In September 2008, on a research trip to Chester as part of the AHRC funded ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project, I picked up the leaflet for a ‘Walk around Chester Walls’: a ‘Unique Circular Walk’, which promised to be ‘Unmissable! – One of Britain’sBestHistoric Walks’.¹ As I followed the outlined route along the stone walls which encircle the early settlement, the leaflet drew my attention to the wonderful views over the city and its individual buildings, repeatedly emphasizing the multiple strata of history encoded within the urban landscape. Eastgate, for example, was described through a brief account of its various...

The map is often considered to define a geographer’s work, with mapmaking being seen traditionally as the principal means of pursuing geographical enquiry.² But increasingly geographers have become less fixed in their views on cartography, of what a map is and what it is to map, recognizing more the value of metaphorical and less literal, ‘maps’ and ‘mappings’. This shift began to occur in the late 1980s, particularly among cultural and historical geographers interested in maps and landscapes and who were driving geography’s so-called ‘linguistic turn’.³ As the subject of language, discourse, metaphor and text all occupied geographers more and...

Boundaries – paradoxically because of their defining peripherality – were central to the lived experience of late medieval Chester, for citizens and outsiders alike. In obvious ways, physical boundaries such as walls and ditches constrained and directed routes through and out of the city, and marked off areas of the town which had different characteristics. Jurisdictional boundaries, too, whether manifested physically or not, affected lives: dictating whether and where a person might trade or practise a craft, where a family worshipped, who had authority over misdemeanours and much besides. The external boundary of the liberties of the city was especially important because...

Two religious communities dominated Chester throughout the Middle Ages. Both were ancient, both perhaps royal, foundations.¹ Both had undergone radical changes at various times, had enjoyed royal and noble patronage and nurtured myths designed to enhance their status within the city and the region.² Each was in competition with the other in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is thus surprising to find Lucian, monk of St Werburgh’s and author of theLiber Luciani De Laude Cestrie, identifying his patron as one of the canons of St John’s and extolling the virtues of his house.³ Indeed, Lucian had himself been...

Writing in the early 1190s, Richard of Devizes imagines a French Jew telling a young compatriot about the English cities he should avoid. He groups Worcester, Chester and Hereford together as northern (in arctois), perhaps Marcher, locations, which collectively suffer regular Welsh violence. Richard’s satirical description imputes innate, indescriminate hostility to the Welsh and implies that Chester and the two other cities are frontier towns on England’s wild west.

We find a much more ambivalent image of Wales in Lucian’sDe Laude Cestrie, a text probably datable to the 1190s and thus the contemporary of Devizes’Cronicon. Here Wales is...

In her account of mapped views of the world, commentator Irit Rogoff argues that such views are, in fact, merely ‘meditations on issues of boundaries and definitions and the interactions between the two’.¹ In her study, Rogoff demonstrates how geographical narratives, which aim to pin down the apparent specificity of place, help to shape our own concepts of representation and meaning. For Rogoff, the geography of the land is ultimately the geography of spatial construction which, in turn, becomes a geography of the mind itself.² This is a concept which has also recently been explored in the context of medieval...

This apostrophe to the city of Chester and its religious appears in an anonymous ballad appended to the 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw’sLife of St Werburge. The author describes St Werburgh as a precious treasure and, employing a term most commonly used of the Virgin, as

‘aduocatrice’. The idea of Werburgh as the city’s advocate or intercessor is central to the socio-political context in which Bradshaw composed theLifein the early sixteenth century. Bradshaw was a Benedictine monk at the abbey of St Werburgh in Chester and his text is not only a record of the life, death...

Few vernacular saints’ lives participate as vocally in regional politics as Henry Bradshaw’sLife of Saint Werburge. Composed before Bradshaw’s death in 1513,Werburgeis ‘calibrated to effect change on the level of local politics’,¹ as Robert Barrett and others have shown, defending the abbey from civic encroachments on its historic privileges. In Bradshaw’s poem, Werburgh becomes ‘the embodiment of abbey, city and region’² and Barrett has recently examinedWerburgeand other Cheshire writings as part of ‘the sheer variety of local responses to institutional and cultural initiatives emerging from the center’.³ Yet this decidedly regional saint’s life is...

From a modern perspective, one of the central ideas about medieval Chester is its image as a border city, marking the difference between the English and the Welsh. Politically and geographically, this was the case: the political border between England and Wales in the north was the river Dee, so when travellers from Wales came into Chester they crossed the bridge over the Dee from the south and entered both Chester and England by the Bridge gate at the south-west corner of the city.

Socially and experientially, however, the border was imagined differently from the subject positions of English and...

Medieval towns were unhealthy places. People lived in close proximity, many of them crowded together in poor quality accommodation and although there were piped water supplies in some towns, provision for the disposal of human, animal and industrial waste was limited to cesspits and open drains in the street. Epidemic diseases inevitably flourished and urban communities proved very vulnerable. Levels of infant and child mortality were always high and it was rare for families in fifteenth-century England to rear as many as two children.¹

All medieval towns therefore depended upon a constant flow of immigrants to maintain their populations. For...

I want to begin with a brief overview of the ChesterShepherds’ Play, the text under discussion in this essay. This pageant, seventh of twenty-four Chester Whitsun plays, was produced throughout its Tudor lifetime by the Painters’, Glaziers’, Embroiderers’, and Stationers’ Company. The earliest known performance of the play took place sometime during the mayoral year 1515–16: in BL MS Harley 2125, Chester herald painter and antiquarian Randle Holme II reports that ‘the shepards play & the Assumption of our lady was playd in St Iohns churchyard’ at that time.¹ The Painters’ 1534 charter mentions ‘þe plae of þe...

The focal point of the Benedictine abbey of St Werburgh’s, Chester, in the later medieval period was the elaborate shrine of St Werburgh itself, located in the presbytery, behind the high altar. Probably built in the 1340s, the stone structure has been described as ‘representing a miniature two-storeyed chapel, the lower storey forming the base and the upper housing the reliquary containing the saint’s remains’.¹ The lower section, with votive niches for pilgrims making supplication to Werburgh, seems never to have been completed: J. M. Maddison suggests that this may have been due to the interruption of the Black Death...