=¥ 1 ie story of (a Our English ‘Towns ————— SS Se ee ETE ER eae caf i LP : : abd lis _— : ‘ —— ———— — i ao ; me os ; s oe Pio y FI 5 ia Nee aa, aes are ae : ; xs a - Teas Ceaale eae ‘ = - oS er aes eerie ba ma Bee Mabeae sh Fb oe te Peete Bees : weet - == og erieg é 2 ie ae : eee esis Ne DoF eee ae syn ab ier ee = Laer See at ne = ee Ne ta ey = “> ty Re 1 woe > #9 Sif 11148-S Len © as it hate A ihe i Th Our English Towns i \\ ey . masa a : onan i te A t ANUARE GAA o ne on a LEONARD'S CASTLE AT MALLING, KENT. REMAINS OF ST. ° THE EARLIEST NORMAN KEEP IN EXISTENCE, D. 1070, A. bd of Rochester Built by Gundulph, Bishop The Story of Our English Towns 4 Told by P* He" Ditchfield, F.S.A. With Introduction by Augustus Jessopp, D.D. London George Redway 1897 a te 2| en | ‘3 ~- Tho ¥ 1 OAs Q\A.¢ ied td hd a Gal e Tue history of the origin, the growth, and the constitutional development of our English towns has been investigated so carefully and illustrated by such an immense expenditure of acumen and erudition during the last few years, that it is to be wondered at that no book has as yet appeared which has attempted to summarise, in a popular form, the main results which the labours of experts have arrived at. The truth is that the literature of the subject has grown to somewhat bewildering proportions, and the questions involved, along with the com- plex historical problems discussed, and still un- solved, are so numerous that the task of presenting to the general reader—other than the professional student of history—a digest of the views put forward, the facts accumulated and the conclu- sions arrived at, is a task that few are qualified Vv 237476 vi PREFACE to undertake, and fewer still would venture to enter upon. Nevertheless the time has come when the attempt should be made, and it may safely be prophesied that such a volume as this, by an antiquary who has won his spurs, has read widely and has not spared himself the requisite pains, will be accepted as a welcome boon by many who cannot hope to devote years of study to laborious historical research. It was the late John Richard Green who first taught us how much was to be learnt by looking into the past of town life, and how important it was to get an insight into the growth of the town communities. Before the appearance of his ‘Short History of the English People,” few among us had realised that the prowess of heroes and the clash of arms do not make nations. We had been almost taught to believe that institutions can be turned out to order by Acts of Parliaments, by paper constitu- tions, or by the fiats of conquerors. So they can be up to a certain point, but that point is soon reached. Institutions are living organisms that must grow if they are to thrive and last, and though the gardener’s shears may do a great deal / PREFACE Vii in the way of stunting or of shaping the growth, there are limits beyond which he cannot pass in determining how the plant will submit to training. If we desire to know the nature of the organism, we must watch its development from the first appearance of life in it, and we must note its slow or rapid changes, through every successive step from the bud of promise to the branching of the tree that serves to shelter or to shade, or, it may be, to become a mere mischievous and poisonous growth, harmful and deadly. When Julius Ceasar about halr a century before Christ paid his first visit to our island, he took some care to collect information con- cerning the people he had set himself to conquer. If that information was not all quite correct, and if Cesar’s half-dozen pages are not all that could be desired, yet the wonder is, not that he did not tell us more that we can rely on, but that so much that he does tell us turns out to be true in the main. There were no towns—as we now under- stand the word—in our island before the Roman times. Of communities associated under recog- nised Headmen, whether Provosts, or Mayors, or Vill PREFACE Bailiffs, or by whatever other name they came to be known—communities occupying a certain definite area, enjoying a certain measure of authority, possessing a certain corporate existence, and rejoicing in their own laws and customs, having their own police, and taxing themselves to provide a revenue which was spent upon themselves and for the behoof of all—of such communities, I say, our remote ancestors knew little or nothing. In times of peril, Cesar tells us, the Britons resorted to certain rallying-places which were centres of union, for defence against a common enemy; but of civic life—of city life— they had hardly a notion. Looking back through ~ the dim past, London and Bristol come out of the haze as great trading-places very early. Very early it seems the carrying trade of the West was shared by the Veneti of the mainland and the Britons of the islands. There was commerce in Britain, and that implies association and a much higher civilisation than Cesar’s sketch of Britain would lead us to expect. But it is almost certain that town life among our ancestors began under our Roman masters, who were at the same time our Roman protectors, and the PREFACE ix bringers in of new things for those whom they ruled. The Roman occupation of Britain lasted just four hundred years, dating from the first serious and successful invasion by Aulus Plautius, with an army of at least 50,000 men, in A.D. 43, down to the final abandonment of the island in A.D. 446. During all this long period the work of czvzltsation of the subject people went on continuously. That is to say, the Britons were being taught to see the advantages conferred upon a people by the czvz/ institutions which town life inevitably brings with it. When Britain was left to defend itself against the hordes of German invaders which poured in upon the island from across the sea, there were at least fifty walled towns in England, exclusive of the military stations with their attendant suburbs, which may be looked upon as fortresses capable of defence by disciplined troops against any assaults which might be made upon them by rude warriors imperfectly organised. The Teutonic hordes who poured in upon our forefathers, and whom it is usual to call Anglo- Saxons, found themselves more than a match for the Romano-Britons, and they conceived a not xX PREFACE unnatural contempt for the islanders, who under their Roman masters had never learnt the art of war, and had found the lessons of military tactics hard to learn. The Saxons in the open probably carried all before them. They had an inbred dislike for cities; they associated gates and walls, and streets and rows of houses, with the notion of slavery. A town with them seemed to be little better than a huge prison, which the sooner it was pillaged and destroyed the better. Nor was this all, the Roman cities proved strong places of resistance for the Britons in the long conflict. As one after another they were stormed or reduced to submission by starvation, they were deliberately destroyed or dismantled. Under the Saxon occupation the towns up and down the land ceased to exist, and though it seems that here and there a Roman town in a dwindled and dilapidated condition managed to keep up the miserable semblance of the old civic organisation, it is hardly too much to say that during the two hundred years which followed the departure of the Romans, town life actually died out in our island, leaving only a few scarcely recognisable vestiges of its old self to testify to the ancient grandeur. PREFACE xi With the beginning of the seventh century a new and mighty force began to work its bene- ficent influence among the Saxon invaders. Up to this time they had been fierce pagans, and, from all that appears, pagans with no religious faith or religious observances maintained by the teaching or ritual services of an organised priest- hood. The Christian clergy during the long conflict had been driven further and further to the west of the island, and were animated by little or no missionary zeal, but rather by a fierce—if patriotic —hatred of the Teutonic invaders, from whom they and their fathers had suffered so much. But when it pleased God to send the first missionaries from Rome to England in 597, and when the long warfare began to draw to an end, and the fierce Anglo-Saxons began to be weary of battles, and to taste the first sweets of security and peace, the Gospel of Christ gained wonderful acceptance among them. It is true that the mission of St. Augustine produced very much less effect than used, till recently, to be claimed for it; but it certainly was a powerful factor in awakening the best and holiest of those who were Xii PREFACE still to be found in the old British Church to a sense of their responsibilities and their duties; and so great an awakening came about among the clergy of the older communion, that when sixty years after Augustine’s death another band of missionaries arrived from Rome, Theodore, appointed to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, found that Britain was almost a Christian land, and his own work was confined to organising the English Church. Other men had been labouring, and he and his entered into their labours. It was the influence of the gospel, preached by devoted men—for the most part working in societies bound together by the bands of a discipline which was immensely potent to give cohesion to the society itself, and to secure effectual co-operation and unity of purpose to the members—which brought about the astonish- ingly rapid conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, and which resulted, too, in the multiplication of those Religious Fortresses which the early monasteries — became in the centuries that followed. The Saxon monasteries were slowly contributing to the growth of the new towns, when another stream of invaders burst in upon Britain during PREFACE xiil the ninth century. What is usually called the Danish invasion was only not as devastating and overwhelming as the Teutonic invasion proved, because there was in the ninth century less to destroy and obliterate than there had been in the sixth. But the struggle with the Danes under the great Alfred and his house could not be a time for peace to bring her blessings to us; there could be no quiet town life then. In the main, during the ninth century cevz/zsatzon was going back; and though there was a grand revival in more ways than one in the tenth century, it was not till the Norman Conquest that our English towns began, as we may say, to rise from the dead, or, if we may vary the metaphor, to raise up their heads above-ground, and to start upon a new growth. When the great survey was made in 1087, commonly known as the Domesday Book, there were undoubtedly many /¢ownzs to be found through the length and breadth of the land. Some few, as Chester, Lincoln, and York, were survivals of the old Roman cities. They retained certain fragments of their ancient privileges and their ancient importance, and may be said to have XiV PREFACE belonged to nobody, except so far as the mighty conqueror claimed them as his own by right of conquest, and claimed to do with them as he would. Some again, as St. Albans, Bury St. Edmunds, and Abingdon, were towns that had grown up as suburbs round a great religious house, and which in the lapse of ages had developed into agoregates of traders, craftsmen, agriculturists, and labourers, who were in all cases tenants of the monastery and subject to considerable exac- tions at the hands of their lords and masters, the abbot and his monks. Other towns again belonged to a lord temporal or spiritual—a bishop or baron—almost precisely in the same way as, in our own time, an agri- cultural parish, with every yard of land and every dwelling in it, belongs to the squire or lord of the manor. In these towns the ¢exants were bound to render certain services and to pay certain annual rents—exactly as the tenants of many large estates at the present day are re- quired not only to pay money rents, but to cart a specified number of loads of coal every year to the capital mansion of the landlord. If the PREFACE XV lord of the town were grasping, or the tenants were found to be growing rich too fast at the expense of the lord, the relations between the two would tend to become ‘‘strained,” and each of the contending parties would be trying to get some advantage out of the other; the lord trying to increase his exactions, the tenants endeavouring to secure to themselves more privileges, more security of tenure, more liberty of action for themselves, and more freedom to manage their own affairs and to govern themselves. In all cases the lord of the town, whether he were abbot or earl or bishop, or the king himself, was in the first instance represented by the bailiff, whose business it was to get all he could from the townsmen for his master. It was inevitable that these bailiffs should tend to become the objects of dislike and suspicion to the com- munity over which they exercised a jurisdiction, oppressive in so far as it was a fiscal jurisdiction, and irritating in so far as it was judicial and resulted in the exaction of amercements from the tenants for offences committed against the customs of the town or manor, such customs being of the nature of bye-laws, partly of sur- xvl PREFACE vivals of ancient conditions of tenure imposed in the first instance by the lord, and partly accretions that had grown up under circumstances favourable to usurpations by the lord. Gradually the townsmen chafed more and more against the pressure brought to bear upon them by the bailiffs, and against the unequal incidence of the dues levied by the lord and exacted by his official. The townsmen clamoured for deliver- ance from what we should call unfair rating, and everywhere the feeling grew that the lord’s dues should be compounded for by a fixed annual pay- ment by the whole body of the townsmen, such annual payment to be adjusted by a new assess- ment of the vafes. Obviously this involved that the townsmen should take the management of their finances into their own hands, and be deli- vered from the presence of the lord’s bailiff, who, under the new arrangement, would be left without any locus standt. But the old bailiffs had been officials of considerable power, and vested with a considerable measure of authority. To get rid of such an official without any magisterial functions, and to leave the townsmen without any one to take his place, would clearly be impossible. This PREFACE XVll would have been to reduce the old government to mere anarchy. When the transition came about, the place of the lord’s bailiff was supplied by a new bailiff, who was the nominee of the towns- men themselves, an officer elected by themselves —holding his position as chief magistrate by no means necessarily for life — strengthened and to some measure controlled by certain assessors, who acted as a council for carrying on the government of the town, which by this time had begun to be a self-governing com- munity. Parz passu with this organic change in the constitution of the towns there was grow- ing up another development of town life. The towns freed from the domination of the old lords stood in very favourable contrast with those other towns which had not yet been able to win autonomy for themselves. It followed that those favoured communities became objects of envy to others. They were desirable places to settle in; they were gradually made free of many vexatious imposts; they gradually acquired many trade privileges, and by reason of these they grew in wealth and importance. But the new townsmen were most jealously and fiercely exclusive; they B XV1ll PREFACE were by no means ready to admit “foreigners” to share in the good things which they or their fathers had won for themselves. The spirit of selfishness, and of very short-sighted selfishness, displayed itself in all the history of town life during the Middle Ages. Very soon, however, there came a pressure from without which proved irresistible. The towns could look for no growth and no rapid expansion of their trade if only the burgesses or owners of houses within the area of the town, or within the circuit of the city walls, were allowed to engage in commercial operations. Some of the privileges (not all) which the townsmen were. so proud of, and guarded with stubborn intoler- ance of outsiders, were granted to merchants and wholesale dealers who were associated in a new union known as the ‘‘ Merchant Guild.” The “Merchant Guild”? brought new capital into the towns, and in the end extended itself step by step to important dimensions. Next came those trade unions which had apparently bor- rowed their name from the older merchant guilds, but which were, as far as can be made out, mere associations of artificers who banded PREFACE x1x themselves together for the protection of their several crafts, and whose determined and ob- stinate tactics had in view simply the keeping up of wages, the keeping down of competition, and the restriction of the output of such manu- factures as, but for the efforts of these early protectionists, could have been increased inde- finitely, especially in the case of articles of general use. All these checks and fetters upon liberty of trade, all this artificial interference with produc- tion, which modern economists are almost unani- mous in condemning as merely mischievous and indefensible, did nevertheless result in bringing about one benefit to the community at large, which has been too much overlooked. If the volume of English manufactures was kept down, and the consequent expansion of the trade seriously re- tarded, the guality of the work done by the limited number of the artificers could not help being improved. The craftsman could without much difficulty earn a livelihood; he had a great deal of spare time upon his hands, and, if he loved his art, he could pursue it for the mere love of it, with a genuine enthusiasm and a cer- tain large-hearted rivalry, and endeavour to surpass xx PREFACE in excellence and artistic finish the work turned out by his brother craftsmen. An artist could afford to throw his soul into his work, because he was not always toiling for mere pay. But as the medieval craftsman had, as I have expressed it, a great deal of spare time upon his hands, so he had an abundance of holidays, and he threw himself into his amusements with a determination to get enjoyment out of them. Hence town life in the days with which this volume deals was in the main a much gayer life than ours. The personal element then was much more apparent than it is among ourselves. The “individual” had not yet begun to ‘“‘ wither,” and in the towns, not yet grown to monstrous aggregates of population, every man knew every one else within the limits of the civic bound- aries. To be quite lost in a medizval English town was by no means easy. A man who desired to be in hiding never felt safe in the streets; a stranger attracted the eyes of all. The habits of the townsman were eminently social; he was strictly drilled in his religious duties, and these obliged his attendance at the pomps and ceremonies of processions and functions in PREFACE xxl which every citizen was expected to bear his part. The Parish Church was the place of re- sort for the whole population, and in the repair and support and ornamentation of this the com- mon home and, in some sense, the palace of the community, all alike took a pride. Things were not done in a corner. But— “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” Things could not go on for ever as they once did among the old burghers. The great break-up came. The suppression—which means the brutal and savage pillage—of the religious houses throughout England brought about in- calculable changes in the sentiments, the beliefs, and the habits of Englishmen in town and country. If the townsman did not suffer as cruelly as the countryman did, yet he did suffer sadly—town life could never again be what it had been. English town life, such as it was, passed away for ever. Reading about it now- a-days, we find ourselves reading ancient history xxl PREFACE indeed. But it is ancient history which has more than one side to it, and these many sides are presented to us in an attractive way in the fol- lowing pages. There is a bright and hopeful side, when the townsmen are seen at their best, each interested in, and each cheerfully working for, the welfare and the glorification of the com- munity of which they were members; there is a dark and repulsive side, when we see the sordid greed of gain making men mean and covetous, each seeking his own advancement by the meanest tricks of a truculent trade-unionism, or by blind and ignorant efforts to carry on a stupid fvo- tectzon of class interests at the expense of those’ not yet admitted to privileges and immunities. There is a noble and a generous side, when the poor are cared for by the self-sacrifices of the well-to-do, and the claims of the needy and unfortunate upon the rich and thriving are responded to by large alms-giving and splendid hospitality; there is a tender and pathetic side, when we are confronted by the religious acti- vity which exhibits itself in all the public and private life of these medizval townsmen. Their beliefs were not quite identical with ours; their PREFACE XXill worship was, so we are pleased to assure our- selves, tainted with superstition, but their prac- tical Christianity (make all the deductions you please) puts us to the blush when we reflect how they were living nearer to their creed than, I fear, we are; and how much more profoundly the religious sentiment influenced the thoughts and habits of the townsmen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than it does ours. Be it, however, as it may, while we read these pictures of a past which has gone, no wise man will wish to bring back that past— “Dead and gone is the old world’s ideal, The old arts and old religion fled ; But we gladly live amid the real, And we seek a worthier ideal. Courage, brothers ! God is overhead.” CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY Old English towns—Foreign towns—Decayed towns—Con- trast between English and foreign towns—* Belford Regis’ —Growing interest in old ee ee l geri birthplace of freedom CHAPTER II BRITISH AND ROMAN TOWNS Mythical origins of British towns— Earthworks — Pit- dwellings—King Lud and London—King Coel— Bath and Prince Bladud—King Lear and Leicester— et York—Edinburgh — Carlisle — Gloucester — Birmin - ham nail-makers —Chun Castle — Roman towns— Itineraries . debe hoa Ii A ROMAN CITY Silchester—Results of recent excavations—Description of the old city—Calleva Attrebatum’”’—Roads—V illas— Hypocausts—Pavements—Villa at Brading—Forum XXV PAGE 31 44 Xxvl CONTENTS at Silchester and the Basilica—Discovery of Christian church — Baths — Amphitheatre — ee ae Roman cities— Roman London. GAAP ERs SAXON TOWNS Saxon ravages—Saxon settlements—A thane’s household— Their daily life—Merchants and craftsmen—Danish wars and their effects—Saxon civilisation—Their churches—St. Andrew's, Hexham— Brixham Church —‘ Domesday Book’’—York—Northern England— Lincoln — Chester — Colchester — Death of Saxon Sreedom ; ; : COAPUE RS. CHURCH TOWNS Monastic towns — Peterborough —Orders of monks—The Benedictine order—Reading Abbey in olden days— Piers Ploughman’s description of a monastery—Dis- solution of monasteries — Bishop's towns — Wells— Bishop’ s castles—Selby and its hermitage—Influence of the Church—Chaucer’s ** Poor Parson of a Town”? . CHA PATER: Vi) CASTLE TOWNS Castles, the mothers of citiee—Norman tyranny—Effects of the Conquest on the towns—English merchants—A Norman keep and fortress—Dungeons and their story —The burghers of castle towns—Their services to the lord—Corfe Castle—Social life in the twelfth century— PAGE 57 73 93 CONTENTS XXV11 PAGE Fitz-Stephen’ s, aes a a at NE as Tilting and tournaments - 109 CHAPTER Vil THE GUILDS Numerous kinds of guilds and their objects —Their origin— Ordinance of guild at Abbotsbury—Guilds and their plays — London — Cambridge—Exeter—The guild- merchant— Royal Winchester and its guilds—Guild- halls : : : ; ; ’ , veto CHAPTER GVIIT THE TYRANNY OF GUILDS: MODERN SURVIVALS Some disadvantages of guild-life—Irksome restrictions— Heavy fines — Foreigners”? and “ Evil May-day”’— Aristocratic tendencies—Basingstoke Guild—Guilds of the Kalendars and other forms of guild-life—Henry VIII. and the City Companies—Destruction of guilds —Preston Guild—Newcastle—Trinity House—Bene- fits conferred by the guilds. : ; : . 148 CHAPTER IX MEDIEVAL TOWNS Towns built by special decree of the king—Hull— Merchants and their houses—Cannynge of Bristol—Richard Whittington and his cat—Sir John Crosby—John Taverner of Hull and his “ Grace Dieu’’—Ecclesias- tical traders—An old town in medieval times—Town houses —St. Marys Hall, Coventry —Craftsmen’ s hovels—State of the streets —Plagues—* Black Death”’ —Fires—Foreign traders—Expansion of commerce . 169 XXVlil CONTENTS CHAPTER X IN THE STREETS PAGE Street scenes—The London Livery Companies—The Mercers and their pageant—Triumphal return of Henry V. from Agincourt: a City welcome—Pageant for Henry VI. —River pageants—Chester’s “ setting of the watch” —Coventry plays and pageants—Kenilworth—Corpus Christi Day—Chester plays—Reading—Pillories and punishments—Master Lickpenny’s adventures . ee ie CHAPTER XI IN FAIR AND MARKET Fairs and their origin—The royal right—Toll and tribute— Description of a fair—Strafford custom—Stourbridge Fair—Fairs in churches and churchyards—Boston Fair and the robber knights—Markets and market- places—Canterbury monks and citizens—The fight for freedom—A burgher’s difficulties —Causes of his prosperity—The growth of manufacture—The coming of the Flemings—Henry V ILI. and the destruction us municipal freedom : : 200 COAL TE Re ST THE GREAT METROPOLIS Royal Winchester—Mercantile supremacy of London— Medieval London—A tour of the walls of the city— A city of palaces—The Strand and the houses of nobles—Bishops’ palaces —Riots—The Intelligencer ”’ of 1648—The “ Newes”’ of 1665—The Plague— The Great Fire—Memorable buildings. : eae CONTENTS CHALLE Ree Lid IN THE DAYS OF GOOD QUEEN BESS “ Merrie England”?-—Ruins and desolation—Scene in Reading Abbey—Destruction of monasteries and dis- Sigurement of churches—The Church and the people— Church-ales—Morrice-dancers and minstrels —Elza- bethan houses—