Conclusion: A City of Many Faces

Summary

Telling the story of a city entails more than a retelling of chronological events. This book has attempted to reveal a different side to seventeenth-century Norwich by re-reading its records with a close lens on the words and actions of its inhabitants in the context of the place in which they lived. It has explored perceptions of space and place from different perspectives and considered some of the conceptual landscapes available to, and created by, inhabitants and their networks. It has endeavoured to show that people negotiated their city in ways that reflected their specific socio-cultural perspectives and that the city was not simply a blank canvas about which people moved, but the spaces and places of the urban environment played an active part in shaping people’s experiences. This was possible because every space and place had meaning; as ideas from dominant discourses became inscribed into memory as common knowledge, they also became inscribed onto spaces, lending them significance that then coloured the subsequent human actions that took place within them. The process was mutual and reciprocal as spaces and places – shaped by human needs and ideas – then radiated those influences outwards.

Just as seventeenth-century people’s lives were specific to their time, created through a process of culture, shared sets of assumptions and memories, customs and conventions, so too were the spatial meanings imbued in the landscape a product of these processes. Thus it is possible to recover spatial meanings through reading people’s interactions with, thoughts about, and actions in, those spaces, just as we decipher seventeenth-century culture through the words, actions and deeds of its people. In particular this book has explored the record of where events took place, how spaces were used and by whom, and the adoption of common linguistic tropes used when referring to those spaces and places. It has considered the possibility of separate spaces, whereby inhabitants occupied different conceptual frames of geographic reference created by pervasive socio-cultural assumptions about people and place. Spatial meanings often reflected the dominant values of (or beliefs about) a particular social group, and this book has considered the impact of this practice on the lives of the city’s poor, women, and immigrant communities and, although spatial understanding was in many ways unique to each individual, shown how there were shared commonalities in perceptions of place.