Chapter X - BOROUGHS AND TOWNS

Summary

Whatever the difficulties of interpretation, the Domesday information for rural England is systematically presented and is remarkable for the detail it provides. When we turn from the countryside to the towns all is different. No instructions about towns appear in the preamble to the Ely Inquest, and the information presented to us is as unsystematic as it is incomplete. It is usually impossible to form any clear idea of the size of a town or of the economic and other activities that sustained it.

The Anglo-Saxon word ‘burh’ or borough signified a fortified centre, and the fact that it later came to mean town does not justify the conclusion that all burh-building resulted in the creation of urban settlements. There has been much debate about whether defence or trade provided the impetus to urban development, but surely both were important. The security of fortified centres encouraged trading activity, while, in turn, trading centres needed to be fortified for protection. Some sites were favourable for trade, and here burhs, or maybe villages, developed into flourishing towns – at bridgeheads on rivers, at the confluences of tributaries, at the crossing-places of route-ways, or near convenient gaps in hill country. Long before the Norman Conquest, a force had begun to operate which was to give to the English town its essential character – that of a trading centre.