London and beyond Essays in honour of Derek Keene Edited by Matthew Davies and James A. Galloway London and beyond Essays in honour of Derek Keene London and beyond Essays in honour of Derek Keene Edited by Matthew Davies and James A. Galloway LONDON INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Published by UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU First published in print in 2012. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY- NCND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free at http://www.humanities-digital-library.org ISBN 978 1 909646 44 5 (PDF edition) ISBN 978 1 905165 70 4 (hardback edition) Contents Preface vii List of contributors xi List of gures xv List of tables xvii I. Markets, hinterlands and environments 1. Feeding another city: provisioning Dublin in the later middle ages Margaret Murphy 2. Did peasants need markets and towns? e experience of late medieval England Christopher Dyer 3. e proliferation of markets revisited Richard Britnell 4. ‘Tempests of weather and great abundance of water’: the ooding of the Barking marshes in the later middle ages James A. Galloway II. Luxury, innovation and skill 5. A taste for the Orient? Cosmopolitan demand for ‘exotic’ durable consumables in late medieval Bruges Peter Stabel 6. Hartlib’s world Rob Ilie 7. Hiding in the forest … e Gilberts’ rural scientic instrument manufactory Anita McConnell v London and beyond III. Suburbs, neighbourhoods and communities 8. Houses and households in Cheapside c.1500–1550 Vanessa Harding 9. ‘e poore lost a good Frend and the parish a good Neighbour’: the lives of the poor and their supporters in London’s eastern suburb, c.1583–c.1679 Philip Baker and Mark Merry 10. Between sea and city: portable communities in late medieval London and Bruges Erik Spindler 11. e kindness of strangers: charitable giving in the community of the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Catherine Wright IV. Governance 12. Londoners and the court of common pleas in the fteenth century Matthew Frank Stevens 13. Crown, city and guild in late medieval London Matthew Davies 14. Urban governments and their citizens in early modern Europe Maarten Prak 15. Victoria Street in theory and practice: scenes from the governmentality of nineteenth-century London Richard Dennis 16. Converging lines, dissecting circles: railways and the socialist ideal in London and Paris at the turn of the twentieth century Carlos López Galviz Bibliography of the published works of Derek Keene Index vi Preface e majority of the chapters in this volume were presented at a conference held in October at Goodenough College in London. e conference was held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the establishment, within the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London, of the Centre for Metropolitan History (CMH). It was also an opportunity to celebrate the contribution to the CMH and to the eld of metropolitan and urban history in general of Derek Keene, founding director of the centre. Derek retired in the summer of , having held the post of Leverhulme professor of comparative metropolitan history at the IHR since . e conference was therefore designed with these twin celebrations in mind, and to that end proved to be a highly stimulating and convivial occasion, which was attended by a large number of Derek’s former colleagues as well as many other urban historians. is volume is therefore intended not merely as a record of the conference, but perhaps more importantly as a tribute to Derek Keene. Any appreciation of Derek’s contributions to scholarship must start with the sheer range of his interests as an urban and medieval historian. His papers and published work are characterized by a thoughtfulness and originality, enabling him to think broadly and originally about cities across time and space and to make many signicant interventions in ongoing scholarly debates. e list of publications at the end of this volume is eloquent testimony to this diversity. Several themes in particular are worth drawing attention to. First is an appreciation of the integration of material, topographical and archaeological evidence, rst apparent in his work on the Survey of Medieval Winchester, a project founded and directed by Martin Biddle. At Winchester, Derek acquired rst-hand experience of archaeological techniques, including dendrochonology and carbon dating, although his great contribution was to develop a methodology of topographical reconstruction based on the city’s rich documentary archive, and to relate the physical evidence of Winchester’s historical environment to its social and economic development. is approach became a cornerstone of the ‘Social and economic survey of medieval London’ (SESML), a project that was funded initially by the Social Science Research Council (forerunner of the ESRC) from to . e project team, led by Derek, were based at the Museum of London but were employed by the IHR. SESML demonstrated the importance of micro-studies within cities vii London and beyond such as London as a means to throw light on much bigger questions, in this case contributing to discussions on the size and complexity of early London and on many of its cultural and economic features, such as shopping and the property market. e value of this and subsequent projects was recognized by the IHR which, under director Michael ompson, responded positively in – to Derek’s proposal that it host a research centre dedicated to the history of London and comparative work on other metropolitan centres. e result was the establishment of the CMH, with Derek as its rst director. e notion of a Centre for Metropolitan History (as distinct from a Centre for London History) is a reection of another theme in Derek’s work – the signicance and role as ‘metropolises’ of large cities as diverse as London, New York and Tokyo. Some of Derek’s most important publications have examined characteristics of London’s history that reect its wider position and status as a rapidly growing metropolis in the medieval and early modern periods. ese and other themes were the subject matter of the projects he directed at the CMH, securing funding from a range of public bodies and private sector funders. Projects included studies of medieval markets, London’s early modern skilled workforce, mortality in nineteenth-century London, and an oral history of the jobbers on the London Stock Exchange. Many of these projects reected another key aspect of Derek’s approach to historical research and writing, in their stress upon the spatial element – upon mapping, topography and the relationship between London and its hinterland. Inuenced by historical geographers such as R. A. Pelham, Derek has always been interested in where things happen, as well as why and how, and carefully crafted maps form a key element of many Keene and CMH publications. In his own writing Derek has repeatedly returned to ideas of London’s participation in networks of towns and cities and its location within wider political and economic systems, and has explored the notion of London as a ‘city state’. e CMH was thus founded not only as a forum for the study of London’s history, but also to employ the city as a kind of ‘laboratory’ for studying broader questions in metropolitan history, comparing London’s development with that of other cities in di erent places and periods. is emphasis was reected ultimately in the major Leverhulme grant made to the IHR in specically for work on comparative metropolitan history, and it was entirely tting that Derek should hold the chair which was funded as part of that nine-year programme, enabling him to take forward a number of collaborative projects. ose who were fortunate enough to be involved in the early days of the CMH will remember fondly Derek’s infectious enthusiasm for research, his eagerness to hear of new ndings and computer analyses as they emerged, viii Preface and his practicality – shown to great e ect when his carpentry skills provided new customized work-stations for the sta in the basement at Tavistock Square! Many aspects of the early projects, although now routine in historical research, were ground-breaking in the late s, including the use of lap-top computers to gather data in archives, the analysis and mapping of large computerized datasets, and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. Under Derek’s leadership, the CMH gained a reputation for the quality and impact of its research programmes, as well as for the many publications, conferences and other events which it continues to facilitate. He led the centre from its early years in Tavistock Square to its re-housing in the slightly grander, and less burglary-prone, surroundings of Senate House. As CMH director, but also as an instinctively collaborative scholar, Derek forged lasting connections with urban historians in many di erent countries which he has maintained throughout his career, leading to many signicant collaborations and projects. Indeed, much of Derek’s work has been characterized by a willingness to scan the horizons of research in urban history, forging partnerships with historians in other countries and disciplines to enrich our understanding of how cities develop and function, not least through his involvement in the International Commission for the History of Towns or the European Association of Urban Historians. A series of meetings between historians of London and Paris during the s proved highly productive, leading among other things to two special issues of the journal Franco-British Studies on aspects of the two cities’ economic and political development. A major publication on Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe also came about through just such a series of interactions.