St Albans 1650–1700: A Thoroughfare Town and Its People (review)

This book about an incorporated town of some 3,200 souls in Hertfordshire during the second half of the seventeenth century is, perhaps, most interesting for the way it has been produced. It is the result of amateur local historians researching and writing in genuinely collaborative fashion, so much so that separately submitted chapters are anonymous and a list of contributors — some now deceased — is printed as part of the preface. In an era of RAE paranoia (in Britain at least) and accentuated professional ego (a more universal phenomenon) this makes for a refreshing, and in some ways liberating, alternative from the monograph or volume of essays. It also brings to bear all the qualities that one would expect from good local history: a fine grasp of the available sources, a strong sense of geographical place, a richness of detail, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the town in question. All of which begs the question that must always be asked of history of this kind: does the book transcend its local interest and expertise and speak usefully to other historians and students of the period?

The short answer is a qualified yes. Yes in the sense that there is an enormous amount of informative and surprising detail for readers to get their teeth into, as well as a conscious attempt to deal with pressing historiographical issues — poverty, religious conformity and dissent, demography, everyday life — in each chapter. Qualified in that the interpretation and argument of individual chap-ters — and so the book as a whole — is not always as apparent as it might be. Given the book's collective authorship, this is, perhaps, unsurprising; and it is worth remembering that even quite celebrated studies of single towns and cities suffer from the same kind of problem. Moreover, chapters on "Social History in Architecture," "Daily Life," and "Ten Families" are interesting in terms of their approach and display a mastery of source material — wills and probate inventories in particular — that puts many a professional historian to shame. That said, one sometimes hankers for slightly less description and slightly more analysis and interpretation.

The book does present some important conclusions and raises some interesting questions, though not always explicitly. One underlying theme is the way in which the political and religious beliefs and assumptions of one generation can change with the next. Indeed, a finding of the book is that, in the case of St Albans, a key characteristic of the Restoration was the dissipation of the "good old cause" as the generation of burgesses who adhered to it gradually died and their successors demonstrated a different set of preoccupations. A second conclusion, hardly startling but important nonetheless, was the reliance of the inhabitants of St Albans on their relations with both the surrounding hinterland and the metropolis. Their economic dependency on markets, inns, and services was, in turn, somewhat at odds with the political autonomy derived from their charter of incorporation and the extensive civic powers it bestowed — this tension between economic "outwardness" and political "inwardness" might have been explored further.

It is a tension that also carries implications for the nature of urban (or civic) identity at this time. The authors assume, for example, that the gentility claimed by wealthier burgesses involved in the governance of their borough was synonymous with — or aspiring to — that of local landowning families and urban professionals. Certainly trade and manufacture could lead to the purchase of a manor and to marriage into the county community. However, that over the course of the early modern period the tag "gentleman" was appropriated by many different social groups (burgesses included) does not mean it carried a single sense or meaning. On the contrary, the civic gentility of tanners such as the Oxtons and Gapes, brewers such as the Pollards, mercers such as the Cowleys, and drapers such as the...