Review Essay: Agents and Agency in the English Medieval City
Forty years have passed since the publication of Maurice Beresford’s magisterial book, New Towns of the Middle Ages, the first systematic historical survey of medieval “town plantation.” During this time new studies have shown how many of the towns that Beresford called new are, in fact, a product of longer-term growth arising from a process of urban formation that involved distinctive stages of development. There is, then, a less than sharp divide between the new towns and those many others described by some urban historians as “organic-growth” towns. As Lewis Mumford pointed out, a division drawn between planned and unplanned towns is artificial and should be discarded. There is no doubt, though, of the continued scholarly interest in those urban places described by Beresford as new towns. Recently, a number of highly detailed studies have appeared on the new towns in Florentine Italy, and the “bastides” of southwest France, for example. Work also continues on the new towns of medieval England and Wales, where archaeological and morphological studies have shown how the foundation of a town was preceded by trading and urban activity. A charter granting borough status typically came quite late in the process, even for those classic examples of English medieval new towns studied by Beresford: the truly “planted” town was relatively rare. Over the intervening forty years, historians of English medieval towns have begun to show that the process of urban formation was a protracted one, and planning produced towns and cities
Urban planning and the design of towns in the Middle Ages: the Earls of Devon and their ‘new towns’
This paper examines what processes might have been involved in the design and planning of new urban landscapes in the High Middle Ages. It does so by looking in detail at the morphology of a group of late twelfth century ‘new towns’ established by one particular aristocratic family in southern England. The paper seeks to encourage a move away from orthodox interpretations of medieval urban forms, and challenges the view that irregularities in plan-form signify a lack of planning.
Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination
List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on editions and abbreviations used Introduction: Dickens and the popular radical imagination 1. Popular radical culture in Regency England: Peterloo and The Queen Caroline Affair 2. Dickens and nineteenth-century show trials 3. Dickens, popular culture and popular politics in the 1830s: Oliver Twist 4. Christmas is cancelled: Dickens and Douglas Jerrold writing the 1840s 5. Popular and political writing in the radical press: from Douglas Jerrold to Ernest Jones, Chartist 6. Household Words, politics and the mass market in the 1850s 7. Flunkeyism and toadyism in the age of machinery: from Bleak House to Little Dorrit Notes Bibliography Index.