This celebrated collection of essays was first published in 1961 to mark the 80th birthday of the great historian and social reformer R. H. Tawney. The list of contributors contains several of the most English distinguished historians of the post-war period, including Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill, Joan Thirsk, Gerald Aylmer and Donald Coleman, and many of the essays in this volume have since assumed classic status. The collection opens with F. J. Fisher’s celebrated overview of ‘Tawney’s Century’, defined as that period which separates the Dissolution of the Monasteries of the 1530s from the Great Rebellion of the 1640s.