About Nottingham
The earliest written mention of Nottingham occurs in AD 868 when the Danish army took up its winter quarters in the Ango-Saxon burh, or borough. Archeological evidence points to its having been founded two or three hundred years earlier, on a strategic small cliff site overlooking the Trent Valley. In the ninth century it became one of five towns of the Danelaw and important as part the administration of a central part of England.
As an English borough, after the integration of the former kingdoms, Nottingham increased in importance and royal favour, with its own mint and bridge over the River Trent which helped communications southwards. When the Normans came to Nottingham in 1068, they built a primitive castle which later became a royal palace. This was within the new borough, which the French built round the castle and the earlier Anglo-Saxon borough to the east becameknown as the English borough.
The two boroughs eventually merged to become a mercantile, trading and manufacturing town as well as the market centre of the immediate agricultural region. Its importance can be judged from the number of its royal charters, especially two which permitted it to have a mayor, and even more importantly, created the town as a corporate body, separate from the jurisdiction of the county.
The post-medieval period was influenced as elsewhere in the country by the political turmoil of the Stuart regime. The civil wars resulted in the town becoming strategically involved in the early years of the conflict. The end of the seventeenth century saw a revival of Nottingham’s fortunes, following the stabilisation of the constitutional and religious problems.
Two developmentswhich helped this revival were the beginnings of a textile industry in the East Midlands based on the stocking frame and the building of a ducal mansion on the site of the former castle. The eighteenth century saw a gradual transformation of the parts of the town, with the rebuildingof larger houses for gentry. Nottingham becasme known as a pleasant town with gardens and orchards, but this was largely to disappear in the second half of the century. The population tripled in this period to a figure of 29,000 in what became an increasingly overcrowded industrial town, due to the refusal of the burgesses to allow expansion of the town on the surrounding former common fields.
This was only overcome at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, which had seen the decline of hand-wrought hosiery industry, off-set by the increasingly mechanised lace industry. It was also a period of reform of out-moded forms of localgovernment and gradual recognition of the worst social and environmental features.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw Nottingham becoming the centre of the country’s lace trade and also further industrial growth in othertrades, particularly engineering, cycle manufacture, tobacco and pharmaceuticals which were to become vital in the next century when lace declined. This period also saw the extension of the borough boundaries to take surrounding villages, its creation as one of the first county boroughs and the granting of city status in 1897. The population of a quarter of a million in 1901 was not far short of what it is today, although the city area has increased from 10,000 to 18,000 acres.
The twentieth century, as elsewhere, saw a first half largely influenced by two world wars. Nottingham did, however, use the period between 1919 and 1939 to make considerable progress modernising what was still largely a Victorian city. The second half, like that of the second half of the previous century, saw vast changes in transport, the demolition and rebuilding of mainly working class houses, the flight of the older manufacturing industries accompanied by new sectors of financial services, along with cultural, entertainment and educational changes. In the last two decades and into the twenty-first century, the greatest transformation has taken place, and is continuing to do so, whithin walking distance from the city’s ancient market place and its dominant Council House.
Written by Geoffrey Oldfield
Exerpt from: Nottingham - An A to Z of Local History
Published by Pen and Sword Books
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk