For most of the period under review the data allow a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, approach to towns and, therefore, important issues such as the relative size of towns can be addressed only in an oblique fashion. From the late tenth century an indication of the relative intensity of urban development can be gained from, first, the coin evidence and, then, Domesday Book, followed by the taxation records. While the documentary record increases from the twelfth century, it is largely ‘external’ to the town itself and reflects the growth and interests of central government; historical evidence is, therefore, mainly concerned with the process of creating and administering towns. A major exception are the urban surveys which survive for a small number of towns and start in the later thirteenth century.

Much new information has come from archaeological fieldwork, but this, like the documentary material, has a bias towards the larger towns. The proportion of any town that has been excavated is very small, and consequently it is difficult to assess the validity of the sample. Excavated evidence can show the diversity of a town through information about the urban fabric, including communal structures such as defences and churches, as well as domestic and industrial buildings, and about the inhabitants themselves and the kind of environment they lived in. Where it is possible to draw upon the results of a number of archaeological excavations in the same town, aspects of the urban economy can be discussed, such as the range and organisation of industries and trading patterns.

geographical and geological setting

The history of urbanisation in Scotland is predetermined by the geography and geology of northern Britain. Often assumed to be a country of sharp divide between Highland and Lowland, its physical nature, however, is more complex. It was not merely the mountainous areas of the Highlands that were seemingly unapproachable from the more gentle Lowland terrain; but the south-west regions of Galloway and Ayrshire were equally divorced from the east coast; and the southern border region of the country, in its very lack of natural, physical definition, often had a somewhat different agenda from the other parts of Scotland.

Even a cursory glance at the west coast of northern Britain, from Lancashire to the northern Highlands of Scotland, reveals the linkages that were to dominate this seaboard. Travel by water was to form the easiest method of contact for the western Highlands, Islands, Galloway and Ayrshire; and the predominant communication points and influences for these areas were to be not the Lowland basin centred around the River Forth, but Ireland and the North of England.

The east coast, by contrast, used the sea to look to mainland Europe, and in particular northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Baltic. They were more approachable, in terms of both ease and time of travelling, than the less accessible parts of Scotland. Rivers, such as the Tweed, the Forth, the Tay and the Dee, all providing natural harbours, would become the foci for this contact. Perth and Stirling, at the highest navigable points of the Rivers Tay and Forth respectively, were to play crucial roles in Scotland's history; and Berwick, Dundee and Aberdeen, with their good harbourage, were to dominate the economic scene; but increasingly under the hegemony of Edinburgh through its pre-eminent port of Leith.

introduction: points of perspective

In 1314 the spire of St Paul's Cathedral in London was damaged by a lightning bolt. The repairs accomplished, a man clambered carefully to the scaffold's summit and replaced the great cross, charged with its precious contents of relics which included a fragment of the cross of Christ. From up here, one commanded a panorama of the city. The square mile of the walled area, and the straggling suburbs to east and west and to the south of the River Thames, were all displayed to view. The urban vista was punctuated by the towers of a hundred parish churches and a score of convents, whose smaller scale expressed, from the perspective of the cross of Paul's, their subordinate and ancillary status. Order was additionally revealed in a network of streets still marked by a grid plan imposed four centuries before by an Anglo-Saxon king. From this vantage point the city appeared entire, comprehensible and available for possession. When, in the sixteenth century, the first urban mapmakers were encouraged by municipal councils to publish such another panoptic vision of the city, they made the same climb in order to construct from steeple-tops the impression, before the possibility of human flight, of the bird's-eye, all-encompassing view. Bishop, monarch and magistrate each conceived of the city as a visible entity, conveniently subject to his direction and control.

proto-urban populations

In the early middle ages only a few rudimentary urban societies were to be found in Britain. Bede could describe eighth-century London as a market well frequented by its many visitors arriving by land and by sea – the reference is presumably to Lundenwic, to the west of the Roman city – and it is also known that there were extensive trading settlements or wics at other sites. By 800 Hamwic, Southampton's predecessor which was perhaps half the size of contemporary London, had streets laid out in a regular grid over a considerable area of some 100 acres (40 ha); it was fairly densely settled by a population living by trade and commodity manufacturing that could have been reckoned in thousands. Whether this was a settled community of permanent residents capable of evolving a distinct social structure, however, remains uncertain, and the casual manner in which the dead were disposed of may point to a society in which many inhabitants were transients and social bonds remained undeveloped. Other proto-urban centres existed in places with a range of central-place functions. Many of the former civitas capitals and coloniae of the Roman period became the setting for major public buildings such as royal palaces or important early churches, and in some cases an appreciable population composed of thegns, priests and their many retainers and servants would have gathered. Although at this distance impossible to measure, such city populations presumably totalled some hundreds of individuals; at a small number of central places the resident population could have considerably exceeded that size.

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.

introduction

These listings attempt to supply basic information which might be used to estimate the relative size and wealth of English medieval towns over this long time span. They should always be used with care and more than a touch of cynicism. None of the documentary sources was created to serve the ends which historians have imposed upon it. Early administrations were inefficient and surviving records subject to damage and omissions of which we are unaware. Political influence allowed towns to escape their full tax burden and other factors of which we are usually ignorant led to inexplicable increases or reductions in their recorded financial obligations. Urban statistical assessments are bedevilled by the problem of defining the area which the town may legitimately be said to have covered: in the lists below some attempt has been made to include immunities and suburbs, and to exclude rural populations beyond the town limits, but this is frequently impossible to achieve, and some of the smaller towns may well have inflated values for this reason.

In Scotland, as in England, ports were the kingdom's gateway to Christendom. Few of medieval Scotland's towns were, however, natural ports. Of fifty-five established burghs by 1300, twenty-three were located on inland sites. Although eleven others were on navigable rivers, most of these arguably owed their origins less to maritime access than to land routes which converged on estuarine fording points. Of the twenty-one coastal burghs many, such as Cromarty and Cullen, were of such minimal economic significance that they can be scarcely classified as either ports or towns. Even among those which did develop a regular maritime trade, the topography of some suggests that maritime access was of secondary significance to their early development. Although, for instance, noted in the early twelfth century as one of only three trading centres north of Forth, it remains uncertain whether Inverkeithing developed around the natural harbour at the mouth of the Keithing burn or around the main thoroughfare which was located on considerably higher ground to the north. A similar observation has been made of Crail and could be made of Montrose, where the distinctive place name of the harbour, Strumnay, suggests a separate origin from that of the adjacent town.

There were few exceptions to the predominantly landward vista of the early Scottish burghs. Aberdeen was probably one, particularly if the plausible identification of its early nucleus as adjacent to the Denburn harbour is accepted. Dundee and Ayr were probably others. These coastal towns were well positioned to exploit the commercial expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an expansion spawned chiefly by a new Anglo-Norman elite demanding the importation of wine and wheat and the more or less simultaneous emergence of large quantities of wool available for export to the Netherlandish draperies.

A century ago the most famous of all Cambridge historians of the medieval English town declared that he was ‘far from thinking that any one history should be told of all our boroughs’. In some ways F. W. Maitland has proved even wiser and more prophetic than he knew. For many of its readers this present volume may itself suggest that a truly unified history of late medieval British towns is an unattainable ideal. The more intensive the research conducted on individual late medieval towns in recent years, the more apparent seems the singularity of each urban place. Because of the nature of the surviving evidence, nearly all late medieval boroughs tend to be studied as if they were autonomous islands in a non-urban sea – even if in fact their insularity was always more apparent than real. The economic fortunes of all major provincial English towns, from Exeter to Newcastle, were dependent not only on external political, administrative and social pressures but also on all-pervasive networks of national and international trade like those which made them increasingly vulnerable to competition from London merchants in the years before and after 1500. Moreover, when one is able, only too rarely, to examine variations in a town's population and productivity at extremely close quarters during a brief period of time, what tends to be revealed is not stability but a situation of continuous and even alarming short-term volatility. It was only after the middle ages were over that new economic and political structures, and eventually the processes of mass industrialisation, gradually began to impose a greater degree of social equilibrium within what had previously been a more or less permanently ‘crisis-ridden’ urban scene.

‘Coming into Canterbury’, wrote Charles Dickens in David Copperfield, ‘I loitered through the old streets with a sober pleasure that calmed my spirits and eased my heart. There were the old signs, the old names over the shops … the venerable Cathedral towers … the battered gateways.’ For Dickens, and for the modern visitor to towns where medieval fabric can still be seen (such as Norwich, which claims to have more surviving medieval churches than any other town in western Europe), the built environment creates a powerful sense of place and a reassuring frame of reference. We can try to reconstruct the former townscape and delve behind it to study the relationship between physical settings and the attitudes which influenced the conduct of medieval life.

The construction of the built environment in medieval British towns reflected both social values and personal initiatives or personal monument making, be it repairing a bridge, erecting a conduit or adding a chapel to the local parish church. But the period was not static. Over the two and a half centuries covered by this chapter, certain developments and underlying trends can be seen.

During the medieval period, several features of construction and amenity first appeared in towns: jetties for the first floor and higher by 1300 (already in London by 1246), dormer windows by 1450 and the flooring over of halls which probably happened in profusion in towns during the fifteenth century before it was necessary or thought fashionable in the countryside. The underlying motors were the conjunction of pressure on space and the availability of cash, generated by trade and other urban pursuits (such as rents), which created the climate for innovation and display, both at the level of grand patronage in a church or the ordinary house.

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.

general characteristics and transitions

The many sources throwing light on the existence, function and significance of the towns of south-eastern England during the middle ages are, as for other regions, fragmentary and incomplete. Measures of urbanisation are crude and below the top rank of towns indicators of urban function are lacking. The contemporary terminology for towns can mislead, although in the South-East, unlike East Anglia, those settlements whose urban status achieved formal recognition broadly corresponded to those which can be demonstrated to have been towns by virtue of social or economic function (Map 22.1). Thus, much of the discussion is concerned with the 150 or so places within the eleven counties surrounding London which at some time during the period were legally identified as towns (Map 22.2).

This definition of south-eastern England, more extensive than that adopted in many regional studies, emphasises the capacity of the region for internal communication and for interaction with commercial networks overseas. The definition also acknowledges the role of London in shaping the region. Since Roman times London has been the dominant city of the British Isles and one of the most substantial in Western Europe. Yet over at least the first half of the period London occupied a site which was marginal in relation to kingdoms whose heartlands lay far from the city. Nevertheless, it was a powerful attraction and perhaps at times a seat of power shared between competing authorities. A continuing theme throughout the period, therefore, concerns London's integrating function, manifested in its special impact on the countryside and towns around it and in the way it gave shape to the English state whose capital it became shortly before 1300.

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.

The term “vitamin K” was first introduced by Henrik Dam in 1935, following discovery of a fat-soluble substance that could prevent bleeding (Dam 1935, 1964). During the years 1928 to 1930, Dam conducted studies on the cholesterol metabolism of chicks at the University of Copenhagen. The chicks were being fed an artificial, practically sterol-free diet to which the then known vitamins A and D were added. He observed hemorrhages (bleeding) in different parts of the body in some of the chicks that had been on the diet for more than two or three weeks. In addition, blood that was examined from some of these chicks showed delayed coagulation or clotting (Dam 1964). The low amounts of cholesterol and fat in the diet were ruled out as the causes of the symptom.

Similar observations were made by W. D. McFarlane, W. R. Graham, Jr., and G. E. Hall (1931).W. F. Holst and E. R. Halbrook (1933) observed that the symptoms resembled scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency, and could be prevented by addition of fresh cabbage to the diet. These investigators concluded concluded that the protective agent in the cabbage was vitamin C. However, when pure vitamin C became available, it was injected into the chicks and failed to prevent the hemorrhagia (Dam 1964).

Large doses of vitamins A and D (fed in the form of fish-liver oils) and commercial carotene also did not prevent the hemorrhagia (Dam 1935). Cereals and seeds did prevent the symptom, and green leaves and hog liver were found to be potent sources of the antihemorrhagic factor. Research groups led by Dam and H. J. Almquist worked independently to show that the factor was a new fat-soluble vitamin. Dam’s report (Dam 1935) was followed in the same year by that of Almquist and E. L. R. Stokstad (1935). The factor was designated vitamin K (Dam 1935, 1964). According to Dam (1964: 10),“The letter K was the first one in the alphabet which had not, with more or less justification, been used to designate other vitamins, and it also happened to be the first letter in the word ’koagulation’ according to the Scandinavian and German spelling.”

The extraordinary diversity of aboriginal food cultures testifies to the capacity of many combinations of foodstuffs to sustain human health and reproduction. From this diversity it is apparent that humans have no requirement for specific foods (with the qualified exception of breast milk, which can be replaced by the milk of other mammals but with less satisfactory results). Modern nutritional science has demonstrated that good health is dependent upon the consumption of a discrete number of biochemical compounds that are essential for normal metabolism but cannot be synthesized de novo in the body. These compounds or their metabolic precursors can be obtained from many different combinations of foods.

It is possible that there are still unidentified trace elements required in such small amounts that it has not yet been possible to demonstrate their essentiality, although it is unlikely that they are of any clinical importance in human nutrition. It is probable that current perceptions of the amounts of some nutrients required for optimal health – such as the relative amounts of various fatty acids necessary for the prevention of cardiovascular disease – will undergo further change, but the present state of nutritional knowledge is adequate as a basis for evaluating the quality of different food cultures in terms of their ability to provide the nutrients required for nutritional health.

This chapter evaluates two contrasting food cultures: the carnivorous aboriginal diets of the Arctic Inuit and the traditional cereal-based diets consumed by the inhabitants of Southeast Asia and of Central and South America. Also, the current nutritional health of these populations is evaluated in terms of their adaptation to a modern diet and lifestyle.