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Urban decline in the later middle ages: the reliability of the non-statistical evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

S. H. Rigby
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Extract

E. H. Carr once admitted his envy of medieval historians who have a manageable body of evidence to deal with but found consolation in the belief that their competence was, in a sense, based on ignorance. Students of the English town in the later middle ages may soon be in the ‘enviable’ position of having no reliable sources at all with which to judge progress of urban life. The use of the statistical evidence of lay subsidy returns of 1334 and 1524 and the lists of admissions of freemen to late medieval towns as indicators of the prosperity of England's towns in the later middle ages has been questioned and the meaning of these sources is open to doubt. Yet much of the evidence for urban decline comes from impressionistic sources, sources which were often compiled by townsmen with a vested interest in pleading poverty in order to obtain financial relief. The value of this evidence has also been challenged.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 11 , May 1984 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

Notes

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57 S.H.A.R.O. 1/50 1498 ordinances.

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85 S.H.A.R.O. 1/50 1498 ordinances.

86 S.H.A.R.O. chamberlains' account, 17 Richard II.

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88 S.H.A.R.O. chamberlains' account 3 Henry IV.

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100 The original commission ordering the extent refers to a rental of 1280 but the 1492 jurors based their extent on a rental of 1286. S.H.A.R.O. 1/700/1 Bailiffs' extent book, f.l; CPR 1485–94, 349.

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111 MCB f.47; HMC Grimsby, 269–70. It was John Ingson, burgess of Grimsby who had had built the tower of St James in 1365 (Rigby, , ‘Boston and Grimsby’, 320Google Scholar). In the late 1470s the mother of the bishop of Lincoln wrote to the mayor of Grimsby urging him to be a ‘good friend and well wilier to the poor house of nuns of Grimsby’ whose income was in decline (HMC Grimsby, 251).

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122 MCB f.3, 17v, 79v.

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