Thus the gentry had already become at the end of the seventeenth century the head and the heart of the English community. They were the source of all activity and the object of every aspiration. Everything in one way or another fell to them and contributed to their importance. The strength of their position, the firmness and reality of their hold upon public opinion, were never better shown than during the most troubled period of English history (1640-1688). In less than half a century the English people witnessed the advent of a great parliamentary struggle, an eight years' civil war, a mighty religious movement, the condemnation and violent death of a king, the establishment of a republic, the defeat of the moderates, the accession to power of the extremists, the military despotism of a great man, then the completion of the cycle by the return of the legitimate line, to be followed finally by a fresh departure in the shape of a dynastic revolution. These great events, however, numerous and important though they were, left the political centre of gravity fixed as before authority, and the Crown to deprive them of their office, if their fidelity proved open to question. Thus the self-government, still vigorous and intact, of small parochial democracies, the authority of the State still unimpaired and far-reaching, hedged in the magistracy on either side and anticipated the danger of a too extensive jurisdiction and an almost unlimited commission. These are the barriers which, as we shall see, were overthrown or lowered in the eighteenth century. An assumption of title to confidence, a species of divine right of aristocracy, were destined to level these obstacles to the exercise of arbitrary power, and to cast aside these guarantees, which came to be regarded as superfluous. in the country gentlemen. Buckle attempts to prove that the revolution of 1648 was directed against the nobility and that it was the work of the lower classes. His argument does not hold good. He quotes the names of several individuals of low origin who played a prominent part in the events of the time. It is the characteristic of every revolution which is prolonged for any lengthened period that men who have nothing to lose thrust themselves into the movement, succeed in making themselves prominent, and force on those extreme measures which bring about a final reaction. These bubbles on the surface are no evidence either of the direction of the stream or of the properties of its waters. A political movement like that of 1640, which at its various stages, and down to 1660, numbered among its chiefs men who were unquestionably gentlemen, like Pym, Hampden, Cromwell,1 Ludlow, Lenthall, Hutchinson and Vane, presents assuredly none of the features of a war of classes; on the contrary the fact remains that the aristocracy was split into two factions,2 and that from the very beginning one of these followed the fortunes of the king, the other those of the Parliament. This 1 This author (Buckle) insists on the fact of Cromwell being the son of a brewer. It is quite possible that Cromwell's father brewed and sold beer: this proves nothing. The one incontestable and decisive fact is, that father and son were country gentlemen of old extraction connected by blood with Thomas Cromwell of Henry VIII.'s time, and connected by marriage with the Hampdens, the Whalleys, and several other families of consideration. See Carlyle, History of Cromwell, i. 19. See also F. Harrison's Oliver Cromwell, c. i. 2 Gneist, ii. 560. shows clearly that the quarrel was in principle a political and religious one, and that neither the nobility nor the gentry saw in it either a threat aimed at their privileges, or an attack directed against an arrangement of classes of which they enjoyed the benefit. We have lists of the associations formed in the eastern counties during the Civil War. All the names which occur are followed by the titles of esquire or gentleman. Not that the smaller landowners and the farmers took no part in it; but they remained in the background behind their acknowledged superiors who were engaged with them in the struggle. Midway in that struggle the House of Lords may have been abolished; later on the position of the gentry in certain places may have been struck at by special measures of banishment or confiscation. These violent proceedings were aimed not at the class but at individuals singled out by their political and religious opinions. The country gentlemen as a class continued to hold their ground. The county archives of Devonshire have preserved for us an ordinance1 of the lords protectors of the liberties of England nominating local magistrates; the names of these magistrates are worth quoting. They are Rolles, Davises, Yonges, Drakes, Fortescues, Carews; in other words they belonged to the families which then formed, and which form still at the present day, the heads of the local gentry. In the full career of the Republic the whole county administration remained in the hands of the justices, and they transacted the business connected with it at their quarter 1 In 1651. Vide Quarter Sessions, from original records. A. H. Hamilton. sessions; they exercised also judicial rights, and it should be remembered that at this period their powers extended to the infliction of capital punishment. The legal records of the time prove that they punished poachers with severity; that they fined unqualified persons who kept dogs for sport; that they regulated wages, and on occasions fixed the maximum. These were the acts of a privileged class still in full and undisturbed possession of its privileges. If we imagine what their position would have been in corresponding circumstances in any one of the French departments in 1791, it will enable us to see clearly how different in their nature the two revolutions were. This short review of the state of the local administration in the middle of the seventeenth century, makes plain the fact that there was at that time. in England no revolt against the established social order, and no generally felt need of a redistribution of power amongst the various classes of the community.. IV THE YEOMEN NEXT after the gentry, and following hard upon them, we find existing in the latter half of the seventeenth century another class which enjoyed great influence and was not less peculiar to England. I mean the yeomen. The yeomen formed, so to speak, a second component, and a vigorous and characteristic one, of that rural society which gave its tone to the whole nation. At the period when the higher gentry began to absorb what remained of the feudal nobility, and established themselves definitely as an upper class, the small landowners -freeholders holding estates of inheritance or for lifelong leaseholders and the larger copyholders made corresponding progress, and the yeomen (the common term applied to all of them) began in their turn to fill the position and take the rank of an agricultural middle class. The reign of Henry VI. had marked the zenith of their influence; they had by that time fully realized the fact of their existence as a body. The inferior limit of their class was approximately determined by the electoral qualification of the forty-shilling freeholder (under the Act of 1430), or by the £4 qualification for |