ABSTRACT
This period, which is still by many regarded-with some reason-as the crucial and transforming age in the history of English society, has been much studied, but no one has so far attempted to rethink the meaning of this much disturbed century afresh. It remains, too readily, the ‘century of revolution’, even though it is becoming more and more apparent, all the noise of battle notwithstanding, that few things really changed, and that continuity is at least as notable as revolution. While our understanding of the surrounding territory in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries has been greatly altered in the past twenty-five years, an orthodoxy created by the men of the seventeenth century themselves, and since buttressed by the doctrinaire preoccupations of liberalism and Marxism, still underlies most books on this period. The tradition may not be altogether misleading, though it is certainly not as obviously correct as seems still to be accepted, but it is a pity that a large number of historians who have done so much valuable work inside the framework fixed by tradition should not have seen that their own labours often disrupt it.
