The idea that there was a characteristic medieval social orderwhich included social class was established in British historiography well before the end of the nineteenth century, and it had nothing to do with Karl Marx. It was the legal tradition in English history which stands at the root of this perception of class. The key thinker was Sir Henry Maine (1822-1888). In his great work, Ancient Law (1861) Maine proposed the idea of a ‘social state’ which had an evolutionary line of progression out of the ‘primitive’. Social evolution was for him revealed by the way a society’s legal system developed. Once a society had evolved the idea of a contract, entered into by individuals, then a man’s status floated free of family and clan and (amongst other things) social classes might develop. He explored how this would happen in his later work on medieval manors (1869). If, as he believed, the idea of lordship was imposed in the middle ages on what he believed were originally ‘free’ villages, then this would naturally tend to create social levels. The inferior tenants would have to enter into a contract of dependency on the lord whom the king had imposed on them, who would be their social superior.1

Maine’s work lies at the root of many of the basic questions of the developing discipline of sociology, and the historiography of the ideas of family and of class begin with him and his circle of correspondents (see also Chapter 4). Despite Engels’ churlish claim in 1884 that Maine had said nothing that the Communist Manifesto had not said in essence twelve