A complaint among twelfth-century English moralists and chroniclers was that monarchs were choosing “men raised from the dust” to be their ministers and counselors instead of members of old noble families. They charged that the king was choosing as his courtiers or familiares low-born men—plebes, ignobiles, even rustici or servi—allowing them to usurp places that belonged to the aristocracy. This chorus of complaint began in the time of William the Conqueror's sons. Only then did nobiles and curiales begin to divide into two distinct groups, and new administrative posts provided opportunities for new men to rise to greater wealth and influence.

The early twelfth-century monastic chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that William the Conqueror “raised up the lowest of his Norman followers to the greatest riches.” Often cited is his complaint about Henry I, “So he pulled down many great men [illustres] from positions of eminence …. He ennobled others of base stock [de ignobili stirpe] who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust, and heaping all kinds of favors on them, stationed them above earls and famous castellans.” The author of the Gesta Stephani also complained that Henry I took men of low birth [ex plebeio genere], who had entered his service as court pages and enriched them, endowed them with wide estates, and made them his chief officials. Another chronicler, Richard of Hexham, made a similar comment, although in admiring rather than condemning language, “He oppressed many nobles because of their faithlessness; he elevated to high honors many commoners [ignobiles], whom he found to be upright and loyal to him.”

Debates about poverty in mid-seventeenth-century England have, for some years, been a staple of historical studies. In our own time, where the numbers of the dispossessed continue to challenge the success of current modes of social and economic organization, such an interest is understandable and to be welcomed. But the relevance of studies of past problems and solutions and their applicability to present purposes is more complex than is usually recognized.

The immediate benefit of studying discussions for change in mid-seventeenth-century England is that they provide an unusual insight into how members of that society conceived of it. In particular, their observations about the problems of poverty and the role of the poor offer us an understanding of the perceived social structure, the ethical bases for social differentiation, and the degree to which the future could be envisioned as differing from the past or present. Such understandings of proposed social change are invaluable for historians wishing to grasp the underlying assumptions on which past thought and action was predicated.

Past proposals for social reform, however, have also been the focus of a significantly different enquiry by historians. In order to render those past programs more comprehensible (and more directly “relevant”) to modern readers, they are often placed on a “conservative” versus “radical” continuum, one end of which has sometimes been marked “extreme left wing.” This article argues that any such classification inevitably leads to misunderstandings of the authors and of their programs and, consequently, misrepresents both to the present.

Historians have seen the mid-1660s as a period of significant distress in many sectors of the English economy. With population pressure diminishing, agricultural prices moved away from the benefit of producers, and rent and land values stabilized. Indeed, landowners were futher burdened by the imposition of higher levels of taxation in the wake of debts generated by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Moreover, English merchants complained that Dutch competition limited the expansion of their overseas commerce, while the Second Dutch War (1664–67) severely dislocated trade and incurred heavy public expenditure and even higher levels of taxation. The outbreak of plague in London, followed by the Great Fire, further interrupted trade at the commercial and transport nexus of the economy. Hence, war finance and the rebuilding of London put pressure on the stock of loanable funds in a period characterized by a generally low level of prices. Interest rates had fallen gradually with the increase in the availability of capital in the first half of the seventeenth century, yet this trend, according to Christopher Clay, “was unquestionably retarded by the extensive government borrowing associated with the succession of civil and foreign wars between 1642 and 1674.” Of course, in seventeenth-century England, a maximum rate of interest was set by statute. The medieval prohibition on usury was first broken in 1545, setting a ceiling of 10 percent per year.