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.
London's first charter of liberties: is it genuine?
As the earliest major document bearing on the history of English urban liberties, Henry I's charter for London has been the subject of much scholarly study over past generations. Its genuineness remained unquestioned until 1973, when Christopher Brooke, Gillian Keir, and Susan Reynolds, in a closely reasoned article, concluded that it was probably a forgery from Stephen's reign or a genuine charter of Stephen's misattributed to Henry I. As a result of their investigation, the subsequent literature on medieval English urban history expresses serious doubt that the charter was issued by Henry I. In the present article it is argued that the charter is almost certainly genuine. An examination of the manuscript tradition, protocol, witness list, and historical context leads to the conclusion that the charter was a product of Henry I's chancery and was probably issued in the summer of 1133.