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.