The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Middle Ages: towns
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English and French kingdoms) and along the Baltic coast. Towns were valuable pieces of property,
for the lord gained revenue from the court, tolls on merchandise, and from the demands of the
market which benefited his own rural manors in the surrounding countryside (Platt 1978, 30–90).
The main stimulus for economic growth in small towns may have been the needs of a local lord.
Country landowners and religious houses acquired properties in the ports, where they could
trade with the surplus of their own manors and farms, and have access to the market in imported
luxuries.
In this early phase, the merchants of many small British towns participated in overseas trade,
and London’s dominance was largely a thing of the future. Ships still came to the river-ports of
York, Lincoln, Norwich, Gloucester and Chester. Wine from the English lands in Gascony (southwest
France) came to Boston in Lincolnshire; wool exports through the town rivalled those of
the capital. Along the eastern and southern coasts, small and medium-sized towns fed their regions
with imports, and shipped out the local produce. By the twelfth century, however, London was
the primary distribution centre for inland trade, and its size and wealth began to dominate southeast
England.
In Wales, by 1135, a boundary zone of castles and nascent towns had been established along
the Marches from Cardiff to Chester. Towns flourished particularly in south Wales during the
eleventh and twelfth centuries: places like Monmouth, Cardiff, Abergavenny, Brecon (where the
first civil town was laid out in the castle bailey, a pattern found elsewhere in the Welsh zone),
Carmarthen and Pembroke. This southern group was complemented by a second wave of fortress
towns added in the north and west by Edward I’s campaigns in the 1270s; the many medieval cellars
of Chester probably date from this period, as the town became a supply base for the royal army.
In Scotland, by the eleventh century, there were also political and economic systems that
could organize and support substantial centres of population, but urban history is obscure before
the widespread introduction of the ‘burgh’ and its privileges by King David I (1124–53) and his
successors. Some towns, like Edinburgh and Stirling, grew next to citadels, while others, such as
Lanark, Selkirk and Dunfermline, are on unprotected sites.
In England, towards the end of the thirteenth century, there are signs of economic strain and
social tensions, at least in the larger towns. The most important single industry was the making of
cloth, but in the thirteenth century, in the face of the highly urbanized Flemish industry, England
became an exporter of wool. Times were good, and many towns were established and prospered;
the population rose in towns and in the countryside. Around 1300, however, fortunes changed.
Crop failures and cattle disease caused widespread famines in 1315–25; a 50 per cent drop in
production brought a 400 per cent increase in grain prices. England was at war with Scotland and
from 1337 with France, which resulted in heavy taxes to pay for the king’s campaigns. The Black
Death of 1348, a Europe-wide epidemic of bubonic plague, was the coup de grâce to a country
already weakened by political problems and natural disasters.
During the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cloth went back to replacing wool as England’s
main export. By 1500, the bulk of the country’s overseas trade was in English hands; so was the
transformation of raw materials into finished products. Many towns, however, some sooner than
others, went into decline. At Nottingham in 1376, houses were falling into decay; Bedford and
Warwick similarly stagnated. At York around 1400, the textile industry was flourishing and the
town’s merchants engaged in overseas trade through the nearby port of Hull, but within 30 years,
the textile industry had migrated to the countryside and wool exports had slumped. Hull could
not compensate by more exports of cloth, for it faced Hanseatic opposition in the Baltic and
London’s interests in Flanders. Lincoln was declining more rapidly, initially from the effect of the
plague and then from problems with its vital waterways, the Fosdyke to the Trent and the Witham
to Boston.