Decline and Growth in English Towns 1400-1640

Although historians have always studied towns, widespread interest in urban history as a specialized historical field is relatively recent. This fashion has stimulated the development of a major controversy about the fortunes of towns in England between the 14th and 17th centuries. Some see them as prone to crisis and frequently subject to decay, while others have held that many of them prospered in these centuries. This book guides the reader through the controversy, summarizes the opposing cases, and adds new insights derived from the author's own research. These insights indicate that the problem lay in the rise and decline of regional economies rather than the rise and decline of the towns which lay in those regions. An extensive bibliography with notes is designed to help the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. This is a book both for students beginning the study of the subject and for their teachers, to whom it should have something new to say.