The activities of medieval monarchs were severely circumscribed by the environment in which they had to operate. They were at the mercy of events in a more acute sense than many modern historians realize. Difficulties of communication in particular could play havoc with royal policy such that a mooted response to a problem that had arisen could be redundant before effected. Most difficult of all would be consistency in terms of royal policy except in the most general understanding of that term, and indeed it could be argued that those historians who do tend to see “consistency” in the policies of medieval monarchs are superimposing onto their subjects an order they desire for their own mental processes.

Much of what has been said so far is applicable to Henry II in his dealings with Irish Sea politics. Henry was overlord of a vast empire through which he constantly circulated and in which the Irish Sea region was but a small part. It was seldom his most important consideration. In his dealings with Ireland and its neighbors, it should always be remembered that this was a region that commanded his attention fitfully, either on its own or as part of a larger whole. It would appear that Henry did try to pursue some limited kind of consistency in areas of his Irish Sea diplomacy. He could also be inconsistent. He could and did find himself at the mercy of events and had to react accordingly.

Despite the very considerable scholarly attention focused on Thomas Cromwell in recent decades, surprisingly little is known or written about his private financial affairs and, in particular, about the acquisition and management of his landed estates. His principal but badly outdated biographer, R. B. Merriman, was content with a few sweeping generalizations about immense ill-gotten wealth; the only modern biography devotes to this topic barely two paragraphs; and G. R. Elton, who began and sustains the Cromwellian renaissance, is concerned primarily with the public man.

Yet at the time of his arrest in 1540, Cromwell was one of the biggest landowners in the southeastern home counties, the end result of an active decade of buying and selling lands, augmented by large monastic and other royal grants. With Cromwell's creation as earl of Essex, his appointment as lord great chamberlain, and his son Gregory's marriage into the Seymour family (becoming thereby uncle to the future Edward VI), the uninitiated might well be pardoned for seeing here the origin of still one more powerful landed political dynasty which, like the Seymours themselves, the Russells, the Paulets, and the Cecils, owed its beginning to political skill and the opportunities of a fluid sixteenth-century land market.

Certainly this new style of service aristocracy, founded first on office in the central government and concentrating on London and the court, with landed wealth frequently coming later as a reward rather than first as a birthright, was perfectly consistent with the major realignment of relations between king and nobility which characterized the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs and their leading ministers.

The relationship between population growth and growing social differentiation and the appeal of Puritanism to—and its effect on— parts of English society has been the subject of much debate ever since the publication of Christopher Hill's Society and Puritanism. The problem was reformulated and elaborated by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, whose studies focused on the village level. They described in detail the effect of Puritan preaching on local society and what parts of local society were particularly attracted by Puritan preachings, taking as an example the village of Terling, Essex. From the late sixteenth century on, Puritanism proved to be a means to enforce public discipline. Keith Wrightson pointed out the concern for order in Puritan preachings. Puritan preachers reminded assize juries of their responsibility to enforce morals and to restore order. Thus they provided a mental framework for the local “better sort,” who wished to readjust their relations to the growing number of local poor. The enforcement of morals was carried out by wealthy local officeholders by means of sweeps of the alehouses, for example, and served as such an adjustment in the village of Terling. Religion, then, ceased to be a vertical bond tying local society together but added instead a cultural dimension to the already existing differences in property and income.

In recent years both Margaret Spufford and Martin Ingram have questioned this connection of Puritanism and the growing difference between rich and poor in many villages. Spufford claims that, despite growing social differentiation, religion still worked as a common bond for poor and wealthy villagers alike.