Subject: M-I: London and Suburban Theory Debates (fwd)
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 19:57:07 -0500 (EST)
From: "hoov" <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>


forwarded by Michael Hoover

Forwarded message:
> Date:         Fri, 30 Jan 1998 04:17:42 -0500
> From: "Terry Nichols Clark (by way of Richard Jensen
>               <h4900-AT-apsu01.apsu.edu>)" <tnclark-AT-MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
> Subject:      London and Suburban Theory Debates
> To: SOCIAL-CLASS-AT-listserv.uic.edu
> 
> From: Elizabeth S Kent <eskent-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
> Subject:      Review: Nicholas on Ward _Metropolitan Communities. Trade,
>               Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London_
> 
> Joseph P. Ward, _Metropolitan Communities. Trade, Guilds, Identity, and
> Change in Early Modern London_. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
> Press, 1997. xii +203 pp. Map, tables, notes, bibliography, and index.
> $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8047-2917-4
> 
> Reviewed for H-Urban by David Nicholas <nichold-AT-clemson.edu>, Clemson
> University
> 
> This impressively documented book is based primarily on manuscripts from
> fifteen archives and libraries, including sixteen companies whose
> records are in the Guildhall Library, London.  The author, who is an
> Assistant Professor of History at Wayne State University, combines
> literature and printed documents in his general bibliography.  Each
> chapter begins with a survey of recent interpretations, indicates
> clearly Ward's view, then documents his thesis with thorough and
> invariably engagingly presented examples from the archives.
> Ward discusses two meanings of community as they concerned
> the liveried companies (trade guilds), not always distinguishing between
> them clearly in his exposition. recent historians such as Valerie Pearl and
> A. E. Beier, has seen a strong dichotomy between the City of London proper
> and the liberties and suburbs within the metropolitan area, which absorbed
> most of the immigrants--London's population at least quadrupled between
> 1500 and 1700--suffered more from disorder, and were havens for
> persons, including but not limited to immigrants, who hoped to escape
> the political and economic restrictions of the City.  In this view the
> suburbs were thus more dynamic, and the unwillingness of the liveried
> companies to adapt to the changing demographics of metropolitan London
> contributed to their decline.  Contemporaries complained that the
> companies failed to control the new residents.
> 
> Ward, by contrast,convincingly emphasizes the metropolis as a unit and
> downplays the contrast between City and suburbs.  There was no longer a
> right of sanctuary, for officials of the City and the liberties cooperated
> to prosecute lawbreakers.  Charity also crossed parish borders.  In the
> 1640s Parliament had new fortifications built that linked the suburbs
> and liberties to the city and issued other statutes that applied to the
> entire metropolitan area.  Ward finds that the liveried companies were
> much less restrictive and internally monolithic than has been thought,
> and also that their purview encompassed all of metropolitan London.
> They thus contributed to the development of a sense of community, in
> both an emotional and physical sense, among their members.
> 
> He groups the companies into retailers, manufacturers, and builders,
> each of which had a distinct role in and attitude toward expansion.  As
> freemen, members of the companies could live anywhere under the lord
> mayor's jurisdiction, which meant the City; but by the mid-sixteenth
> century they could live outside the City for one year, or longer if the
> aldermen consented.  The Vintners' Company charter of 1567 gave them
> rights of enforcement throughout the metropolis, and by 1641 more than
> half the taverns occupied by members of the company were outside the
> City. In 1607 James I gave the Grocers' Company the right to enforce its
> ordinances on persons practicing the trade in the city, suburbs, and up
> to a three mile radius, whether they were free in the company or not.
> The brewers, weavers, coopers, and particularly the construction trade
> companies furnish even more obvious examples.  Ward generally finds that
> the more oriented toward manufacturing the company was, the more likely
> it was to have a strong presence outside the City, which in turn may
> show a problem in treating the liveries companies as a group, given the
> diversity of types of activity that they represented.  As residence
> patterns of freemen became more dispersed, the control of the companies
> over prices and wages and their rights to inspect workmanship, which
> could always be exercised over their members, received a significant
> growth outside the city.
> 
> Ward is less successful, in my opinion, in arguing that the liveried
> companies were coherent organizations that consciously fostered a sense
> of community among their members.  He begins by noting the substantial
> literature on "community," specifically Ferdinand Tonnies' contrast
> between _Gemeinschaft_/community, which requires a significant degree of
> interaction among the members, and _Gesellschaft_/society, which does
> not. The two could coexist, but _Gemeinschaft_ was stronger in the
> Middle Ages, _Gesellschaft_ in the modern period.  Ward seconds recent
> scholars who have diminished the importance of locality; and, since
> communities can transcend place, it follows that there was less change
> than was once seen between the medieval and modern periods.  Ward's
> general conclusion is that "Perhaps the most important political
> division within companies was between those who cared deeply about their
> company and those who did not" (p. 145).  Those who cared deeply found
> it a "community," while those who "cared little about their guild's
> ideals but remained affiliated with it for personal advancement" were a
> "society" (p. 146).  In this view, the very fact that disagreements
> between company members were brought up in the company is a sign of
> community, notwithstanding that many such quarrels resulted in disorders
> and legal actions that involved the Crown, the City government, or both.
> 
> In fairness, however, Ward is careful even here to avoid monolithic
> interpretations of the companies, which were quite diverse among
> themselves. The Grocers' Company, for example, was an umbrella
> organization of many commercial interests. The apothecaries were
> disputing the company's authority over the drug trade, and in 1615 James
> I, over the grocers' opposition, established an Apothecaries' Company,
> which soon absorbed most of the apothecaries who had been grocers.
> Ward's meticulous combing of the company archives reveals fascinating
> information about internal politics, patronage, and faction-building
> within the companies. His discussion of internal politics within the
> companies is central to his thesis that they were reasonably harmonious
> working units that fostered a sense of community among their members, in
> some cases simply by agreeing to respect diversity.  He disputes the
> classic notion that the courts of assistants were aristocratic and
> argues that much of the actual operation of the company was done by
> permanent employees, particularly the company clerks, who provided an
> element of continuity in relation to the rotating boards of wardens. He
> discusses at some length the problem of "decayed freemen," who had
> fallen on hard times, and the makeshift wage jobs that their companies
> gave them, as well as company pensions and almshouses. One of his most
> intriguing expositions deals with questions of literacy and the use of
> written communication between the broad mass of freemen and the boards
> of assistants and wardens, which he sees as a sign of growing
> impersonality of relations.
> 
> On the example of the Grocers, Ward notes that the older companies,
> which had originated as medieval fraternities, still had ceremonial
> functions; but they were declining in the wake of evangelical
> Protestantism, and those members who objected to them were free to stay
> away from them without incurring company sanctions.  Yet he finds no
> clear pattern in any company of reaction to the religious changes; for
> as the companies lost their religious foundation, this became less an
> area in which orientation would have a critical impact on one's standing
> within the Company. He sees a general ethic of toleration developing in
> which continued respect for the Company was a bond of community.
> Dissidents could turn to other parallel communities--in the case of
> grocers, to the new Apothecaries' Company, the East India Company in
> which many grocers invested, the parishes of All Hallows and St.
> Stephen's that they patronized--for "meaningful association."  While the
> grocers kept their company cohesive by tolerating differences, despite
> the problem with the apothecaries, the weavers were very different: they
> were an industrial rather than a trade company, labor-intensive, and
> largely suburban rather than City. While most of the grocers' problems
> were internal, the weavers had disagreements over admitting immigrants
> and technological innovation, areas in which some of the members felt
> that the governors were not enforcing the Company's privileges
> satisfactorily, particularly against aliens.
> 
> The desire to see conscious or subconscious bonds of community in
> everything from policy deliberations to serious discords causes Ward to
> engage in some social-scientific windmill-tilting, such as his proof of
> the fallaciousness of the "assumption that the City and the suburbs
> represented competing types of societies based on incompatible values"
> (p. 44).  He prefaces his discussions of the grocers and weavers in the
> last two chapters, his most detailed examples, with a suggestion (p. 98)
> that what the governors of these companies were really trying to do was
> foster a sense of community among their members, not react to specific
> problems.  Yet in these cases one gets the sense that he is paying
> obeisance to fashionable concepts, for in his chapter on "Communication
> and Company Politics" he gives an excellent discussion of the problem
> that freemen were claiming the right under the custom of London to
> practice any craft, whether the one in which they were trained and
> enrolled or not. This practice predictably led to shoddy workmanship,
> and the companies were as assiduous in enforcing their quality-control
> regulations against their own freemen as against outsiders. Ward notes
> (p. 56) that these examples should caution against the assumption--his
> notes do not say who holds it--that all company members were honest and
> abided by regulations, while all outsiders were trying to deceive the
> companies by evading their regulations. This translates into a not
> surprising contrast of attitudes among freemen toward their callings:
> some respected their guilds, while others did not and used the companies
> as a cloak for deception.
> 
> The "community as emotional bond" aspect of Ward's analytical framework
> is unobtrusive in most of the book. Some will be convinced by it. I was
> not, but I applaud this book as a work of thorough scholarship that
> provides a massive amount of hitherto unpublished information about the
> internal workings o the liveried companies and clearly documents the
> part that they played in extending the authority of the corporations of
> the City of London throughout the metropolitan area.
> 
> Copyright 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work may be copied
> for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author
> and the list.  For other permission, please contact H-Net.Msu.Edu.
> David.



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