Urban Assimilation in Post-Conquest Wales

Ethnicity, Gender and Economy in Ruthin, 1282-1348

Matthew Stevens

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783164011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This book uses, principally but not only, a case study of the Denbighshire town of Ruthin to discuss both the significance of Englishness versus Welshness and of gender distinctions in the network of small Anglo-Welsh urban centres which emerged in north Wales following the English conquest of 1282. It carefully constructs an image of the way in which townspeople's everyday lives were influenced by their ethnic background, gender, wealth and social status. In this manner it explores and explains the motivations of English and welsh townspeople to work together in the mutual pursuit of prosperity and social stability.

Part 1

MEN AS PROPERTY HOLDERS AND THE SOCIAL ELITES

Chapters I and II lay out in turn the distribution of wealth and status in Ruthin. Ruthin’s residents would each have been members of a number of ‘overlapping communities’ defined in different ways, including ethnicity, status, neighbourhood and economic interest.¹ By examining the differing levels of prosperity experienced by Ruthin’s English and Welsh townspeople (chapter I), and assessing whether those differences were reflected in the social status and interactions of persons within the borough’s judicial system and credit network (chapter II), we can reach an understanding of some of the town’s collective values.

I

POPULATION, PROPERTY AND WEALTH

POPULATION

Population, while invariably difficult to gauge, is a natural starting point for the exploration of any community. Two principal documents aid us in establishing Ruthin’s population. Most helpful is a rental of the lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd which survives from 1324. This document served as an administrative stocktaking of every Dyffryn Clwyd tenant-in-chief, how much land he or she held and what annual rent was paid to the lord for those lands.² In addition, thirteen ‘relief rolls’, reports typically compiled twice annually to record relief and entry payments within the lordship, survive for the period 1299 to 1318.³ Supplemented by some data from the records of the great court of Dyffryn Clwyd, the great court of Ruthin and the borough court of Ruthin, these documents allow insight into the inseparable issues of population and wealth within the community.⁴ They also help to indicate the ethnic composition of Ruthin.

That portion of the 1324 rental which pertains to the borough indicates that the town contained almost exactly one hundred burgages, thereby placing Ruthin at the centre of Wales’s contemporary urban hierarchy, in which a middling third of about one hundred Welsh towns contained between fifty and 150 burgages.⁵ If the rental is taken at face value as complete,⁶ those burgages were held by seventy-one individuals of different familial or trade names. Following the methodology used by Soulsby in his survey, The Towns of Medieval Wales, this information may be used to calculate the population of Ruthin by multiplying the number of town burgesses by an estimated, mean household size.⁷ Historians have disagreed about the size of the typical medieval household. Principal reasons for doubt revolve around medieval fertility rates, incidence of illegitimacy, age of marriage, the number of extended family members who typically lived together and the extent to which these aspects of family life may have altered over time given varying degrees of mortality, industrialization and urbanization.⁸ However, using the same rough household multiplier of five employed by Soulsby as well as by Hilton in his comparable study of the English borough of Thornbury, Ruthin’s population can be estimated at 355.⁹ If we do not apply the household multiplier to the personal names (and households) of five unmarried daughters, two widows and three other apparently single women unlikely have represented entire families, a slightly lower estimated population of 315 borough residents results. This method of deriving population, based on probable non-single tenants-in-chief, produces a figure that can be taken confidently as a minimum community size. However, there are strong reasons why Soulsby’s conservative methodology, based solely on tenants-in-chief, is likely to produce a significant underestimate.

First, contemporary population density per household may have been higher in Ruthin and other newly founded Welsh towns, some of which saw their population double within fifty years of foundation, than in older, more demographically stable medieval communities.¹⁰ In the case of Ruthin, the surviving rental’s date of composition (1324) was only forty-two years after Dyffryn Clwyd’s final change of possession into the hands of the Grey family, and the founding of the borough. In what survives of the record for the interim (1282–1324), Jack has counted just over four hundred persons mentioned as holders of town property at one time or another, including forty-six wives holding jointly or widows enjoying dower. Taken as a whole, this group was about one-third Welsh and two-thirds English. Similarly, excluding the small minority of wives and dowagers, as well as a few individuals in transactions not specifying the sale of a burgage or part-burgage, the ethnic ratio of persons we know to have held burgage property at some point between 1282 and 1324 was around one part Welsh (about 110 persons) to two parts English (about 200 persons).¹¹ By contrast, the ethnic ratio of those men and women listed in the rental of 1324 is almost exactly half and half: thirty-six Welsh, thirty-five English and one individual called Hugh Scot.¹²

These data represent a pattern of rapid turnover among arriving and departing English burgesses, likely to have been fed by immigration, and roughly twice that of their Welsh counterparts. Thus there probably existed in Ruthin a fairly stable, established Welsh community alongside a fluctuating English immigrant population. A similar conclusion was reached by Jack, who estimated that English immigration, ‘while on a fairly massive scale, was very unstable’.¹³ In such an environment it is likely that the number of families resident in the town would have outstripped the total number of burgesses. An unsettled and rapidly increasing population would have struggled to build dwellings at a pace in keeping with its own expansion, and the more economically feasible solution to immigrant housing needs would have been the subdivision of pre-existing properties, resulting in a greater population density per burgage. This notion is reinforced by the presence of no less than seventeen independently held half-burgages or small parts of burgages appearing in the 1324 rental.¹⁴ It is important to note that the margin by which the number of households in any Welsh town may have outstripped the number of recorded burgesses would, in the long term, have varied according to local levels of migration, immigration and economic growth or decline.¹⁵ But certainly during the initial years of expansion which followed the foundation of most boroughs, not all persons moving to new Welsh towns necessarily bought, or had the opportunity to buy, a part of the limited volume of burgage property made available by seignorial officials.¹⁶

Ruthin’s population is also likely to have exceeded the total calculable from the number of property holders in 1324 (that is, 315 residents) due to burgage accumulation. The scope for entrepreneurial property speculation in a community subject to a steady inflow of outsiders, inevitably seeking short- and long-term shelter, would have been considerable. In 1324 the number of burgage plots in Ruthin (approximately one hundred) exceeded the number of burgesses (seventy-one) by 29 per cent. Of the one hundred or so burgage plots identifiable in the 1324 rental, fifty-four and one-half were held by twenty-four accumulators; that is to say, about half of Ruthin’s burgages were held by only one-third (34 per cent) of property owners. Moreover, at the top of the scale, six men, four of whom were English and two Welsh (together 9 per cent of property owners), held twenty-one and one-half of the town’s 100 burgages.¹⁷

Such speculation in property was not uncommon in medieval England and Wales, where in some boroughs accumulation had started in the thirteenth century and possibly even in the twelfth. At Cambridge, for example, where burgesses enjoyed liberties from at least the mid-1100s, there were already about twice as many houses as there were burgesses when the hundred rolls were compiled – a trend which in most towns accelerated over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.¹⁸ In Wales, the growing borough of Carmarthen in 1268 already featured 26 per cent more burgage plots on which homes were built than it did burgesses, while at the bishop of St David’s new town of Llawhaden, founded only a few years before Ruthin, the number of occupied burgage plots in 1326 exceeded the number of burgesses by about 27 per cent.¹⁹ In the decades on either side of 1300, when medieval urban population was at its peak density, a steady flow of immigrants from outside lordships such as Dyffryn Clwyd and migrants from within them would have presented an ongoing opportunity for motivated property holders to increase their wealth by letting town accommodation.²⁰ However, burgage accumulation by burgesses (burgage tenants-in-chief) and subtenancy by non-property-owning townspersons has inevitably resulted in the documentary illusion that fewer households – only those represented by burgesses – were present in any community than were actually resident at the time of the compilation of any medieval rental.

Lastly, consideration must be given to the presence of a numerically incalculable body of ‘marginals’ or poor, unestablished migrants. These people, the destitute, prostitutes, unskilled workers and other groups unlikely to hold property, were common in small market towns.²¹ It has been shown by a case study of St Ives, for example, that in the period between 1270 and 1320, though being poor did not necessarily entail destitution, between 2 and 4 per cent of the population comprised ‘paupers’ at any given time.²² Accordingly, incidents concerning paupers and other habitually present marginals were fairly regular occurrences in Ruthin. For example, a few women are identified by occupation in the borough court of Ruthin records as ‘public’ or ‘common’ prostitutes (usually described as meretrix).²³ Other women were sometimes defamed as such. A typical court record is that describing a brawl between two women, Lleucu the daughter of Ieuan Felyn (‘Velhyn’) and Gwerful Llwyd, in July 1313. The borough court roll of this month states that Lleucu was amerced for having verbally abused and beaten Gwerful ‘within a margin of bloodshed’ in response to Gwerful’s having called her a ‘thief, whore and other enormities’.²⁴

Unestablished local migrants, forming a certain transient quotient of the resident population, were also regularly cited in the town’s courts, and notably so during the great famine of 1315–22.²⁵ Alice ‘le Blowestere’ (the boaster?), for example, was fined in the great court of Ruthin in April 1317 for habitually entertaining strangers,²⁶ and in the same session Nicholas, son of the established immigrant Geoffrey de Shirland (Derbyshire, a Grey family holding), was amerced 12d. for beating a certain outsider (extraneus) in the house of Adam Moton.²⁷ These unnamed persons were themselves unlikely to have remained in the borough long enough, or to have had the wherewithal, to initiate legal actions; Nicholas’s victim, for instance, never sought compensation. But the continuous presence of immigrants, migrants and marginals in Ruthin and similar towns added a distinct flavour to the social and curial life of urban environments which were kept intimately familiar with persons on the fringes of the community.

In the light of these considerations – a population density heightened by immigration and migration, burgage accumulation and the regular presence of social marginals – Ruthin would have contained a significantly larger population than can be calculated by employing Soulsby’s methodology of multiplying a total number of burgesses by a mean household size. A more accurate estimate of Ruthin’s population, and the population of other small towns during periods of growth, is better attained by multiplying the known number of burgages, rather than the total number of burgesses, by a household multiplier.²⁸ If calculated in this manner, again using a household multiplier of five, the town’s population would equate to approximately five hundred persons rather than the minimum of 315 (as above). While it is impossible to know the borough’s population with complete certainty, collaborative court roll evidence of rapid immigration and the presence of non-property-owning marginals suggests that at the time of the rental’s compilation Ruthin’s population stood at the high end, if not beyond, this range of 315 to 500 souls.

PROPERTY HOLDING AND RENT²⁹

Patterns of property holding

Patterns of property holding in Ruthin are illustrated in table 1.1, which has been compiled by totalling the various rents paid by persons known from the 1324 rental to have held some property in the borough. If an individual is indicated in the rental as having held property outside the borough as well as within it, then the value of the properties both outside and inside the borough have been totalled in order to place such persons within the appropriate band of rent payers in table 1.1. Thus the table reflects the relative wealth of persons who held property in Ruthin, not just their relative wealth in burgage property. In a few cases, where the rental has listed a burgess’s holdings but not his rents, individual rent values have been estimated by reference to other holdings of the same size in the same location. Also, i...