ORB - Medieval English urban history - Origins : problems of definition

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Introduction to the history of medieval boroughs

Origins: problems of definition

The origins and defining characteristics of medieval English boroughs have been for over two centuries, and remain today, a matter of debate among historians. The wide degree of diversity among England's towns, at all stages in their historical development, hinders the formation of a definitive, one-size-fits-all theory. Theory after theory has been devalued by pointing to particular cases which do not fit, or are even in opposition, and these cannot simply be dismissed as "exceptions proving the rule".

The issues of origins and of attributes are closely related, for part of the debate has focused around whether towns evolved gradually or were each a specific act of creation; the question of what characterizes a town (i.e. differentiates it from other types of settlement) would thus help provide a guide to when towns appeared on the landscape. It should be borne in mind, however, that definition, classification and categorization are the preoccupations of scholars – in the human sciences almost as much as in the physical sciences – not those of the people inhabiting medieval towns; indeed, the inconsistency in medieval times of application of "borough" or related terms makes the historian's task that much harder.

Let us first begin with what may seem obvious, but should not be neglected: towns are gatherings of human beings. Many great writers and scholars have made statements along the lines of "what is a city but its people"; this is useful in preventing us from focusing exclusively on towns as a more-or-less permanent collections of architectural structures with some kind of planned organization based on function and/or topography. Human beings are social animals who for reasons such as mutual support (breeding, feeding, protection) and territoriality are inclined to form communities. However, those communities need not take the form of collective dwelling-places of fixed location, let alone of towns.

It is tempting to think of villages as smaller, less complex precursors of towns, and to think in terms of when one evolved into the other. There are two dangers here regarding medieval towns (and some would argue that the same applies to the earliest urbanization of the ancient world). One is that it is not a straightforward division. We should rather think in terms of a spectrum along which lie conventional markers such as hamlets, villages, market centres, towns, and cities; as a related aside, it should be noted that "town" is strictly an English usage, sometimes applied as a distinguisher from "city", whereas for most other parts of medieval Europe "city" alone is usually applied to urban settlements of varying sizes.

It is human nature to take a spectrum and, sometimes artificially, break it up into distinct categories; this is how we reduce the world to something we can understand. In doing so we look for distinguishing points between cities and towns, or between towns and boroughs. For instance, it has generally been held that in England it was the presence of a cathedral that accorded city status (although Domesday could use the term to apply to county towns that were not diocesan centres), while some argue that cities had a more diversified class structure (insofar as one can talk about "class" at all in the medieval period) and highly organized craft gilds that were a political force. While it is useful to try to make such distinctions, they are just organizing tools, and we should not imagine that every urban place can be neatly fitted into one category or other, any more than we should pursue too far the notion of a rigid separation of town and countryside.

The second danger is that we – particularly in today's highly urbanized society, in which some of our key concepts (civilization, politics) derive from terms assuming urbanization – tend to envisage a progression that has both hierarchical and chronological aspects. That is, regarding the former, that the categories are distinguished from each other by degree (e.g. size); a useful yardstick to an extent, yet, as just one example of the difficulty here, some medieval towns were no larger than large villages – although neither by modern, nor by medieval continental, standards were any English cities besides London very large. Regarding a chronological progression, we might think that towns are likely to have grown out of villages. While this did happen in some cases, it is more helpful to think of both towns and villages as integral parts of a wider pattern of settlement and utilization of the land, emerging from a common environment shaped by economic and political forces.

Having acknowledged this, however, to understand the urban phenomenon of the Middle Ages we still need to risk over-generalization and the artificiality of classification by exploring some of the key attributes that might be considered "defining" of the medieval English town. Historians have approached this from a number of perspectives:

An early approach was to try for a legalistic definition distinguishing towns from other types of settlement based, for example, on special rights and privileges (or "liberties") recognized before the law, or distinctive constitutional forms. Since grants of liberties can usually be dated to a precise year, this approach often allowed for a clear marker of when a settlement acquired urban status. Too clear; this definition is now considered, by itself, artificial.
A similar line of approach has focused on both human clustering (i.e. relatively large population size within a compact geographical area) and architectural or topographical forms characterising the populated space, such as planned layout of streets, burgage style residential plots, protective fortifications, administrative buildings (e.g. castles, cathedrals, town halls), marketplace, or immediate access to long-distance transportation routes.
Another approach emphasizes the social forms, relationships (including differentiation of the inhabitants into "classes") and customs distinguishing towns from the (so-called) feudal society, and tends to portray towns as anomalies recognized by their own inhabitants and by those living outside as socially distinct.
More recent decades have favoured an economic differentiation in which occupational activity in towns was not predominantly agrarian, but the prosperity of a settlement was dependent more on economic diversification and particularly on a continuous role as a redistributor (i.e. market) of goods produced locally and regionally. Similarly, towns can be viewed as focal points for the provision of services, whether they be commercial, industrial, or administrative.

This 15th-century depiction of a scene from a continental city (probably in Flanders) reflects the diverse characteristics of towns: as a focus for habitation and social life; as an economic centre (note the retail stalls in the foreground, while within the tower a craftsman works to produce goods for sale); as a place of security and government (symbolized by the fortifications and the building-interior scene at rear).

All these theories have both merit and drawbacks, and we shall revisit them all in the sections to follow. The reality is that each of England's medieval towns had, at some point in its history, characteristics that fall into one or more of these categories; but the mix and balance varied considerably, geographically and chronologically.

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Created: April 5, 1999. Last update: March 21, 2000