The Creation of a Community

• Introduction - the appeal of the small town, community and the borough community, sources; origins - the early Church, the development of the town; the size of a small town - the physical city; the smaller town in medieval Europe, the size of the population, population change - dilapidation and decayed rents, population change - the admissions list, migration, relative size; economy - occupational structure, clothmaking - participation, organization of the industry, magnitude of the industry, Wells and its countryside, trade, labour, conclusion - qualifying urban decline; the balance of authority - the burgesses' power circa 1300, the moment of crisis, the community's resources, the accommodation; the social history of the borough community 1377-1500 - membership, socio-economic composition, participation and office-holding, trades and "power", oligarchy; the culture of the borough community 1377-1520 - the community ideal, order and tradition, the fraternal ideal, unity, virtues and vices, the institutions of community, initiation, conviviality, manifestations of unity, peacemaking, arbitration; the social world completed - the foreigners - a neglected social category, economic and political situation, poverty, the scope of poverty, women; the culture of the Church - the cathedral, the parish, the parish guilds, chantry and community, prayer, alms - the giving, education, new lives, heterodoxy and control; conclusion - the complexity of small things. Appendices: Wells' bishops; stewards and masters of Wells borough community.

'Here is a valuable addition to the small corpus of modern monographs devoted to individual English towns in the medieval period. Shaw writes shrewdly about 'community', conscious of the voguish and treacherous nature of the concept. Shaw's book, while acknowledging the gap between pious ideal and reality, goes far to demonstrate the practical and ideological impact on one medieval urban society of that communitarian discourse.'Gervase Rosser, The Ricardian, X, No. 126, Sept 1994