Twelve years later, by the time of his second book, Man and the Natural World (1983), the deadening pressures of accountability and quality [i.e. quantity] control were already bearing down, even upon Oxford and Cambridge. But Thomas himself vigorously resisted such malign influences, urging that ‘in the humanities it is infinitely more important that publications should be high in quality than that they should be numerous’. He was able to make this case all the more effectively as he became, in short order, head of an Oxford college, trustee of the National Gallery and British Museum, and president of the British Academy. Yet the knighted administrator and public figure did not eclipse the scholar. For Thomas was invited to deliver the Ford lectures (the greatest honour offered to an historian of Britain by his or her peers) in 2000, the same year that he retired from the presidency of Corpus Christi College. Nine years later, these lectures, ‘revised and expanded’, appear in print as only his third sole-author book.

It was well worth the wait, and not just for those with a special interest in English history c.1500–1800. The Ends of Life: Roads to fulfilment in Early Modern England is a hugely compelling, readable, stimulating and thought-provoking volume. Thomas addresses themes of enduring interest and significance in prose which is always deft, incisive, lively and lucid. His material is organised into seven chapters. The first looks at what ‘fulfilment’ (as we would say) meant for people who did not know or use that word, at a time when the course of mortal ambition was subject to far greater material and cultural constraints than are experienced by those fortunate enough to live in modern Western societies. The remaining chapters each deal with one of the goals of life pursued by English men (and women, both directly and vicariously) between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Thomas first disposes of military prowess, an essentially aristocratic and masculine ideal that privileged battlefield heroics and physical courage above all other human activities and attributes. (Women were not supposed to be physically tough, despite the ‘life-threatening agonies of early modern childbirth’ and the occasional female duellist, professional boxer or violent criminal.) With the effective development of firearms and the emergence of an increasingly complex market economy, plus specialist professional sailors and soldiers, more peaceful pursuits became of greater relevance to most people.

Prominent among these were the demands and satisfactions of work, seen not only as social, economic, moral and religious imperative, but also an intrinsic source of satisfaction. This view was summed up by, among others, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and exemplified by numerous early modern workaholics, not least Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who supposedly indulged in twelve-hour spells at his desk, never rising once ‘to piss nor yet to eat’. Thomas suggests that while most people today (outside the narrow ranks of high-status ‘high achievers’) seek fulfilment in leisure rather than at work, in early modern times the reverse may have been true, partly because working hours were longer, and the distinction between work and leisure generally less clear-cut.

The drive for ever more and ‘better’ material possessions is usually regarded as a recent phenomenon of industrialised or ‘post-industrial’ Western societies. But Thomas shows that the quest for wealth – and the consumer goods it could acquire – was so well established as the main business of life by the mid eighteenth century that even the great apostle of capitalism, Adam Smith (frequently quoted in these pages), felt it necessary to warn against the fallacy that money could buy happiness. Less tangible if possibly more satisfying sources of human felicity included honour and reputation (‘respect’, or being valued by others), friendship, love (marital and otherwise), and the hope or assurance of posthumous fame. Thomas has fascinating things to say about all of these. Seeking to approach ‘the past in the way an anthropologist might approach some exotic society’, he is an extraordinarily well-informed guide and observer, whose erudition encompasses not only the manuscript and printed writings of his three target centuries, but stretches further and wider, from the texts of classical antiquity to modern ethnographic, historical, literary, philosophical and sociological scholarship.

Hence, every page, almost every paragraph, yields marvels and surprises, not least in terms of the anticipation of modern ways and manners. The following example comes from a page opened at random:

Gossip was perceived by most male commentators as a peculiarly female activity, but there is no reason to think that the conversation of most men was very different. Country gentlemen notoriously talked about dogs, hawks, and horses, the weather, and the price of corn ... The elderly and the sick regaled others with detailed histories of their aches and pains (‘many will concern the company in their very stools, and consistency of them’); servants gossiped about their masters; Restoration rakes talked of ‘nothing but fighting and fucking’ and most people enjoyed sexual humour and witty repartee. In 1641 the ‘principal discourse’ of young men among their tippling companions was said to be ‘of women and their appurtenances, of cuckolds and cuckold-makers, what men wear horns, what women britches, what willing ones there be in the town or parish, how such pieces are to be handled’ and much other ‘ribaldry, obscene discourses, songs, tales and jests’; for ‘young men ... usually at their pot-meetings pervert all occasions of talk into bawdry’. By contrast, the Oxford academic Obadiah Walker thought that ‘the frequentest table-talk in England’ was ‘discourse about divinity’.

That paragraph is supported by endnote citations of twelve contemporary primary sources and two modern monographs; in all, the notes cover just under one hundred pages, or about a quarter of the entire book. But this massive learning is lightly worn. Thomas’s last volume was criticised in some quarters as little more than an anthology, lacking explicit hypothesis, theoretical framework or combative engagement with different interpretations. While many readers might regard these as positive virtues, Thomas here goes some distance to address such objections, stressing his concern for the contexts from which his examples and quotations are chosen, and displaying more readiness than before to detail his disagreements with others.

To the charge that he relies on a massive accumulation of evidence rather than ‘theory’ (whether post-structuralist or otherwise) to make his case, it might be responded that if you can dispense with such crutches, so much the better; his failure to flaunt an intellectual scaffolding is scarcely attributable to ignorance or laziness. Nor are these pages devoid of argument and interpretation. On the contrary, they advance, persistently if unobtrusively, a view of sixteenthand seventeenth-century England radically at odds with much current orthodoxy, by downplaying the centrality of religion in everyday life, highlighting change rather than continuity and emphasising broad general trends over microscopic local variations.

In these respects, the influence of R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) – that ‘remarkable work’ which, as he tells us, first kindled Thomas’s historical interests – is still discernible. So is that of two Oxford teachers, the late Christopher Hill, and Adelaide’s Hugh Stretton. Australian readers will also note with pleasure the prominence of writings by local scholars, especially Peter Sherlock and the late Patricia Crawford, among Thomas’s enormous stock of citations. If they require further incentive to obtain a copy, the figures and plates alone, their sober black and white contrasting with the gorgeous jacket illustration on the frailty of all earthly aspirations, are almost worth the price of this handsomely produced book.