Vanessa Harding

RECENT PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY MODERN LONDON

Recent writing on early modern London offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics. Interest in the literary and cultural is particularly strong, and much attention has been given to John Stow, Londons sixteenth-century historian. This review discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stows Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.

Monastic records and the Dissolution: a Tudor revolution in the archives?

Administrative reform in the 1530s amounted, in Professor Geoffrey Elton’s words, to a ‘Tudor revolution in government’. The Dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of their assets played a major part in this. The need to value, survey, document and exploit the monastic estates transformed government record-keeping, necessitating the creation of new offices – such as the Court of Augmentations – and the adoption of new practices and an expanded bureaucracy. The paper traces the response of the bureaucrats to the challenges to record-management resulting from the Dissolution, and the subsequent history of the monasteries’ records of landholding, a task complicated by the activities of later government archivists.

Housing and Health in Early Modern London

The relationship between housing and health in early modern London is not easy to distinguish from the general relationship between wealth or poverty and health. Poor housing was only one of many disadvantages potentially compromising the health of the urban poor: it can be assumed that they had poorer diets, less adequate clothing, less access to clean water for cooking and washing, less access to medical treatment, and probably greater exposure to workplace dangers, than their richer contemporaries, even before we begin to look at their accommodation. And ‘poor housing’ itself has many facets, both physical and use-related: disadvantageous location, exposure to industrial and other pollution, quality of building materials, adequacy of repair, sanitation and water supply, heating and ventilation, furnishing, neighbourhood character, density and character of occupation. Nevertheless, there appears to be some correspondence between poorer areas of London and poor health outcomes; this paper seeks to explore some of the correlations and variables in that relationship.

Communicating London's early history

In an age of ‘performance indicators’, how does society measure museums′ presentation of history, and does this affect the manner in which history is communicated? The internal conflicts between presenting history and preserving research integrity are the context for this review of recent curatorial and archaeological work in London.