Catherine F. Patterson. Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite, and the Crown, 1580-1640. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. viii + 337 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-3587-2.
Reviewed by R. C. Richardson (History Department, King Alfred's College, Winchester)
Published on H-Albion (April, 2001)
The Uses of Influence
The Uses of Influence
Catherine Patterson's book derives from her doctoral thesis on the same subject and she has heralded its publication by the publication of a number of journal articles in the last decade exploring specific aspects of the subject which is here presented as a rounded study. This volume joins other recently published work in a field that has undoubtedly attracted a growing amount of attention in the last few years. Recent studies by Carl Estabrook, Paul Halliday, and Robert Tittler, for example, have approached some of the same issues examined here from somewhat different angles and in the light of evidence drawn from other parts of England in the same period.
Patterson's book stakes out a claim to its own territory by its concentration on such topics as the development of the office and role of high steward and on a lengthy case study of the borough of Leicester in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Leicester and its patrons, indeed, claim pride of place here, though what is said about that borough can be read in the light of information and observations offered more briefly about other towns and cities such as Chester, York, Great Yarmouth, Winchester, Salisbury, and Exeter. The book draws systematically on primary sources culled from the British Library, Public Record Office, fourteen county and four city record offices, Lambeth Palace, Canterbury Cathedral, and from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. As a monograph Urban Patronage in Early Modern England enjoys the firmest of foundations and impeccable credentials and its prefatory acknowledgments display the fact that the modern academic variant of patronage is very much alive and well.
Patterson's study makes clear that patronage in the early modern period was a vital instrument in politics and society, and not something that was merely decorative and insubstantial. For all parties -- patrons themselves, the Crown and its principal servants, and civic leaders -- patronage performed necessary functions, bridging the center and the localities, facilitating government and the maintenance of order, and providing access to authority and decision-making. All parties -- in different ways -- needed patronage, all defended it, all gained benefits from it, all sought to use it to their specific advantage. Tensions and occasional collisions between different parties as well as harmonious co-operation and understanding are part of the story documented here; the exercise of "good lordship" and the display of civic deference had price tags attached to them. The book, for the most part, deals with the working routines of urban patronage and with the ups and downs encountered. It does not deal with London -- a separate study in its own right -- and it does not focus on the counties, except in so far as gentry and aristocracy impinged on, or were deliberately drawn into, the political life of the urban sector. The wide-ranging scope of urban patronage is made clear as is the importance of personal relationships between patrons and urban corporations. The mutual exchange of gifts and shared ceremonial occasions and feasting and other conventions are documented. Wines and spirits of all kinds, sugar loaves, cheeses, boxes of fresh and dried fruit, marmalade, fine leather gloves and a whole host of other luxuries positively cascaded on patrons from ambitious corporations wanting help from well-placed friends to accomplish the urgent goal of the moment. (See pp.161 and 177, for examples.) The discourse, the rhetoric which bridged the giving and receipt of patronage is sensitively analyzed. The complex, interrelated links between the use of freeman status, the rise of the office of high steward, the granting of charters, and parliamentary elections are carefully unraveled. Urban patronage, self evidently, was one element in a multi-dimensional, multi-leveled political network embracing the center and the provinces in this period.
Patterson's book, therefore, successfully engages with a mosaic-like subject. Much of it is structured thematically and the evidence for exploring the themes and issues is drawn from different places and from different points in time. This is not done without some repetition; the importance of patronage as a conduit is endlessly underlined. Chapter six, however, provides a detailed case study of the borough of Leicester and the Earls of Huntingdon as a dynasty of urban patrons. The patron/town relationship spanned a number of generations and was far from constant in its terms and significance; the Elizabethan high point under the "puritan Earl" did not, and perhaps could not, last. The factional politics of the town were volatile, the Elizabethan Earl's successors lacked his influence at the center of government, and other potential alternative patrons thrust themselves forward to fill the vacuum.
Old-style urban patronage, as Patterson's excellent book makes clear, was in any case rendered largely obsolete by the crisis of the 1630s and 1640s. Conduits between the center and the provinces were broken in the turmoil of sharply polarized politics and religion and by the onset of Civil War. As Aylmer's work on the civil service of the interregnum long since taught us, patronage was displaced as a working principle under the Republic. It was not re-enthroned under after the Restoration of 1660 and even then not in the same way as before. The experience of the borough of Leicester and other towns and cities painstakingly documented in this book provides further evidence of the fact.
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Citation:
R. C. Richardson. Review of Patterson, Catherine F., Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite, and the Crown, 1580-1640.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5079
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