The Validity of the Freemen's Lists: Some Norwich Evidence

Abstract

that neither Prof. Hoskins nor myself had stressed the fact that freemen do not comprise the total urban labour force in the different occupations; that the ratio of freemen will vary from trade to trade; and that those with the highest proportion of journeymen or outworkers may well be more important than an analysis of the freemen's lists would suggest. He emphasized that the proportion of freemen to the total population varied from town to town, and that on the whole it tended to be smaller in provincial capitals, such as Exeter and Norwich, than elsewhere. This fact led him to suggest that the freemen's rolls of the smaller towns provide the historian with a much truer indication of the overall occupational structure than do those of their larger rivals.3 In 1973 Prof. Dobson introduced new factors into the argument when discussing the economy of late medieval York. He stressed that before the fifteenth century there was considerable under-registration of those admitted to the freedom by patrimony in the northern town, although he emphasized that such men were increasingly registered in the succeeding centuries and that subsequently they formed a consistently higher proportion of all such admissions. He pointed out that towns clearly varied in the importance they placed on the number of freemen within their ranks, and concluded by suggesting that there was some evidence that the economic factor was of prime importance in determining the number of admissions in a specific town. A sudden increase in