Regional Identities:
Shifting Boundaries and Contested Meanings
Dr Phil Withington: University of Aberdeen
A question of place: cities and walls in seventeenth-century England
City walls were a defining architectural resource of the early modern city. This paper considers their contrasting (and sometimes contested) uses and meanings in England during the second half of the seventeenth century, linking their possession and appropriation to alternative forms of urban identity.
In particular, it examines the tensions between enfranchised citizens (or freemen)of cities - for whom the walls represented political and economic independence, and a certain sense of place - and other urban groupings. Such groupings included gentry, churchmen, professionals, and soldiers. They also included itinerant poor and those on the symbolic and physical margins of civic society. Each of these groups used, experienced and perceived the walls in ways different and sometimes threatening to the citizens. Differences were especially prominent in a period of social transition and political and military unrest.
By considering city walls in this way, the paper provides an alternative perspective on the complex relationship between city, province and state. By focusing on the city of York in particular, it also provides a fully contextualized approach to the study of early modern architecture.
Dr Phil Withington