by Jack Lindsay
In 1130 London and Lincoln asked for the privilege of paying dues to the crown direct, without any control by shire officers; Lincoln offered two hundred silver marks and four gold ones ‘that they might hold their city of the king in chief’; the Londoners offered a hundred silver marks ‘that they might have a sheriff of their own choice’. The Lincolners chose their own reeves to collect dues and take them to Westminster; the Londoners were given control not only of the dues from their own city, but of those from the county of Middlesex where it lay, and gained the right to choose the justiciar who tried pleas of the crown in London.
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London was the pace-setter in urban and trading developments, and deserves some examination. It lay on a tidal river that ran far back into the country. The Confessor’s city had stretched a mile on the north bank, east of the Fleet, and run half a mile inland. It was sheltered by the patched Roman walls, though already there was some settlement around them. A wooden bridge, under which ships could go, ran across to the suburb of Southwark. The site covered the valley of the Wallbrook, with low hills to east and west. Here was the one organized body of Englishmen with whom William had to reckon. The citizens could even interfere with effect in civil war, as in the summer of 1145 when Stephen captured the strategically important castle of Faringdon, Berkshire, with the aid of ‘a terrible and numerous army of Londoners’, in Henry of Huntingdon’s words. The link between civil and military administration lay in the wards, which formed the basis for organizing defence or for keeping the watch. Probably already under Henry I there were twenty-four wards, each with its ward moot (corresponding in function to the court of a rural hundred). The profits of justice were the king’s, though in the Norman period more and more properties passed to the lords of sokes. The respect the Normans felt for the citizens was shown by William’s efforts to conciliate them by confirming their old rights. His fear of them was reflected in the early building of castles. At once after his coronation he went to Barking, ‘while certain strongholds,’ says William of Poitiers, ‘were made in the town against the fickleness of the vast and fierce populace.’ Baynard’s Castle preserved the name of Ralf Baignard, a tenant-in-chief of eastern England. (The last baron of the family in England lost his inheritance in 1140.) The lord of this castle probably held a position of official authority in the city from the outset. In the west was another castle, later called Montfichet, which played a part in the revolt of 1173-4.[495]
The urban immunity of the sokes under the Normans reached a level here that had no parallel in other towns. This fact derived from the city’s commercial importance. Magnates and lords wanted houses in or near the city to ensure access to its market. Like other towns London had houses appurtenant to country estates; in Domesday the king himself had thirteen burgesses there belonging to Bermondsey. Monasteries acquired properties in London, and in the eleventh century some of them gained royal writs conferring jurisdictional powers. By the earlier half of the next century, Londoners, knowing what was going on on the continent, began to aspire to the status of a commune. After the battle of Lincoln, William of Malmesbury says, at the council of London citizens were sent ‘by the Commune, as they call it, of London’, to ask for Stephen’s freedom, and ‘all the barons who had already been received into their commune very earnestly begged this of the lord legate of the archbishop and clergy’.[496] Indeed London was known abroad as a commune. The archbishop of Rouen thanked the illustrious senators, honoured citizens, and the whole commune of London for fidelity to the king, and asked them to do right in a dispute between Algar the priest and Reading Abbey.[497] By 1191 the commune, from which the later mayoralty grew, was established. This development had come about through steady pressure, not through violent struggles such as often accompanied the creation of a commune on the continent. For all its varieties of tenure and jurisdiction the city had built up its own effective unity.
A commune was a sworn association of burgesses or citizens who sought to exclude all control by a lord, rule their own town as a sovereign body, and maintain a force able to defend its walls. Norman kings would not tolerate such a development in England, where in any event London was the only place big and strong enough to aspire to such freedom. The London burgesses, however, took advantage of Stephen’s difficulties to assume quietly the title; but Henry II crushed the movement such as it was, raising the annual rent to the crown (reduced by Henry I) and imposing on the citizens frequent aids and gifts. Attempts made in his reign by Gloucester and York to form communes were sternly repressed. In 1196 the poorer citizens of London revolted against the city fathers, but were put down by the king’s justiciar. Henry II was thus strongly opposed to burghal rights, and at the end of his reign only five English boroughs, apart from London, were directly responsible to the crown for their dues, and none of them could feel safe about retaining the right. But the financial problems of Richard I and John enabled many towns to gain charters, and the tide became irreversible.
Norman laws recognized no distinction of status among the citizens and thus helped the growth of civic unity. There were principes or elder citizens, but their position derived solely from the personal authority of wealth and influence. Henry I in his charter gave every citizen the wergild of 100s, the sum allotted to the pre-1066 ceorl, the early Norman villanus. (Not that this wergild implies that the citizens had servile status; what it implies is the relatively free status of the early twelfth-century villein.) William had addressed writs to the burh-thegns of London, but no later custumals or writs recognize such a patriciate of birth in the city. We may note further that the influx of foreign traders would have helped to break down any English system of ranks.
London was much more purely urban than the semi-agricultural boroughs of the south and midlands. Londoners were aware of the dangers proceeding from their way of life, and they used them to support claims to exemption from taking part in inquests under oath:
Further, there are many folk in the city and they are housed close together and are more crowded early and late than other people are, and notably more so than those of the upland, who hold their county court and ought to swear concerning such matters. For if any one in the city should swear against his neighbour, whether concerning an inquest of an assize, or concerning that in which he has offended, great mischief might arise from it. For when the citizens are thus crowded together, whether at their drinking or elsewhere, they might kill one another and the city would never enjoy steady tranquillity. And for this reason, and by reason of the franchise, and for many reasons, it was established that they should not swear.[498]
Not that we must imagine as yet much huddling together. An average street frontage seems to have been about thirty to forty feet, though such properties were already being divided into smaller mansurae: under William big houses had already sprung up along the road from London to Westminster. Acts of violence, however, did occur. In 1130 there was a riot with thirteen persons mentioned, English and foreign, ‘an assault on the ships and houses of London’.
So far we have seen the Danes on the land or in villages, though they were ready enough to gather in towns when they had the chance. Recent excavations have shown us Danish York. The core of the settlement seems to have been densely built with long narrow timber-framed houses. The main impression is of a somewhat damp and dirty town with thriving industries. There were furnaces here, tan-pits there; functional and luxury goods were being produced in quantity; commodities were arriving from several parts of Yorkshire and probably from beyond; and merchants’ houses stood in close proximity to industrial premises. More important still, the Danish remains prove conclusively that the present streetplan and the general pattern of the arrangement of messuages were already in existence before the Norman conquest (Radley). At the Conquest the town held some 30,000 adults and was ready to take on the role of military capital of northern England through a reorganization of the town that involved the destruction and levelling of the Danish industrial area to make way for Wi
lliam’s new castle. The main industry seems to have been leather: many remains of shoes, laces, belts, garments, bags, sheaths and gloves have been found. The tan-pits were big enough to stack cattle hides in without folding them, and shallow enough to make emptying easy. The earliest freemen’s rolls (1272-8) show that the leather trades continued their importance in the city.
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The growth of new towns in England was slow. Under William I Windsor and Ludlow were built; then we jump to Portsmouth under Richard I, and Liverpool under John. The tradition of royal action in such matters perhaps goes back (if we may take the grid plans of streets as evidence) to Saxon Oxford, Wallingford, and Wareham. But it was not till the first half of the thirteenth century that the economic forces maturing during the twelfth found expression in a considerable number of new towns, for instance six that were the works of bishops of Winchester in Hampshire, Wiltshire and the Isle of Wight: three in open country, a mile or more from previous settlements, and three separated by rivers from existing villages. These towns then antedated the plantation of towns begun by Edward I, which was based on his experiences in Gascony. Towns planted by landlords included Newton Abbot in about 1200, and Chipping Sodbury in 1227; we may note also the move from Old Sarum to Salisbury.[499]
We may glance at this process since it shows the working out of the economic and social forces liberated in the twelfth century. We see, for example, how the population was increasing. The new towns could be filled while the old ones extended their shop and house space. (The period is that of the colonization of the empty spaces from the Baltic to the Danube, and the multiplication of houses in old settled parts like south Germany and Gascony.) In the hinterland of Winchester the new forces produced Yarmouth and Newport (I.O.W.), Portsmouth, Poole, Lymington, Beaulieu and Haslemere, as well as abortive efforts at Newton in Purbeck and near Chichester; and old trading centres were strengthened. We know little of the effects of the new towns on the rural hinterland, of the ways in which they were planned and built, or the motives behind their founding — though the desire for profit certainly played a big part.
Documents merely refer to a market house, stalls, oven, weir, canal, fulling mill, churches, boulting house and well, not to mention a fourteen fathom rope and an iron bucket. The liberty of action enjoyed by the burgess in comparison with the villein is shown by the entries on the bishops’ account rolls for manerium and burgus. The burgus-roll is short, often holding some half a dozen entries (rents, arrears, market and fair tolls, profits of justice); but a single manor might cover four to six feet of closely written parchment, dealing with rents collected, demesne services commuted, produce gathered, and goods transported to market or taken to the stock of farm equipment, farm animals and grain. Here the profits of justice included many payments from manorial villeins, including fines paid on the inheritance of land, fines paid for the marriage of a villein woman, heriots paid on deaths, and yearly recognitions for permission to remain away from the manor as long as the bishop would allow. The four short burgus-entries reveal the progress made by the towns: the taking up of burgage plots, the success of markets, the bustle of legal activity, the large amounts of folk drawn in by the yearly fairs. The next stage of the lord’s withdrawal from a direct share in rents and revenues came when fixed yearly payments were made in lieu of them; the lord turned into a mere money-collector.
From at least the end of the eleventh century onwards the royal grant of a license to hold a fair seems to have implied also a license to hold a court of summary jurisdiction for offences committed at the fair itself. These courts got the name of Piepowder (piepoudreux, dustyfeet) as the suitors appeared informally in their travel-stained condition. A jury of merchants found the judgment or declared the law; so suitors and doomsmen were of the same class. England is the only country with records of such courts.[500]
London was the centre of far-flung trading connections. It lay at the end of a route from Byzantium, which the men of lower Lorraine controlled. Along that route came goldwork, precious stones, cloth from Byzantium and Regensburg, pepper, cummin, wax, fine linen and mailcoats from Mainz, and wine. The king, through his chamberlain, had the right of pre-emption over such goods; then the Londoners might buy what they liked, then the men of Oxford, then those of Winchester, then anyone else. Danish and Norwegian traders could live in the city a year, dealing in timber, sailcloth, marten skins, and the like; they probably still connected London with the east via Russia.[501] William fitzStephen associated the Norwegians with the Russians (the Swedish colony at Novgorod). At Bruggen, the old Hanseatic wharf in Bergen, continental wares predominated before 1200, then English pottery was in the ascendant till about 1400, after which it gave out. In 1186 the Norwegian king Sverri in a speech declared that the Germans brought in so much wine that it was no dearer than ale. In a second speech he said:
We desire to thank the Englishmen who have come here bringing wheat and honey, flour and cloth. We also desire to thank those who have brought here linen or flax, wax or cauldrons. We desire next to make mention of those who have come here from the Orkneys, Shetland, the Faroes or Iceland; all those who’ve brought here such things as make this land the richer, which we can’t do without. But there are the Germans who’ve come here in large numbers with large ships, intending to carry away butter and dried fish, of which the exportation much impoverishes the land; and they bring wine instead, which people strive to purchase, both by men, townsmen, and the merchants.[502]
The compilers of customs at London may have ignored the Flemish through trade jealousy, as we know of them under the Confessor and they are seen established in the city by royal authority in a charter of Henry II to the men of St Omer, which allows the latter to lodge where they wished, and to sell their goods without view of justiciar or sheriff and without paying dues for setting them out; also to visit fairs and markets anywhere in England.[503]
There was a large number of goldsmiths at work. Craft associations were being formed in the Norman period. We meet the guild of weavers in 1130, represented by an Englishman, Robert son of Leustan; and in the 1150s the weavers got a charter to confirm the liberties enjoyed under Henry I and to forbid any non-members to weave in London, Southwark or other places belonging to London, except in so far as had been the custom under Henry I. In 1156 the bakers appear with a debt of one gold mark. By 1180 at least nineteen guilds were fined for being formed without warrant; they included pepperers, goldsmiths, butchers, cloth-dressers. How long they had existed we do not know.[504]
The importance of trade is shown by the political use of embargoes. William of Malmesbury says that Henry I’s relations with Murchertach, high king of Ireland, were normally good, but they deteriorated at one point. Soon, however, the high king ‘was brought to reason by the embargo declared on shipping and trade. For what would Ireland be worth if goods were not shipped from it to England?’ The Pipe Roll of 1130 shows that the Gloucester burgesses considered Henry I’s influence in Ireland strong enough to justify their offer of thirty marks for the recovery of money stolen there. William of Malmesbury, dealing with regional specialization in agriculture and trade, described the fertile orchards of the vale of Gloucester and the volume of shipping handled by Bristol; he stressed the pastoral economy of Cheshire and its dependence on trade with Ireland. In 1127 the claimant to the English throne was invested with the county of Flanders (already importing much wool from England); an embargo drove the citizens of Bruges to rise against him. (The connection with Flanders was further shown by Henry’s settlement of Flemings in Pembrokeshire shortly after the Tinchebrai campaign., these were presumably mercenaries whom he now used as a counterbalance to the Welsh.)
Edward I’s abolition of the right of wreck has been taken to mark an important point in the growth of trade, which was then able to override old feudal privileges. But if we look back we find Henry I declaring that the right of wreck must end and that any goods from a wrecked ship should go to the survivors.
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We know of him because he became a saint after settling in a hermitage on the banks of the Wear near Durham. Many others grew wealthy in the same way without qualms. Godric was a speculator and his contemporary biographer remarks that he preferred using his greater intelligence, sagacior animus, to toiling at agriculture. Such a man was called by Gratian the mercator ‘who is turned out of the temple of God’. Godric was typical of the wandering trader of the times, a shrewd fellow who came from the country to the towns, which he made his base; but except in the winter he was mostly abroad. The impotence of a single trader in such a world, and the insecurity of the roads, encouraged such men to join in associations, guilds, hanses, caritates. The group took wares in convoy from town to town, bought and sold in common, and divided profits in proportion to their respective investments in the expedition. Their trade was wholesale; retail was left to the rural pedlars. They exported and imported wine, grain, wool and cloth. The statutes of the Flemish hanse in London expressly excluded retail dealers and craftsmen from the company.