1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (7 page)

Comparing England with Ireland, the twelfth-century English historian William of Malmesbury wrote: ‘Whereas in Ireland the cultivators of the soil are so poor, or rather so unskilful, that the people live in rustic squalor, the English and the French, with their more cultivated way of life, live in towns and carry on trade and commerce.’ William’s contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote that England was richer even than Germany and saw its cities, ‘glittering on the banks of fruitful and very beautiful rivers’, as among the country’s greatest assets. This same period saw the beginnings of urbanisation in both Wales and Scotland. The towns that grew up then included, in Wales, Cardiff, Carmarthen, Cardigan, Neath, Pembroke and Swansea; and in Scotland, Berwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Aberdeen and Perth. In the history of urbanisation in Britain this is the most important period before the Industrial Revolution.

The beginnings of King John’s Liverpool are typical of many medieval town foundations. In the short and businesslike letter patent of August 1207 the words ‘free’ and ‘liberties’ are prominent. Liverpool was to be a ‘free borough’. The king’s letter was, in effect, its first borough charter. Its burgesses, those people who took up the king’s offer of burgages – plots of land in the new town – were to enjoy certain ‘liberties and free customs’. They were to be free to sell, sublet, mortgage or pass on their burgage to heirs. They were to be free from having to pay servile dues or perform labour services, from paying toll at the borough’s weekly market, as well as at other markets owned by the same lord. Where, as at Liverpool, the lord was the king this was an extremely valuable privilege since he was lord of most of the oldest and biggest towns in England. Burgesses could have their own oven and handmill: unlike servile tenants they were not compelled to use, and pay for using, their lord’s. The law came to recognise the custom that a serf who managed to live in a borough as a burgess for a year and a day was thenceforth to be regarded as a freeman. Hence the medieval saying: ‘Town air makes you free.’ All this was clearly designed to attract settlers, as was the fact that in new towns burgage rents were set at a low level, typically a shilling (12d) a year.

Liverpool was planned on an empty site. Elsewhere lords issued charters that turned pre-existing villages into boroughs by ‘enfranchising’ them. In 1196, for example, the bishop of Worcester turned his village of Stratford-upon-Avon into a borough. Within fifty years Stratford had grown into a market town of some seventy acres in extent with a population of about a thousand. Burgage rents alone brought in £12, at least ten times as much as the rents of a seventy-acre rural manor. Even a small borough with just eighty burgage plots paying a shilling each brought in £4 just from rents, more than the property would have been worth as farmland. Adding in market and mill tolls, plus income from the borough court, it could bring in as much as £10.

Founding a town on a new site involved the lord in major capital outlay, in the case of Liverpool the building of a castle and a chapel for the settlers, since it was situated three miles from the parish church of Walton on the Hill. By granting special freedoms to his burgage tenants the lord gave up some profitable rights, but clearly in the expectation that the market would flourish, bringing in a higher rent income from new settlers, more money from the tolls paid at the weekly market by non-burgesses and from fines levied in the borough court. Alternatively once the town was off the ground its lord could guarantee himself a useful sum, known as the ‘farm’, with virtually no effort on his part, by leasing to the burgesses the right to collect revenues and administer their town. By 1229 Liverpool was paying a farm set at £10. King John’s new town was already doing well.

The rate of new foundation was at its height in the fifty years between 1180 and 1230 when no fewer than fifty-seven new towns were founded in England. Before the Norman Conquest the majority of new English boroughs had been royal foundations, but most of those established in the two centuries after 1066 were founded by wealthy landowners, bishops, abbots and, above all, secular nobles. Maurice Paynell, for example, created a new borough at Leeds by the bridge over the river Aire; and Richard de Argentein was responsible for Newmarket in Suffolk. Some boroughs attracted so few settlers that they remained villages – there were to be many of these ‘rural boroughs’ in Ireland – but the majority did well. Portsmouth was originally founded by a noble, Jean de Gisors, and was then taken over by Richard I in 1194 and developed as a naval base. Other successful new towns of this period included Honiton, founded by the earl of Devon; Chelmsford, founded by the bishop of London; Salisbury, founded by its bishop; Harwich, founded by the earls of Norfolk. One thing is crystal clear from the story of town foundation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The aristocratic landowners of the age were far from being contemptuous of the profits of trade. The Clare family, for example, as earls of Hertford and Gloucester, came to possess more than twenty boroughs.

Of course the urban boom was very far from being solely the creation of royal and aristocratic enterprise. These lords were riding a wave of rising population and rising production. As settlements grew in number and size more and more people were able to specialise as artisans, craftsmen or shopkeepers, making and selling goods in exchange for the agricultural production of the countryside or raw materials from the forest, quarries and mines. Markets proliferated. There were just two markets in Oxfordshire in 1086, but ten more by the 1220s. Everyone lived close enough to a market to be able to walk there and back in a day. Markets could and did spring up as spontaneously as car-boot sales today, but then, as now, they functioned better with some degree of regulation. Ensuring that markets had to be held on different days in different places, for example, allowed itinerant traders to adopt a circuit that kept them in business throughout the week. Even though a few places, such as Stowmarket, became market towns without ever being granted borough status, chartering a borough proved the most effective way of regulating – and promoting – a market.

Although a successful urban foundation depended upon lord and burgesses co-operating as shareholders in a joint enterprise, their interests were by no means identical, and as time went by they were increasingly likely to diverge. Bury St Edmunds was one of the earliest post-1066 urban developments. Abbot Baldwin (1065–97) laid out five new streets and a market place to the west of the abbey. The Domesday Book of 1086 noted that the abbey now had 342 houses on land that had been under the plough in the time of King Edward ‘the Confessor’ (1042–66). After a century of urban growth the monks felt that they were not making as much profit from St Edmund’s town as they should have been. Early in Richard I’s reign they went to see their formidable abbot, Samson, and complained that the income they derived from Bury had remained at its customary level of £40 a year, while ‘revenues from all the better towns and boroughs in England were rising to the advantage of the lords who possessed them’. These were monks with an eye on national economic trends. The burgesses of Bury, however, could not be budged: they looked to the king to protect what they called their ‘liberty’ – which often meant something more like ‘privilege’.

The monks of Bury were, however, right about the economy. Trade was booming. One of the principal engines of the growth of commerce was the increase in the money supply. At this time the only coin minted in north-west Europe was the silver penny, so the discovery in the 1160s of silver bearing ores in the Alps, in Tuscany and, above all, at Freiberg, near Meissen, in Germany, was of huge importance. In 1180 a new English silver penny was designed, now known to collectors and numismatists as the Short Cross penny. The cross design on one side of the coin simplified life for those who wanted to cut it into two or four pieces in order to have money of lower denomination, halfpennies or farthings (fourths). Thanks to the influx of new silver, especially German silver, numismatists estimate that after 1180 English mints were striking at least six times as many pennies as in the previous decades. By the 1220s, when surviving mint records allow accurate statistics of coin production to be compiled, over 4 million silver pennies were being minted annually at Canterbury and London, and mint production continued to rise during the thirteenth century. Indeed not until the nineteenth century was the weight of silver minted each year in later thirteenth-century England regularly exceeded.

By 1215 London was the second largest town, after Paris, in north-western Europe. The Londoner William FitzStephen prefaced
The Life of Thomas Becket
which he wrote in the early 1170s with an enthusiastic description of his city:

Here was a great international market, where goods of all kinds could be bought, both basic commodities such as grain which, in times of harvest failure, could be cheaper here than anywhere else in England, and also a great range of luxury goods. Just thinking of these exotic items so inspired William that he turned from prose to verse:

It was not just a poetic flight of fancy: all these items could be bought in the London of his day.

So great was the attraction of the city’s market that, by 1215, it had pulled the focal point of national administration into its orbit. Earlier kings of England had looked just as much, if not more, to Winchester, but by the later twelfth century Winchester had been overtaken by Westminster. The palace of Westminster, at its centre the magnificent hall built for William Rufus over a century earlier, became increasingly the heart of government. It was here, even during the prolonged absences of the royal court, that you could find the exchequer and the central law courts. By 1215 the English élite realised they could not do without London and Westminster. Many of them possessed, in addition to their country houses, a residence in London or in one of its two main suburbs, Westminster and Southwark. We have an account, for instance, of how Abbot Walter (1174–1211) of Waltham Abbey took the decision to build a stone house just north of Billingsgate. It was intended to be a place where the canons of Waltham or their servants could stay when they were in London, a warehouse for the goods they bought, and a garage for their carts. London was now England’s capital city.

A few important towns, such as Norwich and Bristol, had developed in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but generally speaking the richest towns were the oldest ones, dating back to Roman times, like York, Winchester, Lincoln, Canterbury, Colchester and, of course, London. According to William FitzStephen, however, London was older even than Rome itself, being founded after the fall of Troy by the Trojan exile Brutus, long before Romulus and Remus founded Rome. Indeed, it was Londoners, William explained – in another flight of fancy – who had repulsed Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain. He counted 139 churches, thirteen major ones and 126 parish churches, within the city and its suburbs; seven gates piercing the great wall that enclosed it on the north, linking the king’s massive Tower of London in the east with Baynard’s Castle and the Tower of Montfichet in the west. Two miles further west, joined to the city by a continuous line of development, lay ‘the incomparable royal palace’, which was Westminster. It is clear that, just as they are today, London and Westminster were already seen in combination, as the commercial and political capitals of the nation.

William drew attention to three springs famous for their healing waters in the northern suburbs: Holywell, Clerkenwell and St Clement’s Well. He described how: ‘Beyond the walls to the north lie arable fields, pasture and meadows, with brooks flowing between them and the happy sound of mill wheels turning. Beyond is the forest, where well-wooded copses and the lairs of wild animals can be found: stags and does, wild bulls and boars.’ Among the city’s amenities of which he was particularly proud was a shop selling ready-cooked meals at all hours of the day and night. Situated on the riverbank, amid the premises of the wine importers, it catered for travellers no matter how early or late they arrived or departed. Besides, William pointed out, if an unexpected guest suddenly turned up on your doorstep, you could pop down to the bankside shop and have a meal before them in no time. Its impressive menu offered a wide range of fish, meat, venison and poultry, either roast, boiled or fried – convenience food to suit all tastes and all pockets. It was this kind of thing, William emphasised, that made city life truly civilised.

He mentioned London Bridge only in passing, which shows that he was writing before the magnificent new stone bridge was built. It was begun in 1176 and took some thirty years to complete. Over a thousand feet long, it remained until 1831. Soon after its completion it survived a disaster that would have destroyed any of its Roman and medieval wooden predecessors. In 1212 a fire broke out on the south bank in Southwark. Crowds crossed the bridge either to view the scene or help put it out but were then surrounded by flames when the fire, driven by a south wind, took hold on the north bank too – presumably via the timber or thatched roofs of houses on the bridge. Boats went to rescue those trapped on the bridge, but so many jumped in them that they sank. Some reports spoke of 3000 dead, others of 3000 badly burned bodies washed up on the banks of the Thames, with an unknown number totally consumed by the flames. Three days after the fire a city ordinance was issued against thatched roofs. From then on London would be a timber city but one in which roofs were tiled. An ordinance issued on the same day ordered that ‘scot-ales’ (in effect, bring-a-bottle parties) were not to be held except by licence, which suggests that the fire started at a party. In William FitzStephen’s view, the two plagues of London were the frequency of fires and the excessive drinking of fools.