Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
Once you get to your destination, one of your greatest hopes and expectations is that you will be able to get about unimpeded, and more than physically. You’ll want to move effortlessly in whatever society and culture you visit, smoothly as a fish through water. This will be difficult to achieve for several reasons, and I’ll be covering many of them here. A leading reason will be that the society itself will put barriers in your way.
Social stratification, where privileges are granted to some classes and restrictions imposed on others, is common enough in history to be effectively ubiquitous. Contemporary Americans think, or like to think, that we don’t have those strata, the lords imposing their will on a mass of peons. To some degree that’s true; to some degree that’s not true. Compared to most other times and places, it’s very true1. Our class divisions are less, movement between classes is easier, and penalties for transgressing those boundaries are much lower, and mainly social rather than legal.
It's going to be a hard mental transition to adjust to most places and times you visit, where there will be well-delineated social strata, and serious risks involved in trying to move across the grain. This stands for a putative non-entity nosing into exalted ranks as well as an apparent elite going slumming. You will want to select a persona to emulate before you get to your destination, or very soon after, and stick with it2. This will impose restrictions on your actions. Deal with it.
The social strata I’m speaking about here are the politico-economic ones. Social ranks are often based on money, but not always. They are often based on political power, but not always. They are also based on the intersection of wealth and political power, but maybe not always. There certainly are other factors affecting where you fit within a society, like sex and race, but I will deal with them separately. My subject here is those broader ranks.
Each culture has its own rules and configurations. By using our three core examples, I can show how they differ, and how they sometimes mirror each other.
Roman society was a thick churn of social rankings, clashing and synergizing with each other in complex patterns that can bewilder anyone today who thinks about them too much. It was probably pretty confusing back then, too.
The first one, which most people know about, was the split between the patrician and plebeian classes. Patricians were the self-appointed noble class, and while they had compromised away most of their innate privileges in the earlier centuries of the Republic, they still deemed themselves a cut above the plebeian commoners. Plebeian families could occasionally be admitted to the patrician class, an honor much sought, but only a rare few committed populists considered moving in the other direction.
Another set of rankings was more explicitly economic, and political. Roman Senators had to meet wealth requirements to hold their stations, although this could be finessed with enough political clout. The rank below, the equites (which translates roughly as “knights3”), had their own financial bar to clear. After that you had the common run of citizens, hoping either to move up or just hold on where they were. Beneath them were freedmen, former slaves who had been manumitted, with most but not all of the rights and privileges of other free persons. Then of course were the slaves, who often were the property others counted toward membership in higher classes.
Which class you can pretend to belong to as a visitor will be rather limited. You surely won’t pass as a senator, and feigning membership among the equites will run into suspicion, notably from those trying to keep their perquisites for themselves. Likewise, it does you little good to play a mere freedman, and none to go lower. Your best route is either to play it down the middle, or to pass yourself off as a foreigner of some kind, at least someone not native to the area of the Roman nation that you’re visiting.
If you’re in Rome itself, that basically means you pretend to be from anywhere but the city. Rome of this era was essentially the center of the world, at least to any good Roman. A citizen from another part of the Republic (or Empire) was a mere provincial, something a bit below. This matters most in the city itself, and most strongly in political affairs. If you aren’t interfering in political matters, which you shouldn’t be, this will rest fairly lightly on you. It will naturally matter less if you’re somewhere outside Rome, but it will still be felt.
Another rank structure to be aware of is that between patrons and clients. Influential Romans could gather a circle of dependents to themselves as a power base. The patron would support his clients with everything from cash handouts to legal assistance. The clients would act as a loyal political bloc, voting his way in popular assemblies and backing him should he run for political office. This was an open transaction, perhaps resented by some but not considered shady or corrupt.
In dealing with an ordinary person in Rome, therefore, it will help you to know where he stands on a number of socio-political axes. A poor man may be putting on airs because he’s part of a patrician clan down on its luck4. Another may feel driven to prove himself because he came to Rome from some backwater town. A third may be acting not from his own inclinations, but to get in better with his patron, or someone he hopes to make his patron. Or all three could be the same man.
One more social aspect to consider is the broad frank contempt that the exalted orders held for manual work. “Honest toil” and “the dignity of labor” have much purchase on modern thoughts, but to higher-class Romans, labor was debasing, not dignifying. Wages from manual labor were considered “the very badge of servitude,” according to one Roman, who likewise declared “All mechanics are occupied in a degrading way, for no workshop can have anything about it worthy of a free man.”
The upper-class twit who delivered himself of these scornful dismissals? None other than Cicero, one of the leading intellectual lights of all Roman history -- and incidentally, not quite upper-class. Cicero was not only a plebeian, but born in Arpinum, well outside Rome. He had those two strikes against him in building his career at Rome, but they didn’t inculcate a sympathy for the little fellow. Instead, they led him more to guard jealously the privileges he did possess, naturally or through his own non-manual labors.
Be aware of all that, if there is an occasion where you may need to do some heavy lifting.
A very similar attitude pertained in Elizabethan England. You wanted very much to belong to the gentle ranks, comprising not quite two percent of the population. Being a gentleman was defined as making a good living without the need for manual labor. Physicians, lawyers, priests, military officers, government officials, successful merchants, all could boast of gentlemanly rank, as could graduates of the universities. Here as in Rome, manual work was viewed as degrading, not on an airy intellectual or mental plane but in the social sense. It literally lowered your social grade to work with your hands.
Above the simple gentlefolk you had the esquires, then the knights, then the nobility5. The latter two ranks were in the power of the monarch to grant -- though, desirable as they were, sometimes they were refused. A knighthood brought no money with it, but did bring obligations to make outlays to maintain your station. Some refused knighthoods, and even noble titles, because they couldn’t afford it.
The higher nobles emulated their Roman counterparts in drawing clients to themselves, anywhere from knights down to scientists, artists, and performers6. This brought the clients chances for personal enhancement. For the patrons, the gain was in prestige more than direct personal power. There was no chance to be elected King, after all, but you could raise your profile enough to gain a place at the royal court, or a better place7. Ambition was restrained by barring a patron’s livery (clothes bearing his colors and patterns, basically a uniform) to anyone but his personal servants, so his clients could not take on the look of a personal army.
Below gentle status, your station depended on landholding8. If you held enough land, and it produced enough income, you were a yeoman, which gave you a vote in elections for Parliament. Own enough land, and you could rent it out to tenants to work for themselves. These tenants, called commoners, would pay in labor service, in goods, or later in money.
Towns had a different system than the agricultural countryside. If you were a male householder and not dependent on others for wages, you were deemed a citizen. This could cover up to half the adult male population of a town. Other aspects included the master/apprentice system for learning trades, with various restrictions on the apprentice and obligations upon the master. Townsfolk of the same rank as country dwellers considered themselves superior9.
Ranks were not meant to be easily permeable. You were supposed to know your station and keep it, though there was plenty of scheming over how to nudge up one’s spot on the ladder. Among other ways of keeping the boundaries clear, sumptuary laws barred the wearing of certain luxurious fabrics to any but the higher orders. How effective these laws were is debatable, but the presumption you were showing by putting on a certain article above your station was manifest.
Again, it will be perilous to pose as anything too exalted -- so no velvet hose for you, unless you’re feeling very lucky10. Appearing to come from the humbler ranks is less limiting than it would be in Rome: England’s not big on domestic slavery, and their contempt for manual labor is softer. Something in the upper-middle ranks should probably work well. Your literacy alone will support that role: it was a distinct minority who could read and write in Elizabethan England, though the numbers were climbing.
Personal behavior will also help. Rank and nobility were exhibited by liberality and hospitality. You won’t be sharing your home with anybody -- it’s several hundred years distant -- but showing a generous hand to lower ranks solidifies the impression that you inhabit an exalted station11. Keep this within bounds -- I already warned you against giving excessive vails to servants -- and you’ll make an excellent impression.
You need also to be alert to class elements inherent in the English language in this time. The next chapter will give you some guidance for that, and also for a similar phenomenon in Japanese, which brings us to our final example era.
The Sengoku Jidai was a period of violent flux, and this affected the social hierarchy. Provinces broke from the shogunate, vassals defied lords, merchant guilds took over towns, and peasants revolted, organizing under small landowners of warrior ancestry known as ji-samurai. Lower orders were gaining a purchase on Japan, politically and culturally.
This can be overstated. Advancement out of one’s usual social rank increased to shocking levels, but the actual relations between members of those ranks largely held together. Especially after the early stages of the civil strife, Japanese society retained its class strictures.
The samurai were considered aristocratic, though they were not exclusively a warrior class. They were also cultivated as administrators, and used for bureaucratic work, especially when their battlefield influence waned. The warrior caste among them got separated out more after the unification. This means the archetypal warrior you meet will expect to be treated with respect and deference, but certain functionaries will expect the same. They may lack the sword skills to enforce that -- but don’t count on it.
Many bearers of titles did not have power behind them. This had been true for a long time, all the way to the top. Emperors had long been puppets of the shoguns, but in this century, those shoguns themselves became puppets of whatever warlord held sway in the capital. This must shape your analysis of the politics around you, but should affect far less the manners you show toward those in high ranks.
Those manners will be self-abasing. If the local daimyo approaches you on the street, you’re expected to bow deeply, with your shoes in your hands, until he passes. If some noble personage deigns to speak with you, the same barefoot bowing is expected, with your hands placed between your thighs as they talk. Even when receiving someone of equal rank in one’s home, a person would kneel, hands on floor, until the guest was seated.
Blending into Japanese society will be hard if you’re ethnically Japanese, and almost beside the point if you’re impersonating a visitor from exotic Europe. The visitors from afar will still need to be aware of the ranks, and the heightening of manners needed with the heightening of the stratum in which you move. It’s a matter not only of politeness and diplomacy, but of your personal safety.
Once Japanese society was reunified under Tokugawa, class strictures were re-strengthened, though also reshuffled. Tokugawa promulgated a hierarchy of shi-no-ko-sho: warriors, peasants, artists, merchants. The raising of peasants acknowledged them as a power base, not least as raw manpower for armies. The lowering of merchants was to deter them from using their wealth to form their own power bases, as many had done in the previous century’s chaos. There were outcast classes beneath these, encompassing “impure” work like butchering or burial and “suspicious” workers like peddlers and actors.
This should steer you clear of some guises you might assume. Itinerant trading would leave you flatly on the bottom of the pyramid, so if you’re looking to move trade goods, find a vendor, don’t play one.
Fit the role you play to the era’s expectations, whether as a native or as a traveler. Know what your feigned level in society entails toward those both above and beneath you. This may mean acting cool, or even a bit pushy, to your “inferiors.” If you can endure having to truckle to those above, you can endure dishing it out, though a light touch in the latter case is preferable. If nothing else, it means you have to retreat less if you make a goof.
Footnotes:
This statement offers no comment on whether such stratification is diminishing or increasing in current American society. For a definitive answer, sneak ahead a few decades in your time machine. Failing that, just wait around and see.
You can chance using multiple personae if the risk of someone happening upon both of them is low. If your model of time machine allows quick transits through space, this will be much more easily arranged.
In early centuries, they had been those rich enough to equip themselves with horses when they were sent to war. See also “chivalry.”
Readers of Jane Austen and other Regency-era fiction may recognize the attitudes of genteel poverty. A lot of things change; a lot of things endure.
These were, bottom to top, barons, viscounts, earls, marquises, and dukes.
For instance, William Shakespeare’s theatrical company spent several years as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, before the newly ascended James I made them the King’s Men.
Or if you were the monarch, to overawe your subjects with your might and munificence, and to keep your courtiers humble.
It usually was holding rather than owning. The Crown owned the land; others held it under his sufferance, and with restrictions on selling or buying holdings. There were notable exceptions I won’t go into, largely because you shouldn’t be around in Tudor England long enough to be making big real estate deals.
Of all the social hierarchies I discuss, that one is probably the most consistent and enduring across all cultures and eras. Fish feel as big as their pond, or lake, or ocean.
Rats. My legs look really good in those.
This attitude has persisted into modern times. News of some famous rich person leaving a jaw-dropping tip comes along with fair regularity, and you almost always feel better about that person for having done so.
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