The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525-1640

Abstract

IN the introduction to her edited collection, Imagining Early Modern London (CUP, 2001), J.F. Merritt wrote of the need for historians of the emergent metropolis to ‘reinstate citizens as active participants in the changing city…as individuals making creative, pragmatic responses to a changing urban environment’. This fine study of early modern Westminster demonstrates what that aspiration means in practice. Merritt's purpose is modestly stated as that of filling the ‘peculiar void in the urban history of the capital’ (p. 1) resulting from the relative neglect of Westminster between the Reformation and the rise of the West End in the later seventeenth century—an attempt ‘to build Westminster into our picture of the early modern metropolis’ (p. 356), which succeeds admirably. She provides that vivid sense of place which is the hallmark of the best local studies, tracing in satisfying detail the changing topography of the town, and the consequences for its inhabitants of developments such as the Reformation, the dissolution of the Abbey, the building of the royal palace of Whitehall, the rise of a seasonally resident ‘fashionable society’, and, above all, the problems attending a massive growth of population. Between 1548 and 1640 the population of the principal parishes of St Margaret's and St Martin in the Fields rose five-fold and eighteen-fold respectively, resulting in a total population of some 35,000 by the outbreak of the Civil Wars. By then (and for some time before) ‘Any one of Westminster's parishes…would have ranked alongside the most populous towns in England’ (p. 202).