The inhabitants of seventeenth-century Norwich had a healthy and proactive relationship with their city’s politics. From participating in the formal mechanisms of governance through the practice of holding a local office,debating (or on occasion directing) the course and outcome of a local election, negotiating terms of the corporation’s charter, by expressing opinions about political events or personalities in the alehouse, or even by rioting on the streets, it seems that Norwich people all had something to say about local affairs. Norwich’s ‘vibrant’ and ‘participatory’ political culture was very much a part of the city’s history and landscape.

Provincial politics is often thought of as the poor cousin to national affairs but it often closely emulated, and occasionally influenced, the direction of national politics. Popular politics on the other hand has been given an in-depth treatment over recent years, often by historians using case studies of provincial towns and rural areas.These historians have built on Patrick Collinson’s argument that ordinary people were aware of and played a role in shaping the politics of their day, and have also revealed connections between national affairs and provincial politics.Since the 1990s post-revisionists have moved the study of popular politics away from the heartland of disgruntled rural labourers, to acknowledge the variety of actors that took part in urban and rural protests, riots, and seditious speeches, recognising that there was no clear-cut polarity between elite or popular politics. David Underdown’s work was critical in drawing attention to this, as too has been Tim Harris’ research on later Stuart politics and crowd action, influenced in part by the pioneering work of George Rudé and Edward Thompson.In the case of Norwich specifically, Andy Wood has been explicit in making the connection between the local gentry and the ordinary people in guiding and steering the course of Kett’s Rebellion in the mid-sixteenth century.

The connection between politics and physical place on the other hand has been well made in recent studies. Beat Kümin’s pioneering collection of essays on political spaces in pre-industrial Europe demonstrated just how the social forces of politics shaped ‘architectural, ceremonial, territorial’ and ‘cultural’ spaces, intimately creating and connecting politics with places in our landscape.The work of geographers such as Mike Crang and the engagement of social and urban historians, such as Steve Hindle, Bernard Capp or Peter Clark, in the ‘spatial turn’ of history have enriched the field still further.