Position:Home>History> What was English society like in the late 1600s/ early 1700s?

There would certainly have been balls, but I am not sure that the concepts of 'coming out' and 'the season' had really evolved at that time!. However, leisure activities were certainly very popular at this time!. In 'Stuart England' it says:

'Towns could cater for the socializing instincts as well as the cultural appetites of their inhabitants and their neighbouring gentry!. The golden age of that most decorous of late Stuart and Georgian social institutions, the provincial assembly, began around 1700!. Bowling greens, like those at Bedford and Newcastle, and town walks (some specially laid out, as in Preston and Shrewsbury) were the out-of-door counterparts in social terms of the assemblies, though without all the attractions of London's parks and pleasure gardens!. In one small group of towns, the spa towns, leisure was beginning to be cultivated as nowhere lese!. 'Taking the waters' had been for some years before 1688 a vogue presicrpiton among a section of the medical fraternity!. Queen Anne's visit to Bath in 1702 made it socially compelling also, and BAth itself, with Epsom and Tunbridge Wells "where a lady may as soon shipwreck her character as any place in England" were the first places to develop methodically their facilities in response to demand!. By 1714 Scarborough was beginning to follow!.

These were heady years for the theatre, the years of Congreve's and Farquhar's greatness!. They were memorable years, too, more so even than those before 1688, for the lover of good music, expertly performed!. In both fields London naturally set the fashions, but she exported some, at least, to the main cities and towns of the provinces!. IN a period when spontaneous music-making was giving way to anew professionalism, Londoners alone (and their visitors) could enjoy Italian opera, which took the city by storm during the reign of Queen Anne, or the pleasure gardens and permanent theatres where professional orchestras entertained strollers and theatre-goers!. But London's new music clubs and societies quickly produced many provincial imitators, and while cathedrals began to house concerts, inns like the Greyhound at Norwich were also pressed into service just as they were in the capital!.

Three other instituions that especially illuminate the social mores of Augustan England are the town square, the coffee-house and the periodical!. More than nay new aspect of the residiential habitat of the early 18th century Englishman, it was the fashionable square, built round a common garden or paved area, which best summed up, at once, the prosperity, the civilized taste and the social instincts of the 'pseudo-gentry' of the towns!. Where London pointed the way, Bristonl, Manchester and Birmingham quickly followed - demonstrating in the process how congenially merchants, professionals and the leisured genteel could coexist in Queen Anne's england!. If the square was an integrator, the coffee-house was a leveller!. Already (by 1688) the favourite social haunt of London males above labourer's rank, coffee-houses continued to grow in popularity to such an extent that there were about 650 in the capital by 1714!.

By the reign of Anne, the habit of attending coffee-houses had spread to almost all the larger provincial towns and with it the habit of reading the periodicals and newspapers that were so distinctive a feature of the early eighteenth century!.'Www@QuestionHome@Com

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