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The image of late seventeenth-century London as a phoenix rising reinvigorated from the ashes of the Great Fire has been a powerful and persuasive one. As far as architectural and building practice is concerned this book has argued that many features which were thought to have occurred in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries actually originated much earlier. The London house was a new kind of object. It was perfectly suited in both structure and form to fulfil the demands of an increasingly commercialized, mass-consumption housing market arranged around the continual renewal and replacement of products. The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London house is then a regional dialect or a vernacular variant of the classical language.
As John Styles has argued in his article 'Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England', standardization and the large-scale manufacture of products was a process that was established long before the advent of mechanized factory production in the nineteenth century. The central roles of the carpenter and bricklayer in the production of the London house were to the detriment of the stone masons, once the most powerful of the building trades, and the ones who have received most attention from historians. This chapter shows a picture of a building industry in a state of flux. On the one hand the technology and labour skills required were different only in the quantity and speed of output which were demanded. On the other hand employment patterns and operating procedures were changing rapidly.
The system by which developers improved the value of their land through building is well known. The advantages of the building lease system were many. For a start, as J.R. Ward has observed in a study of late eighteenth-century Bristol, it was a system which allowed finance to operate within a fragmented industrial structure. The building lease system was perfectly adapted to both the labour and the financial conditions of the period. The building of sewage and drainage systems seems generally to have been undertaken by developers, while the matter of water supply was the responsibility of each individual household. Some figures are available from the cases of how much a house cost to build. The prices given for houses in the City are very high. James Burkin's house, which was commissioned by him and described as a mansion house, cost the princely sum of £1,601.
In Georgian London John Summerson outlined what he saw to be the classic development process in the late seventeenth century. He described the prime developer of the time as being 'the noble landlord with a greedy purse' and he gave as his two examples, the fourth Earl of Southampton and the first Earl of St Albans. This chapter sets out to discover whether Summerson's analysis is still sustainable or whether the new wealth of the City played a significant role in the reshaping of the capital. It looks at the types of landholdings upon which development is known to have occurred, the extent to which this took place upon noblemen's estates and the role they played within the development process. The land market was more fluid and hence smaller plots of land were developed, usually by speculators, sometimes with the involvement of the landowner but more often without it.
This chapter seeks to identify the characteristics of the house, to assess how novel it was, and to place it within the existing context of housing in the capital. John Summerson's approach typifies the problems of accommodating the late seventeenth century within a traditional architectural chronology. Summerson's elevation in Georgian London gives an over-regularized view of the house using almost eighteenth-century proportions and including a basement which was not always standard at the time, so that the house truly looks like a less sophisticated version of the Georgian house. Joseph Moxon in Mechanick Exercises discussed the problems of incorporating the traditional central position of the staircase within the essentially linear plan of the urban terrace house, which deprived it of light, and offered top-lighting as a solution.
The desire to smooth out and explain away the inconsistencies in British classicism was evident more recently in Giles Worsley's book, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age, of 1995, in which the late seventeenth century becomes an 'interlude' in his version of British classicism. Besides the search for respectable precedents to validate 'native' architecture many historians have gone one step further and attempted to create a coherent classical tradition within England. With regard to architectural practice the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in Britain has traditionally been seen as a transitional period between the medieval and the modern. It was the time at which the building process changed from being a locally organized craft-based activity into a commercial industry. This introduction aims to outline the main themes in the text and the historiography which it addresses.
The process of urban growth generated a series of changes whereby old spaces became transformed into new ones, open land and countryside were swallowed up by bricks and mortar, and outlying villages and farms were transmuted into first suburban and then in time inner-city areas. Lincoln's Inn Fields represents a different strand in the creation of the quintessential London space. Lincoln's Inn Fields in Strype's view looks like nothing more than an extension of the landscape of the adjacent Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn. The first two squares in London, Covent Garden of 1631 and Lincoln's Inn Fields of c. 1640, demonstrate both the creative architectural mix which formed the English square and the competing demands made on these new urban spaces.
London in the seventeenth century was one of the most important and rapidly expanding capitals in Europe. From the 1660s onwards it was transformed from an essentially medieval town of wooden buildings located within the City walls to a modern metropolis of brick and stone which broke its traditional bounds and spilled out in all directions. John Strype in his 1720 updating of Stow's Survey of London provided a commentary on the social standing of the different areas he described, through his use of the terms 'well', 'good' and 'poor'. From the late sixteenth century onwards building was prohibited in London by legislation and Royal decree, leading to proclamations against the practice in 1580 and 1602 and an Act of Parliament in 1593.
This chapter deals with the Carolingian Empire as a relatively short-lived but highly significant and influential ‘moment’ in western European history. It considers first the nature of Carolingian governmentality as an exercise in Foucauldian bio-power, as something that one might describe as a ‘family-state’. It asks whence the Carolingian Empire derived its income (taxation or tribute?) and how its public state structures operated. The chapter turns next to identity, and how a Frankish identity was constructed and maintained, operating alongside and sometimes against other, more particular ethnic identities. Finally, it examines the religious component to the Carolingian Empire: the cultivation of a form of theocratic religiosity that demanded a great deal of its rulers and of its ruled in terms of the expectations of their faith and their religious practice.
This is the first of a two-volume textbook that is aimed at first-year undergraduates as they begin their study of medieval history. It covers the period from the so-called ‘fall of Rome’ in the course of the fifth century through to the ‘Norman moment’ in the course of the eleventh. The textbook covers the broad geographical area defined by the former Western Roman Empire in an even-handed fashion, giving equal attention to Iberia and to Sicily as to England and to Francia. Each chapter deals with a given region within a defined chronological framework, but is structured thematically, and deliberately avoids a narrative presentation. The topics of governmentality, identity and religiosity serve as broad overarching categories with which to structure each chapter. The authors outline the scholarly debates within each field, explaining to a student audience what is at stake in those debates, and how different bodies of evidence and different interpretations of that evidence give rise to different perspectives upon early medieval European history. Medieval history can seem to the student as if it were an impenetrable thicket of agreed fact that just has to be learned: nothing could be further from the truth, and this textbook sets out to open the way to an engaged understanding of the period and its sources.