ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that innovations in urban charity were closely intertwined with the political emergence of towns. As urban government was developed, the political space of towns was redefined by lords and townspeople. Whereas charters defined jurisdiction, charity performed care and, with it, a claim to order; both suggest an impassioned new attention to the political meaning of urban space in provincial English towns. Social historians of the later middle ages have emphasised the close relationship between urban settlement and English hospitals, especially for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Urban franchises were fostered through a body of charters whose development was itself closely associated with the decades. The products of negotiations among royalty, lordship, and members of the town, such charters often confirmed existing trading rights or political liberties, but increasingly they came to be the tools which created markets and boroughs and which enshrined systems of governance.
