The most successful and highly regarded minstrels were well-paid members of rich households; and at feasts given by the most wealthy families many of them were employed to entertain the guests. The records of the Whitsuntide feast of 1306 given by Edward I in London include a long list of minstrels together with the sums paid to each. The most handsomely rewarded were the minstrels who were given the title of le roy; then came those known as maistres; the less important had names which indicate the kind of entertainment they provided or the instruments they played – Janin le Lutour, Baudee le Taboureur, Gillotin le Santreour, Reginaldus le Menteur, Guillaume sanz Maniere and the female comedian, Matill’ Makejoye.32
The licence allowed to the comedians was considerable, though Henry I is alleged to have put out the eyes of a Norman minstrel who composed and sang songs against him. Many minstrels took advantage of all the opportunities they had of ingratiating themselves with their employers, to whom they had free access, and making as much money out of their privileged positions as they could. Henry I’s wife, Matilda, is believed to have squandered most of her revenues upon rapacious minstrels in her household; one of Edward II’s favourite minstrels, William de Morlei, known as Roy de North, was awarded a grant of land; Edward III’s minstrels were paid the satisfactory sum of 7½d a day in peace time and 12d a day when they were required to go to war as a military band. These included five trumpeters, one citoler, five pipers, one tabouretter, two players of clarions, one nakerer and one fiddler. There were also three additional performers listed as waits.33
By Edward III’s time, as Professor Holt has observed, ‘there was the first of many signs that the profession was getting out of hand’. An ordinance of 1315 indicates that indolent persons, pretending minstrelsy, were going about in search of hospitality and money. It was accordingly decreed that no one except a professed minstrel should seek food or drink in the houses of prelates, earls or barons. Two years later, in 1317, a woman dressed as a minstrel managed to gain access to Westminster Hall at the time of the royal Whitsun banquet and insulted the king by leaving a manifesto attacking his government. In 1496 Edward IV incorporated the royal minstrels as a guild and in an ineffective decree granted them authority to seek out those ‘rough peasants and craftsmen of various mysteries of our realm of England pretending to be minstrels [and carrying] our letters not issued by us and … under colour of the art or occupation of minstrels fraudulently collect and receive great sums of money from our lieges’.34
As well as the king all great lords had minstrels in their households. The Earl of Derby took minstrels with him on his foreign expeditions in 1390 and 1392; while the Household Book of the Earl of Northumberland indicates that he was able to call upon ‘a Taberett, a Luyte and a Rebecc’ as well as six ‘trompettes’. Municipal corporations also employed minstrels to play at all local celebrations and festivities, allowing them a salary and the right to wear the town livery with a silver badge. And although the Church frequently condemned them, they were often to be heard performing at the festivities of religious guilds and even in the halls of monasteries.35
These were the fortunate ones. The rest had to make their living on the open road, playing their instruments, telling their stories and jokes by the wayside, in the market-place, wherever a crowd could be gathered. For these life could be hard. In the worst times even the most skilful of them, like the poet Rutebeuf, were close to starvation. Unless they were protected by licences such as those issued in Chester to bona fide performers, or by the livery of a lord for whom they played on special occasions, they were liable to be treated as vagabonds. And minstrels were known to adopt liveries to which they were not entitled so as to avoid arrest as vagrants. In an attempt to stop this, Edward IV – whose own minstrels’ livery had been usurped by ‘certain rude husbandmen and artificers’ fancying themselves as entertainers – created the guild of minstrels whose officers had authority over their profession throughout the country, except in Chester. It seems that admission to the guild was limited to ‘minstrels of honour’, in the same way that membership of the later guild of minstrels in Beverley was confined to those who could claim to be ‘mynstrell to some man of honour or worship or waite of some towne corporate or other ancient town, or else of such honestye and conyng as shal be thought laudable and pleasant to the hearers’.36
Hard though the life of some unfortunate minstrels was, however, most of them managed to do well for themselves.
They wandered at their will from castle to castle, and in time from borough to borough [in the words of Sir Edmund Chambers, their historian], sure of a ready welcome alike in the village tavern, the guildhall, and the baron’s keep. They sang and jested in the market-places, stopping cunningly at a critical moment in the performance to gather their harvest of small coin from the bystanders. In the great castles, while lords and ladies supped or sat around the fire, it was theirs to while away many a long bookless evening with courtly geste or witty sally. At wedding or betrothal, baptism or knight-dubbing, treaty or tournament, their presence was indispensable. The greater festivities saw them literally in their hundreds, and rich was their reward in money and in jewels, in costly garments, and in broad acres. They were licensed vagabonds with free right of entry into the presence-chambers of the land. You might know them from afar by their coats of many colours, gaudier than any knight might respectably wear, by the instruments upon their backs and those of their servants, and by the shaven faces, close-clipped hair and flat shoes proper to their profession.37
Often to be seen in their wake were the itinerant entertainers whose appeal was largely to the unlettered, the rope-walkers and acrobats, the conjurors, the jugglers and the puppet-masters, and all those other entertainers whose audiences were not so depleted as were those of the more sophisticated minstrels by the advent of printing.
8 Town Life
Although country people were constantly being drawn into towns, these strange and noisy places with their crowded streets and huddled buildings never seemed welcoming to outsiders and, on occasions, could be positively hostile. The rebel priest, John Ball, is believed to have warned some of his associates at the time of the rising of 1381, ‘Bee war [beware] of guile in borough’. Certainly this warning reflects the countryman’s suspicions of the town-dweller which were already centuries old.1
Even such fairly large towns as, say, Nottingham and Warwick had what would be considered today a decidedly rural atmosphere; and the rights of the inhabitants to common pastures were still jealously guarded. In some smaller towns, indeed, there were burgesses who were full-time farmers, while most of the local craftsmen, as at Oakham in Rutland and Congleton in Cheshire, were also husbandmen in what time they could spare from their other avocations. And in larger towns, Coventry, Leicester, Worcester and Gloucester among them, husbandry still occupied a considerable part of the inhabitants’ day.2 Yet not only in such towns as these but also in those smaller places with less than 500 inhabitants, those villes marchandes as official documents describe them, the people’s occupations and concerns were essentially different from those of the peasant: they were engaged in commerce and manufacture, and in providing services; and the weekly market was ‘the focus of their lives’.3 These towns were not necessarily larger than the biggest of the surrounding villages; but the villages were almost exclusively agricultural. In Sherborne, a village with as many inhabitants as a small town, all the taxpayers in 1380–81 were listed as cultivators, though some had surnames indicating that they also practised a craft; whereas in the small town of Stow-on-the-Wold – whose population at this time was probably about 300, and certainly less than that of Sherborne – there were, as Professor Hilton has recorded, no more than four households whose heads were listed in the poll-tax list as being cultivators of the soil. A few of the more well-to-do inhabitants, naturally, held land outside the town; but they did not farm these holdings personally. Their occupations are listed as smith, merchant, velbrugger, that is to say, dealer in sheepskins, and brew
stress. In all, twenty-eight separate crafts and trades were practised in this one small town.4
Most towns were small. A Venetian nobleman who was in England in about 1500 thought the country ‘very thinly inhabited’ with ‘hardly any towns of importance’. And, even a century later, another Italian considered that there were only about twenty-four large towns in the entire country, though ‘populous villages and small towns’ were very frequently encountered. Certainly, throughout this period as much as 95 per cent of the population was still rural; and there were very few towns indeed with over 1000 inhabitants. The provincial capital of York had a population of no more than 8000 in the late Middle Ages. London was exceptional with some 50,000.5
Yet, although they were small, towns were usually rich in comparison with the surrounding countryside, however poor they might have been when first founded. Colchester, for instance, a largish town of some 2200 inhabitants at the time of the Conquest, had not increased in size for two and a half centuries. A toll levied on their goods in about 1300 revealed that one of the richest men in the town was a butcher whose valuation came to no more than £715s 2d. The stock-in-hand of his fellow butchers was mostly limited to brawn, lard and a few salting tubs, though one had two carcasses of oxen valued at 2s each, and another had meat worth 30s. In addition to the butchers, there were thirteen well-to-do tanners and fourteen mercers, but otherwise there were no men of even moderate wealth in the town. During the fourteenth century, however, clothiers came to settle and to make money in the town; so did weavers, fullers, dyers and wool-mongers. In 1373 the undercroft beneath the old Moot Hall was converted into a spacious Wool Hall with a fine porch and adjoining shops. Further shops had by then been built in other parts of the town with living accommodation over them; the poor hovels had been replaced with larger timber-framed dwellings; and the population of the now prosperous town had doubled.6
It was the same in other towns all over the country. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in town after town, old churches were restored and new ones constructed; hospitals, schools and almshouses were founded; market crosses were set up; bridges, aqueducts and wharfs were built, as well as guild halls and common halls in which the town’s charters and other precious documents were kept in chests with many locks. Inns were provided for travelling merchants and traders, and for the ‘mayors and clerks of distant boroughs come to negotiate a commercial treaty’.7
As they became rich, towns also became powerful, often able to extract from the king privileges for themselves which villages, even if larger in area and population, could never have done. In their turn, successive kings found the towns useful allies against an insubordinate aristocracy, and were ready to grant royal recognition to those trading associations in the boroughs, the guilds.
These guilds, established to control the trade within the borough, had originated from organizations with a purely benevolent or religious basis and from associations formed to ensure that the men practising any particular craft never grew too numerous, that standards of quality and skill were maintained, that tools might be shared, raw materials readily supplied, and that charitable assistance might be made available to those who could no longer work, such as an old loriner no longer able to grasp his hammer with sufficient strength or a goldsmith blinded by the fire and smoke of quicksilver. The ordinances of the developing guilds established an increasingly strict control over their particular crafts. The 1307 ordinances of the craft of Girdlers of York, for instance, forbade their members to work by night or to farm out surplus work, restricted master craftsmen in the number of apprentices they could take on, and decreed that all apprentices must serve a minimum of four, later raised to seven, years. Yet, concerning themselves with the spiritual and moral as well as the social welfare of their members, laying down rules for the celebration of Masses for the dead, for regular church attendance, and for the ostracism of those guilty of adultery, the guilds not only endeavoured to ensure that their members led a respectable life and received a fair price for their goods but also that their customers were not overcharged, that the community as a whole benefited from their supervision and regulations. Their members, women as well as men, were subject to strict rules, forbidden, for example, to withhold supplies until demand increased the price, to discuss the guild’s business in public, or to conduct themselves indecorously at their meetings. Punishment for breaches of the rules were often severe and carried out in public, the offender being beaten, fined or placed in the pillory, a placard indicating his offence placed about his neck for the benefit of those who could read and some other indication of his misdemeanour, such as a rotting fish tied under his chin, for those who could not.
As the guilds grew in authority and the burgesses in wealth, so the hold of the aristocracy on the towns, strong if not paramount when Domesday Book was compiled, was gradually weakened. Towards the end of the Middle Ages it became common for the richer burgesses to leave the towns and set themselves up as country gentlemen, and to aspire to socially superior marriages for their daughters. But for a century and a half, from about 1200 to the middle of the fourteenth century, there were families of burgesses in most towns whose members, generation after generation, were evidently quite content to remain in them. This family continuity, as Dr Colin Platt has suggested, reflected a profound satisfaction with urban living that can have only come from a unique combination of independence and economic success.8
The interests of these wealthy burgess families were promoted by frequent intermarriage. In London, of the ninety-five aldermen elected before 1293 over two-thirds belonged to a single complex of interrelated families, ten of them from the family of Henry Fitzailwyn, first Mayor of London, eight from the Blunds and six from the Buckerels, all of these families being connected to each other by marriage and all being extremely rich. Men like these were considerably better off than country gentlemen and some were more wealthy than all but the richest nobility. Fitzailwyn owned property in Kent, Surrey and Middlesex as well as in London-, while the fortune of his successor as Mayor, the mercer, Richard Whittington, was so immense that he was not only able to rebuild London’s main prison and found its principal almshouses but also to bestow money upon numerous charitable enterprises all over the capital. In several county towns there were men with comparable fortunes. William Canynges, a fifteenth-century Bristol merchant, employed 800 men to work his ships and had a further 100 in his pay in the town. And Thomas Horton, clothier of Bradford-on-Avon, was so rich that he personally paid 70 per cent of the entire subsidy of the town. The families to which such men belonged managed over the years to accumulate most of their communities’ wealth. Well over half the wealth of Norwich was in the hands of only 6 per cent of the population; while almost half of Coventry’s was held by 2 per cent.9
These rich burgesses had a virtual monopoly of power. There was, traditionally, a system in medieval boroughs by which all their inhabitants held themselves liable for conscription in times of trouble; and at the muster-at-arms, held twice a year, both rich and poor were expected to appear in military array with such weapons as they could afford, the poor bringing knives, daggers or hatchets, the prosperous burghers presenting themselves ‘after their degree’ with mail or padded coats, bucklers, swords, bows and arrows and, in later times, a gun. But in few towns after the fourteenth century did the rich actually appear, choosing to pay deputies to represent them. Also, each householder was bound to take his turn in keeping nightly watch and ward in the streets; but this duty, too, was performed for the rich by substitutes. It was also upon the poor that the task fell of ensuring that the common rights of a town were not diminished and that its common land and properties remained in good heart and good repair. In Romney, for example, the poor had to keep the marshes drained and free of encroachments, and in Sandwich they were responsible for the maintenance of the dykes and for the protection of the harbour.10
Those prosperous burgesses who paid others to fulfil their duties for them occupied the town�
�s offices as though of right. At meetings in the common hall a select group of them, summoned by the mayor, was commonly taken to represent the general body of inhabitants and to give their assent to measures on behalf of the burghers at large. All important offices were confined to men of a certain station in society, ‘the rank of a mayor’ or ‘the rank of a sheriff’ being well-known medieval phrases intended to express a comfortable social position maintained by an adequate income.11 At Ipswich twelve portmen regularly divided among themselves all the posts of bailiffs, coroners and councillors; and elsewhere from generation to generation, the chief municipal offices were handed down in the few leading families of the place.12 From time to time there were revolts against this assumption that only the members of these families should be considered worthy of high municipal office and enabled to parade about the town in their richly coloured, fur-trimmed robes. In Exeter in 1339 there were ‘impetuous clamours’ against the constant re-election of one or two men as mayor; but this attempt by the common people to assert themselves was not successful, and matters continued much as they had done in the past. So they did at Lincoln where, in 1325, the inhabitants complained that they were without defence against ‘the great lords of the said city’, that these ‘grauntz Seigneurs’ paid nothing while the ‘mean people’ were arbitrarily taxed without their consent, that the money raised by the murage tax for building the city wall was used for their own purposes by the rich burgesses in office who rendered no accounts to the people, that the common people alone were forced to keep the nightly watch. At Oxford the people complained vainly more than once that the mayor and other officers were exacting taxes without the town’s consent, pocketing the money raised, collecting money for their expenses on juries and assizes while leaving the poor to pay their own costs. At York in 1342 Nicholas Langton was elected mayor for the seventeenth time; and at Liverpool for eighteen years between 1374 and 1406 two men shared office between them. Similar stories could be told of almost every town in England.13
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