ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that, despite the peculiar circumstances of its composition, Edmund Dudley's treatise should be considered to be in the mainstream of early sixteenth-century thinking about society. Sixteenth-century social thought is of historiographical significance. The existing literature is teleological, too narrow, or too general. In a number of schools of thought, telos results in misunderstanding early and mid-Tudor contemporaries. There was nothing particularly novel about Dudley's Tree of Commonwealth. It shows that the traditional model of an organic society still had currency in the early sixteenth century and enough potency for one of the most powerful men in the country to argue its case to the most powerful person. Dudley opted for the metaphor of the tree rather than the body, but the principle of mutual obligation was no less pronounced in his treatise than in John of Salisbury's or Sir John Fortescue's.
