The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (21 page)

Of course, we should be grateful to Domesday Book for such information as we can glean. Its listings of houses provide some basis for an estimate of population, suggesting that – after London as the largest urban centre – York, Lincoln, Norwich, Thetford (Norfolk) and Oxford were all sizeable places, although in every case numbers seem to have fallen in the two decades since 1066, apparently through a combination of economic dislocation, castle-building and fires. The population of York is estimated to have dropped from some 8,000 on the eve of the Conquest to 5,000 by 1086, that of Lincoln from 6,000 to 4–5,000, Norwich from 6–7,000 to 5,000, Thetford from 5,000 to 4,000 and Oxford from 5,000 to 2–3,000. Oxford may have been no bigger in 1086 than some other middle-ranking towns, such as Exeter, Gloucester, Leicester, Nottingham, Stamford (Lincolnshire) and Wallingford (Berkshire); others, including Cambridge, Chester, Huntingdon and Ipswich were perhaps a little smaller but still above 1,500. There were a number of lesser Domesday boroughs which presumably had a local commercial role but seem to have housed under 1,000 people – places like Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire), Ilchester (Somerset), Lydford (Devon), Malmesbury (Wiltshire), Romney (Kent) and Tamworth (Staffordshire) – and these may fairly be embraced within any reasonable definition of a town. However some others, with populations of burgesses in single figures – among them Stanstead Abbots (Hertfordshire) and Penwortham (Lancashire) – would have been smaller than many rural settlements and hard to distinguish from them in function or appearance.

Urban defences are discussed further in
Chapter 6
but it is worth noting here that Domesday Book is also useful for passing references to the repair
of town walls at Chester and Oxford and (more significantly for those with an interest in urban topography in general) to the presence of houses ‘outside the walls’, a phenomenon noted at Colchester, Hereford, Leicester and Oxford. There were houses ‘outside the city’ at Canterbury and Lincoln and people named as
suburbani
at Winchester.
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This is not necessarily evidence that the room available within the walls had been filled: late-eleventh-century intramural Winchester had more open space than built-up area except in the very centre.
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But these references suggest that towns were already growing outwards and there is no doubt that the overall story down to the early fourteenth century is the usual one of expansion – growth of the existing urban settlements and the foundation of new ones – though with an added dimension in the efforts made by several of these communities to secure and enhance the privileges of self-government.

As we have seen, most towns relied on their adjoining fields for at least part of their sustenance: Domesday Book duly reports that the burgesses of Cambridge lent their ploughs to the sheriff and that their counterparts at Huntingdon, Oxford, Shrewsbury, Steyning (Sussex), Tamworth, Totnes (Devon) and York all worked their land in one way or another. However, it was their non-farming activities which set towns apart from the surrounding countryside, and made for a population normally larger, more diverse in composition and more densely packed than in a rural settlement, with a sense of corporate identity which encouraged the development of separate administrative and judicial arrangements. Town walls, ditches or other boundary markers often had as one of their main functions the delineation of the area within which tolls were liable to be paid and the urban administration held sway. And as centres of population at the focal point of trade routes, towns were also liable to be chosen as the places where kings and lords built their castles for regional governmental purposes, and where the larger churches came to be founded, so adding to the diversity of urban function, though sometimes at a cost to those whose houses were in the way. Domesday Book mentions the removal of houses to make room for new castles in no fewer than 11 boroughs – such as the 166 ‘destroyed on account of the castle’ at Lincoln – and the physical legacy of this can often be seen in the town’s layout today.
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Cambridge’s castle, still the site of county administration in an elevated position to the north of the river, obliterated the streets of the earliest urban settlement here. That at Winchester was built into a corner of the town walls, removing lengths of street running alongside those walls. And the Norman policy of relocating cathedrals to the most important towns in their dioceses meant that in Norwich, for example, most of the pre-Conquest settlement to the south of the river was taken over for the construction of a new cathedral priory and its associated buildings, at the expense of at least two pre-existing churches and several streets.
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The network of towns in existence in England at the beginning of the second millennium, and that recorded in Domesday Book, owed a great deal to a series of authoritative decisions over the previous 400 years or more. Places which had been chosen by the seventh century as centres of royal and ecclesiastical administration, such as Winchester for the kingdom of Wessex and Canterbury for the kingdom of Kent – both utilizing former Roman sites – would certainly have hosted substantial non-agricultural activity from the outset, as did the coastal or inland ports which were apparently deliberately fostered by kings at this time: towns such as Ipswich (serving a royal centre at Rendlesham), Sandwich (serving Canterbury) and Southampton (originally named
Hamwic
, serving Winchester). All these included the element
wic
in early spellings of the name, and so did London (
Lundenwic
) and York (
Eoforwiceastor
), in both of which the functions of trading port and royal-ecclesiastical centre were combined, based in different parts of the town.
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By the end of the eighth century, there had been further encouragement to urban development through the establishment of a network of fortified
burhs
as protected market towns and communal defences against the threat of Viking raiding along estuaries and rivers. For their part, the Vikings themselves, as they occupied much of northern and eastern England during the course of the ninth century, proved to be considerable stimulants to urban growth: it has been argued that they were responsible for developing linear trading extensions to earlier
burhs
, as happened, for instance, at York (where the ‘Jorvik’ excavations have revealed the growth of a major trading settlement south east of the earlier centre), at Lincoln (where Wigford arose as a trading area across the river to the south of the fortified area), at Cambridge (where settlement was also extended south from an earlier
burh
across the river), and at Huntingdon, which seems to have been developed as the river-port for its already-established neighbour, Godmanchester. In their turn, the kings of Wessex (Alfred the Great in the late ninth century, his son and successor Edward the Elder in the early tenth century) and the rulers of that part of Mercia not under Scandinavian occupation embarked upon fresh schemes of
burh
creation, initiatives which embraced both new sites (such as Wallingford) and existing ones (like Worcester, where the local bishop had already fostered a trading settlement). Thereafter, as Viking-held territory fell to the English, there was a rebuilding and enlargement of some of the
burhs
they had held, among them Bedford and Cambridge, where the defences were extended further south, and Thetford, where they now reached further north. It was also in the tenth century that some of the great religious houses, among them the nunnery at Romsey (Hampshire) and the monasteries at Hartlepool (County Durham), Whitby (Yorkshire), Durham and Peterborough, founded towns around market places deliberately established at their gates, seeking to benefit from the commodities traded therein and to profit from the rents and tolls which could be charged.
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From this pre-Conquest background, which created the heterogeneous picture of urban activity Domesday Book struggled to express, towns continued to grow in size and number – though with fortunes which varied from one to another. Twelfth-century assessments to
auxilia
(or ‘aids’), levied by the exchequers of Henry I and Henry II, show a familiar hierarchy of London, Lincoln, York and Norwich as the leading urban centres, to which Bristol can be added on the basis of similar levies in the thirteenth century. By the time of the Lay Subsidy of 1334, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston (Lincolnshire) had joined the leading group, with Coventry also prominent. When the Subsidy was assessed again in 1524–25, London, Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Coventry still led the way, but York, Lincoln and Boston were well down the list of contributors.
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There are problems with the interpretation of these figures, which as tax assessments are not necessarily the fairest reflections of towns’ respective economic fortunes; their significance for an understanding of late-medieval developments is discussed towards the end of this chapter. Here, we should note the importance of an involvement with international trade: Bristol, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston were major coastal ports, along with others prominent in the earlier assessments like King’s Lynn, Yarmouth (both in Norfolk) and Southampton, while York, Lincoln and Norwich were leading inland river ports. Other towns were famed for their international fairs, their specialized manufacturing or their importance as administrative centres, the greater among them hosting the courts for the shires to which they gave their names, or fulfilling a governmental role on the national stage: not only London and Westminster, but also places like Winchester, Worcester, Oxford and Northampton, all of which played host to sessions of the king’s exchequer during the twelfth century and subsequently to meetings of parliament.
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Towns built on their commercial and administrative functions to establish distinctive identities. In the twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon was impressed with the reputation of Winchester for wine, Worcester for fruit, Exeter for metals and Bath (as a spa) for ‘pools’. His near-contemporary, the anonymous author of the
Gesta Stephani
(Deeds of Stephen), praised Bath for its ‘little springs … creating in the middle of the town baths of agreeable warmth’ where ‘the sick are wont to gather … from all England to wash away their infirmities in the health-giving waters’. Even relatively small towns could attract the attention of a thirteenth-century merchant whose travels around the country left an impression of each one: ‘blanket of Blyth … ruffs of Bedford … quilts of Clare … mead of Hitchin … tiles of Reading’ and so on, though the reliability of all this is tempered by the fact that he ended his
list by declaring that ‘there’s … too much to drink and … my wits are away’.
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Even so, he was right to acknowledge the importance of these lesser towns, since it has been reckoned that by the end of the thirteenth century about as many people in total lived in England’s roughly 600 ‘small towns’ (defined as having populations of between 300 and 2,000) as in the 50 or so ‘large towns’ which exceeded them in size. In the less populous parts of the country, they were the only urban presence; medieval Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, for example, are thought to have had about 40 ‘small towns’ in total by that time, among them Manchester and Liverpool alongside such as Cockermouth and Penrith.
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Crucial to the viability of a town was its market. Since markets were a source of income to whoever was entitled to charge stall-rents and tolls, the right to hold one was supposed to be a privilege specially conferred – by the twelfth century normally only by the crown. Even in the troubled reign of King Stephen, we find a series of royal market grants, such as in Eynsham (Oxfordshire), Ledbury (Herefordshire) and Lichfield (Staffordshire) all on a Sunday, in Cobham (Surrey) on a Tuesday and Ross-on-Wye (Herefordshire) on a Thursday.
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In all, some 2,800 markets are estimated to have been formally granted by the crown to settlements in England and Wales between 1200 and 1500, the majority before 1275, with the peak period coming in the middle decades of the thirteenth century: of 28 places in medieval Derbyshire to be accorded market rights, for example, no less than nine received their grants during the 1250s. Most of the places concerned never had the social and economic diversity characteristic of a town – and after 1300 far more of these ‘village markets’ were closing down than were being set up – but every town certainly had a market. While the international ports and fairs were, in reality, markets writ large, the majority of towns served a local or regional hinterland. Yet this usually weekly gathering was not only vital (literally) to the country dwellers who needed to turn surplus produce into cash or commodities but also provided the context in which non-agricultural activities could flourish, enabling those who lived by trade, craft, manufacture or administration to obtain at least some of their food without having to produce it themselves.
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Despite the impression of there being overall control from above, some market grants were clearly attempts to regularize informal gatherings of traders already taking place, commonly on the Sabbath because of the opportunity to combine trade with worship: a customary Sunday market held in the churchyard of Reepham (Norfolk), for instance, is known only from Henry III’s order in 1240 that it be removed. According to the thirteenth-century lawyer Henry Bracton, who was concerned to offer guidelines in order to limit their proliferation, a new market would be a nuisance if set up within six and two-thirds miles (10.7 kilometres) of an existing one, because ‘a reasonable
day’s journey consists of twenty miles’ and, if this is divided into three parts, ‘the first part, that of the morning, is to be given to those who are going to the market, the second is to be given to buying and selling … and the third part is left for those returning from the market to their own homes’ before nightfall.
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In practice, this limitation seems to have been neither observed nor enforced – innumerable markets were closer to one another than this, and some commodities were traded further afield – but it enshrines the notion that, while producers often welcomed a choice of outlets, close proximity could lead to rivalry and resentment. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Welsh cattle drovers were taking their beasts to Ross-on-Wye’s Thursday market, then going on to Gloucester and Newnham markets on the following Saturday and Sunday, before trying to sell any which remained at Gloucester’s Wednesday market on their way home. In the half-century prior to 1346, grain from the Wiltshire manors of Longbridge Deverill and Monkton Deverill was finding its way not to one local market but several, at Frome, Shaftesbury and Hindon, within a radius of up to 17 kilometres. But early in Henry II’s reign, objections by the men of Wallingford and Oxford to a market at nearby Abingdon led to a violent confrontation in the town and eventually a judicial hearing before the king, settled in Abingdon’s favour on the basis of reliable memory of a market here in Henry I’s time.
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