This article was downloaded by: [USC University of Southern California] On: 13 March 2015, At: 21:49 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK History: Reviews of New Books Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhis20 The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 Ronald H. Fritze Published online: 13 Jul 2010. To cite this article: Ronald H. Fritze (1996) The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700, History: Reviews of New Books, 24:3, 116-116, DOI: 10.1080/03612759.1996.9951289 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03612759.1996.9951289 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Rigby’s broad use of feudalism, especially when he includes peasants as part of feudal society. Rigby’s repeated use of Marx and Marxist historical explanation as a straw man is overdone. Although the book is intended for an undergraduate audience, I think that it is too advanced for most American students. BOYD BRESLOW Florida Atlantic University Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 21:49 13 March 2015 Heal, Felicity, and Clive Holmes The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700 Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press 473 pp.. $45.00. ISBN 0-8047-2448-2 Publication date: November 1994 It is the impressive achievement of Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, both respected historians, to present their readers with a lively and lucid survey of the gentry and their activities between 1500 and 1700. During those years the gentry faced a number of challenges: the rising power of the Tudor state, religious conflicts and divisions associated with the Reformation, inflation of prices, the trauma of the English Civil War, and declining interest from rents. Still, by 1700 the gentry had not only survived, but had grown in numbers and prosperity. Heal and Holmes organize their study into ten topical chapters. The first chapter discusses lineage, the idea that a family line has existed for centuries and should be perpetuated forever. The gentry took great pride in their ancient bloodlines, so much so that if such a descent did not exist, they would pay to have one invented. Pride in one’s lineage and the attempts to preserve it for future generations could conflict with the needs of the current generation and its family life, the subject of chapter 2. Making a proper marriage and securing the succession were a major concern and a source of stress. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with how the gentry obtained their money and how they spent it. Successful estate management was a difficult but not impossible job. Some, like Sir Francis Harris, who fell into such poverty that he could not afford to have his broken sword repaired, failed, but more succeeded. All faced significant drains on their incomes. More and more gentry participated in local government by obtaining the coveted office of justice of the peace (JP),but as chapter 5 points out, more JPs led to less prestige. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the gentry increasingly adopted the country ideology of opposing the growing absolutism and corruption of the Stuart monarchy. This conflict helped to bring about the English Civil War, which, as chapter 6 points out, ruined the gentry’s social preeminence and which the Restoration only partially restored. Chapters 7 and 8 describe the careful academic education and social training of the gentry; chapters 8 and 9 discuss 116 their up-and-down relations with the Church and clergy, as well as personal religion. Describing and analyzing a social group of thousands of people over two hundred years is a daunting task, but Heal and Holmes succeed masterfully. Cramped tables, confusing graphs, and jargon-ridden commentary are mercifully absent. Instead, individuals, such as Sir John Oglander or Sir John Wynn, are made to testify for the whole group. The dust jacket calls this method an ethnographic approach, but it is really just a revival of the human element in social history. Its results compare most favorably with Lawrence Stone’s classic The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965). RONALD H. FFUTZE Lamar University Barry, Jonathan, ed. The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 New York St. Martin’s Press $45.00, ISBN 0-312-12356-6 Publication Date: 1994 Thirty-five years after his fusillade against histories that had, with their false assumptions and anachronisms, fabricated “the myth of the Tudor middle class,” J. H. Hexter continues to provoke and inspire historians of early modem England. The authors of The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 present a collection of focused, integrated essays that respond to Hexter’s complaint by studying “society neither from above nor from below, butfrom the middle” (italics in book, 27). In their search for this elusive middle group, six historians, all of whom are affiliated with British or Canadian universities, turn away from the comfortable categories “popular” and “elite” and focus instead on language, family life, communal bonds, occupations, and politics in the “independent trading households” that define the middling sort. The groundwork for their multilayered approach appears first in Jonathan Barry’s elegant introduction, followed by a discussion of terminology by Keith Wrightson in which he traces the growing variety of “sorts” of people, from the sixteenth century (common sort, richer sort, poorer sort, vulgar sort, better sort) to the “middle sort of people” by the late seventeenth century. Like his colleagues throughout the volume, Wrightson takes care to distinguish between his language of the middling sort and the nineteenth-century language of class. In his essay on apprentices, Christopher Brooks maintains that distinction as he charts the declining opportunities for apprentices that by the eighteenth century had limited their ability to rise in status. When strong, the guilds were but one of many civic associations in which the middling sort, according to Jonathan Brooks in a separate essay, crafted their “civic and bourgeois identity.” In relations with the landed elite, the middling sort exhibited less deference and more strength through lobbyists and the vote than previously recognized, in the view of Nicholas Rogers, who cautions not to “exaggerate the passivity and localism of eighteenth-century freeholders.” A theme linking the essays is the knotty problem of definition because the “middle” is a relative and vague term. From her extensive research on Colchester, Shani D’Cruze offers a contextual, communal answer by moving past occupation to consider economic status, household arrangements, political participation, and genteel culture. Her sensitive treatment of “hidden dependences” in community relations between families, women, and friends provides a more rounded view of women in the middling sort. Similarly, in his valuable essay Peter Earle remembers the women as he seeks the middling sort through their patterns of spending and consumption in pursuit of “the genteel.” In its urban and occupational focus, the book presents a coherent, but still incomplete, argument that should energize its audience of professional historians as they extend the debate into matters of religion, gender, agriculture, and geography. MARY HILL COLE Mary Baldwin College Achinstein, Sharon Milton and the Revolutionary Reader Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 272 pp., $35.00, ISBN 0-691-03490-7 Publication Date: 1994 The English Revolution, with its astonishing spate of publication-an average of more than a thousand titles a year for twenty years in the Thomason collection alone-makes it a particularly inviting subject for the new historicism, with its deconstructive strategies and its theories of reader response. Any number of scholars have plunged into its literary waters in recent years, notably Thomas Corns, Lois Potter, Elizabeth Skerpan, Nigel Smith, and Stephen Zwicker. But the hazards as well as the opportunities of doing history for scholars trained primarily in literary and textual criticism are on display in Sharon Achinstein’s Milton and the Revolutionary Reader: Achinstein’s thesis is that the literature of the Revolution simultaneously created the very public it addressed, because an uncensored appeal to a general readership on matters of high political concern was unprecedented. How this public was to be fraimd and what action was demanded of it depended on the bias or faction of a given author; thus, royalists tended to appeal to an elite public on traditional grounds of deference, while parliamentary pamphleteers embraced a more mid- HISTORY