Economy and society in Dover 1509-1640

This study examines the relationship between economy and society in Dover between 1509-1640. Dover's harbour, threatened by choking shingle, was twice improved by royal intervention, and in the first half of the seventeenth century, during periods of English neutrality, was used as an entrepot for the transhipment of international goods. Through the use of detail, the study attempts to demonstrate the process of urban life and government, and considers the economic, social and cultural consequence of the changes at the harbour. It examines the civic accounts closely, not only for fiscal and social, but also for cultural information, showing how successive corporations, while responding to economic fluctuations and instructions from central government, operated a moral economy. Other evidence is used to show how, in the new conditions of the seventeenth century, wealth accrued to individuals, some of them alien merchants and factors, increasingly from the distribution rather than the production of goods and also from the manipulation of capital. The population possibly tripled over the whole period, and it is suggested that the gap between rich and poor widened in the early seventeenth century. Social structures throughout the period are shown to have been based on occupational networks, extended kinship, status and mutual obligation, and often to have involved the extension and receipt of credit. Protestantism was readily embraced by the ruling group, who are shown to have become both more exclusive and more efficient over the period. From the beginning of the seventeenth century they began to finance civic rule with loans at interest. In spite of greater profits from the harbour, they were under pressure then from forced billeting, recurrent disease, and increasing numbers of transient poor, whom they treated punitively. At that time, too, the Crown made more demands upon them without offering any compensating concessions, so that by 1640 change seems to have been inevitable.