Historians of early modern England, just like the people they study, are preoccupied with order and disorder. Particularly for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, attention has focused on how a government and political nation whose prescriptions demanded unanimity and stability descended into civil war and revolution, the ultimate disorder. The period saw rising populations, social mobility, economic change, and religious division, all of which placed stress on the traditional order. These agents of turmoil deserve close attention. But in focusing so intently on breakdown, we tend to miss seeing how Elizabethan and early Stuart government actually worked. For most of these years, a reasonably stable and increasingly integrated royal government ruled peacefully over the English people. By shifting our attention away from breakdown, we can begin to ask critical new questions. How, precisely, did the leaders of this society work to create order in the face of difference? How did the nature of government affect the ways that people sought stability?

Evidence from urban government—provincial borough corporations—provides critical insight into these questions. Civic leaders found that the best way to maintain order and authority in their own communities was by participating in the wider governing structures of the state. London's attempts at the “pursuit of stability” have received serious treatment in recent years. Provincial towns, however, have less often been studied as a means to understand the polity as a whole. They have in the past been characterized as quite insular, either abjectly dependent on a great lord or gentleman or else “independent” and unwilling to brook outside influences; they sought stability and control by looking inward, reinforcing their own authority.

As long ago as 1981, the distinguished demographers E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield threw out a challenge to historians. “A fully satisfactory interpretation of population history,” they offered, “must embrace a wide spectrum of related topics and techniques.” Such a history would “require an alertness for opportunities to quantify historical evidence and to make effective use of statistical techniques,” they continued, but it would be “equally alive to the importance of studying the attitudes of individuals and groups wherever possible. The family,” they concluded, “is the prime institutional form in population history, and the births, marriages and deaths of its members were affected by their behavioral conventions and beliefs as well as by their social and economic circumstances.” The British aristocracy is an ideal subject for such a multifaceted, family-oriented view of population history. Thanks to T. H. Hollingsworth and other demographers, the statistical record of their population history is probably better established than that of any other social group, while thanks to their own historical importance and privileged status, their domestic experiences are richly documented. Consequently, their social mores and personal attitudes can be identified along with their demographics.

While we normally assume that privileged social groups are healthier and generally live longer than those more humble in station, commonplace expectations have for centuries been reversed when it comes to one component of population history—maternal mortality. Popular culture has insisted, at least since the time of Rousseau, that ladies of fashion paid for their pleasures by being feeble and overly delicate, too weak to withstand the rigors of childbirth.

The Oxford and Cambridge man has long inspired fascination both in Great Britain and abroad. Many have, in fact, acquired an illusory understanding of these enigmatic university students through various caricatures and representations created in literature and film. Yet, despite an apparent level of popular interest, relatively few attempts have been made to understand the culture of male undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in a systematic and scholarly way. With the exception of Sheldon Rothblatt's work on student life in the early nineteenth century, J. A. Mangan's skillful exploration of the cult of athleticism's impact on the ancient universities, and some select studies of individual student societies and organizations, we know very little about the ways in which undergraduates lived their lives, saw their worlds, and viewed those who were traditionally excluded from these milieus. We know even less perhaps, despite the existence of Richard Symonds's examination of the relationship between Oxford and empire, about the ways “Oxbridge” undergraduates saw themselves as Britons and leaders of an imperial and “superior” English race. The conflation of English and British is intentional here. Applying English attributes to Britons did not generally present many problems for university men, even those from Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish backgrounds. “Britishness” and “Englishness” were often applied interchangeably by Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates although, as others have observed, uses of the term “English” tended most often to refer to the admired attributes or “personal” and “communal” traits of Britons, particularly those among the elite.