The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (28 page)

The story of England’s towns in the two centuries following the Black Death is a complicated one, since the country’s economic fortunes fluctuated in that period and the experience of individual places differed. Certainly there was a significant drop in the number of functioning markets, with less than 40% of those recorded before the pestilence still operating in the early sixteenth century. Most of the contraction would have been among the ‘village markets’ but Leland duly recorded several losses in towns, such as at Bideford (Devon) where there was now ‘no weekly market at a sette day’ and at Chorley (Lancashire), home to a ‘wonderful poore or rather no market’.
⁸⁴
Nearly all towns suffered significant loss of population between the early fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and this inevitably affected their physical appearance. Even taking as a baseline the post-Black Death figures obtainable from the 1377 poll tax assessment – themselves reflecting a sharp decline over the previous fifty years – there were some notable falls by the time of the Lay Subsidy of 1524–25: a reduction from about 5,000 to under 2,000 at both Boston and Beverley, some 6,500 down to 4,000 at Lincoln, over 13,000 down to little more than 6,000 at York, and over 4,000 to under 3,000 at Leicester.
⁸⁵
Besides the national downturn, there were local reasons behind these figures: Leland duly noted, for example, that ‘good cloth making at Beverle … is nowe much decayid’ and that Boston ‘hath … beene manyfold richer then it is now’, its ‘steelyard’ quayside area being largely unoccupied.
⁸⁶
Lincoln’s suburbs and back streets were by the early sixteenth century largely abandoned; the number of active parish churches fell from 46 in the early fourteenth century to nine by 1549. York, which was petitioning the crown for relief in the late fifteenth century on the grounds that ‘ther is not half the nombre of good men within your said citie as ther hath been in tymes past’, had witnessed a virtual halt to new house-building in preceding decades.
⁸⁷

Even towns which fared better than those listed above faced severe problems. Coventry prospered as a cloth-making centre in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries but went into prolonged decline thereafter, with two particularly serious depressions from the 1440s to the 1470s and (after brief revival) during the 1510s and 1520s. Though it remained one of the towns most heavily taxed by the 1524–25 Lay Subsidy, it was claimed locally that assessments on this scale were unrealistic. As early as 1442 the governing authority was imposing fines on landlords who failed to rebuild houses they had demolished, only to reverse the policy in 1473 by encouraging them to be pulled down if ‘in doute to fall’; by 1523 no less than 565 vacant houses were identified. Leland summed up its position neatly when he reported that ‘the towne rose by makynge of clothe and capps, that now decayenge the glory of the city decayeth’. Norwich, despite a catastrophic fall in population during and immediately after the Black Death, recovered in the role of regional administrative and commercial capital and (after London which was not a contributor) featured as England’s largest town in the 1524–25 Lay Subsidy in terms both of total assessment and the number of recorded taxpapers: yet early in the sixteenth century there were complaints that ‘many houses, habitacions and dwellynges … grue to ruyn’.
⁸⁸
Canterbury, servicing the headquarters of the country’s southern ecclesiastical province, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with an important coastal trade link to London, were better placed than most to ride out economic depression and having been leading tax contributors before the Black Death broadly maintained their rankings in the 1524–25 Subsidy; Canterbury’s population may well have increased between 1377 and the early sixteenth century. Both, however, had large numbers of vacant properties within them, along with unpaid rent arrears, as the fifteenth century drew to a close. Colchester, another cloth-making town, was generally faring well until the middle of the fifteenth century only to suffer contraction thereafter; it has been estimated that ‘of the 190 years between 1334 and 1524 it is improbable that more than a quarter were years of growth to higher levels of output’ and that its overall population fell possibly by as much as one-third between the early fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
⁸⁹
Salisbury, also a cloth-making centre which generally maintained its prosperity through the late medieval period – evidently England’s seventh most populous town in 1334 and eighth in 1524, with a good deal of domestic and ecclesiastical rebuilding, much of which survives – suffered a slump in production around the middle
of the fifteenth century. Smaller towns also experienced recession, with vacant burgage plots being reported in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries at places as diverse as Brackley (Northamptonshire), Shrewsbury and Hartlepool.
⁹⁰

Some of the most dramatic urban failures were to be found among those deliberately developed during the expansionist thirteenth century, such as Warenmouth (Northumberland), intended as a port for Bamburgh when founded by Henry III in 1247; this was the centre of some activity into the fourteenth century, but had disappeared by 1575 when an exchequer commission could find no trace of an alleged ’sea town’ of Bamburgh. Another case is that of Ravenserodd (Yorkshire), founded by the Earl of Aumale on a recently created sandbank on the Humber in the 1240s, briefly a serious rival as a fishing and trading port to Grimsby only 8 kilometres away, but swallowed up by further shifts in the course of the river little over a century later: ‘this was an exceedingly famous borough … adorned with more ships and burgesses than any of this coast’, according to the
Meaux Abbey Chronicle
of the 1390s, but now it had been ‘reduced to nothing by the merciless floods and tempests’.
⁹¹

Yet for all this pessimism, we need to remember the point made at the beginning of this chapter that, taken as a whole, towns broadly maintained the 15–20% share of the total population which they had attained by the early fourteenth century. Some towns managed to avoid significant population decline and even in those places where economic indicators point to depression, this was not always reflected in the urban landscape. By the early sixteenth century, Halifax, Wakefield, Leeds and Bradford in west Yorkshire, Hadleigh and Lavenham in Suffolk, Crediton, Totnes and Tiverton in Devon were among the rising centres of cloth production which certainly functioned as towns in social and economic terms, benefiting both from a weak gild tradition – so making them attractive to capital investors – and from a boom in cloth exports to the continent in the early Tudor decades. As contributors to the 1524–25 Lay Subsidy, Lavenham ranked fifteenth, Totnes eighteenth and Hadleigh twenty-seventh; none had featured as towns in the pre-Black Death Subsidy of 1334 but – admittedly not without protest at the burden in the case of Lavenham – they now outstripped places like Oxford, Shrewsbury and Southampton. Long-established ports and market-towns such as Exeter and Ipswich also benefited from the proximity of these cloth-manufacturing centres: both were far more significant contributors to the 1524–25 Subsidy than they had been in 1334, and while this does not mean that they had necessarily experienced net growth between those two dates it does suggest that they were faring better than most.
⁹²
Various forms of metalworking – pinmaking at Sherburn-in-Elmet (Yorkshire), cutlery at Thaxted (Essex) and diverse forms of ironmongery at Birmingham – appear
to have found a ready market which helped to sustain their respective towns through the late medieval period. To set against Leland’s account of decayed markets were some he reported upon in very favourable terms: Worksop (Nottinghamshire) had been ‘made a market town more than 30 yeres ago’, Cirencester (Gloucestershire) had the ‘most celebrate market in al that quarters’ and Warrington (Lancashire) enjoyed a ‘better market than Manchestre’; these must all have profited from local opportunism and enterprise which set them apart from less-fortunate neighbours.
⁹³
An excellent example of this has been demonstrated at Buntingford (Hertfordshire), a hamlet in the thirteenth century but a small town of at least 350 people by the early sixteenth, to which date the oldest timber-framed buildings in the modern settlement have been assigned. The fact that Buntingford stood on land partitioned between several manors, so that there was no dominant lord, meant that its affairs were directed by what has been described as ‘an informal … co-operative’ of craftsmen and traders, ‘an independent community of the vill’, which benefited from a well-placed market on Ermine Street while nearby Chipping and Standon declined.
⁹⁴

Beyond this, there are many examples of building schemes which proceeded apace during the fifteenth century, leaving us not only with the bridges and gildhalls mentioned already and the rebuildings and enlargements of parish churches to be discussed in the next chapter, but also with what we can fairly call ‘public utilities’. Common latrines covering a mill-leat on Exe island were provided by the town authorities of Exeter not later than 1467, while conduits supplying townspeople with fresh water – initiatives previously associated with cathedrals or monasteries (as at Lichfield from the twelfth century, Bristol from the thirteenth and Exeter from the fourteenth) – became increasingly common, the outcome either of the generosity of rich benefactors or the enterprise of the urban government. These are known to have been in place in Bristol by 1400, Coventry by 1483, Exeter by 1441 and Ipswich by 1451; the incorporation of Lichfield by royal charter in 1548 had been preceded three years earlier by the establishment of a Conduit Lands Trust, designed to guarantee a regular water supply to the town independent of that supplied by the cathedral. This corporate spirit is also seen at Coventry in 1524 when, concerned at the slump in the local cloth industry, four rich citizens contributed £125 between them ‘to goo to a Comen Welthe for makyng of Clothe’, which implies some sort of collective employment scheme. As evidence of civic pride and concern for the welfare of the urban community as a whole, these initiatives add an extra dimension to our understanding of England’s late-medieval towns, to set alongside the data on generally declining prosperity and population.
⁹⁵
Demographic and economic forces had a profound impact on the medieval urban landscape, but so did the collective decisions of those in power.

S
ince nearly everyone in medieval England had a belief in the teachings of Christianity – even if their observance was often crude, careless or inextricably bound up with folklore
¹
– and since the Church had a pervasive influence in society, as political and spiritual adviser, landholder, builder, patron, and creator of written records, it is somewhat artificial to devote a separate chapter to the ‘landscape of religion’. After all, the Church, with its estates and buildings, appears throughout this book. Nevertheless, it is convenient to treat the features specifically associated with worship in a chapter of their own and accordingly the focus here is on religious houses, cathedrals and local churches: their buildings and their context. Between 1000 and 1540, religious edifices towered over most other elements in the landscape, just as the Church and its teachings dominated people’s lives. And of all the legacies in the landscape bequeathed to us by medieval England, places of worship remain among the most important in terms of frequency of use today.

For convenience, the student of the medieval Church usually draws a distinction between its ‘regular’ and ‘secular’ expressions: ‘regular’ (from the Latin
regula
, a rule) to denote the monks, nuns, canons and friars bound by the rules of their religious orders, and ‘secular’ to cover the bishops, priests, deacons and those in minor orders who were supposed to serve the laity through the diocesan and parochial systems. The difference between them is by no means clear-cut. The regional ‘minster churches’, key to the Church’s pastoral care and mission from the seventh century to the eleventh, before the widespread development of parishes, were staffed by clergy many of whom adhered to a monastic rule, and this tradition lived on among those ‘regular canons’ and friars whose express purpose was to offer a direct,
practical ministry to the laity; moreover, throughout the medieval period, even the most reclusive ‘regulars’ would have claimed to serve the world at large through their regimes of prayer. For their part, the ‘seculars’ embraced many within their ranks who could not obtain a benefice – a post within the Church carrying a guaranteed income – so had to scratch a living outside the formal ecclesiastical structure. By the thirteenth century, there were also groups of lay mystics, such as the Beguines, a movement of religious women which had arisen in the Low Countries but were found in parts of East Anglia, whose life was one of piety and devotion akin to that of nuns, but without a formal rule and without enclosure from the world.
²
The eremitical tradition of early Christian monasticism also persisted in medieval England, in the form of the hermits who looked after isolated chapels, patrolled woods and maintained roads and bridges, and in the various anchorites, both male and female, who were to be found dwelling in cells attached to particular churches, increasingly located in towns rather than the countryside as the middle ages wore on.
³
All this adds colour to the overall picture, but the basic division between ‘regulars’ and ‘seculars’ remains helpful as a basis for discussion.

Monasticism – accepting this as a general term covering the lifestyles of those men and women bound by the rules of a religious order – was intended to appeal to people who sought a life of perfection in this world as preparation for the next, without the distractions of secular life. It had been part of Christian observance since the end of the third century, characterized by extreme asceticism, but about 530 Benedict of Nursia drew up a rule for a monastic house he had founded at Monte Cassino in central Italy which was not only rational, clear and comprehensive but also moderate in its demands. It envisaged a monastery as a self-governing, self-sufficient, community in which the brethren elected their own abbot and consumed the produce of their own fields, and so was equipped to survive in a variety of contexts, whatever the condition of the world outside. The essential humanitarianism of the
Rule of St Benedict
shines through any number of its chapters, and only a few extracts can be quoted here.