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Common people, most of who lived in the countryside, played a significant role in cultural assimilation between the Normans and the English during the medieval period. This chapter examines the presence of immigrants in rural areas, outside of the aristocracy, the relations of the ordinary English people of the countryside with the immigrants, and their influence on identity and culture in England after the Norman conquest. It also explores the interaction of class and ethnicity, particularly through a discussion of relations between native country people and Norman aristocrats. The chapter provides a nuanced picture of the role of English peasants and the way in which class divisions limited it. The term ‘peasant’ and the phrase ‘middling sort’ are explained. Immigration after the conquest was not limited to the elites, but included lesser people as well.

This chapter shows how middling-sort merchants, writing clerks, and dissenters used letters to work out problems regarding business, religion, gender and class. Letters of four generations of Tucker stone merchants reveal how an Anglican Weymouth family constructed social relationships, personal identities, and political aspirations through epistolary language. The Congregational Bateman and Wilson families of Manchester and London used letters to cope with anxieties about gender, business and, especially, personal salvation. Letters of the Quaker Follows family of East Anglia and Leicestershire were their primary link to a Quaker way of life, and reveal tense family relationships. The chapter shows how religious differences produced distinctive modes of letter writing. Epistolary literacy is proposed as a criterion for inclusion in the middling-sort. It was a unifying attribute and powerful weapon in their businesses, families, and spiritual lives.

This introductory chapter shows how a culture of letters and literacy that included lower and middling-sort letter writers was created in England by 1800. It examines the epistolary tradition in English culture and the rise of the post office. The concept of epistolary literacy is introduced and defined. The discovery of thousands of letters in unknown archives below the rank of gentry provided the source material for the book. They will be used to show why people wrote letters, how they used them, and their impact on individuals, families, and society.

This chapter sets the scene of the book. It does so first by going through a series of Hogarth prints—the “Rake's Progress.” We then survey the class structure of England in general and of London society in particular from the historical record. Inequality was high; the so-called “middling sort” was becoming more influential. Approaching the evidence from these two vantage points illuminates the problem of survivor bias that affects all business history.

This chapter examines the response of the middling sort of Norwich to the food riots of 1766. It highlights the need for a reassessment of the ideological culture of the middling sort and to restore them to an active role within the politics of rights and entitlements that made up the moral economy. The chapter describes how the political power of the poor and middling freemen prevented the extinction of the traditional rights and privileges that guaranteed their representation within the structures of municipal government and the criminal justice system of the city.

This chapter examines community-building practices among Irish law students by reconstructing the process of bonding as it occurred in multiple, interconnected places such as Middle Temple Hall, the coffeehouse, and the tradesman's shop. The entry requirements of the Inns, which included the presentation of a security, or bond, encouraged Irish students to form social bonds with each other. Irish students acted as sureties for one another, in some cases bonds linked students entering the Inn at the same time, in others, students already sitting terms became signatories for new arrivals. Mapping out these ‘genealogies’ of bondsmen demonstrates that students engaged in collective behaviour and exposes one of the mechanisms those students used to reproduce community over time. Additionally, Irish students needed someone local and known to the governing body of the Inn to sign their bonds. Increased business and the potential to develop a steady customer base provided the incentives for tradesmen, artisans and shopkeepers to step up as sureties. Coffeehouse keepers were the most active members of the middling sort to sign bonds, and one particular house, ‘The Grecian’, became an Irish space where students and other migrants in London met and forged even closer relationships.

Classical economic theory suggests that commerce played a central role in the growth of politeness and the decline of violence. This chapter complicates commerce’s role in the civilising process by exploring economic violence in eighteenth century Scotland. Economic violence is defined as constituting a range of physical and non-physical violent acts carried out against persons and property, and economic actions interpreted as forms of violence. Drawing examples from legal records and the debtors’ prison, it considers the intersections between masculinity, economy and interpersonal violence, structured particularly around notions of honour. It argues that violence played a functional role within eighteenth-century Scottish commerce, where it supported claims to masculine gender identity. Violence was not only the property of the crowd, used to defend customary rights, but was deployed by a range of different men, including the commercial middling sorts.

The chapter focuses on the core concept of the ‘middle class’. For England and Wales, the former East Germany and the former West Germany, socio-economic positions and financial situations of citizens/consumers are identified along with the social and economic attitudes related to these. The chapter then embarks on an examination of the relationship between individual’s socio-economic position and financial situation and involvement in crime in the marketplace, both as victims and offenders. The findings demonstrate that those with higher levels of income are most heavily involved in these types of crimes, equally as victims and offenders.

The tradesmen and women who form the focus of this chapter appeared in contemporary eighteenth-century texts as a diverse, yet distinct social group: above unskilled workers, but below merchants and those in the professions. By integrating this largely overlooked, but important, social group into our vision of eighteenth-century society this chapter will reconsider existing understandings of class and identity, particularly concerning the ‘middling sorts’: that group most readily associated with Langford’s A Polite and Commercial People. Though Manchester’s tradesmen and women were certainly commercial, it is not so clear that they were best described in terms of politeness. By exploring the nature of personal religious belief alongside the effects of religious change over the long eighteenth century, this chapter will suggest that the lives of a significant proportion of Manchester’s residents were dominated by their devotion to business as well as to religion, whilst they tended to ignore those more fashionable forms of behaviour associated with polite manners and sensibility.

One of the most impressive aspects of A Polite and Commercial People is Paul Langford’s skilful synthesis of a bewildering array of lesser known authors and publications to tap into opinion and sentiment on social, economic, political, and cultural questions, including the remarkable popularity of works of antiquarianism (as well as history) amongst eighteenth-century readers. The progress of manners, a thematic undercurrent throughout the book, allowed eighteenth-century antiquaries such as John Brand and Joseph Strutt to look back upon the manners and customs of the past as the expressions of different social mores, characteristic of ruder, less polished times. Through innovative interdisciplinary research which combined written and visual sources, material culture and architectural analysis, this interest developed into historical accounts of manners and customs, sports and pastimes, which documented the everyday practices of the English people from the time of the Roman conquest onwards: it offered in effect a history of the domestic life of the English people. The historicization of domesticity or everyday life was notably elaborated upon in historical novels by antiquarian-minded writers such as Walter Scott (who had himself worked on Strutt’s failed novel Queenhoo Hall), Harrison Ainsworth, and Bulwer Lytton. Rather than focusing upon novels, however, this chapter analyses how ‘domesticity’ and ‘domestic life’, particularly of the middling sorts, became categories of antiquarian and historical research from the later eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century and in the process provided a social history of the mores and lifestyle of Britain’s polite and commercial classes.

This chapter looks at Heywood’s remarkable rehabilitation after his abjuration in 1543, and examines in detail his turn to a new literary form with A Dialogue of Proverbs. It offers a new reading of this little-discussed text, setting it in the context of the humanist taste for Adagia, and showing how Heywood parodies the form in a dialogue that cites ‘all the proverbs in the English tongue’ to no final effect. It then looks closely at the subsequent editions of ‘Hundreds’ of Epigrams upon proverbs that the playwright published in subsequent decades, drawing out how they both crafted a new persona for him as purveyor of comic wisdom for ‘the middling sort’ in London, and provided a vehicle for his gradual return to commentary upon social, economic, and religious issues.