Assemblage Theory and Town Foundation in Medieval England

Abstract

It is proposed that our understanding of medieval town foundation is limited by a failure to appreciate that ‘town’ is a relational category. It is argued that urban character emerges from social relations, with some sets of social relationship revealing urbanity and others not, as places develop along distinctive, but related, trajectories. This argument is developed through the application of assemblage theory to the development of towns in thirteenth-century southern England. The outcome is a proposal that, by focusing on the social relations through which towns are revealed as a distinctive category of place, we can better comprehend why and how towns mattered in medieval society and develop a greater understanding of the relationship of urbanization to other social processes such as commercialization and associated changes in the countryside.

Assemblage urbanism. Becoming urban in late medieval Southampton

“…If, following DeLanda (see also Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Bennett 2010) we reject the idea of essences in order to focus on the emergent properties of assemblages, the very terms of our analysis come to be called into question. Elsewhere (Jervis 2016a, 382–84) I have reflected upon how the category of ‘town’ is used in medieval archaeology, following Fowler (2013, 44–46) in arguing that the term is an analytical ‘black box’ or ‘circulating reference’ (see also Gaydarska 2016 for a recent consideration of the term urban in archaeology and Olsen et al 2012, 166, for a similar consideration of the category ‘tomb’). What this means is that it is a term which has circulated widely, which has developed particular meanings through past action, and which carries with it certain generalized assumptions which our role, as archaeologists, is to unpack and call into question.…”

“…Alberti and Marshall 2009; Watts 2013). Increasingly these ideas are being put to work to address specific archaeological questions in a range of contexts from understanding Mesolithic human–environment interactions (Cobb 2016) to prehistoric burial practices (Fowler 2013; Crellin 2017) and economic and social developments in the prehistoric, Roman and medieval periods (Jones and Sibbesson 2013; Harris 2013; Van Oyen 2015; Jervis 2016a). These studies of archaeological material do not just allow us to utilize theoretical ideas, but provide opportunities to tackle some of the interpretive difficulties inherent within any new approach (e.g.…”

Decline or Transformation? Archaeology and the Late Medieval ‘Urban Decline’ in Southern England

“…If we view the urban landscape as formed of interactions between people, spaces and the material world, it is not a fixed stage for action but develops through it (Jervis 2016). Processes of pit digging and waste disposal illustrate this point well.…”

“…the intersection of commerce and power One major change in the later Middle Ages in the region is the structure of power and regional administration, which is closely linked to commercial networks. For example, in Sussex, each of the rapes (a system of land division which divided the county into lordships) contains at least one port and a market town in the Weald, as well as a network of smaller markets (Jervis 2016). Here the marketing network can be perceived as a system of estate management, allowing goods from the Weald, such as timber, iron and leather, as well as agricultural produce from the coastal plain and downland areas, to circulate.…”

“…Towns in the Weald had a very different trajectory of development to others within the study area. These markets were generally later foundations, often being unusual nucleated settlements within a landscape of dispersed farmsteads (Gardiner 1997b;Jervis 2016). These towns demonstrate particularly clear historical and archaeological evidence of growth (Cornwall 1976, 16-17;23;Mate 2006, 11-14).…”