Grimsby was first settled in about 866, when its natural advantages as a harbour were recognized by Scandinavian invaders.For a more detailed account of medieval Grimsby see E. Gillett, Grimsby, chaps. 1-4. The 13th-century Lai d’Haveloc described the town’s mythical and aptly named founder, Grim, as a Dane who lived by fishing and selling salt. Indeed, these two closely connected means of livelihood were crucial to both the development and continued prosperity of the port.
Leicester, positioned near the centre of the kingdom, and on a number of good trade routes both by water and by road, had reached a peak of prosperity in the 13th century: in the tax assessment of 1269 it was rated the eighth richest borough in England. By the end of Edward III’s reign, however, a decline had set in, no doubt partially due to the deaths of a large number of townspeople in the great pestilences of 1349 and 1361, but also attributable to a diminution in trade.
By the late 14th century Rochester’s population was less than a quarter the size of Canterbury’s, being estimated at 855 on the basis of the poll tax returns of 1377. Yet the city rivalled Canterbury in antiquity, having been developed in Roman times as a station at the point where Watling Street crossed the Medway. Within a very few years of his conversion to Christianity at the close of the sixth century, King Ethelbert of Kent built a church in Rochester, which soon shared with London the distinction of being the earliest bishop’s see, as created by Augustine in 604.
By this stage in its already long history, Canterbury had grown into a sizeable city containing 12 parishes and an estimated population of nearly 4,000. The Roman settlement had been adapted in Anglo-Saxon times to serve as capital of the kingdom of Kent, and the grant made to Augustine by King Ethelbert of his palace there at the end of the sixth century ensured the city’s place as the first and long unrivalled centre of Christianity in England.
Situated at the crossing point of the river Ouse and the main route between London and the north-east, Huntingdon was an obvious site for early settlement, and by the tenth century it had become a market town of sufficient standing to have its own mint. Although at first development was checked by Danish raiding parties, the royal borough of Huntingdon enjoyed a more settled period of expansion after the Conquest, when, according to the Domesday survey, it housed some 256 burgesses.
Whatever prosperity Leominster has enjoyed may partly be attributed to its situation on a fertile plain fed by three rivers. Although the size of its population in the period 1386-1422 is not recorded, it seems likely that, containing only one parish church, the town was then quite small and had much about it that was rural in character. Over a century later, in 1534, there were only 215 householders living in Leominster which, however, John Leland, writing about the same time, considered to be ‘meatly large’, with ‘good buyldinge of tymbar’.
In 1377 Hereford was inhabited by about 2,850 people, being, therefore, somewhat larger than the more northerly marcher town of Ludlow, but smaller than Gloucester. The city, situated at a bridging point of the river Wye and on the roads from Gloucester and Abergavenny, was potentially a successful trading centre. There had been a guild merchant there since before 1215; the St. Denis fair held regularly from 1227 acquired some importance in the western counties, and in 1331 the inhabitants were granted exemption from all kinds of tolls throughout England.
The dominant theme in the history of Winchester in the Middle Ages is one of continuous decline. The population fell, the built-up area contracted, and the city successively lost its status as a national administrative centre, a royal residence, and an international, and even a regional, market. The city had achieved its greatest eminence in the tenth and 11th centuries as the political and economic centre of Wessex, then dominant over England as a whole. At that time the city was among the dozen most prosperous English towns.
Although it was one of the busiest ports of later medieval England, Southampton was not populous even by contemporary standards. Its population in 1377 has been estimated at 1,728, some 400 fewer than that of Winchester, and it was probably less than half the size of Salisbury and under a fifth that of Bristol. Established by Saxon times, the town was favoured with a long sheltered harbour, double tides and easy communications inland.
The size of the population of Portsmouth during this period is not recorded, but the town was evidently small and somewhat impoverished. Originally ‘Portsmouth’ had been simply the name of the anchorage in the estuary of the river Wallington, used from the 11th century for naval and military expeditions. Richard I, the founder of the town, landed there on his return to England in 1189, and the foundation charter of 1194 was granted during a week’s stay by the King at Portsmouth, on the eve of what was to be his final departure from the country.
