Jane Laughton’s ‘Life in a Late Medieval City’
Having bought a copy from the publishers at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in May, I’ve recently been reading Jane Laughton’s wonderful Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester 1275-1520.
I found Jane’s book to be a fascinating account of medieval Chester, and a wonderful introduction to the medieval city more broadly. Canonical medieval authors like Chaucer, Langland and Gower are more and more often being taught as city writers, and I would consider making the book recommended reading for my undergraduate students.
The book uses a rich range of evidence – principally local court records, but also literary texts, material artefacts and so much more – to paint a detailed picture of Chester and its citizens in the later Middle Ages. The author skilfully moves from individuals (such as ‘Alice the launderer assaulted on the river bank by a millward’s son on Whitsunday in 1306′, now immortalised in the blurb on the back cover) to groups (guilds, the aldermen, the citizens…) to the city as a whole, comparing and contrasting it to other contemporary English cities. This is achieved with inevitable analytical poise, but also with an empathy that really arrests the reader’s interest in the fate of individuals like Alice the Launderer.
I found Jane’s sections on topography and the built environment particularly interesting, because they gave me a much stronger sense of what Lucian elided in his description of the city. For example, though he spends pages and pages comparing the city to Rome (a simile that arises from St Peter’s importance in the cities), he never mentions that part of the fabric of the church of St Peter in the centre of Chester remained Roman. Nor does he mention the high-rent commercial property which abutted St Peter’s when he was writing.
I was also interested in the evidence Jane amassed for lay literacy in late medieval Chester. She points out there are six or seven parchment makers recorded in Chester in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, perhaps based in St John’s Lane near where the scriveners’ were working, and collects some interesting evidence about the prices they charged. Cestrians also owned book: a city butcher owned a copy of Sydrak in 1439, while a matress maker owned (and was illegally deprived of) a grammar book in 1487.
Life in a Late Medieval City is a fascinating book, which can be recommended to all who are interested in medieval Chester.
June 15th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I’ve also found Jane’s book very helpful as I’ve worked on this project. I’ve found her approach to be a useful corrective to reading literary-critical studies which inevitably prioritise the agendas and politics of the monastic texts – after reading so much on Lucian and Bradshaw it was quite a shock to see her remark that ‘the jurisdiction of the Benedictine abbey posed a… serious threat to social harmony’ in medieval Chester (p. 130), or to have the Great Charter of 1506 described in positive terms (pp. 38-9)! I think a great strength of Jane’s book is the way that it presents stories – narratives involving specific individuals and incidents, reconstructed from the available evidence. It’s been fascinating to put these glimpses into urban reality alongside the visions of Chester in the literary texts, with all their idealisations and elisions.
July 6th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
For those who might be interested, I reviewed Dr Laughton’s book for the journal ‘Medieval Archaeology’, and all being well it should be published this year. For further details on the journal see http://www.medievalarchaeology.org/