Urban Identity in Medieval English Townseditors' introduction After receiving basic chartered liberties during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, English towns continued to augment both their privileges and the physical spaces in which they exercised them. Urban ofªcers thereby sought to deªne civic identity as distinct from the rural, noble, and ecclesiastical powers that surrounded them. Four case studies from Exeter, Shrewsbury, Norwich, and York allow in-depth explorations to be made of the ways in which towns deªned physical and juridical space through law suits. The process of mustering legal evidence, choosing a local or royal venue, ªnding helpful patrons, and participating in arbitration contributed to the mature development of urban institutions and their self-conceptions. The disputes and their pursuit before the law show clearly how urban space impacted territorial, legal, and ethnic identity in late medieval society.
URBAN IDENTITY IN ENGLISH TOWNSScholars of the late medieval European town are well aware that urban space was cross-cut by contradictory, even mutually exclusive, images and realities. Although commercial opportunity, personal freedoms, and legal self-determination clearly deªned the urban experience-and made it unique-such liberties could also be accompanied and undermined by inequality, repression, illness, and violence. Such negative attributes all too vividly conªrm popular prejudices about the medieval world in general and the conditions of town life in particular. Moreover, this is not the only set of contradictions inherent in the story of medieval urban space. Another becomes visible through an examination of the shaping of the urban self-image, namely, the ways in which urban liberties were created in the course of struggles to claim, delineate, and defend physical space itself. 1
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