commoners

• social standing

  below the nobility, gentry and higher clergy
• who were at the top level of commoners?

  the 'middling sort' or the bourgeoisie
• the bourgeoisie in towns and cities

  relatively small number of educated professionals
• who are the most numerous and influential group?

  lawyers - exercised considerable influence
• who were lawyers often in collaboration with?

  wealthier merchants
• who were the lower group that the bourgeoisie but still respectable?

  shopkeepers and skilled tradesmen
• what did shopkeepers and skilled tradesmen tend to dominate?

  the borough corporations (town councils)
• what did the 2nd group play a key role in?

  organisations such as guilds and lay confraternities - common feature of urban life in pre-Reformation England
• middling sort in the countryside

  yeomen farmers who farmed substantial properties for an increasingly sophisticated market economy
• consequence of decline in population from the Black Death

  reduced the demand for land and drop in land values which enabled the emergence of the 'middling sort' group
• historian's views: Joyce Youings

  termed this a 'peasant aristocracy'
• who were below yeomen?

  husbandmen
• how did husbandmen live?

  they kept smaller farms than yeomen and supplemented their farming incomes through employment by yeomen or gentry
• how can yeomanry and husbandmen be described?

  'peasant'
• what were labourers usually dependent on?

  the income of the sale of their labour
• how could they supplement their irregular income in some cases?

  through the planting of vegetables or the exercising of grazing rights
• what was their position like in society?

  very insecure