English Social History

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer discusses cultural, economic and political transformations that tore at the fabric of England's social fabric from 1550 through 1700. The writer looks at the rise of the gentry classes, expansion of commerce, waning feudalism, and the burgeoning industrial revolution that paralleled the governmental shift from monarchical rule to the power of Parliament. The writer discusses that at the same time, flowering demographics provided a new insurgence of workers, citizens, and social agents throughout England and the economy was forced to mirror responsively. The writer describes that 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.

From the Paper:

"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."

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