The ‘Decline of Neighbourliness’ Revisited

Abstract

The ‘decline of neighbourliness’ is one of the longest established interpretative themes in the social history of early modern England. Among historians of my generation, it is indelibly associated with two of the foundation texts of the ‘new social history’: Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic . To Macfarlane, the upsurge of witchcraft accusations in the late sixteenth century was closely linked to ‘a deep social change; a change from a “neighbourly”, highly integrated and mutually interdependent villiage society to a more individualistic one’. 1 To Thomas, it reflected ‘an unresolved conflict between the neighbourly conduct required by the ethical code of the old villiage community, and the increasingly individualistic forms of behaviour which accompanied the economic changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’. 2 Both drew in turn upon the interpretation of social and cultural change put forward by Christopher Hill; one in which economic change ‘manifested itself in the rise of a spirit of individualism’ which, in concert with the religious changes of the Reformation era, served ‘unconsciously to atomize the parish’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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