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English Society, 1580-1680

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I have never read a book before that has so many statements followed by: "X should not be exaggerated." Keith Wrightson's "English Society 1580-1680" is almost comical in its middle-of-the-roadness. If any English century should lend itself to exaggerations, it ought to be the one that encompassed Francis Drake, Willliam Shakespeare, a civil war, execution of a king, a military dictatorship and Isaac Newton.

Few of those make it into Wrightson's book, which is so devotedly a social history that the civil war is hardly mentioned.

Instead, he wonders what homely things were like: how Englishmen and women met mates, talked their parents into agreeing to a marriage, learned to read, conducted themselves on Sundays.

To an American, even one not descended from any of these English people, the answers are relevant, because the attitudes of 17th century England were the ones planted in North America, with their medieval survivals and modernizing innovations. In a book written long after this one, "Albion's Seed," David Hackett Fisher demonstrated how the attitudes of the early English (and in some cases, Dutch, German or even Swedish) settlers tended to magnify and reverberate for many generations. But mostly the English.

Wrightson presents a society rather freer and more flexible than its image. The law may have given fathers a veto over their children's marriage partners, but (except for the aristocracy), most fathers were indulgent. It was the beginning of love matches, but, as Wrightson also notes, it was a time and place where about one woman in 10 never married. This was, he notes, much different from European societies farther east, where virtually all women married.

Again, the riots against enclosures or food shortages were, in his description, less riots than theatrically staged protests, and they lacked the violent atrocities that marked French food protests of the same age.

He may oversell how indulgent, flexible and tolerant English society was. To the extent that English people were indulgent or tolerant, they limited their niceness to fellow Englishmen.

The other principal theme that comes through is that the century of 1580-1680 saw the creation of a permanent English underclass, such as had not existed before. In the middle ages and early Renaissance, England was rural and the people in it were to a considerable degree economically autonomous, if poor.

The commercialization of agriculture raised overall levels of consumption, but it cut away the self-sufficiency of the poorest, who were driven off the land, which had provided a regular, if small, income. Once they became wage laborers, their income periodically dropped to nothing, which happened to a medieval peasant only in times of total crop failure.

Life in England, says Wrightson, became less secure for the many, and, as we know from, say, the Left Book Club volumes of George Orwell, it remained that way for many centuries.