Michael J. Braddick

Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Introduction. Grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society

Recent work in social history has given great emphasis both to the variety of forms of hierarchy in early modern society and to the ways in which the experience of hierarchy and subordination was negotiated. At the same time historians, in ̄uenced perhaps by the linguistic turn, have become more sensitive to the fact that order was culturally constructed and that life chances were affected not just by material issues but also by the ways in which the social world was imagined and described. We are now confronted by a picture of the early modern world in which there existed a variety of hierarchies ± class, status (variously determined), gender and age ± justi®ed with reference to a variety of languages which were all, to some degree, unstable and contested. Recognition of the polyphony that this has created has important consequences for a broader understanding of how the social order was represented and constructed. The underlying picture of how power operated and was experienced in the early modern period is, accordingly, more complex. The chapters in this volume offer an alternative reading of the political relationships between dominant and subordinate groups in the construction of social order. By examining this process across a variety of arenas, the essays challenge the appropriateness of a series of binary models (of which the elite/popular dyad is only the most familiar) for capturing the multiplicity of exchanges by which domination was achieved and subordination negotiated. By turning to micro-sociologies of power and of social roles, they seek to develop an account of early modern social order which is sensitive both to the variety of forms of hierarchy and to the possibilities available to the relatively weak for limiting its effects on their lives. The disadvantaged in early modern society navigated their way in a world which afforded many sources of in ̄uence to their more powerful contemporaries. But in negotiating

The Early Modern English State and the Question of Differentiation from 1550 to 1700

It is frequently said that, while historians are theoretically naive, sociologists are insensitive to the particularities of specific historical situations; and that this insensitivity can seriously affect the usefulness of theory. What follows is an attempt to marry the critical insights of sociologists on a central issue, the state, with the sensitivity of historians to the modalities and particularities of the exercise of political and social power in a particular context, seventeenthcentury England. The result, it is hoped, is an account that benefits from the strengths of both.

The Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper, 1641–1657

Sir Cheney Culpeper (1611–1663) was a lawyer and gentleman from the north Kentish Weald. Yet he never rose to prominence in the legal profession. Nor did he take up public office either as an MP or as a diplomat – although he occasionally entertained the possibilities of both. Such aspirations would not have been surprising in someone who was the eldest son of a family which enjoyed connections to the wheels of power in Stuart England. He expected to inherit a considerable portion of the familys not inconsiderable estates – which included Leeds Castle. Yet he was, at a critical juncture, in effect disinherited by his father. Although a committed Parliamentarian, Culpeper did not play a major part either in county or national politics during the Civil War and the Interregnum. His career was, in worldly terms, hardly a success: if success alone were the criterion to justify the publication of his letters over three hundred years later, this volume would not see the light of day.

The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Introduction: John Morrill and the experience of revolution

When John Morrill began his research career the most influential writing about mid-seventeenth-century England was essentially concerned with modernization, and, even in non-Marxist explanations, contained a strong strain of materialism. This was a prominent feature of the sometimes vituperative exchanges of the gentry debate, and John’s first piece of extended writing about seventeenth-century England was written in response to that controversy; it was a long essay, composed during a summer vacation, which examined the relationship between the fortunes of particular gentry families and their Civil War allegiance. His interest in local realities, however, quickly gave rise to dissatisfaction with the broad categories of analysis with which the gentry controversy was engaged. By the time that he published the monograph based on his Oxford D.Phil. thesis, in 1974, he concluded (among other things) that ‘the particular situation in Cheshire diffracted the conflicts between King and Parliament into an individual and specific pattern. As a result all rigid, generalized explanations, particularly of the socio-economic kind, are unhelpful if not downright misleading.’1 A desire to do better than these generalizations has driven his work ever since, and has thereby provided a huge stimulus to scholars of early modern England. His doctoral study of Cheshire marked the beginning of the first of three overlapping but distinct phases in the development of his work, in each of which he has been a leading figure. All have been a point of reference for the work of numerous scholars engaged in a critical reappraisal of the Whig and Marxist traditions. In his first phase, as a local historian,

Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response.

The 15th and 10th the subsidy the assessment the excise the poll taxes and the hearth tax finance, taxation and the locality, 1590-1670 conclusion. Appendices: Norfolk and Cheshire taxation - accounts in the Public Record Office receipts from the subsidy in Norfolk and Cheshire annual receipts from taxation in Norfolk and Cheshire c1590-1642.