Keith Wrightson

The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England

In his Cambridge inaugural lecture in November 1989, Professor Patrick Collinson attempted to re-establish the common ground linking two increasingly separated areas of historical debate when he used his platform to call for ‘a new political history’ of early modern England, ‘an account of political processes which is also social’.1 In reflecting on what I will call ‘the politics of the parish’, this chapter also seeks to explore the opportunities for a ‘social history with the politics put back in’; but in a rather different sense.

The ‘Decline of Neighbourliness’ Revisited

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

The world we have gained: histories of population and social structure. Essays presented to Peter Laslett on his seventieth birthday.

This collection of 15 studies by various authors concerns aspects of historical demography associated with the work of Peter Laslett. The essays range back in time as far as the fourteenth century and span topics as diverse but demonstrably interconnected as internal migration family structure and employment marriage and widowhood inheritance and remarriage the determinants of marital fertility maternal mortality and illegitimacy. Data sources include wills tithing lists manorial court rolls parish registers of various types and family reconstitutions as well as contemporary works and documents. The geographical focus is primarily on England but individual studies are concerned with Sweden and Italy.

Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society: Death in Whickham

The emergence of historical demography in the decades since the Second World War has rendered English historians only too familiar with the demographic facts of mortality in the Tudor and Stuart period. The jagged peaks in burial statistics derived from the aggregative analysis of Anglican parish registers are in themselves sufficient to lacerate the complacency of a western culture in which death, though inevitable, has become postponed, confined, effaced from public view and muted in public consciousness. The patient piecing together of marriages, baptisms, and burials in family reconstruction studies demonstrates less dramatically, but in more compelling detail, the stark realities of an age in which high infant and child mortality and the premature deaths of spouses were perennial threats to the survival of the individual family. Graphs, tables and histograms, simulations and back-projections, the proliferating weaponry of the demographic arms race, combine to bring home to the modern student what every contemporary knew: that life was tenuous; that few could hope to live out the biblical span and die already retired from the immediacy of family responsibilities; that for most death came both unexpected and untimely, cutting them off quite literally in the midst of life. The facts of a demographic regime in which high mortality was a central characteristic are clear enough.

The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560-1765.

This is the first intensive study of an industrial community in early modern England. Whickham, a village built on an underground mountain of coal in north-east England, was arguably Britains first modern industrial society. David Levine and Keith Wrightson employ the latest techniques of socio-historical research and make full use of a wide variety of contemporary sources to explore many aspects of life in Whickham between 1560 and 1765. They bring together vital strands - including industrial development, agrarian change, social stratification, demography, religion, work, leisure, living standards, kinship and the family - to produce a rounded and vivid picture, which throws into relief the achievements, benefits, and costs of the complex process of industrialization. The development of Whickham is set in the larger context of socio-economic change during this period. This is a major contribution to the history of early modern England.