SocialOrders

Why did social boundaries become more rigid in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe?

Historians have often noted that the boundaries between the various social classes in Europe seem to have hardened in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Why? The argument goes something like this:

1) European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was one of striking paradoxes: on the one hand, it was unusually dynamic economically—for some reasons you already know:

Encounter with the Americas—north and south—had generated wealth unimaginable in the late Middle Ages: think of that veritable mountain of silver, and the havoc it played with prices and wages during the sixteenth century, especially.
Improved communications, a greater volume of international commerce and manufacture, a faster pace of trade—all these things were generating unheard-of opportunities for the accumulation of wealth—and wealth of a kind that was not dependent on the ownership of land, the traditional foundation of wealth.

2) All this was taking place on a continent that thought of itself as a “society of orders”: A society of orders is one in which every individual’s relationship to society was conditioned by inherited membership in a particular “estate,” and the privileges it bestowed. As you already know, medieval tradition—going back to the 11th and 12th centuries—had divided society into three such “orders”:

Those who fight—bellatores, or the nobility;
Those who pray—oratores; the clergy;
Those who work—laboratores; or the peasant and artisan classes.

These ideas did not reflect a rigid system of social castes, such as existed in India; rather, person’s “estate” tended to determine a range of lifetime opportunities. This was a considerably more flexible system of social organization (no one, for example, was born into the “order” of clergy, for example).

Although these ideas were very old, versions of it could still be heard in political philosophy, such as the Traité des Ordres et Simples Dignitez (1610), by Charles Loyseau:

Some are devoted particularly to the service of God; others to the preservation of the State by arms; still others to the task of feeding and maintaining it by peaceful labors. These are our three orders or estates general of France, the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Third Estate.

3) Why, then, should an increasingly dynamic economy in have produced more rigid social boundaries? You would think that with greater opportunities to escape the restrictions of a “society of orders,” social barriers would become less rigid, not more. Indeed, as we saw earlier in the term, trade and an expanding economy had in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had contributed to a break down traditional social distinctions—opening the door to new people with new sources of wealth.

One explanation is that population increases offset the benefits of an expanding economy in the sixteenth century; with more mouths to feed, competition for scarce resources increased.
Then in the seventeenth century, the “General Crisis” had a similar effect; either way, competition for resources became more intense.

4) Specifically, the hardening of social orders reflected a psychological reaction to change in society and economy:

New sources of wealth also sowed confusion: new wealth undermined the public symbols of social status -- how could you know whether or not that man in the ermine fur was noble or not?
In addition, Europe’s dynamic new economy was also enlarging social groups that did not fit in well with the traditional “society of orders”: merchants and bankers, especially, but other groups as well, such as migrant workers -- how was one to classify these people? As laboratores? As bellatores?

5) But there was a final factor—especially on the continent: our old friend, the State: everywhere in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, states were struggling to regulate social relations more and more closely.

In an age of seemingly endless warfare—as the seventeenth century was—states made greater and greater demands on the resources of their subject populations;
In an age of seemingly universal social upheaval—as the seventeenth century was—success in war was seen to depend on more and more on securing domestic stability and security.

Hence the need for kings and princes to regulate social relations more tightly; this impulse was encouraged, finally, by similar demands of the state religions of seventeenth century Europe for tighter control of public morality. Regardless of religion, ethnicity, or nationality, all ruling classes thought that a “well-regulated society of orders” was a necessary guarantee of political order.

Thus, social historians often refer to social life in the seventeenth century as “Janus-faced”:

On the one hand: capitalism and state-building create new opportunities for social mobility;
On the other hand: states and societies responded to this fluidity with intensified efforts to make social boundaries more rigid.