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Dr Dyer's Urban Undulations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

C. V. Phythian-Adams
C. V. Phythian-Adams
Affiliation:
Department of English Local History, University of Leicester
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Extract

In seeking to purge what he seems to regard as the dangerously insidious views of an academic ‘gang of four’,Dr Alan Dyer has certainly eschewed gentle persuasion as the appropriate way of re-converting erring heretics. Being apparently the worst offender - and bedaubed in penitential ashes, as I clearly ought to be - it is then hardly for me to answer for the views of my fellow conspirators: Peter Clark, Paul Slack and Penelope Corfield. They are well able to stand up for themselves. All I have space to do here is to reflect on Dr Dyer's re-assertion of the neutralist text-book orthodoxy regarding the state of England's towns in the earlier Tudor period, and so to ponder whether a recantation of my own seemingly obsessional sins might be appropriate. I certainly do not intend simply to reiterate what the disinterested follower of this discussion might wish to read for himself, the actual arguments of my 1975 paper, with its qualifying remarks and its ‘handful’ of 75 urban examples.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 6 , May 1979 , pp. 73 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1. Towns in Societies is to be reprinted in paperback with printing errors corrected. See also Dobson, R. B., ‘Urban decline in late medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, xxvii (1977), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the urban crisis of the late Middle Ages (forthcoming autumn 1979).

3. Smith, R. M., ‘Population and its geography in England 1500–1730’, in Dodgshon, R. A. and Butlin, R. A. (eds), An Historical Geography of England and Wales (London, New York, San Francisco: 1978), 205.Google Scholar

4. This evidence is analysed in detail in the work cited in n.2.

5. The 1563 figures for Coventry comprehend only one parish in full.

6. Hoskins, W. G., Provincial England (1965) 88–9, 108;Google Scholar Simmons, Jack, Leicester Past and Present, i, Ancient Borough (1974), chapt. III, ‘Stagnation’.Google Scholar

7. Charles Phythian-Adams, ‘The economic and social structure’, in The Fabric of the Traditional Community (Open University Course A322, ‘English Urban History 1500–1780’, block II), 15–22.

8. Bridbury, A. R., Economic Growth: England in the later Middle Ages (1975), 77–82.Google Scholar

9. S. Rigby, ‘Urban decline in the later Middle Ages: some problems of interpreting the statistical data’, Urban History Yearbook, 1979, based on a paper read to the Early Modern Town Group at Leicester in spring 1978.

10. Thirsk, Joan, Economic Policy and Projects: the development of a consumer society in early modern England (1978), 35 et passim.Google Scholar

11. Palliser, D. M., ‘A crisis in English towns? The case of York, 1460–1640’, Northern History, xiv (1978) 115–16.Google Scholar