38
Come to town
In the fifteenth century England was still predominantly a rural society, with only a fifth of the population living in approximately 800 towns. Only one city, London, could be compared with the cities of the European continent; the other urban centres were essentially large towns, with populations well under 10,000. York and Norwich were the exceptions, with populations of 30,000 and 25,000 respectively. The more important of them, such as York and Chester, were walled; so were the port towns such as Southampton. At the other end of this demographic range, the majority of towns contained populations of hundreds rather than thousands. Many of these smaller towns were simply ringed with a ditch.
A Venetian traveller, at the end of the fifteenth century, noted that the country was ‘very thinly inhabited’ with ‘scarcely any towns of importance’. We may imagine a land with an uneven distribution of relatively small settlements, in utter contrast to the territories of the city-states in northern Italy. The small towns had not yet reached maturity; they were part of the great unconscious of England.
The most significant public buildings were constructed of stone; the churches were of stone, as were the bridges. But only the richest merchants built their houses of that material. The rest were constructed as before with timber or wattle-and-daub; the streets between them were narrow, dirty and malodorous, combining the less desirable aspects of the farm with the detritus of town life. Pigs and chickens roamed the streets and houses; there is a case from Girton in Cambridgeshire where, in 1353, a hen caused a fatal fire by scratching glowing ashes onto a child’s bed of straw. Cattle were kept in the gardens of some town houses, and the back gardens resembled the ‘strips’ of the common farmland producing fruit and vegetables. Orchards and streams lent for a moment the illusion of open country. In many towns you would never be very far from the sound of running water.
The clamour was great, rising in a crescendo on market day, but a few minutes’ walk would take the visitor into the relative silence of the fields or woods. The town gradually faded into the country, with dwellings and yards becoming fewer and fewer until pasture or field or wood became the landscape. The wind was fresher here, less contaminated by foul smells and the fear of infection, and the earth softer beneath the feet. Yet it would be ill-advised to create a picture of pastoral bliss; many trades were pursued in the cottages and hamlets of the countryside, among them clothmaking and leatherworking. Fewer clothmakers resided in the town than in the country, where labour was cheaper and less regulated.
The towns were nevertheless the centre of commerce and of administration; they were the sites of assembly and of public entertainment. The market cross was the place where proclamations were made concerning the affairs of the town and the kingdom; this was the cross to which royal heralds would come with news of battle. Here, too, were the town stocks and the ‘pound’ or cage for offenders. Some towns were built in the shade of a castle or abbey, in which they found their most reliable and prosperous customers. Relations were not always harmonious, however, and the monks and citizenry of Bury St Edmunds were engaged in several violent confrontations; abbots did not make good landlords.
Other towns were built at the confluence of rivers, where trade was assured. A number of towns had a whole range of purposes. They grew organically without any plan or coordination; a new street would be laid out when traders multiplied; huts and houses were built outside the walls according to demand. They persisted and became hallowed by time. In towns as diverse as Winchester and Saffron Walden the building plots, the width of the streets, the topography of the market, still persist and are still visible.
The inhabitants of any town were deemed to be free after the residence of a year and a day, as we have observed, but the towns themselves were not centres of freedom. Many of them were subject to lords and bishops who took the proceeds of rents and taxes. Their internal administration was controlled by a hierarchy as rigid and as severe as any to be found in the nominally feudal areas of the countryside; the mayor and councillors were taken from the class of the richest merchants, and they effectively dominated all aspects of the town’s life. They ran the guilds; they organized the courts; they regulated the markets. The merchants, owning property, were the ‘freemen’ or citizens. They lived in the same quarter of the town, often side by side, and their families intermarried as a matter of habit.
Specifically or predominantly urban crafts were in demand. The potter worked beside the mason and the tiler; the glover and the draper may have been found in the same small street; the skinner and the tanner were closely allied; the carpenter and the cooper frequented the same timber-yard. In the market at Salisbury were Oatmeal Row, Butchers’ Row and Ox Row. In Newcastle there were Skinnergate, Spurriergate and Saddlergate. These men formed their own craft guilds, in part to defend themselves from the claims of the merchant guilds, but they were far inferior in status to the richer merchants who supervised and generally organized their working practices. Resentment, and even open confrontation, often arose between various members of the two groups; but the ties of commerce guaranteed that no general or permanent collapse of order could occur.
Beneath the craftsmen and the traders were the apprentices, the labourers and the household servants. There were always potentes and inferiores. Nothing in medieval England existed outside a formal social discipline of high and low. That was the nature of the world. At the lowest level of all were the poor or diseased people, attracted to the town by the possibility of begging or charitable relief. The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represented the great age of the almshouses and the hospitals. The larger towns had acquired schools by the fourteenth century, and in the following century one or two of them even possessed lending libraries. That is one pertinent difference between town and country; the level of literacy was higher in one than in the other. These public buildings in themselves expressed the civic pride of the town, exemplified also in the growing emphasis on civic ritual and procession. The mayor had become ‘my lord mayor’, preceded in ceremonial array by the sergeant carrying the sword and mace of the city. Spectacle and squalor resided, as always, on the same streets.
The Angelus or Gabriel bell rang at dawn to awaken the townspeople. Scores of bells pealed in each town, their particular sound alerting the people to begin or to end various tasks. After the Angelus had sounded, business began almost at once; the water-carriers congregated at the wells, and the butchers prepared the meat for their first purchasers. No traders were allowed to open their shops until six o’clock, however, and no goods could be sold before that time. In London no fish could be sold in the streets before Mass had been celebrated at certain stated churches. In the larger towns other bells rang out at nine or ten o’clock to signify that ‘foreigners’, or outsiders, could now begin to bargain in the markets. This was the hour when the first meal of the day was taken. The bells rang at midday for the consumption of the ‘noonschenche’ or noon-drink. This was also the time when builders and other labourers were allowed to sleep for an hour.
The afternoon was a less animated period than the morning; those who had travelled to the towns with their country produce now began to make their way back. Most shops closed at the dying of the light, but cooks and butchers could work until nine in the evening. That was the hour when the curfew bell was rung, ordering the men and women of the town to return to their dwellings. The workers in the fields now had to hasten home before the gate was closed against them. The bell tolled until the gate was shut. The town slept before beginning once more its customary round.