ABSTRACT Regional and chronological patterning in the establishment of towns across Medieval England is investigated in relation to the rural settlement provinces defined by Wrathmell and Roberts. It is proposed that this approach is advantageous to considering urbanization relative to arbitrary county divisions, as settlement provinces allow analysis of the relationship between town and country and between urbanization and physical geography. Following a review of historical and archaeological approaches to understanding urbanization, an analysis of urbanization in each province is presented, considering the chronology of urbanization, the relationship between boroughs, market towns and non-urban markets and variability in strategies employed by landowners to develop commercial places on their manors and estates. We identify marked regional patterning in the pace, intensity and character of urbanization at multiple scales and conclude that it is as a form of nucleation that urbanization can be best understood as a catalyst of commercialization in the Middle Ages.

ABSTRACT Fieldwork in Mobberley, Cheshire, where field-name evidence suggested the forest glass industry, resulted in the significant discovery of an unknown glass furnace site, revealed by an unprecedented surface assemblage of material including glassmaking waste and crucible sherds. This is the fifth wood-fuelled glasshouse site known in northern England. Surface collection resulted in hundreds of artefacts which are described for the first time, revealing much about glassmaking at this location. A gradiometer survey has revealed the likely furnace location. Scientific analysis shows the glass to be of the type produced by French glassmakers, who were active in England from 1567, but were unknown in Cheshire. The glass produced was made to a regional recipe, unknown outside north-west England, where it has been found at two other manufacturing sites. This furnace is unlikely to post-date 1615, when glassmaking was banned using wood fuel. A more specific operational period is indicated by parish register entries, showing glassmaking entrepreneur Francis Bristow was at Mobberley in 1613. This very late forest glass furnace was probably operated by the same French glassmakers who, from 1615, worked a coal-fired glasshouse 18 km away at Haughton Green, to which they probably moved after abandoning the Mobberley furnace.