ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the Church in the origins and the evolution of the larger English towns; that is, to assess the extent to which church institutions might have played a part in the processes of urban development. It investigates what impact they had on the physical shape of the growing towns. Gloucester, a neighbouring shire capital only some 25 miles distant, was only a little larger than Worcester in the medieval period and had many close similarities in its chronological development. The Gloucester material shows that the most serious limitations in the use of later cartography for topographical analysis lie in what could be termed the unsustainable extremes of the medieval urban environment. The Gloucester evidence suggests that street-spaces, street-patterns and plot-patterns in most areas of the densely built-up city centre exhibit a mixture of long-term stability and recognizable. Individual medieval urban extensions may be on an altogether different scale, but may be no less distinct.
