The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700

The Widening Gate

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor

1. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, by Caroline Walker Bynum

2. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century, by Walter Benn Michaels

3. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, by David Lloyd

4. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, by Stephen Greenblatt

5. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, by François Hartog, translated by Janet Lloyd

6. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, by Leah S. Marcus

7. The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry, by Richard C. McCoy

8. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, edited by Lee Patterson

9. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare, by Jonathan Crewe

10. Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext, by Samuel Kinser

11. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre, by Adrian Frazier

12. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, by Alan Sinfield

13. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, by Debora Kuller Shuger

14. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, by Gillian Brown

15. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450—1700, by David Harris Sacks

16. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest, by Jeffrey Knapp

17. Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican- American Social Poetics, by José E. Limón

18. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, translated by Emily McVarish

19. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600, by Randolph Stam and Loren Partridge

The Widening Gate

Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700

David Harris Sacks

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1991 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sacks, David Harris, 1942-

The widening gate: Bristol and the Atlantic economy, 1450—1700 / David Harris Sacks.

p. cm.—(The New historicism; 15)

A Centennial book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07148-4 (alk. paper)

1. Bristol (England)—Economic conditions. 2. Capitalism—

England—Bristol—History. 3. Bristol (England)—Commerce—

History. I. Title. II. Series.

HC258.B76S23 1991

330.9423'93—dc20 90-19878

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @

For Eleanor

Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Closed Arena and the Open Gate

PART I Opening the Way, 1450-1650

CHAPTER 1 Feats of Merchandise

CHAPTER 2 Mere Merchants

CHAPTER 3 Organizing the Society

PART 2 In a Worshipful State, 1450-1650

CHAPTER 4 The Navel of the World

CHAPTER 5 The Sanctification of Power

CHAPTER 6 Little Businesses

CHAPTER 7 Looking Backward

CHAPTER 8 A Shoemakers’ Holiday

CHAPTER 9 Registering the Pilgrimage

CHAPTER 10 The Spirit World

Conclusion: The Widening Gate of Capitalism

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. William Smith’s View of Bristol, 1568 2

2. Early Modern Bristol’s Coat of Arms 3

3. Bristol’s Ecclesiastical Geography, ca. 1500 138

4. Robert Ricart’s Plan of Bristol at Its Foundation 144

5. The Swearing of the New Mayor at Michaelmas in the Late Fifteenth Century 176

6. James Millerd’s View of Bristol, 1673 354

Tables

1. Nonsweet Wine Trade, 1400-1500 22

2. Cloth Exports, 1400-1500 23

3. Cloth Exports, 1500-1561 26

4. Nonsweet Wine Imports to Bristol, 1480-1547 27

5. Value of Goods Subject to Ad Valorem Duties Entered

at Bristol in the Reign of Henry VIII 28

6. Value of Bristol’s European Trade, 1575—76 39

7. Bristol’s Customs Payments, 1624-25 42

8. Distribution of Occupations among Bristol Apprentices,

1532-1542 and 1626-1636 58

9. John Smythe’s Trading Profits, 19 January 1540 to

27 September 1543 74

10. John Smythe’s Profits and Losses on Sales,

24 March 1540 to 27 September 1543 75

11. John Smythe’s List of "Such as be marchauntes and hath

the sporonge of marchauntes I thinck not to be denyed

to be of the mystery," circa 1550 98

12. Bristolians in the Leather Industries (Production and

Secondary Use), 1532-1542 and 1626-1636 108

13. Bristolians in the Textile Industries (Production and

Secondary Use), 1532-1542 and 1626-1636 110

14. Bristolians in the Metalworking Industries, 1532—1542

and 1626—1636 112

15. Bristolians in Major Commercial and Entrepreneurial Occupations, 1532-1542 and 1626-1636 115

16. Occupations into Which Bristolians and Non-Bristolians Were Apprenticed in Bristol, 1532-1542 and 1626-1636 120

17. Percentage of Freemen Admitted to Leading

Entrepreneurial Occupations by Patrimony, Redemption, and Marriage, 1607-1651 124

18. Geographical Distribution of Wealth in Bristol, 1524 148

19. Social Geography of Bristol, 1545 150

20. Occupations of Bristol Sheriffs, 1500-1600 165

21. Occupations of Members of the Common Council, 1605-1642 166

22. Occupations of Bristol Mayors, 1500-1642 168

23. Occupations of Bristol Aidermen, 1605-1642 169

24. Occupations of the Common Councillors Present and Voting on 29 September 1654 256

25. Colonial Traders among the Common Councillors of

29 September 1654 257

26. Bristol Traders with the American Colonies, 1654-1656 258

27. Merchant Venturers Trading with the American Colonies, 1654-1656 260

28. Occupational Background of the Disputants in the Parliamentary Election of 1654 272

29. Emigration and the English Economy, Michaelmas 1654 to Michaelmas 1678 280

30. Emigration and Tobacco Prices, 1655-1678 284

Preface

Bristol is the city that John Cabot sailed from and Thomas Chatterton dreamed, that Hugh Latimer preached to and Oliver Cromwell seized, that entertained Parliaments in the Middle Ages and rioted for Reform in the nineteenth century. Since the Norman Conquest, it has always had an important place in English history, experiencing events and contributing to developments that stirred the nation. What follows is an account of its connection with one small piece of that history, the rise of the Atlantic economy in the early modern period and the accompanying transformation of English economic ideas and practices. But this book is not about economics alone. It is grounded on the belief that we can no more abstract the economy from politics, culture, and society than we can separate intentional human action from thought and judgment. It also rejects the notion that the life of a city like Bristol could ever be treated as a self-contained whole. Instead it views such cities as social organisms living in close relationship with their surroundings. What gives them their structure is the set of internal codes they carry. And what enables them to survive is their ability to adapt to or transform their environment, which itself is always changing.

It was beyond my capacity to write this kind of history encyclopedically. Even if the evidence necessary to define every relevant interrelationship had survived—it has not—I could not have distilled it all into words. Hence in place of a comprehensive treatment analyzing every aspect of Bristol’s history in depth, I offer an extended essay, one that attempts to turn what I have been able to learn about early modern Bristol into a coherent story. Given the city’s importance in this period, a number of such stories were possible, each with different terminal dates and a different emphasis. But the one that interested me most was Bristol’s transition from medieval trading center to Atlantic entrepot. This development has important implications for our understanding of the growth of capitalism in England, for it allows us to see how merchant capital—that weak limb of capitalism, according to many scholars¹—fit into the social and political order of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and helped to transform it. This book, then, is an essay in the local history of capitalism, viewing this historical development from the perspective of a provincial town in the west of England whose traders long had looked to the Atlantic for their livelihoods. As such, it centers the story of this great transformation far from the financial, commercial, and manufacturing capitals of Europe where other important processes of economic, social, intellectual, and political change were under way.

Ever since Marx, the history of capitalism has been a central subject for all students of early modern European history. But its study has oscillated among only a limited number of established positions. On the one hand, there has been a lengthy debate—primarily among Marxists—about whether the transition to capitalism arises principally from internal contradictions within the feudal order or from the dissolution of feudal relationships produced by the so-called commercial revolution. On the other, there has been an equally lengthy debate—this time primarily between Marxists and non-Marxists such as Max Weber and his followers—about whether we should look for the origins of capitalism principally in material changes in the economy or in spiritual changes in mentalité and moral outlook. Fruitful as these controversies have been in unearthing new knowledge, they seem forever to repeat themselves, despite employing hitherto unknown facts and more and more refined terminologies. Such repetition generally signals a problem less of inadequate evidence than of conceptualization. A hidden assumption or a false dichotomization makes resolution of the debate impossible.

The history of Bristol between 1450 and 1700 offers a way out of this dilemma, since developments there defy conventionally accepted distinctions between internal and external forces. In their place, the evidence reveals a strong pattern of reciprocal relationships between the city and the wider world that shaped contemporary outlooks and in turn were affected by them. Bristol’s story, then, provided a good opportunity to rethink some of the heretofore unresolved issues posed by the development of modern capitalism. This book is the result. It does not purport to give a final answer to any question, but if it has succeeded in casting some fresh light on its subject I shall be pleased.

Because this history seeks to explain an economic transformation, its starting place is the central economic fact of Bristol’s fifteenth-century history: England’s loss of Bordeaux in 1453. Thereafter the narrative unfolds by examining the complex interplay of economic, social, cultural, and political changes that followed this event. Part 1 traces the rivalry between Bristol’s merchants and shopkeepers that emerged as the city adapted to a new pattem of trade in the sixteenth century. Part 2 looks to the prevailing patterns of culture in the city in the later Middle Ages, focusing especially on ideas of community and authority. It considers how these concepts and the practices associated with them changed during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In Part 3, the story moves into the second half of the seventeenth century, concentrating on the 1660s and 1670s, to explore how the peculiar structural features of the city’s life that had emerged in the Elizabethan and early Stuart era came undone as the growth of the Atlantic economy went hand in hand with the establishment of a new kind of politics and prompted the development of new ways of economic thought and action. The book concludes by considering the state of social and economic understanding in Bristol at the end of the seventeenth century.

The approach I have followed has meant giving primacy to the longterm economic history of Bristol while omitting to mention the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution and relegating the Reformation and the Civil War to a secondary position. The danger is that these important occurrences will therefore be thought of as no more than effects of the economic history recounted here. Nothing could be further from my intention. The story told by this book is one of human choices, not of determinism. But to develop its theme, many important subjects have had to be presented only as subordinate, not independent, topics. Other books written for different purposes surely will give those subjects the central position and full treatment they deserve, and in such works my own subject no doubt will be mentioned only in passing.

A word should perhaps be said about the relation of this volume to cultural poetics. This term has been used primarily in studies of literary culture. What has it to do with a book about urban history in which reliance on the techniques and scholarly equipment of the social scientist is so evident? Or, to put this point the other way around, why should a work concerned with a form of cultural interpretation depend so much on statistical tables? How can they aid, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s words, in studying the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiring into the relations among these practices?² These questions are especially grounded in the recent development of economic history as a field. In the 1930s, as E J. Fisher has pointed out,

the main requirement of an economic historian was that he should be able to read, since most of his sources were literary. The archetype of the learned monograph consisted of a thin rivulet of text meandering through wide and lush meadows of footnotes. … Today, the first requirement of an economic historian is that he should be able to count, for his materials are largely statistical. The archetype of our modern fashion is one in which a stream, often a less than limpid stream, of text tumbles from table to table and swirls around graph after graph.³

As the scope of economic history has widened, and as its reliance on economic theory has grown, this assessment has become almost a truism. Economic history is now more properly denominated quantitative history or, as Robert Fogel has called it, new economic history—history, as it were, by equation.⁴ This highly sophisticated approach has generated many new and important insights into the study of economic laws and practices. But for all its technical brilliance, it has not solved the historian’s main problem, which remains interpretive, not statistical. The figures having been collected, what do they mean? Given the time, the place, and the enterprise, should we have expected the results we found, or do they require further explanation? As always, the most important questions call upon our understanding and not just our analytical skills, so arriving at a satisfactory account of our subject demands comprehension of the milieu and the motives of the participants, and not just measurement of structures and conjunctures.⁵ To grasp the meaning and significance of economic history requires a careful attention to the changing norms of the market and their relation to broad developments in religion, society, and politics that the term cultural poetics captures very effectively. Put another way, economic history demands attention to literary documents and cultural artifacts as well as statistical sources, and an ability to read and observe as well as to count.

What, then, of the connection of this book to the so-called New Historicism itself? As used among literary critics, this term usually refers to an interest in historically grounded studies of ideology and power in cultural production. For many historians, however, the concept of historicism stands for two seemingly contradictory—and equally noxious —notions. On the one hand, it refers to a form of determinism which argues that history reveals discoverable rhythms and patterns to human life or is governed by discernible laws of social development. On the other, it refers to a form of relativism. The truths it unearths are time-bound; they depend on differences in culture and on the particular historical situation in which events occur or institutions are found. When put together, these two notions lead to a highly artificial view in which each period is reified into a self-standing historical object with its own spirit or principle of organization that fits into a deterministic evolutionary scheme. The end result is a necessary progress of ideas, an iron logic of modes, a forced march of social development in discrete stages.

Nevertheless, it would be impossible to study history without accepting some elements of the historicist’s view. The foundation of historical scholarship, as Marc Bloch argues in The Historian’s Craft, is that it is about human beings living in time. But this simple truth, which every working historian would probably accept, is no mere truism, since historical time understood in Bloch’s sense is not an abstraction—not a simple unit of measurement—but, as Bloch says, a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field in which they become intelligible. Accordingly, it demonstrates continuity, in that one event may lead to others, and it reveals difference, in that periods or cultures are shown to have self-standing characters arising and disappearing in the uninterrupted sequence of the ages. But even though a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time, a given moment can either unite a particular phenomenon with or separate it from what had come before and what would follow. For historians, then, the "very raison d’etre" of scholarship is to be able to decide, as Bloch says, to what extent… the connection which the flow of time sets between two consecutive periods predominates or fails to predominate over the differences born out of the same flow[.] Should the knowledge of earlier periods be considered indispensable or superfluous for the understanding of the later? This view of historical time transforms historicism into a methodology, a source of research questions rather than of metaphysical certainties.⁶

Employed in this heuristic fashion, historicism of Bloch’s kind simultaneously recognizes the importance of historical causality in shaping events and the possibility that their consequences might have been otherwise. This book proceeds from a similar perspective. It aims to account for historical change without assuming its inevitability or explaining away its significance. It rests on the conviction that a culture is not simply a collection of norms and values but a complex and continuously altering arrangement of beliefs and practices governing the whole of social life. This kind of culture is neither monolithic nor uncontested. As Stephen Greenblatt has stressed, every aspect of it involves negotiation: a subtle, elusive set of exchanges, a network of trades and trade-offs, a jostling of competing representations that takes place in time and that is repeated and developed across time.⁷ To grasp the nature of this process requires attention to nuances of meaning, to caesu- rae in meter and to ambiguities of manner in what is said and done. Although many New Historicists will find this book concerned with issues far different from their usual fare and employing methods not normally encountered in cultural studies, and others no doubt will disagree with its emphasis on contingent events and human choices and intentions, all should recognize a reliance on common assumptions about the importance of historical understanding in interpreting cultural processes.

This kind of historical understanding proceeds from what might be called a position of methodological realism, a sense of the past as independent of ourselves, a sense that it is capable of teaching us something about the possibilities of human life that we can discover in no other way. Those of us who study history in this fashion write as though we are describing and analyzing places we might actually have visited. Our professed goal is to illuminate what happened to the people who lived there, to see how the events that affected them unfolded, and to account for why they took the course they did. Hence, our scholarly disputes normally are more about whether we have gotten the story right than about the theories we have employed in reaching our conclusions. We worry about anachronism, about distinguishing between our ways of living and those followed by the societies we study. Some practitioners of this approach even try to vanish before their subjects, as Steven Ozment has said.⁸

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to treat the past as a metaphysical entity, cut off from the present, existing timelessly in independence of our minds and methods—something we can actually recover whole whenever sufficient evidence has survived. What we know of any past culture or society is available to us because of the remnants it has left behind: its texts, its documents, its artifacts. The significance of these items becomes apparent only by virtue of the questions we ask and the techniques we use to answer them. It depends on interpretation, an always daunting task that we would not escape even if by some miraculous means we could be transported in time to view history as it happened. We would still find ourselves, as do historians of contemporary events, translating back and forth from our own social and cultural frameworks to what we can understand of the meanings and purposes of our subjects. Our questions and techniques arise because of our particular interests in the past, which depend on our motives—often ideological as well as academic—for studying it. These in turn vary according to history and therefore according to our relation to the past itself. In consequence, we can never actually see the world through the eyes of our subjects, although we sometimes insist that we should try. We can only imagine how it might have appeared to them, depending as best we can on our critical self-awareness to correct the distortions created by our biases and prejudices. But we can never erase ourselves entirely from what we study. Nor should we want to.⁹

It is never easy to say where a project such as the present one found its origin. In one sense, it began in the late Professor W. K. Jordan’s graduate seminar at Harvard, in which I wrote a paper on Bristol in the Civil War. This research so intrigued me that upon its completion I made it the proposed subject of my dissertation. But my first foray into English archives taught me a salutary lesson. Nearly everything I had concluded about Bristol from printed sources quickly came undone when I saw my first manuscripts, and the social and political divisions I had established in my seminar paper turned out to be illusory. What had seemed a plausible way to cover the facts I had gleaned from the books in Widener Library could in no way account for the evidence I had now discovered. Gradually, however, a new understanding emerged, one beginning with the perception that early modern English cities were, not self-contained social organisms, but places open to the wider world of national and even international affairs. My Ph.D. thesis, completed under Professor Wallace MacCaffrey’s direction and subsequently published in a dissertation series, explored the implications of this view of urban society for the lives and outlooks of the Bristolians, never reaching the Civil War period about which I had first intended to write.¹⁰ But using 1640 as a terminal date created something of a false sense of finality to the story, since events in the late 1630s seemed to settle all the outstanding political and economic issues of Bristol’s history in the later sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. Of course this was only an artifact of the chronological limits of the study; the Civil War and its aftermath almost immediately undid nearly all that happened. Upon completing my dissertation, then, I was left with the dilemma of how to deal with this awkward fact.

The solution came somewhat serendipitously in response to an inquiry from Bernard Bailyn, who had read my dissertation soon after its completion. He was interested in Bristol’s role in American immigration during the later seventeenth century and wanted to know something about its system for registering indentured servants bound for the American plantations. During my research I had made some notes about the origins of this system in 1654 but had given little thought to them at the time. When looked at closely, however, this registration scheme posed a genuine puzzle, since, as is argued in Chapter 8, the remedy it instituted simply did not fit the crime it claimed to punish. What, then, was this ordinance about and what had provoked it? Discovery of the case that had brought the Bristol Common Council to action began to reveal what was at stake, since the main targets of the registration scheme turned out to be interlopers in overseas trade and sectaries as well. In 1654 the activities of these individuals were highlighted at the calling of the first Protectorate Parliament, the elections for which in Bristol had produced victory for conservative merchants and outraged protest from the city’s radicals and sectaries. Many of these radicals turned out to be important colonial traders who frequently supplied indentured labor to the American market. In this light the ordinance and the register seemed designed less to protect servants than to control the traders; it was not so much a mechanism of economic regulation as a weapon of political attack.

Once I had reached this conclusion, much else began to become clear about the role of American trade in Bristol’s life. The nature of the American market, I realized, made it impossible to regulate trade with it under the rules on which Bristol’s major overseas merchants had previously relied. As a result, their victories in the late 1630s were incapable of coping with the new economic order taking shape among the colonial traders. I knew then that I had a solution to the dilemma posed by my dissertation, and I began pursuing the implications of my findings where they would lead. This book is the outcome.

A NOTE ON DATES AND QUOTATIONS

Unless otherwise indicated, all dates are given Old Style, except that the year is taken to begin on 1 January. Spelling and punctuation in the quotations follow the original, but I have expanded the abbreviations.

Acknowledgments

Although this book is about the beginnings of impersonal exchange in the modern market economy, the history of its research and writing testifies to the persistence in our own age of more venerable traditions of generosity, friendship, and support. I am especially grateful for the financial aid that has made this book possible. Early in my training I received assistance from a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and from Harvard University. Later a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard funded my first research trip to British archives. Additional research was furthered in part by other generous grants from Harvard, from the American Philosophical Society, and from the Folger Shakespeare Library. In recent years, Reed College has also helped with summer grants which have made possible the purchase of important research materials.

I also want to thank the staffs of the many libraries and collections that I visited in the course of writing this book. Throughout the project, my labors were immeasurably lightened by the kindness, skill, and knowledge of the archivists of the City of Bristol, especially Elizabeth Ralph and her successor Mary E. Williams. They have made the Bristol Record Office one of the best depositories in Britain in which to pursue local history. I am also indebted to the Treasurer of the Society of Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol and to the Vicar of St. Mary, Red- cliffe, Bristol, for permission to consult and quote from papers in their care and for courtesies extended to me during my visits. Grateful thanks are due as well to the staffs of the Bristol Central Library, the Bristol City Museum, the University of Bristol Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Friends’ House Library, the Library of the Institute of Historical Research, the British Library, and the Public Record Office in Britain; the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, the Houghton Library, the Harvard-Andover Library, the Law School Library, and the Kress Library of Business and Economics at Harvard University; the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the New York Public Library; the University of Wisconsin libraries in Milwaukee and Madison; the library of the University of Massachusetts—Boston; and the Reed College Library.

I am also pleased to acknowledge the permissions I have received to use portions of my earlier work in the present volume. Chapter 4 employs material from The Demise of the Martyrs: The Feasts of St. Clement and St. Katherine in Bristol, 1400—1600, which was published originally in Social History 11, 2 (May 1986): 141-69. Chapter 5 depends in part on my essay Celebrating Authority in Bristol, 1475— 1640, which appeared in Urban Life in the Renaissance, pp. 187—223, edited by Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissmann and published in 1989 by the University of Delaware Press for the University of Maryland’s Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies. Portions of the Introduction, Chapters 6 and 7, and the Conclusion draw on and reproduce material from my article The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol’s ‘Little Businesses,’ 1625-1641, which first appeared in Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, no. 110 (February 1986): 69-105 (World Copyright: The Past and Present Society, Oxford). Several illustrations also are included in this book with the generous consent of those who hold the originals. Figure 1 is from Sloane MS 2596, f. 77 and appears by permission of the British Library. Figures 4 and 5 come from Robert Ricart’s The Maire of Bristowe Is Kalendar, Bristol Record Office, MS 04270 (1), ff. 5V and 152v respectively, and appear by permission of the City of Bristol Record Office.

My deepest thanks are owed to the many teachers, colleagues, friends, and family who have stood by and guided me as I worked and reworked the ideas and arguments put forward in this book. As an undergraduate I had the benefit of studying with an extraordinary group of teachers at Brooklyn College, who together taught me what it meant to analyze, argue, think, and learn. I especially want to mention the late Raymond de Roover, who gave me my first training in late me dieval and early modern economic history, and Madeline Robinton, who introduced me to the study of British history. I am forever grateful to them. In many respects this book is the product of their teaching. At Harvard I was equally blessed. This book first took form under the tutelage of W. K. Jordan, from whose wide learning, sympathetic encouragement, and kindly supervision I benefited during the early stages of my career. After Professor Jordan’s retirement and death, my work was directed by Wallace MacCaffrey, who saw my dissertation through all of its stages. His probing questions, careful attention to detail, and generous criticism not only saved me from many errors but led my researches in a number of new directions which have occupied me since I completed my doctoral degree. I am very pleased that we have remained in close touch over the years, and I want to thank him here for his continued wise advice, warm friendship, and generous support. Only those of us who have worked closely as students with Wallace can truly know the breadth of his learning and the depth of his judgment. He has always seemed to me the perfect exemplar of a gentleman and scholar. A third figure among my teachers at Harvard also played an important role in shaping my understanding: the late Elliott Perkins, with whom I did not study in a formal sense, nonetheless taught me immensely important lessons about the close relationship of teaching to scholarship and about the larger ethical purposes of an academic career. I shall always cherish the friendship and moral support he gave me while I was a graduate student and for many years afterwards. I am not alone in remembering the warmth, hospitality, and human decency he and his wife Mary always managed to show when they were most needed.

I benefited over the years from the interest Bernard Bailyn has taken in my work and from the late John Clive’s friendly regard for my progress. I am also grateful for the thoughtful questions, warm encouragement, and wise advice of John Brewer and Simon Schama. I must thank Carole Shammas and Jonathan Barry as well. At crucial stages in my work, each of them stepped in to help me obtain otherwise inaccessible source materials. My former colleagues and students in History and Literature at Harvard and my present ones in History at Reed College also deserve acknowledgment. They provided the first sounding board for many of my ideas, and their encouraging responses gave me the impetus to go forward. In addition, I want to thank the scholars who attended my presentations of portions of my work at conferences and other occasions, including meetings of the Social Science History Association, the North American Conference on British Studies, the Cambridge Seminar on Early Modern History, and the Harvard History and Literature Staff Seminar. Their comments and questions helped sharpen the focus and extend the perspective of the present work..

Numerous friends and colleagues have read my work in whole or in part, and their advice, judgment, and criticism have been of great assistance to me. Along with those already mentioned, I especially want to thank Harold J. Cook, Natalie Zemon Davis, Sigmund Diamond, Stephen Diamond, Stephen Greenblatt, Harold J. Hanham, Clive Holmes, the late Roger Howell, Richard Marius, J. G. A. Pocock, Lawrence Stone, and Stephen White. In this connection, the readers for the University of California Press deserve special mention. Paul Seaver’s and A. J. Slavin’s reader’s reports were models of insightful criticism, as was the written commentary I received from Buchanan Sharp, who read the manuscript as a member of the Press’s editorial committee. Their remarks and suggestions for revision have without a doubt helped make this a better book. I also want to thank the editors at the University of California Press itself for the care they have taken with my manuscript and for easing my burdens as I have seen the book through its last stages. Stephen Greenblatt and Doris Kretschmer had faith in this project from the time they first encountered it, and I am certain it would not have appeared in its present form without their patience and confidence. Once the final version was submitted, Jane-Ellen Long stepped in as copy editor. I especially thank her for the numerous improvements she has made in the manuscript. Rose Vekony gave the book the benefit of her expert skills in seeing it through the press.

Finally I must say a few words about my greatest debts of all. My dissertation, out of which this present volume has grown, was dedicated to my mother and the memory of my father. That dedication inadequately acknowledges the care and love my parents always gave to me and that I still receive. I hope that this book answers in some small measure their aspirations for me. The present dedication is to my wife, Eleanor, and it too cannot fully acknowledge all she has contributed. Nor can it fully express my gratitude to her. Suffice it to say that without her love and faith, The Widening Gate would never have been completed. I must also note that she has commented on every one of its many drafts and that much of the statistical work presented here would have been impossible without her assistance. Throughout this book’s long gestation she has been its most faithful friend and helpful critic. Her sharp eye for detail has saved me from innumerable errors of omission and commission, and her excellent ear for the English language has helped remove many infelicities and inconsistencies in my prose. This book is not just for Eleanor; it is Eleanor’s as well as mine.

David Harris Sacks

January 1991

Introduction: The Closed Arena and the Open Gate

The sixteenth century was a great age of mapmaking, and among the many surviving examples, city maps are especially common. An aerial view shows us a city, usually fortified, with high church steeples rising majestically above the rooftops and numerous houses crowded tightly together along narrow streets. Around it are hills and forests and fields, in which few buildings or other marks of human settlement can be seen. The city appears as a bounded world, an artifact of man rising up out of the order of nature, rather like the megaliths of the ancient Britons that rise up as from nowhere on the Salisbury plain. These maps seem to show us, in the words of Oscar Handlin, self-contained entities walled off from their surroundings, each one a separate universe… whole and entire of itself.¹

Among the city maps drawn in the sixteenth century is one of Bristol dating from 1568 (Figure l).² It depicts just such a compact place. Although some churches and dwellings are to be observed in the suburbs, its medieval walls and its powerful castle, protected by a moat, still dominate it and define its form. Its stone churches and red-roofed houses show us an environment created by human hands, standing apart from the green fields and woodlands of the nearby countryside. It appears very much its own world.

But we also see two other characteristic, if sometimes neglected, features of this geography: its highways and its waterways. Moving out from the city are roads to Wales and the city of Gloucester to the north, to the cities of Wells and Bath to the south, and to the great metropolis

Fig. 1. William Smith’s View of Bristol, 1568. (British Library, Sloane MS 2596, f. 77. By permission of the British Library.)

of London to the east, linking Bristol with the rest of the kingdom. Even more prominent are the rivers Avon and Frome, on which the city is situated. Together they form the city’s harbor, as we can see from the tall- masted ships docked along the Back and Key. These rivers were as much a part of Bristol’s human geography as were its walls, buildings, and roads. The Frome, as we find it here, was itself the handiwork of man, its channel having been remade by the citizens of the thirteenth century in order to expand the number of docking places near the city center.³ The Avon with its enormous tides, which emptied the channel twice a day, was the principal avenue of communication for the city, leading through Hungroad and Kingroad, at which ships docked as they waited for wind and tide, to the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and thence to the wider world of commerce beyond the seas.

The draftsman of this first authentic map of Bristol was William Smith, a scholar primarily devoted to heraldry, an art of symbols, not to mapmaking.⁴ In the upper right-hand comer of his carefully measured & laid in Platforme view of Bristol, he gives us an example of

Fig. 2. Early Modern Bristol’s Coat of Arms. (Detail from James Millerd’s View of Bristol, 1673.)

this other talent. There, in what would be the northeast quadrant of the map, we find tricked out the arms of the city of Bristol. These arms, which also appeared on Bristol’s common seal, were very much the mark of the city’s status as a corporation, a union of head and body for common action in pursuit of common interests and goals made possible by the express grant of liberties and franchises from the Crown.⁵ They signaled at one and the same time the city’s life as an independent community and its subordination to the authority of the king and the law. In their modern form, these arms show us a fortress upon a hill near a riverbank or seashore with a ship in full sail passing by. However, the version in use in medieval and early modern times depicts the ship sailing through the gates of a great castle (Figure 2). Both images have resonance for us; they symbolize a community that lived by trade and was thus connected to the wider world. But the latter with its gate is the better emblem. It stresses that a late medieval and early modern English city was not only a stronghold, marked by a jurisdictional as well as a physical boundary that distinguished its inhabitants from their fellow Englishmen, but a passage point for people and commodities. Depicting a castle gate with a ship sailing through juxtaposed strength of community with successful enterprise as if to say, as the poet Thomas Churchyard in fact did say for Bristol,

Our traed doth stand on Siuill lief

And thear our glory lies.⁶

Any inquiry into the history of an early modern English city must come to terms with this reciprocal relationship between its political and its economic life. Urban society is characterized primarily by the concentration of diverse socioeconomic functions in a densely built-up center of population, which is dependent on markets located outside the authority of its own government. Urban social order, then, is always vulnerable to regional, national, and even international economic developments beyond the political control of its inhabitants. But an English city of the fifteenth, the sixteenth, or the seventeenth century was primarily a legal and political unit, defined by precise jurisdictional boundaries that offered no real barrier to economic and social change. What held it together were its corporate existence and its sense of community, which separated its freemen and their dependents from their surroundings and gave them a unity and a capacity for collective action they would not otherwise have possessed. This combination of openness to the world of commerce and industry and closeness behind protective walls was the energizing force in city life. It meant that civic society was never at rest, but was always acting on its environment and adapting itself to any changes in it. The town was not a closed arena which drew in upon itself and made of the connections and rivalries of its inhabitants the sole source of local life, but an open gate in which the larger world penetrated into the community and helped shape it.

In modern historiography, the prevailing view of English urban life from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century has been closer to Handlin’s than to the one implicit in Bristol’s coat of arms. Until recently most writers have considered the typical English town of the period not as part of an integrated realm but as a self-conscious and coherent community with a distinct life of its own, separate from that of the kingdom at large.⁷ Or in the words of Mrs. J. R. Green, it was a free self-governing community , a state within the state … a little principality carrying on an isolated self-dependent life.⁸ At the heart of this understanding is a vision, familiar enough to anyone who has read Thomas Hobbes, that juxtaposes the state to society and its constituent communities. Hobbes saw all corporate bodies, the towns included, as many lesser Commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a natural! man, and thought the state could not tolerate them. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth, but to Dissolve it, he says, for powers divided mutually destroy each other.⁹ Hence for him, and for those historians who follow his model, the existence of independent, self-standing communities that command the primary loyalties of their members implies the absence of a strong state, just as the rise of the state entails their disappearance.

At its inception this idea focused on politics. According to Green, a town’s autonomy consisted in its freedom to arm its own soldiers and defend its own territory; elect its own rulers and officials; draw up its own constitutions and ordinances; assess, levy, and raise its own taxes; settle its own trading relations; and administer the law through its own courts. But more recent scholarship has added an emphasis upon sociology, as revealed by the use of the term community. In everyday language the word can mean no more than a collectivity of people having common interests and sharing common activities. It need not imply competition with the larger social organisms of which it may be a part. In this sense the village or neighborhood, the county or town, the district or region, and the kingdom or nation can each be called a community in its own right. Localists following Green’s lead, however, consider the community more narrowly, as a bounded social system of a particular type, or, in Alan Everitt’s words, a little self-centered kingdom on its own.¹⁰ The type is what sociologists sometimes call a Gemeinschaft, a small community characterized by multifaceted, faceto-face, and permanent social relationships in contrast to the partial, impersonal, and transitory relationships found in the larger society. According to theory, such communities are homogeneous, self-sufficient, and slow-changing, marked by a continuous corporate existence and a high degree of interaction and common endeavor among their members. Typically they are dominated by the institution of the extended family, which through patriarchal authority and close ties of affinity provides the community with a strong bond of social solidarity.¹¹

Most of the sociologists of the small community have found a particular place for it in a broad view of social history. According to their model, the earliest societies were simple, undifferentiated, tiny social organisms of men and women living in isolation, close to nature and bound by tradition. More intricately organized forms of social existence, marked by a highly articulated division of labor and governed by rational principles, developed only in the modern world. As this evolutionary process unfolds, the world changes from a place in which social cohesion is the dominant motif to one where competition and the rational pursuit of self-interest hold supreme sway. In the course of the history, small communities gradually disappear as meaningful entities because their members become integrated into larger and larger social organizations.

Similar ideas, amounting to a theory of modernization, are deeply embedded in the approach of localist historians of English rural and urban life. H. P. R. Finberg, for example, tells us that the self-conscious local communities in which he is interested are not much in evidence today. Rather, they—or most of them, at any rate—have undergone a strict course of development from birth, often in the distant past, to death the day before yesterday. The archetypical local history, then, tells the story of the Origin, Growth, Decline and Fall of a Local Community, emphasizing that present-day towns and rural districts lack the old degree of social cohesion that characterized communities of the past.¹² Finberg also suggests some reasons for this change. A railwayman or a mill-owner today, he says,

pretty certainly feels himself more closely linked in sympathies and interests and aspirations with his fellow-railwaymen or fellow manufacturers up and down the country than with the majority of his fellow townsmen. Moreover Leviathan, as we all know, looks with no friendly eye upon allegiances that are not centered on its omnicompetent self. It may be that just as the family, once so powerful a unit, has withered into social impotence, so the local community is destined to wither in its turn. But while it flourished it yielded only to the nation, and not always even to the nation, in its hold over men’s loyalties.¹³

Thus the local community is a form of social life peculiar to a particular phase of history. With the growth of the modern economy and the rise of the state, its existence becomes increasingly problematic and it gradually disappears from view.

This theory of localism has had its uses. By reminding us that state and society have not always existed in their present forms, it has helped us to break new ground in urban history and to reveal much that we did not know about the fabric of social and cultural life in early modern England . Where history once was little more than the study of grand politics, political institutions, and constitutional ideas, it has become allencompassing, covering everything from architecture to xenophobia, each understood in the context of lives lived by ordinary men and women at home. Nothing human—or inhuman, for that matter—is alien to us anymore. Nevertheless, there is something anachronistic in the approach of the localists, since it relies upon an understanding of political and social reality that emerged only at the end of the early modern period and did not become widely held until very much later. The views of those living through this era usually depended upon different premises, ones that accepted a dimension of communal autonomy without also implying a rivalry with the nation or the central authorities.

According to the Elizabethan civil lawyer Thomas Wilson, early modern English cities were highly independent places. They are not taxed, he says, but by their owne officers of thefir] owne brother- hoodes, and no other officer of the Queen nor other possessed authority to entermeddle amongst them. The queen, indeed, placed no governor in any Towne through out the whole Realme; rather, a city’s mayor, chosen locally without reference to royal nomination, served in the capacity of Queens Lieftenant. It was his duty to governe the Citty in good order, and, with the consent of the Common Council, to make lawe and constitutions for the benifitt of the Citty. In addition, Wilson points out, every citty hath a peculier jurisdiction among themselves … by which jurisdiction … they have the authority to Judge all matters Criminell and Cyvill. For these reasons, Wilson thought of cities as privileged enclaves within the structure of government and society. Every citty, he said, has as it were, a Comon Wealth among themselves.¹⁴

But despite this use of the term commonwealth, Wilson recognized—as Green did not—that at no time were English cities entirely free from the fabric of royal mie. Their privileges did not completely liberate them from the system of royal justice or from the obligation to pay taxes. Nor did city governments exercise jurisdiction over wide territories as did some of their continental counterparts. In no sense, therefore, were they classical city-states, radically separated from the hierarchy of rights and obligations that shaped neighboring communities. Wilson stresses that a city’s peculier jurisdiction was the consequence of individual and explicit grants by the King in divers times … confirmed by letters patent under the great seale, and operated under the important restraynt that still all Civili causes may be removed from theirs to the highest Courts at Westminster. Cities, then, were effectively subordinated to both the will and the jurisdiction of the Crown. Although they enjoyed a great deal of self-government, they were not completely self-contained worlds, whole unto themselves.¹⁵

This conclusion is carried even further by early modern London’s great antiquary, John Stowe. He refrains from using the word commonwealth in discussing his city, but instead conceives of a more encompassing commonwealth of which London was but a part. At the conclusion of his Survey of London Stowe prints a long Apologie for his city, written probably by the lawyer James Dalton. It argues that

[i]t is besides the purpose to dispute, whether the estate of the gouernement here bee a Democratic, or Aristocracie, for whatsoeuer it bee, being considered in it seife, certayne it is, that in respect of the whole Realme, London is but a Citizen, and no Citie, a subiect and no free estate, an obendienciarie, and no place indowed with any distinct or absolute power.

Not only are its citizens governed by the same law as the rest of the Realme… a few customes onely excepted, but in Parliament

they are but a member of the Comminaltie … and are as straightly bound by such lawes as any part of the Realme is, for if a contribution in subsidie of money to the Prince bee decreed, the Londoners haue none exemption, no not so much as to assesse themselues: for the prince doth appoint the Commissioners. If Souldiers must be mustered, Londoners haue no law to keepe themselues at home, if prouision for the Princes housholde bee to bee made, their goods are not priuileged. In summe, therefore, the gouemment of London differeth not in substance, but in ceremonie from the rest of the realm.¹⁶

London was without doubt the most highly privileged and independent city in England. If Stowe could agree to this view of its participation in the life of the kingdom, he surely would have said at least as much about the provincial towns.

This model, however, offers a dual vision of urban life. For within its boundaries a city may be said to have a community of its own, existing for the fellowship and mutual aid and affection that citizens give to one another. [W]hereas commonwealthes and kingdomes cannot haue, next after God, any surer foundation than the loue and goodwill of one man towardes another, Stowe’s apologist says, the same is also closely bred and maintayned in Citties, where men by mutual societie and companying together, doe grow to alliances, comminalties and corporations.¹⁷ Such a community could be a democracy or an aristocracy, since as a corporate body it must consist of a head to lead and members to obey, whether the head be selected by a free vote, cooptation, or inheritance.

Neither this approach nor Wilson’s leads us inevitably to a localist interpretation of city life, since neither begins with a vision of the state or society as the necessary enemy of community or the individual. Each focuses our attention on different issues: Wilson’s on the relation of civic to national institutions; Stowe’s on the relation of the civic to the national community. The former stresses civic autonomy but recognizes the city’s dependency on the nation for its freedoms. The latter offers a more complex view. On the one hand, the city is seen as part of a larger polity—a subsidiary body of the commonwealth of England. On the other, it is said to have its own communal integrity and common purposes. From this second viewpoint, the essence of urban society is the fellowship that citizens have with one another. Put in other words, from the perspective of the national polity a city is an organization with important functions to perform; from the perspective of the inhabitants it is a moral community in which head and body work together for common ends. Or, as F. W. Maitland says, it is both organ and organism.¹⁸

These more complex approaches to early modern urban history have important consequences for research strategy and interpretation. One of the advantages of the localist’s stress on communal solidarity is that the supposed compactness and distinctiveness of each community make it possible to study any particular county or town as a complete social organism having its own interlocking system of social relations. As Alan Everitt puts it, local history is the study of "some particular local community as a whole, as a complete society or organism, with a more or less distinct and continuous life of its own."¹⁹ Hence it is a field concerned primarily with structure, and above all with social structure, understood as a systematic arrangement of interconnected parts.²⁰ In other words, this approach owes a heavy debt to the structural-functionalism of British social anthropology, in the sense that all the elements of the social order are seen to fit together to form a single, integrated system.²¹ Such studies begin by assuming the existence of an autonomous collectivity of men and women, the boundaries of which mark the limits of a self-standing society and so help us to restrict the range of our inquiries to sources concerned primarily with relations within those boundaries.

But both Thomas Wilson and John Stowe force us to cast our nets more widely, to consider the community in its context and hence to devote as much attention to events and developments outside its boundaries as to those within them. The members of every society ordinarily are aware of qualitative differences in their degree of personal involvement with others, their formal rights and obligations, and their more informal moral responsibilities and social duties. They commonly recognize a division between Them and Us. But when a community is contained within a larger polity, as were the English towns, the lines of demarcation are often unclear. For there are overlapping levels of authority and overlapping markets, and the community’s boundary is rather more like an open border than a guarded frontier. Men and materials, ideas and influences can pass through in either direction without passport or visa. This means, in turn, that groups within the town were free to form differing relationships to this wider context of action. Hence along with examining the ways the various components of urban society held together among themselves, we shall also have to explore how the city held together with the larger social order of which it was a part, and to look for breakdowns in internal and external relations and for conflicts within the community and between it and the wider world.

This emphasis on the way cities like Bristol were open to the world also has important consequences for the story we shall tell. The structural-functional model employed by localist historians is essentially static. It treats the ways social institutions fit together to make working mechanisms and how social actions promote social cohesion. In this view, conflict is seen as reinforcing the structure of society, because the parties engaged in it compete in the same arena and for the same ends. The theory leaves little room for self-generating change. Studies written according to this model do not completely exclude consideration of change, of course. But change, when it does occur, is understood to come from outside forces. The consequent imbalances in the local social order are then treated as working toward a