Bibliographic Essay: Early Modern English Towns
Written for H-Urban by Joseph P. Ward, University of Mississippi,
<jward@olemiss.edu>
The following is intended primarily as an introduction for non-specialists
to new and recent research on early modern (c.1500-c.1750) English towns.
As such, it is not meant to be comprehensive. Further, due to
considerations of space, working papers, conference presentations, and
unpublished theses are excluded, as are publications of local or regional
historical journals with the exception of _London Journal_. Many of the
works cited below will direct readers to this more specialized literature.
To help readers locate topics or themes that may be of particular interest
to them, the discussion has been divided into seven overlapping sections:
Introductory Surveys; Demography; Economic and Social Conditions; Social
Relations; Religion; Politics; and Culture. Parenthetical references
direct readers to specific items in the bibliography at the end.
1. Introductory Surveys
The main directions of the recent historiography of early modern English
towns were established by volumes authored or edited by Peter Clark [1.3,
1.4], Paul Slack [with Clark, 1.5, 1.6], and Penelope Corfield [1.7] in the
1970s and early 1980s. Sybil Jack's 1996 synthetic survey [1.9] is perhaps
the most direct way to approach the current historiography of towns in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, although the 1990 anthologies
in Longman's Readers in Urban History series edited by Jonathan Barry for
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [1.1] and Peter Borsay for the
eighteenth century [1.2] are still very useful in this regard. The
sourcebook compiled by R.C. Richardson and T.B. James [1.10], while not a
survey as such, is nonetheless worth considering here because it contains
not only an anthology of documents from London and smaller towns across
Britain, but also a very helpful glossary of terms that may be unfamiliar
to non-specialists.
Because of London's dominance over the urban hierarchy, it has a well
developed historiography all its own. Although in what follows discussions
of London will often be integrated with those of other towns, anyone
specifically interested in important trends in the modern historiography of
London should begin with the review essays by Vanessa Harding for 1550-1700
[1.8] and Leonard Schwarz for 1700-1850 [1.11] in the special twentieth
anniversary edition of _London Journal_.
2. Demography
The early modern period witnessed considerable fluctuations in the relative
prosperity and size of English towns. The limitations of the surviving
evidence for the statistical analysis of urban vitality have inspired
considerable innovation among researchers interested in urban demography
for this period. The main features of this work are concisely surveyed in
Alan Dyer's discussion of the historiography of what used to be viewed as
the "decline" of English towns from the fifteenth to the seventeenth
centuries [2.5] and in Clark and Jean Hosking's study of small town
populations [2.4]. For the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, Borsay's book on provincial English towns [2.1] offers a
sophisticated discussion of what he has influentially called "the English
urban renaissance," the generally flourishing condition of urban society
prior to the Industrial Revolution, while Jon Stobart's article [2.16]
focuses on northwestern towns.
The most prominent demographic feature of early modern England was the
growth of London. The population of greater London (including Westminster)
expanded from approximately 50,000 in the middle of the sixteenth century
to over 750,000 two centuries later [2.6, 2.12]. Useful discussions of
sources and methods used in estimating the metropolitan population may be
found in Harding [2.6, 2.8], while James Robertson has addressed efforts by
early modern Londoners to gauge the population [2.14]. Jeremy Boulton's
work on early seventeenth-century Southwark analyzes the influence of
demographic expansion on a neighborhood within the City of London [2.2],
although by this time most 'Londoners' lived in neighborhoods beyond the
City government's jurisdiction [2.3, 2.13, 2.15]. The centripetal
influence of the development of suburban London was offset somewhat by the
willingness of City-based trade guilds to accept members who lived and
worked throughout the sprawling metropolis [2.17]. The environmental,
social, and political consequences of London's expansion are analyzed in
Mark Jenner's article on air quality [2.11] and Harding's work on burial
practices [2.7, 2.9].
3. Economic and Social Conditions
In economic affairs, as in other areas of English urban life during this
period, London played a central role, particularly because of its
predominance in international trade. Steve Rappaport's book [3.19]
provides a good overall survey of London's sixteenth-century economy,
although Ian Archer's study of the later part of the century [3.1] offers
the most holistic-and therefore convincing-account of how London's elite
succeeded in maintaining the appearance (and in many ways the reality) of
stability in the face of economic and social change. The works of Peter
Earle [3.9, 3.10] and L.D. Schwarz [3.21] taken together survey the
metropolitan economy and society during the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. In the early eighteenth century, provincial ports
such as Bristol and Liverpool began to grow at a faster rate than that of
London. Christopher French, however, has used extensive research into
customs records to demonstrate that up until the industrial revolution
London was still the dominant international trading center in the English
economy [3.11]. David Hancock's major study of the influence of Londoners
in the development of Britain's eighteenth-century overseas trading empire
[3.13] reconstructs the careers of twenty-three merchants from their
entrance to the London mercantile scene to their ascendance to prominence
in the burgeoning world of Atlantic commerce.
The fullest long-term account of the economic and social conditions of an
early modern provincial town is David Harris Sacks's monograph on Bristol,
whose port played an increasingly important role in England's trade with
the Americas [3.20]. Useful studies of towns whose fortunes were not as
robust as Bristol's are Ronald Berger's book on the fluctuating vitality of
the Mercers' Company of Coventry [3.2] and Dyer's article on Stratford
[3.7], which explores the ways that early modern town governors responded
to crises such as trade dislocations, fires, and harvest failures in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, an important examination of the economic and social
conditions of a provincial town is John Smail's book on Halifax [3.22],
while a detailed analysis of the consequences of London's growth on the
economy and society of a provincial region is David Levine and Keith
Wrightson's tour-de-force on the Tyneside, whose collieries supplied the
metropolis with its fuel [3.14].
Among studies of specific aspects of the economic life of early modern
towns, work conditions and employment opportunities have attracted
considerable scholarly interest. Corfield's essay offers an excellent
overview of these topics [3.5], and important among more localized studies
are Donald Woodward's book on laborers and building craftsmen in northern
towns [3.25]; Michael Berlin's essay on craftsmanship in London [3.3]; and
articles by Diane Willen [3.24] and Earle [3.8] on economic opportunities
for women. The economic influence of the immigration of skilled
workers-particularly, although not exclusively in the textile industry-from
continental Europe to London and other towns in the southeast has been
thoroughly investigated [3.6, 3.15, 3.17, 3.18]. Early modern towns have
also been the focus of studies of mercantile fortunes [3.12], shopkeeping
[3.16, 3.23], and life insurance [3.4].
4. Social Relations
The fluctuating fortunes of early modern English towns had a pronounced
effect on relations between groups in society. For London, the works of
Rappaport [3.19] and Archer [3.1] discussed above are essential for
approaching social relations in the sixteenth century, as are those by
Earle [3.9, 4.11] for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other
works focused more directly on the responses of the civic elite to
challenges posed by poverty, crime, and disorder include those by Boulton
[4.5, 4.6], Keith Lindley [4.19], Paul Griffiths [4.14], Tim Harris [4.16],
Stephen Macfarlane [4.21], Carol Kazmierczak Manzione [4.22], Robert
Shoemaker [4.29, 4.30], and Slack [4.31, 4.32] for the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and by Donna Andrew [4.1], John Beattie [4.3], Susan
Brown [4.8], Tim Hitchcock [4.17], Norma Landau [4.18], Peter Linebaugh
[4.20], and Elaine Reynolds [4.26] for the eighteenth. For provincial
towns, Smail's work on the emergence of middle-class culture in late
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Halifax [3.22] is very important, while
also noteworthy are smaller-scale studies of aspects of social relations by
Barry [4.2], D'Cruze [4.10], Griffiths [4.15], Mary Fissell [4.12], and
John Rule [4.27]. Clark's book on alehouses [4.9] sheds considerable light
into an important arena for social interaction in towns of all sizes.
Over the past decade, the study of gender relations in early modern towns
has developed into a significant sub-field all its own. Sara Mendelson and
Patricia Crawford [4.25] provide a major new survey of the full variety of
women's experiences that contains many discussions of towns and should be
considered the starting point for anyone interested in this topic. Also
highly useful is work by Vivian Brodsky [4.7], Laura Gowing [4.13], Claire
Schen [4.28], and Willen [3.24] for sixteenth-century townswomen and by
Boulton [4.4], Earle [3.8], and Tim Meldrum [4.23, 4.24] for the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
5. Religion
Early modern urban historians have paid considerable attention to religion
not only because of the centrality of theological ideas in notions of urban
community, but also because archival materials-notably parish registers,
church court records, and wills-survive in relative abundance. The urban
context of the Reformation (long a preoccupation of historians of
continental towns) is currently one of the most robust aspects of English
urban historiography. The pace-setter among book-length case studies in
this area is Muriel McClendon's work on Norwich [5.16], which argues that,
contrary to the common assumption that the Reformation was a disruptive
influence in sixteenth-century England, the town's governors managed to
avoid conflict and persecution when facing religious change. Other recent
monographs have appeared on London [5.6, 5.18], Bristol [5.21], and
Gloucester and its region [5.11], while shorter pieces have appeared on
Chester [5.1], Norwich [5.13, 5.14, 5.15], and London [5.7, 5.25]. Also
highly noteworthy is the exhaustive survey of the political dimensions of
the Reformation in provincial towns recently produced by Robert Tittler
[5.22] as well as Stanford Lehmberg's two-volume study of implications for
religious change on England's cathedrals [5.9, 5.10].
Beyond the Reformation, David Underdown's work on Dorchester [5.24] offers
the most complete study of religion and society in a particularly 'godly'
seventeenth-century provincial town. Daniel Beaver's new book on parishes
in Tewkesbury and its region [5.5] traces the implications of the process
of religious change from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth
centuries. More topical treatments of religion and society in seventeenth-
and eighteenth- century provincial towns include essays by Ann Hughes on
Stratford-upon-Avon [5.8], Barry on Bristol [5.2, 5.3, 5.4], and John
Triffit on Plymouth and Dartmouth [5.23]. For London, Paul Seaver's
biography of Nehemiah Wallington thoroughly explicates the religious
experience of a particularly fascinating artisan [5.19 ]; J. F. Merritt
examines the theology and politics of church building in the early
seventeenth century [5.17]; and Paul Seaward traces the largely
unsuccessful efforts to check lay non-conformity in parishes in the later
seventeenth century [5.20]. Tai Liu's work on popular Puritanism in London
also remains a useful resource [5.12]
6. Politics
The Civil Wars and Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century have, like the
Reformation for the sixteenth century, been a major focus of research as
historians have tried to determine the relationship between 'local' and
'national' conflict. In his illuminating study of Exeter, a major town in
the southwest, Mark Stoyle traces the evolution of popular attitudes
towards the Civil War [6.29]. Initially enthusiastic for the
Parliamentarian cause, the townspeople's eagerness waned after four years
of warfare that ravaged the town and its surrounding suburbs. The general
sense of disruption, confusion, and high cost of the wars is evident in
other recent studies of provincial towns such as Roger Howell on political
elites [6.12], Ann Hughes on Coventry [6.13], Ian Roy on Oxford [6.26]
David Scott on York [6.28], Sacks on Bristol [6.27], and Philip Tennant on
Stratford [6.30].
London, the capital of the Parliamentarian war effort, was largely spared
the direct devastation visited upon some provincial towns by battles and
sieges, although its residents nonetheless contributed money, material, and
manpower to the war effort (indeed, to some degree even to the Royalist
cause). The crisis of the mid-1640s sparked a revolution within the City
government and caused considerable turmoil within its parishes and guilds.
The most recent comprehensive treatment of the war years is Keith Lindley's
evaluation of popular politics from the Long Parliament through the
emergence of the Levellers, with a particular emphasis on reactions to
national events filtered through the prism of London's parishes [6.19,
6.20]. A different perspective is offered by Robert Brenner's study of the
politics of London merchants [6.2]. Smaller-scale treatments of aspects of
the Civil Wars and Revolution in London include Nora Carlin's essay on
trade guild politics [6.3] and the chapters in the anthology edited by
Stephen Porter [6.22] that deal with the city's militia, defenses,
Royalists, political funerals, economy, and society.
For the era prior to the Civil War, Tittler illuminates the practices of
provincial town government in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries [6.31, 6.32]. For that same period, a recent article by
Catherine Patterson reveals the willingness of provincial town governors to
make use of a variety of extra-local means to facilitate the resolution of
conflict in their communities [6.21], while Richard Cust's essay on Great
Yarmouth analyzes of the role of religion in civic politics [6.4]. Aspects
of government and politics in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
London are covered in articles by Ian Archer [6.1], David Dean [6.8], and
Richard Wunderli [6.33]. Those interested in town government during the
period following the Revolution should begin with Paul Halliday's study of
political practices in provincial towns [6.11]. Also important here are
works by Christopher Durston [6.9], Perry Gauci [6.10], Gary de Kray [6.5,
6.6, 6.7], Newton Key [6.14, 6.15], Mark Knights [6.16, 6.17, 6.18],
Michael Power [6.23], Nicholas Rogers [6.24], and Craig Rose [6.25].
7. Culture
The key study of civic culture in late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century provincial towns is Tittler's book on civic
architecture, which shows how town halls and other public buildings came to
display to the entire community the predominance of the magistracy over
town affairs [7.25]. He has followed this project with a series of
articles explaining how commemorative portraits of civic worthies similarly
expressed the ideals of provincial urban elites [7.26, 7.27, 7.28]. Other
recent studies of civic memory include works by Griffiths [7.8] and
Rosemary Sweet [7.23]. The major interpretation of the cultural lives of
provincial towns during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
is Borsay's book [2.1], in which he surveys a broad range of cultural
experiences from architecture and town planning to lending libraries and
musical clubs. Looney's essay addresses similar topics in the context of
Leeds and York [7.12], while Stobart's article focuses on consumerism and
social space [7.22].
Historians of literature-and particular of theater-have done extensive
research into the urban context of early modern English culture, with
particular emphasis on London. Lawrence Manley's major survey [7.13] reads
a broad range of cultural productions against the backdrop of Renaissance
London society, although there have been several other approaches to this
topic offered in recent years [7.9, 7.10, 7.11, 7.29]. For provincial
towns, important work has been published by the Records of Early English
Drama, including volumes on Bristol [7.17], Cambridge [7.16], and Norwich
[7.7]. Elizabeth Furdell's essay offers a glimpse into the world of the
book trade in late seventeenth-century London [7.6], while Peter Burke's
essay [7.4] remains a valuable guide to popular culture in the metropolis,
as does Barry's treatment of that subject for Bristol [7.1]. Useful
discussions of cultural diffusion include Borsay's demonstration of
London's influence on provincial urban culture [7.3] and Carl Estabrook's
new study of the resistance of villagers in the region around Bristol to
the social and cultural influence of towns [7.5].
Pageants and rituals were major events in the urban cultural calendar.
McClendon's important new work on St. George's Day festivities in a variety
of English towns [7.14] demonstrates that the form and meaning of the
rituals were repeatedly reinvented from before the Reformation era through
the nineteenth century. Her essay therefore challenges the findings of
scholars such as Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy who argue that such
public festivals reflected the persistence of traditional piety. Other
work on urban pageantry by Berlin [7.2], Montano [7.15], Sacks [7.18], and
Smuts [7.21] also offer very useful approaches to the subject.
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