Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England, by Alexandra Shepard

In this book Alexandra Shepard uses 13,686 witness statements (of which 3,331 were by women) made between 1550 and 1728 in the church courts of seven dioceses and two archdeaconries, alongside similar evidence from the Cambridge University courts, to examine the relationship between wealth, occupation and social identity across the long seventeenth century. Witnesses were asked both what they were worth in goods, their debts paid, and how they maintained or got a living, and their responses enable Shepard to track how the calculus of esteem was re-evaluated as assessments of worth moved from being based primarily on what one owned to how one earned a living. The book is organised into three sections, the first consisting of three chapters dealing with concepts of wealth and poverty; the second of three chapters addressing questions of maintenance; and the third comprising a single chapter on changing concepts of credibility.