caa a22 4500 388100958 CHVBK 20180307125320.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199904 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0956793300001679 doi S0956793300001679 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0956793300001679 Kent Joan The Rural ‘Middling Sort' in Early Modern England, circa 1640-1740: Some Economic, Political and Socio-Cultural Characteristics [Elektronische Daten] [Joan Kent] A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century'. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England', largely eliminated ‘middle class' from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort', and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such as The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550-1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999 Rural History Cambridge University Press 10/1(1999-04), 19-54 0956-7933 10:1<19 1999 10 RUH https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793300001679 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793300001679 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Kent Joan NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Rural History Cambridge University Press 10/1(1999-04), 19-54 0956-7933 10:1<19 1999 10 RUH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge