This conclusion provides an opportunity to fill in some gaps, and to examine approaches used by the authors of the chapters, using the various specialist branches of history that have developed since 1920 as a framework. This book is intended to develop understanding of Warwickshire’s past for both outsiders and those already engaged with the subject, but also to explore general questions which apply in many other regions, including those outside the United Kingdom.

Birmingham

The first objective is to draw attention to the importance of Birmingham. A celebration of the Dugdale Society should acknowledge the vital role that historians based in Birmingham have played in its past, especially in its early days. As Bearman shows in chapter 1, the Society was formed from an alliance between Wellstood in Stratford and a group of Birmingham historians such as Humphreys, Carter, Houghton and Andrews. They belong to the ‘expert amateur’ category identified in the Introduction as important contributors to local history throughout the Society’s century. In the 1930s, history staff at the University of Birmingham developed links with the Society, and that association became even stronger in the post-war period.

Technical reasons can be found for the separation of Birmingham from Warwickshire, not just in the historical field. As described in the Introduction of this book, the modern city has extended its built-up area and its government across the county boundaries into Worcestershire and Staffordshire. The city belongs only in part to Warwickshire, and became much more than a Warwickshire town as Britain’s second city, ‘a city of a thousand trades’, ‘the workshop of the world’, a centre of science and technological innovation, especially in the eighteenth century, and in recent times a striking example of multiculturalism.

Birmingham’s historians have developed interpretations appropriate for an urban centre that stands on its own, which have been called ‘Birmingham exceptionalism’. The city has been portrayed as unique, not conforming to the general trends experienced in other towns, and developing a special path in unusual circumstances. The first claim was that in its formative years, from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth, it derived strength and dynamism from the lack of restraining government. The idea dates back to Hutton in the eighteenth century, and was given new historical authority in the mid-twentieth century by Gill.

Knowledge and understanding of Warwickshire’s medieval countryside was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century. Dozens of scholars were able to make a contribution because of their enthusiasm for particular historical themes and ideas. They were assisted by an expansion of public funding in research, and also interdisciplinary approaches. The advances in research into Warwickshire’s history were part of a general academic movement to enquire into all sections of society, not just an elite, and to reflect current interest in gender and the environment. Much writing on the county’s social and landscape history connects with work on other places, including continental Europe. This survey will begin with the period 1920–45; followed by the contributions of the mid- and late twentieth century, giving special attention firstly to Beresford, Hilton and Thorpe; and then to their contemporaries and successors. The second part will relate the thinkers and writers to their own historical circumstances. The discussion is confined to the years 1100–1540, and the pre-Conquest period, though of great importance and interest, cannot be included because space is limited.

When the Dugdale Society was founded in 1920, Mary Dormer Harris’s chapter in the Victoria County History (VCH) on social and economic history, although published in 1908, still represented current understanding of the subject. She was aware of the landscape divisions between Arden and Feldon (Fig. 7). She reflected the preoccupation in her day with lord–tenant relationships by discussing villeinage and labour services, and the enclosures and depopulations of the period around 1500. She discussed the role of women. In its early years the Dugdale Society published documents useful to social historians. They included the lay subsidy (royal tax) of 1332, which contained information about the taxpaying capacity of a wide spectrum of society, and three volumes of the feet of fines, recording details of people conveying land. Court records of the late fourteenth century showed the justices of the peace dealing with violent crimes and theft, and also with excessive wages and irregular trading practices. History writing that could benefit from such documents included parish histories for the VCH by Philip Styles, though the volume for which he was local editor in the 1930s did not appear until 1945.

Historians should be aware of their own history. Members of the Dugdale Society noticed in the second decade of the twenty-first century that they were approaching the hundredth anniversary of the Society’s foundation in 1920. Everyone agreed that this milestone should be recognised, and various proposals were debated, but it was soon decided to award prizes to students and independent researchers, and to hold a conference. This event was intended to be a festive celebration of past achievements, but also an appraisal of the present state of historical studies of Warwickshire, aimed both to attract local people and to inform a wider public. Our resolve to embark on potentially costly events was encouraged by a generous bequest from our genial and always supportive president, Sir William Dugdale, who had died in 2014. After more discussion the theme of the conference was agreed: contributors would be invited, from the perspective of their periods and specialisms, to consider different aspects of the history of Warwickshire studied during the century 1920–2020, and explain how and why interpretations had changed. So the conference was called Warwickshire’s Changing Past, a deliberately ambiguous title covering the unfolding events and processes over the centuries, and the perception of those developments by modern scholars. Potential speakers were asked to send in proposals for papers, with the intention of including a wide range of contributors. A committee had the difficult task of selecting contributors from the many proposals submitted. In order to accommodate as many topics as possible the time allocated for each speaker was reduced to the minimum. A programme was decided and publicised.

The conference was to be held in May 2020. In March the final preparations were being made. So many people wished to attend that we were forced to put some of the applicants on a waiting list. Then COVID-19 arrived, and the conference had to be postponed. Eventually it was held as a virtual event in May 2021. All of the speakers making substantial contributions to Warwickshire history participated, and the event attracted more ‘attenders’ than would have been possible had there been a ‘face to face’ occasion. Another advantage of the new technology was that there was more time for comments and questions, enabling speakers to improve their subsequent written papers to take account of points raised. The technology worked well, thanks to the staff of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

This chapter will begin with a consideration of the variety of courts and procedures which regulated medieval urban societies. The different courts reflect the absence of uniformity among the towns themselves, which sometimes gives rise to uncertainties in defining towns and boroughs. Close attention will then be given to a series of court records documenting two towns belonging to a single lord, Worcester Cathedral Priory, with a view to answering the question, did the institutional framework of lordship reflected in the courts help or hinder urban development?

Historians should keep in mind ideal types of towns and boroughs, as long as these do not become rigid models: the exceptions and varieties of forms must be recognised. In the case of towns, specific legal privileges, walls, or a large population (five thousand, for example) are no longer regarded as defining characteristics. The essence of a town has become the existence of a permanent and dense settlement in which a majority of the inhabitants gained their living from a variety of non-agricultural occupations. Such places often had a sense of a separate identity, a distinctive plan with a marketplace, streets and narrow building plots, or an association with an institution such as a hospital or religious fraternity. But these additional characteristics were not essential. Doubts arise when we find a place with many crafts and trades, but with a majority of households occupied by peasants living from agrarian production. And though the size of the settlement ought not to be of crucial importance, can we really describe as a town a place with a population of two hundred, at a time when villages could have been three times as large?3 We are dealing with complex and inconsistent past societies, and we cannot impose on them precise and dogmatic modern schemes.

An ideal type of borough should have more certain and straightforward characteristics, because its privileges were defined in law. Even if the inhabitants had not received a borough charter, they would have understood that they held their plots by burgage tenure. The burgage plots would have been liable to pay a fixed annual money rent (often between 6d and 12d per annum), and the land would have been held freely, without any of the disadvantages of servility such as heavy labour services, tallage or restrictions on movement.

Chaucer, writing for an upper-class audience, satirises the productive base of society, peasants and cottagers, by idealising their frugality and sense of social duty, leaving the reader to contrast these qualities with their perceived selfish acquisitiveness. In dealing with the landed aristocracy, the poet criticises them (without irony) for their exploitation of their tenants, and reminds them satirically that the managers of their landed estates were cheating them. Landed magnates and gentry were engaged in mundane routines of land management, and Chaucer indulges their escapist fantasy of living in ideal places, man-made paradises in gardens and parks. The economy depended on rural production envigorated by commerce, especially with industrial growth after 1350. Chaucer, himself a townsman, wrote about the traders and professionals who functioned in a complex urban environment. He refers to money, credit and contracts, and some of his plots hinge on bargains made and broken.