ABSTRACT
Tudor society is often described as a ladder of ranks or classes descending from Crown and nobles to paupers, vagrants and bondmen. The basic unit of society, then, was the family. Lawrence Stone, in a very influential analysis of the early modern family, has detected a gradual hift from an extended family with stress on kin solidarity and limited affection for children, to the modern nuclear family based on deep affection within a narrow circle. The Elizabethans were the first Englishmen to anatomise their society, just as they were the earliest to explore and map their country systematically. Many historians have viewed economic and social classes as the fundamental divisions of Tudor and Stuart society, and changes in the class structure as crucial to the century between Reformation and Civil War. Throughout the century from Reformation to Civil War contemporaries were concerned about the extent of individual mobility, and even about a threatened dissolution of the whole social structure.
