The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Middle Ages: towns
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rural places, or than towns in previous centuries. Archaeology gives more depth on individual
sites, while documentary study is wider and is effective at the level of larger units such as street or
town. Engravings (for example, Figure 12.1) and other drawings by antiquaries of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries are often useful for reconstructing lost or destroyed medieval buildings
in many towns.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR
In the first half of the twentieth century in Britain, urban history studies were dominated by a
concern exclusively with constitutions and institutions; there was no attempt to think of towns as
actual places. Urban archaeology in Britain began immediately after the last war in the bombdamaged
cellars of London, Canterbury and a small number of other towns, where medieval
buildings and monuments had suffered destruction along with those of more recent centuries
(Grimes 1968).
By the end of the 1960s, many archaeologists were concerned about the destruction of physical
evidence for Britain’s history in towns. This resulted in the survey The Erosion of History (Heighway
1972), which drew attention to the ‘crisis in urban archaeology’. It argued that the most important
English towns of all historical periods would be lost to archaeology in 20 years, if not before;
half of the 906 historic towns remaining in mainland Britain were threatened with some sort of
development, 159 of them seriously.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, archaeologists widened the debate and scope of their activities
from being purely reactive to formulating strategic plans for individual towns (e.g. Carver 1980
on Worcester). In the 1970s, the practice of asking every developer to pay for dealing with the
archaeology of his site in an appropriate way spread from London and the larger cities to a more
general use everywhere (Schofield and Vince 1994). Since 1990, government policy has been to
insist on preservation of historic strata wherever possible, and rescue archaeology has diminished.
At the same time, the urban archaeologists have been digesting the vast haul of information from
the last 30 years of rescue work, and new perceptions of the medieval town and what went on in
it are being formed.
KEY DATA: SITES AND ASSEMBLAGES
This chapter will briefly outline some of the recent thinking and discoveries concerning planned
towns and planned parts of towns; urban defences; streets, markets and public buildings; suburbs
and the waterfront areas of towns; houses and buildings on the domestic scale; evidence of
manufacture and crafts; and the medieval urban environment. Castles, monasteries, and churches
in towns are dealt with in the following chapter.
Planned towns and planned parts of towns
From the modern street-plan of towns, or from maps showing their former state, we can identify
certain layouts that were shared by new towns and by planned extensions to existing (pre-medieval)
settlements. Three main variants have been identified. Firstly, in a small number of towns there is
clear evidence of planning. A chequerboard pattern formed by at least four streets and nine
squares is found rarely (Salisbury or Winchelsea) and must always have been exceptional. Ludlow,
which now comprises a grid of streets, probably grew in a series of stages (Platt 1976, 38–44). A
second grid-plan produced a ladder-like effect with two main streets in parallel (e.g. New Shoreham,
Melcombe Regis). Thirdly, particularly in the years up to 1200, an urban castle might dominate
the town plan to the extent of making it circular or D-shaped, following the castle’s outer defences
(Barnstaple, Pleshey).