Many of the dealings of artisans and traders, both before the Black Death and afterwards, were with neighbouring countrymen, and the broader the region a town supplied the more different types of manufacturing and trade that could flourish there. Archaeologists often discover industrial sites in the middle of medieval towns, since most crafts were conducted in the workman’s own home or nearby. Even in small towns like Thornbury (Gloucestershire) as many as thirty-five different nonagricultural activities are recorded in personal bynames, though many people had smallholdings as well.13 The multiplication of small towns during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries meant that all over England communities of primary craftsmen - bakers, butchers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, tailors, shoemakers, potters - were separating themselves from more agricultural contexts as demand for their services increased. At the same time, the growth of larger towns was accompanied by a growing range of urban crafts and trades there. Norman London was already outstanding for the number of its different occupations,14 and that number increased during the following centuries. Other larger towns followed at a distance with dozens of other different crafts whose presence was increasingly signified in street names in the chief commercial centres. In Winchester between 1300 and 1339, at a time when the city’s population was perhaps about 10,000, there were fifty-seven different recorded non-agricultural crafts and trades, even excluding the city officers and the domestic staff of large households and placing all merchants as a single category.15 Urban economies offered a wider range of employments for women as well as men. Since husbands were responsible in law for the debts of their wives, legal records underplay the extent to which women participated in the growing range of occupational possibilities, but they had a prominent role in the expanding victualling trades during the thirteenth century - especially in retailing foodstuffs and in the brewing and selling of ale16 - and were important in the preparatory stages of the textile industry. Most of the work that was specifically female was low-paid. Women were also important behind the scenes in many male-dominated crafts, working alongside their husbands, apprentices and hired servants. A woman who continued in business after her husband’s death, as some did, had presumably been involved in it during his lifetime.17
The wider range of commodities and services available in large towns meant that their catchment area was larger than that of smaller ones. Cheap clothing might be obtainable from a local market, and some better qualities might be available from time to time at village fairs, but the best range of choice, especially of quality goods, was to be had from a larger town of several thousand inhabitants. The widest range of crafts of all kinds was available in London, whose status as a centre of consumption for the rich was already well established by the thirteenth century.18
Some towns, meanwhile, were actively centres of long-distance mercantile enterprise. Merchants either travelled themselves or sent their assistants round Britain, or to Ireland, France and the Low Countries, and sometimes even further afield. The English were not among the great mercantile peoples of Europe. Much of the overseas trade was in the hands of foreign merchants. Yet in either case the growth of interregional trade encouraged the expansion of ports and some other towns with a distinctive specialization. Between 1100 and 1300 the wool trade with the continent grew through southern and eastern ports, and there were other export trades in grain, hides and minerals. The western coast, by contrast, offered fewer trading opportunities, and experienced less growth of urban life. Though a number of small ports came into existence in Wales, as at Carmarthen, Cardigan and Haverford, Chester remained the principal port north of the Severn estuary on the eastern shore of the Irish Sea. The effect of long-distance trade on urban economies is most apparent in the growth of port towns, including London, though it had an impact on some inland towns, like Shrewsbury, whose merchants engaged in buying and packing wool.19 Some English towns too (especially Beverley, Lincoln, Stamford and Northampton) acquired an international reputation for manufacturing cloth for export in the twelfth and earlier thirteenth centuries,20 though after this promising start English manufactures experienced difficulties in foreign markets in the later thirteenth century and early fourteenth because of the disruptions of international trade by continental warfare.21 The impact of long-distance trade was of very secondary significance for many larger inland towns, and hardly represented at all in the economies of small and unspecialized local market towns. The growing importance of merchants and their trade accordingly led to further differentiation between towns, in the nature of their primary concerns, their employment structures, the character of their social elites, and their vulnerability to external shocks.
The nature and extent of overseas connections remained a powerful determinant of urban character in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the changing structure of overseas trade led to many interesting shifts in the relative advantages of different towns. After the Black Death England acquired greater international importance than ever before in the making of woollen cloth, chiefly because costs of production were relatively low. This was partly the result of a permanent increase in the rate of export duties on raw wool to finance the outbreak of war against France in 1337. Since textile manufacture for export remained a town-based activity, the changing fortunes of the cloth industry saw large shifts in the ranking of towns according to their international industrial competitiveness. In the first instance, up to the early fifteenth century, the growth of the cloth industry favoured well-established centres, including some old towns like York, Salisbury and Colchester.22 Later on, following a long interruption to the growth of exports during the mid-fifteenth century, the focus of attention passed to some newer and smaller inland clothmaking centres - Halifax, Hadleigh, Lavenham, Trowbridge, Stroud, Tiverton, Leeds - which grew at the expense of older centres. Merchant capital was always important in the organization of the manufacture and export of woollens, but in the fifteenth century merchant clothiers were more prominent in the development of cloth towns than ever before. London, like Edinburgh in its Scottish context, captured a larger share of the export trade at the expense of provincial ports. It is likely that smaller English towns prospered at the expense of the larger centres after 1450 chiefly because they offered more unrestricted scope for the deployment of London capital.
Despite the importance of long-distance trade for the development of some of Britain’s most interesting towns, it was not the commonest source of changing urban fortunes, and the underlying chronology of urban growth (1100-1300) followed by urban contraction or stagnation (1300-1500), especially for small towns, is better explained by reference to local trade. Towns developed to supply the inhabitants of rural areas in various ways, so it is not difficult to explain why some urban economies responded to agrarian expansion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but were vulnerable to the transformation of rural life that accompanied the population decline of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the latter period the problem for smaller towns was not always a decline in regional spending so much as the redirection of spending to goods not produced locally, such as metalwares and clothing of superior qualities.
Because of their local orientation, and their commitment to supplying a narrower range of basic goods and services, the economies of smaller towns were less markedly differentiated from one another than those of larger towns. Many features of their employment structure are predictable. They rarely had any clearly defined specialism, though examples of small towns with distinctive industries become more common from the fourteenth century onwards with the growth of English clothmaking. Thaxted (Essex) is an unusual example of a small town that developed a distinctive metal industry, the manufacture of cutlery - seventy-nine cutlers were listed there in 1381.23 Differences there nevertheless were, and these differences were important for the prosperity and survival of small towns through the difficult times of the fifteenth century. Some were more assiduously nurtured by landlords, through the provision of facilities and the orientation of personal expenditure. Between 1415 and 1450 Sir John Fastolf 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.24 Other small towns benefited from a location on a principal road or waterway, which created special opportunities for innkeepers and taverners; the various small Stratfords were all in this position, since the name signifies a location on a surviving Roman road.25
Because a larger proportion of the wealth in towns was in goods, cash and credit than in the countryside, their growth attracted the notice of governments seeking new sources of taxation. In 1100 the chief source of English taxation, the geld, was levied on land and was poorly adapted to tapping urban incomes. By 1300 the system had changed; frequent assessed taxes on movable wealth levied cash from the towns, and customs duties on overseas trade took particular advantage of commercial enterprise in the export of wool and the import of wine. During the transition between these two points there had been a long experimental phase, in which the raising of rents and tallages from boroughs was one of the recurrent elements.26 Customs duties on overseas trade were introduced by the Angevin kings.
Much of the brunt of the experimental phase was borne by the English Jews for whom resistance was well-nigh impossible. Jewish merchants had come to England from Normandy after 1066, establishing communities in a dozen or so places by 1159, including Norwich, Lincoln, Cambridge and Winchester, and there was a Jewish community in York soon after. No Jews established themselves in England further north than this. They maintained safe houses where valuables could be stored, traded in precious metals and lent money to needy gentiles, depending on royal favour for the recovery of sums they were owed. For a long while the crown was willing to offer its protection in exchange for financial benefits, especially the right to tallage Jewish wealth occasionally, but during the thirteenth century these exactions rose to a peak under Henry III, who took ?13,333 from them in 1241-2 and ?60,000 more in taxes over the following fifteen years. Jewish wealth was depleted by this policy, and was given no opportunity to recover. Legislation in 1269, 1271 and 1275 restricted the ability of Jews to act as moneylenders and drove them into direct competition with native merchants in the grain and wool trades. Eventually, in 1290, Edward I succumbed to anti-Semitic feeling and expelled all the Jews from England.27 The destruction of Jewish wealth and enterprise is the most striking illustration in English medieval history of the clash of interests between an accumulating merchant class and a heavy-spending government; Jews were much more vulnerable to such rapacity than the denizen merchants amongst whom they lived.
Meanwhile the kings of England had developed new taxation systems in which ordinary urban families made a greater contribution than at the start of the period - a clear indication that the wealth of towns was perceptibly increasing. Early in his reign, when seeking to establish a working relationship with the Riccardi Company, Edward I of England instituted customs duties on wool as a regular source of royal income. The importance of these taxes on wool for the wars of Edward III from 1337 is an easy demonstration of the way in which economic development had permitted new fiscal and constitutional developments since the eleventh century. Urbanization and commercial development affected royal income in other ways. The increasing circulation of money in the thirteenth century created new opportunities for government that were seized, especially after 1290, to raise taxes on urban wealth to a position of greater importance in the tax structure. In England taxes on movable goods became a principal means to support Edward I’s wars in Scotland and France. These taxes were assessed, up to 1334, by a valuation of vendible livestock, grain, utensils, raw materials and manufactured goods; a proportion of this value was taken in tax from every assessed taxpayer not exempted on grounds of poverty, and the proportion taken from urban taxpayers was usually higher than that taken from countrymen. Unlike the taxation of Jews, however, these taxes on movables were never high enough to arrest mercantile accumulation for long, and the growth of parliamentary traditions during the fourteenth century ensured that institutional restraints on royal acquisitiveness grew stronger rather than weaker over the period after 1300.
The surviving records of these tax assessments before 1334, when their levels became fixed, are a valuable indicator of the ranking of towns and of the differences in wealth between them. In the 1334 assessment, there was a vast gap between London, whose movable was assessed at ?11,000, and the next largest town, Bristol, whose assessed wealth was ?2,200. Only five other towns (York, Newcastle upon Tyne, Boston, Great Yarmouth and Lincoln) were assessed at ?1,000 or more, though Norwich was also in this category in other taxes of the period. The fiftieth town, ranked in this way (excluding the Cinque ports, and towns in the counties of
Chester and Durham, which were not liable to assessment), was Bridgwater, assessed at ?260, and the hundredth was Bath, with an assessment of ?133. Among the hundreds of smaller towns are assessments of ?73 for Harwich, ?69 for Chelmsford, ?60 for Devizes, ?40 for Poole, ?40 for Lancaster and ?30 for Liverpool.28 These figures give some impression of the great differences between the different places that the historian of medieval English towns has to deal with.
World History
