Abstract
In the past fifty years, the main proponents of early modern local identity have been, not surprisingly, local historians. In following H. P. R. Finberg’s famous charge to portray the ‘origin, growth, decline, and fall of a local community,’ local historians have produced numerous studies of particular villages, parishes, and hundreds.1 These studies have been invaluable in revealing what provincial life was like in a variety of places. While some historians have been content to focus solely on a few square miles, others — like Eamon Duffy and David Underdown — have endeavored to show how national events like the Reformation and Civil War played out in particular local communities.2 More recently, scholars have begun to rethink some of the basic terminology — like ‘identity’ and ‘community’ — on which Local Studies has been built. One point of emphasis has been to attempt to identify the boundaries of the local community. Suggestions range from the relatively large (county) to the medium-sized (hundred) to the small (parish or village).3 Others have eschewed ‘artificial’ administrative units in favor of more natural divisions like landscape or agricultural regions.4 Christopher Lewis, however, has argued that the single-community approach ignores the complexity of individual identity, which is actually best imagined as a series of ‘concentric circles’ that radiate outward.5
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Notes
H. P. R. Finberg, ‘The Local Historian and His Theme,’ in The Changing Face of English Local History, ed. R. C. Richardson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 115. Originally published as The local historian and his theme; an introductory lecture delivered at the University College of Leicester, 6 November 1952 (University College of Leicester, 1954).
Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); David Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
James Horn, for instance, has written convincingly of the integrity of the hundred (an administrative unit that encompasses several parishes) in Adapting to a New World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 78–84, 118–119. Many writers have asserted the existence of self-conscious gentry ‘county communities’ prior to and during the Civil War. See, for example, Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (New York: Longman, 1975).
See Alan Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London: Hambledon Press, 1985); and Joan Thirsk, Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History in England, 1500–1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
Christopher Lewis, Particular Places: An Introduction to English Local History (London: British Library, 1989), 35.
Charles Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English Local History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 48.
Everitt, Landscape and Community, 1. For more on the diversity and insularity (which titles I borrow for this section heading) of early modern English communities, see Everrit’s Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), 6–12.
Barry Coward, Social Change and Continuity: England, 1550–1750 (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), 14.
Ibid., 16.
Paul Coones and John Patten, The Penguin Guide to the Landscape of England and Wales (New York: Penguin, 1986), 36.
H. C. Darby, A New Historical Geography of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 275–287.
Richard Carew, Survey of Cornwall (Redruth, Cornwall: Tamar, 2000), 17–18.
T. D. Atkinson, Local Style in English Architecture (New York: Batsford, 1947). Atkinson gives the subject its most extensive treatment, but see also Darby, A New Historical Geography, 258–9; and Coones and Patten, The Penguin Guide to the Landscape, 223.
Charles Kightly, The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 14.
For a contemporary (and critical) account of this practice, see Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 2002), 213–215.
David Cressy, ‘The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England,’ in Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 32. See also David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).
A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 22.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal (Ware, Hertfordshire Wordsworth, 1995), 1.
See Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken (eds.), English Parish Drama (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996). These collected essays discuss a number of local-sponsored dramatic activities in areas as diverse as Chester, West Yorkshire, and the Thames Valley.
Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd edn. (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), xxii–xxiii.
Ibid., xxvii–xxviii.
Stephen Bending and Andrew McRae, The Writing of Rural England, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), xiii. Even in 1801, this figure still stood at about 72 percent (xiii).
By 1650, some 350,000 people lived in London, but that was still only 7.2 percent of the total population of England. Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, ‘Population Growth and Suburban Expansion,’ in London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (New York: Longman, 1986), 37–59 (39).
Tristram Risdon, Chorographical Description, or, Survey of the County of Devon (London: E. Curll, 1714), 2. Subsequent citations of Risdon are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text.
See John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648, 2nd edn. (New York: Longman, 1999), 132–151.
Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington’s influential Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) embodies this trend and its Introduction provides a detailed summary of its key developments.
Clive Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography,’ Journal of British Studies 19: 2 (1980): 54–73.
Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 13.
Ibid., 224.
See Alastair Bellamy, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1666 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Margaret Spufford, ‘The Pedlar, the Historian and the Folklorist: Seventeenth Century Communications,’ Folklore 105 (1994): 13–24 (16).
Beat Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1560 (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996), 247–249.
Ibid., 2, 257.
See Robert Tittler, ‘The Emergence of Urban Policy, 1536–58,’ in The Mid-Tudor Polity, c. 1540–1560, ed. Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), 74–93; ‘The End of the Middle Ages in the English Country Town,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 18:4 (1987): 471–487; and The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
See Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
David Dean, ‘Locality and Self in the Elizabethan Lottery of the 1560s,’ in Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 207–227 (208, 213). All examples of poesies later in the paragraph are from this article.
The numbers here and in the table above are compiled from the extensive list of geographical works provided by E. G. R. Taylor in the back of his Tudor Geography, 1485–1583 (London: Methuen, 1930) and Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, 1583–1650 (London: Methuen, 1934). The lists (and my calculations) include both manuscript and printed geographical works.
D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 6.
Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 12.
William Cunningham’s The Cosmological Glasse (1559) was the first English work to describe the new continental triangulation methods that were bringing a new, mathematical exactness to surveys. According to Peter Eden, by 1598 estate surveys ‘were a commonplace.’ Eden, ‘Three Elizabethan Estate Surveyors: Peter Kempe, Thomas Clerke, and Thomas Langdon,’ in English Map-Making, 1500–1650: Historical Essays, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: British Library, 1983), 68.
Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). McRae is especially interested in how travel contributed to new models of nationhood.
According to the DNB, King ‘was apprenticed on 3 Sept. 1630 as [a] painter … After carrying on business for some years at Chester, he removed to London, where in 1656 he published The Vale Royall of England …’ Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 31 (London: Smith, Elder, & co., 1892), 126.
Daniel King, The Vale-Royall of England. Or, The County Palatine of Chester Illustrated (London: John Streater, 1656), iv, iii. Subsequent citations of King are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text. King’s Vale-Royall is actually a combination of two earlier descriptions of the county by William Smith (c. 1584) and William Webb (1622), though King does add several pages of prefatory material and engravings of gentry arms.
John Chandler, Travels Through Stuart Britain: The Adventures of John Taylor the Water Poet (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), ix.
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30. See also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. Krishan Kumar provides a similar articulation: ‘It is common enough for nations, as for individuals, to develop a sense of themselves by a process of opposition and exclusion. What they are — French, German — is defined by what they are not — German, French. The content of national identity is more often than not a counter-image of what is seen as distinctive in the culture of the other nation or nations.’ Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ix.
John M. Adrian, ‘Itineraries, Perambulations, and Surveys: The Intersections of Chorography and Cartography in the Sixteenth Century,’ in Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bruce (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 29–46 (29).
Philip Symonson’s New Description of Kent appeared in 1596. John Norden published sections of his never-completed Speculum Britanniae on Middlesex (1593) and Hertfordshire (1598) while separate descriptions of Surrey, Essex, Sussex, and Hampshire remained in manuscript. Sampson Erdeswicke’s Certaine verie rare observations of Cumberlonde, Northumberlande … (1574), Reginald Bainbrigg’s Collections relative to the Antiquities of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham (1602), and Thomas Beckham’s Collections for the County of Suffolk (1602) were completed but remained in manuscript. According to Jack Simmons, several other county chorographies generally associated with the first half of the seventeenth century — Reyce’s Suffolk (1618), Burton’s Leicestershire (1622), Risdon’s Devon (1630), Smyth’s Berkeley (1639) — were actually all begun around the turn of the century, and thus in my view more properly belong to this earlier phase. Jack Simmons, English County Historians: First Series (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1978), 6–7.
William Burton, The Description of Leicestershire (London: John White, 1622). Subsequent citations of Burton are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text.
Thomas Gerard, A Survey of Dorsetshire (London: J. Wilcox, 1732), 8. Subsequent citations of Gerard are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text. The Survey was actually completed around 1633.
Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London: S.S. for John Jaggard, 1602), 54. Subsequent citations of Carew are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 299.
Ibid., 138. Helgerson is referring to William Dugdale’s voluminous Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656).
William Gray, Chorographia: or, a Survey of Newcastle Upon Tine (South Shields: George Nicholson, 1892), 20. Subsequent citations of Gray’s 1649 work are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text.
John Hooker, The Description of the Citie of Ercester, Vol. II (Devon and Cornwall Records Society, 1919–1947), 4.
William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent, ed. Richard Church (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970), 226, 187.
Wilhelm Bedwell, A Briefe Description of the towne of Tottenham Highcrosse in Middlesex (London: John Norton, 1631), E1. Subsequent citations of Bedwell are from this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses within the text.
Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 66.
James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Neville Kirk (ed.), Northern Identities: Historical Interpretations of ‘The North’ and ‘Northernness’ (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 5.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 38. For more on increasing realism and native elements in English pastoral, see John Barrell and John Bull (eds.), The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 141–145.
For Michelle O’Callaghan, the pastoral critiques of Drayton, Wither, Browne, and others amount not only to locally based critiques, but to an alternative ‘shepherd’s nation.’ Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheard’s Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. Merritt E. Lawlis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 68. Subsequent page numbers will be provided in the text.
At one point, Deloney even has the King say ‘that no Trade in all the Land was so much to bee cherished and maintained as this, which … may well be called The life of the poor’ (47). For an extended reading on the above episode as an instance of contemporary social protest on the part of Deloney, see Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 51–71.
The most probable date is 1612. There is also evidence that Dover ‘improved or re-created’ existing games rather than starting from scratch. See Christopher Whitfield, Robert Dover and the Cotswold Games (Evesham, Worcs.: The Journal Press, 1962), 13–15.
bid., 19.
All poem quotations and page numbers derive from the edition of Annalia Dubrensia published in E. R. Vyvyan, Dover’s Cotswold Games (London: Tabard Press, 1970).
Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 194.
John Stow, Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1960), 115.
As A Homily Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion (1570) puts it: ‘it is most evident that kings, queens, and other princes … are ordained of God, are to be obedyed and honoured of their subjects; that such subjects as are disobedient or rebellious against their princes disobey God and procure their owne damnation’ (211). Ed. Ronald B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).
Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 107–147. R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 502.
See Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth Century Controversy Over Disorder and Decay in the Universe (London: Cass, 1966).
Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Grove Press, 1960), xv–xvi.
Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, Vol. VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 621.
J. D. Marshall, The Tyranny of the Discrete: A Discussion of the Problems of Local History in England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 75.
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© 2011 John M. Adrian
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Adrian, J.M. (2011). Local Consciousness in Renaissance England. In: Local Negotiations of English Nationhood, 1570–1680. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307216_2
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