COUNTRY , COUNTY AND TOWN

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COUNTRY , COUNTY AND TOWN : PATTERNS OF REGIONAL EVOLUTION IN ENGLAND

By Professor Alan Everitt, M.A., Ph.D., F .R.Hist.S;

READ AT THE SOCIETY'S CONFERENCE 14 SEPTEMBER 1978¹

IT is a remarkable fact, and one that needs to be pondered, that almost all our current regional terms in this country are of very recent origin. Expressions like Tyneside and Merseyside, the West Midlands and the North-East, have no very lengthy lineage; such phrases as the Home Counties cannot be traced back beyond the early decades of the railway era ;² the present usage even of a genuine historic name like Wessex is no more than an antiquarian revival; while the current reanimation of Mercia seems to be chiefly attributable to a contemporary police force. Perhaps the only regional name of this kind with a continuous history to the present day is East Anglia. In other words, (behind most of our modern expressions, ideas and preconceptions lie implicit that were not necessarily of much significance to the people of earlier centuries. A phrase like the Home Counties, for example, implies a kind of regional unity between the shires surrounding London which until recent centuries-and in many respects until recent generations is entirely fallacious. There was no connection between the origins of settlement, for example, in Hertfordshire and in Sussex, and next to none between settlement in Essex and in Kent. Even in the Civil War period there was singularly little contact and no cohesion, as parliament quickly found to its cost, between the counties surrounding the capital.

These facts will bear thinking about. Most of us probably find it difficult to rid our minds of the unconscious preconceptions implicit in regional expressions like these. In studying the evolution of contemporary society, moreover, they obviously have a certain validity, and

^{1 This version has been slightly expanded for publication. A fuller
version of pp. 91- 105 was given as the Gregynog Lectures at the University
College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1976.
^{2 The Oxford English Dictionary gives no quotations to indicate the
origin of this term. I have not been able to trace it before the 1870s, when it
was used by Robert Furley in A History of the Weald of Kent (3 vols., Ashford,
1871-4). It probably derives from the Home Circuit of the assize judges.
it would be cavalier to suggest that we should abandon them altogether. Yet
there are dangers in reading them back into the past, and of attributing to them
a kind of historic unity, which in fact is of recent origin. It is not simply
that the generalisations they give rise to are often likely to prove spurious,
but that they usually impose the wrong kind of regional pattern upon the
landscape of history. The tapestry of local and regional variation in England,
as it appeared to our fore bears, was more elaborately wrought, and more
changing in its character, than such terms suggest.
As historians, what exactly do we mean, or ought we to mean, by a 'region' ?
In England this is a particularly difficult question to answer, and the purpose
of this paper is to indicate something of the character of its complexity. To
begin with, regions vary greatly in I kind. There is a clear distinction between
what one might call a 'conscious' region, on one hand, an area with a sense of
its own identity, a sense of belonging together, and, on the other hand, a
region which is rather a perception of historians or geographers, and which
probably had no conscious significance for contemporaries. The geographers'
distinction between the Highland Zone and the Lowland Zone is one example of
this latter type of 'unconscious' region; what W. G. Hoskins once described in
an illuminating phrase as the 'peripheral counties' of England is another; the
vernacular architects' perception of a zone in which the longhouse was the
characteristic form of traditional farm-building is yet another. In their own
context these are useful expressions; they relate to real ideas; but one cannot
say that they relate to a 'conscious' region, with its own sense of unity and
identity.
Then, secondly, regional definitions may vary with the kind of social order,
or class, that one is thinking of, particularly perhaps in recent centuries. In
the early modern period, for example, the county came to have a meaning and a
coherence for the gentry of the time which it can rarely have had for
husbandmen, craftsmen, and labourers. Not that those of non-gentle status had no
consciousness of the county unit; in some areas, such as Cornwall and Kent, they
certainly had, at any rate in times of crisis, when the shire tended to act
together as a united body. But they did not form part of a single interrelated
community of families, as the county gentry themselves often did. A little
later, we can trace the development of another kind of social region based in
the leisured classes: the 'neighbourhood', or local visiting area of what came
to be called 'carriage' families :³ a peculiarly English kind of
locality which figures prominently in our nineteenth-century literature-in the
novels of Jane Austen, for
^{3 See, for example, my 'Kentish Family Portrait' in Rural Change and
Urban Growth, 1500-1800, ed. C. W. Chalklin and M. A. Havinden (London, 1974),
pp. 193-4.
example-but which can usually have had little meaning at other levels of
society.
Thirdly, and most difficult of all to take account of, is the fact that
regions are not necessarily constant or static units: there is a kaleidoscopic
character about them. Whereas one can say that local communities, like
Leicester, Norwich, or Tolpuddle, have always remained continuously
identifiable, and in a sense the same place, one cannot say this of the regional
pattern of this country. Some kinds of region, it is true, such as the country
or pays of this paper-Dartmoor or the Cotswolds, for instance have remained
similar in extent for centuries. Such areas, moreover, often have a longer and
more continuous influence on provincial development than we sometimes realize.
The fact that at the present time the parliamentary constituencies of North Kent
-Dartford, Gravesend, Rochester, Gillingham, and Faversham-all tend to be
marginal Labour/Conservative seats arises partly from characteristics in their
economy and society whose ultimate origins may be traced back for many
centuries, in some sense even to the roots of Kentish settlement itself. To put
it briefly, they belong to a tract of countryside that since Roman times has
always formed the more workaday part of the county. Nevertheless, taken as a
whole, the basic regional pattern in this country has in many ways not remained
constant: it has been an evolutionary pattern. Not only have regional boundaries
changed: at a more fundamental level, new kinds or types of region have from
time to time come into existence and overlaid or transformed the old. Up to a
point; after all, the reorganization of local government a few years ago,
whatever we may think of its all too evident defects, was a recognition of that
fact; Of these diverse types of region, the two that will be discussed more
particularly in this paper are the 'country' and the 'county'. The former term
is not used here to denote 'country' as opposed to 'town', or 'country' as
opposed to 'court', but 'country' in the old sense of a 'countryside' or a pays.
This particular meaning of the word has largely died out in the common speech of
English people today, though its disappearance is relatively recent, and it
still survives in a few special phrases like the Black Country .⁴
That particular expression is in fact an interesting and rather rare example of
its application to a comparatively modern industrial district.
II
The influence of countrysides or pays upon the evolution of provincial
society is probably something that most of us are now in some degree
^{4 First recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1834, when it was
evidently not a new expression.
aware of. It first struck me forcibly when working with Joan Thirsk on the
sixteenth-century volume of The Agrarian History of England. It struck me
afresh, a few years later, in endeavouring to work out the distribution pattern
of rural nonconformity in Kent and a group of Midland counties.⁵
Since then it has impressed me yet again in working on the early settlement
history of this country, more particuarly in Kent, though also in other areas.⁶
What we see in all these periods is a landscape, a society, an economy, and in
some respects a culture, that in every area was sharply divided into contrasting
pays. Everything that we look at in past centuries is in some degree shaped by
these contrasts. The fact that most of our historic regional names, apart from
those of counties, are the names of countrysides is significant in this
connection: the Chilterns, the Mendips, the Cotswolds, and the Weald, for
example; or Dartmoor, Charnwood, and Arden. IIt was their character as
distinctive countrysides that impressed itself on the early peoples that named
them, often in the Celtic period, and that character has in some sense remained
apparent, though not of course unchanged, throughout their history .
There are still many areas where these differences of pays are plain to see
in the English countryside of today. We can see them in Gloucestershire, for
example, between the Severn valley on one hand and the Cotswolds on the other;
in Yorkshire between the lush pasture- lands of the valley-floors and the bare
fellsides rising above them; or in Kent between the untrammelled sheep-country
of Romney Marsh and the broken, wooded, upland overlooking it. In the days
before parliamentary enclosure such contrasts were a good deal more obvious than
they are at the present time, particularly in the old common-field areas, where
nowadays it often requires an effort of imagination to re-create them. There
were few counties, indeed, where they I did not give rise to marked regional
variations of some kind, and in some districts these variations were to be found
within the borders of a single parish. In the Cambridgeshire parish of
Carlton-cum- Willingham, for instance, there was a pronounced contrast between
the western half of the area, with its vast common-field of some 800 acres, the
only one in the parish, and the eastern half with its parcelled
assart-and-coppice country along the Suffolk border.⁷ I t is the
exceptionally diverse physical structure of this island that lies behind this
regional variation. That is why these contrasting types of countryside are
rarely delimited by county boundaries, but regu-
^{5 Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century
(Leicester University: Dept. of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 2nd
Ser., No.4, 1972). ⁶See my forthcoming book on this subject,
Continuity and Colonization: English Settlement and the Kentish Evidence
(Leicester, 1980). ,
^{7 V.C.H., Cambridgeshire, vi, 152, 165.

larly stretch across the borders of one shire into the next, and in their
essential characteristics are often echoed on similar landforms elsewhere. There
are obvious resemblances between the settlement of the Weald of Kent and the
Weald of Sussex, for example, and the whole Wealden area is more like the Forest
of Arden in Warwickshire, or even Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, than the
marshlands or
the coastal plain of Sussex and Kent. There are also closer resemblances
between the Gault Vale settlements of Kent on one hand, and of Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire on the other, than there are between those of the Kentish Gault
and of Romney Marsh. That does not mean that these areas are identical or that
their history has been shaped by crude determinism; but it does mean that it has
been influenced by complex human responses to particular kinds of environment.
The fact that in Kent alone nearly a thousand years elapsed between the oldest
English settlements of the coastal plain
and the latest English settlements of the Weald bears testimony to the
profound effect of these differences of pays upon the progress of colonization.
The fact that. that lengthy period elapsed also meant that very different types
of economy and rural society developed in the various parts of the county. To a
perceptive eye, these differences are still apparent within the social,
economic, and political contrasts
of the present day, though they are not of course the only factors to take
account of in that connection
In approaching the problem of regional development, then what we really need
at the outset is a systematic map indicating the general framework or pattern of
pays in the country as a whole. In some parts of England not enough is yet known
regarding the origins of settlement or the subsequent evolution of local society
to reconstruct such a map with any great confidence. But it seems clear that in
general we must envisage a pattern of sharply-localized contrasts: an elaborate
mosaic of interlocking rural economics more closely resemble the geological map
than that of our modern regions or our ancient counties and kingdoms. Not that
this pattern will exactly repeat the geological map, for geology is but one of
many factors shaping a countryside or pays, but that it will bear the same kind
of regional imprint, the same kind of localised diversity, the same intricacy
and contrast.
In making these remarks one is clearly begging the difficult question
of how far we may expect to find continuity of outline between the pays of
the settlement period and the pays of more recent centuries. How closely do the
agrarian countrysides of the late eighteenth century, say, really approximate to
those of the pre-Conquest period? The answer to this question is obviously not
at all simple, and may
well differ widely from county to county. Nevertheless, although agrarian
practice itself has varied greatly over the generations, in many pays it will be
found to have varied only within the more or less distinct limits imposed upon
it by the local environment. in many areas it was not until the period of
parliamentary enclosure, the building of railways, the mechanization of
agriculture, the invention of clay-pipe drainage, or some other technical
advance, that fundamental change in regional outlines became possible. When it
occurred at an earlier date, as in the development of orchards and hop-gardens
in sixteenth-century Kent, it was usually restricted to certain types of
countryside, and often fitted into the ancient pattern of farms, fields, woods,
lanes, and boundaries.⁸ In other words it did not as a rule create an
entirely new countryside, or wholly redraw the outlines of the ancient pays. In
many areas, therefore, though not in all, the historic framework of agrarian
regions, before the changes of the last century took place, is of a broadly
similar pattern to the framework of early settlement-zones. In some counties,
such as Buckinghamshire and Kent, a marked correspondence has persisted to the
present day, and there is really nothing surprising in this kind of continuity.
The natural properties of districts like the Chilterns, the Weald, and Romney
Marsh, after all, have necessarily entailed a certain basic, though not
immutable, pattern upon their agrarian evolution.
It is not part of the present purpose to describe in detail how to set about
reconstructing a systematic map of countrysides or pays in England. As a first
step, however, it is useful to recognize that the English landscape is composed
of a number of distinct types or species of country , so to speak, and on this
subject something must be said. For although no two areas exactly repeat one
another, it is possible to classify the multifarious local countrysides of
England, and to perceive a tentative pattern both in the way settlement
proceeded from one type to another, and in the varying kinds of society to which
they tended to give rise. In the space available, attention will be devoted to
their influence on the origins of settlement rather than their subsequent effect
on local society.
Provisionally, and perhaps rashly, the present writer would suggest a broad
classification into eight types or categories of countryside : the fielden or
'champion' areas, the forest areas, the fell or moorland areas, the fenlands,
the marshlands, the heathlands, the downlands, and the wold or wald
countrysides. These categories are only rough and ready ones; at many points
they clearly overlap; and they must not be thought of as either rigid in their
boundaries or unchanging in their character over the centuries. No
classification can be alto-
^{8 As is still evident from the fact that most of the isolated
farmsteads and many of the woodland names in the earliest fruit-growing area,
around Faversham and Sittingbourne, are recorded in medieval or pre-Conquest
documents.
gether satisfactory, and a number of further subdivisions might obviously be
suggested. There are marked differences, as well as resemblances, between the
'fell' or moorland countries of the Pennines, the Lake District, and Dartmoor,
for example. There are also major differences between the 'fielden' countrysides
of Warwickshire, Kent,
and the Welsh Marches. In Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, the High Weald is in some
ways very unlike the Low Weald, and in places little more than sandy heathland,
though in general both areas may be thought of as classic forest country
.Nevertheless, for elementary purposes this broad classification of the English
landscape into eight divisions will perhaps serve. At least it may help to fix
in the mind a different kind of pattern from that of our contemporary regional
terms.
Up to a point, it seems clear that these different types of country often
tended to be settled in different periods.⁹ In some areas we do not
yet know enough to be positive on this point, and there must always have been
wide variations of dating between similar types of landscape in different parts
of the country. Nevertheless, a number of tentative generalizations can perhaps
be advanced. In the fielden or 'old arable' countrysides many settlements are
certainly very ancient-though of course not all-and it seems likely that most of
the earliest English and pre-English places are to be found in these areas. They
are particularly associated with river valleys-the Thames, the Ouse, the Nene,
and the Medway, for example-and with major spring-lines, such as that of the
Gault in Kent and Buckinghamshire, though not with all low-lying districts. The
fell, forest, and heathland areas, by contrast, usually tend, by and large, to
be settled relatively late. In the two latter types of country at least a good
deal of colonization is of post-Conquest origin,¹⁰ and in some areas
new settlements were still being established in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. This seems to be the period of origin of many places called 'row',
for instance, such as Keysoe Row in Bedfordshire and Whitley Row in Kent, and
probably also of many settlements called 'common' and 'heath'.¹¹ In
fenland areas a number of very early .
^{9 See my forthcoming article, 'Place-Names and Pays', in Nomina, iii,
1979.
^{10 These views have recently been challenged by P. H. Sawyer in his
'Introduction: Early Medieval English Settlement', Medieval Settlement:
Continuity and Change, ed. P. H. Sawyer (London, 1976), pp. 1-7. For a critique
of Professor Sawyer's views, see my forthcoming book referred to in n.6 above,
where the relationship of settlement origins and dating to types of countryside
is explored in detail. I should not dispute that some forest settlements may be
very early; but when topographical as well as documentary evidence is taken into
account, it seems indisputable that permanent and continuous colonization ( as
distinct from summer pasturing) in areas like the Weald began late in the Old
English period and was far from complete in the eleventh century. When closely
examined, the evidence that Professor Sawyer cites does not in fact conflict
with that view.
^{11 Such settlements usually arose through encroachment on common land,
or on
settlements may also be found, such as Ely in Cambridgeshire; but there may
have been wider diversities of date in different localities, since variations of
a few feet above sealevel dictate essentially dissimilar topographical
conditions in this type of country .In marshland areas it is also occasionally
possible to find very early places, such as Lydd in Kent. But if the Kentish
evidence in general is any guide-it may well not be-much marshland settlement
did not originate until the tenth or eleventh century , or even later, owing to
problems of drainage and reclamation. In these areas early settlements often
seem to have developed from very localized circumstances: at Lydd itself from
the existence of a shingle island at the tip of a tidal lagoon in the
Romano-British period.¹²
It is the wald and the down land areas of England that are in some ways the
most enigmatic and perhaps the most diverse in their settlement origins. In
these terms one must probably include most of the upland or watershed
countrysides of the Lowland Zone, apart from the late-settled forests and
heaths, whether they are known as 'wolds' and 'downs' or not. Amongst them we
must thus think of regions like the Chilterns, the Kesteven uplands, the West
Cambridgeshire uplands, and perhaps much of the higher country of the eastern
counties, as well as classic downland areas like the Berkshire Downs and the
Yorkshire Wolds. In some of these regions settlement as we know it began
relatively early in the Saxon period, and in many cases it seems to have been
more or less complete by the tenth or eleventh century.¹³ Unlike the
fielden areas, however, these were generally pays of colonization, or in some
cases recolonization of secondary woodland, rather than of primary settlement.
Except in river valleys, as at Lambourne in Berkshire or Chilham in Kent, it
does not seem to be usual to find very early primary settlements in downland
countryside, though in some areas there was substantial prehistoric and Roman
settlement. Further examination may well modify this view, however, in some
parts of the country.
parish boundaries, during a period of rapid population growth, particularly
c. 1570- 1640. See, for example, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV,
1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (London, [967), pp. 409-12. Keysoe Row developed on
the boundary of Keysoe and Bolnhurst; Whitley Row on that of Sundridge and
Chevening. ¹² Lydd is recorded in a charter of 774, much earlier than
any other marshland settle-
ment, Its Roman remains include an earthwork, a track, and second-century
pottery. There is Saxon work in the church. (J. K. Wallenberg, Kentish
Place-Names (Uppsala, 1931), p. 55; G. J. Copley, An Archaeology of South-East
England: a Study in Continuity (London, 1958), p. 277).
^{13 Cf. Alan Everitt, 'River and Wold: Reflections on the Historical
Origin of Regions and Pays' , Journal of Historical Geography, Ill, i ( 1977),
1-19. Nearly all the parishes in a typical 'wold' area, such as the West
Cambridgeshire uplands, are recorded in Domesday Book.
Nowadays, the typical wold and down land areas of England-in Lincolnshire,
Wiltshire, Berkshire, or East Sussex, for example-are notably bare of trees, and
many people think of them as always having been woodless. There are grounds for
thinking, however, that some of them were at one time extensively wooded, and in
regions like the Kentish Downs and the Chilterns substantial wooded stretches
still remain. At present we cannot be sure that the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire
Wolds, or the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs, were ever so afforested, and the
archaeological evidence suggests that parts of the latter at least have been
bare since prehistoric times. In a recent article in the Journal of Historical
Geography, however, the present writer was able to show from place-names and
topographical evidence that the bare downland areas of East Kent were at one
time thickly forested, and the word wald still survives in many local names,
such as Womenswold and Waldershare. A further article, by Della Hooke, shows
that the Cotswolds also were once well-wooded ; and so too were areas like the
West Cambridgeshire uplands, the Kesteven uplands, the Bromswold of
Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Northamptonshire, the upland country
bordering Essex, Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk, and the south Leicestershire
uplands overlooking the Welland valley .¹⁴ If areas like the
Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds were in fact once wooded, they nevertheless
gave rise to very different types of settlement and society from those of the
Kentish Downs or the Chilterns, so that it is convenient to think of them as a
distinct kind of country , although their period of colonization was often
probably similar. It is for this reason that the word wald is used here to
distinguish the early-colonized but wooded upland countries from the barer wolds
and downlands. Like the classic forest countries, much of the wald and downland
countryside of England thus originated from the clearance of woodland, or wald,
from which the word 'wold' is itself derived. It differs from the true forests,
as the term is used here, in that its clearance began at a much earlier period,
and in many cases was probably approaching completion when that of the true
forests began. As a rule, moreover, the social and ecclesiastical structure of
the wald areas was very different from that of the classic forests. By and large
the wald and downland countrysides thus seem to have been areas of intermediate
colonization, predominantly settled between the invasion period and the Norman
Conquest.
This broad classification of English countrysides into eight types, it must
be stressed, is no more than a provisional one. It seems useful, however, to
keep a general outline or framework of regional evolution of this type in mind.
It is important to recognize that, within wide

lbid. ; Della Hooke, 'Early Cotswold Woodland', Journal of Historical
Geography, IV, iv ( 1978), 333-41; Alan Everitt, 'The Wolds once More,'
ibid, V, i ( 1979), 67-71

limits, the settlement of these various kinds of countryside tended to
originate in different phases of colonisation, and to give rise to different
kinds of society, however diverse the dating of those phases may have been
indifferent parts of the country. There can also be no doubt that these
differences of origin ultimately lie at the root of many of the regional
contrasts that we still see in the Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian countryside.
The work of Joan Thirsk and others, after all, has shown how basic was the
division between fielden and forest countrysides in the early modern period, and
how continuously that division has shaped our history .More recently this kind
of regional analysis has been further exploited in varying ways by scholars like
Margaret Spufford in Cambridgeshire and W. J. Ford in Warwickshire.¹⁵
In the writer's view it may now be pressed further in studying and comparing the
settlement, the economy, and the society of the heathland, fenland, downland,
marshland, moorland, and wold or wald types of countryside, both with one
another and with their counterparts in different parts of the kingdom. It may
well shed a good deal of light on such vexed questions as the origins of the
common fields,¹⁶ for example, or the distribution of. deserted
medieval settlements.¹⁷
III

Important though this kind of regional division is, it is obviously not the
only one that needs to be taken account of in studying provincial /society. A
country or pays is basically a natural region; the county or shire, to which we
now turn, is basically an artificial one, an essentially human creation, often
with no significant natural boundaries. In other words the map of our 'coloured
counties' has no obvious relation with that of our countrysides: the regional
pattern is of a quite different kind. All our historic counties go back in some
form for centuries. Several
^{15 See, for example, Agrarian History, ed. Thirsk, ch. I; Joan Thirsk
'Industries in the Countryside', Essays in the Economic and Social History of
Tudor and Stuart England, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961) ; Margaret
Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974) ; W. J. Ford, 'Some Settlement Patterns
in the Central Region of the Warwickshire A von ' , Medieval Settlement, ed.
Sawyer, pp. 274-94.
^{16 The fields of Carlton-cum- Willingham in Cambridgeshire, referred to
earlier, provide a good example of the way field-systems tend to become
eccentric towards the outer edge of a common-field countryside. Those in the
Granta valley to the south- west of Carlton, by contrast, broadly conform to the
classic common-field system.
^{17 To some extent the sites of deserted medieval villages have been
related to different types of terrain ; but a more rigorous examination is
desirable. In particular the word 'village' itself needs to be more carefully
defined. In areas of scattered settlement, such as Kent, the idea is often
inappropriate, and Deserted Medieval Village status has been claimed for many
isolated church sites where in all probability no true village ever existed.
of them, like Sussex, have developed from Old English kingdoms, or , like
Kent, from territories whose ultimate origins lie beyond our present knowledge.
It is the later phases in their history that concern us in this paper, the
period when these ancient units of local government seem to have entered on a
new phase in their life-span with what has been described as the 'advent of the
county community' in the post-medieval period.¹⁸ Although this
development was obviously an evolutionary process that cannot be dated with any
precision, and in some areas may have begun earlier than is generally supposed,
we can probably look to the Elizabethan, Stuart, and Hanoverian periods as the
time when the county as a self-conscious society achieved its floruit. It is not
part of the present purpose to trace this process, or to explore the complex
reasons behind it: political, social, administrative, economic, cultural,
familial, religious, and so on. I have nothing new to add to what I have said
elsewhere on this head, or to what others have said better than I can: Dr
Hassell Smith in Norfolk, for example, Mr Fletcher in Sussex, and Dr Morrill in
Cheshire.¹⁹ Although these and other studies have naturally brought
to light much diversity between the different shires, and a good deal
of variation in the sense of identity and degree of cohesion within them, the
'county commonwealths', as Namier called them, now I seem to have found an
established place in our historical thinking. During the period under
discussion, they surely ceased to be simply administrative units and in many
cases became genuine self-conscious 1 regions, with a life of their own, and an
obviously growing authority in provincial society.
There is one aspect of this subject, however, to which one wishes to draw
particular attention, and that is the rise of the county town r as the focus or
heart of the county community, or in other words as a kind of regional capital.
There are two reasons why it seems desirable to discuss this point. First, it is
doubtful if one can really understand a regional society in the full sense
without some appreciation, 1some sympathetic recreation, of the life of its
capital: and as yet there are remarkably few such places for which this has been
adequately undertaken.²⁰ Quite a good case might indeed be made out
for the view that without an urban focus of some kind a truly regional culture
^{18 By Peter Clark in English Provincial Society from the Reformation to
the Revolution: Religion, Politics, and Society in Kent, 1500-1640 (Hassocks,
1977).
^{19 Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60
(Leicester, 1966) ; A. Hassell Smith, County and Court (Oxford, 1974) ; Anthony
Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600-1660 (London, 1975)
; J. S. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630-1660: County Government and Society during the
English Revolution (Oxford, 1974).
^{20 The best-known study is Sir Francis Hill's four-volume work on
Lincoln. Some of the more recent V.C.H. volumes, such as those covering York and
Warwick, are also valuable in this connexion. In another category is Alan
Armstrong's quantitative
can hardly come into existence. Our modern regions, after all, are I
essentially based on industrial and commercial capitals like Birmingham and
Newcastle. The rise of 'occupational regions' in the early modern period was
likewise associated with the development of entrepreneurial' towns like
Sheffield in the metal trades and Northampton in the shoe industry .The great
regional cultures of the medieval world were no less obviously centred on
European cities like Florence and Venice. Some theorists might go further and
suggest that the relative insignificance of regional cultures of this kind in
medieval England is in some way linked with the relative insignificance of our
medieval towns. It seems doubtful if such abstract arguments are very
convincing, and certainly many of the countrysides spoken of earlier existed for
centuries with a culture of their own, yet without any major urban focus.
Nevertheless, over the last three or four centuries there can be no doubt that
the English town has fulfilled a crucial function in the i development of
regional self-consciousness. The County capital, the 'entrepreneurial' town, and
the industrial city have all exerted a decisive influence in this respect.
The second reason why one wishes to draw attention to the County town is that
it was there that both 'County' and 'Country' met. These regional capitals, in
other words, were not only the natural focus of the County community; they were
also the natural focus of the countrysides or pays surrounding them; and it was
the influence of both County and Country that shaped their distinctive economy
and society. In this sense, although there was no obvious relationship between
the pattern of shires and the pattern of pays, there was a close connection
between them, and a Constant interplay, within the County capital. What one
really means by that statement is this. During the period of emergence of the
County community, we also see the development of increasing specialization in
agriculture in the contrasting English countrysides. Like the County itself,
this specialization was not an altogether new development, and to some extent it
was implicit in the basic diversities of these Countries themselves.
Nevertheless, there was a massive intensification of regional specialization in
farming in the early modern period, and in consequence a massive increase in
internal trade between one kind of countryside and another, an increase which
was necessarily channelled through the market towns of the kingdom. Yet when we
turn to look at the pattern of these market towns, and Compare it with that of
the high medieval period, what we find is that there has been a drastic decline
in the number of markets, a reduction, in fact, of at least fifty per cent, from
more than 1,500 in the late thirteenth century to a mere 750 in the
and sociological study, Stability and Change in an English County Town: a
Social Study of York, 1801-51 (Cambridge, 1974 )
seventeenth. This is now a well-known theme and needs no labouring ; but the
consequence to note was the evolution of a widespread network of 'regional' or
'cardinal' markets through which the market trade of this country came to be
increasingly channelled. This network of regional markets, it is true, was not
at all points identical with that of the county towns; the former were in fact
more numerous than the latter, and in a few counties, such as Buckinghamshire
and Somerset, the old capitals never became important commercial centres.
Nevertheless, by and large, it was the county towns of England, in most areas,
that also became the dominant regional markets.²¹ One thinks of
places like Norwich and Exeter, for example, of Chester and York, of Leicester
and Nottingham, of Worcester and Shrewsbury, of Canterbury, Salisbury, and
Oxford, of Ipswich, Colchester, Maidstone, and so on. These were the places, in
other words, that focussed not only the life of the county community, but also
the life of the countries or pays around them.
How was it that this double influence, of county and country, was actually
articulated in the economy of the county town ? What exactly were its urban
consequences ? In what way did these places develop over this period in response
to it? What kind of regional culture, if any, did they give rise to? The answers
to these questions are obviously far from simple and vary widely from place to
place.
At the risk of considerable oversimplification, however, they can mostly be
grouped under six interrelated headings. The following pages are based on an
examination of five towns in particular Exeter, Shrewsbury, Canterbury,
Maidstone, and Northampton- together with a more superficial analysis, for
comparative purposes, of several other county capitals and a group of smaller
market towns. In most cases the period under review is George III's reign; but
for Northampton the study has been extended back into the late sixteenth
century. Altogether, the occupations of more than 50,000 townsmen have been
traced and tabulated. What are the main conclusions, very briefly summarized, to
which the evidence points ?²²
IV
First, the county towns of Hanoverian England were not generally centres of
staple trades, nor were they usually industrial towns in the sense in which we
use that term of the Industrial Revolution. Some
^{21 Cf. Alan Everitt, 'The Marketing of Agricultural Produce', Agrarian
History, ed. Thirsk ; Alan Everitt, 'The Primary Towns of England', The Local
Historian, xi, '975. I owe the phrase 'cardinal' markets to J. D. Goodacre,
'Lutterworth in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries,' Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 1977, chapter I.
^{22.For the sources employed, see Appendix at end of this article.
of them had once been centres of this kind, as Exeter was of the serge
industry; a few, like Norwich, still remained so; and a few were developing into
major centres of new industries. Maidstone, for instance, was gradually becoming
the dominant focus of the paper industry ; Worcester of the glove industry;
Northampton of the shoe industry; and Leicester and Nottingham of the hosiery
trades. But in the period under review we must not exaggerate this tendency. In
none of the five towns in question did any single trade occupy more than 15 per
cent of the recorded population, and the emphasis everywhere was on occupational
variety .²³ Altogether some 400 distinct occupations have been traced
in the five towns under review: 142 in Northampton, 150 in Canterbury , 174 in
Shrewsbury , and 246 in Exeter .²⁴ The real total was no doubt
substantially larger than that, since it is not possible to compile a fully
exhaustive census, and it had certainly increased greatly over the period since
Queen Elizabeth's reign. Amongst the thousands of apprentices recorded in the
Northampton
Registers, for example, the number of separate trades to which they were
articled rose from forty-five under Queen Elizabeth to eighty- three in the
latter half of the seventeenth century, and 114 between 1716 and 1776. This was
a real increase, moreover; it does not simply represent old trades masquerading
under new guises; and it was an increase that was far more strikingly apparent
in county towns than in most other urban centres. The fundamental development
that it points to is the expanding role of these places first as centres of
organization, and secondly as nurseries of skill.
One of the aspects of their role as centres of organization was their
remarkable development over this period as inland entrepots, as exchanges or
meeting-places of traders, factors, drovers, middlemen, wholesalers, and
wayfaring merchants of all kinds. This is the second point to note in the
evolution of the county town. In part it arose from the position of these places
as regional markets; but it also went a good deal further than that. It gave
rise to a whole range of new business facilities based on urban inns, for
example, whose numbers in Northampton increased, not untypically, by 300 per
cent between
^{23.Shoemakers formed the most numerous occupational group in four of
the five towns : in Northampton ( 1768) , fifteen per cent of the population; in
Shrewsbury (1796), twelve per cent; in Canterbury ( 1818), eleven per cent; in
Exeter ( 1803), six per cent. In Maidstone (1802) papermakers formed the largest
recorded group (thirteen per cent), closely followed by the Medway hoymen and
watermen (eleven per cent) ; but the Maidstone poll-book is much less full in
its coverage. By 1831, significantly, the Northampton shoemakers had increased
nearly five-fold, and accounted for thirty-six per cent of the recorded
population.
^{24 Compare these figures with 28~ separate occupations in Bristol (
1812 ) ; sixty seven in Wellingborough ( 1777), the largest Northamptonshire
town after Northampton itself; thirty in Thrapston, a typical small
market-centre; and fourteen in Clipston, a large Northamptonshire village.
1570 and 1770.²⁵ It also gave rise to a rapidly expanding network
of stage-coach routes and, perhaps more important, to a vast nexus of local and
long-distance carriers' Services. ²⁶ It gave rise, moreover, to a
fascinating development of these towns as regional shopping- centres, a subject
on which the evidence is massive and yet in most
places is still virtually unexplored.²⁷ Finally, and in one sense
perhaps most important of all, it both encouraged and was itself encouraged by
the development of the provincial newspaper, particularly after 1720. Not all
early papers, it is true, were centred in county towns. Some were established in
ports like Bristol; some in rising industrial centres like Birmingham; some in
social capitals like Bath; and a few
in minor market towns like St Ives. But the overwhelming majority were
produced in the old county capitals: in Canterbury, Exeter, Northampton,
Salisbury, Derby, Norwich, Nottingham, York, Worcester, Gloucester, Leicester,
and so on. It might well be argued that no single development has been more
important in the rise of regional self-consciousness in this country then the
establishment of provincial
newspapers. Though to begin with their local news was scanty, their
advertisement pages from -the, outset focussed the life of their hinterland week
by week as nothing else had done hitherto.²⁸}
Closely connected with the entrep6t character of the county town was its
third characteristic: its development as the professional and entrepreneurial
centre of its region. During the eighteenth century old professions like those
of the doctors and attorneys continuously expanded in numbers, while a wide
range of new professions arose in response to the new requirements of the age:
land-surveyors, appraisers, printers, publishers, accountants, architects,
engineers, bankers, insurance offices, and so on--often appearing roughly in
that order. In addition to these general professional occupations, moreover,
which by 1800 were to be found in virtually every county town, and in addition
to the facilities for business education developing alongside them, a number of
towns also developed a more specialised entrepreneurial role, as centres of
organization of some particular regional craft or industry. One of the salient
themes in occupational development in this country over the past three centuries
or so has
^{25 Everitt, 'Marketing of Agricultural Produce'; Alan Everitt, 'The
English Urban
Inn, 1560—1760 ', Perspectives in English Urban History, ed. Alan Everitt
(London, 1973), PP. 91-137.
^{26 J. A. Chartres, 'Road Carrying in England in the Seventeenth
Century: Myth
and Reality', Econ. H.R., 2nd Ser., xxx (1977); Alan Everitt, 'Country
Carders in the
Nineteenth Century', Journal of Transport History, New Ser., iii (1976).
^{27 Particularly informative is the evidence of probate inventories,
wills, and news-
paper advertisements.
^{28 As G. A. Granfield has shown in his fine study, The Development of
the Provincial
Newspaper, 1700-1760 (Oxford, 1962).

been the tendency for certain staple crafts, once practised widely, to become
concentrated in a gradually narrowing circuit of countryside, or occasionally in
two or three separate areas, until a distinct craft-region emerges, with its own
character, its own traditions, its own sense of identity, and its own
distinctive culture. Such developments did not occur in all staple trades;²⁹
they did not always take place during
the same period; they were often more gradual than is generally realised; ³⁰
and they were highly complex processes about which, in many cases, little is yet
known. Nevertheless, the evolution of distinct occupational regions of this kind
can clearly be observed in such industries as glove-making, shoemaking,
lacemaking, nail-making, scythe-making, needle-making, stocking-knitting, and
plush-making: and in
every case an 'entrepreneurial' town of some kind played a crucial role in
this development. By no means all these towns, it is true, were county capitals:
many of them had originated as lesser market centres, and either eventually
developed into industrial cities like Birmingham and Sheffield, or else remained
local market towns like Banbury and Newport Pagnell.. In a substantial number of
cases, however, it was
the county town that became the predominant centre of organization in the
development of 'occupational regions', and where this occurred it added a
further dimension to their role as nurseries of business expertise. In the
hosiery industry, for example, it was chiefly Leicester and Nottingham that
fulfilled this function; in the glove industry it was Worcester; in the paper
industry it was Maidstone; and in the
shoe industry it was Northampton .³¹}
The fourth characteristic of the county town to note was its development as a
centre of leisured life-the life of the gentry. For county families this often
involved annual migration into town, usually
^{19 They did not occur in the wood-crafts, for example, although some
towns acquired
a notable reputation in certain specialised fields: e.g., Wymondharn for
spoon-making,
King's Cliffe for turnery ware, and High Wycombe for chairmaking.
^{20 As in the case of the shoe industry, for example, which despite
increasing concentration in Northamptonshire (and to a lesser extent in Norwich,
Leicester, Somerset, and Westmoreland), still remained widely dispersed in the
late nineteenth century. See P. R. Mounfield's three studies: 'The Place of Time
in Economic Geography', Geography, lxii (1977), 272 ff; 'Early Technological
Innovation in the British Footwear Industry', Industrial Archaeology Review, ii
(1978), 137; 'The Footwear Industry of the EastMidlands (IV): Leicestershire to
1911', East Midland Geographer, iv, No. 25 (1966), 8-.23. See also V. A. Haticy
and J. Rajezonek, Shoemakers in Northamptonshire, 1762-1911: a Statistical
Survey, Northampton Historical Series, No. 6, 1971
81 Other 'entrepreneurial' towns, both large and small, included such places
as Birmingham and Wolverhampton (metal trades); Sheffield (cutlery,
scythe-,making, etc); Olney, Newport Pagnell, Towcester, and Stony Stratford
(Bucks lace industry); Honiton and Ottery St Mary (Honiton lace industry);
Charibury (glovemaking); Hinckley and Mansfield (framework-knitting); Kettering
and Wellingborough (shoemaking); Redditch (needle-making); Gloucester
(pin-making); Luton and Hitchin (straw-plait industry).

at the time of the assizes and horse-races, when they came to spend part of
the winter in their town houses, or in one of the great inns. Both races and
assizes, as a consequence, often became the occasion for county meetings of
every description: administrative, economic, political, charitable, scientific,
cultural, social, horticultural, and so on. According to Edward Hasted in the I
790s, the Canterbury races,
for example, were 'attended by most of the Kentish gentry and a great number
of people from the neighbouring parts; and this city being their usual
rendezvous, it brings a vast concourse of them to it for the time, when there
are assemblies, plays, and other entertainments, during the whole time of the
race week.³² When Hasted wrote, places like Canterbury were still at
the zenith of their influence as social capitals of the county aristocracy.
Within a generation, by the 1820S, this particular role of theirs had begun to
decline, as transport improved, as wealth increased, and as the superior charms
of the London season were opened up to a widening circle of landed families.
As residential centres for the minor gentry, by contrast, and for the
ever-growing numbers of landless or pseudo-gentry of the time, such places
continued to expand. What Hasted said of Canterbury in this respect may be
paralleled in many such towns between Charles II 's reign and Queen Victoria's:
'many gentlemen of fortune and genteel families reside in it, especially within
the precincts of the cathedral, where there are many of the clergy of superior
rank and fortune belonging to it; and throughout the whole place there is a
great deal of courtesy and hospitality .³³ The precise numbers of
these landless or 'town' gentry, as they were sometimes called, are usually not
at all easy to establish and no doubt fluctuated.³⁴ In the second
half of the eighteenth century there may have been about 600 of them, including
dependants, in Shrewsbury, a town of some 15,000 people, and about 220 in
Northampton, a town of some 6,000.³⁵ If these
^{32 Edward Hasted, History and Topographical Survey of the County of
Kent, 2nd edn., Canterbury, xi, 101-2.
^{33 Ibid., p. 101 .The Hasteds themselves were typical of this social
class, and the historian lived for some time in Canterbury. I have traced their
history in 'Kentish Family Portrait', Rural Change, ed. Chalklin and Havinden,
pp. 169-99.
^{34. The phrase 'our town gentry' first appears in Northampton shortly
after the great fire of 1675 and subsequent rebuilding. Not all such families
were landless. John Toke of Canterbury, for example, came of old Kentish landed
stock and moved to the county town only after his wife's death in 1770, leaving
his family-seat and estates at Godinton to his eldest son. Probably many
town-gentry, moreover, like the Hasteds themselves, invested in landed property,
though they did not build up an estate as such or reside on their scattered
farmlands. ..
^{35 Parliamentary poll-books form the most obvious source. In many cases
they probably under-record local gentry; but at Shrewsbury in 1796 and
Northampton in 1768 the figures they give, of 129 and forty-seven respectively,
may be near the mark. Assuming an average household of between four and five,
these would suggest a total of about
figures are at all typical, the urban gentry may have comprised about four
per cent of the population in the county town, and thus formed an important
element in its society. In a sense, indeed, because they were permanent rather
than seasonal residents, their influence was ultimately more significant than
that of the aristocracy.
Two things in particular seem to have attracted them: First, there was the
charm of a more urbane way of life, the polite social intercourse hinted at by
Hasted, or what The Northampton Mercury nicely called 'the soul of
conversation',³⁶ in an expanding circle of like-minded people. So we
find contemporaries like Defoe commending Exeter, for example, as a city that
was 'full of gentry and good company,' and Maidstone, a little surprisingly, as
a town 'where a man of letters, and of manners, will always find suitable
society, both to divert and improve himself. ..³⁷ But although these
families were leisured folk, we must not think of them as necessarily very
wealthy; and as well as the soul of conversation it was often the charm of
economical living that attracted them. '. ..Its a pleasant town to live in,'
said Celia Fiennes of Shrewsbury, 'and great plenty, which makes it cheap living
...' .' ...Abundance of good families live here, , Defoe said of York, 'for the
sake of the good company and cheap living.³⁸ Cheap living, of course,
was one of the advantages which a town that was a good regional market could
offer: just as today a city like Leicester offers more economical living than a
small market town like Lutterworth, because it affords greater variety and
commercial competition. It was from such roots as these, predominantly though
not exclusively, that the county town also developed in this period as a
cultural centre. This is its fifth characteristic to note, and one that has
recently been the subject of scholarly study by Peter Borsay and others.³⁹
We must not exaggerate its importance, of course. The places one refers to
obviously cannot be compared with London or Vienna in these
600 gentlefolk in Shrewsbury and 220 in Northampton. The households of widows
and spinsters are not included in these figures ; but it should be remembered
that Some of the gentlemen Who voted were no doubt unmarried.
^{36 In the first number of The Northampton Mercury (hereafter cited as
NM), 2 May 1720: 'It is surprising to think that this famous, this beautiful,
this polite Corporation, has not long ago been the object of those many printers
Who have established printing offices in towns of less note. And certainly it
argues their want of thought: for the soul
of conversation must be absolutely necessary to a body of people that excel
therein.'
^{37 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through England and Wales, Everyman edn. (
1959), I, pp. 222, 115 (first published 1724-6). At Maidstone Defoe attributed
this character partly to the numerous gentlemen's houses in the surrounding
countryside.
^{38 The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London,
1947), p. 227; Defoe, Tour, II, p. 230. The italics are mine.
^{39 Peter Borsay, 'The English Urban Renaissance: the Development of
Provincial Urban Culture, C. 1680-1760', Social History, v ( 1977) ; Everitt,
'English Urban Inn', pp. 113-20.
respects. Though they gave birth to a fair number of celebrated figures, such
as Garrick and Johnson at Lichfield,⁴⁰ the magnetic influence of the
metropolis ultimately attracted much of the brightest talent a way from them.
Yet If they were rarely peopled by many men of genius , the scale and variety of
cultural life in towns that rarely numbered more than 15,000 inhabitants was
often remarkable . it surely indicates a very substantial cultural public .
If they produced little of truly international genius , moreover it is worth
noting how many of them , while initiating all the cultural modes of their
neighbours - literary , scientific , antiquarian , artistic , dramatic , musical
, educational and so on - also managed to shine out in some speciality of their
own . One thinks for example, of the important school of water-colourists at
Norwich; of the highly original group of early industrial artists headed by
Joseph Wright at Derby; of the Three Choirs Festival founded in connection with
Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford; of the similar Southern Choirs Festival of
Salisbury, Winchester, and Chichester; of the literary, antiquarian, and
publishing circle around Canterbury in East Kent ;⁴¹ of the
architectural and building connections of Warwick and York ; or of the musical
life of Hanoverian Leicester, where Haydn's chamber music was played at picnics
in Bradgate Park, and where the music of Beethoven was first introduced to the
British public by a master-hosier, of all people, William Gardiner (1770-1853).
It is to Gardiner's autobiography that we owe much of our knowledge of this
musical life, and surely no autobiography ever had a more felicitous title-Music
and Friends ( 1838).⁴² Amongst those friends, one whom he visited on
the continent, was Beethoven himself. Such matters as these by no means exhaust
the range of broadly cultural, intellectual, and humanitarian activities arising
in the county town at this time. Typical of another aspect of Hanoverian .
^{40 In Staffordshire the characteristics of a county town were in a
sense divided between Stafford, the assize-town, and Lichfield, the
ecclesiastical centre. Neither place was altogether comparable with such
shire-towns as Leicester or Exeter.
^{41 An interesting insight into this circle is given in the list of 338
subscribers to Hasted, History. ..of Kent, first edition ( 1778-99) .Both
editions were published in Canterbury (by different firms), where there were
then several printing and publishing houses, and where an interesting range of
antiquarian and topographical works was produced. In addition to Hasted himself,
these antiquarian and literary figures included, inter
alia: Andrew Ducarel, John Duncombe, William Gostling, John Burn by, Henry
Todd,
Osmund Beauvoir, and John Monins, all of Canterbury itself; together with
William Boys of Walmer, Edward Jacob of Faversham, Egerton Brydges of Denton,
William Boteler of Eastry, Bryan Faussett of Heppington, and (at an earlier
date, d. 1747) John Lewis of Minster-in- Thanet. .
^{42 Gardiner's own musical compositions are now forgotten; but the
account of him in the D.N.B. seems unduly scornful. Paganini and Weber were also
among his many friends and cultural acquaintances.
enterprise was the movement to found county infirmaries, for example,
beginning with Winchester in 1736, York in 1740, Exeter and Northampton in 1743,
Gloucester and Shrewsbury in 1745, and Worcester in 1746.⁴³No less
interesting was the widespread development of private and business schooling at
this time,⁴⁴ and an apparently massive expansion of the reading
public indicated by some thousands of book advertisements, covering virtually
every subject, in newspapers like The Salisbury Journal and The Northampton
Mercury. Quite different again, yet equally important in its own sphere, was the
remarkable revival of the devotio modema under Philip Doddridge and his
followers at Northampton: an unexpected and far-reaching movement of human
feeling and religious enterprise which stemmed from purely local and provincial
roots, and yet ultimately became crucial to the Evangelical Revival, to the
development of English hymnody, and to the foundation of missionary activity
overseas.⁴⁵ This was a movement, by the way, which touches on yet
another kind of English region: the region of religious influence.
V
The last characteristic of the county town to note, and one that in a sense
was fundamental to the others, was its development as a centre , of
craftsmanship, as a nursery of skill. In many ways this was its most important
characteristic, as it is also the least understood, so that it is worthwhile
commenting on it in some detail. To begin with, the sentimental belief that the
craftsman was essentially a pre-industrial and a rural figure, a picturesque
survival if not an anachronism by the time of the Industrial Revolution, must be
firmly dismissed from our minds. The reality is more complex, and much more
interesting. ..
^{43 Courtney Dainton, The Story of England's Hospitals (London, 1961),
pp. 85-8; Imperial Gazetteer, 1870, sub York; N M, 5 December 1743. Other early
hospitals included Bristol in 1737 and Liverpool in 1745; but the great majority
were in the county towns. Dainton's list is not complete. ..Between 1723 and
1760, for example, more than 100 schools in the Northampton area, many of them
newly established, though not all private, advertised in NM (Cranfield,
Provincial Newspaper, pp. 195-6,215). The most popular subjects advertised were
the three Rs, 'followed by Latin and Greek, and, significantly, book-keeping and
accounts'. ..As minister of the Independent congregation at Northampton, and
principal of the Dissenting Academy there from 1729 until his death in 1751,
Doddridge was a seminal figure in eighteenth-century religious development. I
hope to publish elsewhere my work exploring his influence, based partly on the
subscribers' lists to his Family Expositor ( 1739-56) and his voluminous
correspondence. Dr G. F. Nuttall's work on Doddridge is invaluable, particularly
Philip Doddridge, 1702-51 (London, 1951), and Richard Baxter and Philip
Doddridge: a Study in a Tradition (Oxford, 1951). Characteristically Doddridge
was the moving spirit behind the Northampton Infirmary and one of the founders
of the Northampton Philosophical Society .
In the fullest occupational census we have for any county in the eighteenth
century, the Northamptonshire Militia Lists of 1777, the names and callings of
nearly 12,000 people are recorded. Amongst these occupations, there are about
eighty that must be classified as crafts, and of these eighty about half-a-dozen
basic skills were widely represented in Northamptonshire villages: blacksmiths,
shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, weavers, and wheelwrights, who between them
accounted for ninety per cent of all rural craftsmen. The remaining seventy or
so crafts, by contrast, were almost entirely confined to a few towns, and in
many cases largely confined to Northampton. Even blacksmiths, tailors,
shoemakers, and carpenters were more numerous in towns than in villages, and
there is really nothing surprising in this fact. Craftsmanship, after all,
depended on a lengthy apprenticeship, and apprenticeship was in essence an urban
idea. Although the Northamptonshire pattern was not repeated in all areas, it
was not an untypical one. Outside the new industrial districts, the
concentration of the more highly skilled and recondite crafts in county towns
was a general phenomenon.
Secondly, craftsmen everywhere seem to have formed all expanding section of
the urban population: expanding that is in numbers, though not necessarily in
wealth or status.⁴⁶ Whereas in Northampton the population just about
doubled between Queen Elizabeth's reign and George III 's, the number of boys
apprenticed in each decade more than trebled. In the none too easy employment
conditions of the time, moreover, masters were often able to pick and choose
their apprentices, so that up to a point intelligence and enterprise were
channelled into the craft-structure, and these towns came to be widely
recognised as centres of training. By the late eighteenth century, as a
consequence, craftsmen usually formed about half their recorded population, a
substantially higher proportion than in smaller urban centres.⁴⁷ In
most places they were apparently three or four times as numerous as the
unskilled labourers and domestic servants put together ,⁴⁸ and nearly
four times as numerous as the retail shop-keepers, despite a massive increase
amongst retailers themselves. ..

^{46 In Northampton, which was probably not untypical in this respect,
their inventories usually indicate only a modest level of prosperity, never
comparable with that of the major innkeepers, drapers, tanners, etc. Very few of
them ever became mayors or aldermen. The pattern in York seems to have been
similar. P. A. Berryman, 'The Manufacturing Crafts in York, 1740-1784',
Leicester M.A. dissertation, 1978.
^{47 The proportion varied from forty-three per cent at Canterbury to
fifty-three per cent at Northampton; but the Canterbury poll-book is less
complete in its coverage and no doubt under-represents craftsmen. In the
non-county towns studied, the proportion rarely exceeded about a third, except
in an important city like Bristol.
^{48 These figures are based on the Militia Lists for Exeter in 1803 and
Northamptonshire in 1777. The latter covers all the towns in the county. No
reliable figures of servants
Everywhere, in short, they formed by far the most numerous occupational
category, and in a very real sense the craftsman's Shop was the hallmark of the
Hanoverian County town. One wonders, indeed, if the phrase 'a nation of
shopkeepers', which is often attributed to Napoleon but in fact antedates the
French Revolution, did not originally refer to workshops as much as retail
businesses.⁴⁹ Certainly in the eighteenth century it might have borne
either meaning.
Thirdly, we must not think of the traditional skills of the craftsmen as
having survived unchanged from a timeless past, as the Arts and Crafts Movement
sometimes seemed to suppose. ⁵⁰ On the contrary , they were in
process of gradual but continuous evolution, and in the period under discussion
their most remarkable feature was certainly their adaptability and
inventiveness. For the craftsman, we must remember, was first and foremost a man
Who was skilled with his hands, often extremely skilled at the end of his
seven-year apprenticeship : twice as long a training, after all, as that of a
modern undergraduate. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the eighteenth
century the English craftsman came to be associated with all those qualities of
deftness and individual ingenuity that we now associate with the Japanese. When
one turns to examine the craft-economy of any particular place in depth, as a
consequence, what one finds is certainly not a static or hidebound structure..
On the contrary, new branches of established crafts were developing all the
time, new skills were arising in response to new needs as if by spontaneous
generation, and old skills were continually splitting up and splaying out into
new specialisms. By 1700 the old trade of the wheelwrights, for example, had
given rise to the separate skill of the coachbuilder, that of the joiner to the
cabinetmaker, and that of the brazier to the lockmaker; while the millwright was
branching out into a wide range of mechanical contrivances. By the time of the
Industrial Revolution, as a consequence, the number of separate crafts that had
arisen in this way, each with its own distinct training, was remarkable. In the
five towns under review there were at least 160 different types of craft
workshop, and if it were possible to reconstruct an exhaustive occupational
census, the real total might well exceed 200. There were sixty-two separate
kinds of craft Shop in Northampton, for instance, a town of only 6,000
and labourers can be based on poll-books. Militia lists should not
under-record these groups, proportionately speaking; but one gets the impression
that they in fact under-record domestic servants-
^{49 It was used on both sides of the Atlantic in 1776: by Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations, and by Samuel Adams in a speech reputedly at Philadelphia
( Oxford Dictionary of Quotations ( 1948), pp. 1, 403). Presumably it was not
then a novel expression.
^{50 This is perhaps the one misconception in parts of George Stun's
great work, The
Wheelwright's Shop (Cambridge, 1923).
people, and almost 100 in Exeter, where there may have been nearly 1,000
craft workshops in a city of 17,000 inhabitants.⁵¹ Mere figures,
however, do not convey an adequate impression of this vivid diversity. Take the
metal trades, for example, although any other group, such as the wood-crafts,
would serve equally well. None of the five towns under review was particularly
notable as a metal- working centre; they were not miniature Sheffields or
Birminghams, yet they contained at least 350 master metal-craftsmen, and the
real total was probably nearer 500. Of these 350, 150 were engaged in a single
trade, that of blacksmith; but the remaining 200 followed a great variety of
crafts, at least thirty-five in all. In Shrewsbury, for instance, they included
braziers, cutlers, whitesmiths, pewterers, pump-makers, scythe-makers,
gunsmiths, gun-finishers, locksmiths, pin-makers, nailers, chape-makers, and so
on. Elsewhere they included many of these occupations, and often a number of
others as well, such as scalemakers, stilliers, warming-pan makers, clockmakers,
mathematical instrument-makers, and makers of surveyors' equipment. None of
these trades was on a large scale; there were rarely as many as a dozen of any
of them in most county towns; as a rule they were clearly not producing for an
overseas or a national market, but essentially for a regional one, for an
extensive rural hinterland. That is why crafts of this kind came to be centred
predominantly in the county towns of England: in those old centres of skill, in
other words, that you naturally went to for all your more unusual requirements:
just as in Leicestershire today you still visit the capital of the shire for
these purposes, What sort of goods, then, did these craftsmen make ? A typical
cutler, such as one of the Tuckwell family of Northampton, made not only knives
and forks, but all sorts of scissors, razors, pen-knives, lancets, flems,
butchers' steels, shoemakers' knives, heelmakers' knives, shop-knives,
sheep-shears, swords, and scabbards.⁵² A typical brazier or
whitesmith, such as one of the Tyers or Revell families, made not only all kinds
of saucepans and other cooking-ware, but tea-kettles, coffee-pots,
plate-warmers, barrel-cocks, tea-canisters, fenders, coalscoops, chimney-cowls,
coffin-furniture, and so on.⁵³ Everywhere,
^{51 The figure of 1,000 is a tentative guess. Thirteen hundred craftsmen
are recorded in the Exeter Militia List. This includes journeymen as well as
masters ; but masters are under-represented since men over fifty-five were
excluded. We know very little of the average size of craftsmen's shops at this
time; but such indications as there are suggest that in county towns they were
normally small family affairs, with perhaps one or two journeymen and one or two
apprentices apiece on average. With an average of one master and two journeymen,
a population of perhaps 5-6,000 adult males, of whom half were engaged in crafts
(49.7 per cent in the Militia List would suggest c. 850 - 1,000 workshops .
^{52 NM , 24 and 31 May 1725 .
^{53 NM , 5 and 12 April 1756 .
moreover , such men were branching out into new directions in response to the
new demand s of the age . one of the Tuckwells , for example specialised as a
maker of instruments probably for surveyors ⁵⁴One of the Revells
became a well known maker of warming pans and ‘salamanders’ , that is a pan
‘ which does its office without
leaving any sulphurous smell' in the bed.⁵⁵One of the whitesmiths
became a surgical beltmaker, and was highly commended by the medical profession.⁵⁶
One of the scalemakers, Richard Butlin, became a notable land-surveyor; and it
was he who made the exceptionally fine survey of Northampton in 1746, on which
every street, lane, yard, garden, and ground-plot is accurately delineated.⁵⁷
Perhaps most interesting of all was the ebullient Thomas Yeoman, a Northampton
millwright whose occupation extended into both the metal and the wood-working
fields. As well as designing and building many mills in the area, including a
cotton-mill which for a time he managed himself, he erected weigh bridges and
invented a new machine for cleaning corn which was described in the Gentleman's
Magazine in December 1746. Amongst a whole range of goods that were made in his
shop were air-pumps, bucket-engines for raising water, ventilators for hospitals
and granaries, backheavers for winnowing corn, hollow-sticks for ventilating
corn, refracting and reflecting telescopes, mathematical instruments,
philosophical instruments, and 'electrical machines
for the studies of the curious'. As if this were not enough, he was also a
skilled land-surveyor, a leading member of the early Northampton Philosophical
Society in the 1740s, the author of a Treatise on Mechanics, principally for the
use of other millwrights, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the founders
of the Royal Society of Arts.⁵⁸
54 Thomas Tuckwell was described as a cutler and instrument-maker when
made free, 18 September 1671 (Northampton Borough Records, Assembly Book,
1627-1744, p. 222). His son, Samuel seems to have taken over his late father's
business in 1725
(NM, 24 May 1725)
^{55 NM, I October 1759. ..
^{56 NM, 27 September 1756.
^{57 See Northampton Borough Records, Assembly Book, 1627-1744, pp. 390,
528; Gentleman's Magazine, XVII ( 1747), p. 446; NM, 20 April and 6 July 1752,
where Butlin's shop is said to be continued as a scalemaker's and stillier's
after his death. A 'stillier' was a maker of distilling equipment.
^{58 NM, 1 December 1746, 23 March and 27 Apri11747; Gentleman's
Magazine, XV ( 1745), p. 355; V.C.H. Northants., ii, 334-5; Eric Robinson, 'The
Profession of Civil Engineer in the Eighteenth Century: a Portrait of Thomas
Yeoman, F.R.S., 1704 (?)- 1781', Annals of Science, xviii, 4 ( 1962), 195-215.
The latter article, on the development of the engineering profession from the
ranks of millwrights and instrument-makers in the eighteenth century-Yeoman in
fact described himself as a millwright, not an engineer-is of more than local
interest. It justly points out that 'the vitality of market- town society was a
sound basis on which to construct a community of scientific interest among
engineers and gentlemen' (p. 215). The Northampton Philosophical Society,
founded in 1743, was one of the earliest provincial scientific societies. Other
leading
Individually, developments like these may seem perhaps trivial, and even in
some cases a little comic, in the light of the great inventions of the
Industrial Revolution. But we need to see them as part of a whole, as symptoms
of an attitude of mind, as signs of a climate of ingenuity. Even relatively
small and slowly-expanding county capitals, like Northampton, need to be
visualized as vital nurseries of skill, as centres of an inventive temperament,
as fertile seedbeds of discovery .The career of a man like Thomas Yeoman, though
in a sense unique, was also in a sense intensely typical, both of his town and
of his time, and it clearly illustrates how occupations once relatively simple
in their nature ⁵⁹ were now developing into complex and recondite
skills. Although the old peasant-world of the English countryside was everywhere
disintegrating in this period, under the impact of population-pressure,
capitalist farming, landed aggrandisement, parliamentary enclosure, and other
forces, the infrastructure of craft-
occupations that had grown up alongside it was thus by no means
disintegrating. On the contrary, it was still going from strength to strength
alongside the new industrial world, which had developed out of it and which at
many points still remained a part of it. The craft- economy of these county
towns or regional markets, in short, found a new role for itself in adapting its
skill to the needs of an increasing population, a changing countryside, and an
expanding leisured class. Of the impact of the demands of the leisured class on
the craft- structure little has been said; but it was certainly very apparent in
the fine work of the wood-carvers and stucco-artists, for example; of the
cabinet-makers and coach-builders ; or of the watchmakers, clockmakers,
statuaries, goldsmiths, and other fine-craftsmen.
The evolution of this craft-structure in seventeenth and eighteenth century
England would well repay more thorough and systematic investigation, both
locally and nationally, than it has yet received. In considering the origins of
the Industrial Revolution, we need to take more serious account perhaps of the
remarkable efflorescence of crafts-manship that heralded it, and of the
evolution of the older craft-
centres of this country. Most of these places, it is true, were not destined
to advance very far into the next phase of industrialisation and become fully
developed manufacturing cities during the Victorian period. It is chiefly for
that reason, perhaps, that their economy has rarely been studied in detail and
has perhaps been visualised as hide-
members included Doddridge and such prominent local gentry as Sir Thomas
Samwell. It met from an early date at Yeoman's house in Gold Street ('Portrait
of Thomas Yeoman', 202-3).
^{59 But only relatively simple: a mill, after all, is itself a
complicated piece of machinery, so that it is not surprising that millwrights
became key-figures in the early mechanisation of industry in this country.
bound and reactionary. Yet to read back the conditions and preconceptions of
the nineteenth century into the eighteenth and seventeenth is surely
unhistorical, and can only distort our understanding of the origins of
manufacture itself. The Industrial Revolution did not develop on the basis of
hidebound custom, and it certainly could not have arisen out of a static world.
In many ways the revolution of industry really arose out of the evolution of
crafts.
When we turn to examine the nineteenth century itself, moreover, we find that
this craft-structure not only survived until a remarkably late period, but in
many trades continued to expand alongside the industrial world of the Victorian
era. Judged by its contribution to overseas trade, perhaps, or by the yardstick
of productivity, that structure may seem relatively unimportant. Judged by its
contribution to the basic needs of the home market, however, and by the
substantial numbers of people employed in it, it was far from negligible. In the
Census of 1861 about a quarter of the occupied population of the so-called
'agricultural' counties of the Lowland Zone was reckoned as 'industrial', in
comparison with forty-three to forty-six per cent in the four most
industrialised counties-Lancashire, the West Riding, Warwickshire, and
Nottinghamshire.⁶⁰ Amongst that quarter there was in fact a good deal
of small-scale industry, such as brewing and malting;⁶¹ but there can
be no doubt that craftsmen also formed a substantial element in it. In Kent
alone, for example, Kelly's Directory of 1870 lists nearly 6,000
master-craftsmen engaged in some 140 separate trades, and that list is evidently
not an exhaustive one. At that date there were still some 1,300 shoemakers'
workshops in the county, 600 smithies, 350 wheelwrights' shops, 200 saddlers'
and harness-makers' shops, and a whole range of other craft-activities : 110
cabinet-makers' shops, for instance, eighty stonemasons', eighty shipwrights'
and barge-builders', seventy-five coopers', seventy-five coachbuilders', seventy
basket-makers', fifty-five braziers' and tinmen's, and so on.⁶² To a
greater degree than is sometimes realised,
^{60 See the summary tables in The National Gazetteer of Great Britain
and Ireland, [1868] , XII, Appendix, p. 5. In seventeen of the thirty counties
generally thought of as 'agricultural', including all those south of the Thames
except Berks and Wilts, the 'industrial' population actually outnumbered the
'agricultural'. It was chiefly in the eastern counties that the 'industrial'
population was lowest.
^{61 Kelly's Directory of Kent for 1870 lists 115 breweries and
sixty-five maltings in the county.
^{62 The figures are rounded to the nearest five or ten. Victorian trade
directories of this kind were concerned with recording business units, and hence
normally list masters only, not employees. In general I have therefore assumed
that each individual
represents a separate shop, unless two or more men occupy the same premises.
Those described as 'manufacturers' have generally been excluded, though many
'manufactories' were probably little more than workshops. All who appear to be
retailers only ( e.g., 'curriers and leather-sellers') have also been excluded,
and all engaged in process-
the domestic world of mid- Victorian England was still the hand-made world of
the craftsman.⁶³}
VI
Behind all these multifarious characteristics of the county town we can see
one simple, inescapable human tendency at work, a tendency that explains much in
the evolution of early modern society: birds of a feather flock together. None
of these features, it is true, was entirely peculiar to places of this kind. The
capitals of our shires were not the only inland entrepots of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, or the only cardinal markets and regional
shopping-centres. They were not all significant entrepreneurial towns, and the
urban life of the leisured classes was by no means wholly confined to them. They
did not form the only focal points of cultural and religious activity, or of
medical enterprise and educational opportunity. Neither were they the sole
centres of specialist craft-training, or the sole nurseries of ingenuity and
skill. Some of these activities were certainly to be found in secondary towns
like Stamford and Banbury, or in many smaller market centres, while others were
more prominently developed in rising industrial towns like Birmingham, in social
capitals like Bath and Brighton, and above all in the metropolis. Yet what was
remarkable about the English county town of the Hanoverian period was the
concentration of so many varied functions within it, and the range, the scale,
the scope, and the quality of the facilities it afforded .
For that reason these places came increasingly to focus the economic and
social activity of the countryside around them in the early modern period.
Within a pattern of great diversity from one county to another, there was
clearly a certain common mode to which most
ing and wholesale trades, such as brickmaking and malting. Where crafts are
concerned, it is impossible to say how complete the directory is. About 4,600
farmers are listed, which may represent something like two-thirds of the total,
since there were then about 7,000 farms in Kent. A few craft-occupations are
obviously under-represented, such as sawyers, of whom only two are listed; but
these seem to be exceptional. One might hazard the guess that perhaps two-thirds
of the master-craftsmen in the county as a whole are recorded. This would give a
hypothetical total of some 9,000 masters, and if these employed an average of
two men and two apprentices apiece, the craft-occupations would account for
roughly half the total 'industrial' population of the county (93,000). No doubt
large numbers of the remaining half were employed as 'craftsmen' of a kind in
the dockyard towns.
^{63.A recent study of the furniture industry in 1800-51 has found no
evidence of mass production even at the end of the period. English furniture was
still made overwhelmingly in cabinetmakers' workshops, and in the 1851 Census
the average shop still employed only five craftsmen, including the master;
ninety per cent of all shops, in fact, still employed fewer than ten men. (
Times Lit. Supp., 24 March 1978, reviewing E. T. Joy, English Furniture,
1800-1851).
of them tended to approximate, and in most counties their influence on the
new currents of the time was evidently magnetic. It was not only the life of the
county community itself that they attracted, but the life of its constituent
pays as well, in all their absorbing contrasts. As they expanded in scale, as a
consequence, and as the scope of their facilities increased, they also began to
give rise to a new kind of region, the modern urban hinterland,. and to impart
to that region a growing sense of solidarity, a deepening consciousness of
belonging together. Within their ambit, moreover, the people of the area were
gradually brought into increasing touch with the trade and industry of the
country at large: with the agriculture, the commerce, and the manufacture of
other regions; with the drovers, the factors, and the carriers of distant
counties; with the wayfaring traders of Scotland, Ireland and London; and with
the products of the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Orient. Silks and
velvets from Italy, wine and brandy from France, sugar and spices from the
Indies, tea and porcelain from China, timber from Honduras and the Baltic: by
1750 these and many other overseas commodities had become commonplace amongst
the merchandise of the English county capital: chiefly imported to meet the
demands of the local gentry , no doubt, yet also opening up a world of wonder
and novelty to townsman and countryman as well. It has been the argument of this
paper that the historic pattern
of English regional development is a good deal more subtle and complex than
at first sight appears. Although in contemporary matters lit is often convenient
to employ such terms as Merseyside, the West Midlands, and the Home Counties,
historically speaking these phrases conceal at least as much as they illuminate.
Behind them we must envisage a whole spectrum of local and regional diversity of
which they fail to take cognizance. England, after all, is one of the most
varied countries in the world in its physical structure, and this variety has
inevitably given rise to very diverse landscapes within a relatively small
compass: often within the borders of a single county, and certainly within the
borders of our contemporary regions. Moreover, these contrasts are not confined
to physical characteristics alone; they are also marked by different periods of
settlement, and they have given birth to very varied forms of life. In tracing
the social and economic development of this country as a whole, in consequence,
we must not expect to find a homogeneous or coherent pattern of evolution, but a
piecemeal, localized, and fragmented one: a pattern of regional paradoxes and
survivals, in short, where landscapes of poverty and plenty exist for centuries
side by side, and where in almost every county the advanced and the primitive,
the familiar and the remote, remained strangely intermingled until the eve of
the railway era. Gradually, moreover, and particularly over the last three or
four
centuries, this basic small-network of contrasting pays has been further
complicated, and in places transformed, by the rise of a succession of human
regions, if so they may be called, such as the county community, the urban
hinterland, the occupational region, the industrial region, the social
neighbourhood, the region of religious influence,
and so on. It is from such origins as these that the modern manufacturing
areas of South Yorkshire and the Black Country have arisen, for example, no less
than the old lacemaking districts of East Devon and the South Midlands, or
county communities like Norfolk, Sussex, and Kent. And yet within these new
'human' regions, the old English pays still survived until well into the
nineteenth century, still embedded in their local environment, still vivid with
their own historic idiosyncracies, as readers of Hardy or George Eliot will
realize. Such are the circumstances that have given rise to that elusive and
kaleidoscopic character of regional development in this country which was
remarked on at the beginning of this paper. The coexistence of contrasting
landscapes and economies, each with its own history and its own individual
life-span, surely forms one of the most pronounced, the most persistent, and the
most far-reaching themes in the evolution of English provincial society. If the
pattern outlined in this paper seems to complicate unduly the task of recreating
that society, it should perhaps be remembered that it is from the perpetual
interplay between these diverse economies, from their impact upon one another
over the centuries, and from their occasional conflicts and collisions, that the
vital spark of progress and originality in this country has often arisen .
APPENDIX
The principal sources on which the study of county towns is based include the
following.
(I). Exeter Militia List, 1803, ed. W. G. Hoskins for Devon and Cornwall
Record Society, 1972 (lists occupations of 2,642 men) ; Northamptonshire Militia
Lists, 1777, ed. V. A. Hatley for Northants. Record Society, 1973 ( 11 ,955 men,
of whom 8, 188 were rural) ; parliamentary poll-books for Northampton in 1768 (
1,299 men), Shrewsbury in 1796 (1,967 men), Canterbury in 1818 (1,125 men). and
Maidstone in 1802 (433 men) ; Northampton Apprenticeship Registers. 1562-1776,
formerly in Town Hall. now in Northants. Record Office (c. 7.000 boys). These
are the sources on which most of the figures for occupation cited in the text
are based . They give the occupations of a total of some 18,500 townsfolk , but
in the case of Northampton there is some overlap between the sources and
apprenticeship figures obviously cannot be amalgamated with others in the same
table . For Northampton , a wide range of borough records has also been examined
; together with all the surviving wills and inentories for the town from c. 1560
to 1770 , in the County record Office ( the inventories survive only from c 1660
); the complete run of The Northampton Mercury, 1720-70; and a very varied
collection of printed material in the Local History Collection in the Borough
Library .
(2). In addition to the above, the following poll-books have also been
systematically analysed: Northampton, 1774.1784.1796, 1818, 1826.1831, 1837;
Canterbury, 1790, 1796, 1826, 1830; York, 1807; Norwich, 1812; Great Yarmouth,
1754 and 1831; Nottingham, 1754; and Bristol, 1812. These give the occupations
of a further 23,450 townsmen; but in the cases of Northampton and Canterbury
there is again some overlap between the sources. They also vary widely in their
coverage from place to place and for different years in the same town, so that a
combined tabulation is not practicable. For Northampton and Canterbury, however,
they afford a useful indication of the changing occupational pattern in the
urban economy. In the former town, for example, they show that numbers engaged
in the shoe-trades gradually increased from 192 in 1768 to 910 in 1831, or from
fifteen per cent to thirty-six per cent of the recorded population. Amongst
other towns for which poll-books have been analysed are Newark, Dover,
Rochester, and Newcastle-upon- Tyne.
(3). A full critique of these sources would be out of place in this article.
It should be pointed out, however, that militia lists tend to under-record the
gentry and professional classes. Since they exclude men over about the age of
forty-five (fifty-five at Exeter in 1803), they also under-record the older
master-craftsmen and other senior groups. On the other hand, one would expect
them to provide a useful check on the number of servants and labourers, who must
often be under-recorded in poll-books. In the cases of Shrewsbury in 1796 and
Canterbury in 1818, however, labourers actually
formed a larger percentage of the recorded population ( c. ten per cent) than
in the Exeter Militia List (7.5 per cent). Is it possible that the very large
percentage of unskilled labourers found in sixteenth and early
seventeenth-century towns, sometimes as much as a third of the male working
population, had dwindled so substantially by the late eighteenth century? If so,
there may be a connection here with the increasing number of trained craftsmen.
4). Poll-books obviously vary widely in usefulness according to the local
franchise. The most useful relate to towns where the vote was vested in the
householders, as at Northampton. Where the vote was limited to freemen, as was
often the case, poll-books may nevertheless sometimes afford quite substantial
coverage of master-craftsmen and master-tradesmen. Of the poll-books used in the
main tabulation (see ( I) above), those for Northampton in 1768 and Shrewsbury
in 1796 were chosen because, for various local reasons, they happen to be
particularly full for the years in question; that for Canterbury in 1818 is the
best available for that town, though it is not as good as the two former. In
Northampton many non-householders as well as householders voted (illegally) in
1768, so that the poll-book lists almost 1,300 adult males (i.e. of voting age)
out of a total male population (including children) of c. 3,000. The least full
of the poll-books is that for Maidstone in 1802 ; but it has been included
because of its unusual evidence of family trade-groupings and of the migration
of men trained in the town (particularly in paper-making) to other centres. In
all towns, out-voters have been excluded from the figures. In most cases, these
were purely political and are of little or no interest from the point of view of
the local economy. At Maidstone, however, they included many of the
locally-trained men who migrated to other towns, and in that respect are of
great interest, though necessarily excluded from the tabulation of townsmen. In
addition to under-representing servants and labourers, many poll-books also
appear to under-record gentry, professional men, and a few other groups, such as
innkeepers. For most towns few, if any, exist before 1750 (or indeed 1780),
though there are earlier ones for such cities as Norwich and York. Poll-books of
county elections, it should be stressed, are of relatively little use for
occupational analysis owing to the limitation of the franchise.}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}