9 The Landscape of Late Saxon Burhs and the Politics of Urban Foundation Landscape of Late Saxon Burhs Jeremy Haslam Those who were severely afficted … [now] loudly applaud the king’s foresight and promise to make every effort to do what they had previously refused – that is, with respect to constructing fortresses and to the other things of general advantage to the whole kingdom. 1 Introduction In his discussion of Norman planned towns of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Keith Lilley has made the important general observation that town plans can be used as ‘texts to provide historical narratives which may be compared with the discourses of history offered by other sources and approaches’, and has explored ways in which the analysis of urban form gives a ‘wider understanding of the intimate dialectic between urban space and medieval society’. 2 As such, it is seen as one of the keys to understanding political processes ‘which involved the conquest, consolidation and colonization of territories within frontier contexts’. 3 While the expansion of Norman hegemony in England was facilitated by the creation of urban places largely through the agency of aristocratic elites, it is generally recognised that the creation of fortifed burhs by the king in late Anglo-Saxon England was an important agent in the processes of political expansion and the consolidation and control of territory. Richard Abels has said of King Edward’s general strategy in eastern Mercia in the early tenth century, that it ‘took the form of imposing the king’s personal lordship upon the Danish landholders … who chose him as their lord and protector’, and