Drinking Houses, Popular Politics and the Middling Sorts in Early Seventeenth-Century Norwich

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores some of the most notorious popular political events of early seventeenth-century Norwich, with an eye to understanding these events as specific to the political culture of the middling sorts, especially the freemen electorate. Popular politics was not of course the sole preserve of the middling sorts, but it is interesting how the surviving evidence of political activity (including riots and contested elections) in Norwich strongly suggests an overlap between those men who held power in Norwich and those who most actively contested it. From the same body of civic records, popular politics is also revealed as grounded in particular features of the urban landscape, a claim explored for other cities but not yet for Norwich, as certain drinking houses – inns especially – reoccur as the location for significant political activity. This article argues, therefore, that popular politics in Norwich had a direct and meaningful connection not only with the culture of its middling sorts but also with their social networks and spaces of sociability. In particular it seeks to uncover whether there were any patterns to political happenings and whether, perhaps over time, certain places became fixed as ‘political’ in the common memory of Norwich's landscape.