britain’s myriad of small towns remained at the heart of economic and social life into the early Victorian era, bridging the urban and rural worlds. Diaries like that of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner of East Hoathly reveal an almost constant interaction between villagers and small towns. Turner records how he went to the nearby town of Lewes to buy cottons and cheese, to attend property sales, pay debts, get a doctor, scotch rumours about the disharmony between him and his wife, to participate in church events, to ‘see the finest horse-race that ever I see run’ and as often as not to get drunk and come rolling home. While the traditional open market, the nucleus of most small towns since their inception, was often in decline after 1700, these communities consolidated their position in Georgian provincial society, growing in population and prosperity, as they acquired retail shops and specialist crafts, as well as new leisure activities. The transformation did not occur overnight. In the 1720s the antiquarian and polymath William Stukeley, fresh from London, was dismayed at the small town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where there was ‘not one person … that had any taste or love of learning’ but within a few years things began to improve, as music making and club life blossomed, and he concluded eventually that this ‘is true life, not the stink and noise and nonsense of London’. By the 1760s Fanny Burney could talk of the ‘perpetual round of constrained civilities … unavoidable in a country town’.

on market days, the country came to town and the streets filled up – with buyers and sellers, cattle and sheep, cartloads of corn and bales of cloth; market places were packed with stalls, and the air was filled with the cries of frightened animals and the smell of dung. For many of the smallest market towns, this was the only day in the week when there was enough commercial bustle to make them look recognisably urban. Of course all pre-industrial towns were in some sense market towns, for all depended on public markets to supply themselves with food and raw materials, to bring in country people to deal in country products and so to patronise urban businesses, and to act as a focus for the broad spectrum of commercial and industrial activities which were the basis of the urban economy. However, for the purposes of this volume, London, larger towns, ports, leisure centres and other more specialised urban types have been assigned separate treatment, leaving this chapter to consider the life of the smaller and more nondescript inland settlements which formed the great majority of towns in this period. There were about 650 places with an operating market in England and Wales in the late sixteenth century, rising to nearly 800 a century later, and over 200 in Scotland. If we exclude perhaps ninety of this grand total because more appropriately described by some other label – provincial capital, county town, cathedral city, port – we are left with several hundred of these communities for which the term ‘market town’ sums up their essential character.

the historical Midlands is a concept which is difficult to pin down; to some extent it amounts to that area which is left when more distinctive provincial blocks are removed. For the purposes of this volume the Midlands is defined as the West Midland counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire, combined with the East Midland shires of Derby, Leicester and Rutland, Northampton, Nottingham and Lincoln. There do exist some natural features which help to define this region: uplands to the west and north and the Lincolnshire seacoast, but the southern border can only be defined in our period in terms of the weakening fringe of London’s primary commercial region. This is shown by analysis of the bases of Londonbound carriers in 1684 where there is a marked reduction at about a ninety mile radius from the capital, leaving Worcestershire, mid Warwickshire and mid Leicestershire outside, but Northamptonshire within, London’s region. It is no surprise to find that the major Midland towns all lie beyond this frontier.

Yet the urban networks of the Midlands do have a self-contained and consistent character which justifies thinking in these terms. While the Midland towns by their very location had vital external links, most of them looked primarily to London or to other towns within the region. And they had a great deal in common, for much of the region suffered from poor communications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was a truism of contemporary thought that distance from navigable water necessarily discouraged economic growth: thus in 1722 it was said of Leicestershire that ‘being the most inland county in England, and consequently far from any sea or navigable rivers, you must not suppose it a county of any trade’.

in comparison to France, the Low Countries or northern Italy, the pattern of British towns for much of the early modern period was remarkably polarised. Apart from London, there were no large cities and few middle-rank centres of importance, rather a multitude of very small market centres. For England and Wales the urban hierarchy retained into the eighteenth century the thumb-print of its medieval past. London’s ancient primacy as the seat of government and the country’s most important port was consolidated, as the capital’s population probably quadrupled in the sixteenth century (to 200,000 in 1600), and then more than quadrupled again over the next two hundred years. During the Tudor and Stuart period it was supported on the English stage by a cast of forty or so ‘great and good’ towns (see Chapter 11), major provincial towns but all with populations of under 10,000 in the 1520s and under about 30,000 inhabitants in 1700. Of these, only Newcastle, Bristol, Exeter, Norwich and York could claim to be significant regional cities with extensive trading connections and elaborate civic privileges, and they steadily confirmed their positions as provincial capitals. Most of the rest, places like Gloucester, Leicester or Lincoln, were incorporated shire towns supported by localised trades and industries, meeting the needs of the adjoining countryside. By the Georgian period many of them were profiting from the expansion of their retailing and professional activities, sometimes complemented by specialist craft activity. These regional and county towns were surrounded by several hundred minor market centres, places with fewer than 2,000 people in the sixteenth century, quite often as low as a few hundred; their economies were heavily geared towards marketing and exchange links with the countryside, though by 1700 they had begun to acquire more specialist commercial and other functions.

The chapter examines a paradox: towns played a very significant role in Welsh social and economic life, but before about 1760, the towns that mattered most were not located on Welsh soil. This account will describe the limited importance of the specifically Welsh towns, and the strikingly small urban population of the principality. It will then discuss the networks that did exist in terms of the English regional capitals, especially Bristol, Shrewsbury and Chester; and finally, show how a distinctively Welsh urban network appeared in the south-eastern parts of the country by the end of the eighteenth century.

WELSH URBAN STRUCTURE 1540–1750

Welsh towns were deceptively numerous. As Matthew Griffiths remarks, ‘medieval Wales had been endowed with far more boroughs and market centres than its economy could justify’, the abundance reflecting the need to attract settlers, and many towns withered within a century or two of creation. Nor could they long maintain their position as islands of Norman or English influence, and Ralph A. Griffiths has shown how the later medieval boroughs became increasingly integrated into rural Welsh society. By 1540, a lengthy process of winnowing had left a small number of thriving urban centres, alongside dozens of places lacking the social or economic basis to justify their urban pretensions.

Some fifty or sixty towns in Tudor and Stuart Wales held regular markets, but we reach this figure only by including communities with 200 or 300 people. In 1756, William Owen’s Authentic Account cited fairs at 167 centres throughout the principality, seventy of which were located in the three shires of Carmarthen, Denbigh and Caernarvon.

THE DIVERSITY OF PORTS

ports were among the most dynamic towns during the commercial and Industrial Revolutions in Britain. They were also exceedingly diverse. By definition they were all boroughs or burghs with members of parliament, and councils controlling their domestic affairs. They enjoyed monopoly rights over foreign and most coastal trade. An English law of 1558 restricted trade to specified places and designated Legal Quays within them where all customable goods must be handled. There were approximately seventy-two English ports from 1696, when the customs service was reformed. In Scotland only designated royal and certain baronial burghs could trade overseas, and these were organised in thirteen precincts before the Union and approximately thirty ports thereafter. Although ports were separate entities, to some extent they competed with each other as part of the general or regional transportation system, but they shared characteristics that can be dealt with across the spectrum of places and activities.

By definition ports grew round a waterfront, preferably the mouth of a river linking them to a hinterland, or, less successfully, a stretch of seashore enclosed by a pier or piers and dependent on land carriage. Almost universally throughout northern Europe this waterfront was lined originally with private warehouses backing on to merchants’ houses facing the main street, maximising ground area while minimising expensive water frontage. There was usually a secondary centre round a market serving the local distribution network. In the eighteenth century the ground plan was elaborated in busy ports, with further streets for warehouses. However, the high cost of cartage and government failure to extend Legal Quays encouraged concentration round the waterside, raising land values and confirming the economic domination of those who owned it, with unfortunate effects for later developments.

regions in England have never been closely defined; and urban regions even less so. Cultural identities have been forged locally – in streets, villages, parishes, townships, counties – and also nationally or even, at times, imperially. Moreover, suspicious central governments have always refused to designate formal provincial capitals. That has been the case over many centuries. As a result, regional boundaries in England resist tidy mapping and English towns have never been constrained within distinctly designated regional networks.

Yet there have also existed some broad historical affiliations that were greater than the shire counties and less than the nation. Thus were generated England’s ‘regions of the mind’. In concept, these were permeable and mutable, their boundaries and significance varying over time. But, by virtue of their popular origins, they had a shadowy survivability. They drew not upon formal administrative structure but upon shared geography, experience and culture. In addition, the long-term persistence of urban networks often encouraged these ‘regions of the mind’, since communal identities were forged when people met together – and the towns provided the classic meeting places, where residents and travellers congregated for commerce, conviviality and conversation.

EAST ANGLIA AND REGIONALITY

East Anglia existed regionally in this way. Its boundaries were not rigid. It was not recognised by government as an administrative region and hence had no official provincial capital. Its ‘broad’ speech was fused from a variety of dialects. Moreover, its local economy was not homogeneous. And it certainly was not cut off from the wider world.

this chapter aims to provide an overview of the process of demographic change in the burgeoning growth of towns and cities of the period 1700–1840. The first section will consider the characteristics of migration into urban areas. English towns in this period had a preponderance of females. Why was this the case? What is the particular role of women in the process of urbanisation? The second section will examine the ‘vital events’ of marriage, birth and death. Notably, this time period has been dubbed ‘the dark ages’ of urban demography. The label is justified not only because there are large gaps in our knowledge, but also as a result of the fact that this period is characterised by excess mortality associated with desperate living conditions. The chapter develops by exploring the effects of population change on the progress of urban society. How did migrants assimilate into urban life? How did urbanisation affect social structures? The 1851 census showed that by the mid-nineteenth century half of the population of England and Wales lived in towns. How did people shape the urban context?

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MIGRATION

There is no doubt that urban growth on the scale described by John Langton in the last chapter was to a large measure a result of migration. Yet there has been no detailed analysis of migration into towns and cities for this time period. The paucity of research is particularly apparent for 1750–1850, in which urbanisation and industrialisation are related processes. Indeed much of the available evidence is impressionistic and based on biographical and genealogical material which is only just starting to be quantified.

the six counties in the South-West of England (Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall) are not now associated strongly with urbanisation. Apart from Bristol and Plymouth, the region is predominantly one of small and medium-sized towns. The origins of this modern pattern, in contrast with the more heavily urbanised Midlands and (parts of) the North, lie in the period covered here. Yet it would be misleading to portray this period as one of urban decline in the South-West. Not only was there a more than threefold increase in the urban population of the region between 1660 (c. 225,000) and 1841 (just under 880,000), but even in 1841 the South-West, with 40 per cent of its population in towns, was as urbanised as England generally, leaving London aside (see Table 2.6).1 If urban growth in the previous centuries was less spectacular than elsewhere, this was in part because of the strong urban infrastructure already in place, with over a quarter of the region’s people living in towns by 1660, rising to almost 37 per cent by 1801. Furthermore, if the region lacked an outstanding major new town based on manufacturing and commercial success, it had many smaller ones, notably in Cornwall and in the clothing districts around Bristol, and it had the two greatest inland spas – Bath (see Plates 3 and 28) and Cheltenham, the latter the fastest growing large English town between 1801 and 1841. The leisure and tourism industry they personified was already transforming the coastal towns from Weymouth along the south Devon coast and round to Weston-super-Mare and Clevedon on the Bristol Channel.

the period 1540–1700 saw a transformation of the religious and educational institutions of English, Welsh and Scottish towns, and of the society and culture of their inhabitants. In Britain as in Europe, towns and urban society played an important part in the reformation of the Church and of its role in secular society, both in terms of institutional change and in popular and elite responses to it. Between 1540 and 1580, many of the basic institutional structures of medieval urban society were abolished or fundamentally altered. Important foci of community and civic life, such as fraternities, chantries and ceremonial, disappeared, and town populations and governments had to find a new collective spirit and new ways of organising their sociability. Many town governments came to be influenced by a Protestant or Puritan political ideology, which shaped their view of society and their response to its problems. The reformed Scottish Church achieved a very close relationship with secular urban governments, and set the agenda for action in many spheres, beyond those of religion and education. In the century and a half after the Reformation, religion continued to play an important part in the lives of townspeople in England and Wales, but the Church as a universal institution had been weakened, and the former unity of belief and observance was never recovered. Towns came to accommodate a multiplicity of beliefs and congregations. In the longer term the fragmentation of religious gatherings was paralleled by a decline in observance overall, a growing secularisation of society to which the increase in educational endowment and provision may have contributed.

in the 1830s, critics of the ‘borough system’ – of a parliament heavily weighted towards the representation of small boroughs – and of ‘unreformed’ municipal government portrayed British urban governmental institutions as hidebound, as having failed to adapt to changing times. It is true that, from 1700 to the 1830s, there was little change in the formal institutions either of parliamentary representation or of borough government. Scottish burghs gained representation in the Westminster parliament after the Union of 1707 (and Irish boroughs after the Union of 1800). From the 1770s, would-be parliamentary reformers succeeded in getting the constituency boundaries of three notoriously corrupt parliamentary boroughs redrawn, and one such borough disfranchised. But more radical changes – the disfranchisement of dozens of smaller boroughs, and enfranchisement of large unrepresented towns – had to await the Reform Act of 1832. Similarly, very few new corporate charters were issued after 1700 (though in Scotland, a scattering of burghs of barony were created). Even passage of the 1835 English and Welsh Municipal Corporations Act did not radically change the picture here: among the major unincorporated towns, only Manchester and Birmingham sought incorporation in the remainder of that decade.

By contrast, this was of course an era of striking social, economic and cultural change. National population tripled; the urban share of population grew and there were changes in the urban hierarchy as various industrial and other economically specialised kinds of town rose towards the top of the pile. Towns became the sites of more or less vigorous associational life (now formally tolerated dissenting congregations being among the earlier manifestations of voluntarism).

THE NATURE OF THE REGION

urban growth in parts of northern England during the three centuries under review was spectacular even by the standards of the first industrial nation. It was spectacular in the literal sense that by the early decades of the nineteenth century not only business travellers but also tourists and social commentators were coming to marvel at the novel concentration of factories using fossil fuels in an urban setting in and around Manchester, and at the sheer scale of urban maritime and manufacturing activity in the other towns which were cohering and coalescing. The great industrial and commercial centres gathered up systems of satellite towns in their surrounding districts, conjuring up in one visiting mind the telling image of Manchester as a ‘diligent spider’ at the heart of its web of communications. These were accelerating developments, and they reached their most dramatic, interesting and historically important phase between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, when these new towns were at their most raw, untrammelled, dramatic, exciting and threatening: ‘great human exploits’ which produced and distributed a cornucopia of goods under a shroud of infernal smoke and under conditions which visibly threatened life, health and social and political stability. Provincial urban developments within the North had turned it into a symbol of the future, which might or might not work in the longer term, and by the 1840s the urban concentrations of the region had become the cynosure of the informed contemporary gaze. It therefore makes sense to begin this survey with an analysis of the scale and scope of urbanization within the region in 1840, and then to examine the roots of these unprecedented phenomena and attempt to describe and explain their development.

it is now widely recognised that towns played a central role in the development of a new, more modern British economy and society in the years between 1700 and 1840. However, it is often assumed that the expansive element in urban society, the new social attitudes and cultural values that were helping to change patterns of consumer demand, to mobilise capital resources and to generate novel industrial processes and products, were confined to the great metropolis of London and the specialist ports, resorts and industrial towns whose growth attracted so much attention from contemporary observers. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the role played in this process by the established regional centres and historic county towns, many of which retained their importance well into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their experiences during this period of substantial and sometimes dramatic change in the urban system encompass every possible permutation from explosive population growth to sullen stagnation and raise pertinent questions about the very nature of ‘success’ in the context of urban development. Rather than being passive spectators of a drama taking place elsewhere, regional and county centres were fully involved in the action.

STATUS, FUCTIONS AND PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT

A substantial number of the ‘Great and Good towns’ of early modern England fell into the category of county centres, towns whose social and economic influence over a broad hinterland beyond their immediate market area was recognised by their contemporary classification as ‘the capital of all the county’ or simply ‘county town’.

INTRODUCTION

the fabric of the urban environment experienced accelerating change during the course of the eighteenth century, and the pace of change in some towns, although by no means all, underwent a dramatic gearshift from the 1780s onwards. These changes were driven by rapid population growth and migration, and by technological innovation, leading to the mechanisation of transport and of many manufacturing processes. Central government and municipal authorities contributed very little to this metamorphosis, unlike the experience of many European cities. The traditional pattern of urban social geography, in which the well-to-do lived in the centres of towns and the poor in the suburbs, was shattered in many towns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and replaced by suburban residential segregation based upon socio-economic status and the separation of home and work, in its turn dependent upon ease of transport. Everywhere it is a subtle, complex process of transformation. In some towns, such as Glasgow, it takes place within a generation. In other towns, unaffected by the first stages of industrialisation, it was the end of the nineteenth century before these processes had fully worked themselves out.

Much of this growth and change had to be accommodated within ancient boundaries and administrative structures, creating problems of health, sanitation and housing upon an unprecedented scale. These problems were widely recognised by the 1830s, but it is the 1840s before central government begins to take the first tentative steps towards putting things right.

THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PATTERN

in the early sixteenth century Scotland was undoubtedly less urbanised than England. Data on the population size of Scottish towns are very rare before the middle decades of the seventeenth century but Jan de Vries has calculated that in 1550 1.4 per cent of the Scottish population lived in towns of 10,000 inhabitants or more compared to 3.5 per cent in England and Wales. Another estimate, by Ian Whyte, suggests that 2.5 per cent of Scots were dwelling in towns of over 2,000 in population in 1550 whereas in 1600 8.7 per cent of the population of England were living in towns of this size or bigger. Not only was Scotland an overwhelmingly rural society in this period, more akin to countries such as Ireland and Denmark than to England or Holland, it was also one where urban development was very regionally concentrated. Whole areas, especially in the Highlands and southern Uplands, lacked any urban focus and were distant from any developed marketing centre. In the main, the Scottish towns of the sixteenth century were located in the central Lowlands, especially around the estuaries of the Forth, Tay and Clyde, along the east coast from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and in the lower Tweed valley to the south. These were regions of relatively dense population and rich arable land. It is also the case that in some of these areas town development was extensive and contrasted with the national pattern of very modest urban growth. Recent demographic research on the seventeenth-century hearth taxes has shown that the five counties around the River Forth, East Lothian, Midlothian, Fife, Clackmannan and West Lothian, had by far the highest percentage of town dwellers in Scotland with a level of urbanisation which could be compared to parts of the Netherlands.

an island nation is, commonly, a seafaring one, dependent for much of its way of life on seaborne enterprise. As Charles Lloyd put it in 1659 during the last Protectorate parliament, in which sat Scottish and Irish as well as English and Welsh members, ‘[w]e are islanders, and our life and soul is traffic’. The existence of a seafaring nation turns in large measure on the history of its ports, great and small – their relations with the rural hinterlands which satisfy their needs for food and labour and serve as important markets for their products and services; the multi-faceted roles they play in the nation’s network of urban places, the fiscal and military resources they supply to the state; and the services they provide in trade and communication with the cultures and civilisations lying over the water.

As island nations, early modern England, Wales and Scotland were simultaneously protected by the sea from potential continental enemies and points of passage. It is the tension between these two aspects of island life – the capacity of island peoples to withdraw behind the moat created by the seas surrounding them and their need to cross those same waters to find markets and supplies – that mark island nations as socially distinctive places. How their inhabitants negotiate this relationship and find a balance among its competing elements forms a defining feature of their society and culture. In early modern England, Wales and Scotland, the emphasis was increasingly on market-oriented enterprise and commercial exchange, thereby enhancing the dynamic role played by seaports.

writing home to the Doge and Senate, those crusty patricians ensconced in their colonnaded palace on St Mark’s Square, Venetian ambassadors to the Tudor Court hymned the praises of London as one of the principal cities of Europe, but ignored or dismissed almost all the remaining English towns. Other sixteenth-century visitors from the great continental states were equally critical. Only travellers from the more remote central European countries found anything remarkable in English provincial towns. Scottish and Welsh towns barely figure in foreign reports: Edinburgh on one occasion was compared to a French country town. Yet by the late eighteenth century British towns – not just London but provincial towns – were the envy of the civilised world, admired in the many travellers’ accounts which rehearsed details of their affluence, manufactures, vigorous club life, bustling, friendly shops, well-lit, orderly streets, and much else. Whereas at the start of our period only a minority of English people, maybe 15 per cent or so (and a much lower proportion in Scotland and Wales) resided in cities and towns, by the accession of Queen Victoria nearly half the British population was urban. Not only was there an increasingly integrated national system of towns, but British towns became notable as centres of economic and social innovation, of political discourse and cultural enlightenment, their advance having a growing impact on national society and beyond. Hitherto located on the European periphery in terms of urban development, analogous to regions like Scandinavia and central Europe with their low urban populations and localised towns, from the eighteenth century Britain emerged as the chief laboratory of a modernising world.

thus in mildly satirical vein a poetaster of the 1770s described the smart new cultural world of Georgian Britain. The sense of cultural transformation, of the new sociable importance of women, of new entertainments, of the secularisation of social life, is striking, acute – and exaggerated. As we shall see in this chapter, such changes do figure prominently in the dynamic, and increasingly pluralistic, cultural landscape of British cities during the Georgian era, but they were only part of the painting.

In contrast to the earlier period, there can be little question that cities and towns after 1700 became vital centres for cultural mixing and dissemination, affecting not only the elite classes but a good part of national society as well. The leading cities, particularly London and Edinburgh, became cultural bazaars, increasingly cosmopolitan, importing and translating cultural ideas, goods and practices from continental Europe and beyond. Urban communities became exposition centres, exhibiting the fashionable models of cultural activity, whether performances of Handel’s oratorios, meetings of a newly established learned society or the latest taste in furnishings, dress or speech. Yet British cities in the Georgian era were more than sites or stages for cultural exchange: they were also seedbeds of innovation.