Urban Growth and the Medieval Church

Gloucester and Worcester

Nigel Baker, Richard Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754602668
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351876520
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It has long been recognised that the Church played a major role in the development of towns and cities from the earliest times, a fact attested to by the prominence and number of ecclesiastical buildings that still dominate many urban areas. Yet despite this physical evidence, and the work of archaeologists and historians, many important aspects of the early stages of urbanization in England are still poorly understood. Not least, there are many unanswered questions concerning the processes by which the larger towns emerged as planned settlements during the pre-Conquest centuries. Whilst the commitment of the Wessex kings is recognized, questions remain concerning the participation of the Church in this process. Likewise, our understanding of the Church's influence in the later development of towns is not yet fully developed. Many intriguing questions remain concerning such issues as the founding of parish churches and their boundaries, and the extent to which the Church, as a major landowner, helped shape the evolving identity of towns and their suburbs. It is questions such as these that this volume sets out to answer. Employing a wealth of historical and archaeological evidence, two key towns - Gloucester and Worcester - are closely examined in order to build up a picture of their respective developments throughout the medieval period. Through this multi-disciplinary and comparative approach, a picture begins to emerge the Church's role in helping to shape not only the spiritual, but also the social, economic and cultural development of the urban environment.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This interdisciplinary study of early town development was designed to examine the role of the Church in the origins and the evolution of the larger English towns; that is, to assess the extent to which church institutions might have played a part in the processes of urban development, and to investigate what impact they had on the physical shape of the growing towns. The study combined the approaches of the historian, the archaeologist and the geographer.

Despite important work by both archaeologists and historians, many aspects of the early stages of urbanization in England are still poorly understood. Not least, there are many unanswered questions concerning the processes by which the larger towns emerged as planned settlements during the pre-Conquest centuries. The commitment of the Wessex kings is recognized, but to what extent did other powerful elements in society affect or participate in the process? Specifically, how much did early town growth owe to the major churches which – where these sites had been occupied at all – had been the major occupants? Had the great churches presided over a ‘proto-urban’ phase of development, and was there a significant ecclesiastical element in the state-sponsored programme of planning and development?

Further to that: how, if at all, did the Church influence the later development of the towns? How and when were the parish churches founded, and what specific factors determined and influenced the parish boundaries that had been established by about 1200? And lastly, to what extent did the different churches, as the major landowners in the towns, shape the continually evolving identity of the towns and their growing suburbs?

As this was to be a study in depth, our original intention was to concentrate on just one town. In selecting a suitable subject for intensive study, consideration had to be given to several factors.

The chosen town had to be a prominent Anglo-Saxon city, probably a burh of the Alfredian period with, preferably, some previous recorded history as a central place. The town needed to be the location of an old and important church: either that of a bishop, or a major minster subsequently reformed to become a great religious house. There needed to be a range of available documentation, including early material, and it was essential that there should have been recent archaeological work. A final requirement was that the town should not have been so affected by nineteenth-century industrialization and rebuilding that its historic plan failed to survive in a reasonably intact form to be surveyed for the first-edition large scale ordnance survey maps of the 1880s; and that there should be earlier nineteenth-century and eighteenth-century maps to provide additional information on the older form of the town.

The city of Worcester was at once identified as meeting these requirements; but it soon became apparent that a study of two neighbouring towns sharing a similar historical development would offer greater opportunities. It held out the prospect that what was inexplicable or even invisible in one town might be documented or otherwise detectable in the other; moreover, there would be advantages in drawing comparisons between the ways in which specific developments and phases of development were achieved in each town. Gloucester, a neighbouring shire capital only some 25 miles (40 kilometres) distant, was only a little larger than Worcester in the medieval period and had many close similarities in its chronological development – and also some marked dissimilarities. It offered, moreover, topographical evidence of the highest order, and the results of varied archaeological work over a large number of years. Accordingly, a parallel study of Gloucester was undertaken, to set beside that of Worcester.

Gloucester: sources

In addition to the valuable work of earlier antiquarian writers (Rudder 1779; Rudge 1815; Fosbrooke 1819), there has been more recent historical writing of a general nature on medieval Gloucester. L.E.W.O. Fullbrook-Leggatt’s Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Gloucester (1952) is, despite its limitations, a useful digest of published documentation; Carolyn Heighway’s Gloucester: A History and Guide (1985) provides a welcome account of the medieval period, and brings the results of much of the important archaeological work of recent years to a wider public. In 1988, the fourth volume of the Victoria County History of Gloucestershire, dealing with the city of Gloucester, was published. In addition, there have been over the years numerous shorter treatments of particular aspects of the history of Gloucester that have a close bearing upon the development of the medieval town and the ecclesiastical institutions, of which the best by far have been those by Langton (1977), Langston (1941), Thompson (1929), Ellis (1929) and Heighway (1984a; 1984b).

For more than a century, historians of Gloucester have been able to use the published work of W.H. Stevenson. Stevenson visited the city in 1889, to prepare his report on the contents of the corporation’s archives for the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1891). His transcript of a rental of the whole town, made in 1455 (see below), was published in 1890, and in 1893 he published the Calendar of the Records of the Corporation of Gloucester. These works are invaluable, although the Calendar in particular is not without its shortcomings: Stevenson followed a policy of omitting certain information from the deeds he transcribed, in particular the dimensions of properties, and was inconsistent in his treatment of other documents such as wills.

More thoroughly executed was Stevenson’s edition of the town rental made in 1455 by Robert Cole, canon and rent collector of Lanthony Priory. This remarkable itinerary of the town, street by street and house by house, recording in many cases the names of both the owner and the occupier, and in its first part the rents that were paid, was evidently a response to the bailiffs’ financial difficulties (Holt 1990, 156–8). It was commissioned in an attempt to restore to the level of previous centuries the revenue from the landgable or chief rents that were due to the Crown, and which the bailiffs collected as the farmers of the borough. Cole identified about half of the properties as owing landgable, and for each of them he provided not just the bare description of the tenement and its tenants but also the names of all the earlier tenants, which he had taken from the old landgable rolls at his disposal. This was obviously to establish in each case the ancient liability to pay – and for many properties landgable had not been paid since the early fourteenth century or before, judging by Cole’s inability to name subsequent tenants. The rolls he had went back to the early years of the reign of Henry III, as the earliest tenants he could name were active in and around the 1220s (Cal. Recs Corpn Glouc., passim). The notional value of the landgable was £10 15s 7½d – although, try as he might, Cole could not quite account for every penny of this total, presumably because that figure had ceased to be entirely realistic even by the time of the earliest surviving records (1455 Rental, 114 and passim).

But the rental was also designed to be a more effective aid to easing the revenue crisis. The care that Cole took to record both the effective owners and the tenants of all the properties facing onto the main streets stands in contrast with his failure to complete for each tenement the formula with which each entry ends: et continet in fronte – . Obviously he was never called upon

1.1—Regional location map: Gloucester, Worcester and the principal towns of the Severn valley

to measure each frontage, and to enter the information into the rental; the document we have is thus only the first phase of an exercise whose second phase was never attempted. There is little doubt as to what all this means, for 1455 also saw the bailiffs attempt – unsuccessfully – to secure an Act of Parliament which would have enabled them to pass the responsibility for repairs to the major streets on to householders, each either doing the repairs himself or paying according to the length of the frontage of his property (Rotuli Parliamentorum, vi, 49a). Cole made his rental before the bill was presented, therefore; after its failure there was no need to complete the work.

Once we understand why the rental was compiled, the idiosyncrasies in Cole’s method of working cease to be a puzzle. For all his thoroughness in describing properties on the main streets, he can be very uninformative about the houses lining the back streets and lanes, and certain parts of Gloucester are excluded from the rental altogether. But this was entirely consistent with his purpose, which was to provide all the information that the bailiffs needed to know – and no more than that. Wherever landgable was charged, the property and its surroundings were described well enough for a future rent-collector to identify; the principal lanes – even if no landgable was owed – were adequately recorded and preparations made to enter details of frontages. But Cole showed no interest in house frontages in the minor lanes and the suburbs, where the road surfaces were evidently not maintained by the bailiffs; such districts, if there were no landgable-paying properties there, were dealt with in a desultory manner. The southern suburb was missed out, as were those parts of the northern suburb that belonged to St Oswald’s Priory. The streets around the church of St Mary de Lode are not in the rental, evidently because no landgable was due to the bailiffs from that area, and there was no suggestion that the streets should be properly surfaced. Cole was not a careless and thoughtless worker, therefore. He was, on the contrary, conscientious in fulfilling his commission.

Interestingly, it is quite obvious that the document we possess was not the property of the fifteenth-century bailiffs, but was Cole’s own copy. He used the dorse to construct an elaborate genealogical table of the kings of England, and 16 years after the rental was made he added a note recording the battle of Tewkesbury and the death of Prince Edward (1455 Rental, 125). Stevenson failed to see that this showed that the document was still in Cole’s hands, or felt that the point was unimportant. Furthermore, the only marginal notes on the rental are in Elizabethan hands (ibid., 126–8), so that it is most likely that this copy came into the town archives only after Lanthony’s dissolution – at the same time, presumably, that the original text of another brief Lanthony rental of 1535 was acquired, and of which the town preserved a copy (GCRO GBR 1314; 1455 Rental, xii).

As he had spent years immersed in study of the documentation relating to Lanthony’s Gloucester lands, Cole was the bailiffs’ obvious choice for this difficult task of re-establishing their right to numerous small rents that had not been paid within living memory. It is in keeping with his task as rentarius that, having made such a rental, Cole should have taken care to preserve his own copy: it contained much information that he and his successors at Lanthony would find useful. The early to mid fifteenth century had seen a flurry of archival activity at Lanthony, as the priory’s muniments had been put into order; the purpose was to facilitate the identification of its properties and to document their acquisition, not only to maintain the level of its rents but also as a response to the bailiffs’ occupation of property that the priory regarded as its own (see below, pp. 302–4). From Lanthony, therefore, comes a rare series both of cartularies and of registers of some of the priors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, together with a most comprehensive rental of Lanthony’s Gloucester lands that was largely completed by Cole in the 1440s (A13). In all, there are 13 surviving volumes of these records of Lanthony Secunda, of which 12 are in the Public Record Office. One of the volumes is a cartulary concerned entirely with Lanthony’s lands in Ireland, and has been published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission (Brooks 1953). The most important of the charters contained in the earlier cartularies were rearranged and entered into two new cartularies in 1449. The second of these, containing 139 folios, is concerned only with charters of land in Gloucester and its suburbs (A5). There are also the registers of five of the priors: that of Simon Brockworth (1362–77), William Cheryton (1377–1401), John Wyche (1408–36), John Hayward (1457–65) and Edmund Forrest (1501–25) – this last unfortunately having been unavailable for at least a decade for reasons of conservation. Consisting mainly of materials relating to ecclesiastical and political matters, these registers also contain details of many financial and legal transactions, such as agreements to lease property and disputes in which the priory was involved (Davis 1958, 60–61; Jack 1970–73).

The most important of the sources for St Peter’s Abbey is the Historia et Cartularium of St Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, edited by W.H. Hart for the Rolls Series. The abbey’s history reached its final form during the abbacy of Walter Froucester (1381–1412), although it is clearly the work of several different periods from the late eleventh century onwards (Hist. et Cart., i, x–xii). The cartulary contains a variety of material, including a small number of documents relating or purporting to relate to the abbey’s early centuries. In addition, there are other records of St Peter’s Abbey which are preserved in Gloucester Cathedral Library. A cartulary of about 1400 contains numerous transcripts of deeds relating to properties in and around Gloucester, and there are three registers which cover the period 1500–28, and from which Hart published some extracts in the third volume of his edition (Davis 1958, 51–2; Kirby 1967, 1–2; Hist. et Cart., iii, v–cxvi). A collection of deeds formerly belonging to the abbey is also kept in the cathedral library, mounted in the nineteenth century into ten bound volumes (Kirby 1967, 2–21).

While the early writers on Gloucester took note of casual discoveries, the first deliberate archaeological activity began only in the late nineteenth century. John Bellows, a printer, has been claimed as the city’s first archaeologist. Having found, cleared, and preserved a section of the Roman fortress wall when building his new print works in 1871; he went on to trace the remainder of the wall around the city. In 1890, with a visit by the Royal Archaeological Institute pending, he excavated another section near the north transept of the cathedral, and produced the first reconstruction plan of Roman Glevum. The Corporation was beginning to take the remains of Gloucester’s past seriously around the same time. The museum was built upon and incorporated a section of the wall south of the East Gate, and the surviving stretch to the south was, from 1888, protected, preserved, and made available for public inspection on application to the mayor (Fullbrook-Leggatt 1967, 5–7). The 1880s and 1890s were also distinguished by the work of Henry Medland, an architect, who was an active recorder of discoveries made on building sites. In 1931 W.H. Knowles, President of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, formed the Gloucester Roman Research Committee, with the aim of studying the antiquities and artefacts of the Romano-British town and preparing a complete survey of it; their excavation reports appeared in the county transactions through the 1930s. There was a hiatus in the war years, followed by a resurgence in the 1950s and early 60s with further excavations published by Helen O’Neill; in 1967 the committee was reconstituted with a wider remit than the Roman period, and survives as GADARG (the Gloucester and District Archaeological Research Group), an active body responsible for the annual publication Glevensis.

The Gloucester City Museum was also active in the 1930s, excavating and publishing, and in 1966–7 organized major excavations on the new Market Hall and Longsmith Street sites, the first rescue excavations in the city funded by central government. In 1968 the museum set up a new permanent post, that of Gloucester Field Archaeologist, held first by Henry Hurst and later by Carolyn Heighway. The early 1970s saw a number of major excavations by Hurst and Heighway, on such sites as 13–17 Berkeley Street, St Oswald’s Priory, and 1 Westgate Street. Most of these were published first as interims in The Antiquaries Journal (1972, 1974 and 1975), the final reports appearing steadily thereafter, and it is this generation of excavations that has set the subsequent and continuing research agenda for the city’s archaeology. The City Excavation Unit was also founded at this time, with the post of Field Officer, filled by Patrick Garrod, allowing what has in effect been an unbroken watching-brief ever since, monitoring all manner of intrusions into the city’s buried deposits. Further major excavations took place in the 1980s and 90s, many under the direction of Malcolm Atkin as Head of the City Excavation Unit.

Worcester: sources

Like those of Gloucester, Worcester’s antiquaries provided accounts of uneven reliability of the historic city and its ecclesiastical institutions (for instance Nash 1799; Green 1764 and 1796; Noake 1849, 1866). The early prominence of the Church of Worcester has commanded the attention of historians; by contrast, the almost complete loss of the city muniments has encouraged historians to neglect secular aspects of the medieval city. The evidence for the Anglo-Saxon city received excellent treatment at the hands of Howard Clarke and Christopher Dyer (1969), but between the period of their work and Alan Dyer’s on Tudor Worcester (1963) there is a substantial gap in the secondary literature, which Sir Frank Stenton’s contribution to the fourth volume of the Victoria County History – although useful – does not succeed in filling. Caroline Barron’s paper on the social geography of late-fourteenth century Worcester (1989), however, comes as a welcome demonstration that important source materials still wait to be explored.

By contrast with Gloucester, both the churches and the city of Worcester are well documented for the Anglo-Saxon period. Post-Conquest Worcester is not so favoured: there is above all very little of the detailed topographical evidence that exists for Gloucester. There is no equivalent of the records of Lanthony Priory, and needless to say there is no equivalent of the 1455 rental. But the records of the cathedral priory, now of the Dean and Chapter and housed in the library of Worcester Cathedral, form a very useful collection. To add to the early records of the Church of Worcester contained in Hemming’s Cartulary (Hearne 1723), two of the priory’s volumes have been edited: the rental of 1240, designated as the priory register by its editor (Hale 1865), and the cartulary compiled at about the same date (Darlington 1968). A priory rental of 1458–98 (D&C A 6) survives, as do rentals of the priory’s Worcester lands from the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. The several hundred medieval charters and other records of land transactions were calendared by J. Harvey Bloom (1909), although with so many errors that his edition is quite unreliable and should not be used. Fortunately it has now been superseded by the authoritative work of Susan Brock (1981), whose catalogue of the 2000 ‘B’ class documents from the medieval and modern periods is accurate in every respect. The only shortcoming of this calendar is its failure to include the dimensions of properties which are generally to be found in leases and occasionally in medieval charters. (It is very much to be regretted that this typescript work – like the equivalent calendar of the ‘A’ class documents by Ben Benedikz and Brock – is available only at the libraries of the cathedral and Birmingham University.) The Worcester prop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of plates
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gloucester and the Church before 1100
• 3 The landscape of medieval Gloucester
• 4 Gloucester: churches, chapels and parishes
• 5 Worcester and the Church before 1100
• 6 The landscape of medieval Worcester
• 7 Worcester: churches, chapels and parishes
• 8 The lesser churches and chapels of Gloucester and Worcester: conclusions
• 9 The development of the parishes
• 10 The major religious institutions: their lands and their role in urban growth
• 11 The major religious institutions: their relationship to urban secular authority
• 12 Ecclesiastical precincts in the urban landscape
• 13 The suburbs and the Church
• 14 The Church, town-planning and public works
• 15 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index