Over the last twenty years, there has been a major change in the significance historians are prepared to accord to the civic culture of early modern England, especially the corporate privileges and practices of its towns, and the status of their freemen. It was once assumed, even by most urban historians, that the key developments of the period (defined in this book as ca.1540–1680) in the economy, politics, and culture of England were either explicable without regard to this civic culture or involved its necessary destruction, because it hindered the processes of state and class formation and commercialization. Phil Withington brings together, for the first time in a book-length study, the full range of arguments (and some of the evidence) that has accumulated over the last two decades to suggest that the opposite was the case: that “historians of both English politics and the English state have vastly underestimated the urban dimension of their subjects” (p. 7) and that “freemen and citizens, like any other social group, were very much present at their own making” (p. 15). He identifies the assumptions, both of certain contemporary ideologues such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and of modern historians, which have led to the neglect of corporate towns and their citizens, and then provides countervailing examples, both of the significance that other contemporaries attached to the “politics of commonwealth” and of how such politics has helped us to understand historical change better. This is a polemical book, designed to make a major historiographical impact, and it has both the strengths and weaknesses of such texts: namely a passionate advocacy of its case and a tendency to underplay the existing literature which has lain the groundwork for this particular account.
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Open Access
Dec 1, 2021
Mohammad Ebrahim Mazhari + 3
