Late Medieval English Towns Research Articles

Addressing new aspects of surveillance in late mediaeval England, 1350-1550

The paper addresses new aspects of surveillance in late medieval England. New approaches to the study of the phenomenon are introduced, while a limited study puts some of the author’s suggestions to the test. The study addresses the modus operandi of political and labour surveillance focusing on late medieval English towns. Surveillance was intensified after the Black Death. Institutional and noninstitutional surveillance were part of everyday life, but they were also used by the ruling elites to consolidate their power. Surveillance was endured by the lower social ranks. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that sometimes popular classes resisted surveillance or even used it to their own advantage.

The Boundaries of Popular Control in Late Medieval English Towns

Abstract Scholarship on pre-modern popular politics often focuses on speech, identifying the ways in which people outside the elite could have a “voice” in government. Using examples from late medieval English towns, this article argues for the existence of a particular kind of popular politics that centered on seeing and hearing rather than speaking. This type of politics—labeled “popular control”—concerned the right of the urban political community at large to observe rituals of governance and to audit financial accounts. Through these acts of collective witnessing, lesser citizens and non-citizens exerted an indirect political power to restrict leaders’ freedom of action and to ensure that their performance of office abided by set rules. The unusually detailed Hall Rolls and Hall Books produced by the civic government of Lynn in 1412–13 and 1418–25 illustrate that “popular control,” far from being a vehicle for increasing the urban commons’ “voice” in municipal decision-making, often stood in opposition to principles of elected representation. After 1418, more people were being admitted to the inner sanctum of virtuous individuals deemed capable of offering rational counsel to mayors and jurats, but there were fewer opportunities for the wider public to witness performances of governance by this expanded group of decision-makers. The crux of debate in fifteenth-century English towns—and, perhaps, in the tumultuous world of late medieval Europe more generally—was often less about who should exercise political influence and more about how popular political power could be exercised most appropriately and effectively.

Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530, by Christian D. Liddy

In this book, Christian Liddy offers an important new interpretation of urban politics in late medieval English towns, by focusing on the ‘inherently unstable’ (p. 206) concept of citizenship. He demonstrates that citizenship was a contested identity, and one that generated conflict. This overarching thesis is thoroughly grounded in a fascinating analysis of the archival sources and a subtle appreciation of the language of town politics. Liddy adopts a comparative approach, stressing that native traditions of urban citizenship were unlike the classical models of the Italian city states. Rather than this leading to an argument for English exceptionalism, Liddy stresses that this was, in fact, the picture in other European urban centres. His focus on the five major English cities of Norwich, Coventry, Bristol, York and London allows him to challenge the stereotype of English towns as less populous and less well documented than their European counterparts. Each of the...

Erratum

HistoryVolume 101, Issue 347 p. 653-653 ErratumFree Access Erratum This article corrects the following: Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. By Carole Rawcliffe. Woodbridge. 2013. xiii + 431pp. £60.00. NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA, Volume 100Issue 343History pages: 734-736 First Published online: January 21, 2016 First published: 22 September 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12275AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat In [1], the following error was published on page 736: The surname of the reviewer of the book reviewed was truncated and is incorrectly listed as Naoë Kukita Yoshika. The correct name of the reviewer is Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and has been corrected in the online version of the issue. We apologise for this error. Reference 1Yoshika, N. K. (2015), Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. By Carole Rawcliffe. Woodbridge. 2013. xiii + 431pp. £60.00. History, 100: 734– 736. Volume101, Issue347October 2016Pages 653-653 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe (review)

Reviewed by: Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe Mark Jenner Carole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2013). 445 pp. $99.00 (978-1-84383-836-4). In this weighty, extensively researched, and important book Carole Rawcliffe shakes up many commonly held assumptions about the longue durée history of public health. She also directly challenges the most important late twentieth-century interpreters of the Middle Ages: Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin. Mounted on the steed of archival scholarship, she sets out to slay the medieval muck dragon with a quiverful of facts gathered from a mighty armoury of manuscript and printed sources. [End Page 144] Late Medieval English towns, she argues, were nothing like the excremental vision of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a text which provides the epigraph of her first chapter); nor were they marked by the filth and chaos evoked and emphasized in the accounts of Victorian and early twentieth-century sanitarians and popular historians. Rather, their archives abound with evidence of concern about collective health and with documents recording actions designed to inhibit or to punish insanitary conduct and to reduce the risk of disease. Such evidence, she argues, had been largely obscured by ill-informed prejudice, and by secular-minded modernists’ failure to understand the centrality of religion to medieval notions of good health. After a lengthy introduction that sets out her main arguments (a section time-pressed students will find exceedingly helpful) and a discussion of urban bodies and urban souls that draws out the links among medieval ideas of physical, political, and corporeal health, chapters on the environment and health, on water supply, on food and drink, and on the relief of the sick hammer away at these misconceptions. Examples from towns great and small are marshalled to depict “fruitful collaboration between secular and religious authorities for the provision of plentiful and readily accessible supplies of water,” to emphasize “the enforcement of food standards, the creation of cleaner better organised markets,” and to give credit to the level of effort expended on street cleaning and the removal of nuisances. Cumulatively, her arguments, especially when read alongside recent work by scholars such as Isla Fay, Peregrine Horden, and Dolly Jørgensen, indicate that the roots of public health lie much earlier than the reports of Edwin Chadwick, the prescriptions of Enlightenment police, or the injunctions of the Renaissance city state. However, Rawcliffe’s material is more compelling than the analytical frameworks by which she explicates the beliefs and practices of late medieval townsfolk. First, because she couches her book as a refutation of modern condescension towards the Middle Ages in toto, she leaves unresolved just how far mores changed across the three centuries she covers. At times she suggests that communities’ sensitivity to filth and other potential sources of ill-health varied according to the demographic context: epidemics stirred rulers into action; less lethal decades reverted to environmental laissez faire if not laxity. On other occasions a progressivist narrative lurks beneath the surface of the text. The reader is left with a sense that institutions and patterns of care and regulation increased in sophistication over time. The author emphasizes how far “the spread of medical knowledge” (p. 148) underpinned magistrates’ actions. But is she thereby simply pushing the mythic era of complete sanitary insouciance back to what my early medievalist colleagues refuse to term the “Dark Ages”? How far does a rejection of stereotypes about the pungency of Plantagenets suggest that we should rather think of the vile Vikings or noxious Normans? The relation between the hygienic norms and forms and the development of the state and civil society is never spelled out. Nor will everyone find her interpretation of the social and ideological significance of sanitary measures entirely satisfying. As the title suggests, this books links collective health and the history of the body. Rather than drawing on work shaped by Bourdieu, Foucault or phenomenology, it develops a 1970s and 1980s [End Page 145] historiography strongly influenced by structural–functionalist anthropology. Rawcliffe argues there was a pervasive analogy, often, indeed, a...

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (by Carole Rawcliffe)

<i>Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities</i> (by Carole Rawcliffe)

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. By CaroleRawcliffe. Woodbridge. 2013. xiii + 431pp. £60.00.

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. By CaroleRawcliffe. Woodbridge. 2013. xiii + 431pp. £60.00.

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, Carole Rawcliffe

"Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, Carole Rawcliffe." Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 32(2), pp. 435–436

Carole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. 431. $99.00 (cloth).

Carole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. 431. $99.00 (cloth).

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, by Carole Rawcliffe

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, by Carole Rawcliffe

Carole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. xiii + 431 pp., illus., app., bibl., index. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. $99 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsCarole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. xiii + 431 pp., illus., app., bibl., index. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. $99 (cloth).Karl WhittingtonKarl Whittington Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 106, Number 1March 2015 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/681838 Views: 73Total views on this site © 2015 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Carole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities.

This handsomely produced book systematically dismantles a stubborn Victorian-era notion: that medieval England was squalid, unhealthy, and devoid of sensible medical approaches to protect the public's health. Prominent sanitarians and political reformers of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the medieval era as cautionary opprobrium to reinforce their recommended medical and public health policies. Carole Rawcliffe finds Victorian contempt resilient, even though the historical evidence for such claims was undermined as early as the 1930s. More recently, historians of Renaissance Italian medicine bolstered the old view by drawing a further contrast between late medieval England and the progressive, seemingly modern innovations of Mediterranean city- and territorial states. Italian cities, impressively larger and richer than most of England's urbanized settlements, well before the Black Death spent public money on the recruitment and retention of prestigious public physicians; invested both before and after the coming of vicious plagues in urban hospitals with medical, rather than hospice, objectives; and invented new approaches to surveillance and containment of recurrent plagues. By contrast we find no similar, concerted interventions in England until the time of the Reformation. Rawcliffe does not ask why the English did not follow continental trends; rather she argues that much of this approach to the study of medieval English cities is an unhelpful and anachronistic “medical materialism” (p. 19). Her response is the first chapter's engaging title: “Less Mud-Slinging and More Facts.”

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe (review)

Reviewed by: Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe Meg Bernstein Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013) 445 pp. Rawcliffe has long been one of the clearest and loudest voices on the topic of medieval health, healing, and hospitals; among her myriad publications in that field are Leprosy in the Middle Ages (2006) and Medicine for the Soul: the Life, Death, and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital (1999). In Urban Bodies, Rawcliffe departs from her previous works that focused primarily on case studies in Norwich, where she is based at the University of East Anglia. In this book, she looks broadly at English health in terms of the urban population; she also makes frequent mention of useful comparanda on the continent. The result is a study that is both usefully broad while also remaining extremely attentive to specific documentary sources. Urban Bodies is composed of an introduction, six chapters thoughtfully organized into thematic subsections, and a conclusion. Additionally, Rawcliffe provides an appendix titled “National and Urban Epidemics, 1257–1530,” which remediates the problem of cataloguing some of the smaller and lesser-known outbreaks. Paragraph long descriptions provide references to documentary evidence for each case, which is illuminating to the reader, and reflective of an impressive facility with a tremendous number of sources. The first chapter, “Less Mud-Slinging and More Facts,” sets the historiographical stage for Rawcliffe’s project. Here, she carefully combats the Victorian idea that England in the Middle Ages was foul, polluted, and populated by people uninterested in improving poor conditions. Instead, she establishes a more nuanced picture of the period, writing about vernacular texts [End Page 292] on health-related topics, including manuals on disease prevention, and the laws created by and censures delivered to public officials on the topics of sanitation and disease prevention (46–49). In the second chapter, “Urban Bodies and Urban Souls,” Rawcliffe addresses the civic concerns of public health in later medieval England; this chapter picks up on the pun of the title which addresses both physical bodies and corporate identity. She acknowledges the commonly held belief that plague was punishment for sins by God, and discusses the institution by both prelates and kings of acts of public contrition to seek forgiveness for sin (94–95). Here she considers the notion of cleanliness and health as civic virtues, as well as the material effects of plague. She addresses the impact of depopulation due to disease on the urban landscape, showing that developed areas reverted, parish churches were closed, and building projects were halted due to pestilence (70). The remaining four chapters, “Environmental Health,” “Water,” “Food and Drink,” and “Sickness and Debility,” deal with specific thematic issues. Each of these is divided into between six and ten subsections, which address such diverse themes as “Vicious dogs and marauding pigs,” “Cooks and pie-bakers,” and “Care for the sick poor.” In “Environmental Health,” Rawcliffe discusses waste management, smells, and fire prevention. She examines London’s comparatively early waste pick-up system (137), showing that all classes, not just the elite, sought waste management. The chaos of the urban environment is evidenced by reports of stray animals wandering the streets and sometimes engaging in scuffles, but laws and bans enacted against these practices shows the widespread desire for containment (154–155). “Water” deals with the expulsion of waste and the challenge of sourcing clean water. The chapter opens with Rawcliffe gesturing to the crucial role of the friars in initiating these systems, and argues against the idea that ruling elites were “disinclined either to promote schemes for the amelioration of public water supplies, or even to shoulder the burden of maintaining whatever rudimentary facilities were already in place” (179–180). This chapter also addresses the medical beliefs about water, including the importance of Arabic texts such as Ibn-Sina’s Canon of Medicine, which discussed the health risks of consuming infected water (189). Rawcliffe showed that some of the trades were the worst offenders in terms of water purity, but that “the considerable sums of money expended on aqueducts, conduits, dike, wells and gutters...

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns

<i>Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns</i>

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, by Carole Rawcliffe

Bodies: Communal in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, by Carole Rawcliffe. Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2013. xiv, 431 pp. $99.00 US (cloth). Despite Carole Rawcliffe's protest that Bodies is in many respects a preliminary sortie (p. 7) into the largely unstudied subject of late medieval communal health, it can hardly be considered such. Examining the period of dynamic change between 1250 and 1530, Rawcliffe's book is an ambitious and foundational study of medieval English communities' collective efforts protect themselves from sickness, debility and disease (p. 2). She consults an impressive number of civic records to which she adds archaeological and some ecclesiastical evidence, all with an eye to examining the role played by central government, urban authorities, craft guilds ... and ordinary householders in the collective battle against privation and disease (p. 7). Her investigation includes larger and prosperous centres and also looks at smaller and poorer communities. Bodies's most successful feature is its accessibility and relevance to nonspecialists as well as academic researchers interested in medical, urban, environmental, social, and cultural history. Rawcliffe's first order of business is combatting the myth of the excessively filthy Middle Ages. For too long medieval sanitation has been viewed through the eyes of the Victorian sanitary campaigners, medical positivists, and Monty Python. The villages and towns of medieval England were certainly not clean by modern standards. There were ongoing and sometimes overwhelming problems of dirt and disease, especially in places which were compromised by warfare or economic downturn--she discusses Carlisle for example (pp. 7, 174); but, medieval England was certainly not the sanitary backwater that it has been made out to be. A mixture of royal reform, civic leaders' desire for order, guild pride, the emergent gentries' identification of cleanliness with moral righteousness, and the longstanding tradition of town folk's engagement in civic life resulted in regular and broadly supported sanitation measures. Perhaps the most useful aspect of Rawcliffe's work and the crux upon which her overall argument rests is her second chapter's contextualization of civic society's practice of hygiene as a spiritual and moral necessity. In Urban Bodies, Souls she draws on numerous instances of the civic body being described as a well-governed human body--as in John of Salisbury's Policraticus (p. 78)--in order to show how sanitary measures were applied with equal force to plague or prostitution, civic officials' immorality or pigpens. Rogations were good for public health and so were laws that closed the stews because they contributed to the salubrious nature of the lanes and signified civic dignity and the righteousness of its governors and inhabitants. These are the beliefs that produced the adage about cleanliness' proximity to Godliness. Environmental Health explains why late medieval medical knowledge, grounded in classical and Arabic texts, led civic governors to vigorously combat the infectious and venomous fumes and vapours (p. 123) that were part of urban life. While medieval urbanites had a much higher tolerance for refuse than their present-day counterparts, they nonetheless tackled their refuse problems aggressively, especially in periods of recurring plague. Rawcliffe presents compelling evidence for the importance of public works and sanitary regulations: the maintenance of paved streets; employment of rakers, cleaners, and gong fanners; maintenance of latrines, cesspits, and privies; regulation of butchers, threatening dogs, and runaway pigs; attempts to regulate noxious smoke from wood and sea coal in homes, forges and other industry; and, organized attempts at fire prevention. …

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns. By Samuel K.Cohn, Jr.Cambridge University Press. 2012. xii + 375pp. £60.00.

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns. By Samuel K.Cohn, Jr.Cambridge University Press. 2012. xii + 375pp. £60.00.

Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies. Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities

TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns, by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns, by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

Urban bodies: communal health in late medieval English towns and cities

Rawcliffe continues with her mission to clean up Middle Ages. In earlier work she has already given us scholarly yet sympathetic portrayals of English medicine, hospitals, and welfare for lepers. Now she widens her scope to public health. Her argument is clear, simple and convincing. Through efforts of crown and civic authorities, mercantile elites and popular interests, English towns and cities aspired to a far healthier, less polluted environment than previously supposed. All major sources of possible infection were regulated, from sounds and smells to corrupt matter - and to immorality. Once again Professor Rawcliffe has overturned a well-established orthodoxy in history of pre-modern health and healing. Her book is a magnificent achievement. Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway University of London. This first full-length study of public health in pre-Reformation England challenges a number of entrenched assumptions about insanitary nature of urban life during the golden age of bacteria. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that draws on material remains as well as archives, it examines medical, cultural and religious contexts in which ideas about welfare of communal body developed. Far from demonstrating indifference, ignorance or mute acceptance in face of repeated onslaughts of epidemic disease, rulers and residents of English towns devised sophisticated and coherent strategies for creation of a more salubrious environment; among plethora of initiatives whose origins often predated Black Death can also be found measures for improvement of water supply, for better food standards and for care of sick, both rich and poor. Carole Rawcliffe is Professor of Medieval History, University of East Anglia.

Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. xiii + 431pp. 28 illustrations. 4 maps. Bibliography. £60.00.

Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. xiii + 431pp. 28 illustrations. 4 maps. Bibliography. £60.00. - Volume 41 Issue 2