ABSTRACT
History is not a narrative of events. The historian’s difficult task is to explain what happened. The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. The dates are arbitrary, since they relate to the deaths of queens, not to the life of the community. Nevertheless, during the seventeenth century modern English society and a modern state began to take shape, and England’s position in the world was transformed. This book tries to penetrate below the familiar events to grasp ‘what happened’ – to ordinary English men and women as well as to kings and queens or abstractions like ‘society’ and ‘the state’. What happened in the seventeenth century is still sufficiently part of us today, of our ways of thinking, our prejudices, our hopes, to be worth trying to understand.
