Prof: Okay.
 
Well this week and next week
I'm going to concentrate on
setting the contexts,
introducing you to the contours
of an unfamiliar society,
and today I'll start with the
social order,
how people perceived their
social world as a whole in the
sixteenth century.
Okay.
 
Well, 500 years ago in the fall
of the year 1509 a man named
Edmund Dudley lay imprisoned in
the Tower of London,
the great royal fortress which
dominated the eastern parts of
London,
as it still does.
He was there on trumped-up
charges of treason.
Dudley was a lawyer.
 
He had assisted King Henry VII
in some very unpopular policies
and in 1509 the old king died.
 
The new king,
Henry VIII, came to the throne
aged only eighteen and won some
quick popularity by throwing
Edmund Dudley to the wolves.
 
But as he lay in prison
awaiting execution Dudley made
his peace with man and God by
writing a book which he called
The Tree of Commonwealth.
 
It didn't save him and he
probably never expected that it
would,
but it survived and it remains
a classic statement of
sixteenth-century social values
and it can serve to introduce
some of the keywords of
sixteenth-century society.
 
In The Tree of Commonwealth
Dudley attempted as a loyal
subject to describe what he saw
as the ideal conditions for the
prospering of the kingdom under
its new king,
Henry VIII.
 
The word that he used in his
title, "commonwealth,"
was a real keyword of
sixteenth-century political
discourse.
 
It meant the body politic,
the whole of the realm.
It also meant the common good,
the common interest,
the public welfare of society.
 
In discussing it,
Dudley, in his book,
took the form of an elaborate
allegory.
He imagined the commonwealth as
a great tree.
There were four roots of
commonwealth:
love of God,
justice, trust,
and concord.
 
And there were four fruits of
commonwealth:
tranquility,
good example,
worldly prosperity,
and the honor of God.
Well, the fruits of
commonwealth,
this happy outcome of
harmonious commonwealth,
involved the reconciling,
under the guiding hand of the
king,
of the interests of all the
principal social groups so that
conflict would be avoided and
everyone would be welded into a
harmonious commonwealth.
So, in describing the
commonwealth Dudley described
the various component social
groups and he divided the
subjects of the realm,
in a way that was very
conventional,
into what he called three
'estates' or 'orders',
three estates,
each of which had its role and
each of which had its duties.
First of all came the clergy.
 
Their role was to pray for the
good of the whole,
to sustain Christian values by
their pastoral ministry,
and to avoid the temptations of
worldliness or lusts of the
flesh.
 
All of this was explained.
 
Then he turned to the second
estate, what he called the
'chivalry'.
 
The chivalry were the lay
elite, ranging in status from
dukes at the top down to mere
knights, esquires and gentlemen.
All of these people were
considered to be of 'gentle'
blood.
 
Their duty was to defend the
realm in time of war and to
govern it justly in time of
peace under the king.
They should avoid the abuse of
their power as governors or as
landlords.
 
They should protect and relieve
the poor and the weak and serve
the king well.
 
Thirdly, there were those that
Dudley called the 'commonalty'
of the realm:
the commonalty.
And basically that was all the
rest;
the common people from the
peasantry of the countryside to
the great merchants of the
cities;
all those who were not of
gentle blood.
Their duty was to work,
to get a living that was
appropriate for their place in
society, to keep their families
and to support all the rest.
 
They were advised by Dudley to
avoid 'covetousness' or greed,
to avoid idleness and to avoid
what he called "presumption
above their degree";
they should keep their place.
They should also avoid
"grudging and
murmuring"
against the fact that they were
born,
as he put it,
"to live in labor and pain
and for the most part of their
time in the sweat of their
face."
This is excellent advice for
students.
>
 
I'll repeat that:
avoid grudging and murmuring,
accept that you're here to live
in labor and pain and the most
part of your time in the sweat
of your face.
Okay.
 
Well, all of this is a
perfectly conventional account
of the structures and purposes
of the social order in the
sixteenth century.
 
It's partly descriptive of the
major component groups of
society.
 
It's partly obviously
prescriptive.
It's prescribing how they
should live,
and in doing so it embodies the
central ideals of the social
morality of the time as it was
conceived by people like Dudley:
harmony,
duty, order.
Now clearly this ideal was
communitarian.
Dudley was very preoccupied
with the commonwealth as an
association of interdependent
parts, a community.
But equally clearly it was not
egalitarian.
The component groups might be
interdependent but they were
emphatically not equal.
 
Each group was expected to
contribute "in its
degree" as Dudley put it;
"in its degree,"
according to its place.
 
And each group shared in the
benefits of the commonwealth
"after its degree,"
in accordance with its place.
Now by 'degree' he meant,
of course, the different
gradations of wealth and status
inside each of the three
estates.
 
That hierarchical ranking was
fundamental to sixteenth-century
notions of the social order and
people were never allowed to
forget it.
 
Okay.
 
Well, let's leave Edmund Dudley
meditating in his cell in the
Tower and imagine ourselves
instead in one of England's
9,000 parish churches a few
decades later.
It's a Sunday morning.
 
The bells are tolling to call
people to church.
The church wardens--who were
kind of like the teaching
fellows of the sixteenth-century
parish--
the church wardens are
patrolling the aisles,
getting people sat in their
proper place,
gentry up at the front,
the lowly at the back.
They're chasing out the dogs
because people brought their
dogs to church in those days and
settling everyone down.
And once a year the grave,
gray-bearded minister of the
parish would come into the
pulpit and read out from the
Book of Homilies. The
Book of Homilies were
official sermons which were
published by the Church of
England and were to be read out
periodically in the course of
the year.
 
He began thus:
"Almighty God hath created
and appointed all things in
heaven, earth and waters in a
most excellent and perfect
order.
In heaven he hath appointed
distinct orders and estates of
archangels and angels.
 
In earth he hath assigned
kings, princes with other
governors under them,
all in good and necessary
order.
 
Every degree of people in their
vocation, their calling and
their office have appointed to
them their duty and order.
Some are in high degree,
some in low,
some kings and princes,
some inferiors and subjects,
priests and laymen,
masters and servants,
fathers and children,
husbands and wives,
rich and poor...
 
And where there is no right
order there reigneth all abuse,
carnal liberty,
enormity, sin and Babylonical
confusion."
 
Well, that's the opening
paragraph of the Homily on
Obedience;
the Homily on Obedience,
published for the first time in
the 1540s and another neat
statement of Tudor perceptions
of the social order and its
emphasis on hierarchy and
degree;
order, the word echoing through
that opening paragraph.
Well, put Dudley and the
Homily on Obedience
together and you've got a
world which certainly had
certain communitarian ideals,
the commonwealth,
but one in which it was also
assumed that those ideals were
best served by maintaining a
sort of graduated ladder of
authority and subordination
within each one of the degrees
of society.
 
And indeed the three degrees as
Dudley described them can be
shuffled together into a single
rank order of precedence,
as they were when people went
on processions,
for example.
 
On the back of your handout
you'll find a chart laying out
as one hierarchy that classical
social hierarchy which you've
already read about,
I hope, in the chapter set from
English Society.
 
Okay.
 
Well, if you think back to what
I've said so far it's clear that
within all of this they were
making four kinds of
distinctions between people.
 
There were distinctions of
function, your role in the
commonwealth.
 
There were distinctions of rank
and of status.
There were distinctions of
course of gender and there were
distinctions of age--
parents and children--and many
of these distinctions tended to
overlap.
So I want now to look at them a
little more closely,
starting by looking at rank and
status,
the hierarchy that they
emphasize so much--
and here I'll skip along quite
smartly because you've had a
chance to read about this
already to some degree,
but I'll just reinforce some of
the main points.
Okay.
 
Well, at the top of the social
hierarchy, obviously enough,
stood the king and his
immediate family.
The king was not only the
greatest of the English
nobility,
which he was,
and the greatest single
landowner in the kingdom,
which he also was,
but he was also something
special.
 
The king was the 'anointed of
God' as they put it,
ritually anointed with sacred
oil at the time of the
coronation;
the fount of all secular
authority in the realm,
but also considered to be
ruling by the special grace of
God.
Beneath the crown came Dudley's
chivalry and that was itself
internally differentiated into,
on the one hand--and your
handout will help with this--
on the one hand,
the peerage,
and on the other hand the
gentry.
 
The peerage were the greater
nobility.
They were the nobles who were
distinguished by having
inheritable titles which could
be passed on to their sons:
dukes,
earls, marquises,
viscounts, barons,
lords.
They also had a favorable
position before the law.
They could only be tried by
their peers, usually in the
House of Lords when Parliament
sat.
They had the right to sit in
Parliament by virtue of their
birth and social position.
 
Alongside those great lay
nobles one can also place some
of the great churchmen,
the bishops,
the abbots of great
monasteries.
They also sat in Parliament in
the House of Lords because they
were the lords of the church--
but an important distinction,
of course,
was that their positions were
not inheritable.
 
They were appointed--in the
early sixteenth century
appointed by the pope,
though usually on the advice
and recommendation of the king.
 
So we've looked at the peerage,
the greater nobility.
Then there was the lesser
nobility which contemporaries
referred to usually as the
'gentry'.
They were themselves internally
differentiated into knights,
esquires and mere gentlemen.
 
Knights were created by the
monarch for service,
for service in war,
usually, or in government--as
indeed they still are.
 
High-ranking civil servants in
Britain and military officers
very often get a knighthood at
the end of their active careers,
though the notion of service
has broadened somewhat nowadays
to include other roles in
society.
So we have Sir Ian McKellen,
also known as Gandalf,
>.
 
We have Sir Paul McCartney,
of course, and we even have Sir
Mick Jagger
>
, which proves that he was just
a nice boy really all along.
>
 
So the appointment of knights,
the 'dubbing' of knights by the
monarch, continues of course.
 
In the sixteenth century they
were usually selected to be made
knights from amongst the leading
families of each of the forty
counties of the kingdom,
and the title could not be
inherited.
 
You had to be made a knight
again in each new generation.
Below them were the lesser
gentry of esquires and mere
gentlemen.
 
They had no title except the
right to be called 'Mister'.
Only a gentleman could be
called Mister,
and they had the right also to
bear a coat of arms.
Collectively,
the nobility,
both the peerage and the church
leaders and the gentry,
were the principal landowners
of England and Wales.
In the county of North
Yorkshire for example--
it's up here in the north of
England--
in the early sixteenth century
a study has been done which
shows that the nobility,
the peerage,
owned 27% of the land,
the gentry owned 46%,
and nearly all of the rest
belonged to the church.
Land was not only a source of
income, the rents which were
paid to the great landowners,
but it was also a source of
power over tenants;
it was a source of' 'lordship',
as they put it in this period,
lordship over men.
Some gentlemen owned only a
single small estate,
some had many,
and by the time you get to the
peerage some of them had vast
territories.
The Earl of Shrewsbury,
whom we'll encounter again at
various times,
owned a great deal of land in
the center of England in the
counties of Nottinghamshire,
Derbyshire and Shropshire,
and he was described at the
time as being like "a
prince in four counties in the
heart of England."
 
He was the biggest landowner by
far in that whole region.
So, in any one county those who
possessed the land constituted
its natural governing class and
some of them had been in that
position for generations.
 
But whatever pride they took in
their rank and their ancestry
they knew very well that it was
based ultimately upon the land
that they possessed--
upon their landed wealth.
One gentleman,
Sir John Lowther,
advised his sons as follows:
"Without...wealth (the
supporter and upholder of gentry
and worldly reputation) nobility
and gentility is a vain and
contemptible title in England
and always hath been...Preserve
your estate if you will preserve
your gentility and nobility of
blood,
which is nothing else but a
descent of riches."
A frank recognition of the
realities of the social
structure.
 
Okay.
 
So noblemen and gentlemen
possessed most landed property,
but of course they were only a
tiny proportion of the
population,
probably something like 2%.
The other 98% were the
'commonalty' and of these the
majority lived in the
countryside.
England in the 1520s,
the earliest period for which
we can make really good
population estimates,
had about 2.4 million people
and not more than 10% of them
lived in towns.
 
Indeed, only 5% of them lived
in towns that were bigger than
5,000 inhabitants.
 
5,000 inhabitants was
considered a good,
big town in the sixteenth
century.
Wales had a population of only
about a quarter of a million and
even fewer lived in towns.
 
It's a mountainous region,
very few urban settlements
except around the coast.
 
So we're dealing with an
overwhelmingly rural society,
but the commonalty were far
from being just an
undifferentiated mass of
peasants.
In rural society,
beneath the landowning
gentlemen who drew their income
from rents, people were normally
divided into four subordinate
groups.
There were yeomen,
there were husbandmen,
there were craftsmen and
tradesmen, and there were
cottagers and laborers.
 
You'll find definitions of
these different groups on your
handout.
 
Yeomen are sometimes defined as
being owner-occupiers who
possessed freehold land and they
sometimes were,
but in fact most of them were
tenant farmers.
The crucial thing about yeomen
is that they were substantial
tenant farmers:
people who employed labor;
people who could produce a
substantial marketable surplus
which they could sell to the
towns.
These were the people who were
sometimes described as the
better sort of people in their
villages or the chief
inhabitants.
 
Beneath them were husbandmen,
small family farmers,
generally with holdings of
under 30 acres or so;
enough to support their
families and to produce a modest
surplus to sell,
but relying for the most part
on their direct family labor.
 
Then there were village
craftsmen and tradesmen.
Some of them might be people of
substance.
Millers and blacksmiths were
able to make a good living,
for example.
 
Others were usually poor.
 
Tailors or alehouse keepers who
brewed ale were generally
relatively poor.
 
Most craftsmen fell somewhere
between the two and most of them
also farmed as well as
performing the duties of their
craft.
 
And finally there were the
cottagers and laborers.
They sometimes held a few acres
of land which they rented from a
local landlord or from a local
farmer.
Some of them might have a trade
from time to time,
but most of them relied upon
wages for at least a significant
part of their income,
working as farm laborers on the
holdings of bigger tenants.
 
Well, one can generalize in
that kind of way,
but the proportions of the
rural population that fell into
these different groups varied
enormously from place to place.
What you can say in general is
that rural society was highly
differentiated.
 
A large minority of big yeomen
farmers,
a broad middle band of people
who could get a secure living as
craftsmen or as husbandmen,
and another large minority,
probably about a quarter in the
early sixteenth century,
who put together a rather bare
hand-to-mouth living as
cottagers and laborers.
 
But most people still had
access to the land one way or
another.
 
Even cottagers and laborers
generally had a small holding
and they would have the right to
graze their animals on the
commons of their village;
rights of pasture.
Complete dependence upon wage
labor was still exceptional in
the countryside and I emphasize
that because that's something
that was going to change,
as we'll see,
in the course of the sixteenth
century.
What about the towns then?
 
The townspeople as I've said
were very much a minority but
they were a very significant
minority.
The towns ranged from tiny
market towns which came alive on
market day to what were
considered the great cities with
populations of above 5,000--
and the one truly significant
city,
the city of London down here in
the southeast with a population
in the early sixteenth century
which had already reached about
55,000.
So London was a significant
city by the standards of the
day.
 
I'll look at the distribution
of towns in another lecture,
but the thing to stress today
is that even small towns had a
much more variegated
occupational and social
structure than did country
villages.
They contained merchants.
 
They contained manufacturers.
 
They contained the small number
of highly prestigious
professional people;
lawyers, physicians.
They contained more clergy than
country villages and they
contained also large numbers of
unskilled laborers.
So much for the range of
occupations, but within that
range there were considerable
differentials of wealth and
status.
 
At the top the great merchants
of the cities could be men of
prodigious wealth who were
generally also the rulers of
their towns.
 
To give you just one example,
a man named Robert Jannys,
spelled J-a-n-n-y-s.
 
He was a grocer and he was the
mayor of the city of Norwich,
here in the East Anglian
region, in the early sixteenth
century.
 
In 1523, a tax was levied for
which the return survived and so
we know that Robert Jannys'
personal tax return was bigger
than the entire city of
Rochester,
which was the biggest city down
here in Kent.
He was a plutocrat and there
were men of such prodigious
wealth in all of England's major
cities.
Beneath the urban elites were
the average master craftsmen of
the towns,
those who provided clothing,
leather goods,
metal wares,
and so forth from their own
workshops.
The principal distinction
amongst these people was between
those who were independent
master craftsmen with their own
workshop and those who were
known as 'journeymen',
people who worked for wages by
the day,
skilled workers serving as
employees of the master
craftsmen.
 
Among the master craftsmen,
most of them worked entirely on
their own account,
producing and retailing their
goods,
but there were also those in
some cities who had become
virtually employees of
large-scale merchant capitalists
who gave them raw materials to
work on,
collected the finished
products, and marketed the
goods.
This was known as the
'putting-out system'.
You put out work to skilled
workers and you collect the
goods and market them,
and I mention it specifically
because it was the form of
organization in England's most
important single industry,
the cloth industry,
the manufacture of woolen cloth
most of which was exported to
Europe and which was very
prominent in certain regions.
Norwich was a great cloth city,
so were many of the other towns
of East Anglia,
southern England,
and parts of the West Country.
 
Okay.
 
We've looked then at some of
the major distinctions of wealth
and status, rank and degree.
 
Let's turn to two other
categories that contemporaries
tended to stress:
gender and age.
For the most part,
so far in talking about wealth
and status and rank I've been
talking about adult men and to
do that is an accurate
reflection of the attitudes of
the time,
the attitudes which they held
towards the position of women
and of the young.
Women and young people took
their place in the social order
from either their husbands or
their fathers or their masters,
and to that extent it's been
said their social identities
were 'subsumed',
absorbed, into the social
identities of the adult male
heads of the households within
which they lived.
 
When people talked about the
social order as a whole,
women and children became
almost invisible;
they were just subsumed into
the identities of adult male
householders.
 
Nevertheless,
contemporary moralists did have
very clear views about the place
of women and children and the
young in general,
and in both cases that place
was a subordinate one.
 
Now of course women (and some
of the young) were distinguished
by social rank,
just as adult men were.
Some women in particular might
hold positions of great status
and power by virtue of their
birth and their inheritance,
and we'll meet quite a few of
them in the course of the
sixteenth century.
 
But nonetheless,
although women were obviously
distinguished by their rank,
they were also collectively
distinguished by gender,
the social roles deemed proper
for the different sexes,
and such distinctions were also
fundamental to the structure of
the social order,
as the Homily on Obedience
makes clear.
In general, women's place was
seen as that of being dutiful
adjunct to men as daughters,
as wives, as mothers,
or as sisters.
 
They had little recognized role
outside the household and few
opportunities to pursue an
independent career--at least in
theory it was so.
 
That subordination was
justified by the authority of
scripture,
Saint Paul was constantly
quoted on that point,
and it was also justified in
English law,
especially the law of property.
According to English common
law, property was vested in male
household heads.
 
An unmarried woman who was
described in law--
using the Norman French that
they used in the law courts--
she was described in law as a
femme sole.
You'll find the term on your
handout.
An unmarried woman could hold
property;
she could make a contract;
she could engage independently
in economic life.
 
But a married woman was subject
to the legal doctrine of
coverture.
 
She was described in the law as
a femme covert and her
rights were seriously curtailed
by coverture.
She could hold no goods
independently in marriage unless
a separate trust had been
erected for her.
There was no community of goods.
 
Her husband got a life interest
in any lands which she brought
to the marriage.
 
All of the movable goods of the
family were his and her rights
were limited to her 'dower'.
 
That was usually a third of the
land and goods of the family
which was reserved when her
husband died to keep her in her
widowhood and would eventually
revert to the main heir of the
family.
 
So that was the law as regards
women and in particular their
property rights,
and all of this was bolstered
by widespread assumptions about
the allegedly inferior
capacities of women,
not only in terms of physical
strength but also in terms of an
alleged weakness of intellectual
capacity and emotional
stability.
(The piece on the longer
reading list by Crawford and
Mendelson on Women in Early
Modern England has an
excellent lucid discussion of
these issues in its opening
chapter,
especially the medical
attitudes towards women at the
time).
So, as a result,
any failings which were
observable in women were
attributed not to their unequal
opportunities or their
restricted education but
supposedly their natural
weaknesses,
and the fact that many men also
shared these weaknesses was
conveniently overlooked.
 
Well, the official view of the
church on all of this was again
read out every year in another
homily, the Homily on
Marriage.
 
The Homily on Marriage
declared that--I'm quoting--
"The woman is a weak
creature not endowed with the
like strength and constancy of
mind.
Therefore, they be the sooner
disquieted and they be the more
prone to weak affections and
dispositions of the mind more
than men be."
 
And the homilist went on that
therefore "a woman must be
spared and borne with,
the rather in that she is the
weaker vessel"
--
a phrase from the Homily on
Marriage which was often
repeated.
 
The same homily went on to
advise that "men and women
should live in a perpetual
friendship,"
but it was one based,
of course, upon the assumption
of female acceptance of male
authority.
One of the greater preachers of
the late sixteenth century,
William Perkins,
a great puritan preacher who
preached in the city of
Cambridge,
said as follows concerning
husbands and wives:
"The goodman or master of
the family is a person in whom
resteth the private and proper
government of the whole
household: and he comes to it
not by election...
but by the ordinance of God,
settled even in the course of
nature."
 
And he continued--"The
goodwife of the house is a
person which yieldeth help and
assistance in government to the
master of the family.
 
For he is, as it were,
the prince and chief ruler;
she is the associate."
 
Well, how far these
prescriptions were actually
observed in practice we'll see
in the next lecture,
and also if you wish to work on
it there's an abundant
literature on that issue.
 
But these were the prescriptive
values of the time.
Now of course women,
whatever their formal
subordination to their husbands
and their fathers,
did of course bear some
authority in the commonwealth
alongside their husbands.
 
They bore authority over their
children and over the servants
and apprentices,
the young people who lived
within their households.
 
Servants were generally young,
generally aged between about
fourteen and the mid-twenties.
 
They were generally hired on
annual contracts and they lived
in the households of their
masters and mistresses,
and in return for their labor
they were fed and clothed and
given lodging and a small wage
which was very often paid only
once a year.
 
Some servants stayed with
particular households for years
and might form quite a close
bond with their masters and
mistresses,
but most moved on at the end of
each year.
 
They would go to the hiring
fair and be hired into a new
household,
moving around an area from
village to village until they
would eventually settle down and
marry in their mid- to late-
twenties.
In the towns,
the duties of servants were
largely domestic and servants
were mostly women,
leading some towns to have an
unbalanced sex ratio in favor of
women.
 
In the countryside,
both male and female servants
worked on the farm,
engaged in domestic tasks or in
agricultural tasks.
 
They were known as 'servants in
husbandry' because they engaged
in husbandry--agricultural work.
 
But whatever the case servants
were a very large and a very
distinctive part of society,
a distinctive part of the labor
force in particular in
sixteenth-century England.
It's been estimated that
perhaps a quarter of the entire
population lived in other
people's households as servants,
and it's been estimated that
60% of the population aged
between fifteen and twenty-four
were living as servants at any
one time--
so it was a distinctive element
of the population and a
distinctive phase of the life
cycle for most young people.
 
While they were living through
that stage they lived under the
authority of a master and a
mistress in a household which
perhaps did a great deal to
shape their social expectations,
particularly their expectations
regarding authority;
part of their socialization.
 
Apprentices were predominantly
urban and they were usually
male, young men in their late
teens and early twenties for the
most part.
 
One tends to think of
apprentices as little boys sent
out to learn a craft at the age
of seven or ten.
In fact, they were more like
modern students.
They were generally in their
late teens and early twenties,
and they had been bound by an
indenture,
a legal indenture,
to a master to learn a trade
over a period of years.
 
Usually, apprentices were
migrants to the towns.
They'd come in to learn a
trade, were bound,
lived in with their masters,
and, like servants,
they were very numerous.
 
It's been estimated that in
1550 about 10% of the population
of London were apprentices.
 
They differed from servants in
that they tended to stay with
their master for the whole
period of their training,
which was usually a period of
seven years.
They enjoyed a superior status
because they had superior
prospects in life.
 
One day they would be skilled
journeymen and then perhaps
master craftsmen themselves and
they were aware of this
distinction.
 
But in the meantime they too
lived very much under the
authority of their masters.
 
So most of the young then lived
in positions of subordination
and they had social identities
which were merged with those of
the adult householders under
whose authority they lived.
To give you one example of this
I recently encountered,
I was looking at the deaths
recorded in parish registers in
a plague year in the early
seventeenth century and it was
striking that servants were not
recorded under their own names.
When servants had died of the
plague and were buried they were
put down in the parish register
as "Robert Foster's
maid" or "a man of
John Atkinson"
or terms like this,
the actual name of the servant
not mentioned.
 
They're just anonymous;
they're attributed to their
master or their mistress when
they were buried.
It's just a striking example of
that kind of social submergence
within the identities of their
superiors.
And outside the household too
the prevailing ideal of the age
was what's been called
gerontocratic.
That is to say,
the old should rule;
the young should serve and show
respect.
The moralists of the time when
they wrote about youth
conventionally saw it as a time
of hope but also of danger.
The young were conventionally
portrayed as being unusually
subject to fits of passion,
to rashness,
to volatility,
to intemperance,
and to sexual lasciviousness.
 
Where they got this idea from
one can't imagine.
>
 
Wisdom and self-control were
regarded as coming only with
age,
and accordingly there was a
preference for age and seniority
in all institutional life.
Well, one could say,
"well,
that's just the same
today," but one important
difference is that in the
sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries a far larger
proportion of the population
were young.
 
The high birth rates of the
time and the low life expectancy
meant that the population was
far younger than is the case
today.
 
Far fewer people lived through
to their fifties and even fewer
to their sixties when they
enjoyed these positions of
authority.
 
So then the young lived also in
a situation of subordination.
True adulthood came only when
they eventually married and
achieved economic independence
and had households or workshops
or their own.
 
Then young men were transformed
into masters of families,
young women were transformed
into mistresses of families,
and their place in the social
order shifted upwards
accordingly.
 
From that point on,
differences in their rank were
paramount for men in the public
domain of society at large,
though within the household
differences of gender of course
still held their place.
 
So to sum up,
this was a very highly
structured and stratified
society.
It was inegalitarian in its
social ideals.
It was conceived of as a
commonwealth,
as an organic whole,
but one constituted of people
whose opportunities and
experiences were very far from
uniform or equal,
and that structured inequality
was taken to be part of the
natural order of society.
Indeed, it was taken to be
ordained by God,
as we've seen.
 
It was a predominantly rural
society in which most people
gained their livings from the
land but in which a large
minority were also engaged in
manufactures and in trade.
It was a world in which most
people still aspired to gain
their living relatively
independently,
on the land or by practicing a
trade,
but in which a large minority
already depended on selling
their labor and skills to
others.
Throughout the whole structure,
the household was the principal
place not only of residence but
of economic production and it
was the most immediate unit of
authority under its master and
mistress.
 
It's been said that to a very
large extent social organization
in this period was domestic
organization focused on the
household,
be it the humble household or
the great household of the
aristocracy or indeed of the
monarch himself.
 
So next time I'll take a closer
look at how those thousands of
households functioned:
on the roles of men,
women and children within them,
on their priorities and
strategies,
their basic values,
how they were formed,
and how, so far as we can tell,
they lived.
 
 
 
