9 - The Landscape of Late Saxon Burhs and the Politics of Urban Foundation

Summary

Those who were severely afflicted … [now] loudly applaud the king's foresight and promise to make every effort to do what they had previously refused – that is, with respect to constructing fortresses and to the other things of general advantage to the whole kingdom.

Introduction

In his discussion of Norman planned towns of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Keith Lilley has made the important general observation that town plans can be used as ‘texts to provide historical narratives which may be compared with the discourses of history offered by other sources and approaches’, and has explored ways in which the analysis of urban form gives a ‘wider understanding of the intimate dialectic between urban space and medieval society’. As such, it is seen as one of the keys to understanding political processes ‘which involved the conquest, consolidation and colonization of territories within frontier contexts’. While the expansion of Norman hegemony in England was facilitated by the creation of urban places largely through the agency of aristocratic elites, it is generally recognised that the creation of fortified burhs by the king in late Anglo-Saxon England was an important agent in the processes of political expansion and the consolidation and control of territory. Richard Abels has said of King Edward's general strategy in eastern Mercia in the early tenth century, that it ‘took the form of imposing the king's personal lordship upon the Danish landholders … who chose him as their lord and protector’, and he sees the burhs as prime agents in this process. David Griffiths has also commented on the role of burhs as agents in the consolidation of royal authority in northern Mercia.

For Lilley, new Norman towns also ‘reflect deliberate attempts at consolidating political control by encouraging local integration, partly through facilitating commercial expansion and population influx’. I have argued elsewhere that the same rationale can be applied to the function of late Saxon burhs as agents of the coercion and control of populations, to the end of putting in place strategic defensive measures against the Viking presence. This process, however, was not determined by strategic considerations alone.