Social networks were central to the maintenance of social harmony in the tumultuous years of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. People living through this period experienced a range of social, economic, political and religious change, from rapid population growth to recurrent episodes of plague, other epidemic illnesses and inflation. Power was shifting in the central government and in the counties. Plots were hatched against the monarch and government and there were ongoing negotiations about religion, thanks to the Protestant Reformation. Rather than plunging the realm back into the dynastic conflicts of the fifteenth century, however, this constellation of systemic stress-points prompted people to find ways to achieve social harmony, or concord. From 1580 to 1650, kinship and cultural networks like the west midlands antiquarian group, the ‘Lovers of Antiquity’, encouraged affinity between men that might otherwise have been at odds over religion. Their work, upon which William Dugdale built his Antiquities of Warwickshire, provided a model for intellectual production and social concord. Despite the county’s deep political divisions and reputation as a hotbed of Catholic radicalism, Warwickshire’s intellectual, social and cultural networks cultivated an atmosphere of social and religious coexistence rather than persecution. Correspondence reveals that Dugdale linked members of the west midlands group to other antiquarian circles and to antiquarians in London.

Since the inception of the Dugdale Society a century ago, scholarship on Warwickshire has moved from antiquarian studies of particular families and a method of modern chorography in the Victoria County Histories, to county studies of politics, to methodologies that embraced new social history, gender as a category of analysis and a new model for examining the role of families and individuals in the wider landscape of the county’s history. Antiquarians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as E. P. Shirley, drew on predecessors like William Dugdale for publications that advanced the social and political reputation of specific families. Shirley produced the Stemmata Shirleiana, or the Annals of the Shirley Family, in the mid-nineteenth century and an expanded second edition in 1873. The account traced the main branches of the family from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and adopted a methodology that was strikingly similar to that used by Dugdale and the ‘Lovers of Antiquity’ in the early seventeenth century.