Describing The Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England

Abstract

The terms sixteenth-and seventeenth-century commentators used to describe their society and their interpretation of the relationships between different social groups varied with their own social circumstances and the time in which they were writing. Status descriptions and other kinds of ‘addition’ or style of address were sufficiently fluid to cause confusion, while broad classifications were as likely to reflect the ideological perspectives of the author as social reality. Most Elizabethan writers on the polity gave prominence to the groups who were capable of political action. The gentry were considered as a ruling class and the enfranchised burgesses and yeomen were also constitutionally significant. The political arithmeticians of the late seventeenth century no longer emphasized an organic commonwealth with a traditional hierarchy of tenurial status. Gentility was a social condition, whereas the church or the law were careers.

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