Heather Swanson's new book dealing with medieval British towns appears as part of the Social History in Perspective series co-published by St. Martin's Press in the United States and MacMillan Press in the United Kingdom. The series is oriented primarily to the undergraduate textbook market, generating works that are short, synthetic summaries of broad fields of research rather than research monographs. Developing a coherent and reasonably comprehensive summary of some 400 years of British urban history in less than 150 pages of text is a daunting task, but Swanson manages to do so with great success, producing a work that speaks to advanced scholars in the field without ever forgetting that undergraduates constitute its primary market. This book can be profitably read by anyone who wants a short, stimulating introduction to the history of medieval British towns, or by anyone who wants to catch up on the literature of a field that has seen prolific publication in the past decade or so. It does not aim to provide bold reinterpretations of contentious areas currently debated by specialists, but it does provide a judicious synopsis of such areas, based on an intimate familiarity with the literature of the field and the principal sources which underpin it. Swanson begins her book with a discussion of the chronological and geographical parameters of her field: when and where did towns emerge in Britain, and how did they change over time? With respect to urban origins, she follows the arguments of Duby and Hilton in emphasizing the role of lordship as the impetus towards urbanization in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Lords' demands for cash rents pushed peasant producers to engage in market transactions that were concentrated in the nascent towns, while their concomitant appetite for the finer things in life also created a market for merchants based in the towns. She suggests, too, that the disposition of tithes by the Church may have been a significant part of the growth of urban commercial activity in this early period, a topic that deserves much more attention from specialists than it has hitherto received. English towns developed earlier than those in other parts of Britain, a reflection, Swanson argues, of the earlier and more extensive development of lordship there. This chronological divergence tended to hold true through subsequent periods as well. While English towns underwent rapid economic, demographic, and institutional expansion in the high Middle Ages, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish towns continued to be relatively small and poor, with a more muted impact on their respective societies. By the later Middle Ages, Scottish towns had begun to approximate more closely the roles played by English towns, but they still lacked the institutional sophistication and economic clout of their southern counterparts. In assessing this later period, Swanson notes that many English towns experienced difficulties, but she rejects the notion that urban decay was the norm, arguing for a model of "realignment" rather than widespread decay.
Following this chronological and geographical orientation to the subject, Swanson presents three thematic chapters that constitute the core of the book. These deal in turn with the nature of urban economy, the structures of urban political life, and the dynamics of urban society, each chapter providing an excellent overview of the main issues addressed by recent scholarship. Her discussion of urban economy presents the development of towns as a facet of the broader commercialization of English society in the period, encompassing developments in the countryside as well as in the towns. She tentatively endorses the use of central-place theory as a meaningful tool for the analysis of the economic role of towns, suggesting that towns derived their importance primarily from their ability to articulate effectively the activities of the widely disparate commercial agents and venues that characterized the medieval world. Internally, she suggests that the economies of most medieval towns were oriented towards three main activities: marketing, manufacturing, and service. She shies away from giving a precise breakdown of these different sectors of the economy, as several other historians have recently attempted to do, emphasizing instead the preeminence enjoyed by those who succeeded in commerce over those who succeeded in manufacturing or service categories. She concludes with an appraisal of the forces for economic realignment in the later Middle Ages, contending that prospering towns managed to integrate production and trade in their regional hinterlands with the export market in cloth, while floundering towns either failed to integrate their hinterlands effectively or failed to tap into the export trade.
Swanson's discussion of the dynamics of urban political life begins with a thoughtful overview of institutional development, and then delves into the nature of oligarchical control. She skillfully relates changes in internal structures of government to the pressures and opportunities derived from superior political authorities. Particularly effective here is her treatment of the different paths of development followed by towns in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The ambitions and intrusions of a centralizing state were much greater in England than elsewhere, and towns played key roles in the process of centralization, roles that reshaped their internal dynamics in fundamental ways. Oligarchical control served the interests of the English Crown, Swanson contends, almost as well as it served the interests of the oligarchs themselves. This is an intriguing and original argument, one that deserves fuller treatment than the author could justify in a short survey. Rounding out the chapter is a nuanced discussion of the relations between oligarchies and those beneath them. She accepts to a certain extent the argument, associated principally with Susan Reynolds, that medieval people saw social inequality and deference to social superiors as natural, but she also suggests that exploitation and a resulting feeling of resentment frequently characterized relations between oligarchs and those who were excluded from power. A short survey textbook is not the place to thrash out the relative merits of these contrasting points of view, but a more opinionated approach might have been worth offering in this part of the book.
The last substantive chapter of the book addresses the interpersonal networks and relationships that characterized urban society. A variety of topics is covered, with the seams somewhat less expertly hidden than in earlier chapters. Space is devoted to urban topography, marriage patterns, migration, gender issues, wealth distribution, and literacy rates. The heart of the chapter revolves around a discussion of religious ideology and lay participation in religion. Considering that towns were tightly controlled by governing oligarchies, and considering further that in most towns, significant wealth was concentrated in relatively few hands, why did social unrest so seldom surface? What gave urban society its cohesiveness? The answer, Swanson suggests, is complex. Part of the answer comes from the absence of class consciousness (my term for the phenomenon she describes, not the author's). Part comes from the absence or ineffectiveness of lower class institutions and organizations dedicated to exerting pressure for change. Grinding poverty, economic uncertainty, and high rates of labor mobility were unlikely to generate coherent and sustained movements to reform society. A third part of the answer relates to the practice of religion; more precisely, to the sense of religious fellowship inherent in parish life, confraternities, and the public displays and rituals that characterized urban religious life. Religion subtly reinforced the existing social hierarchy in ways that made opposition risky, not just in this life but in the hereafter as well. Thus, neither the practical circumstances nor the ideological formulations of the period were likely to generate strong protest or rebellion against the status quo. That Swanson was able to address such a broad range of issues in such a short book with such success is a credit to her ability to conceptualize (and to write about) the broader historical context from which urban history takes its meaning. Her book is not without flaws, but they are relatively few and far between, and they do not mar to any significant extent the main issues she addresses. She misdates the earliest occurrence of legislation concerning broadcloths by about a century, for example, but her misdating does not seriously impair the argument she makes about the basic chronological trends in English textile production. The book is certainly far more noteworthy for its merits: it covers a long period of history; it treats all parts of the British Isles; and it illustrates the importance of urban history for more general interpretations of medieval society. It does all of these things well, and in the process manages to convey some of the intellectual excitement inherent in the study of medieval urban history.