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Urban Decline in Late Medieval England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

R. B. Dobson
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Extract

More than four centuries have passed since the famous preambles to the various Tudor acts for the re-edifying of English towns generalized with such unnerving confidence about the lamentable state of provincial urban communities in the early sixteenth century; but no historian today who has the temerity to walk through those still perilous streets can be under any illusion as to the continued hazards of such an expedition. Yet that this journey, despite its dangers and frustrations, deserves to be undertaken more frequently and more urgently than ever before seems very clear. Even the most optimistic historian must occasionally suffer some qualms at a situation in which the single most important issue in pre-industrial English urban history—the exact contribution of the late medieval and early modern town to the society and economy of the nation as a whole—seems to be becoming more rather than less mysterious with every detailed monograph and every new methodological problem. For here of course, much more in 1976 than in 1894, we are in the presence of one of those ‘burning questions in which impetuous economists have outrun the historians, and have not found it pre-mature to set in order by the help of accepted theories the obscure chaos of social history in the Middle Ages’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 27 , December 1977 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1977

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69 Statutes of the Realm, ii, 577; York Civic Records, i, 158; Seyer, S., Memoirs, historical and topographical, of Bristol and its Neighbourhood (Bristol, 1821–1823), ii, 206Google Scholar.

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71 I am heavily indebted to Professor Joyce Youings, Dr David Palliser and Dr Paul Slack for their invaluable criticisms and comments on an earlier version of this paper.