Class and Credit: Social Identity, Wealth and the Life Course in Early Modern England

Abstract

Most historians dealing with social stratification, class, or social structure in the early modern period have generally been concerned with the question of how contemporary society could be divided into different groups or strata. Here the usual strategy has been to adopt the objective gaze of someone observing a past society as an entire group of individuals, and then working on the problem of how to divide them into different hierarchical layers from top to bottom, with those at the top having the most power, wealth, status and those at the bottom the least. This way of seeing was initially adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by the new social historians who began to examine such things from either the Marxist theory of class which provided an historical explanation of how social hierarchy was produced and maintained in terms of wealth and economic power, or sociology which took a more classificatory approach; breaking society into a wide number of groups based on status, occupation, ethnicity and other factors. The most well known instance of the latter approach is Peter Laslett’s characterisation of England as a one-class society divided not by conflict but by status in which power was rigidly limited to a small number of elites.1 In contrast, Christopher Hill sought to interpret English politics and religion in the civil war as manifestations of class conflict between traditional elites and economically rising merchants and tradesmen.2