This paper offers vivid insights into English culture, society and social relations during a century when they were undergoing far reaching changes; and in exploring the nature of these developments and their inter-relationships, attention is focused as much on contemporary perceptions and representations as on modern historians’ understanding of what was happening. The paper ranges very widely, encompassing such topics as the economic and social order; orality, literacy and culture; the rise and fall of witch-hunting; attitudes to poverty, crime and sexual delinquency; ideas about manners and gentility; gender relations and family ties. All these themes are explored in ways that will be found rewarding both by students who come to the period afresh, and those who have already studied the History of the British Isles IV 1500-1700 but wish to deepen their understanding of social and cultural history. In either case, students may well find themselves encountering issues and sources that suggest a topic for further research in an undergraduate thesis. The subject is based in a rich historiography that is constantly being reinvigorated by lively research.
Specifically, the subject embraces seven broad areas: social relations; patterns of settlement, including the causes and effects of population change, migration and the growth of London; family and household, in all their aspects from marriage to the role of women, children and servants; agrarian, industrial and commercial change; patterns of consumption, in such matters as fashion, diet and recreation; cultural differentiation, including the diffusion of reading and writing skills and the variety of popular cultures; and finally poverty and poor relief, social regulation and crime.
Among the prescribed documents are extracts from contemporary tracts, including William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties, on family and domestic relations; Hannah Woolley’s The Gentlewoman’s Companion; or A Guide to the Female Sex; Francis Hawkins’s Youth’s Behaviour; and William Higford’s Institution of a Gentleman. There are also local census and poor relief documents, a travel journal, a diary chronicling a troubled marriage, extracts from church court and criminal proceedings (including witchcraft cases), and the incomparable History of Myddle, Richard Gough’s lively account of the inhabitants of a Shropshire parish. The collection is completed by extracts from J. Thirsk and J.P. Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, chosen to illustrate contemporary opinion on social structures and patterns of consumption, as well as economic developments more narrowly defined. In the examination candidates will be required to answer at least one question specifically relating to the prescribed material.
