Residential Patterns in Pre-Industrial Cities: Some Case Studies from Seventeenth-Century Britain

Abstract

The models of pre-nineteenth-century cities formulated by Sjoberg and Vance are compared. The two writers postulated different kinds of social ecology because they based their deductions about spatial patterns upon different social structures, and this difference, in turn, resulted from their use of different economic variables as sociological determinants. An analysis of the hearth tax returns for three British cities, and of data produced by linking these returns with the admissions lists of freemen in Newcastle, shows that neither of their models replicates what happened in these cities. In Newcastle, a merchant oligarchy existed, dominating a particular residential-cum-economic area, and the gild organization of crafts was reflected in the spatial zoning of occupational groups. Although some parts of Newcastle were occupationally mixed, this probably did not represent the emergence of 'class zoning'. IN the literature of urban geography, little space is devoted to pre-nineteenth-century cities. When the subject is discussed it is usually treated with a bland lack of controversy: textbooks, and monographs and papers on historical and modern cities are alike in their exclusive and uncritical presentation of Sjoberg's generalizations about what he termed the 'pre-industrial city'.1 The reasons for this situation are not, of course, hard to find. Until recently, this was the only set of generalizations available, and the continents in which much of the recent work in urban social geography has been done have no great fund of pre-nineteenth-century urban experience. The current preoccupation of urban social geographers with techniques of analysis which require large arrays of data, and with theories which link urbanism with industrialization or modernization, and thus define the pre-nineteenth-century city out of consideration, also contribute to this end. Moreover, the ease with which the processes which destroyed the 'pre-industrial city' can be thought of as synonymous with those which created the modern city has contributed to the development of the concept of 'ecological transition', and this fusion seems only to have bolstered the confidence of urban geographers in Sjoberg's monolithic ideas about the nature of cities before the transition occurred.2 The result is a general agreement that urban society was segregated by wealth or status, with the rich and powerful living near to the centre and the poor and powerless on the periphery of cities before industrialization, or modernization. Afterwards, class-based segregation became manifest, and the social geography of cities, in terms of these two gross categories, was reversed. It is time to question forcefully the basis of this certitude about the early stage of this sequence. Such questioning has been begun by Vance,3 who recently introduced a welcome note of controversy into the geographical literature. It can be taken a stage further by examining the differences between the conclusions of Sjoberg and Vance, and the reasons for their differences. This should help to bring more sharply into focus the fact that there is not, yet, any set of acceptable generalizations about the social geography of pre-nineteenth-century cities. An attempt to relate the assumptions and conclusions of Sjoberg and Vance to a reasonably sound body of empirical evidence is also necessary, not only because of their differences, but also because each