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A new study of London before the Great Fire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Derek Keene
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Extract

London is one of the best recorded of medieval cities. Yet the very bulk of the sources has in the past inhibited systematic enquiry, so that for many periods and aspects of its history the capital remains the unknown element in English urban affairs. The greatest quantity of records concerns property-holding, and one way of making sense of this forbidding mass of information is to reconstitute it in the form of histories of the properties to which it refers. Since the early eighteenth century this way of using urban records has been adopted from time to time in antiquarian studies which have thrown valuable light on conditions in English medieval towns. In particular H. E. Salter's work on medieval Oxford inspired the present author to apply similar methods in a study of Winchester, which is now complete. Winchester pointed the way to London and to a means of remedying our great ignorance of that city.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 11 , May 1984 , pp. 11 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

Notes

1 Keene, D., Survey of Medieval Winchester (Winchester Studies II, forthcoming)Google Scholar; this includes a brief account of some of the earlier antiquarian studies.

2 Jones, P. E. (ed.), The Fire Court (2 vols, 1966 and 1970)Google Scholar; Mills, P. and Oliver, J., The Survey of the Building Sites in the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666 (London Topographical Society, XCVII–IX (1962), CI (1964), CIII (1967)).Google Scholar

3 The five parishes contained 244 resident tithe-payers in 1638, and probably never fewer than 200 over the period 1250–1666. If we assume that heads of households remained in the sample area for 5 years on average (cf. discussion below) and that the mean number of households was 220, the total number of heads of household over the period 1250–1666 would have been 18,304.

4 The Inhabitants of London in 1638, edited from MS 272 in the Lambeth Palace Library, ed. Dale, T. C. (Society of Genealogists, 2 vols, 1931).Google Scholar

5 Jones, op. cit., I, 192–3.

6 The cash values of rents have been deflated by means of an index based on the building wage rates paid by the wardens of London Bridge for the repair of houses in the city. Wages represent a substantial part of the replacement cost of buildings, and so a wage-rate index is particularly suitable for this exercise, where the purpose is to measure trends in the demand for city property rather than the spending power of the income derived from it.

7 For Westminster, see the forthcoming London Ph.D. thesis of Gervase Rosser.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Dr Vanessa Harding and Joanna Mattingly for their assistance in the project. Since the time of writing the Social Science Research Council has been renamed the Economic and Social Research Council.