请将“、The number of documented condemnations for sexual offences, breach of marital duties, loose speech, neglect of church attendance, brawling and blas-phemy is considerable. This did not just affect members of the lower orders. It was certainly the case that the gentry were prosecuted mainly at episcopal courts, but occasionally - particularly in cases of 'recusancy' (i.e. neglect of church attendance and communion) they might also appear before the arch-deacon.116 The large number of condemnations by the church courts dem-onstrates on the one hand the frequently delivered verdict that the English people were on the whole 'ungovernable', i.e. not fully in thrall to the 'secular development' of social disciplining, while on the other hand the effectiveness of these courts in terms of public order depended on the collaboration of judicial institutions. The best evidence for this is given by all those conflicts in which this collaboration was lacking and hence local order was considerably damaged.117 For without local support and recognition, the church's autono-mous judicial power was greatly confined, even if it was promoted by the crown. This is especially shown in the punishment of 'recusants'. As long as this was simply a question of Catholics, prosecution generally remained con-fined to prominent individuals, on whom fines were usually imposed by way of example. If the offenders were particularly prestigious, the imposition of these penalties was the responsibility of episcopal commissions. The activity of these, however, was combated by the gentry, who saw this as an encroach-ment on the local structures of estate rule. When the laws against recusants were sharpened in 1584, the imposition of the law was transferred to purely secular judicial commissions. These could only intervene on the basis of a report from the local secular and spiritual instances. Their effectiveness was thus subject to preliminary considerations of local politics.
If religious power could only involve itself judicially with good order with the support of the local ruling estates, the Reformation also brought a shift in secular judicial power. For conflicts over questions of faith and the require-ments of piety at a local level led - even if these tendencies should not be over-estimated in their practical effect - to a redefinition of the meaning of ‘public office' - to a moralising of rulership. This was possible because the Justices of the Peace and their estate colleagues also included Puritans, or at least Christians who demanded both of themselves and others that they should regard their secular offices as a work entrusted to them by God. The moralisation of rule meant a redefinition of the habitus of the ruling estates, above all that of the gentry. Patrick Collinson sees this reorientation of what was in practice an already established ruling estate (Collinson says ‘class') as the real ‘rise of the gentry'.118
The cultural transformation of the notion of rule was certainly promoted in the main by members of the gentry, but in no way was it exclusively developed by them. Rather, the moralising of rule under the English ancien régime was also a product of the public discourse - partially independent of power - that developed in the wake of the Reformation. This found expression in the distribution of religious tracts, in conflicts over seating in the church,119 but above all in the claim persistently made by Christians to the right to read the Bible for themselves and pursue with other Christians a way of life pleasing to God.
Sanctioning of conditions of appropriation by ruling power
In the two centuries before the partial revolutionising of the ancien régime, the conditions of material reproduction of a large part of the English population underwent a significant change. Research has focused above all on the trans- formation of relations of production, and among these the change in practices of appropriation and the results of appropriation of members of the higher nobility and gentry. For a while, this last point was linked with the question of the causes of the ‘English Revolution'. This has not been good either for analysis of the social causes of the revolution or for the discovery of groups bearing the processes of capitalisation (cf. below).
In the following section, we shall deal with change in conditions of repro-duction exclusively from the standpoint of their being sanctioned by the ruling power. This restricts the presentation to those characteristics of appropriation that formed structural peculiarities of the epoch of the ancien régime (cf. Part Five, 1 and 2). In this analytical context, two aspects of the structural change in the countryside are particularly important: the dissolution of traditional con-vergences of interest and the sanctioning of private relations of exploitation by the generalised power.
New convergences of interest especially arose in connection with strategies of commercialisation. Recent research has come to see the general level of commercialisation as somewhat less than was previously thought. Even in the early seventeenth century, very many peasants still oriented their production almost entirely to the goal of providing for their own household. The money that they needed to pay for supplies and if necessary also for taxes (the poorer peasant families generally escaped direct taxation), they sought to obtain by occasional wage-labour and domestic work. Even among the nobility, orien-tation to marketable sources of income was in no way universal at this time. Instead, many members of the higher nobility and upper gentry persisted in forms of production that could serve as the basis for a hospitable household and the needs of a retinue. As regards the readiness of peasants to hire them-selves out for war service, for example, only those lords could hope for this who did not seek to extricate themselves from the structure of traditional rul-ership. But despite this, many members of the upper nobility and gentry, and even many richer peasants, made use of the prospects for appropriation that were offered by sales opportunities both at home and abroad.
Strategies of commercialisation did not always compete with the reproduc-tion prospects of those who could not make use of these - at least not initially and not in every case.120 As long as villages were almost depopulated, peasant holdings unoccupied and common land only little used - as was still the case many decades after the Black Death of the mid fourteenth century - commercial strategies of individual landowners, such as were expressed in enclosures, engrossing of farms, and the transformation of agricultural land into pasture, did not necessarily threaten the reproduction prospects of the poor rural population. This changed however as the population grew, entry fines for tenures were abolished and freehold tenancies were so reduced as a result of divided inheritance that use of the common land became an indispensable condition of material reproduction. For many a younger son of peasants, the ‘structural change in the countryside at this time meant the inability to found a family of his own, if he was not actually forced into vagabondage in search of a livelihood of some kind; for many families it brought the loss of that provision, experienced as a 'good life', which their grandparents' generation had enjoyed. On the other hand, other peasant families of this time expanded the land in their possession by purchasing or leasing, especially in the grainproducing areas. To cultivate this they employed labourers (not uncommonly their poorer neighbours). The wages that they paid fell ever further behind the inflationary trend of prices from the mid sixteenth century on.
Of the two or three more prosperous yeomen that there generally were in each village, many now sought, just like the lords, to stop pasture being divided up into fields, which at this time were not yet enclosed. But they were certainly quite prepared to accept the enclosure plans of the lords if they could participate in these themselves. By way of declarations of agreement of the 'inhabitants', however, enclosures were made legal - apart from a few individual cases that were declared 'unjust'.
In this way, there arose a (partial) convergence of interest among those with commercially oriented agricultural 'enterprises'. It was not rare for such an interest to be conflict with that of the poorer peasants, who had always been oriented towards use-value.
The dissolution of earlier convergences of interest brought about the struc-tural preconditions for the particular English form of transition from feudal-ism to capitalism in the countryside: the prevalence of profit interests at the expense of independent small-peasant modes of existence.
Strategies of this kind were successful because, whilst the English peasants had indeed succeeded in winning their personal freedom - the last of them, 
however, only in the first three decades of the seventeenth century121 -, this generally did not automatically mean private property in their tenures; their possession of land remained subject to restrictions, differing from one manor to another, that were set down in a copy of the roll of the manor court (hence the term 'copyhold').
Even peasants who now held their land in the form of copyhold rather than freehold obtained in the course of the sixteenth century the protection of their rights of possession by the general judicial power. The first steps by which this was accomplished were the introduction of proceedings for 'trespass' in common law, or the appeal to the Chancellor, who could make decisions outside the common law on the principle of equity. This legal protection, however, still applied only within the conditions of copyhold. These were established in the context of decentralised rule. Whether a peasant holding was heritable under conditions of freehold, whether it remained in the pos-session of a peasant family for one tenancy or three, or else for a fixed term, was decided between the tenant and the owner of the land. It was within these limits that the right of possession of copyhold tenures was sanctioned by the generalised power.”翻译为中文