Welsh Journals

REVIEWS NEW TOWNS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. Professor Maurice Beresford has already left both professional and amateur historians in his debt by his study of The Lost Villages of England. He has now followed up that study of decay with an examination of an aspect of economic growth in the Middle Ages-the plantation of towns in England, Wales, and Gascony.1 This extensive (though expensive) book is in many ways a remarkable achievement. Professor Beresford takes his very personal method, which attempts to relate documentary sources to topography, into an area in which British historians have lagged far behind their French colleagues. The work of Lavedan, Testut, and Trabut-Cussac2 on the urban history of France has now been emulated in this country. Much of Professor Beresford's book is thus a synthesis of recent (and not so recent) work, particularly in those chapters relating to Gascony. But his account of 'town plantation' in that area has the great merit of bringing some impression of French methods and their results before the British reader. For England and Wales, however, Professor Beresford has had recourse to original documents as well as to his walking boots. The book is organized not on a geographical pattern, but into chapters which discuss and compare developments in the three chosen areas. This inevitably leads to repetition and to some irritating cross-references (especially between Tables and Figures). But Professor Beresford can justly claim to have produced a comparative study. The comparative method lends itself particularly well to treatment of the period c. 1260 to c. 1320 which saw the foundation of so many new plantations in England, Wales, and Gascony. Beginning with a discussion of the reasons for the foundation and endowment of new towns, Professor Beresford leads the reader through the problems raised by their creation, into a chronological survey of town plantation, and finally to a set of three gazetteers listing all the towns which he discusses. The book is thus as much a quarry of information (some of it tabulated) for scholars as an interpretative account of the phenomenon of town plantation in the Middle Ages. From the first the reader is confronted with a problem which impinges more persistently as he reads on. How can one define a 'new town?' If the yardstick is to be the plantation of a settlement on virgin soil, then a very large number of towns described by the author as 'planted' will have to be rejected from his scheme. Promoted villages and new boroughs added to old settlements 1 M. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages, Lutterworth Press, 1967, Pp. 670. 5 gns. 2 P. Lavedan, L'Histoire de l'Urbanisme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1926); L. Testut. La Bastide de Beaumont en Perigord, 1272-1789, 2 vols. (Bordeaux. 1920); J.-P. Trabut-Cussac, 'Bastides ou forteresses?'. Le Moyen Age. LX (1954), 81-135.