Tudor and Stuart England

Over the last two decades a large amount of important and interesting work on Elizabethan and Stuart England has been carried out by social historians. In many respects, their efforts remain unrecognised: the history of those eras, as presented in most 'A' Level syllabuses, and in many undergraduate courses, is still essentially an account of élite politics, notably of the inexorable evolution of the House of Commons. This situation is different from a number of other countries, notably France, where the journal Annales has long provided a forum for the investigation of broader ideas about the past, and the United States, where (with a slight tinge of transatlantic hyperbole) claims have been made for the creation of a 'New Social History'. Despite their relative lack of impact, however, historians of early-modern English society have completed a solid corpus of published work, and have gone a long way towards rewriting our maps of past society.