ABSTRACT
Following groundbreaking Elizabethan social analyses, the seventeenth century saw the affirmation of the power of landed wealth in various guises. Some indications that a language was “genuine,” according to one scholar’s criteria, is its appearance in a variety of formats and from the fact that it was debated.1 Property and its possession seem perfectly to fit this definition, for they became key elements in definitions of social relations in the period. Yet wealth was not uniquely significant in seventeenth-century discourse, because the model of the body social did not simply wither and die. Rather, it developed in new forms. Several authorities advanced theories of patriarchalism, which they generalized from the monarchy down the social scale to the authority of men over women, children, and servants. This model of social relations owed a lot to organic theory with its emphases on hierarchy and interdependence (e.g., service, dependency, mutual aid). Sir Robert Filmer is commonly identified with a political theory of patriarchalism, but those who believed in a “moral economy” extended the concept to government, which they expected to intervene to ensure harmonious economic and social relations.
