11 - Great and good towns 1540–1700

Summary

provoked by the French charge that there was ‘never a good town in England, only London’, the English herald in the Debate of the Heralds of 1549 was moved to respond at length: ‘I pray you, what is Berwick, Carlisle, Durham, York, Newcastle, Hull, Northampton, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Coventry, Lichfield, Exeter, Bristol, Salisbury, Southampton, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Canterbury, Chichester?’ All these, and more, ‘if they were in France, should be called good towns’.

The herald’s list of twenty towns embraces between a third and a half of the fifty or so regional centres and major county towns of England which – with their equivalents in Scotland and Wales – are the subject of this chapter. It also contains fourteen – almost one half – of the thirty-one largest English provincialm towns in the early sixteenth century, which are enumerated in Table 11.1 below. It is evident from the other six towns nominated by the herald, however, that size of population was not the only criterion for entry in his list. Lichfield, Chichester, Durham and Carlisle were there because, like others, they were cathedral cities, Hull because it was another important port, Berwick as a vital frontier citadel. Without some of these, moreover, the thinly populated North of England would scarcely have been represented at all. Status and function were as important as size in defining good towns.