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
The bastides of southwest France
This paper examines a group of towns in southwest France founded during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Many of the towns were designed according to a regular, standardized plan. This paper studies these foundations as formal, historical, juridical, and political phenomena. Moreover, it proposes that the spatial dispositions of the towns be read as a product of the social relations enshrined in their charters.
Plain Tales from the Hills
Set in colonial India these stories date back to the late nineteenth century. The characters are transplanted Englishmen and their families who came to India during the Raj lived and died there.