Small medieval towns, with special reference to Whitchurch, Hampshire, ca 1250-1400

Abstract

Small medieval towns can be seen as an integral part either of the urban network or of rural society. This study seeks to explore the administration, economy and society of a very small town through its documentary record and physical layout, to trace its development up to the end of the fourteenth century, and to consider whether its fundamental character was more rural than urban. The chosen town is Whitchurch in north Hampshire, partly because it is unusual among very small towns in possessing a documentary record, and partly because the medieval history of north Hampshire has not yet been fully explored. Whitchurch was a borough founded in the mid-thirteenth century near a late-Saxon mother church on a manor of St. Swithun's Priory in Winchester. Its main function was as a roadside town; it remained very small throughout the medieval period and eventually became a 'pocket' borough. The lordship of the Priory is seen as the ultimate cause of failure, partly because it administered the town as a manorial tithing in spite of having given it some burghal privileges, but principally because it founded the town too close to the Bishop of Winchester's established town at Overton, at a time when the decline of Winchester had reduced the amount of road traffic in a north-south direction through Hampshire. The conclusion is reached that Whitchurch had an ambivalent urban status, both legally and physically, and that such a small town, with a population of perhaps three hundred in the early-fourteenth century, would be marginally urban in the context of medieval towns in general. Within Hampshire, however, it had a recognizable place in the medieval commercial network.

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