Search results
This book is the first collection of translated sources on towns in medieval England between 1100 and 1500. Drawing on a variety of written evidence for the significan and dynamic period, it provides an overview of English medieval urban history. Readers are invited to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by a wide range of sources. The merchant, for example, is seen from different angles - as an economic agent, as a religious patron and in Chaucer's fictional depiction. The prominence of London and the other major cities is reflected in the selection, but due attention is also given to a number of small market towns. Occasions of conflict are represented, as are examples of groups and societies which both contributed to and helped to contain the tensions within urban society. Changing indicators of wealth and poverty are considered, together with evidence for more complex questions concerning the quality of life in the medieval town. The book moves between the experience of urban life and contemporary perceptions of it - from domestic furnishings to legends of civic origins and plays in which townspeople enacted their own history.
With characteristic honesty and intellectual rigour, Susan Reynolds has challenged the historians of English medieval towns to move on from the accumulation of evidence and ‘to think more about their reasoning, their assumptions, and the concepts that lie behind the words they use . . . . 1 She has not, herself, written directly about wards, whether in London or elsewhere, nor, for that matter, has anyone else except the indefatigable Webb partnership more than a hundred years ago. 2 Susan Reynolds’s own interests have moved away from English urban history
Venice. 1 C.M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages. Government and People 1200–1500 , Oxford, 2004, pp. 186–8. 2 G. Rosser, ‘Myth, image and social process in the English medieval town’, Urban History , XXIII, 1996
communities’. 29 Kümin, ‘Masses, morris and metrical psalms’, p. 76. For Westminster and the parish of St Margarets see Holt and Rosser (eds), English Medieval Town , pp. 228–9. For parishes in south-eastern England see Johnston and MacLean, ‘Reformation and resistance’. For a discussion of the profession
a new degree of historical rigour in the interpretation of objects, supported by an equal grasp of textual sources. 5 The individual archaeological find cannot speak unaided: what is needed is a contextualised interpretation. Such an integrated approach has informed the best work of recent decades on English medieval towns. Pioneering and exemplary in this respect has been the comprehensive survey of Winchester. 6 The
), Town Courts , pp. 176–199. Jane Laughton provided an overview of women in Chester’s city courts: ‘Women in court: some evidence from fifteenth-century Chester’ in Nicholas Rogers (ed.) England in the Fifteenth Century (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994), pp. 89–99. 3 On urban populations, rankings and the urban hierarchy, see Alan Dyer, ‘Ranking lists of English medieval towns’ in D.M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol.1 600–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge
. 135 HRO W/D1/13 rot. 10d. 136 Richard Holt and Nigel Baker, ‘Towards a geography of sexual encounter: prostitution in English medieval towns’, in Lynne Bevan (ed.), Indecent Exposure: Sexuality, Society and the Archaeological Record (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 2001), p. 205; Jones, Gender and Petty Crime , pp. 164–165. 137 McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior , pp. 98–99. 138 Jones, Gender and Petty Crime , p. 186
of popular culture see G. Rosser, ‘Myth, image and social process in the English medieval town’, Urban History , XXIII, 1996, pp. 5–25. 12 C. D. Liddy, ‘Urban enclosure riots: risings of the commons in English towns, 1480–1525’, Past & Present , CCXXVI, 2015, pp
celebration of Corpus Christi see E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992), pp. 43–4; M. Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 243–71; Rubin, Corpus Christi (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 213–87; Rosser, ‘Myth, image and social procession in the English medieval town’, Urban History 23 (1996), pp. 18–19, 21. St Margaret’s declining enthusiasm for the festival may reflect a broader metropolitical trend: there is no evidence that the famed Corpus Christi pageants, found in towns such as Coventry and York, took place in London or in a