The Professions in Early Modern England

What is a profession? You may well ask. After all, the authors who write about 'them' don't seem to know either. Rarely has there been a subject for study so elusive of satisfactory definition. For 'profession' is not simply the equivalent of 'occupation'; the word implies an ideology, the history of which has yet to be adequately charted. The phenomenon raises a large number of tantalising and as yet unanswered questions about the nature of social relations and of work itself in the transitional period between pre-industrial and industrial England.