Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England
'Take but degree away... and hark what discord follows' was a Tudor and Stuart commonplace but the neatness and fixity of what we think of as their social order is a creation of historians.
The transition from a society of 'estates' or 'orders' to a 'class society' is one of the commonplaces of historical sociology. Medieval people, we are assured, conceived of society as being composed of three functionally separated but interdependent 'estates' or 'orders': those who pray; those who fight; those who work. John Wyclif, for example, wrote of the 'thre statis: prestis, lordis, laborers'. William Caxton described the three estates of 'clerkes, knyghtes, and laborers'. Each estate had its God-appointed duties and each also had its all-too-human failings or 'defections'. Social harmony and divine favour depended upon the proper performance of their duties by the members of each estate. As Caxton put it in the Mirrour of the World (1480):
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