The English Medieval Town: A Reader in English Urban History, 1200-1540 9781315846088, 9780582051287, 0582051290, 0582051282

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 8
1. Introduction: The Engish town in the Middle Ages......Page 10
2. Towns in English Medieval Society......Page 28
3. The English borough in the thirteenth century......Page 38
4. The first half-century of the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon......Page 58
5. Small town society in England before the Black Death......Page 80
6. Suburban growth......Page 106
7. Craftsmen and the economy of London in the fourteenth century......Page 129
8. Gloucester in the century after the Black Death......Page 150
9. Ralph Holland and the London radicals, 1438-1444......Page 169
10. The commercial dominance of a medieval provincial oligarchy: Exeter in the late fourteenth century......Page 193
11. The essence of medieval urban communities: The vill of Westminster 1200-1540......Page 225
12. Ceremony and the citizen: The communal year at Coventry 1450-1550......Page 247
13. Urban decline in late medieval England......Page 274
Index......Page 296

Citation preview

www.routledge.com

The Medieval Town

1200-1540

Readers in Urban History General Editors: Peter Clark and David Reeder The Centre for Urban History, Leicester University

THE MEDlEY AL TOWN A Reader in English Urban History, 1200-1540 Edited by Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser THE TUDOR AND STUART TOWN A Reader in English Urban History, 1530-1688 Edited by Jonathan Barry THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TOWN A Reader in English Urban History, 1688-1820 · Edited by Peter Borsay THE VICTORIAN CITY A Reader in British Urban History, 1820-1914 Edited by R. J. Morris and R. Rodger

The English Medieval Town A Reader in English Urban History

1200-1540

Edited by Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser

~~ ~~o~~~;n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First Published 1990 by Longman Group UK Limited Published in the United States of America by Longman Inc. Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

ISBN: 978-1-315-84608-8 (eiSBN)

©

Taylor & Francis 1990

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 33-34 Alfred Place, London, WCIE 7DP. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The medieval town: a reader in English urban history 1200- 1540. - (Readers in urban history). l. E ngland . Towns, history I. Holt, Richard, 1948 June 22II. Rosser , Gervase 1956 May 5III. Series 942'. 009' 732

ISBN 978-0-582-05128-7 PPR Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The medieval town: a reader in English urban history 1200-1540 / edited by Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser. p. em. ISBN 0-582-05129-0. -ISBN 0-582-05128-2 (pbk.) 1. Cities and towns, Medieval-England. 2. City and town lifeEngland-History. I. Holt, Richard, 1948II. Rosser, Gervase, 1956 HT115.E54 1990 307.76'0942'0902- dc20

89-49706 CIP

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this book but points out that some imperfections from the original may be apparent.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

1

1.

Introduction: The Engish town in the Middle Ages Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser

2.

Towns in English Medieval Society R. H. Hilton

19

3.

The English borough in the thirteenth century G. H. Martin

29

4.

The first half-century of the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon E. M. Carus-Wilson

49

5.

Small town society in England before the Black Death R. H. Hilton

71

6.

Suburban growth D. J. Keene

97

7.

Craftsmen and the economy of London in the fourteenth century E. M. Veale

120

8.

Gloucester in the century after the Black Death Richard Holt

141

9.

Ralph Holland and the London radicals, 1438-1444 Caroline M. Barron

160 v

Contents 10.

The commercial dominance of a medieval provincial oligarchy: Exeter in the late fourteenth century Maryanne Kowaleski

184

11.

The essence of medieval urban communities: The vill of Westminster 1200-1540 Gervase Rosser

216

12.

Ceremony and the citizen: The communal year at Coventry 1450-1550 Charles Phythian-Adams

238

13.

Urban decline in late medieval England R. B. Dobson

265

Index

VI

287

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce articles: Associated Book Publishers (UK) Ltd for 'Ceremony and the citizen' in Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500-1700 edited by P. Clark and P. Slack (Routledge, 1972); Basil Blackwell Ltd for 'The first half-century of the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon' by E.M. Cams-Wilson in Economic History Review, 18 (1965); Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society and the author, R. A Holt, for 'Gloucester in the century after the Black Death' in Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 103 (1985); Council for British Archaeology and the author, Derek Keene, for 'Suburban growth' in The Plans and Topography of Medieval Towns in England and Wales edited by M. W. Barley (CBA Research Report 14, 1976); The Historical Association and the author, Caroline M. Barron, for 'Ralph Holland and the London radicals 1438-1444' in A History of the North London Branch of the Historical Association, together with Essays in Honour of its Golden Jubilee (London, 1970); Hodder and Stoughton Ltd for 'Craftsmen and the economy of London in the fourteenth century' by E. M. Veale in Studies in London History Presented To Philip Edmund Jones edited by A. E. J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway, copyright© 1969 Elspeth M. Veale; Leicester University Press, a division of Pinter Publishers, for 'Towns in societies: Medieval England' by R. H. Hilton in Urban History Yearbook (1982); The Past and Present Society and the author, R. H. Hilton, for 'Small town society in England before the Black Death' in Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, 105 (November 1984), world copyright The Past and Present Society; Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies for 'Commercial dominance of a medieval oligarchy' by M. Kowaleski in Mediaeval Studies, 46 (1984), © 1984 by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto; Royal Historical Society for 'Urban decline in late medieval England' by R. B. Dobson in Transactions vii

Acknowledgements of the Royal Historical Society, 27 (1977), 'The English borough in the thirteenth century' by G. H. Martin in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13 (1963) and 'The essence of medieval urban communities: The viii of Westminster 1200-1540' by A. G. Rosser in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 34 (1984).

Vlll

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 stuqjes that follow. The first point to emphasize is that most English towns of 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 1

The Medieval Town 1200-1540 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;' 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 l. S. Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford,

1977). 2. See P. Clark, 'Visions of the urban community: Antiquarians and the English city before 1800', in D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe (eds), The Pursuit of Urban History (London, 1983), 105-25.

2

Introduction: The English town in the Middle Ages 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 of 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 consequentlj remained largely neglected for the following quarter of a century. The narrow, legal definition of 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 3. See, principally, F. W. Maitland, Township and Borough (Cambridge, 1898); M. Bateson (ed.), Borough Customs, Selden Society, 18 (1904); 21 (1906); A. Ballard and J. Tait (eds), British Borough Charters, 1216-1307 (Cambridge, 1923); J. Tait, The Medieval English Borough (Manchester, 1936). 4. C. Gill, History of Birmingham, vol. 1: Manor and B9rough to 1865 (Ox· ford, 1952), 12-26; and see R. A. Holt, The Early History of the Town of Birmingham (Dugdale Society Occasional Paper, Oxford, 1985), 2-3 and passim. 5. P. Saunders, Sociology and the Urban Question (London, 1981), provides a good critique of the literature of urban sociology.

3

The Medieval Town 1200-1540 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 nonagrarian. 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 4

Introduction: The English town in the Middle Ages 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 ? 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 aban6. R. H. Britnell, 'The proliferation of markets and fairs in England before 1349', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 34 (1981), 209-21. 7. M. W. Beresford and J. K. St Joseph, Medieval England from the Air (Cambridge, 1957), 224-6.

5

The Medieval Town 1200-1540 doned. 8 In this way numerous small towns, like so many villages, were 'lost'. Nevertheless, despite the pruning which followed the over-expansion of the !hirteenth 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 8. The Victoria County History of Shropshire, vol. viii (London, 1986) 308-10. 9. ex inf. D. J. Keene; see id., 'A new study of London before the Great Fire', Urban History Yearbook (1984), 18-19. 10. W. G. Hoskins, Local History in England (London, 1959),176-7.

6

Introduction: The English town in the Middle Ages (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 countrysideY The economy of the English medieval town was at all times closely interdependent with agrarian production. Although its market was central to the existence of every town, marketing never became an urban prerogative, nor indeed was it a guaranteed route to urban development. There were many country markets in the Middle Ages which failed to develop into viable towns, despite at times the best efforts of their lords. Around the marketplace a more or less extensive range of industrial services and manufactures needed to coalesce; for while the market may have attracted the peasant to the town, it was the range of specialized economic functions unavailable in the countryside that tempted him to spend what proportion of his money was not ear-marked for rent. And above the basic level of clothes and tools, the importers and the manufacturers of luxury wares drew an appreciable share of the rural surplus into the urban economy. This was true of all urban centres, great and small, although of course the diversity of the services offered increased with the size of the town. Stratford-upon-Avon in the thirteenth century, as described by Eleanora Carus-Wilson (Ch. 4), presented a spectrum typical of the smaller towns, including bakers and brewers and a handful of workers in the metal, leather and cloth trades. In London, at the other extreme, Elspeth Veale found (Ch. 7) almost 200 separately identified crafts, including that of making toggles for bootlaces. While variety and specialization were characteristic of medieval urban industry, the scale of production remained small. Even those .industries which in some towns purported to be organized within gilds were, at the level of production, located in the household. Consequently a very high proportion of urban populations was represented by living-in 'servants': apprentices and assistants in the family business. As many as one in four of Coventry's recorded population in the 1520s was made up of such servants, probably nearly all youths and children. 12 Moreover, no town could maintain more than a limited hold over a particular industry. While some industries - such as mining, pottery and tile making - remained predominantly rural throughout the Middle Ages, others shifted their 11. M. Kowaleski, 'Local markets and merchants in late fourteenth-century Exeter', Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto (1982). 12. C. V. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), 204ff., 221ff.

7

The Medieval Town 1200-1540 base as technological or jurisdictional constraints dictated. Holt's Gloucester exemplifies the early centre of cloth manufacture which, in the later medieval period, saw its production dwindle even as new centres, better situated geographically and less hampered by established patterns of production, grew up in the Cotswolds. Such newly developing places tended soon to become urban in their own right. But although the late Middle Ages witnessed the first signs of industrial activity, not only in the wool-manufacturing towns of the Cotswolds but also in those, such as Leeds and Halifax, of the Pennines, and again in the early metalworking centre of Birmingham, the medieval period knew nothing of the factory workforces and large capital investment in industry which would characterize towns of a later period. In 1540 the industrial city still lay far in the future. Neither size of population nor scale of economic enterprise set the medieval English town apart from the countryside, but rather social and economic diversity. From the beginning, this diversity introduced major problems of organization. Geoffrey Martin's essay (Ch. 3) treats the early, heroic phase of development of the medieval urban constitution. What emerges from the records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is evidence of a great deal of experimentation, often in anticipation of the legitimating charters granted frequently after 1200 by impecunious monarchs and speculating lords. Although this period is served only patchily by surviving sources, it is clear that town dwellers never felt obliged to wait upon legal recognition before coordinating their efforts in a corporate response to urban problems. Typically, the leading inhabitants of Oxford, when requesting their first royal charter in 1191, claimed already to speak in the name of 'all the citizens'. 13 The urban communes of France and the Low Countries have attracted historians' attention for the force with which they campaigned for municipal liberties. But the collaborative achievements of English townspeople in this pre-legal, communal phase were no less remarkable for being in most cases non-violent. By 1300 a political structure was generally in place in the larger towns, within which the legislative and executive rights that had been grudgingly granted were concentrated in the hands of a mercantile elite. This structure was not to be fundamentally altered in the later medieval period, although the element of formal representation - always restricted - would at times be broadened or narrowed in particular cases. A long-standing assumption that medieval urban government tended towards ever greater exclusiveness fits only some towns and not others. Late fourteenth-century Exeter, studied by Maryanne Kowaleski (Ch. 10), does display that 13. R. H. C. Davis, 'An Oxford charter of 1191 and the beginnings of municipal freedom', Oxoniensia, 33 (1968), 53-65.

8

Introduction: The English town in the Middle Ages pattern, but contrasting cases were cited long ago by Alice Stopford Green. 14 Control of urban government was always vested formally in a wealthy minority, but the ways in which that control was maintained merit closer consideration. Political power was largely an expression of economic influence. Because of the small-scale and fragmented nature of the medieval urban economy, the merchants who generally predominated in urban government did not enjoy the concentrated power exercised by the factory master over his workforce in the later industrial town. Instead, the medieval urban merchant owed his prominence to his ability to control the supply of raw materials to the various crafts, and to the large profits which he derived from wholesale trade in luxury items and finished goods. The merchant's economic status, however, was not of itself a guarantee of effective power to govern the wider body of the townspeople. Since the mercantile class was never more than a small minority in urban society, wealth alone was not a practically sufficient basis of enforceable authority. One method of control widely adopted by the merchant rulers of the towns in the late Middle Ages was the establishment and supervision of craft organizations. These were a specialized form of a type of association encountered in many guises in the Middle Ages: the gild. While the craft-based gilds offered their members the sociable attractions of gilds or fraternities in general, in their economic role they served rather the interests of urban government. The craft organization was viewed by the wealthy merchants who ruled the towns as a means of controlling the industrial labour force, whether master craftsmen, journeymen or apprentices. In Hilton's words, the organized crafts were the 'industrial police' designed to enforce the policy of the ruling elite. In the twelfth century there existed independent gilds of clothworkers and other crafts in some of the larger towns, but by the early thirteenth century these had been suppressed or absorbed by the currently evolving borough authorities. Thereafter little is heard of the organized crafts until the fourteenth century. In the intervening period borough courts seem everywhere to have regulated working hours, wage rates and the length of apprenticeships. It was perhaps only when, after 1350, labour became scarce and a potential for artisan resistance was created, that urban rulers felt it prudent to exercise such controls indirectly. In the larger towns from the mid-fourteenth century there increasingly appeared trade combinations in which master craftsmen were compulsorily enrolled and from which they could be expelled if they broke the rules laid down by the wealthy men of their craft and ratified by the city government. The leading gildsmen, in 14. A. S. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, vol. ii (London, 1894), Cbs. 11, 14.

9

The Medieval Town 1200-1540

return for the status of minor office, acted as the willing agents of the borough authorities. The system enabled insubordination to the urban authorities to be punished, in principle, by loss of livelihood. The effectiveness in practice of the craft system as a means of urban government should not, however, be overestimated: its limitations were manifold. The administrations of the smaller towns rarely felt the need to introduce the system, and even in the larger centres it was generally applied only to crafts perceived as requiring a particular degree of control. Recent work has underlined Veale's conclusion (Ch. 7) that a 9reat deal of craft activity in practice went unnoticed or unregulated. 5 The economic gilds have traditionally been seen by historians as reactionary checks on commercial enterprise, but this image is misleading. In the first place, the crafts themselves repeatedly proved capable of adapting to changed economic circumstances. The development in late medieval Coventry of the new craft of capping, which superseded in importance the old-established cloth trades, was effected within the framework of the gilds. 16 More importantly, the gilds' very lack of an effective monopolistic control over the urban economy left beyond their margins a significant zone of relatively ungoverned enterprise. In the suburbs and other areas outside the jurisdiction of the borough court, scope was left for a good deal of unregulated industrial and commercial activity Y In vain did the urban courts periodically attempt to clamp down on those who flaunted rules restricting trade to the paid-up body of the citizens: in a hopeless gesture of this kind the Norwich leet court in 1375 imposed fines for unlawful trading on Alice the wigmaker, Agnes the bookbinder, Andrew the lantern-maker, and John the silkman. 18 The generally restricted functions of the organized crafts did not altogether prevent them, on occasion, from providing a focus for popular discontent. It is not surprising that independently created gilds of lesser artisans, such as that formed among the journeymen saddlers of London in 1383, tended to be quickly snuffed out by authority. But the complexity of urban society denied to town governments an unchallenged monopoly of power. Although formally unrepresentative of the urban population at large, urban councils were constantly exposed to the pressures of wider opinion. This was particularly likely to occur when rifts appeared within the 15. H. Swanson, 'The illusion of economic structure: craft guilds in late medieval English towns', Past and Present, 121 (1988), 29--48. 16. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, 102, 144-6. 17. See e.g. G. Rosser, 'London and Westminster: The suburb in the urban economy in the later Middle Ages', in J. A. F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1988), 45-61. 18. W. Hudson (ed.), Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich during the Xlllth and X/Vth Centuries, Selden Society, 5 (1891), 66.

10

Introduction: The English town in the Middle Ages ruling elite. The attempt of either faction to mobilize wider support in such circumstances created a real, if unofficial, outlet for the popular voice. One such occasion has been described by Caroline Barron (Ch. 9). In the second quarter of the fifteenth century Ralph Holland, a tailor/draper, fought with the established oligarchy of drapers and other merchants. Holland's platform was an appeal for greater recognition of the crafts (including the tailors) in government. As a member both of the tailors' and of the drapers' guilds, Holland was well placed to campaign on behalf of the disadvantaged artisans. His great wealth made his own role ambiguous: to the governors of the city he appeared not as a popular champion but as a factious peer and rival, especially resented for his successful wooing of the craftsmen. But even though the tangible outcome of Holland's quarrel with the city government was limited, it provided a forum for the expression of the concerns of the crafts, and aired the principle of broader representation. The craft organizations exemplify the delegation of responsibility for the day-to-day government of the town. Apart from the trade gilds, there existed in every town a system of petty officers, with local or specific duties: constables, ale tasters, scavengers or rubbish carters, and the like. Such minor offices represented a greater scope for participation in urban government than would appear from study of the city council alone. In daily practice, the particular neighbourhoods - the wards and parishes - of the town were to a large extent accountable for their own affairs. In London by the mid-thirteenth century, for example, it was the communities of the wards which were held responsible for knowi.ng who were the mendicant poor in their districts.19 Beyond the official structures of urban government, other forms of association helped to give order to the diversity of medieval urban society. Among these, the most universally adaptable was the fraternity or gild. Unlike the economic gilds discussed above, the majority of these societies (called indiscriminately gilds or fraternities by contemporaries) was not specific to particular crafts, but represented instead the voluntary association of those living and working together in the town. Though not ex