History of Leeds - Late Middle Ages

Late Middle Ages

For four centuries after the Norman invasion, the growth of Leeds was slow. Its site had no particular military advantages: the great strategic position of that part of Yorkshire was at Pontefract, close by. It had, at first, no commercial values—it may have been that its first beginnings in its staple wool trade sprang from the wool growing of the Cistercians at Kirkstall Abbey, on its western borders. The township was concerned with little more than agriculture, and such trade as it knew was confined to those retailings which establish themselves wherever communities spring up—dealings in the necessities of life, which, reduced to a minimum, are merely food and clothing. The town itself was small—it was probably confined within a triangle formed on the lines of the present lower Briggate, Kirkgate, and the river Aire, with the parish church at one angle somewhere about, perhaps on, the site of the modern one. The streets would be narrow, unpaved and unlighted. The houses, in spite of the fact that stone is so plentiful in the district, were of wood, whitewashed, in many cases, thatched. All around the town lay the open fields and meadows, cultivated on the principle of strip-farming. And beyond these lay the forest of Elmet.