The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (26 page)

Even where the street pattern within a medieval town implies minimal overall planning, a sure sign that there has been some authoritative direction is the presence of ‘burgage plots’, the series of long narrow enclosures for housing, arranged next to each other along the principal streets. In theory, these plots were held by the burgesses, the freeholders who (if there was a measure of self-government) contributed through their rents to the town’s corporate funds and might also participate in collective decision-making – though in practice, subletting made for greater diversity. Analysis of the size of burgage plots has shown that they were normally laid out by standard measures, partly to facilitate equitable calculation of rents. Each community would have had its own measuring ‘rod, pole or perch’ and although in the countryside this varied in length (in Pembrokeshire, 10 feet or about 3 metres, in Cheshire 24 feet, some 7.3 metres), in towns the ‘statute perch’ of 16 ½ feet (5.03 metres) seems to have been widespread; indeed, by the close of the thirteenth century, a statute acre (4840 square yards) was also being recognized, on the basis of 4 statute perches by 40. Accordingly, the Bishop of Worcester’s foundation charter for the new town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1196 stated that each of the plots should cost one shilling (5p) annual rent and measure 3 ½ perches by 12 perches (equating to 18 by 60 metres, or just over a quarter-acre in size); although several plots had been subdivided lengthways into halves or thirds within 50 years of the grant of this charter (creating frontages to the streets of 6 or 9 metres), these basic dimensions still govern property boundaries in the centre of the town today. Similarly, the foundation of Burton-on-Trent (Staffordshire), about the same time as Stratford, was accompanied by a stipulation that the burgage plots should measure 4 perches by 24 (about 20 metres by 121 metres). Where no such specifications exist but plots can be measured on the ground today, similar dimensions have been found in towns as far apart as Evesham (Worcestershire) and Totnes (Devon).
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Not all burgage plots respected the 16 ½ feet perch: different lengths have been noted in Alnwick (Northumberland), in York and in Oxford, where there was a contrast between a short perch inside the walls and a longer one in extra-mural Broad Street.
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But whether the statute measure or a local alternative was used, the key point is that we are in the presence here of substantial urban planning.

Studies of the configuration and dimensions of burgage plots are helpful for the reconstruction of the stages by which a medieval town developed, as in the Bail, the ‘Upper City’ of Lincoln on the site of the former Roman fortress, where the southern part of Bailgate immediately to the east of the castle was probably laid out in the middle of the twelfth century and the northern part towards the Newport Arch – where the plots are wider – some years later. Bailgate was under the jurisdiction of the castle constable on behalf of the crown, but – notwithstanding the well-recorded example of New Winchelsea – we should beware of assuming that the ‘authority’ which took the initiative in urban planning was always an extraneous lord. The ‘Lower City’ of Lincoln, occupying the slope between the Bail and the River Witham to the south, was reconfigured in the first half of the eleventh century, with streets such as the Strait and Steep Hill coming into existence, presumably under the direction of the 12 ‘lawmen’ referred to in Domesday Book who governed this part of the town. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Sandwich, the town’s council seems to have been heavily involved in the realignment of streets to accommodate a westward extension of St Peter’s Church and the repositioning of the fish market: a custumal of 1301 mentions the council’s powers to move a market if its place ‘be too much crowded or too narrow … as was the case with the fishmongers in the new street’.
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This was collective responsibility in action.

Whatever their origins, all towns reflected the growth of population down to the early fourteenth century by extending the built-up area. Along rivers, this sometimes took the form of reclamation of the waterfront, above all in London where over 1.5 kilometres west of the Tower around Queenhithe were the subject of successive schemes from Roman times onwards; indeed, medieval London is estimated to have increased its surface area by 15% through extending into the river, creating space for new dwellings, wharves and warehouses, mostly before 1350. Similar efforts have been identified at King’s Lynn, Hull, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Norwich.
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More widespread was the growth of suburbs beyond the boundaries which delineated the urban nucleus. Suburbs clustered around the main roads as they approached a town, with a pronounced ‘goose-foot’ funnelling effect to these roads if the town walls restricted access to a limited number of gates. As early as the 950s, the area known as Wigford was stretching for almost a kilometre along the main road running southwards from Lincoln and it was further extended thereafter; by the later twelfth century main roads leading out of Canterbury and Winchester passed through suburbs of similar extent. As has already been noted, several towns were recorded as having suburbs in Domesday Book, although whether this settlement beyond defined limits implied some freedom from urban jurisdiction is unclear. On the north side of Lincoln, the suburb of Newport was developed soon after the Norman
Conquest, based on a street running out from the walled area of the town which broadened into a market place and later hosted the great St Botolph’s fair, but this remained under the authority of the governing council. Escape from urban control is more obvious at Shrewsbury, where the abbey was granted at its foundation in the 1080s ‘the whole suburb outside the east gate’. Although there is little evidence of deliberate suburban planning on the part of the monks, they hosted a rival fair to that of the town across the bridge for much of the medieval period and inevitably attracted to the vicinity some of the economic activity which would otherwise have flourished over there.
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In general, whether or not they were subject to an alternative authority, suburbs tended to be more spacious in their layout of streets and properties than town centres; they often acquired boundaries of their own, in the form of banks, ditches and bars across roads, but they were often perceived to lie outside the town gates, with trading allowed free of urban tolls. They might house a considerable proportion of a town’s population – a quarter of Exeter’s total in the 1520s and over a third of Winchester’s in both the 1140s and the 1340s – with many of their residents engaged in industrial activities: an archaeological site at Alms Lane, Norwich, for example, has revealed suburban growth in the thirteenth century over rubbish dumps and quarry pits north of the town, and evidence thereafter of brewing, skinning, pottery-making and working in iron, leather and bone, before the area was abandoned after the Black Death and then developed for housing instead.
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As urban authorities increased their powers during the course of the middle ages, they certainly took an interest in what were, in effect, local planning measures intended to help people live harmoniously in close proximity to one another. The earliest known urban building regulation comes from ninth-century Canterbury, where a space of two feet (0.6 metres) between each house was required, but they are best known from London, where an Assize of Buildings was issued about 1189. As detailed regulations evolved from this, they came to insist that party walls between stone houses should be at least 3 feet (0.9 metres) thick and 16 feet (4.9 metres) high, roofs be tiled or at least not have flammable reeds and straw exposed, and the mouths of cesspits be at least two and a half feet (0.75 metres) away from the property boundary. Good evidence for the enforcement of all this survives both from the excavation of London dwellings obviously built to conform, and also in the record of offences, nearly a quarter of which in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries concerned drainage and water disposal. There is, for example, a fascinating glimpse of sanitary arrangements at London’s Queenhithe in August 1314, where rainwater and other waste from houses and the street were channelled into a gutter designed to cleanse a public convenience ‘on the Hithe’; Alice Wade, who had fitted a pipe from her own domestic privy so that this would discharge into the gutter, was ordered to
remove it, since the gutter ‘is frequently stopped up by the filth therefrom, and the neighbours under whose houses the gutter runs are greatly inconvenienced by the stench’.
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Apart from foul water, what concerned regulators most was the risk of fire: it is some tribute to their success in this regard that whereas there had been five ‘great fires of London’ in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there were none at any time between 1212 and 1666, nor any similar catastrophic conflagrations in the major towns of York, Bristol and Norwich through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An ordinance of 1467 in Worcester forbade thatched roofs and timber chimneys within the town walls, while the Building Assize for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, apparently late-medieval in date, orders that the ground and first floor of buildings must be of stone at least three feet thick; again, archaeological investigation of structures of this date suggest that the rules were being observed.
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This corporate concern for general welfare mirrors the readiness to act in concert for mutual benefit which we have already encountered in rural settlements, and to which we shall return.

It is easy to have a false impression of the appearance of medieval towns since the survival rate of buildings from the period is in inverse proportion to their frequency at the time: rare, highly untypical houses persist (including some castles, to which we shall turn in
Chapter 6
), the mass of humble dwellings have all but disappeared. There remain, for example, some exceptional urban dwellings for the élite, such as St Mary’s Guildhall, Lincoln, built as a royal residence not later than 1157; the thirteenth-century stone palace of the Bishops of Wells; Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries; and Gainsborough Old Hall, built in the 1470s and 1480s by a nobleman who served both Richard III and Henry VII. All these were highly unusual in an urban context because of the lack of any serious constraint on space: the grounds of Gainsborough Old Hall occupied a full quarter of the town, the episcopal palaces were within ecclesiastical enclaves, and the royal house at Lincoln was built in the developing suburb of Wigford, away from the more densely occupied town centre.
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Yet in one sense these élite buildings were in the mainstream of urban house design, for they were all laid out in one way or another around a hall: the motifs of the countryside applied in the town as well, at all levels above the humblest in society.

For merchants, the hall was a place for such business as did not need to be kept confidential, and it must also have conveyed an impression of status
equivalent to that of the lord of a rural manor. Twelfth-century merchants’ houses survive in stone, for example, as Wensum Lodge, Norwich, where the original two-storey range had a single-storey aisled hall added along the street front, and as the Norman House and Jew’s House, Lincoln, which both had halls on the upper floor.
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Nos. 3–4 West Street, New Romney is an early fourteenth century example, reproducing in stone the standard manorial plan of single-storey central hall, cross passage and service end, with the other end of two storeys, comprising undercroft with chamber above. Among new buildings of the fifteenth century, when timber had come to be regarded as a more fashionable, flexible and economical material than stone, Little Hall, Lavenham, Great Porch House, Devizes, and the Merchant’s House, Bromsgrove – each one of which can be linked to prominent local mercantile families – all boast an open hall and a two-storey wing for services below and one or more chambers above. In all these cases, the building plots were sufficiently wide to allow the halls to be set parallel to the street, and, where space and funds allowed, buildings of this type might be enhanced by the development of courtyards behind. Thus, the fifteenth-century Salisbury merchant’s house now known as Church House in Crane Street had a particularly wide passage between hall and service end, to allow horses and carts to gain access from the street to the courtyard beyond. What might be called communal town residences – inns, colleges, hospitals – particularly favoured the courtyard plan to maximize accommodation, while always retaining a hall as an essential element within the overall layout.
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The fourteenth-century New Inn, Gloucester and fifteenth-century Pilgrim’s Inn (otherwise The George) Glastonbury are good surviving illustrations of this arrangement, as are the hospital of Holy Cross, Winchester (founded in the 1130s) and several Oxbridge colleges, where the fourteenth-century Mob Quad at Merton (Oxford) and Old Court at Corpus Christi (Cambridge) both have grounds for claiming to be the earliest survivors in a university context.
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Lower down the social scale, the hall was also a key feature of urban buildings which combined the functions of residence and shop (or workshop). Tackley’s Inn, (106–7 High Street) Oxford, apparently intended partly as student accommodation from the time it was built around 1320, had a hall with screens passage and chamber running parallel to the street, all of which was fronted by five shops with a vaulted undercroft below; a passage between two of the shops gave access from the street to the hall but there appears to have been no direct interior link between hall and shops, suggesting an intention to rent them out as separate units. Similarly, at nos. 38–42 Watergate Street, Chester, also of the 1320s, a run of shops had a hall, with screens passage and service end, occupying the full width behind them; the shops had chambers above and undercrofts below but in all but one case there was no internal link to the hall, again implying a renting-out arrangement
(
Figure  23
). Conversely, at nos. 48–52 Bridge Street, Chester, where again there is a hall running parallel to the street fronted by shops over undercrofts, a series of internal doorways to the hall, apparently giving access to each of the shops, imply that they were all under the owner’s direct control. An alternative layout, well-suited to narrow burgage plots created by subdivisions and for a situation where house and shop were held by the same person, was for the hall to be set at right-angles to the street, with a single shop at the front and private rooms extending behind. A late thirteenth-century example is the so-called ‘eastern house’ of Booth Mansion (nos. 28–34 Watergate Street), Chester, which had a shop facing the street, with undercroft below and chamber above, then hall with services at the back. The merchant’s house at No. 58 French Street, Southampton, of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, had an undercroft largely below street level, and above that a shop accessed from the street with hall and two-storey chambers behind (
Figure 21
). Some aspects of this arrangement were replicated, albeit on a smaller scale, in a terrace of at least 23 houses built about 1450 in Tewkesbury as a speculative development by the nearby abbey; many of the units still survive as nos. 34–50 Church Street, with shop at the front facing the street, chamber above the shop and open hall at the back, though in this case undercrofts were missing (
Figure  22
). A similar terrace development, though with some differences in the internal layout, survives as The Abbot’s House, Butcher Row, Shrewsbury, also of the 1450s and again with the local abbey in the role of building speculator.
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