[Esse é um site muito bom onde você pode ler sobre as cidades Inglesas medievais.]
This text I'll present below is from D. Graham Jones, PhD from St John's College.
He works in the Centre for English Local History - University of Leicester.
[Esse texto que eu mostro abaixo é do Dr. Graham Jones, PhD do St John's College. Dr. Jones trabalha no Centro de Estudos de História Inglesa Local - Universidade de Leicester.]
Anglo-Saxon England. Settlement - rural and town life:
Summary of lecture:
In our own day we have a very clear idea of the difference between town and country; indeed we are heirs of a whole bundle of intellectual concepts and prejudiced snobbery about one or the other.. Townies and bumpkins both go back a long way - to Roman times, in fact. Then too, town and country were easily distinguished, but not so in Anglo-Saxon England. With the collapse of the Roman empire - or rather, since yesterday I was proposing that the empire itself never died, with the collapse of the imperial economy, towns and cities as the Romans knew them disappeared from Britain. The empire had required a huge standing army and a huge bureaucracy to service it, and these were paid for by taxation; taxation paid in coin, not kind, just as the army was paid in coin, not kind. A monetary economy encouraged the growth of markets, indeed required them, and markets led to towns. Within the imperial economy, Britain appears to have been what we would call today a net exporter of produce. Coin flowed in to Britain, and the economy encouraged what academics call conspicuous consumption: the building of lavish villas, for example. When the imperial army was withdrawn from Britain, taxation and the export of supplies for the army ceased, and the flow of imperial coin dried up. Towns and cities as the Romano-British knew them ceased to exist.
READ THE ORIGINAL TEXT HERE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TOWNS
UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER
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