Phil Withington

Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England

In June 1638, William Abell, a citizen and alderman of London and also Master of the Company of London Vintners, struck a deal in the office of the King's Attorney. When Abell entered the office, the Vintners' Company was a self-governing body of tradesmen which, by right of its ancient and chartered privileges, was responsible for all aspects of retailing wine in London. By the time he left, Abell had used the common seal of the company to sign a four-part indenture, or contract, which transformed the Vintners into a royal monopoly.¹ Any powers or profits relating to the retail of wine were now part of a "farm" that the company was to purchase from courtiers of Charles I for an annual fee of £ P37,000.² The distinction between corporate self-governance and royal monopoly carried immense significance for seventeenth-century English men and women, and once Charles I was forced to call the infamous Long Parliament in 1640, the wine farm came under close public scrutiny.³ This involved interrogation by parliamentary committee as England's elected representatives sought to establish why and by whom the monopoly had been authorized. More unusually, it also involved arbitration by the "public" as the warring citizens and freemen of the company resorted to the printing press in order to exonerate and blame each other.

This scenario introduces a concern that has largely escaped historiographical attention: the relationship between public discourse and corporate citizenship in early modern England. The printed pamphlets disputing the wine monopoly between 1640 and 1642 all stressed the discursive basis of corporate governance and decision-making.⁴ Abell and his supporters asserted that the deal struck in 1638 was the culmination of two years of public debate and discussion within the company, that it had been sanctioned by a full vote of assembly, and that his use of the common seal to sign the indenture was therefore entirely authorized.⁵ His opponents, who claimed to speak for the majority of the Vintners, begged to differ. They argued that Abell had secured the company's consent only through sustained and strategic discursive violence, undermining the conversational conventions through which decisions relating to the public good of the company were traditionally made.⁶ This alleged bullying was based on "two sorts of argument"—"many promises and persuasions" and "divers and fearful threatenings"—that contravened basic rules of civility and counsel. Moreover,

As anyone spoke in dislike of [the project], the Alderman [Abell] retorted most bitter words, frowns and sharp rebukes (able to daunt a weak spirit) causing to be put apart, and not permitting him any further liberty of speech, telling them that when he was a young man they durst not speak so saucily, or oppose the Master and Wardens; for if they did, they should be sent away by an Officer to prison.⁷

Not only had Abell robbed the Vintners of their corporate powers and privileges—the legal basis of their citizenship—but he had done so by subverting the very discursive practices upon which that citizenship rested. It was in the face of this double emasculation that the Vintners now took the opportunity of the national political crisis to reclaim their civic credentials and voice. This they did by turning to the printed public sphere. Indeed, by 1642, none other than Henry Parker, the most eminent of parliamentary pamphleteers, was employing his expansive rhetorical skills to defend the Vintners' "own Reputations to the world."⁸ Even as they were robbed of one forum in which to act and talk publicly, they used the medium of print to forge another.

The discursive sophistication demonstrated by the London Vintners was no accident. Rather, it reflected the skills and aptitudes of citizens more generally—not merely in London, but across the incorporated cities and boroughs of England. As this suggests, "citizen" is meant here in the medieval sense of the term, to denote householders who joined and participated in corporate communities. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, corporate "bodies"—guilds and companies such as the London Vintners, and also the incorporated cities and towns such as York and Cambridge—provided a framework, or structure, for continuous and systematic public activity by their citizens. Indeed, in the course of the sixteenth century, this corporate citizenship was infused and enthused by Renaissance notions of public service, participation, and activity: citizenship in a more general, civic-humanist sense of the term. This, in turn, was a product of the developing state—or what early modern people termed a commonwealth—and the way its influence worked downward upon and within communities. Viewed in these terms, the story of early modern state formation is as much about the creation of citizens defined by their capacity for public activity as it is about the centralization of functions conventionally associated with modern polities: war, taxation, and bureaucracy. Central to such citizenship were discussion and debate and the adaptation of requisite conventions and attributes, most notably civility. These skills were learned and used in the context of traditional communities such as incorporated guilds and towns, where corporate citizenship intersected with the ideals of civic humanism to create a new kind of urban political culture. Public participation in this incorporated commonwealth was middling in its social composition and significantly broader than the eighteenth-century "bourgeois public sphere," which it predated. Moreover, its discursive conventions and institutional structures anticipated in complex ways the institutions often (erroneously) assumed to have first structured public discourse for the middle classes—most notably the "press" and "town" of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This earlier story of discursive activity enables continuities with subsequent theories and practices of public discourse to be recognized. In particular, it demands engagement with Jürgen Habermas's idea of the "bourgeois public sphere" and its "belated adoption" in English historiography.⁹ Habermas was the first to conceptualize for historians the communicative basis of politics and to consider "the public" in the context of social, cultural, and economic processes. He also suggested that it was in England that the bourgeois public sphere first emerged. As Keith Michael Baker wanly observes, Britain is Habermas's "model case"; "France appears (with Germany) only as one of the `continental variants.'"¹⁰ More pertinently, Habermas regarded this discursive precocity as "a problem not yet resolved."¹¹ While his conceptualization of the public sphere may have been misleading, he was astute in noting the English penchant for public discussion. One explanation for this discursive aptitude is the conversational aptitude and public consciousness demanded by the early modern commonwealth: that what might be termed a "civic public sphere" was an antecedent and facilitator for the formation of subsequent publics.

Habermas offers a further theoretical challenge, in that by providing historians with the conceptual tools to fathom "our subjects and their history," he also encourages them to invert the relationship between critical theory and historical empiricism.¹² As John B. Thompson notes, it is Habermas's use of the past that allows him to "recast" the "ideas of his intellectual progenitors" and enhance his own critical authority over the present.¹³ The very instrumentalism of this technique nevertheless invites historians to engage "with our contemporary public culture" on a critical basis.¹⁴ This is the more so because Habermas's historicism is fundamental to the process of recasting—the very crucible upon which "the normative category for political critique," against which he judges modern culture, is forged.¹⁵ Thus, the historical veracity of the bourgeois public sphere matters from a contemporary as well as antiquarian perspective.

An additional concern from an early modern perspective is that Habermas uses the onset of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century to forge this critical paradigm. He does so with a historical specificity that belies the normative quality of the bourgeois public sphere that supposedly was discovered. Although embodying the universal aspiration of "communicatively generated rationality," Habermas insists that the bourgeois public sphere cannot be abstracted, transferred, or generalized "to any number of historical situations that represent formally similar constellations."¹⁶ The preceding two centuries are consequently condemned to a pre-modern silence.¹⁷ This enclosure of the "long eighteenth century" is common enough among historically minded cultural theorists.¹⁸ Foucault notes that the Enlightenment looms as "a set of events and complex historical processes ... located at a certain point in the development of European societies"—at the onset, that is, of modernity.¹⁹ In the case of public discussion, however, Foucault and Habermas are both a century too late.

There is another concept of public discourse that is at once non-normative and resonant with early modern understandings of those terms, defined as the discussion of affairs of state in the presence—face-to-face or mediated—of others. It reflects sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of public as "open, common, abroad"—in the presence of an audience (whether literal or metaphorical).²⁰ It incorporates the early modern sense of discourse as communication, or "confabulation," written or oral.²¹ And it emphasizes the political nature of such discussion, which is concerned with the actors, actions, institutions, languages, and policies relating to the exercise of public authority within any given community (local and national). The definition serves as a basic analytical category which nevertheless recognizes the wide variety of public discourse in the early modern period—in terms both of the theories, media, protagonists, settings, languages, and access informing and constituting it, and of the politics of its historical interpretation. The bourgeois public sphere—in which the rules, locations, and participants of certain kinds of political discussion were thought by Habermas to be configured in certain ways—is one such variation. Ethan Shagan's recent reconstruction of popular politics during the Reformation, which he defines as "the presence of ordinary, non-elite subjects as the audience for or interlocutors with a political action," can be regarded as another.²² But the civic public sphere is also important: the modes of discourse and activity associated with corporate governance and citizenship.

There is a crucial aspect of Habermas's account that has largely been neglected by his critics: namely the depiction of the rise of the bourgeois town at the expense of the corporate citizens (known as "freemen," "burgesses," or "citizens" in England) inhabiting medieval boroughs and cities. These groups were particularly crucial to early modern state formation and the dissemination of civic humanist notions of citizenship—processes that must make us reconsider the bourgeois public sphere and the institutions that supposedly structured it. The travails of the Vintners' Company dramatically illuminate the relationship between civic and printed public discourse. Rather than superseding the civic public sphere at some stage during the seventeenth century, alternative modes of public discourse developed alongside and even under the auspices of corporate citizenship.

The structural transformation of the public sphere identifies a period in European history when private people (in effect, propertied men) publicly discussed political matters rationally, freely, and disinterestedly—like citizens "of the fully developed Greek city state."²³ This classical ideal was closest to fulfillment with the bourgeois public sphere that emerged first in England, then in France and Germany, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.²⁴ It was nevertheless distinguished from the classical ideal in important respects.²⁵ The first was the emergence of the modern state: what Habermas terms the sphere of public authority, distinct from the "personal holdings" or "estate" of the "prince." The state consisted of "a permanent administration and a standing army."²⁶ The inhabitants "subject to it" and "only negatively defined by it" were "the private people who, because they held no office, were excluded from any share of public authority."²⁷ This was accompanied by the emergence of civil society, an economic process involving the removal of economic activity from the medieval household economy into "a commodity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision."²⁸ The development of civil society coincided with the consolidation of "the conjugal family's intimate domain." This realm of affection and privacy was the primary source of private experiences and subjectivity governing the public use of reason.²⁹

The bourgeois public sphere emerged between the realm of public (state) authority and the private realms of civil society and domestic intimacy.³⁰ It was structured by two developments (one literary, one associational): newspapers, periodicals, journals, and other outputs of the press; and coffeehouses, clubs, salons, and other places of the town.³¹ Although initially "bound up with aristocratic society," the town was essentially "the preserve of the `bourgeois,' the real carrier of the public, which from the outset was a reading public."³² It included the "new category of scholars," such as lawyers and clergy, and "capitalists," such as "merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers."³³ Before the press and town, monarchs and nobles represented their power and status publicly or negotiated privately with other estates; they did not allow public criticism or engage in public discourse. With the demise of the bourgeois public sphere through industrialization and mass consumerism, public life was effectively refeudalized, a process of degeneration that Habermas critiques through the discursive achievements of the bourgeois public sphere. These achievements included a "kind of social intercourse" replacing the "celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals," the potential discussion of all topics "of common concern," and the establishment of the "public" as "in principle inclusive" (no matter the exclusions of any given instance).³⁴

Historians of early modern England have engaged with this narrative in one of three ways. The first has been to use Habermas as "a crucial starting point of research" while avoiding his "idealism," "teleology," and "tedious and misleading game" of collecting or discarding phenomena according to "his criteria of publicness, rationality or criticism."³⁵ Michelle O'Callaghan has noted "a plurality of political languages that are located in and arise out of the practices of a number of different communities ... jostling for public space in the early seventeenth-century."³⁶ Religious historians such as Peter Lake and Michael Questier have backdated this plurality further, arguing that the impact of post-Reformation religious debate was to construct the public in at least three ways: as an audience to convince, as a concept of legitimacy (whereby sectarian interest was re-described as "public interest"), and as an arbiter of truth.³⁷ The list of these early modern publics, and the variety of their protagonists, languages, genres, and concerns, is long—so much so that Lake and Questier have coined the "de-Habermased notion of the public sphere" to describe public discussion in the period.³⁸

Historians of the English Revolution have been more explicit in refuting the model, showing that the 1640s witnessed an astonishing increase in the market for political literature as well as the emergence of parties intent on representing, influencing, and claiming public opinion and public interest.³⁹ Just as new media, such as newsbooks, were developed, so traditional genres, including almanacs and ballads, were appropriated for political purposes.⁴⁰ According to Joad Raymond, there developed a public sphere in print both distinct from the oral and scribal publics of previous decades and foreshadowing any developments that might have occurred in the later seventeenth century.⁴¹ Moreover, it was driven by factors antithetical to Habermas's model, not least religious heterodoxy and ideological instrumentalism.⁴² David Zaret argues that it was in the 1640s, not the 1690s, that "contending elites [first] used the medium of print to appeal to a mass audience, and activist members of that audience invoked the authority of opinion to lobby those elites."⁴³ Printed petitions and subscriptions made unprecedented demands on public reason and readers' judgment.⁴⁴ Zaret suggests that these new markets and tactics caused a fundamental shift from secrecy to public opinion insofar as normative expectations of political communication were concerned. Moreover, they were "practical developments" that "made it possible for Locke and subsequent philosophers to uphold democratic conceptions of political order that presuppose the existence, rationality, and normative authority of public opinion."⁴⁵

A third response to Habermas's model has been broad, if qualified, concurrence. Steven Pincus argues for the emergence of a Habermasian-type public sphere in the 1660s. Based on the coffeehouse, it was sociologically more inclusive than Habermas allowed in terms of class, gender, and party affiliation; moreover, its genesis lay not so much in the rise of the bourgeoisie as in "a taste for news that could not be suppressed." However, for Pincus there is little doubt that this public sphere marked a major discontinuity with the past, coffeehouses embodying the town and the public sphere that it structured.⁴⁶ Geoff Eley goes further, suggesting that in the eighteenth century, "voluntary association and associational life" became "the main medium for the definition of public commitments" for the bourgeois, and "voluntary association was in principle the logical form of bourgeois emancipation and bourgeois self-affirmation."⁴⁷ In particular, "the ideal and practice of association were explicitly hostile, by organisation and intent, to older practices of corporate organisation, which ascribed social place by hereditary and legal estate."⁴⁸

These various responses suggest that the bourgeois public sphere profoundly underestimates the public spaces of later-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England—a position emphatically endorsed by complementary work on the popular politics of the period.⁴⁹ That political culture was multifarious is clearly demonstrated by the English Revolution, which galvanized a print culture—a press broadly defined—at once penetrative, commercial, and partisan; which drew local antagonisms into a national framework; and which provided the essential context for public activity at the Restoration.⁵⁰ It likewise facilitated female political participation, women petitioning Parliament, writing and printing political literature, and engaging directly in public debate.⁵¹

At least three features of the Habermasian schema nevertheless remain unanswered. First, this literature fails to address in any systematic fashion precisely that aspect of Habermas's argument which appeals to Pincus and Eley: the sociology of public space and the emergence of an explicitly bourgeois public sphere after 1660. The multiplicity of early modern publics does not preclude the emergence of new forms of urban association such as the town. Second, much of the critical engagement with Habermas before the Restoration has focused on discourse as a literary activity, articulated within and through texts. It has much less to say about discourse as ways of talking and meeting—of physically interacting—or the social, economic, and ideological circumstances structuring such talk. However, much of the force of Habermas's account stems from the convergence of literary and associational culture as a context for discourse. Third, the essential humanism of Habermas's account is generally dismissed as idealism. However, David Norbrook has strongly argued that the model remains of historical interest precisely because of the "congruence between its own terms and those of seventeenth-century republicans." If, as he observes, Habermas was primarily concerned with "recovering the spirit of the classical forum and adapting it to modern conditions," then the early modern period was apposite for these purposes because certain people were engaged in exactly that project.⁵²

These three aspects of Habermas's approach—urban association, discourse as talk, and Renaissance humanism—are reasons to regard the bourgeois public sphere as an animal wounded, certainly, but not yet expired. However, it also transpires that they were defining attributes of the corporate citizenship that the "bourgeois public sphere" supposedly eclipsed.

Eley's contrast between voluntary association and "older practices of corporate organisation" highlights a crucial and largely neglected feature of the bourgeois public sphere. Habermas regarded the town—the new institutions of urban sociability structuring the bourgeois public sphere—as replacing the guilds and common councils that shaped the corporate life of "genuine burghers, the old occupational orders of craftsmen and shopkeepers" of traditional medieval cities: companies, in effect, like the London Vintners.⁵³ He cites Percy Ernst Schramm to note that "The feature that constituted the authentic townsman (Burger) is precisely what [the "bourgeois"] lacked, namely, membership in a town community confirmed by an oath of citizenship."⁵⁴ The very factors that precipitated the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere—commercialization, state formation, the breakup of the household economy—caused their "downward social mobility; they lost their importance along with the very towns upon whose citizens' rights their status was based."⁵⁵

Until recently, there was nothing in this story of corporate decline and bourgeois insurgency to surprise historians of English towns and cities. On the contrary, it would have confirmed expectations.⁵⁶ However, more recently the story has begun to be retold.⁵⁷ Its retelling is part of a larger historical revisionism suggesting that a process of public and discursive change informed by classical precepts and embedded in social practice did, in fact, take place in early modern England. However, it cannot be pinpointed to a single year or decade. Nor is it to be found in the isolated analysis of publics created or invoked by religious controversy, tavern banter, tactical petitioning, print markets, English republicanism, or drinking coffee—important though each of those is. Rather, these moments and interactions must be understood in relation to longer-term developments within the English polity that hold implications not merely for the concept of the bourgeois public sphere but also for two of its structural handmaidens: public authority and civil society. The crux of the matter is that, unbeknownst to Habermas, the English monarchy was in no sense, shape, or form a fiscal-military state in 1500; and it did not resemble much of one two centuries later.⁵⁸ Rather, it was an amalgamation of jurisdictions, offices, privileges, communities, and corporations encompassing, often on semi-autonomous and competitive bases, a range of public participants, languages, and interests. This was as true for the summit of government, in London, as it was for the localities—England's principalities, counties, cities, boroughs, townships, parishes, and manors. As Patrick Collinson has influentially put it, "Early modern England consisted of a series of overlapping, superimposed communities which were also semi-autonomous, self-governing political cultures. These may be called, but always in quotes, `republics': village republics; in the counties, gentry republics; and at a transcendent level, the commonwealth of England, which Sir Thomas Smith thought it proper to render in Latin a Republica Anglorum."⁵⁹

This commonwealth of Englishmen—what Collinson also describes as a "Monarchical Republic"—has received much recent attention from historians interested in the social depth of political power.⁶⁰ It has also attracted intellectual and literary historians concerned with the vernacularization and dissemination of Renaissance humanism.⁶¹ Together they have unearthed the convergence of two processes that transformed national and urban political culture in early modern England—though not in the manner envisaged by Habermas. First, the undoubted extension of centralized public authority in this period enhanced rather than diminished the power and corporate identity of officeholders within local communities. New methods of keeping the peace, serving on juries, regulating credit relations, or relieving the poor required, in practice, an unprecedented level of self-governance and discretion both personally and communally.⁶² Successful government required at once a persuasive center and participatory locales—or, as historians have shown, male heads of household from the middle and upper echelons of particular communities willing to take on the increasing burdens and responsibilities of public office for social rather than bureaucratic reasons.⁶³ Indeed, Mark Goldie has estimated that as late as 1700, about one-twentieth of adult males held public office in any year, one-half in any decade.⁶⁴ Second, during the sixteenth century, the predominant intellectual influence on the main brokers in public life—from councilors and lawyers in London to senior officeholders in counties, cities, and parishes—was Ciceronian humanism.⁶⁵ In England's cities and boroughs, not only was politics reconceived in terms of the active life and service to the public, the public good, and the commonwealth (local and national), but also many procedures and practices of local governance were recast in this language of vernacular civic humanism. This promoted the establishment within local commonwealths of cultures of civic aristocracy—in the Aristotelian sense of rule by the meritorious and "best" rather than by blood and inheritance.⁶⁶ It also valorized and inculcated a culture of civility or honestas among local inhabitants. These were personal attributes of "discretion," "honesty," "judgment," "decorum," and "moderation" by which people were supposed to converse with each other and order their domestic and public lives.⁶⁷

These twin processes of institutional realignment and vernacular humanism had implications across society. However, the experience was particularly intense in England's incorporated boroughs and cities, or what were also known as "city commonwealths."⁶⁸ These were urban settlements with some kind of tradition of corporate governance and citizenship around which the public and economic lives of community members—freemen, burgesses, and citizens—were organized. They ranged in scale and complexity from the City of London and its companies and guilds (the Vintners' Company included), to provincial capitals such as Norwich, Bristol, and York, to county towns such as Gloucester and Cambridge, to smaller market towns such as Stratford-upon-Avon and Ludlow. As the English manifestation of those genuine burghers and occupational orders lamented by Habermas, they were communities that should have been in terminal decline. Instead, the century after 1540 saw their proliferation and formation into what might be regarded as an English corporate system.⁶⁹

This was a process whereby corporate citizenship became more rather than less significant within the commonwealth as a whole, and through which inhabitants of increasing numbers of city commonwealths claimed and exercised the powers and responsibilities of semi-autonomous governance. Its main mechanism was the charter of incorporation. This involved townsmen petitioning the crown for a legal charter that either recognized or created the corporate status of the settlement in question, and the crown standardizing the kinds of language, institutions, and practices through which that status was thenceforward constituted.⁷⁰ Incorporation perpetuated medieval concepts of political corporeality into the seventeenth century, the community of freemen, burgesses (in boroughs), and citizens (in cities) becoming a fictional person or body that could own property and be represented both at law and in Parliament. It prescribed a culture of civic aristocracy and honestas as the normative mode of urban governance—that is, by tiers of "common councils" in which the "discreet," "better," "able," and "honest" members of the community were expected to assemble, counsel, and act according to their "wisdoms" and "discretions." It retained and enhanced the economic powers of crafts and guilds—institutions that also inculcated honestas. And it transposed onto this culture of citizenship more general powers and responsibilities that were usually the preserve of county gentry. As a result of incorporation, for example, citizens and burgesses were largely responsible for their own magistracy, elected two representatives to Parliament, collected their own taxes (local and national), and, in larger cities such as London, Norwich, and York, expected to control their militia.⁷¹

It is significant, then, that in 1540 there were 44 incorporated cities and boroughs in England and 4 in Wales, compared to 35 "royal burghs" in Scotland (the Scottish equivalent). By 1640, this figure had risen to 181 in England, 14 in Wales, and 58 in Scotland. Not only had the number of English city commonwealths quadrupled, but it also outstripped the extent of corporate citizenship north of the border.⁷² In the process, between 1584 and 1641, the proportion of English parliamentary representation located in the corporate system—the number of parliamentary representatives elected by inhabitants of city commonwealths—rose from 35 percent to 52 percent, making corporate citizens the single largest constituency in the commonwealth.⁷³ As a process of state formation, this was clearly not one that made urban freemen and citizens private objects of impersonal and permanent public authority. Rather, it created subjects more than capable of talking and acting, as citizens, against the fiscal, bureaucratic, or military conceits of central authority and the paternalism of county and urbane gentry—a concern for "freedom" and "independence" that survived well into the eighteenth century.⁷⁴ Neither did it drown freemen in the relentless waves of civil society. On the contrary, there is every suggestion that guilds and companies continued to play crucial roles in urban economies well into the eighteenth century and provided templates for the new companies, clubs, and societies.⁷⁵ Most telling, however, are the implications for public discourse, because inherent to the practice of corporate citizenship was the valorization of talk concerned with public matters that was governed by honestas. Through their participation in the parishes, guilds, assemblies, common councils, and aldermanic benches that proliferated across post-Reformation England, male heads of household from the middling strata of English society learned to apply, twist, and break the rules of civil conversation. It was on this basis that they engaged in the new discursive struggles of the English Revolution. And it was from this vantage that they subsequently participated in the sociability of the town.

The idiom of this talk was not the use of reason in a Kantian sense but the kind of "tact" ascribed by Habermas to early manifestations of the town—a modus operandi that espoused the circumspection of counsel and anticipated the more aesthetic and rarefied eighteenth-century culture of politeness.⁷⁶ Its general aim was to create conversational moments in which all speakers could use their discretion no matter their relative power and status.⁷⁷ The expectation was not that speakers should ignore inequalities in wealth and position, which conversations inevitably exposed, but that they should rather negotiate them, or indeed use them advantageously, through their conversational acuity.⁷⁸ Structurally this required conversationally decorous and ordered spaces such as counsels and courts. The challenge for interlocutors was both to learn conversational conventions and to cultivate the social awareness and self-knowledge with which to deploy them—to speak with profit for themselves and, when appropriate, the wider community. This amounted to the "extraordinary skill" of knowing, like the effective counselors described by Thomas More, when to say what and how according to time, place, and audience.⁷⁹

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these insights were disseminated through various channels—not least advice books, written explicitly for middling sections of society, that explained how to write "epistles" (letters and petitions) or act the "complete citizen" according to classical strictures.⁸⁰ The institutional corollary of this was the burgeoning number of councils, committees, and assemblies through which public life was organized, and the saturation of civic prescription with the language of honesty and discretion. It is this type of conversational setting that Rembrandt represents in his famous portrait The Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild (The Staalmeesters). (See Figure 1.) In England, the spirit of this idealism is captured by a burgess of early-seventeenth-century Great Yarmouth who, ruminating on the nature of governance in his borough (which he likened to Venice), opined that "it is on counsel that all the rest of public government depends ... and it is by Cicero called the soul, reason and understanding of the commonwealth." As such, "it is very meet that there should be in every great city and town, a competent number of senators elected (but not too many, for that is very dangerous) who are to have a place convenient appointed, where they may all assemble and meet together either for service of the state in general, or for the benefit of the town in particular."⁸¹

Figure 1: Civic discourse in action: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild (The Staalmeesters), 1662. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The creation of civil environments is powerfully illustrated by Jacobean Cambridge. In October 1608, a "committee" of twenty-four burgesses was granted "full power discreetly to peruse the former orders of this town" to assess which were "most fit and convenient."⁸² The following August, their conclusions were "publicly and openly read, allowed and agreed upon to be reasonable and requisite" by all the burgesses assembled at the "common day."⁸³ If the very process of reform was discursive, then one particular order reveals the underlying concern with civil conversation. It was decreed "with full and absolute consent" that when the mayor "shall propound at any common day any matter or cause touching the Town, or the State thereof or any other cause, that then the Recorder or Counsel of this town and the Aldermen of the said Town ... shall in their places have priority of first speech." Thereafter, "the Commoners or Common Burgesses that shall first stand up to answer and speak in the same matter shall be first heard with quietness and without disturbance of any other." If two burgesses stood together, "then the mayor shall judge who did first arise." Moreover, "it shall not be lawful to any man that hath once spoken to reply in that matter without licence of the Mayor ... and so that his speech be to the matter well to be commanded to silence at the discretion of the Mayor and others to speak." Finally, "if any shall speak any indecent or unseemly speeches or shall make reply without leave ... having formerly spoken," they would be fined 2 shillings 6 pence.⁸⁴ The context so created recognized status, place, and the need for conversational order. However, it also allowed all participants to speak, listen, and be heard—to make public use of their discretion. These were precisely the kinds of discursive attributes that Alderman William Abell was accused of subverting in his attempts to turn the Vintners' Company into a monopoly.

Events in Cambridge and London indicate both the discursive basis of corporate citizenship and attempts during the early modern period to imbue that discourse with honestas. They are examples that could be multiplied by as many times as there were city commonwealths, confounding Zaret's claim that before 1640, the English commons were largely deprived of "substantive discussions and debates."⁸⁵ That is not to say that assemblies, councils, and common days were not, in practice, divisive, disorderly, or factionalized. It was, after all, by manipulating the "common day" in Cambridge in 1641 that a puritan faction succeeded in electing Oliver Cromwell as one of the borough's parliamentary burgesses.⁸⁶ Neither is it to deny the exclusionary potential of honestas, in the sense that its drive for order and civility, both personal and institutional, could in practice justify the enclosure of power by those able to describe themselves as better or able within communities.⁸⁷ It is to say that civic power and influence was to a large extent based on a control of discursive practice and conventions, and that the response of many urban inhabitants to innovations in the press or town was rooted in this culture of corporate citizenship. The parish vestries, guild assemblies, and common councils of early modern England serve, in effect, as a crucial source—a kind of repository of skills—that made the discursive precocity noted by Habermas possible.

Nor was it only men who were embroiled in this civic public sphere. Although corporate governance was unquestionably patriarchal, there are at least three reasons why the participation of women in its discursive procedures should not be discounted. First, the theoretical exclusion of women was not translated into practice. Patricia Crawford has suggested that the realities of local citizenship entailed a fair degree of public participation by female householders: certainly petitioning was an art in which many women, including poor women, were by necessity versed long before the 1640s.⁸⁸ Second, although honestas valorized expressly masculine virtues, this masculinity was cultural rather than biological: women could also attain it.⁸⁹ This is neatly dramatized in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) when Shakespeare transposes the attributes of honestas to the borough's female citizens and effeminizes Falstaff, the main male character.⁹⁰ Likewise, the increasing amount of civil litigation during the period, especially regarding defamation, suggests that both men and women were deeply concerned about civility of speech beyond the council chamber.⁹¹ Third, and most important, male and female citizens did not inhabit the "separate spheres" assumed by Habermas. On the contrary, recent historiography stresses the significant overlaps between public and private life, the ongoing importance of the household economy into the eighteenth century, and the manner in which credit and repute were familial rather than individual attributes.⁹² Likewise, it was the household that was enfranchised to the freedom of a city, its head of household representing his dependents in civic arenas. It follows that in practice, public discourse did not cease at the doorstep but rather penetrated parlor and kitchen. This is certainly suggested by a short stanza penned in 1665 to conclude an almanac written and printed in York. The author, a local bookseller named Francis Mawburne, observed that

Now Winter's come, and it is my desire
To get a Toast, and sit down by the fire;
And neighbour-like, we sit and talk and prate,
But not 'gainst King, or Kingdom, Church, or State.⁹³

The "we" is powerfully inclusive, the setting domestic. That Mawburne felt obliged to police, at least rhetorically, his own and his neighbors' "prate" indicates prevailing conversational interests and inclinations. He protests, in effect, too much.

The foregoing discussion puts the controversy over the wine monopoly in a more historicized light. The discursive legitimacy claimed by Abell and the discursive tyranny charged against him were neither incidental to the dispute nor exceptional in tenor. Rather, they reflected the importance of conversational conventions and procedures to corporate sociability more generally. The rapid relocation of the dispute from civic assembly to printing press, in turn, reveals two contrasting notions of public. In the former, the public good of the company was nevertheless discussed in conditions of relative privacy and secrecy—conditions that characterized, to greater or lesser degrees, all corporate governance during the period.⁹⁴ The power of print was, as Zaret in particular has emphasized, to open public discourse to a wider audience.⁹⁵ In this important sense, the civic public sphere cannot be regarded as the direct equivalent of those publics—bourgeois or otherwise—based upon the circulation and appropriation of printed texts. What corporate citizenship did provide was the skills and acumen for citizens to utilize and engage in alternative and perhaps more accessible forms of discursive activity, either through authorship (it is likely that the Vintners penned their early tracts themselves), through the employment of propagandists such as Henry Parker, or by acting as the wider audience—"the public"—that made the rise of the print market possible.

The modes of civil conversation required of common councils and guild assemblies were even more suited to the socially constructed spaces outside the civic public sphere in which people met, interacted, and discoursed—not least the coffeehouse, which facilitated face-to-face interaction, and the postal service, which enabled discourse across geographical space. Both of these institutions increased exponentially in the Restoration period, so much so that it could plausibly be argued that the travails of the Vintners encapsulate in microcosm a story of public development that is ultimately not too far removed from that envisaged by Habermas. In such an interpretation, citizens, confronted with the monopolistic tendencies of the Stuart monarchy, were first robbed of their public powers and roles before becoming citizens anew through their participation in new media and arenas of public discourse. Viewed in these terms, the emergence and extension of alternative public resources marked a major relocation and restructuring of political agency and debate—a point of discontinuity and change no matter the discursive capacities of citizens before the middle of the seventeenth century.

There are a number of reasons to ward against this potentially teleological narrative. As has been intimated above, historians of political thought are increasingly reluctant to characterize the political culture of the early Enlightenment according to "the canonised text of modern liberal constitutionalism."⁹⁶ For example, John Locke, far from the prescient innovator of democratic values, retained a vision of "citizen participation" that mirrored "the extensive practice of neighbourhood self-government"—the "plurality of small-scale quasi-republican `commonwealths'" that flourished "in the interstices of the monarchical polity."⁹⁷ Likewise, the most recent historian of the Augustan coffeehouse suggests that, "instead of a Habermasian public sphere, we find in early eighteenth-century political culture a number of advocates for a more `civilised' public life." Writers at the Spectator envisaged the coffeehouse as not so much "a space for the politics of democratic reason" as a fulcrum of civil society—a new bastion for the values that had long characterized conversations in the guild meeting and common council.⁹⁸ This idealization of the coffeehouse interior is suggested by Figure 2.

Figure 2: Coffee and civility: Anonymous, The Interior of a Coffeehouse, ca. 1700. Inscribed in brown ink "A. S. 1668" (believed to be false). The British Museum.

These continuities in political and discursive theory—and the long genealogy of honestas that they suggest—complement the survival of corporate citizenship as a feature of social practice and identity well into the Restoration. For example, the city of York is an English provincial capital renowned for the emergence of its eighteenth-century town and the promulgation of new forms of public culture.⁹⁹ However, it was also an incorporated city that experienced the fusion of corporate and humanist citizenship during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This citizenship was structured by an elaborate mosaic of interlocking parishes, guilds, courts, and councils that continued to flourish after 1660. Moreover, it was practiced by the large proportion of enfranchised heads of household (i.e., freemen and citizens) within the urban population.¹⁰⁰ As late as the 1660s, more than two out of every three household heads in York were citizens, a proportion that rose to eight out of ten in the most commercialized and mercantile parishes.¹⁰¹ This reflected the ongoing centrality of citizenship to the public and economic life of the city: far from being an archaic and honorific estate, it continued to structure governance and commerce and was an important source of urban identity.

Even more telling, the development of the Restoration book trade, coffeehouse, and postal service in York served to enhance rather than diminish the power of corporate citizenship. Put simply, the press and the town emerged as the result of a structural transformation that directly contradicts the orthodox narrative of declining corporatism to which Habermas subscribed. Before 1640, booksellers in York, as elsewhere, had avoided involvement in civic life, preferring to trade outside the civic jurisdiction (in the cathedral precinct) and so avoid the public demands of citizenship.¹⁰² This changed after 1640. The creation of a Company of York Stationers was first mooted in May 1649; the Mayor's Court registered a similar petition in December 1675; "searchers" for the company of "Stationers, Booksellers and Bookbinders" were listed in 1680; and in May 1682 the "Company" was advised to get its ordinary confirmed at the next assizes.¹⁰³ This enthusiasm for civic organization and practices only increased with the next generation of printers.¹⁰⁴

A similar process of civic assimilation characterized the coffeehouse. Far from announcing the unexpected arrival of the town in English cities, the institution quickly "became an integral part of neighbourhood sociability" and its regulation "a matter of local concern."¹⁰⁵ In York, the merchant and religious dissenter William Wombwell purchased both his citizenship and a license before opening his coffeehouse in 1667. That the license was for both "ale and coffee" only adds to the sense of continuity with previous forms of sociability.¹⁰⁶ This continuity is reflected in Thomas Starling's sketches of the annual Norwich Guild Days at the end of the seventeenth century, which show the coffeehouse absorbed into the everyday routine of civic ritual. (See Figure 3.) This proximity of coffee to citizenship made it extremely difficult for the crown to police coffeehouses in the 1670s, when a series of proclamations were issued ordering their closure as seminaries of sedition. It was those citizens responsible for the regulation of coffeehouses who also drank the coffee.¹⁰⁷ The same was true of the postal service. At the Restoration, the position of York postmaster became a gift of the crown and was purchased by a royalist called Jonas Mascall.¹⁰⁸ Over the next seven years, Mascall was a placeman of the crown, supplying political information and working closely with the garrison and lord lieutenancy.¹⁰⁹ However, his closeness to the "King's Service" led to his estrangement from the citizenry, the corporation taking the unusual step of threatening legal proceedings over an unpaid loan in 1665.¹¹⁰ His position worsened in 1667 when court politics led to his "discharge," leaving Mascall to face "the unsupportable loss of my credit" alone.¹¹¹ His replacement was a citizen less concerned with the "King's Service" than with eliminating the tampering, overcharging, and inefficiencies "by which the Public suffers and this office much dishonoured."¹¹²

Figure 3: Coffeehouses and civic ritual (bottom right): Thomas Starling, from Drawings of Annual Guild Days of Norwich, England, ca. 1706. Wash drawing. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

This combination of public discourse and corporate power coincided, finally, with a thirty-year period in which corporate citizenship represented the most persistent challenge to the prospect (real or imagined) of Stuart absolutism and Catholicism, which was reflected by the monarchy's repeated attempts to fundamentally remodel the charters upon which corporate citizenship rested.¹¹³ The first campaign began almost immediately upon the king's return and culminated with the Corporation Act (1661); the second, more systematic attack followed the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s, when attempts to exclude James, Duke of York, from the throne by Act of Parliament were eventually defeated by his brother, Charles II.¹¹⁴ The so-called Tory Reaction that followed prioritized urban corporations as strategic targets.¹¹⁵ The story in York reflected national trends.¹¹⁶ One amused gentleman noted, "our Mayor and Citizens here have had two meetings since Tuesday last at the Hall to consult their interest in the charter and are much divided ... They have scolded with one another and have out done the fisherwomen of Billingsgate in that Dialect."¹¹⁷ Clearly there were limits to honestas.¹¹⁸ However, these should not obscure a central feature of politics both before and after the English Revolution: that it was as citizens operating in corporate structures that members of the middling sort were most likely to "develop a civic consciousness, an awareness of [themselves as] political actor[s] in a public realm."¹¹⁹ Without an appreciation of this preexisting culture of agency and discourse, the emergence of the "public sphere" in England—bourgeois or otherwise—cannot be fully understood.

Zaret comments that in "critical theory and postmodernism, excessive pessimism on the modern public sphere is fuelled by grossly unbalanced assessments of communicative change that attribute novelty in our era to rapid growth in commercialism and the capacity to produce texts." He suggests that relocating the emergence of an English "public sphere" in the discursive developments of Revolutionary England, and regarding its Enlightenment idealists as simply catching up with changes induced by practical necessities of commercialization and partisanship, "flatly contradicts this premise." It demonstrates, rather, that "the origins of reasoned appeals to public opinion in politics" were due to "communicative developments that critical theorists and postmodernists hold responsible for the contemporary dissipation of reason."¹²⁰

The conclusions here are somewhat different. Any changes in discursive theory and practice during the seventeenth century were contiguous with much longer processes of cultural transformation whereby subjects came to act—and talk—like citizens. This process was engendered not from outside the parameters of public authority, or state, but from within them. State formation in England involved not so much the centralization of military, fiscal, and bureaucratic power as the incorporation, and empowerment, of disparate communities within the overarching concept of commonwealth. This was accompanied by the appropriation of certain discursive skills and traits—what we now call habitus—among middling sections of the wider populace.¹²¹ The rejuvenation of corporate citizenship epitomized this process and the historical irony underpinning it: that the origins of the modern state involved the proliferation of medieval institutions to serve classical ideals.

The experience of the London Vintners suggests the relative ease with which citizens moved from civic to printed discourse once the need and opportunity arose. This is not to say, however, that the one sphere replaced the other as the primary context for public discussion. Far from being eclipsed by the public sphere after 1660, corporate citizenship provided a crucial condition for its emergence, in York serving as a handmaiden for the provincial press and coffeehouse. Its fusion of corporate and humanist values likewise shaped the discursive precocity of England's middle classes, and it provides a historicized context for placing Enlightenment proponents of the public such as Andrew Marvell and John Locke. None of which has prevented corporate citizenship from slipping from historical sight at least twice—first under the weight of later Stuart absolutism, more latterly through the conceptual dazzle of the bourgeois public sphere.

The existence of a civic public sphere in England begs comparative questions, not least the intersections between citizenship and public discourse in other early modern polities and the imperial export of the English variety. This might have been through expressly civic companies, such as the Virginia Company and East India Company, as well as the colonial commonwealths established in seventeenth-century New England.¹²² Certainly the civic dimensions of the English and American revolutions remain to be compared.¹²³ As intriguingly, David D. Bien has noted how the ostensibly feudal system of privileged officeholding and corporate bodies in eighteenth-century France were "not only modern in origin" but also "taught implicit lessons to their members and others." The practical "schooling" in the "participatory and democratic" decision-making that these bodies provided "resonated well with the spreads of democracy in the broader society." It also explains why large sections of a population "which never read Rousseau" nevertheless "had a mental framework for understanding the principles of the Revolution."¹²⁴ In these respects, the parallels with English corporate citizenship in the seventeenth century are striking and suggest that the unexpected legacies—even incipient modernity—of apparently "archaic" corporatism are a subject worth pursuing.

Insofar as they provide a perspective on contemporary public culture, the discursive attributes of London vintners, Cambridge burgesses, or York citizens offer the simple lesson that the quality of public discourse as manufactured and consumed in texts (printed or electronic) cannot be divorced from civic expectations, processes, and participation. They also suggest that in societies governed by participatory publics, change and criticism are as likely to be generated from within governing public structures as from without—that the former is almost a prerequisite for the latter. On both these counts, the modern pessimism refuted by Zaret may, in fact, be warranted: the civic culture of modern Western democracies is constantly lamented, the possibilities of civic participation of the kind enjoyed by early modern citizens diminished.

Be that as it may, the conventions underpinning early modern citizenship were hardly liberal or democratic. They valorized discretion rather than free speech, envisaged civil rather than inclusive conversations, and demanded the subjective internalization of objective practices and procedures. In practice, they nurtured communal as well as national patriotism and were inextricable from both partisan politics and structural inequalities of wealth and power. The activities so prescribed were public, certainly, and also effectively disseminated; but they were never populist, progressive, or open. They were based, rather, on the Ciceronian insight that "without the self-restraint of potentially domineering speakers there can be no conversation or critical reflection"—that, indeed, "managing the relationship between self-interest and social duty, self-restraint and freedom and competition and co-operation" is the point of civil conversation.¹²⁵ It is an ideal that, unlike the bourgeois public sphere, can claim to be a feature of the early modern past rather than a modern construction of it. Whether it provides an appropriate perspective with which to critique the present remains, as it were, open to debate.

Thanks to Colin Davis, Mark Knights, Cathy Shrank, Richard Whiting, and Keith Wrightson for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. Angela McShane and Tom Nichols helped with selecting images. Spellings have been modernized throughout.

Phil Withington is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Leeds and was recently made a Research Fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council. He has published The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005) and is currently researching a project on "Intoxication in Cultural and Historical Perspective.

Notes

¹ London Guildhall Library [hereafter GL], MS15, 201, 3, f. 169.

² For a clear discussion of the financial arrangements, see Anne Crawford, A History of the Vintners' Company (London, 1977), 121.

³ Catherine Patterson, "Quo Warranto and Borough Corporations in Early Stuart England: Royal Prerogative and Local Privileges in the Central Courts," English Historical Review 120 (2005): 894–895; Crawford, A History of the Vintners' Company, 124–125.

⁴ For an example of this neglect, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2000). The Vintners' discussions on the issue can be found in GL, MS15, 201, 3, ff. 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 172.

⁵A True Discovery of the Projectors of the Wine Project (London, 1641).

⁶A True Relation of the Proposing, Threatening and Persuading the Vintners to Yield to the Imposition upon Wines (London, 1641).

⁷ Ibid., 3, 5.

⁸ Henry Parker, Vintners' Answer to Some Scandalous Pamphlets, Published (as is supposed) by Richard Kilvert (London, 1642).

⁹ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989); Anne Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 410.

¹⁰ Keith Michael Baker, "Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 189.

¹¹ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 57.

¹² Craig Calhoun, "Habermas and the Public Sphere," in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 41; Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), 18.

¹³ John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 109.

¹⁴ Lloyd Kramer, "Habermas, History and Critical Theory," in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 257.

¹⁵ Peter U. Hohendahl, "Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics," New German Critique 16 (1979): 92; Calhoun, "Habermas and the Public Sphere," 39, 29, 10.

¹⁶ Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (Basingstoke, 1986), 43; Habermas, The Structural Transformation, xvii. The (ahistorical) philosophical agenda is clearly enunciated in Jürgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere," New German Critique 3 (1974): 49.

¹⁷ Geoff Eley, "Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century," in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 290.

¹⁸ Geoff Eley notes the similarities between Habermas and Raymond Williams in this and other respects; ibid., 294. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London, 1958).

¹⁹ Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, 1984), 43.

²⁰ John Bulloker, An English Expositer: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words in Our Language (London, 1616); Edward Phillips, New World of Words (London, 1695).

²¹ Bulloker, English Expositer (London, 1667); Phillips, New World of Words (London, 1658).

²² Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 19.

²³ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 3–4. Useful summaries of the thesis include Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 109–121; Calhoun, "Habermas and the Public Sphere," 1–29.

²⁴ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 58; Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 111.

²⁵ Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 110; Calhoun, "Habermas and the Public Sphere," 6–7.

²⁶ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 17–18. Emphasis in the original.

²⁷ Ibid., 17.

²⁸ Ibid., 19–20; Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 110.

²⁹ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 28–29.

³⁰ Ibid., 30, 27.

³¹ Ibid., 23, 30–43.

³² Ibid., 43, 23.

³³ Ibid., 23.

³⁴ Ibid., 36–37.

³⁵ Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, 18.

³⁶ Michelle O'Callaghan, "'Now thou may'st speak freely': Entering the Public Sphere in 1614," in Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies, eds., The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, 2003), 74–75.

³⁷ Peter Lake and Michael Questier, "Puritans, Papists and the `Public Sphere' in Early Modern England: The Edmond Campion Affair in Context," Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 589–590.

³⁸ Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 324; Ian Atherton, "The Press and Popular Political Opinion," in Barry Coward, ed., A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003), 100.

³⁹ The full complexity of the situation is suggested in Hughes, Gangraena, 222–318; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 174–175.

⁴⁰ Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996); Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (London, 1979); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J., 1989); Angela McShane Jones, "Rime and Reason: The Political World of the English Broadside Ballad, 1640–1689" (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 2004).

⁴¹ Joad Raymond, "The Language of the Public: Print, Politics, and the Book Trade in 1614," in Clucas and Davies, The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament, 107; Raymond, "The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century," in Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (London, 1999), 109–141.

⁴² Raymond, "The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere," 128–129.

⁴³ Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 6–7, 10.

⁴⁴ Peter Lake, "Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641," in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), 259–290; Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, chap. 8.

⁴⁵ Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 8, 9.

⁴⁶ Steve Pincus, "'Coffee Politicians Does Create': Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture," Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 834, 811.

⁴⁷ Eley, "Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures," 290, 294.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 296, 298–299.

⁴⁹ Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), chaps. 6 and 7; Fox, "Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England," Past & Present 145 (1994): 47–83; Shagan, Popular Politics; Ethan Shagan, "Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII," in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1800 (Aldershot, 2001); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chap. 7; Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chap. 11; Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2002).

⁵⁰ The impact is demonstrated by Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, esp. chap. 8. See also the suggestive comments in Keith Wrightson, "Sorts of People in Tudor and Stuart England," in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), 44, 48–49. For some of the Revolution's discursive consequences, see Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005), esp. 48–53.

⁵¹ Ann Hughes, "Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature," in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), 162–188; Marcus Nevitt, "Women in the Business of Revolutionary News: Elizabeth Alkin, `Parliament Joan,' and the Commonwealth Newsbook," in Raymond, News, Newspapers, and Society, 84–109.

⁵² David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), 13. See also Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 3.

⁵³ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 57, 23, 31.

⁵⁴ Percy Ernst Schramm, Hamburg, Deutschland und die Welt (Munich, 1943), 37, cited in Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 255 n. 53.

⁵⁵ Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 19, 23.

⁵⁶ Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976); Clark and Slack, "Introduction," in Clark and Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972). For the rise of the "town" after 1660, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1990). The narrative is nicely put by Patrick Collinson, "The Protestant Town," in Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), 121.

⁵⁷ Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c.1540–1640 (Oxford, 1991), 335–343; Jonathan Barry, "Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort," in Barry and Brooks, The Middling Sort of People, 84–113; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005).

⁵⁸ John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1994), chap. 1; David Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870 (London, 1997), 17.

⁵⁹ Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum; or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990), reprinted in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 19.

⁶⁰ Patrick Collinson, "The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987): 394–424; Collinson, Elizabethan Essays; Keith Wrightson, "The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England," in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle, eds., The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1994); Mike Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1540–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000); Hindle, "Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of 1596," Historical Journal 42 (1999): 835–851.

⁶¹ Mark Goldie, "The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-holding in Early Modern England," in Harris, The Politics of the Excluded, 153–194; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought (Cambridge, 1995); Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England (Oxford, 2004).

⁶² Steve Hindle, "The Keeping of the Public Peace," in Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle, The Experience of Authority, 213–249; Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004); Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Craig Muldrew, "From a `Light Cloak' to an `Iron Cage': Historical Changes in the Relation between Community and Individualism," in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester, 2000), 156–179.

⁶³ For the process in rural society, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982), 222–228; Wrightson, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1995), 173–184. For urban officeholding, see Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991).

⁶⁴ Goldie, "The Unacknowledged Republic," 161.

⁶⁵ Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998); Cathy Shrank, "Rhetorical Constructions of a National Community: The Role of the King's English in Mid-Tudor Writing," in Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England, 180–199; Shrank, Writing the Nation, esp. chaps. 3 and 5; Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2003); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), chap. 1; Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), chap. 1; Phil Withington, "Two Renaissances: Urban Political Culture in Post-Reformation England Reconsidered," Historical Journal 44 (2001): 239–267.

⁶⁶ Christopher Brooks, "Apprenticeship, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort, 1550–1800," in Barry and Brooks, The Middling Sort of People, 52–84; Jonathan Barry, "Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: The Meanings of Urban Freedom," in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack, eds., Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 181–197; Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns, 183–188; Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 66–75.

⁶⁷ Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, 2–3; Barry, "Civility and Civic Culture," 192–195; Brooks, "Apprenticeship, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort," 77; Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 137–149.

⁶⁸ Thomas Wilson, The State of England anno. Dom. 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher (London, 1936), 20. For the survival of the concept into the later seventeenth century, see Robert Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs, or Boroughs (London, 1690), 2.

⁶⁹ Paul Slack, "Great and Good Towns, 1540–1700," in Peter Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2: 1540–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, chap. 2.

⁷⁰ Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns, 87–96, 161–176; Catherine F. Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite, and the Crown, 1580–1640 (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 8–12.

⁷¹ The most astute accounts of the process remain F. W. Maitland, Township and Borough (Cambridge, 1898); and Maitland and Mary Bateson, eds., The Charters of the Boroughs of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1901).

⁷² Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 18–19.

⁷³ Ibid., 40–41.

⁷⁴ Jonathan Barry, "Provincial Town Culture, 1640–1780: Urban or Civic," in J. H. Pittock and Andrew Wear, eds., Interpretation and Cultural History (London, 1991), 198–234; Rosemary Sweet, "Freedom and Independence in English Borough Politics, c.1770–1830," Past & Present 161 (1998): 85–115.

⁷⁵ Brooks, "Apprenticeship, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort," 65. For London guilds, see Perry Gauci, "Informality and Influence: The Overseas Merchant and the Livery Companies, 1660–1720," in Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis, eds., Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450–1800 (London, 2002), 127–140; and Giorgio Riello, "The Shaping of a Family Trade: The Cordwainers Company in Eighteenth-Century London," ibid., 141–162.

⁷⁶ David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005). For "politeness," see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994); and Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn., 2005), chap. 8.

⁷⁷ Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, 13.

⁷⁸ Manuals targeted at the middling sort include Angel Daye, The English Secretorie (London, 1586); William Fulwood, The Enemie of Idlenesse: Teaching a Perfect Platform How to Indite Epistles and Letters of Divers Sorts (London, 1593); and William Scott, An Essay on Drapery; or, The Complete Citizen (London, 1635).

⁷⁹ Scott, An Essay on Drapery, 136; Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge, 1998), 35–37.

⁸⁰ See fn. 78.

⁸¹ Henry Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth, ed. Charles John Palmer (London, 1854), 55.

⁸² Cambridgeshire County Record Office [hereafter CCRO], City Shelf C, Book 7, f. 1.

⁸³ CCRO, City Box II, 9, f. 1.

⁸⁴ Ibid., ff. 23–23v.

⁸⁵ Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 12.

⁸⁶ CCRO, City Shelf C, Book 7, ff. 210, 313, 329, 341, 357, 462v. The election is discussed in Phil Withington, "Agency, Custom and the English Corporate System," in Henry French and Jonathan Barry, eds., Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 217–219.

⁸⁷ Paul Griffiths, "Secrecy and Authority in Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century London," Historical Journal 40 (1997): 925–951; Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c.1500–1640 (Oxford, 1991), esp. chap. 5.

⁸⁸ Patricia Crawford, "'The Poorest She': Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England," in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge, 2001), 197–219.

⁸⁹ Barbara Correll, "Malleable Material, Models of Power," English Literary History 57 (1990): 258; Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 210–213.

⁹⁰ Leah S. Marcus, "Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 175.

⁹¹ The astonishing increase in defamation litigation remains to be adequately explained. For an introduction to the phenomenon, see Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1996).

⁹² Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (Harlow, 1998); Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historical Journal 36 (1993): 412; Naomi Tadmor, "The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England," Past & Present 151 (1996): 111–140; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation (Basingstoke, 1998), 148–173.

⁹³ Francis Mawburne, Eagle 1666: A New Almanac and Prognostication (York, 1666). The only surviving copy of the almanac is in York Minster Library, Y/059 NEW.

⁹⁴ Griffiths, "Secrecy and Authority"; Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, chap. 5; Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 201.

⁹⁵ Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, chap. 6.

⁹⁶ Mark Goldie, "Introduction," in John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), xxvii.

⁹⁷ Ibid., xxv.

⁹⁸ Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, 256.

⁹⁹ Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance, 8, 12, 30.

¹⁰⁰ David Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979); Phil Withington, "Views from the Bridge: Revolution and Restoration in Seventeenth-Century York," Past & Present 170 (2001): 126–133; Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, chap. 4. In York, "freeman" and "citizen" were coterminous, the former denoting economic rights and liberties (most basically the right to keep shop and practice a trade), the latter recognizing the civic responsibilities and obligations that followed.

¹⁰¹ The averages are calculated by combining local assessment lists for parishes in each of the four wards of the city with lists of freemen and poor rate assessments. Borthwick Institute for Historical Research [hereafter BIHR], Y/MB 34 (churchwarden's assessment for St Michael le Belfrey, Bootham), Y/HTG 15 (assessment for constable for Trinity Goodramgate, Monk), CPH 2542, Samuel Buck c. William Green (wages for parish clerk in Peter Little, Walmgate), PR.Y/MG 19 (parish subscription in 1666 for St Martin's, Micklegate). Francis Collins, ed., Register of the Freemen of the City of York, vol. 2: 1559–1759 (Durham, 1900); York City Archives [hereafter YCA], Series E (Relief of the Poor, 1653–1678).

¹⁰² J. Bernard and M. Bell, The Early Seventeenth-Century Book Trade and John Foster's Inventory of 1616 (Leeds, 1994).

¹⁰³ YCA, B36, f. 226; B38, ff. 11–12; C26, f. 53; B38, f. 187.

¹⁰⁴ The National Archives [hereafter TNA], C5, 439/60, 1681; BIHR, Wills, Richard Lambert, August 1690; Collins, Register of the Freemen of the City of York, 102, 137; YCA, B38, f. 158.

¹⁰⁵ Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, 153.

¹⁰⁶ YCA, B38, ff. 35v–36.

¹⁰⁷ Pincus, "'Coffee Politicians Does Create,'" 823.

¹⁰⁸ TNA, SP29, 219, 69.

¹⁰⁹ Cambridge University Library, Microfilm Reel 381, SP29, 175; TNA, SP29, 218, 93–199; Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1663–4, 307, 309.

¹¹⁰ YCA, B38, f. 14.

¹¹¹ TNA, SP29, 219, 69.

¹¹² Post Office Record Office, PO, 94, 12.

¹¹³ This challenge—and also its discursive basis—is demonstrated for London by Gary S. De Krey, "The London Whigs and the Exclusion Crisis Reconsidered," in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 457–482. The best recent account of the attack on corporate privileges is Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998).

¹¹⁴ Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1995).

¹¹⁵ Jennifer Levin, The Charter Controversy in the City of London, 1660–1688, and Its Consequences (London, 1969).

¹¹⁶ Phil Withington, "Citizens, Community, and Political Culture in Restoration England," in Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England, 146–152.

¹¹⁷ West Yorkshire Archives Service, Leeds, Mex MSS 25/16.

¹¹⁸ That said, even at this moment of corporate crisis, policy was decided discursively, the citizens' lesser representatives, the common council, winning the argument against the court of aldermen over the best strategy for preserving the city. YCA, B38, ff. 206–206v.

¹¹⁹ J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 335, 354.

¹²⁰ Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 17.

¹²¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 1989), chap. 3.

¹²² Suggestive in this respect are Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003); Peter Thompson, Rum, Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1999).

¹²³ It is notable by its absence in Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment.

¹²⁴ David D. Bien, "Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Regime," in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1: The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Bungay, 1987), 111–112.

¹²⁵ Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, 2.

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