Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort

Abstract

Throughout the early modern period, townspeople participated in many types of association. Whereas countrydwellers had few places or occasions to meet save the parish church or the alehouse, the urban resident lived amongst a plethora of groups, formal and informal, voluntary and (in theory) compulsory that both reflected and reinforced the complexity of urban experience. The range of these associations naturally varied according to the size of the town and also over time, while opportunities for participation varied with social status, gender, wealth and pressures of work. But, for adult males above the labouring class, membership of some associations was axiomatic. For most of our period the great majority of such people were involved automatically in some level of local government, in the parish church, and often in an occupational guild. As householders, and especially if they were freemen of a corporate town, they might also play a part in military training and in both local and electoral politics.