Abstract
In De Republica Anglorum, published in 1583, Sir Thomas Smith famously described the structure of the English commonwealth in terms of four ranks of men, descending from the gentry at its apex to day-labourers at its base. Simultaneously, however, he noted the more fundamental distinction between ‘them that bear office, and them that bear none’. In this way, Smith transformed his own four-class social hierarchy into a binary, indeed adversarial, model of political participation. The threshold of access to the circuits of authority was, nevertheless, relatively low. Smith noted that, next to the gentry, yeomen had ‘the greatest charge and doing in the commonwealth’ and conceded that in villages even ‘such low and base persons’ as ‘poore husbandmen’, ‘copiholders’ and ‘artificers’ (among others) ‘be commonly made Churchwardens, alecunners, and manie times Constables, which office touch more the commonwealth’.1 Smith’s list of the considerable public responsibilities exercised by the middling sort included ‘administration in judgements’, ‘correction of defaults’, ‘election of offices’, ‘appointing and collection of tributes and subsidies’ and ‘making lawes’. Thus even in the formal tradition of political thought, the widespread participation of men of middling status was recognized as a significant structural characteristic of the English state.
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Notes
Most particularly by Walter J. King, ‘Leet Jurors and the Search for Law and Order in Seventeenth-Century England: “Galling Prosecution” or Reasonable Justice’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, XIII (1980), 305–23
Walter J. King, ‘Untapped Sources for Social Historians: Court Leet Records’, Journal of Social History, XIV (1982), 699–705
Walter J. King, ‘Early Stuart Courts Leet: Still Needful and Useful’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, XXIII (1990), 271–99.
Matthew Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington Manor Court, 1500–1650’, Oxoniensia, XLV (1980), 260–83
EYAS, PE 144/23, Sigglesthorne Parish Church Book, 1629–1766, unfol; Steve Hindle, ‘Power, Poor Relief and Social Relations in Holland Fen, c.1600–1800’, HJ, XLI (1998), 78.
A. W. Ashby, ‘One Hundred Years of Poor Law Administration in a Warwickshire Village’, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, III (1912), 43.
Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, HJ, XLII (1999), 851
Paul Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and Authority in Late Sixteenth-and Early Seventeenth-Century London’, HJ, XL (1997), 925–51.
Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXXIV (1994), 74–75.
Steve Hindle, ‘Exclusion Crises: Poverty, Migration and Parochial Responsibility in English Rural Communities, c.1560–1660’, Rural History, VII (1996), 135.
Hindle, ‘Exclusion Crises’, p. 136; Peter Rushton, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish and the Community in North-East England, 1600–1800’, Northern History, XXV (1989), 145.
Lancashire RO, QSB/1/70/48; DDC1/1141. See Walter J. King, ‘Punishment for Bastardy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Albion, X (1978), 138
Steve Hindle, ‘The Problem of Pauper Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England’, TRHS, 6th Series, VIII (1998), 71–89.
Cf. Dror Wahrman, ‘National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, XVII (1992), 44–5.
Clyde Kluckhohn, ‘Covert Culture and Administrative Problems’, American Anthropologist, XLV (1943), 218.
Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish’, p. 29; Richard Cust and Peter Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LIV (1981), 50–1.
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© 2001 Steve Hindle
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Hindle, S. (2001). The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c.1550–1700. In: Harris, T. (eds) The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4030-8_5
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