When, during the reign of Richard III, the civic government of Lincoln complained that the ‘decay and dystruccion of youre seyd pore Cite’, which in ‘aunciaunt tyme’ had been frequented by ‘Merchantez’ who ‘bought, and bartered wythin the seyd Cite with cloth, whereupon … [there] usede [to be] grete cloth makyng, and the people putt in occupation, wherby many … placez were inhabett that is nowe playne felde …’, they did a great disservice to their institutional forbears. Whilst it remained true that by this period the city had fewer inhabitants than in times past due to successive bouts of plague, the petition nevertheless glossed over the efforts of preceding generations to provide solutions to the decline of the once dominant textile industry. In particular, following its initial contraction in the thirteenth century, the city quickly established itself as a major centre for the wool trade, while after its re-emergence and subsequent decline in the second half of the fourteenth century, Lincoln saw commensurate growth in the service and agricultural sectors. Of course, it is to be remembered that the supplicatory tone and exaggerated nature of petitions such as this were intentional, and it would be egregious to suggest that the civic authorities were not unaware of these developments when they drafted the petition. Certainly, as the evidence for the later fourteenth century indicates, the local civic authorities were highly sensitive to changes in local and national politics. Considered in this way, this episode serves as a useful analogy for reviewing the two main conclusions of this study.

The first is that the relationship between royal towns and the crown remains central not only for understanding how local attitudes towards power and authority were defined but for exploring the social and economic experiences of individual towns more generally. The clearest illustration of this is the restitution of Lincoln's civil liberties in 1299, which set the tone for many of the developments of the following century. Not only did the intervention of the crown prompt the introduction of new rules for governing the town but it provided a solid platform for ‘new men’ to emerge, many of whom, unburdened by the political follies of the recent past, held links to the growing indigenous wool trade.