Abstract
Theorists interested in urbanisation believe that the process involves more than simple increase in size and that what is important is not a pyramid locating towns in terms of wealth and size but the development of a hierarchy. For a pyramid to become a hierarchy more is required. A hierarchy implies more than simple ranking. It requires more than the replacement of one settlement by another as, for example, Totnes slowly lost ground to Dartmouth as the Dart became choked with tin mine debris. It requires the development of an interlocking structure in which one town services another. The different levels should not simply measure riches but also functions, so that specialisation at every level links individual towns to those above and below them. Goods would thus not simply pass through a single town to the immediate consumer but pass up and down the hierarchy through a number of towns.
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Notes
W. B. Stephens, Seventeenth Century Exeter: A Study of Industrial and Commercial Development 1625–1688, (Exeter, 1958), p. 13–14, 43–4.
W. G. Hoskins, Industry, Trade and People in Exeter 1688–1800 with Special Reference to the Serge Industry (Manchester, 1935), p. 13.
D. M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979), pp. 126–7.
In A. D. Dyer, Decline and Growth in English Towns 1400–1640 (Basingstoke, 1991). In his rank order from top to bottom Lincoln*, Salisbury, Boston*, Beverley*, Canterbury, Winchester, Bury St Edmunds, Gloucester*, Hereford*, Ely, Northampton, Scarborough, Stamford*, Newark, Ludlow, Southampton, Pontefract, Lichfield, Newbury, Huntingdon, Hadleigh, Wells, Bridgnorth, Bridgewater, Barking, Chichester, Peterborough, Maidstone, Don-caster, Cirencester, Louth . * means rank declined 1377–1524. The others either improved or the information is missing.
Howard Carter, The Towns of Wales: A Study in Urban Geography (Cardiff, 1965), p. 35.
Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), p. 11.
J. K. Fedorowicz, England’s Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Study in Anglo-Polish Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 1, 14–16, 20, 50–2, 61.
Eric Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modem England. (Manchester, 1988), pp. 49, 52–4.
For a comparison of prices in Worcester and Winchester see A. D. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester, 1973), pp. 49–51.
J. M. Bestall and D. V. Fowkes (eds), Chesterfield Wills and Inventories, Derbyshire Record Society vol. 1 1977, p. xxii.
W. B. Stephens, Seventeenth Century Exeter: A Study of Industrial and Commercial Development 1625–1688 (Exeter, 1958), p. xix.
L. M. Cullen, Anglo-Irish Trade 1660–1800 (Manchester, 1968), p. 13.
Michael Lynch, ‘Urbanization and urban networks in seventeenth-century Scotland’, Scottish Economic and Social History 12 (1992), p. 32.
J. A. Chartres, Internal Trade in England 1500–1700 (London, 1977), pp. 20–1.
John Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), p. 2.
Michael Lynch, ‘Whatever happened to the medieval burgh’ in Scottish Economic and Social History 9 (1989).
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© 1996 Sybil M. Jack
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Jack, S.M. (1996). Network and Hierarchy. In: Towns in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24956-5_10
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