There are few issues in British history about which so much unsubstantiated assertion has been written as the adverse impact of industrial urbanization upon popular religiosity. Urban history undergraduates are plied each year with the well-worn secularizing interpretation of urban growth which emanated with the Victorians (mostly churchmen) and which has since been reassembled by modern investigators in forms suitable for digestion in ecclesiastical history, social history (Marxist and non-Marxist), historical sociology, and historical geography. This ‘pessimist’ school of thought has reigned virtually unchallenged since the nineteenth century, giving rise in its endless repetition to simplistic historiographical myths. Arguably, systematic inquiry has suffered because modern urban society has been regarded as inimical to religion.

An important start to disentangling the web of confusion has already been made by Jeff Cox in his admirable but underrated The English Churches in a Secular Society, a study of Lambeth between 1870 and 1930. 'In the first and final chapters of that book, Cox commenced the assault on the ‘pessimist’ school, pointing out in necessarily blunt language the illogicality and empirical weakness in the arguments of many historians and sociologists of religion. That book should have a reserved space on every reading list dealing with this issue. The present article attempts to expand on what might be called the ‘optimist’ school of thought concerning the impact of urbanization upon religion: that the churches survived urbanization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Cox adduced from his research on the 1870–930 period that the great decline of the churches had not occurred before then, the following pages shift the focus to a reassessment of of the evidence on the preceding 100 years.

Estimates of urban population before the Black Death have been hampered by a lack of suitable data. Although it is common knowledge that many towns reached a physical size in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that was not exceeded until the early-modern period, little definite is known about the gross urban population at this date. Where attempts have been made to estimate urban populations these have traditionally depended on multiplying from one arbitrary sector of the community, such as property owners, taxpayers or freemen, or on back projections from the late-fourteenth-century poll tax returns. The problem with such an approach is not only that there is little independent basis for the multipliers used, but also that the relationship between any such arbitrary sector and the urban population as a whole may alter from town to town as well as from time to time within the same community. An exception to this approach has been the recent work of Derek Keene, who has used other indicators of population size and pressure, namely land values, the extent of the built-up area and density of settlement, to estimate the early-fourteenth-century populations of Winchester and London. It may be significant that this method has produced considerably higher population figures than had been reached by the more traditional approach. In this uncertainty, any source that purports to record the whole of a demographically defined section of the population is of considerable interest. Norwich is fortunate in the survival of such a source in an early-fourteenth-century tithing roll for the leet of Nedham and Mancroft (hereafter Mancroft), one of the four leets of the city.

Little is known of the value of eighteenth-century rates and taxes as sources for the urban historian. Corfield, in her study of eighteenth-century Norwich, stated in 1976 that ‘the stereotyped nature of eighteenth-century tax assessments precludes use of fiscal data from national sources’ and this is a fair reflection of the then and to some extent the current orthodoxy, despite Rudé's pioneering studies of the 1960s in which he used land tax and poor rate returns to estimate the wealth of the electorate of Hanoverian London and Middlesex. Schwarz, in a study of late-eighteenth-century London, could still comment in 1979 that for eighteenth-century rates and taxes ‘little is known beyond general impressions’. Recently, however, Wright has thrown interesting light on the use of the Easter books and poor rates of early-modern towns and cities, and the 1986 volume on the land tax edited by Turner and Mills, although still largely concerned with the use of rural land tax assessments, includes three chapters on the value of the assessments in urban and industrial history. The writers hope that city rate and national tax returns might play a fuller role as historical sources, but their optimism is tempered with caution because of the returns' intractability and inconsistency. It is hoped here to reinforce both their enthusiasm and their caution, to reveal additional pitfalls and suggest ways to avoid them and in particular to extend the debate to the neglected pre-1780 assessments and to the city of Bristol.

Walter Scott's assertion in Rob Roy that ‘In those days possession was considerably more than eleven points of the law’ overlooked a pivotal point of Scots Law, the distinction between ownership and possession. Possession or occupancy was not ‘as good as title’ as the sixteenth-century Scottish proverb or old French saying ‘possession vaut titre’ claimed. Though the distinction between ownership and possession might have seemed a nicety to Rob Roy in the sixteenth century, by 1617 a general register of titles to land, the Register of Sasines, was established in Scotland, and has continued virtually uninterrupted until the present day. It is consequently a record of immense importance to urban historians.

Charles Dickens visited Preston in January 1854 to report on the cotton lock-out of that year. What he saw contributed to his vision of the archetypal northern, urban industrial centre, Coketown:

It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled.

Three years later a rather different topographical account appeared in Charles Hardwick's history of the borough:

Notwithstanding the occasional carpings of a few splenetic travellers, Preston is generally and deservedly recognized as one of the cleanest and most pleasantly situated manufacturing towns in England. The cotton factories are chiefly erected to the north and east of the old aristocratic borough …. and do not as yet materially interfere with the more ‘fashionable’ or picturesque sections of the district.

The contrast illuminates the shortcomings of the town history both as literature and historical geography; but indicates the tenor of Prestonian self-justification. It is precisely this prosaic subjectivity which makes the histories a rich source. As Peter Clark asserts, ‘even fifth-rate urban historians sometimes have an important story to tell.’

Unlike many other towns with long-established traditions of urban chronicling, history writing in Preston did not blossom until the nineteenth century.

To people from the Continent, like the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Norwegians seem to be something of an urban puzzle. While crowding in towns and cities — about three-quarters of the population now live in urban settlements — the minds and lifestyles of Norwegians, their concept of the good life, are stubbornly rural. More or less the same applies to the Finns. The Danes, on the other hand, are conceived as quite the opposite, a fundamentally urban nation. The Swedes fall somewhere in between.

Differences in urban attitudes, as well as other diversities between the Nordic countries, are cherished among the inhabitants themselves, although most people are well aware that the culturally unifying elements are strong, too. The variations are real, however, and different urban experiences may partly account for them. Take the case of nineteenth-century urbanization, with examples extracted from the 1977 Trondheim Nordic history conference report on urbanization.

The annual number of completed theses which can be reasonably described as having urban themes has remained quite steady in recent years. In the lists of the Institute of Historical Research, for example, it is possible to identify 58 theses as having urban themes in the return for 1985, 41 theses in the 1986 return and 50 theses in that for 1987. It is true that in many cases such theses are not written as contributions to urban history specifically, but nevertheless they can provide much useful information and new insights on urban processes and town life even when the urban aspect of the study is incidental to the main theme. This is especially true of the selection made for this year's review which focuses more than usually on theses concerned directly or indirectly with aspects of urban society and politics in the past, and with a particular emphasis on the history of the urban working class. The review covers mostly theses completed in 1986–7 with some late additions from earlier years. It is based necessarily on the abstracts except for about a third of the theses noticed where it has been possible to examine the text. However, the aim of the review is to indicate the interest which a thesis might have for urban historians rather than to give a comprehensive assessment – which is probablynappropriate for unpublished work.