The Professions in Early Modem England, 1450-1800: Servants of the Commonweal. (Reviews).

The Professions in Early Modem England, 1450-1800: Servants of the Commonweal. By Rosemary O'Day (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000. xi plus 334 pp.).

Sociologists and even historians of the professions have treated their history backwards. They argue from their current state, based on traits such as theoretical knowledge, ethical code, and institutional monopoly of a service, back to their primitive origins which they suppose were much the same if less developed than today. Rosemary O'Day, well-known for her earlier works on the clergy and education, starts from the opposite end of the spectrum. She studies their actual practice and ethos from the original sources in the context of their times and the society they served. Her major theme is that they professed, in the originally religious sense, a calling or vocation to serve God and their fellows. They differed from other Christians only in providing a service that required literate education and training. This the clergy, the lawyers and the medical men did, respectively, in the means of salvation, in defence of civil rights and property, and in maintaining people's health and curing their maladies--all vital concerns of the laity especially in the religious, litigious and disease-ridden society of early modem England.

The three occupations shared a common background in the reformed Christianity and social humanism of the Reformation and the Renaissance which they learned in the grammar schools and, for the highest ranks, at the universities, and took their places in the hierarchical society according to their family connections, access to patronage, education and innate ability, as individuals rather than members of a unified occupational elite.

She does not believe, for example, that the three learned professions of clergy, law and medicine were, at first at any rate, self-conscious groupings ranged against the laity and concerned to exploit their monopoly of expertise for profit and status. The clergy were the most sharply demarcated: before the Reformation they were an estate, separate from the once military and now landed aristocracy and gentry and from the third estate of lay citizens, dedicated to serving God first and only secondly representing the community by prayer and supplication more than by preaching and the cure of souls. The Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Chantries reduced the clergy both in numbers and in role to their mainly preaching, teaching and secular caring function. That function became a source of disputation. The Crown, notably Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, backed by high Anglican bishops, wished them to be set apart by their daily dress, ritual vestments and style of life, and to serve the state as channels of royal propaganda and control, while the more democratic tendency represented by the Puritans emphasised their preaching rather than their sacerdotal function for a laity who were their own mediators with God. Only gradually did the clergy reach a compromise as a gentlemanly occupation serving as much a social role as an ecclesiastical one. They became what Coleridge (not O'Day) was to call a "clerisy", an educated gentleman in every parish, spreading sweetness and light, and incidentally, in some cases, practising theology, literature and science as well.

The other two professions also emerged from the same Christian humanism of the Renaissance and from the notion of labouring in their religious vocation. Both the law and medicine had their formal origin in the higher faculties of the universities, and the higher ranks, the barristers and the physicians, kept a tenuous connection with them. O'Day has a down to earth sense of the fluidity of occupations in a society without professional civil servants or police or effective means of social control. Almost anyone with a basic education and sufficient chutzpa could practice law or medicine at the lower levels, and many did, especially clergymen who sometimes practised both. Common law advocates were protected by their membership of the Inns of Court and recognition by the judges, though it took some time for them to exclude attornies and solicitors. Civil lawyers, once the top of the legal profession, were eventually sidelined by the decline of the ecclesiastical courts and the consequent loss of clients. But in a system in which most occupations were learned on the job, with or without formal apprenticeship, it was fairly easy to claim expertise and the proof was in the practitioner's success.

The same too applied to medicine. O'Day challenges the traditional belief that there were sharp and insurmountable distinctions among physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. The training of the physicians at Oxford and Cambridge was not so exclusively theoretical as was thought, since many of them had studied abroad and most attached themselves to practitioners and learned on the job, just like the surgeons and apothecaries. Most of them, to meet the demands of their patients, practised each other's trades as needed. All three were united in excluding, where they could, the many wise women, cunning men, and similar so-called "quacks", whose treatments often worked better than theirs.

In short, as one would expect in the early stages of any evolving occupation, there was a great deal of fluidity and trial and error before settling down into an accepted system and routine. Exclusive clubs and societies gradually emerged, especially in the eighteenth century, but the very repetition of rules and exclusions suggests wished for aspiration and failure to enforce rather than successful monopoly. Professionalisation as an institutional process with privileged associations and legal enforcement had for the most part to wait until the nineteenth century.

O'Day's book is full of much useful information, on income and living styles, family and social background, education and social mobility, and many interesting case studies of particular clergymen, lawyers and medical practitioners, all of importance to early modernists in general. What is impressive about her work is the common sense understanding of her period in its own terms and the way in which the three classic professions fitted into it and evolved over three critical centuries of their existence. Her book is an excellent study of the early modern professions and a model of insightful historical research.