Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T05:33:53.003Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Urban planning after the Black Death: townscape transformation in later medieval England (1350–1530)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2014

KEITH D. LILLEY
KEITH D. LILLEY*
Affiliation:
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT7 1NN, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This article offers a reconsideration of planning and development in English towns and cities after the Black Death (1348). Conventional historical accounts have stressed the occurrence of urban ‘decay’ in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here, instead, a case is made that after 1350 urban planning continued to influence towns and cities in England through the transformation of their townscapes. Using the conceptual approaches of urban morphologists in particular, the article demonstrates that not only did the foundation of new towns and creation of new suburbs characterize the period 1350–1530, but so too did the redevelopment of existing urban landscapes through civic improvements and public works. These reveal evidence for the particular ‘agents of change’ involved in the planning and development process, such as surveyors, officials, patrons and architects, and also the role played by maps and drawn surveys. In this reappraisal, England's urban experiences can be seen to have been closely connected with those instances of urban planning after the Black Death occurring elsewhere in contemporary continental Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 22 - 42
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Dyer, A., ‘Ranking lists of English medieval towns’, in Palliser, D.M. (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. I: 600–1540 (Cambridge, 2000), 747–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dyer, A., ‘“Urban decline” in England, 1377–1525’, in Slater, T.R. (ed.), Towns in Decline AD 100–1600 (Aldershot, 2000), 266–88Google Scholar.

2 Britnell, R., ‘Town life’, in Horrox, R. and Ormrod, W.M. (eds.), A Social History of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), 145Google Scholar. Cf. Dobson, R.B., ‘Urban decline in late medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 27 (1977), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Rigby, S.H., ‘Late medieval urban prosperity: the evidence of the lay subsidies’, Economic History Review, 39, 2nd ser. (1986), 411–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lee, J.S.. ‘The functions and fortunes of English small towns at the close of the Middle Ages: evidence from John Leland's Itinerary’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 3–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hare, J., ‘Regional prosperity in fifteenth-century England: some evidence from Wessex’, in Hicks, M. (ed.), Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England. The Fifteenth Century, vol. II (Woodbridge, 2001), 105–26Google Scholar; Dyer, C., A Country Merchant, 1495–1520: Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2012), 76–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Dyer, ‘“Urban decline’’’, 283–4, where Dyer maps this uneven geography, and identifies those towns and cities in England that grew and prospered during the later Middle Ages as well as those that declined.

6 Platt, C., King Death. The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England (London, 1996), 25Google Scholar. See also Palliser, D.M., ‘Urban decay revisited’, in Thompson, J.A.F. (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud, 1988), 1–21Google Scholar.

7 Beresford, M.W., New Towns of the Middle Ages (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 51.

9 Slater, T.R. (ed.), The Built Form of Western Cities (Leicester, 1990)Google Scholar; Baker, N. and Holt, R., Urban Growth and the Church. Gloucester and Worcester (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar.

10 Conzen, M.R.G., ‘The plan analysis of an English city centre’, in Whitehand, J.W.R. (ed.), The Urban Landscape: Historical Development and Management, Papers by M.R.G. Conzen (London, 1981), 25–53Google Scholar; Lilley, K.D., ‘Mapping the medieval city: plan analysis and urban history’, Urban History, 27 (2000), 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Conzen, M.R.G., ‘Town plans and the study of urban history’, in Dyos, H. J. (ed.), The Study of Urban History (London, 1968), 113–30, at 119Google Scholar.

12 Beresford, New Towns, 308. Morris, A.E.J., A History of Urban Form before the Industrial Revolutions (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Hohenberg, P.M. and Lees, L. Hollen, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, MA, 1985)Google Scholar.

13 E.g. the urban designs in Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, igegneria e arte militare, late fifteenth century: Biblioteca Nationale Centrale, Florence, MS 11.1 140c, fol. 87; Antonio di Pietro Averlino, Sforzinda in Trattato di architettura, late fifteenth century: Biblioteca Nationale Centrale, Florence, MS II.1, 140c, fol. 11v.

14 E.g. see Eaton, R., Ideal Cities. Utopianism and the (Un)built Environment (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Miller, N., Mapping the City. The Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

15 E.g. Nicholas, D., Urban Europe 1100–1700 (London, 2003), 62, 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schofield, J. and Vince, A., Medieval Towns (London, 2003), 37Google Scholar.

16 Hughes, T.H. and Lamborn, E.A.G., Towns and Town-Planning: Ancient and Modern (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar; Tout, T.F., Mediaeval Town Planning. A Lecture (Manchester, 1934)Google Scholar; Lilley, K.D., ‘Modern visions of the medieval city: competing conceptions of urbanism in European civic design’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 26 (1999), 427–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Beresford, New Towns, 307. Edward III's new castle at Queenborough was also under construction at the time the town was created. On the castle, see Brown, R.A., Colvin, H.M. and Taylor, A.J., The History of the King's Works: The Middle Ages, vol. II (London, 1976), 793–804Google Scholar.

18 The design and layout of medieval Queenborough requires closer study and comparison with other castle-towns of the fourteenth century, such as Beaumaris in North Wales, founded by Edward I. On Edward I's towns in Wales see Lilley, K.D., Lloyd, C.D. and Trick, S., ‘Designs and designers of medieval “new towns” in Wales’, Antiquity, 81 (2007), 279–293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Beresford, New Towns, 509.

20 T.R. Slater, ‘English medieval new towns with composite plans: evidence from the Midlands’, in Slater (ed.), Built Form of Western Cities, 60–82.

21 The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543 Parts IV and V, with an Appendix of Extracts from Leland's Collectanea, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (London, 1908), 88 (fol. 87b). See also Lee, ‘The functions and fortunes of English small towns’, 21.

22 Slater, ’English medieval new towns’, 63.

23 Page, W., Victoria History of the County of Worcester, vol. IV (Oxford, 1924), 309Google Scholar; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1467–77, 361–2.

24 Slater, ‘English medieval new towns’, 65.

25 E.g. Alnwick (Northumberland), Ludlow and Bridgnorth (Shropshire), see Lilley, K.D., ‘Urban landscapes and the cultural politics of territorial control in Anglo-Norman England’, Landscape Research, 24 (1999), 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Salzman, L.F. (ed.), ‘The borough of Sutton Coldfield’, in The Victoria History of the County of Warwick, vol. IV: Hemlingford Hundred (Oxford, 1947), 230–45Google Scholar.

27 Orme, N., ‘Veysey, John (c. 1464–1554)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004Google Scholar; online edn, May 2007 (www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28262, accessed 29 Jun. 2012). In an area where building stone was scarce, this provision by the lord was an expensive outlay.

28 Plan of a projected settlement near Calais, 1541: British Library, Cotton MS Augustus I.ii.69, reproduced in Harvey, P.D.A., Maps in Tudor England (Chicago, 1993), 31, fig. 21Google Scholar.

29 Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward III AD 1348–50, vol. VIII (1905), 32. A ‘rood’ is a quarter of a statute acre, equating to 40 square perches in area. Each granted plot thus appears to have been equal in extent.

30 See Lilley, K.D., ‘Urban design in medieval Coventry: the planning of Much and Little Park Street within the earl of Chester's fee’, Midland History, 23 (1998), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Alcock, N.W., ‘Queen Isabella's new suburb in 1348’, Midland History, 33 (2008), 240–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Demidowicz, G., ‘From Queen Street to Little Park, Coventry: the failure of the medieval suburb in Cheylesmore Park and its transformation into the Little Park’, Midland History, 37 (2012), 106–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. No vestiges of this new suburb survive, and no plan exists of it, but such is the expectation that urban planning in the Middle Ages produces regular forms that their attempt to conjecture a plan shows it to have a formal, regular layout.

32 Adams, C. Phythian, Desolation of a City. Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar. For the ranking, see Dyer, ‘Ranking lists’, 758.

33 Demidowicz, ‘From Queen Street to Little Park’, 106.

34 See Conzen, ‘Town plans’, 119.

35 A suitable starting point for embarking on a wider investigation of towns in other regions of England would be Alan Dyer's maps of late medieval England's ‘uneven geographies’ of urban prosperity and decline: see Dyer, ‘“Urban decline’’’, 283–4.

36 See Friedman, D., ‘Palaces and the street in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy’, in Whitehand, J.W.R. and Larkham, P.J. (eds.), Urban Landscapes: International Perspectives (London, 1992), 69–113Google Scholar; Baker and Holt, Urban Growth, 345–64.

37 See Campbell, J., ‘Norwich’, in Lobel, M.D. (ed.), The Atlas of Historic Towns, vol. II (Oxford, 1975), 15–17Google Scholar; Ayers, B., ‘The urban landscape’, in Rawcliffe, C. and Wilson, R. (eds.), Medieval Norwich (London, 2004), 1–28, at 23Google Scholar.

38 Hudson, W. and Tingey, J.C., Records of the City of Norwich, vol. II (Norwich, 1910), 52Google Scholar.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 On Bristol, see M.D. Lobel and E.M. Carus-Wilson, ‘Bristol’, in Lobel (ed.), The Atlas of Historic Towns, vol. II, 7.

42 Creighton, O. and Higham, R., Medieval Town Walls. An Archaeology and Social History of Urban Defence (Stroud, 2005), 202–4Google Scholar.

43 Calendar Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery), vol. VII, 503.

44 Martin, D. and Martin, B., New Winchelsea Sussex. A Medieval Port Town (London, 2004), 46–8Google Scholar.

45 This investment occurred at nearby Rye too, with construction of new defences and gates there: see Draper, G., Rye. A History of a Sussex Cinque Port to 1600 (Chichester, 2009), 30–6, 167–76Google Scholar.

46 Calendar of Patent Rolls 1385–89, 214.

47 Calendar Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery), vol. III, 425.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 See Lilley, Lloyd and Trick, ‘Designs and designers’; and Lilley, K.D., ‘Urban planning and the design of new towns in the Middle Ages. The earls of Devon and their new towns’, Planning Perspectives, 16 (2001), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Beresford, New Towns, 51.

52 Barron, C., London in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2004), 246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Henry V. A.D. 1415. Letter-Book I, fol. clii (Latin), in Memorials of London and London Life: In the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. H.T. Riley (London, 1868), 614–15. The text in Riley is in translation.

54 Skelton, R.A. and Harvey, P.D.A. (eds.), Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), 17–18Google Scholar.

55 For example, again in London, a map was drawn in the mid-fifteenth century for the purpose of planning a new water supply from Islington to serve the London Charterhouse, covering an area not far from Moorfields. See M.D. Knowles, ‘Clarkenwell and Islington, Middlesex. Mid-15th century’, in Skelton and Harvey (eds.), Local Maps and Plans, 221–8, Plate 19. The manuscript is Muniments of the Governors of Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse, London, MP 1/13.

56 Skelton and Harvey (eds.), Local Maps and Plans, 16.

57 Masters, B., ‘The city surveyor, the city engineer and the city architect and planning officer’, Guildhall Miscellany, 4 (1973), 237–55Google Scholar. For the wider administrative picture of London's ‘civic bureaucracy’, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 173–98.

58 Burgess, L.A. (ed.), The Southampton Terrier of 1454, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Joint Publication, 21 (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

59 Calendar Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery), vol. III, 724.

60 Lambeth, c. 1476, Corporation of London Records Office Bridge House deeds, Small Register, fol. 9v; Lambeth, c. 1478, Corporation of London Records Office Bridge House deeds, Small Register, fol. 10r. Reproduced and discussed in P.E. Jones, ‘Deptford, Kent and Surrey; Lambeth, Surrey; London, 1470–1478’, in Skelton and Harvey (eds.), Local Maps and Plans, 251–62. For the bridgewardens, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 50–1.

61 For example, see Söderström, O., ‘Paper cities: visual thinking in urban planning’, Ecumene, 3 (1996), 249–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (London, 1939), 287–8. On Cabot and Bristol, see Williamson, J.A., The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 120 (Cambridge, 1962)Google Scholar.

63 On Cabot's European network, see Guidi-Bruscoli, F., ‘John Cabot and his Italian financiers’, Historical Research, 85 (2012), 372–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Barber, P., ‘England I: pageantry, defense, and government: maps at court to 1550’, in Buisseret, D. (ed.), Monarchs, Ministers and Maps. The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1992), 26–56Google Scholar.

65 Ruddock, A.A., Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton 1270–1600, Southampton Record Series (Southampton, 1951)Google Scholar; Carus-Wilson, E.M. (ed.), The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Later Middle Ages, Bristol Record Society, 7 (1937)Google Scholar.

66 Skelton and Harvey (eds.), Local Maps and Plans, frontispiece. Of course, this ‘map of maps’ is inevitably only a partial picture, a map of map survivals.

67 Ibid., 15.

68 Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, 7–8; Delano-Smith, C. and Kain, R.J.P., English Maps, a History (London, 1999), 49–66Google Scholar.

69 E.g. the improvement schemes in Florence in the fourteenth century, comprising new bridges over the Arno river, and new fortifications: see Lansing, C., The Florentine Magnates (Princeton, 1991), 11Google Scholar; see also Goldthwaite, R., The Building of Renaissance Florence. An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980)Google Scholar. Similarly in Prague under Charles IV, an ambitious re-planning occurred from the mid-fourteenth century: see Lorenc, V., Das Prag Karls IV. Die Prager Neustadt (Stuttgart, 1982)Google Scholar.

70 E.g. see Keene, D., ‘Shops and shopping in medieval London’, in Grant, L. (ed.), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London, British Archaeological Association (Leeds, 1990), 29–46Google Scholar; Giles, K., An Archaeology of Social Identity; Guildhalls in York, c. 1350–1630, British Archaeological Reports 315 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

71 Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (1810–28), vol. III, 531–2.