Early Modern London 1550–1700 (original) (raw)

Defining the Period and its Historiography 'Early modern London' is not easily defined precisely in historical or historiographical terms. It is normally taken as something less than 'Tudor and Stuart London' (1485-1714), and even the period 1500-1700 may be cut down: historians of the 'long eighteenth century' encroach on the latter part, while the early sixteenth century suffers comparative neglect, except from historians of religion and of international trade. It is not difficult to find reasons, in events or in the kinds and quantities of evidence on which historians draw, for an historiographical break in the mid-sixteenth century, and another in the late seventeenth, and the majority of recent works accept one or both of these. The Henrician and Edwardian reformations and the collapse of the Antwerp market could be seen as marking the end of two distinctive episodes of, respectively, religious observance and economic activity, after which new patterns and practices prevailed; the inception of civil registration in the 1530s and heightened concern with poverty and vagrancy from the 1540s provide both the documentation and the contemporary context for a new kind of demographic and social analysis. Similarly, in the later seventeenth century, the last plague epidemic and the destruction by fire of the greater part of the old city of London mark an epoch in the epidemiological and topographical history of the capital, while, less obviously, the relations between the city and national government took a new tum with the Restoration, the Revolution of 1688, and the financial revolution. By the later seventeenth century, a number of fundamental changes had taken place in the capital's economy, effective government, and appearance, and a new kind of urban, metropolitan culture was beginning to emerge. There is thus a good case for taking an extended 'Tawney's century'-Reformation to Restoration or Revolution-as an approximation of 'early modem London'. This construction of the period, together with a perception that the early sixteenth century, and the later seventeenth, are different and may be treated differently, underlies much of the recent historiography. Most studies dealing with London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries either start and end within the period 1550-1660, or start in the mid-to late-seventeenth century and run into the early eighteenth. Few works genuinely attempt to cover the whole of either century, let alone the period 1500-1700; even those that do usually concentrate on part of the period. Breaking up the period in this way, however, can at times ignore the continuities that do exist, and the fact that the new metropolitan society grew out of the old. Several themes run through the period 1550-1700 and beyond: the trajectory of London's dramatic demographic growth, which began in the early sixteenth century at least and continued, without the marked slowdown once suggested, through the later seventeenth century and into the eighteenth and beyond; the paramount importance of overseas trade to London's economy; the city's continued domination of internal and external trade; the undiminished role of religious belief and affiliation in social and political life in the capital. More links could perhaps be made between periods and aspects currently treated separately. Publications on early modem London range from brief articles to full-length monographs, but tend to focus on a limited topic as well as period. There is no adequate general history of London in this period, whether published in the last twenty years or not. Neither of the two promised volumes, on Tudor London and seventeenth-century London, in the Secker and Warburg series, has appeared. There have been several long-span histories of London (e.g. 1.10), but they have to be brief in their coverage of anyone period and tend to be selective. On the other hand, London history gets into many more works than have 'London' in their titles, simply because the topic