Urban culture and the Church 1300–1540.

Introduction: points of perspective In 1314 the spire of St Paul's Cathedral in London was damaged by a lightning bolt. The repairs accomplished, a man clambered carefully to the scaffold's summit and replaced the great cross, charged with its precious contents of relics which included a fragment of the cross of Christ. From up here, one commanded a panorama of the city. The square mile of the walled area, and the straggling suburbs to east and west and to the south of the River Thames, were all displayed to view. The urban vista was punctuated by the towers of a hundred parish churches and a score of convents, whose smaller scale expressed, from the perspective of the cross of Paul's, their subordinate and ancillary status. Order was additionally revealed in a network of streets still marked by a grid plan imposed four centuries before by an Anglo-Saxon king. From this vantage point the city appeared entire, comprehensible and available for possession. When, in the sixteenth century, the first urban mapmakers were encouraged by municipal councils to publish such another panoptic vision of the city, they made the same climb in order to construct from steeple-tops the impression, before the possibility of human flight, of the bird's-eye, all-encompassing view. Bishop, monarch and magistrate each conceived of the city as a visible entity, conveniently subject to his direction and control. But how many shared the universal vision of Paul's cross? Far below, the teeming alleys and tenements of early fourteenth-century London housed 80,000 individuals, hardly one of whom would ever see the city in this light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]