“Town, Country, and State in Medieval England”
James Masschaele

In recent years, two major issues have attracted a great deal of attention from historians working on the high and later Middle Ages: the growth of centralized states as the period’s defining political institutions; and the growth (and possible subsequent retreat) of towns as the period’s defining social and economic institutions.  Under the former rubric, one can place the work of scholars such as John Maddicott, Mark Ormrod, and Richard Kaeuper, who have explored the roles states played as national war machines, as rapacious consumers of economic resources, as ruthless adversaries of rival political formations, and as hegemonic producers of symbolic capital.  Under the latter rubric, one can point to the recent publication of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, comprising the work of some two dozen scholars, as a particularly good illustration of the field, highlighting in general terms its current vibrancy, and in specific terms its special emphasis on the roles towns played as economic agents, as centers of learning and culture, and as distinctive forms of social and political community.

Though they represent two of the most visible fields of historical research, these two areas of enquiry have seldom been juxtaposed with each other.  There are exceptions to any rule, of course, but on the whole, specialists in the two disciplines tend to work in isolation: neither field has been deeply influenced by the other’s debates, and neither has made great use of theories drawn from the other’s work.  This is somewhat surprising given that the two have adopted similar chronological frameworks, emphasizing the “long” thirteenth century as a period of dramatic growth and development, and the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a period of difficulty and dislocation.  It is even more surprising considering that both seek to incorporate arguments about developments in the countryside into their models of development.  In the case of states, recent work has emphasized the ability of centralizing governments to gain direct access to rural society in their quest for resources, manpower, and allegiance; in the case of towns, the emphasis has been on rural migration, commercial interaction with hinterlands, and the scope and direction of the flow of raw materials.  It is certainly possible that state formation and urban development involved separate processes that did not overlap significantly with each other, but it is much more likely that the dynamics linking state and countryside, on the one hand,  and town and countryside, on the other, were closely connected.

The argument for interdependence and mutual reinforcement will serve as the point of departure for the paper I propose to give at the upcoming meeting of the Medieval Academy in New York.  I will argue that the economic relationships inherent in the commercial links between town and countryside mirrored the administrative relationships inherent in the political links between state and countryside, and that the two were related to each other.  Two corollary arguments follow from this basic premise, namely that towns were pivotal conduits of political centralization, and that states reinforced and sometimes even redirected the economic relations between towns and their surrounding hinterlands.  To support these positions, I will draw on primary source material illustrating some of the contexts in which towns brought rural inhabitants into face-to-face contact with agents of the state, particularly in matters of taxation (including purveyance) and law.  In the case of taxation, I aim to present evidence about where, when, how, and by whom money and purveyed goods were actually turned over from taxpayers and/or suppliers resident in the countryside to a treasury situated in Westminster or a base of operations located near a military front.  In the case of law, I am interested in showing where and when different legal venues met (particularly the courts involved with property assizes, peace sessions, and gaol deliveries), who attended them, and how they influenced the lives of participants.

In both the fiscal and legal realms, one cannot help but be struck by the extent to which institutions functioning on behalf of the state overlapped with institutions functioning as private economic entities.  Though their interests differed considerably, provincial merchants, tax collectors, and assize court justices clearly went about their business employing similar notions about how space was configured, and about how the constraints imposed by space might be overcome to facilitate activity beyond the boundaries of an individual town or village.  It is equally clear that inhabitants of the countryside enjoyed a multifaceted relationship with particular towns, to which they traveled, not just as producers and consumers interested in making use of urban markets, but also as litigants, as jurors, as taxpayers, and as royal creditors, or, in other words, as the clay from which the state was shaped.