Preface

Summary

This book is a study of a city from the perspective of its inhabitants. The premise is that the built environment and the populace shared an intimate relationship; cities were not homogenous or passive entities but multifaceted palimpsests created by the processes of people’s lived experiences. Inhabitants’ culture and ideals shaped city space and lent meaning to urban places. In return, those places lent human interchanges depth and quality. Thus conceived a city had many possible faces, or cognitive maps, by which it could be imagined. This book seeks to recover some of these maps. Every inhabitant had a unique perspective of city space which depended on their lifestyle and personal circumstances. This means that recovering individuals’ cognitive maps is a near impossible task, but we can seek to recover something of the shared perspectives of communities and networks by exploring the ways that people spoke about or used their city in the surviving records. In so doing, this close study will reveal something of urban inhabitants’ ways of seeing, negotiating and conceptualising their environment, people’s relationship with urban space, and with each other. The city is Norwich, a place that experienced many of the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century at first hand, and whose administration and people left ample records to chart its vicissitudes.

This book grew from doctoral research and has been a long time in seeing the light of day. Much of this research was undertaken at the excellent facilities of the Norfolk Record Office whose records cover city, county and church in great depth, shining a light onto the lives of many centuries of inhabitants. In researching and writing this book, I have benefitted from the help of many people and organisations. First and foremost, the endlessly knowledgeable and patient staff at the Norfolk Record Office (NRO), followed by, in no particular order, the staff at Norwich’s Millennium Library and Shirehall Research Centre, the National Archives and British Library, and the library of the University of East Anglia (UEA). Involvement with the research communities of these organisations, the NRO and UEA in particular, has provided inspiration and many friendships. I owe special thanks to Andy Wood and Silvia Evangelisti, the former for supervising my PhD thesis from start to finish, and the latter for reading draft sections of this book and providing valuable suggestions for improvement.