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  • The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England
  • Mark Kishlansky
The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England. By Phil Withington (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 298 pp. $75.00

This book of paradoxes argues that the period in English urban history between 1530 and 1688, heretofore considered stagnant, was actually dynamic. It contends that oligarchic urban corporations were hotbeds of democracy and that the utopian prescriptions of English humanists were accurate descriptions of the experiences of urban denizens. It also claims that the exclusion of women from borough government was the source of influence and power and, most incongruously of all, that the "democratic" values of city commonwealths, which made the English Republic possible, were among the Revolution's first casualties (83).

Withington's arguments about the vitality of early modern urbanites rest largely upon the dramatic increase in the number of royal charters of incorporation granted following the English Reformation. He defines urban areas by their incorporation rather than by criteria like central place, demographic density, or occupational diversity. By these traditional tests, towns and cities stagnated during the early modern period, with the exception of the tenfold explosion of London's population. Chartered boroughs, however, increased throughout the period. Although charters were a set of specific legal rights, Withington maintains that they more importantly enabled a definition of community that provided its citizens a primary identification and cultural loyalty. Freeman status within a corporation conferred more than the simple rights bestowed by enrollment in a company or participation in an election. It conferred the values of citizenship upon its holders, encouraging both a sense of ownership within the community and a sense of sacrifice to it.

This ethos of citizenship gave individuals a "calling" for government that they exercised in the places that "adopted" them (113–115). It was the vital characteristic of urban life, expanding political consciousness and political participation in the early modern world. This expansion is unhelpfully labeled "democratic," sometimes because it manifested itself in struggles against corporate oligarchies (sixteenth-century Ludlow) and sometimes because it encompassed such humble occupations as tallow chandlers and plumbers (late seventeenth-century Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Yet, even the most optimistic estimates of the numbers of borough freemen excludes more than half of the adult males from citizenship; an even larger percentage of them was barred from meaningful political participation. Not even the smallest urban corporations were democratic. All of them were deliberately established as oligarchies, [End Page 107] and all of them chose their most powerful permanent members by cooption.

Withington roams freely across period and place in his history of urban political culture. With nearly 200 boroughs and the experiences of millions of people from which to choose, the dangers of tendentiousness are readily apparent. But Withington cleverly avoids such dangers by the implicit assertion of a histoire immobile that makes one piece of evidence as powerful as another and by occasional in-depth portraits of three vastly different corporations—Ludlow, Cambridge, and York. This sample provides a diversity of location and size, although all three corporations exist in overshadowing proximity to greater royal jurisdictions that complicate their ideology of commonwealth. Until 1641, Ludlow was the site of the Council of the Marches of Wales, Cambridge of an autonomous University, and York of a Council and a Cathedral with overlapping and competing immunities. Withington convincingly makes use of these complexities to deny any simple typology of boroughs, loyalties, and experiences.

The most interesting aspect of The Politics of Commonwealth is its author's imagination. This book displays unusual intellectual curiosity and methodological capacity. Its sources span nearly every imaginable genre, each more unexpected than the last. Charts and graphs are juxtaposed with long quotations of poetry and analyses of apprenticeship contracts with exegeses of humanist texts. Smith and Habermas serve equally as sources of social theory, though the one idea that underpins the work's conception, corporatism, is more frequently associated with French than British history.1

Withington wishes to believe in a communitarian past in which the modernizing engine was the freeman rather than the farmer, and the fuel was ethics rather than surplus value. Thus is...

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