The Elizabethan aristocracy anatomized, atomized and re-assessed

Abstract

It is now twenty-five years since the late R. H. Tawney opened the scholarly debate which has made ‘the storm over the gentry’ one of the classic word-battles of our time. The storm has still not subsided and is unlikely to do so for the present; but the debate is in process of changing both its character and its direction, to the undoubted benefit of its future progress. Tawney's account of the ‘rise of the gentry’ between 1540 and 1640, his assault on the English aristocracy, and all the subsequent disputations, touched a vital nerve of English history. The early stages of the discussion also revealed a propensity to draw premature conclusions from inadequate data which in many cases would have to remain as hypotheses of uncertain probability, at least until detailed studies, the essential foundation of synthesis, were forthcoming.

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E. Ladewig Petersen

E. Ladewig Petersen, M. A. 1955, D. Phil. 1964, Professor of history at the University of Odense, Denmark. Specializes in the earliest history of Islam and the economic history of Northern Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. At present engaged in a number of investigations of the history of Danish nobility during its heyday.