No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
A tale of two towns: Buntingford and Standon in the later middle ages
Abstract
The controversy over the fortunes of English towns in the later middle ages has tended to generate more heat than light. Much of the evidence employed in this debate has been drawn from the larger English towns, but this essay suggests a widening of the research agenda to include a more systematic assessment of small towns and village markets. Although weakened by the reduced demand for grain after the Black Death, these places competed for the growing local trade in basic consumer goods. Evidence from northeast Hertfordshire reveals that this competition resulted in a significant restructuring of the hierarchy of local marketing centres, and a decline in the ability of seigneurial and urban authorities to regulate trading activity.
... Scholars such as Bridbury (1981; and Tittler (1984) cite evidence for urban building projects and a growth in the proportion of taxation received from towns between the 14th and 16th centuries as a sign of urban buoyancy. Comparative analyses of historical records (Saul 1982;Bailey 1993;Dyer 1991; and archaeological evidence (Jervis 2016b;2017) suggest that fortunes were mixed, with some towns prospering and others suffering for a variety of reasons, but particularly in relation to regional economies. The concept of decline itself can be questioned; we would expect urban populations to fall, but this need not be indicative of decline (Reynolds 1980;Palliser 1988, 2). Lilley (2000) proposes that decay of the physical landscape need not be indicative of economic decline, urban contraction potentially being an indicator of adaptation to a new set of socio-economic circumstances (see also Lilley 2015). ...
It is proposed that assemblage theory offers the possibility of exploring archaeological evidence in innovative ways, in order to write alternative narratives of urban development. By combining historical and archaeological scholarship with work in contemporary urban geography, it is proposed that the concept of urban decline in the later Middle Ages is problematic and a more fruitful alternative approach would be to focus on the transformation of urban assemblages. These ideas are explored by drawing upon archaeological evidence from Southampton, UK.
... A declining population saw a decrease in settlement and trade, but an expansion in income and output per capita, meaning that after 1348, a town could be smaller but those living 32 there could be richer. 171 If we look at St Albans during the time that the urban decline was meant to be occurring, the monastery, although still able to maintain their records, must have struggled with losing forty-seven monks and their abbot. Abbot Thomas de la Mare was elected, and he was able to maintain the monastery, and despite not having the numbers, remained influential in St Albans. ...
This thesis aims to examine the relationship between the monks and monastery of St Albans, and the townspeople and the tenants on the manors it held, including a case study on the manor of Codicote, by considering how the nature of this relationship changed throughout the history of the abbey from one of dependency to independence, and of animosity to acceptance. It will analyse events from the foundation of the monastery when the town grew around the abbey, to the problems of the fourteenth century, and finally, the Dissolution.
This thesis concludes that the relationship between the monastery and the town of St Albans and its surrounding manors had three phases: the first phase took place from the foundation of the abbey through to the fourteenth century, where the town and monastery were dependent on one another. The second was during the fourteenth century, where the townspeople fought for their freedoms while the third was from the end of the fourteenth century through to the Dissolution when the town was able to function without the monastery, but still maintained a productive relationship that continued until after 1539 when the abbey was dissolved.
This thesis is an addition to the work that has already been completed on both St Albans and Benedictine monasteries. It will go beyond the vast historiography on the subject by examining the relationship between town and abbey not as a simple political or financial one, but instead, as a complex changing relationship with multiple layers evolving over time.
... Studies of urban decline typically focus on single larger towns, for example Coventry (Pythian-Adams 1979) and Colchester (Britnell 1986). As Christopher Dyer (2015) highlights, no study has been undertaken of a small town and its respective region, although the fortunes of smaller towns have been contrasted with each other (Bailey 1993;Goddard 2011). In order to address this issue, a regional case study will be presented, embracing the counties of Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire (Illus. ...
Archaeological evidence is used to examine how urban life changed in the later medieval towns of Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire in southern England, in light of ongoing debates about the existence of a fifteenth-century urban ‘decline’. The article proposes that rather than seeking evidence of decline, we should consider how and why experiences of urban life vary. The role of towns in commercial and political networks is highlighted as a key cause of variability in late medieval urban experience.
p>Small medieval towns can be seen as an integral part either of the urban network or of rural society. This study seeks to explore the administration, economy and society of a very small town through its documentary record and physical layout, to trace its development up to the end of the fourteenth century, and to consider whether its fundamental character was more rural than urban. The chosen town is Whitchurch in north Hampshire, partly because it is unusual among very small towns in possessing a documentary record, and partly because the medieval history of north Hampshire has not yet been fully explored. Whitchurch was a borough founded in the mid-thirteenth century near a late-Saxon mother church on a manor of St. Swithun's Priory in Winchester. Its main function was as a roadside town; it remained very small throughout the medieval period and eventually became a 'pocket' borough. The lordship of the Priory is seen as the ultimate cause of failure, partly because it administered the town as a manorial tithing in spite of having given it some burghal privileges, but principally because it founded the town too close to the Bishop of Winchester's established town at Overton, at a time when the decline of Winchester had reduced the amount of road traffic in a north-south direction through Hampshire. The conclusion is reached that Whitchurch had an ambivalent urban status, both legally and physically, and that such a small town, with a population of perhaps three hundred in the early-fourteenth century, would be marginally urban in the context of medieval towns in general. Within Hampshire, however, it had a recognizable place in the medieval commercial network.</p
In order for towns to come into being and to grow, a number of factors needed to converge, and isolating any one of them as the key variable can be a bit misleading. There needed to be economic growth on a scale that would support an urban structure, but the impetus towards town creation and the shape that the urban network took was determined also by the actions of those in power. There are, then, elements of both a bottom-up and a top-down explanation for the emergence of towns in medieval Britain, deriving on the one hand from organic growth, the expansion of the population and the growth of the market, and on the other from the way in which economic growth was stimulated by and manipulated by lords.
A fresh examination of how society and economy changed at the end of the middle ages, comparing urban and rural experience. The traditional boundary between the medieval and early modern periods is challenged in this new study of social and economic change that bridges the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It addresses the large historical questions - what changed, when and why - through a detailed case study of western Berkshire and Newbury, integrating the experiences of both town and countryside. Newbury is of particular interest being a rising cloth manufacturing centre that had contacts with London and overseas due to its specialist production of kerseys. The evidence comes from original documentary research and the data are clearly presented in tables and graphs. It is a book alive with the actions of people, famous men such as the clothier John Winchcombe known as ‘Jack of Newbury’, but more notably by the hundreds of individuals, such as William Eyston or Isabella Bullford, who acquired property, cultivated their lands, or, in the case of Isabella, managed the mill complex after her husband’s death.
This important new study examines the market trade of medieval England from a new perspective, by providing a wide-ranging critique of the moral and legal imperatives that underpinned retail trade. James Davis shows how market-goers were influenced not only by practical and economic considerations of price, quality, supply and demand, but also by the moral and cultural environment within which such deals were conducted. This book draws on a broad range of cross-disciplinary evidence, from the literary works of William Langland and the sermons of medieval preachers, to state, civic and guild laws, Davis scrutinises everyday market behaviour through case studies of small and large towns, using the evidence of manor and borough courts. From these varied sources, Davis teases out the complex relationship between morality, law and practice and demonstrates that even the influence of contemporary Christian ideology was not necessarily incompatible with efficient and profitable everyday commerce.
Urban landscapes are neglected by landscape history. This paper uses the sub-set of Hertfordshire medieval towns to investigate the topographical characteristics of the most common plan family' of English town-plan types: the ‘street town’. It concentrates particularly on the influence of administrative boundaries and common land on the development of medieval urban topographies in this region. It then examines the characteristics of plot metrologies in Hertfordshire's street towns to suggest the variety of planning undertaken by overlords and individuals in time and space.
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the terms on which customary land was held in England were transformed from hereditary villein tenure into copyholds and leaseholds. Historians have been uncertain about the precise nature, pace and geography of this transformation, and, indeed, the variety and fluidity of tenurial forms has caused some bewilderment. This article argues that the original villein tenure was displaced by one of four broad categories of customary tenure, a process which began immediately after the Black Death of 1348–49, i.e.much earlier than previously assumed. These rapidly emerging tenures were more dignified and attractive than villein tenure, due to the removal of servile language from their conveyances, the growing practice of issuing of a 'copy' of the land transfer as proof of title, and the development of monetarized rent packages. The preference for life tenures in western and central England, and for heritable tenures in the south east and east, is already clearly identifiable by c.1400, and the reasons for these emerging regional patterns are analysed.
THIS PRESIDENTIAL address, originally entitled 'Is the Archaeology of Small Towns Worth Pursuing??, surveys the results of numerous archaeological interventions in medieval small towns in England and Wales, focusing on work published since an overview that appeared in 1985. Its purpose is to show the value of research on sites which are sometimes seen as unrewarding. The cumulative results of sixteen years of investigation have thrown important new light on urban origins; characteristics and definitions; functions and diversity; and long-term development.
The origins of the market are obscure, but substantial documentary evidence survives from the eleventh century onward, when chartered markets and new towns were established across Western Europe. The expansion of the market system is important for business history because it created new opportunities for business growth. There has been no systematic literature review on market evolution since Henri Pirenne and Raymond de Roover, and this article attempts to fill the gap. It shows that successful markets were regulated–often by civic authorities–to maintain a reputation for reasonable prices and quality control. Markets were located at both transport hubs and centers of consumption, even when the latter were quite remote. However, as transport and communication costs declined, shakeouts occurred and only the larger markets survived.
The descriptions of small towns in John Leland's Itinerary provide valuable evidence about their economic functions and fortunes in a period often categorized as one of urban decline. Leland described markets, ports, industries, buildings and transport links. He identified examples of small towns expanding, through new commercial and industrial opportunities, notably cloth manufacture, as well as others in decline, and suggested that investment by entrepreneurs and benefactors had enabled some small towns to prosper. These experiences reflected both the particular functions of individual towns and their role in wider regional economies.
On the Parish? is a study of the negotiations which took place over the allocation of poor relief in the rural communities of sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. It analyses the relationships between the enduring systems of informal support through which the labouring poor made attempts to survive for themselves; the expanding range of endowed charity encouraged by the late sixteenth century statutes for charitable uses; and the developing system of parish relief co-ordinated under the Elizabethan poor laws. Based on exhaustive research in the archives of the trustees who administered endowments, of the overseers of the poor who assessed rates and distributed pensions, of the magistrates who audited and co-ordinated relief and of the royal judges who played such an important role in interpreting the Elizabethan statutes, the book reconstructs the hierarchy of provision of relief as it was experienced among the poor themselves. It argues that receipt of a parish pension was only the final (and by no means the inevitable) stage in a protracted process of negotiation between prospective pensioners (or 'collectioners', as they came to be called) and parish officers. This running theme is itself reflected in a series of chapters whose sequence seeks to mirror the experience of indigence, moving gradually (and by stages) from the networks of care provided by kin and neighbours into the bureaucracy of the parish relief system, emphasising in particular the importance of labour discipline in the thinking of parish officers. By illuminating the workings of a relief system in which notions of entitlement were both under-developed and contested, On the Parish? provides historical perspective for contemporary debates about the rights and obligations of the poor in a society where the dismantling of the welfare state implies that there is, once again, no right to relief from cradle to grave.
Was there a growth in the proportion of the population living in England's towns in the later middle ages? Uncertainty about national population trends and about the taxation multipliers needed to arrive at population totals has made it difficult to answer this question. A direct comparison of the proportion of taxpayers that was urban in 1377 and 1524 suggests that the urban share of population was static or may even have declined in this period. However, such decline provides no simple index of urban prosperity or decay: a decline in urbanization could be the product of rural buoyancy rather than of urban recession.
English small towns before industrialization deserve our attention because they provided homes and livings for large numbers of people–a tenth of the population by 1300. Small towns, even those with only a few hundred inhabitants, can be distinguished from various ‘town like’ settlements such as industrial and open villages. They can be regarded as fully urban, and shared many characteristics with larger towns. They played an important role in the commercial hierarchy, and brought trade to the ordinary producers and consumers of the countryside. Small towns influenced the economy and society of their neighbourhood, not least by providing a channel for migration and social advancement. As centres of entertainment and culture they diverted and even civilized those who lived in and around them. Small towns were important for those who lived at the time, but they are also significant for modern perceptions of the past. Historians, through studying them, are encouraged to revise their views of government, economic change and regional differences.