This volume presents new research on key themes in the history of London and other European towns and cities, from the middle ages onwards. The essays brought together here celebrate the contribution to scholarship of Derek Keene, founding director of the Centre for Metropolitan History, and until 2008 Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Metropolitan History at the Institute of Historical Research, London. They offer new perspectives on a range of questions, with several resulting from major projects led or inspired by Professor Keene. The themes of the volume are central to the work of many urban historians today: the complex relationships between urban centres and their hinterlands; the importance of luxury goods and the transfer of new skills and technologies; the communal aspects of metropolitan life displayed in suburbs, religious groups and trans-national 'portable communities'; urban governance, considered through the lens of political relationships between institutions, cities and royal governments, and through studies of major initiatives in urban planning and infrastructure; and the effects of environmental changes that continue to shape cities today. The essays offer comparative perspectives on London's rich history, as well as studies of other cities, including Dublin, Bruges, Ghent, and Paris. These essays form a rich resource for scholars of British and European urban history, as well as for historians of London and the general reader.
Author(s): Matthew Davies, James A. Galloway (eds.)
Publisher: Institute of Historical Research
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: XVIII+374
City: London
Preface vii
List of contributors xi
List of figures xv
List of tables xvii
I. Markets, hinterlands and environments
1. Feeding another city: provisioning Dublin in the later middle ages / Margaret Murphy 3
2. Did peasants need markets and towns? The experience of late medieval England / Christopher Dyer 25
3. The proliferation of markets revisited / Richard Britnell 49
4. 'Tempests of weather and great abundance of water': the flooding of the Barking marshes in the later middle ages / James A. Galloway 67
II. Luxury, innovation and skill
5. A taste for the Orient? Cosmopolitan demand for 'exotic' durable consumables in late medieval Bruges / Peter Stabel 87
6. Hartlib’s world / Rob Iliffe 103
7. Hiding in the forest...: The Gilberts’ rural scientific instrument manufactory / Anita McConnell 123
III. Suburbs, neighbourhoods and communities
8. Houses and households in Cheapside c.1500–1550 / Vanessa Harding 135
9. 'The poore lost a good Frend and the parish a good Neighbour': the lives of the poor and their supporters in London’s eastern suburb, c. 1583 – c. 1679 / Philip Baker and Mark Merry 155
10. Between sea and city: portable communities in late medieval London and Bruges / Erik Spindler 181
11. The kindness of strangers: charitable giving in the community of the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / Catherine Wright 201
IV. Governance
12. Londoners and the court of common pleas in the fifteenth century / Matthew Frank Stevens 225
13. Crown, city and guild in late medieval London / Matthew Davies 247
14. Urban governments and their citizens in early modern Europe / Maarten Prak 269
15. Victoria Street in theory and practice: scenes from the governmentality of nineteenth-century London / Richard Dennis 287
16. Converging lines, dissecting circles: railways and the socialist ideal in London and Paris at the turn of the twentieth century / Carlos López Galviz 317
Bibliography of the published works of Derek Keene 339
Index 351
