London experienced repeated outbreaks of popular xenophobia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the worst coming in the Evil May Day riot of 1517. This article illuminates the hydra-like nature of the stereotype of the immigrant at this time, which rhetorically combined the diverse population of aliens into a single material and political threat. It begins with a close analysis of the riot itself, before examining the continuing relevance of this distinctive caricature. It shows how the perceived ‘privileges’ afforded to several different sorts of strangers in early modern London made them a special target for popular hostility.

The economic problems of the 1690s spurred an extraordinary surge in politicised debates and complaints about commercial, financial and other material affairs. This article begins by examining the magnitude of the shift in economic fortunes between the reigns of James II and William III (1689-1702, highlighting the main sources of concern: wartime disruption to trade, rising taxes, the currency crisis associated with the recoinage of 1696, and the high food prices of 1693-9. More significantly, it assesses the nature and extent of the public response. Trade, finance and fiscal impositions became increasingly pervasive topics of public conversation and printed debate, as evidenced both in anecdotal reports and in a crude but telling analysis of published titles. Moreover, national political divisions -between Williamites and Jacobites, Whigs and Tories, Court and Country, anti-French and anti-Dutch -were absolutely central to this economic discourse. Perceptions of the monarch and parliamentary leaders were directly linked to how people interpreted the hardships of this decade. This manifested itself in innumerable short tracts, broadside ballads, seditious conversations, riotous protests and many other modes of public communication. Finally, through comparisons with earlier and later periods such as the 1540s, 1590s, 1640s and the early eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the tumult of the 1690s had a longterm impact and has been unjustly neglected in the historiography of economic crisis and political conflict. The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1702For many people, the Revolution of 1688 that brought William III and Mary II to the throne seemed to coincide with a sharp reversal in the nation's economic fortunes. The reign of James II was a period of relative plenty and prosperity, but the 1690s were a decade in which England faced an unhappy conjunction of war, hunger, currency failure and financial dislocation.A conversation in a shop on London Bridge on 6 June 1696 offers an initial glimpse of how people interpreted the distressing conditions of the time. A man named Robert Morgan came in to buy a handkerchief and fell to talking with Edmund Baker, the shopkeeper's apprentice. Morgan was apparently angry about the current scarcity of lawful money -he had only old clipped shillings -and also questioned the official account of a recent assassination attempt against the king. In his eyes, England was a nation in decline:'Was not the tradeing better when King James was here then now?', asked Morgan. '[T]hen our Lives must have paid for it', Baker replied. ' [O]ur Livelyhoods & Lives goes now', countered Morgan. Here we have the views of both opponents and supporters of the Revolution neatly encapsulated. From the perspective of Morgan and many other dissidents, the consequences of 1688 were currency shortages, commercial 'decay' and the spread of economic misery. In contrast, Baker -like most loyal Williamites -saw any material hardships as...

Reading and writing became widespread in England over the course of the early modern period, with literacy expanding alongside rapid commercial development and growing economic inequality. This article shows how tradesmen and others of similar rank used reading and writing to create a powerful identity that cut across some of the sharpening divisions in wealth from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Growing numbers of economically precarious “middling” men and women took advantage of the spread of literacy to construct social roles for themselves based on godly work, vocational knowledge, and occupational fraternity. This analysis begins with the uniquely voluminous collection of notebooks filled by an Essex tradesman named Joseph Bufton (1651–1718). Drawing on his notebooks together with other examples of non-elite writing and cheap print, it reveals a broad literary culture that was emerging in provincial towns at this time. Through this, it connects the historiography of social structure and economic change to the growing research on non-elite literacy and life-writing. Taken together, these findings suggest that the existing narrative of early modern “social polarization” should be revisited. Rather than consistently reinforcing the deep economic divisions between workers and masters, literacy could often serve as a tool for crafting a shared identity that could encompass a whole trade.

The world’s first nationwide, publicly funded welfare system emerged and solidified in England over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its influence on society and economy during this period was profound, but this article is the first attempt to determine the scale of its impact by examining the amount of money annually spent on relief across the whole period. Drawing on data from 184 widely dispersed parishes over more than two centuries and a new estimate for spending in c.1600, it shows that poor relief experienced alternating phases of rapid expansion, relative stability and occasionally outright retrenchment. Levels of redistribution were pushed higher by both ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ factors. Specifically, trends in relief spending are compared to other indices such as population, economic expansion, central government revenues, labourers’ wages and inflation to show how the growth of poor relief related to wider demographic and economic changes. Such comparisons make it possible to think more clearly about causation: how much of the growth in spending can be attributed to such developments? While law, demography, inflation and other well-attested factors certainly contributed to the rise of this early modern welfare system, the poor themselves may well have played an important role.

No abstract