Space, Property, and Propriety in Urban England

Abstract

The public space in medieval towns and cities was shaped and influenced by the private spaces that surrounded it. The private was, like the public, a complex domain; many interests coexisted there. The pressures of population gowth and commercial development fragmented individual holdings and created overlapping layers of claims to particular spaces. Neighbors' interests also impinged; the enjoyment of the private was far from exclusive. Elaborate codes of property rights and legal procedures evolved as a fundamental part of urban custom. When the property market declined in the later Middle Ages, however, practices changed, and new ways of defining and describing private property emerged.

Urban Plot: Developing a Consistent Definition for Comparative Urban Studies

“…62 Vanessa Harding presented a similar definition of the burgage plot, that is, the counterpart of plot: "[b] urgage plots were, typically, long, narrow properties laid out at right angles to urban streets, with a house at the street and yards or gardens behind." 63 This definition refers to the physical aspects of a plot and adds a new trait to its description. Harding states that part of a plot was occupied by a house, while the remaining space was used as a courtyard or garden.…”

Gender and the City before Modernity: Introduction

“…However, even physical boundaries, like the boundaries of 'ownership' and rights over property, were not necessarily absolute in a modern sense. 27 On the other hand, many of the societies with which we are dealing had strongly formalised ideologies and cosmologies which were replicated in the design of urban space, as well as in formal social and political frameworks. This is particularly clear in the Aztec case study, where public/private, male/female and interior/exterior were central, indigenously constructed dichotomies that strongly structured both sociopolitical organisation and the design and use of urban space.…”

The Later Medieval English Urban Household

“…60 Issues such as whether houses were inhabited by owner-occupiers, or rented out to tenants, were important in urban areas and the significance of this has been highlighted by Vanessa Harding. 61 The period c.1380-1500, for instance, was characterised by large-scale institutional landlords investing extensively in the building and repairing of houses for rent. 62 The impact of different types of ownership on house form is yet to be studied in depth, but it may be that institutional landlords might have developed their own style of house construction in order to make their properties easily distinguishable from others.…”