Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500-1700

Peter Clark, Paul Slack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415860406
• eBook ISBN: 9781135671914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This collection of essays in English urban history covers a period which has been called 'the Dark Ages in English Economic History', on which it directs a revealing light. The essays range from a discussion of the role of ceremony in the civic life of Coventry at teh end of the Middle Ages to the influence of war on London Merchant class at the end of the seventeenth century.

This book was first published in 1972.

I

Introduction

Peter Clark and Paul Slack

The chronology of urban historiography in England has been erratic.¹ The so-called ‘Historical Revolution’ of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stimulated an enhanced awareness of the local community and its history, producing a crescendo of county surveys and descriptions; but, although there were a number of important publications, concern with the peculiar urban phenomenon never had the same impetus.² If a trickle of town histories nourished urban antiquarianism in the first part of the eighteenth century only the last decades witnessed any surge of writing, a movement which swept into the early years of the nineteenth century precipitated by radical demands for franchise reform and an allied desire to investigate the origin of corporate privileges.³ With the achievement of reform in the 1830s the level of urban historiography fell away; to be revived again by the High Victorians. However, the academic world of late nineteenth-century England was dominated by medievalists, their interest often confined to early burghal institutions. Their instrument, the Historical Manuscripts Commission, during its early perambulations of town archives calendared medieval deeds and charters in extenso but too often passed over the accumulations of later centuries. Under this influence local antiquarian societies with their charabancs of clergy and gentlefolk pursued the grail of democracy in the history of the medieval town.⁴ The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century town was put on one side. It was equally outflanked by the other wing of Victorian urban historiography, a manifestation of the civic self-confidence of the great industrial cities. Unfortunately, few of these centres were important before the last years of the seventeenth century and the detection of the industrial city in the shade of the pre-industrial township tells us comparatively little about early modern urban society.⁵ Paradoxically, the Victorian interest in urban history did some positive disservice to historical writing. Town records left to slumber were now exposed to the rigours of antiquarian zeal: collections were jumbled and documents rifled; parchment deeds were turned into glue or sometimes incinerated. The influence of Maitland had led to the valuable publication of municipal records by some towns, but the momentum of the last years of the century lasted for little more than a decade.⁶

In recent years, however, English historians have turned once more to the study of urban problems.⁷ Towns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are being explored seriously for the first time, most notably in the pioneering work of Professor W. G. Hoskins.⁸ However, English urban historiography for this period has yet to reach the age of academic majority so clearly attained by the French with their massive urban theses.⁹ There are some analyses of trade structure, political organization and demographic change in individual towns; but with a handful of exceptions we lack both studies of the urban comunity in all its interrelated functions and surveys of towns in direct comparison one with another.¹⁰ Our image of the English town between 1500 and 1700 is fragmentary and the promise of English urban studies remains as yet unfulfilled.

The orthodox excuses for publication come in two varieties: either there is too much or too little material already in print. Clearly the argument for this collection must fall into the second category. But if the immaturity of urban historiography for this period affords an excuse for this volume, it likewise imposes serious restraints on its content. Omissions are patent: coastal shipping, the growth of Puritanism, education, the image of the town in contemporary literature, for themes; Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, the market towns, for towns. Any hope of providing a more comprehensive survey of urban development from 1500 to 1700 is limited by the present state of research. Nevertheless, the papers in this volume, discussing as they do some of the most significant problems of urban society, including the erosion of civic ritual, poverty, housing and political conflict, may help to re-draw the outline of the early modern town; they suggest that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it experienced a major reorientation of its role.

* * *

Any attempt to write an introductory survey of English towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is beset by an army of problems. There are the source difficulties we have already mentioned: too often we are at the mercy of a random scattering of information about a town, too rarely do we learn of more than a handful of its contemporaneous characteristics. More problems are created by the necessity to relate structure and the dynamics of change. It is arguable that in the following account urban dynamics are given undue prominence, that there is insufficient portrayal of the quality of urban life. But there is perhaps some justification for an approach which lays less stress on the static image. Firstly, the continuities of urban institutions and attitudes are described in some of the detailed papers elsewhere in this volume. Secondly, general discussion by historians has tended to concentrate on structural problems and consequently the theme of urban transformation has been neglected. Such problems dictate the character of this introduction: it must be seen at most as a model for discussion, an attempt to set in a new framework the work so far completed on the English town in the years 1500 to 1700.

The historian is also confronted with another problem: one of definition. What does he mean by a ‘town’? For the modern industrial community we have the conceptual tools of Park and Burgess, and others.¹¹ However, sometimes these are hardly relevant to the pre-industrial town and demand quantitative information rarely at the disposal of the historian of the early modern period. G. Sjoberg in The Preindustrial City describes from the viewpoint of the sociologist the basic characteristics of this sort of community, relying on examples from a wide range of societies. His outline of urban characteristics—with its emphasis on demographic structure, social and kinship organization, economic function, political structure, religion and education—is more valuable than the selective evidence with which he seeks to support them.¹² Part of the confusion springs from the kaleidoscopic quality of urban society in England. The complexity of corporate types alone defeated the Webbs. It is not surprising that sixteenth-and seventeenth-century commentators were themselves overwhelmed. William Harrison was reduced to drawing a rough demographic divide between a market town with two thousand communicants and villages with two or three hundred. John Hooker of Exeter described a ‘civitas’ baldly as a ‘multitude of people assembled and collected to the end to continue and live together in a common society yielding dutiful obedience unto their superiors and mutual love to [one] another’.¹³ Information is only superficially more illuminating at the end of the seventeenth century: the vagueness of John Adams and the fluctuating tables of Gregory King do not evince much confidence in their categorization of urban society.¹⁴

The problems here are obviously enormous but we can perhaps suggest that there were four characteristics of the pre-industrial town: a specialist economic function, a peculiar concentration of population, a sophisticated political superstructure, and a community function and impact beyond the immediate limits of the town and its inhabitants. This is not to say that every community which we might describe as ‘urban’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries possessed all the elements of this definition. The wealth of urban types comprehending the proto-modern enormity of London and the still manorial and partially rural Manchester and Birmingham make this an unreal possibility. But we can use this definition as a starting point for a rough categorization of urban phenomena, an attempt to relate to a recognizable framework the disparate multiplicity of communities which contemporaries called cities and market towns.

There were three tiers of urban society in England from 1500 to 1700. On the most simple level were communities which revealed three (sometimes only two) characteristics of urbanism, as well as having strong rural overtones. In this group were decaying, small corporate towns, the developing market centre and the incipient industrial agglomeration: New Romney or Winchelsea, Ashford or Loughborough, Halifax or Birmingham. One of the few common denominators was low population size or density. When Gregory King sought to classify towns by size of population in 1696 he believed that of his 794 towns outside London 650 had between 150 and 200 houses; many were probably to be found amongst this group of ‘simple towns’. Even where population size was considerably greater, as amongst the new industrial centres, density remained fairly low.¹⁵ Another feature shared by a number of these towns was the absence of a sophisticated political superstructure: the political organization of the small corporate town was barely more elaborate than the sub-political institutions of the ordinary market town.

The middle tier of urban society is distinguished by towns which exhibit all the elements of the urban definition described earlier. By 1700 they may have numbered about 120 and were all incorporated. Sidney and Beatrice Webb found about 200 municipal corporations in existence in 1689 but not all these showed the other characteristics of a complete urban community. There was also a quantitative difference between these chartered towns and the ‘simple towns’. In general, they correspond with the 130 towns listed by King as having between 300 and 500 houses each, although a number had substantially more inhabitants.¹⁶ Population density was also greater. Other characteristics included a more elaborate community organization framed by gilds and civic ceremonial, a more sophisticated economic function combining industry, trade and specialist service activity, and (potentially) a more extensive urban impact. Towns belonging to this middle sector of urban society included many of the smaller cathedral cities such as Canterbury, Chichester, Gloucester, Lincoln and Rochester.

In the first division of the urban league table were seven or eight major cities; by the end of the seventeenth century they included Bristol, Exeter, York, Norwich, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, perhaps Hull, certainly London. London in the years 1500 to 1700 established a metropolitan hegemony unrivalled in Western Europe embracing almost all aspects of national life. As early as 1588 the political theorist Giovanni Botero declared, ‘in England, London excepted, although the country do abound in plenty of all good things, yet there is not a city in it that deserves to be called great’.¹⁷ However, Botero exaggerated: on a less exalted level Bristol, Exeter and York all played the important role of quasi-metropolitan centres with their own large areas of influence for most of this period. All the cities in this group exhibited the four elements of urbanism defined earlier but, unlike our middle tier of chartered towns, they may also have reached the take-off point of urban viability, able to absorb at least short-term crises. By 1700 they all had populations in excess of 8,000 though only Bristol and Norwich apart from London had more than 20,000 inhabitants. For most of these two centuries they parade a highly developed economic function, the full paraphernalia, civic and political, of the great city (some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ceremony and the citizen: The communal year at Coventry 1450–1550
• 3 The trade gilds of Tudor York
• 4 The migrant in Kentish towns 1580–1640
• 5 Poverty and politics in Salisbury 1597–1666
• 6 Politics in Chester during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum 1640–62
• 7 East London housing in the seventeenth century
• 8 A provincial capital in the late seventeenth century: The case of Norwich
• 9 London merchants and the crisis of the 1690s
• Index