Suchergebnisse

This book is a pioneering social and economic study of a London suburban parish in the seventeenth century, which sheds new light on the important but relatively neglected topic of London's social history. Chapters on demography, social and occupational structure, topography, population turnover and residential mobility, and neighbourly relations, lead to a discussion of the involvement of the inhabitants of the district in local government and church ceremonial. Throughout, social and economic features of the neighbourhood are compared to those found elsewhere in London, and in other towns and cities, in early modern England. The book will therefore be of interest to all concerned with the behaviour of the town dweller in the past, and will serve as a springboard for further historical studies of urban society

ABSTRACTThis article argues, using evidence from Georgian London, that historical demographers need to revisit the effects of two inter-related phenomena: the effects of burial fees on interment practices and the ebb and flow of a very considerable 'traffic in corpses'. By the eighteenth century burial space in London was at a premium and there was an active market in the provision of suitable, and affordable, burial grounds. This article is based on the sextons' books of the Westminster parish of St Martin in the Fields. These books are very unusual in recording exported 'certificate' and 'arrears' burials. The 'traffic in corpses' revealed by this source is analysed in some detail and burial fees turn out to be of great importance in understanding local fluctuations in interment practices. A neighbouring parish, St Anne, Soho, was acting as a veritable 'clandestine burial centre' which interred non-parishioners for profit on a huge scale for most of the eighteenth century. The 'commodification' of burial, driven partly by considerations of cost, thus had a major impact on interment practices in the eighteenth-century metropolis. A key finding is that, due to this postmortem flow of corpses, the total number of recorded burials in any one parish may not necessarily have been driven by fluctuations in local mortality rates.

This article represents an exercise in microhistory applied to early modern London. Deploying prosopographical methods, it reconstructs the life history of one John Bedford (1601–1667) from his birth in Huntingdon to his death in the West End of London. Much of his adult life was spent in the London parish of St Dionis Backchurch, with an interlude in the Irish town of Londonderry. Bedford fled from Ulster at the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. His unusually detailed will provides the bedrock of this narrative, and his reconstructed life sheds important light on ties between London and Ulster, on debt and credit relations and on the methodological strengths and limitations of community studies that focus on a specific place.

This volume represents the proceedings of a conference held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1995. It consists of five parts. In part 1, "Meanings of Material London," David Harris Sacks explores the 1601 Essex Rebellion and finds its failure in the primacy that commercial relationships now held over older patron–client bonds. Will Kemp's Morris dance from London to Norwich, meanwhile, seemingly illustrates the way in which market capitalism corrupted civic virtue and traditional hospitality. Derek Keene's richly documented survey of the London economy reinforces the value of a long-term perspective on the capital's growth. The roots of London's consumption patterns can be traced back as far as 1300, and much of its skilled trades and mercantile expertise derived from Continental rather than native sources. Part 2 examines "Consumer Culture: Domesticating Foreign Fashion." The title of Joan Thirsk's thoughtful essay "England's Provinces: Did They Serve or Drive Material London?" is an accurate guide to its content. Existing provincial skills could be exploited to develop new industries or crops catering either to the London market, or to gentry and aristocracy intent on creating islands of metropolitan taste in the provinces. Jane Schneider shows how the accession of James I ushered in a world in glorious technicolor, a welcome relief to the relative drabness of high Elizabethan fashion, and relates this sartorial revolution to familiar changes in England's overseas trade. Color is of concern also to Anne Jones and Peter Stallybrass, who describe the growing popularity of yellow "mantles" in the early seventeenth century, an enthusiasm that ignored their criminal and, worse, Irish associations. Jean Howard analyses Westward Ho, in order to explore attitudes to foreigners. Ian Archer's rewarding essay "Material Londoners?" begins part 3 of the volume. He explores the limited extent to which "new," "acquisitive" commercial values conflicted with traditional Christian personal and communal values. This is followed by Gail Paster's examination of that age's peculiar fashion for ever more violent purges and evacuations. Patricia Fumerton contributes an essay notable for its wrongheaded conflation of the experience of vagrancy with that of London's servants and apprentices.

Although research on survival strategies is still at a relatively early stage, there are clearly some areas where there is considerable difference in emphasis placed by historians on the relative importance of particular "expedients" deployed by the poorin extremisThere is, for example, uncertainty regarding the amount of support given by neighbours as opposed to relatives. There is some historical contention, too, over the importance to the elderly of care by their children, as opposed to alternative sources of maintenance such as earnings, charity and especially the formal institutions of poor relief. After all, in the early modern period the principle source for a study of the survival strategies of poor people is always likely to be the records of poor relief or charitable agencies and institutions. The obvious danger here is that historians of poor relief consistently overestimate the importance of such relief to the poor. Both Richard Wall and Pat Thane, using evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, for example, have demonstrated that the elderly received far more support from relatives than has been realized. Professor Thane has argued that this situation is unlikely t o have been new. Other historians, however, are much more sceptical over the value of intergenerational flows of wealth from children to elderly parents.

This article presents a new price series for seventeenth‐century London and uses the data to construct the first cost of living index for the capital for that period. Comparison with the Phelps Brown Hopkins (PBH) series suggests that although short‐term variations were very similar, there is some suggestion that prices in London were more inflationary after the middle of the seventeenth century than in the PBH series. A new London real wage series, also presented, is consequently less buoyant than that constructed by PBH for their southern building craftsmen.

London's cultural and social life is the focus of four recent books which, with the exception of a few forays by Manley, concentrate mostly on the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century.