Abstract
In his Cambridge inaugural lecture in November 1989, Professor Patrick Collinson attempted to re-establish the common ground linking two increasingly separated areas of historical debate when he used his platform to call for ‘a new political history’ of early modern England, ‘an account of political processes which is also social’.1 In reflecting on what I will call ‘the politics of the parish’, this chapter also seeks to explore the opportunities for a ‘social history with the politics put back in’; but in a rather different sense.
This chapter is based upon a James Ford Special Lecture delivered at the Univesity of Oxford in May 1993. I wish to thank Adam Fox, Malcolm Gaskill, Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle, Naomi Tadmor, Andrew Wood and David Levine, all of whom read and commented upon the original text, for their advice and criticism, and the members of seminars and lecture audiences in Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Liverpool and Lund who have discussed particular issues with me. I am especially grateful to all those who have generously allowed me to refer to, or quote from, their unpublished doctoral theses.
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Notes and References
P. Collinson, De Republica Anghrum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990), p. 14.
Quoting J. W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 49; and
A. Macfarlane et al., Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge, 1977), p. 187.
The phrase quoted is from J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), p. xiii.
For recent attempts to reconceptualise the local community, see C. Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English Local History, Department of English Local History Occasional Papers, 4th series (Leicester, 1987); and
Phythian-Adams, ‘Introduction: An Agenda for English Local History’, in C. Phythian-Adams (ed.), Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester, 1993), pp. 1–23. On social networks and power, see
M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 1, 13.
Quoting D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–1600 (Oxford, 1986), p. 28; and Scott, Domination, p. 3.
W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge, 1989), p. 123.
D. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire, 1500–1800 (London, 1992), ch. 3; and
A. P. Fox, ‘Aspects of Oral Culture and its Development in Early Modern England’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), ch. 3.
N. Tadmor, ‘Concepts of the Family in Five Eighteenth-Century Texts’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), esp. pp. 62–85, 132–7.
As is powerfully argued in G. Schochet, ‘Patriarchalism, Politics and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England’, Historical Journal, vol. 12 (1969), pp. 413–41.
S. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 38–9.
T. K. Harevan, ‘The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change’, American Historical Review, vol. 96 (1991), pp. 107, 115.
R. E. Pahl, Divisions of Labour (Oxford, 1984), p. 20, and chs 1–2 passim;
R. Wall, ‘Work, Welfare and the Family: An Illustration of the Adaptive Family Economy’, in L. Bonfield et al. (eds), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), p. 265.
M. Prior, ‘Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford, 1500–1800’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (London, 1985), p. 95.
P. Thompson, ‘Women in the Fishing: The Roots of Power Between the Sexes’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 27 (1985), p. 15.
R. Houlbrooke (ed.), English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries (Oxford, 1988), p. 65;
D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Sodety: Whickham, 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 319–20; Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London’, p. 147. Cf.
S. Wright, ‘“Churmaids, Huswyfes and Hucksters”: The Employment of Women in Tudor and Stuart Salisbury’, in L. Charles and L. Duffin (eds), Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1985), p. 105. It is worth noting that such evidence is most commonly to be found in accounts of the making of nuncupative wills, which not infrequently contain expressions of feeling which were omitted from more formal testamentary documents.
Quoted in A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London, 1993), p. 9. Records of litigation can provide examples of husbands anxious not to make decisions without their wives’ consent. One litigant declared that ‘hee cannot perfectly answere . . . before hee have had conference’ with his wife; another, after ‘his wife came to him and did stand with him … changed his former speaking, and saide hee woulde pay no money’: see
T. Stretton, ‘Women and Litigation in the Elizabethan Court of Requests’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1993), pp. 155–6.
R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents, Vol. II: Commerce, Finance and the Poor Law (London, 1924), pp. 313–16;
P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 42 (1989), p. 337; Erickson, Women and Property, p. 36 and chs 9–10.
Erickson, Women and Property, pp. 9, 14; R. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (London, 1984), p. 114. For representations of marital discord in popular humour, see
E. Foyster, ‘A Laughing Matter? Marital Discord and Gender Control in Seventeenth-Century England’, Rural History, vol. 4 (1993), pp. 3–21. Women’s activity as litigants is illuminatingly discussed in Stretton, ‘Women and Litigation’, ch. 2 and passim.
Houlbrooke (ed.), English Family Life, p. 65 and ch. 2 passim. Cf. K. Wrightson, English Sodety, 1580–1680 (London, 1982), pp. 95ff. For deathbed interventions, see e.g. Levine and Wrightson, Industrial Society, p. 290; Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London’, p. 146.
S. Amussen, ‘Governors and Governed: Class and Gender Relations in English Villages, 1590–1725’ (unpublished Brown University Ph.D. thesis, 1982), pp. 193–4, 206–7; C. Issa, ‘Obligation and Choice: Aspects of Family and Kinship in Seventeenth-Century County Durham’ (unpublished University of St Andrews Ph.D. thesis, 1987), p. 259.
Alluding to A. Munro, Friend of My Youth (Penguin edn, Toronto, 1991), p. 60: ‘One thing she has noticed about married women, and that is how many of them have to go about creating their husbands. They have to start ascribing preferences, opinions, dictatorial ways. . . This way, bewildered, sidelong-looking men are made over into husbands, heads of households.’ The same process can work in reverse, of course.
I. Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Service and Coming of Age in Seventeenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, vol. 3 (1988), pp. 41–64. See also Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, 1994).
For an illuminating discussion of these issues, see P. Griffiths, ‘Some Aspects of the Social History of Youth in Early Modern England, with Particular Reference to the Period, c.1590–c.1640’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), ch. 7, quoting p. 451.
M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), chs 4, 6. See also, among the many studies of this issue, Wrightson, English Sodety, ch. 3; Houlbrooke, The English Family, ch. 4; M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 88–98; R. M. Smith, ‘Marriage Processes in the English Past: Some Continuities’, in Bonfield et al. (eds), World We Have Gained, esp. pp. 67–9, 76ff, 96;
P. Rushton, ‘Property, Power and Family Networks: The Problem of Disputed Marriage in Early Modern England’ Journal of Family History, vol. 11 (1986), pp. 205–19.
Wrightson, English Society, pp. 44–51; D. Cressy, ‘Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England’ Past and Present, vol. 13 (1986), pp. 38–69; Issa, ‘Obligation and Choice’, passim; A. Mitson, ‘The Significance of Kinship Networks in the Seventeenth Century: South-West Nottinghamshire’, in Phythian-Adams (ed.), Sodeties, Cultures and Kinship, pp. 24–76;
K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1995), pp. 82–103 and postscript.
See e.g. K. Wrightson and D. Levine, ‘Death in Whickham’, in J. Walter and R. S. Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Sodal Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 156ff;
D. Beaver, ‘“Sown in Dishonour, Raised in Glory”: Death, Ritual and Social Organisation in Northern Gloucestershire, 1590–1690’, Social History, vol. 17 (1992), pp. 389–419.
Quoted in I. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), p. 84.
Quoted in S. Hindle, ‘Aspects of the Relationship of the State and Local Society in Early Modern England: With Special Reference to Cheshire, c.1590–1630’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), pp. 256–7.
Amussen, Ordered Society, pp. 104, 152ff. Ingram, Church Courts, p. 165, describes ‘credit’ and ‘honesty’ as ‘the lower class equivalents of gentry notions of honour’. See also the important discussion in C. Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England’, Social History, vol. 18 (1993), pp. 163–83.
N. Alldridge, ‘Loyalty and Identity in Chester Parishes, 1540–1640’, in S.J. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion (London, 1988), pp. 110–11.
Hindle, ‘State and Local Society’, p. 237. There is now an extensive literature on the subject of mediation and reconciliation in medieval and early modern England. See, e.g., M. Ingram, ‘Communities and Courts: Law and Disorder in Early Seventeenth-Century Wiltshire’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1977), pp. 125–9; M. Clanchy, ‘Law and Love in the Middle Ages’, and
J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours”: Litigation and Human relations in Early Modern England’, both in J. Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 47–67, 167–7;
E. Powell, ‘Settlement of Disputes by Arbitration in Fifteenth-Century England’, Law and History Review, vol. 2 (1984), 21–43.
J. S. Craig, ‘Co-operation and Initiatives: Elizabethan Churchwardens and the Parish Accounts of Mildenhall’, Social History, vol. 18 (1993), p. 376. For some sceptical remarks on the extent to which neighbourhood transcended social distance, see Archer, Pursuit of Stability, p. 80.
Alldridge, ‘Loyalty and Identity’, pp. 106–7; Hindle, ‘State and Local Society’, pp. 412–13. Cf. the analyses of East Anglian parish officers in Craig, ‘Co-operation and Initiatives’, pp. 363–4; and H. R. French, ‘Chief Inhabitants and their Areas of Influence: Local Ruling Groups in Essex and Suffolk Parishes, 1630–1720’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1993), ch. 3.
A point well made in R. A. Davies, ‘Community, Parish and Poverty: Old Swinford, 1660–1730’ (unpublished University of Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 1987), pp. 297 ff, where analysis of social networks suggests that rich and poor ‘inhabited rather different social worlds’ save for those occasions when patron-client ties were activated for specific purposes.
Quoted in A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), p. 193. For the probable influence of status differences on the outcome of mediation, see Amussen, Ordered Sodety, pp. 174–5.
See, e.g., J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (Borthwick Papers No. 58, York, 1980); Ingram, Church Courts, ch. 10; Amussen, Ordered Society, pp. 101–4;
L. Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 35 (1993), pp. 1–21;
J. A. Sharpe, ‘Witchcraft and Women in Seventeenth-Century England: Some Northern Evidence’, Continuity and Change, vol. 6 (1991), pp. 179–99;
C. Holmes, ‘Women: Witnesses and Witches’, Past and Present 140 (1993), pp. 45–78;
M. J. Gaskill, ‘Attitudes to Crime in Early Modern England, with Special Reference to Witchcraft, Coining and Murder’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1994), chs 2, 7.
The classical accounts of English witchcraft accusations are A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970); and
K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), chs 16–17. Both explore tensions in neighbourly relations but pay less attention to the question of gender relations. For more recent studies exploring more fully the question of witchcraft and gender, see
C. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: the Politics of Popular belief (Oxford, 1984), pp. 61–3, 84–8, 149–52, and the works of Sharpe, Holmes and Gaskill cited in n. 43 above.
M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, vol. 105 (1984), quoting p. 97;
D. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 116–36.
S. Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, vol. 9 (1994), pp. 391–419.
See, e.g., P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988);
A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), ch. 7; T. Wales, ‘Poverty, Poor Relief and the Life-Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk’, and
W. Newman Brown, ‘The Receipt of Poor Relief and Family Situation: Alden-ham, Hertfordshire 1630–90’, both in R. M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 351–404, 405–22; J. Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in Walter and Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order, quoting p. 125; P. Rushton, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish and the Community in North-East England, 1600–1800’, Northern History, vol. 25 (1989), pp. 135–52;
A. L. Beier, ‘Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England’, in A. L. Beier et al. (eds), The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 201–40; Archer, Pursuit of Stability, p. 86 and ch. 5; Levine and Wrightson, Industrial Society, pp. 344–55, 377–81.
F. G. Emmison (ed.), Early Essex Town Meetings (Chichester, 1970), p. 101.
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 2, 6.
S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 21, 23, 34, 43.
For the concept of ‘structural amnesia’, see J. Goody and I. Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968), p. 33;
R. B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 139–40.
See, e.g., B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in She West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley, 1980);
K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982);
P. Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modem England (Cambridge, 1984); Manning, Village Revolts. For protests intended to secure the right ordering of the market in times of dearth and the customary ‘moral economy’, see also Thompson, Customs in Common, chs 4–5;
J. Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 47–84;
J. Walter, ‘A “Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, Past and Present, vol. 107 (1985), pp. 90–143.
W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (London, 1957), pp. 104–9.
A. Wood, ‘Social Conflict and Change in the Mining Communities of North-West Derbyshire, c. 1600–1700’, International Review of Social History, vol. 38 (1993), pp. 31–58; and Wood, ‘Industrial Development, Social Change and Popular Politics in the Mining Area of North-West Derbyshire, c.1600–1700’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1994), chs 4–6.
J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 3. Bohstedt is here characterising riot in general.
A. J. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 26, 35, 89; Levine and Wrightson, Industrial Sodety, pp. 359–69, 389–427. Cf.
J. Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London, 1981), ch. 8.
Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 254–5. For a recent survey of eighteenth-century industrial protest, see J. Rule, Albion’s People: English Sodety, 1714–1815 (London, 1992), pp. 201 ff.
M. S. Byford, ‘The Price of Protestantism: Assessing the Impact of Religious Change on Elizabethan Essex: The Cases of Heydon and Colchester, 1558–1594’ (unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1988), p. 426. Dr Byford uses this phrase to characterise the developing religious position of William Sheppard of Heydon.
R. M. Smith, ‘“Modernisation” and the Corporate Medieval Village Community in England: Some Sceptical Reflections’, in A. H. R. Baker and D. Gregory (eds), Explorations in Historical Geography (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 140–79. Other relevant discussions of characteristics of the state and political society include
D. A. Carpenter, ‘English Politics in Politics, 1258–1267’, Past and Present, vol. 36 (1992), pp. 3–42;
G. Harris, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, vol. 138 (1993), pp. 28–57;
P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985), ch. 1;
M. Braddick, ‘State Formation and Social Change in Early Modern England: A Problem Stated and Approaches Suggested’, Social History, vol. 16 (1991), pp. 1–17.
See, e.g., Wrightson, English Society, ch. 6; Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, passim; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modem England, 1550–1750 (London, 1984), esp. chs 3 and 8;
C. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), chs 4–5. For a superb synthesis of the historiography of state formation in early modern England, see Hindle, ‘State and Local Society’, ch. 1.
J. Maltby, ‘Approaches to the Study of Religious Conformity in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England: With Special Reference to Cheshire and the Diocese of Lincoln’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), pp. 36 ff;
D. A. Spaeth, ‘Common Prayer? Popular Observance of the Anglican Liturgy in Restoration Wiltshire’, in Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People, p. 127; and Spaeth, ‘Parsons and Parishioners: Lay-Clerical Conflict and Popular Piety in Wiltshire Villages, 1660–1740’ (unpublished Brown University Ph.D. thesis, 1985), pp. 15–16, 31.
See. e.g., K. Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Brewer and Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People, pp. 21–46; J. R. Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford, 1986), esp. chs 5–8. The phrase quoted is from MacCulloch, Suffolk, p. 342.
M. K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 206–11. Cf. MacCulloch, Suffolk, p. 317.
A. R. Pennie. ‘The Evolution of Puritan Mentality in an Essex Cloth Town: Dedham and the Stour Valley, 1560–1640’ (unpublished University of Sheffield Ph.D. thesis, 1990), pp. 86–7;
P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1988), pp. 145–6;
C. Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Sodety Under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), pp. 279–84 and conclusion.
J. A. Sharpe, ‘Enforcing the Law in the Seventeenth-Century English Village’, in V. A. C. Gatrell et al. (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500 (London, 1980), p. 114;
R. Cust and P. G. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, vol. 54 (1981), 51;
T. A. Davies, ‘The Quakers in Essex, 1655–1725’ (unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1986), p. 19.
Macfarlane et al., Reconstructing Historical Communities, pp. 144–8; R. von Friedeberg, ‘Reformation of Manners and the Social Composition of Offenders in an East Anglian Cloth Village: Earls Colne, Essex, 1531–1642’, fournal of British Studies, vol. 29 (1990), pp. 354, 376–7;
J. S. Craig, ‘Reformation Politics and Polemics in Sixteenth-Century East Anglian Market Towns’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), ch. 4. For further examples of such superimposition, see
D. Underdown, Fire From Heaven: The Life of an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), pp. 7, 23, 27–32, 34, 39, 42, 151–2; Mcintosh, Community Transformed, pp. 181–205 and chs. 3, 6.
I have in mind both the longstanding debate over the sociology of Puritanism and the more recent controversies occasioned by the arguments of K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York, 1979) and
D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–60 (Oxford, 1985).
H. Newby, ‘The Deferential Dialectic’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 17 (1975), pp. 139–64; Wrightson, English Society, pp. 57–61; Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 21–24, quoting pp. 21–2.
Alldridge, ‘Loyalty and Identity’, pp. 93–5; P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 182 n. 71, 195; Amussen, Ordered Sodety, pp. 138 ff.
This point and the following discussion are influenced by Q. Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 111, 114.
J. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 168–9;
F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 15–16, 124.
See, e.g., the petitions quoted in K. Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England’, in E. and S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914 (Brighton, 1981), pp. 19–20.
Cultural distancing is a central theme of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, and of Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1983). Other relevant works include, e.g., Collinson, Birthpangs, esp. ch. 5; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, esp. ch. 3; Rule, Experience of Labour, ch. 5; Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 33–4; R. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Sodety, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1973), chs 6–8;
P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 11; Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 174 ff; Rollison, Local Origins, esp. chs 3, 10; Fox, ‘Aspects of Oral Culture’, esp. chs 2–3.
K. Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1994), pp. 28–51. Cf. the later emegence of ‘polite society’, as discussed in, e.g., Borsay, Urban Renaissance, chs 9–10; and
P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3.
K. Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in P. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 45 ff. For a fuller discussion, see Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People”’.
Wood, ‘Industrial Development’, pp. 110–11; G. C. Smith, ‘“The Knowing Multitude”: Popular Culture and the Evangelical Revival in Wiltshire, 1739–1850’ (unpublished University of Toronto Ph.D. thesis, 1992), p. 149. Cf. R. Malcolmson, ‘“A Set of Ungovernable People”: The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in Brewer and Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People, pp. 85–9; Levine and Wrightson, Industrial Society, pp. 274–8; Rollison, Local Origins, ch. 10; J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 1.
R. W. Scribner, ‘Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?’, History of European Ideas, vol. 10 (1989), p. 182.
K. Snell, ‘Deferential Bitterness: The Social Outlook of the Rural Proletariat in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England and Wales’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), p. 162. As has been observed in another context, ‘the history of discourse is not a simple linear sequence in which new patterns overcome the old, but a complex dialogue in which these patterns persist in transforming each other’:
J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago, 1989), pp. ix-x.
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Wrightson, K. (1996). The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England. In: Griffiths, P., Fox, A., Hindle, S. (eds) The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24834-6_2
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