Volume 27, Number 9 · May 29, 1980
Plebes and Patricians
By Lawrence Stone
An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
edited by John Brewer, edited by John Styles
Rutgers University Press, 400 pp., $24.00
About a quarter of a century ago many historians decided that it was high time to study rather more of the population than the top 2 or 3 percent, from whom were drawn the political and social elite: the kings, generals, nobles, judges, bishops, politicians, and local magnates whose (mostly bloody) deeds had hitherto filled the history books. The trouble was, however, that very few of the bottom 97 percent have left any trace of themselves in the records, except the bare facts of their births, marriages, and deaths. As a result, much of the early work on the poor was aridly statistical in nature. But it fairly soon became apparent that reducing the vast majority of the population to a set of numbers in a table was hardly more enlightening than ignoring them altogether. We still did not know anything about what they thought or felt.
Review, 2006 words
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