Social relations and everyday life in England, 1500-1640

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This project explores the multiple ways in which inequalities of wealth and power were experienced, understood, accepted and contested in Tudor and early Stuart England. It will result in a book entitled Faith, Hope and Charity: Social Relations in England, 1500-1640 (contracted to Cambridge University Press), two journal articles, a symposium, a conference and an informal workshop. Public impact will be achieved through working with the Friends of the National Archives on the symposium and working with TNA archivists in creating new online finding aids, so opening up to a broader public fresh bodies of TNA material. I proceed from a deceptively simple question: how, despite the rapidity and intensity of economic and social change (population growth, urbanization, deepened commercialization, social polarization, social conflict) profound alteration in religious culture (the uneven, contested process of protestantization) and sometimes vicious social conflicts (riot, rebellion, episodic political crisis and - in the end - civil war) did Tudor and early Stuart society cohere? Periodization has been carefully considered. Around 1500, population expansion becomes noticeable. New bodies of archival material commence in useful runs from the same time (especially TNA material). Yet with the exception of work on rebellions, research on early modern English society tends to take its start-point at 1560. In contrast, I shall explore the whole range of the period 1500-1640. This will set the agenda for future work, opening up a substantial body of archival material to scrutiny as well as situating the post-1560 period against a clearer sense of what came before. At the other end of my period, the human, material and political impact of the civil wars form a decade of profound discontinuity into which, for now, I intend not to enter. In the long-term, I intend write a social history of the English Revolution. But that lies in the future. The title of the monograph draws on 1 Corinthians 11-13: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now, we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.My title therefore foregrounds the Scriptures as massively powerful yet constantly contested texts. The title does the following interpretive work: (a) Faith. Obviously, this alludes to the power of Christian faith within everyday life and communal relations in Tudor and Stuart England. Less obviously, it alludes to the capacities of local solidarities - faith in one another, in neighbours and friends - to weather the storms that threatened otherwise to overwhelm villages and towns. These included dearth of food, loss of rights, infectious disease, high taxation, exploitative lordship and the enclosure of common lands. (b) Hope. In an economy characterised - for poorer people - by constant insecurity, what hope was there for the future? Hope is here used as a category against which to situate profound material inequality and political disempowerment, and against which to locate lower-class agency. (c) Charity. This critically important concept refers not only to poor relief. It also references the social meanings of charity. Partially, charity was functional: poor folk begged for support on their knees, with their caps in their hands. But charity was relational: poor folk had expectations of their richer neighbours - when demands for charity were frustrated, those expectations could quickly mutate into something far more assertive. The concept of reciprocity is central here. All three words - faith, hope and charity - lead us into the unpredictability of working people's lives and into their potential capacity to shape the world around them.