Ideal and Reality in English Episcopal Medieval Town Planning

Slater, Terry R.

doi:10.2307/622527

Cited by 59 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Slater (1981, 1987) showed that a ‘long perpetuation of lot boundaries’ in old Medieval ‘burgages’ (‘basic “cells” in any analysis of medieval town plans’, p. 211) continued in Winchester and York. Suffice it to say that the morphology of towns does not easily change even with changes in the political environment.…”

Section: Resilience Of the First Formal Town Plan And Natural Units Omentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Surveying was a kind of writing on the land’: The economics of land division as town planning

Lai

Davies

2020

Planning Theory

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This article is about the economic role of the primaeval layouts (plats) for a new development area as a conscious act of physical planning. It explains that these foundational layouts of a town or country in the ‘new world’ were traditionally the work of a surveyor, the impacts of which have been lasting. Typically following a grid iron pattern, with roots in ancient history, the layout of the surveyor may not look attractive. Yet, it has stood the test of time and continued to condition modern development. It serves two significant economic functions. First, it reduces several types of transaction costs, namely, those of competition for land, valuation allocation, identification and subdivision of land as well as revising a layout. Second, it serves to achieve agglomeration, establish a proprietary and common setting and provide vital information as different forms of public good.

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Section: Resilience Of the First Formal Town Plan And Natural Units Omentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Surveying was a kind of writing on the land’: The economics of land division as town planning

Lai

Davies

2020

Planning Theory

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“…Are these places really so similar and/or different in their forms, and if so why is this? Without a close contextual reading of contemporary sources, comparing medieval town plans like this often only leads to uncertainty in matters of urban design and planning, especially where written sources are absent, as is typically the case for 'new towns' founded in England before the thirteenth century (Slater 1987;Lilley 2001). What follows here is a brief discussion arising from comparing the c .1300 plans of Rhuddlan and Flint, Conwy and Beaumaris, and placing them within the milieu of activity of castle construction and urban formation that was going on contemporaneously in each case, and which is revealed through the records made by those involved in the design and planning process.…”

Section: Comparing the Built Forms Of Edward's New Townsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designs and designers of medieval ‘new towns’ in Wales

Lilley¹,

Lloyd²,

Trick³

2007

Antiquity

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Medieval 'new towns' seem to echo Roman towns in having a grid of streets associated with a fortress, and have often been credited with a standard plan applied by the hand of authority. Here the authors analyse the new towns founded by Edward I in Wales and find some highly significant variations. Rediscovering the original layouts by high precision survey and GIS mapping, they show that some towns, founded at the same time and on similar topography, had quite different layouts, while others, founded at long intervals, had plans that were almost identical. Documentation hints at the explanation: it was the architects, masons and ditch-diggers, not the king and aristocracy, who established and developed these blueprints of urban life.

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“…As Whitehand (1981) has shown, their two approaches were quite different, with Dickinson adopting a taxonomic method of classifying the layouts of medieval towns and cities according to the characteristics of their street layout, and Conzen preferring instead to recognize that fossilized within the composite forms of European towns and cities were the medieval stages of evolution, their medieval morphogenesis. It is this latter, ‘Conzenian’ approach (Whitehand and Larkham 1992, 5–8, 10–11) that has since held dominance in the mapping of medieval urban landscapes in Anglophone human geography (Simms 1979; Slater 1987; Lilley 2000a), providing historical geographers, urban archaeologists and medieval historians with opportunities to piece together what urban landscapes physically looked like, on the ground, and how and when they were formed and transformed during the Middle Ages (Brooks and Whittington 1977; Baker and Slater 1992). For the most part this involves using nineteenth‐century cartography, particularly large‐scale (1:500 and 1:2500) town‐plans, as a basis for analysing the forms of streets and plots, creating maps of the discrete morphological areas (‘plan units’) and then linking these expressions of the physical form of a particular town or city with documentary and archaeological evidence to reveal its sequence of medieval morphogenesis, and thus perhaps account for particular reasons why an urban landscape took the particular form that it did (Slater 1987 1996; Lilley 1999 2000b).…”

Section: ‘Mapping’ Urban Morphologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cities of God? Medieval urban forms and their Christian symbolism

Lilley

2004

Trans Inst British Geog

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Situated in the context of recent geographical engagements with 'landscape', this paper combines 'morphological' and 'iconographic' landscape interpretations to examine how urban forms were perceived in late medieval Europe. To date, morphological studies have mapped the medieval city either by classifying urban layouts according to particular types, or by analysing plan forms of particular towns and cities to reveal their spatial evolution. This paper outlines a third way, an 'iconographic' approach, which shows how urban forms in the Middle Ages conveyed Christian symbolism. Three such 'mappings' explore this thesis: the first uses textual and visual representations which show that the city was understood as a scaled-down world -a microcosm -linking city and cosmos in the medieval mind; the second 'mapping' develops this theme further and suggests that urban landscapes were inscribed with symbolic form through their layout on the ground; while the third looks at how Christian symbolism of urban forms was performed through the urban landscape in perennial religious processions. Each of these 'mappings' points to the symbolic, mystical significance urban form had in the Middle Ages, based on religious faith, and they thus offer a deepened appreciation of how urban landscapes were represented, constructed and experienced at the time.key words urban morphology medieval Europe landscape iconography

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Ideal and Reality in English Episcopal Medieval Town Planning

Cited by 59 publications

References 12 publications

‘Surveying was a kind of writing on the land’: The economics of land division as town planning

‘Surveying was a kind of writing on the land’: The economics of land division as town planning

Designs and designers of medieval ‘new towns’ in Wales

Cities of God? Medieval urban forms and their Christian symbolism

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