1. Oscar Handlin, “The Modern City as a Field of Historical Study,” in Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, eds., The Historian and the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963), p. 2.

2. BL, Sloane MS 2596, f. 77: William Smith, The Particular Description of England. With the Portraitures of Certaine of the Cheiffest Citties & Townes, 1588, f. 77; a facsimile appears in William Smith, The Particular Description of England, 1588; with views of some of the chief towns and armorial bearings of nobles and bishops, ed. Henry B. Wheatley and Edmund W. Ashbee (London: privately printed, 1879), plate 25; see also William George, “The Date of the First Authentic Plan of Bristol,” BGAS 4 (1879–80): 296–300.

3. H. A. Cronne, ed., Bristol Charters, 1378–1499 (BRS 11, 1945), pp. 33, 37, 38.

4. Smith, The Particular Description of England, 1588, pp. vi ff.; DNB, “William Smith.”

5. On the history of Bristol’s common seal, see James Dallaway, “Observations on the First Common Seal Used by the Burgesses of Bristol,” Archaeologia 21 (1827): 79–87; J. R. Planché, “On the Municipal Seals and Armorial Ensigns of the City of Bristol,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 31 (1875): 180–89.

6. Thomas Churchyard, The Firste Parte of Churchyardes Chippes, contayning twelue severall Labours (London, 1575), f. 118^r.

7. Alan Everitt, “ The County Community,” in E. W. Ives, ed., The English Revolution, 1600–1660 (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 49.

8. Mrs. J. R. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1894), vol. 1, pp. 1–2.

9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth, Ecclesiaticall and Civill, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 368, 375.

10. Everitt, “County Community,” p. 48.

11. The classic account of Gemeinschaft is to be found in Ferdinand Tönnies’s seminal work of 1887, Community and Society, ed. and trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). See also Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 136–39; and Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933). By the Second World War the idea of community as a special kind of social form had reached general currency in English usage: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 65–66. Cf. H. P. R. Finberg, The Local Historian and His Theme (Leicester University, Dept. of English Local Hist., Occasional Papers 1, 1952), pp. 5–8; Alan Everitt, “The Local Community and the Great Rebellion,” reprinted in K. H. D. Haley, ed., The Historical Association Book of the Stuarts (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973), p. 76; Alan Everitt, New Avenues in English Local History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970), p. 6; Alan Everitt, Ways and Means in Local History (London: National Council of Social Service for the Standing Conference for Local History, 1971), p. 6.

12. Finberg, The Local Historian and His Theme, pp. 5, 6, 7, 9, 15.

13. Ibid., pp. 7–8.

14. Thomas Wilson, The State of England, 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher, in Camden Miscellany 16 (Camden Society, 3d ser., 52, 1936), pp. 20–21.

15. Ibid., p. 21.

16. John Stowe, A Survey of London, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 206–7.

17. Ibid., p. 198.

18. Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols., 2d ed., rev. by S. F. C. Milsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 635–36. For Maitland’s more general statement of this view, see pp. 687–88. For later statements along these same lines, see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 1540–1640, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), ch. 9; Clive Holmes, “The County Community in Stuart Historiography,” JBS 19 (1980): 54–73; see also David Harris Sacks, “The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol’s ‘Little Businesses,’ 1625–1641,” Past and Present 110 (February 1986): 69–75.

19. Everitt, Ways and Means in Local History, p. 6.

20. See, e.g., Everitt, New Avenues in English Local History, p. 6.

21. For a classic statement of this social theory by a British social anthropologist, see A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses, foreword by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Fred Eggan (London: Cohen and West, 1952).

22. See, e.g., Alan Everitt, Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (Leicester University, Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 2d ser., 1, 1969), pp. 35ff.; Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 249ff.

23. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 300.

24. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 3, 385.

25. Finberg, The Local Historian and His Theme, p. 11.

26. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 174–210.

27. “A Catalogue of Some Books and Treatises Relating to the Antiquities of England,” in William Camden, Camden’s Britannia, Newly Translated into English, with Large Additions and Improvements, ed. Edmund Gibson (London, 1695), unpaginated.

28. See, e.g., [John Graunt], Natural and Political Observations mentioned in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt (London, 1662; 5th ed. 1676), ed. W. F. Willcox (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939); Gregory King, Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, reprinted in G. E. Barnett, ed., Two Tracts by Gregory King (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936); William Petty, The Economic Writings of William Petty, 2 vols., ed. C. H. Hull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899); Karl Pearson, The History of Statistics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries against the Changing Background of Intellectual, Scientific and Religious Thought: Lectures by Karl Pearson Given at University College London during the Academic Sessions 1921–1933, ed. E. S. Pearson (London: C. Griffin, 1978), pp. 1–140; William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought, 1660–1776 (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 79–146; Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 92–121; Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 129–30; Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 127–29; Lorraine Daston, “The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance, 1650–1830,” in Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine Daston, and Michael Heidelberger, eds., The Probabilistic Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 237–60.

29. See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1951).

30. For a view of evolutionary biology as historical narrative which has much in common with the approach followed here, see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).

31. See, e.g., Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); see also Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 3 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1979–1982), vol. 3, esp. chap. 1; Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), esp. chap. 3; Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, esp. chap. 1.

32. Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 42; for a fuller discussion of this point see below, chap. 4.