Town life

Richard Britnell

THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Medieval English towns, though much smaller than those of today, were sufficiently distinct from rural communities to justify separate consideration. They were trading centres, where employment was heavily dependent on non-agrarian activities. Though this implies that they should be identified primarily by economic criteria, towns developed distinctive characteristics, and the largest ones created political and cultural institutions without parallel in rural communities. There was no medieval word corresponding closely to our word ‘town’, but most of the places that need consideration for their urban characteristics were described in contemporary documents as ‘boroughs’, a word packed with a complex amalgam of economic, legal and cultural significance. Many different aspects of development were apparent in the physical shape and appearance of towns, so that a survey of the urban environment leads some way to an appreciation of what it meant to be a medieval town-dweller.

Though towns varied greatly in population and complexity, their size and layout alone distinguished them from rural settlements. The principal street or streets were lined with a distinctive configuration of properties, often of half an acre or less, held by money rents and freely transferable by sale or lease. These were the characteristics of ‘burgage tenure’, the form of freehold most characteristic of the urban environment, and many boroughs were so called simply because they contained properties of this kind. In many towns, especially smaller ones, the shape of these plots remains to this day incorporated into property boundaries, sometimes in the form of long, stone-walled gardens stretching back behind each house. The residences and workshops of the very smallest towns comprised simply two rows of house plots facing each other across a main road, or a tight cluster centred on a marketplace, but the more successful towns spread into more complicated and irregular plans. Where different stages of urban growth were characterised by differences in the dimensions of burgage plots, the contrasts often remained to be recorded on modern maps. Historical reconstruction of settlement plans is most secure when such cartographic evidence can be matched with that of medieval rentals listing these properties. Their size and the ground rent varied from town to town, but annual rents of 6d or is were common. At Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, where a market charter was granted by King John early in the thirteenth century, there were subsequently 123 burgage plots occupied at a standard rent of is each. Situated near a trading area, burgage plots were adapted to the needs of families who depended upon manufacturing and trade for their daily subsistence. They allowed their tenants a house and outbuildings by the street, and enough space to grow vegetables and to keep hens, without implying any deeper commitment to agriculture. Since most craftsmen worked from their own homes, the sights, sounds and smells of manufacturing must have pervaded the streets through much of the day.

Adjacent to main town streets there commonly stood barns for storing harvested crops, and behind the houses lay fields and closes, for though many townsmen no longer lived an agrarian way of life, no hard line divided urban and rural economies. Particularly among the wealthier ranks of urban society there were landowning families, most noticeably in those older towns, such as Cambridge, that had extensive fields attached to them. Pasturing animals on town commons was a right whose importance to the burgesses of many towns is indicated by the number of disputes concerning enclosures that reached town courts, and sometimes went on to the king’s justices. This meant that, quite apart from beasts ofburden, and animals on their way to and from market, town streets were liable to be thronged at some times of day with the livestock of local residents being moved from place to place. Other animals got on to the streets by error. Stray pigs, a universal problem in medieval towns, not only endangered passers-by (especially children) but also damaged property and dug up road surfaces. Pig-keeping amongst the inhabitants of Southwark and Westminster was encouraged by the size of the London market, and even there pigs were liable to escape into the streets for want of proper attention. In 1408, twenty-seven people were charged with allowing their pigs to stray in Westminster. A town with walls might have some hope of restricting movement by farm animals; the town court at Ludlow tried in 1476 to exclude pigs from within the walls. This strategy was not usually available, however, and it is doubtful how effective it was.

Livestock around town inevitably complicated problems of waste disposal and public hygiene. The inevitable deposits of animal dung were complemented by the sweepings and emptyings of urban households, which accumulated particularly on patches of waste land and in back streets. Shitelane, in fourteenth-century Winchester, was appropriately named. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries public concern with the disposal of waste from private households increased. Those who deposited filth in unauthorised places were fined, and householders were made responsible for the street in front of their houses. There was also more public provision for the salubriousness of public spaces. Londoners had had a public latrine at Queenhithe as early as the twelfth century, and other towns had provided such facilities near central marketing areas by the fifteenth. Such measures could only expect a limited success, given the magnitude of the problems of waste disposal.

Townsmen commonly cleaned their clothing at common washing places in flowing water. Drinking water, by contrast, was most commonly drawn from wells. The shortage of wells was one of the reasons why the bishop of Salisbury moved the site of Salisbury from Old Sarum in 1219. Common wells were a consistent feature of urban topography. In Colchester, for example, Stockwell, St Helen’s Well, a well in Trinity Lane and All Saints’ Well were all within easy reach of the town centre.1 Public supplies were augmented by the private wells of wealthier householders. Not until late in the middle ages is there widespread evidence of water brought into towns by conduits. About the years 1448-51, the inhabitants of Wells constructed a system to pipe fresh water into the marketplace, bringing water from a source in the grounds of the bishop of Wells. Maintaining clean water supplies was a task of the urban authorities that met with setbacks through the contamination of wells and streams by poor drainage, badly sited cesspits, and the careless disposal of waste products. The hand of urban authorities concerned with this problem was strengthened by statutory legislation of I388 which, in order to prevent the spread of disease, prohibited the throwing of garbage into watercourses.

The principal town streets led past houses, workshops and outbuildings to the central trading area that was vital to a town’s existence. Not surprisingly, new towns were often located on an existing road, especially

Essex Record Office, Colchester and North-East Essex Branch, Colchester Court Rolls 38/2, 5o/i3v, 54/i9v; Colchester Oath Book, fos. 165—6.

At the point where it crossed a river or formed a junction with another road. Urban trade encouraged bridge construction, though too little is known about the dates at which most bridges were first built to be sure how closely the two were connected. Numerous new towns and markets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have an Old English name ending in ‘ford’ - such as Chelmsford, Rochford, Romford, Stratford and Wolvesford (the modern Witham), all in Essex - but it was unusual for them not to have bridges by the thirteenth century, and in some instances it is possible to show a link between the development of towns and the development of communications in this way. At Durham, Framwellgate Bridge was constructed at the behest of Ranulph Flambard, bishop of Durham from 1099 to 1128, who also created an adjacent borough below his castle walls. The importance of good road communications for the trade of medieval towns was recognised in the king’s special interest in preserving the peace along them. The Anglo-Norman Leges Henrici Primi (1113 X1118) explain that roads to cities and royal towns were designated the king’s highway, and that they should be wide enough for two wagons to pass; especially heavy penalties were imposed on those who assaulted anyone travelling. The same principle is implied in Edward I’s Statute of Winchester of 1285, which provided that the verges of the king’s highway were to be kept broad and clear to inhibit the ambushing of travelling merchandise.2

The marketing area was often a single open space in which various types of stalls could be set out. Late medieval evidence from Banbury, for example, shows a large central marketplace in which separate areas were consigned for corn (Cornhill), meat (Butchers’ Row) and livestock (Pig Market, Cow Fair). Where there was no adequate open space, markets might be distributed between a few central streets, as in Stratford-upon-Avon, where there was a Sheep Street, a Swine Street and a Corn Street. Market authorities usually provided market stalls, from which they derived rents. The trade of such formal markets was chiefly to serve the needs of local households. In the simplest case small towns had a single market day each week, when outsiders would bring their goods into the town for the townsfolk to buy, and would take away such cash and urban produce as they needed. Sunday markets were abandoned during the early thirteenth century, in the face of clerical disapproval, and there were other restrictions on choice. Disputes could arise if two neighbouring markets

L. J. Downer, ed., Leges Henrici Primi (Oxford, 1972), p. 248; Statutes of the Realm (ii vols., 1810—28), i, p. 97.

Were held on the same day, and it was incumbent on the founders of new towns to avoid such clashes.

In larger towns the layout of public markets was more complex. Here markets were held on numerous days of the week, sometimes every day, to meet household needs. Different commodities were traded in different parts of the town. In late medieval York trading points had multiplied to the point that much of the central area was taken up with buying and selling. The chamberlains’ accounts of the city of York record income from the two principal markets for provisions, the Pavement and the Thursday Market, as well as from the fish market on Foss Bridge.173 The London system was even more complex, and there was no single market there for most commodities. By the thirteenth century there were two principal riverside corn markets at Billingsgate and Queenhithe, and two inland grain markets, where principal roads entered the city, the four together reflecting ‘the regional origin of the grain sold in them, the means by which it was transported to London, and the other commercial interests of those who dealt in it’.174 Southwark, outside the city’s jurisdiction, was another terminus of the grain trade.

Many older towns were entered through gates in a town wall, but this was not true of newer ones except when there was some special problem of defence, as at Southampton, where walls were constructed during the thirteenth century. Where there were town gates they were often used for purposes of public regulation and control - as points for the collection of tolls on trade, for example. The Leges Henrici Primi assert baldly that ‘every town has as many streets as it has main gates appointed for the collection of tolls and dues’.175 Walls were often used to restrict movement at night, and it was common to prohibit the location of brothels inside them. The many towns without walls had to achieve similar objectives in other ways. Where walls existed, urban growth regularly implied the creation of suburbs, characteristically sprawling along the roads beyond the town gates, as at Gloucester. ‘Suburbs were the growing edges of the town.’176 Settlement densities could be every bit as high in some of these suburbs as in the inner precinct, especially if the

Walled area included the grounds of abbeys, cathedrals or castles, as well as the cemeteries attached to parish churches.

Any large town attracted suppliers of large quantities who wished to sell their wares in smaller lots either to individual households or to intermediaries of various kinds. When grain and fish were brought by sea (to port towns such as Newcastle, Lynn, Southampton and Bristol), by river (to riverbank towns such as York and Cambridge) or by road in wagons, it was advantageous for these goods to be sold near the point of disembarking or unloading, especially if the wharfs were away from the town centre. It would have been a major disincentive to supplying Exeter, for example, if shippers had had to transport cargoes from the wharves at Topsham on the Exe estuary to the town markets, four miles away. Most large towns therefore had bulk markets separate from the central retail markets, either on the waterside or at a point where a major street entered the town. These were subject to tight regulations about how trade was to proceed in order to prevent individual townsmen from cornering supplies.

All towns had shops as well as public markets. They varied in character from purpose-built buildings on main thoroughfares, built by landlords or speculators, to parts of the tradesmen’s own homes. A shop was an intermediate space between the public world of the market and the private world of the family home, a space where craftsmen could both work and meet their customers. Shops were characteristically places where manufactured goods were made, but some traders specialised in repairs, like the cobbler who mended shoes. Others offered personal services, like the barbers’ shops that were a common feature of town streets. Shops had to be secure and weatherproof buildings, and some were the lower floors of two-storey structures. Where land was very valuable in town centres, as in thirteenth-century Cheapside, they were often surprisingly small. The average Cheapside shop at the peak of London’s growth around 1300 was 6-7 feet wide and 10-12 feet deep, and on prime corner sites they might be no more than 4 feet square.7

Another half-public, half-private context for trade was that of the taverns, alehouses and inns that were becoming a more regular and conspicuous feature of town streets from the thirteenth century onwards. By the fifteenth century inns and the larger alehouses had distinctive names and signs. Taverns sold wine, alehouses sold ale, and inns provided accommodation and maintenance for visitors and stabling for their

D. Keene, ‘Shops and shopping in medieval London’, in L. Grant, ed., Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London, (British Archaeological Association, 1990), p. 34.

Horses. It is common to find the keepers of these establishments listed in town court records, charged with the infringement of rules that universally regulated the price of bread, ale and wine. Besides conviviality, they supplied a context for certain sorts of trade especially between burgesses, who were less bound by urban regulations than outside traders were. Innkeepers were themselves often actively engaged in a wider range of business, assisted by the numerous contacts they gained through keeping open house.

With all these signs of activity, the importance of manufacturing and trade to town life would have been immediately apparent. The power structure would have been more difficult to interpret merely from evidence that met the eye. The relationship between the town’s inhabitants and the owners or occupiers of its most impressive buildings varied considerably from town to town. A castle or an abbey could mean that the town had a powerful overlord, but it was not necessarily so.

Many towns had castles nearby, or even in their centre. In old towns they had been violently imposed on the townsmen as a repressive measure — probably not within living memory in thirteenth-century England, though the same could not be said of Wales. Larger towns might even have more than one; London had three and York had two, one on either side of the River Ouse. Superimposed castles had a substantial effect on the topography of the older towns. Sometimes, as at Stamford, they were constructed on sites away from principal centres of population, but - as at Gloucester, Colchester, York, Lincoln, Oxford and Norwich - they had often been placed within town walls on space already occupied, and their development had entailed the destruction of residential property. Other castles, in the course of time, had been built not in existing urban centres but in defensive positions in the countryside, and in these cases town life accompanied or followed castle construction rather than attracting it. There are numerous examples in southern England — as at Corfe in Dorset, Arundel in Sussex or Devizes in Wiltshire, and in the Welsh marches at Ludlow and Monmouth. New castle towns were also prominent in areas of late urban development, such as northern England, where there were imposing examples at Newcastle and Carlisle, as well as at smaller centres such as Barnard Castle, Warkworth and Alnwick. Such castle boroughs had continued to be founded, even in southern England, for a century after the Norman Conquest.

During the century before 1200 castles had been a real danger to the safety and continuity of urban life, since they drew towns into the thick of conflict in times of civil war. The conflict that followed King John’s repudiation of Magna Carta (1215) was a sequence of sieges that saw action in Rochester, Colchester, Windsor, Barnard Castle, Durham, Lincoln and Dover. But during the thirteenth century urban castles dropped out of the picture as serious military installations. Large numbers were abandoned and fell into disrepair over the course of the following centuries. The castles at Bedford, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Exeter, Hereford, Lincoln, Norwich, Oxford, Salisbury, Shrewsbury and York, as well as at some smaller towns, were said to be in ruins by 1500. At Worcester the stones of the castle were used for repairing the town walls and gates in 1459. Where urban castles survived through the later middle ages, and remained prominent features of the urban landscape, they owed their survival to purposes other than defence. Some served as residences for royal, baronial or episcopal households, as at Windsor, Warwick, Ludlow or Durham, and in these cases they characteristically remained administrative centres as well. Another factor in the survival of urban castles was their adaptability for the purpose of royal justice. Castle halls could accommodate royal courts of law, particularly in county towns where they housed the assizes and the county court, and the towers and dungeons of the castle could be used as prisons. The most notorious example of a castle being taken over as a prison was the Tower of London. Many county towns relied on some part of their castle as a prison, as at Colchester, Carlisle, Chester, Exeter, Hereford, Newcastle upon Tyne, Oakham, Northampton, Rochester, Shrewsbury, Winchester and York.

Because abbeys have a longer history than castles, their relationship to the development of urban topography was more complex. Some were pre-Conquest foundations that had been founded on new sites and had been the primary reason for a town coming into existence, as at St Albans, Bury St Edmunds, Ely, Peterborough and Durham. In all these instances the abbey constituted a very prominent feature of the urban landscape. But since the founding of new abbeys near existing towns had remained common in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, there were many towns for which the monastic presence was a secondary feature, as at Colchester, whose two religious houses, both just outside the town walls, were founded around 1100. Either way it was common, especially for larger towns, to have at least one monastic house standing cheek by jowl with burgage properties, often constituting something of a threat to the interests of the townsmen.

Imposing though castles and abbeys were as part of the urban scene, as symbols of power they could be deceptive. Colchester, with a Norman castle and two substantial abbeys, nevertheless enjoyed a very substantial degree of administrative autonomy, and the effective centre of daily decision-making, in the hands of an urban elite, was a relatively inconspicuous moot hall beside the town’s central marketplace. Some towns were administered by leading burgesses in the thirteenth century and afterwards from a central guildhall, the name implying that selfgovernment had developed through some understanding between the burgesses and the members of a merchant guild. Such lowlier buildings provided the space for town courts and council chambers. Here the money collected from tolls was guarded in a communal wooden chest, and here were stored the records that increasingly from the thirteenth century onwards charted the growing scope and sophistication of urban government by townsmen. Most larger towns had such administrative headquarters, commonly situated near the central markets since the supervision of trade was one of the principal duties of town officers.

The cultural activities of townsmen were represented most visibly by church buildings. In older towns, especially those that had grown vigorously before 1200, the early multiplication of churches founded by pious landowners and townsmen had created large numbers of tiny parishes with only slight endowments. London had over 100 parishes by 1200. No other town could compare with this, but Norwich and Winchester each had about fifty-seven, Lincoln forty-eight, and York over forty. In these towns, as in some smaller ones, the parish was a very local focus of interest that brought together people from a small range of streets. However, the proliferation of urban parishes came to a halt in the mid twelfth century. The development of ecclesiastical law then assigned defined territorial rights to existing parishes, so that any attempt to reshape parish boundaries meant a loss of income to the rector. Consequently, many newer towns, such Chelmsford, had only a single parish church. It was often difficult to achieve agreement even for this level of provision, which explains why many new towns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became chapelries in existing parishes rather than parishes in their own right. For example, the new town of Market Harborough in Leicestershire, founded about 1170, remained a chapelry dependent on the parish church of Great Bowden. The new town of Hartlepool, founded on the Durham coast about the same time, was similarly dependent on the older parish church at Hart.

Besides their parish churches, townsmen had recourse to other centres of instruction and devotion. The thirteenth century witnessed the foundation of friaries in many of the more prosperous towns of England. Unlike monks, who were at least supposed to turn their backs on the secular world, friars had an explicit mission to the laity that was best served in larger centres of population and thus they deliberately selected towns as sites both for their priories and for much of their work of evangelisation. Some towns had four or more houses of friars of different orders by 1300 - not only Winchester and Norwich, for example, but also Boston, Lynn and Newcastle. The friars commonly took over central urban spaces. The Franciscans (Greyfriars) came to Gloucester about 1230 and the Dominicans (Blackfriars) soon afterwards; both were given sites within the city walls. When the Carmelites (Whitefriars) came there in about 1268, however, they went outside the walls to the north-east.

TOWNS AND TRADE

The thirteenth century marked the conclusion of over three centuries of urban growth. Since the late Saxon period, the number, size and distribution of towns had developed impressively, to the point that by 1250 there was a framework of urban trading centres across the kingdom. Some towns continued to grow in response to increasing demand for the goods and services they produced, so that the urban population of medieval England attained a peak somewhere around 1300. The market demand sustaining this expansion derived in part from the expenditure of greater landlords, both secular and religious, but more significantly from the purchase of goods and services by lesser landlords and villagers. Urbanisation was also encouraged in some contexts by the long-distance trade across the North Sea and the English Channel, though before the later fourteenth century the principal English exports - wool, hides, grain, minerals and other raw materials - had little impact on urban employment outside the growing port towns.

As an example of growth in the kingdom’s older towns, we may consider the borough of Gloucester, not yet a cathedral city, which perhaps had between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants in 1200. At that time the town already had three abbeys (St Peter’s, St Oswald’s and Llanthony), eleven parish churches, three hospitals and a castle that served as a centre of royal administration. In the following century the number of institutional households increased further with the establishment of the three friaries. This number and range of ecclesiastical institutions implies that Gloucester ranked among England’s twenty principal towns. Gloucester benefited from the growing wealth of the surrounding countryside and smaller market towns. Its iron and cloth industries served local buyers, and other mundane manufactures included soap, needles, girdles, gloves and barrels. There was a fishing industry that supplied inland consumers. The town also offered commercial services for the marketing of Cotswold wool. Besides their capacity to participate in regional development, Gloucester people were also able to benefit from the expansion of long-distance trade because of the town’s position on the River Severn. Ships engaged in trade along the river from the West Midlands to Bristol and South Wales, and also to Ireland. Migrants from as far away as Cornwall and Ireland responded to the growing commercial and manufacturing opportunities the town had to offer. All these developments encouraged an increasing density of settlement within the town centre and continuing physical expansion beyond. The development of suburbs continued into the earlier thirteenth century. To the north, houses and shops stretched beyond the old North Gate of the walled Roman city along Lower Northgate Street to a region called Newland. Beyond East Gate a suburb developed in what was called Barton Street. Beyond Westgate the suburbs stretched down to the river in part of the town called Home Bridge.

All over the kingdom, meanwhile, the number of towns had increased as a result of landlord enterprise, continuing a pattern of scattered urban development that had been vigorous since the eleventh century. The classic study of these new foundations, by Maurice Beresford, identifies at least forty-five towns founded on new sites between 1200 and 1299, with another twenty probably from the same period.177 A further nine originated between 1300 and 1370. The thirteenth-century newcomers include many that attained a lasting importance as local market towns - such as Haslemere (Surrey), Weymouth (Dorset), Salisbury (Wilts.), Thame (Oxon), Chipping Sodbury and Northleach (both Glos.). Some achieved even greater heights in the course of later economic development, notably Leeds (Yorks.) and Liverpool (Lancs.), both of which were founded in 1207, and Hull (Yorks.), re-founded in 1293. Other new enterprises, closely analogous to Beresford’s new towns, transformed existing rural settlements. Olney (Bucks.) was reconstructed as a town by the earl of Chester probably not long before 1237, and

Lechlade (Glos.) was similarly developed during the 1220s by the abbot of Gloucester.

How urban did medieval England become as a result of these developments? Estimates of the proportion of the population that lived in towns depend on what we are prepared to think of as a town and what we are disposed to accept as a figure for the population of England as a whole. If we take a high estimate of total population (six million) and a low estimate of urban population (two-thirds of a million) around 1300, then the proportion of the total living in towns works out at 10 per cent; but if we work with a low estimate of total population (four and a half million) and a high estimate of urban population (just under one million), as can also be proposed for the same date, the proportion is over 20 per cent.178 It is reasonable on this understanding to suppose that the urban population of England was between 10 and 20 per cent of the total around 1300; most writers on the subject tend to prefer the upper part of this range. The total urban population of the kingdom declined, as did the total population of the kingdom, between the early fourteenth century and the mid fifteenth, and it was still significantly lower in 1500 than it had been in 1300, but there is no reason to suppose that the urban proportion was reduced.

On any interpretation, England was a land of predominantly very small towns even at the height of its medieval urban development. In 1300 probably five out of six towns had fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. At most sixteen towns had populations over 10,000, and even in 1300 the proportion of the population in towns of over this size was less than i per cent of the total population of the kingdom. Only London, with a population in 1300 estimated at 60,000-80,000 (or 100,000 if we include its suburbs on either side of the Thames), would count as a large city by European standards; by 1300 its metropolitan dominance ‘was already firmly established as a fact of English urban life’.179 The heavy preponderance of little towns is chiefly attributable to the characteristically slight dependence of the English economy on long-distance or overseas trade, and the correspondingly low level of specialisation between them. It may also in part be related to the powerlessness of individual towns to exercise economic control over surrounding territories, which meant that it was difficult for towns to restrict the development of their neighbours by direct compulsion. This distinguishes the leading English towns from some of their more powerful late medieval equivalents in northern Italy and Flanders. The English context was one in which urban growth was overwhelmingly competitive in response to the growth of local demand for basic services and manufactures.

By reducing the costs of trading, including the costs of risk and uncertainty, urban markets contributed benefits to traders of all sorts, and that was the principal reason why so many could be newly established in a period of expanding local trade. Families that depended upon commerce and manufacturing for a living would be attracted to town life precisely because of the lower costs of trading there, and no compulsion was needed to persuade people to move from country villages into prospering towns. Yet the growth of towns as centres of consumption, because of the range of new opportunities for trade and employment that they opened up, undoubtedly benefited social groups other than townsmen. The greater ease with which peasant families could sell their farm produce was a mixed blessing, because it laid them open to new forms of exploitation by landlords hungry for cash. Yet many families in country areas benefited from the wider range of consumer goods available, particularly in the context of rising real incomes after the Black Death. Greater dependence upon the market, with its attendant risks of indirectly transmitted crises, were to some extent compensated by the greater confidence with which people could trade in normal circumstances, through closely supervised institutions of trade. The price to be obtained for goods in an urban market was a competitive one that reflected relative scarcities of supply and pressures of demand, and was to that extent recognised as a just one.

The operations of townsmen in search of the most favourable sources of supply brought about considerable progress in the integration of the regional markets for food and raw materials, so that at any given moment grain and livestock were purchased most heavily where they could be acquired most cheaply, and large price differentials were rapidly eliminated. The scope for these institutional developments to bring about price stability in a small country like England was limited to the extent that climatic conditions affected all regions in much the same way. In the famine conditions of 1315-18 prices oscillated wildly, and thousands died of starvation both in towns and country villages. Although England was able to acquire some grain from the Baltic region or from France in years of dearth, the capacity of imports to alleviate hardship was modest in comparison with the benefits of international trade in more recent centuries. However, by 1300, at least for southern and eastern England, it

Is possible to discern the rudiments of a national market centring on London. A study of the grain trade of the home counties has confirmed in detail that in the later thirteenth century the city was a powerful enough centre to integrate the price structure over much of southern England, with particularly clearly marked price gradients from the city’s major supply region along the Thames Valley.11 Price formation was probably least structured in the north and west of England, where the impact of urban demand was more localised and where transport was more costly.

The pattern of urban supply varied in detail between towns, but local trade patterns had common characteristics. There was a limited distance over which peasants and farm managers were willing to transport grain and livestock by road if their sale required personal supervision, and this created a common structure in which each town was a local centre for marketing by small producers. The thirteenth-century lawbook Bracton conservatively defined 62=3 miles as the distance over which goods could be conveniently traded in a day, and perhaps that represents some sort of norm, although longer road journeys to market of ten or twelve miles are recorded.180 181 The sale of farm produce was often the responsibility of women from peasant families, who carried their butter, poultry or other produce to town, sold it from the appropriate stalls, paid the tolls the town demanded, and took home the cash remaining from any purchases to pay rents, fines or taxes. Estate officers, too, were often responsible for selling their employers’ produce in urban markets. By 1300 most countrymen had more than one centre within such a distance, and the marketing areas of different towns overlapped. If this had been the only pattern of supply it could easily be visually represented by locating towns on a map and drawing a regular circle around each one.

To the extent that middlemen supervened in supplying towns, however, marketing structures were more complicated, and the distance over which goods were traded was more extended. Wider catchment areas for bulky goods were facilitated if a town had good water communications, since transport by water was much cheaper than by land. London could not have been fed from lands and pastures within a 12-mile radius of the city, and the heightened role of middlemen there is evident both from the prominence of corn merchants, or bladers, in the thirteenth-century ruling elite, and from the city’s dependence upon remote sources of supply. A large town might become regularly dependent upon a smaller one as a collecting centre. Henley-upon-Thames (Berks.) was a regular up-river resort of London grain merchants, and Faversham was a comparable source of supply down river.182 Opinions are currently divided over the extent to which, outside London, urban growth depended upon such supply links between the larger and smaller towns. James Masschaele has stressed the role of smaller towns as part of the supply network of the fifty larger ones.183 It remains to be empirically determined at which point down the urban hierarchy such networks in fact ceased to be significant. No complex dependence upon external markets was needed to supply foodstuffs to Colchester, with its population of around three or four thousand.184

The extent of interdependence between towns was not limited to the structure of agrarian trade. Other patterns of urban hierarchy resulted directly from differences of urban specialisation. Although it is difficult to distinguish significant variations in occupational structure between one little market town and another, there were definite contrasts between small towns and larger ones, especially when those larger ones were ports or were associated with some distinctive field of mercantile enterprise. Sea fish, and imported goods such as wine, salt, dyestuffs and millstones, required redistribution from ports to dealers in inland towns, and the growth of ports on England’s southern, eastern and south-western coasts since the eleventh century - Newcastle, Boston, Lynn, Great Yarmouth, London, the Cinque Ports, Southampton, Poole, Plymouth, Bristol - implies that structures of dependence were part of more general urban growth. Superior manufactures - high-quality cloths and metalware, for example - also derived from particular towns, and depended upon mercantile networks for their distribution. The sort of development to be seen at Gloucester clearly depended upon the existence of distribution networks with other towns. Such differences of specialisation, which affected the decisions of large households about how to supply their different requirements, created a hierarchical distinction between the larger towns, where quality and speciality goods were obtainable, and the numerous smaller towns whose products were more ordinary. Busier towns were also able to offer a range of services - especially in law, finance and education - that were much less likely to be available in a smaller centre. Besides governing some patterns of trade and credit between smaller towns and larger ones, such specialisms inevitably influenced the movements of traders between town and town, and even to some extent patterns of inter-urban migration.

Following the demographic disasters of the fourteenth century, the famines of 1315-18 and the Black Death of 1348-9, it is likely that for at least a century and a half larger towns became less reliant on smaller ones as sources of cereals. As pressure on agricultural resources declined through reduced consumption, and as transport costs rose through scarcities of labour, supplies from the immediate locality became more preponderant. Henley and Faversham were of diminishing importance in London’s grain supplies in this period, and it is unlikely that such a weakening of extended supply networks was unique to the capital. River traffic on the Thames contracted during the fifteenth century.

Meanwhile, the networking of towns for the distribution of pastoral products and manufactured or imported goods became more advanced as standards of living rose. The growth of urban textile industries in the later fourteenth century, and again in the later fifteenth, was not solely in response to export markets, important though these were. A higher standard of clothing was in demand in the home market, and new mercantile networks came into being to satisfy that demand. In the later fourteenth century a new structure of marketing was needed to distribute the cloth from the growing cloth towns - Coventry, Salisbury, Colchester, Norwich, York - to London, to the ports and to inland centres of distribution and consumption. In this period at Colchester there was a striking growth of commercial links both with London and with Hadleigh, another prospering centre of cloth manufacturing in Suffolk. In the later fifteenth century inter-urban mercantile networks became even more complex, especially between provincial towns and London, as the textile industry diffused to a large number of smaller towns all across the kingdom. The more widespread consumption of certain imported manufactures (pottery, linen) and raw materials (iron, dyestuffs) depended upon similarly intensified networks between towns, and especially those that linked the provinces to London. Those towns that could not benefit from the new networks for one reason or another - perhaps in some cases because of the very strength of their institutionalised autonomy - were liable to suffer a loss of trading advantage. The problems of York’s textile industry in the later fifteenth century in competition with the up-and-coming textiles of Halifax, Wakefield and Leeds have been ascribed in part by Jennifer Kermode to the isolation of York merchants from London credit networks.185

The middle ages, though a period of urban growth, was not one in which all towns had even prospects of prosperity, and across the period from 1200 to 1500 there were numerous shifts in the relative position of different towns and different regions. In any circumstances urban fortunes could be expected to be volatile over so long a period, but all the more so because the towns were small; in a town of 10,000 it only needed two or three hundred incoming families to increase the population by 10 per cent. Opportunities for growth were to some extent determined by advantages or disadvantages of location. Not only were sites on main roads, river crossings and navigable rivers favoured in varying degrees by ease of access, but there were additional regional considerations. Different parts of the kingdom had differing urban potential, partly because of contrasting qualities of land and partly because of differences in access to wider trade patterns. The distribution of urban wealth partly reflects the distribution of agricultural resources in an age when it was expensive to carry grain over long distances. The uplands of northern and western England were more conducive to pastoral husbandry than to intensive cropping, and the proportion of the land under cereals was less than it was through much of the Midlands, East Anglia, the home counties and Wessex. The pattern of England’s long-distance trade also favoured the south and east, both because trade along the coast was relatively cheap and because it could be directed to the continent of Europe. The western and more northern coasts of England, though capable of sustaining some trade through Chester, Carlisle, Newcastle and the small Northumbrian ports, were engaged with much poorer trading partners on the edge of the known world. Trade with Ireland was substantial, but could not compare in quantity with that connecting England to the richer populations of France, Spain, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Germany. In 1200 the towns of southern and eastern England were already more populous, wealthier and better located for mercantile enterprise than those in the north and west, and notwithstanding the growth of towns everywhere during the thirteenth century the bias of urbanisation within Britain swung even more strongly to the south-east of the island during the late middle ages.

At every stage, however, the fortunes of towns were shaped to varying degrees by the investment decisions made by individuals and groups, and this introduced a large element of unpredictability into the causes of urban growth in different periods. The decisions of landlords were important to a wide range of towns at different stages of their fortunes. They were particularly apparent, of course, in decisions to build new towns, governed as these were by the economic and political power of individual landlords, the location of their estates, and the amount they were prepared to invest. In the development of older towns, too, landlords’ decisions concerning their physical and institutional infrastructure, the location of large households and the founding of abbeys, all had an impact upon commercial prosperity. Most smaller towns, lacking administrative autonomy, remained heavily dependent on the lords who owned them. Eleanor Carus-Wilson argued, for example, that the development of Castle Combe as a centre of clothmaking was attributable to the personal interest of Sir John Fastolf, who bought and developed the manor. Between 1415 and 1450 he needed cloth in large quantities to fit out his retinue of soldiers in France, and he directed his orders to his own tenants back home. About fifty new houses were built in Castle Combe in the war period, and new fulling mills were constructed for finishing cloth.186

The decisions of the king and other landlords concerning their urban property continued to have some impact on urban prosperity all through the middle ages. For example, the fortunes of Winchester from the thirteenth century were closely related to the abandonment of the city as the centre of royal administration and royal residence. Winchester’s sluggish performance - after its brilliant start in the late Saxon and Norman periods - was partly attributable to the decline of royal interest in the town, and the transfer of government activity to Westminster. In 1200 the permanent administrative centre of the kingdom was already in Westminster, and around that time Winchester Castle stopped being used as a major repository for royal treasure. Kings continued to visit Winchester Castle, though the town’s importance as a military and political centre took a knock with the loss of Normandy in 1204. In the course of time royal visits became less frequent, and the castle was abandoned as a major royal residence after a fire in 1302.

Besides landlords, however, townspeople themselves were agents of urban development, especially in some of England’s largest and proudest towns. The growth of the woollen towns of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries - Beverley, Lincoln, Stamford and Northampton being outstanding among them - seems to be explained more by the enterprise of merchants than by anything that landlords did. The remarkable international success of a handful of the older boroughs in promoting their woollen textiles in the later fourteenth century — York, Salisbury, Colchester, Norwich, Coventry — has similarly to be ascribed to the dynamism of their merchants in opening up new markets and building business connections abroad. This must be the principal reason for the success of particular towns, even if there were more general reasons, such as Edward Ill’s heavy export duties on wool, to explain the success of English cloth exports at this time.

The operations of London merchants, in association with local elites, were critically important both in developing the city’s volume of trade and in determining which other towns benefited from the expansion of cloth exports during the later fifteenth century. The changing level of property values in the city shows that it was not immune from the consequences of fifteenth-century recessions. It is possible that London’s population had fallen between 1300 and 1524, and quite likely that the city had experienced prolonged phases of economic contraction. Nevertheless, relative to other English towns London’s wealth showed a long-term increase, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this indicated an increasingly metropolitan status. The city was concentrating more of the kingdom’s mercantile wealth and activity, and exercising more influence on the fortunes of other towns, so enhancing the southern and eastern bias of England’s urban prosperity. This success owed a great deal to the business practices developed by London merchants, which gave them superior access to credit and superior networks of business contacts both in the English provinces and in the Low Countries. The analysis of merchant enterprise in larger towns focuses on groups, but the case for the importance of mercantile enterprise can be shown to rest in some instances on individuals. Men such as Thomas Spring III of Lavenham were of considerable importance in building up the trade of their respective towns.

One town that lost rank during the thirteenth century was Dunwich, which decayed from being one of the wealthiest ports in England in the late twelfth century as a result of sea floods and the deterioration of its harbour. The town was one of the top ten in the later twelfth century, on a level with Winchester and Lincoln, to judge from the tallage it paid to the crown, but it does not figure amongst the hundred wealthiest towns in 1334. Its defences against the sea were built up in the later thirteenth century after flooding in the 1250s, but renewed inundation in 1287-8 marked a turning point from which recovery proved impossible. Storm damage was cited in 1300 as a reason why the burgesses could not pay Edward I their normal fee farm of ?65. A survey of 1325 showed that 269 houses and twelve other properties had been swept away by the sea. This amounted to about a quarter of the town. This is a clear case of a community being reduced severely as a result of natural disaster. Ports that did not suffer from Dunwich’s problems were probably amongst the biggest success stories. Among the wealthiest twenty English towns in 1334 were Bristol (second), Newcastle upon Tyne (fourth), Boston (fifth), Great Yarmouth (seventh), Lynn (eleventh), Southampton (seventeenth) and Ipswich (nineteenth), and it is likely that all these rankings represent a significant advance over the position of these towns in 1200. The tallages and aids demanded by the crown from Newcastle, Southampton and Yarmouth rose relative to those from other towns in the course of the period 1154—1312.187 These towns were benefiting from the combined effects of favourable location, supportive landlord investment and successful local mercantile initiatives.

For the period between 1334 and 1524 the evidence for changes in urban rank is better because of the availability of nationwide tax assessments from those years, and though the information has to be used with caution, some of the changes are sufficiently striking to be worth detailed comment (table 6.1). Of the twenty leading towns in 1524, some — Bury St Edmunds, Colchester, Coventry, Lavenham, Salisbury, Totnes — had benefited to varying degrees and at various times from the success of local merchants in promoting the growth of clothmaking. Exeter had developed as a port serving the exceptionally prosperous economy of the south-western textile region. Some of the other successes — Maidstone, Reading, Worcester — are less easily explained. Some of the twenty leading towns of 1334 had meanwhile dropped behind — notably Lincoln, Boston and Yarmouth. The relative decline of the latter two illustrates a malaise affecting a number of east-coast ports in the fifteenth century, chiefly under the impact of competition from London, showing that

154  Richard Britnell

Table 6.i. The twenty wealthiest English towns in 1524, with changes in ranking since 1334

Source: R. H. Britnell, ‘The economy of British towns, 1300—1540’, in D. M. Palliser, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, I: 600—1540 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 329.

Locational characteristics could affect towns quite differently in different economic circumstances.

THE EXERCISE OF POWER

All English towns were subject both to the apparatus of royal government and to rights of tenurial lordship, whether that of the king or of some other lord. Landlords’ rights took many forms, but the most common gave them rents from burgage plots, market stalls and land in the town fields and pastures, together with the profits of petty jurisdiction and tolls on trade. How a landlord chose to manage his urban possessions could make a considerable difference to his relations with townsmen on his estate. The larger a town became, the heavier the administrative task of managing its affairs, since the collection of revenues, the supervision of markets and the managing of litigation all required ongoing attention through the year. Lords with large and complex urban revenues often (not always) divested themselves of the managerial burden by transferring responsibilities to an individual lessee, to a consortium, or to the townsmen as a body. This last practice necessarily implied some administrative autonomy on the part of those concerned, especially where the lease included revenues from markets and fairs. By 1200 the larger royal towns were leased out either to an individual royal agent or, increasingly commonly, to the leading inhabitants of the town, in exchange for an annual payment. Early in the reign of Richard I the right to lease the king’s revenues had been conceded by charter in perpetuity to the townsmen of Bedford, Colchester, Hereford, Northampton and Worcester, and from then on such grants become more numerous than before.

Some towns on the lands of wealthy churches or lay landowners other than the king were similarly given charters by their lords, and were authorised to elect their own senior officers, though it was unusual for such officials to have powers as extensive as those in royal towns. It was no foregone conclusion that all townsmen should enjoy even this limited degree of independence. Bury St Edmunds, St Albans, Evesham and Durham - all towns founded at the gates of major monasteries - remained seigniorial boroughs, both because administrative costs were relatively low for a resident landlord and because abbeys wished to maintain a high degree of control over their immediate environments. Small towns, too, were often administered by nominees of their overlords rather than by elected officers, since they presented fewer administrative problems than large boroughs and had scanty reserves of competent administrators amongst their inhabitants. An estate steward commonly presided over their courts, and estate officials collected judicial fines and tolls. In the late fifteenth century the ordinary courts of the bishop of Durham’s borough of Northallerton were held before appointed townsmen; but twice a year, at Michaelmas and Easter, the steward of the bishop’s liberty presided over the chief sessions, which handled tenurial, economic and social regulation.

Towns varied greatly in their importance to landlords. At one extreme, we may take the case of Westminster, whose value to Westminster Abbey increased from about 2 per cent of the abbey’s total revenue in 1086 to 13 per cent in 1530. This is an outstandingly impressive example of the possibilities. By contrast, if we take the small town of Clare (Suffolk), which was at the seat of the great baronial honour of Clare, its value in the 1330s was about ?16, less than i per cent of the total value of the estate. If a landlord decided to retain direct control over a town, whatever the reason, the holding of courts became a matter of obligation that might not be a lucrative one: some town courts cost more to run than they earned in revenue. In the case of small towns, it is often difficult to see where the advantage in direct rule lay.

Many small towns had no institutions to distinguish them from the inhabitants of a rural settlement except that they held their property by burgage tenure. The existence of a market gave the inhabitants of a borough the right to trade without paying toll, but the same right was expected amongst the tenants of manors with ordinary village markets. Rights to put animals on borough commons, or to fish in particular streams, similarly have their plain analogies amongst the tenants of rural communities. However, particularly in larger towns, townsmen often showed active concern for the status of the towns in which they lived, and common patterns of expectation were born of the emulating of one town by another. By 1200 a variety of distinctive institutions had created a hierarchy of criteria by which a borough’s inhabitants might consider themselves specially privileged. One of these was the formation of a body of borough freemen or burgesses distinct from urban householders, and even including ‘foreign’ burgesses, who were not resident in the borough but who were prepared to pay for urban privileges. The right to freedom of trade, to pasture animals on the town commons and to be considered for office in the borough were detached from rights of tenure, and were made dependent on free status in this distinctive sense. Free status could be achieved by birth (by being the son of a freeman), by completing an apprenticeship in the town, or by being formally admitted in return for a money payment. A further development of burghal status came at the point when burgesses leased urban revenues from the king or other landlord, and so engaged in a large degree of urban self-government. Other, less welcome, marks of status derived in the course of time from the interest shown in urban wealth by the king. Particularly from Edward I’s reign some towns were taxed at a distinctive higher rate and so constituted a sub-group of ‘taxation boroughs’. The summoning of urban representatives to parliaments, increasingly normal from 1295 onwards, created a different but overlapping category of ‘parliamentary boroughs’. Neither of these categories was very fixed, but most of the larger boroughs could always expect to be included in both, and a few took their right to parliamentary representation seriously as an index of status. These various advances in borough status all gave increasing scope for urban elites to organise themselves and to regulate the daily life of the towns in which they exercised authority.