The Medieval Town in England 1200-1540

Richard Holt, Gervase Rosser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138158979
• eBook ISBN: 9781317899808
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book brings together twelve outstanding articles by eminent historians to throw light on the evolution of medieval towns and the lives of their inhabitants. The essays span the period from the dramatic urban expansion of the thirteenth century to the crises in the fifteenth century as a result of plague, population decline and changes in the economy. Throughout the breadth of current debates surrounding the history of urban society is fully explored.

Chapter One
Introduction: The English Town in the Middle Ages

Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser

The period between the late twelfth century and the beginning of the sixteenth marked a distinct phase in the history of the English town. Within this long span of three centuries, wider economic and social developments brought about dramatic changes in urban life. The era opened, in a context of rapid population growth, with a rising trend of urban expansion and new town foundations; by the middle of the fourteenth century that trend was reversed, and within the contracted economy of England (as of Europe in general) after the arrival of the Black Death, towns inevitably contracted both in size and numbers. Nevertheless, the period is distinguished by an underlying continuity of the essential forms of urban life, which differed in important respects from those both of earlier and of later times. The purpose of this introduction, therefore, is to provide a working definition of the medieval town in England, and to establish the general context for the particular studies that follow.

The first point to emphasize is that most English towns or the late Middle Ages were small by the standards of the modern city, or indeed by those of the greater urban centres of medieval Flanders or Italy. The majority of English towns contained fewer than 1500 people. Even so, taking into account the numerous small towns established in England by the year 1300, the country should be seen as sharing in the urbanization that affected much of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Secondly, the medieval European town was not differentiated from the countryside to the same extent as towns in other times and places. The English town in particular was subject to the pervasive powers both of royal government and of society at large; the town's incorporation within the wider political and social framework was consolidated by legal and fiscal developments of the thirteenth century. The assimilation of urban to rural social structures was underlined by a further distinctive trait of the medieval English town, which was the relatively undeveloped nature of urban industry. The preponderance of domestic production in medieval industry rendered unnecessary the development of a large urban proletariat, with the result that social relations in towns were not fundamentally different from those which pertained in the countryside. Finally, the social order of the English medieval town was pervaded by a set of religious beliefs which was given its definitive official form by churchmen in the thirteenth century, and which thereafter, until the Reformation, infused the language and the ritual of urban as of rural life. The sixteenth century witnessed the transformation of the medieval town in all of these fundamental respects. First, a new and unprecedented upsurge of population placed an intolerable strain upon social relations in towns as they had become defined in the late medieval period. Secondly, the successive stages of the Reformation removed the panoply of sacramental religion and ritual within which the social and political life of the towns had been played out during the preceding three centuries. The outcome, the early modern town, was in many ways a new social phenomenon.

For all their interest, published studies of towns during the period of the later Middle Ages have in the main been brief, with only rare attempts at synthesis. Alice Stopford Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, a still inspiring masterpiece of social history published in 1894, has not yet been superseded by a work of equivalent length and depth of treatment. Susan Reynolds' recent survey, however, has brought a fresh clarity to all aspects of the subject, opening it up to the investigation of a new generation of students;¹ and the past two decades have been marked by the production of varied and creative work in this area. Consequently, the outlines of a new urban history are beginning to be discernible. The essays in this volume have been chosen to represent the vigour of recent work in the field, and the variety of methodological approaches to the subject currently being advocated and practised. Of itself, such a diverse collection of studies cannot amount to an integrated interpretation of their common theme. It should, however, indicate where the emphasis will lie in any future work of synthesis.

This is not to suggest that, prior to the current phase of interest, the English medieval town was neglected by historians. From the later Middle Ages onwards, antiquaries produced a host of local histories, works which individually can still contain much of value.² The turning of scholarly attention to general questions of medieval urban history, which occurred in the late nineteenth century, was prompted by specific contemporary concerns with the nature of English law, the origins of constitutional democracy, and the development of capitalism: grand themes of history whose evolution various writers saw as bound up with the medieval town. F. W. Maitland, the principal founder of medieval urban history in England (though his work was by no means confined to towns), gave to this new field of study a specifically legal direction. Scholars of the next generation carried this further, and sharing a primary concern with constitutional niceties Mary Bateson, Adolphus Ballard, James Tait and others developed a perspective on towns narrower than that of Maitland himself. Tait's achievement was to bring to its culmination the study;)f the borough as a legal entity, defined by judicial independence and charters of privilege. Ironically the very thoroughness of his juridical researches, brought together in 1936 in The Medieval English Borough, gave the impression that he had exhausted the subject of the medieval town, which consequently remained largely neglected for the following quarter of a century.³

The narrow, legal definition or the chartered borough has tended to be taken all to readily as the model of the medieval town. The effect has been to exclude from view much of the full spectrum of urban life in the Middle Ages. The writer of the standard history of Birmingham, having examined the abundant evidence of economic life in this expanding market town, nevertheless concluded that it remained a village, an essentially agricultural settlement, throughout the medieval period. Having received no charter of urban liberties from its lord, it could not possibly have been a town.⁴ More enlightened historians, meanwhile, have taken a broader view, well aware that the official legal framework provides at best a partial definition of medieval society, and that charters and constitutions are characteristic only of some towns at certain periods.

As an alternative to demonstrably inadequate legal definitions, attempts have been made - largely by sociologists - to provide a societal model of the town. Their success, however, has been limited, since they have failed to identify determinants of urban social organization which are confined exclusively to towns. The phenomena of industrialization, capitalism, or social segregation, for example, are not necessarily urban.⁵ For historians, the positive lesson to be drawn from the literature of urban sociology is that the town has never been an autonomous agent in society; indeed, on the contrary, it is always an integral part of society at large. Marx himself argued in this way, even while he recognized in the concentration of urban populations a catalyst of broader social changes. The point is made for the medieval town by Rodney Hilton (Ch. 2). So far from arriving like a strange cuckoo in the nest of medieval society, the town was a natural outgrowth and expression of existing social relations. This denial of urban autonomy has profound implications for the understanding of the social structure of medieval towns.

A definition of the medieval town needs, therefore, to take account of its assimilation to agrarian society. But it also had, undeniably, a distinct identity, which makes it a legitimate object of study. An acceptable working definition describes the town as a relatively dense and permanent concentration of residents engaged in a multiplicity of activities, a substantial proportion of which are non-agrarian. Furthermore, it was the heterogeneity of its composition, rather than the sheer weight of human numbers, that produced the distinctively urban character of the medieval town, since for this period at any rate it would be impossible to specify an absolute minimum size of an urban population. Diversity was accentuated by the fact that many town dwellers were non-natives, who lacked the shared experience of a common upbringing in a local environment. Only constant rural immigration could sustain population levels in the face of high urban mortality. The larger the town, the wider the catchment from which migrants came, and the greater the diversity of settlers. Diversity, indeed, was the fundamental characteristic of urban society in the Middle Ages; and it created social forms unknown in the countryside.

Three consequences, general and interrelated, followed from this. The first was tension or conflict within a population which incorporated such various, and often contradictory, interests; recorded clashes were perennial and sometimes violent. Secondly, interest groups formed, representing one set of ambitions or another. Factionalism and social strife were far from being purely urban phenomena, but the concentration of population intensified awareness both of common bonds within the group and of rival interests outside it. The third major result of the complexity and volatility of the urban population was the constant challenge to find ways of holding it together. That medieval towns survived at all, while yet, on occasion, accommodating significant adjustments in social organization, is testimony to the relative success of a range of responses to that challenge.

In the twelfth century the urban economy was still concentrated in a few centres, whose origins lay in the Anglo-Saxon period. The cities of Roman Britain had been abandoned after the breakdown of the Roman state in the fifth century. The new urban growths of the later Saxon and Viking periods, though in some cases for religious or strategic reasons located on the sites of former Roman towns, were different both in function and in form from the classical city. In early medieval England a number of different types of town coexisted, usually distinct from one another but occasionally found in combination. There was the royal estate centre; the trading emporium; the fortified site or burh; and the ecclesiastical focus of a religious cult. Over time, these roles tended to fuse in different combinations, a process that was complete by 1300. The later medieval town, whether large or small, was characterized by a greater homogeneity of basic functions than had been found in its early medieval predecessor.

The leading motive behind the wave of 'new town' foundations in the thirteenth century was commercial. As the national population expanded at an unprecedented rate, lords were presented with a clear economic incentive to speculate in the promotion of markets on their estates. In addition to obtaining royal market grants, many estate owners encouraged further economic development by inviting permanent residents to settle in the nascent market towns on preferential terms. The novelty of this pattern should not be exaggerated: such initiatives were certainly not unknown in earlier centuries. Moreover, while some of the thirteenth-century developments occupied virgin sites, many more were rather extensions of existing village settlements. Nevertheless, between the late twelfth and the late thirteenth centuries the number and scale of urban promotions reached hitherto unequalled levels, transforming the landscape of England in the process. Between 1200 and 1349 several thousand market grants were issued by the Crown, and while some of these represented confirmations of existing markets, collectively they represented a genuine expansion.⁶ By no means every speculative venture succeeded. The hopefully named Newton, founded near Poole on the Dorset coast in 1286, seems never to have amounted to much more than the isolated farmhouse which it remains today, and this experience was not unique.⁷ Other foundations enjoyed a brief life before vanishing again in the less favourable conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Caus, a twelfth-century creation in the Welsh Marches, amounted by 1300 to thirty-four burgages or house plots below the castle; yet within a generation of the first plague epidemic of 1348 decline had set in, and by the early sixteenth century the site was virtually abandoned.⁸ In this way numerous small towns, like so many villages, were 'lost'. Nevertheless, despite the pruning which followed the over-expansion of the thirteenth century, a broad pattern of urban centres, large and small, was established by 1300 which continued in place until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond.

It is with reason that attention has already been drawn to the end of the medieval urban spectrum occupied by the smaller towns, for these were by far the most numerous category. By European standards, England boasted few large towns: indeed, London alone could be compared in scale with the greater cities of the Low Countries and northern Italy. The English capital probably contained 80 000 residents at its late thirteenth-century peak, a tally that would not be reached again, following the late medieval slump, until the 1580s.⁹ After London, only Bristol and Norwich seem certain to have had populations of more than 10 000 at their maximum extent around 1300. Between the bench-marks of 10 000 and 5000 were bracketed about a dozen more provincial towns.¹⁰ The precise rank-order of these towns varied; but throughout the later Middle Ages their number was concentrated in the south and east of the country. Since most of these relatively large urban centres (which included, in their respective heydays, Newcastle, York, Boston, Ipswich, Coventry, Salisbury and Exeter) owed much of their growth to international trade, their common location within easy access of the continental seaways was logical. But a more fundamental influence on the distribution of medieval towns of all sizes was the underlying pattern of human settlement. This was most dense in midland and southeastern England, in which zone it was natural that the greatest number of regional markets should be concentrated. Nevertheless, despite this weighting towards the south and east, the quantity and general distribution of England's smaller towns - in the early fourteenth century, perhaps 500 places each containing between a few hundred and 5000 inhabitants - meant that few people in this predominantly agrarian society lived more than a day's journey from an urban centre.

The economic functions of these various towns within the wider economy have been the object of increasing attention in recent years. It is no accident that a historian in the first place of rural society, Rodney Hilton, has most clearly drawn attention to the role of towns as centres of exchange. Here cash generated by the sale of rural produce in turn facilitated both the payment of rent to lords and the acquisition of manufactured goods. Richard Holt's study (Ch. 8) shows how Gloucester served as the hub of a regional corn trade, which linked the town closely both with its rural hinterland and with greater markets further afield. Similarly, the evidence of debt relationships in fourteenth-century Exeter has been used to demonstrate the many ties which bound that city with suppliers of wool and consumers of fish in the villages of the surrounding countryside.¹¹ The economy of the English medieval town was at all times closely interdependent with agrarian production.

Although its market was central to the existe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Engish town in the Middle Ages
• 2. Towns in English Medieval Society
• 3. The English borough in the thirteenth century
• 4. The first half-century of the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon
• 5. Small town society in England before the Black Death
• 6. Suburban growth
• 7. Craftsmen and the economy of London in the fourteenth century
• 8. Gloucester in the century after the Black Death
• 9. Ralph Holland and the London radicals, 1438-1444
• 10. The commercial dominance of a medieval provincial oligarchy: Exeter in the late fourteenth century
• 11. The essence of medieval urban communities: The vill of Westminster 1200-1540
• 12. Ceremony and the citizen: The communal year at Coventry 1450-1550
• 13. Urban decline in late medieval England
• Index