earticle

영어

This article evaluates the previous discussion of urban growth and decline in the late medieval England and aims to provide an alternative view which highlights the impact of broader social changes on the urban reconfiguration. The debate on late medieval cities had been bifurcated between the conventional emphasis on decline and the revisionist insistence on growth, too often ending with competing ideas unable to render a comprehensive view. For a coherent account of the urban topography of the period concerned, a structural analysis of the urban transformation in reference to labor supply, changes in warfare and industry, and rise of London in the context of plagues and war, must be taken into consideration.
The circumstance in which late medieval English cities found themselves was an entanglement of decline and growth following a series of plagues in the 14th century, the effect of which extended to both urban and rural England. With the plague, the symbiosis between cities and country, especially in terms of immigration, had broken down, leaving some cities more vulnerable to intermittent supply of labor, let alone permanent shortage. Still other cities witnessed an aggravating situation, when the prolonged war between England and France had multiplied urban residents' tax load. Concurrently, a gradual shift in industry from wool to cloth worked in favor of some cities at the cost of others. And the ascent of London as the unrivaled center of trade and industry, under the royal auspice, placed some in decline and others in prosperity. The findings suggest that the late Middle Ages was not a period of irreversible urban decline but one in which cities reconfigured themselves in diverse ways to adapt to the structural transformations.