Dr James Brown
History, University of Oxford [UK]
James.Brown(at)history.ox.ac.uk
I was awarded my doctorate at the University of Warwick in 2008, for a thesis entitled ‘The Landscape of Drink: Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton’. It offers the first case study of drinking spaces and cultures for the early modern British context, and partakes of a broader theoretical interest in the material venues of social exchange within preindustrial urban communities. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century publicans, especially at the lower reaches of the victualling hierarchy, were no strangers to the documentation of individual identity. From the Licensing Act of 1552 the names and occupations of authorised alehouse-keepers were recorded in the recognizance files of local magistrates (see below), which became ‘working archives’ for the disciplinary agents charged with collecting taxes and sureties, maintaining order and detecting unlicensed activity. However, strategies of registration could protect as well as encroach upon the interests of alcohol retailers. Licensed individuals regularly appealed to documents of record in cases where their legality was disputed, while some alehouse-keepers voluntarily pasted paperized licensing materials onto their signboards to reify their legitimacy within urban landscapes. As well as my IdentiNet responsibilities, I also coordinate the Oxford-based, Mellon-funded project Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters.
1667 alehouse-keepers’ recognizance for Southampton mariner William Tompkins, recording his name and occupation as well as those of two individuals providing sureties for his good conduct. © Southampton City Archives SC9/2/11, fo. 11r.
