The Decline of Oligarchy in Seventeenth-Century Norwich

Abstract

The resurgence of oligarchies in England's provincial towns during the fifteenth century and their firm control over almost all aspects of civic life during the sixteenth century has received considerable attention and is apparently beyond dispute. The characteristic feature of this oligarchical control was the domination of the important civic offices by urban dynasties whose members practiced the most influential and lucrative trades, were the most affluent citizens, and were linked by close family ties. Comparatively few studies have been made of officeholders of the seventeenth century, especially for the period after 1660, yet the evidence so far accumulated suggests that officeholding remained the exclusive privilege of a closed social elite. Nevertheless, Norwich may provide an instructive exception. An examination of the pool of men eligible for political office in Norwich, the largest provincial capital, indicates that the door to political office was open to men of diverse social backgrounds and occupations to a greater extent than during the sixteenth century and apparently much more so than in the other large provincial capitals. Oligarchy may be defined as the possession and exercise of power by a few individuals either directly, as a consequence of holding the important political offices, or indirectly, as a consequence of controlling recruitment of officeholders and influencing their decisions. In the former case, which was the general pattern establishsed in those fifteenth and sixteenth-century towns which remained free from the intervention of territorial magnates, oligarchy implies further that the magistrates have either the exclusive privilege of appointing their own replacements or the ability to manipulate the mechanism of political recruitment involving a wider electorate through control of the processes of nomination and election of officeholders.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.