UNITED KINGDOM, FLAG OF THE

red, white, and blue flag in which are combined the Crosses of St. George (England), St. Andrew (Scotland), and St. Patrick (Ireland). Initially the flag was called a jack only when it was flown at the bowsprit of British naval vessels. It was commonly called the Union Jack by the late 17th century, and that name became official in the late 19th century. The Union Jack is flown on land for government and military purposes, and at sea it serves as a flag for the Royal Navy. The general public uses it unofficially as a civil flag. Its width-to-length ratio is 1 to 2. Union Flag (16061801), in which are combined the white-on-blue Cross of St. Andrew (for The earliest form of the flag of Great Britain, developed in 1606 and used during the reigns of James I (160325) and Charles I (162549), displayed the red cross of England superimposed on the white cross of Scotland, with the blue field of the latter. Because in heraldry a red on blue is not considered permissible, the red cross had to be bordered with white, its own correct field. During the Commonwealth and Protectorate period (164960), the Irish harp was incorporated in the Union Jack, but the flag resumed its original form on the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Thus did the Union Flag, or Great Union, continue in use until January 1, 1801, the effective date of the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland. In order to incorporate the Cross of St. Patrick (a red diagonal cross on white) while preserving the individual entities of the three crosses, the heraldic advisers to the sovereign found an elegant solution. The existing white Cross of St. Andrew was divided diagonally, with the red appearing below the white on the hoist half of the flag and above it on the fly half. To avoid having the red cross touch the blue background, which would be contrary to heraldic law, a fimbriation (narrow border) of white was added to the red cross. In the centre, a white fimbriation also separated the Cross of St. Patrick from the red Cross of St. George. The Union Jack is the most important of all British flags and is flown by representatives of the United Kingdom all the world over. In certain authorized military, naval, royal, and other uses, the Union Jack may be incorporated into another flag. For example, it forms the canton of both the British Blue Ensign and the British Red Ensign. It is part of the flags of such Commonwealth nations as Australia, New Zealand, and Tuvalu, as well as of the U.S. state of Hawaii, the Australian states (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia), and three Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario). Whitney Smith History Anglo-Saxon England The invaders and their early settlements Anglo-Saxon England. Although Germanic foederati, allies of Roman and post-Roman authorities, had settled in England in the 4th century AD, tribal migrations into Britain began about the middle of the 5th century. The first arrivals, according to the 6th-century British writer Gildas, were invited by a British king to defend his kingdom against the Picts and Scots. A tradition reached Bede that the first mercenaries were from three tribesthe Angles, Saxons, and Juteswhich he locates on the Cimbric Peninsula, and by implication the coastlands of northwestern Germany. Archaeology, however, suggests a more complex picture showing many tribal elements, Frankish leadership in the first waves, and Frisian contacts. Revolt by these mercenaries against their British employers in the southeast of England led to large-scale Germanic settlements near the coasts and along the river valleys. Their advance was halted for a generation by native resistance, which tradition associates with the names of Ambrosius Aurelianus and Arthur, culminating in victory about 500 by the Britons at the Battle of Mons Badonicus at an unidentified location. But a new Germanic drive began about 550, and before the century had ended, the Britons had been driven west to the borders of Dumnonia (Cornwall and Devon) and to the Welsh Marches, while invaders were advancing west of the Pennines and northward into Lothian. The fate of the native British population is difficult to determine. The case against its large-scale survival rests largely on linguistic evidence, such as the scarcity of Romano-British words continuing into English and the use of English even by Northumbrian peasants. The case against wholesale extermination also rests on linguistic evidence, such as place-names and personal names, as well as on evidence provided by urban and rural archaeology. Certainly few Britons in England were above servile condition. By the end of the 7th century people regarded themselves as belonging to the nation of the English, though divided into several kingdoms. This sense of unity was strengthened during long periods when all kingdoms south of the Humber acknowledged the overlordship (called by Bede an imperium) of a single ruler, known as a bretwalda, a word first recorded in the 9th century. The first such overlord was Aelle of Sussex, in the late 5th century; the second was Ceawlin of Wessex, who died in 593. The third overlord, Aethelberht of Kent, held this power in 597 when the monk Augustine led a mission from Rome to Kent; Kent was the first English kingdom to be converted to Christianity. The Christian church provided another unifying influence, overriding political divisions, although it was not until 669 that the church in England acknowledged a single head. The social system Aethelberht set down in writing a code of laws; although it reflects Christian influence, the system underlying the laws was already old, brought over from the Continent in its main lines. The strongest social bond of this system was that of kinship; every freeman depended on his kindred for protection, and the social classes were distinguished by the amount of their wergild (the sum that the kindred could accept in place of vengeance if a man were killed). The normal freeman was the ceorl, an independent peasant landowner; below him in Kent were persons with lower wergilds, who were either freedmen or, as were similar persons in Wessex, members of a subject population; above the ceorls were the noblessome perhaps noble by birth but more often men who had risen by service as companions of the kingwith a wergild three times that of a ceorl in Kent, six times that of a ceorl elsewhere. The tie that bound a man to his lord was as strong as that of the kindred. Both nobles and ceorls might possess slaves, who had no wergild and were regarded as chattels. Early traditions, embodied in king lists, imply that all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Sussex were established by rulers deemed to have descended from the gods. No invading chieftain is described by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as kingalthough the title was soon usedand chieftainship, as before the conquest, remained central to Germanic tribal society. The sacral character of kingship later increased and changed in meaning as the Christian ruler was set apart by coronation and anointment. In the established English kingdoms the king had special rightscompensations for offenses committed in his presence or his home or against anyone under his protection; rights to hospitality, which later became a food rent charged on all land; and rights to various services. He rewarded his followers with grants of land, probably at first for their lifetime only, but the need to provide permanent endowment for the church brought into being a type of land that was free from most royal dues and that did not revert to the king. From the latter part of the 7th century such land was sometimes conferred by charter. It became common to make similar grants by charter to laymen, with power to bequeath; but three servicesthe building of forts and bridges and service in the armywere almost invariably excepted from the immunity. The king received fines for various crimes; but a man's guilt was established in an assembly of freemen, where the accused tried to establish his innocence by his oathsupported by oath helpersand, if this failed, by ordeal. On matters of importance the king normally consulted his witan (wise men). There were local variations in the law, and over a period of time the law developed to meet changed circumstances. As kingdoms grew larger, for example, an official called an ealderman was needed to administer part of the area, and later a sheriff was needed to look after the royal rights in each shire. The acceptance of Christianity made it necessary to fit the clergy into the scale of compensations and assign a value to their oaths and to fix penalties for offenses such as sacrilege, heathen practices, and breaches of the marriage law. But the basic principles were little changed. The Anglo-Saxons left England a land of villages, but the continuity of village development is uncertain. In the 7th8th centuries, in what is called the Middle Saxon shuffle, many early villages were abandoned, and others, from which later medieval villages descended, were founded. The oldest villages are not, as previously thought, those with names ending in -ingas but rather those ending in -ham and -ingham. English trading towns, whose names often end in -wich, from the Latin vicus (village), developed in the Middle Saxon period, and other urban settlements grew out of and date from the Alfredian and later defenses against Viking attack. History Britain from 1914 to the present World War I The British declaration of war on Germany on August 4, 1914, brought an end to the threat of civil war in Ireland, which since March had occupied the Liberal Cabinet Prime Minister H.H. Asquith almost to the exclusion of everything else. Formally at least, party warfare came to an end. The Conservatives agreed not to contest by-elections and to support the government in matters pertaining to the war. The Asquith coalition Such compromises were easy to make in the autumn of 1914, when the excitement over the outbreak of war was high, causing a crush of enlistments, and when it was still generally believed that the war would be over within six months. By the spring of 1915, however, enthusiasm for the war began to cool and recruiting fell off. Moreover, Asquith's government seemed to have lost its grip on affairs; newspapers carried reports of an inadequate supply of ammunition on the Western Front, and on May 15 the first sea lord, Admiral John, Lord Fisher, resigned. The Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, under pressure from his followers to take a stronger stand, announced that the party would demand a debate on the conduct of the war. Asquith quickly offered forming a coalition, thereby ending the last Liberal government. The coalition consisted of Liberals, Conservatives, and one Labourite. In the new Cabinet, announced on May 25, Arthur James Balfour replaced Winston Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty. More important, a new department, the ministry of munitions, was established with the Liberal David Lloyd George at its head. The coalition, supposed to allay tension among parties over the conduct of the war, worked badly. Although the ministry of munitions did indeed resolve the armament crisis surprisingly quickly, dissatisfaction with Asquith's relaxed management of affairs continued and centred, in the autumn of 1915, upon the rising demand in the press and among the Conservatives for compulsory military service. With apparent reluctance the prime minister allowed an inadequate measure for the conscription of unmarried men to be passed in January 1916. But it was not until May 1916, after more controversy and threats of resignation, that a comprehensive bill passed for compulsory enlistment of all men between the ages of 18 and 41. Meanwhile, on April 24, 1916, Monday of Easter Week, under circumstances not unconnected with the approaching conscription, a rebellion directed at securing Irish independence broke out in Dublin. Violence was suppressed within six days, and the surviving rebels were arrested amid general derision from the Irish population. But Britain's punishment of the rebels, including 14 summary executions, quickly turned Irish sympathy toward the men, who were now regarded as martyrs. The Easter Rising was the beginning of the Irish war for independence. Even though the rebellion was quelled, the problems of Ireland needed to be addressed. Prime Minister Asquith called upon Lloyd George to try to arrange for an immediate grant of Home Rule between the Irish nationalist and unionist parties (the former being fully committed to the principle of Home Rule, the latter only partially). Although a compromise was in fact reached, discontent among senior unionists prevented a bill from going forward. Thereafter Home Rule ceased to be an issue because southern Ireland now wanted nothing but independence. Asquith was further weakened. The government also drew criticism for its war policies. For one, Britain was unable to help Romania when it declared war upon the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. More significantly, Britain launched its first major independent military operation, the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 13, 1916), with disastrous results. On the first day of battle the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties. Although little of strategic significance was accomplished, the battle brought the reality of war home to Britain. (For details on the military aspects of World Wars I and II, see the articles World War I and World War II.) Dissatisfaction with the government mounted until, in the first week of December, Asquith and most of the senior Liberal ministers were forced to resign. Lloyd George became prime minister with a Cabinet consisting largely of Conservatives. History Great Britain, 18151914 Britain after the Napoleonic Wars The end of the long wars against Napoleon did not usher in a period of peace and contentment. Although both agricultural and industrial production had greatly, if unevenly, increased during the wars, the total national debt had nearly quadrupled since 1793. Of the total annual public revenue after 1815, more than half had to be employed to pay interest on this debt. Furthermore, the abolition of Pitt's income tax in 1816 meant that the debt burden fell on consumersmany of them with low incomesand on industrialists. The archaic and regressive nature of the national taxation system, along with a mounting scale of locally levied poor-law rates, which fell heavily on middle-income groups, provoked widespread anxiety and criticism. The postwar economy and society The postwar period was marked by open social conflicts, most of them exacerbated by an economic slump. As the long-run process of industrialization continued, with a rising population and a cyclic pattern of relative prosperity and depression, many social conflicts centred on questions of what contemporaries called corn and currency, agriculture and credit. Others were directly related to the growth of factories and towns and to the parallel development of middle-class and working-class consciousness. The agriculturalists, who were predominant in Parliament, attempted to safeguard their wartime economic position by securing, in 1815, a new Corn Law designed to keep up grain prices and rents by taxing imported grain. Their political power enabled them to maintain economic protection. Nonetheless, many of them suffered, particularly after 1819, when there was a return to the gold standard, from a serious fall of agricultural prices. Debts contracted during the wars became more onerous as prices fell. There were many complaints of agricultural distress during the early 1820s. Many of the industrialists, an increasingly vociferous group outside Parliament, resented the passing of the Corn Law because it favoured the landed interests. Others objected to the return of gold in 1819, which was put into effect in 1821. Whatever their outlook, industrialists were beginning to demand a voice in Parliament. The term middle classes began to be used more frequently in social and political debate. Town and village labourers were also unrepresented in Parliament, and it was they who bore the main brunt of the postwar difficulties. Bad harvests and high food prices left them hungry and discontented, and in the worst years, whenever bad harvests and industrial unemployment coincided, discontent assumed a political shape. Moreover, the development of a steam-driven factory system with new rhythms of work and new controls led to a breakdown in traditional family relationships and the growth of towns with structures of communication that were quite different from those of villages or preindustrial urban communities. These changes fostered the emergence, though it was not always shared, of the sense of a working class. There were radical riots in 1816, 1817, and particularly in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre, when there was a clash in Manchester between workers and troops of the yeomanry, or local citizenry. Local magistrates, without adequate police forces at their disposal, were often unsure how to deal either with secret conspiracy or with open challenges to authority, while the government of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool, with only rudimentary administrative machinery at its disposal, tended at first to follow a policy of repression. The Six Acts of 1819, associated with Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, the home secretary, were designed to reduce disturbances and to check the extension of radical propaganda and organization. They provoked sharp criticism from Whigs as well as from radicals, and they did not dispel the fear and suspicion that seemed to be threatening the stability of the whole social order. There was a revival of confidence after 1821, as economic conditions improved and the government itself embarked on a program of economic reform. Sidmouth retired, to be succeeded by Sir Robert Peel; and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, committed suicide. Even the king, George IV (182030), who had been drawn into the heart of politics when his estranged queen, Caroline, returned to England in 1820 and for a time became a radical heroine, ceased to be the target for continual radical abuse. Liverpool was a sufficiently able and sensible prime minister to work with new men and to move in new directions. Between 1821 and 1825 duties on raw material imports were reduced and tariff schedules were simplified; and in 1828, one year after Liverpool resigned, the fixed Corn Law of 1815 was replaced with a law providing for a sliding scale. During this same period Peel was reforming the criminal law. Even after the collapse of the economic boom of 182425 no attempt was made to return to policies of repression. History 18th-century Britain, 17141815 The state of Britain in 1714 When Georg Ludwig, elector of Hanover, became king of Great Britain on Aug. 1, 1714, the country was in some respects bitterly divided. Fundamentally, however, it was prosperous, cohesive, and already a leading European and imperial power. Abroad, Britain's involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). It had acquired new colonies in Gibraltar, Minorca, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson's Bay, as well as trading concessions in the Spanish New World. By contrast, Britain's rivals, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, were left weakened or war-weary by the conflict. It took France a decade to recover, and Spain and Holland were unable to reverse their military and economic decline. As a result Britain was able to remain aloof from war on the Continent for a quarter of a century after the Hanoverian succession, and this protracted peace was to be crucial to the new dynasty's survival and success. War had also strengthened the British state at home. The need to raise men and money had increased the size and scope of the executive as well as the power and prestige of the House of Commons. Taxation had accounted for 70 percent of Britain's wartime expenditure (93,644,560 between 1702 and 1713), so the Commons' control over taxation became a powerful guarantee of its continuing importance. Britain's ability to pay for war on this scale demonstrated the extent of its wealth. Agriculture was still the bedrock of the economy, but trade was increasing, and more men and women were employed in industry in Britain than in any other European nation. Wealth, however, was unequally distributed, with almost a third of the national income belonging to only 5 percent of the population. But British society was not polarized simply between the rich and the poor; according to writer Daniel Defoe there were seven different and more subtle categories: From 1700 to the 1740s Britain's population remained stable at about seven million, and agricultural production increased. So, although men and women from Defoe's 6th and 7th categories could still die of hunger and hunger-related diseases, in most regions of Britain there was usually enough basic food to go around. This was crucial to social stability and to popular acquiescence in the new Hanoverian regime. But early 18th-century Britain also had its weaknesses. Its Celtic fringeWales, Ireland, and Scotlandhad been barely assimilated. The vast majority of Welsh men and women could neither speak nor understand the English language. Most Irish men and women spoke Gaelic and belonged to the Roman Catholic church, in contrast with the population of the British mainland, which was staunchly Protestant. Scotland, which had only been united to England and Wales in 1707, still retained its traditional educational, religious, legal, and cultural practices. These internal divisions were made more dangerous by the existence of rival claimants to the British throne. James II, who had been expelled in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, died 13 years later, but his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, pressed his family's claims from his exile in France. His Catholicism and Scottish ancestry ensured him wide support in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands; his cause also commanded sympathy among sections of the Welsh and English gentry and, arguably, among the masses. Controversy over the succession sharpened partisan infighting between the Whig and Tory parties. About 50 Tory MPs (less than a seventh of the total number) may have been covert Jacobites in 1714. More generally, Tories differed from Whigs over religious issues and foreign policy. They were more anxious to preserve the privileges of the Anglican church and more hostile to military involvement in continental Europe than Whig politicians were inclined to be. These attitudes made the Tories vulnerable in 1714. The new king was a Lutheran by upbringing and wanted to establish wider religious toleration in his new kingdom. As a German he was deeply interested in European affairs. Consequently he regarded the Tory party as insular in its outlook as well as suspect in its allegiance. Britain from 1715 to 1742 The supremacy of the Whigs Even before he arrived in Britain, George I had decided to exclude the two leading Tory ministers, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. In their place he appointed two Whig politicians, Charles, Viscount Townshend, and James, Viscount Stanhope, as secretaries of state. Townshend's brother-in-law, Robert Walpole, became paymaster general. Walpole, who came from a minor Norfolk gentry family, was an extremely able politician, shrewd, greedy, and undeviatingly Whig. He encouraged the new king's partisan bias, turning it unremittingly to his advantage. A general election was held in February 1715, and, due in part to royal influence, the Whigs won 341 seats to the Tories' 217. In December the Old Pretender landed in Scotland, provoking an armed rebellion that was quickly suppressed. The proved involvement of a small number of Tory landowners led to Tories being purged not only from state office but also from the higher ranks of the army and navy, the diplomatic service, and the judicial system. To make their capture of the state even more secure, the Whigs passed the Septennial Act in 1716. It allowed general elections to occur at seven-year intervals instead of every three years, as mandated by the Triennial Act of 1694. The intention was to tame the electorate, which during Anne's reign had shown itself to be volatile and far more inclined to vote Tory than Whig. Having defeated their Tory opponents, the Whig leaders began to quarrel among themselves. In 1717 Walpole and Townshend left office and went into open opposition. Stanhope stayed on, with Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, now serving as secretary of state. At the same time the heir apparent to the throne, George, Prince of Wales, quarreled with his father and began to flirt with Opposition groups in Parliament. These events set the pattern for future political conflicts. From then on until the 1750s the Opposition in Parliament would be a hybrid group of Whig and Tory sympathizers. And from then on until the early 19th century Oppositions in Parliament would enjoy sporadic support from successive princes of Wales. In 1717 the rebel Whigs were a serious threat in large part because Walpole was such a skillful House-of-Commons politician. As peers, Sunderland and Stanhope were confined to the House of Lords and lacked spokesmen in the Commons who could match Walpole's ruthlessness and talent. He showed his power by mobilizing a majority of MPs against the Peerage Bill in 1719. Had this legislation passed, it would have limited the king's prerogative to create new peers, thereby cementing the Whig administration's majority in the House of Lords. To prevent further blows of this kind, the Whig elite ended its schism in April 1720. The royal family temporarily buried its differences at the same time. The restoration of unity was just as well, as 1720 saw the bursting of what became known as the South Sea Bubble. The South Sea Company had been founded in 1711 as a trading and finance company. In 1719 its directors offered to take over a large portion of the national debt previously managed by the Bank of England. The Whig administration supported this takeover, and in return the company made gifts (in effect, bribes) of its new stock to influential Whig politicians, including Stanhope and Sunderland, and to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal. In 1720 investing in the South Sea Company became a mania among those who could afford it and some who could not; South Sea stock was at 120 in January and rose to 1,000 by August. But in September the inevitable crash came. Many landed and mercantile families were ruined, and there was a nationwide shortage of specie. Parliament demanded an inquiry, thus raising the possibility that members of the government and the royal family would be openly implicated in financial scandal. This disaster proved to be Walpole's opportunity, and he did not waste it. He used his influence in the Commons to blunt the parliamentary inquiry and managed gradually to restore financial confidence. The strain of the investigation killed Stanhope, and Sunderland too died in 1722. Walpole duly became first lord of the treasury and chancellor of exchequer, while Townshend returned to his post as secretary of state. Walpole's position as the king's favourite minister was finally assured when he exposed the Atterbury plot. Francis Atterbury was bishop of Rochester. Always a Tory and High Churchman, he drifted after the Hanoverian succession into Jacobite intrigue. In 172122 he and a small group of conspirators plotted an armed invasion of Britain on behalf of the Old Pretender. The plot was uncovered by the secret service, which was more efficient in this period than it was until World War II. Atterbury was tried for treason by Parliament and sent into exile. This coup, one politician aptly wrote at the time, was the most fortunate and greatest circumstance of Mr Walpole's life. It fixed him with the King, and united for a time the whole body of Whigs to him, and gave him the universal credit of an able and vigilant Minister. History The early Stuarts and the Commonwealth England in 1603 Economy and society At the beginning of the 17th century, England and Wales contained more than four million people. The population had nearly doubled over the previous century, and it continued to grow for another 50 years. The heaviest concentrations of population were in the southeast and along the coasts. Population increase created severe social and economic problems, not the least of which was a long-term price inflation. English society was predominantly rural, with as much as 85 percent of its people living on the land. Small market towns of several hundred inhabitants facilitated local exchange, and in contrast to most of western Europe there were few large urban areas. Norwich and Bristol were the biggest provincial cities with populations of around 15,000. Exeter, York, and Newcastle were important regional centres, though they each had about 10,000 inhabitants. Only London could be ranked with the great continental cities. Its growth had outstripped even the doubling of the general population. By the beginning of the 17th century it contained more than a quarter of a million people and by the end nearly half a million, most of them poor migrants who flocked to the capital in search of work or charity. London was the centre of government, of overseas trade and finance, of fashion, taste, and culture. It was ruled by a merchant oligarchy, whose wealth increased tremendously over the course of the century as international trade expanded. London not only ruled the English mercantile world, but it also dominated the rural economy of the southeast by its insatiable demand for food and clothing. The rural economy was predominately agricultural, with mixed animal and grain husbandry practiced wherever the land allowed. The population increase, however, placed great pressure upon the resources of local communities, and efforts by landlords and tenants to raise productivity for either profit or survival were the key feature of agricultural development. Systematic efforts to grow luxury market crops like wheat, especially in the environs of London, drove many smaller tenants from the land. So, too, did the practice of enclosure, which allowed for more productive land use by large holders at the expense of their poorer neighbours. There is evidence of a rural subsistence crisis lasting throughout the first two decades of the century. Marginally productive land came under the plow, rural revolts became more common, and harvest failures resulted in starvation rather than hunger. It was not until the middle of the century that the rural economy fully recovered and entered a period of sustained growth. A nation that could barely feed itself in 1600 was an exporter of grain by 1700. In the northeast and southwest the harsher climate and poorer soils were more suited for sheep raising than for large-scale cereal production. The northeast and southwest were the location of the only significant manufacturing activity in England, the woolen cloth industry. Wool was spun into large cloths for export to Holland, where the highly technical finishing processes were performed before it was sold commercially. Because spinning and weaving provided employment for thousands of families, the downturn of the cloth trade at the beginning of the 17th century compounded the economic problems brought about by population increase. This situation worsened considerably after the opening of the Thirty Years' War (161848), as trade routes became disrupted and as new and cheaper sources of wool were developed. But the transformation of the English mercantile economy from its previous dependence upon a single commodity into a diversified entrept that transshipped dozens of domestic and colonial products was one of the most significant developments of the century. The economic divide between rich and poor, between surplus and subsistence producers, was a principal determinant of rank and status. English society was organized hierarchically with a tightly defined ascending order of privileges and responsibilities. This hierarchy was as apparent in the family as in the state. There, as elsewhere, male domination was the rule; husbands ruled their wives, masters their servants, parents their children. But if hierarchy was stratified, it was not ossified; those who attained wealth could achieve status. The social hierarchy reflected gradations of wealth and responded to changes in the economic fortunes of individuals. In this sense it was more open than most European societies; old wealth was not preferred to new, ancient title conferred no greater privileges than recent elevation; the humble could rise to become gentle, and the gentle could fall to become humble. During the early 17th century a small titular aristocracy composed of between 75 and 100 peers formed the apex of the social structure. Their titles were hereditary, passed from father to eldest son, and they were among the wealthiest subjects of the state. Most were local magnates, inheriting vast county estates and occupying honorific positions in local government. The peerage was the military class of the nation, and in the counties peers held the office of lord lieutenant. Most were also called to serve at court, but at the beginning of the century their power was still local rather than central. Below them were the gentry, who probably composed only about 5 percent of the rural population but who were rising in importance and prestige. The gentry were not distinguished by title, though many were knights and several hundred purchased the rank of baronet after it was created in 1611. Sir Thomas Smith defined a member of the gentry as he that can bear the port and charge of a gentleman. The gentry were expected to provide hospitality for their neighbours, treat their tenants paternally, and govern their counties. They served as deputy lieutenants, militia captains, and most importantly, as justices of the peace. To the justices fell the responsibility of enforcing the king's law and keeping the king's peace. They worked individually to mediate local disputes and collectively at quarter sessions to try petty crimes. As the magistracy the gentry were the backbone of county governance, and they maintained a fierce local independence even while enforcing the edicts of the crown. Beneath the gentry were those who laboured for their survival. There were many prosperous tenants who were styled yeomen to denote their economic independence and the social gulf between them and those who eked out a bare existence. Some were the younger sons of gentlemen; others aspired to enter the ranks of the gentry, having amassed sufficient wealth to be secure against the fluctuations of the early modern economy. Like the gentry, the yeomanry were involved in local government, performing most of the day-to-day, face-to-face tasks. Yeomen were village elders, constables, and tax collectors, and they composed the juries that heard cases at quarter sessions. Most owned sufficient freehold land to be politically enfranchised and to participate in parliamentary selections. Filling out the ranks of rural society were husbandmen, cottagers, and labourers. They were the vast majority of local inhabitants, and their lives were bound up in the struggle for survival. In towns, tradesmen and shopkeepers occupied the ranks below the ruling elites, but their occupational status clearly separated them from artisans, apprentices, and labourers. They were called the middling sort and were active in both civic and church affairs, holding the same minor offices as yeomen or husbandmen. Because of the greater concentrations of wealth and educational opportunities, the urban middling sort were active participants in urban politics. Government and society Seventeenth-century government was inextricably bound together with the social hierarchy that dominated local communities. Rank, status, and reputation were the criteria that enabled members of the local elite to serve the crown either in the counties or at court. Political theory stressed hierarchy, patriarchy, and deference in describing the natural order of English society. The most common visual description of this political community was the metaphor of the body politic. Like the human body, government and society were organic and their parts interdependent. Each element had its special and essential tasks to perform, without which the body could not function. At the head was the king, whose rule was based upon divine right and whose conception of his role in the state came closer to personal ownership than corporate management. Most of the aristocracy and gentry were the king's own tenants, whose obligations to him included military service, taxes, and local office holding. The monarch's claim to be God's vice-regent on earth was relatively uncontroversial, especially since his obligations to God included good governance. Except in dire emergency, the monarch could not abridge the laws and customs of England nor seize the persons or property of his subjects. The monarch ruled personally, and the permanent institutions of government were constantly being reshaped. Around the king was the court, a floating body of royal servants, officeholders, and place seekers. Personal service to the king was considered a social honour and thus fitting to those who already enjoyed rank and privilege. Most of the aristocracy and many gentlemen were in constant attendance at court, some with lucrative offices to defray their expenses, others extravagantly running through their fortunes. There was no essential preparation for royal service, no necessary skills or experiences. Commonly, members of the elite were educated at universities and the law courts, and most made a grand tour of Europe where they studied languages and culture. But their entry into royal service was normally through the patronage of family members and connections rather than through ability. From among his court the monarch chose a privy council. Its size and composition remained fluid, but it was largely composed of the chief officers of state: the lord treasurer, who oversaw revenue; the lord chancellor, who was the crown's chief legal officer; and the lord chamberlain, who was in charge of the king's household. The archbishop of Canterbury was the leading churchman of the realm, and he advised the king, who was the head of the established church. The privy council advised the king on foreign and domestic policy and was charged with the administration of government. It communicated with the host of unpaid local officials who governed in the communities, ordering the justices to enforce statutes or the deputy lieutenants to raise forces. In these tasks the privy councillors relied not only upon the king's warrant but upon their own local power and prestige as well. Thus, while the king was free to choose his own councillors, he was constrained to pick those who were capable of commanding respect. The advice that he received at the council table was from men who kept one eye on their localities and the other on the needs of central policy. This interconnection between the centre and the localities was also seen in the composition of Parliament. Parliament was another of the king's councils, though its role in government was less well defined than the privy council's and its summoning was intermittent. In the early 17th century Parliament was less an institution than an event; it was convened when the king sought the aid of his subjects in the process of creating new laws or to provide extraordinary revenue. Like everything else in English society, Parliament was constituted in a hierarchy, composed of king, lords, and commons. Every peer of the realm was personally summoned to sit in the House of Lords, which was dominated by the greatest of the king's officers. The lower house was composed of representatives selected from the counties and boroughs of the nation. The House of Commons was growing as local communities petitioned for the right to be represented in Parliament and local gentry scrambled for the prestige of being chosen. It had 464 members in 1604 and 507 forty years later. Selection to the House of Commons was a mark of distinction, and many communities rotated the honour among their most important citizens and neighbours. Although there were elaborate regulations governin