Folger guides provide lively, authoritative surveys of important aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural history. Attractively illustrated with material from contemporary documents, the Guides are designed for the general reader and are particularly valuable as enrichment resources for courses in Renaissance history and literature.

A study of the flourishing market for horses in pre-industrial England.

Rural England's Great Rebuilding of 1570-1640, first identified by W.G. Hoskins in 1953, has been vigorously debated ever since. Some critics have re-dated it on a regional basis. Still more have seen Great Rebuildings around every corner, causing them to dismiss Hoskins's thesis. In this first full-length study of the rebuilding phenomenon, Colin Platt, an accomplished architectural and social historian, addresses these issues and presents a persuasive fresh assessment of the legacy of this revolution in housing design. Although accepting Hoskins's definition of a first Great Rebuilding, starting with the 1570s and ending in the devastations of the Civil War, the author argues convincingly for a more influential "second" Great Rebuilding after peace had returned.; In examining architectural change both in the buildings themselves and through the writings of discerning contemporaries, today's family house, whether in town or country, is shown to owe almost nothing to the Middle Ages. Instead, its origins lie in the increasingly sophisticated world of the Tudor and Jacobean courts, in the refined taste of returned travellers, and in a growing popular demand for personal privacy, unobtainable in houses of medieval plan.; This fascinating and challenging study of changing tastes marks an important contribution to our understanding of Tudor and Stuart society and as such will not only be welcomed by students and historians of early modern England but by the interested general reader.

This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. This book attempts to define the term "middle classes" and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product.

This book was first published in 1962. Until the era of the Industrial Revolution wool was, without question, the most important raw material in the English economic system. The staple article of the country's export trade in the Middle Ages, it remained until the nineteenth century the indispensable basis of her greatest industry. This book looks at the decline of cloth industry in East Anglia sine the mid-sixteenth century.