There are three criteria, economic, political and cultural, by which medieval settlements qualify for urban status. The first is that of economic centrality: a town was a place where non-agrarian activity was exceptionally well developed, that acted as a focus of demand for agricultural produce, and was consequently a centre for exchange. The presence of a well-established market with a community of artisans and tradesmen, able to attract visits by countrymen from seven miles away or more, indicates a town in accordance with this requirement. The second criterion is that of administrative complexity and structure. Towns were administratively more demanding than rural communities, partly because of their greater volume of litigation, partly because of the need for more supervision of the environment, partly because of statutory requirements to monitor trade from week to week.1 The obligation to control weights and measures, in particular, was an obligation to the crown that kings periodically pursued by sending their officers to test that royal standards were being enforced.2 This greater administrative burden sometimes increased the attraction to landlords of allowing townsmen a measure of self-government, but much depended upon the administrative costs to the landlord on the one hand (including, maybe, the costs of suppressing tenant resistance), and the advantages of retaining control on the other. In practice the administrative autonomy of towns varied very widely, being most advanced, from the late twelfth century, in the older and larger royal boroughs. The third criterion of urbanity is that of cultural diversity. Towns were more likely than rural settlements to have a polyfocal structure of social activities. Foreign merchants and artisans, both passing visitors and longer-term residents, were to be found in the larger cities. Amongst native residents, towns offered a wider range of alternative social groupings. The number of parishes was a very poor guide to the size of a settlement’s population, but older towns often had numerous parishes of different character, and the presence of monasteries, friaries and other religious institutions created additional bonds of allegiance.3 In the later middle ages towns were more likely than villages and hamlets to have a variety of religious fraternities, whose memberships had different social characteristics. Crafts, too, could also act as reference groups for those belonging to them if they were large enough to support a range of social activities such as providing relief for needy members, or praying for the souls of those who died.4
These three criteria indicate how an appropriate scale of urbanity may be envisaged and partially constructed, starting at the bottom with ambiguous cases of small marketing centres with no administrative independence and without separate parochial status, and reaching at the top to London around 1300 with its numerous specialized markets, its proud tradition of self-government, its foreign visitors and immigrants, its hundreds of churches and its companies, guilds and fraternities. The degree to which urban characteristics are identifiable is inevitably related to settlement size; they are most obvious in the largest centres of population and become increasingly hard to distinguish in smaller ones. This line of thought is worth pursuing simply because of the very wide range of places under discussion. Historians of medieval England describe as towns many settlements that would not qualify as urban in normal modern usage. Beresford’s study of New Towns of the Middle Ages, for example, includes South Zeal (Devon) with twenty burgesses in 1315, presumably with a population of around a hundred. The justification for calling such small places towns is that in the predominantly agrarian economy of the time they functioned as such by the economic, political or cultural criteria outlined above. They were distinguished by particular central-place activities, and need to be distinguished by some word or other from settlements of a predominantly agricultural character.
Considerable progress has been achieved during the last hundred years in exploring differences between towns and the villages around them, and in identifying urban origins and patterns of development. These discussions oscillate uneasily between asserting the separation of town and country and recognizing the impossibility of understanding towns outside a pervasively rural environment. Agricultural interests and concerns penetrated into the heart of even many larger towns whose inhabitants held much of their capital and employment in landownership and farming. An old town like Cambridge had attached fields that were administered in its law courts and over which its burgesses had rights of common.5 In many places such rights were one of the chief advantages of being a burgess, and the importance town-dwellers attached to them may be judged from their propensity to wrangle among themselves and with local landlords over unwarranted enclosures.6 Among the newer towns, by contrast, there were many whose burgage plots were laid out without any land attached, often as enclaves within the fields of an existing settlement. Their law court had no jurisdiction over property other than that held by burgage tenure. However, since tradesmen who prospered characteristically invested in land on surrounding manors, even towns such as these often had an agrarian component to their inhabitants’ incomes.
Historians have explored the tensions between the separate and the embedded qualities of town life in recent years in many contexts, and they are central to some of the most interesting and frustrating current debates. The extent to which England became more urbanized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the extent to which town-dwellers dominated the growing demand for agricultural produce in that period, are cases in point, since a lot hinges on what sort of community is reckoned urban, and on how distinctive urban demand was from rural demand. Another debate concerns the extent to which towns were prosperous or decaying in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and whether rural industry was growing at the expense of urban industry, where again the distinction between the greater cities like Norwich or York and smaller places like Totnes and Tiverton, is central to the definition of what was going on. Such debates have generated many excellent studies, but one of the most important lessons to be learned from them is that the large number of very small towns is a principal source of ambiguity, and that overstating the distinction between town and country is a recurrent source of confusion.
The extent of urbanization in England in this period was far from static. Anglo-Saxon urban development had been confined to southern England and the midlands, and there were still in 1086 few towns with more than a few thousand inhabitants. London was already England’s largest city, but probably had no more than 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. During the following two centuries towns already established in 1100 grew, to differing extents, while many new markets and boroughs were founded even in parts of Britain that had known no town life earlier on.7 Beresford has identified 170 new towns founded between 1066 and 1350, of which 145 were founded before 1250.8 Most, like Linton (Cambs.), remained on the fringe of urban status,9 but others - Newcastle upon Tyne, Hull, Boston and King’s Lynn are important examples - became trading centres of international significance. England south and east of a line from Exeter to York remained the most urbanized part of the country by any criteria, but well beyond that line local economies were transformed by the construction of new marketing centres. In parts of northern and western England the development of urban life was closely associated with the coming of Anglo-French lords who built boroughs to augment the value of their estates, sometimes in conjunction with the construction of a castle for defence; Richmond (Yorkshire), Barnard Castle (Durham) and Alnwick (Northumberland) are good representative examples with surviving castles. It seems possible that the proportion of the population that was urban by the most generous definitions (including many places of ambiguous urban status) increased from at most 10 per cent in 1086 to reach 15 to 20 percent around 1300.10
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by contrast, many towns shrank in size, particularly the largest ones, and some of the smallest towns lost their minimal urban characteristics. Since England’s population as a whole declined in this same period through famine (in 1315-18) and disease (in 1348-9, 1361 and in subsequent epidemics of plague, typhus and other diseases), a decline in aggregate urban population was compatible with a slight increase in its share of the total.11 The relative success of the urban sector of the economy was due partly to the ability of some towns to benefit from national and international commercial opportunities in manufacturing industry, though different places benefited at different periods. Mortality remained everywhere unattractively high, but in other respects the archaeological and the documentary record agree that most towns became pleasanter places in this period. Even where population had fallen, urban families were able to benefit from reduced pressure on space, generally fuller employment, higher incomes and better living standards than their predecessors.12
Medieval urban development permanently transformed the importance of towns, trade and industry in English society, both in terms of their weight and their spatial distribution. Manufacturing and trade came to account for a larger share of employment and income, and the administrative and cultural aspects of town life were also transformed, at least in the larger towns, through the development of distinctive institutions of local government. The structures of everyday life in late medieval towns were more definitively urban than those of 1050. The differences between towns with respect to economic specialization, administrative operations and cultural preferences had widened in the process, and small towns had come to differ more from large ones. That increasing variety of urban experience is one of the most rewarding features of urban history, even though it restricts the historian’s freedom to make sweeping generalizations.
World History
