1 - Shaping the Body Politic: Charters of Incorporation and Early Stuart Government

Summary

A borough's charter of incorporation was a nearly mystical thing. Through the will and words of the sovereign, it made a disparate group of men into a single corporate person. While enumerating and validating the rights and privileges of a corporate town to govern itself and to carry on its business, a charter also defined a borough relative to the monarch and to other institutions and individuals in the realm. Incorporation, articulated and embodied in the material charters that towns treasured, made corporate boroughs different from most other forms of local government in England. A charter provided a town a measure of autonomy, yet it also deeply bound the borough that requested it to the crown that granted it, strengthening the monarchical state.

We know that the early Stuart monarchs, like their Tudor predecessors, promoted this form for urban government, granting large numbers of charters of incorporation and reincorporation to towns and cities large and small. Less clear is the sort of relationship between borough and crown a charter was intended to create. Historians of England's trading companies have increasingly focused on the complex ways that those corporations functioned within the imperial state, but there has been somewhat less focus on how borough corporations functioned in the monarchical state. Robert Tittler has documented the crown's extensive incorporation of provincial boroughs from 1540 forward. He highlights the bond between central authority and urban governments forged in the wake of the Reformation, characterizing this development in the context of a “drive for local autonomy,” particularly regarding control of towns lands and relations with neighboring gentry. Phil Withington has described a “corporate system” that developed under the Tudors and early Stuarts, integrating the local and the national. Some of the scholarship on particular towns has emphasized a sense of independence that charters allegedly conveyed; enjoying and protecting their liberties, townsmen focused inward. Central authorities were distant, intervening at moments of disruption, when the interaction was likely unwelcome. For instance, one historian has emphasized Chester's “independent nature” and the “continuing alienation of local from central government” in the early Stuart period. At the same time, some suggest that while borough liberties were vitally important to local residents, the crown was less interested in them.