Introduction: the politics of social moderation

Historians who do not feel comfortable talking about a ‘middle class’ in England before the nineteenth century instead often use the term ‘middle sort’. Whatever sleight of hand may sometimes be inherent in this manoeuvre – for the occupants of the two categories often seem eerily similar – early modern historians console themselves that ‘middle sort’ (or sometimes ‘middling sort’) was at least a bona fide early modern term. Using this term, and trying to understand its contemporary nuances, captures subjective understandings of early modern social relations in ways that more recent and ideologically freighted terms like ‘middle class’ simply do not. Thus a number of historians, most notably Keith Wrightson, have tracked the emergence of the idea of a ‘middle sort’, arguing that the ‘middle sort of people’ were only occasionally identified as such in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but that use of the term increased from the 1620s onwards, accelerating rapidly in the Civil Wars and Revolution, indicating the growing significance and cultural coherence of people whose wealth and status depended upon trade. This view has been nuanced by Henry French, who showed that even after the idea of a ‘middle sort’ came into vogue, the middle sort rarely deployed it themselves. It remained in the seventeenth century a term of theoretical analysis rather than self-identification, and in local contexts the middle sort usually referred to themselves as ‘chief inhabitants’, stressing their ascendancy rather than their mediocrity.

As a result of these valuable investigations we now understand a great deal about the complex social and cultural position of the ‘middle sort’ in early modern England. On the upper end, the middle sort might mimic the qualities of their betters, purchase manors and over generations become gentrified; yet increasingly through our period they also might reject such aspirations and defend the life of useful trade over decadent gentility. On the lower end, the middle sort might claim entry into the oligarchies of their communities through the rhetoric of gentility; yet since a decreasing percentage of tradesmen actually owned their means of production, they might easily fall into dependency and become indistinguishable from wage earners. The seventeenth-century ‘middle sort’ thus appear in the historiography as ancestors of both the bourgeoisie and their skilled employees, and understanding the process of differentiation between these groups has become a significant scholarly enterprise. In sum, by paying attention to the terms by which contemporaries described themselves and others, historians have re-authorised the centrality (for the seventeenth century if not for the sixteenth) of tradesmen, shopkeepers, merchants and capitalist farmers within a cultural rather than a social or Marxist historiography.