ABSTRACT
The issue of urban decline during the later Middle Ages remains unresolved despite the quantity of ink which has been spilled upon it during recent decades, and if the debate has thrown up nothing very new recently, this must be due more to the diversion of scholarly energies elsewhere than to any strong feeling that the problems raised by the question have been either solved or exhausted. And yet, despite decades of work, there are still ways of approaching the issue which have not yet been fully exploited, and it is the purpose of this chapter to attempt to extract some general enlightenment from one of the basic classes of documentation which has always underpinned the debate – the archives of taxation raised by the central government. Here I intend to compare the levels of population indicated by the poll tax of 1377 and the subsidies of 1524–5 in an attempt to indicate the broad drift of urban development between these two dates. I have made an effort to present as broad and comprehensive a view of the urban system as is possible, since one of the prevailing defects of the debate in the past has perhaps been a tendency to argue by limited numbers of instances rather than by seeing individual towns, or even groups of towns, as belonging to a holistic system, the development of which influences, and is influenced by, the experience of each individual element within it.
