Until regular and routine record-keeping (in both senses of compilation and archiving) of a bureaucracy became established – at first nationally, though only very gradually, under the Norman-Angevin kings, and then locally once towns had been granted more extensive powers of self-government – the term Dark Ages, in its correct sense of scarcity of documentary evidence, might reasonably be said to apply to English towns of the early medieval period. Fortunately, scientific investigation in areas such as archaeology and topography over the last half-century or so have done much to fill some of the gaps in our understanding, even though much of what they tell us remains subject to uncertain interpretation and debate. But for the period prior to the Norman Conquest historians have relatively little documentary evidence at their disposal. Anglo-Saxon chronicles and Viking sagas make scattered references, though some remain obscure or subject to variant interpretations. Writs and charters of that period are perhaps even less useful because, by their nature, fragmentary sources, even when copies are gathered into registers.

Anglo-Saxon ports and burhs

The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings contain a few regulations pertinent to urban affairs, though for the most part they are preoccupied with enforcing respect for the Church, its teachings and its dues, with crimes of assault or of livestock theft, and with problems that led to social disorder (such as vendetta). Furthermore, the authenticity of some of these Anglo-Saxon sources is questionable, because of a later penchant for forgeries that attempted to attribute rights or privileges to pre-Conquest origins. The London regulations given above, for example, known only through a collection of Anglo-Saxon laws compiled ca.1100, were once thought to be part of a slightly broader set of edicts issued by Ethelred; although the authenticity of the regulations themselves is generally accepted, the connection with Ethelred remains unproven. Internal evidence indicates compatibility with a late tenth century date, but suggests that this set of regulations (if indeed it represents a single code) was the product of consultation between king and Londoners; at least some of the regulations read as though drafted by the latter, but it was clearly the mandate of the former, in regard to maintaining peaceable international relations, to regulate tolls imposed on foreign merchants.

By this time London, although not officially the capital, was already clearly the most important port of the realm, the chief communications link with Flanders, Normandy, and other parts of France – places which would be the focus of England's overseas economic and military relations for most of the Middle Ages. The merchants of Rouen, capital of the duchy of Normandy (with which England had signed a treaty in 991) prior to the time of William the Bastard, had in the eleventh century a London wharf allocated to their use at Dowgate; they are particularly singled out in the London regulations, though not quite so much as the Germans. Merchants subject to the German emperor were accorded similar commercial privileges to those allowed London citizens by custom, with the explicit exception of the right of a London burgess to purchase a share in any cargo arriving in the city's port, before the goods could be offered for sale to outsiders; this right of pre-emption is later found in a number of towns' custumals (e.g. Ipswich, Yarmouth Norwich, Maldon, and Newcastle, and may have been equally ancient in some of those places. With the possible exception of the Danes, Rhinelanders were perhaps the foreigners best documented in English trade in the eleventh century, and Lorrainers in the following. German wines were much favoured up to the late twelfth century, and the luxury goods in which German merchants dealt – notably linen and other fine cloths, furs, spices, and craftwork of precious metals – were also valued. However, commercial links with Flanders may already have been even more significant by the eleventh century. The above regulations mention specifically the merchants of Huy, Liege and Nivelle, Flemish cities in this period had reached about the peak of their importance; Huy, situated on the Meuse, then being one of Flanders' most prosperous cities. The Flemings were buying up English wool, hides, and other raw resources to fuel their rapidly growing urban industries; although as yet there was relatively little importation of Flemish cloth into England, Flemish ships were venturing to Spain and into the Mediterranean, further afield than the English yet dared go, and bringing luxury goods back into English markets.

Another important Anglo-Saxon text which, like the law codes, survives only in later copies is the Burghal Hidage, accepted as authentic, though the limited information it provides, about a series of fortifications begun during Alfred's reign, has raised more questions than it has answered. Although some earlier rulers had actively developed market centres, the Burghal Hidage evidences what might be considered the first systematically planned urbanization project in Britain since Roman colonization. Driven by the need for defence and offence against Viking raiders and invaders, the phased establishment of burhs across southern England, some at key strategic points (with emphasis on the Thames as a incursion risk and on protecting the heartland of Wessex) evidently had the ultimate goal of creating a network each of whose nodes was within forty miles of those closest; these nodes might serve as bases for campaigning armies, as refuges for people of the region, and as obstacles to advancing enemies. The plan required identifying long-standing settlements where older fortifications could be re-used or bolstered, and of erecting new fortifications in other locations; attention must also have been paid to roads linking burhs. There was subsequently enshrined in royal law the recognized obligation of all free men to contribute to the maintenance of defences and bridges; this found mention in the above Domesday entry for Chester, while at Oxford a large number of properties were held conditional to their owners fulfilling an obligation to keep the town walls in repair.

The burh planners appear to have understood that building fortifications by itself would not suffice, that they had to provide for manning of defences from the local populace, as at least a temporary measure until a relieving force could be brought up, and they must also have thought about provisioning of garrisons or encamped armies. While the initial intent may not have been to create new towns, there likely was, or arose, some perception of the advantages of associating with the burh-forts permanent settlements that could supply goods and services to military forces and provide additional resources for manning and maintaining defences; construction or restoration of fortifications, along with provision of employment opportunities, would have encouraged migration from the countryside. This civil defence initiative, which also involved (possibly as a later phase) careful laying out of streets within the burh enclosures – probably on similar fundamental principles to those later applied at New Winchelsea, and with the same intent of facilitating the apportionment of plots of land to residential and other uses – subsequently expanded into regions retaken from the Vikings (e.g. at Maldon and Norwich). The concentration of trade into urban sites (not necessarily just wiks, as some argue), in the law of Alfred's son Edward (above) should be understood in conjunction with the burh programme. This near-monopoly – at least in law, though practice may have been a different matter, for the restriction of trade to 'ports' was unenforceable and the production of warrantors must have proven impracticable in many cases – was further bolstered, in regard to urbanization, by Athelstan's extension of the minting system and intent to concentrate it in such places, and again in the eleventh century by the transfer of seats of episcopal administration into the larger towns. These initiatives gave impetus to the revival of a few existing cities or growth of lesser settlements, while some, though not all, of the new foundations evolved into modest-sized towns, taking their place within an inexorably elaborating network of market centres and within the determined effort of the monarchy to enhance its jurisdictional influence over the populace of the emerging English realm.

Any network, be it military or economic, could only function effectively if imbued with reliable connectivity between its nodes. The above extracts from the Leges Henrici Primi (cap.80), though not exclusively concerned with towns, show not only royal attention to the integrity of the overland transportation infrastructure, but also point to matters that loom large in urban judicial administration from the thirteenth century. Ensuring that the roads could be relied on to perform their function would naturally be a long-standing concern for from the perspectives both of efficient administration of the kingdom and the economic viability of towns. Domesday provides confirmation of this concern in its entries for several towns. From Canterbury we have the statement that the city reeve had to track down and fine anyone who dug up, or installed a post in, any of the main roads within the city or leading up to it. The Dover entry prescribes a fine of 100s. due the king from anyone who encroached on the public highway with a fence or a ditch or who allowed a tree he was cutting down to fall across such a road. At Nottingham there was a much higher fine for digging a ditch or ploughing within two perches of the highway. Fines and forfeitures for highway robbery, along with those for disturbing the peace or housebreaking, were at the core of judicial profits due the king.

The Domesday boroughs and wiks

Despite these various sources of information, our picture of towns prior to the eleventh century remains hazy. The curtains begin to be raised only with the compilation of the Domesday Book. Although its value in the Middle Ages as a reference source for various purposes – such as identifying which towns could be taxed as part of royal demesne, or which villages were on royal demesne so that their inhabitants could claim free status – appears not to have been realized until some considerable time after its production, for historians it has been a mine of information. Domesday's chief preoccupation was not with urban settlements as such but with land-holding and land-related resources in general, and most of that was rural; yet towns were not anomalies in a predominantly rural landscape. Those responsible for compiling the final report which we call Great Domesday were, for the most part, able to differentiate the more prominent towns – mostly the county towns – and adapt the arrangement of information to accommodate this differentiation; thus, for example, the Herefordshire section starts with a description of Hereford, Shropshire with one of Shrewsbury, Cheshire with Chester, and so on. The sister volume, Little Domesday, covering East Anglia, does not follow quite the same arrangement, although its most important towns are still distinguished within the overall scheme. Less consistency is apparent in the integration of smaller towns into the scheme of the survey, though this may be partly a facet of the way in which evidence was given to the commissioners from a variety of sources.

There are a number of cases in which blank spaces have been left where we would have expected information on particular towns. The gaps in coverage include some of the most important, such as London and Winchester, and practically all towns in a couple of counties. The blank spaces suggest that not all omissions were intentional, but it may also be that some places we today would categorize as having been urban in the 1080s were not so considered by the Domesday commissioners or compilers. At the same time, there are instances of burgesses and markets appearing outside the context of towns. We cannot therefore identify from Domesday a list of eleventh-century towns that is hard-and-fast, but attempts have produced figures ranging from 112 to over 130; taken together, the towns may have encompassed around 10% of the population of England. These English towns were diverse in their origins, and included:

• The more important Roman military and civil settlements, such as Lincoln and Chester, revived under new management;
• lesser Roman settlements, such as Hereford, which survived into the early Saxon period as a centre of ecclesiastical administration, expanded as a planned royal town of Mercia, was revitalized through adoption into the burh programme, and again refortified as a border defence after being plundered by a combined Welsh-Cheshire force in 1055.
• Places that first come to notice as burhs of Wessex or Mercia, or their Danelaw equivalents. The site of Shrewsbury, for instance, had probably long been settled when it draws our attention as a flourishing product of Alfred's daughter's programme of fortified urbanization in early tenth century Mercia, an intermediary defence between Hereford and Chester along the Welsh border. The position of such towns in a danger zone helps explain why the customs of both Hereford and Shrewsbury, as recorded in Domesday, included quasi-military services due the king from the burgesses.
• Minor towns with very modest populations, like Torksey (even Domesday describes it as small), first documented for its stint as a Danish army's winter camp (873), and subsequently becoming associated with Lincoln (it lay about ten miles north-west of that city) so closely as to be sometimes perceived as a suburb.
• And places that historians think of as proto-urban, such as Middlewich.

Another preoccupation of Domesday was with places where the king had rights and dues associated with full or shared lordship, with the result that settlements developing alongside, and under the thumb of, major religious foundations tended to receive little attention (as may have been the case with Battle), perhaps the most notable exception being Bury St. Edmunds (which, despite its name, is not treated as a borough in Domesday). The king had pre-eminent lordship over most of the boroughs covered by Domesday, as indicated by a typical two-thirds share of their revenues. By contrast with those settlements clearly indicated as boroughs, there are places not so named, yet having a somewhat urban appearance from which the king received income. For instance, the neighbouring central Cheshire salt-making centres of Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich – tied by a network of roads to Chester, from where much of the salt was redistributed, and of saltways into northern England and Wales – are treated in Domesday's arrangement in a way comparable to boroughs, a status they appear to have had by the early fourteenth century, yet they are described only as wiks and there is no mention of burgesses living there (even though elsewhere in the book we hear of burgesses without any mention of a borough). These were clearly considered places apart and their salt extraction industry of some economic importance; however, urbanization was only rarely the result of an intensive industrial specialization.

The entries vary quite a bit from town to town in detail and in the types of information reported: from the terse statement of the overall value of Rochester to the lengthy lists of individual property-holders at Leicester and Colchester, the latter being a rare instance in which quantities of burgesses are identified by name. Despite the acknowledgement in a number of Domesday entries of the danger of fire to the physical fabric of towns, details about that fabric are scarce. A range of residential buildings is seen, from large halls to the numerous small cottages at York, and castles receive frequent but only passing mentions (simply because they consumed real estate that had formerly contributed to royal revenues), but churches were of relatively little interest to the survey and are seriously under-represented, while the encircling fortifications that would later become a graphic symbol of boroughs receive even shorter shrift. The commissioners were limited in what they were instructed to enquire into and the types of questions they asked were geared towards rural estates.

As a result, Domesday tends to paint a picture of towns that hardly seems urban to us today, biased as it is towards resources we think of as agricultural. The presence of markets is mentioned only in a few towns, mostly smaller places like Tewkesbury, Beccles, Wallingford (in all of whose markets the monarchy had a fiscal interest), and Taunton, even though we must think that every town surely had its own market. Such features were not normally worthy of notice under the terms of reference of the Domesday commissioners; York's famous Shambles is only mentioned because the York holdings of one of the king's tenants-in-chief included a couple of its stalls. Similarly, we know relatively little of the extent and ways to which marketing activities may have been regulated; much of that was governed mostly by local custom. Yet it seems probable enough that the interdependence (so fundamental to the later medieval economy) between the raw resource-producing countryside and towns where specialized artisans converted some of these resources into a range of products and where merchants redistributed both resources and products further afield, was already starting to emerge and prompting regulatory mechanisms, such as tolls and standardization of weights and measures; an episcopal document from York, roughly contemporary with Domesday, points to established rights of collecting tolls on exports and imports, some of them due the bishop and some the king, while in the next century we even know the identity of one of York's toll-collectors. Not surprising then that the monarchy, from at least the time of the Conquest, began to insist that any would-be new market had to acquire a royal licence, and that some annual royal revenues stemmed from marketing activities; this insistence does not seem to have acquired general acceptance before the late twelfth century, however. The Middlewich entry in Domesday shows that industrial activity could also be closely regulated and taxed. There can be no doubt that lively commerce was a characteristic of eleventh century towns, far more than is evident from Domesday, even if it was not as ubiquitous and systematized as in later centuries.

Despite the commissioners' limited remit, the local witnesses they called on sometimes had their own ideas about the survey, and we are fortunate first that those men giving evidence on behalf of a few towns thought it advisable to make statements as to certain of those customary laws they possessed which entailed fines or forfeitures (temporary or permanent loss of property) to the king, and second that such statements survived the editing that the commissioners' submissions underwent to produce a more manageable final report. As a result of the variations in reporting, we are able to see distinctive characteristics of some towns, such as the prominent role of ecclesiastical institutions at Canterbury, the large number of baronial landlords at Leicester and Northampton, the particular importance of farming pursuits to many of the residents of Colchester and Maldon, the role of Dover as a key port linking England to the continent, and the salt extraction industry that was the raison d'être of Droitwich. The picture of urban communities, individually and collectively, presented in Domesday is far from comprehensive, but what we have – albeit in the form of a puzzle of scattered jigsaw pieces – is still significantly better than any documentation available from earlier date.

We may infer from Domesday that by mid-eleventh century a somewhat different urban network, still in a state of flux, from that of the burhs is in existence. Those burhs which were to survive as towns by now exhibited characteristics we would consider urban, in terms of their residential density and layout, occupational diversity, and evidence of long-distance commerce. Similarly, and at an even earlier period, the importance of wiks as trading centres and attractors of settlement was diminished (though not extinguished) as they either acquired burghal characteristics or were out-developed by towns emerging elsewhere in their regions, or by the appearance of fairs, drawing foreign traders more inland. Most shires were served by at least one town with market and administrative facilities; some encompassed a handful of towns. The Lincolnshire section of the text, for example, begins with its county town, Lincoln, and continues with Stamford and Torksey. Towns were fairly well distributed across southern and Midland England, but York and Durham were isolated examples in the north. The location of the leading mints also shows a good distribution in the south and Midlands and suggests a growing use of coins in trade and other transactions. Mints and their moneyers are well evidenced in Domesday, being important to the king both as a source of revenues and as the mechanism (in conjunction with legislation) enabling a high degree of royal control over the coinage.

The commercial role of towns arguably overshadowed their military importance by this time, despite the importance of maintaining and upgrading fortifications under the continued threat of Danish invasion. This transition was a gradual one. Edward the Elder's law restricting trade to towns had doubtless been prompted primarily by concerns over sale of stolen goods, and only secondarily to ensure the collection of tolls on commerce. Towns offered better assurance of the legitimacy of a transaction by providing a more public setting in which transactions could occur (i.e. what would later be known as a marketplace, although it is not clear that there were yet spaces formally allocated for that exclusive use) and better access to credible witnesses. This law found continuance in the reign of his successor, Athelstan, who issued a similar requirement, but exempted petty trading (of goods worth less than 20 pence). Continued persistence is suggested by its appearance in the collection of laws attributed to William I, but known only through an early thirteenth century copy apparently representing a mix of Anglo-Saxon laws redrafted in time of William I, new laws formulated during his own reign, and later interpolations of doubtful authenticity. The Anglo-Saxon efforts to concentrate economic and defensive functions in towns made such places natural choices for the Normans to use as centres for administering their newly-conquered territory, which was one of the reasons for constructing urban castles.

Domesday documents the disruption resulting from the need to bring the country under the control of its new overlords. The violent subjection of many parts of England, drawn out due not only to initial resistance but also to subsequent local uprisings and rebellions by the Conqueror's own barons (e.g. at York and Norwich), took its toll either directly or indirectly, and this is vividly portrayed in the Domesday entries for many towns. The large number of destroyed, abandoned or unmaintained properties suggests either a reduction in population (through deaths or flights) and/or hard times that prevented or discouraged rebuilding; frequent Domesday references to burgesses too impoverished to pay their customary dues (e.g. Ipswich and York) contributes to the sense of devastation. Dover's Domesday entry reports extensive damage from the Normans' assault during the early days of their invasion. By contrast, in the decades following the Conquest, settlement at Bury St Edmunds expanded around and under the protection of the abbey there, with many new houses built; and twenty-two Norwich burgesses had fled that city to live in Beccles, a much more modest town (but with an advantageous location on the River Waveney) under the sway of the same abbey. Sandwich too appears to have prospered under the ecclesiastical lordship of Canterbury, and perhaps also through its utility to the king (second only to Dover) as a port facing the continent and as a supplier of ships, it grew in size during the period of time documented by Domesday, and may indeed be considered to have attained an urban character in that period. Furthermore, lay Norman overlords introduced new colonies, mostly of Frenchmen, into several established towns (e.g. Norwich) as a prelude to a more widespread trend of new town-founding in the twelfth century. This new blood with ties to the continent, taken in conjunction with the construction of castles and sometimes cathedrals, created employment opportunities and introduced new consumers of goods and services which may have helped the fractured urban communities recover; in addition, the slightly superior privileges accorded to the French colonies may have raised the bar as regards aspirations of English burgess to improve their conditions.

Despite the many changes wrought by the Conquest, we can also find in Domesday Book evidence of continuity within urban society. Domesday's statements of long-standing borough customs show them a mix of privileges and obligations, the latter including not only ground-rents, tolls, customary fees, judicial fines and forfeitures from convicted criminals, but also such things as: provision (beyond normal requirements of national defence) of men, horses, carts, or ships for royal escort, guard, or military service; labour in the king's fields; and renders of raw materials needed by the royal household, such as imported furs from Chester, iron from Gloucester, and honey or herring from several towns. A major thrust in the future development of local administration would be for townsmen to maintain and expand their jurisdictional privileges and to escape, or commute to some more appropriate form, their obligations. Though the widespread grant of privileges by charter was a later development, clearly some towns were in possession of special privileges before the Conquest; for example the royal concessions made to some south coast ports, in return for ship-service, existed well before formalized through the Cinque Ports confederation, and the statement of customs of Newcastle-upon-Tyne has the air of something concocted from Anglo-Saxon laws and borough customs and from post-Conquest innovations, even though the castle, whose construction was the catalyst for adjacent settlement that subsequently acquired borough status, was indeed new at the time of the Domesday survey.

Elements of continuity can also be seen in local administration. Although the personnel at the national and regional levels of authority had changed, institutions and personnel at local level retained a strong Anglo-Saxon flavour. Kings had exercised authority over towns through local officials since at least the seventh century. In the Late Anglo-Saxon period the title most commonly applied to such an official was 'reeve'; borough reeves appointed by the king (or other lord of a town), along with some of their duties, are mentioned in a number royal laws and Domesday entries for towns; those duties, though they may have varied a little from town to town, included such things as: publicizing and administering laws, regulations, and royal orders; policing; executing judicial punishments; overseeing the collection of revenues due the king (though in most cases on behalf of the sheriff, who delivered and accounted for those monies); ensuring that properties from which landgable rents were due were suitably tenanted; organizing repairs to defences and bridges; and witnessing certain real estate and marketplace transactions (for which the reeve might be due a user fee).

The townsmen, sometimes referred to collectively as the burhware, had some common liabilities and property, and must have had some kind of communal mechanism to address related issues; this was presumably the periodic public assembly, the folkmoot, heard of in some Anglo-Saxon laws, seemingly presided over by the reeve, and prohibited from meeting on Sundays, as was the holding of markets. More focused institutions were the district's hundred court and the borough court, or burghmoot, in many cases the latter effectively having hundredal jurisdiction; again the reeve looks to have been the presiding officer. By a law of King Edgar (958-975), the burhgemot was to convene a minimum of three times a year to deal with judicial matters – this did not preclude judicial sessions being held more regularly if needed. The three full meetings were supposed to be attended by all those subject to its jurisdiction (essentially, all freemen who were tenants of borough land, referred to as suitors), this being in case any suitor was to be accused of any offence; Edgar specified that any accused who failed to appear in court over the course of an entire year, and in whose innocence the suitors lacked confidence, could be arrested, if necessary, by a posse selected by the court from those in attendance. The tithing system, also known as frankpledge, was used for reporting offences committed locally, and the full court meetings (known in some places as lawmoots) were to administer the tithings, as regards their memberships. Besides the tithings – which were groupings of individuals, though likely along something of a neighbourhood basis, at least originally – other administrative sub-divisions are seen in several Domesday boroughs (see below).

Town councils, in any formal sense, were a feature of a later time, but the borough court likely considered not just judicial but also administrative matters. Interestingly, there appears in a handful of towns, all under the sway or influence of Viking invaders, a somewhat mysterious group with special competence and authority referred to as lagemen (lawmen), rendered in Latin as iudices (judges). Originally twelve in number – a figure commonly used for groups of witnesses and, later, jurors and councillors – they appear to have been drawn from the upper echelons of society, being property-holders whose status was considered comparable to, though not the same as, that of the thegnly class; they perhaps straddled a gap between burgess and thegn. Some were involved in lending money for mortgages and, it has been suggested, others may have been minters at some time in their lives; conceivably, lawmen and moneyers, along with other administrators and professional warriors, were elements of an early urban elite in the centuries prior to local self-government and the rise to prominence of the merchant class.

The authority of lawmen did not, however, derive from landlordship, as the amount of property held by individual lawmen varied quite considerably; not all of it was within boroughs, though the status of borough lawmen is likely to have been bound up only with urban real estate. An introduction from Scandinavia, where lawmen interpreted customary law and used their knowledge of it to give judgements, the institution was, by the time of Domesday, already old in England, and may have diverged in character from one town to another; in some places it seens in decline, for by 1086 their number at Stamford had shrunk to nine, while at York we hear only of four. The list of names from pre-Conquest Lincoln shows a mix of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon holders of the status, indicative of co-existence and intermarriage of the two cultural groups; comparison with the later list supports the suspicion that the role was hereditary there by that time. By contrast, the Chester evidence suggests that, pre-Conquest, at least vacancies in their number were filled by seigneurial appointment; we cannot be sure whether lawmen there were as elevated, in terms of status and property-owning. Lawmen were still known in Cambridge and Stamford as late as the thirteenth century, the status still hereditary, and associated with ownership of particular properties; once a connection between status and land had been made, it would have been almost inevitable for the role to become hereditary, but there is some evidence that in Scandinavia it may also have been hereditary and it is not inconceivable that the connection could have passed from a personal to a landed privilege. Geoffrey Martin noticed an early fourteenth century instance of an Elias Lagheman of Ipswich – in this case Lawman being a surname rather than an official designation – who held property abutting on the tolhouse, which stood in the parish at the very core of the town, and others member of the family also held property in that parish. Again in the thirteenth century, we can also still see Chester's doomsmen. Even at Lincoln there is some hint that there existed ca. 1300 a successor to the institution of the lawmen, perhaps incorporated as a superior group within the town council; the requirement that they be burgesses might have been prompted by post-Conquest corruption of the original institution.

Although Domesday tends to define 'lawmen' in terms of a status entailing relationships, privileges, and obligations – characterized particularly by sake and soke, thus differentiating them from run-of-the-mill burgesses – this was because of the intent behind the survey; that the title more properly applies to an office is supported by the Chester entry's mention of their mandatory duty to attend sessions of the borough court. It seems probable that these were men (prominent local land-owners whose personal interests naturally involved them in court business) expected to have acquired, and to pass along to their sons, a superior knowledge of local customs and national law, and to be able either to pass sound judgements or advise the court on the same. Such men would be aware of local tenurial disputes and of the goings-on of local officials, and would be in demand as witnesses to the ceremonies involved in land transactions or as pledges for the security of a transaction; they would therefore have been a logical choice to give evidence to the Domesday commissioners, which might explain the lists of Lincoln names that otherwise appear gratuitous, and perhaps also some of the statements of borough customs that found their way into Domesday. To what extent they may at that date have, collectively or individually, retained a formal role as doomsmen remains a question-mark.

Domesday also reveals that some towns had administrative sub-divisions: ten wards at Cambridge, six at Stamford, four quarters at Huntingdon, six shires or shares at York (with a seventh under the archbishop's jurisdiction). At later date sub-divisions were a basis for judicial administration and policing, but at the time of Domesday, although useful for organizing borough entries, it is not clear what their administrative implications were; certainly there is no reason to associate such sub-divisions with the lawmen, whose formal authority appears more collective than individual. Besides sheriff, portreeve, seigneurial court, local legal customs, and wards, however, we can elicit from Domesday no more information about the mechanics of urban government, at least with any certainty; an isolated reference to the burgesses' guildhall at Dover is too vague to draw any sound conclusions.

Likewise, what it shows us of urban society can only be part of the picture. The bulk of the Domesday survey comprises records of which properties were held, where, by whom, what resources were associated with them, how much their value, and above all what revenues or services the king could expect therefrom. Most of the land, other than that held by the Church, was in the hands of the king and his tenants-in-chief (or their sub-feoffees), and this holds true of urban property. The nobility, greater and lesser, had strong landed interests in towns, both after and before the Conquest, and the lesser nobility – the thegns of the earlier period and the retainers of important lay and ecclesiastical lords in the later – look to have been a much more prominent element of urban society than they were in later times.

Quite apart from the role of the military class in defending the tenth-century burhs, which may well have entailed assigning each of them a propertied base within the burh to which they owed service, in more peaceful times manorial lords would still have benefited from access to markets (for both buying and selling), to the shire or hundred courts where they asserted or protected their interests, to churches through whose ceremonies they could better satisfy their spiritual needs, and to the prospective income in rents obtainable from the more densely settled places in the country. For the burh planners it would have bolstered the commercial dimension of such places to connect more intimately with the local community a group of relatively affluent and influential consumers. It should not surprise us, then, that Saxon thegns and Norman barons owned town houses, regardless of whether they used them personally or let them to their own men. Much of the Domesday text relating to towns deals with that class, rather than with burgess society, even though by this time certain of the burgesses proper were beginning to rival, in terms of influence over local affairs, the rural warriors who had likely dominated towns in the burh period, and would end up supplanting them – a trend that occurred elsewhere in medieval Europe, often in a more revolutionary fashion.

Further down in the socio-economic hierarchy were the burgesses, a free status that meant more than simply residents of a borough, having, before 1086 and perhaps much earlier, acquired a certain measure of technical precision from the preferential terms under which they had tenure of those urban properties liable for contributions towards customary payments to the borough overlord(s). This did not preclude a small minority from having thegnly status, or even in very exceptional circumstances from being unfree; nor was it an invariably male status. In addition there were various groups of impoverished or unfree residents from which the burgesses were usually differentiated (e.g. Norwich). This summary oversimplifies the complexity of urban social structure.

The consequence of Domesday's focus on land-holding is that, apart from minters, whose fees to licence their work it was important to record, secular occupations of burgesses are not often mentioned. Merchants are well-evidenced at Nottingham and implicit in a number of other places, as are the smiths and wire-drawers of Gloucester, while at Bury St. Edmunds we explicitly hear of bakers, brewers, cooks, porters, washerwomen, tailors, and makers of robes, shoes, and purses, all employed by the abbey. The Chester entry's reference to brewing is indicative of how ubiquitous that activity was, but the reference to Hereford ale-wives is made only because their husbands had to pay an annual licence fee of 10d. The six smiths of Hereford, also paying a licence fee, and those at Wallingford (at least five) point to a metal-working industry furnishing more than purely local needs. By contrast no potters are documented in Domesday towns; archaeological evidence suggests their industry was tending to relocate to rural sites. Lyme Regis is portrayed as a fishing community that was also home to salt-workers, but the three fishermen identified at Huntingdon must have plied their trade in the River Ouse and/or local ponds that were a feature of the fenland. The 24 fishermen described as residents of Great Yarmouth only scratches the surface of that fishing community, for they were attached to the adjacent manor of Gorleston; many of Yarmouth's 70 burgesses proper must also have been involved with the fishing industry.

Winchester

Very fortunately for historians, one conspicuous gap in Domesday – the missing entry for Winchester – is compensated for by a survey there of property held of the king. It was undertaken in the early twelfth century, though surviving as a mid-twelfth century copy in a volume now known as the Winton Domesday, which also contains a second survey of 1148, contemporary with creation of the volume; however, it appears to call on a similar record from the time of the Confessor (TRE), and so is considered as one of the 'satellites' of Domesday Book. If indeed its postulated predecessor existed, this would suggest that record-keeping within towns may not have been as unknown as it now seems. Although Winchester, as the royal capital of Wessex, is an exceptional case, one cannot help but wonder if Domesday's detailed lists of property-holders at Colchester and Leicester might have derived, directly or indirectly, from written records something along the lines of the Winchester survey.

The two surveys of Winchester, along with a number of other documents from the eleventh century or earlier, combined with findings from a well-planned programme of archaeological investigation, allowed Martin Biddle, working with Derek Keene and various specialists, to reconstruct a picture of eleventh-century Winchester far more detailed than any portrayal of a town we can get from Domesday. Even though no individual town, and particularly one as special as Winchester, can be considered 'typical', what we now know of Winchester provides a prism through which we can, cautiously, review the more fragmentary evidence from at least those other towns of comparable size and complexity.

In acreage Winchester was one of the largest burhs listed in the Burghal Hidage, but not one of the new creations, for it had been a settlement from pre-Roman times, and the defensive wall erected by the Romans established a framework for much of the medieval development of the city; however, little of their internal street layout was reused when the burh planning took place, with one notable exception: Roman approach roads had channelled traffic onto a central east-west route through the city which was later known as ceap stræt (shopping street), and later still as the High Street. Yet Saxon Winchester was not much of a commercial centre; after being deserted by the Romans, it languished before reviving as a base for ecclesiastical and royal administration in the ninth century, as the coastal port of Hamwic (Southampton) declined partly due to its vulnerability to Viking raiders, making Winchester a safer location for establishing a mint. Most of the residents likely made their livelihoods off the functions, or needs, of the Old Minster and royal palace, both in place by mid-seventh century. There were large uninhabited areas within the walls.

It is debatable whether Winchester, though a large and complex site, can be considered truly urban before its refounding as a burh. As part of that conversion, new streets were laid out in a rectilinear pattern covering the entire site (suggesting an expectation for population growth) and linking up to a street running adjacent to the walls (to facilitate defence); the streets – old and new – were surfaced with cobbles. Large plots appear to have been parcelled out to prominent Wessex men who would help defend the burh. Perhaps from the outset the it was anticipated that at least some would in the long run subdivide the plots and find sub-tenants for homes built either by the landlords or their tenants; or maybe subdivision was partly just a natural outcome of country-dwellers in the region seeking refuge, in times of threat, on the burh plots owned by their manorial lords. At the same time, or a little later, a network of watercourses was created, presumably to supply domestic and industrial requirements, although there cold also have been a military rationale in terms of fire-fighting. Repair of the walls and the addition of an outer defensive ditch also occurred around the same period (the 880s).

Early in the next century two new monasteries were established within the walled circuit, indicative of the growing importance of Winchester and of an expanding population. In the 960s the three minsters and the bishop's palace were consolidated into a single precinct consuming most of the south-eastern quadrant of the city, with several stretches of streets in that area cleared of houses. This contributed to overcrowding in the High Street and elsewhere, and encouraged the development of suburbs on all sides of the city, probably beginning with that just beyond the West Gate; the same pressure may well be the explanation for some of the encroachments on public land. A large percentage of the land within the walls and the suburbs was held by the king or the bishop; of what remained most had come into in the hands, probably by royal gifts over time, of the monasteries in the city and religious houses elsewhere in the county, and of lay members of the landed nobility; subsequently these areas had also become subdivided. This trend of diversified landlordship is characteristic of Domesday boroughs and historians have applied to it the descriptor 'tenurial heterogeneity'. By the Conquest the frontages of the principal streets (those leading to the city gates) were fully lined with buildings and lesser streets were in process of becoming similarly built up, while most of the parish churches (57 by the late thirteenth century) were already in place. There is no sign of the communal pastureland or fields of which most other non-coastal towns incorporated something – and which a few (such as Colchester) had in abundance – and only a handful of references to 'curtilages', a term indicating land without major residential buildings, often serving as gardens, orchards, or livestock enclosures, among other uses.

The two surveys were conducted in a very systematic fashion, proceeding street by street, property by property, with the intent of identifying the present and former tenants and the rents and services they owed from their holdings; in the process incidental information was recorded about the topography of the city, the character many of the properties, and the roles and relationships of some of the tenants. Close to 300 holdings were included in the earlier survey; the later, undertaken at the initiative of the bishop (who was the largest landlord in Winchester), and covering the entire city, encompassed well over a thousand. The extract given above covers part of the High Street, as an illustration of the diversified character of the most important route through the city. Besides residences, it had facing onto it shops, stalls, specialized market areas (Winchester, like London, having had no single central marketplace), cellars (shops, storehouses, or taverns partly below street level), minting forges, a guildhall, and churches – not unlike the high streets of quite a few English towns today if one substitutes banks for mints and allows for the supersession of marketplaces by department stores. Streets already had names assigned them, most derived from the personal name of some one-time property-owner or from a characteristic of the topography; only Tanner Street is a name clearly indicative of a clustering of practitioners of particular trades, and explicable by the watercourse running along it that would have supplied a necessary resource for tanning; other street-names may have referred to shoemakers and, less certainly, goldsmiths. Late tenth century sources refer to the streets of the shield-makers and fleshmongers and an early twelfth century source to a street of the fullers.

More trades than this are revealed by the two surveys, either explicitly or through occupational surnames, although the earlier survey is weakened by its lack of coverage of extra-mural areas, and both inevitably ignore the lower ranks of society who were not holders of property but more like lodgers. Given these gaps and biases, it is hard to draw meaningful conclusions for the pre-Conquest period, but certainly by the early twelfth century there is good evidence of various components of the leather industry (e.g. butchers, tanners, saddlers, and shoemakers of various kinds), of a modest cloth industry (e.g. dyers, parmenters, drapers, fullers – yet none of the last in the earlier survey, despite the street named for them), of metalworkers (mostly blacksmiths and goldsmiths), and of the building trades (e.g. masons, carpenters, painters). Of persons associated with the victualling trades, which tended to focus in and around the High Street, butchers and cooks are most in evidence, while brewers, bakers, or fishmongers seem under-represented; the later survey includes two breweries run by women, one possibly acting as the agent of the owner of the building, while several men owned multiple breweries (or were renting buildings for that use) though we cannot be certain they were the operators.

More surprising than the scarcity of such trades is the low number of men described as merchants, only one of whom held more than a single property. Some may simply lie hidden in the survey (i.e. among the great majority whose occupations were not specified), but perhaps many were relatively small-scale operators who had not yet developed the wealth, or inclination, to invest heavily in property, as they would later do. Furthermore we have to keep in mind that many traders were drawn into commerce as a by-product of craft occupations and that merchants, in terms of middlemen exclusively engaged in redistribution, were fewer than they would later be. The only notable exception to the dearth of well-to-do merchants appears in the later survey: Peter the mercer, whose brother Ernold was one of the wealthiest private landlords at that period; however, we cannot know whether Peter acquired property with profits from commerce (as was the norm in the Late Middle Ages), or whether he came from a wealthy landed family and branched out into trade (as instanced by Ianusius Mercator, a member of the de Beaumes family prominent in Ipsiwich in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).

It was not yet the hour of the merchant class. Winchester's socio-economic elite was composed rather of other groups; on the whole, if we may judge from personal names, this elite was culturally Anglo-Norman by the close of the eleventh century. The most prominent of these groups may have been the moneyers, engaged in minting and in at least some cases money-changing, and probably also money-lending (suggested by the case of Walter Chibus); by mid-twelfth century a Jewish community was starting to develop in Winchester; Jews would in time supplement and, to a degree, supersede Christian lenders as Winchester declined somewhat as a minting centre and concerns over usury became more problematic. But in the eleventh century the presence of king and his administrators – the principal royal treasury being located in the city – created a higher need for coin than would have been generated solely by commerce, although the importance of the latter is suggested by minting workshops being mostly located off the High Street. A number of current or former moneyers are identified in the surveys, and Biddle et al. tentatively identified quite a few others – up to twenty from the time of the Confessor; there may have been between about four and eight active at any given time, though some minters owned, or rented, more than one workshop and were presumably employing assistants (as indicated in Ethelred's coinage regulations). Goldsmiths were another prominent occupational group in the surveys, wealthy and land-owning. This may well have been an occupation pursued by men who had previously held minters' posts, or by members of their families in their own or other generations.

The goldsmiths and moneyers were of burgess rank, but relatively wealthy and economically on a par with the royal officials who form another component of the urban elite of the eleventh century – men such as Herbert the chamberlain, Hugh Oillard, William fitz Odo, and Robert Mauduit. Some officials may have been more or less full-time residents of the city, while others just maintained bases there for when visiting, but many had property elsewhere and are unlikely to have felt the same commitment to civic interests that could be expected from burgesses. Likewise, various members of the lay nobility and ecclesiastical dignitaries almost necessarily had, in a city with so important a role in national administration, houses in which they could lodge when in town; but these persons can hardly be considered part of urban society, except as consumers for local goods and services and thus a source of prosperity and social advancement of some of the burgesses.

As suggested above in regard to the burhs, large landowners from the countryside surrounding Winchester probably had some involvement in the city's affairs and society in the tenth century, and may still have done so in the eleventh, for the surveys point to links between rural estates and urban property; one example in the survey of ca.1110 is the royal thegn Chiping, lord of Headbourne Worthy and holder of a number of other Hampshire manors, as well as three houses in Southampton and eight in Winchester (leased from the Old Minster). This continued after the Conquest; the de Port family, for example, had several members included in the survey of ca.1110. The Anglo-Saxon reeves of Winchester appear to have been drawn from this class; not until the late twelfth or thirteenth century did the office come into the hands of burgesses. Among their responsibilities, the reeves collected royal revenues in the city, such as landgable, rents from stalls, and perhaps even geld, although it was the sheriff who accounted for such monies to the royal administration; they licensed property expansions onto public land (although the justiciar mentioned as intervening in unauthorized encroachments was more likely a shire than a local official, and was a Norman innovation), and acted as witnesses to property transactions; they presumably presided in the burghmoot and may have supervised the organization of the watch – there being no sign yet of the aldermanries through which this was later done – and the performance of the gatekeepers (seen in the 1148 survey).

In addition to the elements discussed above, we have the cnihtas, at least some of whom clearly held borough property, but they are too hazy a group to know quite where they fitted into Winchester society. Also the local clergy, few of whom were wealthy property-owners, though other family members may arguably have had a more central role in urban affairs; parish priests could be considered as having a more significant role in local society but, although some appear in the survey (mostly holding single pieces of property), others would have fallen outside the survey's scope. Add to this mix a smattering of wealthier tradesmen – other than goldsmiths this seems to have been some of the cloth-workers and victuallers.

The burgesses as a collective had a mechanism for expression in the burghmoot (although the name is not recorded until 1212); it may have been where the 86 burgesses took the oath to carry out the property survey. We see in the various guilds other signs of association for mutual interest, which became more formalized over time and more influential in protecting the economic interests of citizens; both merchant and craft guilds were present in the city by the early twelfth century. Earlier there were socio-religious guilds; even the residents of the suburb outside the West Gate had their own guild, which communally held income from certain properties and may later have amalgamated with the merchant guild.

After a period of relatively steady growth, in terms of population size and prosperity, from the time it was refounded as a burh up to the twelfth century, and of growing political importance as it became first a key centre for defence in Wessex and then the administrative capital of a united England, Winchester took more of a back seat. It was outpaced commercially and as a minting centre by other towns and its close ties with the monarchy and national administration weakened. As the twelfth century progressed, kings were making less use of Winchester for ceremonial purposes and elements of the royal administration were transferred to Westminster. The destruction of the royal palace during the siege of Winchester in 1141 was mainly a symbolic landmark in a more gradual process, for the castle was by now being used as the royal residence and King Stephen had already transferred the palace to his brother, the Bishop of Winchester. Although Winchester's fortunes revived after the end of the civil war, its society could elicit praise, and it retained importance throughout the medieval period as a regional market centre as well as in the nominal role of capital through the second half of the twelfth century, the real focal point of the realm, combining political with economic energy, had become London-Westminster.

Conclusion

The special role accorded by law to towns in regard to commerce and minting, reinforced by the efforts to ensure these took place in secure locations during the protracted contest between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons for control of England, gave impetus to an initial phase of re-urbanization of the landscape, following the decline of former Roman colonial centres. By the time those advantages had disappeared, conditions of relative peace had permitted the population growth, the expansion of agricultural productivity, the development of a more elaborate network of markets and ports, and the rise of a merchant class, which could support both the continued development and increasing prosperity of many existing towns and also a new phase of urbanization as Norman overlords sought to cash in on economic trends.

Certainly by the close of the eleventh century, and arguably much earlier, we can perceive the groundwork for many of the characteristic features of towns, as they were later in the Middle Ages, either in place or being laid. There was a fairly sizable number of centres of population, possessing what were, in the English context, key urban attributes, such as:

• defensive fortifications, providing the security that fostered the conduct and growth of commerce and industry;
• some degree of planned development of layout of streets and facilities on at least part of the site
• a regulated market serving to redistribute the raw resources surplus of the neighbourhood (and sometimes an extensive agrarian hinterland), often along with goods brought from distant locations;
• workshops producing the coinage that was conducive to commercial development;
• a measure of industrial activity that, if mostly small-scale, was usually diversified;
• residents who were sufficiently socio-economically differentiated that they could be classed into a distinctive group (burgesses) understood to be oriented primarily towards trading and ancillary functions and showing some tendencies towards communal action;
• types of real estate and tenurial conditions that served the needs of the essentially non-agrarian pursuits of burgesses;
• the presence of administrative institutions (both secular and ecclesiastical) that tied local communities into larger frameworks of control and coordination

These centres were also hubs in a communications/transportation network of routes that may have originated to serve military needs, but was equally useful for the growth of commerce (tying together the rural areas producing raw materials and the sites where those materials could be, with or without conversion into secondary products, moved on to more remote destinations of consumption or further distribution) as well as for the development of a national system of government in which the towns were an important component. For the king, towns were becoming an increasingly significant source of revenues of various kinds, while for towns the monarchy provided the protection – military, legal, and regulatory – that enabled commerce to flourish. The differences between towns in the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries were more often ones of scale, detail, or sophistication, than of substance.