what are the sources of a
medieval Towns?
Answers
Introduction
Our understanding of history is largely determined by what evidence of the past has survived to us, and principally by such of that evidence which is readily available and assimilable; that is, which has been published, analyzed, and interpreted by antiquarians, academics, independent scholars, or (especially in the Internet Age), unschooled members of the public. The process of publication – and I use the term in its broadest sense of communication from individuals to audiences through whatever media – sifts, summarizes, organizes, reconfigures, and speculates about the basic facts; this Web site is no different. It is a complex and highly conjectural process that can give rise to a variety of viewpoints, sometimes widely differing, on the subject-matter. Some areas of historical study are relatively focused, and so it was initially with the history of English towns, when the available evidence was confined to a limited and fairly manageable corpus of original documents produced mainly by or for the central government and from the observations, over the centuries, of local men or travellers; this pushed researchers towards study of constitutional aspects of towns, and encouraged interpretation of the nature of towns in constitutional terms. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw considerable efforts to survey, publish and analyze more documents from local archives, with study gradually extending beyond political history into social and economic history.
Answer: Medieval records, especially local records, compared to those of more recent centuries, tend to be either one-off products or incomplete, even fragmentary, components of what were once fuller series. The majority also are biased towards both administrative functions or preoccupations and a particular segment of urban society: the wealthier townsmen, whose existence and activities are far better attested and documented than those of their poorer neighbours; thus, for example, customs accounts, property deeds, wills, and even most records of civil courts cast a spotlight on activities involving the deployment of wealth. Despite losses from negligence, disasters, and thievery, England is quite fortunate in what has survived, while even losses are compensated for somewhat through notes or even transcripts made by antiquarians. Some towns now have almost nothing from the Middle Ages, but others remain relatively rich in their medieval archives. Yet it is not exclusively to the towns themselves we need look for documentary evidence.
Most such national documents involve record of some payment to the king, or the upholding, protection, or delegation of royal rights in which Crown assets were implicated. Less easy to explain are the quite large numbers of urban property deeds that have ended up in the National Archives, probably for a variety of reasons, such as that the properties were involved in legal disputes adjudicated by royal agencies, or the Crown may have acquired an interest in them, or simply that they came by a circuitous route through private collections. Modest numbers of original or enrolled deeds can be found in archives at all levels. Beyond the Public Record Office, the collection of the former Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum (now part of the British Library) and that of Oxford University's Bodleian Library are particularly notable for including numerous documents originally belonging to the corporations or citizens of towns, but which fell into the hands of private collectors in an age when corporations had little interest in old documents without day-to-day practical use and were casual about lending them out or pursuing their return; borough records have occasionally turned up in rather unlikely places, but it is hard to generalize about whether this dispersion helped or hindered the preservation of evidence of medieval towns. It seems likely that surviving records from the earliest period of borough self-government represent only a small part of what was actually produced, although both clerical and archival procedures gradually systematized.
The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, set up in 1869, published surveys of the historical records of a small number of cities and towns, often incorporating extracts; their reports helped spur on further studies utilizing some of those records and remain of some use even today, although certain of the records they describe have since been published more fully. Several of the researchers employed by the Commission, such as Henry Harrod, John Cordy Jeaffreson, Henry Thomas Riley, and William Dunn Macray had published (or would subsequently) catalogues or transcripts of the manuscript records of particular towns. At that period there was a good deal of enthusiasm, on the part of urban corporations, local history and scholarly societies – almost every county has had its own record series – and, often under the auspices of borough authorities, individual historians for publishing medieval records in their original language; the series issued by the Early English Text Society, Selden Society, and Surtees Society, for instance, have included a number of volumes of town records, while the London and Southampton Record Societies, and the Oxford Historical Society have been even more focused on documents pertinent to urban history. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries impressive work was done by some of the great names in local or urban history – Stevenson, Cox, Hudson, Bateson, Harris, Salter, to name but a few – paving the way for landmark studies of medieval towns in general, such as those of Green, Gross, Ballard, Stephenson, and Tait. This focus on issuing transcripts of original records has all but ground to a halt today, given the unfavourable economics of print publishing and the virtual disappearance of Latin from the educational curriculum; the current trend is to publish English translations of primary sources. Large amounts of primary materials remain unpublished (and therefore at risk, notwithstanding today's improved archival practices and facilities), including some very important documents.
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