The origins and early development of medieval towns in northern Europe

Abstract

Tn the I950S, the debate over Pirenne's Mahomet et Charlemagne, which Chad dominated historical writing about early medieval towns since it was published posthumously in I937, came to an end. Simultaneously, new syntheses concerning the early history of towns in Europe were published. Among the most important of these is Ennen's book on the European town, which appeared only in I953 though work on it had begun Io years earlier.2 The volume emphasized the originality of the Germanic town as a new phenomenon in northern Europe. Its most important element was a merchants' settlement, characterized by the placename wik. Furthermore, Ennen considered these wik settlements to be the precursors and prototype of the northern and central European medieval town, the origin of which Pirenne had dated to the tenth or eleventh century. Basically, Pirenne explained these wik settlements as creations of the originally itinerant merchants who eventually surrounded their wik with ramparts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, thus putting an end to the 'protohistoric' phase and in effect founding the real medieval town. In Bonn, where Ennen worked, archaeology within the context of interdisciplinary Landeskunde (regional historical geography) had already been recognized as a source for the history of the middle ages. For some years before the start of the Second World War, Jankuhn had carried out excavations on the site of the deserted early medieval traders' settlement of Haithabu on the German-Danish border. 3 Nevertheless, archaeology plays only a subsidiary part in Ennen's work. Her book is based mainly on written sources, though she did pay some attention to the topography of the later medieval towns as a potential source for earlier situations. This was not uncommon in the I930s and I940s,4 but it was as far as historians were prepared to go in adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of early towns. Similar remarks can be made with respect to another German book, published in I958 and also dedicated to the emergence and early development of towns in Europe north of the Alps.5 It is a collection of studies, the