The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

  A major town is an intimidating place. Already you will have seen the desiccated remains of thieves left hanging on gallows at windswept crossroads. At the principal gates of a regional capital you will find the heads and limbs of traitors on display. When you enter the city of York (the largest city in the north) you will see the blackened heads of criminals stuck on poles above the city gates, their eyes plucked out by birds. Legs and arms hang by ropes, each the relic of a treasonable plot, now riddled with maggots or covered with flies. These remains remind you of the power of the king, a greater and more ominous shadow behind the immediate authority of the mayor and aldermen, local lords, sheriffs, and judicial courts.

  This, you could say, is the landscape of medieval England: a place of fear and decay. But the moment you walk under the shadow of a city gatehouse, you realize it is much more than that. In Exeter, for example, as soon as you enter the great gate of the city, you face the wide and handsome prospect of South Street. Some of the finest houses and inns are here, the gable ends of their steeply angled roofs neatly meeting the street. On your right is the church of Holy Trinity, a cult of special devotion in the late fourteenth century. Farther down you have the handsome town house of an abbot. On your left is a row of merchants’ houses, some with their shops open, with silks and other expensive fabrics on show inside the covered shop fronts. For a moment you might notice the uneven surface of the road, which is dust, or mud after it has rained. But then you will be distracted by the amount of activity around you. Ponies and packhorses are ambling through the town, towards the marketplace, laden with grain and guided by peasants from the local farms. Priests pass by, robed in their habits, with crucifixes and rosaries hanging from their girdles. Perhaps a black-robed Dominican friar is preaching to the people at the top of the street, watched by a small circle of admirers. Workers are driving their sheep and cattle into market or steering carts laden with eggs, milk, and cheeses towards the line of shops known as Milk Street.

  The city is so alive, so full of busy people, that within a short while you have forgotten about the decapitated traitors. And Shitbrook’s stench is no longer in the air; now there is a remarkable absence of animal dung in the streets. All is revealed in South Street when you see a servant shoveling up horse dung from the area in front of his master’s house. As you walk towards the center of the city, you will encounter more traders’ shops tightly packed together in small street-front premises—sometimes tiny rooms of less than forty square feet—but all with their distinctive projecting signs to tell the illiterate their trade. Some are paintings depicting the items on sale, such as a painted knife indicating the shop of a cutler. Others are three-dimensional objects: a bushel on a pole, showing that freshly brewed ale is available, or a bandaged arm, marking a surgeon’s premises. At the top of Smithen Street, which leads down to the river, you can hear the clang of blacksmiths hammering away at their forges and shouting in guttural voices at their apprentices to fetch water or bring coal. Others in the same street are setting up stalls, hanging out ironwares such as scissors, rushlight holders, and knives to attract the attention of those coming in from the surrounding countryside. A little farther on you come to Butchers Row, or the Shambles, where the counters of the shops are laden with meat lying exposed in the sun, with joints and carcasses hanging from hooks in the shade of the shop behind. Listen to the thunk as the cleaver comes down and strikes the chopping board, and watch as the leather-aproned butcher lifts the red meat onto the scales, balancing it carefully with metal weights until he is satisfied that he, at least, is getting a good deal.

  It is here, among the city’s shops, that your preconceptions of medieval England will begin to fall apart. Walk into the center of any large town or city and you will be struck by the extraordinary range of costumes, from russet-clad peasants to richly dressed merchants and esquires and their wives, and maybe even a knight or nobleman. Their traveling cloaks might hide the colorful hues of their clothes in grey winter but, in this sunlight, the rich reds, bright yellows, and deep blues are shown off, trimmed with furs according to social rank. Similarly the languages and accents you hear in a city give a cosmopolitan air to the place. Foreign merchants are regularly to be found in the greater towns and cities, but even in the smaller ones you will hear both French and English spoken in the street, and occasionally Latin and Cornish. Over the hubbub of the morning’s business you will hear the town crier, calling from the crossroads at the center of the town, or laughter as friends share a joke. Over it all the practiced cries of the street vendors ring out as they walk around with trays of food, calling out “Hot peascods” or “Rushes fair and green,” “Hot sheep’s feet” or “Ribs of beef and many a pie.”1

  Given the noise and the textures of the place, you may be surprised to learn how few people actually live in the greater towns and cities of England. In 1377 the walls of Exeter encircle six or seven hundred houses where about twenty-six hundred citizens live. But that makes it the twenty-fourth largest community in the whole kingdom. Only the very largest—London, with more than forty thousand inhabitants—can properly be called a great city when compared to the largest Continental cities of Bruges, Ghent, Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome, all of which have in excess of fifty thousand. However, do not be misled into thinking that towns like Exeter are small, quiet places. The inns add considerably to the total, albeit on a continually shifting basis. Travelers of all sorts—clergymen, merchants, messengers, king’s officers, judges, clerks, master masons, carpenters, painters, pilgrims, itinerant preachers, and musicians—are to be found every day in a town. In addition you will come across crowds of local people coming in from the countryside to buy goods and services or to bring their produce to the retailers. When you think of the sheer variety of wares and services which the city provides, from metalwork to leatherwork, from the sheriff’s courts and scriveners’ offices to apothecaries’ and spicemongers’ shops, it soon becomes clear how the daytime population of a city can be two or even three times as great as the number of people living within the walls. And on a special occasion—during a fair, for example—it can be many times greater.

  The Largest English Towns in 13772

  Rank

  Place (cities in capitals)

  Taxpayers

  Estimated

  Population

  1

  LONDON

  23,314

  40,000

  2

  YORK

  7,248

  12,100

  3

  Bristol

  6,345

  10,600

  4

  Coventry

  4,817

  8,000

  5

  NORWICH

  3,952

  6,600

  6

  LINCOLN

  3,569

  5,900

  7

  SALISBURY

  3,226

  5,400

  8

  Lynn

  3,217

  5,400

  9

  Colchester

  2,955

  4,900

  10

  Boston

  2,871

  4,800

  11

  Beverley

  2,663

  4,400

  12

  Newcastle-upon-Tyne

  2,647

  4,400

  13

  CANTERBURY

  2,574

  4,300

  14

  Bury St. Edmunds

  2,445

  4,100

  15

  Oxford

  2,357

  3,900

  16

  Gloucester

  2,239

  3,700

  17

  Leicester

  2,101

  3,500

  18

  Shrewsbury

  2,083

  3,500

  19

  Great Yarmouth

  1,94
1

  3,200

  20

  HEREFORD

  1,903

  3,200

  21

  Cambridge

  1,902

  3,200

  22

  ELY

  1,772

  3,000

  23

  Plymouth

  ca. 1,700?

  2,800

  24

  EXETER

  1,560

  2,600

  25

  Kingston upon Hull

  1,557

  2,600

  26

  WORCESTER

  1,557

  2,600

  27

  Ipswich

  1,507

  2,500

  28

  Northampton

  1,477

  2,500

  29

  Nottingham

  1,447

  2,400

  30

  WINCHESTER

  1,440

  2,400

  The total of 100,000 taxpayers in the thirty largest communities indicates that about 170,000 people—about 6 or 7 percent of the population of the kingdom—live in towns. There are about two hundred other market towns in England with more than four hundred inhabitants. In total, about 12 percent of English people live in a town of some sort, even if it be a small town of just a hundred families.3 It follows that the majority live in rural areas, coming into their local town or city when necessary. The majority walk in, and walk home, carrying whatever they have bought or driving whatever livestock they have to sell. It is this purposeful coming and going of people, this movement, which makes a medieval city feel so vibrant and alive.

  Town Houses

  The range of people living in a city is matched by the wide variety of buildings to be found within the walls. You have already seen some of the most handsome and prestigious houses, situated on the widest, grandest, and cleanest streets, which are almost always those leading from the principal gates into the center of town. But not all citizens dwell in the luxury of handsome three-storey houses. You will have noticed the small alleys, sometimes no more than six or seven feet wide. They look dark on account of the jetties of upper storeys which close in over the thoroughfare, so that the second and third storeys of houses facing each other come within just three or four feet. Houses here have little light and probably no outside space. Some alleys are barely more substantial than muddy paths. If there are no servants to clear them, and if the householders fail to clean them, before long they become dank, smelly, and altogether unsavory. Walk along one of them in winter, on a murky afternoon in the rain, and your impression of richness and civic pride will soon be washed away. The rain splashes down into wide muddy puddles through which you will have to pass, and the lack of light (due to the lowering clouds and the overarching houses) rinses all color from the scene. Then you see the rivulets of water trickling between the buckets of offal and kitchen rubbish outside a house, carrying the liquid of rotting food into the street. Next time you walk along here in the churned-up mud, the stench of decay will fill your nostrils.

  These two- and three-storey buildings are nowhere near the bottom end of the housing hierarchy. If you walk down a few more of these dark alleys, you will see that there are turnings off which are even narrower. The most densely inhabited areas of a city are warrens of tiny lanes and paths, sometimes no more than three or four feet wide. Here you find the poorest houses: low, single-storey rows of old timber buildings, with no proper foundations, subdivided into small rented rooms. You can see that they are old: the shutters hang at angles or have disappeared completely. The shingles (wooden tiles) are slipping from the roofs, which are covered in lichen and moss or streaked with birdlime. The paths and alleys leading to them are little more than stinking drains, effectively open sewers. They are the most dilapidated buildings in the city, but because they are not on a main street, and because they do not threaten civic pride (because no visitors or wealthy people see them), the authorities do not force the owners to keep them in good repair. If a door is open, you may just discern in the gloom a single room divided into two unequal parts, the smaller for the children to sleep in, and the other for cooking and the adults’ mattresses. There is often no toilet, just a bucket (to be emptied at Shitbrook). The tenants of these houses spend almost the whole day away from home, at their workplaces; they eat in the street and urinate and defecate where they can, ideally in the municipal toilets on the city bridge. Their children grow up similarly out of doors, playing in the street. They were the urchins who ran up to you when you first approached the city gate.

  Walking through the alleys and lanes of a medieval city, you are bound to come face-to-face with a high wall. This is not the great wall encircling the settlement but one of a number of subdivisions you can expect to find—around monasteries, for example, or protecting the houses of rich knights, prelates, and lords. In most cities you will find the precincts of the cathedral area enclosed by a wall, with gates allowing people in during daylight hours and firmly keeping them out after dark. Similarly, the older monasteries, which may date back to Saxon times, tend to be located in the center of the city. All towns have at least one walled-off religious enclosure, and some have more than a dozen. For this reason, space inside even the most extensive city is relatively scarce. Often a third of the whole area inside the walls is given over to the monasteries and religious precincts. Add the tenth or so given over to the royal castle, and a similar area for the parish churches, and it is clear that almost the entire population has to live in half the city—with most of the best sites occupied by the large houses of the wealthy. Hence the immigrant population has to be squeezed into small tenements constructed on the sites of destroyed houses or alongside a churchyard. Few inhabitants of these slums make enough money to move up into the houses of the prosperous traders and freemen of the town.

  Walk back to the market square or the main market street of the city and look around. Notice how almost all the houses are narrow and tall. Each is no more than about fifteen or sixteen feet wide. Most are three or four storeys in height, with shutters either side of the unglazed windows. This arrangement of narrow, tall houses means that many merchants can have a frontage on the main marketplace. At ground level you see the heavy oak door to the building. To its side, and occupying most of the front of the house, is the shop front. At night and on Sundays this is closed up and looks like a wooden barricade across a large window. But during trading hours the lower half is hinged down to form a display counter and the upper half is hinged up, and propped, to provide a shelter for the goods. The shop inside may actually be a workshop—perhaps of a leatherworker, jeweler, tailor, shoemaker, or similar craftsman. Other traders—butchers and fishmongers, for instance—tend to work out of doors, standing in front of their counters, using their shops’ interiors as storage areas. In either case, the house above is where the trader and his family live. Only the richest merchants—those who specialize in goods transported in bulk, by sea—have separate houses and warehouses. This close relationship of residence and work premises means that many shop buildings have some fine touches of decoration: tiled or slate-hung upper storeys, or projecting wooden beams with carved corner pieces. Some even boast carved and painted coats of arms or heraldic beasts.

  And then you turn a corner and see some totally different houses, altogether larger and set sideways onto the street. Your eye is immediately drawn to the pointed gatehouse, with a crenellated stone tower above, or the long wooden house with large oriel windows projecting over the road. These are the houses of the wealthiest and most important citizens. Just as the various types of traders congregate together—the dyers by a watercourse, the cloth merchants in Cloth Street, the butchers in Butchers Row—the majority of the most influential citizens also live close to one another in the widest, most prominent streets. Here you may find the town house of a major financier next to that of a knight or an archdeacon. At the start of
the century such houses may well be still made of wood, but increasingly they are being rebuilt so that by 1400 the majority are proud and sturdy stone structures, with chimneys and glazed windows. This is why, when gazing down a street of well-spaced high-status town mansions, you will invariably see one or two covered in scaffolding. Close inspection will reveal that the scaffolding is made up of poles of alder and ash lashed together, supporting planks of poplar, with pulleys for raising and maneuvering stones and baskets of tiles. In this way, the dilapidated remains of the thirteenth century are gradually being swept away, and new and extended structures are taking their place.

  These types of accommodation—from the single-room alleyway slums to the tall merchants’ houses and the wide stone mansions of the wealthy—do not fully illustrate the variety in building and accommodation in a city. There are, in addition, the smart houses of the canons and other officers within the cathedral precinct, each with its scriptorium, chapel, and library as well as living quarters. In the case of Exeter, there is the royal castle, with its ancient gatehouse (which is already three hundred years old by the time the Black Prince visits it in 1372). There is the guildhall abutting the high street, the bishop’s palace adjacent to the cathedral, and the College of the Vicars Choral (who sing Mass in the cathedral) just outside the cathedral close. The finest inns, with their signs displayed above their wide arched gates, are to be found on the main streets. The towers of the town gatehouses also provide accommodation to a select few civic servants. At the bottom end of society, accommodation for some visitors is provided by letting out sleeping space in the barns and stables that are to be found dotted around the city. Many houses are subdivided so that, in a row of three old traders’ houses, you might find a dozen poor families. There are also the monastic guesthouses, the friaries, and the hospitals. And as you leave the city itself and pass into the suburbs you will have the distinct impression that, while the residents might be relatively few in number, the structures in which they live show greater variety than any modern city, even though the latter has twenty or thirty times as many inhabitants.