Charles Phythian-Adams – författare

This book is a contribution to both national and local history. Coventry is taken as a richly documented case-study of the crisis which marked the end of the medieval period for many substantial towns. Its demographic and economic decline is followed from the fifteenth century to a dramatic period of short-term crisis between 1518 and 1525. Attention is then focused on the traditional structure of the community: the life-cycles of the citizens are related to the intricate pattern of social positions within a multi-dimensional survey. The author illustrates how the occupants of this structure were depleted by crisis and decline, through devastating depopulation, the attrition of the male labour-force, and the failure of the population to reproduce itself. The results included an uncontrolled insurrectionary riot, the emergence of a radical programme for reform along very early 'Commonwealth' lines in the 1530s and, ultimately, the erosion of the old communal organisation and its ideals.

This work maps the cultural and physical divisions of medieval England. It concentrates on the level of hierarchy immediately above individual local societies, using detailed case studies of networks of linked communities in the East Midlands, the South and East Anglia. The societies studied are respectively on the periphery of a "cultural province", central to another such province and linked closely to a major urban centre. The text is a synthesis of modern continental historical scholarship, social anthropological and geographical techniques, and English medieval history. Included in the investigations are findings about the role of women in defining the sense of local community during the medieval period.