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

• 224 • John Schofield
particularly from faraway places within Britain and abroad. There were links with many European
cities and states, but one strong link was with south-west France (Gascony), which was part of
the English kingdom.
No more new towns were established after Queenborough in Kent (a special case, being a
naval base) by Edward III in 1368. At the start of this chapter, the period of economic downturn
in the early fourteenth century and the Black Death in 1348–9 was given separate status, and
since urban archaeology can most easily chart change, the traumatic changes of this period should
be apparent in the archaeological record. However, more fieldwork is required to test this picture
or up-and-down graph of fortunes that we have been offered by documentary historians.
The third part of the Middle Ages, from 1350 to about 1500, is poorly understood by
comparison with the earlier period, in towns as in the countryside. In contrast with the period
before 1340, this is the time of growing power of the craft guilds and the lessening of power of
the lords and religious magnates. In both large and small centres, the archaeological strata of this
later period are thin; the waterfront zones are increasingly unhelpful, as stone walls take over
from timber revetments and the dated groups of artefacts become far less frequent. It seems the
case that after the Black Death, because there were considerably fewer people in towns, several
processes took place. Shops disappeared from central streets; some houses became larger, while
the unwanted margins of settlement crumbled, decayed and were covered with their own version of
Figure 12.8 Torksey, Lincolnshire: an aerial view of the shrunken medieval river port, in an angle of the
River Trent (left) and the Foss Dyke (foreground). The town stretched from the Dyke to the later railway
line 0.8 km away. In its heighday, it had three parish churches and two monasteries; now it is almost all
fields.
Source: Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography; Crown copyright reserved