English Provincial Towns Research Articles

Loans from English provincial towns to the crown during the reigns of Edward II and Edward III*

Abstract This article examines the origins and evolution of the English crown's policy of requesting loans from towns to finance military campaigns between 1307 and 1377. By analysing the exchequer receipt rolls, it illustrates how Edward II experimented with urban loans from 1311 to circumvent the restrictions imposed by the ordinances. It subsequently examines when and why urban loans became a regular policy; how they were negotiated, collected and reimbursed; and why towns and their inhabitants contributed credit. Although they were of marginal financial value, these loans transformed the political relationship between the crown and towns in the later middle ages.

The decline of guilds and their monopoly in English provincial towns, with particular reference to Exeter

ABSTRACTThis article examines the decline of the craft guilds in early modern England by way of a case-study of the Tuckers’ Company in Exeter. From the 1980s, this case figured prominently in the historiographical debate concerning guild decline; however, it has not been examined recently. The current study reveals the Tuckers’ Company is not a case of decline in guild membership so much as a case of the loss of guild monopoly and a concomitant transition to charitable functions. On the basis of empirical sources, this study also reveals the mechanisms and context of this transformation in the post-Civil War politics of the city of Exeter. Specific attention is given to first, the decline of royal authority bolstering the guild against the city government and secondly, the shift of power in the guild with the ascendance of the merchant fullers. Finally, the historiographical implications of the article's findings are discussed.

News, Noise, and the Nature of Politics in Late Medieval English Provincial Towns

AbstractRecent research has stressed the importance of “popular politics” in English political culture especially after the Peasants' Revolt and during the political disturbances of the fifteenth century. Scholars have begun to explore how the structures of local political culture could inflect the nature of politics on a national level, notably through petitioning and the circulation of open letters and manifestos, thus moving beyond the nobility and gentry to consider the influence on late medieval political life of the society and culture of rural and urban communities that were far from the center of power. This article is a contribution to a growing body of work that aims to show how particular aspects of provincial urban politics affected national political culture. By focusing first on news distribution and contemporary conceptual structures that linked rumor, noise, and riot in one continuum; and by then considering the relationship between communal mobilization at times of political crisis and everyday policing institutions such as the hue and cry, the article investigates how the nature of political life in provincial towns affects our understanding of late medieval English political culture as a whole.

Detached gardens and the urban fringe of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English provincial towns

The distribution and extent of detached gardens in a sample of ten English provincial towns were examined for the eighteenth century, through cartographic analysis and the construction of GIS-generated zones parallel to the urban fence. The study revealed that detached gardens formed a distinct and abundant feature in the urban fringe, in particular within two hundred metres of the built-up area. A longitudinal case study of the processes of plot transformation in Shrewsbury, based on maps from 1830 to 1940, indicated that a reduction in provision of detached gardens was linked to booms in the house building cycle, while periods of increased provision in the form of urban allotments were occasioned by national emergencies. The system of provision was largely profit-motivated and it disintegrated as towns expanded in the middle and late nineteenth century. Garden ground provided the prime location for housing and an awareness of its morphological frame is essential for an understanding of expansion from the urban core. It is suggested that urban morphologists have neglected detached gardens in their attempts to develop models of urban land transformation using the concept of the fringe belt.

‘Pulp Methodism’ Revisited: The Literature and Significance of Silas and Joseph Hocking

Writing pseudonymously in the New Age in February 1909, Arnold Bennett, acerbic chronicler of Edwardian chapel culture, deplored the lack of proper bookshops in English provincial towns. A substantial manufacturing community, he claimed, might be served only by a stationers shop, offering ‘Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn books, Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example, except the brothers Hocking.’ Bennett’s lament was an unintended compliment to the ubiquity of the novels of Silas and Joseph Hocking, brothers whose literary careers spanned more than half a century, generating almost two hundred novels and innumerable serials and short stories. Silas Hocking (1850–1935), whose first book was published in 1878 and last in 1934, has been described as the most popular novelist of the late nineteenth century. By 1900 his sales already exceeded one million volumes. The career of Joseph Hocking (1860–1937) was slightly shorter, stretching from 1887 to 1936, but his output was equally impressive. The Hockings’ works have attracted interest principally among scholars of Cornish life and culture. It will be argued here, however, that they have significance for the history of late Victorian and Edwardian Nonconformity, both reflecting and reinforcing the attitudes, beliefs and prejudices of their large and appreciative readership.

Who were the urban gentry? Social elites in an English provincial town, c. 1680–1760

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.

Contrasting Histories of the English Provincial Town

Contrasting Histories of the English Provincial Town

Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 by John Miller

Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 by John Miller

Religion and Politics in English Monastic Towns

ABSTRACTThis article tackles religion and politics as different aspects of a variety of social practices within a common culture. It examines thie political and religious climate of English provincial towns with a monastic presence in the period before before 1540. It demonstrates the extent to which monastic interests were fused with those of local elites, and argues those elites sought to undercut the process of dissolution and to preserve something of the monastic framework through the unfolding crisis. It challenges the notion of a natural dialect between traditional religion and provincial politics and uncovers a dynamic of negotiation productive for both constituencies before and after the Dissolution.

Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 – By John Miller

Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 – By John Miller

Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660-1722

Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660-1722

The Orderliness Hypothesis

This extension of the railway system by means of feeder lines means that in many ways the early development of the system can be viewed, not in terms of booms and slumps, but in rational steps. By the end of 1833, three of the five English provincial towns with a population of more than 100,000 had railway links with London under construction; by the end of 1836 only Portsmouth remained among English towns of over 50,000 population without a line authorized; and by the end of 1837 most towns of more than 20,000 inhabitants were on or close to the route of an authorized railway.1

The provincial social survey in Edwardian Britain

Abstract This article examines three social surveys carried out in English provincial towns after Seebohm Rowntree's study of York and before A. L. Bowley's sample surveys of five towns. The authors emphasized specific local circumstances and suggested local voluntary and municipal remedies for the social problems they described. Their focus was on the community, and although informed by the discourses of ‘national efficiency’ that also lay behind Rowntree's researches, the solutions to the problems of juvenile life and casual labour that compromised national efficiency were to be found in local endeavour. Poverty was viewed in the context of its impact on the community rather than on the individual.

The Birth of Public Science in the English Provinces: Natural Philosophy in Derby, c. 1690-1760

The industrial revolution and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were two of the most important events in the whole of human history and the question of how these two relate to each other must therefore form one of the most vital of all inquiries in the history of science. As the industrial revolution began in England- and largely provincial England- the question of how scientific knowledge came to be disseminated to these regions forms a crucial part of such an enquiry. Using Derby as a case study, this paper examines how Newtonian philosophy came to be spread, how and why science became a cultural activity as part of the Habermasean public sphere, and how scientific theory related to early industrial and technologicalventures in an English provincial town. The richness of Derby's scientific culture is revealed by the careers of John Whitehurst FRS, John Arden, Thomas Simpson FRS, Benjamin Parker and George Sorocold and the importance of science in the curriculum of the local Dissenting academy.

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English high in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.

Civic Portraiture and Political Culture in English Provincial Towns, ca. 1560–1640

In recent years the investigation of urban political culture prior to the Civil War has benefited greatly from three historiographical initiatives, all of them suggesting in one way or another the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. Though it deals with a later period, the work of Peter Borsay and others on what he has labeled “The English Urban Renaissance” has fleshed out a wide variety of cultural forms, verbal and nonverbal, and documented their development in the urban milieu. These studies have implicitly raised the question of antecedents from the pre-Civil War period and have suggested some possible lines of development. Yet by viewing urban culture as largely developing out of the cultural and social demands of the landed classes, rather than from concerns which were indigenously urban, and by not specifically connecting culture with politics to begin with, this work remains limited in its influence on the investigation of the earlier period.A second tradition has emphasized the importance of Protestant, and especially Puritan, ideology in urban political culture before the Civil War. Such scholars as Paul Seaver, Patrick Collinson, and David Underdown have illuminated the force of those religious and moral concerns on the governing process and have explored such cultural forms as the sermon and the lecture as part of this effort. Their approach has been more explicitly political, and—even if the objective is often to assess the role of Puritan ideology in English politics leading up to the Civil War—it has still told us a great deal about the politics and culture of towns themselves in this period.

Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in English provincial towns

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the concept of collective memory as a component of political culture in pre- and especially post-Reformation provincial towns. Pre-Reformation political culture depended heavily on a collective memory shaped by traditional religious experience and institutions. When so many of these were destroyed by the Reformation, it became necessary for the ruling elites of provincial towns to create alternative cultural forms, and thus to refashion a usefully legitimizing political culture. Three forms of this refashioned and legitimizing collective memory – civic regalia, civic portraiture and historical writing – are examined as they applied to the provincial urban milieu in the years c. 1540–1640.

The English Economy from Bede to the Reformation.

Dark Ages 7th-century England in Bede and the early laws Domesday Book - a re-interpretation the Domesday valuation of manorial income the farming out of manors 13th-century prices and money supply before the Black Death the Black death the Hundred Years' War - costs and profits new introduction to B.L. Manning's The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif markets and freedom in the Middle Ages English provincial towns in the later Middle Ages a reply to S.H. Rigby on Late Medieval Urban Prosperity - the evidence of the lay subsidies the Lisle letters 16th-century farming.

The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the English Provincial Town, 1660-1770.

The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the English Provincial Town, 1660-1770.

The Financial Structure of an English Provincial Town in the Early Modern Period : An Analysis of the Chamberlains' Accounts of Elizabethan Newcastle upon Tyne

The Financial Structure of an English Provincial Town in the Early Modern Period : An Analysis of the Chamberlains' Accounts of Elizabethan Newcastle upon Tyne