Introduction

Abstract

Few historical essays can have had a more enduring effect than Jack Hexter’s article attacking ‘the myth of the Tudor middle class’.¹ Though literary critics, politicians and students have continued to see early modern England in terms of the rise of the middle class, few professional historians have dared to do so; indeed, the issue has hardly seemed worthy of discussion. With a few exceptions, even Marxist historians have adopted alternative social classifications, playing down the importance of middle-class or bourgeois groups during this period.² Meanwhile, the attention of historians has focused elsewhere. The great storm over the gentry in the 1950s and 1960s was succeeded by an emphasis on ‘history from below’, concentrating on the lower classes and ‘popular culture’. This has in turn given way to renewed concern with the gentry, even the aristocracy.