The substantial and middling tenants at this time would have held on long leases, typically of 11 or 19 years.
His description of ' middling ' values is highly prescriptive, static, and defined against aspects of social mobility that he regards as inimical to these values.
The middling sorts were keen consumers of publicly performed music as well as avid makers of music in their homes.
In simple numbers they constituted the largest group within the middling sort, responsible for nearly half the inventories.
Their religion may also have made it possible for them (and the middling sort) to allow those below them a more active role.
The master-servant divide allegedly widened over the course of the eighteenth century, trickling down from the nobility to the middling sorts.
In response, they exaggerated and denounced the new styles visible among urban servants, apprentices and middling folk.
We speculate that it was this consumer-conscious middling sort which promoted urban change.
