Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650-1830

318 Pages·2013·3.302 MB·English

by  Jon Stobart

SUGAR AND SPICE
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Sugar and Spice
Grocers and Groceries in
Provincial England,
1650–1830
JON STOBART
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© Jon Stobart 2013
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First Edition published in 2013
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For Jane
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Acknowledgements
Th ere are many people and organizations that have assisted in the research and
production of this book. Grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC have
made possible much of the archival work for this project, and I am grateful for
their support. Undertaking this work would have been impossible without the as-
sistance of archivists and search-room staff in a large number of places: the record
offi ces in Bedford, Chester, Hanley, Lichfi eld, Maidstone, Northampton, Nor-
wich, Oxford, Preston, Shrewsbury, Staff ord, Stratford-upon-Avon, Truro, War-
wick, York, and at the British Library, the Central Library in Manchester, the John
Rylands Library, Northamptonshire Central Library, and Th e National Archives.
I would like to thank Lucy Bailey, Amy Barnett, and Andrew Hann for generously
making available some of their data and thus enriching various sections of the
book. Th anks also to the following for permission to reproduce images: the Bod-
leian Library, University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection; the Cheshire Ar-
chives and Local Studies; the Norfolk Library and Information Service, and
Northamptonshire Central Library.
Th ere are numerous colleagues who have helped to refi ne my thinking about
groceries, retailing, consumption, and material culture. Th ese include the organiz-
ers and participants at a wide range of conferences and seminars in Amsterdam,
Antwerp, Berlin, Cambridge, Exeter, Ghent, Jyvaskyla, Leeds, Leicester, Lisbon,
Liverpool, London, Lyon, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford, Paris, Rouen, Tel-
ford, Warwick, and Wolverhampton. Particular thanks go to Amy Barnett, Bruno
Blondé, Nancy Cox, Sheryllynne Haggerty, Ian Mitchell, Mark Rothery, and Sara
Pennell for reading drafts and talking about groceries and grocers. Th ey encour-
aged me to think broadly and to be rigorous in my analysis. Th e quality of the fi nal
text owes much to the care and attention of Hilary Walford and Andrew Hawkey,
who helped to correct my grammatical, typographical, and presentational errors.
Finally, thanks to my family, who have, more or less convincingly, shown an inter-
est in the grocery trade of eighteenth-century England. Th ey have been very
patient.
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Contents
List of Tables x
List of Figures xii
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 . Ancient and Modern: Th e Grocery Trade in Early Modern England 18
2. A New World of Goods: Groceries in the Long Eighteenth Century 41
3. From Colony to Counter: Networks of Supply 65
4 . Geographies of Selling: Th e Grocery Trades in Provincial Towns 90
5. Selling Spaces: Display and Storage of Groceries 112
6. Selling Groceries: Service, Credit, and Price 139
7. Exotic, Empire, or Everyday? Advertising Groceries 165
8. Baskets of Goods: Customers and Shopping Practices 190
9 . Tea and Cakes: Consuming Groceries 215
1 0. Cups, Caddies, and Castors: Groceries and Domestic Material Culture 240
C onclusion 264
Bibliography 276
Index 293