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The Shop Within?: an Analysis of the Architectural Evidence for Medieval Shops

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

David Clark
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Extract

It is now almost forty years since W. A. Pantin wrote that ‘the origin and history of the medieval English shop is … a subject which badly needs investigation.’ Since then, although the study of vernacular buildings has become respectable, shops seldom appeared as a subject in textbook indices or, until recently, as a separate topic in bibliographies. Part of the reason, understandably, is that much of the architectural evidence has been obliterated. Few original shopfronts remain; internal features have long since been removed. However, buildings which can be shown to have contained shops — either workshops or retail spaces — in medieval times (taken as broadly the period from 1100 to 1500) can be found in many towns and cities in England. They range from simple one-room lock-ups to substantial multi-storey jettied buildings, from a room in a merchant’s house to whole rows of workshops associated with basic living accommodation. While it is dangerous to draw quantitative conclusions from the evidence of such survivals, they can, with the help of documentary sources, shed some light on how spaces were used. The purpose of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the medieval shop as a place where goods and money were exchanged, as a contribution to the better understanding of surviving structures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 43 , 2000 , pp. 58 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2000

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References

Notes

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116 Lewis et al., Hall Houses, pp. 66-67.

117 Stenning, ‘Timber-framed Shops’, pp. 35, 37.

118 Ibid.

119 Ibid., pp. 35, 38.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid., pp. 35, 37.

122 Ibid., and Wood, English Medieval House, p. 221.