The Corporate Town and the English State Bristol's Little Businesses 1625-1641

The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol's "Little Businesses" 1625-1641 David Harris Sacks Past and Present, No. 110. (Feb., 1986), pp. 69-105. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28198602%290%3A110%3C69%3ATCTATE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z Past and Present is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Aug 4 15:01:34 2007 THE CORPORATE TOWN AND THE ENGLISH STATE: BRISTOL7S "LITTLE BUSINESSES" 1625-1641* In the introduction to his Parliaments and English Politics, Conrad Russell refers us to the large "body of local studies" that has appeared in the last twenty years. These works, he says, present findings "incompatible with many of the traditions" of English political his- tory, which usually stress the existence of a national polity unified by a single regime of governing institutions and a common understanding of political issues. Instead, these local studies suggest a different political world where "obstructive localism" often prevailed "above any concept of national interest". In this same opening chapter Russell also discusses what he calls "little businesses". Little busi- nesses are largely local businesses, pr~marily of a petty economic or administrative nature. These, Russell reminds us, represent the majority of the work of a parliament, and, as he says, often "may have concerned members and their constituents more than some of the great matters which are more familiar to us". l We might add that such little businesses also represent the majority of the work of the privy council and other arms of royal government. But are these little businesses also evidence of localism? On their face they might seem to be, for the repair of bridges or the mainten- ance of lighthouses -to use Russell's examples -hardly appear the * Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Cambridge Seminar on Early Modern History (Cambridge, Mass., April 1981), to the Middle Atlantic Section of the North American Conference of British Studies (New Haven, March 1982) and to the Anglo-American Historical Conference (London, July 1983). I wish to thank the following scholars for helpful comments and advice: Samuel H. Beer, Jay Boggis, John Brewer, John Clive, Sigmund Diamond, Srephen Diamond, James Henretta, Roger Howell, Norman Jones, Wallace MacCaffrey, Nathan Miller, Srephen Poppel, Conrad Russell, Simon Schama. Kevin Sharpe, Arthur J. Slavin, Lawrence Stone, David Underdown, Srephen White and James Willunson. Conrad Russell, Parliamnts and English Politics, 1621-!629 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 4, 8, 37. See also Conrad Russell, "Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604-1629", Htstory, Ixi (1976), pp. 25-6. The phrase "little businesses" was used originally by Edward Conway the younger in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, dated 18 Apr. 1624: Public Record Office, London (hereafter P.R.O.), S.P. 14!163!1, quoted by Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, p. 37. 70 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 110 stuff of grand politics. Such a conclusion depends, however, upon what story we are telling. If we are interested in the more traditional forms of political history, they should be thought of as Russell does. Local issues had been the stock-in-trade of royal government from the Conquest, if not before. Do not Thames river fish weirs appear in Magna Carta? The issues seem of significance only to those in the local communities affected by them. But what if we are interested in the history of the state? When looked at in this context, little busi- nesses suggest the local community's inability to accomplish its goals or resolve its difficulties with its own political resources. From one viewpoint, then, little businesses indicate not localism but the need of the local community to call upon the state to help it perform necessary services or cope with its own internal problems, including perhaps social rifts and political divisions. And here there may be much more of a story to tell. In what follows, I shall explore this issue more fully as it applies to the history of Bristol in the reign of Charles I and particularly in the 1630s. These years were especially problematic for the provincial town, but far from contributing to localism they enhanced the penetra- tion of national into local politics and thus heightened the interrelation between the community and the state. But before we can proceed, we must take a somewhat closer look at the idea of localism. I LOCALIS'M IN PERSPECTIVE Localism is a theory of mentaliti, although probably most of its proponents would shudder at the word. It defines the mental horizons that supposedly bounded the social and political world of most inhabitants of Tudor and early Stuart England. According to Alan Everitt, the leading spokesman for the school, each town and county was a "self-conscious and coherent community with a distinct life of its own . . . in which politics played merely an intermittent part". Although a sense of identification with the national community was also growing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the local community "gradually gained ground at the expense of other local groups and of the state", and normally called forth the stronger allegiance. As a result, the "recurring problem" of the period was not any rivalry between king and parliament, and still less between a feudal aris~ocracy and a bourgeoisie, but "conflict between loyalty to the local community and loyalty to the state". "Implicit in the BRISTOL'S "LITTLE BUSINESSES" 1625-1641 71 social development of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", Ever- itt says, was "the inevitable collision between local and national loyalties" . 2 As a consequence of this paradigm, England's seventeenth-century crisis, long considered a great revolution by Whig and Marxist alike, has begun to lose its revered status among many historians. Where scholars once happily thought of this period as the seed-time of English liberty or the birth-day of British capitalism, many have come to treat it as no more than an era of political dislocation that altered little and settled nothing. Everitt, for example, argues that in most places the Civil War itself was really a matter of local feuds in which factions drawing membership from the same social class contested for control of the local community, often under the banner of national party labels, but without true commitment to the party programmes.3 Recently Roger Howell has argued that "local issues or national issues seen in local terms" also dominated politics in the towns. Rather than serving as "the natural recruiting ground" for revolutionaries, these places sought internal peace, local accommoda- tion and, when war came, neutrality, not impassioned engagement in the great ideological battles of the day. Thus he warns us that a provincial centre like Newcastle or Bristol was "sub-political", that is, a society "in which the conduct of local affairs received the main emphasis, interest in national affairs a secondary one".4 The attractiveness of this interpretation is not hard to see. With one swift thrust the localist has sought to impale both the Whig and the Marxist on the sword of anachronism. Both these viewpoints presuppose the existence of a national arena for political action. But if in truth Tudor and Stuart England was organized primarily by township and county - with local factional rivalries, not great constitutional principles or broad class interests, determining the 2 Alan Everitt, "The County Community", in E. W. Ives (ed.), The English Ra>olutron,1600-1660 (New York, 1971 edn.), p. 49; Alan Everitt, Suffolk and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660 (Suffolk Rec. Soc., iii, Ipswich, 1960), pp. 33-4; Alan Everitt, Change in the Pralinces: The Seventeenth Centuly (Univ. of Leicester, Dept. of English Local Hist., Occasional Papers, 2nd ser., i, 1969), p. 10; Alan Everitt, "The Local Community and the Great Rebellion", repr. in K. H . D. Haley (ed.), The Histmcal Assoctatlon Book of the Stuarts (London, 1973), pp. 76-7, 79. Everitt, Suffalk and the Great Rebellion, pp. 11-36; Alan Everitt, The Community ofKent and the Great Rebellton, 1640-1660, 2nd edn. (Leicester, 1973); Everitt, "Local Community", pp. 76-99. Roger Howell, "The Structure of Urban Politics in the English Civil War", Albion, xi (1979), pp. 115, 126 and passim; Roger Howell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the Puritan Ra>olution(Oxford, 1966), p . 336 and in general pp. 334-49 passim. Cf. .Mrs. J . R. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1894), i, pp. 1-2. 72 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 110 divisions - it would have been incapable of having a transforming social or political revolution. The main problem of the period, then, would be the shifting relations between the localities and the central authorities -or, as Trevor-Roper has said, "the relations between society and the State".5 This argument turns on the localists' use of the concept of "com- munity". In everyday language the word can mean no more than a collectivity of people having common interests and sharing common activities. The localists, however, consider the community more narrowly, as a bounded social system of a particular type, or, in Everitt7s words, "a little self-centred kingdom on its ownn.6 The type is what sociologists sometimes call a "Gemeinschaft", a small community characterized by multi-faceted, face-to-face and per- manent social relationships in contrast to the partial, impersonal and transitory relationships found in the larger society. These are qualities that enable such communities to be studied as complete social organ- isms having their own interlocking systems of social relations. There is, in other words, a strong functionalist character to this work, which assumes the existence of autonomous communities.' A theory of the state and of politics follows logically from this understanding. Students of Gemeinschaft assume that political activity based on broad ideologies and universal political principles is not a widely diffused mode of behaviour before modern times. If it appears at all, it is concentrated among an elite at the centre. In local communities politics has not as yet become an autonomous field of action in which rival parties single-mindedly contest for control of government agencies and public policy. Instead the pursuit of power remains entangled in the web of undifferentiated social relations exemplified by kinship groupings and patronage networks. The state, H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century", in Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisu in Europe, 1560-1660 (Garden City, N.Y ., 1967), p. 72. Everitt, "County Community", p. 48. The classic account of Gemeinschaft is to be found in Fernand Tonnies' seminal work of 1887, Camunity and Society, ed. and trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York, 1963). See also Max Weber, The Theow of Social and E c om l c Organization, trans. A. M . Henderson and Talcott Parsons, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1964 edn.), pp. 136-9; and Emile Durkheim, The Divtsion of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York, 1933). By the Second World War the idea of community as a special kind of social form had received general currency in English usage: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulaly of Culture and Society (New York, 1976), pp. 65- 6. Cf. H. P. R. Finberg, The Local Historian and his Theme (Univ. of Leicester, Dept. of English Local Hist., Occasional Papers, i, 1952), pp. 5-8; Everitt, "Local Community", p. 76; Alan Everitt, New Avenues in English Local Histmy (Leicester, 1970), p. 6; Alan Everitt; Ways and Means in Local Histoy (London, 1971), p. 6. 73 BRISTOL'S "LITTLE BUSINESSES" 1625-1641 then, symbolizes the realm of politics as we know it in modern society, while the community represents the sub-political realm of faction typical of the pre-modern world. The two can coexist, but not permanently. In the long run the former will overwhelm the latter.s For the localist historians, the seventeenth century represents a clash between these two modes of political organization and political behaviour. The story they tell is one of crisis in which the poor integration of local communities into the national polity is only one among many symptoms of the existence of a weak state. The principal characters of the narrative are the justices of the peace and town magistrates, who found themselves caught between their obligations to their neighbours and their duties to the nation, making their positions, in Conrad Russell's words, "inherently self-contradic- tory".9 According to this view, political upheaval comes when this weak state attempts to behave like a strong one, even though it suffers from insufficient revenues, underdeveloped national institutions and the hegemony of faction over bureaucratic tradition and political ideology. Bold state action inevitably forces local governors to choose between their dual loyalties, usually in favour of their communities and not their country. lo This theory of localism certainly has its merits. It has helped scholars to break new ground in social history and to reveal much that we did not know about the fabric of life in early modern England. Nevertheless, the localists may also have led us astray, for they often forget that localism is a theory of mentaliti and thus should be grounded upon the political outlooks of those we study, rather than our own. But how is it possible, for example, to say with Russell that most seventeenth-century Englishmen "put their county before their See Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York, 1970 edn.), pp. 98- 120; Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation", in his From Max Weber: Essays inSociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright 'Mills (New York, 1946), pp. 77-128, esp. pp. 77-87; Max Weber, "Class, Status, Party", ibtd., pp. 180-95, esp. pp. 194-5; Edward Shils, "Center and Periphery", in his The Constitution of Society (Chicago, 1982), pp. 93-109; Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago, 1981), chs. 5-6, 8. Russell, Parliaments and Engltsh Politics, p. 327. lo Conrad Rilsseil, "Causes of the English Civil War" (paper delivered to the annual conference of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., December 1980); Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 417-33; Conrad Russell, "Parlia- ment and the King's Finances", in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origim of the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 91-1 16; see also Russell's introduction to this volume, pp. 1-31; Conrad Russell, Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509-1660 (London, 1971), pp. 310-41. 74 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 110 country",ll unless we situate ourselves outside the historical moment of which we write and judge the national interest according to some absolute standard or from our preferred perspective? No early seventeenth-century country gentleman or town magistrate would or could have put his opposition to government policy in these terms. By the mid-seventeenth century, of course, a number of English writers had come to see the state in opposition to society and its constituent communities. But before 1640 the theory of political organization depended on different premises that suggest a dimension of communal autonomy without also implying a rivalry with the central authorities. As regards the corporate towns, we can distinguish two different approaches. The first I shall call the "liberties and franchises" approach. According to Thomas Wilson -the Elizabethan civil lawyer -early modern English cities were highly independent political worlds. They make their own "lawe and constitutions", he says, and "they are not taxed but by their owne officers of the[ir] owne brotherhoode"; "no other officer of the Queen nor other" possessed "authority to entermeddle amongst them". The queen, indeed, placed no "gover- nor 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". 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 Cqvill". For these reasons, Wilson thought of cities as privileged enclaves within the structure of government and society. "Every citty", he says, was "as it were, a Comon Wealth among themselves". Nevertheless, Wilson recognized that at no time were English cities entirely free from the fabric of royal rule. Their privi- leges, established by individual and explicit grants from the crown, did not liberate them from the system of royal justice nor from the obligation to pay taxes. 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. l2 The second approach I shall call, despite Wilson, the "common- 11 Russell, Parliaments and English Pohttcs, p. 121; this thought appears in slightly different phrasing a number of times in Russell's book: see, for example, pp. 8, 258, 325. l2 Thomas Wilson, The State of England, 1600, ed. F . J. Fisher, in Camden Miscellany, xvi (Camden Soc., 3rd ser., lii, London, 1936), pp. 20-1. 75 BRISTOL'S "LITTLE BUSINESSES" 1625-1641 wealth" approach. London's great antiquary, John Stow, does not use the word in discussing his city. Instead he conceives of a more encompassing commonwealth of which London was but a part. At the conclusion of his Suruay of London, Stow prints a long "Apologie" for his city, written probably by the lawyer, James Dalton. l3 It argues that: It is besides the purpose to dispute, whether the estate of the gouernement here bee a Democrane, or Aristocratte, for whatsoeuer it bee, being considered in it selfe, certayne it is, that in rejspect of the whole Realme, London is but a Citizen, and no Citie, a subiect and no free estate, an obedienciarie, and no place indowed with any distinct or absolute power, for it is gouerned by the same law that the rest of the Realme is . . . l4 If Stow could accept this view of the most highly privileged and independent city in England, he surely would have agreed that the provincial towns were also subordinate in the same way to the English state. This commonwealth model offers a dual vision of urban life. For