Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 177

Keith Wrightson has been a formative influence in the development of early modern social history over the last forty years, and this festschrift provides both a fitting tribute and interesting insights into the current state of the discipline. It begins with a long and weighty introduction in which the three editors contextualize Wrightson’s achievement and trace changes in social history over the course of his career. It highlights the enduring themes, and the subtly nuanced shades of understanding deployed at the interface of the traditional social order and the forces of social and economic change. Wrightson’s initial achievement was to focus on people and community politics in social and economic history. How this has fared as history was submerged by the linguistic turn in the humanities is a second and important theme of the chapter.

In the remainder of the book the contributors demonstrate the wide range of themes Wrightson’s students have addressed. Many made use of the micro-study technique, a case study, often from a single community looked at from several positions. Alexandra Shepard examines how communities treated the fathers of illegitimate children. They were often expected to take responsibility, physically as well as financially once the child had survived the first few years, but by the later seventeenth century the parish was more frequently directly involved with the placing of the child. Helen Berry uses the intriguing case of Italian castrati opera stars in London to explore perceptions of their gender (and sexuality) during the eighteenth century. Naomi Tadmor deploys a gendered approach to the eighteenth-century Sussex diaries of Thomas Turner, showing how Turner’s wife was excluded from parish affairs while her husband often did parish business over a hearty meal on the rates. Paul Griffiths looks at written record keeping by townships and cities, and the new information culture partly spawned central government’s enactments. It created information networks between towns, as well as providing London with data and turning oral custom into written record, but may also perversely have made local government more secretive. Phil Withington’s chapter on intoxicants in early modern York looks at the ale house and the ‘moralists and magistrates’ who regulated it, central Wrightsonian territory. The early seventeenth century surge in wine and tobacco consumption in inns and taverns changed the focus of York’s intoxication, but it was the small alehouse keepers who were most scrutinized and purged. Food and drink are the focus of Adam Fox’s contribution, considered as badges of social status. Using a combination of contemporary writings, and a rather uncritical take on Gregory King’s calculations on food expenditure by social group, he considers variation in diet as an indicator of social status. Tim Stretton considers early modern neighbourliness and indebtedness, pointing to the wider use of written bonds, and contrasts England’s readiness to imprison debtors, with Massachusetts’ ban. England’s increasing litigiousness went with an un-neighbourly willingness to enforce the letter of the instrument, and a growing culture of vexatious litigation. Malcolm Gaskell considers neighbourliness in the context of witchcraft accusations, demonstrating the ‘capricious and contested’ range of neighbourly situations which engendered court cases – the political, the isolated old woman accusing her neighbours of trying to bewitch her, but above all pointing up the gulf between richer and poorer sorts in much more nuanced ways than in Macfarlane’s classic scenario. Andy Wood’s chapter on deference and paternalism successfully deploys sociological ideas to clarify this contested area and argues that deferential pleas for a return to past harmonious social relations in early modern England gave way in the nineteenth century to a sense that the golden age was irrecoverable. Steve Hindle’s fertile research on the Newdigate papers and Chilvers Coton here considers the estate workforce and their patterns of recruitment and work. Servants in husbandry came from outside the parish, and changed frequently, while local day labourers were vital for peak season, and 25 per cent of their work was at piece rates. Wage rates appear low, but whether this was the result of paternalist relationships is unclear, and complicated by the burgeoning local coal industry which has left few records. Henry French’s chapter on the old poor law in Terling illustrates a well-documented topic only lightly explored by Wrightson and Levine in their study. His massive database of poor law payments up to 1800 used in combination with a very full 1801 census return shows the dominance of short-term help to a wide range of families, the scale of the crisis of the 1790s and enriches rural historians’ understanding of the reality of poor law provision. In the final chapter Craig Muldrew charts the relationship between economic and political governance from Sir Thomas to Adam Smith, looking at the change in vocabulary from Commonwealth to Nation and Society. He stresses how labour and labour discipline have long been seen as the key to public opulence, and the importance to Adam Smith’s thought of government’s role in controlling vested interests of every kind.

These varied essays match the breadth of Wrightson’s interests and the high research standards he engendered. Wrightson’s approach ensured that social and economic history broke out from the structures and categories of its initial phase to ensure that individuals and communities could be given full voice. It is no criticism to reflect that his territory (and that of the contributors) is almost exclusively England. Wrightson’s contemporaries in early modern political history widened perspectives to stress Scotland and Ireland and the British question. Economic and social historians have increasingly made global comparisons, while the COST and CORN initiatives have triggered transnational rural approaches. Will Wrightson’s successors subtly shift his very English focus without losing the rigorous and nuanced approach he instilled?