In part III of this volume, towns are considered ‘small’ if they had populations of fewer than 2,000. For the early middle ages such a clear-cut division by size is both impossible and inappropriate – not merely for lack of data. During the ninth to twelfth centuries the urbanising potentials of a variety of places were gradually being realised in a range of different ways, and urban characteristics remained fluid. In 1200 Oxford and Cookham were very different sorts of places; in 800 they may have been quite similar. To apply a cut-off line across the whole period would be nonsensical, though the point comes when certain sorts of town (notably the planned and fortified towns in the tenth century) rise above the line and come within the scope of the previous chapter rather than this one. It seems more useful here to concentrate on processes than on size categories, and to treat the earlier and more modest stages of the urbanisation process as a continuum across these centuries.

Commercial activity is often considered a basic characteristic of urbanism, and it remains true that a place completely lacking a market is hard to define as even a small town. On the other hand, it has come to be realised that much marketing activity in early and high medieval Britain took place in pre-urban or entirely non-urban contexts. Sceatta distributions show that by 750, in southern and eastern Britain, exchange was taking place on open-ground sites and places of assembly such as deserted hill-forts; informal trading-places are now known to have remained numerous and important through the middle ages.

a framework

In 1300 Wales was almost as urbanised a country as England (Map 22.12). The current view, based largely, if tentatively, on the surviving records of a lay subsidy imposed on Wales by Edward I in 1292–3, is that Wales' population at that time was about 300,000 souls. It had about 100 towns and chartered boroughs, albeit they were on average smaller in size than those of England; only a minority is likely to have had more than 1,000 inhabitants each. The proportion of Wales' population that lived in these towns seems not to have been significantly smaller than town-dwelling proportions in England (estimated at 15 per cent) or Spain; fewer than one fifth of these town dwellers were of Welsh descent. Furthermore, in 1300 townsmen and country dwellers from Wales were regular visitors to the substantial, prosperous border towns of Chester, Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Leominster, Hereford, Tewkesbury, Gloucester and, by sea and ferry, to Bristol, whose own merchants customarily plied their trades in many a Welsh town.

Wales in 1300, then, was an urbanised society to a significant degree. This may seem surprising in view of the fact that Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–1223), who knew southern Wales especially well and had travelled widely through much of the country, implied that the Welsh population: do not live in towns, villages or castles, but lead a solitary existence, deep in the woods. It is not their habit to build great palaces, or vast and towering structures of stone and cement. Instead they content themselves with wattled huts on the edges of the forest, put up with little labour or expense, but strong enough to last a year or so.

geographical background

By the strictest definition, East Anglia corresponds to the medieval diocese of Norwich: Norfolk, Suffolk and south-eastern Cambridgeshire. For the purposes of this chapter the whole of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire are included (Map 22.10). East Anglia had wide areas of high fertility and a good climate. The long curve of its coastline ensures easy access to the sea even for inland places; sailing distances to important parts of the continent are short. Although there are many harbours for small craft, good major harbours are few and liable to be affected by recurrent problems both of erosion and of silting. In the early part of our period the configuration of the central part of the East Anglian coastline was very different from what it is now. A great estuary extended to within a few miles of Norwich which was probably the major port for the area. The estuary silted up and was drained in or by the eleventh century. It was this which allowed the development of Yarmouth on a sandbank at the estuary's mouth. Inland communication by water was of fundamental importance. The rise of Yarmouth and of Lynn is largely to be explained by each lying near the focus of a major river system. A lesser one converged near Ipswich. There is evidence that minor rivers were much more important for transport in the middle ages than was later the case. The road system of medieval East Anglia has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, likely that the significance of Norwich as a great hub for far-reaching roads is old.

The history of British towns is a very distinctive one in a European – even in a world – perspective. Until the eighteenth century most of them were small by international standards, yet in the nineteenth century Britain became the first country in the world to urbanise, that is, to have more than half of its population living in towns. The divide is neatly measured by the 1851 census, which showed (depending on urban definitions and boundaries) about 54 per cent of English and Welsh people, and 52 per cent of Scots, town dwellers. No one, therefore, questions the importance of British towns and urbanisation in the last two centuries, and it is indeed possible to write British history since 1850 from an urban point of view. For the pre-industrial period the subject has understandably seemed less important, since though southern Britain at least has had towns for most of the last two millennia, for much of that long period they were relatively small: relative, that is, both to contemporary continental cities, and to modern towns. Visitors from Venice judged late medieval London to be the only important British city, while Patrick Collinson has described Tudor towns (other than London) as ‘small-scale Toytowns and Trumptons’ compared to the great imperial cities of Germany and the Netherlands.

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.

numbers and location of small towns

A first stage in understanding late medieval small towns must be to ask how many there were, and where they were located. But how do we recognise the small towns among the thousands of rural settlements? Those places can be identified which enjoyed the status of boroughs (in England and Wales) and burghs in Scotland. But that can only initiate the inquiry, because we know that many small boroughs and burghs existed only in law and never developed into urban settlements. Other places, especially in eastern England, became towns without gaining the privileges of a borough. The clerks used the word ‘vill’ to describe both rural and urban places, and in doing so echoed common speech, in which a wide range of settlements were called ‘towns’. Without clear guidance from contemporary terminology, we must apply our definition of a town, searching for evidence of a compact and permanent settlement, in which a high proportion of the inhabitants pursued a variety of nonagricultural occupations. In addition, we might hope to find that the town served as the commercial, administrative or religious centre of its locality, and that it had the topographical characteristics of closely set houses, narrow plots and a market place.

Small towns are defined here arbitrarily as containing fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Places have accordingly been excluded if they are found to exceed that figure at any time in the period, but some of them did not remain consistently large. No lower limit has been imposed, though we would expect that most towns would be larger than the surrounding villages, and in practice the great majority of small towns had populations in excess of 300.

the nature of the region

The pace and pattern of urbanisation in northern England was more varied than the traditional image of an undeveloped backwater might suggest (Map 22.11). Certainly this is an area with a high proportion of upland over 500 feet (180m) and large tracts of uncultivated marginal land where economic activity was invariably measured lower than in other English regions. Yet, within a region divided north–south by the spine of the Pennines and east–west by the Lakeland massif and North Yorkshire Moors, the dominant characteristic of northern settlement history was its variety.

Both coasts are penetrated by navigable rivers draining large basins. The resultant landforms created different soil types which changed over comparatively short distances, to include thin sands and gravels, acid moorlands, estuarine fens, alluvial flood plains, the inland mosses of Lancashire and Cheshire and the well-drained eastern lowlands. The difficult terrain dictated land communications. These had been established by the Romans and survived for the most part as the only routes feasible: north–south on either side of the Pennines following lowland plains and valley routes (Eden–Lune), trans-Pennine across the south Pennines from Tadcaster to Chester via Manchester, north-west from upper Teesdale across Stainmore to the Solway, and west along Hadrian's wall.

The Cambridge Urban History begins with the seventh century because that was when permanent town life, on our definition, began in southern Britain. However, it would be wrong to plunge into the story of medieval British towns without at least some discussion of previous urban life in this island. The long Roman occupation of Britannia had entailed the introduction and development of towns on the Mediterranean model, and some scholars have argued that the occupation of some of those towns was never interrupted. The current consensus is for discontinuity at least of urban life if not of occupation; but no one doubts the importance of the infrastructure left by the Romans: the town sites, the road network linking them and in many cases the very shape of streets and town centres. This Roman prologue, as it were, is therefore of importance to later developments. Before it is faced, however, a little should be said of the possibility of recognisably urban settlements even before the Roman occupation.

Neolithic farming communities first appeared in Britain around 3500 bc, and by 3000 bc they were established in many areas. This development of settled agriculture led to the need for ‘central places’ and meeting places in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, though to nothing yet recognisably urban as it did in the Middle East at the same time. The Iron Age, however (c. 500 BC–AD 50 in southern Britain), witnessed the development of tribal states with, probably, some form of central authority, accompanied by forms of settlement which may be interpreted as genuinely proto-urban.

The south-west comprises the modern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. This region bestrides the divide between highland and lowland England. The majority of the region comprises the older, harder rocks of upland Britain, together with the more acidic soils derived from those rocks, the consequent pastoral farming systems, an ancient bocage landscape and a dispersed pattern of rural settlements. There are few large towns (Map 22.8). The upland moors of Mendip and Exmoor and the granite bosses of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor add transhumance and mineral exploitation of silver, tin and lead to the economic equation, whilst the long, indented coastline to both the north and south of the peninsula brought opportunities for fishing, coastal trading and links with South Wales, Ireland, north-west France and Iberia. However, the south coast is altogether more sheltered than the north with its steep cliffs and lack of inlets.

In contrast, Wiltshire, Dorset and east Devon are part of the lowland zone with fertile clay vales, chalk and limestone escarpments and plateaux. Soils are more fertile, the climate is drier, mixed farming systems predominate and nucleated village settlements are the norm. However, there were also large areas of lowland heath on the poor sandy soils of south-east Dorset, and extensive down-land pastures on the chalk of Salisbury Plain which could be exploited to feed huge flocks of sheep. Whereas water was in short supply on the downs, the opposite was true in the marshlands of the Somerset Levels which provide a third distinctive local landscape of much richer pastureland.

Few regions of Europe, certainly in lowland territories, owe their identities solely to inherent characteristics of soil, relief or people. The ecology has been unstable, not least on account of human influence. Long-term cycles in the extent and density of settlement, and some catastrophes, have shaped the ways in which natural resources have been used to best advantage. More intensive use has, through exchange, promoted regional specialism in production and culture, and has generated material and mental infrastructures which can persist through disruptive episodes. Political frameworks, power and tradition are products of those processes and at the same time strongly influence them. Language, for example, is a signifier of local identity which owes as much to politics as to inheritance or migration. Often, the regional boundary markers according to different sets of criteria will not coincide, even in a territory where the physical landscape seems well defined. Moreover, in order to identify the character of a region it is necessary to look beyond it: to other regions within the territory, nation or state, to influences outside that larger space and to the possibility that the region itself may straddle the boundary of that space.

Markets and towns play a central role in the formation of territorial and regional identities, and the following surveys explore that interplay over nine centuries. Overall the period is characterised by growth in the resource base, both human and natural, from a level which was initially very low. That development was interrupted by invasions and natural disasters, occasioning severe demographic setbacks, but there was a continuity to the process which is apparently absent from the transition from late Roman to early medieval times in southern Britain.

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.

demand for urban goods and services

There is a striking contrast between any analysis of changing demand in the late middle ages and that of earlier centuries. Changes in the period 600–1300, at least at the level of generalisation attempted in Chapter 5, may be summarised with the broad statement that the rising income of landlords, the growth of rural demand and the expansion of long-distance trade were all favourable to the growth of urban incomes over long periods of time. For most of that long period the evidence is not good enough for any much more subtle refinement. No comparable simplicity is viable for the shorter and much better documented period from 1300 to 1540, and it is difficult to generalise about the performance of late medieval urban economies with any firm assurance.

As in the past, the urban households of landlords often contributed a large and distinctive part in the composition of demand affecting townsmen. This was not true only of the small episcopal or monastic towns where it is most obvious. One of the most striking instances is Westminster, where the royal Court with its associated institutions of government, together with Westminster Abbey, and the visitors to both, generated trade both in Westminster itself and in London nearby. Besides numerous manufacturing industries that could prosper in this context, the victualling trades conspicuously benefited. The court and the abbey generated an exceptional demand for meat and so created local employment in grazing and butchering. Heavy dependence upon the presence of large households was the lot of many smaller towns.

At the beginning of the seventh century, nowhere in Britain could have been described as a town, a place with permanent occupants whose life styles were distinct from those of rural contemporaries. Urbanism had become established at a few sites by c. 700, but even thereafter its progress was slow and intermittent.

Although vestiges of an urban past may have survived in fifth- and sixth-century Canterbury, the new Church communities established inside and outside its walls after 597 did not stimulate rapid regeneration. An early seventh-century gold coin inscribed Dorovernis Civitas marks an aspiration to revive the city's status, and a valuable gold and garnet pendant and other objects have been found in extramural cemeteries and at intramural sites. Those who owned such things need not have lived within Canterbury, however, and occupation remained sporadic there, with one area that had already had post-Roman use even being abandoned. Sunken-featured buildings were still constructed in the style current since the early fifth century, but ground-level timber structures have also been found. Iron workers certainly continued to operate inside the walls, and another craft, pottery making, was beginning to become more specialised, but the quality of the local clays probably caused it to be extramural. Some demand for higher-quality products may have been developing, and the 675 charter reference to Fordewicum is usually taken to mean that a wic or landing-place was coming into use downstream from Canterbury on the River Stour at Fordwich, where toll privileges were granted in the next century.

As the chief gateways of an island kingdom perched on the periphery of Europe, English and Welsh port towns served a crucial function not only in linking Britain with the continent and neighbouring islands, but also in facilitating inter-island trade and communications. Presiding over this traffic and trade was a wide social and cultural mix of peoples: merchants and mariners, pilgrims and pirates, rich and poor, native English and foreigners who traded by coast and overseas, embarked for distant lands, fished nearby waters, built and owned the country's ships and manned the royal navy. While this concentration of distinctive occupational groups and visitors clearly differentiated seaports from inland settlements, so too did their special relationship with the crown, which relied on the inhabitants of port towns to transport troops and supplies, to collect the hefty revenues associated with royal customs and to police the staple system. Port towns also occupied a significant place in the urban hierarchy; eight of the twenty wealthiest English towns in 1334, seven of the most populous towns in 1377 and half of the twenty wealthiest towns in 1524–5 were port towns. In Wales, six of the ten largest towns around 1300 were seaports.

waterfronts and port administration

This chapter will focus primarily on coastal towns with immediate access to the sea, treating riverine ports only when they were customs headports, such as Exeter and London, or when they could be easily reached by ocean-going ships. Exeter, in fact, was a port town only in an administrative sense since it enjoyed no direct access to the sea, relying instead on its outport four miles south at Topsham, which itself is located at the head of a narrow-channelled estuary, six miles from the open sea.

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.

demand for urban goods and services

No definition of the word town is very convenient for the analysis of medieval economies. It is tempting to take the contemporary term burh or burgus as a proxy, but this needs resisting because there was so little consistency or stability in the way the word was used. Population levels might serve as a guide if they were reliably known for each town, but they are not. Differences of taxable wealth are on record, and for 1334 can be charted for most of England, but they depend upon the size of the assessed area and the social distribution of wealth to such an extent that there is considerable overlap between places with ‘urban’ features (craftsmen, traders, marketing institutions) and places dependent solely on rural pursuits. It will be assumed here, first, that a necessary condition for being considered a town is that a settlement should have some institutional apparatus for regular local or long-distance trade; from the eleventh century onwards this would normally mean at least a weekly market. Secondly, a settlement with this institutional provision is classifiable as a town if its income depends to a perceptible degree upon the sale of manufactures and services to buyers external to the body of townsmen. Buyers external to the urban community, in this context, may mean large households or bodies of administrative personnel adjacent to the town; describing such purchasers as external is justifiable because large households of all kinds normally drew most of their income from outside the town in which they were placed.

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.