George Sheeran's book aims to explore the medieval towns of Yorkshire through their architecture and 'use of space'. The book is written in a plain and lucid English that will be accessible to all readers, with a minimal use of references and no footnotes. The inclusion of many full-page illustrations (mainly monochrome photographs and reproductions of old drawings) further enhance the volume's usefulness for those unfamiliar with its subject. This is an attractive book for new students of medieval towns, or for those seeking a first acquaintance with Yorkshire.
The style of the book is reflected in its contents in which Sheeran is perpetually anxious to explain and simplify academic language and academic debates. The book begins with a short chapter 'deconstructing' the term town through a brief summary of some of the different legal and social definitions of urbanity employed by some English medieval historians in the past century or so. On the whole it is the social definitions of town life that the author finds most useful, and, throughout the book, studies of urban economies are largely avoided. Indeed important studies of Yorkshire merchants, markets and trade by authors such as Richard Britnell, Wendy Childs and Jennifer Kermode (the current leading experts in the field) are not referenced at all. Similarly political history, and the history of the religious orders of Yorkshire, is barely referenced. The second chapter summarises in a little more detail medieval and modern ideas about social order, which the author has found instructive, with a particular reliance on the work of Steven Rigby (S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Late Middle Ages: Class, Society and Gender [London, 1995]). This chapter provides the key to understanding the author's understanding of urban landscapes as physical expressions of authority and conflict.
Sheeran's book therefore sits well within the contemporary paradigm that insists on reading the built environment as a text -- in this case as a text of social conflict as defined by sociologies derived ultimately from the work of Marx and Weber. Although specialists will be familiar with such approaches, this is one of a number of new textbooks that seek to introduce the novice student to such ways of thinking about material culture. It aims to show that different disciplines such as archaeology, history, sociology and geography can be made not just to illustrate each other, but to interrogate each other. This book is the microcosm (if you like) to the macrocosm of Keith Lilley's Urban Life in the Middle Ages, 1000-1450 (London, 2002), and a local companion to the national coverage of Jane Grenville's Medieval Housing (Leicester, 1997) or John Schofield and Alan Vince's Medieval Towns (Leicester, 1994).
Having established his agenda, the rest of the book deals with different elements of the urban landscape in turn. Chapters Three and Four deal with the distribution and plan of towns and contain some useful plans and data, Five and Six with (primarily) churches and castles, Seven and Eight with guildhalls and markets, Nine (which is much the longest chapter) with houses, Ten and Eleven with public health, walls and suburbs. Chapter Twelve finishes with an interesting account of the ways in which the influence of medieval urban forms can still be detected in the modern fabric of Yorkshire towns. Since the major primary sources of his study are the surviving buildings themselves, the main chronological focus is on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Throughout he sustains his thesis of architecture as an expression of authority and conflict, and summarises the conclusions of many specialist studies with admirable clarity and concision in a way that often gives them a new force. For example, in tackling the ideas of Pantin on urban house forms he generally adopts the criticisms of Pantin's approach made by Schofield and Grenville (that Pantin's model was simplistic and excessively influenced by rural housing), but is able to extend them further with a range of new examples, such as the towered houses of Hull or the urban cottages of Knaresborough.
In less than 200, heavily illustrated pages the book covers a lot of ground, and the more specialist reader will find some topics are too abbreviated, sometimes to the point of error. The curt dismissal of arguments about the 'regional' character of ecclesiastical architecture (69-70) is perhaps a little too breathless, even if it serves the purpose of alerting the reader to the possibility of argument. Similarly St Peter's Gates in York did not 'mark the boundary of the Minster's jurisdiction' in the city, even though they might have been a physical reminder of the Minster's power (and impotence) in the face of civic authority. For the specialist historical reader it is also likely that Sheeran's analysis of power and conflict will not seem particularly sophisticated either, while for the specialist archaeologist he does not provide any critical data. The illustrations are (most effectively) presented primarily for their aesthetic effect, and the absence of a scale on most of them makes it hard to judge the dimensions of any of the buildings illustrated here.
Apart from the enterprising last chapter, the choice of chapter subjects is not very different from established traditions of urban topographical studies which can be traced back to the earliest antiquarians. This point is implicitly acknowledged by the very nice use that is made of antiquarian maps and drawings throughout. Indeed it is the way in which this book stands in a long tradition of local antiquarian scholarship that is really one of its greatest strengths, and one of the best reasons for buying it. For the very best thing about Medieval Yorkshire Towns is the synthesis it provides in one volume of so many archaeological studies of the county's smaller towns combined with enterprising use of some printed and translated documentary sources. While all medievalists have surely heard of York and its Minster, how many know about the surviving medieval shops of Pontefract, the warehouses of Selby, the hospitals of Ripon or the burgages of Skipton? It is the impression given here of the scale and surviving fabric of some 40 odd medieval towns in the county, that is the most fascinating and which whets the appetite for more.
As an attractive, clearly and forcefully argued book for beginners the one thing that Medieval Yorkshire Towns lacks is a guide as to how readers may continue finding out more about Yorkshire towns for themselves. There are many such field guides of a general nature, but in a second edition it would be good to see an appendix providing specific guidance about sources for the local novice. The whole volume is very successful at opening the eyes of those who are interested in old buildings, but have never thought about them very critically in their social context. The tone of the writing and general content of the book is far more informed and provocative than tourist guides to the UK generally are, but it is comparable to the more scholarly tone of some tourist guides published in continental Europe. It would be an excellent guide for any medievalist visiting Yorkshire for the first time, and may even encourage them to do so.