The origins and development of an Ulster urban network, 1600-41

Abstract

Historians of any pre-industrial society, such as early seventeenth-century Ireland, must devote the bulk of their energies to the study of the rural world. Rural society, however, cannot be studied in isolation without a serious distortion of the reality of the social structure, since the urban element, although subsidiary, was nevertheless an important feature of pre-industrial society. There are, however, considerable problems in studying urban history in early modern Ulster since the sources can only be described as meagre. The basic sources used by many English early modern urban historians, the corporation records, are missing for all but a few Ulster towns. Only Belfast and Carrickfergus have corporation books for the pre-1641 period. The dearth of other important sources, such as freemen's rolls, means that areas of human activity such as the occupational structure of Ulster towns cannot be demonstrated with the accuracy that English early modern historians have been able to attain. Nor will it be possible to chart the detail of the day-to-day administrative or political structures of towns. Topics such as local elections, the minutiae of poor relief, and law and order must remain relatively shadowy This is not to argue that the history of the Ulster town cannot be written. The work of R. J. Hunter has demonstrated that it is possible by using fragments of central government and local records not only to reconstruct the administrative context of the establishment of towns but also to discover the social, economic, and political structures of individual towns. Ulster towns are among the better documented principal towns in Ireland for the early modern period. The interest of central government in the development of the plantation produced a number of surveys which shed considerable light on urban development. Indeed two of the principal towns in Ulster, Coleraine and Derry, are well documented because of the disputes which surrounded the activities of their developers, the Irish Society, and a rival planter, Sir Thomas Phillips. Ulster also provides an important case study in urbanisation since it contained an older pre-seventeenth-century urban network which was expanded and developed as part of both the informal colonisation and the more formal plantation scheme in Ulster. It is the aim of this paper to examine the development of this new urban network.

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