Li Xinkuan, The Controversy of Terms and Standard of Definition concerning the Middling Sort in Early Modern England

　　The western scholars in recent years proposed to use the term of ‘the middling sort’ to replace ‘the middle class’ in order to refer to the social mediate stratum which formed in the social transformation process in early modern England. This causes a lot of academic controversy, though this term has been widely recognized and accepted. In fact, it is not necessarily appropriate to replace ‘the middle class’ with ‘the middling sort’ in all research fields, but the latter is more in line with the complex historical facts of the social transformation during that time, when the study of the economic and social phenomena in early modern England was conducted. Starting from the contemporary description and observation on the middling sort, the lifestyle can be used as a standard to define the middling sort and confirm its group composition. Some academic disputes can also be effectively resolved through this approach.