XII: SOCIAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

 

Q: How severe were the strains placed upon English society by the economic and demographic changes of the early modern period, and how did society cope with those strains?


[NB many of the items in the lists on XI Agriculture and Population, on XIII Family, Sex and Marriage and on IX Education and Literacy are also relevant,]

 

Introductions

  1. K Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680
  2. JA Sharpe, Social History of England 1450-1750
  3. J.A.Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550-1760 (2nd edition, 1997)
  4. P Laslett, The world we have lost
  5. P Laslett, The world we have lost further explored

Poverty and vagrancy

  1. JF Pound, Poverty and vagrancy in Tudor and Stuart England

  2.  AL Beier, The problem of the poor in Tudor and Stuart England

  3. EM Leonard, The early history of English poor relief
  4. Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782. New Studies in Economic and Social History. Cambridge University Press, 1995
  5. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner, ed. Londinopolis Essays on the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000
  6. Steve Hindle, 'Dearth, fasting and alms:  The campaign for general hospitality in late Elizabethan England' Past and Present 2001 172: 44-86

       

 Local life

  1. K Wrightson and D Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling 1525-1700
  2. M Spufford, Contrasting communities: English villagers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Crime

  1. JA Sharpe, Crime in early modern England
  2. C Herrup, The common peace
  3. D Hay, 'Property, authority, and the criminal law', in D Hay et al., ed., Albion's fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth century England
  4. Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge University Press, 2000

 

Order and disorder

  1. A Fletcher and J Stevenson, eds., Order and disorder in early modern England (an important collection)
  2. J Brewer and J Styles, eds., An ungovernable people: the English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
  3. B Sharp, In contempt of all authority: rural artisans and riot in the West of England, 1586-1660
  4. P Clark 'Popular protest and disturbance in Kent, 1558-1640', Economic History Review 1976
  5. CSL Davies 'Peasant revolts in France and England: a comparison', Agricultural History Review 1973
  6. Ronald G. Asch, Nobilities in Transition, 1550-1700: Courtiers and Rebels in Britain and Europe . Reconstructions in Early Modern History Series. London 2003.
  7. Paul Thomas, et al ed., Authority and Disorder in Tudor Times: 1461-1603 CUP 1999
  8. R.W.Hoyle, 'Agrarian agitation in mid sixteenth-century Norfolk:  A petition of 1553' The Historical Journal 44 (2001)
  9. L Shaw-Taylor, 'Parliamentary enclosure and the emergence of an English agricultural proletariat' Journal of Economic History 61 (2001)

Other important studies

  1. P Clark, The English ale-house: a social history 1200-1830
  2. A Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism

Also:

  1. David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The making of an industrial society: Whickham 1560-1765
  2. JS Cockburn, ed, Crime in England 1550-1800
  3. P Griffiths, A Fox, and S Hindle, The experience of authority in early modern England
  4. A.L.Beier, 'Poverty and progress in early modern England', pp.201-39, in Beier, Cannadine & Rosenheim (ed.s) The first modern society
  5. Steven Hindle, 'Exclusion crises: Poverty, migration and parochial responsibility in English rural communities, c.1560-1660', Rural History 7,  (1996) 125-49
  6. Marjorie K. McIntosh, (1998). 'Local responses to the poor in late medieval and Tudor England', Continuity and Change 13, 209-45
  7. J. Barry & C. Brooks eds., The Middling sort of people
  8. K. J. Kesselring,. Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Series. Cambridge University Press, 2003
  9. Peter Clark, ed. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 2, 1540-1840 . Cambridge University Press, 2000
  10. Paul Slack, 'Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England ' Past and Present 2004

 

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