Suchergebnisse

Administrative reform in the 1530s amounted, in Professor Geoffrey Elton's words, to a 'Tudor revolution in government'. The Dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of their assets played a major part in this. The need to value, survey, document and exploit the monastic estates transformed government record-keeping, necessitating the creation of new offices – such as the Court of Augmentations – and the adoption of new practices and an expanded bureaucracy. The paper traces the response of the bureaucrats to the challenges to record-management resulting from the Dissolution, and the subsequent history of the monasteries' records of landholding, a task complicated by the activities of later government archivists.

The port of London in the 14th century accommodated a wide range of activities and interests, several important aspects of which are considered here.The first part of the thesis looks successively at the general topography of the port, at the authorities which administered it, and at trade and shipping in London. It is clear that the port was effectively only the city waterfront, but within this stretch were several areas with different characteristics. Certain well-established 'ports' or inlets for general merchandise, especially victuals, contrasted with areas where there was little or no mercantile activity, and with areas like the Vintry and the Wool Wharf where major overseas trades were located. Waterfront structures were very varied in type and use. Both the City and the Crown exercised jurisdiction in the port. The City collected local customs and legislated to preserve the port's facilities and control wholesale and retail trade. The royal Customs accounts provide information for the operation of that system, which had some shortcomings, and also for trade itself, showing the range of London's trading contacts, and changes in the major trades in wool, woollen cloth, and wine. Ships of widely differing sizes, types, and origins visited London, and an estimate of the annual volume of shipping is made. Ownership and contractual arrangements are considered. The second part of the thesis returns to more detailed examination of the topography of the waterfront, in gazetteer form. The first attempt to study such a large area of the City through topographical reconstruction, it shows,through brief accounts of all the properties to the south of Thames Street, what the area was like in physical terms, and who owned it, aspects which were clearly related to the way in which the waterfront was used.

Résumé La façon dont une société s'occupe de ses cadavres peut être riche d'enseignements. Les rituels mortuaires et les pratiques funéraires révèlent et renforcent les structures sociales, et sont un mécanisme important pour assurer une continuité et une récupération sociales face à la mort. Les premières villes modernes, et particulièrement les grandes métropoles comme Londres ou Paris, ont du faire face à un défi hygiénique et pratique, qui consistait à enterrer chaque année des milliers de morts tout en s'efforçant de ménager la susceptibilité des croyances populaires. Cet article montre quelles solutions et pratiques elles ont développées, et soutient qu'il existe un rapport essentiel entre la façon dont les problèmes concernant la mort et l'enlèvement des corps étaient traités à Londres et à Paris au début de l'époque moderne, et la manière dont ces villes font face aux grandes crises et aux problèmes d'ordre et de désordre. La continuité dans les pratiques funéraires pendant la période de la Réforme semble avoir été un facteur de stabilité à Londres, et une source de conflit à Paris.

Music – as many of the contributors to this special issue of Urban History point out – is an important component of the urban experience and can play a significant role in the construction of a civic identity, and yet it is a topic that urban historians have tended to overlook. There are some parallels with the case of the fine arts, to which a special issue of this journal was devoted in 1995, both in the causes for this neglect – which similarly include 'the intimidating traditions of connoisseurship associated with the field' and the difficulty we have with analysing the 'aesthetic experience' – and in the developments which are helping to overcome such inhibitions. So far, the impulse seems to be coming from musicologists and music historians, who, inhabiting a fairly small corner of the academic field, are fully conscious of the need to forge connections with other disciplines and historiographical traditions. The importance of contextualizing and historicizing not only the composition but also the production, transmission and reception of music has been recognized for some time, but so far urban historians have not responded as perhaps the music historians thought they might to the insights and openings that a musical 'new historicism' seems to offer. But there is clearly an opportunity – indeed, a pressing need – to develop a broadly-based cultural history of towns and cities in which music will take its place. The aim of this special issue is to promote that objective by illustrating the state of the art and suggesting some of the ideas, tools and methodologies with which it might be developed in future.

In an age of 'performance indicators', how does society measure museums′ presentation of history, and does this affect the manner in which history is communicated? The internal conflicts between presenting history and preserving research integrity are the context for this review of recent curatorial and archæological work in London.

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, in both Western Europe and East Asia, towns and cities helped to shape the individual consciousness, against the background of a more traditional society in which collective values remained strong. Towns were centres of stimulus, challenge, and opportunity for residents and visitors, and the identity of the town itself, its character and history, became a strong theme in the formation of the individual. Writing and the circulation of texts played an important part in this process. Towns created artefacts, rituals, and memories that embodied their history and identity, but individuals positioned themselves and their families in the town histories as they wrote them. The seven essays in this volume range in focus from Renaissance Venice to nineteenth-century Edo (Tokyo), and from capital cities (Seoul, London) to provincial towns in France, England, and Japan. They explore the interaction of self, family, and social group and the construction of collective memory, examining autobiographies, letters and "exchange diaries", family narratives, and urban histories and collections. Together, they challenge the long-prevailing historiography that contrasts the emergence of the individual in European societies with the persistently traditionalist and collective character of East Asian societies in the Early Modern period