Dr Dyer's Urban Undulations

Abstract

In seeking to purge what he seems to regard as the dangerously insidious views of an academic ‘gang of four’,Dr Alan Dyer has certainly eschewed gentle persuasion as the appropriate way of re-converting erring heretics. Being apparently the worst offender - and bedaubed in penitential ashes, as I clearly ought to be - it is then hardly for me to answer for the views of my fellow conspirators: Peter Clark, Paul Slack and Penelope Corfield. They are well able to stand up for themselves. All I have space to do here is to reflect on Dr Dyer's re-assertion of the neutralist text-book orthodoxy regarding the state of England's towns in the earlier Tudor period, and so to ponder whether a recantation of my own seemingly obsessional sins might be appropriate. I certainly do not intend simply to reiterate what the disinterested follower of this discussion might wish to read for himself, the actual arguments of my 1975 paper, with its qualifying remarks and its ‘handful’ of 75 urban examples.