Social Relations and Urban Space

In this wide-ranging and thoroughly researched study of early modern England’s second city, Fiona Williamson discusses how uses and perception of space were contested by the people of seventeenth-century Norwich. Her introduction provides a clear and informative overview of the economic and political developments which took place during the seventeenth century, when the population more than doubled. Between the 1620s and 1650s Norwich was hit by trade depression (with poor-relief recipients outnumbering ratepayers in the 1630s), but the city recovered after 1660 and had developed a diverse retail sector by 1700 to augment its traditional strengths in brewing and cloth production. By 1600, Norwich had long been a dissenting city, both politically and religiously, and continued to be so over the next hundred years. During the 1630s, a Puritan faction emerged, seizing power in 1642, and in 1674 dissenters were elected to public office, while the years after 1689 witnessed anti-Catholic riots and Jacobite-hunting

Dissenting opinion · Economic history · Great Depression · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Public space · Sociology · Engineering · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity