Urban Cultures

The commercial activity of towns prompted some of the most characteristic cultural developments of everyday experience in the later middle ages. The everyday life of markets, inns and taverns is only imperfectly perceptible, though it is clear from sources of the fourteenth century onwards that it was lively. The principal documentary fall-out from this culture consists of written rules and regulations relating to trade, industrial relations, the environment, law and order, and other matters of common concern. People in towns were even more dependent on each other than in the countryside, partly because they did not produce their own means of subsistence, partly because they lived in closer proximity, and they depended on a distinct set of shared facilities. Some of the emergent problems were tackled by statute law, but many urban communities - especially larger ones - formulated additional by-laws. The multiplication of rules for everyday life in large and relatively complex communities is an important and interesting area of medieval cultural development, even if in practice the interpretation and implementation of these rules was much more open to negotiation and compromise than the bare texts of urban ordinances would imply.33

The extent to which new modes of social regulation became intrinsic to urban culture is apparent from the legal records of the later middle ages, and above all from the presentment of leet courts that that met two or three times a year to police minor breaches of the law. On these occasions sworn jurors, in response to a long series of questions put to them in court, reported infringements of statutes and by-laws that had occurred since the last session of the leet. By the fourteenth century a large part of the business of an urban leet court concerned commercial and industrial regulations that had come into existence since the late twelfth century, and the implementation of such rules had increasingly distinguished urban policing from the equivalent leet courts in the countryside. Behind the formal verbiage of urban court rolls lies a rich variety of interplay between law and social values. The mechanical answering of questions often implied little moral commitment by jurors to the procedures in question. The attractions of a steady income from fines encouraged urban authorities to convert some procedures to routine systems of licensing rather than of deterrence; this was notoriously the case with the assize of ale. However, individual brewers (most of whom were women) were liable to real disapproval and the imposition of genuinely penal fines for unacceptable practices, such as the use of fraudulent measures. Clerks recording the business of leet courts sometimes left no doubt that juries had expressed themselves forcibly in denouncing a breach of regulations. One of the most common occasions for such outrage among leet juries was breach of the so-called Statute of Forestallers. Forestalling was the offence of cornering goods on the way to market with the intent to sell them at a higher price, and local juries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries frequently presented forestallers as the prime cause of unexpected price increases that could not be attributed to anything more obvious. The adoption of this infringement of the law by jurors throughout the kingdom as a point of deeply held principle, even though it had been generally enforced as a point of law only from the later thirteenth century, implies that a new moral economy relating to matters of exchange and price formation was in the process of being created.34

In larger towns the development of a distinctive culture along these lines went farther than in smaller ones. Craft guilds became more numerous from the thirteenth century onwards, and especially from the late fourteenth, though their development varied from town to town. Urban crafts were a core area for intervention in the public interest by urban governments, who insisted on approving craft rules before they could be enforced. Because craft guilds were regulating bodies they required officers to enforce discipline and to answer for any defaults, and so the ordinances of craft guilds also had to provide for the election of guild masters, usually as an annual event. Craft guilds also often assumed some of the devotional attributes of religious fraternities, which were also numerous in towns though not particularly distinctive of urban society. The development of the craft represents a rich new culture of rules, responsibilities and forms of association.35 Women participated visibly in the more pious cultural developments of the later middle ages, as in the membership of religious fraternities, but the effect of craft guilds on their status as workers was probably adverse, since crafts imposed a male hierarchy on the organization of production and mostly recognized only male participation.36

Even though craft ordinances may give a misleading impression of rigidity in the structure of work, they created a framework in which relations between craftsmen, and between them and city governments, were negotiated. Their contents may be summarized under five main headings - standards of goods and services, training requirements, complaints procedures, environmental hazards and hours of work - though not all crafts were concerned with all these issues. Crafts powers could be used to inhibit fraudulent trading (such as the passing off of old meat as fresh), to prevent gross inconvenience (such as the failure to manufacture tiles to a standard size), or to maintain the reputation of a town’s export goods. Standards of manufacture were maintained or altered by imposing rules about raw materials, technology or measurements. In Bristol, for example, the craft regulations specified details of the preparation of woad for dyeing, the quality of dye materials to be used, and of other aspects of dyeing technology.37 Rules to control quality were generally accompanied by granting guild officers the right to search the premises of craftsmen for bad workmanship - usually in York two searchers were appointed for each craft. Sometimes this object of craft regulation was met by insisting that two crafts should be kept separate, so that checks on quality could be maintained at each stage of production. At York in the late fourteenth century the crafts of shoemaking and tanning were ordered to be kept distinct to prevent shoes being made of bad leather, and for similar reasons saddlers had to use leather prepared by specialized curriers.38 Regulations often went further by restricting access to a craft to properly trained practitioners. The Coventry barbers of 1421, for example, restricted practice of their craft to those who had served an apprenticeship or could otherwise prove the adequacy of their skill to the guild masters. The standardization of training was a common feature of guild rules, usually by imposing an apprenticeship system. The Coventry barbers of 1421 provided that ‘no man shall take no prentice to the said craft no less years than seven year’. Seven years was an increasingly common period of apprenticeship, though some guilds operated with fewer. The reasons for insisting on apprenticeship were more complex than a mere concern with quality would require, however, and to some extent apprenticeship was a restrictive practice. It guaranteed an employer the labour of the apprentice during the period of apprenticeship - unless the apprentice ran away - and permitted a craft guild to restrict access to a particular trade. Some craft ordinances provided that customer complaints should be brought in the first instance before the masters of the relevant guild, with appeal to the town courts if the guild masters failed to do justice. There were obvious advantages here in keeping cases of a technical nature out of the courts. A number of crafts created environmental hazards, and it was convenient for town authorities to make their members responsible for restricting the nuisance. It was the duty of the butchers’ craft to ensure that the area around the meat stalls was left clean. If self-regulation failed, the masters would be reported before a leet jury and would be fined. Craft rules also often restricted hours of work; the Coventry barbers in 1421 stipulated that a barber who shaved on a Sunday without permission should be fined ten shillings.39

Larger towns, because of their distinctive problem of having to negotiate between conflicting social groups, developed complex symbolic codes to express ideals of harmony.40 The favourite image was that of the body, whose parts could be allocated differences of status, the head necessarily being the most exalted. Since differences between eyes, ears, noses and so on are also analogous to differences of employment, corporate imagery could be used to weld status differences to occupational differences as twin aspects of a natural social harmony. This organic view of society, in which the totality was regarded as a living thing of which individuals are adjuncts, is far removed from the laissez-faire ideology of modern liberal thought. Its origins were much older, and it derived biblical authority from the epistles of St Paul.41 When combined with the imagery of Christ’s body and blood, the bread and wine of the Mass, it offered a powerful symbolic legitimation of the social order. In the late middle ages it was ritually represented in some towns at the feast of Corpus Christi by processions to church that simultaneously idealized respect for differences of rank and drew attention to the need for cooperation between crafts. This latter symbolism was most explicit in the mystery plays organized in some towns - notably York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry. ‘Mystery’, or ‘mastery’, was synonymous with ‘craft’, and the plays were so called because individual crafts were responsible for particular plays.42 Both processions and plays were a matter of public obligation; in 1461 the burgesses of Coventry introduced a fine of ?5 on any craft that failed to produce its play according to custom.43

Romantic conservatives have sometimes taken this ideology as a representation of the way in which medieval urban society truly was - a harmonious world of cooperation between men and women of different status and different occupational groups. Little knowledge of the historical reality is required to see that this interpretation will not do. Urban societies were frequently riven with conflicts between employers and employees and between rival crafts, and the corporatist ideology of the Corpus Christi procession was responding to a troubling reality rather than imaging public complacency. The same problems that fostered a distinctive urban culture through a multiplication of rules, increasing activity by the law courts and an increasing number of craft guilds and other regulatory bodies, is to be seen here too in the formation of a distinctive civic form of ideology with associated rituals of corporate life. If the ceremonial flourished most in larger towns, that was not simply because they could afford a bigger display. It was also because the problems of conflicting interests in urban society were there most visible.