The Eighteenth-Century Town

A Reader in English Urban History 1688-1820

Peter Borsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317899747
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The eighteenth century represents a critical period in the transition of the English urban history, as the town of the early modern era involved into that of the industrial revolution; and since Britain was the 'first industrial nation', this transformation is of more-than-national significance for all those interested in the histroy of towns. This book gathers together in one volume some of the most interesting and important articles that have appeared in research journals to provide a rich variety of perspectives on urban evelopment in the period.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Peter Borsay

The study of English urban history between 1688 and 1820, what may conveniently be called the long eighteenth century, was, until the last decade or so, relatively neglected. Attention focused on the more overtly ‘eventful’ periods before the Civil War and after the inception of the Industrial Revolution. This pattern of research had the effect of accentuating the differences between the pre-industrial and industrial town, and encouraged the view that the transformation of the one into the other was a dramatic, even revolutionary, event. However, notions of this type have now come under critical scrutiny. At a general level, the nature and significance of the Civil War¹ and the Industrial Revolution,² two of the corner-stones of post-war British historiography, are being reappraised. In the field of urban history pioneering volumes, such as Penelope Corfield’s (1982) The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 and the collection of essays edited by Peter Clark, (1984) The Transformation of English Towns 1600–1800, have redirected attention to the long eighteenth century and emphasized the deep roots of economic and social change. In Britain and across the Atlantic, evolution rather than revolution is coming to seem the more appropriate concept to describe the transition from pre-industrial to industrial urban society,³ and with this change in approach the stereotyped images of the modern and pre-modern town are beginning to crack. Central to this reassessment are two questions. To what extent do traditional features of town life persist during the Industrial Revolution? And how far can the new urban trends associated with this economic transformation be detected in the century or so preceding it?

The issue of continuity is one of the key themes examined in this Introduction. The second major issue addressed will be that of urban identity. Though much has been written which touches obliquely upon English towns between 1688 and 1820, it is doubtful to what extent the majority of this constitutes urban history. More often than not towns are treated as the accidental spaces in which interesting processes and incidents happen to occur; not as a special type of place which, by virtue of its generic qualities, moulded experiences and instigated events. Such a lack of urban sensitivity is partly due to the tendency to investigate towns individually rather than collectively. But it may also reflect the fact that historians themselves often seem unclear as to what constituted a town. In their attempts to measure urbanization, C. M. Law, Penelope Corfield and Anthony Wrigley have excluded settlements of below either 5000 or 2500 people. Yet the clear majority of towns explored in the recent work of R. W. Unwin, John Marshall and Margaret Noble fall well below either of these thresholds.⁴ The extent to which the mass of small settlements that formed the bedrock of the urban system were fully-fledged towns remains an unresolved problem. There is also doubt among some historians whether it is meaningful during the early modern period to distinguish between town and country, and therefore valid to isolate a specifically urban variable.⁵

Though continuity and identity are the two central issues investigated in this Introduction, it is also intended to touch upon other problems which have come to the fore in recent research. With these concerns in mind, nine broad areas of urban life will be examined: the urban system, demography, the economy, social structure, standards of living, the environment, politics, religion, and culture. Exploration of these subjects will place the readings reproduced in this collection in a general context, though each contribution will also be prefaced by a brief comment intended to highlight its special significance.

One of the most important features of recent work in early modern urban history has been the determination to view towns as a whole rather than as solitary entities. Critical to such an approach has been the need to establish a typology and system of settlements. The most common solution has been the concept of an urban hierarchy, with many commentators adopting a four-tiered model: country or market towns at the base, regional centres on the next rung, provincial capitals on the next, and London, in a division all of its own, at the apex.⁶ A town’s place within this hierarchy depended on the depth and range of influence it exerted over its hinterland, and the sophistication of its economic, social, political and cultural organization. Few attempts have yet been made to evaluate precisely the type of interaction that existed between towns within the hierarchy, or to apply the idea of an urban system to a local context. However, the regional studies of Margaret Noble and John Marshall have pointed the way forward. The former detects an increasingly differentiated hierarchy of towns in eastern Yorkshire; while Marshall divides Cumbria into five groups of urban settlements, each possessing its own head town, with the constituent members of each group holding markets on separate days and the leading towns servicing the shopkeepers of their satellite centres with goods.⁷ The links established through wholesale trading, such as Ian Mitchell has uncovered in Cheshire,⁸ were probably a crucial factor in determining the composition and working relationships of a regional urban network.

On a grander canvas, the most cogent case for an early modern urban system has been that proposed by Jan De Vries. He argues that between 1500 and 1800 there emerged an integrated European network of towns, bound together by economic rather than political or administrative forces. These three centuries were themselves only one stage in a longer term process of urbanization, in which the medieval period represented a formative phase (as many new towns were established), and the early modern years an era of consolidation. The latter trend was particularly evident between the early seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, ‘the age of the rural proletariat’, when town populations generally stagnated or declined, and the component parts of the urban hierarchy became increasingly differentiated. Only with the economic transformation of the late eighteenth century did a new creative period emerge, and with it a major restructuring of the urban hierarchy.⁹ The problem for English historians, as Anthony Wrigley has made clear in an important article reproduced in this volume (Chapter 2), is that the shake up of the urban system was underway long before the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁰ The rise of Birmingham can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century and it, along with Manchester and Liverpool, was experiencing dynamic growth from the late seventeenth century. By 1750 these three centres are among the top seven towns in the country, having rapidly ascended the urban ladder to join the élite club of provincial capitals.¹¹ England’s ‘urban revolution’ of the nineteenth century therefore has deep roots, a consequence of it diverging from the European pattern of urbanization at some point during the early modern period. Indeed, the extent of change in the eighteenth century has led Penelope Corfield to question the whole notion of an urban hierarchy, and to suggest that during these years a more modern and pluralist system was emerging, in which towns were defined in terms of their ‘leading economic functions’ rather than their regional influence.¹² The development of thoroughfare towns, dockyards and resorts, and the migration of industrial production into the town, even before the rise of steam power, meant that many centres displayed a growing economic independence from their local hinterlands.

A striking feature of the English urban system was, as one observer of the continental scene has put it, ‘the paltry size of all the towns outside of London prior to the eighteenth century’.¹³ In 1700 over four-fifths of England’s towns had a population of less than 2000 people.¹⁴ It could be argued that this is something of a terminological mirage, since any serious demographic definition of an urban centre would exclude the mass of petty settlements that masqueraded as towns, and demote them instead to the status of villages. However, such an approach flies in the face of several studies which suggest that communities of well under 1000 people, and even under 500, could display distinctly urban characteristics.¹⁵ To add to the peculiarities and paradoxes of the English urban system, it was dominated by a capital city which had grown dramatically from about 120 000 people in 1550, to around half a million in 1700, containing almost one in ten of all Englishmen, and constituting the largest city in Western Europe.¹⁶ England, therefore, had an extraordinarily bottom- and top-heavy urban hierarchy. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the two features were related. In a relatively compact and centralized state, linked together by good water and road communications, a highly differentiated and simplified network of towns made the greatest sense. During the eighteenth century, under the impact of a more diversified and regionally oriented pattern of economic development, the middle of the hierarchy was to fill out, foreshadowing the shape of the urban system in the following century. Whereas in 1700 there were only 67 towns of between 2500 and 100 000 inhabitants, accounting for a mere

per cent of the nation’s population, by 1801 there were 187 such centres, containing 20 per cent of the country’s people. Not that London’s ascendancy necessarily diminished: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with about 1 million inhabitants, it still contained 10 per cent of the total population.¹⁷

If the metropolis retained its dominant position in the hierarchy, what was the fate of the smaller centres during this period of change? A number obviously climbed into the middle ranks. But it is argued that for the majority the eighteenth century was a bleak period, as the urban system was subject to a widespread process of rationalization or ‘shake out’. Alan Everitt has suggested that by 1770 perhaps as many as one-third of the market towns of Tudor and early Stuart England and Wales had become extinct, and John Chartres has argued that in the century after 1690 the number of marketing centres fell by about one-fifth among a group of sixteen ‘metropolitan Western England’ counties. Competition from the prosperous middling towns, partly as a consequence of improved transport facilities, was squeezing the lesser and weaker centres out of the system.¹⁸ However, detailed studies of the North of England have challenged the universal validity of this thesis. Only five of the twenty-three country towns of eastern Yorkshire between 1700 and 1850 could be described as ‘declining centres’; only three of the nineteen market towns of the Vale of York in the late seventeenth century had ‘virtually ceased to function as markets’ by the 1830s; and John Marshall’s extended study of Cumbria calls the years 1760 to 1830 ‘a high noon of the more substantial small market town, in the North of England and probably in the country at large’.¹⁹ Persistence and continuity rather than serious decline is the message which emerges from these studies. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century there were still almost 700 urban centres with populations of under 10 000 people.²⁰ The future debate on the fate of the small town in the eighteenth century will clearly need to focus on two issues. First, how great was the degree of regional variation? For example, was the North a more conducive environment for the tinier centres than the South? Second, to what extent were there differences of status within the small town category itself? It is probable that the semi-small market centre, with good external communications, prospered at the expense of the more marginal and isolated towns.

The long eighteenth century was a period of substantial demographic urbanization. Between 1700 and 1801 the proportion of the people of England and Wales living in settlements of over 2500 increased from just under one in five to almost one in three.²¹ The principal motors of change were the metropolis and the larger centres – Liverpool, for example, grew spectacularly from over 5000 people in 1700 to almost 90 000 by the end of the century – but it is possible in some areas that even small country towns increased their share of their regional populations.²² What caused this urban growth? At a national level the study of demography has been dominated by a debate over the relative influence of fertility and mortality on population change. However, in the case of towns critical attention has focused on the role of migration, since (given the high mortality rates found in towns) it was only this that could have instigated the level of urban increase achieved during the eighteenth century. In the case of London, where the death rate exceeded the birth rate and yet the population grew by more than 50 per cent between 1650 and 1750, it has been suggested that ‘the birth surplus of … about half the total population of England at that time was earmarked to meet’ the city’s needs. Even in Nottingham, where natural increase played a significant part in growth from the mid-1740s, immigration was responsible for nearly 60 per cent of the 11 000 rise in the town’s population between 1779 and 1801.²³ Early modern England was a remarkably mobile society, and it is clear that many of those on the move found their way to towns. Peter Clark has suggested that between 1660 and 1730 roughly two in every three people changed their parish of domicile at least once during a lifetime, and David Souden that one-half to two-thirds of the inhabitants of late seventeenth-century towns were newcomers. Though Jan De Vries argues that in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe towns lost much of their attractiveness to migrants because of rural proto-industrialization, there is little evidence that this was the case in England, doubtless because industrial growth affected both tow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the Continent in the early modern period
• 3. Country, county and town: patterns of regional evolution in England
• 4. Urban improvement and the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• 5. The English urban renaissance: the development of provincial urban culture c.1680–c.1760
• 6. The London ‘mob’ in the early eighteenth century
• 7. Bath: ideology and utopia 1700–1760
• 8. Science, provincial culture and public opinion in Enlightenment England
• 9. Money, land and lineage: the big bourgeoisie of Hanoverian London
• 10. Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1793: politics and regional identity in the English provinces in the later eighteenth century
• 11. Social class and social geography: the middle classes in London at the end of the eighteenth century
• 12. Voluntary societies and British urban élites 1780–1850: an analysis
• Select reading list
• Index