ABSTRACT

The monastic town was recognized as a distinctive type of town very early in the historiography of English medieval urbanism. This was primarily because of its distinctive socio-political characteristics and the conflict that periodically ensued between townspeople and monastic community over the degree of freedom the former possessed to manage their own affairs. The evidence from monastic towns was therefore vital in the debate concerning the legal status of boroughs which dominated late nineteenth-century scholarship.1 It was of some significance, too, when historical debate moved on to consider the economy of medieval towns2 since the wealth of many of the monasteries which held towns was substantial. Topographical historians have also utilized the category in their discussions of urban development,3 though without any clear definitions of what constitutes the particularities of a monastic town, other than the mere presence of a monastery, but there have been few detailed investigations of this group of places or even of the topographical development of individual monastic towns.4 Yet, from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries Christian monastic religious communities were an important dimension in the development of English medieval towns. Many of the earliest urban places were gathered around monasteries, and still more was this so in Ireland where research in the past decade has demonstrated the significance and the distinctive sub-circular forms of these proto-urban settlements,5 forms which are now being recognized in England too.6 In the high-medieval period, as towns began to grow rapidly, many towns were dominated topographically by the walled enclosures of monastic precincts of various kinds, some larger towns having six or more institutions by the fourteenth century. As well as the precinct itself, these monasteries, convents and friaries were major landholders; urban properties and agricultural lands, together with appropriated churches, being managed to support the life of the community.