The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (24 page)

When the Statute of Bridges in 1531 obliged what it described as a ‘town corporate’ to maintain any which stood on its land, it was recognizing the collective powers which many urban communities had acquired by that time. A book on the landscape is not the place to explore these powers in any detail, but the story may briefly be told. Essentially, the market activity of a town necessitated a special court if only for the resolution of trading disputes, a corporate identity developed among traders in common pursuit
of commercial advantage, and it was unrealistic for lords to enforce within towns the labour services and other obligations associated with servile tenure, so properties came to be held ‘freely’ for money rents with little restriction on their transfer. Much of this can be glimpsed in Domesday Book – albeit with the benefit of hindsight – but it was from the twelfth century that these corporate privileges were refined, defined and enshrined within charters which, collectively, can be regarded as conferring ‘borough status’. A very early example is a charter of Henry I for the men of Beverley, datable 1124–33, confirming ‘free burgage according to the free laws and customs of the burgesses of York, and also their gild-merchant with its pleas and toll, and with all its free customs and liberties in all things as Thurstan the archbishop gave to them’. Nearly 50 royal charters to English towns survive from the reign of his grandson, Henry II, with the right to a gild-merchant, freedom from toll, burgage tenure and various borough customs (usually modelled on those elsewhere) as the standard fare. Oxford, for example, not later than 1162, was specifically confirmed in its entitlement to a gild-merchant, freedom from tolls all over England and Normandy and other ‘customs, liberties and laws which they have in common with my citizens of London’ including provision for court cases to be settled according to London law: a clear message to the king’s sheriff of Oxfordshire, based at the castle in the south-west quarter of the town, not to interfere.
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What all this meant, in practice, was that the leading tradesmen were free to form an association for their mutual benefit – the gild-merchant – burgage properties within the town were to be held for money rents without any vestige of ‘unfree tenure’, there was an opportunity to trade free of toll wherever specified, and a series of local laws and customs would apply within the borough under the jurisdiction of its own officers.

Another concession, which featured less regularly and was liable to be revoked and then restored according to political necessity, was the right of a borough to answer for its own farm to the royal exchequer. What this meant was that the farm – a lump sum rendered annually to the king, covering rents and various customary dues – would be accounted for not by the sheriff (who was also responsible for the ‘shire farm’ and who stood to profit from any excess collected) but by officers of the borough: any surplus raised, over and above the farm required, could then be used for the borough’s own purposes. Gloucester is known to have enjoyed this right by the 1170s and by the close of Edward I’s reign in 1307 no less than 50 boroughs did so, as part of a proliferation of concessions during the course of the thirteenth century which, in addition to those itemized above, might include the right to elect a mayor and entitlement to levy murage, pavage or pontage for the upkeep of walls, streets or bridges respectively. All this added to the sense of corporate identity and activity; Lincoln, for example, was able to pave ‘the high road through the … town’ in 1286. By the fourteenth century, some boroughs
were regularly sending representatives to parliament, while by the fifteenth it was normal for charters to include a right for the borough collectively to hold land, possess a common seal and issue its own bye-laws.
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Reality was of course more complicated that this brief account might suggest, since boroughs differed on many points of detail. Gilds-merchant varied in the extent of their exclusivity and in their precise relationship to the governing authority of the town: effectively the same body at Winchester and Worcester, for example, but kept distinct at Exeter. Most boroughs, especially those which acquired their key privileges after the twelfth century, never formally had a gild-merchant, but the leading merchants still formed themselves into a governing assembly to discharge the corporate responsibilities which had been conferred. Even the status of ‘burgess’, with a right to trade freely within the borough, differed from town to town: open to any man born there at Colchester, but more usually by the thirteenth century a privilege acquired by inheritance, apprenticeship or purchase. The prevalence of sub-letting increasingly distanced this status from possession of a ‘burgage plot’ within the town, a topic to which we return below. It is also the case that, while the greater towns acquired more independence to become by the fourteenth century substantial self-governing communities, smaller market towns lagged behind. Even some economically flourishing places found it difficult to secure the grant of significant liberties, especially if they were located on the demesne of a lord other than the king. The abbeys of Abingdon, Bury St Edmunds and St Albans were most reluctant to grant any substantial self-governance to the towns at their gates; the consequent resentment led to violence in all three places during the Great Revolt of 1381. Leicester, though a substantial midlands town which profited from the wool trade, failed to gain the autonomy of comparable places until its lordship had passed to the crown with the accession of Henry IV in 1399. That said, some smaller towns did manage a measure of corporate activity, one example being Towcester (Northamptonshire) which, although governed by successive lords of the manor outside the royal demesne, obtained the king’s permission in the mid-fifteenth century to pave its main street with limestone.
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This discussion of urban privileges is a necessary prelude to any treatment of the phenomenon of the ‘medieval new town’. Maurice Beresford’s pioneering book on the subject, first published in 1967, defined them as the result of ‘decisions … to plant towns where no settlement existed’ and identified no less than 171 examples in England, with a further 200-plus in Wales and
Gascony. The distinction drawn was between new urban settlements on previously unsettled land, where plots were laid out and prospective settlers offered attractive terms on which to build their houses, and the larger number of organic ‘villages-turned-town’ which lay outside the scope of the book. Among the ‘new towns’ of England, the foundations of some 44 were dated to the period 1066–1140 (the Norman Conquest to the onset of the civil war of Stephen’s reign), a further 96 from the end of that war in 1153 to the accession of Edward I in 1272, another 16 during Edward’s reign to 1307, but only six during the rest of the medieval period, with none after 1368.
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This ground-breaking study has predictably attracted criticism from those it has stimulated to engage in further research on the subject. Apart from its serious neglect of pre-Conquest initiatives, the book makes a distinction between ‘new’ and ‘organic’ towns which in reality was rarely clear-cut. At Higham Ferrers in 1250–51, for example, there was already an established village community before the Earl of Derby took a series of preconceived steps to free the villeins and start an annual fair, effectively converting it into an urban centre: there was no ‘plantation’ here, but there was certainly a deliberate decision to found a ‘new town’.
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Indeed, the concept of an ‘organic’ town is itself open to challenge, if by this is meant an urban settlement which grew of its own accord without any direction by the king or other lord: a village could certainly prosper from its agricultural activity and outstrip its neighbours in size of population, but a market was an essential prerequisite to support the crafts and trades which characterized a town and as we have seen this was a privilege the grant of which was supposed to be controlled from above, whether in the defended
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and at the monastic gatehouses of the pre-Conquest period or during the centuries which followed. So there is a sense in which every medieval town was a deliberate creation on the part of the king or other lord on whose estates the settlement lay; as an added incentive to utilize the market, the privileges of borough status outlined above might also be conferred as part of a package, designed to attract settlers and maximize the lord’s profits from rents and trade.

It ought to be said at the outset that despite the proliferation of urban initiatives, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, not every feudal lord chose to exploit his estates in this way. A study of borough foundation across the northernmost shires of England has shown that, while the Bishop of Durham was very keen on such ventures, there were several northern baronies – like those based on Embleton and Wark in Northumberland – which declined to develop them, whether from inertia or from careful calculation of likely returns on investment.
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Nor were all foundations bound to succeed, even at times of burgeoning growth in population. Oversley (Warwickshire) was established by the Boteler family in the middle of the twelfth century, when they built two roads to link their castle to the major midlands routeway
known as Ryknild Street and provided a chapel and burgage plots alongside these roads. However, the settlement was not located at a crossing of the nearby River Arrow and proved less attractive to settlers than Alcester, 1.5 kilometres to the north, which was. In the event, several plots were not built upon and the settlement was abandoned by the early thirteenth century.
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As for whether the layout of a town’s street pattern was deliberately planned, we now know that the relationship between this and the foundation of new urban settlements is by no means straightforward. Some new creations of the pre-Conquest period, such as Thetford and Sandwich, lacked any rigidity of plan
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and even where a deliberate layout seems obvious it often resulted from a staged process over several generations. Close analysis of the grid plan at Ludlow, for example, has shown there to have been at least four different phases to the laying out of the town, from the twelfth century onwards, while at Burton-on-Trent the local abbey originally created a single-street town only then to add four further sections, the last of which, in the late thirteenth century, failed for lack of settlers. Likewise Durham, though dominated by its cathedral and castle in a loop of the River Wear, has been described as ‘a series of village scale units … a series of separate borough entities’.
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The vast majority of cases of medieval urban planning actually represent either enlargements of, or replacements for, towns or villages which existed already, their claim to be ‘new’ often being compromised by the fact that the same fields were being farmed as hitherto: Beresford himself drew attention to this in the cases of New Sleaford (Lincolnshire) and New Malton (Yorkshire).
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Genuine examples of ‘new towns’ in the sense of urban settlements consciously founded and laid out as separate entities on uninhabited land are by no means widespread.

Prime examples of what may fairly be called ‘burghal extensions’ – planned appendages to established settlements – are the significantly named Eynsham Newland and Sherborne Newland (Oxfordshire and Dorset respectively), both ventures of the thirteenth century, both adjacent to but outside the confines of a pre-existing town, and both represented by ‘Newland’ street names today. Elsewhere, at Appleby-in-Westmorland, a new town was laid out early in the twelfth century on the west bank of the River Eden, with a castle at the southern end some 30 metres above the river, a new parish church of St Lawrence near the bridge at the northern end, and a broad market street (‘Boroughgate’) running downhill between the two; but an earlier, pre-Conquest settlement survived east of the river, was referred to in a thirteenth-century lawsuit as ‘Old Appleby where the villeins dwell’ and still preserves the name Bongate (bondmen’s street). Another example is Downton (Wiltshire), where in 1086 there was a substantial village with a recorded population of 131 on the east bank of the River Avon and where the Bishop of Salisbury proceeded to develop a ‘new market’ and ‘new borough’
on the west bank in the early thirteenth century: there were 40 burgage plots here by 1211-12 and 89 by 1218-19, occupying the long straight street leading from the bridge, still known locally as ‘The Borough’.
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At Ashbourne (Derbyshire), the Domesday settlement north of the Henmore Brook is marked by the presence of the parish church, but during the thirteenth century the Ferrers family developed a long street running east, roughly parallel to the brook, incorporating a triangular market place and culminating in a manor house and park at the opposite end of the town: this initiative took advantage of traffic passing between the midlands and the north west (including that attracted by lead and silver mining in the area), leaving the original settlement as no more than the church-end of Ashbourne, without an identity of its own. At about the same time in Shropshire, the Abbot of Shrewsbury developed ‘Newtown’ as a planned appendage to Baschurch; with its straight streets and carefully delineated parallel house-plots, it still presents a marked contrast to the parent settlement. And as late as 1447, the construction of a new bridge over the River Severn prompted the development of Bewdley (Worcestershire) as a planned replacement for Wyre Hill, less than a kilometre to the west; almost a century later, Leland described Bewdley as ‘a very new towne, and that of old tyme there was but some pore hamelet’ which he implied had disappeared – although here at least Wyre Hill persists as a street name within Bewdley today. New developments like these have recently been described as ‘medieval enterprise zones’ which remained attached to their parent manor, and drew much of their population from within that manor; as far as the founding lord was concerned, the old and new settlements were both important sources of income, offering alternative revenue-streams.
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