Editing Norwich (section)

===Civil War to Victorian era===
In the [[English Civil War]], across the Eastern Counties, [[Oliver Cromwell]]'s powerful [[Eastern Association]] was eventually dominant. However, to begin with, there had been a large element of Royalist sympathy within Norwich, which seems to have experienced a continuity of its two-sided political tradition throughout the period. Bishop [[Matthew Wren]] was a forceful supporter of [[Charles I of England|Charles I]]. Nonetheless, [[Roundhead|Parliamentary]] recruitment took hold. The strong Royalist party was stifled by a lack of commitment from the aldermen and isolation from Royalist-held regions.{{sfn |Hopper |2004}} Serious inter-factional disturbances culminated in "The Great Blow" of 1648 when Parliamentary forces tried to quell a Royalist riot. The latter's gunpowder was set off by accident in the city centre, causing mayhem. According to Hopper,<ref>{{harvnb |Hopper |2004}}</ref> the explosion "ranks among the largest of the century". Stoutly defended though East Anglia was by the Parliamentary army, there were said to have been pubs in Norwich where the king's health was still drunk and the name of the Protector sung to ribald verse.

At the cost of some discomfort to the Mayor, the moderate [[Joseph Hall (bishop)|Joseph Hall]] was targeted because of his position as Bishop of Norwich. Norwich was marked in the period after the [[Restoration (England)|Restoration]] of 1660 and the ensuing century by a golden age of its cloth industry, comparable only to those in the [[West Country]] and Yorkshire,{{sfn |Rawcliffe|Wilson|Clark|2004}} but unlike other cloth-manufacturing regions, Norwich weaving brought greater urbanisation, mainly concentrated in the surrounds of the city itself, creating an urban society, with features such as leisure time, alehouses and other public forums of debate and argument.{{sfn |Wilson |2004b}}

[[File:Original Norfolk and Norwich Hospital - geograph.org.uk - 84361.jpg|thumb|Founded in 1771, the [[Norfolk and Norwich Hospital]] cared for the city's poor and sick. It closed in 2003 after services were moved to the [[Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital]].]]

Norwich in the late 17th century was riven politically. Churchman [[Humphrey Prideaux]] described "two factions, [[Whig (British political party)|Whig]] and [[Tories (British political party)|Tory]], and both contend for their way with the utmost violence."{{sfn |Knights |2004}} Nor did the city accept the outcome of the 1688 [[Glorious Revolution]] with a unified voice. The pre-eminent citizen, Bishop William Lloyd, would not take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs. One report has it that in 1704 the landlord of Fowler's alehouse "with a glass of beer in hand, went down on his knees and drank a health to James the third, wishing the Crowne [sic] well and settled on his head."{{sfn |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}}

Writing of the early 18th century, Pound describes the city's rich cultural life, the winter theatre season, the festivities accompanying the summer assizes, and other popular entertainments. Norwich was the wealthiest town in England, with a sophisticated system of [[poor relief]], and a large influx of foreign refugees.{{sfn |Pound |2004 |p=61}} Despite severe outbreaks of plague, the city had a population of almost 30,000. This made Norwich unique in England, although there were some 50 cities of similar size in Europe. In some, like Lyon and [[Dresden]], this was, as in the case of Norwich, linked to an important proto-industry, such as textiles or china pottery, in some, such as [[Vienna]], [[Madrid]] and [[Dublin]], to the city's status as an administrative capital, and in some such as [[Antwerp]], [[Marseille]] and [[Cologne]] to a position on an important maritime or river trade route.{{efn|1=For table of city sizes see {{harvtxt |Corfield |2004 |p=143}}}}

In 1716, at a play at the ''New Inn'', the Pretender was cheered and the audience booed and hissed every time [[George I of Great Britain|King George]]'s name was mentioned. In 1722 supporters of the king were said to be "hiss'd at and curst as they go in the streets," and in 1731 "a Tory mobb, in a great body, went through several parts of this city, in a riotous manner, cursing and abusing such as they knew to be friends of the government."{{efn |1=Reports quoted by {{harvnb |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}}}} However the Whigs gradually gained control and by the 1720s they had successfully petitioned Parliament to allow all adult males working in the textile industry to take up the freedom, on the correct assumption that they would vote Whig. But it had the effect of boosting the city's popular [[Jacobitism]], says Knights, and contests of the kind described continued in Norwich well into a period in which political stability had been discerned at a national level. The city's Jacobitism perhaps only ended with 1745, well after it had ceased to be a significant movement outside Scotland.{{sfn |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}} Despite the Highlanders reaching [[Derby]] and Norwich citizens mustering themselves into an association to protect the city, some Tories refused to join in, and the vestry of [[St Peter Mancroft]] resolved that it would not ring its bells to summon the defence. Still, it was the end of the road for Norwich Jacobites, and the Whigs organised a notable celebration after the [[Battle of Culloden]].{{sfn |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}}

The events of this period illustrate how Norwich had a strong tradition of popular protest favouring Church and Stuarts and attached to the street and alehouse. Knights tells how in 1716 the mayoral election had ended in a riot, with both sides throwing "brick-ends and great paving stones" at each other.{{sfn |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}} A renowned Jacobite watering-hole, the ''Blue Bell Inn'' (nowadays ''The Bell Hotel''), owned in the early 18th century by the high-church Helwys family, became the central rendezvous of the Norwich Revolution Society in the 1790s.{{sfn |Jewson |1975 |p=38}}

Britain's first provincial newspaper, the ''[[Norwich Post]]'', appeared in 1701. By 1726 there were rival Whig and Tory presses, and as early as mid-century, three-quarters of the males in some parishes were literate.{{efn |1=Quoted by {{harvnb |Knights |2004 |pp=181–182}}}} The Norwich municipal library claims an excellent collection of these newspapers, also a folio collection of scrapbooks on 18th-century Norwich politics, which Knights says are "valuable and important". Norwich alehouses had 281 clubs and societies meeting in them in 1701, and at least 138 more were formed before 1758. The [[Theatre Royal, Norwich|Theatre Royal]] opened in 1758, alongside the city's stage productions in inns and puppet shows in rowdy alehouses.{{sfn |Chandler |1998}}{{sfn |Blackwell |Blackwell |2007 |loc=Chap 2}} In 1750 Norwich could boast nine booksellers and after 1780 a "growing number of circulating and subscription libraries".{{sfn |Dain |2004}} {{harvnb |Knights |2004}} says: "[All this] made for a lively political culture, in which independence from governmental lines was particularly strong, evident in campaigns against the [[American Revolutionary War|war with America]] and for reform... in which trade and the impact of war with [[Revolutionary France]] were key ingredients. The open and contestable structure of local government, the press, the clubs and societies, and dissent all ensured that politics overlapped with communities bound by economics, religion, ideology and print in a world in which public opinion could not be ignored."{{sfn |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}}

[[File:OctagonChapel.JPG|thumb|upright=1.2|left|The [[Octagon Chapel, Norwich]]]]

Amid this metropolitan culture, the city burghers had built a sophisticated political structure. Freemen, who had the right to trade and to vote at elections, numbered about 2,000 in 1690, rising to over 3,300 by the mid-1730s. With growth partly the result of political manipulation, their numbers did at one point reach one-third of the adult male population.{{sfn |Knights |2004 |pp=168–174}} This was notoriously the age of [[rotten borough|"rotten"]] and [[pocket borough|"pocket"]] boroughs and Norwich was unusual in having such a high proportion of its citizens able to vote. "Of the political centres where the Jacobin propaganda had penetrated most deeply only Norwich and Nottingham had a franchise deep enough to allow radicals to make use of the electoral process."{{sfn |Thompson |1968 |p=513}} "Apart from London, Norwich was probably still the largest of those boroughs which were democratically governed," says {{harvnb |Jewson |1975}}, describing other towns under the control of a single [[fief]]dom. In Norwich, he says, a powerful Anglican establishment, symbolised by the Cathedral and the great church of St Peter Mancroft was matched by scarcely less powerful [[wikt:congeries|congeries]] of Dissenters headed by the wealthy literate body [of Unitarians] worshipping at the [[Octagon Chapel, Norwich|Octagon Chapel]].{{sfn |Jewson |1975}}

[[File:Map of Norwich 1781.jpg|thumb|Map of Norwich, 1781]]

In the middle of political disorders of the late 18th century, Norwich intellectual life flourished. [[Harriet Martineau]] wrote of the city's ''literati'' of the period, including such people as [[William Taylor (scholar)|William Taylor]], one of England's first scholars of German. The city "boasted of her intellectual supper-parties, where, amidst a pedantry which would now make laughter hold both his sides, there was much that was pleasant and salutary: and finally she called herself ''The Athens of England''."{{sfn|Martineau |1870}}

[[File:St Peter Mancroft.jpg|thumb|[[St Peter Mancroft]]]]

Despite Norwich's longstanding industrial prosperity, by the 1790s its wool trade had begun facing intense competition, at first from Yorkshire woollens and then, increasingly, from [[Lancashire]] cotton. The effects were aggravated by the loss of continental markets after Britain went to war with France in 1793.{{efn |1={{harvnb |Hayes |1958}} Quote: "a major city manufacturer, and government supporter, Robert Harvey Jr as writing on 12 March 1793: 'The consequences of this just and inevitable war visit this poor city severely and suspend the operations of the Dutch, German and Italian trade and the only lingering employment in the manufactory is the completion of a few Russian orders, and the last China [[camlet|cambletts]] which I hope will find encouragement in the new East India Charter. This languid trade has doubled our poor-rate and a voluntary subscription of above £2,000 is found inadequate to the exigencies of the poor."}} The early 19th century saw de-industrialisation accompanied by bitter squabbles. The 1820s were marked by wage cuts and personal recrimination against owners. So amid the rich commercial and cultural heritage of its recent past, Norwich suffered in the 1790s from incipient decline exacerbated by a serious trade recession.

As early in the war as 1793, a major city manufacturer and government supporter, Robert Harvey, complained of low order books, languid trade and doubling of the poor rate.{{efn |1=Quotations and facts from {{harvtxt |Wilson |2004b}}}} Like many of their Norwich forebears, the hungry poor took their complaints onto the streets. Hayes describes a meeting of 200 people in a Norwich public house, where "Citizen Stanhope" spoke.{{efn|1=Lord Stanhope was a radical peer, seen by many at the time as a dangerous menace. He is said to have given his rabble-rousing speech in a Norwich public house in 1794.}} The gathering "[roared its] applause at Stanhope's declaration that the Ministers unless they changed their policy, deserved to have their heads brought to the block; – and if there was a people still in England, the event might turn out to be so." Hayes says that "the outbreak of war, in bringing the worsted manufacture almost to a standstill and so plunging the mass of the Norwich weavers into sudden distress made it almost inevitable that a crude appeal to working-class resentment should take the place of a temperate process of education which the earliest reformers had intended."{{sfn |Hayes |1958 |pp=242–243}}

At this period opposition to [[William Pitt the Younger|Pitt]]'s government and their war came – in their case almost unanimously – from a circle of radical Dissenting intellectuals of interest in their own right. They included the Rigby, Taylor, Aitkin, Barbold, and Alderson families – all Unitarians - and some of the Quaker Gurneys (one of whose girls, [[Elizabeth Fry|Elizabeth]], was later, under her married name of Fry, to become a noted campaigner for prison reform). Their activities included visits to revolutionary France (before the execution of [[Louis XVI of France|Louis XVI]]), the earliest British research into German literature, studies on medical science, petitioning for parliamentary reform, and publishing a highbrow literary magazine called "The Cabinet", in 1795. Their blend of politics, religion and social campaigning was seen by Pitt and Windham as suspicious, prompting Pitt to denounce Norwich as "the Jacobin city". [[Edmund Burke]] attacked John Gurney in print for sponsoring anti-war protests. In the 1790s, Norwich was second only to London as an active intellectual centre in England, and that it did not regain that level of prominence until the [[University of East Anglia]] was established in the late 20th century.<ref>Sources: C. B. Jewson: ''Jacobin City''; I. Scott: ''Reactions to Radicalism in Norwich 1989–1802''; J. P. Foynes: ''East Anglia against the Tricolor 1789–1815''; Cambridge Modern History.</ref>

By 1795, it was not just the Norwich rabble who were causing the government concern. In April of that year, the Norwich Patriotic Society was founded, its manifesto declaring "that the great end of civil society was general happiness; that every individual had a right to share in the government."{{sfn |Jewson |1975 |p=66}} In December the price of bread reached a new peak, and in May 1796, when William Windham was forced to seek re-election after his appointment as war secretary, he only just held his seat.{{efn |1=Before the 20th century it was the practice for a sitting member to seek re-election if appointed to ministerial office.}} Amid the disorder and violence that was such a common feature of Norwich election campaigns, it was only by the narrowest margin that the radical Bartlett Gurney ("Peace and Gurney – No More War – No more Barley Bread") failed to unseat him.{{sfn |Thompson |1994}}

Though informed by issues of recent national importance, the bipartisan political culture of Norwich in the 1790s cannot be divorced from local tradition. Two features stand out from a political continuum of three centuries. The first is a dichotomous power balance. From at least the time of the Reformation, Norwich was recorded as a "two-party city". In the mid-16th century, the weaving parishes fell under the control of opposition forces, as Kett's rebels held the north of the river, in support of poor clothworkers. Indeed there seems to be a case for saying that with this tradition of two-sided disputation, the city had steadily developed an infrastructure, evident in its many cultural and institutional networks of politics, religion, society, news media and the arts, whereby argument could be managed short of outright confrontation. Indeed, at a time of hunger and tension on the Norwich streets, with alehouse crowds ready to have "a Minister's head brought to the block", the Anglican and Dissenting clergy exerted themselves to conduct a collegial dialogue, seeking common ground and reinforcing the well-mannered civic tradition of earlier periods.

[[File:Surrey House on Surrey Street - geograph.org.uk - 22919.jpg|thumb|left|[[Surrey House]], historic headquarters of the Norwich Union insurance company]]

In 1797 [[Thomas Bignold]], a 36-year-old wine merchant and banker founded the first [[Norwich Union|Norwich Union Society]]. Some years earlier, when he moved from Kent to Norwich, Bignold had been unable to find anyone willing to insure him against the threat from highwaymen. With the entrepreneurial thought that nothing was impossible, and aware that in a city built largely of wood the threat of fire was uppermost in people's minds, Bignold formed the "Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire". The new business, which became known as the Norwich Union Fire Insurance Office, was a "mutual" enterprise. [[Aviva|Norwich Union]] would later become the country's largest insurance giant.

From earliest times, Norwich was a textile centre. In the 1780s the manufacture of Norwich [[shawl]]s became an important industry<ref>[http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/Research/Academic_Articles/Social_History/Norwich_Shawls/index.htm Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service website] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120324192534/http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/Research/Academic_Articles/Social_History/Norwich_Shawls/index.htm |date=24 March 2012}} — "Norwich Shawls".</ref> and remained so for nearly a hundred years. The shawls were a high-quality fashion product and rivalled those of other towns such as [[Paisley, Renfrewshire|Paisley]], which had entered shawl manufacturing in about 1805, some 20 or more years after Norwich. With changes in women's fashion in the later [[Victorian period]], the popularity of shawls declined and eventually manufacture ceased. Examples of Norwich shawls are now sought after by collectors of textiles.

Norwich's geographical isolation was such that until 1845, when a railway link was established, it was often quicker to travel to [[Amsterdam]] by boat than to London. The railway was introduced to Norwich by [[Samuel Morton Peto|Morton Peto]], who also built a line to [[Great Yarmouth]]. From 1808 to 1814, Norwich had a station in the [[Semaphore line|shutter telegraph chain]] that connected the [[British Admiralty|Admiralty]] in London to its naval ships in the port of [[Great Yarmouth]]. A permanent military presence was established in the city with the completion of [[Britannia Barracks]] in 1897.<ref name=museum>{{Cite web |url=http://www.rnrm.org.uk/web_trail/web_bar_02.html |title=Britannia Barracks |publisher=Royal Norfolk Regiment Museum |access-date=9 November 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141109225923/http://www.rnrm.org.uk/web_trail/web_bar_02.html |archive-date=9 November 2014 |url-status=live}}</ref> The [[Bethel Street drill hall|Bethel Street]] and [[Cattle Market Street drill hall|Cattle Market Street]] [[drill hall]]s were built around the same time.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.drillhalls.org/Counties/Norfolk/TownNorwich.htm |title=Norwich |publisher=Drill halls project |access-date=16 July 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170813144606/http://www.drillhalls.org/Counties/Norfolk/TownNorwich.htm |archive-date=13 August 2017 |url-status=live}}</ref>