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The Rural ‘Middling Sort’ in Early Modern England, circa 1640–1740: Some Economic, Political and Socio-Cultural Characteristics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Joan Kent
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Extract

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such as The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 1999 , pp. 19 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1. Thompson, E. P., ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture’, Journal of Social History, 7 (1974), 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’, Social History, 3 (1978), 133–65; and now his, ‘The Patricians and the Plebs’, in idem, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 1–96, which brings together material from the earlier essays and responds to criticisms of them (quotation found in ‘Eighteenth-Century English society’, p. 142, or Customs in Common, p. 32); Hexter, J. H., ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, in Hexter, , Reappraisals in History (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

2. See the following, listed by date of publication: Wrightson, K., ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches’, in Bonfield, Lloyd, Smith, Richard M. and Wrightson, Keith (eds.), The World We Have Gained: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett (London, 1986), pp. 177–202Google Scholar; Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–83 (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Earle, Peter, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Wrightson, K., ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts’, in Corfield, P. J. (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 30–52Google Scholar; Barry, J., ‘The State and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (1991), 75–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wahrman, Dror, ‘National Society, Communal Culture: an Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, 17 (1992), 43–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the essays collected in Davison, L., Hitchcock, T., Keirn, T. and Shoemaker, R. B. (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Journal of British Studies, 32:4 (10, 1993) which was devoted to ‘Making of the English Middle Class, ca. 1700–1850’; Barry, J., ‘The Making of the Middle Class?’, Past and Present, 145 (1994), 194–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the articles collected in Barry, J. and Brooks, C. (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London and New York, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mascuch, Michael, ‘Social Mobility and Middling Self-Identity: The Ethos of British Autobiographers, 1600–1750’, Social History, 20 (1995), 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wahrman, Dror, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hunt, Margaret R., The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England 1680–1780 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1996).Google Scholar

3. Major studies include Campbell, Mildred, The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven, 1942; London, paper ed., 1983)Google Scholar; the works of Hoskins, W. G., esp. The Midland Peasant: An Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (London, 1957)Google Scholar, Essays in Leicestershire History (Liverpool, 1951) and Provincial England (London, 1965); Spufford, Margaret, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrightson, Keith and Levine, David, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, Terling 1525–1700 (New York, 1979; Oxford, Clarendon paperbacks, 1995)Google Scholar; and Wrightson, Keith, English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, 1982)Google Scholar. See also McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine, David and Wrightson, Keith, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rollinson, David, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London and New York, 1992)Google Scholar. Among very recent local studies which include material and observations on the rural middling sort (and which appeared, or of which I became aware, after completing a draft of this article) see especially the essays collected in Griffiths, Paul, Fox, Adam and Hindle, Steve (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (New York, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hindle, Steve, ‘Exclusion Crises: Poverty, Migration and Parochial Responsibility in English Rural Communities, c. 1560–1660’, Rural History, 7 (1996), 125–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and a study which spans the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French, Henry R., ‘Chief Inhabitants and their Areas of Influence: Local Ruling Groups in Essex and Suffolk Parishes 1630–1720’ (Cambridge PhD thesis, 1993).Google Scholar

4. Barry, , ‘Introduction’, in Barry, and Brooks, (eds.), The Middling Sort of People, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

5. See Mascuch, ‘Social Mobility and Middling Self-Identity’, whose random sample of 135 autobiographies and diaries included 2% yeomen and 9% tradesmen, while clergy and professional groups account for 37%. Of a further third who styled themselves gentlemen he believes most to have belonged to the professions (p. 51).

6. Information about the middling in Little Munden is based on the following materials in the Hertfordshire Record Office (hereafter HRO): Bishop's Transcripts of the parish register, Bundle 111, nos. 2–87; parish books with summary accounts and rating lists, D/P71/5/1, D/P71/5/2; the Field Book of 1730, D/P71/3/1; wills and inventories; parish assessments for the land tax in 1715, 1718, 1722, 1725, 1730, 1735, 1741, 1745 and 1749 and one rate for the window tax in 1730; and the hearth tax in Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), E.179/248/ 23, no 43 and E. 179/375/30; manuscript poll books, QPE 1–2 (1697), QPE 5 (1714); printed poll books for 1722, 1727, 1734, 1754; Quarter Sessions rolls, (hereafter QSR), 5–7, 14, 17, 20, 22–4, 26 and printed sessions records in Hardy, W. J. (ed.), Hertford County Records, (Notes and Extracts from the Sessions Rolls), i–ii (Hertford, 1905)Google Scholar, and Hardy, William Le (ed.), Hertford County Records, (Calendars to the Sessions Books), v–vii, 1930–1931 (the volumes in this series hereafter will be cited as Hertford County Records).Google Scholar

7. Information about the middling in Shelton is derived from accounts of the parish officers in Norfolk and Norwich Record Office (hereafter NNRO), PD358/33; PD 358/41, and microfilm of this manuscript, MF/X/256/11; PD358/78; the parish register PD358/1 (now on microfiche) and wills and inventories (also now on microfiche) in NNRO (Shirehall Microform Room); local rating lists found in PD358/33 and PD358/41; hearth tax in PRO, E.179/154/704; printed poll books for 1714, 1734 and 1768.

8. The following materials in the Staffordshire Record Office (hereafter SRO) have been employed in studying the middling in Pattingham: local rating lists and accounts of constables, churchwardens and overseers, D3451/2/2; D3451/2/3; D3451/2/4–59; D3451/5/ 2–46; D3451/6/1; D 3451/6/2–42; settlement documents, D3451/5/61–126, 223–45; other parish materials in D3451/5/308, D3451/8/10; a few accounts and a few wills in D(W)1807, roll 381 and Transcripts of Pattingham Court Rolls D(W)1807, nos. 160–293; Transcripts of Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, nos. 16–34; occasional original sessions rolls for the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century (Q/SR); Quarter Sessions Order Books (Q/SO), ii–vii, x–xiv (i, viii and ix are not extant); Quarter Sessions Minute Books, Q/SM/e/i, pts. i and ii; and wills and inventories in Staffordshire Joint Record Office, Lichfield (hereafter SJRO); the hearth tax in PRO, E.179/256/31; Thomas, H. R. (ed.), The Pattingham Parish Register, 1559–1812 (Staffordshire Parish Register Society, 1934).Google Scholar Some of the Staffordshire quarter sessions order books lack pagination, or at least folio numbers are not visible on the microfilm supplied to readers, so sometimes reference will be given only to a particular date of sessions, e.g. Mich. 1660).

9. See Wrightson, Keith, ‘“Sorts of people” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Barry and Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of PeopleGoogle Scholar; and French, , ‘Chief Inhabitants and their Areas of Influence’.Google Scholar

10. The discussion of local rates is based on assessments found among the parish accounts, SRO, D3451/2/2, D3451/2/3; HRO, D/P71/5/2; NNRO, PD358/33, PD358/41; hearth taxes for the three parishes cited in nn. 6–8 and land tax assessments for Little Munden cited in n. 6; see also Wrightson, and Levine, , Terling, pp. 34–5Google Scholar, for social categories and distribution of the hearth tax in that parish.

11. SJRO, inventory of Francis Taylor, 28th August 1736. For loans to parish officers see SRO, D3451/2/29; D3451/2/36–41. The Staffordshire inventories (and wills) found in SJRO are catalogued by names and dates: see also Devey, Roger, 6th 10 1671;Google ScholarBillingsley, Richard, 10th 06 1701;Google ScholarSmith, John, 28th 07 1709;Google ScholarFalkener, William, 8th 05 1730;Google Scholar and for some smaller sums loaned at interest see also Northwood, Henry, 14th 07 1729;Google Scholar Henry Falkener, included with will of Falkener, Edward, 27th 10 1684;Google ScholarPhillips, Thomas, 7th 10 1684;Google ScholarRudge, Thomas, 4th 09 1717;Google ScholarBridgin, Roger, 30th 04 1724;Google ScholarSouthall, Thomas, 10th 12 1686.Google Scholar

12. This is based on a study of the land tax records and poll books for Little Munden cited in n. 6 and on the wills and inventories for the parish. The poll books make it possible to trace those entitled to vote because they held freehold in Little Munden but who resided elsewhere and Little Munden residents who held freehold in other parishes. Such men have also been traced in the land tax records of some neighbouring parishes, especially Great Munden, Sacombe and Watton; these records are also found, classified by parish, on microform in HRO.

13. See the sources cited in n. 10. Such patterns appear similar to Charles Phythian-Adams's description of ‘lineage families’ spread over a ‘local society’ composed of a number of parishes; see his essay ‘An Agenda for English Local History’, in Phythian-Adams, , ed., Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester, 1993), esp. pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

14. For Gissing see Kent, Joan R., The English Village Constable: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford, 1986), pp. 88, 128–9.Google Scholar Some Shelton wills contain evidence of the middling holding property in another parish, sometimes in several, and such patterns may have been fairly common in that parish too; see the following wills in microform in NNRO (Shirehall): MF224/W172;MF225/W104;MF221/W7;MF225/W166;MF219/W149;MF223/W128; MF 213/W5; MF222/W65. A few Pattingham wills contain references to land-holdings in other settlements; but most land in this manor apparently continued to be held in copy-hold, and small transfers within the manor were more common than the acquisition of property in other parishes.

15. For examples of servants' chambers and a maids' chamber see the following Little Munden wills: HRO, 71 HW 10, 25 HW 8; and for the servants' dining room, SJRO, Barker, William, 28th 04 1742Google Scholar (will). For some other examples of accommodations for servants see John Smith of Nurton, yeoman, , (28th 07 1709)Google Scholar; Falkener, William of yeoman, Hardwicke (8th 05 1730)Google Scholar and the following Little Munden inventories, ranging in date from 1626 to 1710: HRO, 80 HW 24; 110 HW 43; 6 HW45.

16. For recent studies of consumer behaviour see especially Weatherill, Lorna, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London and New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Shammas, Carole, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; and two collections of essays, McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John and Plumb, J. H., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1985)Google Scholar and Brewer, John and Porter, Roy (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York, 1993).Google Scholar

17. This is based on a study of estate documents (wills and/or inventories) for fifty Pattingham men whose estates were probated between the 1660s and the 1770s; most are found in SJRO, but two wills and four inventories from the early eighteenth century are among the Pattingham court papers in SRO, D(W) 1778/V/1363. The various chambers mentioned are found in the following wills/inventories: Brown, James of gent, Copley, (24th 05 1701)Google Scholar, White, Benjamin (22nd 01 1705/1706)Google Scholar, Smith, John of yeoman, Nurton (28th 07 1709)Google Scholar; the yellow bed belonged to gent, William Barker (28th 04 1742)Google Scholar; and see Hardwicke, William of Great More, gent (17th 06 1740)Google Scholar and Taylor, Francis (11th 05 1745).Google Scholar

18. This is based on the study of wills and/or inventories for 62 men of Little Munden (though some were resident in other parishes, especially Great Munden, at the time of making their wills) in HRO.

19. Weatherill, , Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, esp. pp. 172–8, 187–8.Google Scholar

20. Barry, , ‘Introduction’, in Barry and Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People, pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

21. This discussion is based on tax lists, especially the land tax, information about residence and land-holding in the poll books and evidence from wills; and families have been reconstructed (as far as the sources allow) from the Bishop's Transcripts of the parish registers. For full references to these sources see n. 6.

22. SJRO, Brown, Thomas (26th 12 1692)Google Scholar; Brown, James (24th 05 1701).Google Scholar

23. See Wrightson, , English Society, esp. pp. 225–7Google Scholar; Wrightson, and Levine, , TerlingGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 7; Wrightson, ‘Sorts of people’.

24. See Wrightson, and Levine, , Terling, pp. 104–5.Google Scholar

25. The discussion of Pattingham is based on the local accounts cited in n. 8; for Alrewas see SRO, D783/2/1/1; D783/2/2/1; D783/2/3/1; D783/2/4/1; D783/2/4/3.

26. See n. 6 for the sources on which these statements are based.

27. HRO, Little Munden Land Tax Assessments 1715–1716, 1718–1738, 1741–1719.

28. SRO, D3451/5/33 (Francis Taylor); D3451/5/9 (Edward Parkes); D3451/5/46 (William Rudge); see also D3451/5/9 (Thomas Hardwicke); D3451/2/22 (William Taylor).

29. The material in this paragraph is based on the signatures found in parish accounts or on vestry decisions recorded in parish books; for specific references to the parish materials see nn. 6–8.

30. Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon), 2735/9/1, e.g. fos. 21, 22v, 23v, 44v. (constables' accounts). I am grateful to Conrad Russell for drawing my attention to the very rich collection of parish accounts for Great Staughton.

31. See below, pp. 20ff.

32. For a discussion of the extent to which other parishioners assisted constables during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Kent, , Village Constable, pp. 234–9Google Scholar. Evidence from the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century for Pattingham and Shelton is drawn from the accounts of the constables, churchwardens and overseers and there is also some evidence in the Little Munden Parish Book; for full references to these materials see nn. 6–8.

33. See jury lists found in quarter sessions records, e.g. HRO, QSR 5–7, 14, 17, 20, 24, 26, ranging from 1640 to 1706. The names of a number of grand and petty jurors from Pattingham are found in the sessions order books; see, for example, SRO, Q/SO, x (Mich. 1697, Easter 1701, 1704); xii (Easter, , 1728)Google Scholar; xiii, 52v, 69v, 92; xiv (Mich. 1737, Epiph. 1737–8) and 19v, 31, 31v, 74, 81, 151.

34. Hertford County Records, vi, 352, 427; SRO, QS/O, x (Trans. 1703); for other High Constables from Pattingham see the following references in Quarter Sessions records: John Hardwicke of the More, xi (Easter, 1707); William Hardwicke of the More, xiii, 179v (Epiph. 1735/6), also recorded in Q/SM/e, i, pt ii, 262v; Roger Devey of Clive, vii, 158v (Trans. 1666); Roger Devey of Pattingham, xi (Easter, 1711); James Brown of Copley, SRO, Q/SM/e, i, pt 1, 6v (Mich. 1689).

35. For discussion of the role of the middling sort as voters, in the countryside as well as the towns during the eighteenth century, and a summary of conflicting views on this subject, see Rogers, , ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth Century Polities’Google Scholar in Barry, and Brooks, (eds.), The Middling Sort of PeopleGoogle Scholar, and the references cited there.

36. Printed poll books for Hertfordshire were used for the years 1722, 1727, 1734 and 1754 and manuscript poll books for 1697 and 1714 ( see n. 6); and for Shelton printed poll books for 1714, 1734 and 1768.

37. For a brief discussion see Kent, Joan R., ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in England, circa 1640–1740’, The Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 394.Google Scholar

38. One example of an earlier payment for an unspecified act of Parliament is found in the Ashwell (Herts) churchwardens' accounts for July, 1607 in HRO, D/P7/5/1, p. 297.

39. Leicestershire Record Office (hereafter LRO), DE720/30 (constables' accounts), fos. 63, 65, 79, 87, 94v, 97v. In 1653 Friskney (Lincs) officers paid for an act for marriages and registers (Lincolnshire Archives Office, hereafter LAO, Friskney, Parish 12/1, pt. ii) and in 1657 constables in Pattingham bought a copy of the act for the Lord's Day (SRO, D3451/6/1). See also an entry in the constables' accounts of Wymeswold (Leics), British Library (BL), Add MS 10457, fo. 240.

40. SRO, D3451/2/3, (1679, 1680–1); D3451/2/7, 24; for other examples see entries in the churchwardens' accounts of Branston (Leics) in 1678 for the act ‘for buring in wooling’ and in 1689 for several statutes against swearing and drunkenness (LRO, DE 720/6, fos. 5, 17v).

41. For other disbursements by parish officials for acts and proclamations during this period see, for example, NNRO, PD358/33, p. 100; LAO, North Somercotes, Parish 12/1, 1695–6, 1701, 1708–9; LRO, DE 720/31, fo. 41; DE 720/6, fo. 33v; Price, F.D., ed. The Wigginton Constable's Book 1691–1836, Banbury Historical Society, 11, Chichester, 1971, p. 4;Google Scholar SRO, D783/2/2/1, 1694–5; D783/2/3/1, 1696–7.

42. E.g. in Ashwell the workhouse statute of 1723 (HRO, D/P7/25/1, 1st February 1727/8) or the ‘new act of Parliament’ purchased by the constables of Alrewas (Staffs) in 1742–3 (SRO, D783/2/2/1, 1742–3).

43. Local festivities to celebrate some of these political and military events have been discussed by those concerned with changes over time in the festive calendar e.g. Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkley and Los Angeles, 1989)Google Scholar and Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar but they have not been viewed in the context of interrelationships between the state and local communities. Fox, Adam, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 597–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides an interesting discussion of popular access to political news, but does not discuss these official channels for the circulation of information.

44. SRO, D3541/2/3; and for other examples of the payments during these years for books of thanksgiving or prayers, and for celebration of military victories, see LRO, DE 720/30, fo. 79v; LRO, DE625/60, fo. 106; HRO, D/P26/7/1.

45. SRO, D3451/2/3; LAO, North Somercotes, Parish 12/1,5 Nov. 1688; HRO, D/P7/9/1, 1688 and 1689 (constables' accounts) and see also entries in the Ashwell churchwardens accounts, D/P7/5/1, p. 43 and D/P7/5/2B, 1688, 1689, 1696 and 1697; LAO, North Somercotes, Parish 12/1, 14th February, 28th February 1688/9, 11th April 1689; LRO, DE 720/6, fos. 9, 15, 16, 20v, 25. Both the churchwardens and the overseers in Gissing (Norfolk) also recorded expenses to celebrate William's coronation, NNRO, PD50/37, PD50/44(S).

46. Celebration of George's coronation appears in many accounts; ‘the rejoyceing day for victory over the rebbells’ in 1716 is found in the constables' accounts of North Somercotes, Parish 12/1 in LAO.

47. There was ringing and thanksgiving at the news of peace in Pattingham in 1697–8 and 1712–13, while other occasions of thanksgiving, ‘good news’ and ‘joyful news’ recorded by churchwardens there in 1706, 1708–9 and 1713–14 probably marked turning points in English 35. military engagements during the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (SRO, D3451/2/7, 22; D3451/2/16, 18, 23); the churchwardens also paid the ringers for a thanksgiving day in 1746–7 (D3451/2/53).

48. SRO, D3451/2/22 (1711–12); D3451/2/49; LRO, DE 720/6, fo. 4v.

49. See the essays in Griffiths, et al (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England and the Ph.D. theses of several of the authors cited there;Google Scholar especially relevant to the discussion here are the following essays in that volume: Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish’; Steve Hindle, ‘The Keeping of the Public Peace’ and Andy Wood, ‘Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free Miners and their Law, c. 1550–1800’. See also Hindle, ‘Exclusion Crises’; Fox, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion’; Wood, Andy, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture: England, 1550–1800’, Social History, 22 (1997);CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, ‘Beyond Post-Revisionism? The Civil War Allegiances of the Miners of the Derbyshire, “Peak Country”’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 23–40;Google Scholar French, ‘Chief Inhabitants and their Areas of Influence’.

50. Holmes, Clive, ‘Drainers and Fenmen: The Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century’, in Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 166–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. King, Peter, ‘Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800’, The Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beattie, John, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986), pp. 389–99, 406–30;Google ScholarHerrup, Cynthia B., The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 6; MacDonald, Michael, ‘The Secularization of Suicide in England 1660–1800’, Past and Present, 111 (1986), esp. 95–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

52. See Rogers, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Polities’, especially pp. 167–78; and for a recent re-evaluation of the role of electors in the early seventeenth century see Richard Cust, ‘Politics and the Electorate’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, 1989), pp. 134–67.

53. E.g. Kent, , Village Constable, especially chapter 7;Google ScholarWrightson, Keith, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Brewer, John and Styles, John (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1980);Google ScholarSharpe, J. A., ‘Enforcing the Law in the Seventeenth-Century English Village’, in Gattrell, V.A.C., Lenman, B. and Parker, G. (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980);Google ScholarCraig, John S., ‘Cooperation and Initiatives: Elizabethan Churchwardens and the Parish Accounts of Mildenhall’, Social History, 18 (1993), 357–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. Wrightson, , ‘Sorts of people in Tudor and Stuart England’, esp. pp. 45–8.Google Scholar On more frequent parish meetings see Kent, , ‘The Center and the Localities’, p. 392Google Scholar and the references cited there, and also Morrill, J. S., Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society During the English Revolution (London, 1974), pp. 229–30, 239–41.Google Scholar For some examples of parishes drawing up petitions see entries in constables’ accounts of Branston (Leics) and Mavesyn Ridware (Staffs): LRO, DE720/30, fo. 65 (1645–6); SRO, D3712/4/1, 1643–4, 1644–5. For the other constables' accounts mentioned see LRO, DE625/60 (Waltham); Cambs. Record Office (Huntingdon), 2735/9/1 (Great Staughton); Bennett, Martyn (ed.), A Nottinghamshire Village in War and Peace: The Accounts of the Constables of Upton 1640–1666 (Thornton Society Record Series, 39, 1995).Google Scholar I am grateful to Martyn Bennett for a copy of his edition of the Upton accounts.

55. E.g. LRO, DE720/30, fos. 64v, 81v, 85, 94v, 95 (3), 95v, 109, 122v and in 1666–7 also with the High Constable and ‘the reste of the constables’, fo. 122.

56. SRO, D3712/4/1 (constables' accounts, 1649–50).

57. Innes, Joanna, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 40 (1990), 63–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar and idem, ‘The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Stone, L. (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain 1688–1815 (London, 1993), esp. pp. 101–17Google Scholar (I am grateful to Joanna Innes for an offprint of this essay); L. Davison et al, (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive; and see also Barry, Jonathan, ‘Introduction’ to Barry, and Brooks, (eds.), The Middling Sort of People, pp. 21–2Google Scholar; Kent, , ‘The Centre and the Localities’, esp. pp. 391–9;Google ScholarBrooks, Colin, ‘Public Finance and Political Stability: The Administration of the Land Tax 1688–1720’, The Historical Journal, 18 (1974), 281–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Barry, , ‘Introduction’, in Barry, and Brooks, (eds.), The Middling Sort of People, p. 15.Google Scholar

59. See especially Wrightson, and Levine, , Terling;Google ScholarSharpe, J. A., Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983);Google Scholar and also Wrightson, , English Society, especially pp. 164–73.Google Scholar For Wrightson's response to those who have questioned such a portrayal see ‘Postscript: Terling Revisited’ and a full bibliography in Wrightson, and Levine, , Terling (Clarendon Paperbacks edition, 1995), pp. 186–220.Google Scholar See also two more recent contributions to the discussion: Ingram, Martin, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Griffiths, et al (eds.), The Experience of Authority and Marjorie K. Mclntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998).Google Scholar

60. E.g. SRO, D3451/6/12, 26, and 14 and 34 which involve women who probably were alesellers; SRO, Q/SO, xiv, 130, Q/SM/e/i, pt ii, 249v; an order by the Herts justices in 1691 for putting into force acts for suppressing ‘profaness and debauchery’, Hertford County Records, vi, 445–6; and Little Munden cases, HRO, QSR 23, no. 248; Hertford County Records, v, 455, 473, 265; vi, 24; vii, 117; D/P71/5/2, 14th October 1742. In rural areas by the eighteenth century regulative offences often may have been presented to the justices at petty sessions and penalties meted out there; and in the absence of petty sessions records, it is difficult to estimate the extent of such prosecutions.

61. Keith Wrightson also drew attention to the disciplinary role of the poor law by the late seventeenth century; e.g. ‘Aspects of Social Differentiation in Rural England, c.1580–1660’, The Journal of Peasant Studies,. 5 (1976), 45; Wrightson, and Levine, , Terling, p. 183Google Scholar; Wrightson, , English Society, especially pp. 181–2, 227–8Google Scholar; Wrightson, , ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England’, p. 201.Google Scholar

62. See Kent, , ‘The Centre and the Localities, pp. 392–4Google Scholar; HRO, D/P71/5/2, 12th July 1664; Calderdale Central Library, Archives Division, SPL 306/5, fo. 66v (I am grateful to John Styles for drawing my attention to the Sowerby records); HRO, D/P7/9/1, 6th May 1736 (at the end of the book following the constables’ accounts for 1741). See also HRO, D/P71/5/2, 5th September 1697, 6th June 1703, 5th May 1706; SRO, D3451/5/17.

63. The debate about how local communities employed the settlement laws, and against whom, while relevant to the discussion, cannot be pursued here. See especially the exchange between Landau, Norma and Snell, K.D.M.: Landau, , ‘The Laws of Settlement and the Surveillance of Immigration in Eighteenth-Century Kent’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), 391–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The Regulation of Immigration, Economic Structures and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 541–71; idem, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Context of the Laws of Settlement’, Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), 417–39; idem, ‘Who Was Subjected to the Laws of Settlement? Procedure under the Settlement Laws in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Agricultural History Review, 43 (1995), 139ff.; Snell, , Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1600–1900 (London, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Pauper Settlement and the Right to Poor Relief in England and Wales’, Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), 375–415; idem, ‘Settlement, Poor Law and the Rural Historian: New Approaches and Opportunities’, Rural History, 3 (1992), 145–72.

64. Hindle, , ‘Exclusion Crises’, especially pp. 139–41.Google Scholar In ‘Migration, the Law and Parochial Policy in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Southern England’, Southern History, 15 (1993), 86–139, Roger Wells also drew attention to divisions within parishes over issues of migration and settlement; see esp. pp. 95–7.

65. The parish books record the charitable endowments, ranging in date from 1591 to 1689–90, and the distribution of such funds (or bread) to as many twenty or (during the 1640s) even 58. thirty inhabitants. For the petitions cited see Hertford County Records, vi, 451; vii, 126, 129, 140; and for some other settlement cases, Hertford County Records, vii, 173, 190, 191, 242, and HRO, QSR 24, nos. 487, 488.

66. Hertford County Records, vi, 339; vii, 244, 245; HRO, D/P71/5/2, 15th October 1740.

67. An order issued by two justices in May 1710 for the removal of William Dean and eight children from Church Eaton to Pattingham was appealed to Translation sessions, 1711 and heard and decided in Pattingham's favour at Michaelmas sessions 1711; but by then the Deans apparently had been moved to Pattingham and they were to cost the parish a substantial sum between that time and Dean's death in 1716–17; see SRO, Q/SO, xi (Translation and Michaelmas, 1711); D3451/ 5/ 20–25; D(W)1807, Roll 381 (overseers' accounts, 1713–14); D3451/2/22.

68. The generalizations in this paragraph are based on the overseers' accounts, D3451/2/3 and D3451/5/2–46 and three sets of accounts found in the court rolls, D(W) 1807, Roll 381 and on the churchwardens' accounts, D3451/2/3 and D3451/2/4–59 and the settlement papers in D3451/5/61–126, 223–45. See also appeals of settlement cases affecting Pattingham in quarter sessions records, SRO, Q/SO, v, 336, 339, 371; vi, 88, 99, 104v; x (Epiph, . 1699/1700); xiGoogle Scholar (Epiph, . 1716/1717); xiiGoogle Scholar (Easter, , 1723); xiii, 120, 125–125v, 131vGoogle Scholar; Q/SM/e/i, pt ii, 250v, 253.

69. Hertford County Records, ii, 70. The marking or ‘badging’ of the poor was provided for by a statute passed in 1696/7, 8 & 9 Wm III, c. 30, and there is evidence in parish records of such badges being made and sewed to the poor's clothing; for some examples see the citations in Kent, , ‘The Centre and the Localities’, p. 368Google Scholar, n. 12.

70. SRO, D3451/5/308: this is based on the forty-two entries for the years 1713 to 1746. See also references to masters who took parish apprentices in Pattingham in the overseers' accounts in 1683–4, 1693–4, 1722–3, 1728–9, 1730–1, 1740–1, SRO, D3451/2/3; D3451/5/2, 29, 32, 34. 46; and for some cases of apprenticing poor young women, see D3451/2/3, 1676; D3451/5/44. T. Hitchcock also draws attention to the importance which parish elites attached to ‘training and disciplining’ children (Hitchcock, , ‘Paupers and Preachers’, p. 157)Google Scholar and Paul Griffiths to similar concerns in one city, during an earlier period, about the young who were idle and ‘out of service’in ‘Masterless Young People in Norwich, 1560–1645’, in Griffiths, et al (eds.), The Experience of Authority, pp. 146–86.Google Scholar

71. For example, the Little Munden overseers recorded payments for the schooling of a boy in 1736, and the following year they paid to apprentice him, HRO, D/P71/5/2.

72. SRO, D3451/2/3, 1677–9; D3451/2/ 13, 24, 35, 37, 39, 42, 48, 52, 54; for earlier references to a schoolmaster in Pattingham, see the churchwardens' accounts for 1596 and 1605, SRO, D3451/2/2. Pattingham appears on an 1842 list of parishes where there were non-classical schools that were endowed or re-endowed in the eighteenth century; see Jones, M.G., The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938 and Hamden, Conn., 1964), p. 361.Google Scholar

73. HRO, D/P7/5/1, pp. 220, 368, 371, 373, 375, 379, 392, 439. For some other examples of parish provisions for the schooling of the poor see NNRO PD358/41, MF/X/256/11, 28th October 1692; PD 219/92; and for maintenance of parish schools, PD219/59, 1666–7; Calderdale Central Library', Archives Division, SPL 143, 1673–4, 1680–81.

74. A school in Ashwell with twenty-four pupils appears on the list of charity schools in 1724 cited in Jones, , Charity Schools, p. 366.Google Scholar On the workhouse in Ashwell, and the parishioners' goals in establishing it, see below, pp. 34–5.

75. HRO, D/P7/5/1, p. 187; SJRO, Thomas Southall, 10th December 1686; LRO, DE 73/PR/T:1691/73. Jones suggests that there were attacks on charity schools in rural areas and that middle class farmers did not support instruction for poor children (e.g. Charity Schools, p. 95); and attitudes may have changed by the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century.

76. For references to ‘the poors house’ or almshouses in Pattingham see SRO, D3451/2/3; D3451/5/21; D3451/5/32. Expenses in connection with almshouses in Ashwell appear in the churchwardens' accounts from the 1580s onward (e.g. HRO, D/P7/5/1, pp. 209, 290, 390, 434–5, 442; ‘Almes houses’ are mentioned in the Ashwell overseers' accounts (HRO, D/P7/12/1) and in 1718 one of the overseers also paid £80 for the purchase of lands for the use of the poor (HRO, D/P7/25/1, 6th September 1718).

77. The act 9 Geo II, c. 7, an act for amending the laws relating to settlement, employment and relief of the poor, authorized parishes to establish workhouses and probably was passed in response to local pressures. On the Pattingham workhouse see SRO, D3451/5/38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46 (overseers' accounts); and on the Ashwell workhouse see HRO, D/P7/25/1 (Ashwell charities) and the overseers' accounts D/P7/12/2. The workhouses in Pattingham and Ashwell are also discussed, in a somewhat different context, in Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities’.

78. HRO, D/P7/5/1, pp. 188–9.

79. HRO, D/P7/25/1, 8th February 1727/1728. The values expressed here seem to be in keeping with those described by Timothy Hitchcock, the modern expert on the SPCK, the workhouse movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the philosophy behind such institutions. I regret that I have not had an opportunity to read Dr. Hitchcock's Oxford D. Phil, thesis, ‘The English Workhouse: A Study in Institutional Poor Relief in Selected Counties, 1696–1750’ (1985); but see Hitchcock, , ‘Paupers and Preachers’.Google Scholar

80. See the Pattingham overseers'accounts, SRO, D3451/2/3 and D3451/5/2–46. On the decision to suppress the workhouse in Ashwell, see HRO, D/P7/12/2 (7th April 1729); D/P7/25/1 (5th June 1729); and for evidence of its continuance see entries for the 1730s in the overseers' accounts, D/P7/12/2.

81. NNRO, PD358/41, and in microfilm MF/X/256/11 (volume lacks pagination); the volume includes a number of inventories similar to those cited here. For Gissing see NNRO, PD50/44(s).

82. This is based on an examination of wills for Little Munden from the late sixteenth through most of the eighteenth century, found in HRO; and also on evidence about charitable donations recorded in the town book, HRO, D/P71/5/2; and on the Pattingham wills described in n.17. See Phillips, Thomas (7th 10 1684)Google Scholar in SJRO.

83. A view advanced by Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in Hay, et al, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New York, 1975), 17–63Google Scholar; but his view has been challenged by several historians. See especially the criticisms in King, Peter, ‘Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which emphasizes the role of people at various social levels in the criminal justice system.

84. Hertford County Records, ii, 79. For other examples, see a Staffordshire case cited by Sharpe, , Crime in Early Modern England (London, 1984), p. 104Google Scholar; and a Staffordshire presentment at Trinity sessions 1605, in Burne, S. A. H., ed. Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, v, 225Google Scholar (Staffordshire Historical Collections).

85. The years 1739–42 were characterized by scarcity and high prices, and apparently not just in Staffordshire; see Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, pp. 207–11Google Scholar, and references cited there. In Pattingham where burials averaged 15 a year during the decade 1731–40, with a low of 8 in 1731 and a high of 21 in 1733 and 1740, the number rose to 36 in 1741, Thomas, (ed.), Pattingham Parish Register, pp. 173–8.Google Scholar These calculations are based on a calendar year beginning 1st January; but if one follows the register and contemporary practice and begins the year on 25th March, the number of burials in both 1740 and 1741 was high, at 29 and 34, respectively, with the average for the previous ten years just under 15 and the range 10–18.

86. SRO, D3451/8/10.

87. See the churchwardens' accounts, SRO, D3451/2/42ff. and the constables' accounts, D3451/6/32ff; and legal proceedings and their outcome can be followed in quarter sessions rolls and order books for the period in SRO. The churchwardens also paid the charges involved in judicial proceedings against a man accused of abusing a servant girl in 1741–2; and they may have played a role in bringing a presentment for burglary to Lent assizes in 1740/1, PRO, ASSI 4/19, p. 438.

88. See the discussion of the context, and some of the prosecutions that resulted, in Kent, , ‘The Centre and the Localities’, pp. 363–4, 396–8Google Scholar. Additional parish and quarter sessions records have been examined since that essay was published, as have some Staffordshire assize records for the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, PRO, ASSI 4/14–15, 17–19; ASSI 2/1–2, 5–10, 13; ASSI! 5/53, 55–8.

89. For discussion of other associations for the prosecution of felons, including some references to Parish Organizations, see Philips, David, ‘Good Men to Associate and Bad Men to Conspire: Associations for the Prosecution of Felons in England 1760–1860’, in Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis (eds.), Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 113–70;Google ScholarKing, P. J. R., ‘Prosecution Associations and their Impact in Eighteenth-Century Essex’Google Scholar, in ibid., pp. 171–207; Shubert, Adrian, ‘Private Initiative in Law Enforcement: Associations for the Prosecution of Felons, 1744–1856’, in Bailey, Victor (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1981), pp. 25–41Google Scholar; Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, pp. 48–50.Google Scholar

90. This is based on the parish and quarter sessions materials cited in n. 87.

91. Some were bound over to keep the peace, sometimes because of assaults or affrays, e.g. HRO, QSR 6, no. 221; QSR 7, nos. 158, 167; Hertford County Records, v, 342; SRO, Q/SO, v, 290, 292; vi, 234; xiii (Mich. 1729). In other cases they were indicted for giving hospitality to wandering people or taking inmates or possessing cottages without four acres of land. Presentments of this kind continued to be made to the court leet in Pattingham through 1660, when the leet records end, SRO, Transcripts of Pattingham Court Rolls, D (W)1807. For such presentments to quarter sessions from Little Munden during the 1690s, see HRO, QSR 23, nos. 72, 78, 438; QSR 24, no. 259.

92. E.g. Sharpe, J. A., ‘Crime and Delinquency in an Essex parish 1600–1640’, in Cockburn, J. S. (ed.), Crime in England 1550–1800, (Princeton, 1977), pp. 90–109.Google Scholar

93. E.g. SRO, Transcripts of Pattingham Court Rolls, D(W)1807, roll 264; SRO, D3451/6/l,1661–2; D3451/6/7; Q/SO, v, 324. At least two Little Munden officers were presented to sessions for failure to make presentments to the hundred jury, HRO, QSR 24, no 97.

94. Offences such as enclosing wastes, ‘overpressing’ the commons with sheep and diverting or obstructing water courses were common in the Pattingham Court Rolls through the 1660s, as long as records of leet business are extant, and probably continued thereafter, D (W) 1807; presentments of some of the middling of Little Munden were returned to quarter sessions for such offences as late as 1700; see Hertford County Records, i. 391, 395; ii. 28 (2), 30; vii. 63. Such presentments probably were often made to the justices at petty sessions, and dealt with there, and thus would not appear in sessions records; and in Hertfordshire this would have been especially true after the abolition of hundred juries in 1714.

95. Wells, , ‘Migration, the Law and Parochial Policy’, p. 95.Google Scholar

96. Ibid, pp. 95–6; Short, Brian, ‘The Evolution of Contrasting Communities within Rural England’, in Short, Brian (ed.), The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis (Cambridge, 1992), p. 29.Google Scholar

97. Comments by the anonymous referee for Rural History led me to give further consideration to this issue.

98. SRO, D3451/14, 50.

99. Brown, W. Newman, ‘The Receipt of Poor Relief and Family Situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire 1630–90’, in Smith, Richard M. (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), p. 419.Google Scholar

100. SRO, D783/2/2/1, 1739–40; and for other examples in Alrewas records see 1730–1 and D783/2/3/1.1727, 1743, 1747.

101. See especially Pollock, Linda A., Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983);Google ScholarHoulbrooke, Ralph A., The English Family 1450–1700 (London and New York, 1984)Google Scholar, chapters 6 and 7; Macfarlane, Alan, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, (Norton Library ed., New York, 1977), chapters 5–7;Google ScholarWrightson, , English Society, pp. 104–18;Google Scholar and on raising young people to be independent and autonomous see also Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven and London, 1994).Google Scholar

102. NNRO (Shirehall Microform Room), ANF wills 1671, no 5 ( MF 213). For some other examples of provisions for raising children see the following wills in NNRO (Shirehall): ANF wills 1727, no 166 (MF225); ANF wills 1679, no 192 (MF 216); ANF wills 1687, no 149 (MF 219); and Little Munden wills: HRO, 26 HW 104; 139HW3.

103. NNRO, PD358/33 (constables' accounts, 1672, 1685).

104. NNRO (Shirehall), ANF will 1713, no. 126 (MF 223); HRO, 74 HW 65; SJRO, William Barker of Great More, gent (28th April 1742).

105. SJRO, William Falkner of Hardwicke, yeoman (8th 05 1730);Google Scholar LRO, DE 73/ PR/T: 1664/110.

106. Thomas, (ed.), Pattingham Parish Register, p. 152.Google Scholar

107. Jonathan Barry suggests that the middling sort in the towns were all able to read by the late seventeenth century, ‘Introduction’, in Barry, and Brooks, (eds.), The Middling Sort of People, p. 19.Google Scholar Perhaps this was true in the countryside as well, though it seems unlikely; and if so, abilities did not always extend to writing.

108. Evidence of continuing illiteracy among some men of middling status is based on signatures and marks on wills, both of testators and witnesses, on inventories, parish accounts and vestry agreements, local rating lists and in some cases local assessments for national taxes such as the land tax.

109. Alldridge, Nick, ‘Loyalty and Identity in Chester parishes 1540–1640’, in Wright, S. J. (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988), p. 108Google Scholar indicates that the title ‘mister’ often accompanied the holding of major office in Chester parishes, and this appears to have been true in country parishes too by the end of the seventeenth century.

110. SRO, D3451/2/3 (overseers' accounts, 1681–2); SJRO, Samuel Falkener of Hardwicke, farmer (27th June 1766).

111. SJRO, William Barker, gent (28th 04 1742)Google Scholar, Perry, John of Rudge, (26 07 1775).Google Scholar

112. Cited in Weatherill, , Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, p. 208.Google Scholar

113. D'Cruze, , ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester’, especially pp. 181–2, 196–9.Google Scholar

114. The theme of ‘communalism’ runs through the interesting study of the late medieval English parish by Kümin, Beat, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1560 (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1996).Google Scholar

115. Mascuch, , ‘Social Mobility and Middling Self-Identity’.Google Scholar

116. I owe this suggestion to Keith Wrightson.

117. See especially Wrightson and Levine, Terling and Wrightson, English Society.

118. Hitchcock, , ‘Paupers and Preachers’, p. 146.Google Scholar

119. Shoemaker, , Prosecution and Punishment, chapter 9, quotation at pp. 257–8.Google Scholar John Beattie also draws attention to demands for more systematic prosecution under the criminal law between 1689 and 1718, especially in London, though he is dealing with a somewhat higher social and political level. He argues that some back-bench MPs, perhaps prompted by their constituents, and in the case of London, grand juries (composed of merchants, shopkeepers and substantial tradesmen), were behind demands for more effective punishments and that they called for a ‘much firmer line than the authorities and the courts were taking’. See his ‘London Crime and the Making of the “Bloody Code”, 1689–1718’, in Davison, L. et al (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive, pp. 49–76Google Scholar, quotation at p. 51.

120. Wrightson, , ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Brewer and Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People, pp. 21–46, and esp. pp. 41–6.Google Scholar