ached with considerable timidity.(21) It is not difficult to see why: the doctrine of `the utility of poverty' is singularly unattractive from the perspective of modern academic scholarship; equally remote are the motivations and behavioural patterns of the preindustrial poor who seemingly declined opportunities to improve their wretched lot. The undoubted bias of early modern commentators, deriving from the class, occupations and regions in which they operated, has repeatedly been stressed. Most of them had a vested interest in the maintenance of low wages and compliant work-forces, and very many were employers or merchants whose personal fortunes were inextricably linked with the policies which they propounded; and since they sought to influence opinion in favour of self-interested outcomes, rhetoric repeatedly ran ahead of factual reporting and objective analysis. Few historians, therefore, have chosen to follow Elizabeth Gilboy in seeing the ascription of a preference for leisure among the lower orders as an `idea ... commonly enough expressed to make one feel that it was not merely due to prejudice', or her instinct that, `Behind this exaggerated picture there must have been some modicum of truth'.(22) On the contrary, recently Jan de Vries, who would see an `industrious revolution' commencing in the sixteenth century, has gone so far as to dismiss the `vast body of contemporary commentary' as a `trope justifying the subordination of the "dependent classes"'(23)Yet, while it would be naive to accept in full the implications of the main body of contemporary observations, it would be equally naive to dismiss them in their entirety simply because they emanated from the upper social strata.(24) It has been noted above that it is possible to untangle a stronger thread of consistent and coherent analysis from among the welter of prejudice and moralizing than is usually admitted, and what could be more natural than that the preoccupations...
