Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700

"This is less fun than the other books, it’s a very serious work of history. But it’s interesting for me for two reasons. The first is that in my field it has been hugely influential. It’s about a village called Terling, which is in Essex. It’s a relatively economically vibrant, religiously active village not too far from London. It’s got very good records from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book by Wrightson and Levine has been so influential that there’s now a Terling thesis about the early modern period. This is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because of the economic changes that were happening, there was a rise of the middling sort and they were intrinsically much more receptive to Puritanism. They saw that there was a lot of poverty in their village and they wanted to control it. That control was manifested through things like restrictions on people having time in the ale house, prosecutions for sexual misdemeanours. Even things like swearing and playing football on the Sabbath fell into these guys’ crosshairs. That thesis, which people have challenged and unpicked, has been very influential. It has also changed the way early modern historians look at the English nuclear family. Wrightson and Levine looked at people’s wills and found they didn’t leave very much money outside their immediate family, which suggests that what they called ‘non-kin’ were not very important to English people. It fed into this idea of English individualism and the importance of the nuclear family way back in seventeenth-century England. The second reason I think it’s really interesting is that it takes the same anthropological approach of people like Robert Darnton and melds it with this tradition of local history. What we call the ‘Leicester School of Local History’ is where you look for big, often economic, themes in the history of a single village. One of the classic examples is W. G. Hoskins’s The Midland Peasant , which is about a village in Leicestershire. It’s a very English tradition, that particularly economic and social approach to one village. Wrightson and Levine take that and stick in a bit of cultural history. They’re very influenced by people like Alan Macfarlane who’s an anthropologist and they use Terling as a way of thinking about how English society is changing in that period. They may be wrong, there are even historians who debate their interpretation of that one village. Methodologically and in terms of the ideas though, this is so influential and so interesting as a book. One of the things that Wrightson argues in another article, and I think this is influenced by his Terling stuff, is that the early modern period sees something called a ‘decline of neighbourliness.’ I think this is just another attempt by an early modern historian to create a really interesting narrative. His argument is that in the Middle Ages there was this real language of neighbourliness. Villages worked by getting together and working in the same manorial court, sharing the same common land, socialising in the same ale houses, playing the same games, and the same sports. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two major changes happened. One is the rise of fundamentally divisive forms of religion such as puritanism, this then sees these middling people try to regulate the behaviour of the poor and stop them doing certain types of games. Wrightson’s middling sort think in very different ways as well, they see themselves as being linked to the gentry, reading the same books, going to grammar schools and universities, thinking in very different ways to the nearest poor. Wrightson also writes about the rise of capitalism and he thinks that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England developed along particularly capitalist lines: the market became more important. This means you got the enclosure of common lands and economic differentiation between the middling sort and the poor. In the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that then shatters this neighbourliness and creates a very different world going into the eighteenth century. It’s a world that is ready for parliamentary enclosure, the battles over food prices, and things like that."