Social mobility in Britain between 1550 and 1700

English Social History

Cultural, economic, and political transformations tore at the fabric of England's social fabric from 1550 through 1700. The rise of the gentry classes, expansion of commerce, waning feudalism, and the burgeoning industrial revolution paralleled the governmental shift from monarchical rule to the power of Parliament. At the same time, flowering demographics provided a new insurgence of workers, citizens, and social agents throughout England; the economy was forced to mirror responsively. Out of the shifting seas could have come the frustrated truncation of old world social mores evidenced throughout other Western lands, but instead came a new life of revolution, a transfusion of commercial ingenuity, and increased potential for social mobility in Stuart England.

At the heart of the new social texture was the transformation of the economy taking place throughout England at the dawn of the sixteenth century. In both the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, the highlands of England witnessed a filtration of recent urban social revelations. The population boomed, and the effects of the demographic increase rippled through Chippenham, Orwel, and Willingham. While regional diversification was clearly evident between the three villages, one on the calk, another on the clay uplands, and the last on the fens, the similarities are just as striking. Despite the important geographical disparity, the Subsidy Rolls of 1524-1525 contrast greatly with the Episcopal records taken forty years prior. The population was booming, and by the hearth taxes of the 1660s, the tiny villages of the British hinterland were, in spite of territorial difficulty, flourishing.

The relative divergences of the three villages are melded together in the three- to four-fold population growth that took place between 1550 and 1700. The Scientific Revolution took the agricultural mainstay by storm, and soon the more financially substantial farmer was ballooning his supply to meet the demand of urban populations. At the same time, the small landholder began to lose out, and the less-accumulated farmer faced increasingly meager livelihoods. Gradually, an advancing capitalist class developed in opposition to the striving worker whose grasp on wealth and what Wrightson calls the "acquisitiveness" grew more and more nebulous.

In the classic Marxist social struggle, the working class laborer is squeezed out of the prosperous economic equation, surpassed so in production by his more financial superiors that his ability to compete in the market becomes irrelevant. In late Tudor English villages, the simplified Marxist paradigm colored not only the urban economy, but also the national internal social fabric spread throughout the country. Day laborers nationwide who owned no land were left without the rank, status, and income to survive the metamorphosis from feudal society to functioning economy. Suddenly, distinctions in social class became apparent in the previously cohesive peasantry class that comprised a large cultural majority of England.

Until the end of the late medieval period, the peasantry of the English working classes was considered a coherent social entity; blacksmiths, cobblers, husbandmen, and village craftsmen all compromised the same laboring cultural enclave. Despite their different villages, the Willingham peasants understood the daily toil of those in Orwel, and vice-versa. Their social affinity was affirmed on all levels; John Harrison and Sir Thomas Smith divided society into 'four degrees.' At the top of their English hierarchy were "those whom their blood doth make noble and known."

The aristocracy bore arms as "gentlemen," constituting a specific order of society so demarcated by their heralds. Their cultural status was infused with symbols that separated them from the workers no longer tied to their lands as serfs, but with equal imposition.

Beneath their accolades of wealth and banners, the citizenry and yeomanry filled the social spaces above the workers. Smith argued that these two groups had the possibility to "commonly live wealthy," a large and ever-growing chasm that separated them from the working classes. In that group, the "day-labourers, poor husbandmen, landless merchants, retailers, copyholders, and artificers" comprised "the fourth sort of men which do not rule." Smith's birthplace in the first group of description was the bastion of his approach to social theory, and further evidence to conclude that the wealthy saw the workers' backs as the hidden underbelly of English culture. Their emphasis was placed not upon the masses, but instead upon the ruling few whose place grew more nebulous by the turn of the century. By ignoring the lowest classes, the aristocracy would be taken by surprise over the next two hundred years as civil war restructured the hackneyed establishment and the middle two groups Smith delineated would become the powerful middle class unafraid to wield its real strength.

In 1550, social mobility was openly discussed at two levels: among the yeomanry, whose proximity to the noble classes proffered cultural exposure to the age-old aristocracy and the financial lucidity to afford the luxuries of the nominal elite, and those in the noble classes whose marriages to better themselves were penned through popular literature still firmly a part of artistic history. Like in the words of Shakespeare and his peers, the import still lay with the nobility, and the extended society was viewed as historically static. But the scientific revolution and its corresponding philosophers brought new approach to Europe; Descartes and Bacon laid to rest former superstitions from the feudal era and the agrarian economy. With modern math and science, new explanations were at the forefront of public thought; as the shores, villages, and cities of Europe teemed with the explosion of new life, market relationships came into new definition as well.

The birth of the early modern came in the change from feudalism to capitalism, but not in the starkest terms later defined by Marx. Apart from historiographical wars, Wrightson's interpretation of the socioeconomic transformation of Europe that began in the villages of England began in 1450, but by 1600, the one hundred and fifty year gulf brought mass population rise and a roughly 600% on the prices of foodstuffs. The resulting shifts were witnessed most clearly in the villages narrated in Contrasting Communities, were the status quo was forced to give way to the destruction of new demands, supplies, and economic fortune. Very quickly, the established pattern of life in Britain was forced into a modern spectrum, one in which inflation was the only thing that matched the growing numbers of mouths to feed.

The mass inflation financially devastated the peasantry, Wrightson purports to the accord of his academic peers. "Landless peasants and the urban classes were devastated by inflation," he explains, but the "fairly well-to-do landowners and farmers benefited from increased demand and higher prices." With survival of the working class an inherent necessity of the early modern England, it was clear that new economic opportunities would have to become manifest for the nation to survive its fiscal and social strains.

Wrightson answers this dilemma in the last half of his book, focusing his attention on the income of England and Wales. Between the early 1560s and the late 1640s, the combined income of the two countries doubled. With it, the struggling demographic split between the upper class and the lower classes widened, but the growing middle class found strength and sustenance in agricultural production and the development of new industries. As urban growth became a reality and London blossomed into a teeming, lively center of relevant commerce, the Keynesian trickle-down theory in application brought viable opportunities to the newly minted urban labor class. The industrial revolution began to develop, and at the same time, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment focused attention on the importance of institutionally recognizing non-nobility. The role of the church became an intrinsic part of village life, offering early-day welfare to the struggling peasants leftover from the economic revolution. In the poverty stricken communities of the most economically irrelevant villages, the cottage industries were served in turn by social cottage services that helped mollify the vast gulfs between the created castes.

Historically analyzed records of England's parishioners leave trace registers of four different categories of the nation's social typography; they were registered by rank, occupation, wealth, and marital status. The registries of the Appleby, England church rosters and probate records keep careful marking of the entrenched hierarchy between 1698 and 1707. Between 1600 and 1642, there was little change in the village's occupational date, and only four families became part of the parish community.

The next half-century, however, saw ten-fold increase; between 1642 and 1700, 46 new families registered themselves. In 1700, the changing infrastructure was abundantly clear: no longer were the vast majority of parishioners at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but more were moving into the developing middle class, which already far out-shadowed the ruling elite.

Appleby Parish Registers: Occupational Statistics from 1698-1707.

RANK:

Mason

Gentlemen

Baker

Clergy

Butcher

Yeomen

Salter

Husbandmen

Batter

Day Laborers

Tailor

Servants

Weavers

Paupers

Shoemaker

CRAFTSMEN BREAKDOWN:

Apothecary

Blacksmith

Barber

Wheelwright

Whittawer

Cooper

Carpenter

John Hooker's, 'Synopsis Choreographical of Devon-shire', Transactions of the Devonshire Association, in Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates.

After the Civil War, the population growth in Appleby and England as a whole slowed. Whether it was demographic malaise or the social imperative for smaller and more careful family formation, the war stunted the population boom. In good fortune, this cessation allowed for the necessary cultivation of the pre-existing fibers of society. The first-time availability of credit, burgeoning trade, and new industries were given the chance to solidify, and migration to the urban centers became a reality in most public lives. The population intensification that described the pre-war economy made the townspeople of Appleby, Chippenham, Willingham, and Orwell, become part of communities no longer separate from the urban life but intrinsically tied to it. As a result, when poverty came to the villages during the wars, migration to the economic strongholds of the urban fortress was a logical alternative.

The peasantry of the villages had little opportunities available to them, and indebted to the research of Laurence Stone, Spufford manages an in-depth discussion of the literacy of English villagers. Without the benefit of the educational institutions that perpetuated the grammar school lesson plans, the villagers had little social capital with which to compete for the jobs now up for grabs by more people. With the transition to the cities where greater opportunity lay and the slowing tide of childbirth that reestablished demographic equilibrium, the middle class opened up to the labor classes in a way never before witnessed in English history.

1700 brought the end of the Civil Wars, and the creation of credit allowed for England to open its doors to new commerce. No longer was it struggling for power with France; instead, between 1550 and 1700, England became a country of economic growth and stability that allowed for national expansion to prevent the French control of the continent, Wrightson argues. As the nation benefited, so did its people; the middle class was firmly established in the labor organization of England, and no longer was its social fabric so segregated into four clear classes led by the top minority. Instead, the well-to-do workers and capitalists who maximized on the situational advantages of the era became the prominent social force in the actual English hierarchy, returning to the piqued Marxist understanding of the birth of the new social class.