This article examines late medieval urban political thought. By means of an intertextual methodology that combines the efforts of continental scholars and English literary historians, it provides new insights into the political ideas that circulated within the towns of the fourteenth-century duchy of Brabant. A qualitative analysis between different source types, that originated amongst socially diverse groups, will indicate that political ideas had a polyphonic character. Indeed, ideas were constantly reconstructed and reshaped by the social groups that used them and the context in which they were uttered. During the fourteenth century, the Brabantine citizenry was involved in an ideological battle that was fought with similar, but adaptable, weapons.

This article examines the expertise and duties of clerks in medieval English towns, particularly their roles in creating custumals, or collections of written customs. Customs could regulate trade, office-holding, prostitution and even public nuisance. Many clerks were anonymous, and their contributions to custumals understudied. The careers of relatively well-known clerks, however, do provide insights into how some clerks shaped custumals into civic repositories of customary law. By analysing their oaths and known administrative practices, which involved adapting material from older custumals, this article argues that town clerks played critical roles in transmitting customary law to future generations of administrators.

Property rents in medieval towns were an important source of income for property-owners including the king, local lords and civic authorities, and a significant expense for local residents. This article examines the causes of variation in property rents in fourteenth-century Hull, an important international port with unique records on plot dimensions. It illuminates the topography and growth of the port, identifying locations where rents were highest, and particular streets which attracted premium rents. Civic and mercantile property-owners are examined through reconstruction of their biographies and the impact of the identity of owners on rent levels is assessed.

Modern Irish history is urban history. It is a story of the transferral of a populace from rural settlements to small towns and cities; of the discipline and regulation of society through new urban spaces; of the creation of capital through the construction of buildings and the sale of property. The history of Ireland has been overwhelmingly the history of land, but too often the emphasis has been on the field rather than the street, and on the small farmer instead of the urban shopkeeper. But the same questions of property run throughout Irish urban history from the early modern period to the contemporary, as speculators, businesses and government have attempted to convert land into profit, creating new buildings, streets and spaces, and coming into conflict with each other and other vested interests. Indeed, as recent work on Irish cities has shown, a turn to the urban history of Ireland provides a framework and a methodology for writing a textured and complex history of Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity.

Fires are often seen as a constant in early modern European towns, changing only in the modern era when inflammable building materials replaced wood. This article argues that the incidence, nature and risk of fire shifted repeatedly over time. Fire danger was determined not only by building materials but also by forms of construction, by the everyday uses people made of flame and by wider factors such as climatic variation and shifts in world trade and consumer demand. It was influenced by urban social and political change, including the way governments and populations responded to the risk. Responses to new fire dangers in turn helped change the way urban government functioned.

This article analyses the changing options for the provision of burial places between the Reformation and the mid-nineteenth century in two major provincial cities, Bristol and Exeter. The two cities experienced very different patterns of change, especially in their Anglican provision, reflecting medieval differences of organization as well as the differential impact of dissent. Common factors include the effect of epidemics (plague, cholera) and population pressure, but also great conservatism regarding use of inner-city burial places. The major changes are associated with the three great shocks to church–state relations: the Reformation, the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the reform period of the 1830s and 1840s.

A remarkable cluster of Irish town histories appeared in the early nineteenth century, coming after several generations of unprecedented urban growth. But that growth stalled and most Irish towns entered a long period of stagnation. Meanwhile, academic interest in the urban past became dormant. Urbanization in Ireland resumed in the twentieth century, but the study of urban history was late to develop and slow to move beyond the documentation of built heritage. However, public interest in medieval origins, official interest in urban heritage and the vision of a handful of medieval historians and historical geographers have helped transform the prospects for Irish urban history.

This article examines the thriving lodging house sector in early modern Venice, arguing that such spaces of temporary accommodation offer a valuable key to understanding how mobility and migration shaped the daily lived experience of the city. Lodging houses were important both to the many Venetian residents who profited from renting out rooms, and to the people who stayed in them, and found there companionship, conversation and access to social and professional networks. Considering the kinds of encounters, conflicts and exchanges that unfolded in these shared spaces, the article offers new insight into the functioning of a pre-modern multicultural metropolis.

Nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization in western Europe have clearly contributed to the formation of societal knowledge and self-reflexive cultural iconographies. Especially from the 1820s onwards, one major context for discussing the social and cultural diversity of the city and concomitant socio-political tensions was the emerging market of journals and magazines. Based upon the writings of two exemplary authors, this article investigates with which techniques and metaphors nineteenth-century journalistic sketches depicted urban sociability and conditions. Furthermore, it reflects on how not only the ever more differentiating urban environments but also the proximity of different networks and institutions of knowledge encouraged the refinement of social observation and thought. Exploring a neglected genre of social knowledge production, the article proposes new perspectives for urban history and aims at stimulating a critical review of contemporary research practices in all branches of the social sciences.

This article addresses efforts to reform market activity in pre-Famine Ireland, exploring Karl Polanyi's assertion that the ‘free market’ required ‘the intervention of the state in order to establish it’. It begins by rooting Ireland's alleged ‘social ills’ – over-population and subsistence agriculture – in terms of integration into international markets from the mid-eighteenth century. From the crisis of the 1820s, state actors came to see the extension of the cash economy as central to remedying these ‘ills’. Altering the physical fabric of exchange to encourage ‘rational’ market behaviour, I argue reformers aimed to ‘enclose’ commercial spaces economically and physically from non-market forces. Utilizing novel technologies of vision and precision, market space could thus operate according to a logic and ethics of its own, inculcating voluntary compliance through new standards of ‘trust’ and ‘fairness’. I conclude by asking, if indeed the state had come to operate as much through ‘freedom’ as force by 1845, how we might begin to reassess the course and context of the Irish Famine.

This article locates the ‘principal inn’ within the physical and cultural space of the eighteenth-century British town. The principal inn was the all-purpose venue for the sociable activities of polite society: from dining, drinking and conversing with friends to business deals, meetings of club and societies, legal proceedings, military musters, civic and religious proceedings. Through their central location, carefully designed interior spaces and refined material culture of furniture, fixtures and fittings, principal inns were key sites in the elite control of urban space, the enforcement of social hierarchies and the reinforcement of social values.

In 1452, approximately three-quarters of Amsterdam was destroyed by fire. Despite attempts by the city government to encourage citizens to build using brick and pan tiles, the city was mainly rebuilt with timber-framed buildings. Only in 1521 did petrification of Amsterdam's buildings gradually start to become more widespread, coinciding with an enormous increase in the total number of houses. The great rebuilding of Amsterdam led to a sustainable renewal of the housing stock, of which some houses have survived to the present day. This article investigates the reasons for the delay in building with brick, based on building archaeological research, bylaws and investigation of the 1562 tax register. It shows the mechanisms of transforming a wooden city into a brick one and reveals the effects on living conditions in the final stages of the rebuilding process in the sixteenth century.

This article examines the decline of the craft guilds in early modern England by way of a case-study of the Tuckers’ Company in Exeter. From the 1980s, this case figured prominently in the historiographical debate concerning guild decline; however, it has not been examined recently. The current study reveals the Tuckers’ Company is not a case of decline in guild membership so much as a case of the loss of guild monopoly and a concomitant transition to charitable functions. On the basis of empirical sources, this study also reveals the mechanisms and context of this transformation in the post-Civil War politics of the city of Exeter. Specific attention is given to first, the decline of royal authority bolstering the guild against the city government and secondly, the shift of power in the guild with the ascendance of the merchant fullers. Finally, the historiographical implications of the article's findings are discussed.

The infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. This article examines the foundation stone ceremonies that marked the beginning of several large-scale building Roman Catholic church building projects between 1850 and 1900, and in particular considers the extent to which these highly visible and ceremonial events prefigured the more permanent occupation of public space by the new buildings. These foundation stone ceremonies were complex events that reflected contemporary political issues such as land rights as much as they engaged with the spiritual concerns of the Roman Catholic congregations in Ireland during this period.

Civic improvement in Georgian Britain required significant amounts of capital. Tontines were an important means of financing projects. This article provides new evidence based largely on local newspapers that demonstrates their local and national importance for mutual assurance and building. Shifts in profitability depended on the price of Consols and this explains why building tontines increased in importance. Tontines were used to fund new leisure spaces, workhouses, prisons, bridges, streets and other improvements. Their popularity waned in the later nineteenth century but until then they were an important means of funding civic improvements.

The study of the urban experience in Lisbon, the former capital of the Portuguese empire, creates a specific observatory to interpret the colonial process and its post-colonial developments. Following an itinerary from colonial to post-colonial times, this article examines the continuities and discontinuities of Lisbon's urban dynamics linked with Portugal's colonial history through three interlinked processes. First, the material inscription of policies of national identity in the memory space of the city since the late nineteenth century until today. Second, the expansion of a network of economic relations that affected Lisbon's industrial, commercial and urban life. And finally, the development of a system of social and political organization, where spatial distribution and civil and political rights were unequally distributed.