ABSTRACT
Historians’ approaches to medieval towns have been hugely influential. Towns are commonly accepted as part of the feudal world and so the relationship between town and country has become an important research goal for all. The aim of reconstructing urban living conditions requires interdisciplinary cooperation, particularly with environmentalists, as does the concern to identify, characterize and provide a chronology for short- and long-term periods of urban change. Our preoccupation with continuous urban ‘progress’ might also be partially explained by our principal concern with the town as an economic entity. However, even if one disagrees with defining towns by using bundle criteria, it is important to remember that towns performed a variety of non-economic functions — to put it crudely, as centres of strategic importance or of political or secular or religious authority. Aristocratic involvement is most obvious from the later 11th to 13th century in the surge of new towns, some of which failed from their over-provision.
