Assemblage Theory and Town Foundation in Medieval England€¦ · Assemblage Theory and Town Foundation in Medieval England Ben Jervis It is proposed that our understanding of medieval

Assemblage Theory and Town Foundationin Medieval England

Ben Jervis

It is proposed that our understanding of medieval town foundation is limited by a fail-ure to appreciate that ‘town’ is a relational category. It is argued that urban characteremerges from social relations, with some sets of social relationship revealing urbanity andothers not, as places develop along distinctive, but related, trajectories. This argument isdeveloped through the application of assemblage theory to the development of towns inthirteenth-century southern England. The outcome is a proposal that, by focusing on thesocial relations through which towns are revealed as a distinctive category of place, wecan better comprehend why and how towns mattered in medieval society and develop agreater understanding of the relationship of urbanization to other social processes such ascommercialization and associated changes in the countryside.

Introduction

Assemblage theory (after Deleuze & Guattari 1987;see also De Landa 2006) offers a means of think-ing through archaeological data which forces us toexplore how evidence finds meaning in relation toother fragments of knowledge about the past. Hereit is proposed that thinking through assemblage the-ory, which, along with associated ‘relational’ ap-proaches, has increasing currency in both archaeology(e.g. Fowler 2013; Harris 2014; Hodder 2012; Jervis2014; Jones 2012) and human geography (Allen 2011;Dewsbury 2000; Dewsbury et al. 2002; McFarlane2011), a radically different approach to the studyof the medieval town can be taken (see Astill 1985;2009; Dyer 2003, for general reviews of previous ap-proaches). If we view the town as relational (that is,formed through the performance of social relation-ships), then it stands to reason that it emerges throughsome relationships and not others. Therefore, it isthrough these relations that a place is defined as ur-ban and that the process of urbanism had relevance tomedieval people. By implication, it might be arguedthat the town does not reveal itself through all sets ofrelations, suggesting that some elements of medieval

society might transcend the urban/rural divide im-posed through modern analysis.

This approach is used here to move away fromseeking to define the town, a task which, as discussedbelow, is fraught with difficulty, and towards explor-ing the forms which medieval urbanism takes. In sodoing, the value of assemblage theory to both me-dieval archaeology and settlement archaeology moregenerally, in shifting the focus of analysis from seeingplaces as simply urban to reflecting upon the pro-cesses which make them so, is demonstrated (see alsoChristopherson 2015). A problem with defining townsis that they take different forms and perform differentroles. Attempts to define urban archaeological signa-tures have often resulted in frustration, highlightingpatterns of similarity as well as dissimilarity betweentown and country, suggesting that fresh perspec-tives might be required (see, for example, Egan 2005;Pearson 2005). Through a consideration of the natureof categorization processes the first part of this pa-per proposes that categories of town emerged as peo-ple related to places and communities, meaning thatdifferent understandings of urbanism might exist si-multaneously. Taking this as a starting-point, the re-mainder of the paper uses archaeological evidence

Cambridge Archaeological Journal 26:3, 381–395 C© 2016 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. This is an Open Access article, distributedunder the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution,and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.doi:10.1017/S0959774316000159 Received 30 Mar 2015; Accepted 14 Feb 2016; Revised 11 Dec 2015

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Ben Jervis

from the Weald of Sussex (UK) to propose that,rather than being a characteristic of a place, urban-ism is an emergent quality of assemblages of ac-tants (that is, the people, things and materials whichparticipate in social practice) linked through perfor-mances of everyday life. This discussion leads to acall to move from an emphasis on site-specific in-terpretation to a multi-scalar consideration of theprocesses through which different forms of urban-ism come to be revealed through the analysis ofpast practice, finding parallels with recent consider-ations of urban processes in Scandinavia in particu-lar (Ashby et al. 2015; Christopherson 2015; Sindbaek2007).

Defining towns: unpacking an analytical black-box

We all think we know what the word town means. Apicture of a relatively small but densely settled place,a commercial centre with some administrative func-tion, probably springs to mind. Yet the definition ofthe word continues to be debated in medieval studies.‘Town’ stands for more than a place; it is an analytical‘black-box’ (that is a concept which crystallizes pastaction and circulates as a referential starting-point; seeLatour 2010, 160), standing for a tradition of histori-cal and archaeological study (see Fowler 2013). Theterm circulates as a reference to a particular type ofsettlement which does not appear to be primarily ru-ral in character. Debates about what exactly we meanby town are not new, being as old as the medievalsettlements themselves. Masschaele (1997, 79–83) dis-cusses how tax assessment forced the urban characterof places to be considered, as towns and villages weretaxed differently. Places such as Andover (Hamp-shire), whose community probably saw themselves asurban, having a guild merchant and borough charter,for example, were taxed at the rural rate. This high-lights how places might simultaneously have beenperceived as urban and rural. Assessments made forspecific purposes categorized places as towns, withthese categorizations being enacted through admin-istrative practice. As these practices were repeated,through the enacting of this assessment, so ‘town’, asa reference to a particular process of categorizationcirculated, forming a reference against which townsas a category of place were understood. Importantly,this medieval categorization of places shows that set-tlements without borough charters (that is, grantedcertain freedoms seen to be fundamental to urban life)could be perceived of as towns.

Through historical documents, therefore, wehave inherited an understanding that some placeswere towns and that some were not; but this under-

standing is partial, directed by categorizations madefor specific purposes and passed on to us through anincomplete historical record. Furthermore, inconsis-tencies between sources make it difficult to develop afirm definition of what a town is. Attempts to over-come this by creating a check-list of urban charac-teristics (Biddle 1976; Reynolds 1977) have been un-successful, as only the largest towns fulfil all of thecriteria and certain characteristics might be consid-ered as more important than others. A pragmatic andcommonly used definition is that towns are placeswhich have an economy that is largely dependentupon activities other than agriculture (Dyer 2002, 7).Whilst this is satisfactory, in that it allows the dis-tinction between urban and rural places to remainfuzzy, its vagueness limits its utility. Dyer (2002, 7)cautions against critiquing the contrast between townand country too deeply, as it is an important analyticaldistinction, which can be considered relevant withinthe medieval mind.

Whilst it is true that the category of town wasmeaningful in the medieval period, Masschaele’s(1997) work shows how ‘town’ was interpreted differ-ently depending upon the context of categorization.Historians and archaeologists have specific reasonsfor wanting to categorize places as urban or rural;they seek, for example, to know how town life dif-fered from village life, or how agricultural productionrelated to the marketing of produce. The debate hasbeen undertaken in relation to the circulating refer-ence of the town—we know this category is real, butwhat were these places for? Beresford saw towns asan instrument of lordship, founded to market agricul-tural surplus and generate income; they were ‘spe-cialized centres of making and dealing’ (Beresford1967, 55–6). Medieval society is typically seen as beingagrarian and, therefore, towns have been set in oppo-sition to rural settlements, as an anomalous featurein an agricultural economy. Following Hilton (1992)in particular, scholarship shifted towards seeing ur-ban and rural as united within an economic system,with towns being necessary for the disposal of sur-plus and the manufacture and exchange of other com-modities. In order to function, towns require a de-gree of freedom or liberty, creating the town, or bor-ough, as a specific category of place (Hilton 1992,10–14). Hilton points to similarities in the social or-ganization of town and country: tensions betweenruling and peasant classes and the organization ofeconomic activity around the household unit in par-ticular. He uses this to demonstrate that towns werenot anomalous within medieval society; however, wemight also ask whether these similarities relate to theambiguity over the classification of places discussed

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previously. Perhaps towns are a useful category whendiscussing economic networks, but in relation to otherelements of life do not emerge as a distinctive cate-gory. This past analysis has created a reference whichhas circulated over the intervening centuries, leadingus to attempt to work backwards to try to place asettlement within or outside this category (see alsoChristopherson 2015, 112). I argue that this approachhas resulted in an analytical seizure. ‘Town’ as a cat-egory emerged and was ‘black-boxed’ through circu-lation in the assessment of places for economic pur-poses, be it gathering taxes in the past or undertakingeconomic history in the present. Hilton’s work hasbeen highly influential in placing the relationship be-tween town and country into focus, leading to revo-lutionary insights into the medieval economy (Astill2009, 265; Dyer 2002, 3; Dyer & Lilley 2010, 81; Hilton1992, 17–18; Kowaleski 1995). However, this work hascaused the distinction to circulate further as a usefulanalytical tool in the present, but perhaps maskingareas of life where an urban/rural dichotomy is notapparent.

If, however, we removed this pre-conceived di-chotomy and worked from the archaeological evi-dence upwards, a clear distinction between urban andrural would not emerge. Rather, we would see a highlyvaried spectrum of small and large, nucleated anddispersed, economically diverse and specialized set-tlements. The category of town is an inheritance; it isa black-box packed through the performance of me-dieval life, the ongoing categorization of places andthe circulation of these categories through particulartypes of social practice. The process of urbanizationcan be viewed at multiple scales, being a widespreadcharacteristic of twelfth- to fourteenth-century Eng-land, but also taking regional and local forms. Histo-rians such as Britnell (1996) and Dyer (2005) relate thegrowth of towns to the increasing commercializationof society, fuelled by the export trade and the need togenerate increasing seigniorial income to fund royalexpenditure on wars. This led to the growth of profes-sions and trades, as well as an increasing pressure toformalize trade through the granting of borough andmarket charters. The process of borough chartershipclearly created a distinctive category of administrativeplace, but one which, in other areas of life, was notnecessarily sharply distinguished from other types ofsettlement. Urbanization and commercialization areseparate but closely related processes. Towns weremore than commercial places, and commercial activ-ity took place outside towns. In modern discussions ofdefinition and function, however, the key distinctionis between categories of urban and rural place, theprimary move having been from a focus on contrast

to one on relationality and connectivity (see partic-ularly Kowaleski 1995). I propose, however, that anover-reliance on the urban-rural divide hinders thedevelopment of a deeper understanding of the dy-namics of medieval society. Therefore, rather than us-ing archaeology to justify the extent to which a placeis a town, a further depth can be achieved by unpack-ing the urban black-box, taking the word ‘town’ outof circulation and de-constructing it, using the evi-dence to examine the process of becoming urban andto consider what this means, rather than to assess thestate of being urban (see also Christopherson 2015).As demonstrated by Fowler (2013), the aim of archae-ological analysis is constantly to critique this receivedwisdom, to go back to the evidence, to enter into di-alogue with it and, although remaining informed bypast study, not to be led by it. As Latour (2005, 27)argues, the world is constantly in flux and there areno such things as stable categories, just processes ofcoalescence which emerge and dissolve through ac-tion. The action of study has allowed the black-boxedconcept of ‘town’ to continue to circulate and, in do-ing so, has sent scholarship on a certain trajectory.The aim here is to explore whether, by placing thisblack-box to one side, by unpacking and re-packagingit, new insights into the process of urbanization(taken in the sense of a national phenomenon of thenucleation and specialization of settlements) mightemerge.

It has been argued that towns emerged as a cat-egory through the assessment of places for specificpurposes. Jones (2012) perceives categories not as apriori distinctions, but as resulting from the emer-gence of similar entities from repetitive interactionsbetween people and materials, or ‘performances’. Wecan, therefore, expect there to be similarities betweenthese places categorized as towns through variousforms of assessment in the recent and distant past;however, archaeological analysis in particular is oftenguilty of placing a settlement into an a priori categoryof ‘town’. A category is a means of classifying things inspite of their differences and, as such, rigid distinctionand categorization might be seen as masking the per-formative and heterogeneous nature of entities in thepast, the variability which is clear when one looks atmedieval settlements in depth. Settlements, therefore,can be viewed as repetitive performances of interac-tions between humans and their surroundings. Theperformance of a place brings together human andnon-human participants, situating them spatially (asimilar perspective on the town as performed has beenreached by Christopherson 2015). A town (as definedby Dyer 2002) is never at rest: people move aroundit, materials transform into objects in workshops and

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buildings decay. Towns are not material settings forurban life, nor are they collections of people. Rather,they are vibrant bundles of interactions between peo-ple and materials and, as they are constantly in mo-tion, forming and re-forming, ‘town’ might be con-sidered a verb rather than a noun (Dewsbury et al.2002). Furthermore, the process of ‘towning’ or ‘be-coming urban’ might relate only to specific elementsof everyday life. Rather than underplaying Hilton’sidentification of similarities between urban and rurallife, perhaps we should emphasize these and, ratherthan focusing on polarizing categories, explore whycertain sets of social relationships became urban andothers did not.

Shifting perspectives: medieval towns asassemblages

So far it has been argued that the term ‘town’ relatesnot to a way of being, but to a process of categoriza-tion, and that it is through the need to confront andunderstand patterns of difference in settlement thatvarious, sometimes conflicting, definitions have de-veloped. The aim of the second part of this paper isto develop an approach through which it is possi-ble to understand better how these patterns of differ-ence emerge and their implications for the wider socialform of medieval England. This requires an alterna-tive approach, as conventional archaeological analysismight be argued to see the town as a stage or framefor the action of urban life. Whilst we acknowledgethat urban form changes with the fortunes of a town(see, for example, Lilley 2015), there remains a frac-ture between the study of the sociality of urban lifeand its material manifestation. Materials are taken asproviding evidence of the adherence of a place to apreconceived, black-boxed, notion of what a town is.It is clear, however, that the places which we iden-tify as towns are highly varied in size and character.The approach developed here focuses on social rela-tions. Towns are more-than-spatial phenomena; theycan be considered as bundles, or assemblages, of so-cial relationships between people, materials and theirenvironment, grounded in physical space but takinga permeable form in which they are entangled withtheir surroundings. Through the application of thisperspective to a specific case study, the urbanizationof the Weald of Sussex, the processes of assemblingtowns and their implications at different scales will beconsidered. This will build towards an understandingof the town, not simply as a category of place, but as away of becoming through specific, effective and mu-tually constitutive relations between people and theirsurroundings.

Urbanization in medieval Sussex: a summary andan approach

Sussex is a county situated in southeastern Eng-land. By the thirteenth century, it was already par-tially urbanized. In the southern part of the county, anumber of settlements are recognized as towns. Someexisted prior to the Norman Conquest of ad 1066,principally developing from late Saxon burhs (de-fended settlements). Further urban places, primarilyports, developed through the eleventh–twelfth cen-turies. It is worth pausing briefly to consider someof the elements of these places which have, in thepast, been used to define them as urban. These settle-ments typically have regular street layouts, somethingwhich is seen as typical of towns. In Chichester, thestreet alignment relates to the remnants of the Romantown, whilst in other burhs, such as Lewes, the gridcan be seen as having a defensive function (Drewettet al. 1988, 333–9). In these planted settlements, landwas granted to local manors and religious institutions,creating a need for the regular division of space. Yetsystems of land division and styles of architecture ap-pear similar to those in surrounding rural settlements(see Reynolds 2003). Port towns have a specific func-tion, developing at strategic locations to control trade,forming part of its infrastructure and being one endof a spectrum of landing-places along the coast. In-dustry gradually shifted from rural estate centres tothese new settlements; however, control was still ex-ercised over access to resources, given the tenuriallinks between town and country. Yet, we can also see,for example in the evidence provided by material cul-ture, the development of distinctive experiences of lifein these places (e.g. Astill 2006; Jervis 2014, 110–18).The archaeological evidence demonstrates, therefore,both similarity and difference between these placesand contemporary rural settlements.

Following Butler’s (1993) discussions of gen-dered identity, Gregson and Rose (2000, 447) arguethat places do not pre-exist action, but rather thatthe performance of social relations brings them intobeing. Places can be considered to be assemblages ofsocial relations: through activity, assemblages ‘takeplace’ (McFarlane 2011). If we view these townsas assemblages, they are not planted stages, popu-lated by people, but rather places which emergedfrom specific sets of social relationships. In generalterms, these relations might include the control ofresources through trade and manufacture and theneed to defend these resources from Viking raids,which materialized as towns, reiterated through theperformance of social life (see also Christopherson’s(2015) consideration of towns as performed places).

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This materialization of relationships caused theseplaces to develop along specific trajectories anddevelop distinctive characters, their form structuring,and being structured by, these performances. Theseiterative performances reproduced certain normativebehaviour and attitudes, which restricted the waysin which social relations could form and might beseen as underpinning the similarities which can beseen both between these settlements and betweenthe towns and contemporary rural sites. However, asbundles of interaction, towns are also effective. Theyare places where difference could be negotiated atintersections of spheres of interaction, leading to theemergence of particularly urban forms of identityand practice (Christopherson 2015, 130).

It is in this brief consideration of urbanism inlate Saxon Sussex that we can begin to see the key ele-ments of an interpretive framework emerging. Firstly,we can see towns as materializations of specific sets ofsocial relations. This process of place-making is mu-tually constitutive of other urbanizing processes, the‘towning’ of people, things and practices. The perfor-mance of these relations can be perceived as a processof gathering (Lucas 2012) and is what Deleuze andGuattari (1987, 245) term ‘territorialization’. Social re-lations gather a range of actants in a particular locationand serve to bind them together. This creates an as-semblage which can be identified through the tracingof these relations in the archaeological record, for ex-ample the laying out of streets and the division of land.Gathering, however, is a transitory process. The ap-parent permanence of the town is brought about by theeffective nature of these relations. By creating a streetgrid, dividing land and articulating power throughtenurial links, social relations are ‘coded’ (Deleuze &Guattari 1987, 47). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 5) per-ceive a world formed of flows, for example of matterand ideas, which move across a social plane, becom-ing entangled in random and multiplicitous ways, theprocesses of territorialization (or gathering) throughwhich assemblages form. These social relations haveimplications and can be perceived as ‘striating’ thissocial space, limiting the ways in which social re-lations can form (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 559–60).This striating of space is the process of coding, theways in which behaviour is limited and an assem-blage re-iterated. There is still space for creativity andchange between striations, but within certain bounds.Therefore, the performance of social relations wasboth reproduced and constrained by normative be-haviour, rules, regulation and the residues of past ac-tion. Furthermore, this coding might be seen as push-ing these entangled flows along certain trajectories,exacerbating specific social processes. Lilley (2000),

for example, has demonstrated how the form of someAnglo-Norman towns in Wales and Ireland servedto marginalize local populations. This marginaliza-tion can be seen as coded through the layout of urbanspace, becoming increasingly exacerbated with everyperformance of urban life from which these peoplewere excluded.

When thinking through the process of urbaniza-tion, therefore, we can use these concepts of territo-rialization and coding to perceive how the processof becoming urban emerges through iterative gather-ings. As will be discussed later, urbanization occurredat multiple scales, coding action (or striating space) ina stratified way with implications for new and existingsettlements.

The focus of this paper is a second wave of ur-banization in Sussex, which principally occurred inthe thirteenth–fourteenth centuries in an area in thenorthern part of the county, known as the Weald(Fig. 1). This is an area which was sparsely settled inthe pre-Conquest period, but was gradually cleared ofdense woodland through the medieval period (Bran-don 1969, 135–42; Chatwin & Gardiner 2012; Gardiner1996). Settlement was largely dispersed, with townsforming distinctive nucleated foci. Here the first townto develop was Battle, in the eleventh century (Searle1974, 69; James 2008), with further towns developingat East Grinstead (Leppard 1991), Crawley (Stevens1997; 2008), Horsham (Stevens 2012) and Roberts-bridge (Gardiner 1997a) in the thirteenth–fourteenthcenturies. There is also an ambiguous class of nucle-ated settlements, termed by Gardiner (1997b) ‘substi-tute towns’. These are places which served as centraleconomic foci for dispersed rural communities, butwithout many of the characteristics which might beseen as typical of a fully-fledged town. It is these am-biguous settlements, as well as the fact that the Wealdwas sparsely settled in the Anglo-Saxon period, thatmakes it a suitable area for developing new frame-works for examining urbanization. The following dis-cussion is broken into three sections. The first exam-ines the processes of gathering and coding throughwhich these places emerged; the second explores therelationship of settlement foundation to the surround-ing landscape, discussing the issue of scale and intro-ducing the concept of de-territorialization; and the fi-nal section considers the implications of this approachfor shifting towards a focus on becoming, rather thanbeing, urban.

Gathering assemblages

Urbanization might be considered to develop at the in-tersection of two different scales of social process. The

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Figure 1. The location of towns and markets in Sussex. The area in grey is the Weald.Boroughs: 1: Arundel; 2: Battle; 3: Bramber; 4: Chichester; 5: East Grinstead; 6: Hastings; 7: Horsham; 8: Lewes;9: Midhurst; 10: Pevensey; 11: Rye; 12: Seaford; 13: Shoreham; 14: Steyning; 15: Winchelsea; 16: Withering.Towns (urban places with market charters): 17: Crawley; 18: Mayfield; 19: Petworth; 20: Robertsbridge; 21: Rotherfield.

decision to plant a town formally, that is, through theacquisition of a borough or market charter, was gener-ally that of the lord holding a manor or estate. In gen-eral terms a lord may have had several motivations,chiefly economic: the need to generate revenue to payincreased taxes arising from royal expenditure, a de-sire to retain revenue from the marketing of surplusfrom their estate, and to generate tolls from market-ing activity (Britnell 1996, 121). In the Sussex contexta further motivation can be suggested. The pattern oflandholding in Sussex is considerably less fragmentedthan in many areas of the country. The county was di-vided into five north–south divisions, known as rapes.Each rape was the possession of a lord, whose seat wassituated in a port town. Across the rape a variety ofdifferent landscape zones were present, providing dif-ferent resources and lending themselves to differenttypes of agricultural regime. The foundation of townsin the Weald by these lords or their associates, for ex-ample at East Grinstead (rape of Pevensey), Crawley(rape of Lewes) and Horsham (rape of Bramber), maysuggest the establishment of a marketing system inwhich the full resources could be managed and pro-cessed. At this scale, therefore, town foundation can beseen as an instrument of estate management (see alsoGoddard 2011), emerging from top-down economicpressures.

A focus on lordship alone is misleading, imply-ing that towns are the result of human agency andintentionality. Intentionality alone, however, does notequate to outcomes. By acting out intentionality, lordsacted upon existing networks of social relations, theoutcomes emerging as an effect of this process. If wetake a view of agency as emerging from social in-teraction, as a property of relations (Bennett 2010, 24;Latour 2005, 63; see Jones & Boivin 2010 for a review ofapproaches), then towns are not a means of seignio-rial expression, but rather a product of networks ofpower in elite medieval society, perhaps most funda-mentally the tax burdens recognized as driving me-dieval commercialization (Britnell 1996, 121; Hilton1985, 7). More accurately, it is not the town whichemerges from this process, but the borough or marketcharter. Documents such as charters can be considereda form of black-box; they code social relations throughtheir relationship with other legal documents (Latour2010), for example those which decree that marketingcan only take place in recognized locations. A char-ter is more than a document: it is the materializationof an assemblage of lordship, which, through beingenrolled into the performance of particular courses ofaction, principally the marketing of resources, servedto limit, or code, this action, focusing it on specificplaces in the landscape.

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Examples of ‘failed’ towns show that the processof town foundation is about more than a charter (seeBeresford 1967, 290–302). The foundation of nucleatedsettlements (including towns) in the Weald appears re-lated to places in the landscape which were alreadyimportant locations of gathering (Gardiner 1997b, 65).East Grinstead, for example, is identified as a hundredmeeting place (Leppard 1991, 31). Churches and hun-dred meeting places attracted regular gatherings andbecame places of exchange; in many cases in the Wealdmarkets appear to precede permanent settlement (seealso Dyer 2003, 98, for a general discussion of the re-lationship between towns and existing landscape fea-tures). For other places, such as Crawley, there doesnot seem to have been such a history of regular formalassembly, but its situation at a crossing of north–southand east–west routes, at an administrative boundary(between the rapes of Bramber and Lewes), suggeststhat it may have formed a nodal point in the land-scape (Stevens 1997, 193). Roads through the Wealdwere sparse and therefore traffic through this densewoodland was channelled along particular routes(Gardiner 1997b, 70; Searle 1974, 46). Prior to the for-malization of markets through charters, we can per-ceive of flows of movement through the landscape.These built towards repeated processes of assemblywhich made these places, and associated communi-ties, persistent (De Landa 2006, 36). These processesof assembly leave little archaeological trace. Exam-ples might be small quantities of pre-twelfth-centurypottery recovered from excavations in Crawley(Stevens 2008).

The agency for town foundation emerges at theintersection of this assemblage of lordship (whichmight be considered one driver of the national trendtowards urbanization and commercialization) and lo-cal processes of gathering. Christopherson (2015, 119)highlights a contrast between top-down, processualapproaches to urbanism and post-processual, bottom-up approaches. What the approach taken here demon-strates is that these need not be mutually exclu-sive (Fleicher 2015, 134); lordship is as important asmore banal social interactions, with change emerg-ing when these different spheres of interaction col-lide. This has implications for thinking about thespatiality of power in the landscape. Rather than ex-pressions of seigniorial or communal power, we cansee towns as a negotiation of power relations, ascreating new power structures both internally (e.g.civic government) and regionally, as the formaliza-tion of towns furthered their existing role as fociof gathering, crystallizing territories which emergewith town foundation, but out of congealed historicalaction.

These repeated processes of gathering bothemerged from and generated wider sets of social, eco-nomic and political relations. They caused places topersist in the landscape, with past action constraininghow people and goods could flow across it and in-teract with each other. The presence of Roman roads,the division of land into hundreds and the establish-ment of parishes are all examples of the past inter-actions which had striated space in both a physicaland a conceptual way. People and things were di-rected across the landscape, whilst administrative di-visions drew people to particular gathering places inpreference to others. As McFarlane (2011, 654) states,assemblage thinking ‘emphasizes the depth and po-tentiality of sites and actors in terms of their histories’;it forces us to think about not just what phenomenaemerged from, but the processes through which thisoccurred. Once established as gathering places, struc-tures such as churches, landmarks denoting meetingplaces or road junctions colonized as markets becamefoci of citational behaviour, recognized as locationsfor the playing out of particular sets of social relationswhich reiterated their significance. We can see, there-fore, how these places, through the coding broughtabout by past action, emerged with wider territories(De Landa 2006, 104); they emerged both as persistentand central places within the landscape.

Prior to town foundation, these places were al-ready mediating the emergence and reiteration ofcommunities (see Harris 2014 for a discussion of thisconcept). As these places were formalized, for exam-ple through the granting of charters, a shift in theregional dynamic of power can be perceived, as a neu-tral gathering place became a regulated centre of pro-duction and marketing. Commercial relations wereformalized, changing how people perceived them-selves through the performance of this activity, whatwe might view as the emergence of specifically ur-ban forms of identity, or a ‘towning’ of the self. Asdiscussed below, it is through this process that wesee a sharp distinction emerge between urban andrural and the reformulation of communities; with aprocess of becoming urban came a process of becom-ing rural. As Hilton (1992, 10–14) demonstrates, inboth town and country power structures were sim-ilar and, rather than seeing this process as enfran-chising urban communities and excluding rural ones,we can see the specialization and intensification of acommercial network, in which specialized people andplaces emerged. However, bonds of mutual relianceensured that connections were retained between townand country. The urban market became a location inwhich urban and rural social networks intersectedwith each other, in which difference was negotiated

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and the town emerged as a particular type of placethrough marketing interactions.

Even within the three towns associated with thelords of the rapes or other major landowners, dis-tinctions can be seen. Crawley is a market ratherthan a borough for example, implying that Michaelde Poynings, who acquired the charter, was not will-ing to give the inhabitants the full freedoms enjoyedby those living in Horsham and East Grinstead. Thismay be because, as archaeological excavation demon-strates (Cooke 2001; Stevens 1997; 2008), Crawleyfunctioned principally as a site for the processingof iron and it was desirable to retain some seignio-rial control over this resource. Market charters arealso a characteristic of the so-called ‘substitute towns’,which developed principally on land belonging to thecrown (e.g. Rotherfield) or to the Archbishop of Can-terbury (e.g. Wadhurst, Uckfield and Mayfield: seeDuBoulay 1966, 125, 137) (Fig. 2). These settlementsappear to have developed at similar kinds of centralplaces, with informal plots surrounded by demesneland developing around market places and marketcharters serving to formalize existing commercial ac-tivity (Gardiner 1997b, 71). Monastic and royal es-tates were managed for different reasons to seignio-rial ones; often produce was intended for consump-tion by landowners, with varying proportions beingmarketed (Hare 2006). Within this context boroughprivileges were not appropriate, but there were ben-efits to being able to profit from existing marketing.Tenurial geography was such that these central placeswere parts of different constellations of relations. Aswith the seigniorial towns it can, however, be arguedthat market settlements emerged at the intersectionbetween two scales of interaction, the local and theadministrative.

Deleuze (1995, 160) states that it is not ‘begin-nings and ends that count, but middles’. It is this em-phasis of the middle that a consideration of townsas processes brings out. Urbanization is one event ina longer trajectory of place-making, emerging fromexisting, iterative, processes of gathering which codeaction and striate social space. The agency for changeemerges when existing networks of interaction col-lide. If we see gathering and re-iteration as perfor-mances, then ‘performativity is about connection’(Dewsbury 2000, 476). We can see that through theconnection of different territorialized sets of actions(or assemblages) new things, boundaries, territoriesand places emerge. Seigniorial boroughs emerge fromthe collision of elite networks and localized perfor-mances of place and substitute-towns through sim-ilar collisions with different tenurial networks. Thisillustrates how towns emerged from different sets of

relations, a national phenomenon, negotiated locallyat the intersection of scales and realms of interaction.It is from here that we can progress to think moreabout these collisions, through a discussion of de-territorialization and scale.

Extending place: de-territorialization and scale

Scale has emerged as a key point of discussion. In onesense urbanization can be viewed at multiple scales,from an (inter)national phenomenon with regionalvariants to the individual experiences of householdsand people who were transformed from a rural toan urban way of life. In another sense, action can beperceived as stratified, in the manner described byDeleuze and Guattari (1987, 46–7). For them, assem-blages are formed of other assemblages and interac-tions can reverberate between scales. These scales arenot neatly nested into each other, but are enfoldedwith one another. If we think of an assemblage asconstituted of a variety of actants, then each actant isan assemblage in itself. Each actant might, simultane-ously be a part of other assemblages, a process termedde-territorialization, as through these actants, assem-blages extend beyond themselves. It is this process ofde-territorialization that enfolds scales. An example isthe borough charter discussed above: it is simultane-ously part of the assemblage of medieval elite societyand of the place to which it relates; it de-territorializesthe local performance of place, folding it into the na-tional web of interactions through which we can per-ceive a broader process of urbanism. Therefore assem-blage theory becomes a useful tool for overcoming thedivide between local and larger-scale studies of townfoundation (see also Allen 2011, 277; Latour 2005, 173).

Our settlements are themselves stratified assem-blages: each is formed of households and individuals,but is a part of larger assemblages which are the rapes,estates, Sussex and local, regional and national urbannetworks, for example. These assemblages are not dis-crete, but overlap with one another, the town beingarticulated differently through enrolment in these net-works. This demonstrates the key point from the firstsection of this paper, that ‘town’ is not a single cate-gory of place, but rather a mode of becoming whichoccurs through enrolment in these different sets of in-teractions. The current section explores this contentionfurther, through a consideration of the relationshipbetween our towns and their rural surroundings andtheir place within regional urban networks.

Excavations in Crawley demonstrate that in thethirteenth century, iron production became an ur-ban industry. This shift was accompanied by an in-tensification of output, with the close relationship

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Figure 2. Market foundations on the Wealden estate of the Archbishop of Canterbury (grey area).

between producer and market, and the concentra-tion of production on the estate in a single centre.Iron, then, was an actant in the reiteration of Craw-ley, but was enrolled in multiple other processes ofassemblage as it was put to use. The product de-territorialized the industry: iron might be consideredan assemblage convertor (Deleuze & Guattari 1987,378), a medium through which localized interactionsbetween people and materials are joined to interac-tions and processes occurring in different places, atdifferent speeds. Objects and materials offer a means

of mediating social relationships across scales, fold-ing the ‘global’ or non-local processes into personal,small-scale performances (Bennett 2010, 42). It wasthis de-territorialization which caused externalities toact upon the process of iron production. Increased de-mand from the army and the London market meantthat production needed to intensify, with producersdevoting more time to iron working (Cleere & Cross-ley 1985, 89–91; Hodgkinson 2008, 37). Here, then,we can see another confrontation of scale, betweenlocalized production and external demand, with the

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agency for change emerging in this coming together.Iron production did not occur in isolation. Coupled tothe intensification of the iron industry was the greatermanagement of woodland resources and clearance foragriculture. Timber was a valuable trade resource andwood also had to be managed for fuel (Galloway etal. 1996; Gardiner 1996, 123; Pelham 1928). Some ev-idence of coppicing and woodland management canbe seen in the wood fuel remains from excavationsin Crawley (Stevens 2008, 141). This clearance cre-ated further demand for iron tools (Hodgkinson 2008,37). The de-territorialized nature of iron enrolled itin multiple processes of change. As an industrial re-source, like cattle required for leather production (seeBrandon 1969, 149; Saunders 1998; Searle 1974, 5, forevidence of tanning in towns), it mediated the rela-tionship between the intensification of agriculturalactivity and the intensification of production. Both in-dustries ‘became urban’ as conflicting demands onland, labour and resources led to the emergence ofincreased specialization, as part of a commercializingeconomy.

In this specialization, we see the negotiation ofthe polarized divide between town and country, withtowns becoming Beresford’s (1967, 55–6) ‘specializedcentres of making and dealing’. But these productionprocesses were neither exclusively urban nor rural.The urban processing of rural resources created a di-alogue which made a firm divide between town andcountry untenable, if we base our understanding onsocial connections rather than the spatial differentia-tion of activity. In this light, we might argue that thatthe settlement is a less useful frame for analysis thanseeking to understand the system and the intercon-nections between different activities through whichspecialization emerged and became focused in spe-cific locations. As Jones and Sibbesson (2013) arguefor the emergence of the Neolithic, we can perceiveof multiple, entangled, trajectories of action, with theagency for change emerging at their intersections. Inthis context iron production and agriculture might beperceived of as two such trajectories. Urban characterdeveloped out of these intersections, rather than beingbestowed upon a place through the act of foundation.It was in the performance of social practice that peo-ple, places and things became urban, as towns wereactualized through processes of assemblage. That is tosay, urbanity was not a given property of a place, butwas re-iterated and improvised. Urbanism is not de-fined as a set of characteristics, but as a quality definedin relation to other ways of becoming that emergedout of alternative entanglements of these courses ofaction, resulting in multiple forms of both urban andrural experience.

Urbanization was, therefore, part of a wider eco-nomic change, what might be termed commercializa-tion, which was negotiated through changing relation-ships with resources. The presence of informal mar-kets set places on trajectories through which market-ing activity intensified, was formalized, and becameenrolled in the performance of places which were dis-tinct from both other places and the places that theyhad been. The presence of chartered markets ‘over-coded’ the existing system of informal markets anddispersed settlement (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 71–3).Urban places, as sets of social relations, emerged outof previous performances, and were effective in thatthey generated new relations, as well as reiteratingexisting ones, which distinguished them from otherplaces. Social space was further striated, but with cer-tain constraints (the need, for example, to undertakemultiple forms of economic activity in an unspecial-ized economy) being smoothed and a new form ofsocial space, in which a distinction between town andcountry was perceptible, emerging.

Dewsbury (2000, 477) argues that it is at pointsof rupture, where performance is disrupted, that wereveal ourselves, as it is in these situations that re-negotiation takes place. Therefore, it is at points ofchange and rupture that towns reveal themselves asa distinctive entity, as urbanism comes to be definedin relation to other modes of becoming. There are,however, elements to Crawley which are distinctlyrural. Fields were laid out with the town and industrywas seemingly organized at a household scale (Cooke2001; Stevens 2008, 145). But in the performance ofproduction and marketing it is revealed as a differ-ent kind of place to those which surround it. It be-came urban as the processes which constituted it asa place changed and caused its position in relationto other places, its region, people and resources to bere-negotiated. Importantly, allied to this process, wecan see other places as becoming rural. Whereas inthe Wealden context dispersed settlements had beennormal, commercialization brought about a point ofrupture, in which they are revealed as different tothe emerging urban centres, and in which the perfor-mance of these places takes them on a divergent tra-jectory, as specialized producers and managers of re-sources. At the time of urbanization, therefore, we seean intensification of occupation and agricultural activ-ity, a shift in the economy of the region to one basedon small-scale, specialized, production. This coloniza-tion of the woodland transformed it from a wild to amanaged landscape, a process of which urbanizationwas one part.

This consideration of the relationship betweentowns and their surroundings brings us to the wider

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commercial networks within which these settlementsparticipated. The full range of pre-urban commercialconnections in the Weald is difficult to re-constructowing to the limited number of excavations and thesmall number of finds recovered from them. Withthe intensification of the management of rural re-sources and production came the intensification ofcommercial activity. The coastal ports were conduitsfor Wealden products, particularly timber (Pelham1928). Pottery production centres developed aroundthe fringes of the Weald, their position determinedin part by access to markets (Gardiner 1990, 49). Pot-tery from Surrey, presumably transported through theWeald, appears at coastal sites. Finds of French pot-tery in Horsham (Stevens 2012) and Crawley (Stevens1997) perhaps hint at return trade. The pre-urban mar-kets were already nodes in commercial networks, theflow of goods around Sussex was already coded, caus-ing trade to take place in particular places and not inothers. The Wealden towns therefore emerged in re-lation to these existing urban centres. Whilst townswere not direct copies of others, existing urban struc-tures acted on the form that new towns took. Thiswas not so much a case of copying street layouts, butrather ways of dividing space, assigning land and do-ing business (cf. discussion by Lilley (2010) of townsin Devon and Hampshire). The differences betweenreligious and seigniorial foundations in terms of lib-erties (the granting of borough or market charters)demonstrates an enfolding of scale, as marketing cen-tres were founded in relation to estates, whilst takingthe form of other settlements which emerged throughsimilar processes.

Processes of urbanization in one town were con-nected to those in other towns, a point well demon-strated by Sindbaek (2007), who shows how exchangenetworks mediate the emergence of different typesof urban place. These marketing connections de-territorialize towns, with action in one place havingimplications for others. Therefore, urban processes ina single place can be seen as enfolded with those inother places at a regional scale. This has two impli-cations: firstly, activity in one town cites that in oth-ers, creating a category of places joined through theperformance of similar forms of commercial activity;secondly, we can see new forms of urban socialityemerging as towns became sites of negotiation be-tween the local networks discussed earlier in this sec-tion and wider commercial networks. The very rela-tionships which constitute towns also de-territorializethem, forcing them into relations with other towns andmarkets. Links to south coast ports and to Londonsimultaneously contributed to the coming togetherof these places, but also situated them within eco-

nomic networks. Increased demand for Wealden ironpulled them into supra- regional networks of sup-ply and consumption. The impact of major events,such as warfare, became localized through the de-territorialization of iron, having a transformative ef-fect on the towns, driving them towards more in-tensive production and more explicit differentiationfrom surrounding settlements. These were not net-works through which goods simply passed, but wereperformative, transformative networks in which ac-tivities such as trade mediated processes of becomingurban at multiple scales. This was not in the sense ofadhering to a particular urban template, but rathera process of transformation in which urban assem-blages take on the appearance of other, similar places,and become distinguished from their surroundings.Furthermore, as urbanism was performed at differentscales, so various experiences of urban life, multipleurbanisms, occurred as people became urban throughtheir enrolment in different zones of the assemblage.

By looking at the material actants enrolled in theconstitution of urban places, we can see how townsare not separated from wider society, but emergewith other forms of sociality. Whilst urbanism gath-ered actants in processes of making and trading, italso de-territorialized the town, causing ruptures intraditional ways of doing through which a contrastbetween urban and rural becomes visible. It is inthese moments of rupture that we can perceive a cat-egory of town emerging. This process of becomingurban is allied with, in the Weald, processes of be-coming rural, as part of a wider commercializing andmanaging of the landscape. Town and country can-not, therefore, be separated in a processual sense asthey define each other; processes of becoming urbanare enmeshed in processes of becoming rural. Theseactants are the media through which scales are en-folded, as demand in distant places pulled local per-formances of gathering in the market into wider pro-cesses driven by factors such as taxation and war-fare. The assembly of the town, therefore, flowed be-yond its physical borders; through networks of in-teraction spatial and commercial territories emergedinto which the town was de-territorialized (see DeLanda 2006, 104). These might be classed as hinter-lands, but rather than seeing towns as controllingthese spaces, I am arguing for spaces emerging whichare defined in relation to these new centres. As theybecome urban, so people become affiliated with a mar-ket, enter into regional networks of commercial inter-action and are enrolled in processes which over-codeexisting social relations. Through these interactionstowns form, becoming an active presence in the sociallandscape.

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Multiple urbanisms

This paper began with a discussion of issues sur-rounding the definition and recognition of towns andhas gone on to highlight the variation amongst placeswhich we might categorize as urban. It has been ar-gued that, rather than focusing on the town as anentity, a deeper understanding might emerge if wefocus analysis on the processes through which socialchange was mediated and friction between scales ar-ticulated. This analysis leads to a contention that notonly do different forms of urbanism exist, but thatif urbanism emerges at intersections between assem-blages (as argued, for example, in the case of the ironindustry), towns emerge through various forms of dis-course (McFarlane 2011, 652). Both urbanization andits related process of commercialization can be consid-ered as wide-scale processes formed through localizedinteractions. Elsewhere towns also formed in similarways, as coalescences of associations, but did not forma single type of town but multiple forms of urban as-semblage, manifesting as various forms of urban iden-tity and sociality (Thrift 2007, 161). It is less that we cancreate a typology of towns, but more a case that peopleassemble their own urbanisms as they experience andpartake in social relations; towns are not found, butare actualized as they are enacted within an assem-blage (Dewsbury 2000, 482; McFarlane 2011, 665). Asdiscussed above, it is at points of rupture that townsreveal themselves. This is as much the case in the di-vision between urban and rural which emerges in theWeald in the thirteenth century as in the tax assess-ments discussed by Masschaele (1997), where townsreveal themselves through an inability to be taxedon agricultural produce. Following Butler (1993) andGregson and Rose (2000), it was argued that towns arenot stages for action, but are produced through per-formances. Therefore, towns are not inhabited, but areproduced through dwelling in space (McFarlane 2011,651), emerging through specific forms of relationshipwhich cause tears in the social fabric and reveal dif-ference. Being urban is, therefore, not a characteris-tic of a place; urbanism is a property which emergesthrough social interactions. Industry becomes urbanas it enacts a divide between towns and other places,just as other activities, such as the cultivation of fieldsin Crawley, appear to transcend the urban and ruraldivide. Rather than focusing at a simple level on sim-ilarities and differences between rural and urban life,or particular sites, an assemblage approach allows usto de-territorialize our site, follow the flows and therelationships which constitute it and understand howcontrasts emerge through which urban places revealthemselves. In other words, we can work from the ev-

idence to trace the areas of medieval society in whichurbanism is significant and those in which it is not,rather than taking as a starting-point that a place isa town and that we should, therefore, expect certainthings of it.

We can push this argument further still, to ques-tion whether places are always towns. If we viewplaces as reiterated through performance, and de-termine that urbanism reveals itself through certainsets of social relations and not through others, wecan view urbanism as something of a flicker, ratherthan a constant. The processes which weave the fab-ric of a place are transformative, but do not shifta place to an urban state; rather they cause urbanqualities to surface. These processes are the mediumthrough which a place becomes urban, but perhapsalso, as they cease, might be perceived as processesof unbecoming, as ruptures heal over and the dis-tinctions that they bring about dissolve. Over thelonger term, ruptures are apparent in the differenttrajectories that places take, creating a spectrum ofurban places. Urban trajectories can be perceived atthe national scale, but locally we can see differentforms of coding emerge, the social spaces of settle-ments and regions being striated as places are de-territorialized in different ways, manifesting as thecontrast between boroughs and substitute towns, forexample. As the processes that cause ruptures are ex-acerbated, so the presence of urban qualities becomesmore vivid. Perhaps, then, the reason that towns areso elusive is that they are emergent, coming intoview in different ways through different processes,of which historical and archaeological research isjust one.

Conclusion

This paper set out to utilize assemblage theory to de-velop new perspectives on processes of urbanizationin medieval England. Principally this entailed mov-ing from understanding ‘urban’ as a state of being, toa state of becoming, to highlight the varying forms androles taken by places that we recognize as towns in themedieval past. The consideration of town as an ana-lytical black-box served to demonstrate that categoriesemerge through action, and this was developed fur-ther when it was argued that towns appear at pointsof rupture in social practice. By viewing the town re-lationally, several key conclusions have been reached.Firstly, towns reveal themselves as the performanceof relationships between scales of interaction createsdifference. Secondly, these processes of emergencehave implications, as action comes to be codedand places develop along trajectories, in which they

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demonstrate similarity to some places and differencefrom others. Thirdly, we might also perceive of perfor-mances in which the town is not revealed, or in whichdifferent forms of distinction are revealed as signif-icant. As a flickering quality urbanism is revealedthrough certain interactions, but not through others.This has implications for the practice of writing urbanarchaeology, and settlement archaeology more gener-ally. If we see places as relational, then we must extendour analysis beyond the site to consider how it relatesto other places, and how processes lead to the emer-gence of distinction and similarity. Focusing on emer-gence through processes is fundamentally differentfrom seeking to identify signatures of urban or ruralactivity. Indeed, the frustration of attempting to do sostimulated the change of approach discussed here. Itfollows, therefore, that rather than seeking to classifyplaces in accordance with historical systems of cate-gorization, emerging out of particular sets of practice,categories must be seen as emerging through perfor-mances at different scales to consider how social pro-cesses of commercialization and urbanization mightbe considered to have been articulated locally, region-ally and nationally. In conclusion, therefore, this studycalls for a reappraisal of how we do urban archaeol-ogy, moving from a focus on urban places to processesof ‘towning’ or ‘becoming urban’ to appreciate theways in which the places that have been identified astowns diverge from other places.

Ben JervisHistory, Archaeology & Religion

Cardiff UniversityJohn Percival Building

Colum DriveCardiff CF10 3EU

UKEmail: [email protected]

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Author biography

Ben Jervis MCIfA is lecturer in medieval archaeology atCardiff University. He specializes in the archaeology ofsouthern England with research interests in material cul-ture, urban settlement and the application of theoretical ap-proaches within medieval archaeology. He is the author ofPottery and Social Life in Medieval England: Towards a relationalapproach (Oxbow, 2014) and co-editor of Objects, Environmentand Everyday Life in Medieval Europe (Brepols, 2016). He is as-sistant editor of Medieval Ceramics.

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