English Provincial Towns in the Later Middle Ages
U rban studies are very much the current fashion. But gloom pervades them. Towns are forever declining from some golden age in the distant and undefined past. Crises oppress them. Insoluble problems sap their vitality. If they are early into clothmaking, rural competition presently overwhelms them. If they have urban neighbours these soon supplant them, only to be overtaken in their turn by some local misfortune, as we are told that sixteenth-century Coventry was,1 or by more general calamities. Once the theme has been proposed the evidence with which to support it seems to lie all about us. A grievance eloquently phrased, the lightest words of a passing traveller, a petition for relief acceded to by the king, evidence of falling property values or dilapidations-from insubstantial indications such as these, we may, apparently, draw sweeping conclusions about the economic fortunes of decades, sometimes of whole centuries, of urban history. No argument in support of this defamatory campaign needs excessive scrutiny. If Hull declines it does so partly because York's decline in the fifteenth century has dragged it down. But if Southampton declines it does so in spite of Salisbury's rise to supremacy in clothmaking and its importance as an entrepot for the region that uses Southampton as its port. Even Italian patronage of Southampton somehow counts against it. If certain towns are high in the tax lists that is because their tax is paid by one or two exceptionally rich men who happen to be citizens. But if townsmen are ever impoverished by the crippling obligations imposed upon them by civic extravagance that is because their rich fellow-citizens have bribed or bullied their way out of paying their share of a communal burden. If the towns are ruinous it shows in the decline of rents; but if merchants wax rich in them they demonstrate the quality of their commercial acumen by devoting substantial sums of money to investment in town property. "Those who