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

Middle Ages: towns
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dark earth, the deposit normally associated with the Saxon centuries. Some towns, like Torksey in
Lincolnshire, declined to almost nothing; now they are largely fields (Figure 12.8).
Archaeological and historical work is beginning to suggest that the period from 1350 to 1500
can be divided further. At first, up to about 1420, urban populations reproduced themselves and
made up for the plague losses. Towns went through a period of self-selection, where one might
decline, but a local rival rose (Wallingford overtaken by Reading, Torksey overtaken by Boston).
The larger centres such as York, Norwich and King’s Lynn went through a good period.
After 1420, more general decay set in, and even the larger towns declined. By the early sixteenth
century, to take an extreme case, it was reported that a quarter of all the houses in Coventry were
empty. At the same time, there was a fundamental change in the trading patterns around the
south of Britain. The fifteenth century opened in a phase of prosperity for foreign commerce,
which had slumped to less than half of its former value by the middle of the century, and then
rose to new heights. The area of trading swung away from Gascony and Normandy, and withdrew
from the Baltic, to a more concentrated North Sea axis centred on the Netherlands. These changes
are evident in the character of imported objects on British sites. It was the port towns, some of
them growing new functions for the first time, that survived in good shape into the sixteenth
century— not only London and Bristol, but Newcastle, Colchester, Ipswich, Exeter and Chester.
We are at present only dimly aware of all the factors at play here, and regional archaeological
studies will show which areas retained vitality or exploited new markets. Even greater changes, to
the topography of towns and to the lifestyles of townspeople, were about to follow in the 1530s
with the dissolution of the monasteries and the religious changes collectively known as the
Reformation.
THE BRITISH EVIDENCE IN ITS WIDER SETTING
Although the rescue archaeology movement, in Britain and other European countries, has
brought about the excavation and interpretation of sites of all periods from Palaeolithic to the
modern, it has a special relevance for towns in Britain and for medieval archaeology. Urban
archaeology as a discipline has grown up almost totally since 1945. Medieval archaeology as a
subject has only a slightly longer history: in Britain, the first discussions of the concept date
from about 1940. Rescue archaeology has also been active in medieval towns all over Europe
(for examples of national reviews, see those for Germany and Sweden, in Fehring 1991 and
Esgard et al. 1992). Though archaeologists in European countries, like their British counterparts,
are now digesting the evidence of the last five decades, some common questions and answers
are appearing. A critical question concerns whether archaeologists in medieval towns should
try to apply theoretical models to their results, and whether these models should be derived
from historical sources and deal with historical problems, or should be constructed totally by
archaeologists themselves.
Did medieval towns advance the economic development of Britain or Europe? Some scholars
think that towns were irritants in the basically rural feudal system of life-control, and that towns
were instrumental in the campaigns for individual rights (first for men, and later for women).
Braudel (1979) distinguished between three sorts of town: the open town, which is still attached to
its parent agricultural world; the subject town, which is shaped by an external political authority (a
bishop, prince or king); and the closed town, where those within the town take over power for
themselves. Western European economic growth is seen to be pushed forward by the attempts
of some closed towns to increase and maintain their fortunes. This three-part grouping, which
could be applied to British towns, underlines clearly that British towns are part of a larger European