An increasingly urban society

New powerful social groups: businessmen, merchants and industrialists

An increasingly literate society: by 1700 nearly half of the male population and a quarter of the female population of England were able to read and write

The growth of the gentry, a class below the peerage, became a major feature of life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The genteel section was a very broad and disparate group: anyone who had an income derived from land that was physically worked by others

Such people usually had local government responsibilities, for example acting as magistrates

They and their sons would probably have spent time at a university or one of the Inns of Court

The social elite was further broadened when James I introduced in 1611 the category of baronet: by 1640 you could purchase a baronetcy for as little as £400