The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  This rich élite lived in town mansions in the grandest style. The earliest town houses, like those in the country, were of timber-frame construction with walls of wattle and daub; but the ravages of fire and the requirements of a burgess’s reputation had soon led to the widespread use of stone. At Canterbury there were at least thirty stone houses by the early thirteenth century; and at Southampton for many years, among several others of the same material, ‘the “great stone houses” of Richard of Leicester, an early thirteenth-century notable of Southampton, remained a landmark of the port’.14

  Town houses differed little in plan from many houses in the country. There was the same hall built over store-rooms and approached, perhaps, by an outside staircase; there were the same chambers and the same separate kitchen. But there were, except for the most fortunate town-dweller, problems presented by congestion. In rows of houses whose gable ends faced on to a narrow street, there was little space on the site for anything other than a small yard into which rubbish might be tipped; and the street itself was usually littered with rubbish already. Even in London, which had more scavengers and rakers to call upon than other towns, a foreign visitor said that the streets were ‘so badly paved that they got wet at the slightest quantity of water’. They were also clogged with rubbish and excrement which lay rotting and stinking in the gullies running down the middle of the cobbled streets whence it was occasionally washed away by heavy rainfalls into ditches, streams and eventually the river.

  From time to time the rakers carted the filth in the streets away to tip it into the great pits or lay-stalls that were dug outside the city gates or down to the river where boats were moored, waiting to ferry it away. But no sooner had a street been cleaned and its rubbish carted off than it was filled up again with kitchen refuse and excrement thrown out of doors and windows, with rushes discarded from hall floors and straw cleared out of stables, with rotting animals’ heads and entrails from butchers’ shops, with rubble from builders’ yards, stale fish from fishmongers’ yards, and feathers from poulterers. Year after year attempts were made to prevent citizens from throwing their rubbish into the streets, from building pigsties outside their front doors, from blocking the gutters with offal, oyster shells and fish-heads and from throwing dead animals into the river and into the city ditch. But the very frequency of the orders and proclamations, issued by the king and the city corporation, indicates how little regard was paid to them.15

  London was far from exceptional in this respect. In Nottingham, a wealthy and thriving borough, streets were blocked with piles of cinders thrown out smoking hot from the bell-foundry and iron workshops, or with heaps of corn which the householders winnowed – or as they called the process ‘windowed’ – by throwing it in handfuls from the upper floors so that the wind might carry away the chaff. In the even wealthier city of Norwich, the market-place, which was still not paved in 1507, was pitted with holes excavated by builders as sand-pits. And in Hythe, so an early fifteenth-century jury declared, streets were alternately choked with refuse and flooded with water. Timber dealers threw trunks across the highway; dyers poured their waste water over it; butchers, swine-keepers and even respectable merchants such as the Honywodes cast their waste on to it or established ‘hoggestocks’ which were ‘abominable to all men coming to the market as well as to all dwelling in the town’. The ‘Cherche Weys’ were occupied by the pits of a skinner. There was ‘no carrying through Brokhellislane’. The Holy Well and the well in West Hythe were both choked with rubbish, while ‘the water in the cart of Geoffrey Waterleader by which the whole community is refreshed’ was made foul by the refuse from the butchers’ shambles. Everywhere gates and bridges were falling into ruins, walls decaying, hedges overgrown and ditches undrained.16

  Yet progress was slowly made. The dangers consequent upon pollution of the soil had long been recognized; and the lining and regular cleaning of cesspits had been advocated by town authorities since the twelfth century. By the fourteenth century building contracts were specifying the provision of both adequate cesspits and privies; and in some new buildings the privies were so arranged that they could be cleared from the street by those who were paid to cart away night-soil. In London there were public latrines at the gates and on platforms overhanging the Walbrook; and by the late Middle Ages there were public latrines also at Leicester, Winchester, Southampton, Hull and Exeter and, no doubt, elsewhere. Nor was London alone in enjoying a supply of fresh water: pipes or open conduits served Exeter, Bristol and Southampton in the fourteenth century, and Gloucester and Hull in the fifteenth.17 At the same time more and more towns were paying serious attention to the paving of streets. In 1482 a paviour was appointed in Southampton and paid a salary to inspect the town’s paving, to order repairs where necessary and to collect the cost from the householders who, here as elsewhere, were responsible for that part of the street outside their own dwelling. A few years later Nottingham also had a municipal paviour who was paid 33s 4d a year and provided with an official gown.18

  The houses of the poor were also being improved. In earlier times they had been little better than the cottages of the villagers, though several had been on two floors, the upper storey projecting over the lower. They were still mostly timber-framed, but they were now more conveniently designed and often more spacious. The house in which a moderately successful shopkeeper or master craftsman lived might expect to have a shop or work-room on the ground floor, a hall, larder and kitchen on the floor above, and bedchambers and a privy on a third floor reached by a staircase from the hall. There might also, perhaps, have been a cockloft in the gable of the roof. As with the earlier houses, each storey commonly projected over the one below so that in very narrow streets people standing at the upper floor windows of houses facing each other could almost touch hands. The poorest workers had to be content with far smaller and less salubrious houses in the suburbs of the town or in dwellings converted from some abandoned defensive work on the town wall. But in several towns speculators had built rows of cottages for working people closer to their work; and, although these were excessively small, they seem to have been a distinct improvement upon the majority of those cottages which, with the help of a local carpenter, the countryman built for himself. There is, however, little evidence of much concerted effort to develop towns to a preconceived plan. Some, on the sites of Roman settlements, tended to follow the original grids for the sake of convenience; but most grew haphazardly, the streets winding in accordance with the whims of individual builders, the houses in groups at odd angles, spare plots providing dumping grounds for rubbish in which pigs and hens grunted and strutted in constant search of sustenance. Castles or abbeys often provided a nucleus for a town; while rivers and natural harbours frequently influenced the shape of a town’s development. So, sometimes, did a busy fair or market, held perhaps at some important crossroads.

  At the time of Domesday Book there were only about fifty markets in England and Wales; but thereafter numerous other places had acquired market rights, particularly in the years 1227 to 1350 when 1200 new markets were recognized.19 The regulations of these markets usually kept traders localized in a specific area. Some traders were required to separate themselves from the rest because of the unpleasant smells or sights with which they were associated, butchers, fishmongers and tanners among them. Others, like smiths and potters, were made to keep their distance because of the dangers of fire. Some, like dyers and fullers, had to locate themselves near running water. Yet others chose to carry on business close to men in the same trade as a matter of convenience. Several towns had separate corn, hay and livestock markets; in many others a central market locality would be divided into separate areas where specialized traders were concentrated. In London the names of the streets still leading off Cheapside – Wood Street, Milk Street, Ironmonger Lane, Poultry, Bread Street – all indicate where the stalls of the various trades were kept in the market before its open ground was covered with buildings; while the names of other London stree
ts indicate the former centre of a trade or craft or the place where its goods were sold in the market. So Fish Street Hill is where the fishmongers had their stalls, Sea Coal Lane where the coal merchants were established by the Fleet river from the time of Henry III, Goldsmith Street where goldsmiths congregated even before the Goldsmiths’ Company received its first charter in 1327, Lombard Street where the Italian bankers settled after the expulsion of the Jews from London in 1290, and Jewry Street and Old Jewry where the Jewish moneylenders lived in their ghettoes before that time. Likewise in Salisbury, Butcher Row, Cordwainer Row, Pot Row, Ironmonger Row, Wheeler Row and Fish Row all owe their names to market traders.

  While markets, usually held weekly, were designed to satisfy the needs of ordinary shoppers, fairs, held annually, were established for trading on a larger scale. Many of them originated with the congregation of pilgrims at holy shrines in abbeys and cathedrals on saints’ days when, taking advantage of such an influx of visitors, traders and merchants would set up stalls to tempt them to part with what money they had not reserved as an offering at the shrine and for their journey home. Fairs are known to have existed in Anglo-Saxon times, though their charters were not granted until after the Conquest, a large proportion of them being issued in the thirteenth century. In the county of Somerset alone no less than ninety-four fairs were established by charter before 1500, several of them in 1304 and the years immediately following as rewards for service in the Scottish wars granted to lords of the fair who had the right to demand rent from the stallholders.20

  Some fairs specialized in a particular commodity. Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield – where Rahere, founder of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Lord of the Fair, was not above performing juggling tricks for the entertainment of those who attended it – was a cloth fair. Barnet had a horse fair; Abingdon a cattle fair; several ports had fishing fairs; other places, like the celebrated Stourbridge Fair which belonged to the Corporation of Cambridge, had a conglomeration of stalls selling all manner of goods from gingerbread to tuning forks.

  Bailiffs were appointed to ensure that ordinary shops were kept closed and the lords of the fair received their proper profit, that the regulations governing the conduct of traders were observed, that weights and measures were tested, and that the food and wine offered was of a satisfactory standard. Defaulters, and those responsible for the affrays that so frequently erupted, were brought before Courts of Pie Powder whose name was probably derived from the French pieds poudreux signifying the dusty feet of the travellers dealt with in them.

  The craftsman whose wares were sold at fairs and markets had usually served out his apprenticeship in the house of a master who undertook to teach him his trade, and who might additionally be required to give him a general education, as well as bed, board and clothing, in return for complete subservience and a hard day’s work as soon as he was qualified to provide it. His apprenticeship complete, he became a journeyman and could thereafter work for a wage, either for his original master or for another. If skilful and ambitious he might then submit an example of his craft to his guild which would decide upon its merits whether or not he could become a master himself.

  Travelling craftsmen, such as the masons and wood-carvers whose skill took them from city to city to work upon cathedrals and churches, were accommodated in lodges in which up to about twenty lived at a time. But most craftsmen slept above the workshops where they spent their day, working long hours and as closely tied to their town as the peasant was to his village.

  9 Daughters and Wives

  Although a woman was seen as subordinate to her father or her husband, and her goods were theoretically not under her own control, she was not left defenceless at the man’s mercy. The Church recognized separation in cases of gross cruelty, fornication and apostasy; while the law accepted a woman’s right to hold land, to make a will or a contract, to sue and to appear as her own or her husband’s attorney, and, if widowed, to be the guardian of her children. She could also appeal against her husband to her family when in urgent need of their help. In the case of poorer women, manorial custom would usually make allowances for her if she were having a baby: her obligations to the lord of the manor might well be waived for the time being, or she might even be sent a present, though less perhaps because the lord felt moved by compassion than because he recognized the importance of her function in providing the estate with fresh labourers.1

  Whatever her customary privileges or legal rights, however, the married woman was not considered to stand on the same level as her husband; and it cannot be doubted that many wives were beaten almost as often as their children. A man fined at Sporle Manor Court for thrashing his servant expressed a common sentiment when he indignantly expostulated that he did not know what the world was coming to, that the day would soon come when a man might not beat his own wife.2

  A marriage in families of property was a matter of business like any other: a poor man might choose a wife because he loved her; but parents with money or land would expect their children to marry with an eye to the family fortune. Love might come later but was not considered prerequisite. The marriage of Elizabeth Paston is a case in point. When she was about fifteen her parents decided that she would marry a rich widower, Stephen Scrope, a man of fifty who, so he himself recorded, ‘had suffered a sickness that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years ensuing, whereby I am disfigured in my person and shall be whilst I live’. Elizabeth naturally had no inclination to marry him and at first declined to do so. Her mother therefore kept her at home so that she should see no other more attractive man and saw to it that for three months she was ‘beaten once in the week or twice, sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places’. This treatment eventually induced the girl to give way; but for some reason the marriage did not take place, and for the next ten years various other possible husbands were considered and their circumstances investigated, the greatest importance always being attached to the Paston family’s ‘worship and profit and to the lands of the man under consideration standing clear’. Two country squires were rejected, presumably because they were not rich enough; and then Elizabeth’s brother, John, received a letter from Lord Grey of Hastings: ‘If your sister be not yet married, I trust to God I know where she may be married to a gentleman of 400 marks of livelode, the which is a great gentleman born and of good blood.’

  This sounded promising; but it transpired that the gentleman in question was a ward of Lord Grey whose interest in the marriage was prompted by the hope that he could get his hands on the Paston dowry himself. So these negotiations were abandoned, and yet others entered into with a man to whom Elizabeth was at last married, whether or not happily is unknown.

  Other members of her family, however, did find happiness; and one at least did marry for love. This was Margery, the youngest sister of Sir John Paston, for whom a profitable match was confidently expected. Several offers were made to her family, but none had been considered worthy of her, and her mother had taken her to St Saviour’s Abbey, Bermondsey, to pray ‘that she may have a good husband’. Suddenly after several years in which various matches were considered, the Pastons were horrified to be told that Margery Paston had pledged herself to Richard Calle, Sir John’s chief bailiff. The reactions of the family, from whom she had long kept the pledge secret out of fear, were as violent as she had feared. Her brother wrote scornfully of his sister selling ‘candle and mustard in Framlingham’; her mother was furious; the family chaplain was as cross as anyone and advised that the matter should be submitted to the consideration of the Bishop of Norwich. It was a very serious affair because plights of troth were then binding and the Church, while disapproving of them, did recognize them if properly made. The bishop closely examined Margery Paston as to the exact words she had used. She repeated them and added spiritedly that ‘if those words made it not sure she would make it sure ere she went thence, for she thought in her conscience she was bound whatever the words were’. The bishop emphasized all the d
isadvantages of the marriage, the shame to her family and the disapproval of her friends. But she remained unshaken, as did Calle during his examination. The bishop then said he would reserve judgement until after Michaelmas to give time for any possible impediments to the marriage to be disclosed. Margery begged him to give a ruling earlier than that, but he declined to do so; and so she set out to go home. On the way, however, she was met by the family chaplain who told her she was no longer welcome there: her mother would not receive her nor would any of her mother’s friends. She had to go back to Norwich where the bishop found her lodgings from which she eventually moved to Blackborough nunnery near Lynn. Her mother remained unreconciled to the marriage and wrote to her son,

  I pray you and require you that ye take it not pensively, for I know it goeth right near your heart, and so it doth to mine and to others. But remember you, and so do I, that we have lost of her but a worthless person, and set it the less to heart … If he [Calle] were dead at this hour, she should never be at my heart as she was.