NA 
 093 
 ■64m 
 
 Di 
 
 Oi 
 0! 
 0! 
 1\ 
 
 3; 
 
 9; 
 1 i 
 9i 
 Oi 
 
 MEDIAEVAL 
 TOWN PLANNING 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 DEUVKRED AT •HE |OHN KVLANDS LIBRAHY ON THE 
 IjTH DECEMBER. 1916 
 
 T F. lOl'T, M.A., F.B.A. 
 
 BISHOP FRASER fKOKfiSSOK OI MEDIA VAI ANJ) ECCLliSlASTICAL HISTORY I.\ THE 
 
 u;^r EksiTY oi- m/w-.chksiek 
 
 Repyinul from '' J he iliillctiu of the John Rylands Library 
 Vui. . ?'o I, AprH'Aiigust, 1917 
 
 MANCHESTER: THF. \]\[\\ t..,S, .? LIME 
 
 GROVE, OXFORD UOAD. LONC... EN AND CO., 39 
 
 PAThkNOSTEk ROW. LONDON, La... . YORK, iJOMJJAY, 
 
 CALCJTTA, ANi; MADRAS. BERNa. J) QUARITCH, n 
 GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W. MCMXVII
 
 Y AT 
 
 Nbi 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 i Street 
 
 I, W.
 
 l/v ./ 
 
 MEDIEVAL ^ ' 
 
 TOWN PLANNING 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY ON THE 
 13TH DECEMBER, 1916 
 
 3 
 
 BY 
 
 T. F. TOUT, M.A., F.B.A. 
 
 BISHOP ERASER PROFESSOR OF MEDIEVAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 
 
 Reprinted from " The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library " 
 Vol. 4, No. I, April- August, 191 7 
 
 MANCHESTER: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 12 LIME 
 GROVE, OXFORD ROAD. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., 39 
 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.G., NEW YORK, BOMBAY, 
 CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. BERNARD QUARITCH, 11 
 GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W. MCMXVII
 
 Tc ■ 
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING.^ 
 By T. F. tout, M.A., F.BA. 
 
 BISHOP FRASER PROFESSOR OF MEDI/EVAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL 
 HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER. 
 
 NOWADAYS the phrase town planning is dinned repeatedly 
 into our ears. A generation, tending more and more to 
 concentrate itself into great cities, is constantly told that 
 town planning is the remedy for many of the most obvious evils of 
 existence in the towns we are familiar with. An eminent architect 
 told a Manchester audience some live years ago, that town planning 
 means " the application to a town of that process of ordered forethought 
 which we habitually apply to individual buildings "." It is because we 
 have neglected to apply to our towns as wholes that process of looking 
 ahead, which self-interest imposes on us when we build a house for 
 ^ourselves, that our cities have grown up anyhow, and have in too many 
 trcases become mere rabbit warrens of disorderly alleys and over- 
 ^crowded houses. And this state of things, barely tolerable in his- 
 ^ torical towns of moderate size, becomes absolutely unendurable in the 
 overgrown cities which are the special feature of our modern civilization. 
 It cannot be denied that our town planning enthusiasts have much 
 reason on their side. They are never more right than when they 
 reprobate the haphazard way in which our modern British cities have 
 grown up. We of the north have very special reasons for lamenting 
 the want of imagination shown by the builders of the great towns of 
 Lancashire and Yorkshire. Perhaps it would be truer to say that 
 there have been few builders of towns, but an infinite number of 
 builders of individual houses and streets. What we most suffer from 
 is the lack of adequate control on the part of some general authority, so 
 
 ^ An elaboration of the lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library, 
 13 December, 1916. 
 
 ^ Paul Waterhouse, Old Towns and New Needs, the Warburton 
 lecture for 1912 (Manchester Uniyersity Press, 1912), pp. 1-2. 
 
 3 
 
 437207
 
 4 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 that each individual has been left to pursue his own interest wherever 
 he conceived it to lie. The reasons for this neglect are written large in 
 the political and social history of Britain, though we might also perhaps 
 plead that there have been more numerous exceptions to this rule than 
 modern architects and up-to-date social reformers sometimes imagine. 
 But neither circhitects nor social reformers are as a rule historians, and 
 they seldom know accurately either the historical conditions, which made 
 town planning so difficult, or the extent to which these difficulties have 
 been overcome. Even the dark days of the late eighteenth and early 
 nineteenth centuries show notable schemes of town planning, of which 
 the best is doubtless the "new town" of Edinburgh. But faint 
 suggestions of similar motives can surely be seen in the regular align- 
 ments and straight-cut streets which mark the early procession of 
 modern Manchester southward from the original nucleus, and the first 
 climbings of modern Liverpool eastward up the hillside outside the 
 narrow limits of the mediaeval town. Again old new quarters of 
 London, such as the Duke of Bedford's Bloomsbury Estate, with its 
 straight streets and leafy squares, are distinct evidences of the applica- 
 tion by a great landlord of prudent forethought in directing the 
 development of a town quarter springing up on the soil which he 
 owns. Gower Street, which to Ruskin was the abomination of 
 aesthetic desolation, the redudio ad absurduni of the hideous pro- 
 cess that began with the Renascence, suggests to the town planner the 
 bright promise of a future of well-ordered cities in which men may 
 live in comfort and health. I would not like to say that either Ruskin 
 or the town planner were wholly right or wholly wrong. I simply 
 indicate in passing two rather different points of view. 
 
 We must refuse to traverse insidious bypaths, and get back to 
 real business. My task to-night is not with the town of the future, 
 or even with the town of the present, or the town of the recent past. 
 Dryasdust, as is well known, is content to pursue his hobbies with a 
 minimum amount of concern for the world he lives in, or for the world 
 in which his descendants may live in. Yet even Dryasdust may find 
 some pleasure in approaching his remote studies with some reference to 
 the fashion in which the men of the period which he delights to study 
 have overcome problems not dissimilar to those which vex the souls 
 of his own age. When all the world is talking of town planning, 
 the historic aspects of that problem may well occupy the attention of
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 5 
 
 the historian. It is natural nowadays for a mediaevalist to interest 
 himself in mediaeval town planning. I cannot flatter myself that what 
 I have to tell you to-night will give much practical guidance to those 
 who are anxious to make the Manchester of the future better ordered 
 and more wisely planned than the Manchester of the past. But it is 
 not altogether unpractical to realize that remote ages had to grapple 
 with the same problems as those which we ourselves are trying to 
 meet, and it is eminently practical, if we are able, as I think we shall 
 be able, to draw the moral that the methodical organization of town 
 construction can only be attained when the impulses of the individual 
 are adequately controlled by the corporate v^dll of the community, and 
 when the immediate advantage of the moment is subordinated to the 
 ultimate welfare of the future. 
 
 Normal mediaeval conditions were not particularly favourable to 
 town planning. Both the small size of the ordinary mediaeval state 
 and the limited control which mediaeval man had over material resources 
 made it more difficult in those days to plan out a great town than it is 
 for the great nations of the modern world with their almost unbounded 
 power of harnessing nature to their service. In some ways we ap- 
 proach modern conditions more nearly if we go back to a more remote 
 period, and particularly if we go back to the great days when the 
 whole civilized west was ruled by the Roman Empire, or if we revert 
 to the still more distant time when the kingdoms of Alexander and his 
 successors compelled the near east to submit to a veneer of western 
 civilization, and by so doing made the Roman Empire possible. 
 What history teaches us as to ancient town planning is admirably set 
 forth in a little book which Prof. Haverfield of Oxford published 
 some four years ago.^ I cannot do better than refer those of you, 
 who would wish to go back even farther than I can do to-night, to 
 Mr. Haverfield's lucid and orderly marshalling of the facts of this 
 subject so far as illustrated by the Graeco- Roman world. 
 
 Into the origins of town planning we have no need to follow 
 him, for they have no conceivable relation to later times. Yet it is 
 interesting to know that scholars have seen suggestions of town 
 planning in the remote antiquity of the bronze age, and that Babylon 
 
 ^ F. Haverfield, Ancient Town Planning (Oxford University Press, 
 1913).
 
 6 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 as described, perhaps wrongly described, by Herodotus, was laid out 
 with straight streets running parallel to or at right angles with each 
 other. Town planning of a more modern sort begins in the fifth cen- 
 tury B.C., when Hippodamus of Miletus laid out Piraeus, the port 
 of Athens, in a form as rectangular as the irregularity of the ground 
 allowed. But the ordinary Greek city had no plan at all, and Athens 
 itself was in striking contrast to its port. Its glory was in its wonder- 
 ful public buildings, its temples, and its colonnades ; its shame was 
 in its fortuitous congestion of rude hovels, separated by tortuous lanes, 
 which rivalled the squalor and disorder of a modern oriental city. 
 But the cities of Greece grew and were not made. It was only when 
 colonies were founded, or cities, like Piraeus, were made all of a piece, 
 that the town planner has his chance. 
 
 The town planner's opportunity came when Alexander and his 
 successors plastered the near east with Alexandrias, Antiochs, 
 Seleucias and Pergamons, destined from their foundation to be leading 
 cities of a great empire, capitals of highly centralized despotisms. 
 Yet the cities of the Hellenistic and Macedonian ages have no lesson 
 for us, since such as are still great cities now represent not the regular 
 proportions of their founders' designs but the picturesque confusion of 
 a modern Turkish town, which has forgotten its origin under the long 
 pressure of its fierce barbarian masters. 
 
 It was otherwise when the Roman Empire began to follow the 
 example of the Macedonians by setting up, first in Italy, and afterwards 
 in the conquered provinces of the west, colonies and municipalities whose 
 sites have often been continuously inhabited ever since by civilized man. 
 Their rectangular proportions, their straight, narrow streets, their regular 
 blocks of building testify to the symmetry and method of their designers, 
 and approach the simplicity of the Roman camp from which many of 
 them arose. What Roman towTi planning was like can perhaps best 
 be realized by him who wanders through the straight and narrow 
 streets of the excavated portions of Pompeii, the more so when he 
 realizes that exceptional circumstances made Pompeii one of the more 
 irregular of the towns of ancient Italy. But what Vesuvius did for 
 Pompeii, the Teutonic invasions did more effectively for most of the 
 cities of the old Roman world. The barbarians from the north utterly 
 broke down the continuity of Roman town life. Very few scholars 
 nowadays believe that there was any organic connexion between
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 7 
 
 Roman municipal institutions and those of the middle ages and modern 
 times. It is almost the same with sites as with institutions. Prof. 
 Haverfield demonstrates to us that in our island of Britain the well- 
 thought-out Roman scheme which made little Silchester, not only a 
 well-planned town but a garden city on a small scale, did not sur- 
 vive the coming of the Angles and Saxons. Even when the barbarian 
 conquerors crouched for shelter behind the old Roman walls of a derelict 
 city, they reconstructed the interior of the town after their own fashion. 
 Prof. Haverfield will not even allow that the apparently Roman 
 plan of Chester and Gloucester, where four straight streets, running 
 from four chief gates, meet together at a centre, has anything Roman 
 about it. The main streets of Chester and Gloucester, London and 
 Colchester are mediaeval, not Roman, in their direction and alignment. 
 At Colchester this is particularly clear, not only in the town area, but 
 in its approaches. To the west, as Mr. Round tells us, the English 
 settlers mapped out the open fields of the urban agricultural community 
 which replaced the Roman city, and covered up with their crops the 
 great Roman cemetery and the abandoned Roman road to London, 
 while to its north a new highway led direct to the gates of the med- 
 iaeval town.^ Though a Roman gate still affords access to Lincoln 
 from the north, the survival of a Roman line of road in continuation 
 of it, through the city itself, is as likely to be the result of the topo- 
 graphical limitations of a narrow hill site as it is of historical 
 survival. Whatever town planning the Romans brought to Britain, 
 none of it has survived to afford any lesson to us. Its very existence 
 has only been revealed by modern archaeological research. 
 
 The case is the same, Mr. Haverfield tells us, in the great Roman 
 towns of Southern France. Buildings have survived, but never the 
 plan of the town. It is only in Italy that our authority can see any 
 continuous survivals of Roman town planning in such instances as the 
 Roman quarter of Turin. Yet even here the modern historian is tempted 
 to ascribe the admirable regularity of the plan of that best planned of 
 the historical cities of the peninsula not so much to the Romans as to 
 the fostering care of the house of Savoy, ever anxious to embellish its 
 
 ^ See Mr. J. H. Round's remarkable inaugural presidential address to 
 the Essex Archaeological Society, " On the Sphere of an Archaeological 
 Society," reprinted from the Transactions of that Society, XIV. 4, and 
 especially the map and the remarks on p. II.
 
 8 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 capital in comparatively recent times. Be this as it may, it remeiins 
 that whatever Roman town planning has survived has come to us 
 through the long centuries of the middle ages. 
 
 We have at last got to our real subject, but it was necessary for 
 our purpose to appreciate the deep gulf that history has dug between 
 the town planning of antiquity and later ages. With the middle ages 
 we have to start afresh, and for many centuries we see conditions very 
 inimical to town life in all its forms. While the Greek and Roman 
 thought that the happy life could only be lived in the city, the nascent 
 civilization of the middle ages was of the country not of the tovm. Its 
 unit was the court and manor of the feudal landlord, the homesteads 
 and farm buildings of his humbler tenants. There was neither the 
 good government necessary for ordered town life, nor the commerce 
 which made it economically possible for great hordes of men to dwell 
 together in an urban area. When men still gathered together in little 
 town communities, it was not by reason of any sentimental preference 
 for civic life, but because the needs of protection and defence forced 
 them to dwell side by side on some fortified hilltop, where they might 
 save themselves from pirates and plunderers. But for that every man 
 would have dwelt hard by the fields and meadows which assured him 
 his subsistence. 
 
 It follows that as there were few towns there was no town planning 
 in those dark ages which lay between the fall of the Roman world and 
 the development of that well-marked type of civilization which we 
 call mediaeval. In those ages we must go to the great monarchies of 
 the east if we would seek for new examples of town planning, as for 
 instance at Baghdad, planned so well by one of the greatest of the 
 Khalifs that it became the greatest commercial centre of the world of 
 Islam. But it is even more improbable that these oriental town planners 
 were imitated by westerns in later ages than that mediaeval statesmen 
 and architects consciously followed the tovm plans of Roman days.^ 
 
 By the eleventh century the dark ages were drawing to a close. 
 Strong kings and princes arose who ruled roughly but effectively over 
 
 ^ See on this subject a summary of Prof. Unwin's interesting lecture 
 on " Eastern Factors in the Growth of Modern Cities ; Baghdad and Saint 
 Nicholas," in Journal of the Manchester Egyptiayi and Oriental Society^ 
 1915-16, pp. 13-17. I appreciate the learning and admire the ingenuity 
 and imagination of my colleague, but I cannot feel quite convinced as to the 
 soundness of his general thesis.
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 9 
 
 large dominions. With comparatively settled order a relatively high 
 standard of well-being v^as insured. The result was the wonderful 
 progress and prosperity of the twelfth century. And with this revival 
 of strong rule came two results that boded well for tovms. The 
 successful emperor, king, or duke wished to hold down his conquered 
 enemies, and promote among them his own ideals of civilization. The 
 improved material prosperity gave once more a chance for trade and 
 industry. And from conquest and commerce alike, there necessarily 
 arose a new need for towns. 
 
 Some towns, including most of the great cities of history, grow ; 
 others on the other hand are made. And the process of town making 
 is as legitimate as the process of constitution making. Prof. Pollard 
 in a paradoxical moment has lately told us that constitutions that 
 develop are better than constitutions that spring from the brain of the 
 legislator.^ The answer is that it all depends on the constitutions. 
 This is the case with towns as well as constitutions. Under certain 
 conditions both alike must be made, or they do not come into existence 
 at all. We have now got to one of those periods of history in which, 
 as in the Macedonian age, the conscious creation of towns on a large 
 scale was both a political and economic necessity. With the " fever 
 for founding towns " that marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
 the golden age of mediaeval town planning set in. It is to this 
 period that we have chiefly to address ourselves. 
 
 The political necessity for town making arose earlier than the 
 economic need. In the humble beginnings of the new towns of the 
 middle ages military considerations were always paramount. A 
 strong ruler conquered a district adjacent to his old dominions, or 
 wished to defend his frontier against a neighbouring enemy. He built 
 rude fortresses and encouraged his subjects to live in them, so that they 
 might undertake the responsibility of their permanent defence. Thus 
 arose the " boroughs" which the successors of Alfred the Great 
 " timbered " along the boundary line between their West Saxon inherit- 
 ance and the Danelaw. Thus began the towns which the Carolingian 
 conquerors set up in Saxony, and, later on, the fortresses of the same type 
 which were erected by the Saxon emperors beyond the Elbe in the 
 
 ^ See his " Growth of an Imperial Parliament " in History, I. 129 et seq., 
 and the criticisms on it in the same periodical by Prof. Ramsay Muir and 
 Mr. D. O. Malcolm, ibid. I. 193-214.
 
 10 
 
 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 .^ 
 
 Slavonic districts which they were initiating into the priceless blessings 
 of an early form of German Kulhir. This primitive Drang nach Osten 
 came to a head in the thirteenth century, when it had not only teuton- 
 ized the lands between the Elbe and the Oder, but planted German 
 colonies all through the East Baltic lands, through Poland and its sub- 
 ject states. For us the chief result was the setting up of new tov^s, 
 military outposts of the Teutonic power, whose soldier-burgesses were 
 to keep the Slavs and Letts in their places. In the new Teutonic 
 towns in Slavonic lands, we have one great group of artificially-made 
 towns, which, as the impulse became stronger, grew into something 
 beyond mere fortresses. Their clergy and monks dragooned the rude 
 natives into adopting the teachings of the church. The traders, who 
 followed the soldiers and priests, found a profitable occupation in 
 exploiting their economic necessities. The result was towns of sufficient 
 size to demand some sort of planning on the part of their founders. 
 Particulars of this process are very little knov^, or at any rate are 
 little accessible to a lecturer writing in war-time in Manchester. But 
 It is certain thaft not only were the older cities of Prussia, of Silesia, 
 of Poland, and of Lithuania the result of such methods, but that the 
 laying out of the oldest parts of many of these towns bears witness to 
 this day of the rectilineal alignments and the rectangular blocks of 
 allotments common to the town planners of every age. Thus Breslau, 
 1 now for centuries a thoroughly Germanized town, was in its origin a 
 Teutonic outpost among the Slavs of Silesia, and shows in its plan the 
 I marks of its origin. It is the same with the towns of Prussia, 
 \ Livonia, and Poland. We see it, for instance, in the disposition of 
 \ Breslau, and repeated in Cracow, the old capital of Poland. These 
 influences perhaps went even farther east. Lithuania long resisted all 
 Teutonic and Christian influences, and at last only took them filtered 
 through Polish channels. Yet in Vilna, the chief city of Lithuania, 
 the orderly ground plan of the central parts, stands in such contrast 
 to the oriental disorder of its suburbs, that I feel constrained to show 
 it to you along with the plan of Breslau. It is fair to add that 
 both the Breslau and Vilna plans come from a seventeenth century 
 book of towTi plans, which may owe something to the imagination of 
 the map maker, who gave more and more flight to his fancy the farther 
 he got eastwards. When he arrived as far east as Russia imagination 
 exhausted itself with Moscow, and his plans of other Russian towns 


 
 medit^val town planning 1 1 
 
 are more or less pretty pictures which give no guidance to the topo- 
 grapher. 
 
 Let us turn to other aspects of our subject which are easier to 
 trace and which have more direct relation to ourselves and our own 
 history. The process, which pushed forward the Teutonic cause from 1 
 the Elbe to the Oder and from the Oder to the Vistula and 1 
 Dvina, was repeated whenever a conqueror came to a new country 
 with followers eager for land-grabbing. We see it in England after 
 the Norman Conquest when the French-speaking king and his French 
 barons set up numerous little towns in their demesne lands and at- 
 tracted settlers to them by the promise of liberties, such as towns in I 
 their own lands beyond the Channel had long enjoyed. Such new^ 
 towns were specially numerous in the north and west, where the Celts 
 of Wales and Cumbria had as little power of resistance to the mail- 
 clad knights as the Slavs of Silesia or the Letts of Livonia had to the 
 chivalry of Germany. Thus it was that numerous boroughs were 
 called into being to receive the laws of Breteuil, an obscure town on 
 the Norman-French border, just as the outposts of Germany in the east 
 had been granted the laws of Magdeburg. The western towns, th 
 oldest Welsh towns, and many Irish towns arose in this manner. But 
 few of the Noi man foundations of this type attained much success, and 
 none, so far as I know, give evidence of mediaeval town planning. We 
 must wait for the thirteenth century before we get that in England. 
 But before we deal with thirteenth century examples in our own land, 
 let us turn to France, the one continental country that was in intimate 
 connexion with ourselves all through the middle ages, and which, 
 both as friend and foe, profoundly modified the course of our national 
 history. 
 
 During the twelfth century the French monarchy became as 
 powerful as the German kingdom under the Saxons and Salian rulers 
 had ever been. It remained surrounded by a ring of vassal states, whose 
 lords were powerful magnates, like the Duke of Normandy, the Duke 
 of Aquitaine or the Count of Toulouse. Each of these was as com- 
 petent, within his sphere, to maintain order and uphold good-peace as 
 the King of Paris himself. Between the overlord and the great feuda- 
 tories there was natural enmity and a constant struggle for supremacy. 
 In the long run the Crown prevailed, and even in the south, where 
 men spoke a different tongue and thought different thoughts from the
 
 12 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 Frenchmen of the north, the Crown uhimately acquired ascendancy. 
 The conquest of the south by the northern kings was faciUtated by 
 the fact that the south, especially the district of which Toulouse was 
 the capital, had adopted the outspoken i heresies of the Albigensians. 
 This enabled a crusade to be preached against the Languedocian 
 heretics, and the conquest of the south was made possible by the 
 crusaders from the north who came to fight, alike for the faith and 
 for themselves. When the south was subdued after a bloody struggle, 
 it lay open to northern exploitation. Thus, ere the thirteenth century 
 was very old, a land depopulated and exhausted by war, rich in re- 
 sources, and sullenly hostile to its conquerors, was ready for the victor 
 to work his will on. 
 
 There were towns of great antiquity, populous and wealthy, in the 
 conquered south, but these had for the most part won for themselves 
 a municipal independence which still survived the conquest and made 
 them as hostile as, and more effective than, the beaten nobles to resist 
 the newcomers. Here we have the conditions of the Slavonic lands 
 after the German Conquest, or of Britain after the Norman Conquest 
 essentially repeated, save only that here the conqueror was not only 
 stronger but ruder than his victims, and that the vanquished land was 
 full of flourishing and populous cities. } The remedy was the same as on 
 ftX me eastern marches of Germany. From the wholesale and long-con- 
 ' ' tinned application of this remedy arose the villeneuves and bastides of 
 Southern France, the best examples of town planning known to the 
 I middle ages. 
 
 The word bastide, which in Northern France takes the form of 
 
 bastille, means simply a fortress. Here, as in the far east and in the 
 
 far north, the primary motive for the new foundation was military. 
 
 Some bastides were set upon the frontiers as barrier fortresses. 
 
 Others were erected over against an old town likely to give the 
 
 new lords trouble. All were possible refuges to the countryside, 
 
 when invasion or civil war came. But the economic motive loomed 
 
 large from the first. It paid a lord to attract settlers and traders 
 
 to his own town, and to divert commerce from the towns which 
 
 .. were self-governing or subject to his rivals. Though bastides were 
 
 I strewn so thickly over the map that only a small proportion be- 
 
 * came real towns, yet the rarity of success mattered the less since
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 13 
 
 the profits of success were great, and the risks of failure were incon- I 
 siderable. 
 
 The origin of the bastides of Languedoc is to be found in the 
 days before the northern conquest when monasteries, possessing large 
 tracts of lands and no tenants to till them, attracted settlers to their 
 estates by setting up little fortresses for them to live in and investing 
 the inhabitants with modest immunities. The greatest princes of the 
 south, the Counts of Toulouse, followed this policy on a larger scale, 
 and thus everything was easy when St. Louis, King of France and his 
 brother Alfonse, Count of Poitiers, the inheritors of the results of the 
 northern conquest of Languedoc, became the pioneers of a more 
 conscious movement towards town plantation. On that part of the 
 spoils of Languedoc which fell to the king himself, St. Louis set up 
 new towns of his own. The rest of the country of Toulouse went 
 to Alfonse of Poitiers, the son-in-law and successor of the last native 
 Count of Toulouse, and in this region he worked on the same lines as 
 his brother as a founder of bastides. If the great king's bastides 
 were the more enduring and important, those of Alfonse were by far 
 the more numerous. In a later generation, subsequent kings of France 
 inherited both brothers' work, and carried on their policy of town 
 making. Their example was followed by all the remaining feudal 
 potentates of the south, notably by our Edward I, who in early man- 
 hood received from Henry III the Duchy of Gascony to support his 
 state, and who, even before he was King of England, stepped into the 
 place left vacant by Alfonse's death in 1270, as the most active 
 founder of bastides of his age. 
 
 Whoever was the builder, the bastides were devised after the same 1 
 fashion. A site was procured, either on the founder's own lands, or 
 more often by arrangement with some local lord or prelate, who 
 would gladly surrender some of his nominal rights over an unprofit- 
 able estate on the chance of its being protected and developed by co- 
 operation between him and his powerful suzerain. When the site 
 was got, a name was chosen. Sometimes it suggested the novelty ; 
 of the experiment, ^ sometimes the liberties promised to the colonists,"^ 
 sometimes the security it offered,^ sometimes a special feature of its 
 
 ^ Villeneuve. " Villefranche. 
 
 ' Sauveterre, Salvatierra, La Sauve, Le Salvetat, Monsegur, La Garde.
 
 14 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 \ site/ sometimes the name of its founder, ^ sometimes a famous town of 
 \ a distant region that made some special appeal to the projector/ al- 
 ■ ways something either rather conventional or slightly bizarre. Then 
 \ the founder or his agent set up a pale* to mark the central point of 
 j the new settlement. 
 
 I Then the town planning began. When the ground allowed it, a 
 f rectangular or square site was selected as the easiest to arrange.^ But 
 though this was the normal shape, we have bastides of all sorts of 
 eccentric outlines, as for example the exceedingly irregular Sauveterre 
 de Guienne, shaped almost like a pear.^ In any case the new town 
 was protected always by a wall and ditch, rarely by a citadel or 
 castle in addition. Any such defensive works were commonly erected at 
 the charge of the founder. The fortifications and the site were in fact 
 the chief contributions of the founder to the making of the town. 
 Whatever the general outline of the bastide, the internal dispositions 
 were always on the same principles.' Each new town was plotted out 
 in squares or oblongs, by straight streets, crossing each other at right 
 angles, the main thoroughfares leading direct from the chief gates to 
 the centre of the town. Here the important arteries of traffic, the 
 carrteres, or carriage ways, met together in a central square, the 
 streets themselves being often carried across each side of the square 
 under arcades formed by a projection of the first floors of the surround- 
 ing houses/ though in other cases the covered arcades which were a 
 
 ^ Miranda, Miranda, Beaumont, Mirabel, Miramont, Montjoie, Aigues 
 Mortes. 
 
 ' Libourne (Roger of Leybourne), Nicole (Henry of Lacy, Earl of Lin- 
 coln), La Bastide de Baa (Bishop Burnell of Bath), Beaumarches (Eustace 
 of Beaumarchais, seneschal of Philip 111). 
 
 ^ Cordes, Grenade, Hastingues, Pampelonne, Cologne, Plaisance, 
 Fleurance, Barcelonne, Boulogne. 
 
 * Hence the " new town " of Pau (le pal) which became later the capital 
 of Beam. 
 
 * This is best illustrated at Montpazier, see the plan and description in 
 Didron, Annales Archeologiques, reproduced in plate III. See also plate 
 IV of Cadillac (Gironde). 
 
 ^ See its plan in Haverfield, Ancie?ii Town Planning, p. 144. 
 
 ' This is well seen in the plan of Beaumont in Perigord (Dep. Dor- 
 dogne), figured in Didron, Annates Archeologiques, VI. 78, where the re- 
 stricted dimensions of the low plateau on which the little bastide was 
 erected compelled all the blocks of houses to be arranged askew. For 
 other analogous irregularities see the plan of Ste. Foy in ibid. X. 270.
 
 s « 
 
 - <
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 15 
 
 general feature of the central piazza were of more restrained propor- 
 tions. In the area of the square the chief public building, the town 
 hall, was commonly placed, the ground floor, open at the sides, being 
 used as a covered market place, while business was transacted in 
 rooms raised above it on pillars. This plan is still to be seen in the 
 few surviving ancient town halls of smaller boroughs in our own 
 country, notably in the west of England. Round about the square 
 the principal inhabitants erected their houses in the most convenient 
 and open sites available for them. Hard by the chief square was a 
 smaller square wherein the parish church was placed. Lesser 
 churches and minor public buildings were scattered through the town 
 according to accident. 
 
 Each settler received a block of land, wherein to erect his 
 dwelling. Behind it was generally ample space for a garden. 
 The obligation to build a house at his own expense was the chief 
 pledge of the good faith and financial stability of the settler. In 
 new societies, where there was little social disparity, each house- 
 allotment was of similar size, as rectilineal in shape as everything else 
 in the bastide. But it looks as if important people often got several 
 allotments assigned to them, as was certainly the case in the English 
 and Welsh towns formed after this model. It was carefully stipu- 
 lated by the founder that the settlers' houses should be run up within a 
 reasonable period. Thus in one group of bastide charters ^ one-third 
 of the house was to be finished within the first year, and two- 
 thirds within the second year. If this were done, the structure could 
 be completed at the proprietor's discretion. But every householder 
 was bound to build over the whole street-front of his allotment, and 
 sometimes also a minimum breadth of the house, backwards from street 
 to garden, was also stipulated. As the normal townsman was still 
 primarily a cultivator, every settler received a grant of arable and pas- 
 ture land, sometimes too an orchard or vineyard, in the neighbourhood of 
 the town. These had been waste lands in many cases, and were now to 
 be brought into cultivation by the labour of the new population thus at- 
 tracted to the soil. As an inducement towards cutting down wood- 
 land and turning it into agricultural land, bastide builders were allowed 
 
 ^ See the Charter of Saint Osbert in the diocese of Bazas in Roles 
 Gascons, II. 13 (1276). This clause was repeated in the Cheirter of 
 Sauveterre, Gironde, ibid. ll. 200.
 
 16 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 to take from the lord's forest the timber from which their houses were 
 mainly constructed.^ 
 
 The whole scheme was on a small scale. The main roads are 
 to us excessively narrow, but the middle ages seldom used carts and 
 carriages, and there was no problem of traffic congestion to be faced. 
 Moreover in a southern climate narrow streets shaded the burgesses 
 from the sun and protected them from the icy v^dnds which are the 
 least pleasant form of the southern winter. The side streets were 
 mere lanes, accessible at the best to a pack-horse or mule ; at the 
 worst only traversable by the pedestrian. 
 
 The bastide, even nowadays, is a picturesque place with a local 
 colour and atmosphere of its own. It is nearly always small ; partly 
 because mediaeval conditions made large towns almost impossible, and 
 partly because bastide-{oMTi^vs\<g was so easy that so many were set 
 up as to make it out of the question for as many as one in ten to be- 
 come even a modest success. Some bastides have disappeared alto- 
 gether. We are ignorant even of the sites of several of the ring of 
 bastides, of which the bclstide of Bath was one, which surrounded 
 Bordeaux, doubtless with the object of destroying the commerce and 
 humbling the pride of the self-governing and rebellious capital. When 
 it has continued its existence till now, the ordinary successful bastide 
 remains a sleepy little place for all its old-world charm. You can bicycle 
 or motor along the excellent roads of South- Western France, and see 
 them by the score ; but when you have sampled half a dozen or so, you 
 have no real need to pursue your travels any farther, since all are very 
 much alike. The typical modern bastide is at the best a " chef lieu de 
 canton," a little market town of perhaps a couple of thousand or less 
 inhabitants. The larger agglomeration which has sprung from bastides 
 is represented by the " chef lieu d'arrondissement," a place running 
 perhaps up to a population of ten thousand. Such is Edward I's 
 "y^oundation of L^ibourne, a flourishing borough owing its prosperity to 
 its magnificent site of the confluence of the Isle with the Dordogne, up 
 which the small ships of the middle ages came, laden with corn or wool 
 from England, to receive their return cargo of wine for the island 
 
 ^ A convenient general treatise on bastides is that of A. Curie-Seimbrcs, 
 Essai sur les Bastides (Toulouse: Privat, 1880). It may be brought up 
 to date by the excellent article on bastides by A. Giry in La Grande 
 EncyclopMie.
 
 '-^■■•atJ^^^i ' * ^^^^-l^^^^'^M^^^^^^i^ 
 
 V. AlGUES MORTES (GaRD) (WESTERN HaLF) 
 
 (From Didron : " Annales archeologiques ". X. Paris, 1856)
 
 MEDIi^VAL TOWN PLANNING 17 
 
 market. Such too is Alfonse of Poitiers' most successful bastide, 
 Villefranched[eRoiiergue. Of the two great foundations of St. Louis 
 Ai^ues Mortes is a bustling little place enough, much more active than 
 the sleepy bastides farther west, but it never succeeded in being the 
 great Mediterranean port that its founder designed it to be, and there- 
 fore its massive walls and magnificent castle have been suffered to re- 
 main to this day, the finest specimen of a mediaeval walled town in 
 the world, its beauty enhanced by the dreary waste of sand, marsh, flat 
 meadow and stagnant waters that encompass it. A more prosperous 
 history has attended the " n ew town_ ^^Qf Carca^onne, which St. 
 Louis also established as a commercial borough, leaving the old " city" 
 of Carcassonne on its fortified height beyond the Aude as the abode of 
 the clergy serving its churches and the soldiers guarding the noble ring 
 of fortifications that make the cit^ of Carcassonne as unique among 
 the fortified cities set on hills as Aigues Mortes is among the towns 
 established in the plain. Yet from the thirteenth to the twentieth 
 century the " ville" of Carcassonne attracted to itself all the life of the 
 cite. In the middle ages the " new town " owed its size and pros- 
 perity to its cloth industry ; in our own days it is the flourishing 
 capital of the department of the Aude. But it still retains the town plan 
 designed for it by the officers of St. Louis when they first measured 
 out its streets and staked off its building lots in the years immediately 
 succeeding 1248. 
 
 I have mentioned Edward I as an active founder of bastides in 
 France, and it would seem natural now to turn from foreign instances 
 and ask how far town planning was extended by him or others into 
 the England which he was soon called upon to rule. I have already 
 shown that after the Norman Conquest there was a good deal of town 
 founding, and probably town planning, on a modest scale in Britain. 
 But with the establishment of the strong centralized monarchy, which 
 resulted from the Conquest, the chief need for this passed away. 
 The reign of law was real enough to make it unnecessary for the 
 cultivator to seek, like his foreign counterpart, for a home within the 
 walls of a privileged borough, and there were no wildernesses, desolated 
 by war, crying aloud for new towns to protect the farmers enticed to 
 till the neighbouring lands. There were few frontiers to defend or 
 invaders to drive out. There were, moreover, no English towns, 
 not even London, with privileges so strong that, like the cities of
 
 18 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 Gascony and Languedoc, they could tempt kings and princes to set 
 up rivals over against them. It was enough then for England that from 
 time to time villages should receive the modest privileges of a country 
 borough from the king or their immediate lords. But neither the 
 process which in our own neighbourhood gave charters to Salford, 
 Manchester, and Stockport, nor the extension by charter of wider priv- 
 ileges to the greater cities involved much town founding or any town 
 planning. Towns, " Newtowns," as they were often called, were set 
 up, and one of these was Liverpool, which started on its career as 
 a foundation of King John, who, when still only Count of Mortain, set 
 it up as a port for the lands between the Ribble and Mersey of which 
 he was then the lord. But there is no evidence of town planning, 
 and it is unlikely that any systematic laying out was attempted. It 
 required something exceptional for mediaeval England to witness a town 
 deliberately planned. Such exceptions occurred now and then in the 
 case of an individual town ; they once arose in relation to a great 
 district. We can, therefore, illustrate the accidental foundation of 
 an exceptional town from the case of the foundation of new Salisbury 
 early in the reign of Henry III, and the comparatively wholesale founda- 
 tion of towns by the real bastides in North Wales, set up when the 
 fall of the last native Welsh prince secured direct possession of his 
 dominions by Edward I, under circumstances that tempted the monarch 
 to establish in Wales bastides with a hand only less lavish than that 
 which had scattered new towns over Gascony. Later in his reign 
 Edward also set up two new towns in England itself. From these 
 thirteenth century examples, all involving town planning as well as 
 town foundation, we can illustrate the extent which our own land took 
 part in the systematic laying out of new towns during our period. 
 New Salisbury, the bastides of North Wales, the English bastides of 
 Hull and New Winchelsea must now engage our attention. 
 
 Old Salisbury, or Old Sarum, as it is generally called, was a 
 typical hill town, wherein a castle, a cathedral, and the houses of the 
 inhabitants were crowded within the narrow compass of the flat 
 summit of a steep mount. By the thirteenth century the cramped site 
 was too small for its motley population, which complained, moreover, 
 that there was no water and too much wind on its bleak height. 
 Two miles to the south the bishops possessed a rich stretch of meadow 
 land watered by the Avon. Already many citizens had sought more
 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 !4'rf? 
 
 i\- ' »■■■ ^f^' ^ -«i' ^ 
 
 .-nurcn 
 
 
 ft 
 
 I JZ Jit "f^u-a^joWht. 
 
 {M 
 
 g* tT^ »^ ^ 
 
 VII. Salisbury (Modern) 
 (From " The Ordnance Survey of England and Wales ")
 
 
 
 ^ ^? 4 '* 'f-f 
 
 
 
 
 duadavix^-'J'''^'* 
 
 VIII. Flint (Seventeenth Century) 
 (From Speed: "Theatre of . . . Great Britaine ". London, 1676)
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 19 
 
 commodious quarters in the plain, when in 1 220 Bishop Richard le 
 Poer resolved to transfer his cathedral there. The first stone of the 
 new church was laid, and ample space was left round it for the green 
 close which is still one of the glories of the new Salisbury of the 
 plain. To the south the bishop's palace was also set in great gardens 
 while to the north the bishop planned a new city, big enough to en- 
 tice the men of Old Sarum to desert their overcrowded upland, and 
 attractive enough to tempt traders and settlers from every side, and in 
 particular to take away the trade of the flourishing borough of Wilton 
 some three miles to the west. The same large ideas that inspired the 
 erection of cathedral, close, and palace, induced the bishop to lay out 
 his new city on an ample scale. Its straight-cut roads and chess-board 
 plan of allotments showed that as early as 1 220 the bastide type was 
 quite well recognized and willingly adopted, though we must not sup- 
 pose conscious imitation of either ancient or foreign models. In- 
 deed the streets were wider than most ancient or mediaeval towns, 
 notably more spacious than the lower town of Carcassonne, built thirty 
 years later, and its nearest continental counterpart. But in England 
 there was no great need for fortifications. A "deep and strong" 
 ditch, diverted from the Avon, afforded such sufficient protection on 
 the north and east sides that the citizens never troubled themselves to 
 build the wall they were authorized to construct. On other sides 
 the Avon itself was a sufficient bulwark. Within, the "fair streets" 
 excited the admiration of the traveller Leland ^ when he visited the 
 place over three centuries later ; and in particular he was pleased at 
 the " little streamlets " running down every street, which are still a 
 frequent feature of the modern city. Leland admired too the market 
 place, set out after the bastide fashion in the centre of the city, " very 
 fair and large and well watered with a running streamlet," having in 
 one corner the town hall " strongly builded of stone " and in another 
 the chief parish church. By 1 227 new Salisbury had arisen so far that a 
 royal charter gave all the liberties of Winchester and the privileges of 
 a " free city " to the bishop's new venture. Ere long Old Sarum was 
 deserted save by the castle garrison, and Edward 111 allowed the 
 dean and canons to use the Norman cathedral on the height as a 
 quarry for stones to repair the most homogeneous and best planned of 
 English cathedrals, which lay beyond the greatest triumph of town 
 ^ Leland, Itinerary, \. 258-9, ed. L. T. Smith.
 
 20 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 planning that mediaeval England saw. Before long the great western 
 road was diverted from its steep course up and down Old Sarum 
 hill, and conducted through the bishop's new city. This drove away- 
 traffic from Wilton and soon transferred the commerce of the epony- 
 mous borough of the Wilsaetas to its modern rival. Irritated at the 
 loss of customers, the men of Wilton strove to force traders of the dis- 
 trict to attend their markets and there, and there only, expose their 
 goods for sale. But beating and bullying merchants is not in the long 
 run a good way of attracting trade. In a few generations Wilton 
 became the tiny townlet that it still remains, its life blood having 
 been almost as much absorbed into Salisbury as that of Old Sarum 
 itself. 
 
 The foundation of new Salisbury was based on purely ecclesias- 
 tical and economic motives. It was necessary to find room and com- 
 fort for clergy and traders in a well -planned city of the plain. The 
 unimportant castle could safely remain on the hill. It was otherwise 
 with the new towns which Edward I estabUshed in North Wales after 
 the fall of Llewelyn ap Gruffydd. In each case ahke continental 
 parallels force themselves upon our attention. If Sahsbury anticipates 
 Carcassonne, the Edwardian towns in Wales exactly reproduce the 
 conditions of the many bastides that Edward I had delighted to set 
 up in Gascony. Here, as in Aquitaine, the military motive was 
 supreme, and second to it was the economic motive emphasized by the 
 desire of the Englishman, already rather a " superior person," to teach 
 "civility" to the " wild Welsh" by the stimulating example of the 
 English soldiers, traders, and clergy whose business was to direct them, 
 not necessarily too gently, in the right way. No Welshman need apply 
 for burgess- ship of towns which were meant for ** good Englishmen 
 only. These latter were attracted into exile just as in Gascony, by town 
 lots, large grants of lands to till outside the walls, a monopoly of the 
 commerce of the district, and as many economic and social privileges 
 as were compatible wdth the mihtary unity of the borough. There 
 was always a castle with a permanent garrison. The constable <w 
 this castle was ex officio mayor of the little borough to which it stood 
 as its citadel. As there was nothing, either then or later, to make 
 such towns very large, the tourist can still study their plan, walls, and 
 castles, much as they were devised by their town planners. 
 
 Let us begin at Flint, a place which had not even a name in
 
 
 :^' >^ t; '-J ^ ^ -o -, 'A -^ ri:C^J^-S^7-U4C^| 
 c; ui u^ ^ i; K^ UJ K^ ;= ^'^ r:i_;^ ;V=< ':^ K K -^^ H ^ 
 
 
 .^^''
 
 MEDIv^VAL TOWN PLANNING 21 
 
 1277/ but which a few years later was a flourishing bastide, the 
 shire town of the new dependent county of Flint, which became 
 a sort of Welsh extension of Edward's own Cheshire palatinate. 
 Though modem industrialism has reared its hideous head all around, 
 we can still make out the line of the streets, drawn at right angles 
 from each other and leading up to the castle, majestic even in its 
 ruin. A few miles farther west, Rhuddlan shows its castle, but there 
 is little town planning now visible in the village that Edward wished 
 to make a real town, and to which he desired that the Bishop of St. 
 Asaph should transfer his see. But we must cross the Conway to see 
 Edward's Welsh bastides at their best, to Conway itself wdth its 
 glorious castle dominating both river and town. The triangular shape 
 of the borough — the form of a Welsh harp is the " right way " of de- 
 scribing it — has not prevented the geometrical planning of the streets 
 and plots in rectilinear lines. Still better does the bastide plan come 
 out in Carnarvon, a town that had more of a future before it, as the 
 capital of North Wales, than its eastern sisters. These are the 
 successes of the Edwardian policy ; the failures as in Gascony were 
 even more numerous. Later than 1284 Edward set up a new 
 castellated borough at Beaumaris, others were made by his son, as 
 prince and king ; and still others by the Black Prince. Then in 
 England as in Gascony town planning ceased by the middle of the 
 fourteenth century. The king was not the only town founder in 
 Wales. In Southern and Western Wales, the lords marcher con- 
 tinued the policy which had begun in Norman days. Llewelyn 
 himself strove as late as 1 273 to set up at Abermule a castle, town 
 and market in rivalry to the castle, town and market of the king at 
 Montgomery.^ 
 
 We cure lucky in having more details as to the process by which 
 these Welsh towns were made than we have of many of their continental 
 elder brethren. Nearly every point that I have mentioned already 
 as regards the Gascon group was reproduced in the North Welsh 
 variety of the same type. The similarity of plan applied not only to 
 the general outline but to the detailed plots assigned to the individual 
 settlers. The " placeae " of Gascony are reproduced, even in name, 
 
 ^ See for this J. G. Edwards, " The Name of Flint Castle " in English 
 Historical Review, XXIX. 315 (1914). 
 * Cal. Close Rolls, \in-9, p. 51.
 
 11 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 in the little borough of Newborough in Anglesea, a foundation of 
 Edward II, but they are more generally known as " burgages ", A 
 comparison between the two groups will show that, while at Carnarvon 
 and Criccieth the individual " burgage " was 80 x 60 feet, at Beaumaris 
 there was the same length but only half the breadth, namely 40 feet. 
 The charters of a gi'oup of Gascon towns of which that of Sauveterre 
 de Guienne is first, assigned the settlers "places" of 24 x 72 feet,^ 
 while at Valence d'Agen the places were either 24 x 60 or 36 
 X 60.^ It is not likely that a " foot" of exactly the same length was 
 used in Gascony and England, but even allowing for this it is clear 
 that the Gascon "place" was a smaller allotment than the north 
 Welsh " burgage ". It naturally, therefore, paid a much lower rent. 
 But the mass of the bastides were not likely to become more than 
 agricultural villages, and the north Welsh towns were to be peopled 
 by a dominant race, drawn from a distance and needing more induce- 
 ment to accept the painful, if sometimes profitable, role of posing as 
 pioneers of an alien civilization. In the same way any reputable 
 person, serfs included, were welcomed in a bashde, while the Welsh 
 borough was limited to free Englishmen, Jews, like Welshmen, being 
 forbidden all entrance. 
 
 An essential element in town planning is the selection of a good 
 site on which a new foundation has a chance of attaining greatness. 
 The Gascon bastides were scattered too thickly to make their positions 
 anything but matters of accident, though sometimes, as in the case of 
 Libourne, Edward or his agents showed a real eye for a site, marked 
 out by nature for an important town. The maturer work of Edward 
 in North Wales may well claim to have been distinguished by insight 
 in the selection of good localities for potential towns. The nameless 
 rock, or " the Flint," where Edward's earliest foundation arose, 
 commanded the estuary of the lower Dee. Rhuddlan was the head of 
 the navigation of the Clwyd. It prospered greatly until the increase 
 in the size of ships, and the silting up of the river left the borough 
 high and dry, so that the suggestion that the deserted village was 
 ever a seaport seems to modern visitors ridiculous. The advantage 
 of the site of Conway, dominating the passage of a broad river and 
 providing access from the further bank to the mountain of Snowdonia, 
 and the attractions of Carnarvon and Beaumaris, protecting the two 
 
 ^ Roles Gascon, II. 13, 201. "^ Ibid. II. 209.
 
 - i - 1 5 = 5 = = s ? i- s 
 
 
 ? E 
 
 1! c
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 23 
 
 banks of the Menai Straits, are obvious on the face of things. And that 
 Edward took pains with his choice of sites is clear from the trouble 
 lavished and the misunderstandings faced when he chose as the site of 
 Conway the hallowed Cistercian monastery which was the favourite 
 foundation of the Welsh princes, with the result that he was com- 
 pelled to provide a new home for the monks higher up the stream in a 
 position of less military and economic importance. When a bad site was 
 chosen, such as that of Bere amidst a wilderness of hills in Merioneth, 
 the town simply never came into existence. We may perhaps claim 
 for Edward a touch of that instinct in choosing town sites which is a 
 rarer gift for the town planner that the mechanical measuring out of 
 straight lines and right angles in plotting the roads and " burgages " within 
 the walls. To see this gift in perfection we must go back to the two 
 great town planners of antiquity who have left their names in the 
 Egyptian Alexandria and in Constantinople. 
 
 The same insight marked Edward Is work on the rare occasions 
 when, after the conquest of Gwynedd, he had an opportunity to 
 plan new towns in his own English realm. Among his claims to 
 fame is his foundation of Hull, or to give it its full title the Kingstown 
 on the Hull, with Liverpool one of the very few of the greater historic 
 towns of England that can boast, or lament, a founder. Two events had 
 drawn Edward to the North. There was the Scottish trouble, which 
 demanded his best efforts after 1 290 and brought him and the whole 
 machinery of state to York for years on end. There was also the lapse 
 to the Crown of the inheritance of the earls of Albemarle, whose great 
 lordship of Holderness was thus made royal domain. Now the old 
 port of Holderness was Ravenser, now buried beneath the sea, and 
 already dropping by degrees into the muddy Humber. With the view 
 of providing a successor to Ravenser, and a port more accessible from 
 York and the interior, Edward chose a site where the little river Hull 
 pours its waters into the Humber. The angle between the two 
 rivers, just west of the Hull and north of the Humber, belonged to 
 the monks of the neighbouring monastery of Meaux, and its advantages 
 had already brought a few houses, ships and traders to the spot.^ But 
 
 ^ Cal. Patent Rolls, 1281-92, pp. 270, 278, 354, and Cal. Close Rolls, 
 1288-96, pp. 9, 101, 261, show that there was some population and trade 
 at Wyke before 1290 and that it was sometimes called Hull. In 1279 the 
 monks of Meaux had a charter permitting a weekly market at Wyke {Cal, 
 Charter Rolls, II. 214).
 
 .24 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 about February, 1293, Wyke, as it was then called, was a humble 
 enough place, and it was therefore not hard for Edward to negotiate 
 its exchange for other lands.' Once secure of the coveted position, 
 he immediately set forth to found a new town upon it. Four months 
 after the transfer, he gave Wyke the new name of the Kingstown on 
 the Hull, and proclaimed two weekly markets there. A deviation 
 of the Hull " gave it water protection on all sides, and provided for 
 our own age a complete ring of docks, round the nucleus of the modern 
 city. It was a new Libourne in a colder and flatter land. The site 
 was laid out with Aquitanian regularity and the vast offices and 
 warehouses that in the modern town now take up the narrow space 
 between the docks and the Humber, and are still grouped round 
 Edward's great church of the Holy Trinity, cannot altogether conceal 
 from the historic tourist the fact that the oldest part of the modern 
 town still follows the lines of a normal bastide, with its chess-board 
 pattern, and its central market square on which abuts its chief church. 
 A feature in the construction was that it was the first English town in 
 which brick was the chief building material, much of Trinity Church, 
 all the town gates, and many of the houses being, then or later, built 
 of bricks.^ By 1 299 the time was ripe for a royal charter constituting 
 Kingston a " free borough " wath extensive franchises.* So thoroughly 
 did Edward provide for the needs of the new port that, like the bishops 
 of Salisbury, he diverted and constructed high roads to give access to 
 it.^ By a master-stroke of policy he enticed the chief merchant of 
 Ravenser, William de la Pole, to throw his interest into Kingston 
 by granting him the manor of Myton, included in the King's purchase 
 
 ^ Chron. de Melsa, II. 186-92, tells the story from the Meaux point 
 of view. 
 
 ■' Cal. Close Rolls, 1 288-96, p. 292. This order of 1 July, 1 293, to pro- 
 claim throughout Yorkshire the holding of two markets a week in the " King's 
 town of Kingston-on-Hull " is the first evidence of the new name that I have 
 come across. 
 
 ^ Leland, Itmerary, I, 49-50, ed. L. T. Smith. 
 
 ^ It is in Cal. Charter Rolls, II. 475-6, dated 1 April, 1299. Ravenser 
 was compensated by a duplicate charter, issued the same day {ibid. p. 
 476). 
 
 ^See Cal. Patent Rolls, 1301-7, p. 191, instruction of 16 May, 1303, 
 to royal officers, appointed to survey and arrange the roads to the new town 
 of Kingston-on-Hull, to inquire where it will most benefit the town and mer- 
 chants for roads to be made, and whether on the king's land or on that of 
 others.
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 25 
 
 from Meaux. There Pole erected a stately mansion which, until 
 their migration to London in the next generation, became the head- 
 quarters of the first great house of merchant princes known to mediaeval 
 England. Pole's son, another William, became first Mayor of Hull in 
 1 322. The identification of the Pole family with the royal foundation 
 secured the thorough exploitation of the King's favour and the natural 
 advantages of its position. When a century later Ravenser was 
 swallowed up by the sea, Hull stood without a rival among the ports 
 between Newcastle and Lynn. 
 
 In southern England another famous port was already enduring 
 the fate that was soon to be meted out to Ravenser. This was 
 Winchelsea, or more precisely Old Winchelsea, a town then situated 
 on a low cliff off the East Sussex coast, which had long been crumb- 
 ling into the sea, and over whose site nowadays the German submarine 
 may perchance have torpedoed many a harmless merchant- ship. 
 After vain efforts to prop up the old town,^ Edward encouraged its 
 still prosperous inhabitants to change bodily the site of their borough. 
 He chose for their new home the wooded hill of Iham. This emi- 
 nence rose steeply above the broad estuary then formed by the river 
 Brede so that the site, though raised above all danger of flood, was ac- 
 cessible for sea-going craft and easily defensible. It lay some three 
 miles north-west of Old Winchelsea. As early as 1 280 Edward di- 
 rected his steward to obtain by purchase or exchange land at Iham 
 suitable for the new town.^ In 1 28 1 he nominated Stephen of Pen- 
 chester, Itier of Angouleme and Henry le Waleys to assess certain 
 "places," that is "burgages" or building sites, and to let them for 
 building at a fixed rent to the " barons and good men " of Winchelsea.^ 
 Penchester, more properly called Penshurst,* was warden of the 
 Cinque Ports, and it is significant that the second commissioner, Itier, 
 was a Gascon of wide experience in bastide building, while the third, 
 Henry le Waleys, was a great London merchant with close Gascon 
 connexions, who had been mayor of Bordeaux as well as of London. 
 
 ^ For instance, Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1272-81, p. 151. 
 
 ''Ibid. p. 144. ""Ibid. 1281-92. p. 3. 
 
 * Stephen was called Penchester by contemporaries, but so was the 
 place now called Penshurst in Kent, which gave him his name, where he 
 lived and was buried. It is better therefore to call him by the modern form 
 of the place name.
 
 26 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 Yet all these efforts remained for two or three years fruitless. 
 It looks as if the king tried to drive too hard a bargain with the men 
 of Old Winchelsea, and that they were too wary to accept his first 
 offers. Anyhow in 1 284 a fuller commission was appointed with 
 greater powers and discretion. In this Penshurst and Waleys were 
 associated with Gregory of Rokesley, the actual mayor of London, to 
 " plan and assess the new town of Iham which the king is order- 
 ing to be built there for the barons of Winchelsea, as that town is al- 
 ready in great part submerged by the sea and is in danger of total 
 submersion ". The commissioners were to " plan and give directions " 
 for the necessary streets and lanes, for places suitable for a market, and 
 for two churches to be dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury and 
 St. Giles, the patron saints of the two parishes in the old town. They 
 were also to assign and deliver to the said " barons " of Winchelsea com- 
 petent " places," or building sites, according to their requirements.^ In 
 these minute directions we have the most detailed evidence of con- 
 scious town planning by royal authority that the age was to witness. 
 Note also that the king still kept the site in his own hands. 
 
 How far Penshurst and the two Londoners discharged their mis- 
 sion is not knowm. But it looks as if the "barons " clung as long as 
 they could to their old abodes, the more so as they may still have 
 been afraid of entrusting themselves to the absolute control of the royal 
 lord of the new borough. However in 1287, when Edward was in 
 Gascony, a mighty inundation threatened to sweep away the water- 
 logged remnants of Old Winchelsea, and after that no more delay 
 was possible. One of Edward's strongest ministers, John Kirkby, 
 Bishop of Ely, the treasurer, was, either now or earlier, assigned to the 
 " ordering " of the new town." But he seems to have thought that the 
 best way of getting the thing done was to let the persons chiefly con- 
 cerned have a preponderating share in the management of the new ven- 
 ture. Accordingly in 1 288 the regency, of which Kirkby was perhaps 
 the leading spirit, handed over Iham hill to the " barons of Winchelsea," 
 save some ten acres reserved for the king's use. On their taking up 
 their abodes in the new town, they were to enjoy the same liberties that 
 they had had before at Old Winchelsea.*^ The effect of this was that the 
 
 1 Cal. Patent Rolls, 1281-92, pp. 81-2. - Ibid. 1301-7, p. 185. 
 
 ^ Cal. Fine Rolls, I. 249 (23 June, 1 288). An earlier cancelled 
 order of 21 June is in Cal. Close Rolls, 1279-88, pp. 509-10.
 
 w W
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 27 
 
 washed-out burgesses were to be secure of their old franchises and to 
 participate in the laying out of the town. From this point onwards the 
 greater liberality of the administration and the growing cruelty of the sea 
 combined to accelerate the progress of the new venture. Iham, now 
 New Winchelsea, was duly laid out into thirty-nine chequers or squares 
 after the fashion of Gascony and Gwynedd. But certain deviations 
 from the normal bastide plan, noted by local historians, may perhaps 
 be due to the irregularity of the site and the prejudices of the bur- 
 gesses, though they are more likely the result of the king's wish to lay 
 out the new nest as much like the old one as possible, to tempt the 
 timid fledglings to take up their quarters in it. Power to wall the 
 town was given to the burgesses.^ Along the western and only exposed 
 side a moat was drawn. Strong gates, soon to be supplemented by a 
 wall, barred access to the borough. Magnificent churches, friaries, and 
 public buildings arose under the king's own eye. By 1 297 New Win- 
 chelsea had so far come into being that it could afford accommodation 
 for the embarkation of the great host which Edward led from its 
 harbour to Flanders. As in Hull, Edward made terms with the most 
 active of the local magnates. The house of Alard, who stood to 
 Winchelsea as the Pole family stood to Hull, had already fought in 
 his wars and soon had custody of the town for life. A prosperous 
 future seemed assured, but before very long the sea played almost as 
 cruel a trick on New Winchelsea as it had played on its predecessor. 
 The harbour silted up ; the waters retreated leaving the town high 
 and dry on its hill, and looking towards its neighbour Rye over the 
 marshes that now fill up the site of the harbour where ships had once 
 sciiled and anchored. New Winchelsea, therefore, ceased to be a 
 port and soon also it ceased to be a town. In the magnificent fragment 
 of St. Thomas' Church, with its matchless series of Alard tombs ; 
 in the remaining gates, one standing forlorn in the fields far from 
 human habitation, and above all in the signs of town plots that can 
 still be discerned in land now given over to husbandry — the traveller 
 can still see suggestions of the sometime greatness of the most elaborate 
 scheme of town planning ever devised even by Edward I. 
 
 There is another town planning scheme of Edward I, which 
 was perhaps never fully realized, but which nevertheless had some 
 permanent importance in history. As a result of Edward's first con- 
 
 1 Cal. Patent Rolls, 1292-1301, p. 147 (1295).
 
 28 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 quest of Scotland in 1 296, Berwick-on-Tweed, up to that date the 
 chief commercial centre of southern Scotland, fell into his hands. The 
 king had prescience enough to foresee future troubles with Scotland, 
 and we may feel sure that the strategic and commercial advantages of 
 the peninsula site of Berwick, on the tongue of land between the 
 Tweed and the sea, made its appeal to the founder of Libourne, 
 Hull, and Winchelsea. Accordingly he resolved to make it an 
 English town and outpost of English influence. This involved the 
 displacement of the Scottish population and the assignment of their 
 homes to English settlers, to attract whom a new constitution for the 
 town was clearly necessary. For all these objects a wise king thought 
 it prudent to take the best advice he could procure. Accordingly, 
 while on his way south back from his recent conquest, Edward issued 
 writs ordering representatives of the chief towns in England to meet 
 him at Bury St. Edmunds, to which place also a general parliament 
 was summoned for 3 November, 1 296. Though many of the towns 
 sent their citizens and burgesses to this assembly, Edward's con- 
 sultative council, though meeting at the same time and place, was 
 constituted by other persons than those sent to represent the same 
 Constituencies in the Parliament. By a writ of privy seal of 21 
 September, London was ordered to elect " four wise men of the 
 most knowing and most sufficient who know best how to devise, 
 order and array a new town to the most profit of the king and of 
 merchants ". These were to attend at Bury St. Edmunds on the 
 appointed date, and be ready to proceed elsewhere on this business 
 wherever the king may enjoin them to go. We knew exactly how 
 the Londoners carried out the order. There were summoned on 22 
 October the aldermen and four good men of each ward of the city, 
 and these unanimously selected the four experts in planning new towns 
 who were to help the king in his mysterious and unnamed new 
 venture in town making.^ Yet this was not all, for three days later 
 more normal writs of summons ''^ were issued to twenty-three other cities 
 and boroughs to send to Bury two representatives each, whose 
 
 ^ The writ and its return are printed in Palgrave, Parliamentary 
 Writs, I. 49 ; and in Muniynenta Gildhall<B Londonieyisis. Liber 
 Castumarum, II, i. 77-8 (Rolls Ser.). 
 
 ^ See Pari. Writs, I. 49. These were letters close under the great 
 seal after the usual fashion.
 
 MEDIEVAL TOWN PLANNING 29 
 
 qualifications were described in exactly the same language as in the 
 London writ. We may pause to marvel on the stir it would make 
 nowadays for twenty-four towns, ranging in importance from London 
 to Dunwich, being called upon to produce at a few weeks' notice fifty 
 experts in town planning to help the king to plan a new town ! It 
 shows how town planning was in the air, though few of the persons 
 selected had any personal experience in the business save perhaps the 
 two citizens of New Salisbury, who when at home had always before 
 them the great town planning experiment of their grandfathers' days. 
 
 Unluckily little came of the deliberations at Bury St. Edmunds. 
 The experts doubtless met, but they settled nothing. Further provisions 
 for advising the king had consequently to be devised. On 1 5 Novem- 
 ber Edward summoned from Bury a new assembly to meet him on 2 
 January, 1 297, at whatsoever place in England he might then happen 
 to be.^ This time the king tore asunder the transparent veil of 
 secrecy which, then as now, seems to be worshipped by statesmen 
 almost for its own sake. The business for this assembly was to advise 
 the king as to a certain ordinance for his town of Berwick- on-T weed. 
 Moreover the list of towns, called upon to send representatives, was 
 very different, Winchelsea and eight fresh boroughs coming in while 
 Salisbury and twelve others dropped out. Also the selection of ex- 
 perts by public meeting seems not to have been a success — even 
 nowadays it might be a risky method ! On this occasion the king 
 nominated the persons he wanted and addressed special writs to them. 
 By this device he at least procured the services of some experts, for he 
 summoned Henry le Waleys, the sometime joint-planner of Winchel- 
 sea, now again Mayor of London, and Thomas Alard, Warden of 
 Winchelsea for life, and its leading citizen. 
 
 Edward made the business easy by promising that he would not 
 keep the assembly longer from its homes than he could help. It was 
 now summoned to Harwich, whither the king had removed. But when 
 the town planners came on 2 Januaiy , if they did come, to Hcirwich, they 
 seem to have soon shuffled out of their responsibilities, for a fortnight 
 later Edward issued a third set of summonses for another assembly, this 
 time to be held at Berwick itself in April, to which specified represen- 
 tatives of selected towns on the north-east coast from Newcastle to 
 Lynn, with Oxford thrown in rather inexplicably, were to be summoned 
 
 1 Pari. Writs, I. 49-50.
 
 30 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 through the sheriffs of their respective shires.^ The only outcome was 
 the resettling of Berwick by Englishmen and the new charter of 1 302 
 which made Berwick a " free borough "." I cannot find that any real 
 town planning was attempted, and there is little in the alignments of 
 the modern town to suggest that it was. The important result wa: 
 the permanent detachment of Berwick from Scotland. Its formal 
 inclusion in England is a thing of our own day. 
 
 After the conquest of Calais in 1 347, Edward III, following his 
 grandfather's Berwick plans, displaced the French burgesses by English 
 settlers. Here there was real town planning, as the still abiding 
 streets of the old town of Calais, between the railway- station and the 
 sea, continue to testify. But we have now got at the very verge of the 
 golden age of mediaeval town planning, whose extreme limits we may put 
 roughly between 1220 and 1350. In the declining middle ages town 
 destruction is more conspicuous than town making ; yet enough of the 
 tradition lingered on to survive in some well-planned towns of the 
 sixteenth century, such as Leghorn, and to inspire the Dutch to repeat 
 at Batavia in Java and the English Colonists to revive in North 
 America the rectilineal plans of the middle ages. But, as experts tell 
 us, the first European adventurers found towns planned like chess- 
 boards in Mexico, as they had previously been found in China. You 
 may decide as you will as to how far there was any merit in their 
 doing the obvious thing for sensible men under the circumstances in 
 which they were placed. " Post hoc " is not necessarily " propter 
 hoc," and, just as we must not affiliate the planned towns of the 
 middle ages too meticulously to the planned towns of antiquity, so 
 we must not lay excessive stress on the continuation of the mediaeval 
 tradition in modern times. But there is this to be said for the 
 later case of continuity, that there is a continuous history between the 
 mediaeval and the modern town which makes us, whether we like it 
 or not, the necessary children of the middle ages. Between the towns 
 of the Romano-Greek world and ourselves, the barbarian invasions have 
 drawn a deep gulf. 
 
 Such was mediaeval town planning. When we have said about 
 it all that we can, it remains the exception rather than the rule. 
 Only in a few special districts, and under specially favourable condi- 
 tions did the "new towns," artificially created, become important 
 
 ^Parl. Writs, I. 51. ' Cal. Charter Rolls, III. 27-8.
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 31 
 
 enough to bulk large in history. Even then the successful " new 
 town " was generally something that replaced a former town rather 
 than an entirely new creation, a new Carcassonne on the plain ab- 
 sorbing the business of the old Carcassonne on the hill, a new Win- 
 chelsea sedulously following the traditions of the old Winchelsea, 
 swallowed up by the sea, a Kingston-on-HuU carrying on the trade of 
 Ravenser engulphed in the waters of the H umber, an English Berwick 
 and an EngHsh Calais continuing the activities of the Scottish Ber- 
 wick and French Calais. Perhaps we could claim more for the 
 mediaeval town planner if we extended our categories and included in 
 our lists new quarters of old towns, planned after approved models, 
 the mediaeval equivalents, let us say, of the new town of Edinburgh. 
 Such were the older parts of the lower town of Boulogne-sur-mer, called 
 the qzcartier des ca7'reaMX by reason of the mathematical regularity 
 of its rectangular streets and building blocks, a regularity only departed 
 from when the prudent town planner introduced here and there a " lying 
 corner," a coin menteur, an artificially devised irregular twist to protect 
 those using- its streets from the full force of the wdnd. Such too was the 
 new quarter of the city of Amiens, to the south of its great cathedral. 
 This district was planned in the fifteenth century on the site of the ancient 
 ramparts demolished at that period in order to extend the circumfer- 
 ence of the city.^ So well was the work done that the chief street 
 of this quarter, the Rue des Trois Cailloux, remains to this day the 
 chief artery of traffic in Amiens, and with the neighbouring streets still 
 retains substantial traces of the town planning activity of its fifteenth 
 century founders. Further examples could easily be given, but these 
 perhaps are enough to illustrate a subsidiary point. Perhaps also the 
 reconstruction of an old town after its destruction by warfare or some 
 natural conversion may well have proceeded on similar lines. We 
 know that after the burning of the lower city of Carcassonne by the 
 Black Prince in 1 355, it was rebuilt exactly on the plan laid down 
 by St. Louis. Whether the same happened after Milan was rebuilt 
 when laid waste by Frederick Barbarossa, we have probably no data 
 
 ^ For Boulogne and Amiens see C. Enlart, Manuel d' archcolegie 
 
 francaise, II. Architecture civile et niilitaire, pp. 238-40. M, Enlarl's 
 
 section, § II., "fondation et plan de villas," etc., pp. 237-48, contains an 
 
 excellent summary of the effects of mediaeval town planning with interesting 
 
 illustrations.
 
 32 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 to determine. While any such reconstruction would give a good 
 chance for co-operative effort, we must set against it the intense in- 
 dividualism of the mediaeval tow^n owner and the comparative ineffec- 
 tiveness alike of a mediaeval army to destroy a solidly built structure 
 and of a mediaeval political authority to compel general acceptance of 
 a prearranged plan. 
 
 Allowing for all these things, it still, I think, remains the case 
 that the greater mediaeval towns grew by a natural process rather than 
 were made by a town planner. When that admirable scholar Miss 
 Mary Bateson told us that mediaeval towTis did not grow but were 
 made, she had in her mind not the urban agglomeration but the legal 
 corporation. The houses and the population grew ; they only became 
 a technical "borough" when they had received their charter of 
 liberties or incorporation. For us whose concern is with the mass of 
 streets and houses and not with the legal relations of the inhabitants 
 to the state in which they were included, the point has only a re- 
 stricted and limited application to the new townis and quarters of 
 towns of which we have already spoken. 
 
 The towTis which developed by natural growth naturally extended 
 themselves in all sorts of different ways. We have seen this even in 
 the case of bastides and "new towns" : their general shape varied 
 according to local conditions. But, if any generalization may be per- 
 mitted at all, it may be lawful to say that the town which was made 
 was normally rectilineal in outline, the town which grew tended 
 to assume a circular or elliptical shape and to extend itself in succes- 
 sive portions which often assumed a concentric pattern. Now and 
 then a made town may have been devised like this. But this type of 
 expansion seems to me more characteristic of the town which grew of 
 itself ^ than of a town which owes its origin to an act of creation. 
 
 ^ Prof. Unwin in the able lecture already referred to gives numerous 
 instances of the concentric type of mediaeval city formation, and has per- 
 formed a valuable service in calling attention to them. Baghdad, the eastern 
 prototype of the class, w^as originally planned as an almost perfect circle at 
 the centre of which was the Khalif's palace, round which were public offices 
 and open spaces, all this Governmental quarter being enclosed by a thin 
 residential district on the inner side of the circular wall. The commercial 
 quarters arose later by concentric rings outside the original enceinte. See the 
 plan in G. Le Strange, Bagdad during the Abbasid Caliphate^ and an 
 adaptation from it published in the Manchester Guardian of 12 March,
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 33 
 
 Even the obvious military advantages of a shape approaching the circle 
 did not outweigh the comparative simplicity of the simpler rectangular 
 shape. And, however you plan your original town, the town planner 
 never can tell how or where it will grow. Even the mediaeval town 
 planner was often bciffled by the capricious and unexpected forces that 
 controlled the building activities of the next generations. The town 
 planner under the modem conditions of vast agglomerations, capable 
 of indefinite expansion, will still find this rock ahead of him. 
 
 We have seen that town planning was the exception in the middle 
 ages. It was also limited in its scope as well as in its extent. Here 
 the town planners of the ancient and the mediaeval worlds were both in 
 the same predicament. They confined their efforts to devising straight 
 streets of width adequate for their purpose, to providing building sites, 
 squares and open places, similar in type and regular in outline, to 
 planning the town defences on lines corresponding to its interior 
 arrangements. The modern town planner does all these things, except 
 the last, and he has only desisted from this since modern military 
 science has made the town fortifications of a Brialmont as obsolete 
 as those of a Vauban or of a St. Louis. 
 
 And he does these things on a larger scale and with greater re- 
 sources. He is not hampered by the need of crowding his population 
 together within the smallest possible area so as to make its defence 
 practicable by a limited armed force. If he has to deal with 
 hundreds of thousands while his predecessor had to deal with a score 
 of hundreds, he has infinitely greater control over the material with 
 which he is working, and by far greater authority at his back. Yet 
 there is a tendency for even the modern town planner to limit him- 
 self in practice to the same categories followed by his predecessors. 
 A simple-minded Lancastrian might well, before August, 1914, have 
 come back from Diisseldorf or Berlin, thinking that in following the 
 model of the broad avenues, the leafy gardens, and the vast and 
 monumental tenements of even the poorest quarters of the modern 
 planned German city, he had found the remedy for all the 
 dreariness and irregularity, for all the mean streets and festering 
 slums of the British manufacturing town. No doubt we should have 
 
 1917. 1 am not altogether convinced by Mr. Unwin's explanation of the 
 type arising in the west by reason of the deliberate adoption of eastern 
 models.
 
 34 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 done well had we had a quarter of the method and training, the fore- 
 sight and the imagination that have characterized the German town 
 planner. But the philanthropist should not forget that the vast tene- 
 ments of Germany may hide away overcrowding more hideous, and 
 homes more cut off from life and ciir than we find even on the Tees, 
 Tyne, or Clyde. If town planning is to realize the ideal of its pro- 
 moters, it must have a wider vision than vouchsafed to the Germans 
 of to-day, or to the city builders of the thirteenth century. For the 
 problems which most vex the soul of the British social reformer made 
 little appeal to the men of the middle ages. The mediaeval townn planner 
 had a limited sanitary outlook. If he provided access to sources of 
 water supply and gutters to carry away the rain water, he gave his 
 burgesses all that he wanted. If, too, he made modest provision for 
 the cleansing of the streets and prohibited pigs from haunting the 
 public ways, he thought that everything necessary had been done to 
 secure public health. The men of the middle ages were charitable to 
 excess, but they were so accustomed to dwell in squalor and discomfort, 
 and to witnessing the hideous sufferings of the poor surrounding them, 
 that they accepted all the ills of life as inevitable. Piously regarding 
 these horrors as the visitation of Providence, devised perhaps to punish 
 them for their sins, they never conceived it was wnithin their capacity to 
 remedy existing conditions in any radical sense. The philanthropic or 
 humanitarian motive underlying much of modern town planning was 
 far in the background of the mediaeval mind. The problem of over- 
 crowding, the need of housing under healthy conditions were seldom, if 
 ever, present to him. For these reasons alone the modern social re- 
 former cannot expect to find much practical guidance from the town 
 planner of the middle ages. For those less severely practical it should 
 ever be interesting to see how the same problems present themselves, 
 though under different conditions, throughout all the ages. 
 
 NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 It is impossible as a rule to reproduce the precise plan of* a mediaeval 
 town. We can only study them in modern survivals or in maps which are 
 sufficiently old to represent substantially mediaeval conditions. For this 
 purpose the great contributions to cartography made in the early seventeenth 
 century mainly by Dutch map makers and their German and English imitators 
 are of great value. Luckily the conditions of town life were so stable in
 
 MEDI/EVAL TOWN PLANNING 35 
 
 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that there is every reason to believe that 
 such maps in many cases reproduce essentially the plan of the mediaeval 
 town. Whether the map drav^^er always took the trouble to be accurate is 
 of course another matter, but even his imaginations are instructive to those 
 who are seeking the general type rather than the exact topographical features 
 of a given town. Moreover, the planned towns of the middle ages were so 
 seldom prosperous and growing in modern centuries that the modern maps, 
 whose precision is beyond question, can often confirm the accuracy of the 
 old maps or suggest criticisms of them. For this reason some modern town 
 plans have been figured, either as in the case of Salisbury for purposes of 
 comparison, or as in the case of Winchelsea, because no really early maps 
 are accessible. In some of the French bastides the dispositions are so 
 well defined that a theoretical plan might almost be devised. A list of 
 illustrations with a few notes on them is now appended. 
 
 I. Breslau in the Early Seventeenth Century. IFrom Braun and Hohen- 
 berg : Civitates orbis terrarum. Cologne, 1612-17.] 
 
 II. Vilna in the Early Seventeenth Century. IFrom Braun and Hohen- 
 berg : Civitates orbis terrarum. Cologne, 1612-17.] 
 
 III. Montpazier (Dordogne). IFrom Didron : Annales Archeologiques, 
 xii. (1852).] 
 
 IV. Cadillac (Gironde). [From Braun and Hohenberg : Civitates orbis 
 
 terrarum. Cologne, 1612-17.] The early seventeenth century 
 ducal palace and the town enceinte of the same date take away 
 part of the effect of the original plan. A visit to the place 
 rather suggests the impression that the elaborate defences are 
 due at least in part to the cartographer's imagination. 
 
 V. Aigues Mortes (Western half) (Gard). [From Didron : Annales 
 
 Archeologiques, x. (1850). Here the modern conditions repro- 
 duce with absolute precision the line of the ancient walls and in 
 all probability those of the original streets. The fortifications 
 are of the reign of Philippe le Hardi (1 270-85).] 
 
 VI. Salisbury in the Seventeenth Century. [From Speed : Theatre of 
 . . . Great Britaine. London, 1676. Fol. 25.] 
 
 VII. Modem Salisbury. [From The Ordnance Survey of England and 
 Wales.] 
 
 VIII. Flint in the Seventeenth Century. IFrom Speed : Theatre of . . . 
 Great Britaine. London, 1676. Fol. 122.] 
 
 IX. Carnarvon in the Seventeenth Century. [From Speed : Theatre of 
 . . . Great Britaine. London, 1676. Fol. 123.] 
 
 X. Hull in the Seventeenth Century. [From an engraving by Wenceslaus 
 Hollar, c. 1665.] 
 
 XI. Modern Winchelsea. [From The Ordnance Survey of England 
 and Wales.] 
 
 4375^07
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 '^ i^ioa 
 
 U)«URL WIAY 
 
 f?ETD BOOK BOX 
 
 1 7 Titeo 
 
 
 u^f^f^n 
 
 j^i 
 
 M "AY 2 
 
 Id. 
 
 uri 
 
 
 2 1974 
 
 OCT 11 
 
 OISCHARGEURL 
 
 DEC 9 1980 
 
 979 
 
 9. 
 
 lie 
 
 lie 
 
 a 
 to 
 
 FormL9-25m-8,'46(9852)444 
 
 -J'* 
 XXV, 310, 3s, 6d. nei, or interleaved 4s 6d.net. 
 
 *«* This catalogue is the first of its kind to be issued, with the exception of a few union liiti 
 of periodicals and incunabula, 
 
 AN ANALYTICAL CATALOGUE OF THE CONTENTS OF THE TWO EDI- 
 TIONS OF "AN ENGLISH GARNER." compiled by Edward Arber (1877-97). and 
 rearranged under the editorship of Thomas Seccombe (1903-04), 1909. 8vo, pp, viii, 22 L 
 Is, Tiet. 
 
 Ai BRIEF HISTORICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE LIBRARY AND ITS CON- 
 TENTS, illustrated with thirty-seven views and facsimiles, 1914, 8vo, pp. xvi, 73, and 
 thirty-seven illustrations, 6d, net. 
 
 THE JOHN RYLANDS FACSIMILES. A series of reproductions of some of the more in- 
 teresting and important of the rarer books in the possession of the library. The volumes 
 consist of minutely accurate facsimiles of the works selected, preceded by bibliographical 
 introductions, 
 
 I. PROPOSITIO JOHANNIS RUSSELL, printed by William Caxton. circo A.D. 1476. 
 . . , With an introduction by Henry Guppy. 1909. 8vo, pp. 36, 8. 3s, 6d, net, 
 *,* An oration, pronounced by John Russell. Chancellor of England, on the investiture of 
 
 Charles. Duke of Burgundy, with the Order of the Garter, in February, 1469, at Ghent, 
 
 For many years the copy now in the John Rylands Library was considered to be unique. 
 
 Until 1807 it lay buried and unnoticed in the heart of a volume of manuscripts, with which it had 
 
 evidently been bound up by mistake. Since then, another copy has been discovered in the librai^ 
 
 at Holkam Hall, the seat of the Earl of Leicester, 
 
 UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA
 
 A BOOKE IN ENGLYSH METRE, of the Great Marchaunl man called "Dives Prag- 
 maticus ". . . . 1 563. . . . Wilh an introduction by Percy E. Newbery ; and remarks on 
 the vocabulary and dialect with a glossary by Henry C. Wyld. 1910. 4to, pp. xxxviii, 16. 
 5s. net. 
 
 -■roduced is believed to be the sole 
 >ct of instructing the young in th 
 life in their own tongue. 
 
 VTh 
 ichhad th. 
 comrion c' 
 
 J. 
 
 1910. 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 \L1TILBUKEI 
 
 Pestilence . . . m 
 
 WUh an 
 
 V'Of t 
 lop Va'f 
 kno' n to 
 
 Thi e is 
 
 oduct' 
 little . 
 as, thi ' 
 'e su 
 indi 
 
 000 739J90 7 
 
 [London']"" n485 ?l7 .' .' 
 
 •hf "aytied and reherced many _ 
 
 by thi . . . Bisshop of Arusiens. 
 by Guthrie Vine. 1910. 4to, pp. xxxvi, 18. 5s. net. 
 
 consisting of nine leaves, written by Benedict Kanuti, or Knutsson, 
 separate editions are known, but only one > copy of each, and an odd leaf 
 
 in any edition of the place of printing, date or name of printer, but they 
 al! inte i one the five pes employed by William de Machlinia, who printed first is 
 nership with 'ohn Lettou and ai erwards alone in the City of London, at the time when William 
 ton was at le most active periu 1 of his career at Westminster. 
 
 )ODCU' ^ OF "^HE FU iEENTH CENTURY IN THE JOHN RYLANDS 
 LIBRAK i'. ^produced in facsimile. With an introduction and descriptive notes by 
 Campbell Dodgson M.A. Folio. Ten plates, of which two are in colour, and 16 pp. of 
 text, in a portfolio. 7s. 6d. v^t. 
 
 *,* Two ' ' th V odcuts a. of exceptional interest and importance, and have been known 
 
 cel<. orated jr a ,itury an . a half, but have not hitherto been reproduced in a satisfactory 
 
 IP'' "^ ' ' ■ - • ™ 1 .^j^ referred to represent 
 
 red a great celebrity 
 it the unchallenged 
 
 f the original Syriac 
 al reprint or trans- 
 lustive introduction 
 seum, the accessory 
 ave appeared since 
 on. Fellow of Clare 
 
 Shortly. 
 Pp. 140. 20 Illus- 
 
 illustrations, of the 
 n time to time. 
 
 net each. 
 
 GLISH POETS. 
 
 By William Poel, 
 
 i IN THE EAST 
 Pp. 32. 7 Illus- 
 
 Thumb, Dr.Phil., 
 
 !4. 2 Illustrations. 
 ENTURY. By 
 
 iblication, which in 
 ent additions to the 
 value and interest.
 
 'IS