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

• 214 • John Schofield
A second group of apparently planned elements were more irregular, and concern the emphasis
placed upon the market, especially as defensive considerations declined during the thirteenth
century. Markets might be in the main street, causing its edges to bulge into a cigar-shape, or the
meeting of two or three ways might produce a triangular space. These two market-forms are very
common in towns, and one might ask what, if any, deliberate policy of planning they represent,
apart from the initial decision to start the market.
Ideas of what may be termed medieval town planning are most evident in the new towns
associated with Edward I. In the north at Berwick, and in Wales at Flint, Conwy and Caernarvon,
he hoped both to keep the peace by establishing garrison towns but also to encourage it by
promoting ports and markets, incidentally ensuring effective markets to feed the garrisons. These
towns were therefore military units in which castle and borough were designed as a single concept.
The castles have survived well in these Welsh towns, but unfortunately there is little evidence at
present for ordinary houses in these specialized places; we have to look to contemporary
foundations in Gascony in France, where there are many English and French towns called bastides,
in which the medieval fabric survives to be studied.
Many town plans were composed of a series of topographical units of different periods. The
clearest examples are those towns of great age, such as Abergavenny, Doncaster, Godmanchester
and Hereford, but the apparent homogeneity of planned towns should also be regarded with
caution. New towns might have been laid out systematically at first, but soon spilled over and
developed their own idiosyncracies. In addition, as demonstrated in many ‘planned’ cases, the
units of new settlement were based on field boundaries and ridges, as in the twelfth century at
Stratford and Lichfield. In Scotland, cumulative phases of settlement from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries and later are suggested at Perth by analysis of street-blocks and plot widths.
The emphasis of wider European studies (Clarke and Simms 1985) has also been to emphasize
the cumulative character of town plans, often with many stages from a Dark Age or Carolingian
fortified centre, through markets, extensions and suburbs, to the fully expanded city of Renaissance
times.
Urban defences
The best way to understand a town’s topography is to start with the outer boundary. Defences
signified the town limits and the size or the intended size of the settlement. Extensions to circuits
might therefore be caused by growth of population or expansion of building beyond original
boundaries, as at Abergavenny, Bridgnorth and Southampton in the thirteenth century, or Cardiff
and Pembroke in the fourteenth century. Only Bristol, Lincoln, Norwich and York developed
extensions in several directions, which resemble the concentric rings of defences seen in continental
cities, though there may be more examples to be identified. Rebuilding the defences to define a
smaller area than before, which presumably reflects urban decay or retrenchment, is rare, but
there are examples at New Winchelsea, where the defences in 1414–15 reduced the area of the
town, and at Berwick-on-Tweed, where the Elizabethan circuit covered only two-thirds of the
area of the fourteenth-century town. Alternatively, city walls might be built, or lines of defence
strengthened, by joining together existing lines of the walls of stone houses and blocking up
openings such as doors and windows, as is documented at Southampton and Edinburgh.
Roman defensive circuits were reused by medieval towns on the same sites, for instance at
Canterbury, Lincoln, London and York. The walls were of masonry, and the surviving Roman
gates formidable structures, so that it was usual for medieval gates to occupy the same sites as
their Roman predecessors. At other towns, a defensive circuit originally of Anglo-Saxon date
was partly or wholly reused by the medieval town, as at Barnstaple, Bridgnorth, Oxford or
Totnes.