CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

14
THE MEDIEVAL CITY
to other lords who supposed that if they also granted charters and laid
out the streets of a new town they too would reap a steady income just
as the lord of Totnes was doing. First came the borough of Bridgetown,
at the distant end of the bridge across the river Dart. It achieved a very
modest success at first, but then decayed and is today represented only
by a small cluster of houses. Another attempt at town foundation was located
a mile or so to the north. It was entirely unsuccessful, and no town
ever materialized. The amount of business available in this part of Devon
was not adequate for two incorporated boroughs, let alone for three.
In England, where government was more centralized and more effective
than in almost any other part of Europe, it became the practice for
the king to authorize the establishment of a town or market and fair. Before
he did so, however, the king usually instituted an inquiry known as
ad quod damnum. It asked the simple question: what harm might the proposed
market do to the trade and profitability of markets already in existence?
Only if there would be none was the proposed market, in theory
at least, allowed to proceed. In continental Europe the same practice
broadly prevailed. Market and fairs were established and given protection
by territorial lords who profited from their activities. It became the
general rule that no town could be founded closer to another existing
town than a day’s market journey (see p. 71).
Those who granted charters of foundation to medieval towns can have
had little knowledge of the theoretical basis of their distribution. Only
by a prolonged process of trial and error did they learn that some towns
would fail if they were too closely spaced or if located in unproductive
areas incapable of generating any significant trade. Yet hope springs eternal,
and the tally of unsuccessful and failed towns runs to hundreds. Nor
did they understand the institutions and infrastructure that made for a
successful town. In this they looked to those that had—fortuitously perhaps—achieved
a measure of success and imitated their practices or
“laws.” Many towns in England adopted the “Laws” of Breteuil, a small
town in upper Normandy, which seemed to the Norman invaders of England
to have achieved a certain degree of success. (See “Biographies and
Places,” pp. 174–75.)
The biggest wave of town foundations during the Middle Ages was in
central and eastern Europe. Here it was part of the eastward progression
of German-speaking peoples from the Elbe Valley to that of the Oder,