Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-16T05:56:06.958Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

English pre-industrial urban economies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Nigel Goose
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In an attempt to define how pre-industrial towns are differentiated from their counterparts in industrial societies, some (though not all) historians have emphasized the unspecialized nature of their economies. Of Elizabethan Leicester, Hoskins wrote ‘The special interest of Leicester to the economic and social historian is that it had no industry worth speaking of. Here was a community of some three thousand people, the largest and wealthiest town between the Trent and the Thames, which had no obvious means of livelihood…Towns which had no marked industrial character (such as Leicester) greatly outnumbered those which had (such as Coventry).’ Recently this argument has been developed by Patten, who writes ‘far from having “no obvious means of livelihood” at the time, Leicester had an urban superstructure as typical of Stuart and Restoration towns as it was of Elizabethan towns. The activities of building, brewing, provisioning, tailoring, weaving and the like in pre-industrial Leicester supported the basic economy of every pre-industrial town. Specialities in the manufactures of the day—usually textiles, iron and leather goods—were invariable additions rather than the basis of their economies… To look at the pre-industrial town is thus to look at an unspecialised economy… In dealing with the non-specialised urban economy we are dealing with the majority of English pre-industrial towns.’ The case is forcefully put, but does it stand up to scrutiny?

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 9 , May 1982 , pp. 24 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hoskins, W. G., Provincial England (1965), 88.Google Scholar

2 Patten, J., English Towns 1500–1700 (1978), 148, 163, 165.Google Scholar

3 Hoskins, op. cit., 80.

4 Pound, J., ‘The social and trade structure of Norwich 1525–1575’, Clark, P. (ed.), The Early Modern Town (1976), 135.Google Scholar

5 Palliser, D., Tudor York (1979), 155.Google Scholar

6 Ibid.; Phythian-Adams, C., in The Fabric of the Traditional Community (1977), 20–1.Google Scholar

7 See Phythian-Adams, op. cit., 17. The same is also true of Cambridge, Colchester and Reading.

8 This figure comes from a sample of 653 individuals' occupations taken from wills for the period 1500–1619.

9 Phythian-Adams, op. cit., fig. 5, p. 16. The figure for Oxford was even higher still: see Crossley, A. (ed.), Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, IV, 105.Google Scholar

10 Phythian-Adams, Ibid.; Dyer, A., The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (1973), 84Google Scholar; the figures for Cambridge, Colchester and Reading will be presented in my forthcoming thesis, ‘Economic and social aspects of provincial towns 1500–1700: Cambridge, Colchester and Reading’.

11 Phythian-Adams, op. cit., 15.

12 Ibid., 16–18.

13 Patten, op. cit., 22.

14 Pound, op. cit., 134.

15 Ramsay, G. D., The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1943), 16.Google Scholar

16 Pound, J., ‘The Norwich census of the poor, 1570’, Norfolk Record Soc., XL (1971), 16.Google Scholar

17 Quoted in Cromwell, T., History and Description of the Ancient Town and Borough of Colchester (1825), II, 287.Google Scholar

18 Cromwell, op. cit., I, 108.

19 Burley, K. H., ‘A note on a labour dispute in early eighteenth-century Colchester’, Bulletin Inst. Hist. Research, XXIX (1956), 228.Google Scholar

20 Phythian-Adams, C., Desolation of a City (1979), 88.Google Scholar

21 Patten, J., ‘Urban occupations in pre-industrial England’, Trans. Inst. Brit. Geog., N. S. II (1977), 299.Google Scholar

22 Dyer, op. cit., 82.

23 Toulmin-Smith, L. (ed.), Leland's Itinerary in England (c. 1535–43), (1907), I, 111.Google Scholar

24 Defoe, D., A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (Penguin edn, 1971), 58.Google Scholar

25 Pollard, S., A History of Labour in Sheffield (1959), 6.Google Scholar

26 Clarkson, L. A., The pre-industrial economy in England 1500–1750 (1971), Table 2, 88–9Google Scholar; Langton, J., ‘Industry and towns 1500–1730’, in Dodgshon, R. A. and Butlin, R. A. (eds.), An historical geography of England and Wales (1978), 180Google Scholar, and sources cited therein.

27 Anderson, M., Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (1971), p. 25 and n. 22.Google Scholar

28 These figures, taken from the 1861 census, were kindly supplied by Paul Laxton.

29 Pilgrim, J. E., ‘The rise of the “new draperies” in Essex’, Uni. Birmingham Hist. J., VII (1959–1960), 49–50.Google Scholar

30 Defoe, op. cit., 58.

31 Bowden, P. J., The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (1971), 50–1.Google Scholar

32 Dyer, op. cit., p. 93.

33 Defoe, op. cit., p. 58.

34 Stephens, W. B., Seventeenth Century Exeter (1958), 6, 12, 135.Google Scholar

35 MacCaffrey, W. T., Exeter 1540–1640 (2nd edn, 1975), 162–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Hoskins, op. cit., 80.

37 Ibid., 79, n. 1.

38 Ibid., 80.

39 Ibid., 81.

40 A. Everitt, ‘The market towns’, in Clark, op. cit., 194.

41 See Phythian-Adams, , Traditional Community, 16.Google Scholar

42 Palliser, op. cit., 271.

43 See Corfield, P., ‘Urban development in England and Wales’ in Coleman, D. C. and John, A. H. (eds) Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-industrial England (1976)Google Scholar; and ‘Economic growth and change in seventeenth-century English towns’, in The Traditional Community Under Stress (1977), 35–71.Google Scholar

44 These lists are brought together in Patten, , English Towns, 42.Google Scholar

45 For Sussex market towns see Patten, , English Towns, 170–1.Google Scholar

46 Briggs, A., Victorian Cities (Penguin edn, 1971), 151, 186.Google Scholar

47 See Phythian-Adams, , Traditional Community, 16.Google Scholar

48 Briggs, op. cit., 151.

49 Ibid., 106–8.