Agency, Custom and the English Corporate System

Abstract

Urban historians have long regarded the cities and boroughs of early modern England as ‘deeply rooted’ in a ‘complex of tradition’—a ‘complex’ that not only survived into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but ‘witnessed a renewed emphasis’.¹ This idea of the traditional urban community has informed the assumption, still common to local historiography, that, until the onset of urbanisation in the last decades of the seventeenth century, towns were ‘pre-modern’ rather than ‘early modern’.² More recently, it has been argued that urban ‘tradition’ was invented rather than immutable. Robert Tittler has noted that, in the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provincial townsmen constructed historical narratives that consolidated the autonomy of urban communities and the oligarchies that governed them.³ Whether in their compilation of civic genealogies, transcription of civic record, or display of civic artefacts, the historical energies of civic elites were living proof of Keith Thomas’s dictum that ‘the most common reason for invoking the past was to legitimise the prevailing distribution of power’.⁴ Jonathan Barry has discerned a later tradition of independent chronicling that differentiated (for example) inhabitants of Bristol from genteel ‘foreigners’, ‘urbane’ interlopers, and county antiquaries, the creation of civic memory contributing, in effect, to a sense of civic distinction.⁵