A POLARISED SOCIETY?

It has become a commonplace to refer to early modern English society as imbued with rank, hierarchy and degree. But this commonplace is an indispensable starting-point. We cannot usefully consider the means of order and the sources of disorder until we have established the context of men's personal, social, economic and cultural relationships in this period. So the first section of this introduction is concerned with social structure. Tudor and Stuart society was highly stratified. Our problem, as Keith Wrightson has pointed out, is how to bring together contemporary perceptions of its nature and the view of social developments which is emerging from the thinking of early modern historians over the last few years. The criteria of social rank included birth, wealth, occupation and the life style that accompanied their gradations. Historians do not agree, any more than did contemporary commentators, on the precise weight to be given to these various criteria.

In Elizabeth's reign William Harrison distinguished four ‘degrees of people’: gentlemen, the citizens and burgesses of the cities, yeomen in the countryside and finally those who had ‘neither voice nor authority in the commonwealth but are to be ruled and not to rule other’. About 1600 Sir Thomas Wilson listed nobles, gentry, citizens, yeomen, artisans and rural labourers as the main social categories, taking care to make distinctions within the gentry between titled and professional men.