Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in English provincial towns

Urban History

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 283-300

  Tittler, Robert ^a  

^a Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLLECTIVE MEMORY; POLITICAL HISTORY; PROVINCIAL TOWN; SIXTEENTH CENTURY; URBAN HISTORY;

EID: 0031400951     PISSN: 09639268     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963926800012360     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. It is first explored in the works of Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945); especially Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris, 1952; 1st pub. 1925),
2. and La mémoires collective (Paris, 1950)
3. trans. as On Collective Memory (ed. M. Douglas, 1950);
4. The Collective Memory, ed. and trans. F.J. Ditter and V.Y. Ditter (New York, 1980) and most recently by L.A. Coser (Chicago, 1992).
5. From Halbwachs, La topographie legendaire des évangiles (Paris, 1971)
6. as translated and cited by B. Schwartz, 'The social context of commemoration, a study in collective memory', Social Forces, 61, 2 (1982), 375.
7. K. Thomas, 'The perception of the past in early modern England' (Creighton Lecture, London University, 1983), 2-4.
8. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)
9. and L. Colley, Britons Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992).
10. R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994);
11. D. Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, 1995);
12. M. Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987).
13. See also, for example, L.L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991).
14. A. Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago and London, 1994);
15. R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (London and Chicago, 1992)
16. and L. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995).
17. C. Phythian-Adams, 'Ceremony and the citizen, the communal year at Coventry, 1450-1550', in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 (London, 1972), 57-85.
18. J. Barry, 'Provincial town culture, 1640-1780: urbane or civic?', in J.H. Pittock and A. Wear (eds), Interpretation and Cultural History (New York, 1991), 198-234. The views of those who have emphasized cultural appropriation are summarized on pp. 205-9.
19. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, 15 and passim.
20. This has been termed 'counter-memory' by Michel Foucault, and is discussed in N.Z. Davis and R. Starn (eds), Memory and Counter-Memory, a special issue of the journal Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 2-3.
21. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (London and New Haven, 1992), 327.
22. The following three paragraphs derive from E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 ibid., 327-37, with quoted passages noted as appropriate.
23. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 Ibid., 334.
24. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 Ibid., 161-3 and 335.
25. See particularly C. Phythian-Adams, 'Ceremony and the citizen', esp. 80.
26. P. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris, 1984-96).
27. For a short summary of Nora's use of the term, see his essay 'Between memory and history'. Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 7-25.
28. Maidstone Borough Archives, Kent County Archives, MS. FA FAc/9 Bundle 2. It is possible that the word 'ancient' refers to a banner, but syntax and the lack of other contemporary evidence for provincial town banners make this an unlikely interpretation.
29. For the use of artefacts and other material objects as mnemonic devices, see esp. A. Radley, 'Artifact, memory and a sense of the past', in D. Middleton and D. Edwards (eds), Collective Memory (London and New York, 1990), 46-59.
30. L. Jewitt and W.H. St John Hope, The Corporate Plate and Insignia of Office of the Cities and Towns of England and Wales, 2 vols (London, 1895), I, lxiii-lxxxix.
31. This and the following paragraph is largely based on L. Jewitt The Corporate Plate and Insignia of Office of the Cities and Towns of England and Wales, ibid., xviii-xl.
32. Deposition of Walter Hamon, Serjeant to the Mayor, in the case of Countess and Earl of Pembroke v. Inhabitants of Shaftesbury, PRO, E.134/18, James I, East. I.
33. C.S. Davies (ed.), A History of Macclesfield (Manchester, 1961), frontispiece.
34. A. Rosen, 'Economic and social aspects of the City of Winchester, 1520-1670' (University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1975), 229; BL Harleian MS 1944, fol. 92r. See also Mayor and Bailiffs of Carmarthan v. Devereux et al., PRO, STAC 2/Bundle 17/271, esp. the plaintiff's bill.
35. J.J. Anderson (ed.), Records of Early English Drama (REED), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Toronto and Manchester, 1982), 10;
36. A. Johnston and M. Rogerson (eds), REED, York (Toronto, 1979), 155, 194-8, 554, 583, 586, 588-9, 599;
37. D. Galloway (ed.), REED, Norwich (Toronto and London, 1984), 252.
38. The infinitely grander and more complex ceremony surrounding a royal entry into London is recounted in R.M. Smuts, 'Public ceremony and royal charisma, the English royal entry into London, 1485-1642', in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 65-93,
39. and Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, ch. 5.
40. BL, Add. MS 8937, fol. 1a.
41. Martin Weinbaum, British Borough Charters, 1307-1660 (Cambridge, 1943), xxix-lv.
42. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 332-4.
43. L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), 712.
44. Sir Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London, 1969), 29.
45. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1982), esp. 1-9.
46. The following draws upon my essay entitled 'Civic portraiture and political culture in English provincial towns, c. 1560-1640', under editorial consideration, and on the census of English civic portraits from provincial towns to the year 1640 identified as Appendix I in that study. Though most civic portraits have not been reproduced in published form, samples of some of the most polished of the genre may be seen (re: Norwich portraits) in A. Moore (ed.), Family and Friends, a Regional Survey of British Portraiture (London, 1992), plates 1-22,
47. and one of the cruder and more typical in Brian Frith, Twelve Portraits of Gloucester Benefactors (Gloucester, 1972), cover illus.
48. Robert Jannys, John Marsham, and Augustine Steward, all mayors and leading citizens of Norwich, died in 1530, 1532 and 1570 respectively. Yet all were painted (perhaps from earlier drawings) in the early seventeenth century. Bury St Edmunds did not acquire a portrait of its late fifteenth-century benefactor Jankyn Smith until 1616. Nicholas Thorne, Mayor of Bristol in 1545, was first painted in 1624. The double portrait of John and Joan Cooke, Mayor and Mayoress of Gloucester of c. 1600, came as much as sixty years after their deaths.
49. See, the portrait of Giles Tooker of Salisbury, clutching the charter he did so much to obtain for the borough, reprinted in C. Haskins, Salisbury Corporation Pictures and Plate, 2 (Salisbury, 1910; 1st pub. 1888), 9-12.
50. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, xxiii.
51. On this trend generally, and on the role of lawyers themselves in sustaining it, see esp. C.W. Brooks, Pettifoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The 'Lower Branch' of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), chs 3-6.
52. See esp. A. Dyer, 'English town chronicles', Local Historian, XII (1976-77), 285-95,
53. and P. Clark, 'Visions of the community, antiquarians and the English city before 1800', in D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe (eds), The Pursuit of Urban History (London, 1983) esp. 105-13.
54. On the question of who read such chronicles, see esp. Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles, ch. 1.
55. Some of the best of these include William Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent (2nd ed., 1596, STC no. 15176);
56. Sampson Erdeswicke, Survey of Staffordshire (c. 1593; London, 1723);
57. Richard Carew, Survey of Cornwall (1602; ed. F.E. Halliday, 1953);
58. Tristram Risdon, The Chorographicall Description . . . of Devon (c. 1635; London, 1910);
59. and Thomas Gerard, The Particular Description of. . . Somerset (c. 1632; ed. E.H. Bates, Somerset Record Society, 15, 1900);
60. and of course the most famous and perhaps best of them all, John Stow's Survey of London (1598 and 1603), of which the best modern edition is by C.L. Kingsford (1908).
61. The neglect of unpublished town histories of this and subsequent periods is common amongst nearly all who have written of the genre. Notable exceptions include Barry, 'Provincial town culture' for the subsequent period,
62. and Daniel Woolf, whose work in progress, The Origins of English Historical Thought, promises to be the definitive treatment.
63. John Vowell alias Hooker, The Cittie of Excester . . . (c. 1575ff., 3 vols, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1919-47);
64. Henry Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth (c. 1612-19, ed. Charles John Palmer, Great Yarmouth, 1854);
65. David Rogers, 'The breviary of Chester history', partly transcribed in L. Clopper (ed.), REED, Chester (Toronto, 1979), 232-54.
66. Nora, 'Between memory and history', 7-24.
67. Barry, 'Provincial town culture'.
68. See also R. Sweet, 'The production of urban histories in eighteenth-century England', Urban History, 23, 2 (1996), 171-88
69. and R. Sweet, idem, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford, 1997).
70. A.D. Mills, 'Chester ceremonial, re-creation and recreation in the English medieval Town', Urban History Yearbook, 18 (1991), 5;
71. W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 1540-1640 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975; 1st pub. 1958), 272-73;
72. and P.W. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons, 1558-1603, 3 vols (London, 1981), II, 333-5;
73. G.H. Martin, 'The origin of borough records', Journal of the Society of Archivists, 2 (1960-64), 152.
74. The point is made especially well in Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles, ch. 12.
75. Wallingford Borough Archives, Berkshire Record Office MS. W/AC1/1/1.
76. D. Underdown, Fire From Heaven, Life in an English Country Town in the Seventeenth Century (London and New Haven, 1992), 51.
77. More on Whiteway's historical writing is summarized in Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles, 269-71,
78. and see, also, William Whiteway of Dorchester, His Diary, 1618-1635 (Dorset Record Society, 12, 1991). Another, still unpublished but very full effort of this type is known, from the name of its donor, as 'Dr Taylor's History' of Shrewsbury, written between the late 1570s and 1603 and located in the Library of Shrewsbury School. Though its earlier sections derive from printed national histories (including Stow's Annals) which were well known at the time, those sections dealing with the author's lifetime are obviously drawn from personal recollections, oral testimony and local records. My thanks to James Lawson, Librarian of Shrewsbury School, for his help with this volume.
79. Cited in G.H. Martin, 'The publication of borough records', Archives, 8, 36 (1966), 200.
80. The process is described in the ultimate report of the committee, chaired by Manship. A copy may be found in BL, Add. MS 23,737, 'A copy of a catalogue of charters of Great Yarmouth. . .'.
81. For a recent discussion of which, see Sweet, 'The production of urban histories in eighteenth-century England', 171-88.
82. Both the difficulties of maintaining the harbour from silting up and the disputes regarding jurisdiction over the fishery are treated in R. Tittler, 'The English fishing industry in the sixteenth century; the case of Great Yarmouth', Albion, IX, 1 (1977), 40-60.
83. C.J. Palmer (ed.), The History of Great Yarmouth by Henry Manship (Great Yarmouth, 1854), 118.
84. Manship, History of Great Yarmouth, 118.
85. Daniel Woolf's much more exhaustive study of the issue has yielded a map of the towns producing urban chronicles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to be published in his forthcoming The Origins of Modern Historical Culture. No less than thirty locations are indicated. My thanks to him for sharing this information with me.
86. For Collinson's contributions, see esp. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford, 1982), esp. ch. 4,
87. and The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), ch. 2, and Underdown, esp. Fire from Heaven.
88. D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London and Berkeley, 1989)
89. and Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England.
90. R. Tittler, Architecture and Power. The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, 1500-1650 (Oxford, 1991).
91. Phythian-Adams, 'Ceremony and the citizen', 80.
92. M. Aston, 'English ruins and English history: the dissolution and the sense of the past', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973), 231-55.
93. This view results from a number of local studies, but is best summarized in J. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces. Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630-1650 (London, 1976 and 1980), passim, and esp. 38-9, 45-6, 95-7.