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Towns in societies–medieval England1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Rodney Hilton
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Extract

There is an old historical tradition which saw the towns in the middle ages as being an antagonistic element within the whole society which was seen—quite rightly of course—as being predominantly rural and agricultural. Put in more abstract terms the agrarian economy was seen as a natural economy and as such incompatible with the exchange economy of the towns. This simplistic vision could hardly stand the test of empirical investigation since clearly the urban and rural economies could not operate independently of each other. More sophisticated writers indeed saw the towns, not as an antagonistic element but as innovatory. The towns were literally responsible for a civilizing process. They sowed the seeds of the future in the not always receptive soil of feudal society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 9 , May 1982 , pp. 7 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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Footnotes

1

Delivered as a lecture to the annual conference of the Urban History Group, University of Loughborough, 3 April 1981.

References

2 Not that late Anglo-Saxon England was under-urbanized compared with other states in north-western Europe. Domesday Book, which has no continental rival, shows this very well.

3 We must not, of course, forget the informal market constituted by the buying and selling of goods between neighbours. But this was not sufficient to modify the picture of a peasantry providing its subsistence needs from its own holdings.

4 But gentry occupation of urban dwelling would be an interesting subject to explore further.

5 See the tables in the introduction to ‘English medieval boroughs: a handlist’, by M. Beresford and H. P. R. Finberg (1973), and Urban History Yearbook (1981), 59–61.Google Scholar

6 Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme (1978), 20.Google Scholar The American translation (The Three Orders, feudal society imagined) deforms this statement, pp 8–9, perhaps by a printing error.