The Social Origins of the English Revolution

In the last half-century the historiography of the English Revolution has gone through fairly well defined stages. The problem of the social origins of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century was first brought to the attention of historians at large by R. H. Tawney in 1940. He saw a change in the ownership of property occurring in the century before the civil war, by which the old-fashioned landowners decayed and a new class of gentry rose to the top. The most serious charge that can be levelled against the protagonists in the debate over the gentry is not so much that they were premature in formulating hypotheses. Like the standard of living of the English worker in the early nineteenth century, or the quality of education in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the dispute has thrown up a vast mass of contradictory evidence and disputed statistics.