Citizens, Soldiers and Urban Culture in Restoration England

Abstract

The article unpacks the circumstances surrounding a riot in York Minster in February 1686, exploring the social and political dynamics of the violence and emphasising the communal affiliations and loyalties of those involved. It contextualises the riot in terms of the relationship between citizens and freemen of York on the one hand and soldiers garrisoned in the city on the other, suggesting that these sources of social identity served as a palimpsest for other tensions. In so doing it demonstrates that while historians are fully aware of the religious and partisan basis of urban (and national) conflict in the later seventeenth century, they are less attuned to its corporate dimensions and, in particular, the manner in which militarism continued to insinuate itself in the everyday lives of urban inhabitants. The article shows that civic militarism as embodied in the civic militia was an entrenched feature of corporate citizenship. While this militarism was given full expression in the latter 1640s and 1650s, it was severely curtailed after 1660, when the citizenry lost control of the keys and walls of the city and had both military companies and the gentry-dominated county lieutenancy imposed upon them. In unpacking this largely unheralded aspect of urban society the article pays close attention to the politics of space and memory that gave rise to the riot, the fractured state of authority within the city, and the manner in which elites and subordinates could be united by communal animosities. It also demonstrates how the new social relationships associated with the ‘urban renaissance’ were redolent with England's corporate and revolutionary past.