Urban Government

Abstract

Great pains have been taken so far to impress on the reader that the town should be defined economically in the first instance, rather than as a legal entity. Some backtracking is now called for because legally defined privileges, even if only the most basic right to hold land by the more liberal terms of burgage tenure, were seen by contemporaries as a distinctive element of urban life. The emphasis now placed on the importance of the market as the basis of the urban network came about as a reaction by historians to the stress laid on the legal and constitutional definition of boroughs found in the pioneering works on towns such as Tait’s Medieval English Borough and Ballard’s British Borough Charters.¹ It has been demonstrated that to define towns in purely legal terms is not enough. However, the significance now being given to the role of lords in attempting to structure and control the urban network is a reminder that towns were seen by contemporaries as legally distinct entities. This was true of Anglo-Saxon towns as well as those planted in Britain post conquest and colonisation. There was a sense that the business of townspeople was conducted on different terms to those of the surrounding countryside. What were those terms? How distinctive was the urban community legally and administratively; in what respect were towns innovative, and in what ways did they act as a brake on social change?