ABSTRACT
Contemporary accounts from late-medieval England show an increasing concern over the physical state of towns and cities. In the 1530s, for example, John Leland stated how, in the case of Coventry, ‘the glory of the city decayeth’ and, in the Statutes of Henry VIII, there are descriptions of towns with ‘desolate and void groundys, with pittys, sellers and vaultes lying open’. 1 Over the last two decades historians have looked to these accounts as evidence for urban decline; a symptom of demographic and economic crises that were affecting England in the three centuries following the Black Death. 2 The impact that these ‘crises’ had on medieval towns has caused much controversy, not least following the publication, in 1979, of Phythian-Adams’s detailed study of the early-sixteenth-century demographic crisis in Coventry. 3 A year later, a review article by Reynolds called into question what historians really meant when they used the word ‘decay’, and she asked whether urban decay is the same as urban decline. 4 This chapter seeks to examine closely the evidence for urban decay in the landscapes of late-medieval English towns and cities, and questions how far evidence for urban decay may be used as evidence that towns were in decline in the later Middle Ages. The chapter does this by considering what physical impact the demographic crisis in Coventry had on the city’s landscape; and by suggesting that evidence for urban decay is open to a variety of interpretations. The aim of the chapter is to suggest that urban ‘decay’ (in a physical sense) is not necessarily a sign of urban ‘decline’ (in demographic and economic terms), and that urban landscapes in the later Middle Ages were undergoing transformations that reflected broader changes in the social and economic composition of cities. The chapter closes with some reflection on medieval urban decline in the light of Beauregard’s 236conceptual work on the ‘post-war fate’ of North American cities. 5
