A pioneering social and economic study, which sheds new light on London's social history. Chapters on demography, social and occupational structure, topography, population turnover and residential mobility, and neighbourly relations, lead to a discussion of the involvement of the district's inhabitants in local government and church ceremonial.

This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. The majority of people who lived in early-modern England were neither very rich nor very poor, yet a disproportionate amount of historiography has been directed towards precisely these groups. This book intends to define the term 'middle classes' and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product rising and falling according to others' activities.

For almost a hundred years the academic study of migration concentrated on evolving standardised models of migration behaviour based on data from censuses or the registration of births, marriages and deaths. More recently, it has been realised that such models fail to take into account the decision-making behind migration and that better understanding will come from study of the behaviour of individuals as well as aggregate numbers. In this book the imaginative use of alternative sources DS for example, apprentice books, guild and craft records, legal and court documents, diaries and biographies DS gives fresh insights into the processes of movement to reveal much more complex circulatory behaviour than the standard models derived from census and registration sources alone have suggested.The first chapter confronts the issue of rural mobility in post-famine Ireland and is followed by a study centred on Alpine rural families which built impressive networks across pre-industrial Western Europe. Two chapters focus on the particular characteristics of worker groups: mining families of south Lancashire during the period of rapid increase in coal production in the eighteenth century; and the organised mobility of skilled labour in nineteenth-century central Europe. Next, an imaginative and rigorous deployment of the techniques of family reconstruction and record linkage embracing a variety of sources (vital event registers, wills, port books, apprentice records) teases out the migration histories of those who settled in eighteenth-century Liverpool. There are two chapters on female migrant behaviour, drawing attention in the case of eighteenth-century Rheims to the opportunities and restrictions on the life of migrant women at different points in their lifecycles; and showing how poor women struggled to survive in nineteenth-century Dublin. The final chapter uses family histories assembled by numerous genealogists and family historians to challenge the orthodox view of direct stepwise migration from a smaller to a larger town in the urban hierarchy.

This book is the first major study of courtship in early modern England. Courtship was a vitally important process in early modern England. It was a period of private and public negotiation, often fraught with anxiety. If completed successfully it brought respectability, the privileges of marriage and adulthood, and a stable union between socially, economically, and emotionally compatible couples. Using Kent church court and probate material dating from the 15th to the end of the 16th century, the book blends historical and anthropological perspectives to suggest novel and exciting approaches to the making of marriage.

Lena Orlin paints a dense picture of everyday life in Renaissance England, with an emphasis on personal privacy, the built environment, and the life story of a remarkable undiscovered woman - merchant's wife and mother of four, Alice Barnham - with a central role in some of the most important untold stories of sixteenth-century women.

Accounting for Oneself is a major new study of the social order in early modern England, as viewed and articulated from the bottom up. Engaging with how people from across the social spectrum placed themselves within the social order, it pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts when answering questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, and with a broad geographical coverage, this study explores how men and women accounted for their 'worth' and described what they did for a living at differing points in the life-cycle. A corrective to top-down, male-centric accounts of the social order penned by elite observers, the perspective from below testifies to an intricate hierarchy based on sophisticated forms of social reckoning that were articulated throughout the social scale. A culture of appraisal was central to the competitive processes whereby people judged their own and others' social positions. For the majority it was not land that was the yardstick of status but moveable property-the goods and chattels in people's possession ranging from livestock to linens, tools to trading goods, tables to tubs, clothes to cushions. Such items were repositories of wealth and the security for the credit on which the bulk of early modern exchange depended. Accounting for Oneself also sheds new light on women's relationship to property, on gendered divisions of labour, and on early modern understandings of work which were linked as much to having as to getting a living. The view from below was not unchanging, but bears witness to the profound impact of widening social inequality that opened up a chasm between the middle ranks and the labouring poor between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. As a result, not only was the social hierarchy distorted beyond recognition, from the later-seventeenth century there was also a gradual yet fundamental reworking of the criteria informing the calculus of esteem.

In seeking to portray a more positive image of young people in the 16th and 17th centuries, this study surveys attitudes and activities to demonstrate that youth had a creative presence, an identity, and a historical significance which was never fully explored.