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English pre-industrial urban economies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Nigel Goose
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Extract

In an attempt to define how pre-industrial towns are differentiated from their counterparts in industrial societies, some (though not all) historians have emphasized the unspecialized nature of their economies. Of Elizabethan Leicester, Hoskins wrote ‘The special interest of Leicester to the economic and social historian is that it had no industry worth speaking of. Here was a community of some three thousand people, the largest and wealthiest town between the Trent and the Thames, which had no obvious means of livelihood…Towns which had no marked industrial character (such as Leicester) greatly outnumbered those which had (such as Coventry).’ Recently this argument has been developed by Patten, who writes ‘far from having “no obvious means of livelihood” at the time, Leicester had an urban superstructure as typical of Stuart and Restoration towns as it was of Elizabethan towns. The activities of building, brewing, provisioning, tailoring, weaving and the like in pre-industrial Leicester supported the basic economy of every pre-industrial town. Specialities in the manufactures of the day—usually textiles, iron and leather goods—were invariable additions rather than the basis of their economies… To look at the pre-industrial town is thus to look at an unspecialised economy… In dealing with the non-specialised urban economy we are dealing with the majority of English pre-industrial towns.’ The case is forcefully put, but does it stand up to scrutiny?

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 9 , May 1982 , pp. 24 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

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7 See Phythian-Adams, op. cit., 17. The same is also true of Cambridge, Colchester and Reading.

8 This figure comes from a sample of 653 individuals' occupations taken from wills for the period 1500–1619.

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11 Phythian-Adams, op. cit., 15.

12 Ibid., 16–18.

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38 Ibid., 80.

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