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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
1 Quoted in Dobson, R. B., “Urban Decline in Late Medieval England,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 27 (1977), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 To cite just some of the more important book titles: Clark, Peter and Slack, Paul, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972);Google ScholarEveritt, Alan, ed., Perspectives in English Urban History (London, 1973);CrossRefGoogle ScholarDyer, Alan D., The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester, 1973);Google ScholarClark, Peter and Slack, Paul, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976);Google ScholarClark, Peter, ed., The Early Modern Town: A Reader (London, 1976);Google ScholarReynolds, Suss, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford, 1977);Google ScholarAbrams, Philip and Wrigley, E. A., eds., Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1978);Google ScholarPatten, John, English Towns, 1500–1700 (Folkestone, Kent, and Hamden, Conn., 1978);Google ScholarPhythian-Adams, Charles, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979);Google ScholarPalliser, D. M., Tudor York (Oxford, 1979);Google ScholarPubMed and, most recent, Neale, R. S., Bath: A Social History, 1680–1850 (London, 1981);Google Scholar and Corfield, P. J., The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar
3 The small number of professional men and salaried officials is one of the most striking characteristics of English towns. In his study of Ipswich in Country Towns in Pre-Industrial England, Michael Reed lists 29 members of “professional and salaried occupations’ in 1702, after a period of substantial growth in the numbers of people in such occupations (p. 112); by contrast, Châteaudun, a city of smaller size, contained Ill officials, tax farmers, and members of the liberal professions at about the same time (Couturier, Marcel, Recherches sur les structures sociales de Châteaudun, 1525–1789 (Paris, 1979), 144).Google Scholar
4 Thirsk, Joan, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar
5 The sources do not always permit a precise appreciation of the place of agricultural workers in English towns. In tiny Warwick, 27 to 31 percent of the town's work force was engaged in husbandry in the sixteenth century (Reed, Country Towns, 52), but Clark and Slack could write of the larger agglomerations that “the occupational structure of the typical county town had a strong bias towards agricultural services. We can see this at Canterbury in the early seventeenth century when as many as 9 percent of the freemen were engaged in agriculture or agriculture-related trades’ (Clark, and Slack, , English Towns in Transition, 27).Google Scholar Compare this last figure with the situation of such considerably larger French cities as Montpellier, Dijon, and Clermont, where laboureurs and viguerons accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the active population (Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1960), 337-38, 342;Google ScholarRoupnel, Gaston, La ville et la campagne au XVIIesiècle: Étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (Paris, 1955), 12758;Google ScholarManry, A. G., Histoire de Clermont-Ferrand (Clermont-Ferrand, 1975), 186–88).Google Scholar
6 Clark, and Slack, , eds., “Introduction’ to Crisis and Order in English Towns;Google ScholarClark, and Slack, , English Towns in Transition, chs. 6–9.Google Scholar
7 Clark, and Slack, , English Towns in Transition, 101;Google ScholarPhythian-Adams, Charles, “Urban Decay in Late Medieval England,’ in Towns in Societies, Abrams, and Wrigley, , eds., 159–86Google Scholaridem, Desolation of a City; Dobson, , “Urban Decline.’Google Scholar
8 Dyer, Alan, “Growth and Decay in English Towns, 1500–1700,’ Urban History Yearbook (1979), 69Google Scholaret passim. See also the sharp reply by Charles Phythian-Adams, “Dr. Dyer's Urban Undulations,’ ibid., 73–76.
9 Pearl, Valerie, “Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London,’ The London Journal, 5:1 (1979), 3–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Rigby, S. H., “Urban Decline in the Later Middle Ages: Some Problems in Interpreting the Statistical Data,’ Urban History Yearbook (1979), 46–59,CrossRefGoogle Scholar reviews the earlier works in the debate and indicates some of the ambiguities of the evidence. See also Phythian-Adams, “Urban Decay’ and Desolation of a City; Dobson, “Urban Decline”; and, for a recent optimistic voice, Bridbury, A. R., “English Provincial Towns in the Later Middle Ages,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., 34:1 (1981), 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Dyer, , City of Worcester, ch. 13, provides further evidence of stagnating urban wealth.Google Scholar
12 See also here the important article of Borsay, Peter, “The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture c. 1680-c. 1760,’ Social History, 2:5 (1977), 581–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 This is shown particularly well in Patten, English Towns, ch. 6.Google Scholar
14 Much of the credit for the English attention to this theme must surely go to the important article of Pound, J. F., “The Sririial and Trade Structure of Norwich, 1525–1575,’ Past and Present, no. 34 (1966), 49–69,CrossRefGoogle Scholar reprinted in Clark, , ed., Early Modern Town. Gottfried's Bury St. Edmunds also contains a close analysis of the city's changing occupational mix.Google Scholar
15 A partial exception to this statement is the excellent recent dissertation by Fart, James R., “The Rise of a Middle Class: Artisans in Dijon, 1550–1650’ (Northwestern University, 1983), 53–56,Google Scholar although his analysis is not as detailed as that of English authors such as Pound. Gascon, Richard, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (environs de 1520-environs de 1580) (Paris-The Hague, 1971), 351–99, 610–42, 902–5, provides the fullest account of the evolution of occupational structures in any French city in this period, but the central question in his analysis is the impact of the civil wars on the city.Google Scholar
16 Patten, , English Towns, ch. 6.Google Scholar
17 For an explicit discussion of the relative merits of these two sources that ends with a vote for marriage contracts, see Garden, Maurice, “Les inventaires après décès: Source globale de l'histoire sociale lyonnaise ou juxtaposition de monographies familiales?’ Cahiers d'histoire, 12:1-2 (1967), 153–73,Google Scholar and his Lyon et les lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1970), 211–29 et passim.Google Scholar
18 French social historians have by no means neglected probate inventories, but, like Garden or Pierre Deyon in his study of Amiens, they have tended to use these records primarily to illuminate the style of life and cultural preferences of members of different social milieu.x, relying on marriage contracts for quantitative examination of the evolution of wealth and the social structure over time. (Deyon does use probate inventories to explore the wealth of those in the textile trades.) The team of students working on Paris under the direction of Roland Mousnier has relied heavily on inventories after death, but the major product of their work published to date, Recherches sur la stratification sociale à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles: L'échantillon de 1634, 1635, 1636 (Paris, 1976),Google Scholar is a limited analysis of a single point in time. For the eighteenth century, the situation is now beginning to change with Roche, Daniel, Le peuple de Paris: Essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1981);Google Scholar and Baulant, Micheline, “Niveaux de vie paysans autour de Meaux en 1700 et 1750,’ Annales, 30:2–3 (1975), 505–18, the first installment of a major research project still under way.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, III, iv;Google ScholarFisher, F. J., “The Development of the London Food Market, 1540–1640,’ Economic History Review, 5:2 (1935), 46–64;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 30 (1948), 37–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “London as an 'Engine of Economic Growth,“ in Britain and the Netherlands, Bromley, J. S. and Kossman, E. H. eds. (The Hague, 1971), IV, 316,CrossRefGoogle Scholar reprinted in Clark, , ed., Early Modern Town;Google ScholarWrigley, E. A., “A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Sririiety and Economy, 1650–1750,’ Past and Present, no. 37 (1967), 44–70,CrossRefGoogle Scholar reprinted in Abrams, and Wrigley, , eds., Towns in Societies; and Daunton, M. J., “Towns and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century England,’Google Scholar in ibid., 245–78.
20 Some investigation of this issue may be found in Robert Forster, The House of SaulxTavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700–1830 (Baltimore-London, 1971), chs. 1, 3;Google Scholar and Harding, Robert R., Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, 1978), 171–79.Google Scholar