. I am grateful to my colleague Dr Michael Duffy for this reference. ¹³⁰ Lancs. RO DDB 62/207 Marriage settlement between John Barcroft, Gisburn, gent., and Elizabeth Barcroft, Colne, spinster, 11 Aug. 1756; Ambrose William Barcroft was 24 when his father died in 1783. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 21–2. ¹³¹ Lancs. RO DDB 61/25 William Barcroft, Nansemund, Virginia, to William Barcroft, Noyna, 30 Sept. 1752. ¹³² Berry, ‘Sense and Singularity’, 178–99. The same was true in London also. See Langford, ‘Uses of Politeness’, 314.

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combined with risky, but rewarding, trade.¹³³ This combination may have been particularly prevalent among the Pennine tenants of the duchy of Lancaster, who had been granted secure copyholds and freeholds in the sixteenth century, and who resisted accumulation by large estates thereafter. Ironically, it became more difﬁcult once the family opted for gentility and thus rendered direct involvement in business undesirable. A legal career provided perhaps the best compromise, but it also carried the danger of clientage to the greater gentry, as their attorney, agent or paid adviser. John Barcroft suffered this difﬁculty in the 1760s and 1770s. Despite a locally prestigious legal career, an estate of over 400 acres, and a rental income of almost £500 per annum, he remained an electoral client of local gentry, and was singled out for public criticism by them in the disputed Clitheroe borough election of 1780.¹³⁴ Without the (uncommon) beneﬁts of a substantial inheritance, or an advantageous marriage, gentility was attained only by painful accumulation, testamentary prudence, and a degree of consciousness about where, how, and how far to project the appropriate social characteristics. As Mascuch and Muldrew have emphasized, for many ‘middling’ people social descent appeared more likely than upward mobility.¹³⁵ Whatever the individual’s actual trajectory, the uncertainties of the early modern business cycle, the perils of credit connections, the absence of personal or business insurance, or of a structured career ladder, meant that fortune’s caprices often seemed more powerful than the best-laid plans.¹³⁶ Certainly, Ambrose Barcroft (III and IV) may have had some sympathy with this view. Even those upon whom fortune smiled with greater regularity might wish to remain socially circumspect. Few members of the ‘middling’ rose further in one lifetime than John Morley of Halstead, Essex. In December 1725 Morley wrote an autobiographical fragment, while staying at the Red Bull inn, in Newport, Essex. ‘Having occasion to call at this place, the night drawing on, itt came into my thoughts of Mentioning the way of my being ﬁrst knowne to that great man of Trade and Incoureger of Industery, Sir Josiah Child’.¹³⁷ Morley was born in Halstead in the mid-1650s, followed his father into trade as a butcher, and by the late 1680s was married with several children. At this time, Josiah Child bought Boys Hall outside Halstead. In many respects, Child was the archetype for Steele’s mercantile champion Sir Andrew Freeport.¹³⁸ He was Governor of the East India Company, a well-known author on trade, and vastly wealthy—at ¹³³ This point is emphasized, perhaps too much, by C. F. Foster, Capital and Innovation: How Britain Became the First Industrial Nation (Northwich, 2004), 173–84, 317–23. ¹³⁴ H. R. French, ‘The Creation of a Pocket Borough in Clitheroe, Lancashire, 1693–1780: ‘‘Honour and Odd Tricks’’ ’, Northern History, 41/2 (2004), 821. ¹³⁵ M. Mascuch, ‘Social Mobility and Middling Self-identity: The Ethos of British Autobiographers, 1600–1750’, Social History, 20 (1995), 61. ¹³⁶ C. Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit’, 147–77. ¹³⁷ British Library Landsdowne MSS 825, fo. 9v. ¹³⁸ Dawson, Comic Theatre, 35. For lifestyles in this group, see also R. Grassby, The English Gentleman in Trade (Oxford, 1994), 177–208.

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his death in 1699, he was reputed to have left £200,000.¹³⁹ After buying Boys Hall he sent two servants into Halstead to ﬁnd a butcher to dispose of the deer in his park, which he was planning to convert to agricultural land—itself an act of some social symbolism, because Child certainly did not need the additional income. Morley gained the contract, and occasionally took messages to Sir Josiah’s mansion at Wanstead in the south of the county. Eventually Morley plucked up the courage to tell a servant that he desired to see the great man his master, not attempting to name Sir Josiah Child, fearing I might not doe it in a proper manner … Att my sending my letters to the great man (as I then cal’d him), by his Butler into his Parlor, he ordered the Butcher should bee cal’d, which I, attending in the great Hall, overheard with no small concerne of mind. But goeing to the Parlor door as submissively as I could … viz. makeing a very low bow, with my hat in both my hands, between my leggs, with a coller band and long shoe strings, in a Butchers frock and I think a gurdle, steel and apron, and my heire being thin, I was particulerly observ’d.¹⁴⁰

In retrospect, the memory of this scene amused Morley, particularly his unpolished appearance and his cringing obsequiousness to Child. However, two other elements are apparent in this memory. The ﬁrst is that he erred on the side of caution, opting for extreme deference in negotiating an unfamiliar social encounter with someone who was obviously a superior, rather than risk giving offence. Simply requesting to see Child might have been regarded as socially presumptuous, so Morley tried to moderate this by highly submissive behaviour. The second is his depiction of the encounter as far outside his normal range of experience. Morley lacked the social reference points necessary to manage this meeting with any sense of ease. It was rare for middling country butchers and members of the super-rich metropolitan mercantile elite to cross paths, so it is not surprising that Morley felt lost. After this awkward introduction the interview continued. Morley remembered that Child had asked him peremptorily how much money he possessed. He answered that he had about £120, to which Sir Josiah responded ‘but how much will drive your trade?’ Morley replied ‘and like your Honour (bowing as above) about £20’. Sir Josiah then advised him to put the remaining £100 in East India Company stock. ‘At which I was very much surpriz’d, and Answered (bowing as above) And like your Honour, I had rather buy fat sheepe’, since as far as Morley was concerned East India stock was ‘such Ireon Backs as are sett against Chimneys’. However, he promised to bring the money on his next visit, ‘and departed from the Parlor Dore pleased at my being at liberty’. In four or ﬁve ¹³⁹ R. Grassby, ‘Child, Sir Josiah, ﬁrst baronet (bap. 1631, d. 1699)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004). Child was governor of the East India Company in 1681–3 and 1686–8, and deputy governor 1684–6, 1688–90. ¹⁴⁰ BL Landsdowne 825, fo. 9r.

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months Morley’s stock rose in value to £160, which ‘gave me much pleasure, beleeving my money was not lost’ after all.¹⁴¹ Morley ploughed his stock market gains into several properties around Halstead. He sold these at a proﬁt as well, only getting caught out once by the complexities of entry ﬁnes and quit-rents, which he said he knew as much about then as ‘I now understand the Hebrew languidge’.¹⁴² However, Morley proved quick to learn, and was soon engaged as Sir Josiah’s land agent, eventually purchasing land ‘to the greatest part of twenty thousand pounds vallue’. He went on to be a land agent and business manager for Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and made his own fortune in the process.¹⁴³ Harley’s circle also provided him with a number of illustrious friends, including Alexander Pope, who wrote him several letters in the 1720s, and who may have seen the autobiographical fragment soon after it was written.¹⁴⁴ Clearly, Morley was an expert storyteller, as well as being very modest about his success. His origins were not, perhaps, quite as humble as he made out in his autobiography. For example, his savings of £120 at the time of his meeting with Child were substantial for a butcher in his early thirties with a young family to support. This suggests that Morley had already established himself ﬁrmly among Halstead’s ‘middling’ residents, even if he was not listed among ‘several of the chief parishioners of Halstead’ who petitioned the Quarter Sessions in April 1694. Four years later, however, he testiﬁed in an Exchequer case that he (like Ambrose Barcroft) had been appointed a Land Tax commissioner, being styled ‘gent.’ in his deposition.¹⁴⁵ This was only about ten years after he had ﬁrst met Sir Josiah Child. His ﬁnancial security allowed him to capitalize on the opportunities that came his way after his meeting with Sir Josiah, and formed the base for his ascent of the social scale. Even so, he did not conceal his relatively humble origins. In 1716 he had his portrait painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Morley was shown wearing a full wig, frock coat, and sword; his left hand rested on a book (of accounts?), his right hand held a pen. Yet the background showed a frieze in which a butcher was carrying a lamb across his shoulders.¹⁴⁶ In addition, he bought and remodelled Blue Bridge House, a substantial farmhouse beside the highway on the eastern outskirts of Halstead, adding a fashionable portico, sash ¹⁴¹ Child’s gains were much greater. In 1680 his stake in the Company was valued at £17,000. By 1691 it was worth £51,500. Grassby, ‘Child’. ¹⁴² BL Landsdowne 825, fo. 11r. ¹⁴³ Morley may have brokered the marriage of Harley’s son to Henrietta Hollis, daughter of the duke of Newcastle, receiving 2% of her dowry (£500,000), or £10,000. A. Hills, ‘Matthew Prior in Essex’, Essex Review, 44 (1935), 236–42. ¹⁴⁴ Morley sent Pope gifts on a number of occasions, and was also one of the subscribers for the publishing of Pope’s Odyssey, in 1722. A month after Morley wrote this fragment Pope referred to ‘the account of your life’ in a letter to him. G. Sherburn, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1956), ii. 148, 362. ¹⁴⁵ Essex RO (Chelms.), Quarter Sessions bundles, Q/SBb1, Easter 1694 Halstead petition, 17 Apr. 1694. NA E.134 10 William III Mich. 21, Thomas Todd v. Elizabeth Wangford. ¹⁴⁶ ‘John Morley of Halstead’, Essex Review, 11 (1902), frontispiece, plate 3.

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windows, wrought iron railings and gates. Once again, though, he emphasized his past by placing the arms of the Butcher’s Company immediately above his initials over the gate.¹⁴⁷ These contrasting elements illustrate that, although Morley continued to acknowledge his social origins, he had also (in large measure) transcended them. This was also the message of the autobiographical fragment. How did Morley want to be perceived? Clearly, he was not ashamed of his origins, but did he want to prove that he had surpassed them? His autobiography stresses his earlier ignorance, of social decorum, of the law, and of business procedure. Its overall objective was to amuse the reader with his past faux pas, but the humour came from a conscious but implicit contrast with his present knowledge, and a shared assumption with the reader about how he should have behaved. His depiction of his awkward subservience before Sir Josiah Child emphasizes his social discomfort, stemming from an understanding that he was well and truly out of his social ‘sphere’, but it was written for his new friends, rather than his neighbours in Halstead. It indicated that he was now much more at ease with ‘great men’, and willing not to pretend to be something he was not. Among them, at least, he presented himself in the guise of plain John Morley, the butcher. However, in his home parish Morley lived in the manner of a parish gentleman. The remodelled fac¸ade of Blue Bridge House was as clear a statement of his social aspirations as the guests he entertained within it.¹⁴⁸ In 1693 he bought the advowson for the rectory of Gestingthorpe, ﬁve miles from Halstead, and gave £200 to augment the living. He was churchwarden in Halstead between 1702 and 1706, and ten years later gave large brass candelabra for the nave of the church.¹⁴⁹ Together with his friend Samuel Fiske, he paid for the paving of the market place in the town in 1705. All these acts were those of a gentleman of the parish. Yet a story connected to his life suggests that he butchered a pig at Halstead market every year, to prove his skills and his origins.¹⁵⁰ Morley negotiated these two social worlds by acting slightly differently in each, but also by maintaining a constant ambivalence towards gentility. In the parish of Halstead he acted like a local ruler and benefactor, but never denied his trading background. Among friends like the poets Pope and Matthew Prior, he acknowledged his origins openly, and played on his past lack of sophistication, possibly to avoid criticism of his current social pretensions. Instead of exhibiting a concern with the socially differentiating features of gentility like Benjamin Allen, Morley praised the meritocratic ideals of the ‘great man’ Sir Josiah Child. He wrote approvingly of the way in which Sir Josiah had picked him on his ¹⁴⁷ ‘John Morley of Halstead’, Essex Review, 153. ¹⁴⁸ In 1726 it was valued at £60 per annum, or approximately £1,500 at 25 years’ purchase for freehold land. Essex RO Morant MSS D/Y 1 Holman correspondence, Holman to M. Lemoroy, Shadwell, 12 Nov. 1726. R. C. Allen, ‘The Price of Freehold Land and the Interest Rate in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41, 1 (1988), table 3, 46. ¹⁴⁹ ‘John Morley’, 158. ¹⁵⁰ Ibid, 153.

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merits, and not because of his birth: ‘He incuridg’d me not to be discuridg’d by reason of my being a butcher, adding noe wise man that imployed me in business would ask wither I was a baker, a butcher, a brewer, a tanner, a turner, a taylor, or a sayler, but wither his business was done.’¹⁵¹ This was an unusual attitude in the later seventeenth century, but it had been of tremendous assistance to Morley’s social ascent. Doubtless, too, Morley’s engaging character helped his social contacts, as Alexander Pope remarked.¹⁵² While he was able to shift between the images of the rough-edged butchermade-good, and a loftier, beneﬁcent social bearing in the parish of Halstead itself, his open, approachable character sufﬁced for both situations, without the need to engage in overt displays of gentility. Pope’s surviving letter, written after Morley had suffered an accident while out surveying, teased him about his aristocratic patrons. ‘I fancy you lay in so long, only to receive visits and letters and homages and messages in the greater state, to hear the condolement of Countesses and Duchesses, and to see the diamonds of beauties sparkle at your bedside’. However, other observers did not share this tolerance of Morley’s humble origins. Caulﬁeld’s ‘Remarkable Characters’ noted that ‘He was called ‘‘Carcase Morley’’ from his original calling of a butcher’.¹⁵³ Jonathan Swift remembered Morley as ‘a rascally butcher … the principal cause of my lord’s [Oxford’s] wrong conduct’.¹⁵⁴ Ultimately, Morley’s self-deprecating awareness of his origins allowed him to ﬁt in with the townsfolk of Halstead and Robert Harley. His autobiography demonstrates an acute awareness of his social position, and an understanding that while he could live in a gentlemanly manner, his position as a gentleman was equivocal. He may have been able to afford a gentlemanly style of life, but he had paid for it by a dependent role, as servant and agent to the mercantile and political elite. Morley provides an extreme example of social mobility within a single lifetime. He was sufﬁciently circumspect not to impose his status as a gentleman on an area far beyond the hinterland of his native Halstead, or without at least a nod to his past. Similarly, because it was impossible for him to hide his background in the circles surrounding Child and Harley, he acknowledged and even accentuated it in order not to be viewed as an upstart. He lacked the main qualiﬁcations for undisputed gentility—birth and education—which not even his considerable wealth and inﬂuential friends could supply. It was a different matter for his children, however, and his eldest son John styled himself ‘esq.’ and served repeatedly as a churchwarden in the town, while his younger son Thomas was sent to Oxford, where he quickly developed the nickname ‘Morley’s rake’.¹⁵⁵ ¹⁵¹ Landsdowne 825, fo. 12v. ¹⁵² ‘John Morley’, 362. ¹⁵³ Ibid., 193. Quoted in Sherburn, Pope Correspondence, ii. 148. ¹⁵⁴ Sherburn, Pope Correspondence, ii. 148. ¹⁵⁵ HMC Portland MSS, vii. 296. Letter from Dr William Stratford, Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, to the Earl of Oxford, 23 April 1721: ‘Morley’s rake that was our student is married … [to] … a little sorry girl that was a servant to a poor bedmaker here’.

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Morley’s daughter, Martha, married Thomas Unwin, a London wholesale grocer.¹⁵⁶ They may have achieved greater acceptance within the locality because they started from an advantageous position, as the children of a wealthy, and extremely well connected, local ‘gentleman’. Equally, though, none attempted the difﬁcult task of trying to match their father’s connections with literary and political ‘high society’, preferring to remain in the safety of their own provincial social ‘sphere’. As has been shown elsewhere, Morley was not alone among his peers in Essex and Suffolk in being cautious about the representation of his gentility to the wider world.¹⁵⁷ The prime concern of such people was the danger of rejection and social ridicule—of being dismissed as ‘Carcase Morley’, instead of accepted as ‘Mr Morley’, gentleman. Historical studies of gentility and social mobility have tended to concentrate on ‘emulation’ as a signiﬁer of genteel aspirations, as if the attainment of gentility was primarily a matter of material substance, and simply of owning the ‘right’ items. This is a function of the sources, particularly our dependence upon probate inventories as a means of detecting the social values of the middling, in the absence of personal materials. As a result, historians have sometimes overlooked the fact that gentility was, obviously, a social rather than a purely material process. It depended on acceptance and rejection, admittance and ostracism, which were personal and could be painful. This process of social evaluation also meant that there was no single standard or site of gentility. Gentility in the parish was assessed by reference to different criteria and personnel than gentility among the county elite.¹⁵⁸ Gentility in larger towns differed in some respects from gentility in the countryside, even if the two forms were ultimately compatible.¹⁵⁹ The gentility of scientiﬁc or antiquarian discourse could credit some participants as gentlemanly ‘truth-tellers’, when they might not be accepted as gentlemen in purely social contexts. Increasingly in clothing districts, ‘gentlemanly’ manufacturers were appearing in proximity to neighbouring landed gentry.¹⁶⁰ Looking, behaving, and sounding like a gentleman might gain the newcomer admittance to many of these gatherings, but they did not guarantee acceptance.¹⁶¹ For those whose credentials seemed doubtful, it helped to have other levers to apply. John Morley’s powerful patrons probably outweighed his obscure origins. For Benjamin Allen’s competitor, Samuel Dale, powerful intellectual sponsors associated with John Ray backed up his meticulous scientiﬁc observations, projecting him onto high ¹⁵⁶ ‘John Morley’, 203. ¹⁵⁷ French, ‘Social Status’, 94–6; Ibid. ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 57–8. ¹⁵⁸ Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 237. ¹⁵⁹ Ibid. 239. ¹⁶⁰ A. Randall, ‘The Industrial Moral Economy of the Gloucestershire Weavers in the Eighteenth Century’, in J. Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism 1750–1850: The Formative Years (Harlow, 1988), 29–51. ¹⁶¹ Langford, Propertied Englishman, 486.

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table and the fringes of the Royal Society.¹⁶² Such levers became more necessary when individuals moved beyond social environments in which they could exert personal control—outside what Dale and some of his Essex contemporaries described as their ‘sphere’.¹⁶³ For ‘chief inhabitants’ it was easier to foster a reputation for gentility among their (normally) compliant peers, than in settings and institutions in which they did not determine the criteria for estimation and belonging. This equation of decreased social inﬂuence in direct proportion to the distance from one’s social foundations may well apply at all levels in the early modern social hierarchy. However, the widespread recognition of the threshold of gentility meant that it was a boundary that many individuals crossed warily, and a territory into which they did not stray very far, because rejection or ridicule might be understood widely and occur very publicly. It might also percolate back into the parish and affect their credibility and authority as ‘chief inhabitants’. Better not to pretend to be a ‘gentleman’ than to try, and be rejected. It would be wrong, however, to depict gentility or the gentry as social entities for which the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’ always exhibited uncritical admiration. There were issues that exposed divisions of interest between the two groups, and which provoked resentment among parochial rulers about their lack of legal autonomy. In the countryside, these might include hunting rights and (increasingly) magisterial intervention in poor relief decisions.¹⁶⁴ More signiﬁcantly, they could also involve conﬂicts over the powers of manorial lordship. In parts of the south, manors were often small and fragmented, and sufﬁciently affordable to be purchased by yeomen or successful urban tradesmen. Yet this also provided the potential for conﬂict between these sometimes smallscale manorial lords and their yeoman tenants, whose resources might be almost as great. This phenomenon is more apparent in the period before 1650 than in the following century. Inﬂation forced manorial lords to increase their incomes from lease-rents, and by more intensive exploitation of manorial perquisites (copyhold ﬁnes, timber rights, and amercements for ‘nuisances’).¹⁶⁵ These efforts often had the greatest impact on the largest manorial tenants, who themselves were sometimes taking advantage of higher grain and livestock prices, and falling real wage rates.¹⁶⁶ This could arouse hostility, particularly to the smaller gentry’s powers of lordship, and possibly to them as a group. One example of this conﬂict comes from Earls Colne. There, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century Roger Harlackenden, a London lawyer and estate steward, purchased the ¹⁶² French, ‘ ‘‘Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen’’ ’, 55–6. ¹⁶³ Ibid, 55, 57. ¹⁶⁴ For hunting, see P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981); for divisions of interest over poor relief see Hindle, On the Parish?, 405–32; P. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), 357–67. ¹⁶⁵ R.W. Hoyle, ‘Redeﬁning Copyhold in the 16th Century: The Case of Timber Rights’, in van Bavel and Hoppenbrouwers, Landholding, 250–64; French and Hoyle, English Rural Society, ch. 5. ¹⁶⁶ Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 20–1.

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village’s two manors from the earl of Oxford.¹⁶⁷ This produced a considerable change in lordship. The village went from being part of an estate comprising fortysix manors in the county to having its own resident minor gentry family, whose principal assets were just these two manors.¹⁶⁸ The immediate consequence was that the management of the estate was transformed from a low-pressure system where the values of demesne rents, ﬁnes, and perquisites had not kept pace with inﬂation, to a high-pressure regime, in which the lord tried to obtain signiﬁcant increases in the returns from these assets. Demesne rents were increased quite sharply from the nominal sums extracted by the earl. Copyhold ﬁnes rose, and the Harlackendens tried to exercise control of timber growing on their tenants’ copyholds. As Richard Hoyle has demonstrated, this was a relatively common ploy by landlords in East Anglia in the sixteenth century, and it sometimes provoked considerable resistance.¹⁶⁹ In Earls Colne, this policy alienated a number of the leading tenants, who eventually combined to ﬁght and defeat the lord’s claim to this timber. During this dispute and the many other controversies in the village between 1590 and 1630 one of the Harlackendens’ ﬁercest opponents was Henry Abbott. Abbott was born in 1564, the son of Robert Abbott.¹⁷⁰ His father died three years later, leaving only £6 13s. 4d. for Henry to inherit at 21, though the family may also have owned some freehold land in the manors.¹⁷¹ Although he owned some land, inherited a sizeable house in the town’s main street from his uncle, and obtained 20 acres through his marriage, Henry seems to have concentrated on the cloth trade, apparently both as producer (clothier) and retailer (draper).¹⁷² This ensured that he was ﬁnancially independent, reducing his reliance on his real estate, diminishing the manorial lord’s leverage over him, and allowing Henry to behave with relative impunity. Even in early adulthood Henry exhibited a clear dislike of authority. He was involved in several brawls in the village, accused of playing cards and dice instead of assisting the watch, and of failing to attend the manorial leet. In 1593 the leet summed him up as ‘a vile and troublesome member of the commonwealth’, and levied a huge ﬁne of £5. By this time, much of Abbott’s resentment had settled on the new manorial lord. The ﬁne came after a particularly tactless ¹⁶⁷ See French and Hoyle, English Rural Society, ch. 3. ¹⁶⁸ This ﬁgure is calculated by reference to manorial histories in Morant, Essex, i. 17, 84, 85, 191, 205, 234, 236, 250, 258, 259, 266, 345, 346, 351, 448, 471, 485, 486, 488, 489, 490; ii. 13, 92, 188, 211, 212, 215, 216, 220, 222, 223, 269, 284, 286, 292, 300, 302, 304, 307, 331, 333, 334, 359, 461, 532, 578. John Church was steward to the Earls Colne cluster of manors. See W. J. Petchey, A Prospect of Maldon 1500–1689 (Chelmsford, 1991), 161–2. ¹⁶⁹ Hoyle, ‘Redeﬁning Copyhold’, 255–63. ¹⁷⁰ www.alanmacfarlane.com Earls Colne Baptism Register, 26 Mar. 1564 [6500582]. ¹⁷¹ Will of Robert Abbott, Earls Colne, 7 May 1568 [2601076]; Earls Colne court rolls, 18 Mar. 1589 [66700214]. ¹⁷² Copyhold transfer between William Abbott and nephew Henry Abbott, Colne Priory court roll, 5 Dec. 1616 [33501522]. Henry married Thomasine Culverton, and obtained 20 a. 2 r. 1 Their heirs retained this until 1742.

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remark made to the bailiffs who had come to seize cloth to pay a previous ﬁne: ‘(mrs Harlackenden being lately departed this world) I thought your master had sent you to me to have taken cloth to make mourning coats’.¹⁷³ Abbott’s lack of respect for the Harlackendens stemmed from the previous year, when he and a number of other tenants had tried to buy the manor of Colne Priory, in order to dissolve it and make themselves freeholders.¹⁷⁴ They had been pre-empted by Harlackenden, possibly by underhand means.¹⁷⁵ This was the substance behind Abbott’s grumble in 1593 that ‘for 5li he the said Abbotte would discharge all Mr. Harlackenden his tenants from doing any more service than coming to his court and put off their hats and go their ways’.¹⁷⁶ Four years later, Roger Harlackenden singled out Abbott among the Quarter Sessions jurors who had decided that the road between Coggeshall and Earls Colne ‘always of right hath been repaired by the gentry’, rather than the villagers as a whole.¹⁷⁷ Harlackenden seems to have suspected that Abbott was trying to ensure that he paid handsomely for the privilege of ‘lording it’ over the village. In 1610 Abbott interrupted the sermon of the new vicar, Thomas Greenﬁeld, whose ‘puritan’ religious sympathies accorded with those of the lord of the manor, but alienated many others in the community. Greenﬁeld’s sermon was on the theme of the obedience of children and servants, and at one point Abbott interjected ‘now he prateth against his master’.¹⁷⁸ Most damagingly of all, Abbott was instrumental in the successful attack on the lord’s manorial prerogative on the felling of timber on tenants’ copyholds. The previous management regime under the earl of Oxford had paid little attention to this right; tenants had acted largely at their own discretion and, as a consequence, there were no clear precedents for the exercise of such control by the lord before the 1580s.¹⁷⁹ In particular, the larger copyholders regarded this issue as intrusive. They were copyholders ‘by inheritance’, and (in effect) were secure in the possession of their estates.¹⁸⁰ The lord’s power to exact additional ﬁnes from them when they cut timber on their ‘own’ lands was often ignored, ¹⁷³ Earls Colne court rolls 9 June 1593 [66902038]. ¹⁷⁴ In subsequent court cases, the Earl of Oxford’s party alleged that Harlackenden had been told to sell the manor to the copyholders. Chancery Depositions, Henry De Vere v. Richard Harlackenden, 7 Feb. 1607 [1600005]. ¹⁷⁵ One allegation was that Harlackenden paid only £700 for Colne Priory, an asset worth £300 per annum. Chancery Depositions, Edward De Vere v. Roger and Richard Harlackenden, 23 Apr. 1594 [17401440, 17401543]. ¹⁷⁶ Earls Colne court rolls 9 Jun. 1593 [66902051]. ¹⁷⁷ Harlackenden Account Book, 17 Nov. 1596 [23000106]. ¹⁷⁸ Assize Indictments, 16 July 1610 [14000709]. ¹⁷⁹ No references to timber felling occurred in Earls Colne court rolls before 1563. One case in Colne Priory implied that licences were required to fell timber for repairs on copyholds. Colne Priory court roll abstracts, 14 June 1557 [53800979]; Earls Colne court rolls, 13 Mar. 1577 [66000752]. In 1612, the earliest licence that could be found was from 1581. Harlackenden account book [22900056, 22900101, 22900112]. ¹⁸⁰ Copyholds in Earls Colne were conveyed through the manorial court for a ﬁxed (customary) rent, and a variable (and quite substantial) ﬁne to the lord upon sale or inheritance.

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and was obviously resented.¹⁸¹ In addition, as a group the larger copyholders could well afford the costs of an extended legal contest over the matter. Predictably, Abbott relished the ﬁght. In 1615 he brought a case in Common Pleas which tested the lord’s right to license felling on copyholds.¹⁸² Details of this case do not survive, but in another case between tenant and lord, in 1623, Abbott recalled that Richard Harlackenden sought a trial in order to establish his rights over oaks on Abbott’s copyhold.¹⁸³ The outcome of this case is unknown, and the lord continued to issue licences for wood felling until 1620.¹⁸⁴ However, Abbott and other tenants resumed their challenge to the lord’s rights, and matters culminated in the early 1620s in a case in Star Chamber. Again, the pleadings are missing, but the following year an agreement was enrolled in the manorial court between Harlakenden and eleven named tenants, headed by Abbott.¹⁸⁵ In it, the lord relinquished his right to levy ﬁnes on this activity, and the tenants secured complete control over the wood on their copyholds. If one aspect of this attack was institutional, on the rights of manorial lords, the other was personal—on the conduct of the Harlackendens themselves. Abbott’s evidence in 1623 was delivered as part of a larger effort to undermine the credibility of the Harlackendens’ court rolls. At one level, this was simply part of a rather desperate, and long-running, strategy by another tenant to query inconvenient evidence.¹⁸⁶ At another, it sought to undermine the probity of the Harlackendens in the eyes of the village. The charge that the manorial lord was prepared to manipulate his court rolls in order to change custom in his favour challenged the trust upon which his authority was constructed. It also posed an implied threat to his credit as a gentlemanly ‘truth-teller’, and thus his social standing more generally. This intent was singled out for condemnation in the ﬁnal decree in this case, which insisted that such charges ‘tend to the disgrace of the defendant Mr. Harlackenden (being a gentleman of quality) and of his court rolls’.¹⁸⁷ While Abbott never expressed his social resentments explicitly, this case shows that he and other villagers sought an outcome that would have deﬂated ¹⁸¹ See e.g. Earls Colne court rolls, 24 July 1592 [66901718]; Colne Priory court roll abstracts, 20 Apr. 1598 [54100532]. ¹⁸² Abbott stated that it was 6 or 7 years before 1623, but another deponent put the time at about 5 years previously. Chancery Depositions Rosse v. Harlackenden, 13 June 1623 [17701688, 17702011]. ¹⁸³ Ibid, [18000770, 17700005, 17701669]. ¹⁸⁴ Colne Priory court rolls, 4 Apr. 1616, 10 Apr. 1618 [33500978, 33600406]; Harlackenden Account Book [22900383, 22900393; 22911421; 22900428]. ¹⁸⁵ Earls Colne court rolls, 15 Apr. 1623 [38002216]; Colne Priory court rolls 16 Apr. 1623 [33801042]. ¹⁸⁶ The case, between Rose Rosse and Richard Harlackenden, involved Rosse’s alleged unwillingness to provide for her children by her ﬁrst husband after 1585. Rosse alleged that Roger Harlackenden had either falsiﬁed the court rolls, or had been prepared to do so on her behalf. Chancery Depositions Rose Partridge v. Richard Harlackenden, 10 May 1622 [16200179]. These allegations ﬁrst appeared in Star Chamber Depositions Elizabeth and Francis De Veer v. Richard Harlackenden, Jun. 1606 [19200502]. ¹⁸⁷ Chancery Depositions Rosse v. Harlackenden, 9 Oct. 1623 [18400005].

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the Harlackendens’ pretensions to be persons ‘of quality’, by throwing doubt on their behaviour as gentlemen. Conversely, the Harlackendens were extremely anxious to refute such aspersions publicly. The 1623 case, in which Abbott and others gave hostile testimony, cost Richard Harlackenden the large sum of £91 5s., a price he was willing to pay in order ‘to defend my father’s reputation’, and, by association, his own position both as a manorial lord and as a gentleman.¹⁸⁸ Earls Colne was a turbulent and highly litigious place in the early seventeenth century. Abbott’s protests were minor facets of much larger contests over legal and cultural authority, notably the twenty-year dispute about the ownership of the manor of Colne Priory between the Harlackendens and the De Veres, and the divisions created by the Harlackendens’ ‘puritan’ religious preferences.¹⁸⁹ Plainly, Abbott relished conﬂicts with a family whose social, economic, administrative, and moral authority grated upon him. In other circumstances, for example if the earls of Oxford had remained as distant manorial lords, it is easy to imagine Abbott as a natural, if not particularly godly, ‘chief inhabitant’, regulating the community as a member of the manorial homage and the parish vestry. He was a wealthy householder, and towards the end of his life in the late 1620s and early 1630s, his status was recognized through an extended period as constable, although it did not prevent him receiving a couple of beatings during his tenure.¹⁹⁰ His personality and circumstances ensured that he used his ample resources to resist authority with relative impunity, rather than to exercise it with the requisite respect. However, can we detect any general ‘middling’ characteristics among the speciﬁcs of Abbott’s anti-authoritarian reﬂexes? In some respects, Abbott’s behaviour appears antithetical to deﬁnitions of the historical ‘middle-class’, both old and new. While we could depict him as a ‘bourgeois’ sentinel, deﬁantly resisting ‘gentry’ oppression, he was hardly a shining example of Christopher Hill’s ‘industrious sort of people’, but for his engagement in trade. He was not godly, had a marked preference for ‘idle’ pastimes and games, and shirked personal authority. While he was happy to ally himself to his peers when it suited him, he was just as likely to abuse them as to stand beside them in ‘middling’ solidarity. Conversely, he was hardly a precursor of the later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ‘middle sort’ either, if we wish to characterize it by a desire to ‘ape the manners and morals of the gentry’. Yet, implicitly, Abbott illustrates the efforts of the more prosperous parish householders to mark out a sphere of authority in which they were paramount, and not subject to the intrusive powers of lordship. He also represents this impulse at a moment of transition, as the regulatory power of the court leet declined, and the ecclesiastical parish was reconstituted as the ¹⁸⁸ Harlackenden Accounts, May 1622 [23000321]. ¹⁸⁹ French and Hoyle, English Rural Society, ch. 5. ¹⁹⁰ Quarter Sessions’ Rolls, 27 Mar. 1629 [20502511], 16 Apr. 1629 [20502552], 6 Oct. 1635 [20502653, 20502686].

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basic unit of civil administration in the late sixteenth century. Both bodies were subject to scrutiny by the gentry, with the difference that the manor was the lord’s jurisdiction, whereas the parish was merely overseen by the JP, but was run by men of Abbott’s rank. As Hindle has shown, the latter system also generated plenty of resentments about Gentry interference, but these were conﬂicts over administrative responsibilities rather than ones about personal obedience.¹⁹¹ In the face of two particularly committed and intrusive manorial lords, Abbott tried to realize his desire for economic and social autonomy by resistance. While much of his animus towards the Harlackendens was personal, there are hints that he resented the gentry as a group, particularly when they claimed legal and social authority of a kind unavailable to him. This was close to ‘class consciousness’, because it displays some perception that the social positions and economic interests of ‘gentlemen’ and ‘tenants’ were inevitably and diametrically opposed, and that tenants might achieve greater personal autonomy without lords. It is impossible to determine whether such resentments were shared more widely among his peers. In other, nearby villages where there were no resident, small-scale lords, or where relations with them were more harmonious, ‘chief inhabitants’ carved out a niche by monopolizing the institutions of the parish, co-operating with, but also distinguishing themselves from, the gentry in the exercise of authority.¹⁹² Abbott came close to creating such autonomy in 1592, and appears to have regretted this lost opportunity for the rest of his life. The subsequent history of the Abbott family is one of burgeoning parish ‘gentility’, despite themselves. When Henry Abbott (I) died in early 1637, his will describes him as a ‘yeoman’—an attribution commensurate with the lands brought to him by his wife, and a personal estate of £187 3s. 4d.¹⁹³ His son Henry (II) lent most of this money on mortgage to Thomas Fisher in May 1637. Later that year, Henry secured the title to Fisher’s lands (83 acres called Heyhouse) and became the largest copyholder in the village, with just over 100 acres in total.¹⁹⁴ In turn, his will of 1654 reveals that he had lent £540 on four mortgages and a further £10 on bond.¹⁹⁵ Henry (II) inherited some of his father’s obstinacy along with his money. Josselin noted his reluctance to pay tithes, and observed at his death that he ‘regarded not the lord in his illness, and was not much capable to look after him’.¹⁹⁶ His brother Robert displayed much ¹⁹¹ Hindle, On the Parish?, 407–27. ¹⁹² For ‘chief inhabitants’ controlling Braintree and Finchingﬁeld 1620–40, see Emmison, Early Essex Town Meetings. ¹⁹³ Archdeaconry Act Book, 31 Jan. 1637 [2002310]. ¹⁹⁴ Earls Colne court rolls, 30 May, 2 Oct. 1637 [38600488, 38600814]. With his mother’s estate, Henry (II) possessed 103 a. 3 r. 26 p. ¹⁹⁵ Earls Colne court roll, 18 Jun. 1650 [390.00224], Will of Henry Abbott, Earls Colne, 1654 [4301469]. ¹⁹⁶ Josselin received tithes from Abbott ‘very lovingly and quietly’ on 28 Oct. 1650, and noted Abbott’s death on 7 Aug. 1655. A. Macfarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, Records of Social and Economic History,  3 (Oxford, 1991), 219, 351.

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greater hostility to Josselin, tithes, and the established church, and eventually became a Quaker.¹⁹⁷ Henry (II)’s heir, also called Henry (III), was estimated to possess an annual income of £2,000 to £3,000 in 1684, from lands in Earls Colne and Coggeshall.¹⁹⁸ This was sufﬁcient for him to be described routinely as ‘gentleman’, even in an indictment for ﬁshing illegally in the pond of a nearby landed estate, although other sources suggest that he, like his grandfather, was primarily a clothier.¹⁹⁹ In addition to his apparent lack of deference, he also inherited the family dislike of Josselin, and the Church of England, and was consistent in refusing to pay tithes. In 1656 Josselin recorded that he had stated baldly that ‘he had rather give money to pull the church down and lay it in the highways’.²⁰⁰ His eldest son, another Henry (IV), married Abigail, the daughter and heir of a Suffolk freeholder. Her dowry included freeholds and copyholds in Kersey in Suffolk and Great Tey and Witham in Essex. Henry (IV) was a ﬁgure of some local standing, serving as a Quarter Sessions and Assize juror, and being referred to (posthumously) as ‘Captain Abbott’, presumably his rank in the local militia.²⁰¹ This wealth and status was not without its ironies, however. By 1691, Abbott had acquired a share in the tithes of the neighbouring parishes of Great and Little Coggeshall, and sued several individuals for non-payment—doubtless an action that would have amused his grandfather, great-uncle, and father!²⁰² Henry Abbott (IV) died in 1710 and the Earls Colne farm passed to his bachelor sons, Henry (V) and Joseph. The latter extended this estate in 1729–30, then bequeathed this holding of 162 acres to his sister, Abigail Johnson, in 1735.²⁰³ It remained within the Johnson family, until they ﬁnally sold out in 1852.²⁰⁴ By the time the Abbott estate descended to Abigail and Oliver Johnson, the heads of three generations of the family had been accorded the title ‘gent.’, reﬂecting several parallel movements—the family’s gradual ascent into the upper ranks of the local ‘chief inhabitants’, their steady accumulation of land, and the wider application of this social epithet by the early eighteenth century. Like her great-grandfather, Abigail was the largest copyholder in the manor. Unlike her forebears, though, she and her husband were relatively peaceable ¹⁹⁷ Ibid. 379, 417–18, 605–6. ¹⁹⁸ Chancery Depositions Abbott v. Clark, 16 Jan. 1685 [170.00092]. ¹⁹⁹ King’s Bench Ancient Indictments, 12 Apr. 1690 [139000015]; Chancery Depositions Henry Abbott Sr. v. Henry Abbott Jr., 28 June 1686 [17200005]; Will of Richard Hayward, Earls Colne, yeoman 1693 [5101227]. ²⁰⁰ Josselin, Diary, 366. ²⁰¹ Quarter Sessions’ Bundles 2 Sept. 1697 [20900136]; Assize Indictments, 24 July 1700 [14200349], 29 Mar. 1708 [14200446], 28 July 1708 [14200452]; Will of Edward Abbott, Copford, gent., 10 July 1714 [5600583]. ²⁰² Exchequer Pleadings Henry Abbott v. Thomas Nichols and Arthur Butcher, 1691 [18700288]. ²⁰³ Earls Colne court roll, 31 Mar. 1720 [41400227]; Colne Priory court rolls, 1 May 1729, 3 Apr. 1730 [36500697, 36600022]. ²⁰⁴ Colne Priory court roll 10 Mar. 1735 [36700466]; Earls Colne court roll 10 Mar. 1735 [42100713]. The 1854 Estate Rental [80000285] summarizes the later descent of the estate.

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members of the parish elite. Oliver served ﬁve times as a churchwarden and an overseer, and attended the vestry 114 times between 1723 and 1750, ﬁgures well above the parish norm.²⁰⁵ Similarly, between 1722 and 1750 only four ratepayers (including the lord of the manor) were assessed at higher levels than the Johnsons.²⁰⁶ By this time, too, although Earls Colne had regained a resident lord of the manor, a distant descendant of the Harlackendens, the manor was largely moribund, except as a register of title, and the bitter personal and cultural disputes that had plagued the parish in the early seventeenth century had long since been extinguished. The Johnsons had achieved the autonomy and authority sought by Henry Abbott (I), but by integrating with, rather than displacing, the ‘better sort of people’ in the parish. In the process, though, they adapted gentility to ﬁt their circumstances, and never retreated completely into the ranks of the rentier landlords. They could be comfortable alongside other such village ‘gentlemen’—Edward Cressener, a retired London tobacco wholesaler, Thomas Sewell, a Cressener relative and local attorney, John Newton, another prosperous yeoman-landholder, or John Hatch, a largely landless grocer.²⁰⁷ This social segment marked a change in the village since Henry Abbott (I)’s time. Then, its ‘chief inhabitants’ had still been important ﬁgures in the locality, but they did not claim to be gentlemen. So far, we have only really considered rural society, and mobility into the ranks of the landed gentry proper. This was the most difﬁcult form of social ascent, because it meant renouncing the strategies that had allowed aspirants to get within striking distance of this status in the ﬁrst place, as Ambrose Barcroft (III) discovered. Unless industrial capital could be recouped and transferred smoothly into landed or other income-yielding assets, the danger was of cutting off the branch on which one sat. ‘Gentlemanly employs’ were one solution—notably law and medicine—and a rural-industrial region such as Essex and Suffolk, or the Cotswolds, could support gentleman-clothiers or wholesale drapers, the bulk of whose business could be conducted from the study, rather than shop counter, the warehouse, or the loom. However, it is undoubtedly the case that towns, particularly large towns, offered more opportunities for the creation of highly prosperous wholesale and retail businesses, and provided social settings in ²⁰⁵ Only four other people served as churchwarden in these years, and even the most assiduous members of the vestry attended on average only 71 times. ²⁰⁶ Between 1722 and 1750 the median assessment level for the vestry was 256, where the parish median was 100. Johnson’s median assessment through this period was 927. The ﬁgure for all ofﬁcers was 97.9. ²⁰⁷ In his will Edward Cressener was described as a ‘citizen and embroiderer’ of London, but as a ‘tobacconist’ in the Earls Colne burial register. Will, 6 Apr. 1722 [5701486], Earls Colne Burial Register 1720–29, 1 May 1722 [8600305]; Thomas Sewell was described as ‘cousin’ in the will of Elizabeth Cressener, the wife of John Cressener, brother of Edward, 5 Mar. 1731 [5800985], see also Essex RO (Chelms.) microﬁlm T/B 186 Account and Memoranda Books of Thomas Sewell, Jr.; John Newton, will, 22 Aug. 1757 [93000065, 93000070, 93000075]; Colne Priory Court Roll, 10 Dec. 1748 [37200335] shows that John Hatch owned only 3 r. copyhold and a house and shop called Boxsteads, but was a freehold voter, cf. 7 May 1734 [22100519].

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which fashionable modes and manners might obscure the sources of income on which they were based. County towns also provided administrative centres that drew in the gentry, and threw up social gatherings, during Assizes and Quarter Sessions.²⁰⁸ Such centres also received the attention of aristocratic patrons during county elections, in addition to fostering institutions and societies that sought aristocratic or gentry participation and support. It was here that the varying notions of urban and rural gentility collided and overlapped. As a consequence, the urban arena may have allowed greater emphasis on the external aspects of gentility among the civic ‘chief inhabitants’—on dress, material furnishings, fashionable display, and genteel gatherings and sociability. Yet, as has been suggested, these took place with a social context just as well established as in any village. The urban social elite consisted of a known collection of families, connected by ties of kinship, credit, and administrative responsibility into which the newcomer had to ﬁt. There may have been more of a chance for landed and non-landed families to mix, interact, and inter-marry as a result of urban social gatherings, but, as Borsay has indicated, ‘civilizing and social distancing … went hand in hand’, as barriers were put up to exclude non-genteel groups.²⁰⁹ Even so, the evidence of material culture and display among the ‘chief inhabitants’ of urban society allows us to examine how far gentility was manifested primarily by certain symbols and signiﬁers in this environment, among a population whose income tended to be earned rather than unearned. The aldermanic elite of Colchester provides one such social setting. The town, and notions of gentility, featured in the opening pages of Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Defoe knew Colchester well, choosing it as the location of Moll’s earliest misadventures because it was an industrial centre in which women could obtain easy, if poorly paid, employment. This allowed him to begin Moll’s career with an ironic discussion of notions of (female) gentility. Moll was a foundling, brought up by the parish, and when she reached 8 years old the authorities ordered that she be put out into service. Moll protested at attempts to send her away to earn her living elsewhere.²¹⁰ Her foster mother asked how she would support herself, posing the question ‘what, would you be a Gentlewoman?’—that is, would she rather stay at home without working? Innocently, Moll agreed, causing much amusement, but her deﬁnition of the status was ‘to be able to Work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible Bug-Bear going into Service, whereas they meant to live Great, Rich, and High, and I know not what’.²¹¹ Defoe introduced three levels of irony into this discussion. First, there was the incongruity of a poor parish child apparently professing a desire to gentility. Secondly, Moll’s childish understanding of gentility unwittingly associated the status with working ²⁰⁸ Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 267–83; P. Clark (ed.), County Towns in Pre-industrial England (Leicester, 1981) 8–9, 16–24 ²⁰⁹ Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 284–308, quote 286. ²¹⁰ Defoe, Moll Flanders, 10. ²¹¹ Ibid., 13.

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to maintain independence, which looked particularly unlikely at ‘3d. per diem spinning’, and 4d. for ‘plain work’.²¹² Thirdly, this exchange began the novel’s deeper moral consideration of gentility, and the corrupting inﬂuence of pride and social ambition upon Moll herself. This ﬁnal element reﬂected Defoe’s ambivalence about social mobility, and his dislike of individuals who moved between social categories, particularly tradesmen who would be gentlemen.²¹³ Later, in an oft-quoted passage, Moll describes her criteria for choosing as a second husband, ‘that Land-water-thing, call’d, a Gentleman-Tradesman’. ‘I was not averse to a Tradesman, but then I would have a Tradesman forsooth, that was something of a Gentleman too … and not to be one that had the mark of his Apron-strings upon his Coat, or the mark of his Hat upon his Perriwig.’²¹⁴ For Defoe, this overriding concern with social signiﬁers was ‘folly’ because it invited extravagance, neglect of business, debt, moral decay, and potential ﬁnancial and social ruin. Elsewhere, he criticized the kind of woman who valued ‘herself upon her being a gentlewoman, and thought it a step below herself, when she married this mechanic thing called a tradesman’.²¹⁵ Yet gentility is the lure for Moll, because it embodied the freedom from the necessity to work, and the freedom to indulge in fashion, consumption, and display, and to render oneself distinctive and (even) praiseworthy. If the male signiﬁers of gentility were the wig and sword, ‘holland shirts’, stabling horses, learning ‘dog-language’, and keeping ‘the sportsman’s brogue upon their tongues’,²¹⁶ for women they comprised the accomplishments picked up by Moll as a servant in a wealthy Colchester household. These included tuition in dancing, speaking French, writing, playing musical instruments, and singing.²¹⁷ Such skills were requisite for a life of leisure and sociability in gatherings in ‘parlours set off with the tea-table and the chocolate pot’, or with ‘wine, punch, or ﬁne ale’, ‘treats and liquors all exotic, foreign and new among tradesmen, and terrible articles in their modern expenses’.²¹⁸ While Margaret Hunt has exploded the stereotypical division between ‘middling’ men as producers or income-generators, and women as consumers and shoppers, the exclusion of women from paid work formed an important component of urban gentility.²¹⁹ The ‘leisured’ wives of ‘gentlementradesmen’ played an essential role in performing the social rituals of gentility, and in investing them with meaning as material signiﬁers of this status in the household. They helped create an intermediate social stratum, which lay between families where both partners had to engage directly in paid activities in order to maintain economic independence, and those where neither had to do so. In these intermediate households male income ﬂows funded the genteel lifestyle, but women were essential to its creation and performance. ²¹² ²¹³ ²¹⁴ ²¹⁷ ²¹⁹

Defoe, Moll Flanders, 11. See Defoe, English Tradesman, 86; see also Shinagel, Defoe, chs. 10–12. Defoe, English Tradesman, 60. ²¹⁵ Ibid. 202. ²¹⁶ Ibid, 86–7, 73. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 18. ²¹⁸ Defoe, English Tradesman, 84. Hunt, Middling Sort, 125–46.

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We can get a sense of female gentility among the urban ‘chief inhabitants’ through depositions given about the estate of Anne Pelham, of Colchester, who died in 1688, with assets amounting to £1,724.²²⁰ She died in extreme old age, possibly aged 97 or 98, and in a state of mental decay, causing uncertainty about her capacity to make a will. She had been part of the ruling elite of the borough, and her grandchildren and kin were prosperous tradesmen in the town. For example, her son-in-law, John Brasier, a grocer, who had died in 1663, was assessed on four hearths the previous year, when the median for the town as a whole was three.²²¹ He had also served as a Common Councillor of the borough in 1655, parliamentary tax assessor six times between 1645 and 1657, and was twice a civil court juror in 1653.²²² Samuel Great, the husband of her great-niece, with whom she had lived her ﬁnal days, was an Assistant (the position immediately below Alderman in the corporation) between 1668 and 1684 and 1692–1706.²²³ Martha Flanner, cousin of her grandson John Brasier, was married to William Flanner, elected an alderman in 1692.²²⁴ Most of the witnesses giving evidence in this case were women, because they nursed her, and formed the bulk of her visitors. Three social strata were evident. There were the female servants, young unmarried women such as Elizabeth Sparrow, aged 21, Mary Smith, aged 24, or Anne Paul, aged 18.²²⁵ Most had been quite mobile, geographically. Sparrow, for example, had served in six different households since leaving home at the age of 15. Secondly, there were older women, predominantly widows, who had nursed Anne at night. Martha Midworth, a widow, aged 45, had moved to Colchester nine years before, having previously lived in a village about seven miles away. In addition to nursing Anne, she earned her living ‘by going to day labour and by spinning’. Finally, there were Anne’s visitors, who shared her social standing. As has been noted, one was Martha, wife of William Flanner, aged 40. She had lived in Colchester for twenty-two years, and had known Anne for twenty years. She stated ‘that her husband is a mercer by trade and liveth by the same and maintaineth her’. Mary, ²²⁰ NA Prerogative Court of Canterbury PROB 28/1303 Great v. Eyre, 1688; PROB 5/1858 Inventory of Anne Pelham, Colchester, widow, 19 June 1688. The value given is for personal effects and ‘good debts’, her ‘bad debts’ amounted to a further £668, with shares in 8 ships (some dating to 1639) valued at £355 17s. 7d., giving a nominal total of £1,724 13s. 7d. Anne told Martha Flanner that she had no money because ‘shee had ventured all her Estate to sea and lost it there’. ²²¹ Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/RTh 1 Essex Hearth Tax, 1662, John Brasier, Holy Trinity parish. Anne was his executor. NA C5 423/197 Chancery Bills and Answers, answer of Anne Pelham, Colchester, widow, 14 Nov. 1667. ²²² Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/RTh 1 Essex Hearth Tax 1662; Essex RO (Col.) D/B5 Gb4 Colchester Assembly Minute Book 1646–62; British Library MSS Stowe 842 Parliamentary Subsidy Assessors and Collectors, Colchester 1643–65; Essex RO (Col.) T/A 465/139 [Microﬁlm] Colchester Thursday Court Book, 1652–5. ²²³ Essex RO (Col.) D/B5 Gb5 Colchester Assembly Minute Book 1667–1692; D/b5 Gb6, 1693–1712. ²²⁴ Essex RO (Col.) D/B5 Gb5 Colchester Assembly Minute Book 1667–1692. ²²⁵ For all deponents mentioned in this section, see NA PROB 28/1303.

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wife of John Milbanke, linen draper and mayor of Colchester in 1688–9, aged 63, noted that Anne had recognized her, but had called her by her maiden name of ‘forty yeares agoe’. Sarah Holland, aged 40, was wife of John Holland, ‘a gauger belonging to the Excise and maintaineth her’. Mary Briscoe, a widow aged 70, and Anne’s next-door neighbour, was in a slightly more equivocal position, living ‘partly upon some rent she hath and partly by her labour in winding of quills for the wool trade’. Signiﬁcantly, Anne Paul reported that she was Mary Briscoe’s ‘apprentice’, presumably in this wool-winding business, not her domestic servant. Obviously, these distinctions were due primarily to marital status. In general, Anne’s social visitors were ‘maintained by their husbands’, whereas her nurses and servants occupied these roles because they had to support themselves in the absence of a male income. Women of Anne’s social position in the town had time to pay visits to friends and neighbours, because they did not need to engage in business activities or paid work, particularly the drudgery of domestic service, or poorly paid piece work. Unlike the unmarried female servants, they were usually very stable geographically, and were often related (albeit distantly) to Anne, illustrating the kinship networks that bound together these elites. While all these women participated in the care of Anne, to some extent, those able to live without labour were members of a distinct social milieu with time to devote to genteel pursuits. We can gain a sense of some of these pursuits by looking at another probate case, concerning the estate of Peter Johnson, ‘gent.’, a Colchester clothier, who died in August 1680, and the subsequent behaviour of his daughter Deborah. These provide a cautionary tale of pride and extravagance that could have been written by Defoe. Peter Johnson had been one of the ‘principal tradesmen’ of the town. His inventory shows that he lived in considerable comfort.²²⁶ His hall contained six leather chairs, two pictures, a clock, a looking glass, and sixteen books, among other items. The ‘Parlour next the Street’ housed two tables, seven ‘backed chairs’, eight cushions, one ‘frame for a great book’, one looking glass, as well as hangings for the walls of the room. The house also contained two rooms with furnishings coordinated by colour, a ‘Green Chamber’ and a ‘Red Chamber’ - a feature noted in Chapter 3. These household goods were worth £95 4s. 6d., and the house contained thirteen rooms, with at least seven hearths, which put Johnson among the town’s elite.²²⁷ This prosperity was based on a considerable business turnover, because at his death Johnson had 176 cloths in stock, valued at £439 19s. He left a wife, and at least four children—Abraham, William, Anne, and Deborah. His funeral reﬂected the style in which he had lived, costing £15 ²²⁶ NA Prerogative Court of Canterbury PROB4/1822 Peter Johnson, Colchester, gent., 1 Aug. 1680. ²²⁷ Essex RO (Chelms.) Q/RTh 7 Essex Hearth Tax 1671. Johnson was assessed on 7 hearths in St Peter’s parish.

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11s. 3d. All this paled beside the estate of his brother Abraham, a London citizen and ﬁshmonger who had died in 1674, who was fully a representative of Earle’s metropolitan ‘middle class’.²²⁸ He left bequests totalling £1,453, including a farm north of the borough, and a silver cup bearing his coat of arms and valued at £20, which he asked his brother Peter to present to the corporation, as well as £10 to the poor of his native parish of Holy Trinity, Colchester. After Peter’s death the fortunes of the family declined. Abraham Johnson (Jr.) had been apprenticed to Jeremy Daniell, linen draper, in 1677, a privilege that had cost his father a premium of £60 or £70. Abraham had stayed with Daniell until shortly after his father’s death. Then one day his Master reproved him ‘for some ill course of life’, at which Abraham ‘tooke his hatt & went away & never returned more into his Masters service’.²²⁹ However, Abraham did not proﬁt from his rebellion because he died soon after, aged 20, in 1683 with debts of £93 6s. In the mean time, his brother William had also died. His sister Anne had married Henry Stilleman, a tradesman who styled himself ‘gent.’, and who had received a £400 portion with Anne at their marriage, and also £100 after Abraham’s death.²³⁰ Eventually, however, Anne seems to have died as well, leaving Deborah as sole heir. At this point, in 1683, all the deponents in the Exchequer case agreed that Deborah had begun to live ‘in a higher Degree then before’. John Raynham, who had been a fellow apprentice with Abraham Johnson at Jeremy Daniell’s house, estimated that, in the year between receiving her legacy and marrying, Deborah had spent about £350. Part of this expenditure resulted from her determination to pay Abraham’s debts and funeral expenses. However, Raynham remembered that Jeremy Daniell, acting as Peter Johnson’s executor, had paid Deborah £287 0s. 9d. as part of her legacy in July 1683, which she had spent on a range of luxuries. Raynham reported that ‘Deborah in her life time was very desirous to have her picture drawne’, at the cost of £20. She bought a mare to ride on, costing £7 5s., and spent £6 on a new side-saddle. In this period she lodged at Jeremy Daniell’s house, with her own maid, whose wages and their combined board had amounted to £20 for the year. Deborah also spent at least £70 in Daniell’s shop on linens and fabrics, presumably to be made into dresses and furnishings. These expenses continued until she had frittered away her considerable legacy, a fact that her mother admitted in court and which Deborah seems to have concealed from her prospective husband, William Jekyll, until after their marriage. Witnesses recalled that Deborah had pleaded with her husband, with tears in her eyes, to give Daniell a full discharge for her debts. He had refused, the case came to the Exchequer, and Deborah died aged 20 in May 1686. ²²⁸ Essex RO (Chelms.) D/DJ 20/5 Deeds of Braiswick Farm, including copy of will of Abraham Johnson, citizen and ﬁshmonger, London, 16 Dec. 1674. ²²⁹ NA E.134 3 and 4 James II Hil. 30, deposition of John Raynham, linendraper, aged 25 (Abraham Johnson’s fellow apprentice). ²³⁰ Essex RO (Col.) D/DC/5/9 will of Henry Stilleman, Colchester, gent, 22 Aug. 1706.

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This cautionary tale highlights several aspects about life among the ‘gentlementradesmen’ of Colchester. Deborah’s pattern of life was signiﬁcant. With no siblings for whom to provide, and a weak (or complicit) guardian, she had a personal and ﬁnancial freedom enjoyed by few other women in her position. Her spending suggests that she had clear social expectations, and a perception of herself as a gentlewoman. If she did not, it is difﬁcult to explain why she wanted her picture painted, or why she desired to ride side-saddle on her own horse. Indeed, one reading of her actions might be that she was spending with a view to attracting a husband of sufﬁcient standing to enhance and perpetuate these social ambitions—staking her inheritance on the chance of a larger return. Her extensive expenditure on cloth may also indicate that she was putting together a wedding ‘trousseau’ appropriate to her status, albeit unknown to her intended husband. With an income that deponents agreed amounted to £70–90 per annum, she could certainly afford to live in ‘high degree’. However, it seems that she, like Ambrose Barcroft (III), fell victim to the central paradox in the lives of these ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ that such a leisured life depended on earnings from a trade or profession. Nevertheless, if her expenditure would have shocked her father, her social aspirations may have met with his guarded approval. He had aspired to be a gentleman, and she was intent on living the life of a gentleman’s daughter. This case again reinforces the impression of a relatively close-knit social milieu among the borough’s ‘chief inhabitants’. Most of those who were called to give evidence came from the same group of ‘principal tradesmen and inhabitants’ as Peter and Deborah Johnson. Jeremy Daniel was a linen draper, a trade that could produce considerable wealth, as the inventory of Henry Potter showed in Chapter 3. John Raynham, Daniell’s apprentice, became Mayor of the town in 1705.²³¹ Other deponents included Peter Johnson, a linen draper aged 25, and a cousin of the Johnson family who became Mayor in 1714,²³² and the apothecary Henry Lamb, then aged 40, who had supplied medicine to Peter Johnson, Sr., and whose household goods were noted in the previous chapter. The Johnsons did business with, and lived among, people who represented the highest ranks of Colchester society and who were at or near the rank of alderman in the corporation. These people may have felt that Deborah Johnson’s extravagance was rather heedless (although no one seems to have stopped her), but they occupied the same social milieu as she did and shared many of her aspirations. Henry Lamb’s house was as much a statement of his tastes and aspirations to leisure and gentility as was Deborah Johnson’s expenditure. Lamb simply was able to balance these aspirations against his income better than Deborah had been in her short life. Colchester’s ‘polite society’, of female conversation around the tea table or male sociability around the billiards table, of liveried footmen and personal maids, of wigs and swords or expensive linen, resembles that depicted in Earle’s London ²³¹ Essex RO (Col.) D/B 5 Gb6 Colchester Assembly Minute Book 1693–1712. ²³² Ibid., Gb7 Colchester Assembly Minute Book 1712–41.

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‘middle class’. However, this stratum of provincial ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ also illustrates a point that is obscured in metropolitan society, that such activity took place within a social context of known individuals and personal connections, rather than being a simple reﬂection of impersonal, status distinctions. In Colchester, it is evident that Anne Pelham and her grandchildren, or Deborah Johnson and her friends, occupied a social segment that was narrow, but which contained numerous kin, business, and friendship connections as a result. As Shani D’Cruze has suggested, the social networks of Colchester’s ruling elite probably extended far beyond their peers, because they occupied positions of administrative, political, legal, and charitable authority that generated links to most social groups.²³³ However, regular social interaction, particularly within the home, may have been more discriminating because it was based on choice rather than necessity. Those who were able to live ‘Great, Rich and High’ in early eighteenth-century Colchester may have used this style of life to differentiate themselves from the less prosperous, ‘mechanick’ tradesmen and small producers, by creating social sites that were difﬁcult for others to enter. They may, in fact, emphasize the aspirational nature of urban gentility, but also the desire to preserve and police its lower social boundary. The obvious way to do this was by vetting the personal characteristics of individuals. This was not merely a matter of judging how they behaved, dressed, or spoke, but of locating them within a known, deﬁned circle of kin, friends, ‘credit-worthy’ businessmen, intellectual authorities, or political opinions, religious beliefs, or fashionable tastes. These judgements mingled the personal and impersonal, and the speciﬁc with the general. They bound individuals into a social subset, by creating afﬁnities of interest and values, and (in the process) erecting hurdles to newcomers. The same processes occurred among other social groupings, being most pronounced in the creation and maintenance of confessional identity.²³⁴ The ‘town gentry’ were undoubtedly a permeable grouping, in which participation centred on a shared domestic material culture that was easier to acquire than a landed estate. However, admittance to their ranks also required a degree of evaluation, assimilation, and approval, involving the giving and return of hospitality, or inclusion in wider social events. This had to be cultivated and could not be taken for granted. Alongside these two accounts, another Essex source helps to shed light upon the role of ‘gentility’ as a social ideal at the other end of the ‘middling’ spectrum. ²³³ S. D’Cruze, ‘Eighteenth-Century Colchester’, 191–6. ²³⁴ Berry, ‘Sense and Singularity’, 187–94; M. R. Watts, The Dissenters, i. From the Reformation to the French Revolution (London, 1978), 289–315, 346–71, 382–93; J. Spurr, ‘From Puritanism to Dissent, 1660–1700’, in C. Durston and J. Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), 234–65; Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 272–97, 344–50; J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community (London, 1975), 121–43; M. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), 70–97; M. Mullett, ‘From Sect to Denomination? Social Developments in Eighteenth-Century English Quakerism’, Journal of Religious History, 13 (1984), 168–91.

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This is Joseph Bufton’s series of almanacs, which he kept in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.²³⁵ Bufton was a wool comber in Coggeshall, and was born in 1651, the second son of John Bufton, a Coggeshall clothier. In 1671 his father paid tax on ﬁve hearths, where the parish median was two.²³⁶ This prosperity helped to place John among the ofﬁce-holding group in the parish and he served several times as an overseer in the period between 1659 and 1675, and his hearth tax assessment was the same as the median for all overseers in this period.²³⁷ His son Joseph was trained as a wool comber and from 1678 began to record various local and national events in a series of almanacs, embellishing his notes with his own brand of doggerel verse. His interests were omnivorous and obsessive. By 1716 he had accumulated 37 such almanacs and notebooks. These included: 5 ﬁll’d up with things taken out of other books; 2 old accounts for London 1 for Colchester; 1 ﬁll’d up chieﬂy with burials and marriag; 1 with the monthly account I kept; 1 ﬁll’d with notes of sermons; 1 has accounts of household stuff & c.; 1 I keep some accounts in; 1 I keep on my board and write in dayly.²³⁸

His two large lists of marriages and burials in the parish and elsewhere between 1678 and 1699 locate him at the heart of his community. In over half of the 212 marriages he recorded, Bufton was able to locate one of the partners as a member of a local family.²³⁹ Thus, when Moses Groom, a comber, married Anne Lark in April 1687, Bufton was able to note that Anne Lark was the sister of John Thurgood’s wife. Bufton’s records of burials were even more extensive, listing 720 between January 1678 and May 1696, of nonconformists as well as Anglicans, inhabitants of neighbouring parishes as well as Coggeshall residents, often linked by participation in the cloth trade. This interest extended from Elizabeth Bowyer (‘a lame girl about seventeen years old’) to Sir Mark Guyon, whose torchlight funeral procession Bufton noted in detail in 1691.²⁴⁰ He was usually able to include details of male occupations, or of familial afﬁliations and relationships, and could make further observations about almost a quarter of these individuals.²⁴¹ So, when ‘Old Carter’ of Great Tey died in October 1678, Bufton noted that he was ‘the father of Richard Carter the distracted fellow’.²⁴² Occasionally, Bufton was even able to record people’s nicknames, noting that Thomas Newton’s late wife ‘was commonly called Nibs Coney’, or that a woman ²³⁵ Essex RO (Chelms.), D/DBm Z 7–14, and [Microﬁlm] T.A.156 of other originals held in Brotherton Library, Univ. of Leeds. See also E. L. Cutts, ‘Curious Extracts from a MS Diary of the Time of James II and William and Mary’, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, 1 (1858), 117–27. ²³⁶ Essex RO (Chelms.), Q/RTh 1 Essex Hearth Tax, 1662. ²³⁷ Essex RO (Chelms.), D/P36/8/1 Coggeshall Vestry book 1609–98. ²³⁸ Essex RO (Chelms.), D/DBmZ 10. ²³⁹ He recorded personal information in at least 112 instances, or 53%. ²⁴⁰ Bufton Almanac, 26 Feb. 1679; 1 Nov. 1690. ²⁴¹ That is, in at least 159 instances, or 22%. ²⁴² Bufton Almanac (unfol.), 30 Oct. 1678.

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had been the wife of ‘Witch Webb’.²⁴³ Through these records we can gain a sense of how Bufton was familiar with, knowledgeable about, or interested in almost everyone in the town and its hinterland. This level of engagement in local life was very unusual, but not unique in the period. For example, Jacob Bee, a skinner and glover in late seventeenth-century Durham, maintained a similar record of vital events and a local chronicle.²⁴⁴ Bufton charted various events in parish life, such as the procession organized to mark the coronation of William and Mary in April 1690, or the protests in May 1693, when ‘the poor did rise because the Bakers would not bake’.²⁴⁵ His detailed and persistent interest in recording parish affairs was matched by a desire to observe national events, albeit at a distance. He supplemented his local chronicle of the Glorious Revolution with extracts from ‘the Booke called an Historicall Account of the Actions of the Prince of Orange, printed 1689’.²⁴⁶ Even so, his preoccupation was with local affairs, suggesting that this knowledge was the raw material from which Bufton fashioned his version of the community’s ‘collective memory’—his register of how people related to each other, and of some of the signiﬁcant things they had witnessed together. His notes also allowed him to orient himself to these changes by monitoring how he ﬁtted into these constantly shifting personal networks. In this respect, he appears to have identiﬁed himself much more strongly with, and within, the notional social entity of ‘the town’ than Benjamin Allen did, for example. There were other ways in which Bufton displayed his position at the centre of events in the parish. Although he was never recorded as a parish ofﬁcer, he has attracted notice from historians because of his record of the affairs of his trade, principally his notes of the ‘orders, ordinances and decrees’ of a guild encompassing the weavers, combers, and clothiers of the town.²⁴⁷ He also recorded the rules of the ‘Combers’ Purse’, an early friendly society set up by the Coggeshall wool combers. The former body was intended to exclude unqualiﬁed interlopers from the clothing trades, presumably to prevent the undercutting of wages by unskilled labour.²⁴⁸ The latter institution was an attempt to prevent ‘poor labouring men’ from falling ‘into decay through the many calamities, afﬂictions and troubles that do attend us’.²⁴⁹ Both bodies sought to ameliorate the equivocal economic position of the wool combers—who were skilled independent craftsmen, yet also dependent on piece rates that were vulnerable to labour competition. However, Bufton’s notes show that in dedicating his ²⁴³ Ibid. 16 Sept.1678; 5 July 1684. ²⁴⁴ ‘Diary of Jacob Bee of Durham’, Surtees Society, 118 (1910), 43–63; ‘Jacob Bee’s chronicle of Births, Marriages and Mortality’, Surtees Society, 124 (1914), 54–175. ²⁴⁵ Bufton Almanac, 11 Apr. 1690, 18 May 1693. ²⁴⁶ J.S., An Historical account of … William III … (London, 1689) [Wing/J32B]; Bufton, Almanac, 12 Dec. 1688, 14 Feb. 1689, 21 Feb. 1689, 11 Apr. 1689. ²⁴⁷ Kerridge, Textile Manufacturers, 206; see HMC, Var. Coll. 8, MSS. of S. Philip Unwin, 580–82. ²⁴⁸ HMC, Unwin, 582–4. ²⁴⁹ Ibid, 582.

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account of these meetings in 1686, he addressed the fullers and ‘all true hearted combers’ as ‘gentlemen’.²⁵⁰ This may simply have been a rhetorical ﬂourish, but the fact that he used this term to address trade groups (‘our trade’ in the case of the combers), is signiﬁcant. What could such an application mean in this social context? Bufton does not elaborate, but clearly he was addressing manual crafts, ones that lacked even the status ﬁg leaf of distance from direct involvement in manufacture or retail—unlike clothiers or merchant drapers. While many were independent craftsmen, working on their own account, all were bound into the web of credit and piecework spun by the ‘putting-out’ system. Although most owned their own equipment, they depended on clothiers for the supply of raw materials and the payment of piece rates. Bufton acknowledged this in his remarks to the combers. He commented, ‘Gentlemen, the success we have had … as to the preventing of intruders may give us some encouragement in the raising and maintaining a purse for the help of such of us as may by sickness, lameness or the want of work fall into decay’.²⁵¹ Evidently, then, these were ‘gentlemen’ who might fall into decay if they became unable to work. In this respect, such a group was incompatible with most contemporary understandings of gentility. These were not even ‘gentlementradesmen’, but rather ‘mechanick-gentlemen’. Bufton may also have been employing other aspects of the social ideal of gentility. First, in using this form of address to frame his record of these gatherings, he was indicating that the fullers and combers were worthy of social respect. In this sense, the use of the term conferred dignity on the proceedings and participants. Secondly, this usage suggests that Bufton wished to represent the participants as equals, coming together to decide the fate of their trade, and agreeing to exclude unqualiﬁed interlopers and to relieve their poorer ‘brethren’. Thirdly, and related to this, styling the participants as gentlemen was a means of presenting them as enfranchised political agents, capable of taking decisions rationally and governing themselves effectively. The record was designed to embody the decisions of a group of responsible and equal agents, ‘and if any man think that what we have declared or any part of it, be unreasonable or impertinent to the business in hand, we are ready to hear their [sic] reasons.’²⁵² As a consequence, we can begin to see why gentility seemed to be the most appropriate social concept to apply to these activists. It encapsulated the values of honour, disinterestedness, self-discipline, and altruism that the group realized would be required to fulﬁl their plan. Nevertheless, it is signiﬁcant that Bufton lapsed into the trope of gentility in order to express such ideals, rather than depicting them as the attributes inherent in other possible social entities, such as ‘honest workfolks’ or the ‘industrious sort of people’ in Coggeshall. Despite addressing the participants in this way, Bufton also acknowledged social superiors. In establishing the Comber’s Purse he wrote that they wished ²⁵⁰ HMC, Unwin, 580–1.

²⁵¹ Ibid. 581.

²⁵² Ibid.

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to denigrate neither the Poor Law, ‘nor do we slight the care and charity of our superiors’.²⁵³ Instead he hoped ‘our good masters and the rest of our townsmen will … encourage us as those worthy masters and others have done our fellow brethren the pursers in Colchester’.²⁵⁴ This may have been the ‘public transcript’ of deference displayed in the ofﬁcial ‘published’ agreement, as opposed to the gentlemanly equality of the internal concord between the fullers and combers. However, it also recognizes that these craftsmen, including Bufton, existed in partial economic dependence on their ‘masters’.²⁵⁵ The marginal nature of these household economies was also illustrated by rule 11 of the ‘Purse’ which sought to prevent any ‘afﬂicted’ man from selling or pawning ‘any of his goods or wearing clothes’ or running ‘himself into debt’.²⁵⁶ Clearly, Bufton recognized that the pressing social concern of these trades was to maintain household solvency and independence, rather than to aspire to status as a parochial ‘chief inhabitant’ or to claim recognition as gentlemen. This suggests that he did not use the term because he thought he or his cohorts were, or were likely to become, gentlemen, but because it had a ring to it—a ring that echoed the tones of respect accorded to those who could lay a stronger claim to this status. His own more personal poems and notes provide further insights into his social perspective, and his location within small-town society. For example, in copying some ‘Verses from Chelmsford for a Bellman which I wrote for Andrew Rust 1699’, he recorded the view that: Thrice Happy’s he who in a Middle State, Feels neither want nor study’s to be great, He eats and drinks & lives at home at ease Whilst warlike monarchs cross the raging seas.²⁵⁷

This recycled ballad verse is Bufton’s only comment about a ‘middling’ social identity. As a consequence, it is unclear whether or not his repetition of this conventional praise of the ‘golden mean’ between poverty and riches represents a deeper social identiﬁcation with the ‘middle sort’. Certainly, this excerpt has similarities with the opening passage of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, of 1719, in which Crusoe’s father tried to discourage his son’s wanderlust by informing him that the ‘Middle State’ was ‘the best state in the world, the most suited to Human Happiness, not exposed to the Miseries and Hardships, the Labour ²⁵³ Ibid. 582. ²⁵⁴ Ibid. 582–3. ²⁵⁵ Bufton recorded names of fellow workers employed by his ‘master’, the Colchester clothier William Hedgethorne. Ibid. 589–91. However, Bufton was described as a ‘clothier’ in a 1692 deed. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/P 36/25/32 Feoffment of Samuel Crane’s Charity, Coggeshall, 16 Jan. 1695. ²⁵⁶ Bufton’s Almanac, 584. ²⁵⁷ Verses by the bellman (the town crier) were common in broadsheet ballads in the seventeenth century. See e.g. W. Major, A Copy of Verses … in the Parish of St. Mary Newington-Buts, in Southwark (London, n.d.) [Wing (2nd edn.)/M306]; T. Ouldman, A copy of verses … in the town of Lambeth (London, 1689) [Wing (2nd ed.)/O590E].

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and Sufferings of the Mechanick part of Mankind, and not embarrass’d with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the Upper part of Mankind.’²⁵⁸ The difference between the two perspectives was that Defoe expressed identity clearly in terms of groups, whereas Bufton’s verse was slightly more ambiguous. The individual was in a ‘middle state’ between wealth and poverty, but was he also part of a group who could be characterized in this way? His voluminous notes are frustratingly silent on this point. Bufton, himself, seems to have occupied this ‘middle state’. Admittedly, he appears not to have indulged in the sort of display and luxury manifested by Deborah Johnson, or found in the house of Alderman Henry Lamb, from whom Bufton bought ‘physic’ in 1697.²⁵⁹ Yet he possessed sufﬁcient spare time throughout his life to develop his intellectual curiosity, and rehearse his minor literary ambitions, in the pages of his notebooks. These interests came to rival those of the Barcroft family in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For example, between 1680 and 1716, Bufton encountered at least 161 books, compared to the 112 owned by the Barcrofts. The difference was that while the Barcrofts could afford to furnish a small library on shelves in the parlour, Bufton’s study was always temporary and portable—he mentions owning only thirteen volumes himself.²⁶⁰ Instead, he borrowed most of these texts, cramming extracts onto the spare pages of his surviving almanacs in order to carry them round in his pockets.²⁶¹ Like many of his contemporaries, he favoured works of practical divinity, including those by seventeenth-century luminaries such as Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, John Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet, and White Kennet,²⁶² ²⁵⁸ D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford, 1990), 4–5. ²⁵⁹ Bufton, Almanac, 13 Apr. 1697 ‘bought at Mr. Lamb’s at Colchester’ and 8 June 1697. ²⁶⁰ R. Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man … (London, 1658) [Wing/A1158]—var. 17thcentury eds.; N.H., The Compleat Tradesman … (London, 1684) [Wing/H96A]; G.L., The Pious Soul’s Daily Exercise (London, 1700) [Wing (2nd edn.)/P2282D]; R.B., The English Empire in America (London, 1685) [Wing/C7319]; R.B., Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men … (London, 1683) [Wing/C7323]; E. Calamy, The Saints’ Rest … (London, 1651) [Wing (2nd edn.)/C264]; E. Pearse, The Great Concern … (London, 1674) [Wing/P983A]; R. Dugdale, A Narrative of Unheard of Popish Cruelties towards Protestants … (London, 1680) [Wing/D2473]; R. Gouge, The Faith of the Dying Jacob … (London, 1688) [Wing/G1358]; B. Calamy, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions … (London, 1700) [Wing/C223]; C. Ellis, Christianity in Short … (London, 1682) [Wing, 1996/E552aA]; M. Henry, Self-Consideration Necessary for Self-Preservation … (London, 1712) [STC T088685]; R. Parr, The life of … James Usher … (London, 1686) [Wing/P548]. ²⁶¹ Of the 161 works cited by Bufton 127 were on religious themes. Essex RO (Chelms.) D/DBm Z9 Bufton Almanac. ²⁶² R. Baxter, The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience … (London, 1653) [Wing/B1373A]; Ibid. True Christianity, or Christs Absolute Dominion … in two Assize Sermons Preached at Worcester (London, 1654) [Wing (2nd edn.)/B1436]; Ibid. Compassionate Counsel to All Young Men (London, 1681) [Wing/B1229]; Ibid. Richard Baxter’s Dying Thoughts upon Phil. 1.23 (London, 1683) [Wing/B1373A]; Ibid. A Paraphrase of the New Testament (London, 1685) [Wing/B1338]; Sylvester, Reliquiae Baxterianae; J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners … (London, 1666) [Wing/B5523]; Ibid. Solomon’s Temple Spiritualised … (London, 1688) [Wing/B5595]; J. Tillotson, Sermons Preach’d upon Several Occasions (London, 1671) [Wing/T1256] var. 17th-century

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and combined them with his extensive sermon notes.²⁶³ In this respect, he exempliﬁes Baxter’s ‘sober sort of men of the middle rank’, free from the hardships experienced by those, ‘necessitated … by tiresome excess of labour … to live in ignorance for want of good books or of time to read them, and think of what they hear at church’.²⁶⁴ Yet, without better evidence, we cannot determine whether his views embody an inchoate ‘middling’ identity based on thrift, godliness, and industry, or if they simply reﬂect values espoused more widely in this historic centre of ‘puritanism’. Even so, Bufton appears to be marked off materially and perhaps socially from the ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ or the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’. Signiﬁcantly, he did not transcribe any of the conduct literature on gentility, concentrating instead on moral as opposed to social self-improvement. While this omission may simply have reﬂected his ﬁnancial inability to join this group or its temptations, he exhibited no signs of aspiring to such a style of life. No inventory of his goods survives, but in May 1695 he listed the items given to his sister Rebecca in their father’s will. These included a wainscot chest, two red upholstered chairs, two ‘wrought’ stools, and a ‘high bedstead’ with a ﬂock bed, pillows, curtains, and other items. As Chapter 3 showed, these items could have been found in any, or all, of the broad centre section of this middle group. They are consistent with a household of comfort and utility rather than the elaborate display found in the higher sections of the group. Elsewhere, Bufton noted carefully the injunction contained in ‘a Book called The Young Mans Guide Written by T.G. [Thomas Gouge]’.²⁶⁵ This advised the young man to: Be moderate in the pursuit of worldly things in seeking after riches … Happly you may wear better clothes, fare more deliciously, provide portions for your children & at last go to hell with more credit than the poorer sort. And is this a privelege to be so much desir’d & laboured after to descend with pomp into the pit.²⁶⁶

Bufton was a committed believer in the mould of the pre-war mainstream of Essex ‘puritanism’, and able to remain within the Church of England. Yet he recognized the ambiguous value of worldly success and gain, particularly the dangers of moral laxity or self-indulgence that it appeared to invite. In these respects, there seems to be a strand of social caution running through Bufton’s memoranda. As with Mascuch’s seventeenth-century autobiographers, there is an eds.; G. Burnet, A Sermon Preached before the House of Peers … on the 5th November 1689 (London, 1689) [Wing/B5889]; W. Kennett, The Works of Charity. In a Spittal Sermon … 1710 (London, 1710) [STC T142380]. ²⁶³ Bufton noted 107 funeral sermons preached between January 1663 and December 1697. ²⁶⁴ R. Baxter, ‘The Husbandman’s and the Nation’s Advocate and Petition to Racking Landlords’ in J. Thirsk and J. Cooper (eds.), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), 185. ²⁶⁵ T. Gouge, The Young Man’s Guide … (London, 1696) [Wing (2nd edn./G1388A]. The ﬁrst edition of this work was published in 1670, but the 1696 edition contains the passage quoted. ²⁶⁶ Ibid. 149–50.

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implicit fear both of ﬁnancial failure, and also of the potential moral corruption that could accompany the pursuit of ‘worldly things’.²⁶⁷ Of course, this was partly a matter of perspective. The ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’ of Colchester may not have felt that they were feeding their own pride and desires for social ‘credit’, or risking moral pollution. Instead they may simply have endeavoured to maintain a comfortable existence and modest prosperity, differing only from those around them in the scale of their success. Yet, despite this shared pursuit of occupations or trades, we can identify aspirations in them towards gentility and the accoutrements of the leisured lifestyle that we cannot distinguish in Bufton. His thirst for knowledge about his neighbours and his neighbourhood suggests that he was located among that part of ‘the town’ from which Benjamin Allen was so concerned to distance himself. Despite this, however, when he sought a form of address that combined social dignity with independence and autonomy, Bufton opted for the idiom of gentility. While he may have been ﬁrmly outside the ranks of the ‘gentlemen-tradesmen’, or the ‘chief inhabitants’ of his parish, gentility still had meaning for him as an ideal of social authority and enfranchisement. Why, though, was he unable to apply a different, more overtly ‘middling’ social vocabulary? Why was this vocabulary so absent among the ranks of the parish rulers more generally, to the extent that they preferred to clothe themselves in the often ill-ﬁtting garb of gentility? This is more puzzling when we realize that values did exist that were undoubtedly voiced by, if not perhaps entirely speciﬁc to, the ‘middling’. Joan Kent pointed to the shared experience of local authority and administration ‘through which were channelled particular social and moral values which helped to shape middling identity’.²⁶⁸ These ‘touted such virtues as diligence, hard work, discipline and economic independence’.²⁶⁹ She argued that parish rulers enacted such principles through their control of the poor law rewarding industry, punishing idleness, inculcating self-sufﬁciency and deference in the young through education and apprenticeships, and enforcing them on others through the foundation of parish workhouses. In these actions, Kent detected the presence of ‘values sometimes associated with the Victorian middle class’, including ‘moderation, discipline, regularity, hard work, cleanliness and moral conduct’.²⁷⁰ She concluded that ‘the middle ranks in the countryside did possess certain characteristics, attitudes and values which helped to deﬁne them and to set them apart from those below, and sometimes above, them’.²⁷¹ Bufton seems to embody some of these, but can distinct, deﬁning ‘middling values’ be identiﬁed in the records of the poor law? Steve Hindle’s recent, exhaustive survey of ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial systems of poor relief casts doubt on this endeavour. First, Hindle’s research illustrates considerable differences ²⁶⁷ Mascuch, ‘Middling Social Identity’, 61. ²⁶⁸ Kent, ‘Rural ‘‘Middling Sort’’ ’, 20–1, 42. ²⁶⁹ Ibid, 31. ²⁷⁰ Ibid., 34. ²⁷¹ Ibid. 42.

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in the balance of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ provision between parishes, agrarian and economic regimes, and over time. An ‘open’ vestry could allow ‘the lesser ratepayers, who might not hold parish ofﬁce’ a ‘collective voice’ over ‘issues of eligibility and entitlement’. Their economic marginality gave them a vested interest in ensuring that ‘parish policies to the poor were equitable’,²⁷² and criteria for judging deserving behaviour that might differ from those of the parish elite. Secondly, it is sometimes difﬁcult to trace the common thread of values that links together parish authorities’ diverse responses. For example, the overseers’ tolerance to migrants could depend on the prevailing labour requirements of the area.²⁷³ Labour-hungry cloth-producing regions might favour in-migration, while agrarian parishes with stagnant labour demand and few spare resources might deter newcomers. These differences could be compounded by the economic cycle, particularly in cloth-producing parishes, as Defoe recognized. Landlords themselves might break ranks, admitting the poor as tenants and using relief payments to subsidize their rents, thereby sending the poor mixed messages.²⁷⁴ Thirdly, other considerations could sway the overseers’ decisions about eligibility, notably localism. ‘ ‘‘Neare dwellers’’ who came in search of alms, work, or shelter might be tolerated, when those from further aﬁeld were whipped home without hesitation’.²⁷⁵ Skill shortages could also inﬂuence the treatment of different occupations. Rural craftsmen such as blacksmiths or wheelwrights were often encouraged to settle, and indulged if they needed temporary relief.²⁷⁶ Geographic location also affected decision-making, with thoroughfare towns sometimes being more concerned than their more remote counterparts to move on vagrants rather than to punish them.²⁷⁷ As enclosure continued, open-ﬁeld parishes might attract incomers from neighbouring settlements, in which domestic economies had been subverted by the loss of commons.²⁷⁸ These conditions determined the problems faced by parish authorities, and inﬂuenced both the welfare choices available to them and the norms they wished to perpetuate. Particular individuals, notably the parish minister, could also affect the values expressed by the vestry.²⁷⁹ Fourthly, the accounts and decisions recorded in parish records do not simply represent the unmediated values of the ‘middle sort of people’. Hindle has stressed the negotiations that took place around the ‘discourses and practices of parish ²⁷² Hindle, On the Parish?, 448. ²⁷³ Ibid., 356. ²⁷⁴ Ibid. 329–31, 357. ²⁷⁵ Ibid. 358. ²⁷⁶ Ibid. 356. ²⁷⁷ Ibid. 331. ²⁷⁸ J. Goodacre, The Transformation of a Peasant Economy: Townspeople and Villagers in the Lutterworth Area, 1500–1700 (Aldershot, 1994), 120–47, J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), 206, 219–20; but see also L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘Parliamentary Enclosure and the Emergence of an English Agrarian Proletariat’, Journal of Economic History, 61/3 (2001), 640–62. ²⁷⁹ Hindle, On the Parish?, 359, 326–36; the classic illustration of this process is, of course, K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (2nd edn., Oxford, 1995), 153–66.

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ofﬁcers and magistrates’.²⁸⁰ These centred on ﬁve behavioural norms—‘feare of God’, industry and thrift, sobriety, deference, and ‘painfulness and carefulness’.²⁸¹ In practice, these translated into contests between givers and recipients, over regular church attendance, willingness to work, avoidance of behaviour deemed ‘drunken’, ‘disorderly’, or wilfully idle, and respectful gratitude to providers of charity. Undoubtedly, these standards were applied widely and to real effect. Parish records depict the ‘chief inhabitants’ applying these sanctions, strengthening the impression that they originated with and embodied the values of this social group. However, apart from the obligations to industry and ‘painfulness’, these were Christian injunctions that moralists, clergy, and lawmakers wished to apply to all sections of society. In dealing with the poor, though, the parish relief system provided those authorities with a ﬁnancial lever by which to secure compliance. It was much more difﬁcult to ﬁnd the appropriate sanctions necessary to reform other social groups, as the church courts and the Societies for the Reformation of Manners discovered.²⁸² There was little doubt (among moralists at least) of the need to do so, however. There can be little doubt either that parish ofﬁce was the administrative experience par excellence of the ‘middling’, or that it reinforced certain values. Perhaps the one that was shared most widely was the creation of a ‘ratepayer mentality’, where the collective liability of all contributors to the compulsory parish rates produced an overt concern to minimize claims, expenses, and provision wherever possible. This had two signiﬁcant social consequences. The ﬁrst was the intrusive moral scrutiny of the poor by parish ofﬁcers, even in parishes not under the inﬂuence of the ‘hotter sort’ or Protestantism.²⁸³ This may reﬂect the intensiﬁcation of social prejudices about the poor, and the expansion of social distances in village life. Whether or not this was new in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century has itself been the subject of serious historical debate.²⁸⁴ Equally, it is difﬁcult to determine how far the values expressed in the name of the ‘chief inhabitants’ were theirs alone, whether the bulk of the ‘ratepayers’ supported or rejected them, or whether these were aspirations that many of the poor shared, but were simply unable to fulﬁl. Secondly, this mentality may have fostered social values that were intrinsically territorial. Keith Snell has emphasized the strength and persistence of this ‘culture of local xenophobia’, institutionalized ²⁸⁰ Hindle, On the Parish?, 360. ²⁸¹ Ibid, 381–98. ²⁸² See e.g. Ingram, Church Courts; J. Hurl-Eamon, ‘Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies’ Campaign against the Brothels of Westminster, 1690–1720’, Journal of Social History, 37/4 (2004), 1017–35. ²⁸³ Ingram, Church Courts, 323–64; id. ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in P. Grifﬁths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), 47–88. ²⁸⁴ M. Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’ in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 41–57; Wrightson and Levine, Terling, 198–220.

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through the parish-centred liabilities established by the Elizabethan poor laws.²⁸⁵ However, he argues that even among the poor themselves these laws fostered a ‘parish-centred view of rural society’ of ‘rivalry with and distrust of other parishes and their inhabitants’, because they had a ‘stake as recipients of parish money, or as residents in parish housing’.²⁸⁶ Snell notes that this parochialism retarded the development of ‘broader working-class consciousness’ and movements well into the nineteenth century.²⁸⁷ As was shown above in Chapter 2, it also cemented the powerful localism inherent in Richard Gough’s identity as a ‘chief inhabitant’, and motivated his record of the various victories and defeats inﬂicted on, or by, neighbouring communities in the perennial disputes over settlement. Ultimately, though, if these norms amounted to a distinct ‘middling’ valuesystem, they did so implicitly —in the same way that the disjointed, discrete groups of parochial ‘chief inhabitants’ amounted, in sum, to a ‘middle sort of people’. Equally unsatisfactorily, there appears to have been little to link these implicit ‘middling’ social values to the explicit language of authority in which this social segment chose to present itself. It seems that there was no universal contemporary term for ‘middling’ social authority or forms of power, other than the localized, inward-looking dichotomy between ‘chief ’ and other ‘inhabitants’. This ﬁtted well with the parochial scale against which the value judgements governing belonging, eligibility, and entitlement were measured, but did not lend itself to wider generalization. The role of ‘chief inhabitant’ or parish governor could not provide an ideal of social authority to match the pervasive political, cultural, and intellectual dominance of the concept of gentility. As Jonathan Barry and Phil Withington have pointed out, the citizen, freeman or burgess of the corporate town offered the most obvious model of intermediate social authority among the ‘middling’.²⁸⁸ Barry has observed that if codes of urban governance imply a citizenry free to act as independent political, agents, then ‘the gentry were not the only class in early modern England’ to attain full social enfranchisement.²⁸⁹ Recent research has emphasized the political agency of such individuals within the civic ‘res-public’, made visible through the customs of the corporate borough.²⁹⁰ Therefore, citizens and burgesses provided a template for legal, political, and constitutional liberties, even if the exact nature of these was contested,²⁹¹ and the practical legal and economic signiﬁcance of these rights was in slow decline before the eighteenth century.²⁹² As such, it is possible to agree with Barry’s assertion that ‘in the broadest sense, urban freemen were the citizens, the bourgeois, of English towns’, and ‘the ideal types of the urban ²⁸⁵ K. D. M. Snell, ‘The Culture of Local Xenophobia’, Social History, 28/1 (2003), 1–30. ²⁸⁶ Ibid., 30, 24. ²⁸⁷ Ibid., 30. ²⁸⁸ Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, 181–96; P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), 51–84. ²⁸⁹ Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, 182. ²⁹⁰ Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 56. ²⁹¹ Ibid. 51–66. ²⁹² Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, 187–96.

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middling sort’.²⁹³ The question is, whether these ‘bourgeois’ rights created a ‘bourgeois’ identity? A comprehensive answer to such a question far exceeds the bounds of this study, and the types of settlements examined here. However, the available evidence suggests that corporate towns did not necessarily supply the missing collective social terminology for the ‘middle sort’, despite providing fertile ground for the growth of ‘middling’ fortunes. Withington’s account of the disagreements about burgesses’ rights in late Elizabethan Ludlow reveals a familiar social and political dichotomy, in which ‘Twelve and Twenty Five of the ablest, wisest and worthiest of the burgesses’ sought to represent the wider burgess community, a ploy dismissed by their opponents as a design to exclude the ‘residue of burgesses’, and treat them like disenfranchised ‘plebs’.²⁹⁴ This last phrase adds a classical dimension to the rhetoric, but in other respects ‘burgess’ has simply replaced ‘inhabitant’ as a synonym for the lowest rank of qualiﬁed householder. It provides an accurate description of their legal privileges, but does not appear to offer a vision of a distinct urban ‘bourgeois’ status. Elsewhere, the role of burgess supplied an identity that was enmeshed in more conventional estimations of status. In 1679, when the borough of Preston drew up new rules for its workhouse, notions of freedom intersected with other status descriptions.²⁹⁵ The workhouse was to have a governor and deputy, a treasurer, a clerk, a master workman, and a ‘foreman or second workman’, chosen by the mayor and common council, but from a variety of different social levels. As beﬁtted their status, the governor and his deputy were to be selected from among the freemen—the (large) body of formally enfranchised inhabitants and property holders in the borough. However, freedom itself was insufﬁcient, because they were to be ‘of the best rank and quality’ within the free burgesses. A subtle distinction was drawn between the governor and deputy, and the treasurer or ‘storehouse keeper’. The latter had to be a resident free burgess, ‘solvent and responsible in estate’, but not necessarily someone of the best rank. Unlike his superiors, he was also allowed a ‘stipend’. The implication was that the governor and deputy-governor were ﬁt to wield executive authority objectively because they were of the best rank, and did not need to be paid. Presumably, the treasurer had to be a free burgess, because he had a direct ﬁnancial responsibility to the borough, but there was no such stipulation for the remaining ofﬁcers. Rather, their appointment depended on their skill, rather than their freedom. The clerk was to write ‘a good hand’ and ‘keep accounts’. The master workman was to be ‘skilful and well-knowing’ in the production of ‘worsted or woollen yarn’, which was to be the principal product of the workhouse, while the foreman was merely to assist in this process. All three were to be paid wages, at the discretion of the council. ²⁹³ Barry, 186, 192. ²⁹⁴ Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 69–71. ²⁹⁵ Lancs. RO CNP 3/1/1 Preston Council Order Book, 1608–1781, 4 Aug. 1679.

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In terms of status, therefore, enfranchisement in Preston was the basic qualiﬁcation for civic responsibility and accountability. Yet it was not the only social threshold. ‘Rank and quality’ also intruded as indicators of the ﬁnancial independence, responsibility, and credibility necessary for higher ofﬁce. Indeed, given the borough’s famously open franchise, it would have been dangerous to assume that all freemen were clear exemplars of the solvent house holding ‘middle sort of people’.²⁹⁶ Thus, when the civic elite came to decide who could be trusted with executive power, ‘rank and degree’ may have weighed more heavily with them than freedom alone, because it was a better guide to social identiﬁcation—that is, to the selection of people like them. Freedom may also have contained greater meaning in Preston because it retained (and retains) a ‘Guild Merchant’, whose regulatory powers were limited, but whose social function was considerable during celebrations held every twenty years. Elsewhere, guild regulation and rights of borough freedom remained tangible inﬂuences on civic identity, although they may have gone into sharp decline after about 1730.²⁹⁷ Most of the other towns in this study lacked either borough franchises or developed guild structures. Indeed, those located in the Essex–Suffolk clothing region had developed partly because of their weak guild regulation. This ensured that the language of freedom intruded rarely into discussions about civic rights or social descriptions. Even where borough rights were important, their social signiﬁcance is less clear-cut. The borough of Colchester provides two contrasting examples. The prolonged trade depression between 1707 and 1715 bankrupted many of the clothiers who controlled the trade (and the borough), and caused severe hardship for thousands of weavers. It sparked years of labour unrest, culminating in a major riot in March 1715. It also intensiﬁed the already endemic partisan friction in the borough. This was pursued by a variety of means, including an obscure legal manoeuvre to challenge the authority of the borough in the contentious summer of 1713, when one John Till sought to indict a free burgess before the county Quarter Sessions in Chelmsford, rather than the borough’s own sessions.²⁹⁸ Till was condemned by the grand jury as ‘an insolent, turbulent fellow’, and the language of civic freedom was invoked, to preserve ‘our Antient Priviledges’, and demand the disenfranchisement of ‘such free burgesses as have abetted him therin’. So there was a lively debate about civic freedom and rights. Yet this terminology is conspicuously absent from the descriptions of the tumultuous weavers’ strike two years later. Then the clothiers petitioned the Privy Council collectively not as free burgesses invoking their privileges or customs, but as an economic interest group, representing the ‘Many Inhabitants of the Borough of Colchester … Trading in ²⁹⁶ See above, Ch. 3 n. 60. ²⁹⁷ See M. J. Walker, ‘The Extent of Guild Control in England, c.1660–1820’ (University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 337. ²⁹⁸ Essex RO (Col.) Colchester Quarter Sessions Roll D/B 5 Sr 104, Mich. 1713.

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Woollen Manufactures’.²⁹⁹ Without guilds, there was little to be gained legally or rhetorically from invoking rights of freedom. Responding to a message from the Privy Council, the mayor, George Clarke, wrote that he had gathered together ‘as many of the Gentlemen concerned, as I could Assemble in so short a time’, before moving on to ‘the ﬁeld (whither the Rioters were Retired)’.³⁰⁰ Elsewhere, Clarke described his fear that the longer this ‘unhappy Tumult among the poor people’ persisted, the greater the danger that ‘the consequence will be fatal to the persons & Estates of several substantial Tradesmen amongst us’.³⁰¹ He wrote in the guise of a concerned but detached magistrate, and employed dispassionate (if not wholly neutral) social terminology of ‘tradesmen’ and ‘poor people’, when in fact he was a ‘baymaker’ himself—one of those ‘tradesmen’ concerned directly with the dispute.³⁰² This was not, as in Ludlow, a dispute speciﬁcally between sections of the corporation about civic rights, which explains why neither side employed the language of the civic order or debated competing conceptions of their ideal constitution. Yet it was, effectively, a dispute between the higher echelons of the corporation (dominated by ‘tradesmen’), and the ranks of the burgesses (populated by ‘workmen’), about the borough’s right to conﬁne the cloth trade to freemen, trading via the monopolistic Dutch Bay Hall.³⁰³ In this instance, it was the weavers who were insisting on ‘(what they call) a Free Trade’, without restriction from the Bay Hall, a change the ‘tradesmen’ depicted as ‘perfectly destructive to the Manufacture of this Towne’³⁰⁴ and a rather laissez faire version of the plebeian ‘moral economy’.³⁰⁵ Episodes such as this suggest that by the seventeenth century the language of civic freedom was more important in supplying descriptions of legal and political rights, than it was in providing organizing principles for social identity. This usage also implies that divisions of interest and authority engendered by employment and power relationships could undercut the notion of common rights in the borough ‘respublica’. Of course, all such usages were rhetorical and episodic, and it is difﬁcult to assess the relative weight of feeling behind the use of each of these tropes. What inspired greater loyalty, or exerted greater long-term inﬂuence over identity formation, the defence of the borough’s civic freedoms against the depredations of renegade burgesses, or the rights of the weavers against their ‘masters’? In fact, the story of urban society and labour relations in the eighteenth century emphasizes the increasingly difﬁcult struggle by town dwellers to hold together both these forms of identity, in the face of ²⁹⁹ NA PC 1/14/101 Petition dated 29 Mar. 1715. ³⁰⁰ Ibid, Letter from George Clarke, mayor of Colchester, to Lord Townshend, 19 Mar. 1715. ³⁰¹ Ibid, 23 Mar. 1715. ³⁰² Essex RO (Col.) D/B5 Cb2/33 Colchester Thursday Court Book, 1701–9, apprenticeship indenture enrolled 1 June 1702. ³⁰³ Goose and Cooper, Tudor and Stuart Colchester, 81–2; Morant, Essex, i. 78–9. ³⁰⁴ NA PC 1/14/101, 19 Mar. 1715. ³⁰⁵ Cf. Randall, ‘Industrial Moral Economy’, 29–51.

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growing contradictions between them.³⁰⁶ The (admittedly patchy) evidence from Preston and Colchester suggests that through the seventeenth century ﬁtness to wield higher authority in the borough became connected rhetorically to norms of authority embodied by the image of the ﬁnancially autonomous ‘gentleman-tradesman’, rather than being encapsulated within that of the enfranchised ‘burgess’. In boroughs with open franchises, it was no doubt the case that most ‘middling’ people were burgesses, and that most of the burgesses who held ofﬁce were ‘middling’. However, being a burgess may not alone have supplied a template for social authority among this segment, except through its power in boroughs where guilds or the educative rituals of civic freedom remained strong.³⁰⁷ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries urban ‘civility’ and citizenship may have offered an additional means of conceiving of this status, alongside other concepts of social estimation such as ‘rank’, ‘credit’, ‘repute’, ‘quality’, ‘inhabitancy’, ‘politeness’, and gentility, rather than the main foundation of a speciﬁcally ‘bourgeois’ identity. Ultimately, the problem encountered in this chapter, and in the two that preceded it, is not that it is impossible to identify likely sources and forms of ‘middling’ identity, but rather that it is relatively easy to distinguish a plethora of alternatives. How should we distinguish between them, and how can we place them in order of importance? The idea of ‘inhabitancy’ was the concept that was used most widely by the middling to denote their social position. As was demonstrated in Chapter 2, it embodied notions of material substance, economic independence, personal autonomy, trustworthiness, and ﬁscal responsibility. However, it was also shown that the term was connected intimately to values of geographical stability and personal or familial roots within the locality. Ironically, therefore, this ubiquitous ‘middling’ identity tended to atomize rather than unite the group who used it because it tied them to particular hierarchies in speciﬁc locations. In a sense, while it does seem to have amounted to a proximate form of social ideology for those of greater or lesser property in the parish, it is very difﬁcult to demonstrate that it functioned to draw together its adherents. Perhaps the records of the poor law or the vestry have misled us into giving too much importance to parish boundaries, but it is very difﬁcult to ﬁnd examples of ‘middling’ individuals who expressed a wider social perspective. We are left with a social group that was visible across the country, and which exhibits some consistency in membership, activity, responsibilities, and attitudes, but which appears to have deﬁned its position in local rather than national terms. Equally, in this study at least, it has not proved possible to identify a conception or stereotype of social authority that was speciﬁc to this group. ³⁰⁶ See J. Rule, ‘Employment and Authority: Masters and Men in Eighteenth-Century Manufacturing’, in Grifﬁths et al., Experience of Authority, 286–317. ³⁰⁷ Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, 191–5.

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Again, we may come closest to this concept in the implied meanings within ‘inhabitancy’. To be described as an ‘inhabitant’ within the parish was often to have been deemed ﬁnancially ‘sufﬁcient’, with the ability to pay rates—that is, to be considered capable by the parish authorities of forming and maintaining an ‘independent’ household. Independence was a fundamental marker of social autonomy, denoting freedom from want, and from the shaming, constraining ‘dependency’ of charity or relief. Financial independence was also seen to imply independence of judgement, and the capacity for self-government. These elements were often regarded as fundamental components of adult masculinity and personal freedom. While it is clear that many of the poor shared this desire to attain and protect these attributes, their possession seems to have been essential for entry to characteristically ‘middling’ activities, such as parochial ofﬁce holding. Similarly, many of these parish rulers’ proposed projects for ‘setting the poor on work’ seem to have been motivated by the desire to propel or coerce the dependent into independence. As was suggested above, however, we are again at the mercy of parish records when we try to weave this concern into an all-encompassing set of ‘middling’ values. We cannot be sure that initiatives were taken with this intention, nor can we be certain that the poor themselves lacked this aspiration, even though they did not possess the means to realize it. Independence, then, was a norm that was necessary to the existence of a wider ‘middling’ identity, but not a sufﬁcient proof of its existence. This brings us back to the concept of gentility. The purpose of this chapter has not been to argue that gentility provided a unifying identity for the ‘middling’, because they all exhibited a desire to be gentlemen or gentlewomen. Rather, it has been to explain why the higher echelons of the group had to appropriate and modify this value-system in order to realize their ambitions for social autonomy and personal authority, rather than achieving these by adapting elements from closer to home. In essence the appropriation of gentility by the ‘middling’ demonstrates what lies beneath the oft-repeated historical truism that this was a ‘hierarchical’ society. This does not mean that early modern society was one that was either instinctively deferential, or without ‘class-like’ entities or interests. Instead, this chapter has demonstrated that the values espoused by the governing elite supplied the language in which authority was versed for other social groups. It was not that one had to be a gentleman before one could exercise authority or attain social dignity, but rather that such authority and dignity was bound up inextricably with notions of gentility. In this sense, the norms underlying gentility also symbolized social authority more generally. Gentility embodied social enfranchisement in ways that were more powerful than the other alternatives available to the ‘chief inhabitants’ of provincial England. As a result, we could argue that until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries the middling were, to some degree, enmeshed in the normative hegemony of the elite, even if they had long since carved out a practical separation of powers from this group. If this argument is accepted, it becomes easier to explain why

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recognition as a gentlemanly physician was so important to Benjamin Allen, why the Barcrofts almost buried Ambrose (III) under the weight of their social expectations, or why Deborah Johnson spent so much money. This chapter has also been at pains to emphasize that the appropriation of the idiom of gentility was not simply a matter of direct emulation. Instead, individuals used elements that ﬁtted their circumstances, and assumed this status to different degrees, in a variety of contexts. Status mobility within a lifetime was more difﬁcult than that between generations, because with the former it was impossible for the person concerned to start from scratch. For John Morley or Ambrose Barcroft (II) personal history always constrained their capacity for social reinvention, because it determined their point of departure and restricted the paths they chose to pursue. For John Morley, Jr., or Ambrose Barcroft (III), the task was easier because their education and upbringing allowed them to approach gentility from within, rather than without. At all levels within the ranks of the ‘genteel’, though, norms of gentility were adapted to personal circumstances. Foxhunting landowners fashioned their interpretation of the status around very different criteria to those employed by urban socialites.³⁰⁸ ‘Gentlementradesmen’ accentuated the material signiﬁers of leisure and sociability, because these formed their cultural bridge with urban professionals and landed rural visitors, and obscured the potential incompatibility created by the source of their wealth. Although aspiring ‘chief inhabitants’ insisted on their gentlemanly dignity in their dealings within the parish, they could be more circumspect in presenting themselves to the magistracy, for example. Such manoeuvres were not simple social hypocrisy, but rather part of the usual process of successful selfpresentation in a complex society, of tailoring the message to the preconceptions of the audience. However, John Morley’s uncomfortable ﬁrst encounter with Sir Josiah Child demonstrates that the unwary could soon ﬁnd themselves socially out of their depth, deprived of reference points to guide them or the refuge of common ground. To a degree, therefore, although these examples lend some support to Klein’s view that gentility was a cultural resource to be employed according to context, they also illustrate that this context was never neutral or entirely without risk. The values of gentility pointed to, and were supported by, certain expectations about social and ﬁnancial ‘credit’, authority, education, connections, interests, attainments, and attitudes. While these never cohered into a single agreed set of values, the assumption was always that gentility was based on an abstract, universally applicable set of norms, rather than the speciﬁc and relative status distinctions between ‘chief’ and ordinary ‘inhabitants’. This meant that those who claimed to be gentlefolk generally had to subject themselves to a wider constituency and range of judgements than those who preferred safety (and back-biting) within the conﬁnes of the parish. The only way of mitigating the extent of this scrutiny was to be careful about the context in which one advanced ³⁰⁸ Berry, ‘Sense and Singularity’, 184–5.

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such claims. This explains the notable sensitivity to social setting and audience exhibited by individuals such as John Morley. Such evidence suggests we should reinstate the social dimension alongside the cultural aspect of gentility. Only a portion of the ‘chief inhabitants’ could get away with claiming to be gentlefolk, because these claims rested not just on their conﬁdence in their understanding of this cultural form, but also on their capacity to afford its components, gain access to arenas in which it could be displayed, and exert inﬂuence over how it was presented and received. Certainly, it is true that Joseph Bufton reached unthinkingly for the concept when he wanted to address his brethren as equal, yet autonomous, social agents. Yet there is no evidence that Bufton made any other claim to this status, or showed the kind of aspirations manifested by those from whom he derived employment. Social position alone did not determine whether or not an individual would use this cultural form, but it exerted a real inﬂuence over the extent, and often the success, of this endeavour. What motivated the ‘middling’ to become these ‘amphibious’ social creatures? Benjamin Allen supplies the most detailed insight into possible motives. While he tailored his deﬁnition of gentility carefully to his circumstances, equally it is evident that he yearned for a social trump card, with which he could distinguish himself effortlessly from his unscholarly medical competitors and prosperous but prosaic neighbours. He desired a social position that these individuals could not attain, and to which they had to defer. Gentility offered this, because it represented a clear social threshold that was acknowledged universally, despite disagreements over deﬁnitions. It was a way out of the contingent pecking order of local ofﬁce, the vestry, and the rating list, because it referred to norms that were external to, and larger than, the parish. Such values were, theoretically at least, related to personal virtues and attainments as well as to wealth and fashion, so they offered the prospect of a degree of dignity, authority, and respect that could not be obtained simply by being one of the ‘principal and most substantial inhabitants’. This was why Allen believed that gentlemen should be regarded as ‘better’ men than their neighbours, and treated accordingly. By contrast, ‘chief inhabitants’ were only distinguished from the rest of the ratepayers because they possessed more of the same kind of attributes. In these respects, gentility provided a ‘symbolic language’ of power for the ‘middling’, as well as for other social groups. Yet, as the preceding two chapters have illustrated, it was the ‘chief inhabitants’, rather than the wider body of rate paying householders, who were the most likely to make such claims. They were ones who were in the closest social proximity to minor landowners and wealthy professionals, and the best ﬁnancial position to acquire the material trappings of gentility, or educate their children in the requisite intellectual and behavioural traits. Once again, though, while this group provide us with the best evidence, we have to grapple with the silences of individuals from Joseph Bufton’s position, further down the pecking order of parochial power. We have little material to indicate whether they, like Bufton, conceived of agency via the idiom of gentility, but also whether they, like

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him, displayed little obvious ambition to manifest it themselves. This reticence leaves a gap in the ﬁnal proof of the hypothesis advanced here, that the ‘middling’ had to describe their social authority in the language of gentility, because they had no terminology of their own to employ. Nevertheless, in the absence of any obvious or recurrent alternatives, this assumption appears credible, if not entirely certain.

Conclusion T this volume, the uncertain nature of the evidence about ‘middling’ identity has been a constant refrain. For social commentators, such identity was relatively unproblematic, particularly compared to the incessant debate over the nature and bases of gentility, or the ink that was spilled about the plight, and the threat, of the poor. Yet the ‘middle sort’ was so easy to invoke precisely because it was such a malleable social category, whose membership could be altered to ﬁt the rhetorical purposes of those who employed it. In the provinces, meanwhile, those who we might wish to describe as the ‘middle sort’ said little about the ways in which they perceived their social position. This may have been because it was sufﬁciently obvious not to require comment, because there were few occasions on which their opinions on the matter were recorded, or because they did not conceive of it in terms that are familiar to us. In those relatively rare instances where parish rulers did choose to distinguish themselves as ‘chief inhabitants’, the language appears slightly stilted and formulaic, a metaphor which lined up a community uncomfortably in its best clothes for inspection by a visiting dignitary. Tongues became a little freer when using concepts of ‘worth’, ‘honesty’, ‘credit’, and ‘repute’, but these terms are as resonant as they are relative and imprecise. In the face of such uncertainty, what can we conclude from the research undertaken above? First, all three regions in this study were saturated with capitalist forms of land holding and economic activity by the seventeenth century. Consequently, it is difﬁcult here to sustain deﬁnitions of the ‘middling’ based on their supposed predilection for ‘capitalist’ as opposed to ‘subsistence’ activity. Proﬁt-oriented farming, household production, industrial organization, retailing networks, or capital usage occurred throughout the ranks of the ‘middling’, in rural Lancashire and industrial Suffolk. Conversely, as Overton and colleagues. have demonstrated, apparently ‘subsistence’ production for household consumption was also, perhaps inherently, part of this proﬁt-seeking behaviour, and increased with inventoried wealth. Therefore, it seems impossible to sustain the notion of a peculiarly, or particularly, capitalist urban ‘bourgeoisie’, in opposition to a rural economy divided between exploitative ‘capitalist’, and ‘peasant’ or ‘subsistence’, producers. As Chapter 1 showed, the range of economic functions and their spatial concentration was certainly much greater in towns outside the south-east of England. However, it is misleading to draw sharp distinctions between a proﬁt-driven urban society bent on the ‘pursuit of status’, and the surrounding countryside, stuck in the ruts of a subsistence economy. Material consumption was certainly more conspicuous in some of the wealthier urban households, and as the division between Goosnargh and nearby Preston

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suggests, this was not merely a function of access to markets or absolute wealth. Yet that does not mean it was impossible to be ‘middling’ in Goosnargh, or that it stood outside the ‘world of social competition’. Much depends on our deﬁnition of ‘status’-laden activity, consumption, or display. Rural parishes were stocked with a ready supply of capitalist producers, social competition, and ‘middling’ households, even if these do not always conform to the prerequisites of our deﬁnitions of the ‘middle sort’ or ‘bourgeoisie’. Such deﬁnitions are not helped by contemporaries’ blithe disregard for the social demarcations and status indicators honed so carefully by historians. In contrast to these, parish authorities seem to have been happy to lump together small and large farmers, copyholders and tenants, ‘putting-out’ manufacturers and craftsmen, wholesalers and retailers, and practitioners of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ trades as ‘the inhabitants’ or the ‘chief inhabitants’ of their settlements. Why did they collect together many individuals within a single scale of estimation whom we might wish to categorize separately or in hierarchical relation to one another? Here, we have to confront the social entity of ‘the parish’, and its inhabitants’ willingness to conceive of status primarily within its bounds and according to rate-paying capacity, based on a notion of annual income. As has been suggested in Chapter 2, this focus on the parish suggests a distinct, and unfamiliar, conception of the scale of social interaction, acceptance, and belonging. It presupposes a parish ‘of the mind’, as well as that embodied in the vestry book or the surveyor’s drawings. We have seen how the banal language of ‘inhabitancy’ concealed deeper social distinctions and divisions. While designation as one of the ‘inhabitants’ could indicate merely the plain fact of residence, the phrase contained layers of subsidiary meanings. In particular, it distinguished the ratepayers—the fully enfranchised citizens of the ‘parish state’—from other, lesser residents, closer to the margins of dependence, and disenfranchisement. However, in all three regions Chapter 2 also showed that some of these citizens were more equal than others. Those deemed to be of greater ‘credit’, ‘repute’, ‘worth’, or ‘estimation’ were entitled to occupy the superior administrative, ﬁscal, and moral position of the ‘chief’ or ‘better sort’ of inhabitants. As points of relative stability within constantly mobile parish populations, these rulers came to exert considerable power over local administration and society. In all this, the parish-centred perspective was crucial. It dictated the social catchment area and the scale and forms of estimation applied within it. As has been observed, the irony is that such a localized, parish-centred conception of status was so widespread and uniform across the country at this time—possibly as a social by-product of the gradual percolation of the institutional form of the Elizabethan Poor Law to all corners of the kingdom. Despite this, the study has been at pains to acknowledge that this genre of social description amounted only to one variety among many available to the ‘middling’, reﬂecting one context among many in which they needed to characterize themselves. Others might range from the nicknames that embodied

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personal identity, belonging and acceptance, to the abstract generalities of ‘sorts’ or ‘classes’ of person, supplied by contemporary status taxonomies. Even so, because the focus of this study has been on the internal identiﬁcation of the ‘middling’ in provincial England, it is asserted here that this parish-centred understanding was the primary means by which this grouping conceived of and expressed their social position. It was certainly the mode into which Richard Gough slipped, almost unconsciously. In effect, the language of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘chief inhabitants’ was the social terminology used most often by the ‘middle sort’, and an identity as a parochial ‘chief inhabitant’ was the characteristic social expression of the ‘middle sort of people’. Our problem, though, remains that it does not quite amount to an overt middling social identity in practice, because it did not provide them with a sufﬁciently powerful external classiﬁcation—a collective stereotype that could be used by others to identify the group, and which was applicable nationally. Did such things exist among the ‘middling’ and, if so, where are they to be found? This study has suggested that gentility was one such organizing principle for this group, even if it deﬁnitely was not a status to which more than a minority among them ever aspired. Chapter 3 emphasized how only the wealthiest ‘chief inhabitants’ possessed the obvious material trappings of a genteel style of life, or created houses in which the rituals of genteel sociability could be enacted. This was a ‘sphere’ that incorporated only perhaps the top 5 or 10 per cent of the ‘inhabitants’, as they are revealed by probated wealth or ofﬁce-holding patterns. The conclusions of this study also suggest that to regard this ‘middling’ gentility as a surrogate for, or marker of, deeper ‘bourgeois’ values within this social segment is to ignore the context in which these values were expressed. As Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrated, while provincial expressions of gentility were usually founded on material foundations as a ‘chief inhabitant’, often they seem to have been intended to create a new social barrier within our putative ‘middle sort’, splitting the ranks of the parish rulers. Yet these expressions of gentility frequently comprised all those elements of fashionable furnishing, assembly, and display that historians have gathered together as symbols of ‘middling’ consumption, culture, and capitalism. This may have been the ultimate end of such developments by the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century, but does this ‘bourgeois’ end really provide the motivational means, as far back as the 1660s? Undoubtedly, as previous studies have emphasized, the ranks of these prosperous consumers were thicker in towns, and thickest of all in London, where they formed a distinct, powerful, and increasingly coherent social stratum. It was in London that the ideas of social commentators had most meaning, probably because such ideas were generated here, and addressed to an audience located here. Therefore, if we wish to conceive of the ‘middle sort’ as a consuming, genteel, fashionable, business-like, and prudent ‘bourgeoisie’, then we can do so most effectively and appropriately in the context of London. By the second

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quarter of the eighteenth century, such an image might also be appropriate in Bristol, Norwich, and the growing manufacturing centres and resort towns of the provinces (not to mention Dublin, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, too). These settings generated many of the stereotypes on which ‘middle-class’ identity came to be constructed, because they provided concentrations of population where such distinguishing traits (Earle’s ‘vaguely middle-class things’) could be observed en masse, and also locations where their diagnostic power was necessary to make sense of so many unknown faces. However, to acknowledge this is not necessarily to accept that the urban ‘middle sorts’ were the sole progenitors of the later ‘middle class’. Instead, we need to focus on the wider signiﬁcance of gentility as a cultural form among the provincial ‘middling’. Here we come back to the way in which John Brealey or Joseph Bufton were unable to conceive of social authority or embody it in terms other than those inherent in ‘gentility’. Brealey’s ‘gentleman-like’ clothiers, who signiﬁed their creditworthiness, prosperity, and probity through the gold braid on their hats, or Bufton’s mutually supporting comber-‘gentlemen’ indicate the deeper cultural power of this identity. It was the most potent available symbol of social autonomy, authority, and (paradoxically) equality. If this power is acknowledged, it becomes easier to explain why those with sufﬁcient wealth in towns, but also their peers in the countryside, should have participated in a phenomenon labelled variously by historians as the ‘urban renaissance’, or the culture of ‘politeness’, ‘civility’, or ‘gentility’. While no doubt some of this activity was the result of simple emulation, competition, or mindless fashion, the status denoted by such behaviour had social and moral importance among the ‘middling’. To repeat Benjamin Allen’s already overused comment, to be a gentleman was to be (or to attempt to be, and be accepted as) ‘a better man and more excellent’. This excellence was not merely material, or even social. Rather, it was personal and moral. To be accepted as a gentleman or gentlewoman was, in the eyes of some of those who sought it, to be recognized as a better person, someone ﬁt to exercise social, political, and moral authority free from the interminable squabbles over relative position on the rating table, or in relation to the communion table. Of course, similar disputes happened even within the Olympian ranks of gentlemen, but the status still marked an important social and normative threshold. Chapter 4 has suggested that this was an important reason why the ‘middling’ pursued politeness, even unto death in the case of Ambrose Barcroft (III). The other conclusion we can draw from Barcroft, Allen, Bufton, or any of the other provincial ‘gentlemen’ featured in this discussion, is that such an imperative was not the exclusive preserve of urban dwellers locked into the ‘world of social competition’. Social competition could occur even where the number of competitors was small, and the forms of competition unsophisticated. As a consequence, we can see that although the metropolitan ‘middle sort’ were the most obvious precursors of a later (and predominantly urban) ‘middle class’, they

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merely manifested social traits that can be observed more widely among diffuse populations in provincial England. Does this make them all part of a homogeneous ‘middle sort’, ‘class’, or ‘bourgeoisie’? Certainly, the rulers of parish and town, and the wider rate-paying ‘inhabitant’ population from whom they were drawn, shared many social characteristics, and even (as we have seen) a common social outlook and vocabulary. In some instances, this amounted to more than just the existence of unacknowledged similarities. Certainly, too, the discourse of tripartite social description, of three ‘sorts of people’, had begun to parcel up these similarities into common social experiences, and out of them to create shared (if still partial) social stereotypes, of the kind employed by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders. If we revert to Jenkins’s deﬁnitions, the ‘middle sort’ possessed a minimal exterior categorization by 1700, that was ﬂeshed out considerably by 1750, and that had become something altogether more concrete by the end of the eighteenth century. This categorization obviously had meaning, or social commentators would not have employed it. We should also acknowledge, though, that this mode of social description never achieved the discursive dominance implied by its ﬁrst historical proponents, and never evolved in the purely linear fashion that they suggested. Even so, it had sufﬁcient resonance with contemporary social experience to become a permanent feature in the descriptive lexicon. In this sense, we can argue that it is valid to employ the term as a mode of collective categorization in this society. If we choose to label a group, or groups, situated between the landed gentry and the dependent poor, as the ‘middle sort of people’, we are not doing violence to the concept, or expressing ourselves in ways that contemporaries would have found impossible to comprehend. One methodological problem remains, though. This is the question of whether or not interior identiﬁcation was also inherent in this mode of description. If there is not much evidence that those whom we might choose to call the ‘middle sort’ chose to describe themselves in this way, then this term appears to have limited potential as an expression of their collective identity. The main hurdle to this wider identiﬁcation seems to have been the boundaries of the parish ‘of the mind’. These continued to corral the ‘middling’ into the separate but parallel social compartments occupied by the serried ranks of the ‘chief inhabitants’. This study argues that one way out of these corrals came not through the application of a seventeenth-century ‘language of sorts’, but rather through a longer-term process of cultural evolution. At its core was the impetus to gentility, and the emerging material culture of civility, politeness, assembly, and display, noticeable in county and resort towns, but distributed more widely (if not particularly deeply) before 1750. This provided the clay from which a new social identity was moulded, that melded the social authority, autonomy, and respect bound up in the concept of gentility to the circumstances of those who had to work for a living, and who lacked a country estate. Crucially, the concept of gentility provided a national status identity, based on extra-local criteria, which could

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link together its adherents within a consciously distinct social template—despite the perennial disagreements about the nature of gentility itself. This sociocultural formation remained remarkably protean in the eighteenth century. It underlay the ‘aristocratic’ mercantile gentility found among the ‘big bourgeoisie’ of London, or among Smail’s super-rich Halifax merchant-manufacturers. At the same time, though, it provided normative foundations for another emergent and critical social discourse that contrasted sober, industrious, domesticated ‘middling’ rationality with elite licentiousness, luxury, and deceit. Yet again, it also contributed one element of the radicalism of Paine and the corresponding societies of the 1790s, and the social, political, and moral equality through enfranchisement sought by ‘mechanick’-gentlemen, in an echo of Bufton.¹ As a result, this gentlemanly dynamic was a cultural resource that was appropriated, reshaped, and reinvented in the discourses that forged the ‘middle class’ as political agent, social category and symbol for collective identiﬁcation in the period outlined by Wahrman. This process involved a longer, more convoluted series of terminological, conceptual, stereotypical, and social developments than is posited by historians’ existing and more straightforward, application of an appropriate-sounding term to a likely looking social group. It is difﬁcult, therefore, to reduce these changing modes of self-presentation to a single, simple trajectory, from ‘sort’ to ‘class’. In this respect, the result of this study may be regarded as an unsatisfactory methodological attempt to have your cake and eat it—to assert the existence of the bases of a ‘middle sort’, but at the same time to deny the presence of a formative group identity. Historians crave certainty, even if they rarely attain it, and no more so than in the treacherous waters of social description. Most voyagers in these latitudes are engaged in other enterprises, and require from a social terminology only that it is reasonably speciﬁc without being hopelessly determinist or overtly anachronistic. For them, the category ‘middle sort’ retains sufﬁcient contemporary provenance, and has accumulated a large enough interpretative impetus behind it, to justify its continued use as a social descriptor. Others might wish to venture more cautiously, particularly when they are analysing the collective activities and motivations of historical groups. In these instances, the terms used to describe these collectivities can have an altogether more formative effect. The difference between these two modes is the difference between Jenkins’s collective categorization and group identiﬁcation, or Marx’s ‘class in itself ’ and ‘class for itself’. The conclusion of this study is that there is still too little evidence to move with conﬁdence from the former to the latter when describing the middle sections of the social order of provincial England at this time. ¹ Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 499–530.

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Index Abbott, Henry (I), of Earls Colne, Essex 230–4, 236 Henry (II), of Earls Colne, Essex 234–5 Henry (III), of Earls Colne, Essex 235 Henry (IV), of Earls Colne, Essex 235 Abbotsbury, Dorset 70, 112–3, 115 Addison, Joseph 150 Agrarian History of England & Wales 31, 51, 60–1 agriculture, agrarian economy 26, 30, 31, 48–58, 62–5, 71–7, 80, 88–9, 109 as urban by-employment 48–50, 67–8, 79 Dorset, distribution of landholding in 72–6, 88 diversiﬁcation in 71–2, 75–6, 80 farming practices in 71–6, 80, 176, 179 husbandmen in 53, 75, 77, 79 importance of landless dairying in 73–4, 76–7, 88 importance of sub-tenancy in 74–5, 88 yeomen in 53, 73, 75, 77, 79 Essex & Suffolk, farming practices in 50, 52–58 distribution of landholding in 50, 54–8, 61, 88, 138, 229 diversiﬁcation in 50, 52–4, 57 husbandmen in 52, 53, 58 importance of sub-tenancy in 50, 55–9, 86, 104–5, 118, 138 proﬁts of 54, 229 yeomen in 52–3, 55, 58, 138, 229, 231, 234 Lancashire, distribution of landholding in 61–5, 69, 88 diversiﬁcation in 62, 65, 68 farming practices in 60, 62, 64–5, 68–9 husbandmen in 53, 62–4, 69 importance of 3-life lease system in 61–3, 69 labourers in 63–4, 69 yeomen in 53, 60, 62, 64, 68–9 see also capitalism, in agriculture Alldridge, Nick 120 Allen, Benjamin, of Braintree, Essex 100–1, 210–3, 216, 226, 228, 245, 250, 259, 260, 265 deﬁnition of ‘gentleman’ by 211–2 Allestree, Richard 216 Alphamstone, Essex 107 Alton Pancras, Dorset 94

Amounderness Hundred, Lancs. 69 Anglican Church 2, 18, 92, 108, 235, 244, 249 Aristocracy 2, 15, 54, 96–7, 145, 205–6, 208–9, 227, 237 Arkell, Tom 36 Ashmanshurst, Hants. 96 Assizes 143, 237 juries 19, 235 ‘Association’, culture of 102 Axminster, Devon 85 Balzac, J. L. Guez, seigneur de 216 Barcroft family, of Colne, Lancs. 213–23, 248, 259 books owned by 215–6, 217, 248 Barcroft, Ambrose (II) 213–6, 259 Ambrose (III) 216–23, 236, 242, 259, 265 Ambrose (IV) 220–1, 223 John, 222 n. 223 Thomas 214, 219 William, of Nansemund, Virginia 222 William, of Noyna, Lancs. 220–1 Barry, Jonathan 102, 143, 253 Bath, Somerset 19, 78 Baxter, Richard 3, 22–3, 248–9 Beaminster, Dorset 39, 71–2, 74, 76–8, 113–4, 118, 122–3, 133–6, 176 churchwardens’ rates 73, 118 n., 119, 133–6 distribution of landholding in 73–4, 76 distribution of occupations in 77, 79 length of residence in 133–6 manorial structure of 72–3 1649 Parliamentary survey of 73 probate inventories in 153, 175 proportion of ratepayers serving in parish ofﬁce in 119 sailcloth manufacture at 71 bed, sheets, see Linen, household. Bedford, St. Cuthbert’s parish 97 beds, ﬂock/chaff/straw 153–4, 156, 160, 162, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 195, 198, 249 feather, down 153, 154, 156, 160, 162, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195 Bere Regis, Dorset 71 Berkeley Square, London 149–50 Berry, Helen 149, 209, 222

296

Index

Betchworth, Surrey 97 Bettey, J. H. 72, 74 Birmingham 19, 87 Blackburn, Lancs. 38, 68 Blackmoor, vale of 70–1, 81 Black Notley, Essex 40–1, 112–5, 210 Blandford Forum, Dorset 71 Bletchingley, Surrey 97 Bocking, Essex 33–5, 54, 122–3, 125 n. books 153, 155, 157, 158, 161, 163–4, 167, 172, 178, 181, 184, 190, 192, 194, 196, 215, 240, 248 Bordeaux 86 Borsay, Peter 142–3, 150, 186, 237 Boston, Massachusetts 265 Bourgeois, bourgeoisie, deﬁnitions of 89, 141, 143–4 French 10 revolution 2–3, 26, 233 values 175, 200, 253–4, 257, 264–5, 267 see also ‘middling’, values Bowland, forest of, Lancs. 65 Boyle, Robert 215 Braintree, Essex 33–4, 37, 39–41, 47, 54, 87, 99, 100–1, 101 n., 113–5, 120, 123–4, 129, 131–3, 139, 212 ‘select’ vestry in 120, 123, 125–7, 129, 131–3, 133, 210 n., 212 Brearley, John 95, 265 Bridport, Dorset 71 Bristol 19, 80, 199, 265 Britnell, Richard 185 Broad, John 76, 100 Broadwindsor, Dorset 39, 70, 107, 112–3, 118, 122–3 Bryson, Anna 202, 204–7, 212 Bufton, Joseph, of Coggeshall, Essex 244–50, 260, 265, 267 almanac chronicles of 244–5 books read by 248–50 records of ‘Combers’ Purse’ by 245–7 Bunyan, John 248 Burke, Peter 202 Burley, K. H. 36 Burnet, Gilbert 248 Bury, Lancs. 182 Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk 54 by-employments 47–51, 56–8, 64–5, 67, 74, 80, 86, 88, 118, 138, 213–4, 230 see also agriculture, as urban by-employment Cambridge, King’s College 72, 103 Queen’s College 210 Cannadine, David 6–11, 15, 17, 22 Cannon, John 23

Canterbury, Kent. 219 Prerogative Court of 153 Cape Verde Islands 81 capitalism, divisive social effects of 1–4, 26, 245–7, 262–4 in agriculture 50, 55–9, 63–4, 67, 69–70, 72, 73–4, 86–8 in material consumption 142–3 social complexities of 41, 47, 69–70, 73–4, 86–8, 245–7, 262–4 Care, Henry 216 Caribbean 173 Carter, Philip 22 Catholics, exclusion from ofﬁce of 124 ‘cattle-plague’ (rinderpest) 60 Cavendish, Suffolk 34 chairs, cane, rush, wicker 145, 154, 156, 160, 162, 166, 169, 171, 177, 181, 184, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197 leather 154, 156, 160, 162, 165–6, 169–71, 173, 177, 181–4, 187–9, 191, 193, 195, 240 upholstered, ‘turkey-work’ 146–7, 151, 153, 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 164, 165–6, 169–71, 173, 177, 181, 184, 186–9, 191, 193, 195, 197, 249 joined 154, 156, 160, 162, 164, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 188–9, 191, 193, 195, 198, 249 Chamberlayne, Edward 205 Charles (I) 1 charities, oligarchic social functions of 127–31, 139, 170 parish, trustees, feoffees of 92, 127, 139, 170 Chelmsford, Essex 247, 255 Cheriton, Hants. 96 chests 154, 156, 160, 162, 164–6, 169–71, 176–7, 181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 195, 198, 249 of drawers 28, 146, 151, 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 164, 166, 171, 173, 177, 181, 183, 184, 186–9, 191, 193, 195, 197 Chester, Cheshire, St. Oswald’s parish 120 Chester, diocese of 153 Chesterﬁeld, fourth earl of (Philip Dormer Stanhope) 22 Chetnole, Dorset 75, 77–8 distribution of occupations in 77 probate inventories in 153 Chichester, Sussex 149 Child, Josiah 54, 223–7, 259 social attitudes of 227 china, wares 28, 145, 153, 154, 156, 160, 162, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197

Index church seating, social signiﬁcance of 104, 109 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 217 cider production 72, 75 Clacton, Great, Essex 105 ‘clap-bread’ 60, 70 Clare, John 19, 27 Clare, Suffolk 34 Clark, J. C. D. 7 Claridge, John 72, 76 class consciousness, borough as arena for 253–4, 256 classical deﬁnitions of 4–5, 89 episodic character of 47–8 formative role of language in 9–10, 17, 92–106, 128, 139, 203 parish as arena for 25, 29, 92–106, 110, 126, 131–2, 234 recent theories of 15 through material consumption 142–5 weakness among ‘middling’ of 23–4, 41, 41 n., 42, 92–106, 140, 264, 267 see also capitalism, divisive social effects of ‘class for itself’ 12, 267 ‘class in itself’ 12, 267 Clitheroe, Honour of 61 Clitheroe, Lancs. 25, 38, 60, 64–6, 68, 112–5, 181, 223 agriculture in 64, 65 distribution of landholding in 64 market functions of 64–5, 67, 70 occupational structure in 64, 66–7 probate inventories from 65, 153, 181 town moors in 64–5 clocks 28, 146, 151, 153–4, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 170–1, 177, 181, 184, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 240 cloth industry, Essex & Suffolk, trade cycles in 33–6, 39, 41–2, 47–8, 59, 245, 251, 255–6 baize & says, (‘New Draperies’) 30, 32–3, 33 n., 34–6, 41–3, 47, 51, 237, 244–7, 255–6 broad cloths 33, 33 n., 35 clothiers 33–4, 34 n., 35–6, 41–5, 47–51, 86, 230, 245–6, 255–6 female employment in 36, 49, 237, 239–40 petitions to Privy Council from 33, 34, 47 n., 255–6 weavers 33–6, 41–4, 47–51, 58, 86, 165, 245, 255–6 wool combers in 244–7, 265 cockﬁghting 218, 219 coffee 146, 153–4, 156, 160, 162, 164, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197 Coggeshall, Essex 33–4, 37, 39 n., 54, 99, 114, 132, 231, 235, 244

297

tithes at 235 ‘Coketown’ 47 Colchester, Essex 33–4, 37–8, 46–7, 54, 56, 117, 180, 185, 237–43, 244, 250, 255–6, 257 All Saints’ parish 112–3, 122 apprentices in cloth industry at 35 borough freedoms in 255 borough ofﬁcers’ hearth tax assessments in 117, 239 clothiers, baymakers in 36, 47, 255–6 ‘Dutch’ Bay Hall at 33–4, 38, 47 n., 256 experiences of female servants in 239–40 Flemish migrants in 33, 33 n., 34 Greenstead parish 105 Holy Trinity parish 241 Moot Hall at 38 1665–6 Plague at 34, 34 n. 1660s population level of 117 poverty in 36, 38, 39 n., 41, 47, 236, 240, 255–6 probate inventories from 179–80, 185–6, 188, 239–40 1715 Riot in 255–6 St. Botolph’s parish 38 St. Giles’ parish 38 St. Leonard’s parish 112–4, 117 St. Peter’s parish 38, 104 St. Runwald’s parish 38, 113 weavers in 255–6 Workhouse Corporation 41 Colne, river 32, 87 Colne, Lancs. 213, 219 Grammar School 214–5 Company, Butchers’ 226 Company, East India 223–4 ‘competition, social’ 143–4, 152, 174, 188, 198, 263, 265 Complaisance, The Art of 206 Compleat Parish Ofﬁcer, The 93, 98, 111, 125 ‘consumer revolution’ 175 consumption, conspicuous 27, 70, 176 formative social role of 27, 67–8, 142–8, 150–1, 158, 165, 169–70, 173, 175, 179, 182–3, 185–8, 198–200, 207, 217–8, 226, 238, 240, 262, 264, 266 diffusion of new items through 146–7, 151–2, 158, 163–5, 170, 173, 175–6 major household items of 152–3 regional differences in 158, 164, 166–7, 189–98 see also, culture, material; inventories, probate; rooms, colour-coordination of Corbet, John 3, 23 Corﬁeld, Penelope 5–6, 17, 148, 205, 208 Cornwall 145, 197

298

Index

Cornwall, duchy of 72 Cotswolds 87 couches 154, 156, 160, 162, 165–6, 169, 171, 173, 177, 181, 183–4, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195 Cranﬁeld, Beds. 96–7 Cranleigh, Surrey 97 Craven, Lancs. 220 ‘credit’, moral evaluation of 23–4, 139 estimations in parish of 27–8, 111, 121, 243 social impact of 58, 90–2, 109, 121, 210, 250, 257, 263 Cressy, David 5, 7, 145 Crusoe, Robinson 247–8, 266 culture, material 141, 141 n., 142, 147, 175, 198, 243 curtains, window 146, 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 164–6, 171, 173, 177, 181–3, 184, 187–9, 191, 193, 195 Curtius, Quintus 217 cushions 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 165–6, 170–1, 173, 176–7, 179, 181, 184, 185, 188–9, 191, 193, 195, 240 Dale, Samuel, of Braintree, Essex 125, 127, 210, 213, 228–9 Dawson, Mark 204, 207–8, 212 D’Cruze, Shani 243 Dedham, Essex 37–8, 114, 124 n., 127, 129–31 Grammar School trustees 127–30 deference 247 Defoe, Daniel 19, 33, 35–6, 39, 59–60, 64, 71, 76 n., 78, 82, 84, 148, 151, 184, 187, 199, 207, 237–8, 240, 247–8, 251, 266 Delaware, river 220 Deptford, Kent 219 Devon 71–2, 80, 87, 180, 197 Donne, John 215 Dorchester, Dorset 70, 74, 78 Dorset 25, 30–2, 38–9, 44–8, 53, 70–88, 103, 112, 122, 159, 170, 173, 180, 188, 197–8 Dorset, absence of urbanisation in 71 Dublin 265 Durham 245 Earle, Peter 18–9, 143–7, 150, 175, 187, 241, 265 Earls Colne, Essex 37, 41, 54–7, 106, 112–3, 118, 122–4, 132, 135–8, 229–36 control of timber rights in 230–3 distribution of land in 55–7, 234–5 Grammar School in 127 n. length of residence in 136–8

manor of Colne Priory 231, 233 manorial lordship in 229–34 overseers’ rates in 136–7 parish ofﬁce in 106, 135–8, 233, 236 Workhouse in 41 East Bergholt, Suffolk 34, 37–8, 40, 100, 107, 112–5, 127–31 probate inventories in 153 town land trustees 127–30 East Woodley, Hants. 96 ‘economy, moral’ 256 education, classical 183, 209, 213–4, 217 emulation, social 144–5, 147, 150–1, 174–5, 182–8, 198, 204, 243, 258, 265 enclosure, social effects of 251 England, Church of, see Anglican Church Essex 25, 28, 30, 32, 37, 40, 44–7, 51, 53–4, 61, 64, 68–70, 72, 74, 78, 80, 86, 112, 122, 124, 128, 152, 158–9, 164, 180, 185, 188, 197, 229, 236, 255 deputy-lieutenants of 35, 36 Hinckford Hundred, poverty in 36, 37 Lexden Hundred poverty in 36, 37 Eton College 72 Everitt, Alan 183 Eversholt, Beds. 96 excise service 219, 240 Exeter, Devon 82, 86 Farndish, Beds. 96, 97 Fawley, Hants. 96 Fielding, Henry 85 n. Fiennes, Celia 59–61, 64 Finchingﬁeld, Essex 37–40, 52, 54, 101, 101 n., 114, 123–4 Finsbury, London 149 Flanders, Moll 237–8, 266 footmen 148, 187, 242 ‘fops’ 19, 207–8, 221 forks 147, 151 forms, benches 159 Foulridge, near Colne, Lancs. 213–4, 219 Fox, Adam 132 France 10, 34, 86 freedom, civic as social enfranchisement 253–7 Furbank, Philip 11 Furness, Cumbria 66 Fylde, Lancs. 63, 66 Gale, Thomas, Master of St. Paul’s School, London 213 game laws 21 Gardiner, R., Compleat Constable 90–1 Garstang, Lancs. 60, 124 n. Gentleman’s Calling, The 216

Index gentleman-tradesman 19, 95, 148–9, 151, 175, 186–8, 198, 200, 207–9, 214, 221, 223–8, 236, 238–43, 249–50, 257, 259 gentility, as extra-local social category 24, 28–9, 95, 200, 201–9, 211–3, 226–9, 235–7, 246–7, 258–61, 264–5 female aspects of 174, 203, 209, 237–8, 239–42 ﬁfteenth-century urban gentility 144, 185, 199 social characteristics of 20–1, 95, 147–51, 183, 203–9, 211–2, 216–9, 221–9, 232–3, 236–40, 246–7, 258–61, 264–7 social expansion of 148, 150–1, 176, 183, 185–6, 198–200, 205–10, 213–23, 225–9, 235–40, 246–7, 258–60, 265 social/moral equality embodied in 29, 149–50, 200, 204–5, 208–9, 211, 237, 246–7, 258, 260, 265–6 gentry, landed 3, 18, 19 n., 21, 54, 96, 149, 151, 182–3, 200, 204–6, 208–10, 214, 218, 222–3, 228–9, 232–5, 259–60, 266 urban, ‘pseudo-’ 95–6, 144, 147–9, 151, 207–9, 228, 236–7, 240, 243 see also language, formative social importance of Gestingthorpe, Essex 226 Godalming, Surrey 132 Goose, Nigel 35, 38 Goosnargh, Lancs. 38, 61, 61 n., 62–3, 67, 99, 110, 114–5, 123–4, 124 n., 179, 262–3 occupational structure in 63, 67 probate inventories from 62–3, 69, 153, 175–8 1642 Protestation Return in 63, 67, 176 Townley estate in 62 Gough, Richard 23, 93–4, 97, 109–1, 121, 131, 253, 264 Gowing, Laura 24 Grazier, The Complete 54 Great Yeldham, Essex 104–5, 111, 139 Grotius, Hugo 215 group, identiﬁcation, see Identity, internal categorization, see Identity, external Guide, The Young Man’s 249 Guildford, Surrey, Holy Trinity parish 103 St. Mary-the-Virgin parish 103 guns, pistols, weapons 153, 155, 157–8, 161, 163–5, 167, 172–3, 178, 181, 184, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196 Halifax, Yorks. 267 Halstead, Essex 34, 37, 138, 223–6 Blue Bridge House at 225–6

299

Essex, Boy’s Hall at 223–4 Halstock, Dorset 103 hangings, tapestry 155, 157, 161–2, 167, 172, 177, 179, 181–2, 184–5, 190, 192, 194, 196–7, 240 Hammersmith, London 149 Hareﬁeld, Middx. 99 Harlackenden, family, lords of manor in Earls Colne, Essex 230–4, 236 Harlackenden, Richard, of Earls Colne, Essex 232–3 Roger, of Earls Colne, Essex 229, 231 Harley, Robert, earl of Oxford 225, 227 Harrison, William 205 Hartley Witney, Hants. 96 harvest failure 34, 39 Hearth Tax, as indicator of residence 134–5 assessment distributions in 44–5, 68–9, 77–8, 114–5, 117, 168 assessment distribution of parish/borough ofﬁcers in 114–5, 117, 131, 168, 176, 239, 244 comparison with probate inventory valuations 44, 44 n., 45, 68, 77–8, 168–9, 240 exemption from 36–8, 68–9, 87, 115, 134 regional variations in 36–9, 44–6, 68, 77–8, 114–5, 117 urban-rural comparisons 69, 78 Hermitage, Dorset 94 Hill, Christopher 2–3, 5, 142, 233 Hindle, Steve 91–2, 100, 108, 111, 132, 234, 250–1 Hogarth, William 148, 184, 199 Holdenhurst, Hants. 96 ‘honesty’ 22, 24, 28, 91, 99, 198, 246, 262 Horkesley, Little, Essex 114–5 Horn, Pamela 76 Horrox, Rosemary 144 Hoskins, W. G. 151 Houghton Conquest, Beds. 103 Hoyle, Richard 230 Hunt, Margaret R. 22, 143, 238 Hunt, William 32, 38 Hutchinson, Lucy 17 n. ‘idealism’ 8 ‘ideal types’, Weberian 14, 31 identity, external 12–15, 17, 25, 29, 234, 264, 266–7 internal 12–15, 23, 25, 29, 140, 264, 266 gender 24, 90–91, 107–8 regional 30–2, 95–6 social, other forms of 24, 90, 101 see also language, formative social importance of

300

Index

independence, social 94, 245–7, 258 ‘inhabitants’ 16, 27, 93, 97–102, 107, 126, 139–40, 254–5, 263–4 ‘ancient’, (implicit residential qualiﬁcations of) 98–100, 107, 131–8, 251, 253, 257–8, 263 ‘chief, principal, better sort of’ 20–1, 27–9, 36, 92–7, 99–102, 104–6, 124, 126–9, 132, 139, 176, 201–3, 205–6, 212–3, 225, 233–7, 242, 252–3, 258–60, 263–4, 266 implicit gender assumptions within, see Identity, gender implicit social assumptions within 97–102, 105, 107, 111, 139, 258, 263 ‘major part of’ 102–3, 107, 139 ‘poorer, meaner, vulgar sort of’ 92, 96, 98–100, 176, 216 see also language, formative social importance of instruments, musical 155, 157, 161, 163, 167, 170, 172, 178, 181, 184, 190, 192, 194, 196 inventories, probate, composition of samples 153, 158 n., 165, 185, 188 household items recorded in 154–5, 158–63, 166–7, 171–2, 177–8, 181–4, 189–96 household wealth, trade stock & total valuations in 42–4, 46, 49, 53, 60, 62–3, 65–70, 72, 75, 77–81, 84, 146 n., 151, 155, 158–64, 166–7, 169, 170–2, 178, 180–4, 186–88, 190, 192, 194, 196–7, 239–40 farming equipment in 52–3, 60, 62–3, 65, 67–8, 72, 75, 79 social composition of samples 188–98 urban and rural comparisons in 46–7, 69, 78, 87, 147, 150, 182 see also consumption; rooms, colour-coordination of Ireland, King’s County 220 Jenkins, Richard 12–17, 20, 23, 266–7 Johnson, Oliver & Abigail (ne´e Abbott) of Earls Colne, Essex 235–6 Johnson, Deborah, of Colchester, Essex 240–3, 248, 259 Jones, Gareth Stedman 8–9 Josselin, Ralph, of Earls Colne, Essex 138, 234–5 justices of the peace 18, 21 keeps, glass 154, 156, 158, 160, 162, 165–6, 169, 171, 173, 177, 181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 195

Kelvedon, Essex 33 Kennet, White 248 Kent 145, 149, 197 Kent, Joan 250 Kersey, Suffolk 235 King, Gregory 17 n., 89 Kingsclere, Hants. 96 Kirkham, Lancs. 124 n. Klein, Lawrence 202–4, 259 Knatchbull’s Act 41 n. Kneller, Godfrey 225 Knox, Vicesimus 22 Lake District 66 Lamb, Henry, of Colchester, Essex 186, 186 n., 187, 242, 248 Lambeth, Surrey 98, 121 Lancashire 25, 30, 32, 38, 44–48, 53, 59–61, 63, 68–9, 70, 72, 77–8, 86, 88, 112, 124, 159, 188, 198, 219–21, 262 Lancashire plain 59–60 parishes 61 Lancaster, Lancs. 25, 38, 60, 114–5, 123 ‘select’ vestry in 123 Lancaster, duchy of 61 Lancaster, Herald at Arms 66 Land Tax, commissioners 21, 218, 225 Langford, Paul 148, 208 language, formative social importance of 6–9, 11–13, 15–16, 23, 25, 42, 91–2, 94, 96–7, 99–102, 107, 109, 121, 123, 126, 128, 131–2, 198, 201, 246–7, 253–4, 255–6, 258, 260–7 Laslett, Peter 83, 149, 204 Lavenham, Suffolk 33 n., 34, 37, 40, 114–5 Lavenham, Suffolk, probate inventories in 153 Layston, Herts. 132 Leeds 19 Leigh, Dorset 75, 77–8 distribution of occupations in 77 probate inventories in 153 Levellers 2 Lewes, Sussex 123 libertinism 207–8 Lillington, Dorset 75 Lilly, William 3 Lincoln, diocese of 96 linen, household 154, 156, 160, 162, 166, 169–71, 173, 176, 177, 181, 184–5, 189, 191, 193, 195 Lingﬁeld, Surrey 97, 103 Liverpool 19, 59, 66, 85, 87 Locke, John 215 London 18–19, 25, 78–80, 82, 86, 95, 132, 142, 144–8, 164, 175, 187, 199, 208, 214, 228–9, 236, 241, 244, 264

Index Bishop of 92, 132 season 21 St. Bartholomew-the-Great 92, 99 St. Paul’s School 210, 213 Long Melford, Suffolk 34, 37 probate inventories in 153 Long Parliament 2 Longstock, Hants. 97 looking glasses 146, 151, 154, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164–6, 170–1, 173, 177, 181, 183–4, 186–9, 191, 193, 195, 197, 240 lordship, manorial, ‘middling’ hostility to 229–34 Loveday, Richard 216 Ludlow, Salop. 254, 256 Lyme Regis, Dorset 25, 30, 39, 70, 78, 81, 113–4, 117, 120, 170, 180 borough ofﬁce 171–2, 173 Cobb, the 82 criminal activity 85 distribution of servants 174 household structures and borough/parish ofﬁce 83–4, 86, 120, 174 1697 household structures 82–4, 120, 174 mariners 84 merchants 82, 84, 86–7, 170, 173, 180 occupational structure 84, 86, 173 patterns of overseas trade 81–2 1660s population levels 117 probate inventories 84, 153, 171–3, 188 proportion of households serving in borough/parish ofﬁce 120 skewed sex ratio 83 Macfarlane, Alan 136 Malaga, Spain 82 Man, Whole Duty of 216 Manchester 9, 19, 66, 87 Manners, Societies for the Reformation of 252 Manning, Brian 1–3, 5, 26 Marsh, John 149, 209 Marx, Karl 142, 267 Marxism 2–4, 8, 11–12 Mascuch, Michael 223, 249 Maza, Sarah 8, 10, 25 medicine, institutional effect of 18 ‘Mediocres’ 143 Merritt, Julia 132 Methodists 95 ‘middle sort of people’, deﬁnitions of 1–4, 141–4 absence of collective identity among 16–26, 27, 94, 95, 97, 109–10, 147, 175, 199, 247–55, 257–8, 260–7 economic foundations of 58–9, 69–70, 77, 81, 87–8, 118

301

see also language, formative social importance of middle class, contemporary usage of 9, 22 formative material consumption among 28, 141–5, 147, 175, 187–8, 198–200 linguistic determination of 9–11, 16 Marxist deﬁnitions of 1–3, 26, 89, 233 Middle Claydon, Bucks. 98, 100 ‘middle ranks’ 9, 22, 249 ‘middle state’ 247–8 ‘middle station’ 9 ‘middling’, values 233, 250, 253, 258, 267 military, institutional effects of 18 Milton Bryant, Beds. 103 Milton, John 3 Mirandula, Octavianus 217 mirrors, see looking glasses Mitson, Anne, ‘dynastic families’ 128 morality, social inﬂuence of 22–24, 27, 90, 95, 121, 250–3, 265 Morant, Philip 41 Morley, John, of Halstead, Essex 149, 223–8, 259–60 ‘Carcase’ 227–8 Mosterton, Dorset 39, 107–8, 113, 122 Muldrew, Craig 22–24, 90, 223 Mun, Thomas 215 Murphy, F. J. 81 Musgrave, William 219 Myddle, Salop. 23, 93–4, 131 Myddle, History of 23, 93–4, 111 Nayland, Stoke-by-, Suffolk 34, 37, 40, 102, 110, 113–5, 122 probate inventories in 153 Neale, R. S. 4, 10 Netherbury, Dorset 72–3, 77–8 distribution of occupations in 77 manorial structure of 73 probate inventories in 153 Netherlands 33, 215 Newfoundland 81 Newmarket, Suffolk 54 Newport Pond, Essex 37, 113–6, 122–3, 133–6, 223 length of residence in 133–6 overseers’ rates 118 n., 118–9, 133–6 1692 Poll Tax in 119 proportion of ratepayers serving in parish ofﬁce 119 rate assessment of ofﬁcers in 116, 133–6 Newsham, Lancs. 175 New York 82, 265 Nicholas, Edward 17 n. nicknames 244, 263 Norfolk 31, 87, 109

302

Index

North, Dudley 215 North, Roger 36 Norwich 19, 199, 265 diocese, consistory court of 153 Noyna, near Colne, Lancs. 213–4, 219–20 N¨unning, Vera 22 ofﬁce, borough 48, 83, 104, 117–8, 120, 165–74, 185–6, 239, 253–4 extra-parochial, Hundred 109, 214 ofﬁce, parish, patterns of attendance in 122 social role of 19–20, 25, 27, 63, 74, 91, 93, 97, 110, 121, 128, 131, 133–5, 139–40, 250, 257 women’s role in 107–8, 119 ofﬁcers, borough, comparative material consumption of 165–74, 185–8 comparative rate paying 117–8, 120 distribution of hearth tax assessments of 117–8, 239 ofﬁcers, parish, constables 56, 92, 106, 108, 112–5, 119–20, 127–8, 130, 176, 233 churchwardens 63, 77, 92, 98, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112, 113–5, 116, 119–21, 127–31, 176, 226–7, 236 comparative material consumption of 154–64, 176–9 comparative rate-paying proﬁle of 109, 113–5, 164 other 92, 106, 109, 128, 176 overseers of the poor 13, 36, 59, 92, 98, 101, 102, 106–7, 109, 111–4, 116, 119–21, 127–30, 139, 174, 176, 236, 244, 251 sidesmen 109, 112–6, 128 surveyors of highways 92, 106, 112–6, 119–20, 127–9, 176 see also rate-payers; vestries Oporto, Portugal 82, 86 ‘order’, rhetorical signiﬁcance of 92, 132 Orsett, Essex 92 Overton, Mark 30, 80, 146, 150–2, 159, 197, 204, 262 Oxford, earls of (De Veres) 54, 230–1, 233 Oxford, university of 227, 227 n. Paine, Thomas 267 parish, as ﬁctive social entity 19–20, 23–25, 27–29, 89, 91, 100–1, 110, 245, 253, 257, 263–4, 266–7 ‘parish state’ 19, 27, 263 Parliament 21 Pascal, Blaise 215 patriarchal authority, social effects of, see Identity, gender patronage 18

Pelham, Anne, of Colchester 239–40, 243 Pendle, forest of, Lancs. 61 Pennell, Sarah 141 Pennines 60–1, 63, 66, 68, 181, 203, 209, 213, 220, 222 Pennsylvania 220–1 Petty, William 215 Pewton Mewsey, Hants. 96 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 265 pictures, paintings 28, 153–4, 157–60, 162, 165–6, 170, 171, 173, 177, 181–4, 186, 188–9, 191, 193, 195, 240–1 Pitman, Jan. 109 Plymouth, Devon 82 ‘politeness’ 24, 28, 59, 70, 148–9, 150–1, 202–4, 206–9, 212, 222, 242, 257, 265–6 politics, social importance of 9–10, 12, 14, 16 Pollard, Anthony 144 Poole, Dorset 78 poor, deserving 13–14, 94, 98, 100, 107–8, 132, 251–2, 266 undeserving 13–14, 94, 98, 100, 107–8, 251–2 Poor Law, legislation 98, 107, 110, 247, 253, 263 Pope, Alexander 225–7 Portsmouth, Hants. 103–4 Portugal 34 Postles, Dave 24, 105 Potter, Henry, of Colchester, Essex 187 poverty, poor relief 35–41, 47–8, 63, 68, 83, 87, 91–2, 94, 98–100, 110, 165, 212, 237, 247, 250–2 settlement legislation 98 Presbyterians 95, 97, 124–5, 125 n. Preston, Lancs. 25, 30, 38, 59–60, 64–70, 79, 97, 114–5, 117, 123, 124 n., 179–81, 183, 185, 186 n., 187, 254–5, 257, 262 borough ofﬁcers in 166–9, 185, 187, 254–5 colour co-ordinated inns at 182–3 Guild Merchant 66, 66 n., 255 house of correction/workhouse at 66, 254–5 house of correction/workhouse, ofﬁcers’ status in 254 legal centre at 59, 66 manorial ofﬁcers in 166–9, 188 market area of 65, 65 n. market functions of 66–8, 70 occupational structure in 66–8, 185, 254–5 parish ofﬁcers in 166–9, 185, 188 1660s population level of 117 probate inventories from 65, 67–9, 153, 166–7, 169, 179–83, 185, 187

Index

303

Prior, Matthew 226 probate courts, social selectivity of 78 professions, institutional effect of 18 proletarians, proletarian identity, proletariat 2–3, 41–2, 47, 86 ‘proto-industry’ 48 Prynne, William 3 ‘puritanism’ 34, 125, 231, 233, 249, 252 Pyrford, Surrey 97

rooms, colour co-ordination of 27, 179–85, 240 colour co-ordination, origins of 185 signiﬁcance of colour co-ordination in inns 182–5 see also consumption; inventories, probate Rossendale, forest of, Lancs. 61 Rotherhide, Surrey 97 Runciman, W. G. 7–8

Quakers 137, 235 Quarter Sessions 237, 255 cases 104, 126, 235 juries 19, 118, 120, 231 orders 105 parochial petitions to 16, 93, 99, 225, 231

Salisbury, bishop of 72 dean & chapter of 72 diocese, peculiar courts of 153 Salisbury Plain 70 Scammell, Lorna, see Weatherill, Lorna Secretary, Female 216 Send, Surrey 96, 97 Shadwell, London 149 Shaftesbury, Dorset 71 Shambrook, Beds. 103 Shammas, Carole 145, 146 n., 159 Shapin, Steven 149, 204–6, 211–2 Shefﬁeld, Yorks. 87 Shepard, Alexandra 22, 24, 90, 108, 111 Sherborne, Dorset 30, 39, 70, 74–5, 75 n., 78–81, 101, 114, 120, 127, 130, 170, 180, 182–3 almshouse & school governors 127, 130, 170 almshouse & school governors, material consumption of 170–2 Benedictine Abbey at 130 button making in 79, 80 colour co-ordinated inns at 182–3 common ﬁelds in 79, 79 n. distribution of occupations in 79, 81 economic decline in 81 pattern of service in parish ofﬁces in 120–1, 130 probate inventories in 153, 170–2, 180, 182 Sherborne Castle estate, Dorset 75 Sherburn family, Stoneyhurst, Lancs. 61 Goosnargh estate of 62 Shere, Surrey 96 silverwares, spoons, plate 153, 155, 157–8, 161, 163–4, 167, 170, 172, 177, 181–4, 187, 190, 192, 194, 196, 241 ‘sincerity’ 22 Skewness 116, 116 n. Skipton, Yorks. 217 Slaidburn, Yorks. 153, 181 Smail, John 143, 267 smallpox 39, 100–1 Snell, Keith 252 ‘social imaginary’ 10

Rakes 207–8, 227 Rake’s Progress, A 148 ‘rank, order and degree’ 5–8, 15, 22, 96, 255, 257 rates, calculation of 111–2, 139 rate-payers, proportion serving in parish ofﬁce 119–20 rate-paying, as indicator of income 89, 100, 103–6, 111–5, 139 duration of as status marker 133–7 median lifetime assessment levels 116–120, 123 social signiﬁcance of 26, 89, 93, 98–101, 103–6, 108, 111, 113, 116, 118–121, 133, 139–40, 212, 252, 258, 260, 263, 265 variation across lifecycle in 118–9, 123 see also ofﬁcers, parish; ofﬁcers parish; vestries Ravensden, Beds. 97 Rawsthorne, Lawrence of Bury, Lancs. 181 Ray, John 210, 228 ‘real social knowledge’ 6–7, 11 1715 rebellion 59 Reform Act 9–10, 16 regions, ‘sheep-corn’ 31–2 ‘wood-pasture’ 31–2 see also Underdown, David Reigate, Surrey 97 ‘Renaissance, English Urban’ 141, 144, 149, 265 ‘reputation’, see ‘credit’ revisionism 3 Ribble, river, valley 30, 60, 65–67 Richmond, archdeaconry of 153 Roberts, Stephen K. 19 Rodgers, H. B. 60, 65 Romsey, Kent 209

304

Index

social mobility 51, 213–28, 259 dichotomous 5–8, 15, 42, 47–8, 59, 92–4, 96, 253 hierarchic, see ‘rank, order and degree’. tripartite, triadic 6–8, 15, 97 Society, Royal 229 Solebury, Pennsylvania 220 Somerset 23, 25, 31, 70, 86 ‘sorts of people’ 5, 94–8, 101, 110, 123, 216, 233, 246, 264, 267 sorts, language of 5–6, 16, 94–5, 97, 266 Southwark, Surrey, Christchurch 97 St. George-the-Martyr 97 St. Olave’s parish 96–7 Sowerby, Yorks. 214 Spain 34, 173 Stafford, Staffs. 87 Stanway, Essex 54, 56–7 distribution of land in 56–7 ‘state-formation’ 110 Steele, Richard 150, 205, 223 Steer, F. W. 153 stereotypes, social, role of 13–14, 17, 20–21, 23, 94–5, 203–9, 257–8, 260, 262, 264, 267 Stiffkey, Norfolk 109 Stour, river 32, 38, 87, 128 Stratﬁeld Turgis, Hants. 96 Strode family, Beaminster, Dorset 73, 76 structuralism 12, 15 Southampton, Hants. 82 St. Mary’s parish 96 South Perrot, Dorset 39, 70, 107, 113, 122 St. Alban’s, Herts. 103 Sudbury, archdeaconry of 153 Sudbury, Suffolk 33–4, 37, 46–51, 65, 67 borough ofﬁcers 165–8 borough ofﬁcers, hearth tax distribution among 168 borough ofﬁcers, occupational structure of 168 by-employments in 48–51, 67 common lands 48–9, 65 commons money 49 landholding in 50–1 occupational structure in 35, 49–50, 67, 87, 165, 165 n. 1674 population levels of 117 probate inventories from 49–51, 67, 153, 165–8 rights of borough freedom in 49 St. Gregory’s parish 48, 50, 114, 117 St. Peter’s parish 102 Suffolk 25, 30–2, 37, 40, 44–7, 51, 53–4, 61, 64, 68–70, 72, 74, 78, 80, 86, 112, 122, 128, 152, 158–9, 164, 180, 185, 188, 197, 235–6, 255, 262

Swift, Jonathan 227 Swindon, Wilts. 105–6 Sydling St. Nicholas, Dorset 39, 70, 113, 122–3, 139 systactic social categories 7 tables, billiards 183, 187, 242 card, ‘playing’ 187–8 long/square 153–4, 156, 159–60, 162, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 195 octagonal, round 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 195 oval, dining 151, 153–4, 156, 158–60, 162, 165–6, 169, 171, 173, 177, 181, 183–4, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197 Tatham-cum-Ireby, Thatham Fell, Lancs. 38, 68, 114 Tatler, The 205 Tawney, R. H. 142 tea, tables, sets 27, 145–6, 148, 151, 153–4, 156, 160, 162, 164, 166, 171, 177, 181, 184, 186–9, 191, 193, 195, 197, 238, 242 Tey, Great, Essex 235, 244 Thirsk, Joan 31 Thompson, E. P. 6 Thornton, Peter 185 Tillotson, John 214–5, 215 n., 248 Tockenham Wick, Wiltshire 16 Toppesﬁeld, Essex 40–1, 112–4 town, as ﬁctive social entity, see parish, as ﬁctive social entity trades, ‘clean’ 145, 199, 263 ‘dirty’ 145, 199, 263 Tranquillus, Gaius Suetonius 182, 182 n. Trawden, Lancs. 214 Turkey 215 Twyford, Hants. 103 Uffculme, Devon, probate inventories in 153 Underdown, David 16, 31, 78 distinction of regional ‘cultures’ by 31–2 see also regions universities, institutional effect of 18 Verney, Sir Ralph 100 vestries, attendees, length of residence of 133–8 parish, material consumption in 175–9 ‘open’ 57, 91, 98–9, 101–2, 106, 108–9, 112, 116, 122, 124–9, 134–5, 138–9, 179, 201, 233, 236, 251 pattern of attendance in 122–6

Index ‘select’, closed 92, 101, 108, 120–7, 129, 131–2, 169, 175, 185–6, 188, 201 social proﬁle of 112–5, 116, 119, 121, 133–7, 169, 251 see also ofﬁce parish; ofﬁcers, parish; rate-payers Vickery, Amanda 203, 209–10, 213, 222 Virgil 217 Virginia 81, 84, 173, 222 Chesapeake Bay 86 ‘virtu’ 205, 217 ‘virtuosi’ 213 Wahrman, Dror 8–11, 15–16, 200, 267 Wakeﬁeld, Yorks. 95 Wall, Richard 83 Walter, John 41–2, 48 Walton-le-Dale, Lancs. 65 Wanstead, Essex 224 Wapping, London 149–50 Warham All Saints, Norfolk 109 Warwick, earls of (Riches) 54 Warwickshire 36 Quarter Sessions 16 Weatherill, Lorna 145–7, 150–1, 186, 204 Weber, Max 5, 11, 14, 142 Wells, dean & chapter of 72 West Africa, Guinea 82 West Indies 81–2, 86 Barbados 82 Montserrat 82 Nevis 82

305

West Riding, Yorks. 51 Westminster 132 Weymouth, Dorset 78 White Horse, vale of, Wilts. 70 Whittingham, Lancs. 38, 60, 175 Wigan, Lancs. 38, 68 Wilden, Beds. 97 wills, Essex & Suffolk 152–3 Wiltshire 31 ‘medley’ cloth in 78 Winchester, Hants., St. John’s parish 97 Winchester, diocese of 96, 103 Winchester College 72 Winthrop, John 17 n. Witham, Essex 33, 37, 235 Withington, Phil 253–4 Wonersh, Surrey 103 Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire 16 working class 2, 6, 11, 253 Wormingford, Essex 105 Wrightson, Keith 4–6, 17, 23 Writtle, Essex, probate inventories in 153 Yetminster, Dorset 39, 70, 72, 74 n., 75, 77–8, 98, 102, 110 disputed churchwarden in 77, 121 distribution of landholding in 74–5, 77 distribution of occupations in 77 1649 Parliamentary survey of 74 York 19, 217–8 Yorkshire 95, 96 ‘xenophobia, culture of local’ 252–3