Centre for Metropolitan History Annual Report 2003-4

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH C E N T R E F O R M E T R O P O L I T A N H I S T O R Y Annual Report 2003–4 (1 August 2003–31 July 2004) Page 1. Director’s Report 3 2. Project Reports i Markets and Fairs in Thirteenth-Century England 7 ii Views of Hosts: Reporting the Alien Commodity Trade, 1440–1445 11 iii People in Place: Families, Households and Housing in Early Modern London 13 3. Comparative Metropolitan History i Leverhulme Professor 17 ii Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow 21 4. Bibliographical and Information Services i London’s Past Online 24 ii Research in Progress on the History of London 27 iii Other Activities 28 Appendices I Advisory Committee 29 II Staff of the Centre 30 III Visiting Research Fellows 32

CMH ANNUAL REPORT 2003–4 IV Postgraduate Students 32 V Conference and Seminar Papers 33 VI Publications 34 VII Seminar on Metropolitan History 35 VIII Sources of Funding 36

1. DIRECTOR’S REPORT The CMH has had a busy year, in which we have started two new research projects as well as developing plans for future projects and other initiatives in metropolitan history. We held a number of events during the year, including a workshop on the theme of ‘London and Empire’, a conference on ‘Guilds: London... England... Europe’, and a particularly successful two-day conference on ‘Metropolitan Catastrophes: Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations in the Era of Total War’, organised by Derek Keene and Stefan Goebel as part of the Centre’s programme of work in Comparative Metropolitan History. In October 2003 work began on our new collaborative project, ‘People in Place: Families, Households and Housing in Early Modern London’, funding for which was obtained from the AHRB by Dr Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck), Dr Richard Smith (Cambridge) and Dr Davies. Good progress has been made by our project team, comprising Mark Merry and Phil Baker in London and Gill Newton in Cambridge; presentations arising from the research will be made at seminars and conferences during 2004–5. The bulk of the work so far has centred on the construction of a large database to encompass a broad range of longitudinal and cross-sectional sources relating to five Cheapside parishes, and areas of Aldgate and Clerkenwell. A good start has also been made on entering data from the parish registers for Cheapside, paving the way for work on reconstituting the families who lived in that part of the city. The work of the project is described more fully below. In November we were very pleased to hear that the ESRC had awarded funding to the Director and Dr Helen Bradley for a new project, entitled ‘Views of Hosts: Reporting the Alien Commodity Trade 1440–1445’. Helen began work on the project at the Centre in April 2004 and has made excellent progress. The ‘Views of Hosts’ themselves comprise returns sent to the Exchequer under a statute of 1439, which made aliens fully accountable to English-born ‘hosts’ for their private business transactions. The host made a register of the commercial dealings of the aliens for whom he was responsible, recording the names of their business contacts, the quantities and types of merchandise traded, and the prices they charged or paid. The aims of the project are to produce a full, annotated transcript in Anglo-Norman French and Latin, freely accessible on the internet; a database, accessible and searchable through the same website; and a translation into English, with an introduction, index of persons and glossary of merchandise, to be published as a volume by the London Record Society. DIRECTOR’S REPORT

CMH ANNUAL REPORT 2003–4 Following the success of the IHR’s pilot digitisation project, an application was made by the IHR early in 2004 to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a grant of $900,000 to begin a major two-year programme of digitisation of medieval and early modern historical resources for British History Online <http://www.british-history.ac.uk>. We were delighted to hear just before Easter that the application was successful. The project will enable the CMH to make available online all its extensive datasets, such as the Walbrook and Aldgate Gazetteers, and the 1690s taxation data, in a fully cross-searchable format. In addition, a range of published sources will be digitised, including eight volumes published by the London Record Society and key sources such as the R.R. Sharpe’s Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London, and Calendar of Wills proved in the Court of Husting, Mark Benbow’s ‘Index of London Citizens, 1558–1603’ (1989) and J.R. Woodhead’s The Rulers of London, 1660–1689 (1965). A mapping resource will be created using first edition 1:2,500 Ordnance Survey maps of Greater London obtained under licence from Landmark, which will nest within a national mapping scheme at a scale of 1:10,560. This phase of the project will also involve the identification of further resources to be digitised, in anticipation of a further application for funding in 2006. The CMH Director is a member of the steering group for British History Online and is responsible for coordinating the work on London sources. A major development for the CMH this year was the approval by the School of Advanced Study of a new taught M.A. course in Metropolitan and Regional History. This is a joint initiative between the Centre and the Victoria County History, and takes as its guiding theme the variety and importance of the relationships between metropolis and region from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on London and southern England. It will use the continuous history of London and its surrounding territory over eight centuries as a test bed for exploring important general, comparative themes in the evolution of regional and city cultures. The broader context will be also be significant, especially the growth of other regional capitals and regional identities in Britain and the development of cities and their regional contexts on the continent. It will draw on the expertise and resources of the staff in both research centres, and will share options with other Masters courses in related fields in the London colleges. The new M.A. will take its first cohort of students in October 2005, and over the next year the course team will be busy preparing course materials and publicising this exciting initiative. One of the target constituencies will be students contemplating further research at M.Phil./Ph.D. level, and to this end we are pleased to have recruited two new

research students who will begin their studies in October 2004. Catherine Wright will be working on a thesis entitled ‘Social and cultural connections between the English and the Dutch in England, c.1660–c.1720’, with the basis of the project being a study of the Dutch communities in London. At the same time, Laurie Lindey will start work on a study of ‘The London furniture trade, 1640–1730’, examining networks and forms of production, retailing and consumption within the furniture trade in the capital, and providing a much- needed context for the existing studies of artefacts and collectors. Both students will be working with Matthew Davies and Derek Keene. They will join Feona Hamilton, who is working on ‘The power and influence of the London merchant in the late thirteenth century with special reference to the de Rokesley family’. Craig Bailey’s PhD thesis on ‘The Irish network: a study of ethnic patronage, 1760–1840’ was successfully examined in March. He was jointly supervised by Derek Keene and David Green, of King’s College, London. The year also saw the completion of our ‘Markets and Fairs’ project, and we were delighted to hear that Emilia Jamroziak had been appointed to a research fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, which she took up in January. Congratulations are also due to Stefan Goebel, our first Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Metropolitan History. After completing his second and final year in post, Stefan will be taking up a permanent appointment as Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Kent. Sadly we will also be losing David Tomkins and Eileen Sanderson, following the end of the AHRB-funded bibliography project, ‘London’s Past Online’ in September 2004. The project has been a tremendous success, making accessible details of more than 40,000 books, articles, theses and other publications relating to the history of London, in collaboration with the Royal Historical Society Bibliographies. We hope at some stage to augment the bibliography with details of archaeological publications and other local materials. This has also been a year of book launches. Of particular significance for the Centre was the publication on 24 April of St. Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004, edited by Derek Keene, Arthur Burns and Andrew Saint and published by Yale University Press. A service was held in the cathedral, at which the bishop of London delivered a sermon in honour of St Mellitus, the first bishop of the see of London, and this was followed by a reception in Guildhall Art Gallery. The book is an impressive, and weighty (in all senses) tribute to the scholarship of Derek and his fellow editors, and of the more than 40 contributors. The Centre’s staff (never known to miss a party), were also represented at the launch of Caroline Barron’s eagerly awaited book, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1540 (Oxford University Press). Finally, late June saw the celebration of the publication of The History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, by Matthew Davies and Ann Saunders, published by Maney, which took place appropriately enough in the splendid surroundings of Merchant Taylors’ Hall.