There is an old historical tradition which saw the towns in the middle ages as being an antagonistic element within the whole society which was seen—quite rightly of course—as being predominantly rural and agricultural. Put in more abstract terms the agrarian economy was seen as a natural economy and as such incompatible with the exchange economy of the towns. This simplistic vision could hardly stand the test of empirical investigation since clearly the urban and rural economies could not operate independently of each other. More sophisticated writers indeed saw the towns, not as an antagonistic element but as innovatory. The towns were literally responsible for a civilizing process. They sowed the seeds of the future in the not always receptive soil of feudal society.

One of the problems of urban history is the fearsome range of expertise that the urban historian is supposed to appreciate, if not master. Belaboured, rightly, by archaeologists, geographers, and architectural historians, we have begun to open our eyes to the evidence of the physical environment of medieval towns, but that is not the half of it. In order to understand urban institutions one needs to be a religious historian, an economic historian, a legal historian; and if one were ever to make sense of everything that is included in the ‘social history’ of towns, then social anthropology, historical demography, and sociology are only three of the battery of foglamps that would be needed to penetrate our cloud of unknowing. The subject which I now wish to add to the list of those we are supposed to cover does not even have the attraction of sounding new and modish and exciting. The history of political thought has, after all, formed a part of undergraduate history courses in this country ever since they began, and it is traditionally one of the least popular and least satisfactory parts of them, especially for the sort of students who may go on to be interested in urban history: those who relish the exact, the local detail, the reality of topography, the ability to connect the documents of the past with visible phenomena in the present.

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?

Officially sponsored investigation of charities has a long history encompassing the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century commissions issued under the Statutes of Charitable Uses of 1597 and 1601, and the brief national inquiry made for the Gilbert returns of 1787–8. It was in the nineteenth century, however, that the first detailed general surveys of English and Welsh charities were made. In August 1818, amidst revived interest in the more effective utilization of charitable funds, the Brougham Commission was appointed by parliament to examine the state of charitable trusts for educational purposes in England. With the renewal and widening of its powers in the following year, it spent almost two decades investigating charitable trusts of all types in England and Wales. The Commission expired in 1837 but, after lengthy vacillation, parliament set up a permanent body in 1853. Like its predecessor, this new commission began collecting up-to-date information about charitable trusts; a task it still performs today. The invaluable products of the two commissions are several voluminous series of reports and digests printed in Parliamentary Papers between 1819 and 1913, and extensive records dating from 1819 held by the Charity Commission and the Public Record Office. This article discusses these sources and their value to the urban historian.

In April 1980 a group of urban historians and political scientists met at the University of York under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council to pool what they knew about the changing relations between central and local government and to identify areas for future research. The initiative had come from the political scientists whose interest in the subject had been stimulated by recent government policy. Those who attended from among the historians had to confess that this was not a subject that had recently been much discussed among them. When I was invited by the editor of this Yearbook to contribute an article on a neglected aspect of urban history, it seemed a good opportunity to draw the attention of the urban history group to the subject. What follows is an amended version of the paper that had originally been written for the SSRC seminar.