ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role of the case study of Wallingford in wider debates in urban archaeology and history. It examines urban evolution across divisions between traditional periods as defined chiefly by historians and largely adhered to by archaeologists. Power was enabled through gaining admittance to the controlled spaces; in Wallingford as elsewhere, influential Anglo-Saxon aristocrats held rights and land within the town, forming component parts of much wider urban holdings. Wallingford lacked two particular hallmarks of high-medieval growth and prosperity: the town had neither friaries around its fringes nor fraternities who invested in guildhalls. Wallingford features quite prominently in narratives of the Norman Conquest as the place where Duke William crossed the Thames on his circuitous approach to London, while the castle is readily characterised as a stamp of Norman royal authority. But it would be stretching the point to characterise the changes to Wallingford's townscape in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest as a 'transformation'.
