It is nearly two decades since Tony Wrigley first discussed the possible effects that the experience of London life may have had on changing the society of seventeenth-century England. Despite some excellent work on certain aspects of London's social history, however, his qualification still stands: ‘too little is known of the sociological differences between life in London and life in provincial England to afford a clear perception of the impact of London's growth upon the country as a whole’. Among the obstacles to this latter goal are that metropolitan and provincial society are often seen as qualitatively different and, perhaps in consequence, comparisons between the two have not been seriously attempted. What is needed is a model which might serve to embrace the experiences of both urban and rural inhabitants within a common framework.

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.

In the last decade an area of urban history receiving increasing attention has been that of crime and, in particular, nineteenth-century crime. For those social scientists whose main interest is the study of lower-class life the study of crime has become increasingly fashionable. However, the study of crime is the study of the whole of society and the relationship of the various classes within that society. That law-makers create law-breakers is axiomatic and the study of crime is, therefore, not just the study of criminals but also of the institutions which defined them as criminals. For too long it has been implied that studying criminals is the study of a subset of lower-class life. This is a reflection of the fact that research is largely a middle-class occupation and so researchers bring to their work their own middle-class perception of society. The result is the automatic acceptance that crime consists purely of larceny, burglary, assault, rape and murder while overlooking the middle-class crimes of fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, offences against the Companies Acts, Consumer Protection Acts and Factory Acts.

The history of crime, penal policy and policing is currently enjoying a vogue — and not least fashionable among the topics under discussion has been the question of the nineteenth-century English ‘criminal class’, the origins of the term and its social significance. Critics are divided more or less equally into quantifiers and phenomenologists, optimists and pessimists about real trends. Few are the questions about the known facts but no agreement appears in sight on the subject of their interpretation. The principal reason for disagreement, as it appears to the present writer, is the central dominance of predicative, mono-thematic perspectives and explanations — any of which will fit the facts quite well but all of which seem insusceptible to conclusive proof. First let us consider the range of dispute among the phenomenologists — each of whom may also be characterized as a univer-salist, in the sense that they seem to believe the possible range of criminal events illimitable and the figures on crime merely a reflection of external social reactions rather than evidence of any upward or downward trend in measurable events.

Irish historians have been rather slow to recognize that urban history constituted a valid area for scholarly research. Publications in this field prior to 1960 were few in number, while as late as 1979 Gearoid MacNiocaill criticized the discipline for its undue bias towards three areas: the antiquarian, the topographical and geographical and the legal. This criticism retains some validity today: antiquarian or topographical publications relating to Irish towns have a flourishing popular market, but following decades of neglect the history of Irish towns and cities is being explored with an unprecedently high level of attention, while areas totally unknown are being opened up and new dimensions are emerging. In the process even comparatively recent works such as those edited by Butlin in 1977 have become thoroughly outdated, while the papers presented to the 1979 Irish Conference of Historians, which were intended to act as ‘both a framework to be consulted and a map of the way to future progress’ also present an inadequate picture of contemporary urban history scholarship. In the process of this scholarly awakening, however, Irish urban history is emerging as a discipline with an individual personality. While the directions of research are strongly influenced by work in England, the U.S. and Europe, the specific Irish preoccupations are a reflection of both mainstream Irish history and, to some extent, of contemporary Irish politics and society.

In September 1985 full-time work began, under the auspices of the Institute of Historical Research, on writing a co-operative, up-to-date volume on the history of the London County Council to appear in its centenary year, 1989. The inauguration of this ambitious project occurred-fitly in some ways, in others ominously-at just the time that the Greater London Council was about to disappear and with it a 100-year-old assumption that ‘unitary metropolitan government’ is inevitable and natural. Nobody thinks that the problems of London government are going to go away after GLC abolition, and the most exciting thing that might come out of a reinterpretation of the LCC's history is that it could inform future debate about what metropolitan government has been and can be, and what it has done and can do for Londoners. That is certainly our intention.

The place of Charles Booth's London poverty survey within an empirical tradition of sociology has been much discussed in recent years. The pivotal position which Booth had in this tradition was highlighted by Philip Abrams especially. Booth's achievement, it has been claimed, was to illuminate the structural underpinnings of poverty rather than just its extent. In doing so he not only challenged the assumptions of political economy but brought new life to the tradition of house-to-house surveys and case-studies as practised by those involved in the statistical movement of the nineteenth century in Britain. Booth sought answers to narrowly denned social problems, seeking to generate new and superior data capable of bearing the questions. His was the habit of ‘ad hoc compartmentalised research’, from which one main line of development was the government enquiries of the Webb era and beyond. Another line of descent can be traced in the social survey movement centred in the United States, and through this Booth's influence spread to the Chicago school of urban sociologists. Despite this wideranging influence those who followed Booth's lead studied his own descriptions of his findings and methods, and rarely, if ever, looked behind the published volumes to the varied materials generated by the large-scale research project he masterminded. These materials represent a rich and varied source of data which have so far been relatively little used by historians, and then mainly in a minor illustrative way.