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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780:
a French approach*
FrancËois-Joseph Ruggiu
University of Paris-Sorbonne
Abstract
This article concerns the formation and evolution of an urban gentry in two English
county towns during the second half of the seventeenth century and the ®rst half of
the eighteenth century. Utilizing research which reconstructed the lives of major
citizens of Canterbury and Chester, it suggests that the turmoil of the Interregnum
and of the Restoration created a political elite of merchants and craftsmen, involved
in the service of the local community and rewarded for that service with the symbolic
signs of gentry status, most notably the title of `gentleman'. The values and the
behaviour of this urban gentry approximated to the model of the landed gentry but
were very di€erent from those of the future middle classes of the second half of the
eighteenth century.
The Institute of Historical Research conference on French Perceptions of British
History provided me with the opportunity to resume research conducted in
the framework of my thesis on `The nobility and middle-sized towns in
France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries'. Started in
1989 under the guidance of Jean-Pierre Poussou, and published in 1997,1 my
thesis concerned the nature of the relationship of the French nobility and the
English gentry with provincial towns, from the beginning of the seventeenth
century to the end of the eighteenth.2 As English case studies, I chose Chester
and Canterbury:3 both were old commercial towns where the average
* This article is a revised version of a paper given at the Anglo-French Conference, `French
perceptions of British history', held at the Institute of Historical Research, 8±10 Sept. 1999. I would
like to thank FrancË ois Crouzet and Jean-Pierre Poussou for the advice that they gave me at the
various stages of my work. I would also like to thank my two commentators at this conference,
Jonathan Barry and Peter Borsay, for their readiness to assist me; I hope that they ®nd the echo of
their remarks, both in this paper and in future articles. Finally, I thank the anonymous reader for
Historical Research for his accurate and very interesting comments, and Kate Atkinson, who translated
this article into English.
1
F.-J. Ruggiu, Les e lites et les villes moyennes en France et en Angleterre, XVIIe±XVIIIe sieÁ cles (Paris,
1997). See also idem, `La gentry anglaise: un essai de de ®nition au tournant des XVIIe et XVIIIe
sieÁ cles', XVIIe SieÁ cle, cxcvii (1997), 775±95.
2
A general comparative approach between English and French elites was also applied in M. W.
McCahill, `Open elites: recruitment to the French noblesse and the English aristocracy in the 18th
century', Albion, xxx (1998), 599±629.
3
I would like to thank the archivists and sta€ of Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Chester City
# Institute of Historical Research 2001.
Historical Research, vol. 74, no. 185 (August 2001)
Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA.
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250 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
population (between 5,000 and 15,000 inhabitants in the period under
discussion) did not experience the levels of growth witnessed elsewhere in
the eighteenth century. These towns were home to strong administrative
powers and, by virtue of the charters granted to them, enjoyed county
corporate status, and thus a very high degree of municipal autonomy. As well
as resembling each other, and the two French towns which made up the
comparative sample in my thesis (Abbeville and AlencË on), Chester and
Canterbury bore witness to the social evolution of a speci®c category of
towns: the numerous, middle-sized provincial towns which were the
administrative and economic capitals of small, yet clearly individualized
regions, and which remained largely una€ected by the changes which
accompanied the rise of international commerce and of industrialization.4
In this earlier work I tried to reconstruct the lives of families who lived in
Chester or Canterbury and whose members had enjoyed, at one time or
another, the status of `gentleman'. To an English reality ± the urban gentry ±
I applied a typically French approach: the study of the historical trajectory of
families (`suivi longitudinal des familles') by means of prosopography, or the
collective biography which results in an individualized study of all the
members of a group. This approach usually takes the form of a quantitative
study of the group in question, but where this group is small, it also allows a
qualitative study.5 In undertaking a collective biography of these families, I
found myself facing many of the most dicult issues in English social and
urban history, as discussed in the seminal works published in the nineteenseventies and eighties by Alan Everitt, Peter Clark and Peter Borsay among
others.
In this article, I shall endeavour ®rstly to present these great historiographical currents and highlight the ways in which they have in¯uenced my
research. Secondly, I shall demonstrate that the urban gentry formed an
original social group, which appeared in the ®rst few years after the
Restoration, and that its appearance was linked more to a political
engagement within municipal institutions than to an assimilation of the
cultural norms of the landed gentry (even though, it must be said, many of
Record Oce, Cheshire Record Oce, the Public Record Oce and the Centre for Kentish Studies
in Maidstone, without whose help I could not have successfully completed this article.
4
The study of other types of town, such as ports or industrial towns, which underwent a process
of expansion in the 18th century, or indeed of larger towns, would surely have given very di€erent
results. However, the types of towns studied here provided, until the end of the 18th century, the
framework of French and English urban networks.
5
The most important works in this ®eld are: on the history of the nobility, M. Figeac, Destins de
la noblesse bordelaise, 1770±1830 (Talence, 1996) and M. Nassiet, Noblesse et pauvrete : la petite noblesse en
Bretagne, XVe-XVIIIe sieÁ cle (Mayenne, 1993); on the history of rural society, J.-M. Moriceau, Les
fermiers de l'Ile-de-France: l'ascension d'un patronat agricole, XVe-XVIIIe sieÁ cle (Paris, 1994); and on the
history of municipal elites, P. Guignet, Le pouvoir dans la ville au XVIIIe sieÁ cle: pratiques politiques,
notabilite et e thique sociale de part et d'autre de la frontieÁ re franco-belge (Paris, 1990) and G. Saupin, Nantes
au XVIIe sieÁ cle: vie politique et socie te urbaine (Rennes, 1996). See also, for the 19th and 20th centuries,
J.-L. Pinol, Les mobilite s de la grande ville: Lyon ®n XIXe-de but XXe sieÁ cle (Paris, 1991).
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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
251
the urban gentry integrated themselves into the landed gentry, at least
super®cially, by means of a process of imitation, in particular in the sphere of
consumption). Thirdly, I will explore the profound cultural ambiguities
a€ecting the urban gentry, using the example of Ambrose Barnes, a merchant
and alderman from the town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The identity of the
urban gentry includes traits characteristic of the middle class during the
eighteenth century, yet it is also linked to the model of the landed gentry
idealized by the constitutional and puritan thinkers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, from whom they borrowed the ideal of devotion to
the service of the community. Finally, I will attempt to analyse the
development of the urban gentry as a social body in eighteenth-century
England, and of its relations with the middle classes, which currently
constitutes a major historiographical debate.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, most sources ± tax registers
(such as those for the Hearth Tax and the Land Tax), poll books, freemen
books, municipal archives (particularly records showing the deliberations of
corporations) and even testaments or marriage settlements ± reveal an
indisputable increase in the number of individuals who assumed or had
conferred upon them the status of gentleman. In contrast to the nobility on
the continent, adherence to the gentry in England did not rely on a legal
de®nition.6 In light of this, when de®ning the group in question, I chose
early on to consider all those to whom the status of gentleman had been
attributed or whose gentry status had been recognized by the social body.7
In Chester, the registers of the 1665 Hearth Tax show that twenty-two
people were recognized as being members of the gentry, either on the basis
of traditional titles such as baronet or knight, or possession of the qualities
of an esquire or gentleman;8 the nine parish registers surviving for the 1704
Land Tax illustrate the presence of twenty-eight individuals belonging to
the gentry, and this number rises to just under forty for the whole town.9
The ®gure cited for the number of gentlemen or esquires from Chester in
the Poll Book of 1747 is ®fty-four,10 while the 1781±2 Directory records
seventy-®ve gentlemen, of whom at least thirty were descended from the
After the Glorious Revolution, the heralds of the College of Arms even stopped checking if
those who bore coats of arms actually had the right to do so.
7
It would have been possible to carry out this study according to di€erent criteria, e.g. economic
(de®ned by assessment on tax or the value of a probate inventory) or social (de®ned by profession).
This method has produced very interesting results, despite having the inconvenience of relying on a
criterion de®ned by the historian himself (see J. Kent, `The rural middling sort in early modern
England, c.1640±1740: some economic, political and socio-cultural characteristics', Rural Hist., x
(1999), 19±54 and, for France, P. Jarnoux, Les bourgeois et la terre: fortunes et strate gies foncieÁ res aÁ Rennes
au XVIIIe sieÁ cle (Rennes, 1996) ).
8
F. C. Beazley, `Hearth Tax returns for the City of Chester, 1664±5' (Lancashire and Cheshire
Record Soc., lii, 1906), pp. 1±65 (based on P.R.O., E 179/86/146).
9
Chester City Record Oce (hereafter C.C.R.O.), CAS/2, Assessments Books, Land Tax, 1704.
10
An Alphabetical List of the Names of All the Freemen of the City of Chester, who polled, and for whom
at the General Election . . . July 1747 (Chester, 1747).
6
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252 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
professional and merchant elites of the town.11 In Canterbury, the progression was less swift: the ®rst register for the Window Tax of 1721 testi®es to
the presence of only twelve gentlemen, none of whom had recently emerged
from the merchant class.12 The registers of the 1759 Land Tax bear the
names of around twenty gentlemen, and in the last years of the eighteenth
century the number rose to thirty-two. Most other urban studies corroborate these ®gures.13 A tax register of 1660 from Norwich records fewer than
twenty-one esquires and fourteen gentlemen; in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the
parish registers of the sixteen-sixties con®rm the presence of some ten
baronets and esquires and twenty-one gentlemen, even though these
numbers declined sharply at the beginning of the eighteenth century; in
Ipswich, the percentage of the gentry in the population increased from 1.9
in 1603±60 to 6.5 in 1662±1714; and in Shrewsbury, 6.1 per cent of those
registered as freemen were esquires, gentlemen or other members of the
leisured classes in 1650±75, and this percentage increased to 18.4 for the
period 1750±75.14
During the middle ages and the sixteenth century, the majority of the
gentry living in towns were landed. In most cases, they either possessed an
urban property which they visited occasionally, or they were widows who
migrated to the towns to escape the boredom of country life. However,
during the reigns of Charles II and his successors a transition occurred, and
the families of the landed gentry became a minority in the growing
population of urban gentlemen. Peter Ripley notes that the twenty-one
probate inventories of gentlemen from Gloucester in the second half of the
seventeenth century reveal only one gentleman belonging to a family who
had registered their coat of arms during the Visitation of 1682±3.15 Alan
Everitt was one of the ®rst historians to notice the emergence of these urban
families, who assimilated themselves into the ranks of the gentry without
necessarily adopting the way of life of the landed gentry.16 In order to
11
E. Dyke, `Chester's earliest directories, 1781±2', Jour. Chester Archaeological Soc., xxxvii (1949),
253±66.
12
Canterbury Cathedral Archives (hereafter C.C.A.), B/C/W/521/1±12 and CKS, Q/CTL,
Christchurch, 1725.
13
For an e.g. of a town where the numbers of gentry were small, see S. D'Cruze, `The middling
sort in 18th-century Colchester: independence, social relations and the community brokers', in The
Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550±1800, ed. J. Barry and C. Brooks
(1994), pp. 184±6.
14
J. T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620±90 (Oxford,
1979), p. 6; J. Ellis, `A dynamic society: social relations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1660±1760', in The
Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600±1800, ed. P. Clark (1984), pp. 190±227, at pp. 217±19;
M. Reed, `Economic structure and change in 17th-century Ipswich', in Country Towns in PreIndustrial England, ed. P. Clark (Leicester, 1981), pp. 88±141; A. McInnes, `The emergence of a leisure
town: Shrewsbury 1660±1760', Past & Present, cxx (1988), 53±87.
15
P. J. G. Ripley, `The city of Gloucester, 1660±1740' (unpublished University of Bristol M.Litt.
thesis, 1977).
16
A. Everitt, `Social mobility in early modern England', Past & Present, xxxiii (1966), 56±73; idem,
`Introduction', to Perspectives in English Urban History, ed. idem (1973); idem, `Dynasty and community
since the 17th century', in Landscape and Community in England, ed. idem (1983).
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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
253
distinguish them, he proposed the terms `urban gentry' or `town gentry',
according to an expression he had found in Northampton. He even suggested
the term `pseudo-gentry', which was adopted for a while but is hardly used
nowadays.17 According to Everitt, the urban gentry was made up of men and
women of independent means, or those who had been merchants or
professionals, and who, at least in ocial documents, took or were accorded
the status of `gentleman'. In his study of Gloucester, Ripley echoes Everitt
when he evokes the idea that urban gentlemen were essentially urban
landowners living o€ an inheritance composed largely of town houses and
suggests that they represented, at least ideologically, the bourgeois of the preindustrial age.18
A second step was taken in the study of the English urban gentry when
Geo€rey Holmes illustrated the link between its sudden appearance and the
rise, at the time of the last Stuarts and the Hanovers, of professions:
professors, clergy, army ocers, doctors and, above all, lawyers.19 Similarly,
Penelope Cor®eld observed that the majority of attorneys in Norwich called
themselves `gentlemen': twenty-two of the thirty attorneys registered in the
town between 1729 and 1731 voted, in 1734, under the title `gentleman' and
not under the guise of their profession.20 It is unquestionable that professionals formed a very large part of the urban gentry. De®ning their social
identity, however, is no easy task, not least because the urban gentry often
included descendants of rural elites. Indeed, the example of George Booth, a
lawyer living in one of the fashionable streets in the town of Chester in the
second half of the seventeenth century, illustrates not only the social
ambiguity of such individuals, but also the danger in creating categories
which are simply too narrow. George Booth was the grandson of Sir George
Booth, who had led the unsuccessful rising of the gentry of Cheshire against
parliament in 1659. The elder branch of the family entered the nobility at
the Restoration, while in 1688 George succeeded his father, Sir John Booth of
Woodford, as protonotary and clerk of the crown for Cheshire and Flintshire.
Relations between the earl of Warrington and the Booth family were
excellent. Indeed, George's daughter, Katherine, fondly recalls her cousins
Betty and Mary several times in her diary. However, in a similar yet
contradictory fashion, her father mentions aldermen and freemen of Chester
in his diary, and he does so with such familiarity as to indicate that they were
17
Idem, `Social mobility', pp. 70±1. The term `pseudo-gentry' is problematic because it constructs
a social reality which contemporaries would not have recognized (see P. J. Cor®eld, `The rivals:
landed and other gentlemen', in Land and Society in Britain, 1700±1914: Essays in honour of F. M.
L. Thompson, ed. N. Harte and R. Quinault (Manchester, 1996), pp. 1±33, at p. 9, and R. Sweet, The
English Town, 1680±1840: Government, Society and Culture (1999), p. 191).
18
`All these men were typical bourgeois of the pre-industrial age. If an individual had no visible
connection with a trade and could maintain the expected standards, he could be accepted as a
gentleman' (Ripley, p. 40).
19
For the history of professions see, e.g., G. Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society,
1680±1730 (1982) and P. J. Cor®eld, Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700±1850 (1995).
20
Ibid., p. 79.
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254 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
very close.21 An individual like George Booth clearly occupied an intermediary position between the traditional landed gentry and the urban gentry,
and cannot be de®nitively classed as belonging to either group.
The urban gentry, however, did not merely embrace the downwardly
mobile younger sons of the landed gentry. Through a fairly standard process
of social promotion, which was taking place both on the continent and in
England, the urban gentry also included members of the merchant elites who
were progressively being integrated into the socially superior group of the
landed gentry. The ¯uctuating status of Thomas Cowper, a Chester ironmonger, provides a good example of this.22 In the Hearth Tax register of
1664±5, as well as in his will drawn up in May 1671, Cowper bears the title
of alderman. However, he is referred to as `gentleman' in his son's act of
admission for Brasenose College in Oxford. As a reward for the loyalty
displayed towards the king by the town for which Cowper was mayor,
Charles I, during a visit to Chester in 1642, even o€ered him a knighthood.
Cowper refused, yet he did list his coat of arms during the Visitation of
Cheshire at the Restoration. Cowper's will reveals that he possessed a manor
in Huntington in the county of Chester, and land in the county of Flint; the
monetary legacy that he left to his wife, Katherine, and to his children and
grandchildren was worth almost £1,000. Finally, Cowper also bought a
digni®ed residence, Overleigh Hall, in the immediate vicinity of Chester.
What makes the case of Cowper, as well as that of his counterparts in
Chester and Canterbury, so interesting, is the fact that, while living in a
town, they managed to acquire the status and appearance of the gentry as
well as their place in the urban oligarchy. The exact place of these pseudogentlemen in the English social hierarchy under the Stuarts and Hanovers is a
source of much discussion. Could they really be considered as a social
subgroup of the gentry, or was the distance that separated them from the
landed gentry immeasurable?23 For Lawrence and Jeanne Stone, the answer is
clearly negative:
They were men of limited means, were actively engaged in retail buying and selling,
and probably did not own a single acre of agricultural land, certainly not a country
house. They had no knowledge of Latin. They did not dream of swaggering around
town with a sword at their side, and they would have been completely at a loss if
anyone had challenged them to a duel. By any sociological de®nition, they did not
21
G. P. Crawfurd, `The diary of George Booth of Chester and Katherine Howard, his daughter, of
Boughton, near Chester, 1707±64', Jour. Chester Archaeological Soc., xxviii (1928), 5±96; Dictionary of
National Biography.
22
On the Cowper family: Chester, Cheshire Record Oce (hereafter C.R.O.), WS, 1671, Thomas
Cowper, alderman, 24 May 1671; G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester (3
vols., 1882), i. 375; A. Adams, `Cheshire visitation pedigrees, 1663' (Harleian Soc., xciii, 1941), p. 30;
The Cheshire Sheaf, 21 March 1944, p. 27.
23
For a review of the characteristics and values of the landed gentry before the 18th century, see
F. Heal and C. Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500±1700 (Basingstoke, 1994). They tend to
compare the English gentry, at least for the 16th and early 17th centuries, to the continental
nobilities.
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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
255
count as gentlemen, yet gentlemen is what they called themselves on public
documents.24
For them, the urban gentry corresponded to a bourgeoisie, or was even a
precursor of the English upper middle class of the nineteenth century. The
example of Thomas Cowper, however, illustrates that such a point of view is
too simplistic.
If the origins and social position of these urban gentlemen remain
somewhat uncertain,25 the consequences of their presence in towns have
been the subject of extensive studies. As early as 1977, Peter Borsay put
forward the hypothesis of a renaissance of English towns under the Stuarts
and Hanovers.26 Inspired by the permanent or temporary urbanization of a
growing number of landed gentry families, this movement, according to
Borsay, resulted in a number of substantial changes in urban life: the
development of leisure facilities, assembly halls, race courses and theatres;
the rise of luxury services and luxury trade; the improvement of streets and
public amenities; and ®nally, the development of neo-classical architecture.
Provincial towns, according to Borsay's hypothesis, became for the gentlemen
of the neighbouring countryside, an `arena' hosting political, legal and
worldly gatherings, such as the assizes and the quarter sessions. More than
this, though, these fasionable gathering spots became show grounds where
the socially prominent members of the provincial hierarchy paraded their
elevated status, and where the not so prominent members displayed their
potential for joining the higher ranks. Going still further, and referring to
Bernard de Mandeville's principle of social emulation as illustrated in his The
Fable of the Bees (1714), Borsay suggested that the lifestyle of the landed
gentry ± the ways in which they spent their spare time, their patterns of
consumption ± was imitated by an elite group of citizens, composed
primarily of members of the liberal professions but also of successful
merchants. The town became the centre of a genteel way of life where
these elites assumed new and speci®c characteristics linked not so much to a
socially-de®ned gentility but rather to a culturally-de®ned one. In Paul
Langford's opinion, the emergence of the urban gentry is not so much
24
L. Stone and J. C. Fawtier-Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540±1880 (Abridged edn., Oxford,
1986), pp. 151±2. See also J. Barry, `L'identite bourgeoise dans l'Angleterre moderne', Annales E.S.C.
(1993±4), 853±84.
25
One particular category is an exception: the successful merchants or the ®rst big manufacturers
(see R. G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: the Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700±1830 (Manchester,
1971), or the studies on London businesses during the period of the Hanovers).
26
P. Borsay, `The English urban renaissance: the development of provincial urban culture,
c.1680±1760', Social Hist., v (1977), 581±98, elaborated upon in idem, The English Urban Renaissance:
Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660±1770; idem, `The rise of the promenade: the social and
cultural use of space in the English provincial town, c.1660±1800', British Jour. 18th-Century Studies, ix
(1986), 125±133; idem and A. McInnes, `Debate: the emergence of a leisure town or an urban
renaissance?', Past & Present, cxxvi (1990), 189±202. See also J.-P. Poussou, `Les villes anglaises du
milieu du XVIIe sieÁ cle aÁ la ®n du XVIIIe sieÁ cle', in Etudes sur les villes en Europe Occidentale du milieu
du XVIIe sieÁ cle aÁ la veille de la Re volution francaise, ed. A. Lottin, J.-P. Poussou and others (Paris, 1983),
pp. 130€.
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256 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
connected to a social phenomenon, but simply to the evolution of the social
taxonomy, and he invokes a genuine debasement of the status of `gentleman',
which therefore rendered it more accessible to a growing number of
individuals.27 At the end of a series of articles on the social taxonomy of
the eighteenth century, Cor®eld put forward the idea of the emergence at
the beginning of the century of two rival concepts of gentility: a meritocratic
one favouring the urban gentry, at the expense of a hereditary one favouring
the traditional gentry.28 It seemed to me, however, as I began my research,
that the study of the lives of individuals a€ected by the enormous social
mutations which enabled them to acquire the status of gentleman, could
reveal more than the study of the transformation of towns or society more
generally.29
Consequently, I tried to examine the interpretations outlined above in the
light of a study of the lives of a group of individuals who, at one point or
another, assumed the status of `gentleman'.30 In Chester, as early as the
sixteen-sixties, I was able to observe a strong presence of new gentlemen
descended not only from merchants (this was true for four of them) but also,
in the case of about twelve, from the traditional town guilds. During the
same period, in Canterbury there was no comparable merchant elite whose
members had assumed the status of gentlemen or esquires. There was a great
number of landed gentry families who had undergone a process of
urbanization, as well as men in the legal profession who enjoyed the status
of gentleman,31 but there was no mention of merchants or craftsmen. From
the sixteen-eighties, however, freemen books reveal that certain merchants
and craftsmen from Canterbury had joined the lawyers in assuming the rank
of gentleman, although it was only after the seventeen-thirties and forties
that the tax registers re¯ected this change.
My intention was not to study the relations ± be they of integration,
assimilation, coexistence or con¯ict ± between the new group of gentlemen
P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727±83 (Oxford, 1989), p. 66.
P. J. Cor®eld, `Class by name and number in 18th-century Britain', History, lxxii (1987), 36±61;
idem, `From rank to class: innovation in Georgian England', History Today, xxvii (1987), 36±42; idem,
`The rivals', pp. 12±18.
29
See P. Earle, `The middling sort in London', in Barry and Brooks, pp. 141±158, at pp. 146€., for
a discussion of the concept of gentleness and the di€erence between it and gentility. See also P. Earle,
The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660±1730 (1989),
pp. 3±16.
30
The lists of urban gentlemen which I established for Canterbury and Chester and which
appear in the appendix to my thesis were constituted from various sources, whether ®scal,
genealogical (in particular the Visitations), local (freemen registers, newspapers, directories) or
from families (particularly wills) (F.-J. Ruggiu, `Les e lites nobiliaires et la ville en France et en
Angleterre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sieÁ cles' (unpublished University of Paris IV-Sorbonne Ph.D. thesis,
1995) ).
31
E.g., Michael Terry, John Crane, John Whittled, John Simpson, Richard May, Peter Evans,
Benjamin Agar, John Sawkins, Richard Scrimshaw and Peter Pyard, all solicitors in the courts of
justice, regularly bore the title `gentleman', and their children continued to enjoy this status in the
freemen's register.
27
28
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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
257
and the landed gentry. Rather, it was, in the ®rst instance, to analyse their
origins and their social evolution, and then to attempt to understand how
they were able to assume the characteristics of the gentry. What enabled
these urban merchants and craftsmen to assume the status of gentlemen?
Was it the result of a cultural rede®nition? Or was it perhaps due to the
gradual shift, already evoked by numerous historians, from gentility to
gentleness? It was in observing a chronological discrepancy between Chester
and Canterbury that I was able to ®nd the answer: since both towns were
economically, socially and culturally similar, why was there a delay in the
increase in the number of gentlemen in Canterbury alone, if this increase was
an essentially cultural phenomenon?
A study of the municipal governments in each town o€ers a ®rst
important clue. According to the charter granted to the town of Chester
by Henry VII on 21 April 1506, the municipal corporation was made up of a
mayor, twenty-four aldermen and forty common councillors, while the
administration of the town included a recorder, two sheri€s, two treasurers,
a clerk of the pentice, and around twelve other minor ocials. Canterbury
became a county corporate by virtue of a charter bestowed upon it by
Edward IV in 1461. The town's government, known as the court of
burghmote, was composed of a mayor, twelve aldermen and twenty-four
common councillors. In addition, there was a recorder, elected by the mayor,
the aldermen and the town clerk (known as the clerk of burghmote, and
elected in his turn by the court of burghmote from amongst the common
councillors). As far as the hierarchy of the minor municipal ocers is
concerned, it was, in all but name, almost identical to that in Chester.
However, contrary to the charters in both towns, the designation of
aldermen and mayor was placed under the strict control of those already
in power. That the conduct of public life constituted a crucial step in the
mechanisms of upward mobility is evident. The majority of new gentlemen
in Chester had climbed the various rungs of the local political ladder and
had also been mayor at some point.32 What is more, for the most part, these
gentlemen belonged to the bench of aldermen or justices of the peace,
which formed the town's real instrument of government. Thomas Cowper,
for example, climbed the various stages of the local cursus honorum; before
being an alderman, he was sheri€ of Chester in 1630 and then mayor in
1641±2. In Canterbury, however, this milieu of mayors and aldermen did
not give rise to an urban gentry until the end of the sixteen-seventies.
Indeed, there were always fewer urban gentlemen in Canterbury than in
Chester.33 We must then look beyond participation in local politics if we
wish to understand the emergence of urban gentlemen, and in particular the
32
William Street was mayor 3 times (1666±7, 1683±4, 1688±9), while Edward Bradshaw (1637±8,
1653±4) and Thomas Thrope (1637±8, 1661±2) were mayor twice.
33
E.g., Thomas I Ockman, who entered the body of freemen following his apprenticeship as a
grocer in 1635, was mayor several times. However, it is under the title of `Mr.' that he appears in the
register of the parish of St. Alphage in 1670 (C.C.A., B/C/H/A, 1670/4).
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chronological discrepancy between the two towns. It seemed to me that this
discrepancy could be explained by the fact that the aldermen of Canterbury
did not lend their political in¯uence to the service of the monarchy during
the Civil War, while the aldermen of Chester ®rmly committed themselves
to the service of the king and, as a result, received substantial social bene®ts
at the Restoration.
In fact, in Chester the municipal body was strongly committed to the
royalist camp from the very start of the con¯ict between Charles I and the
Long Parliament.34 When the king arrived in Chester in September 1642, the
most prominent inhabitants o€ered him the sum of £300 as a contribution
to his war e€ort, before raising another £500 in February 1643 towards the
reinforcement of the town's forti®cations. Many even went beyond ®nancial
contributions and committed themselves militarily to the king.35 Parliament's
capture of Chester did not subdue the town's royalists who, despite being
chased from the bench of aldermen, continued to support and ®ght for the
Stuarts.36 The bene®ts of this devotion were clearly spelled-out when, during
the Visitation of 1663, the king's supporters, the `City Fathers', were ocially
integrated into the ranks of the gentry.37 In Canterbury, the seizure of the
municipal institutions by a moderate parliamentarian faction at the beginning of the con¯ict favoured a degree of consensus, which meant that the
town elite tended to remain aloof from the political struggles, both locally
and nationally. The 1648 rising in Kent, which began with rioting in
Canterbury on Christmas Day 1647, was swiftly repressed by troops sent
in by the county committee, and the town (of great strategic importance, and
home to a strong radical religious community) remained under the strict
supervision of the central authorities. Hence, at the Restoration, few
prominent families from Canterbury could rely on royal favour as a
means to progress in the social hierarchy. As a result, the 1663 Visitation
of Kent recorded very few gentlemen descended from aldermen.38 Instead of
municipal control passing into the hands of the urban oligarchy, who now
found their potential for social progress blocked, it passed into those of the
neighbouring rural gentry. Over the years, however, this limitation was
slowly overcome, and then disappeared altogether with the fall of James II:
A. M. Johnson, `Politics in Chester during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum, 1649±62', in
Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500±1700: Essays in Urban History, ed. P. Clark and P. Slack (1972).
35
See R. H. Morris, The Siege of Chester, 1643±6 (Chester, 1923).
36
William Crompton, alderman since 1646 and mayor in 1649±50, refused to swear allegiance to
the Protectorate.
37
Nineteen gentlemen of Chester are counted in this Visitation: Aldersey, Bennett, Brett, Broster,
Coulhurst, Cowper, Crompton, Harvey, Hulton, Jones, Land, Minshull, Pennington, Poole, Sparke,
Street, Taylor, Thrope and Wainwright.
38
The 1663 Visitation of Kent lists the names of 42 gentlemen of Canterbury, although the great
majority of them were in fact members of the landed gentry who had temporarily migrated to the
town (Sir G. Armytage, A Visitation of the County of Kent, 1663±8 (Harleian Soc., liv, 1906) ). In the
wills of the 1660s-70s, George Mills, linen draper, appears as one of the few aldermen to have borne
the title of gentleman and, indeed, he was an essential ®gure in the royalist party in Canterbury
during the Civil War.
34
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the merchant families of the town of Canterbury began to `produce'
gentlemen.
The gentlemen of Chester at the Restoration were local administrators
who had played a major, political role during the years of the Civil War and
Interregnum. They had deserved to acquire the status of gentleman as a
symbol of power and of authority, a symbol reserved to those who held the
town's future in their hands, and who had kept it loyal to the king. This
social change underwent an acceleration in Chester, and was triggered o€ in
Canterbury in the last third of the seventeenth century, during which time it
bene®ted from the disruption caused ®rst by the Glorious Revolution and
then by the political struggles between whigs and tories during the reigns of
William III and Anne.39 The di€usion of gentleman status in English towns
in the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the
eighteenth did not represent a debasement of these honorary titles, rather it
was symbolic of the recognition by society of the quality of the men who
then took charge of political power. By virtue of their commitment to the
service of king and community, these men, descended from the shop ¯oor or
the workshop, acquired the symbolic capital necessary to assume publicly the
status of gentleman.40 What is more, just like the country gentlemen towards
whom they now drew closer, these new gentlemen entered an established
system of ranks and status. This explains why the mercantile origins of the
new gentlemen were sometimes forgotten through the years, as the funerary
stele of Gerard Jones, in the church of St. Bridget of Chester, clearly
illustrates. A goldsmith of Welsh origin, Gerard Jones died in December
1665 after having been mayor of the town in 1658±9.41 During the Visitation
of 1663, the heralds registered Jones's coat of arms, yet took care to specify
that no proof existed for it. However, his tomb in the church of St. Bridget
was surmounted with a coat of arms with twelve quarters, of which six
proudly referred to Welsh lords, and a seventh to Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, `king
of North Wales and prince of Powys'.42 The stele signi®es, for a member of
this urban gentry, an attachment to the values of gentility rather than
gentleness.43
A large number of provincial English towns were controlled during the
Civil War by such elites, more or less committed to Cromwell, but
39
J. Miller, `The Crown and the borough charters in the reign of Charles II', Eng. Hist. Rev., c
(1985), 53±84.
40
I tried to illustrate that the same was true for the newly-created members of the nobility in
French middle-sized towns during the reign of Louis XIV. Even if the social reality which I have
described was not the same in England as it was in France ± the urban gentry is not the precise
equivalent of the urban nobility ± their paths of upward mobility were similar.
41
It was Gerard Jones who, with the help of the recorder John Ratcli€e and Colonel John Booth,
opened the gates of the town of Chester to the troops of Sir George Booth during the rising of 1659.
42
J. H. E. Bennett, `Arms and inscriptions sometime in the church of St. Bridget, Chester', Jour.
Chester Archaeological Soc., xxiii (1920), 10±37, at p. 23.
43
For an analysis of the subsequent lives of these families, see Ruggiu, Les e lites et les villes
moyennes, pp. 93±106. A part of each family was integrated into the landed gentry, and a greater part
simply disappeared after a generation or two as a result of the lack of male heirs.
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260 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
particularly anxious to defend the superior interests of the civic community
and to preserve a degree of unity within it.44 It would thus be quite usual to
identify an urban gentry made up of royalist oligarchies, as well as those who
rallied in time, rewarded either by the monarchy with the granting of a
title,45 or by the social body with the recognition of gentleman status. The
links between national political events and the dynamic forces at work in
local societies are therefore made clear.46
The in-depth study of a single individual,47 perceived not through his social
acts but by means of a diary,48 appeared to me to be essential in validating the
hypothesis which I had based on the study of family biographies. It was
Margaret Hunt's evocative and stimulating book dedicated to the middling
sort in English society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that drew
to my attention the `memoirs' of Ambrose Barnes.49 Barnes (1627±1710) was a
merchant from the port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England. At
the beginning of his career, Barnes's commercial relations stretched as far as
the ports of the Baltic Sea and the colonies of North America. However, in
1700, only ten years before his death, he narrowed down his commercial
activities and adhered to the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
which supervised the trade of charcoal from Newcastle.50 Barnes had been
one of the aldermen of Newcastle, a county in its own right, thanks to the
charter with which it was endowed. The town was administered by a mayor,
44
See, in particular, I. Roy, `The City of Oxford, 1640±60', in Town and Countryside in the English
Revolution, ed. R. C. Richardson (Manchester, 1992), pp. 157€.
45
J. W. Kirby notes the presence of 3 of the 10 principal burgesses of 1656, as well as the presence
of the son-in-law and the son of 2 others (idem, `Restoration Leeds and the aldermen of the
corporation, 1661±1700', Northern Hist., xxii (1986), 123±174, at p. 127).
46
The analysis presented here focuses on men rather than on women, for the following reasons.
Firstly, when I began this study at the end of the 1980s, the themes of gender history were still very
much in an embryonic stage in France. Today I would adopt a very di€erent approach to this
question. Secondly, the sources, in particular the ®scal registers, do not easily allow the identi®cation
of women belonging either to the landed gentry or to the urban gentry, since, excluding the wives of
barons or knights, all women carry the title of `Mrs.', which also designates women of the mere
middling sort. Finally, it seems to me that the women in towns were either daughters, wives or
widows of an urbanized landed gentry (see Ruggiu, Les e lites et les villes moyennes, pp. 156±7), or
otherwise daughters, wives or widows of the landed gentry who had followed the men of the family.
47
`Memoirs of the life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, late merchant and sometime alderman of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne' (Surtees Soc., l, 1866) (hereafter `Memoirs').
48
On the diculty of studying diaries see, e.g., M. Foisil, `L'e criture du for inte rieur', in Histoire
de la Vie Prive e, iii: de la Renaissance aux LumieÁ res, ed. P. ArieÁ s and G. Duby (Paris, 1986), pp. 331±69
and Journal de ma vie: Jacques-Louis Me ne tra, compagnon vitrier au XVIIIe sieÁ cle, ed. D. Roche (1st edn.,
1982; Paris, 1998).
49
M. R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680±1780 (Berkeley,
Calif., 1996), esp. pp. 147±150. Hunt's work reminds us that the ambition to rise socially does not
necessarily characterize the middling sort.
50
`Extracts from the records of the company of hostmen of Newcastle-upon-Tyne' (Surtees Soc.,
cv, 1901), pp. xxxii±v; ibid., p. 274, `8 May 1700, Admission of Ambrose Barnes, merchant and free
burgess by service'. Barnes is part of the 5% of the population to have had between 6 and 9 hearths
noted in the registers of the 1665 Hearth Tax (see R. Howell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan
Revolution: a Study of the Civil War in North England (Oxford, 1967).
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a bench of ten aldermen and a municipal council made up of twenty-four
individuals.51 Despite the fact that he had retired from the bench of aldermen
in 1659,52 Barnes retained indisputable political in¯uence, particularly visible
during the reign of James II.
The precise nature of the `memoirs' of Ambrose Barnes remains unclear.
The volume published by the Surtees Society in 1866, is derived from a
manuscript of around 500 pages, which contains a dedicatory inscription
dated 19 June 1716, and is signed `M. R.' (the meaning of these initials is
uncertain).53 The text does not constitute a `memoir' in the strict sense of the
word, since it was not written with the aim of illustrating the author's
situation in his contemporary context. Instead, it would appear to be more of
a memorial, or a book in memory of Barnes, apparently derived from works
that he himself had written.54 What is more, the motivation for the work is
clearly religious: Barnes was an avowed nonconformist who was in contact
with numerous dissident preachers, and the manuscript aims to portray the
®gure of a moderate puritan hero and to justify his political attitude in the
sixteen-eighties. Originally close to Oliver Cromwell and his republicans,
Barnes upheld his radical commitments for a long time: he revealed some
sympathy for the duke of Monmouth, executed in 1685 after his rebellion
against the Catholic James II. Nevertheless, in a swift reversal of his attitude,
Barnes supported James II's attempts to impose religious tolerance in 1687
and 1688. After the banishment of the tory elite loyal to the Church of
England, Barnes seems to have been so strongly involved in the governing of
the town that, after the advent of William of Orange, he was obliged to
withdraw from all political activity.
Margaret Hunt's reading of the text takes into account this apologetic
dimension, yet she leaves it aside in order to focus primarily on the cultural
values which, according to her, are clear from the text. Hunt detects in the
life of Barnes ± as it is presented by his biographer and as he himself
apparently expressed it throughout his works ± a manifesto of bourgeois life.
Accordingly, throughout the `memoirs', Barnes seems to embody order,
rationality and utilitarian values, as opposed to the disorder, irrationality and
corruption which characterize aristocratic life.55 Indeed, several elements
converge to make of Barnes a man steeped in the culture of the middling
sort. To begin with, he has the appropriate social characteristics, since it is as
a merchant that he takes on the simple title of `Mr.' in the register of the
51
A historical and descriptive view of the county of Northumberland and of the town and county of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ii (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1881), p. 763. There were also a sheri€, a recorder
and a town clerk. See the important work of R. Howell for more information on political life in
Newcastle during the 1650s and at the beginning of the Restoration.
52
Howell, pp. 209€.
53
Out of the 511 pages of the volume, the `Memoirs' themselves take up only 258. A long
appendix in the form of political and religious records of the town of Newcastle takes up the
remainder.
54
`Memoirs', p. 209.
55
Hunt, p. 149.
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262 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
1665 Hearth Tax.56 What is more, his behaviour and his frugality, the
strictness of his mode of life ± in bed at nine o'clock at night, up at ®ve
o'clock in the winter and four o'clock in the summer ± and his attitude
towards his wife and children symbolize, for Hunt, a set of ethics which
reject the traditional values of the deferential and patronal society.
A thorough reading of the text con®rms the pertinence of Hunt's
observations, but puts into question the validation of the theory whereby
Barnes embodies bourgeois, patriarchal society and lives locked away within a
moral family order which opposes the pretentious, super®cial and extravagant behaviour of the families of the political elites in general, and the
nobility and gentry in particular. In fact, Barnes's gentility is repeatedly
emphasized throughout the various chapters of the `memoirs'. The ®rst lines
of the text, which are devoted to the genealogy of the Barnes family, leave no
room for doubt: `Mr. Ambrose Barnes, the eldest son of Mr. Thomas Barnes,
was born at Startfort, a small town standing upon the river Tees in the edge
of the county of York, where his progenitors for many descents, lived in the
rank of gentlemen, being the lords of the soil and manors'.57 Even the family's
Saxon origins are speci®ed, con®rming that it predated the arrival of William
the Conqueror and the founding of the `Norman yoke', a charge levied by
parliamentarians, and even more so by the Levellers, against the Stuarts
during the English Revolution.58 What is more, Barnes seems even to have
taken or occasionally to have been given the title of esquire, especially in
petitions addressed to him.59
Far from rejecting the patronage, deference and vertical bonds which were
at the base of English society, Barnes situates himself precisely within the
world of rank and status; indeed he bene®ts from this position. The list of his
friends and acquaintances clearly reveals the connections he enjoys with a
section of the nobility and local gentry, connections which are marked by a
strong religious commitment.60 His own marriage to a descendant of the
56
P.R.O., E 179/158/104, fo. 4 and R. Welford, `Newcastle householders in 1665', Archñologia
áliana, 3rd ser., vii (1911), 49±76, at p. 62. The area in which Barnes lived was one of the
smallest and most well-o€ in the town. It included just 30 heads of family, one of whom was an
esquire, and 22 of whom were quali®ed by the title `Mr.' or `Mrs.', as well as 18 heads of family
who lived in houses with 6 or more hearths. None of these 30 individuals was exempt from
paying taxes.
57
`Memoirs', pp. 23€.
58
The Visitations of Yorkshire and Northumberland, however, ignore the family of Ambrose
Barnes (The Visitation of Northumberland in 1615, ed. G. W. Marshall (1878); Pedigrees Recorded at the
Herald's Visitation of the County of Northumberland, made . . . in 1615 and . . . 1666, ed. J. Foster
(Newcastle, 1878); The Visitation of Yorkshire made in the years 1584/5 . . . to which is added the subsequent
Visitation made in 1612, ed. idem (1875) ).
59
`Memoirs', p. 180. Further research is needed concerning this point.
60
Ibid., pp. 160±4. Apart from the families of the urban gentry of Newcastle, Sir Francis
Anderson, Sir Nicholas Cole and Sir Ralph Jennison, we can also ®nd on Barnes's list of
acquaintances some prominent landed gentry families of the region, in particular the Liddells, to
whom Barnes was related. Phrases such as `the old earl of Devonshire treated him as his intimate and
equal' (ibid., p. 157) clearly situate Barnes within the classical vertical bonds linking the nobility and
the urban elites. What is also fascinating is the network of Barnes's family and amicable relations,
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Claverings, an old and in¯uential gentry family of the region, is proof of his
genteel aspirations.61 The di€erence between Barnes, the merchant from
Newcastle, and one of his cousins from the landed gentry, Sir James
Clavering, is, however, illustrated by means of the following anecdote:
Mr. Barnes would pleasantly tell, yet with a mournful sort of pity, how speaking one
day seriously and closely to Sir James Clavering concerning a life to come, and what a
call old age is, to prepare for it. ``Ay, cousin Barnes'', said Sir J. ``You say true. I hope [I]
shall be saved, for I never make visits on Sundayes, but keep within doors, and read
Dugdale's Baronage of England.62
What is underlined here is a spiritual, as opposed to a social, di€erence
between the two cousins, while the family relation is made clear by the
familiar ``Ay, cousin Barnes''. Yet, Barnes's genteel aspirations are reinforced
through his children.63 While his daughters married into merchant families,
Barnes's eldest son, Joseph, became a barrister-at-law and then recorder of
Berwick.64 As for the younger son, Thomas, he chose to serve God, most
probably in a nonconformist church.65 As a ®nal word concerning Barnes's
social connections, it is interesting to note his long-standing economic
relationship with the Catholic Sir Francis Radcli€e (d. 1697). Barnes came
to know Sir Francis (later Viscount Radcli€e and Langley, before James II
made him count of Derwentwater) when he took out a lease on lead mines
belonging to him.66
It seems, therefore, that within its social context Barnes's life is much more
complex than Hunt seems to think. Indeed, Barnes's social connections in no
way prohibit him from constructing in his writings the image of a world very
di€erent from, even contrary to, his own. It also seems that, while in theory
he denounces patronal relations, in practice he not only values them but
bene®ts from them as well. This theoretical denunciation is the path that
Hunt pursues, in particular when she vividly alludes to Barnes's hatred of
French customs. A passage of the `memoirs' ± made up of extracts from a text
which includes dissident families, papists, whigs and Jacobites. These relations invite us to envisage a
more in-depth study into the support given to James II's attempts to impose religious tolerance in
1687 and 1688 by the nonconformists of the north of England.
61
Barnes's mother-in-law was the aunt of Sir James Clavering of Axwells, baronet, in the county
of Durham.
62
`Memoirs', pp. 52€.
63
Ibid., pp. 49€.
64
Barnes's elder daughter, Mary, married a successful merchant from Newcastle, Jonathan
Hutchinson, who was alderman of the town and deputy of the chamber of communes for 12 years.
His younger daughter, Anne, married a mercer.
65
Barnes's eldest son indisputably belonged to the urban gentry: Joseph Barnes of Newcastleupon-Tyne, esquire, is cited in an indenture tripartite of 1692 (Proc. Soc. Antiquaries of Newcastleupon-Tyne, 3rd ser., vii (1915±16), 146).
66
Cited by the editor of the `Memoirs', p. 156n. In my thesis, I tried to illustrate, through the
example of the Grosvenors of Chester, the overlapping of the political links of patronage as well as
vertical economic links ± in this case founded on the renting of Welsh mines ± formed between a
prominent family of the landed gentry from the outskirts of the town and the members of the urban
elites.
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264 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
probably written by Barnes in the sixteen-nineties and entitled Enquiry into
the Nature, Grounds and Reasons of Religion ± is strongly evocative of this:
We are fond of French clergymen, French goods and French fashions, though mere
tri¯es, shittlecocks [sic] and gewgaws. No inventions please us unless they be Frenchmade, and like their apes, we imitate their garbs and their house-keeping. Their
tooth-drawers and their barbers are our admired surgeons. We are made upon
French music, French players, French misses, French dancing-masters, French
language, French airs, French legs, French hats, French grimaces and compliments.
It is clear, both to myself and to Hunt, that what is being targeted here is the
aristocracy's imitation of tastes and customs from the continent. However, for
Barnes, it was within the ranks of Charles II's entourage and the court party
(which opposed the country party in the sixteen-seventies) that the origins of
English decadence could be found. Hence the anti-French charge can be seen
to take on a political meaning in the following sentence: `All the expence [sic]
of blood and treasure, all the jeopardy and hazard we lie under, are justly
chargeable on the Court party of the reign of Charles II. Whatever names or
appellations that party take to themselves, they have always carried about
with them the same inclinations'.67 Similarly, the importance Barnes accords
to temperance and moderation is also endowed with political connotations.
Indeed, it is not so much the nobility in general which is stigmatized when
Barnes repeatedly condemns drunkenness in his `memoirs', but more
speci®cally his political opponents. One such enemy was the famous
George Je€reys, chief justice of the king's bench under James II, and
responsible for the repression (considered an extremely bloody one in the
Protestant imagination) of the partisans of the duke of Monmouth.68
A more profound reading of this fascinating text is unfortunately not
possible here. However, I wanted to evoke the most important passages which
serve to direct the reading of the text towards a political rather than a
cultural study. A political analysis reinforces the originality of the town
gentry of the seventeenth century, which can in no way be understood as
simply a precursor of the middle classes of the eighteenth century.69 The
67
For an analysis of the political dimension of the anti-French xenophobia in the reign of James
II, see S. Pincus, `To protect English liberties: the English nationalist revolution of 1688±9', in
Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650±c.1850, ed. T. Claydon and I. McBride
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 75±104, esp. pp. 82±4.
68
During George Je€reys's trip through Newcastle for the northern circuit, it seems that Barnes
approached the judge, and he later speci®ed that Je€reys `indulged himself in his usual drunken
excess' (quotation from the original manuscript in J. Brand, The History and Antiquities of the Town
and County of the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne (2 vols., 1789), i. 496). In fact, the `Memoirs' specify
that Barnes enjoyed parties where a happy medium was found: `This gentleman's sparingness this
way was so well known that the old earl of Derwentwater, treating him once with very rich wine,
[said] to him, ``That I may have your company the longer, I will leave you to your own glass: for I
love to drink with my friend ad hilaritatem, to cheerfulness, but ad ebrietatem [sic], to drunkenness, I
hate it'' ' (`Memoirs', p. 157).
69
Indeed, such a ®gure resembles Sir Dudley North, who, as R. Grassby reminds us, never
doubted that business was compatible with gentility (R. Grassby, The English Gentleman in Trade: the
Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641±91 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 177±9).
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themes evoked by Hunt ± notably those which emphasize virtue, the
condemnation of vertical bonds, the hatred of luxury and an appreciation
of self discipline ± are unquestionably present in the `memoirs' of Ambrose
Barnes. However, they are not used to shape a social sphere which could be
categorized as representative of the middle classes, as opposed to the leisured
classes. Nor do they shape a virtuous private sphere inhabited by the middle
classes, as opposed to a corrupt public sphere dominated solely by the
aristocratic elites. Just like the urban gentlemen described earlier in this
article, a man like Barnes de®ned himself above all by the public role he
assumed for the service of the community.70 As such, the values expressed by
Barnes, republican heir of the sixteen-®fties, must be seen in their real
political light. It would therefore be wrong simply to place these themes in
the context of the transition of cultural and social values between two wellidenti®ed idioms: the traditional puritan idiom illustrated by Philip Stubbes,71
and the `middling' idiom of the second half of the eighteenth century. It is,
rather, in the political `resettings' that took place in the mid eighteenth
century, in a period beyond that of the rage of the parties, that the
beginnings of this cultural idiom and the construction of its social dimension
must be found. It is to this shift in values that this article will now turn.
The appearance of an urban gentry in Chester as early as the Restoration, and
then slightly later in Canterbury, resulted from the political commitment of
a handful of individuals to the service of the civic community and the
monarchy. This commitment enabled them to accumulate the symbolic
capital necessary to assume publicly the status of gentleman. What is more,
this commitment not only encouraged the social recognition of these civic
elites by the rural elites, but also their dissociation from the middling sort.72
In the eighteenth century, however, even though the urban gentry continued
to grow numerically, the status of `gentleman' still acted as a means of social
di€erentiation: not all economically in¯uential families, or all families bound
to civic functions, were a part of the urban gentry. The failure of extremely
70
See the assertion of his biographer: `He had not been long the governor of his own family,
when the town began to cast an eye upon him as ®t for public government' (`Memoirs', p. 90).
71
See the text published under the title Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare's Youth
A.D. 1583 (1877±9). In a recent article, Alexandra Walsham very cleverly questioned the puritan
identity of Stubbes, and illustrated that the man usually considered to be a herald of puritan values
was also ± or especially? ± a pamphleteer whose work ®t into the framework of Elizabethan
commercial infra-literature (A. Walsham, ` ``A Close of Godliness'': Philip Stubbes, Elizabethan Grub
Street and the invention of Puritanism', in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: a Tribute to
Patrick Collinson from his Students, ed. S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 177±206.
72
Concerning the de®nition of the middling sort, see Barry and Brooks. As for the relationship
between the middling sort and the middle class, see J. Seed, `From middling sort to middle class in
late 18th-century and 19th-century England', in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500:
Studies in Social Strati®cation, ed. M. L. Bush (1992). Concerning the di€erence between the social
reality of middle groups in English society in the 17th and 18th centuries, the existence of a
consciousness of common interests between these groups, and the representation of these groups in
the various discourses and in particular in political discourse, see D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle
Class: the Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780±1840 (Cambridge, 1995).
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266 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
successful individuals, such as William Gray of Canterbury to attain the
quality of gentleman, has often puzzled historians, who have conscientiously
reconstructed the thriving careers of such men. William Gray, born in 1696,
was admitted a freeman of Canterbury in 1717, and he became master of the
guild of grocers in 1734. Living in the parish of St. Mary Magdalen, he
became a municipal councillor in 1724, and in 1748, after twenty-four years
as a simple common councillor, he was accepted to the bench of aldermen.
The following September he became mayor, and then eleven years later, in
1760, accepted the title for a second time.73 His high rank in the civic
hierarchy of Canterbury was maintained by his para-municipal undertakings,
such as the management of Canterbury's workhouse between 1752 and 1757,
and then again between 1762 and 1764, as well as that of the Maynard and
Cotton Hospital from 1768 to 1783. However, William Gray did not at any
time ®gure amongst the gentlemen of Canterbury. This example clearly
illustrates the complexity of the social alchemy, and contradicts the simplicity
of the de®nitions of the gentry reported as early as 1730 in Nathaniel Bailey's
dictionary (`Nowadays, all those who possess money are considered gentlemen'), and in the observations of travellers like the young FrancË ois de la
Rochefoucauld (`Nous fumes surpris de toutes les amitie s de qu'on nous ®t,
tous les gentilshommes (note de l'auteur: Gentilhomme est une mauvaise
expression dans ce sens; il n'y a pas de vraie distinction dans cette classe en
Angleterre; je veux dire seulement les gens aÁ leur aise qui ont recu de
l'e ducation) nous engageaient aÁ diner').74
What becomes evident through the study of the urban gentry families in
our two examples, Chester and Canterbury, is that the town hall no longer
remained the centre of political and social control of the town, nor the
guarantor of advancement in the social hierarchy. In Chester, the monopolization by the Grosvenors of the two representative seats of the town, and
their hold on the electoral life of Chester, might well go some way to explain
the relative disengagement of the political elites. Amongst the members of
the urban gentry cited in the 1781±2 Directory, only the merchant John
Bramwell (1798±9), the solicitor John Kelsall (1767±8), the stationer John
Lawton (1770±1), the paper manufacturer Joseph Snow (1780±1) and the
wine merchant Henry Hesketh (1762±3) had been mayor. Indeed, most of the
members of the liberal professions bearing the rank of gentleman never
entered the political arena in Chester. This was the case for the Adams
family, whose founding father had been a yeoman of Wixhall in Shropshire;
his son, Thomas II, followed by his grandson, John, became a clergyman,
while his great-grandson, Thomas III, became an apprentice of law in 1733,
trained by George Ball of Chester. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1738,
Thomas III went on to become a solicitor at the court of great session of
C.C.A., CC Supplementary MSS. 6, Alderman Gray's notebook.
Nathaniel Bailey is quoted by Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 4. The diary of
FrancË ois de la Rochefoucauld was published in J. Marchand, La vie en Angleterre au XVIIIe sieÁ cle, ou
Me langes sur l'Angleterre, 1784 (Paris, 1945); the quotation is at p. 53.
73
74
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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
267
Cheshire and Flintshire. He inherited from his mother, Mary Wood, the
possessions of the Sparkes, an urban gentry family in the second half of the
seventeenth century. The owner of the living of St. John, Thomas III assumed
the status of gentleman both in his will of 1780, and in the Directory of
1781±2. Yet, he only entered the body of freemen in 1753±4, some ®fteen
years after his apprenticeship ended. What is more, he appears never to have
attempted to hold any political oce.75 Similarly, the solicitors of Chester,
and in particular those of the diocese, like Hugh Speed, were not represented
as a group in the ranks of municipal ocers. As a ®nal example, it is
interesting to note that the obituary for John Derbishire, a solicitor from
Chester, published on 26 June 1781 in Adams' Weekly Courant, emphasizes his
professional qualities, his integrity and courtesy (`engaging manners'). His
death is presented as being a loss for the community in general rather than
for the city in particular.
The signs of a fading municipal apparatus were also witnessed in
Canterbury, where only a small number of the gentlemen registered in
1788 remained a part of it. Some individuals repeatedly refused to sit
within the corporation despite the ®nes they incurred as a result, while
others, like George Legrand, Lee Warley, John Cantis and John Baker, never
aimed at rising beyond the common council. As for the Lade family, its
upward mobility did not take in the town hall or municipal oces at all:
while John Lade became a common councillor in 1737, an alderman in
1755, and then mayor twice, in 1757 and 1762 respectively, neither his
brother, Michael, nor his nephew, John III, followed in his footsteps. In the
light of these examples, I would like to follow the argument explored by
Everitt in his article `Dynasty and community since the seventeenth
century'. Everitt outlines the shaping, during the eighteenth century, of
commercial urban dynasties whose structure, rami®cations and functions
resembled the more well-known models of the nobility or the squirearchy.76
He concludes his article by asserting that `in the ancient boroughs like
Leicester (for example) or Newcastle-under-Lyme, the development of
dynastic connexion outside the old corporation often established a kind
of ``alternative society'', an informal substitute for the cursus honorum of the
guildhall'.
In fact, civic functions tended to discourage rather than to promote social
advancement during the eighteenth century. The town hall, along with all
that it symbolized ± active participation in civic life ± no longer constituted
the natural, or the exclusive breeding ground for members of the urban
gentry. One's profession (especially if it was one in the legal domain), the
standard of living that resulted from it, and the esteem that it engendered,
acquired just as much signi®cance, if not more, as one's commitment to the
service of the town. It is this new de®nition which explains the
C.R.O., DBC/1, Rectory of St. John the Baptist, Chester, 1509±1718; ibid., DBC/2; Cheshire
Sheaf, xxii (1915), p. 13.
76
Everitt, `Dynasty and community', pp. 309±31.
75
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268 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
unprecedented growth in the numbers of the urban gentry in Canterbury
and in Chester. Indeed, it seems to me that the progressive disengagement
of the professional and merchant elites from municipal functions, or rather
the primacy which they slowly came to concede to professional success
alone, rather than to devotion to the community, helps to account for the
transition from the notion of civic gentry in England under the Stuarts and
the ®rst Hanovers to that of the upper middle class in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries.
In light of this, it is hardly surprising that the notion of `middle class' ®rst
appeared in London. The economic advantages of the metropolis were
accompanied by a political domain notable for its restriction of opportunity.
The 10,000 voters of London, registered in the large livery companies of the
city, elected a twenty-six-strong court of aldermen, and a court of common
council which had only 234 members.77 Thus, in the second half of the
eighteenth century, the ratio of councillors to voters was approximately one
to thirty-eight in London, while it was one to twenty-three in Chester, and
one to twenty-seven in Canterbury. The likelihood of reaching the ranks of
the municipal magistrates was much smaller in the capital than in the
provincial towns, while the economic and social in¯uence required was
probably greater. Peter Earle calculated that, between 1660 and 1730, thirtyone of the forty-nine common councillors of the parish of Allhallows Bread
Street left a fortune worth more than £5,000 at their death. He went on to
con®rm that of those thirty-one, twenty left a fortune worth more than
£10,000.78 A great number of merchants or artisans possessing moderate
fortunes would have been guaranteed easy access to the ranks of the civic
gentry in the con®nes of a small provincial town. In the metropolis, however,
these same moderately wealthy individuals found themselves stripped of such
opportunity. For the most part, they turned to lesser oces in small
corporations or to vestries, or else they managed their own businesses. Yet,
none of these options o€ered them the power of political management which
had originally bolstered the claims of the civic gentry to gentility. In addition,
they could no longer pretend to belong to the social ideals of the landed
gentry. Nonetheless, having already acquired too widespread an acceptance
for there to be a semantic return to the past, these individuals continued to
bear the title of `gentleman'.
The provisional conclusions with which I would like to end this article are of
two kinds. As far as methodology is concerned, it seems absolutely essential
to me to return to the study of individuals and their lives, a step which,
without adopting all of its elements, strongly resembles the Italian approach
of micro-history. This approach is fundamental because it is only by studying
the individual that we can test the ever more complex theoretical construc77
78
J. Rule, Albion's People: English Society, 1714±1815 (1992), p. 103.
Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, pp. 248±9.
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The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
269
tions which have been built around the issue of the division of elites in
provincial towns.79 Indeed, in following the example of the Anglo-Saxon
initiators of `linguistic turn', we must continually question the categories
which we have inherited from the historians of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. However, in so doing, we must be sure not to orientate
our e€orts solely towards the study of the discourses as an end in itself, a
study which has largely been facilitated by the emergence of cultural mass
consumption in the eighteenth century and hence by the existence of a well
identi®ed corpus of sources. Rather, we must also, and perhaps especially,
concentrate on the link between the discourses and the reality of the urban
social classes, as it is evoked in the archives. The urban gentry presents us
with a magni®cent opportunity for the observation of such links: indeed, to
have borne the title of gentleman whilst writing (or, as was more often the
case, when dictating) one's will, or in the ®scal register, illustrates both a
performative discourse as well as the recognition of a status guaranteed by
the social body. Moreover, it appears to me that our knowledge of the elite of
eighteenth-century English urban society would bene®t enormously from the
study of the county elites, similar to those already undertaken for the end of
the sixteenth and ®rst half of the seventeenth century in the context of
controversies on the origins of the English Revolution.80 As a ®nal word
concerning methodology, I hope that this article will encourage other studies
of di€erent types of town to prove or invalidate my Chester and Canterbury
models.
On a scienti®c level, without in any way invalidating Borsay's important
contributions to the historiographical debate, I think that it is necessary to
add to them.81 It is at the Restoration that Borsay situates the beginning of
the disappearance of the traditional model of the gentility and its replacement by a process of cultural di€erentiation of the strata of English society
based on the notions of politeness and gentleness.82 I agree with the
suggestion that the towns played an intrinsic role in this evolution, but by
taking the study of individuals as my starting point, as opposed to that of
towns and of their transformations, I believe that Borsay's analysis should be
placed within a longer chronological context. It was only from the seventeenforties that the quality of gentleman in provincial towns began to be
connected to the adherence to a set of cultural values based, amongst
other things, on education, profession and appearance, and not on traditional
79
For a replacement of the ``patrician-plebeian'' division with a division between the elites
themselves (between those who adapted themselves to a national culture and those who remained
rooted in the local communitarian culture), see D. Wahrman's interesting analysis in idem, `National
society, communal culture: an argument about the recent historiography of 18th-century Britain',
Social History, xvii (1992), 43±72.
80
A notable exception in this ®eld is P. Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: the Glamorgan
Gentry, 1640±1790 (Cambridge, 1983).
81
Indeed, an important part of my thesis was dedicated to an adaptation to France of the
problematics shaped by Peter Borsay for England.
82
P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance, pp. 225€.
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270 The urban gentry in England, 1660±1780
political participation. The transition from the traditional conception of the
hierarchy, which was still active in the ®rst half of the seventeenth century,
to this new cultural de®nition was facilitated by the appearance and shaping
of the urban gentry from the Restoration to the seventeen-forties.
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