This book is the end product of a long and complicated project which owes much to a great number of people. At a chance meeting at Manchester University in 1977 Professor T. S. Willan helpfully suggested that I should approach the British Academy with a proposal to edit some of Sir John Lowther of Whitehaven's correspondence with his stewards. I considered these letters were potentially an invaluable source for social and economic historians and so gratefully embraced his suggestion and that project began the following year. In 1979 my colleague Wilfrid Prest, knowing that the letters I was editing were largely stewards’ correspondence, courteously invited me to contribute an essay on estate stewards to a symposium he was organising on the professions in early modern England. Here I was in a quandary. I knew quite a lot about Lowther's stewards. I knew nothing about the stewards of any other landowner. My wistful suggestion that my colleague might welcome a ‘case study’ based on the Lowther stewards was firmly declined. What was wanted was a synthesis. I soon discovered that on the subject of stewards in seventeenth-century England there was virtually nothing to synthesise. Two or three articles had been published on eighteenth-century stewards but they were rather too late for my purposes. If the essay was to be written I would have first to do the fundamental research and then try to synthesise what I had discovered.