‘Sore Decay’ and ‘Fair Dwellings’: Boston and Urban Decline in the Later Middle Ages

Despite a mass of recent research, the development of town life in late medieval England remains an enigma. One school of thought believes that town life flourished as would be expected in an age of economic growth and achievement. Another school believes that towns were impoverished in the later middle ages, a reflection of an age of recession and declining national income. The debate has been compounded by the treacherous nature of the statistical evidence for urban prosperity and by historians' legitimate doubts about the evidence for urban decline contained in the towns' own petitions for financial relief. The potential for disagreement has been encouraged by a failure to define terms such as the period and towns being studied and the meaning of ‘decline’. The debate on the English gentry in the century before 1640 foundered on a similar failure to define the questions and terms at issue. Thus forty years after the beginning of that controversy it has been claimed that historians are no better off than Harrington, who was writing in the 1650s. It is often said that historians do not resolve their debates. They merely lose interest and pass on to new subjects. Urban historians may soon decide that they are no better off than John Leland, who described many English towns in the 1530s, and move on to new areas of research. Here, however, it is argued that more definite conclusions can be reached and the town of Boston is used as a case study to reveal the problems faced by the urban economy in the later middle ages.