Conclusion

By studying the urban political sector—a framework within which towns and the people who lived in them could pool their collective resources to influence national politics, and in which the internal governance and political experiences of different individual towns could influence those of others within the sector—it becomes possible to write a history of late medieval English politics that is not focused exclusively on aristocratic landholders. An urban sector model allows for the political might of smaller towns in a centralized monarchy (such as was the case in fifteenth-century England) to be compared more profitably to that exercised by the more celebrated towns and urban leagues of Northern Italy and Flanders. Also, this book’s emphasis on frequent fluctuations in the nature of the English urban sector, rather than long-term trajectories, serves to question evolutionary narratives concerning the transition from the ‘medieval’ to ‘early modern’ English town.