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. The rhetoric of urban government emphasised the ideal of unity under the crown: several town councils claimed that their respective city was ‘the king’s chamber’. 2 None the less, in whatever terms civic government presented itself as a unitary authority, power in the borough was always in practice refracted through a diversity of jurisdictions by which the hierarchical character of urban politics was
This book is the first collection of translated sources on towns in medieval England between 1100 and 1500. Drawing on a variety of written evidence for the significan and dynamic period, it provides an overview of English medieval urban history. Readers are invited to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by a wide range of sources. The merchant, for example, is seen from different angles - as an economic agent, as a religious patron and in Chaucer's fictional depiction. The prominence of London and the other major cities is reflected in the selection, but due attention is also given to a number of small market towns. Occasions of conflict are represented, as are examples of groups and societies which both contributed to and helped to contain the tensions within urban society. Changing indicators of wealth and poverty are considered, together with evidence for more complex questions concerning the quality of life in the medieval town. The book moves between the experience of urban life and contemporary perceptions of it - from domestic furnishings to legends of civic origins and plays in which townspeople enacted their own history.
urban government. The royal policy of conciliation and toleration of Protestantism did not solve the problems of governance in Nantes. Rather, it jeopardised the crown’s legitimacy, for the contract that bound king to subjects required that he eliminate heresy and uphold the Catholic Church. Royal vacillation and indecision also made practical governance in the city more difficult. The result was irresolute government and outbursts of religious passions that went unpunished. A vacuum of authority appeared at city level. France descended into civil war as rival
7 The slow road to ‘modernisation’ The inter-war years were dominated by a resurgent Conservative Party. Many of its members’ sympathies still lay, as regards local governance, on the Salisbury plain of a dual polity. However, fears that urban government might be captured by socialists and used to further ownership of the means of production compelled Conservatives to reluctantly interfere in local politics. Even Conservatives like Neville Chamberlain who sympathised with New Liberal values of equality of opportunity tempered their support for the larger
to have grown at the expense of local activism that focused on urban government in particular. That long-standing voluntary association – the Women’s Institute – had launched the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign although its original impetus emanated from a fear of litter encroaching upon the countryside. However, it would be legitimate to argue that these ‘do good’ organisations were unlikely in themselves to check corruption. Britain has enjoyed a strong voluntary tradition and that tradition seemed in excellent health in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, membership
decision making in early Stuart towns explores questions of consensus, division and voting, revealing the complex interplay of language and practice in urban political culture. In the early seventeenth century, England’s towns and cities clearly operated within a system that valued concord, demanded order and trusted the best, ‘most discreet’ men to govern. Suppressing the potential for division and disorder was the goal of the state as well as of local governors. At the same time, the nature of urban government gave some townsmen regular opportunities to give their
This collection of essays on roads in Britain in the Middle Ages addresses the topic from a cultural, anthropological and literary point of view, as well as a historical and archaeological one. Taking up Jacques Derrida's proposal that 'the history of writing and the history of the road' be 'meditated upon' together, it considers how roads ‘write’ landscapes. The anthology sets Britain’s thoroughfares against the backdrop of the extant Roman road system and argues for a technique of road construction and care that is distinctively medieval. As well as synthesizing information on medieval road terminology, roads as rights of passage and the road as an idea as much as a physical entity, individual essays look afresh at sources for the study of the medieval English road system, legal definitions of the highway, road-breaking and road-mending, wayfinding, the architecture of the street and its role in popular urban government, English hermits and the road as spiritual metaphor, royal itineraries, pilgrimage roads, roads in medieval English romances, English river transport, roads in medieval Wales, and roads in the Anglo-Scottish border zone.
In the late nineteenth century Glasgow had been a model of Victorian urban government and the local elite was steeped in Victorian ideals of public service and civic probity. After the expansion of the franchise in 1918 local politics became more open and the Irish Treaty of 1921 undermined the necessity of the Unionist Party in Scotland and Glasgow in particular. By 1933 Labour had become the majority party in Glasgow’s City Council. A new type of politician entered public life that needed to live by politics as much as live for politics. This was achieved by using public office to accept bribes; dispense favours over public building programmes; cultivate patron-client relationships to secure drink licences; control the allocation of vendors’ stalls in local markets. A local press campaign resulted in the establishment of a Tribunal of Inquiry (1933) which exposed wrong doing in respect of the Council’s housing department. Little was done and corruption persisted throughout the post-war years and Glasgow shows that corruption can prevail in a political system where one party ruled for long periods of time without significant political opposition.
light on the subjects of their deliberations.’95 The Brussels physicians, on the other hand, explained their membership restrictions, in a letter to the urban government, as a means ‘to consolidate our undertaking and prevent the disorder that would necessarily result from the all too easy admission of numerous members to this type of meetings.’96 Their policy shows that not all the medical institutions of the 1820s and 1830s fit in with Broeckx’ narrative of an expanding ‘spirit of association’. In Brussels, exclusivity remained an important part of the urban medical
extreme antipathy to emerge, but none could be found. Across Europe, the early twentieth-century state took its most active, most interventionist form in the institutions of urban government. Thus the historically neglected personnel of city administration were called upon – or called upon themselves – to define a set of problems to be solved, a set of solutions to solve them and pronounced M1054 JERRAM TEXT M/UP.qxd:Andy Q7.3 18/10/07 10:04 Page 193 Conclusion: Germany, space and modernity 193 themselves as the appropriate agents in this process. They did this