Publications by Charlotte Berry
The Margins of Late Medieval London is a powerful study of medieval London’s urban fringe. Seekin... more The Margins of Late Medieval London is a powerful study of medieval London’s urban fringe. Seeking to unpack the complexity of urban life in the medieval age, this volume offers a detailed and novel approach to understanding London beyond its institutional structures. Using a combination of experimental digital, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume casts new light on urban life at the level of the neighbourhood and considers the differences in economy, society and sociability which existed in different areas of a vibrant premodern city. It focuses on the dynamism and mobility that shaped city life, integrating the experiences of London’s poor and migrant communities and how they found their place within urban life. It describes how people found themselves marginalized in the city, and the strategies they would employ to mitigate that precarious position.
Journal of British Studies, 2021
Immigration was essential to trades reliant on fashion and high skill in London around the turn o... more Immigration was essential to trades reliant on fashion and high skill in London around the turn of the sixteenth century. This article explores the patterns of migration to the city by continental goldsmiths between 1480 and 1540 and the structure of the communities they formed. It argues that attitudes to migration within the London Goldsmiths’ Company, which governed the trade, were complex and shifted in response to evolving national legislation. A social network analysis of the relationships between alien masters and servants indicates how the alien community changed and adapted. Taking a view across the traditional late medieval and early modern period boundary allows for a deeper understanding of how attitudes to migration and to migrant communities changed as London's population began to grow.
Medieval Londoners: essays to mark the eightieth birthday of Caroline M. Barron, 2019
In the summer of 1521 a woman named Agnes Cockerel was expelled from her home in the London paris... more In the summer of 1521 a woman named Agnes Cockerel was expelled from her home in the London parish of St. Sepulchre without Newgate.1 Agnes was not the kind of woman that respectable Londoners wanted living on their street. She was described as a prostitute ‘a brothel of her taylle’ (fo. 101) and ‘a crafty dame’ (fo. 100).2 In response, she launched a defamation case at the London Consistory Court. The case provides a rare perspective on the workings of expulsion as a punishment and the wider relationship between reputation and mobility at the end of the middle ages.
Subaltern City?: Alternative and peripheral urban spaces in the pre-modern period (13th-18th Centuries), 2018
This essay explores the complexities of defining ‘marginal’ space in fifteenth-century London, an... more This essay explores the complexities of defining ‘marginal’ space in fifteenth-century London, analysing the socio-economic context in which senses of marginal space were created. This essay assesses whether the periphery of fifteenthcentury London can be considered a marginal space. It draws on the definitions of subaltern space developed by Ananya Roy and utilises quantitative, qualitative and social network analysis of wills. The urban development, socio-economic structure and social relations of three extramural neighbourhoods are explored. London’s extramural neighbourhoods displayed distinctive ‘marginal’ qualities, such as lower levels of citizenship, cheaper housing and the presence of groups leading precarious lives. Marginality is shown to be a more complex quality of urban space than simple identification with the poor, instead concerning the relationship between a peripheral neighbour, the central city and the wider region. Aspects of subaltern space, such as the ‘zone of exception’, can be found in the form of religious precincts exempt from civic regulation. However, extramural society was highly mixed and its spatial boundaries blurred by social praxis.
This study considers the London wardmote inquest as a venue for social networking in the late fif... more This study considers the London wardmote inquest as a venue for social networking in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It uses a combination of social network analysis (SNA) of wills and a set of ordinances for the conduct of wardmotes written by the jurors of Aldersgate ward in 1540. Wardmotes were an important venue for men to accrue social capital and ‘respectability’ in the eyes of their neighbours and develop personal connections which were crucial for social and economic advancement in the pre-modern city. Such advancement is evidenced in the later office holding careers of jurors and their importance in parish social networks. The meeting of the inquest was a potentially fraught occasion of conflicting loyalties which required close policing in order to engender the sociability key to its role as a venue for networking.
Keywords: sociability; social network analysis; fifteenth-century; sixteenth-century; Aldersgate; Portsoken
PhD thesis by Charlotte Berry
Geographic and social marginality were connected in the pre-modern city. Property values, economi... more Geographic and social marginality were connected in the pre-modern city. Property values, economic topography and transportation combined to create marginal spaces as
distinctive transition zones between city and countryside. This thesis explores the complex relationship between marginal space and social marginalisation in fifteenthcentury
London (1370-1540). It argues that extramural space produced communities which were particularly mobile, and that processes of social marginalisation were spatially informed. The thesis augments the secondary literature of late medieval London, which has often focussed on the city’s institutions and the lives of its citizens,by instead concentrating upon urban life outside the framework of the city government and livery companies. Such an approach is made possible through a combination of
digital and quantitative methodologies with in-depth qualitative analysis. Using wills, property records and legal and administrative sources, as full a picture as possible is developed of life on the fringes of the medieval city. Chapter One introduces the themes of the thesis and provides an overview of the secondary literature. It discusses the existing understanding of the concept of ‘marginality’ within the thesis, and suggests a nuanced approach which views marginality as mutable and negotiated rather than being attached to fixed categories of individual. Chapter Two develops the concept of marginality further through close attention to key elements of London’s fringe; its topography, the distribution of wealth around the city and the religious houses which were sited there. The chapter establishes a framework for the meaning of spatial marginality and considers the ambiguities resulting from the patchwork of liberties and precincts interrupting urban space.
Chapter Three is an analysis of society and economy on the fringes of the city. It focuses on four parishes; St. Botolph Aldgate, St. Botolph Aldersgate, St. Botolph Bishopsgate, All Hallows London Wall and St. Katharine Cree. Using wills and property records, the chapter argues that property values were generally lower outside the city walls but this did not simply mean that entirely poor suburbs developed. Instead, people
were drawn to these neighbourhoods by the mixture of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. In the later fifteenth century, significant landowners invested in the building of cheap rents, particularly outside Bishopsgate. However, other neighbourhoods were particularly attractive to prosperous artisans and aristocratic elites because of the availability of large properties. Chapter Four analyses social networks and spatial connections. It does so primarily using wills. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to make comparisons between different cohorts of testators and suggest the complex of factors which could weaken and strengthen community at the margins. Visualisation of bequest patterns using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) suggests that testators had highly localised understandings of urban space, prioritising their own part of the city. Such visualisation also suggests that extramural neighbourhoods had close economic and social ties with the immediate hinterland along their approach road. Chapter Five discusses the importance of mobility in extramural society. Consistory court records, an under-utilised source for the history of mobility, provide
unique insights into the ways that people moved around city space and the degree of migration amongst London’s population. It argues that mobility was an unstable period
of life, especially for the poor, which was likely to endanger their reputations. Nonetheless, moving around was an important strategy for survival, as demonstrated by the experiences of women who suffered domestic abuse and others ostracised from neighbourhood communities. Chapter Six focuses on processes of social marginalisation and policing. It argues that the neighbourhood was the key venue for the building and dissemination of reputation, and that it was not just the ‘middling sort’ who were engaged in doing so. Authority was exerted through informal and formal means by the householders who formed wardmote juries but also, at the margins of the city, by the leaders of religious houses. The spatial ambiguities of the fringes also created particular opportunities for people to avoid policing or damage to their reputations through tactical use of precinct space.
Seminar Papers by Charlotte Berry
Delivered to the Medieval Economic and Social History seminar at the University of Cambridge in F... more Delivered to the Medieval Economic and Social History seminar at the University of Cambridge in February 2019 and at the Metropolitan History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, January 2018.
Paper delivered to the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University ... more Paper delivered to the Late Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 27th October 2017.
Given at the Medieval and Tudor London Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, May 2015.
Conference Papers by Charlotte Berry
Paper delivered at Making Groups: At the Edge of Politics, a 2 day colloquium at the University o... more Paper delivered at Making Groups: At the Edge of Politics, a 2 day colloquium at the University of Lille, 8th November 2019.
Neighbourhoods outside the city walls were spatially separated from the economic and symbolic centres of urban life: marketplaces, procession routes and government buildings. Late medieval London’s extramural parishes were also less well connected to urban social structures, with a lower proportion of the population holding citizenship and guild membership than within the walls. Based on social network analysis of wills and examination of court records, this paper will discuss how community was formed in London’s extramural neighbourhoods. It will demonstrate the need to look beyond urban institutional structures to understand sociability in peripheral areas. I will argue that group formation was complicated by the multiple spatial frameworks for social networks available to those living outside the city walls: the neighbourhood, the city and the region.
Paper given at 'Out of Place: Vagrancy and Settlement' conference held at the Institute of Histor... more Paper given at 'Out of Place: Vagrancy and Settlement' conference held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 6th December 2017.
The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. This paper will explore this paradox in relation to the role of the highly mobile poor and vagrants in London society in the period from c.1470-1530. It will consider the relationship between the official category of the ‘vagabond’ as set out in royal and civic legislation and lived experiences of the poor and mobile who were resident or temporarily resident within the city. By utilising depositions from the London Consistory Court which have been little explored by historians alongside other civic and parish records, the paper will balance official views of vagrancy and mobility with the experiences of ordinary Londoners. I will argue that as a result of the universality of migration and mobility, efforts were made to draw definitions between ‘legitimate’ and ‘suspicious’ forms of mobility.
Delivered at 'Ordering the Margins' one day conference at the Institute of Historical Research, L... more Delivered at 'Ordering the Margins' one day conference at the Institute of Historical Research, London, September 2017.
Neighbourhoods on the pre-modern urban fringe have often been considered as spaces which were marginal to the city, albeit that this marginality was sometimes more discursive than reflective of social reality. This paper will consider parishes beyond the walls of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London and address the question of whether, as well as being physically peripheral, they were also marginal social spaces. These places later became early modern slums and by focussing on the period at the start of London’s population increase, the paper addresses an important and less studied transition stage in the history of the city and suburbs. Although nominally the civic authorities drew their jurisdictional boundary through the extramural neighbourhoods, this paper will argue that senses of neighbourhood paid little heed to such boundaries. Using Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘social space’, I will argue that residents of the margins experienced their locality in distinctive ways. Particularly, the paper will demonstrate how migration, day-to-day mobility, disruptive behaviour and the influence of religious houses created distinctively marginal social space. I will also address the socio-economic profile of the periphery and to what extent it was poorer than the city centre.
Paper given at 'Mobility and Space' at the University of Oxford, June 2017.
Paper delivered at the Social History Society Conference, April 2017.
The pre-modern city relied... more Paper delivered at the Social History Society Conference, April 2017.
The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. Historians of later medieval England including Shannon McSheffrey and Sarah Rees Jones have set out the means through which civic elites enforced the ideal of the settled household and attempted to manage the mobile. This paper seeks to explore the other side of this process by examining the experiences of migrants and the highly mobile in urban society around the turn of the sixteenth century. Such a ‘bottom-up’ approach is common amongst early modern historians but much less so for the earlier period. However, by utilising the depositions made in the London Consistory Court supplemented with evidence drawn from testamentary and property records the paper will redress this balance. The paper will question how far the migrant was socially marginalised in a city where most had been born elsewhere and explore the precarious line that existed between living a ‘respectable’ settled life and a ‘suspicious’ transitory one. In particular, I will focus upon neighbourhoods at the fringes of the city which, being marginal in themselves, were the entry points of many migrants to London. The paper will argue that in these communities, the line between mobility and stability was especially blurred with consequences for community cohesion.
Paper given at Urban Belonging: History and the Power of Place, Institute of Historical Research,... more Paper given at Urban Belonging: History and the Power of Place, Institute of Historical Research, 13th January 2017.
Pre-modern cities usually relied upon in-migration to sustain their populations. Late medieval London is no exception, and recent scholarship has highlighted the prevalence of both European and English outsiders in the city and their importance to the urban economy. This paper will explore the experiences of ordinary men and women as they migrated to the city and the processes through which they might integrate and find belonging in urban society. The aim is to examine the social realities engendered by the demographic and economic necessity of migration. A particular emphasis will be placed upon the experiences of migrants in neighbourhoods on the fringes of London, through which urban-rural traffic flowed and which were thus the first point of contact for many migrants with the city. Importantly, movement between city and country will be discussed as a constant, two way activity, thereby calling into question how far migrants ‘belonged’ in the city and the extent to which some might remain marginal to urban society. Evidence will be drawn from a mixture of traditional qualitative approaches and digital methodologies such as social network analysis in order to consider both the experience of the individual and the sociological processes at work in shaping that experience. The paper will argue that, particularly for the urban poor, mobility within and beyond the city was extremely common and impinged upon their ability to find belonging within a neighbourhood.
Given as part of the panel 'Spaces on the Urban Margin and Periphery in the Pre-industrial Period... more Given as part of the panel 'Spaces on the Urban Margin and Periphery in the Pre-industrial Period' at the European Association of Urban History conference, Helsinki, August 2016.
Delivered at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 2016.
This paper exp... more Delivered at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 2016.
This paper explores the London wardmote (neighbourhood court) as a venue for networking and socialising in the fifteenth and early sixteenth- centuries, applying research in the social network analysis of wills and analysis of a previous unstudied set of regulations for conduct in the court.
Given at the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections Spring Meeting, Apr... more Given at the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections Spring Meeting, April 2016.
Calls for papers by Charlotte Berry
http://negotiatingnetworksblog.wordpress.com/
Teaching Documents by Charlotte Berry
Lecture slides for Lives of London KCL Liberal Arts course.
Uploads
Publications by Charlotte Berry
Keywords: sociability; social network analysis; fifteenth-century; sixteenth-century; Aldersgate; Portsoken
PhD thesis by Charlotte Berry
distinctive transition zones between city and countryside. This thesis explores the complex relationship between marginal space and social marginalisation in fifteenthcentury
London (1370-1540). It argues that extramural space produced communities which were particularly mobile, and that processes of social marginalisation were spatially informed. The thesis augments the secondary literature of late medieval London, which has often focussed on the city’s institutions and the lives of its citizens,by instead concentrating upon urban life outside the framework of the city government and livery companies. Such an approach is made possible through a combination of
digital and quantitative methodologies with in-depth qualitative analysis. Using wills, property records and legal and administrative sources, as full a picture as possible is developed of life on the fringes of the medieval city. Chapter One introduces the themes of the thesis and provides an overview of the secondary literature. It discusses the existing understanding of the concept of ‘marginality’ within the thesis, and suggests a nuanced approach which views marginality as mutable and negotiated rather than being attached to fixed categories of individual. Chapter Two develops the concept of marginality further through close attention to key elements of London’s fringe; its topography, the distribution of wealth around the city and the religious houses which were sited there. The chapter establishes a framework for the meaning of spatial marginality and considers the ambiguities resulting from the patchwork of liberties and precincts interrupting urban space.
Chapter Three is an analysis of society and economy on the fringes of the city. It focuses on four parishes; St. Botolph Aldgate, St. Botolph Aldersgate, St. Botolph Bishopsgate, All Hallows London Wall and St. Katharine Cree. Using wills and property records, the chapter argues that property values were generally lower outside the city walls but this did not simply mean that entirely poor suburbs developed. Instead, people
were drawn to these neighbourhoods by the mixture of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. In the later fifteenth century, significant landowners invested in the building of cheap rents, particularly outside Bishopsgate. However, other neighbourhoods were particularly attractive to prosperous artisans and aristocratic elites because of the availability of large properties. Chapter Four analyses social networks and spatial connections. It does so primarily using wills. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to make comparisons between different cohorts of testators and suggest the complex of factors which could weaken and strengthen community at the margins. Visualisation of bequest patterns using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) suggests that testators had highly localised understandings of urban space, prioritising their own part of the city. Such visualisation also suggests that extramural neighbourhoods had close economic and social ties with the immediate hinterland along their approach road. Chapter Five discusses the importance of mobility in extramural society. Consistory court records, an under-utilised source for the history of mobility, provide
unique insights into the ways that people moved around city space and the degree of migration amongst London’s population. It argues that mobility was an unstable period
of life, especially for the poor, which was likely to endanger their reputations. Nonetheless, moving around was an important strategy for survival, as demonstrated by the experiences of women who suffered domestic abuse and others ostracised from neighbourhood communities. Chapter Six focuses on processes of social marginalisation and policing. It argues that the neighbourhood was the key venue for the building and dissemination of reputation, and that it was not just the ‘middling sort’ who were engaged in doing so. Authority was exerted through informal and formal means by the householders who formed wardmote juries but also, at the margins of the city, by the leaders of religious houses. The spatial ambiguities of the fringes also created particular opportunities for people to avoid policing or damage to their reputations through tactical use of precinct space.
Seminar Papers by Charlotte Berry
Conference Papers by Charlotte Berry
Neighbourhoods outside the city walls were spatially separated from the economic and symbolic centres of urban life: marketplaces, procession routes and government buildings. Late medieval London’s extramural parishes were also less well connected to urban social structures, with a lower proportion of the population holding citizenship and guild membership than within the walls. Based on social network analysis of wills and examination of court records, this paper will discuss how community was formed in London’s extramural neighbourhoods. It will demonstrate the need to look beyond urban institutional structures to understand sociability in peripheral areas. I will argue that group formation was complicated by the multiple spatial frameworks for social networks available to those living outside the city walls: the neighbourhood, the city and the region.
The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. This paper will explore this paradox in relation to the role of the highly mobile poor and vagrants in London society in the period from c.1470-1530. It will consider the relationship between the official category of the ‘vagabond’ as set out in royal and civic legislation and lived experiences of the poor and mobile who were resident or temporarily resident within the city. By utilising depositions from the London Consistory Court which have been little explored by historians alongside other civic and parish records, the paper will balance official views of vagrancy and mobility with the experiences of ordinary Londoners. I will argue that as a result of the universality of migration and mobility, efforts were made to draw definitions between ‘legitimate’ and ‘suspicious’ forms of mobility.
Neighbourhoods on the pre-modern urban fringe have often been considered as spaces which were marginal to the city, albeit that this marginality was sometimes more discursive than reflective of social reality. This paper will consider parishes beyond the walls of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London and address the question of whether, as well as being physically peripheral, they were also marginal social spaces. These places later became early modern slums and by focussing on the period at the start of London’s population increase, the paper addresses an important and less studied transition stage in the history of the city and suburbs. Although nominally the civic authorities drew their jurisdictional boundary through the extramural neighbourhoods, this paper will argue that senses of neighbourhood paid little heed to such boundaries. Using Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘social space’, I will argue that residents of the margins experienced their locality in distinctive ways. Particularly, the paper will demonstrate how migration, day-to-day mobility, disruptive behaviour and the influence of religious houses created distinctively marginal social space. I will also address the socio-economic profile of the periphery and to what extent it was poorer than the city centre.
The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. Historians of later medieval England including Shannon McSheffrey and Sarah Rees Jones have set out the means through which civic elites enforced the ideal of the settled household and attempted to manage the mobile. This paper seeks to explore the other side of this process by examining the experiences of migrants and the highly mobile in urban society around the turn of the sixteenth century. Such a ‘bottom-up’ approach is common amongst early modern historians but much less so for the earlier period. However, by utilising the depositions made in the London Consistory Court supplemented with evidence drawn from testamentary and property records the paper will redress this balance. The paper will question how far the migrant was socially marginalised in a city where most had been born elsewhere and explore the precarious line that existed between living a ‘respectable’ settled life and a ‘suspicious’ transitory one. In particular, I will focus upon neighbourhoods at the fringes of the city which, being marginal in themselves, were the entry points of many migrants to London. The paper will argue that in these communities, the line between mobility and stability was especially blurred with consequences for community cohesion.
Pre-modern cities usually relied upon in-migration to sustain their populations. Late medieval London is no exception, and recent scholarship has highlighted the prevalence of both European and English outsiders in the city and their importance to the urban economy. This paper will explore the experiences of ordinary men and women as they migrated to the city and the processes through which they might integrate and find belonging in urban society. The aim is to examine the social realities engendered by the demographic and economic necessity of migration. A particular emphasis will be placed upon the experiences of migrants in neighbourhoods on the fringes of London, through which urban-rural traffic flowed and which were thus the first point of contact for many migrants with the city. Importantly, movement between city and country will be discussed as a constant, two way activity, thereby calling into question how far migrants ‘belonged’ in the city and the extent to which some might remain marginal to urban society. Evidence will be drawn from a mixture of traditional qualitative approaches and digital methodologies such as social network analysis in order to consider both the experience of the individual and the sociological processes at work in shaping that experience. The paper will argue that, particularly for the urban poor, mobility within and beyond the city was extremely common and impinged upon their ability to find belonging within a neighbourhood.
This paper explores the London wardmote (neighbourhood court) as a venue for networking and socialising in the fifteenth and early sixteenth- centuries, applying research in the social network analysis of wills and analysis of a previous unstudied set of regulations for conduct in the court.
Calls for papers by Charlotte Berry
Teaching Documents by Charlotte Berry
Keywords: sociability; social network analysis; fifteenth-century; sixteenth-century; Aldersgate; Portsoken
distinctive transition zones between city and countryside. This thesis explores the complex relationship between marginal space and social marginalisation in fifteenthcentury
London (1370-1540). It argues that extramural space produced communities which were particularly mobile, and that processes of social marginalisation were spatially informed. The thesis augments the secondary literature of late medieval London, which has often focussed on the city’s institutions and the lives of its citizens,by instead concentrating upon urban life outside the framework of the city government and livery companies. Such an approach is made possible through a combination of
digital and quantitative methodologies with in-depth qualitative analysis. Using wills, property records and legal and administrative sources, as full a picture as possible is developed of life on the fringes of the medieval city. Chapter One introduces the themes of the thesis and provides an overview of the secondary literature. It discusses the existing understanding of the concept of ‘marginality’ within the thesis, and suggests a nuanced approach which views marginality as mutable and negotiated rather than being attached to fixed categories of individual. Chapter Two develops the concept of marginality further through close attention to key elements of London’s fringe; its topography, the distribution of wealth around the city and the religious houses which were sited there. The chapter establishes a framework for the meaning of spatial marginality and considers the ambiguities resulting from the patchwork of liberties and precincts interrupting urban space.
Chapter Three is an analysis of society and economy on the fringes of the city. It focuses on four parishes; St. Botolph Aldgate, St. Botolph Aldersgate, St. Botolph Bishopsgate, All Hallows London Wall and St. Katharine Cree. Using wills and property records, the chapter argues that property values were generally lower outside the city walls but this did not simply mean that entirely poor suburbs developed. Instead, people
were drawn to these neighbourhoods by the mixture of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. In the later fifteenth century, significant landowners invested in the building of cheap rents, particularly outside Bishopsgate. However, other neighbourhoods were particularly attractive to prosperous artisans and aristocratic elites because of the availability of large properties. Chapter Four analyses social networks and spatial connections. It does so primarily using wills. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to make comparisons between different cohorts of testators and suggest the complex of factors which could weaken and strengthen community at the margins. Visualisation of bequest patterns using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) suggests that testators had highly localised understandings of urban space, prioritising their own part of the city. Such visualisation also suggests that extramural neighbourhoods had close economic and social ties with the immediate hinterland along their approach road. Chapter Five discusses the importance of mobility in extramural society. Consistory court records, an under-utilised source for the history of mobility, provide
unique insights into the ways that people moved around city space and the degree of migration amongst London’s population. It argues that mobility was an unstable period
of life, especially for the poor, which was likely to endanger their reputations. Nonetheless, moving around was an important strategy for survival, as demonstrated by the experiences of women who suffered domestic abuse and others ostracised from neighbourhood communities. Chapter Six focuses on processes of social marginalisation and policing. It argues that the neighbourhood was the key venue for the building and dissemination of reputation, and that it was not just the ‘middling sort’ who were engaged in doing so. Authority was exerted through informal and formal means by the householders who formed wardmote juries but also, at the margins of the city, by the leaders of religious houses. The spatial ambiguities of the fringes also created particular opportunities for people to avoid policing or damage to their reputations through tactical use of precinct space.
Neighbourhoods outside the city walls were spatially separated from the economic and symbolic centres of urban life: marketplaces, procession routes and government buildings. Late medieval London’s extramural parishes were also less well connected to urban social structures, with a lower proportion of the population holding citizenship and guild membership than within the walls. Based on social network analysis of wills and examination of court records, this paper will discuss how community was formed in London’s extramural neighbourhoods. It will demonstrate the need to look beyond urban institutional structures to understand sociability in peripheral areas. I will argue that group formation was complicated by the multiple spatial frameworks for social networks available to those living outside the city walls: the neighbourhood, the city and the region.
The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. This paper will explore this paradox in relation to the role of the highly mobile poor and vagrants in London society in the period from c.1470-1530. It will consider the relationship between the official category of the ‘vagabond’ as set out in royal and civic legislation and lived experiences of the poor and mobile who were resident or temporarily resident within the city. By utilising depositions from the London Consistory Court which have been little explored by historians alongside other civic and parish records, the paper will balance official views of vagrancy and mobility with the experiences of ordinary Londoners. I will argue that as a result of the universality of migration and mobility, efforts were made to draw definitions between ‘legitimate’ and ‘suspicious’ forms of mobility.
Neighbourhoods on the pre-modern urban fringe have often been considered as spaces which were marginal to the city, albeit that this marginality was sometimes more discursive than reflective of social reality. This paper will consider parishes beyond the walls of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London and address the question of whether, as well as being physically peripheral, they were also marginal social spaces. These places later became early modern slums and by focussing on the period at the start of London’s population increase, the paper addresses an important and less studied transition stage in the history of the city and suburbs. Although nominally the civic authorities drew their jurisdictional boundary through the extramural neighbourhoods, this paper will argue that senses of neighbourhood paid little heed to such boundaries. Using Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘social space’, I will argue that residents of the margins experienced their locality in distinctive ways. Particularly, the paper will demonstrate how migration, day-to-day mobility, disruptive behaviour and the influence of religious houses created distinctively marginal social space. I will also address the socio-economic profile of the periphery and to what extent it was poorer than the city centre.
The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. Historians of later medieval England including Shannon McSheffrey and Sarah Rees Jones have set out the means through which civic elites enforced the ideal of the settled household and attempted to manage the mobile. This paper seeks to explore the other side of this process by examining the experiences of migrants and the highly mobile in urban society around the turn of the sixteenth century. Such a ‘bottom-up’ approach is common amongst early modern historians but much less so for the earlier period. However, by utilising the depositions made in the London Consistory Court supplemented with evidence drawn from testamentary and property records the paper will redress this balance. The paper will question how far the migrant was socially marginalised in a city where most had been born elsewhere and explore the precarious line that existed between living a ‘respectable’ settled life and a ‘suspicious’ transitory one. In particular, I will focus upon neighbourhoods at the fringes of the city which, being marginal in themselves, were the entry points of many migrants to London. The paper will argue that in these communities, the line between mobility and stability was especially blurred with consequences for community cohesion.
Pre-modern cities usually relied upon in-migration to sustain their populations. Late medieval London is no exception, and recent scholarship has highlighted the prevalence of both European and English outsiders in the city and their importance to the urban economy. This paper will explore the experiences of ordinary men and women as they migrated to the city and the processes through which they might integrate and find belonging in urban society. The aim is to examine the social realities engendered by the demographic and economic necessity of migration. A particular emphasis will be placed upon the experiences of migrants in neighbourhoods on the fringes of London, through which urban-rural traffic flowed and which were thus the first point of contact for many migrants with the city. Importantly, movement between city and country will be discussed as a constant, two way activity, thereby calling into question how far migrants ‘belonged’ in the city and the extent to which some might remain marginal to urban society. Evidence will be drawn from a mixture of traditional qualitative approaches and digital methodologies such as social network analysis in order to consider both the experience of the individual and the sociological processes at work in shaping that experience. The paper will argue that, particularly for the urban poor, mobility within and beyond the city was extremely common and impinged upon their ability to find belonging within a neighbourhood.
This paper explores the London wardmote (neighbourhood court) as a venue for networking and socialising in the fifteenth and early sixteenth- centuries, applying research in the social network analysis of wills and analysis of a previous unstudied set of regulations for conduct in the court.
Explores the preservation of historic buildings in Hackney, London in the interwar period and its relationship to local identity. Uses the case studies of Sutton House, a Tudor manor house, and the medieval St. Augustine's church tower.