Search

We have in this volume surveyed the towns of three countries over a span of nine centuries. The reader who has followed our contributions so far, or is about to engage with the urbanisation charted by Peter Clark and his colleagues in Volume II, may well expect some broad insights underlying our detailed analyses. What are the most significant of them? First, towns before the sixteenth century were collectively more important, populous and wealthy than is still often acknowledged by historians of later periods. After the earliest period of intermittent urbanisation (or reurbanisation) in England between c. 600 and 850, there followed what Christopher Dyer has characterised as ‘a period of sustained urban growth’ between c. 880 and 1080. This is a claim fully confirmed by the studies in Part II of this volume, and should not unduly surprise us, for the growth of towns was only one of a series of important economic developments in late Anglo-Saxon England, changes which were perhaps ‘more significant than any which took place in the sixteenth century or even later’. Dyer's ‘second period of urbanization’, this time involving Britain as a whole, lies between the late eleventh and early fourteenth centuries, and is much better known. Richard Britnell suggests that for England, where the statistics are best, towns may have accounted for almost 10 per cent of the national population by 1086 and up to 15 per cent by about 1300; Dyer would go further and see a doubling of the proportion living in towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century London was pre-eminent among English urban communities. Whether ranked according to wealth or according to population, its pre-eminence was undisputed. Although London was larger, more populous and wealthier than other English towns, it was distinguished from them not only by size and volume: it developed, in the period covered here, characteristics which were distinctive. London was different not only in scale, but also in kind. This pre-eminence is reflected in the creation and for the most part survival of a remarkable series of administrative records. Although the chamberlain's records (including the apprentice and freedom registers) were destroyed in a fire in the seventeenth century, the City is rich in custumals, record books and wills and deeds enrolled in the Husting court from the mid-thirteenth century. The pleadings in the mayor's court survive from the end of the thirteenth century and the records of the meetings of the court of aldermen and court of Common Council from 1416. In addition to the City's official records, there survive thousands of testaments enrolled in the ecclesiastical courts, pre-Reformation records of some thirty of London's parish churches and material of great interest from the archives of the livery companies. Much of this material, particularly that from the city's own administration, has been edited and calendared. Moreover, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Londoners developed a taste for ‘London chronicles’, i.e. histories of England written in the vernacular and divided into mayoral, rather than regnal, years. These chronicles throw some fitful light upon the course of English history, but rather more light on the thought-world of the Londoners who commissioned and bought them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measured in terms of their populations, twenty or so towns emerge as important provincial centres with some 2,000 taxpayers in 1377. To these must be added Exeter, which doubled in size during the fifteenth century to emerge as the third largest provincial town in 1524–5, and Edinburgh, whose population was growing towards c. 12,500 by 1560 (see Table 18.1). York alone achieved a size or status comparable to large European towns such as Antwerp, Bremen or Lyon. Most of the greater towns of Britain were distinguishable from market towns by the scale and intensity of their urbanity: physical size and appearance, complex internal economic and social structures, sophisticated government and regional significance. Even so, few enjoyed the close formal interdependence of a large Italian, French or German town with its contado or umland. In Britain, administration outside urban liberties commonly remained subject to the crown. Coventry, Gloucester and York were exceptions: Coventry by acquiring some 15,000 acres of the manor of Coventry, Gloucester through its incorporation of thirty or so villages in 1483, and York as the result of its jurisdiction over an adjacent rural wapentake, the Ainsty. Population size in 1377 reflected the economic vitality of towns which had recovered from the depredations of the Black Death. Though population losses varied, it is likely that many of the greater towns lost a third to a half of their inhabitants between 1348 and 1349. Some, like Boston and Winchester, were already beyond their most successful phase by 1348–9 and retained their rank on the strength of earlier prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature and development of late medieval town government remains an extremely controversial issue amongst urban historians. Was this, as some claim, a time of growing exclusivity and oligarchy or was it an era of increasing popular participation in town government? Was urban political conflict, particularly that of the communitas against the mercantile oligarchy, the inevitable result of opposing class interests or were shared ideological norms and a sense of civic community effective in legitimating the authority of town rulers and minimising conflict? Is the concept of ‘oligarchy’ itself a loaded anachronism when applied to a society which saw the rule of the rich as ‘aristocratic’ (i.e. rule by the ‘better sort’ for the ‘common profit’) rather than as ‘oligarchic’ (i.e rule by the self-interested few)? Did urban political conflicts revolve around the corruption of individual rulers rather than issues of political principle or a desire for structural change in town government? The extent of self-government The survival of the records of civic administration generated by the self-governing royal boroughs has tended to give a misleading impression of late medieval town government. In fact, in England, only a minority of towns achieved the degree of autonomy enjoyed by royal towns such as York and Winchester, where the burgesses elected their own mayor and bailiffs to govern the town, to collect royal revenues and account for the fee-farm, and to administer justice in the borough court. By the thirteenth century, many of these self-governing towns had acquired a ‘mayor's council’ but, in the later middle ages, many added a second or ‘common’ council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early settlement 400–900 In the late fourth century London, formerly one of the most substantial Roman cities north of the Alps, was the prime seat of authority in Britain and still a significant centre of urban life. Within a generation or two, following the withdrawal of imperial rule, the city had been virtually abandoned. Yet later London owes much to its Roman predecessor. The carefully constructed site on the Thames, the bridge at the hub of an extensive road network and the ready access to a productive hinterland and to the river networks and markets of northern Europe endowed London with continuing potential as a place for business. The circuit of walls was to shape the city for centuries to come. Features within the walls, surviving as enclosures or as barriers to movement, influenced later settlement and may have marked seats of authority (Plate 3). During the fifth and sixth centuries this largely uninhabited site perhaps served as a focus for a zone of settlements within some twenty miles (32 km). London persisted as a massive, but ruined, physical presence and as an idea in bureaucratic memory. Perhaps the most important element in the city's continuity is ideological: in the recognition of its power as the organising principle for a distinctive territory. London comes more clearly into view in 601, when Pope Gregory envisaged that it would serve as the primatial see of England. Political reality no longer matched Roman perceptions and London, in the province of the East Saxons, was under the overlordship of the king of Kent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveying the topography of towns before 1300 inevitably draws heavily on the disciplines of archaeology and plan analysis, rather than on documents and standing buildings, which are predominantly late medieval. Fortunately, the proliferation of urban excavations since the 1970s has produced a huge volume of topographical material, telling us much more about the siting, phases and layout of many towns than could be learnt from documents alone. This does not mean that we should neglect the value of early documents, however brief and laconic: the expert excavator of medieval Paris, Michel Fleury, demonstrates from personal experience ‘la nécessité d'allier constamment les données des sources écrites à celles que fournissent les fouilles archéologiques’. Nevertheless, there is much detail that we could never have gleaned of early medieval topography without excavation, and for the very earliest periods for the most crucial facts – whether a town site remained inhabited, or whether it was relocated – such evidence is all we have. It is therefore important that major discoveries of the past few years be built into general syntheses as soon as possible, and that is one of the purposes of this volume. Most Roman town sites were also urban in the middle ages, and in most cases the Roman core lies beneath the modern town centre. However, to move from those premises to the conclusion of ‘continuity of site if not of urbanism’ is to go beyond the evidence. It is now clear that, of the four most important towns of the earliest post-Roman period, Ipswich was without a Roman past, while London and York developed on open sites outside the Roman walls before shifting back into the fortified area in the ninth and tenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many other parts of Europe, churches are often the key to explaining the revival or emergence of towns in Britain in the earlier middle ages; nor did they cease to be influential once the towns were well established, but, on the contrary, continued to dominate many smaller towns, or to be powerful forces in larger ones, as landlords, consumers and patrons of the arts. Not least among the last was architecture: churches were usually the most important features in the landscape, being usually the tallest structures, often topographically the most extensive, and architecturally the most innovative. While defining the role of churches in towns is fairly straightforward in the earlier middle ages, exploring culture is much harder, chiefly because it is difficult to define a specifically urban culture before the end of the thirteenth century. The high culture of courts and major churches did not necessarily require, though it often enjoyed, an urban setting, while popular culture is not only hard to divide into urban and rural forms but is also poorly documented for this period. None the less, it is possible to discern one cultural area where towns played an active role towards the end of this period: that is the growth of literacy and the development of education. Accordingly, this chapter will be broken up into four sections of unequal length: first, a short summary of the role of churches in the embryonic towns of the 600-900 period; secondly, an overview of churches in towns as they expanded or were created in the tenth and eleventh centuries; thirdly, an overview of the diversification of ecclesiastical institutions in towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and fourthly, a sketch of three separate aspects of urban culture: schools, the increasing use of the written word by townspeople and the development of the genre of urban panegyric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exercise of power and authority in, through and over towns is fundamental to the evolution of the English state. State and towns were linked so intimately that the process or progress of each depended on the other. Power and authority in pre-conquest towns Our earliest sources are suggestive, if meagre. A law of Hlothere and Eadric, kings of Kent (673 x 686), specifies: ‘If a man of Kent buys property in London he shall have two or three trustworthy men or the king's wicgerefa (wic reeve) as witness.’ The wic element relates to London as a major trading place; royal authority was already linked to the regulation of trade. Narrative sources put royal officials in the context of an urban site. Bede, writing c. 731 on Edwin of Northumbria (616–33), mentions a royal prefectus, obviously an important man, at Lincoln. A Life of Cuthbert (written 699 x 705) mentions civitatis praepositus at Carlisle in 685. Maybe such men exercised authority simply in a former Roman place, somewhat more probably in but chiefly from one. Such Roman centres could survive as centres of authority, if more doubtfully with other functions. Bede is explicit that Canterbury was the metropolis of the whole imperium of Æthelbert of Kent. London and York apparently enjoyed comparable status. The governmental status of some lesser places is attested by the names of early West Saxon shires. Hampshire (Hamtunscir, first mentioned s. a. 755 in the Chronicle, composed c. 891) takes its name from Hamtun, the royal centre at or near modern Southampton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]