ABSTRACT

Towns had often been defined by the exclusive rights to hold markets granted to them by royal and imperial authorities, and they came to be constituted around the juridical framework which gave the right to exercise a trade or profession to a town's guilds and corporations. As we saw in Chapter Two, corporate bodies were not only a mode of trade defence, but also the basis for representation in urban affairs. Its corporations were a town's most basic institutions, bridging the private world of economic interests and the public sphere of urban government and ritual. If the juridical boundaries were more strict than the economic reality, they themselves underpinned a certain conception of the urban. The masters and jurandes of urban corporations provided the town's freemen and burghers. In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Germany, for example, only those who were citizens of a town had the right to sell in a market, to brew beer or to open a workshop.2 Manufacturing might be excluded from the countryside by law, as in Prussia before the early nineteenth-century reforms or Sweden before the 1850s, whose restrictions sought to concentrate within towns the conflicts which surrounded industry and trade, and to protect the countryside and its subordinate peasantry from such tensions. Even where rural production was

permitted, precise distinctions would protect the exclusive rights of urban guilds, as with the laws which forbade country shoemakers round Bologna from selling in the town itself, while permitting their urban counterparts to sell higher-quality shoes in the countryside. As Bologna's shoemakers insisted throughout the eighteenth century, crafts were an urban activity and had to be defended as such. 3 Towns and small enterprise were thus historically bound together, even if frontier artisanal districts such as Paris's faubourg Saint-Antoine show that the boundary between town and country was more clear in law than on the ground. In the words of Fernand Braudel, 'the town accumulates and amasses shops, markets, houses and artisans',4 and his judgement was as true for the modern as for the early-modern era. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in spite of the continuation of rural industry and industrial villages, production and commerce were concentrated ever more firmly in the towns of industrialising Europe.