Professions, Ideology and the Middling Sort in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

There is a long tradition in social theory and historical writing which makes a connection between ‘the rise of the professions’, the evolution of the middle classes, and the making of the modern industrial world. Consequently it is often taken for granted that before 1750 the professions were numerically insignificant and tied largely to the interests of the aristocracy and gentry.¹ Yet recent research on doctors, lawyers and clergymen is opening new perspectives which suggest that it is time to reconsider some of our preconceptions about the long-term history of the professions. Most notably, viewed from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social and numerical prominence of groups such as doctors and lawyers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appears much less singular than was previously imagined. For example, thanks to a ten-fold increase between 1485 and 1640 in the number of men qualified to practise as attorneys or barristers in England’s two-tiered legal profession, the ratio of lawyers to population as a whole was roughly the same in the mid-seventeenth as it was in the early twentieth century.²