CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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THE MEDIEVAL CITY
were the “burghs” founded in England by the Anglo-Saxon kings of the
ninth and tenth centuries. These were built for defense against the invading
Scandinavian peoples. Some completely disappeared after their
usefulness had ended, but others succeeded in attracting craftsmen and
traders by the protection they could offer and in consequence grew to be
important towns. In central Europe the eastward spread of German settlement
was accompanied by the foundation of urban settlements that
combined commercial and defensive functions. The foundation of
monasteries, most of them of the Benedictine Order, also provided nuclei
around which traders and craftsmen settled. The monasteries themselves,
together with those who visited them as pilgrims, created a
demand for goods and services that were provided by small urban communities.
These towns—Roman survivals, trading and monastic communities,
and defensive settlements—all had this in common. They were prefeudal
in the sense that they had their origins before the feudal occupation
of the land and at a time when there was, in effect, some freedom of
movement and the social restrictions of the feudal system had not yet
been imposed. They did not need authorization from secular or ecclesiastical
authority in order to establish a town, though this may later have
been requested and was granted in their retrospective charters. Such
towns are here defined as “prescriptive,” meaning that their authority derived
from long-standing usage. In few instances can one say when these
towns began, and when they first appear in the records, they were usually
already well established. As feudalism developed from the tenth century
onward, these towns were seen as anomalies, as institutions that lay
outside the feudal concept of society, almost as a threat to its well-being.
How then to reconcile the prescriptive city with the feudal view of society?
This quandary was resolved in two contrasting ways, both admirably
demonstrated in England. In the first, feudal authority might impose a
castle on the urban foundation, as if to keep the radical urban population
under control. In England and France almost every significant city
that had survived from the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods had a castle,
built usually in a corner of its walled perimeter. London may be the
best example, with the Tower of London within its southeastern angle
and bordering the river Thames, but the list would also include Canterbury,
Exeter, York, Chester, Winchester, and Norwich as well as numer-