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This chapter discusses history of the excavations of Latin colony, Cosa. In the later 1940s Cosa attracted the attention of Frank Brown, the founding excavator at Cosa, of the American Academy in Rome. He saw it as an excavation site that could provide insight into the Etruscan-Roman transition, into the processes of Roman colonization and into the formative phases of Roman Republican architecture. The first stage in the American Academy archaeologist operations involved the clearing and mapping of the site. The most striking feature at the site of Cosa today is the impressive wall circuit formed of massive polygonal blocks of limestone. After the walls, the most impressive remains at Cosa are those of the temple complex on the Arx. After the excavation of the Arx, in 1950 the American Academy turned to the excavation of the forum. The chapter also talks about building of houses, port, hinterland of Cosa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instrumentation for open surgery has seen relatively little change over the last several decades. Laparoscopic surgery is equipment intensive. Each surgical specialty has different requirements for instruments, and laparoscopic urology involves gaining access, visualization, placement of instruments, dissection and hemostasis of target tissues, extraction of specimens, and wound closure. Adaptations of adult laparoscopic instruments continue to be made for appropriate application and improvement of the safety of laparoscopic procedures in infants and children. This chapter gives an overview of the basic equipment and instruments that should be available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Scotland, as in England, ports were the kingdom's gateway to Christendom. Few of medieval Scotland's towns were, however, natural ports. Of fifty-five established burghs by 1300, twenty-three were located on inland sites. Although eleven others were on navigable rivers, most of these arguably owed their origins less to maritime access than to land routes which converged on estuarine fording points. Of the twenty-one coastal burghs many, such as Cromarty and Cullen, were of such minimal economic significance that they can be scarcely classified as either ports or towns. Even among those which did develop a regular maritime trade, the topography of some suggests that maritime access was of secondary significance to their early development. Although, for instance, noted in the early twelfth century as one of only three trading centres north of Forth, it remains uncertain whether Inverkeithing developed around the natural harbour at the mouth of the Keithing burn or around the main thoroughfare which was located on considerably higher ground to the north. A similar observation has been made of Crail and could be made of Montrose, where the distinctive place name of the harbour, Strumnay, suggests a separate origin from that of the adjacent town. There were few exceptions to the predominantly landward vista of the early Scottish burghs. Aberdeen was probably one, particularly if the plausible identification of its early nucleus as adjacent to the Denburn harbour is accepted. Dundee and Ayr were probably others. These coastal towns were well positioned to exploit the commercial expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an expansion spawned chiefly by a new Anglo-Norman elite demanding the importation of wine and wheat and the more or less simultaneous emergence of large quantities of wool available for export to the Netherlandish draperies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A framework In 1300 Wales was almost as urbanised a country as England (Map 22.12). The current view, based largely, if tentatively, on the surviving records of a lay subsidy imposed on Wales by Edward I in 1292–3, is that Wales' population at that time was about 300,000 souls. It had about 100 towns and chartered boroughs, albeit they were on average smaller in size than those of England; only a minority is likely to have had more than 1,000 inhabitants each. The proportion of Wales' population that lived in these towns seems not to have been significantly smaller than town-dwelling proportions in England (estimated at 15 per cent) or Spain; fewer than one fifth of these town dwellers were of Welsh descent. Furthermore, in 1300 townsmen and country dwellers from Wales were regular visitors to the substantial, prosperous border towns of Chester, Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Leominster, Hereford, Tewkesbury, Gloucester and, by sea and ferry, to Bristol, whose own merchants customarily plied their trades in many a Welsh town. Wales in 1300, then, was an urbanised society to a significant degree. This may seem surprising in view of the fact that Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–1223), who knew southern Wales especially well and had travelled widely through much of the country, implied that the Welsh population: do not live in towns, villages or castles, but lead a solitary existence, deep in the woods. It is not their habit to build great palaces, or vast and towering structures of stone and cement. Instead they content themselves with wattled huts on the edges of the forest, put up with little labour or expense, but strong enough to last a year or so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical and geological setting The history of urbanisation in Scotland is predetermined by the geography and geology of northern Britain. Often assumed to be a country of sharp divide between Highland and Lowland, its physical nature, however, is more complex. It was not merely the mountainous areas of the Highlands that were seemingly unapproachable from the more gentle Lowland terrain; but the south-west regions of Galloway and Ayrshire were equally divorced from the east coast; and the southern border region of the country, in its very lack of natural, physical definition, often had a somewhat different agenda from the other parts of Scotland. Even a cursory glance at the west coast of northern Britain, from Lancashire to the northern Highlands of Scotland, reveals the linkages that were to dominate this seaboard. Travel by water was to form the easiest method of contact for the western Highlands, Islands, Galloway and Ayrshire; and the predominant communication points and influences for these areas were to be not the Lowland basin centred around the River Forth, but Ireland and the North of England. The east coast, by contrast, used the sea to look to mainland Europe, and in particular northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Baltic. They were more approachable, in terms of both ease and time of travelling, than the less accessible parts of Scotland. Rivers, such as the Tweed, the Forth, the Tay and the Dee, all providing natural harbours, would become the foci for this contact. Perth and Stirling, at the highest navigable points of the Rivers Tay and Forth respectively, were to play crucial roles in Scotland's history; and Berwick, Dundee and Aberdeen, with their good harbourage, were to dominate the economic scene; but increasingly under the hegemony of Edinburgh through its pre-eminent port of Leith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical background By the strictest definition, East Anglia corresponds to the medieval diocese of Norwich: Norfolk, Suffolk and south-eastern Cambridgeshire. For the purposes of this chapter the whole of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire are included (Map 22.10). East Anglia had wide areas of high fertility and a good climate. The long curve of its coastline ensures easy access to the sea even for inland places; sailing distances to important parts of the continent are short. Although there are many harbours for small craft, good major harbours are few and liable to be affected by recurrent problems both of erosion and of silting. In the early part of our period the configuration of the central part of the East Anglian coastline was very different from what it is now. A great estuary extended to within a few miles of Norwich which was probably the major port for the area. The estuary silted up and was drained in or by the eleventh century. It was this which allowed the development of Yarmouth on a sandbank at the estuary's mouth. Inland communication by water was of fundamental importance. The rise of Yarmouth and of Lynn is largely to be explained by each lying near the focus of a major river system. A lesser one converged near Ipswich. There is evidence that minor rivers were much more important for transport in the middle ages than was later the case. The road system of medieval East Anglia has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, likely that the significance of Norwich as a great hub for far-reaching roads is old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the region The pace and pattern of urbanisation in northern England was more varied than the traditional image of an undeveloped backwater might suggest (Map 22.11). Certainly this is an area with a high proportion of upland over 500 feet (180m) and large tracts of uncultivated marginal land where economic activity was invariably measured lower than in other English regions. Yet, within a region divided north–south by the spine of the Pennines and east–west by the Lakeland massif and North Yorkshire Moors, the dominant characteristic of northern settlement history was its variety. Both coasts are penetrated by navigable rivers draining large basins. The resultant landforms created different soil types which changed over comparatively short distances, to include thin sands and gravels, acid moorlands, estuarine fens, alluvial flood plains, the inland mosses of Lancashire and Cheshire and the well-drained eastern lowlands. The difficult terrain dictated land communications. These had been established by the Romans and survived for the most part as the only routes feasible: north–south on either side of the Pennines following lowland plains and valley routes (Eden–Lune), trans-Pennine across the south Pennines from Tadcaster to Chester via Manchester, north-west from upper Teesdale across Stainmore to the Solway, and west along Hadrian's wall. It is within this context that the history of northern towns must be seen. This was a sparsely populated region and towns were generally small: only four had 2,000 or more taxpayers in 1377 and only three were ranked in the top twenty in England by wealth in 1524–5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General characteristics and transitions The many sources throwing light on the existence, function and significance of the towns of south-eastern England during the middle ages are, as for other regions, fragmentary and incomplete. Measures of urbanisation are crude and below the top rank of towns indicators of urban function are lacking. The contemporary terminology for towns can mislead, although in the South-East, unlike East Anglia, those settlements whose urban status achieved formal recognition broadly corresponded to those which can be demonstrated to have been towns by virtue of social or economic function (Map 22.1). Thus, much of the discussion is concerned with the 150 or so places within the eleven counties surrounding London which at some time during the period were legally identified as towns (Map 22.2). This definition of south-eastern England, more extensive than that adopted in many regional studies, emphasises the capacity of the region for internal communication and for interaction with commercial networks overseas. The definition also acknowledges the role of London in shaping the region. Since Roman times London has been the dominant city of the British Isles and one of the most substantial in Western Europe. Yet over at least the first half of the period London occupied a site which was marginal in relation to kingdoms whose heartlands lay far from the city. Nevertheless, it was a powerful attraction and perhaps at times a seat of power shared between competing authorities. A continuing theme throughout the period, therefore, concerns London's integrating function, manifested in its special impact on the countryside and towns around it and in the way it gave shape to the English state whose capital it became shortly before 1300. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The south-west comprises the modern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. This region bestrides the divide between highland and lowland England. The majority of the region comprises the older, harder rocks of upland Britain, together with the more acidic soils derived from those rocks, the consequent pastoral farming systems, an ancient bocage landscape and a dispersed pattern of rural settlements. There are few large towns (Map 22.8). The upland moors of Mendip and Exmoor and the granite bosses of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor add transhumance and mineral exploitation of silver, tin and lead to the economic equation, whilst the long, indented coastline to both the north and south of the peninsula brought opportunities for fishing, coastal trading and links with South Wales, Ireland, north-west France and Iberia. However, the south coast is altogether more sheltered than the north with its steep cliffs and lack of inlets. In contrast, Wiltshire, Dorset and east Devon are part of the lowland zone with fertile clay vales, chalk and limestone escarpments and plateaux. Soils are more fertile, the climate is drier, mixed farming systems predominate and nucleated village settlements are the norm. However, there were also large areas of lowland heath on the poor sandy soils of south-east Dorset, and extensive down-land pastures on the chalk of Salisbury Plain which could be exploited to feed huge flocks of sheep. Whereas water was in short supply on the downs, the opposite was true in the marshlands of the Somerset Levels which provide a third distinctive local landscape of much richer pastureland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measured in terms of their populations, twenty or so towns emerge as important provincial centres with some 2,000 taxpayers in 1377. To these must be added Exeter, which doubled in size during the fifteenth century to emerge as the third largest provincial town in 1524–5, and Edinburgh, whose population was growing towards c. 12,500 by 1560 (see Table 18.1). York alone achieved a size or status comparable to large European towns such as Antwerp, Bremen or Lyon. Most of the greater towns of Britain were distinguishable from market towns by the scale and intensity of their urbanity: physical size and appearance, complex internal economic and social structures, sophisticated government and regional significance. Even so, few enjoyed the close formal interdependence of a large Italian, French or German town with its contado or umland. In Britain, administration outside urban liberties commonly remained subject to the crown. Coventry, Gloucester and York were exceptions: Coventry by acquiring some 15,000 acres of the manor of Coventry, Gloucester through its incorporation of thirty or so villages in 1483, and York as the result of its jurisdiction over an adjacent rural wapentake, the Ainsty. Population size in 1377 reflected the economic vitality of towns which had recovered from the depredations of the Black Death. Though population losses varied, it is likely that many of the greater towns lost a third to a half of their inhabitants between 1348 and 1349. Some, like Boston and Winchester, were already beyond their most successful phase by 1348–9 and retained their rank on the strength of earlier prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the chief gateways of an island kingdom perched on the periphery of Europe, English and Welsh port towns served a crucial function not only in linking Britain with the continent and neighbouring islands, but also in facilitating inter-island trade and communications. Presiding over this traffic and trade was a wide social and cultural mix of peoples: merchants and mariners, pilgrims and pirates, rich and poor, native English and foreigners who traded by coast and overseas, embarked for distant lands, fished nearby waters, built and owned the country's ships and manned the royal navy. While this concentration of distinctive occupational groups and visitors clearly differentiated seaports from inland settlements, so too did their special relationship with the crown, which relied on the inhabitants of port towns to transport troops and supplies, to collect the hefty revenues associated with royal customs and to police the staple system. Port towns also occupied a significant place in the urban hierarchy; eight of the twenty wealthiest English towns in 1334, seven of the most populous towns in 1377 and half of the twenty wealthiest towns in 1524–5 were port towns. In Wales, six of the ten largest towns around 1300 were seaports. Waterfronts and port administration This chapter will focus primarily on coastal towns with immediate access to the sea, treating riverine ports only when they were customs headports, such as Exeter and London, or when they could be easily reached by ocean-going ships. Exeter, in fact, was a port town only in an administrative sense since it enjoyed no direct access to the sea, relying instead on its outport four miles south at Topsham, which itself is located at the head of a narrow-channelled estuary, six miles from the open sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the period under review the data allow a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, approach to towns and, therefore, important issues such as the relative size of towns can be addressed only in an oblique fashion. From the late tenth century an indication of the relative intensity of urban development can be gained from, first, the coin evidence and, then, Domesday Book, followed by the taxation records. While the documentary record increases from the twelfth century, it is largely ‘external’ to the town itself and reflects the growth and interests of central government; historical evidence is, therefore, mainly concerned with the process of creating and administering towns. A major exception are the urban surveys which survive for a small number of towns and start in the later thirteenth century. Much new information has come from archaeological fieldwork, but this, like the documentary material, has a bias towards the larger towns. The proportion of any town that has been excavated is very small, and consequently it is difficult to assess the validity of the sample. Excavated evidence can show the diversity of a town through information about the urban fabric, including communal structures such as defences and churches, as well as domestic and industrial buildings, and about the inhabitants themselves and the kind of environment they lived in. Where it is possible to draw upon the results of a number of archaeological excavations in the same town, aspects of the urban economy can be discussed, such as the range and organisation of industries and trading patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Coming into Canterbury’, wrote Charles Dickens in David Copperfield, ‘I loitered through the old streets with a sober pleasure that calmed my spirits and eased my heart. There were the old signs, the old names over the shops … the venerable Cathedral towers … the battered gateways.’ For Dickens, and for the modern visitor to towns where medieval fabric can still be seen (such as Norwich, which claims to have more surviving medieval churches than any other town in western Europe), the built environment creates a powerful sense of place and a reassuring frame of reference. We can try to reconstruct the former townscape and delve behind it to study the relationship between physical settings and the attitudes which influenced the conduct of medieval life. The construction of the built environment in medieval British towns reflected both social values and personal initiatives or personal monument making, be it repairing a bridge, erecting a conduit or adding a chapel to the local parish church. But the period was not static. Over the two and a half centuries covered by this chapter, certain developments and underlying trends can be seen. During the medieval period, several features of construction and amenity first appeared in towns: jetties for the first floor and higher by 1300 (already in London by 1246), dormer windows by 1450 and the flooring over of halls which probably happened in profusion in towns during the fifteenth century before it was necessary or thought fashionable in the countryside. The underlying motors were the conjunction of pressure on space and the availability of cash, generated by trade and other urban pursuits (such as rents), which created the climate for innovation and display, both at the level of grand patronage in a church or the ordinary house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand for urban goods and services There is a striking contrast between any analysis of changing demand in the late middle ages and that of earlier centuries. Changes in the period 600–1300, at least at the level of generalisation attempted in Chapter 5, may be summarised with the broad statement that the rising income of landlords, the growth of rural demand and the expansion of long-distance trade were all favourable to the growth of urban incomes over long periods of time. For most of that long period the evidence is not good enough for any much more subtle refinement. No comparable simplicity is viable for the shorter and much better documented period from 1300 to 1540, and it is difficult to generalise about the performance of late medieval urban economies with any firm assurance. As in the past, the urban households of landlords often contributed a large and distinctive part in the composition of demand affecting townsmen. This was not true only of the small episcopal or monastic towns where it is most obvious. One of the most striking instances is Westminster, where the royal Court with its associated institutions of government, together with Westminster Abbey, and the visitors to both, generated trade both in Westminster itself and in London nearby. Besides numerous manufacturing industries that could prosper in this context, the victualling trades conspicuously benefited. The court and the abbey generated an exceptional demand for meat and so created local employment in grazing and butchering. Heavy dependence upon the presence of large households was the lot of many smaller towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century London was pre-eminent among English urban communities. Whether ranked according to wealth or according to population, its pre-eminence was undisputed. Although London was larger, more populous and wealthier than other English towns, it was distinguished from them not only by size and volume: it developed, in the period covered here, characteristics which were distinctive. London was different not only in scale, but also in kind. This pre-eminence is reflected in the creation and for the most part survival of a remarkable series of administrative records. Although the chamberlain's records (including the apprentice and freedom registers) were destroyed in a fire in the seventeenth century, the City is rich in custumals, record books and wills and deeds enrolled in the Husting court from the mid-thirteenth century. The pleadings in the mayor's court survive from the end of the thirteenth century and the records of the meetings of the court of aldermen and court of Common Council from 1416. In addition to the City's official records, there survive thousands of testaments enrolled in the ecclesiastical courts, pre-Reformation records of some thirty of London's parish churches and material of great interest from the archives of the livery companies. Much of this material, particularly that from the city's own administration, has been edited and calendared. Moreover, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Londoners developed a taste for ‘London chronicles’, i.e. histories of England written in the vernacular and divided into mayoral, rather than regnal, years. These chronicles throw some fitful light upon the course of English history, but rather more light on the thought-world of the Londoners who commissioned and bought them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the seventh century, nowhere in Britain could have been described as a town, a place with permanent occupants whose life styles were distinct from those of rural contemporaries. Urbanism had become established at a few sites by c. 700, but even thereafter its progress was slow and intermittent. Although vestiges of an urban past may have survived in fifth- and sixth-century Canterbury, the new Church communities established inside and outside its walls after 597 did not stimulate rapid regeneration. An early seventh-century gold coin inscribed Dorovernis Civitas marks an aspiration to revive the city's status, and a valuable gold and garnet pendant and other objects have been found in extramural cemeteries and at intramural sites. Those who owned such things need not have lived within Canterbury, however, and occupation remained sporadic there, with one area that had already had post-Roman use even being abandoned. Sunken-featured buildings were still constructed in the style current since the early fifth century, but ground-level timber structures have also been found. Iron workers certainly continued to operate inside the walls, and another craft, pottery making, was beginning to become more specialised, but the quality of the local clays probably caused it to be extramural. Some demand for higher-quality products may have been developing, and the 675 charter reference to Fordewicum is usually taken to mean that a wic or landing-place was coming into use downstream from Canterbury on the River Stour at Fordwich, where toll privileges were granted in the next century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveying the topography of towns before 1300 inevitably draws heavily on the disciplines of archaeology and plan analysis, rather than on documents and standing buildings, which are predominantly late medieval. Fortunately, the proliferation of urban excavations since the 1970s has produced a huge volume of topographical material, telling us much more about the siting, phases and layout of many towns than could be learnt from documents alone. This does not mean that we should neglect the value of early documents, however brief and laconic: the expert excavator of medieval Paris, Michel Fleury, demonstrates from personal experience ‘la nécessité d'allier constamment les données des sources écrites à celles que fournissent les fouilles archéologiques’. Nevertheless, there is much detail that we could never have gleaned of early medieval topography without excavation, and for the very earliest periods for the most crucial facts – whether a town site remained inhabited, or whether it was relocated – such evidence is all we have. It is therefore important that major discoveries of the past few years be built into general syntheses as soon as possible, and that is one of the purposes of this volume. Most Roman town sites were also urban in the middle ages, and in most cases the Roman core lies beneath the modern town centre. However, to move from those premises to the conclusion of ‘continuity of site if not of urbanism’ is to go beyond the evidence. It is now clear that, of the four most important towns of the earliest post-Roman period, Ipswich was without a Roman past, while London and York developed on open sites outside the Roman walls before shifting back into the fortified area in the ninth and tenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A century ago the most famous of all Cambridge historians of the medieval English town declared that he was ‘far from thinking that any one history should be told of all our boroughs’. In some ways F. W. Maitland has proved even wiser and more prophetic than he knew. For many of its readers this present volume may itself suggest that a truly unified history of late medieval British towns is an unattainable ideal. The more intensive the research conducted on individual late medieval towns in recent years, the more apparent seems the singularity of each urban place. Because of the nature of the surviving evidence, nearly all late medieval boroughs tend to be studied as if they were autonomous islands in a non-urban sea – even if in fact their insularity was always more apparent than real. The economic fortunes of all major provincial English towns, from Exeter to Newcastle, were dependent not only on external political, administrative and social pressures but also on all-pervasive networks of national and international trade like those which made them increasingly vulnerable to competition from London merchants in the years before and after 1500. Moreover, when one is able, only too rarely, to examine variations in a town's population and productivity at extremely close quarters during a brief period of time, what tends to be revealed is not stability but a situation of continuous and even alarming short-term volatility. It was only after the middle ages were over that new economic and political structures, and eventually the processes of mass industrialisation, gradually began to impose a greater degree of social equilibrium within what had previously been a more or less permanently ‘crisis-ridden’ urban scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand for urban goods and services No definition of the word town is very convenient for the analysis of medieval economies. It is tempting to take the contemporary term burh or burgus as a proxy, but this needs resisting because there was so little consistency or stability in the way the word was used. Population levels might serve as a guide if they were reliably known for each town, but they are not. Differences of taxable wealth are on record, and for 1334 can be charted for most of England, but they depend upon the size of the assessed area and the social distribution of wealth to such an extent that there is considerable overlap between places with ‘urban’ features (craftsmen, traders, marketing institutions) and places dependent solely on rural pursuits. It will be assumed here, first, that a necessary condition for being considered a town is that a settlement should have some institutional apparatus for regular local or long-distance trade; from the eleventh century onwards this would normally mean at least a weekly market. Secondly, a settlement with this institutional provision is classifiable as a town if its income depends to a perceptible degree upon the sale of manufactures and services to buyers external to the body of townsmen. Buyers external to the urban community, in this context, may mean large households or bodies of administrative personnel adjacent to the town; describing such purchasers as external is justifiable because large households of all kinds normally drew most of their income from outside the town in which they were placed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early settlement 400–900 In the late fourth century London, formerly one of the most substantial Roman cities north of the Alps, was the prime seat of authority in Britain and still a significant centre of urban life. Within a generation or two, following the withdrawal of imperial rule, the city had been virtually abandoned. Yet later London owes much to its Roman predecessor. The carefully constructed site on the Thames, the bridge at the hub of an extensive road network and the ready access to a productive hinterland and to the river networks and markets of northern Europe endowed London with continuing potential as a place for business. The circuit of walls was to shape the city for centuries to come. Features within the walls, surviving as enclosures or as barriers to movement, influenced later settlement and may have marked seats of authority (Plate 3). During the fifth and sixth centuries this largely uninhabited site perhaps served as a focus for a zone of settlements within some twenty miles (32 km). London persisted as a massive, but ruined, physical presence and as an idea in bureaucratic memory. Perhaps the most important element in the city's continuity is ideological: in the recognition of its power as the organising principle for a distinctive territory. London comes more clearly into view in 601, when Pope Gregory envisaged that it would serve as the primatial see of England. Political reality no longer matched Roman perceptions and London, in the province of the East Saxons, was under the overlordship of the king of Kent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain's myriad of small towns remained at the heart of economic and social life into the early Victorian era, bridging the urban and rural worlds. Diaries like that of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner of East Hoathly reveal an almost constant interaction between villagers and small towns. Turner records how he went to the nearby town of Lewes to buy cottons and cheese, to attend property sales, pay debts, get a doctor, scotch rumours about the disharmony between him and his wife, to participate in church events, to ‘see the finest horse-race that ever I see run’ and as often as not to get drunk and come rolling home. While the traditional open market, the nucleus of most small towns since their inception, was often in decline after 1700, these communities consolidated their position in Georgian provincial society, growing in population and prosperity, as they acquired retail shops and specialist crafts, as well as new leisure activities. The transformation did not occur overnight. In the 1720s the antiquarian and polymath William Stukeley, fresh from London, was dismayed at the small town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where there was ‘not one person … that had any taste or love of learning’ but within a few years things began to improve, as music making and club life blossomed, and he concluded eventually that this ‘is true life, not the stink and noise and nonsense of London’. By the 1760s Fanny Burney could talk of the ‘perpetual round of constrained civilities … unavoidable in a country town’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long before the orthodox onset of the Industrial Revolution, and well before Europe was facing a similar shake up, the traditional urban order in Britain was experiencing the forces of change that were to reshape its character. An important feature of the transformation underway was the emergence of the so-called ‘new towns’, and among these one of the most novel and distinctive categories was watering-places – inland and coastal resorts devoted to the provision of health and leisure. This chapter will examine the evolution of the resort from about 1700 until the arrival of the railways, an event whose influence can be exaggerated but which none the less represented a watershed. Four sets of issues will be explored. First, the chronology and pattern of development. Second, the broad factors responsible for this. Third, the urban status of watering-places, their relationship to other towns providing similar services, and their typology. Fourth, the particular economic, social, political and cultural characteristics of resorts. Because of their newness and distinctive profile, spa and seaside centres provide a litmus test of the urban transformation unfolding in the long eighteenth century. Though apparently very different from the classic ‘new newtowns’ of the Industrial Revolution, they were to form a vital element in the urban network which emerged. Chronology and pattern of development In Britain the earliest commercial development of spas as a health cure for the social elite dates from the late Tudor and early Stuart era. This parallels the beginnings of a period of discovery and rediscovery of springs in France, though in Italy there seems to have been a network of widely used watering-places since at least the later medieval period, whose clientele included the aristocracy. In the case of Britain, Phyllis Hembry has located the foundation of sixteen spas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and there are clear signs of exploitation of the springs at Buxton, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and most notably Bath (see Plate 3), which saw substantial investment in the health and visitor facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The fabric of the urban environment experienced accelerating change during the course of the eighteenth century, and the pace of change in some towns, although by no means all, underwent a dramatic gearshift from the 1780s onwards. These changes were driven by rapid population growth and migration, and by technological innovation, leading to the mechanisation of transport and of many manufacturing processes. Central government and municipal authorities contributed very little to this metamorphosis, unlike the experience of many European cities. The traditional pattern of urban social geography, in which the well-to-do lived in the centres of towns and the poor in the suburbs, was shattered in many towns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and replaced by suburban residential segregation based upon socio-economic status and the separation of home and work, in its turn dependent upon ease of transport. Everywhere it is a subtle, complex process of transformation. In some towns, such as Glasgow, it takes place within a generation. In other towns, unaffected by the first stages of industrialisation, it was the end of the nineteenth century before these processes had fully worked themselves out. Much of this growth and change had to be accommodated within ancient boundaries and administrative structures, creating problems of health, sanitation and housing upon an unprecedented scale. These problems were widely recognised by the 1830s, but it is the 1840s before central government begins to take the first tentative steps towards putting things right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of ports Ports were among the most dynamic towns during the commercial and Industrial Revolutions in Britain. They were also exceedingly diverse. By definition they were all boroughs or burghs with members of parliament, and councils controlling their domestic affairs. They enjoyed monopoly rights over foreign and most coastal trade. An English law of 1558 restricted trade to specified places and designated Legal Quays within them where all customable goods must be handled. There were approximately seventy-two English ports from 1696, when the customs service was reformed. In Scotland only designated royal and certain baronial burghs could trade overseas, and these were organised in thirteen precincts before the Union and approximately thirty ports thereafter. Although ports were separate entities, to some extent they competed with each other as part of the general or regional transportation system, but they shared characteristics that can be dealt with across the spectrum of places and activities. By definition ports grew round a waterfront, preferably the mouth of a river linking them to a hinterland, or, less successfully, a stretch of seashore enclosed by a pier or piers and dependent on land carriage. Almost universally throughout northern Europe this waterfront was lined originally with private warehouses backing on to merchants' houses facing the main street, maximising ground area while minimising expensive water frontage. There was usually a secondary centre round a market serving the local distribution network. In the eighteenth century the ground plan was elaborated in busy ports, with further streets for warehouses. However, the high cost of cartage and government failure to extend Legal Quays encouraged concentration round the waterside, raising land values and confirming the economic domination of those who owned it, with unfortunate effects for later developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now widely recognised that towns played a central role in the development of a new, more modern British economy and society in the years between 1700 and 1840. However, it is often assumed that the expansive element in urban society, the new social attitudes and cultural values that were helping to change patterns of consumer demand, to mobilise capital resources and to generate novel industrial processes and products, were confined to the great metropolis of London and the specialist ports, resorts and industrial towns whose growth attracted so much attention from contemporary observers. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the role played in this process by the established regional centres and historic county towns, many of which retained their importance well into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their experiences during this period of substantial and sometimes dramatic change in the urban system encompass every possible permutation from explosive population growth to sullen stagnation and raise pertinent questions about the very nature of ‘success’ in the context of urban development. Rather than being passive spectators of a drama taking place elsewhere, regional and county centres were fully involved in the action. Status, fuctions and patterns of development A substantial number of the ‘Great and Good towns’ of early modern England fell into the category of county centres, towns whose social and economic influence over a broad hinterland beyond their immediate market area was recognised by their contemporary classification as ‘the capital of all the county’ or simply ‘county town’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London: portent of the future ‘In 1737 Samuel Johnson, having failed to make a very successful living hitherto, made his way to London, at the age of twenty-eight, and wrote a gloomy prognostication of his chances of survival: For who would leave, unbribed, Hibernia's land, / Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? / There none are swept by sudden fate away, / But all whom hunger spares, with age decay: / Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire, / And now a rabble rages, now a fire; / Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, / And here the fell attorney prowls for prey; / Here falling houses thunder on your head, / And here a female atheist talks you dead.’ Johnson had not yet visited Scotland, or he might have revised his views on the comparative safety of life in the Highlands. It was in London that he found the company that he most longed to frequent and in London that he made his career. He did not leave London often and it was in London that he died forty-seven years after his arrival, having made his famous remark that a man who was tired of London was tired of life, as there was in London all that life could afford. Most of the poem had in fact little to do with London, although it was quite correct in pointing out that the capital had its highwaymen and that the older houses occasionally fell into the street. Johnson used London to typify decadence This was, from one point of view, part of an anti-urban tradition that long predated Johnson and long outlived him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An island nation is, commonly, a seafaring one, dependent for much of its way of life on seaborne enterprise. As Charles Lloyd put it in 1659 during the last Protectorate parliament, in which sat Scottish and Irish as well as English and Welsh members, ‘[w]e are islanders, and our life and soul is traffic’. The existence of a seafaring nation turns in large measure on the history of its ports, great and small – their relations with the rural hinterlands which satisfy their needs for food and labour and serve as important markets for their products and services; the multi-faceted roles they play in the nation's network of urban places, the fiscal and military resources they supply to the state; and the services they provide in trade and communication with the cultures and civilisations lying over the water. As island nations, early modern England, Wales and Scotland were simultaneously protected by the sea from potential continental enemies and points of passage. It is the tension between these two aspects of island life – the capacity of island peoples to withdraw behind the moat created by the seas surrounding them and their need to cross those same waters to find markets and supplies – that mark island nations as socially distinctive places. How their inhabitants negotiate this relationship and find a balance among its competing elements forms a defining feature of their society and culture. In early modern England, Wales and Scotland, the emphasis was increasingly on market-oriented enterprise and commercial exchange, thereby enhancing the dynamic role played by seaports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. The same applied to ‘great towns’, the other conceptual category which contemporaries applied to the upper reaches of the urban hierarchy, though in this case size came more deliberately into the frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Towns in early modern Britain performed many commercial, manufacturing, service, legal, political and cultural functions, and these were unevenly distributed. Even capitals as dominant as London and Edinburgh did not contain all the activities found in their respective urban systems, and different towns performed varying combinations of functions, whose fortunes shaped significant restructurings of British urban systems over this period. Urban production and trade, and their regulation, involved townspeople acting in various local, regional and national contexts. Many facets of urban life were tightly intertwined with hinterlands, and interdependences of town and country were central to many urban economic sectors. While some historiographical tension persists between work focusing on contrasting features of urban and rural life, and work focusing on urban–rural (and urban–urban) connections, the foci are substantially complementary. Contrasts grew as connectivity increased, with growing spatial divisions of labour in economic, political, social or cultural activities. This chapter considers urban life, insofar as it was distinctive, through the specialised roles connecting towns with other places. We interpret ‘agrarian’ broadly, since rural economies were seldom solely agricultural. In comparative studies of European urbanisation, threshold populations of 5,000 or 10,000 have often been used, and for the demographic analysis of British towns this makes sense. But from an economic perspective very many much smaller places were unambiguously regarded as towns by contemporaries for whom functions, rather than population, provided ‘urban’ attributes. Sixteenth-century urban economic specialisations were less marked than later, but earlier commentators readily – if unsystematically – characterised towns by their specialised functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth-century pattern In the early sixteenth century Scotland was undoubtedly less urbanised than England. Data on the population size of Scottish towns are very rare before the middle decades of the seventeenth century but Jan de Vries has calculated that in 1550 1.4 per cent of the Scottish population lived in towns of 10,000 inhabitants or more compared to 3.5 per cent in England and Wales. Another estimate, by Ian Whyte, suggests that 2.5 per cent of Scots were dwelling in towns of over 2,000 in population in 1550 whereas in 1600 8.7 per cent of the population of England were living in towns of this size or bigger. Not only was Scotland an overwhelmingly rural society in this period, more akin to countries such as Ireland and Denmark than to England or Holland, it was also one where urban development was very regionally concentrated. Whole areas, especially in the Highlands and southern Uplands, lacked any urban focus and were distant from any developed marketing centre. In the main, the Scottish towns of the sixteenth century were located in the central Lowlands, especially around the estuaries of the Forth, Tay and Clyde, along the east coast from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and in the lower Tweed valley to the south. These were regions of relatively dense population and rich arable land. It is also the case that in some of these areas town development was extensive and contrasted with the national pattern of very modest urban growth. Recent demographic research on the seventeenth-century hearth taxes has shown that the five counties around the River Forth, East Lothian, Midlothian, Fife, Clackmannan and West Lothian, had by far the highest percentage of town dwellers in Scotland with a level of urbanisation which could be compared to parts of the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical Midlands is a concept which is difficult to pin down; to some extent it amounts to that area which is left when more distinctive provincial blocks are removed. For the purposes of this volume the Midlands is defined as the West Midland counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire, combined with the East Midland shires of Derby, Leicester and Rutland, Northampton, Nottingham and Lincoln. There do exist some natural features which help to define this region: uplands to the west and north and the Lincolnshire seacoast, but the southern border can only be defined in our period in terms of the weakening fringe of London's primary commercial region. This is shown by analysis of the bases of Londonbound carriers in 1684 where there is a marked reduction at about a ninety mile radius from the capital, leaving Worcestershire, mid Warwickshire and mid Leicestershire outside, but Northamptonshire within, London's region. It is no surprise to find that the major Midland towns all lie beyond this frontier. Yet the urban networks of the Midlands do have a self-contained and consistent character which justifies thinking in these terms. While the Midland towns by their very location had vital external links, most of them looked primarily to London or to other towns within the region. And they had a great deal in common, for much of the region suffered from poor communications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was a truism of contemporary thought that distance from navigable water necessarily discouraged economic growth: thus in 1722 it was said of Leicestershire that ‘being the most inland county in England, and consequently far from any sea or navigable rivers, you must not suppose it a county of any trade’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chapter examines a paradox: towns played a very significant role in Welsh social and economic life, but before about 1760, the towns that mattered most were not located on Welsh soil. This account will describe the limited importance of the specifically Welsh towns, and the strikingly small urban population of the principality. It will then discuss the networks that did exist in terms of the English regional capitals, especially Bristol, Shrewsbury and Chester; and finally, show how a distinctively Welsh urban network appeared in the south-eastern parts of the country by the end of the eighteenth century. Welsh urban structure 1540–1750 Welsh towns were deceptively numerous. As Matthew Griffiths remarks, ‘medieval Wales had been endowed with far more boroughs and market centres than its economy could justify’, the abundance reflecting the need to attract settlers, and many towns withered within a century or two of creation. Nor could they long maintain their position as islands of Norman or English influence, and Ralph A. Griffiths has shown how the later medieval boroughs became increasingly integrated into rural Welsh society. By 1540, a lengthy process of winnowing had left a small number of thriving urban centres, alongside dozens of places lacking the social or economic basis to justify their urban pretensions. Some fifty or sixty towns in Tudor and Stuart Wales held regular markets, but we reach this figure only by including communities with 200 or 300 people. In 1756, William Owen's Authentic Account cited fairs at 167 centres throughout the principality, seventy of which were located in the three shires of Carmarthen, Denbigh and Caernarvon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the region Urban growth in parts of northern England during the three centuries under review was spectacular even by the standards of the first industrial nation. It was spectacular in the literal sense that by the early decades of the nineteenth century not only business travellers but also tourists and social commentators were coming to marvel at the novel concentration of factories using fossil fuels in an urban setting in and around Manchester, and at the sheer scale of urban maritime and manufacturing activity in the other towns which were cohering and coalescing. The great industrial and commercial centres gathered up systems of satellite towns in their surrounding districts, conjuring up in one visiting mind the telling image of Manchester as a ‘diligent spider’ at the heart of its web of communications. These were accelerating developments, and they reached their most dramatic, interesting and historically important phase between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, when these new towns were at their most raw, untrammelled, dramatic, exciting and threatening: ‘great human exploits’ which produced and distributed a cornucopia of goods under a shroud of infernal smoke and under conditions which visibly threatened life, health and social and political stability. Provincial urban developments within the North had turned it into a symbol of the future, which might or might not work in the longer term, and by the 1840s the urban concentrations of the region had become the cynosure of the informed contemporary gaze. It therefore makes sense to begin this survey with an analysis of the scale and scope of urbanization within the region in 1840, and then to examine the roots of these unprecedented phenomena and attempt to describe and explain their development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘A mercate town [Guildford] is well frequented and full of faire inns.’ (W. Camden, Britannia, 1607, 1977 edn, Surrey and Sussex) ‘[Canterbury is] a flourishing town, good trading in the Weaving of Silks … There is fine walks and seates [for] the Company; there is a large Market house and a town Hall over it … [and] the Cathedral.’ (C. Morris, ed., The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes c. 1682–1712, 1984) ‘In the reign of George II, Brighton began to rise into consideration as a bathing-place … and it ultimately obtained the very high rank which it now enjoys as a fashionable watering-place, and its grandeur and importance, under the auspices of George IV … Steam vessels sail from this place to Dieppe … The principal branch of trade is that of the fishery.’ (Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England, 1840) ‘[Portsmouth is] a seaport, borough, market-town; [Portsea is] now the principal naval arsenal of Great Britain.’ Lewis, ibid.) ‘Lewisham is a most respectable village and parish … inhabited by a great number of opulent merchants and tradesmen who have selected this pleasant and healthful neighbourhood as a place of retirement from business.’ (Pigot and Co.&s National Commercial Directory, 1839, Kent, Surrey and Sussex) The special features of the towns of the Home Counties and adjoining shires which these quotations illustrate were the result of several factors. Unlike much of the Midlands communications were good except in the Weald. Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire had a big coastal traffic which was more sheltered than that of North-East England. Inland counties were tied by the Thames and a growing number of navigable tributaries, and the Ouse linked Bedfordshire to the Wash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The six counties in the South-West of England (Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall) are not now associated strongly with urbanisation. Apart from Bristol and Plymouth, the region is predominantly one of small and medium-sized towns. The origins of this modern pattern, in contrast with the more heavily urbanised Midlands and (parts of) the North, lie in the period covered here. Yet it would be misleading to portray this period as one of urban decline in the South-West. Not only was there a more than threefold increase in the urban population of the region between 1660 (c. 225,000) and 1841 (just under 880,000), but even in 1841 the South-West, with 40 per cent of its population in towns, was as urbanised as England generally, leaving London aside (see Table 2.6).1 If urban growth in the previous centuries was less spectacular than elsewhere, this was in part because of the strong urban infrastructure already in place, with over a quarter of the region's people living in towns by 1660, rising to almost 37 per cent by 1801. Furthermore, if the region lacked an outstanding major new town based on manufacturing and commercial success, it had many smaller ones, notably in Cornwall and in the clothing districts around Bristol, and it had the two greatest inland spas – Bath (see Plates 3 and 28) and Cheltenham, the latter the fastest growing large English town between 1801 and 1841. The leisure and tourism industry they personified was already transforming the coastal towns from Weymouth along the south Devon coast and round to Weston-super-Mare and Clevedon on the Bristol Channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regions in England have never been closely defined; and urban regions even less so. Cultural identities have been forged locally – in streets, villages, parishes, townships, counties – and also nationally or even, at times, imperially. Moreover, suspicious central governments have always refused to designate formal provincial capitals. That has been the case over many centuries. As a result, regional boundaries in England resist tidy mapping and English towns have never been constrained within distinctly designated regional networks. Yet there have also existed some broad historical affiliations that were greater than the shire counties and less than the nation. Thus were generated England's ‘regions of the mind’. In concept, these were permeable and mutable, their boundaries and significance varying over time. But, by virtue of their popular origins, they had a shadowy survivability. They drew not upon formal administrative structure but upon shared geography, experience and culture. In addition, the long-term persistence of urban networks often encouraged these ‘regions of the mind’, since communal identities were forged when people met together – and the towns provided the classic meeting places, where residents and travellers congregated for commerce, conviviality and conversation. East Anglia and Regionality East Anglia existed regionally in this way. Its boundaries were not rigid. It was not recognised by government as an administrative region and hence had no official provincial capital. Its ‘broad’ speech was fused from a variety of dialects. Moreover, its local economy was not homogeneous. And it certainly was not cut off from the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North of the equator It has become a truism of historical writing to conceive of Africa in the course of the nineteenth century as becoming increasingly a part of, and a product of, the expansion of Europe, which, beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had integrated ever larger areas of the world into a single economic system. In attempting an overview of the state of the continent on the eve of partition – roughly over the decade of the 1870s – a large number of questions arise from a consideration of this truism. To what extent was Africa already an adjunct of an economic system dominated by Europe? What was the relationship between Africa and this European system – was it one of an equal or an unequal exchange of commodities? To what extent was Africa dependent economically, if not yet politically? What social and ideological changes were beginning to follow from this dependency? Was Africa a fruit ripe for plucking in the 1870s, was there a certain inevitability about the forthcoming imperialist carve-up, or was partition an extraneous historical occurrence forced upon a continent which had within it other options for coping with the future? There are no answers to these questions that are at the same time simple and sensible. Certainly the answers to all such queries will differ, according to the region of Africa which is under scrutiny. Even within particular regions, the situation of individual states, societies or groups of people, their relations with each other and with the outside world (especially with the European capitalist economies) varied greatly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period since the First World War the importance of the cities has been reinforced through a rapid expansion of their tertiary functions combined with retention of an important stake in manufacturing, albeit with much diversification. The accessibility of cities has improved through a rapid growth in road transport offering a far more developed system than the railway network, which has been drastically reduced in consequence. This has meant the avoidance of a ‘dual economy’ type of development in which city growth is associated with increasing urban isolation and diminishing influence or contagion throughout the region. But it has, equally, not induced urban growth evenly throughout Scotland: disorderly urban sprawl would not be possible anyway given the relatively stringent planning controls that have evolved during the period but even in the context of government and local authority control of urban layouts it is evident that the growth areas are restricted, especially in the Outer Regions where the urban network remains poorly developed. Thriving industries require the full range of urban amenities such as may usually be found in the regional centres of Scotland, but spread away from these cities is difficult. For an industry can only flourish in the context of favourable environmental circumstances. The spread of industry to the Outer Regions is socially necessary, in view of the reduction in employment in primary sectors which are no longer so labour intensive, but the recent improvements in terms of power and transport are not balanced by a satisfactory urban pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small offshore islands are more prominent in Scotland than in any other part of the British Isles and the fact that they are particularly numerous off the north and west coasts has led to close parallels being drawn between Scotland and Scandinavian lands such as the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway. It is very difficult to decide how many islands there are altogether because they range in size from Lewis & Harris with some 200,000 ha down to the most insignificant dimensions. The census of 1861 recognised 787 islands and all but 31 lay in the Highland counties extending from Bute to Shetland. Even then only 185 of these islands were inhabited: in 1971 the figure was down to 105. The story of island depopulation is quite as emotive as the saga of the clearances and even though the details are too fragmentary to permit a comprehensive study of desertion going far back in time there is a sufficient number of well documented cases to reveal community failure and landlord oppression on a scale that disturbs the social conscience of any one who is orientated by the ethos of the welfare state. Yet sympathy for people who find it necessary to transfer to a new environment should not obscure the normality of this process, for a farmer who decides to farm an island by commuting from an external base, rather than by living permanently on the holding, is really behaving no differently from a mainland colleague who enlarges his holding by amalgamation and takes over a formerly separate holding where the farm house may then fall into disuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crofting is closely associated with the Highlands in the popular mind and there are certainly some districts in the region where smallholdings are still a prominent element in the landscape. This should not obscure the reality of large farm dominance overall, as the nineteenth century generally witnessed a persistent diffusion of commercial farming. But in the Highlands the failure of the planned village movement to provide an effective solution to the problem of overpopulation led to the persistence of traditional agrarian structures until after the Napoleonic Wars, with only limited intrusions by sheep farmers. The compromise was a dynamic one, much affected by the generally upward trend in the profitability of sheep farming and the generally downward trend in the ability of small tenants to support themselves. Yet the economic factor, seeking the highest return from each piece of land, had to be balanced against small tenant perception of opportunity elsewhere, landlord interest in land reclamation by subsistence farmers, and the general estate interest in having a local labour supply available. Reliable information was sparse in remoter parts of the Highlands and Islands and this made the cohesive fabric of the local community all the stronger. Any adjustment would be painful with population growing fast in relation to commercial opportunities. Some security was provided by the retention of the gaelic aristocracy as landlords on the southern model (in contrast to the expulsion of native landowners in Ireland). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter examines the development of Scotland as an independent state strong enough to withstand external pressures for a unified Britain until the beginning of the eighteenth century. The emergence of the idea of a separate state in north Britain remains somewhat mysterious. Most conventional explanations seem inadequate.However, there is no doubt about Scotland's resolve to defend her independence through the introduction of a feudal system on the Anglo-Norman model. The modernisation of government was essential for survival although the price was a heavy one, not simply in terms of conflict with England but equally as a result of debilitating strife within Scotland due to the regional problem of Highland separatism. The growth of industry and commercial agriculture was inevitably stunted by these harsh strategic realities; yet there is evidence of an accelerating rhythm of growth in the seventeenth century. The border and lowlands were peaceful and social change was creating a climate where economic expansion was accepted, except in the Highlands where traditional values could still be asserted through military activity. The formation of Scotland About a thousand years after the Romans had first built Hadrian's Wall, the southern boundary of a northern state was drawn along the river Tweed as the result of the battle of Carham (Berwickshire) in 1018. This line, which eventually became the accepted boundary between England and Scotland, remained unstable for centuries. The whole area between the Forth–Clyde line in the north and the Tees in the south became a zone of bitter contention with the struggles of the two states mirrored by the feuds of local families, in whose hands lay much of the responsibility for administering the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]