Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces, 1660-1780 (review)

This book, a study of the city of Bristol and its hinterland, argues that the divisions between urbanites and villagers were even deeper than the familiar divisions of class and gender in early modern England. Whereas other historians have claimed that the provincial cities that emerged in the late seventeenth century were conduits for the spread of urban culture to the nation at large, Estabrook finds that villagers within a stone's throw of the city walls were virtually untouched by urban mentalités and that Bristolians knew more about what happened in London than in their rural environs. Only in the mid-eighteenth century did suburban developments bring city people physically into the country, but such developments represented less a melding of urban and village cultures than an extension of the former into the space of the latter. Estabrook reports that only religious dissenters found shared values and established networks across the topographical divide, a fact that underscores the central role of Anglican parochial organization in focusing the attention of both urban and rural people upon their immediate geographical locale.

Much of the book's interest lies in its methodology, particularly Estabrook's use of quantifiable materials (wills, inventories, and parish registers) to examine questions of cultural value and preference. Patterns of charitable giving, of lending and borrowing, of marriage, of apprenticeship, and of consumption are all brought into play to demonstrate the gulf between urban and rural values and experiences. Villagers spent none of their spare cash on the mirrors, books, musical instruments, and caged birds with which Bristolians filled their houses. Urbanites lent and borrowed promiscuously to and from social equals and superiors, tolerating a high degree of uncertainty about repayment; in villages, by contrast, lenders were of higher status than borrowers and demanded rigorous guarantees. Bristolians apprenticed their children to, married with, and bestowed charity upon other city dwellers, not villagers. Estabrook does not ignore the more traditional sources for cultural history, making compelling use of accounts of rural crime in Bristol newspapers to examine hostile rustic stereotypes, as well as of Anglican sermons to show the identification of the spiritual community with a bounded parish space.

A book so tightly argued around a single thesis inevitably raises more questions than it tries to answer. The author does not directly address the implications of his intriguingly ambivalent portrait of urban society. On the one hand, he echoes the well-accepted view that urban culture was distinct in its concern with appearance and conspicuous consumption. On the other hand (and with more originality), he presents urban government and parish life as exclusionary and, in this sense, ironically similar to the stereotypically closed-minded rural localism. This latter view calls into question currently fashionable claims about the leveling, integrative effects of the urban public sphere.

Estabrook might also have been more forthcoming about chronology and causality. The book suggests that the urban-rural divide was more severe after the Restoration than before it, but hazards no explanation. Finally, why do the political divisions that have played so large a role in the historiography of the period, and which might be expected to cut across urban-rural lines, receive so little attention in this book?