Introduction

Summary

'tis a great trust

Sir Henry Parker, 1693

Seventeenth-century England can be seen as a series of distinct, although overlapping, structures. The central structure of the government and the legislature overlapped the structure which consisted of a patchwork of counties and their governments. In turn these structures are overlapped by a third for the realm can also be perceived as an array of towns and villages directly or indirectly connecting with one disproportionately large city, London. Yet another structure was the church with its dioceses and hierarchies, its jurisdictions and its complex patchwork of lands and livings. There was a further underlying structure of great significance: England was made up of landed estates, predominantly owned by the nobility, the gentry, the church and the Crown. These estates were omnipresent. They were not confined to the countryside for they penetrated into every borough and town and, indeed, into the very capital itself. English society was composed of landlords and tenants, and some English landholders were both. It naturally follows that one cannot understand the workings of English society without studying the relationships between landlords and tenants. At the interface between them stood one man whose activities were of crucial importance to both: the estate steward.

Stewards make useful witnesses for modern historians because of two characteristics shared by many landowners among the nobility and greater gentry: absenteeism and an insatiable curiosity about the estates from which they were absent.