Urban Life in a Time of Crisis: Enduring Urban Lifeways in Later Medieval England (ENDURE)

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ENDURE capitalises on a critical mass of archaeological data and innovations in archaeological science to ask how urban lifeways were transformed by the 14th-15th century crises. Urban decline, the result of climate change, plague and political unrest has been a key theme in medieval studies. A focus on decline conceals the diverse lived experiences of urban communities. Focussing on the small towns of England, ENDURE asks whether some elements of everyday life persisted, whilst others were changed irreversibly. The resilience of medieval communities is a growing area of study. However, resilience, which focusses on purposeful adaptation to preserve a specific social context, is insufficient to understand continuity in terms of hardship and the ability to withstand, resist or sustain change. An emphasis on endurance creates a new interpretive space to understand lived experiences of medieval crisis. ENDURE applies a multi-scalar methodology to reconstructing diverse urban lifeways. Radiocarbon dating of lipids extracted from pottery will offer an unrivalled level of chronological resolution to assess the short- and long-term consequences of crisis for urban communities. ENDURE conceptualises towns as emergent and fluid assemblages, formed of relations between people, materials, animals and plants. Focussed around three key pillars (production, commerce and domesticity), ENDURE will reconstruct these relations through a multi-scalar methodology which combines big data derived from hundreds of archaeological excavations within medieval small towns, historical data and cutting-edge scientific techniques. Stable isotope analysis of faunal remains and analysis of lipids extracted from pottery will generate high-resolution data pertaining to production (agriculture, food processing), commerce (provisioning) and domesticity (cooking, the urban environment). This integrated conceptual and methodological framework will reveal the diversity of medieval urban experience.