Early Modern Towns Research Articles

Sports and celebrations in English market towns, 1660–1750*

Abstract This article explores the recreational uses of streets and squares in the early modern market town. Late seventeenth-century financial accounts reveal civic authorities spending small sums on plebeian recreations—bonfires and bull-baitings—usually located in the market square. However, they also reveal a steady decline in municipal support for such recreations in the century following the Restoration. The author uses this evidence to argue that the early modern market place was an important communal space with a cultural significance as well as practical commercial value, and that the century following the Restoration saw the beginning of moves to clear plebeian sports and celebrations out of the public streets and confine the market place to traffic and trading.

The Demography of Early Modern Towns: York in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (review)

Chris Galley. The Demography of Early Modern Towns: York in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Liverpool Studies in European Population, no. 6. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998. xiv + 220 pp. Ill. £32.50 (cloth), £14.95 (paperbound).

Women and men as godparents in an early modern swedish town

This study analyzes godparenthood networks in Helsingborg, Sweden, in the period 1688–1709, from a gender perspective. Special concern is devoted to the social relations underlying the godparenthood of women and men, respectively, with the focus on women. In Helsingborg, in the period 1688–1709, godparent relations formed a gender-specific social-hierarchical network pattern in which women played a prominent part. Married women, if not kin to the parents, were chosen as godparents primarily from social strata higher than the biological parents, thus expressing the vertical relations. Married men were chosen primarily from the same social groups as the parents, expressing horizontal social relationships.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Galley Chris, The Demography of Early Modern Towns: York in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CenturiesKleinman, Martin, Matznetter, Walter and Stephens, Mark European Integration and Housing PolicyKeating, Michael The New Regionalism in Western Europe. Territorial Restructuring and Political ChangeFerrier, Jean‐Paul Ante´e 2, Le contrat ge´ographique ou l’habitation durable des territoiresJonas, Andrew E.G. and Wilson, David (eds) The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades LaterLewis, David and Williams, Fred Laurence Policy and Planning as Public Choice: Mass Transit in the United StatesRietveld, Piet and Bruinsma, Frank Is Transport Infrastructure Effective? Transport Infrastructure and Accessibility: Impacts on the Space Economy

The Early Modern Town

The Early Modern Town

Family and Community in Late Medieval and Early Modern Towns

Family and Community in Late Medieval and Early Modern Towns

A model of early modern urban demography

Early modern towns are often said to have experienced natural population decrease. Most historians explain this phenomenon by high levels of urban mortality or by shifts in rural-urban migration. Data presented for York [England] during the period 1561-1700 show that existing models of urban demography provide only a partial explanation of that citys demography. An alternative model is therefore presented; one where overall levels of urban fertility are subject to change and where the urban economy is an important influence on migration on the ability to marry on fertility and hence on levels of natural change. (EXCERPT)

Identité Urbaine, Identités Sociales Les bourgeois de Bois-le-Duc au XVIIIesiècle

L'idée que la vie était plus intime avant la révolution industrielle qu'à l'époque moderne est l'un des clichés du XIXesiècle qui a survécu jusqu'à nos jours. C'est comme un commentaire sur l'anonymat des relations sociales dans la société post-capitaliste (ou post-communiste) de la fin du XXesiècle, qu'il faudrait interpréter ce cliché plus que comme une représentation exacte du passé. Des travaux tels que ceux d'Eugen Weber(Peasants into Frenchmen, 1976) continuent néanmoins de renforcer le cliché selon lequel les communautés locales intimes auraient progressivement évolué en sociétés nationales anonymes.

Development and change in burgage plots: the example of Wells

More attention is now being paid to the analysis of medieval and early modern town plans. Current debates include the usefulness of nineteenth-century plans to recreate earlier patterns and the antiquity and durability of the so-called burgage plot. This piece uses the abundant documents which survive in Wells to illustrate the history of the properties of one town. Several cycles of change are identified giving a complex mixture of continuity and change in plot boundaries. The material is used to suggest a series of processes which can result in boundary changes. The findings are related to recent work elsewhere in England. The need for more research is stressed.

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

Assessed taxes as sources for the study of urban wealth: Bristol in the later eighteenth century

Little is known of the value of eighteenth-century rates and taxes as sources for the urban historian. Corfield, in her study of eighteenth-century Norwich, stated in 1976 that ‘the stereotyped nature of eighteenth-century tax assessments precludes use of fiscal data from national sources’ and this is a fair reflection of the then and to some extent the current orthodoxy, despite Rudé's pioneering studies of the 1960s in which he used land tax and poor rate returns to estimate the wealth of the electorate of Hanoverian London and Middlesex. Schwarz, in a study of late-eighteenth-century London, could still comment in 1979 that for eighteenth-century rates and taxes ‘little is known beyond general impressions’. Recently, however, Wright has thrown interesting light on the use of the Easter books and poor rates of early-modern towns and cities, and the 1986 volume on the land tax edited by Turner and Mills, although still largely concerned with the use of rural land tax assessments, includes three chapters on the value of the assessments in urban and industrial history. The writers hope that city rate and national tax returns might play a fuller role as historical sources, but their optimism is tempered with caution because of the returns' intractability and inconsistency. It is hoped here to reinforce both their enthusiasm and their caution, to reveal additional pitfalls and suggest ways to avoid them and in particular to extend the debate to the neglected pre-1780 assessments and to the city of Bristol.

Child health as a social value in early modern England.

Until recently, early modern children were neglected as a historical topic because of their political and economic insignificance. Historians of the family have made children important but at the cost of imprisoning them within the family environment. Older children have been of less interest than infants. This paper suggests that the subject of child health can show the value placed on the child by the wider society. Especially among the high proportion of poor families in early modern towns, children between the ages of 7 and 14 could be useful and even essential for the survival of the household. Survival strategies involving children could evolve irrespective of blood relationship; intergenerational dependency consequently becomes a more complex question. Urban authorities shared this appreciation of the potential value of children. A wide range of social policies was adopted for preserving the viability of younger children, of which institutions such as hospitals were probably the least important. For older children, the institutions of service and especially apprenticeship as supervised by the crafts and municipal authorities acquired a major role in maintaining the health of children, reflecting the socio-economic importance of mechanisms of interdependence outside the family group. This role was modified in the context of parish apprenticeship. The changing content and experience of apprenticeship, which affected a high proportion of early modern children, is a subject well deserving of further consideration.

Civic ceremony in early modern London

The ceremonial life of the early modern town has emerged as an important area of study for urban historians. Ever since the publication of Charles Phythian-Adams' innovative study, attention has focused on the elaborate series of processions, pageants and rites of passage which were a constant feature of the yearly cycle of town life. In the wake of his work other studies of the ceremonial life of late medieval and early modern towns have added to the urban historian's awareness of the importance of ritualized forms of behaviour as a symbolic thread which helped bind together the social fabric of the townscape. The research done thus far forms one of those areas of scholarship in which the cross-fertilization of the interdisciplinary approach, so beloved of the ‘new’ urban history, has proved particularly fruitful. It might be surprising then that London, the largest of English towns, has yet to receive similar treatment. There have been, of course, several important studies of the capital in the early modern period, and they have something to say about the ceremonial life of the city. These have largely concentrated on topics such as the structure of government, the nature of London's ruling elite, and social mobility within the city's craft organizations. While providing important sidelights on ceremony, these treatments have tended to place ceremonial events in the background, as the ‘icing on the cake’. At the same time there have been many important studies by art and literary historians of ceremonial occasions such as coronations, royal entries or the Lord Mayors' Shows, but these have tended to concentrate on ceremony as an expression of dynastic propaganda or as a development in dramatic form rather than as part of the social history of the city. The object of this article will be to attempt to rectify this gap in our knowledge by applying some of the framework bequeathed by Phythian-Adams, and so try to assess the relevence of his conclusions about urban society in this period to the particular case of London.

Easter Books and Parish Rate Books: a new source for the urban historian

Whilst the historian of the nineteenth-century town is able to turn to the censuses for information about the demographic and occupational character of a particular community, nothing comparable survives for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lists of the entire population are extremely rare and records enumerating sections of the community only, such as tax lists, are difficult to use without firm evidence of the proportions exempted and the levels of evasion. An impression of the social and occupational structure of the early modern town can be obtained only by deriving material from a range of local as well as national sources.

The early modern town—its history and historians: a review article

Twenty-five years ago, when Jean Delumeau published his study of sixteenth-century Rome, contributions to the social (as opposed to the institutional) history of early modern towns were still rare events. Since about 1960, the trickle has become a flood. Historians from different countries have contributed to this development to varying degrees and in different ways; the French, with a shelf of massive doctoral theses; the Italians, with multi-volume histories of specific cities; the Germans, with symposia on small towns, and so on. The virtually simultaneous publication of three monographs on provincial English towns, one of them by an American scholar (J. T. Evans), prompts a question about the place of Anglo-American research in this picture. Are there distinctive English and American schools of preindustrial urban history? If so, is this because the towns studied are different, or the historical traditions of the students?

Anatomy of an Oligarchy: the Oxford Town Council in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The conventional wisdom of English urban history holds that town government in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coming increasingly under the domination of a tight, resurgent oligarchy. This view was embalmed by Jacob in his volume of the Oxford History of England, and is reproduced in the newest works on medieval and early-modern towns. Clearly, the doubts voiced at length by Mrs. Green in the late nineteenth century and developed quite vigorously by Bridbury in 1962 have found no echo, and the doctrine is now, in the words of one historian, “apparently beyond dispute.”Yet, in spite of such remarkable unanimity, any student of urban history in this period must feel some unease due to the slender empirical basis upon which this view has been predicated. Monographs on late-medieval and early-modern English towns are few, and specialized studies of town government are equally rare. Indeed, Hoskins has recently identified “the personnel of the governing class” as “one important and almost unfilled field of urban study.” Thus, an extended examination of the structures and personnel of a late-medieval and early-modern urban “oligarchy” needs little justification because of its potential substantive and methodological implications for the constitutional, political, and social history of the English town.The following study attempts to do this for Oxford, a middling urban center at this time, which, according to Mrs. Lobel, shared in the heightened oligarchy of the age. It is neither a proper study in constitutional history nor a narrative of local politics or governmental activities. Rather, it focuses upon the changing structures and personnel of the town in order to shed some new light on the problems raised above.

PeterClark (editor), The Early Modern Town (London, Longman, 1976), pp. viii + 332: £3.10

Australian Economic History ReviewVolume 18, Issue 2 p. 194-195 Book Review Peter Clark (editor), The Early Modern Town ( London, Longman, 1976), pp. viii + 332: £3.10 R. S. Neale, R. S. Neale University of New EnglandSearch for more papers by this author R. S. Neale, R. S. Neale University of New EnglandSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 January 1978 https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.182br9AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume18, Issue2January 1978Pages 194-195 RelatedInformation

Urban Decline in Late Medieval England

More than four centuries have passed since the famous preambles to the various Tudor acts for the re-edifying of English towns generalized with such unnerving confidence about the lamentable state of provincial urban communities in the early sixteenth century; but no historian today who has the temerity to walk through those still perilous streets can be under any illusion as to the continued hazards of such an expedition. Yet that this journey, despite its dangers and frustrations, deserves to be undertaken more frequently and more urgently than ever before seems very clear. Even the most optimistic historian must occasionally suffer some qualms at a situation in which the single most important issue in pre-industrial English urban history—the exact contribution of the late medieval and early modern town to the society and economy of the nation as a whole—seems to be becoming more rather than less mysterious with every detailed monograph and every new methodological problem. For here of course, much more in 1976 than in 1894, we are in the presence of one of those ‘burning questions in which impetuous economists have outrun the historians, and have not found it pre-mature to set in order by the help of accepted theories the obscure chaos of social history in the Middle Ages’.

The Early Modern Town: A Reader

The Early Modern Town: A Reader

PRE‐INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND1

HistoryVolume 62, Issue 206 p. 433-438 PRE-INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND1 C.S.L. DAVIES, C.S.L. DAVIES Wadham College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author C.S.L. DAVIES, C.S.L. DAVIES Wadham College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: October 1977 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.1977.tb02350.x 1 English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700. By Peter Clark and Paul Slack. Oxford University Press. 1976. vii + 176 pp. Cloth £3.50; paperback £1.75. The Early Modern Town: A Reader. Edited by Peter Clark. London: Longman. 1976. viii + 332 pp. Cloth £6.50; paperback £3.10. Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F.J. Fisher. Edited by D.C. Coleman and A.H. John. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1976. ix + 302 pp. £12.50. The Age of Plunder: the England of Henry VIII, 1500–1547. By W.G. Hoskins. London: Longman. 1976. xviii + 262 pp. Cloth £5.95; paperback£3.50. The Economy of England, 1450–1750. By D.C. Coleman. Oxford University Press. 1977. xi + 223 pp. Cloth £3.75; paperback £1.75. Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society from 1500 to 1750. By B. A. Holderness. London: Dent. 1976. x + 244 pp. Cloth £6.50; paperback £2.95. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume62, Issue206October 1977Pages 433-438 RelatedInformation