Urban housing: a documentary study of four Midland towns 1530-1700

Abstract

Studies of vernacular buildings have tended to be largely rural in scope, for many natural reasons, not least the fact that 'old' buildings in the countryside often represent a relatively high proportion of the present housing stock. This has led to an unjustified neglect of town buildings of the 16th and 17th centuries, for despite W. G. Hoskins' general article extending his original thesis of the Great Rebuilding to the townsl and a number of distinguished studies of small numbers of standing structures in individual towns,2 no work which can begin to rival the achievement of Barley' s Farmhouse and Cottage3 has appeared for the towns. The most influential feature of Barley's approach was the combination of documentary analysis and the study of standing structures, but most of the 'archaeological' work on urban buildings has tended to neglect the documentary approach. This article attempts to begin to remedy this situation by analysing the information to be derived from the surviving probate inventories from the towns of Birmingham, Coventry, Derby and Worcester, a total of nearly two thousand documents drawn from the period 1530-1699.4 The probate inventory is of course a familiar source for the historian of housing, but some re-statement of the problems inherent in its use is perhaps helpful in an urban context. A particularly intractable problem is that of consistency: in this case, does the run of inventories from these 170 years represent a uniform sample of the middling reaches of urban society? Only internal evidence is available to answer this question, and it does seem possible that during periods of ecnnomic depression the sample is distorted, and also that poorer people are drawn into the will-making net after 1660. However, there seems no means of either measuring or of compensating for this distortion-it is simply a factor which must be borne in mind when assessing the evidence. An additional problem of sampling is that some towns seem to produce an eccentric number of inventories in proportion to their population-thus Coventry seems to be represented by more, and Birmingham less than their relative populations would suggest. This must in part be due to differences in social and economic structures which determine the size of the will-making group in the total population: it could involve the inclusion of more small houses in the Coventry sample and fewer in Birmingham. 207