By Harold Perkin
The normal textbook at the improvement of recent English society and at the development of the professions in England.
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Extra resources for The Origins of Modern English Society
Example text
It was not confined to the landowning élite, for every man of any kind of property had his ‘legitimate influence’ with his ‘dependants’: master with servants, farmer with labourers, industrialist with workers, and so on. But its head and centre was the influence of the landowner, larger or smaller, over a wider or narrower stretch of countryside. ’1 The life of a hamlet, a village, a parish, a market town and its hinterland, a whole county, might revolve around the big house in its park. Its reception rooms, gardens, stables and kennels were the centre of local social life; its estate office the exchange for farm tenancies, mining and building leases, and a bank for small savings and investments; its home farm a permanent exhibition of the best available agricultural methods and techniques; its law-room, if the landowner was on the bench, the first bulwark of law and order; its portrait gallery, music-room and library the headquarters of local culture; its dining-room the fulcrum of local politics.
1 Class feeling was nearer to the surface in industrial relations. Capitalism in the sense of production for the market by wageearners employed by capitalists was as old as the old society. The very conditions which brought the one into being inevitably produced the other. The decline first of serfdom and then of the small peasant demanded the expansion of industrial employment for the surplus population. 2 Because of the initial restrictionism of the craft guilds, most of these domestic handworkers worked in the villages and small unincorporated towns and depended on a merchant for materials and the disposal of the product.
Appealing mainly to those working men who were just beginning to emerge from complete subordination to landlord or employer, it provided a short first step in either direction from Church or from Dissent. The sandwich, as it were, acquired a second layer of filling below the first, midway between middle and lowest layers. 4 There was nothing cynical about this: one sect contained as much scope for piety or worldliness as another, they were all equally Protestant, and atheism was equally anathema to them all.