8

Peasants and towns

In 1354 at Horsley in a country of steep valleys and wooded slopes in central Gloucestershire Henry atte Mulle complained that Henry Croumere, with whom he was in legal dispute, had taken away his horse. ¹ Without this animal he could not travel to town (probably Tetbury or Minchinhampton) to trade (a literal translation would be ‘to merchandise’) and do business (negocium). We must suppose that especially on market day, on Wednesday in the case of Tetbury, people like Henry atte Mulle on horseback, or leading a packhorse loaded with grain, carts full of hay, firewood, or geese, men on foot driving an animal, women bringing baskets of eggs, fruit, and vegetables, all converged on the town. This chapter will examine peasant involvement in towns and assess the consequences of the interaction between town and country. As well as drawing on the evidence from the twenty best researched places, special attention will be given to the well-documented town of Alcester. A town is taken to have been a dense and permanent settlement with inhabitants pursuing a variety of non-agricultural occupations, mostly in manufacturing and trade.

Origins of towns

At the end of the twelfth century the larger towns of the region were well established. Bristol, Gloucester, Warwick, and Worcester had been planned and encouraged by kings, lay magnates, bishops, and monasteries. Tamworth and Winchcomb had strong associations with the region’s past rulers. Droitwich was a special case as a centre of salt production of much interest to kings and local magnates. ²

Before the twelfth century a number of smaller towns were beginning to grow, at Berkeley, Cirencester, Coventry, Evesham, Pershore, Tewkesbury, and Thornbury. They began a trend, which led to the appearance of more than forty towns between the late twelfth and early fourteenth centuries. ³ A half of the prime movers of these towns were major secular lords, barons, and earls. A third were monasteries or bishops, and the remainder lesser lay lords, such as knights. Towns apparently owed their existence to the rich and powerful (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1 Towns in the west midlands. This omits less-certain candidates for urban status, such as Redditch, Knowle, and Mitcheldean. Some towns were sited on landscape frontiers, such as the Cotswold edge. There were notable gaps, such as west Worcestershire and the centre of the Cotswolds. Most of the towns were established by 1300; Stourbridge and Stroud later.

The ‘new town’ model, which emphasizes the role of the lord, can be applied to many of these urban developments. The sequence of events began with a lord, eager to gain profit and status. The lord, or the estate officials, identified a site with a road junction or river crossing (or both), and altered the road layout so as to maximize the flow of traffic along a main street. Plots of land were measured and defined, and tenants encouraged to take them up by grants of liberties and privileges. These benefits often included burgage tenure, so tenants were freeholders, paying a fixed money rent, and able to sell or dispose of their plot as they wished. A market charter would be obtained from the Crown, and the new venture would be advertised as an opportunity for new settlers. ⁴

Even if the new town model is thought to have been the normal pattern of urban development, the lords depended on the settlers’ decision to move to the town. Lords pushed some subordinates into taking up new plots, but they had limited powers, so the townspeople were mainly volunteers. Oversley (Warwickshire) was laid out as the apparent first stage of a small town at the gate of a twelfth-century castle, but the site proved to be unattractive, people moved away, and the would-be town failed by about 1225. ⁵ An offer from a lord needed to be matched by a sustained response from people prepared to move and then stay. As Oversley faltered, nearby Alcester on a more advantageous site, was growing.

Lords might attempt to compel tenants to trade in their markets. The abbot and convent of Halesowen made an agreement in 1363 with their tenants that any of them selling grain would firstly take it to the market of Halesowen borough. Similarly, Worcester Priory in 1342 ordered people at Blackwell and Shipston to offer cattle for sale at Shipston market before selling them privately. When in 1423 Thomas Lette of Shipston took four pigs to the market at nearby Brailes, he was charged by the Worcester monks a toll of 1d, which would have been paid if the sale had been conducted properly in Shipston marketplace. ⁶ Normally buyers and sellers were not pressured to use a particular market.

Townspeople did not just respond to initiatives from above. Some sites for new towns were chosen because traders and artisans had already established themselves. Plots and houses at Burton Dassett Southend (Warwickshire) were planned in 1280–1300, following a market charter of 1267, in the hope of founding a new town. For a time, it was known as Chipping Dassett. However significant occupational surnames, with two people called Marchaund, occur among the tenants of 1279, who do not look like recent arrivals, and excavation suggests that an area of plots resembling those found in towns had come into existence before 1250. ⁷ Bretford (Warwickshire) is another apparent new town established by a lay lord with a market charter, town plan, new bridge, diverted main road, and burgage tenure in the early thirteenth century. However, a town had already begun to develop, as in the year of the charter, 1227, the tenants, some of whom were pursuing trades and crafts, were already living at Bretford and probably operating an informal market. ⁸ In both cases the lords were catching up with unofficial developments, which they did not discourage, but sought to control.

The formative phase of some towns takes us back to the minster churches of the period 670–850. Markets were held near churches on Sundays, when those gathered for religious services could stay to buy and sell. Coleshill had a prominent minster church, with an adjoining marketplace (Figure 8.2). In the early thirteenth century, the market was held on Sundays, and dated back before 1200. The embryo of a town plan, with houses ranged along a single main street, could have begun to form before 1200, marked by irregular building plots still visible in modern times around the church. A similar development can be observed next to the church at Cheltenham, another early minster. ⁹

Figure 8.2 Plan of Coleshill, Warwickshire. Based on a map of 1844, but many of the property boundaries date from before 1300. Those on the eastern side of the main street, both to the north and south of the church, belonged to a rural settlement and the initial growth of a trading centre around the church and the marketplace. The regular tenements on the west side, with a back lane, probably belong to a phase of urban planning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The roads leading to other towns suggest Coleshill’s role as a trading hub (source: note 9).

The town plan can suggest that a town grew without a grand scheme imposed by a lord. Roads could meet in an irregular pattern suggesting an original rural settlement, or that groups of incomers established themselves at road junctions. Thornbury’s four main streets now converge on a space called ‘The Plain’, and there is a similar irregularity in the layout of Tetbury, a town in which a minster had an early influence. Phrases such as ‘primary towns’ or ‘organic towns’ have been coined to describe these towns that emerged gradually without a single master plan. ¹⁰

Lords varied greatly in their influence over urban growth. Stratford-upon-Avon was founded in a single act of planning in 1196, with a grid of streets, a wide market street, and probably a new bridge. The king issued a market charter, and the privileges of the new burgesses were set out in a document which was not granted to them, but written for the lord’s archives. A great lord, a bishop, promoted the ambitious plan as a display of power and lordly magnificence. The lord’s officials administered the borough, but with a very light rein, and the townspeople found that their religious fraternities served as a route to practical autonomy. ¹¹ Not much grandeur was on display at Bromsgrove, with its single main street along which in the 1260s and 1270s plots were laid out. Two lords, Worcester Priory and the king (or rather his officials) co-ordinated the early stages, but showed little interest in further co-operation, or in promoting the town. The town was not a borough, so its tenants had no special privileges, but they succeeded in leading an urban way of life and governing the town informally. ¹² The lord of the rural estate of Tardebigge (Worcestershire), the Cistercian abbey of Bordesley, indicated no ambition to found a town at all, which did not accord with Cistercian ideals of rural isolation. Nonetheless in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a loose collection of innkeepers, artisans, and traders assembled a short distance from the monastery, in the tithing of Redditch which reported business to the manor court. ¹³ Perhaps it should not be called a town, but it had some urban characteristics. These examples show that lords could be zealous planners of towns, or promoters at a distance, or just interested observers of urban growth.

Alcester was a town with an early history combining various strands of urban development. The town lies at a point where the river Alne joins the river Arrow, flowing out of the woodland landscapes of north and west Warwickshire. The Arrow continues four miles south to join the Avon, which drains the champion country of the south and east of the county. Alcester had been a Roman town, served by two major roads, one running west to east joining Droitwich and Stratford, the other linking the Fosse Way in the Cotswolds to Watling Street to the north of Arden. Three other significant roads complete the picture of Alcester as a well-connected place (Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 Plan of Alcester, Warwickshire. Based on a map of 1754, the core of the town was contained within the walls of its Roman predecessor. The irregular pattern of boundaries suggests a piecemeal growth 1000–1300, in contrast with the planned suburb of Bleachfield Street. The church in the marketplace replaced the early minster church, which was moved to the meadows when it was refounded as an abbey (source: note 14).

Alcester could be called an ‘organic town’ because its irregular streets and plot boundaries suggest piecemeal growth. Roads join at the town centre, crossing the Arrow by two bridges, with two foci, to the north a triangular marketplace, and to the south a space that may have been a second marketplace. The rows of regular plots along Bleachfield Street give it the character of a planned suburb.

The main built-up area north of Bleachfield Street lay within the Roman walls, which defined an oval area, but the Roman town had been largely abandoned in the early Middle Ages, with its defences as a short-lived legacy. ¹⁴ A minster church founded within the walled area is the likely source of an elaborately carved and decorated ivory crozier head of the eleventh century. An eleventh-century legend claimed that a royal council had been held at this ‘celebrated place’ in 709. The story has been discounted but the author may have been encouraged to embroider the past because he was impressed in his own day by Alcester’s Roman origins (still visible in its walls), its minster church, and role as the centre of a royal estate. ¹⁵

In about 1138/9 the minster church was refounded as a small Benedictine monastery in the meadows a quarter mile from the original site. ¹⁶ It was replaced in the town by a church dedicated to St Nicholas, sited in the main marketplace like other churches with this dedication, which was probably serving an existing town. Indications of the town’s early beginnings include pottery of the eleventh century from the southern part of the town. Also the rents that were charged for holdings in the town, recorded in the sixteenth century, consist of small sums of 2 ½d, 3d, 4d, and 6d rather than the standard 12d per plot, resembling rents found in towns before the Norman Conquest. The market needed no charter after 1200 as it had already been established, though it was renewed in c.1274. A further indication of Alcester’s early development is the pottery industry, which was established in the twelfth century and continued into the thirteenth. The kilns were sited between the Abbey and the medieval town, and are likely to represent an early but short-lived urban industry. ¹⁷ The town seems to have had deep roots, dating back to the twelfth century and probably before 1100. It had grown on royal demesne, but in the twelfth and later centuries came into the hands of lay aristocratic families. Kings tended to be benevolent and distant lords, and their successors, the Botreaux and the Beauchamps, intervened in only limited ways.

All of this is relevant to our theme because the townspeople came together in complex movements over a long time and are likely to have moved from the nearby countryside, which in 1086 was quite densely settled, especially to the south of Alcester. We do not know their origin in the early days of the town, but the surnames of townspeople recorded in c.1300 reflect the movement of villagers mostly from within five miles. The minster and the lords had a role in these processes, but did not plan the town or exercise close control over it.

Peasant migration into towns

Peasants moved in large numbers into towns to take up a new way of life. Information about peasant migration comes from town dwellers’ family names, which were based on villages of origin. The name of William of Saynebyr, who was a tenant at Chipping Campden in 1273, derived from Saintbury, his (or his father’s) home village a mile and a half from the town. The list of tenants of 1273 can be supplemented from other sources of similar date to give a sample of fifty surnames, and 44 per cent of them came from places within 10 miles ¹⁸ (Figure 8.4). Northleach seems to have been founded in 1220, and a survey was made in 1266–7. Analysis of this and other early sources shows that 71 per cent of those with names deriving from places came from within 10 miles. ¹⁹

Figure 8.4 Migration into Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. The origin of the early migrants into the town is recorded in the surnames of the population of 1273. They came from villages which used the town’s market, along a dense road network, which connected the town with both the wold to the south and the champion to the north (source: Madge, IPMs, pp. 63–9, 80–3).

What types of peasant were motivated to move? The social structure of their village of origin provides a clue. For example, Thomas de Upton of Campden and Gilbert de Haselton at Northleach came from villages where most tenants were yardlanders. ²⁰ It seems to follow that the migrants were representative of the better-off villagers, and it is possible that these people gave up their holdings of 30 acres of land, or at least sublet them, and moved into a new town to take up a craft or trade. However, a yardland gave its tenant a good income and security, and the sons of the more substantial tenants, not the tenants themselves, were likely to have migrated, with some financial help from their families.

The migration by members of better-off peasant families may not be the whole story, because peasants with substantial holdings did not predominate in all of the villages from which migrants came. Robert de Brokthrop migrated to Northleach before 1266; as his village of Brookthorpe in Gloucestershire was socially diverse with a proportion of smallholdings, he may not have belonged in the top ranks of landholders. ²¹ If families held cotlands a relative’s entry into town society might have received some support, so the migrant was not fleeing from misery. Our observations are biased in favour of well-documented peasants and the better-off townspeople who held burgages, and there is likely to have been a lower class of penniless migrants who lived as lodgers, servants, or subtenants.

The country dwellers transferring to the town needed skills and experience to make a living in a new urban environment. Some arrivals may have been practising a craft or trade in the countryside so they were bringing their existing skills into a commercial centre with better opportunities. Country craftsmen in the thirteenth century might be identifiable from their names, for example, in Chipping Campden’s area of influence the villages of Ilmington and Quinton, from which burgesses were recruited included among their late thirteenth-century tenants people called barker (tanner), smith, carpenter, and carter, and in neighbouring villages lived a chapman, cook, smith, and tailor. ²² These people (or their fathers) had transferable skills appropriate to founding a business in a new town. Many stayed in the country, but some were able to move or they encouraged their sons to do so. Providers of food and drink figure prominently in urban occupations, and this is very apparent at Halesowen in the unique records of its first days from about 1270. An influx of women transferred to the town the activities they had previously practised in the country: brewing ale, baking bread, and selling flour (probably oatmeal). They also prepared flax for spinning and weaving. ²³ They would be encouraged by the urban environment to brew more, sell more, and generally quicken the commercial pace.

The villages of origin of the townspeople can hint at the mechanics of migration. One method of recruitment was for news to travel across a landed estate. Gloucester Abbey’s borough of Northleach recruited from other Abbey manors, even from Brookthorpe at a distance of 17 miles. Markets must have been great opportunities to spread news of opportunities in towns, and to build confidence if a visitor from the country observed a crowd of buyers and sellers. Many new townspeople came from places within the zone of trading contacts, and the villages of origin of Campden’s burgesses were well placed on the road network.

Towns were often sited strategically in relation to the frontiers of landscapes, so that Alcester attracted immigrants from the woodland and champion of Warwickshire, and people from both the wolds and the champion of the Avon valley looked to Campden on the edge of the wolds. Lines of towns were strung out along the divide between Arden and Feldon in Warwickshire, and down the Cotswold edge from Campden to Chipping Sodbury. Across the landscape boundaries complementary products were traded—in the case of Alcester wheat and other grains from the champion were carried to the woodland, and timber, firewood, bacon, cheese, honey, and oats in the opposite direction. The origins of the town dwellers confirm the town’s role in connecting landscapes through its people as well as its commodities. ²⁴

By contrast Birmingham seems to have drawn people from its own specialized woodland landscape. It was granted a market in the mid-twelfth century, and was clearly developing actively in the 1230s. By 1296 and 1344, when two rentals name many tenants, who had moved from the pastoral landscapes to the north-east and north-west, with a number from hamlets in south Staffordshire. One came from a village on the road to Coventry, Alspath. ²⁵ No name suggested that anyone travelled from the champion country to settle in the clearly prosperous and expanding Birmingham.

The great majority of contacts between town and country depended on the road system which was being improved in the period of urban growth between 1180 and 1330 by the building of bridges. ²⁶ Worcester on the west midlands’ only navigable river, the Severn, received migrants from riverside villages, such as Apperley (Gloucestershire), recorded in 1275. ²⁷

To sum up the contribution that peasants made to the expansion of towns until c.1300. The focus is on the smaller towns because they had the closest relationship with the peasants, and they were either founded or were still in an early stage of growth in the thirteenth century. The larger towns had begun much earlier, but were continuously receiving newcomers from the villages. Bristol names from the early fourteenth century, many of them belonging to members of the elite, show that people came from other towns such as Oxford, but some derive from villages within 10 miles. From Gloucestershire came people from Beachley, Bitton, Hawkesbury, and Tockington. ²⁸ Coventry was expanding in the thirteenth century, and displayed its power of attraction by gaining many citizens from other towns at a distance of 20 miles and more. But shorter distance migrations had originated in villages within 10 miles such as Dunchurch, Maxstoke, and Pailton, all within 10 miles, suggesting that local peasants hoped for a good living in a burgeoning commercial centre. ²⁹

The large towns had been able to increase their inhabitants by c.1300 to about 14,000 in the case of Bristol, with 5,000 at Gloucester, 5,000 at Coventry, and 3,000 for Worcester, accounting for about a tenth of the 260,000 people estimated (and probably underestimated) to have lived in the three west midland counties. ³⁰ The smaller towns, about sixty of them with populations between 300 and 1,500, could together account for 24,000, so the ‘urban ratio’ lay in the region of 20 per cent. The towns’ inhabitants included many former peasants, or people recently descended from peasants.

West-midland peasants continued their connections with towns, so that a third of serfs recorded as leaving their manors in the period 1350–1500 moved into towns (see ‘Migration’ in Chapter 4). Among the fifteenth-century sample, twenty-one went to towns outside the region, including London, Calais, and Salisbury. Sixty travelled to larger towns in the region such as Bristol and Gloucester, but especially to Coventry and to some extent Worcester, which were increasing their populations in part of the period. The other migrants with known urban destinations were spread over twenty smaller towns, including Chipping Campden, Evesham, Pershore, Tewkesbury, and Winchcomb.

The records of migrations by serfs can tell us what they did in the town in which they settled. A dozen of the serfs who went to towns were reported to be ‘with’ a named town dweller, so Katherine Alvard of Bevere (Worcestershire) in 1476 was said to be ‘with William Josse’ of Worcester, and this is likely to mean that she was entering a household as a servant. ³¹ For a young woman working as a servant was an informal version of apprenticeship, by which experience of household management and such domestic (and money-making) skills as brewing were acquired. Occupations being pursued by departed male serfs often as servants included brewing, baking, shoemaking, and weaving. One was with a carpenter, another with a ‘troughman’ which must mean a woodworker producing kneading troughs. Mostly these ‘placements’ were with independent artisans, pursuing their craft in their own houses, like John Yate, a baker of Coventry, whose shop, we are told was near Broadgate in the city. He was reported in 1428 to be employing John Porter from Hartlebury, who was aged 16. ³² Some found work in the brewhouse or bakehouse at Evesham Abbey. ³³ Rural immigrants in towns found marriage partners in towns, like Agnes Robyn, a Sambourn serf who had married Thomas Suard of Evesham by 1472, just as in York couples met through the woman’s employment. ³⁴ Agnes of the Feld of King’s Norton (Worcestershire), presumably from a peasant background, was apprenticed to a Coventry purse maker, Robert Raulot, in 1345. ³⁵ At the end of our period an abundance of records of apprenticeship from Bristol throws light on routines of recruitment which had probably been in existence (though undocumented) for many years. Between 1532 and 1539 the names are known of apprentices, their place of origin and parentage, together with details of the masters and their occupations. Young people were drawn to Bristol from a large area, including south-western counties, but to focus on our region sixty-seven came from towns, including Coventry, Worcester, and Birmingham, but mainly from the urban centres of the Severn valley such as Gloucester, Tewkesbury, and Berkeley (Figure 8.5). Eighty-six with rural origins had parents identified as husbandmen, yeomen, and labourers, many of whom are revealed by their appearance in the tax assessments of the 1520s as belonging to a wide spectrum of peasant society with goods valued in a range from 20s to £10. Some parents in the countryside had occupations as artisans. Masters who took on country apprentices were practising thirty-two crafts, the most frequent being hoopers (barrel makers) and whitetawyers (processing sheepskins). The rural recruits were concentrated in the Severn valley, with a number from such villages as Iron Acton, Pucklechurch, and Westbury-on-Trym. The gaps in the eastern Cotswolds and Warwickshire suggest the rival attraction of apprenticeships in Oxford and Coventry. The places sending recruits included villages in north Worcestershire such as Chaddesley Corbett and Rock, from which boys went to Bristol, not a difficult journey because they lay in the hinterland of Bewdley, a busy river port from which a succession of boats travelled down the river. Not all of the apprentices were male, as they included Selia Tovy from Broadwas (Worcestershire) who went to learn the art of housewifery in the household of a Bristol mercer. ³⁶

Figure 8.5 Origins of apprentices at Bristol, 1532–9. The map marks the towns and villages from which apprentices originated. Bristol’s influence was strongest in south Gloucestershire but extended up the Severn to north Worcestershire (source: Hollis, Apprentice Book).

In addition to the stream of young country people gaining a practical education by working as servants or serving as apprentices, many sons of servile families attended schools, for which their fathers were supposed to obtain permission from their lord, or face a fine when their sons’ education became public knowledge. Some schools had been endowed in villages (see ‘Social mobility’ in Chapter 4). Most of the schools in the region were held in towns, twelve of them in Warwickshire alone. Very small towns such as Bromsgrove and Shipston made some provision for education. ³⁷ Most of the available places would have been taken by town boys, but the steady flow of references in the court rolls to the education of serfs’ sons must mean that rural pupils attended urban schools.

Serfs left their village to better themselves in the town, but they did not always succeed. There are hints that the first move did not go well, because the absentee was reported in a succession of towns. One who went to Coventry had initially moved to Cirencester. Another apparently found that Worcester suited him better than Droitwich. Many of the migrants were young, and doubtless expected to find rewarding employment, and eventually to practise a craft. This optimism was not shared by those who moved in a state of poverty, like John Taylor of Kempsey who in 1462 withdrew to Worcester, and left his holding of 6 acres in the lord’s hands. ³⁸ He was expecting perhaps to live in the city like many others from alms or casual employment.

After they moved, townspeople did not forget their rural origins. In making their wills they made bequests to rural relatives and churches in their native village. John Hands or Hannys of Stratford-upon-Avon, probably the wealthiest person in the town when he died in 1473, had been born in the village of Hidcote Bartrim (Gloucestershire) and left £3 6s 8d to the church there; he also bequeathed property in the village to his son. ³⁹ In the town where Hands made his fortune the archive of the Fraternity of the Holy Cross shows people from town and country transferring urban property. Members of the Kyngton, alias Walker, family had an interest in two adjacent shops in the ‘Middlerow’, a major retail attraction in Stratford’s town centre. Richard Kyngton was a husbandman of Tidmington, Walter Kyngton lived at Charlecote, and was also called a husbandman, and Robert Kyngton belonged to Alveston. William Walker, father of Robert, had been the heir of Isabella Walker of Loxley, daughter of Emota Colyns of Compton Wynyates, and one of these women had probably been married to a townsman. All of the villages lay within 12 miles of the town. ⁴⁰ Deeds from the rural Compton Verney archive record that the Jones family held a yardland by free tenure at Compton in the late fourteenth century, and a family member was John Jones junior, called a chaplain in 1362. Another John Jones was a tenant in 1406, and the holding had come into the hands of Agnes Jones by 1434. She had been married to Henry Wilkyns of Compton, but when he died she married Thomas Baret of Stratford-upon-Avon, giving him the tenancy of a freehold yardland. ⁴¹ These bonds of kinship and marriage between townspeople and country dwellers made movement of people a commonplace event, but also allowed the flow of funds, so that for example rural money could have been invested in urban businesses.

Occupations and commerce: Peasant influence on towns

Towns, and in particular the largest towns, connected with wealthy elites based in the countryside. Lay aristocrats and leading churchmen joined urban fraternities (such as Coventry’s Trinity Guild) and drew rents from urban property. Merchants of Bristol and Coventry traded in wine and spices for rich consumers, and top-of-the-range craftsmen made expensive and specialized products for rich clients, such as armour, or church organs. All of this was remote from the everyday world of peasants.

Peasants were not cut off from the larger towns. Gloucester, for example, around the year 1400 licensed annually a hundred or so ‘foreign’ traders for a shilling or two each. To select a sample year, in 1380 villagers who paid their fees lived within 10 miles and brought bread, ale, grain, malt, and fish into the town. ⁴² Peasants living near all of the region’s larger towns would have taken advantage of such market opportunities.

Most peasants lived in the neighbourhood of small market towns, and the occupations of the townspeople reflect the varied needs of the less affluent, but still numerous, rural population that visited their shops and markets. The number of separate occupations helps us to recognize a town and judge its rank. A large town such as Worcester had more than fifty trades and crafts according to such sources as the 1381 poll tax. ⁴³ Most small towns could muster twenty or thirty, which reflected the needs of those coming to the town as consumers.

Shipston’s court rolls of 1310–1520 record nineteen occupations. This modest spread of trades and crafts would be expected in a very small town with only 300 inhabitants. At another small town, Bromsgrove, twenty occupations are recorded, but unlike many small towns there were significant concentrations of crafts, with six weavers in 1393, and five tanners in 1500. ⁴⁴ Cotswold towns in 1381 provided a living for a rather large number of different trades and crafts such as thirty-five at both Chipping Campden and Winchcomb, and twenty-eight at Stow-on-the-Wold. The Cotswold towns were unusual because their trading population included merchants, that is, large-scale dealers in wool, though in the three mentioned here there were only one or two in each town, so it is misleading to call them ‘wool towns’. ⁴⁵

Table 8.1 shows the twenty-nine occupations recorded for Alcester, drawing on evidence from court records, especially those of the borough court of the fifteenth century. The variety of occupations at Alcester seems appropriate for a community of about 600 people.

Table 8.1 Occupations in Alcester, 1380–1504

Food and drink:	baker, brewer, butcher, fishmonger, miller, spicer
Textiles:	weaver
Clothing:	hosier, tailor
Leather:	corviser (shoemaker), glover, saddler, tanner
Wood:	bowyer, cooper, collier, sawyer, wheeler
Metal:	ironmonger, smith
Building:	carpenter, glazier, mason, thatcher
Services and miscellaneous:	barber, chandler, chaplain, clerk, ostler (innkeeper)

In the case of Alcester, anyone living within a few miles of the town could attend the market and sell their produce, and also buy the goods that were not available on their holding or in their village. The table shows that peasants’ purchases could include sea fish, such as dried cod and red herrings, shoes and harness, a barrel or tub, a cartwheel, or horseshoes. A visitor from the country might wish to negotiate with a carpenter about building work. Alcester’s list of occupations included two luxury trades: glaziers who worked on high-status buildings, and a spicer, who presumably sold pepper, ginger, sugar, and dried fruits mostly in demand by aristocratic and wealthy clerical households. The ostlers of Alcester had as their main clientele travellers on the main roads who could afford the accommodation and meals. Alcester’s traders were evidently not exclusively concerned with the less affluent consumers, but the ordinary people of the villages were more numerous, and in combination had more spending power.

Some occupations were probably omitted by chance from Alcester’s records. Most towns had at least one cook selling takeaway meals, who sometimes broke regulations by intervening in the market for food and pushing up prices, like the cooks at Halesowen who bought poultry before it could be offered to the general consumer. A draper selling cloth retail was frequently encountered in towns. If a weaver was working at Alcester, a fuller or dyer might also be expected, and indeed at Alcester (although she was not called a dyer or dyster, the female equivalent) Matilda Brown in 1462 was said to have agreed to dye some cloth. ⁴⁶ These three trades seem to have been present in the town in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century if the personal names of cook, dyer, and linen draper are taken as evidence for occupations. ⁴⁷ And finally, life in small towns often included some entertainment. A musician is occasionally mentioned, notably in 1462 when a lawsuit was brought by John Pyper of Atherstone (Warwickshire) against John Pyper of Nuneaton. Townspeople and visitors to both towns evidently could expect to hear the sound of the ‘baggepype’. ⁴⁸

The peasant visitors needed to be confident that when they arrived at the market with a load of corn or an animal that there would be a good prospect of finding a buyer and the price would be fair. They also expected that the goods that they wished to buy would be of high quality and not overpriced. The town’s authorities needed to reassure those coming from the country, who were probably suspicious of the cunning ways of townspeople. ⁴⁹ Confidence would be built if any disputes could be settled, which was possible if outsiders as well as the townspeople had access to the borough court to recover debts, to obtain redress if a trespass had occurred, or to deal with broken contracts, goods retained, or deception. The problems that led to these lawsuits were not everyday occurrences, but the bargains that went wrong give us a sample that began as routine transactions. The ideal record of these cases would name the litigant and the place of residence, the transaction that led to the dispute, and the value of the goods or animals, or the sum of money in the case of a debt. However, the clerk tended to abbreviate the entry, and often all that is given is the names of the parties, the type of action (for debt for example) and little else. In the borough court records for Alcester between 1424 and 1504 much of the litigation was between inhabitants of Alcester, and there were occasional disputes arising from dealings between traders from Alcester and those from seven urban centres within twelve miles. Country people are identified in a minority of cases.

A standard procedure in the Alcester court was to take a distraint of goods, to bring pressure to bear on the litigant to attend court and pay any money owed. Alcester’s residents were distrained by taking household utensils, such as a brass pot or a pewter dish, but a visitor from the country might lose a horse or the goods it was carrying. In 1439 John Mase of Great Alne had a horse and 4 bushels of barley taken, together worth 10s, and William Knoll of Kinwarton was distrained by 2 bushels of barley worth 20d. ⁵⁰ The plea initiated by Richard Haselholt, a leading Alcester townsman, against Nicholas Cockes of Cleeve Prior in 1462 led to distraint by a sack and 4 bushels of barley worth 2s. 6d. ⁵¹ Cockes was a prominent villager in Cleeve, and he clearly had a surplus of grain to sell. The grain taken in distraint, is evidence for an important element in the town’s trade. Incidentally, the peasants were taking grain to market by packhorse, which seems to have been the main means of transporting goods.

The surviving court records for Alcester contain thirty-five other examples of people from named villages owing money, or being owed money by Alcester residents, giving rise to a plea of debt. This is a minimum number of encounters between town and country as the clerks did not consistently record the place where litigants lived. The legal cases encourage us to think of the town as a source of credit for peasants. Usually credit was given when a sale was agreed, so it was really a delayed payment, but occasionally a cash loan had been arranged. This could lead to a plea in the court with no reference to a sale or other dealing between the parties, such as the claim in 1468 that Henry Bovy of Coughton owed money to two Alcester men. ⁵² A dozen debt pleas arose from transactions between two parties, neither of whom lived in Alcester, but in different villages, such as Cock Bevington the home of Thomas Laurans in 1486, and Marlcliffe near Bidford, where John Yeven lived. ⁵³ Did these pleas arise from bargains struck in Alcester, perhaps in the marketplace and therefore to be resolved in the Alcester court? Or was it simply that the parties looked to the Alcester borough court as a trusted and effective settler of debts? In either case it strengthens the idea of the market town as a hub for its rural surroundings.

The litigation in the borough court can be mapped (see Figure 8.6) and helps to define Alcester’s hinterland or sphere of influence, the cluster of rural settlements belonging to thirty-six villages mostly within 8 miles. Debts and other causes of litigation show villages within a similar radius in a number of west midland towns such as Atherstone and Nuneaton in north Warwickshire, Stratford and Shipston in the south, and at Pershore and Droitwich in Worcestershire. ⁵⁴ Each town’s hinterland contained between 4,000 and 10,000 people, and territories overlapped, so that many country dwellers could choose between two or three towns.

Figure 8.6 Hinterland of Alcester. The fifteenth-century court rolls sometimes record the place of residence of litigants, often those owing money to Alcester traders. This indicates the town’s zone of influence, which notably included both the champion country to the south and the woodland to the north.

The commodities that appear in the records of Shipston include pulse, hay, malt, and a calf. Thornbury had a more pronounced specialism in textiles, so its traders dealt in grain and malt, but also wool and cloth. Atherstone and Nuneaton were located on the edge of the woodlands, so charcoal figures among the goods subject to dispute, as did cattle and dairy produce.

The market gave opportunities for middlemen and entrepreneurs, who are identified in town courts as forestallers and regraters, who intercepted goods before they reached the market. At Coleshill in 1383 peas and oats were being acquired by a trader (who was a carpenter) from nearby Maxstoke, John Ambresley. He resold them, and was therefore accused of regrating. ⁵⁵ A rural tenant of Halesowen, Thomas Hulle, was identified as a bagger or badger (cornmonger) in the 1420s and 1430s. He did not always co-operate with the court, but in other ways was a conventional tenant of a middling holding, with a customary half yardland and a toft held as a freehold. During the period of food shortage and high prices in 1438 two men broke into his house, perhaps in pursuit of stored grain. ⁵⁶ In years of bad harvests food traders took on a high profile: in the famine year 1316 a baker called Rosa le Meleward of Eldersfield (Worcestershire) was accused of selling bread of low weight (against the assize) and retailing oatmeal. ⁵⁷ Rural entrepreneurs also operated in the meat trade, such as Simon Hayne of Attleborough (Warwickshire) who presumably bought livestock around his rural base, and sold meat in Nuneaton market for twenty years between 1389 and 1409. ⁵⁸

Most of the documented middlemen were town-based, like John Harry and John Odeston of Nuneaton who were accused of forestalling eggs, milk, and butter in 1390, and at Droitwich in the early fifteenth century six forestallers, four of them women, were said to be dealing in foodstuffs, and specifically in eggs, doves, and fowl. ⁵⁹ Perhaps the offences were routine, and the authorities were finding a way of imposing a tax on traders. In Coventry, a large town with a huge demand, in 1380–1 nine women and a man were said to have regrated doves, geese, capons, butter, eggs, cheese, and other ‘small victuals’ in six separate cases. ⁶⁰ The products all came from the country, and presumably peasant women were meeting with town traders, many of them women, and welcoming the chance to sell their produce in a single transaction rather than spending hours retailing in the market place, in the street, or door-to-door.

Manufactured goods could also be bought in bulk and distributed, as was the case at Charingworth (Gloucestershire) reported in 1424, when John Vicarye bought a hundred ropes of bast at Shipston-on-Stour. ⁶¹ The ropes were made from the bark of lime trees, and were probably sold at Shipston by a dealer from the Arden who bought them from ropers working in the woodland. Vicarye would not have needed so many ropes, and must have acquired them in order to sell them around the villages of north Gloucestershire. Town-based grain merchants plied their trade in the champion villages around the lower Avon valley and the eastern banks of the Severn. In the 1380s, thirteen cornmongers from Tewkesbury and seven from Cheltenham collected formidable quantities of grain, 600 quarters in one case and 540 quarters in another, mainly from peasant producers, presumably for shipment down the river Severn to Bristol. ⁶² On a much more modest scale urban artisans were selling loaves of bread in the villages, in north Warwickshire for example where bakers from Coleshill (Warwickshire) in the late fifteenth century were taking bread for sale in four nearby villages. ⁶³

A striking feature of the borough of Alcester was its custom of granting for a fee, usually 12d, the ‘liberty within the borough to buy and sell freely’, or in another version to have the ‘liberty and franchise of the vill’. This meant that individuals, eight of them in 1438, fourteen in 1463, eight in three batches in the late 1460s, and another eleven in 1475, were gaining the same privileges as burgesses, and indeed when five townspeople in 1462 ‘are made new burgesses’, they also paid a fee of 12d. Some of these purchasers of access to the borough were tenants of properties in the town which were not burgages, and therefore they did not enjoy the privileges of burgesses. At least two lived in Bleachfield Street, which lay outside the borough. Others were active in the urban economy: four sold ale, and another four were involved in pleas of debt or trespass. Some were country dwellers with ambitions to trade, like John Smyth who paid his fee in 1438. He came from Dunnington, 3 miles to the south-west and was renting a shop in Alcester. ⁶⁴ Birmingham had a similar arrangement by which ‘rent payers’ (censarii) paid 2d or 4d for access to the town’s market. Eighty-five of them were listed in 1296 but some traces of the institution survived into the sixteenth century. About twenty-six of those paying in 1296 seem to have been resident in the town, but names such as John, son of Gregory of Smethwick, suggest that they came from rural settlements within a 10-mile radius. Some may have moved into Birmingham, but a substantial number seem to have been country dwellers who either brought produce into the town, or sought work in the town.

As well as their country produce, peasants sold their labour in the towns, and appear in the records as servants, day labourers, and artisans. Urban authorities, such as the Bristol fullers in 1381, were so concerned by competition from rural fullers that they prohibited (no doubt unsuccessfully) receiving cloth for finishing that had been fulled in the country. ⁶⁵ Coventry citizens were told in the early sixteenth century not to deal with fullers who worked outside the city. ⁶⁶ These resentments tended to be expressed in hard times, so the rural cloth workers were not always so unwelcome.

Rural workers in the building industry tended to live near towns. The name ‘carpenter’ seems to cluster around Coventry according to the 1332 tax list, and carpenters were identified in the 1379 poll tax, with three at Stivichall and four at Bulkington and its adjacent hamlet of Ryton, both within 5 miles of Coventry. ⁶⁷ At Bristol between 1295 and 1322 construction projects on the castle brought into the workforce people living on the castle’s rural estate. The villagers of Mangotsfield paid the constable a modest rent for permission to quarry, presumably with a view to selling stone in the town. In 1295 fifteen masons were employed on the castle work, who probably travelled from some distance but thirty labourers seem to have lived on the castle estate, including John de Camey, a customary tenant of Mangotsfield. ⁶⁸

The fraternity of the Holy Cross at Stratford in the fifteenth century paid for constructing and maintaining its own guildhall, almshouses, and schoolhouse, and also invested heavily in dozens of rent-paying properties in the town. Stone, timber, and tiles were mostly obtained from the woodland landscapes to the north of the town, and some of the leading carpenters came from the Arden: John Bromefeld lived at Rowington, Thomas Parsons at Tanworth, and Henry Perkyns at Haseley. They supplied timber from sources near to their homes as well as building houses. They were probably landholders, as Thomas Parsons is recorded to have been, though we do not know if he worked the land himself or let it for rent. ⁶⁹

Peasant consumption and towns

Townspeople were responding to peasants’ consumption demands. The peasant possessions most frequently encountered are indicated in Table 8.2, with the variety of garments, utensils, implements, and furnishings specified in documentary and archaeological evidence. The size of this great collective inventory might give an impression of peasant affluence, but of course these things were spread unevenly over many households, and individuals often lacked some basic furnishings or implements. On the other hand, the list understates peasant consumption, as the documents tended to omit cheap items, such as pottery, and archaeological finds from sites which are not waterlogged exclude objects made of wood and leather. To appreciate the urban role in peasant consumption we need to know where, how, and by whom these objects were made, exchanged, and distributed.

Table 8.2 Peasant possessions, classified by materials

From written documents
Textiles	tablecloth, towel, cushion, banker, painted cloth, coverlet, sheet, blanket, mattress, carpet, sack, canvas cover
Clothing	chemise, hose, doublet, hood, cap, kerchief, shirt, supertunic, gown, robe, tunic, coat
Leather	shoes, belt, harness, traces, bridle, saddle, sheath, horse collar
Wood *	table, bench, form, stool, chair, cupboard, almery, chest, ark, barrel, tub, trough, bucket, stand, cup, seed-lip, plough, cart, harrow, flail, rake, sieve, riddle, goad, whip, hames, spinning wheel, wych (a bin), bushel measure, bow and arrow
Metal (iron) *	knife, spade, fork, mattock, rake, scythe, sickle, weeding hook, axe, auger, saw, tyres (on wheels), plough share, coulter, clout, tines of harrow, heckle, comb, door furniture (locks and keys, hinges, hasps, studs), frying pan, spit, tripod, trivet, andirons
Metal (non-ferrous)	pots, pans, lead vats, basin, ewer, pewter dishes, pewter spoons, silver spoons
Ceramic	tiles
Stone	quern, mortar
Miscellaneous	rope, hair cloth, sack
From archaeological evidence
Metal (iron)	knife, shears, scythe, sickle, weeding hook, spud, needle, lock, key, hinge, door stud, hasp, horseshoe, ox shoe, bit, spur, curry comb, chisel, punch, awl, reamer, arrowhead
Metal (non-ferrous)	dress accessories, e.g. buckle, belt end, harness fitting, brooch, mount
Ceramic	pottery, tile, ridge tile
Stone	quern, mortar, whetstone, door pivot, spindle whorl, grindstone
Bone	flute/pipe, dice, comb, toggle
Miscellaneous	glass smoother

* a number of items, e.g. plough, bucket, spade, were made of a combination of wood and iron, and have been rather arbitrarily classified here.

Wooden implements such as flails for threshing corn, or the handles of spades or scythes, could have been made, or at least mended or replaced, in the home. One type of spindle whorl was cast from lead in urban workshops, but the simple and even clumsy discs of stone or reused ceramics could have been fabricated without specialist skills. Musical pipes made by inserting holes for fingering in a hollow bird bone appear to have been home-made. Repair work on metal implements and utensils may have been attempted by peasants, but the small quantities of slag and metal-working residues found on excavated rural sites were probably left by itinerant tinkers. The great majority of the items listed in Table 8.2 were made by specialists.

The materials used often came from the countryside: wood and timber, the fibres used in cloth (wool and flax), iron, and stone. A good deal of processing and manufacture was country-based, for some cloth and tanned hides, and most potting and tile making. However there were major cloth industries in Bristol and Coventry for at least part of our period, and on a smaller scale in clothing towns in south Gloucestershire and north Worcestershire. Normally every town, like Alcester, had a weaver and dyer. Non-ferrous metal working was in particular an urban industry, and the larger scale bell makers or founders who made the brass pots owned by almost every peasant household were confined to the more important towns such as Worcester. ⁷⁰ Copper alloy dress accessories would also be made in large towns, and the designs are sometimes so close to finds from London that they are likely to have been made in the capital, though then distributed through provincial traders down to small-town retailers. ⁷¹ Ironworking was widely distributed because so many horse owners required a local shoeing service, but country smiths probably made knives and agricultural implements, and sharpened blades. Smiths and ironworkers operated in towns, for example, a specialist maker of arrowheads was working at Solihull in 1475–6, and an arrow maker paid the poll tax at Rugby in 1379. ⁷² Tailors are found scattered through the villages, but concentrated in some towns. In 1381 three tailors and three shepsters (dressmakers) are recorded in Lechlade, and ten tailors and three shepsters in the much larger centre of Cirencester. ⁷³ Tanners also congregated in towns, for example, at Bromsgrove; shoes were occasionally made in the country, but many country people went to towns for their leather goods. Woodworkers such as coopers and wheelwrights were often town-based, though turners and coopers can be found operating in woodland rural settlements. A wealthy consumer in 1392–3 bought wooden utensils, such as a tub, buckets, and pails, at Chipping Campden, probably at the fair, and these goods may also have been obtained there by ordinary consumers. ⁷⁴

Houses were the most expensive and complex of peasant acquisitions. Some elements of self-help were involved, because the peasant household’s own labour could have contributed to such tasks as preparing the site and digging clay for walling. The labour of the mason, carpenter, dauber, and roofer could have been recruited in both country and town. Four carpenters were living in Southam in 1379, who must have found work in the surrounding villages as well as in the small town. ⁷⁵ Masons and slaters could also be town-based. The building materials were often sourced locally, in particular stone, clay, sand, rods, wattles, and thatching straw, but timber was frequently brought from a distance or purchased. The lord of the manor of Whatcote in the 1440s built peasant houses and barns, using much the same methods as peasants if they had been arranging the work. ⁷⁶ The larger timbers were purchased at Stratford-upon-Avon, a major distribution centre. While they were in the town the lords’ officials also purchased nails and the iron fittings for the doors and shutters.

Even if goods were made in the country, the town was still the place from which they were distributed, as towns served as centres of communication for dealers and middlemen. Wealthy mercers and drapers handled linen and woollen cloth (and other goods). The leading traders were concentrated in large towns such as Coventry, but there was a drapery in a town as small as Rugby where small-scale retailers would offer cloth presumably of a type and quality appropriate for less affluent rural customers. ⁷⁷ Litigation can record the purchase of cloth by a peasant consumer, such as John Bynethetown of Bricklehampton (Worcestershire), who was said in 1335 to owe John de Pendock of Pershore 16d for cloth bought. The small sum suggests that it was only part of the original purchase price. Bynethetown was listed among the taxpayers of his village in 1327, and he paid 7d, so was not very wealthy. ⁷⁸

An intricate network connected rural consumers, urban traders, and industrial workers in the countryside. Pottery was made from the thirteenth century into modern times at Chilvers Coton (sometimes called Potters Coton) in north Warwickshire. Potters are sometimes supposed to have travelled round villages and towns to sell their wares, but more likely middlemen were involved. George Bayly alias Potter in the early years of the sixteenth century held land and perhaps a kiln in Chilvers Coton, and took a leading role in Nuneaton, where he was rated highly in the town’s tax assessment of 1525. ⁷⁹ He and others from Nuneaton are likely to have organized the distribution of pots so that they reached Coventry, towns such as Southam and Warwick, and every rural settlement within a 20-mile radius. The highly competitive pottery trade could present consumers with a choice of wares from a number of centres of manufacture. An example of successful marketing by Bayly’s predecessors was the dominance of Chilvers Coton pottery at Burton Dassett Southend, 24 miles from the kilns. From excavations of the settlement occupied between c.1220 and 1500, 14,000 pieces of Chilvers Coton ware were recovered, far exceeding the market share of its two main rivals at Deritend (near Birmingham) and Brill/Boarstall in Buckinghamshire. ⁸⁰

Peasants in Alcester’s hinterland were not entirely tied into local markets. They also acquired, through a chain of middlemen, overseas imports, notably the chest of pruis owned by a Cleeve Prior tenant, which was a piece of furniture imported from the Baltic and named from Prussia, and at Weethley a whetstone imported from Norway was owned and subsequently lost or discarded by a villager. In the hinterlands of other Warwickshire towns pieces of lava quern stones (from hand mills) found at Burton Dassett Southend had originated in the Rhineland, and also from the same part of Germany a tenant of Weston-juxta-Cherrington around 1500 owned a drinking jug of German stoneware, and a similar find comes from Barston in north Warwickshire. ⁸¹ These exotic imports would have been bought locally, from a retailer in a market town, or perhaps at a fair. Overseas trade was of course flowing in the other direction, with exports to the continent of Cotswold wool, Gloucestershire cloth, and grain from the Severn valley. The profits from this commerce may have made a small contribution to the level of consumer spending in the region.

Finally, Table 8.2 does not include foodstuffs, yet these must have featured among the purchases by peasants in their local towns. Salt, essential for making cheese and curing bacon came from Droitwich along a well-established network of roads to all parts of the region. Peasants were familiar with sea fish. Herring, served to workers harvesting demesne crops, would have been appreciated in peasant households as nutritious, tasty, and relatively cheap. Herring bones from the excavations at Pinbury (Gloucestershire), were likely to date from the thirteenth century. The demand was met mainly by urban fishmongers, though herring were being sold by a shop in Chaddesley Corbett village in 1441. ⁸² The town could also offer the better-off peasants food and drink superior to that in their own households or in the village, such as the pies and meals prepared by the cook who traded in most towns, white bread (wastel) made from finely sieved flour, and high-quality ale such as the ‘best ale of Bristol town’ relished by a widow of Shirehampton according to an agreement of 1483. ⁸³

The accumulated value of peasant consumption for the town can be estimated, firstly by calculating the size and population of the hinterland. Returning to Alcester, we have already noted that it dominated a rural area formed of thirty-six tax-paying villages. In 1327 they contained 614 taxpayers; estimating the number of households exempt from tax and the size of the household leads to a total of 7,500 people living in 1,500 households. Table 8.3 indicates the stratification among the households, and estimates the amount of money they had to spend each year. The total of £1,200 represents the potential consumer expenditure for Alcester and its surroundings. In practice, village traders or another town could have been favoured for some purchases. Alcester might have had 120 households in 1327, so a notional share of consumer spending of £10 each could have been the basis of the town’s economy.

Table 8.3 Households and expenditure in the hinterland of Alcester (Warwickshire) 1327

Note: smallholders are estimated to have bought basic foodstuffs, which middling and larger holdings would have produced for themselves.

Peasants and changing fortunes of towns

Towns throughout Europe mostly multiplied and expanded in the thirteenth century, and then experienced varying fortunes in the next two centuries. West-midland towns followed the same trend. Changes in peasant numbers and welfare ought to have connected with the ups and downs experienced by towns, especially smaller towns, which were most closely entwined with the surrounding countryside.

The conventional picture of the rural scene in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries highlights the expansion over new land, the increase in the rural population, and the production of a surplus for exchange, all of which are found in the west midlands. More than thirty places appear to have been emerging as towns in the thirteenth century, and a dozen had apparent twelfth-century origins. Some were new towns founded in a single act of planning. Towns like Alcester grew over a long period and other places can be shown to have expanded piecemeal from an analysis of their plans. Bewdley and Brinklow both apparently began in the thirteenth century from an initial core along a main street, and added groups of plots (plan units) in stages. ⁸⁴ Estimating population can be based on surveys of tenants and tax records, but the numbers of people that lived in each burgage cannot be known, nor how many people were exempted from taxation. Evesham had embryonic origins before the Norman Conquest, and by 1200 had gathered almost 1,000 inhabitants. In the next century it could have reached over 1,500 especially if part of the adjacent settlement of Bengeworth was integrated into the town. Chipping Campden from a starting point before 1200, had about 525 people in 1273. Stratford was founded in 1196, had more than a thousand inhabitants by 1252, and could have attained near to 2,000 in the early fourteenth century. Birmingham may have been developing around a market in the mid-twelfth century, and could have had 1,250 inhabitants in 1296. Northleach, a small place getting off to a late start in c.1220, is likely to have grown to 430 by 1266. ⁸⁵

Urban growth of the thirteenth century amounted to a major social change, with the newly founded or rapidly growing small towns by 1300 together providing a living for thousands of people. The new town dwellers were taking on quite small plots of urban land with insufficient space to live from agriculture: at Chipping Sodbury, for example, a town with at least 800 inhabitants in the thirteenth century, the borough was assigned a territory of 107 acres, filled with streets and burgage plots with no space for large fields. ⁸⁶ Such towns were dependent on making an income from crafts and commerce, in order to buy foodstuffs from the country.

A productive symbiosis between urban and rural ways of life, did not always work, as not all towns achieved much growth. Moreton-in-Marsh struggled to reach a population of 300, and remained small throughout the Middle Ages, though its people seem to have practised enough non-agricultural activities for it to be regarded as urban. That test has not been passed by Alvechurch, Clifton-on-Teme, Prestbury, and St Briavels, though they were all boroughs.

The proliferation of markets and fairs indicates the surge in the promotion of commercial activity before 1350, which includes more than fifty rural markets in the three shires that made up the region. The lords who founded them by obtaining a royal charter chose sites which would be likely to attract local peasants, but in most cases the market did not flourish. ⁸⁷ Peasants were not confined within the official market network. For example, Bibury in Gloucestershire was a village which retained some vestiges of its former importance as the site of a minster church and estate centre, and was well-sited in a river valley served by some major long-distance roads. It was divided between two lords, which may have encouraged peasant enterprise. A space in the centre of the village, now known as ‘The Square’ resembles a marketplace. In 1327 Robert le Chapman (meaning ‘trader’) paid his tax at Bibury, and later in the century an unusual number of brewers plied their trade there. In 1381 those paying the poll tax included a ‘merchant’, three carpenters, a butcher, a tailor, a brewer, and a smith. A butcher was recorded in the early fifteenth century. ⁸⁸ Other villages with unofficial markets are scattered over the region, including Mitcheldean and Newland in the Forest of Dean, and various woodland settlements such as Chaddesley Corbett in Worcestershire and Tanworth-in-Arden in Warwickshire. Lords made no direct profits from these activities, and they seem to be the result of villagers seeking the convenience of a nearby local market, at which no tolls were required.

In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rural society was shrinking, with houses abandoned in almost every settlement, while some villages were in terminal decline. This was echoed in the towns like Warwick and Winchcomb which have been said to have been stagnating. John Leland, observing towns in the 1540s, reported that Thornbury had been a clothmaking centre, ‘but now idleness much reynithe there’. ⁸⁹ Transfers of properties in the courts of Pershore included some tofts, meaning that houses had decayed, and the authorities were making agreements with new tenants to rebuild or repair dilapidated buildings. Upton-on-Severn was well placed as a river port serving a woodland hinterland in south-west Worcestershire, but in 1429–30 ‘various burgages’ were lying in the lord’s hands for a lack of tenants, and so complete was their abandonment that the sites of the burgages were not known, and former tenants could not be traced. The tolls of the market and fair, once worth 12s, had ceased to yield any revenue. ⁹⁰ Lechlade’s market and fair generated little income for the lord of the town in the fifteenth century, and at nearby Fairford the rents from the borough were much diminished. ⁹¹ Towns that had been successful only in a low key began to lose any claim to be urban, for example at Brailes and Bretford. Rural markets were lost from sight. In Warwickshire, for example, more than twenty markets authorized by royal charters had ceased to function by 1600, and most of them had failed many years before that date. ⁹²

Signs of distress were not universal. Perhaps reports of declining rents and market tolls resulted from slack administration and concealment by officials. In some towns when houses deteriorated they were rebuilt and repaired, by the lord of the town at Rugby in the 1440s, and by a major property owner (the Fraternity) at Stratford-upon-Avon throughout the fifteenth century. ⁹³ The expenditure on buildings was a vote of confidence in the long-term future of the town. The improvement in the urban fabric is reflected in the number of timber-framed houses of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, some dated by dendrochronology, which are still visible (or partly hidden by modern brick or stone facades) along the streets of Alcester, Bewdley, Droitwich, Henley-in-Arden, Pershore, Shipston-on-Stour, Tewkesbury, and Winchcomb. Population figures are as uncertain in this period as before 1349, but recovery from plague mortality is suggested by Chipping Campden’s 600 people in 1381, compared with the estimate of 525 in 1273. It remained at about 600 in the early sixteenth century. Northleach’s expansion has been attributed to its importance as a base for three major families of woolmongers. In the fifteenth century, burgages had been divided in half to accommodate more tenants, and new building partly filled the marketplace, raising the population in the long term from 430 in 1266 to about 600 in the early sixteenth century. ⁹⁴ Birmingham had some wool merchants in the early fourteenth century, but its metal industries and tanning sustained its later growth, from 1,250 in 1296 to around 2,000 in the early sixteenth century.

Northleach and Birmingham moved forwards by specializing, but towns which catered for all comers with a wide range of crafts and trades, such as Alcester, Evesham, Nuneaton, and Stratford fared reasonably well, and these are the most relevant to gauging the continued importance of the towns’ interactions with peasants. ⁹⁵ New urban life could be breathed into previously obscure settlements at Stourbridge and Stroud, and centres of trade which did not quite qualify as towns developed and expanded, for example, at Knowle (Warwickshire) and Redditch (Worcestershire). ⁹⁶ These were all in woodland landscapes, and they benefited from the development of pastoralism and industry. A final reassurance of the health of the urban sector was a town’s ability to survive the stress test of disaster. Birmingham had suffered a great fire around 1300, but seems to have recovered, as might be expected of that vigorous centre in a period of opportunity, but Shipston-on-Stour in 1478, when it was holding its own at a time of falling population and vacant land in its champion hinterland, had most of its houses destroyed in a fire, but carried on trading and was largely rebuilt within five years. ⁹⁷

How could towns manage to avoid decline? Although the number of people in their hinterlands fell often below 5,000, and although the grain trade had diminished in volume and profitability, the towns that had emerged by 1300 continued to occupy niches in the marketing network. They adapted to the shift in farming from arable to pasture by developing their handling of livestock and animal products, raising the profile of butchers, tanners, and fellmongers in the later part of the period. The better-off section of the rural population benefited from larger holdings and changes in farming methods. The remaining smallholders received increased rewards from employment and were able to keep at least a few animals.

However, there is limited direct evidence for the assumption that clothing worn by peasants increased in quality. The agreements for the maintenance, usually of retired tenants sometimes specify the clothing and shoes to be provided annually. They mention lengths of woollen cloth of 2 ¾ yards and 3 ells, or complete garments such as a tunic with hood. The amount of money per person varied between 2s for a boy’s clothing to 4s for the cloth allowed to a retired yardlander and the same for a widow giving up a half yardland. Although they range in date between 1318 and 1483, no upward or downward trend can be detected, though they seem to be suggesting that peasants were buying cloth for about 1s per yard. These contracts, in clothing as well as food, seemed to be repeating a customary standard which defined a minimum rather than reflecting actual consumption. National legislation in 1463 and 1483, fixing limits on the quality of cloth that could be worn by labourers, implied that without legal restraint they would wear cloth worth 2s per yard. ⁹⁸ Many peasants would surely expect to dress at least as well as a labourer, so perhaps, contrary to the evidence of the maintenance contracts, more money was being spent generally on clothing in the late fifteenth century?

A rare opportunity to judge changes in peasant possessions over a long period comes from the pottery. The high point of design came in the thirteenth century, when among the pots available in our region the jugs from the Brill/Boarstall kilns were decorated with colourful glazes and elaborate surface treatment with strips of applied clay and rouletting. The Chilvers Coton potters made some very elaborate jugs, including examples with moulded human faces, clearly intended to serve as a point of attraction and comment at the meal table where they would be used to serve ale. ⁹⁹ However these more elaborate pots seem to have been intended mainly for the urban market. A high proportion of the wares deriving from villages consisted of rather drab and functional cooking pots with little elegance of form and minimal decoration. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the potters seem to have been responding to more refined consumer preferences, or perhaps the potters were educating the taste of their customers by introducing new techniques and designs. The technical quality changed with the advent of ‘midland purple’ with harder-fired fabric and a better finish. Towards the end of the fifteenth century so-called Cistercian ware appears, which was well-fired, thin-walled, and glazed inside and out. Drinking cups in this ware offered a very superior alternative to the wooden drinking bowls in everyday use for centuries. ¹⁰⁰

Houses and other buildings also allow us to trace changes in consumption over the centuries. The amount of accommodation seems to have increased in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the occasional addition of cross-wings to one storey houses, adding an extra chamber on the first floor (see ‘Space for households’ in Chapter 5). At Burton Dassett Southend the floor area of houses, and therefore the amount of space available for each member of the household, expanded. Roofs of stone tiles were being provided at the same settlement before 1350, but both slates and ceramic tiles, though by no means common, appear more often in the fifteenth century. The hearth in the hall was moved from the centre of the floor to near a wall, which implies that smoke was removed not from a louvre at the apex of the roof, but by means of a smoke hood, an internal chimney suspended over the fire. This increased the potential warmth and comfort of those using the hall. There is some direct evidence from housing therefore that peasants enjoyed better living standards in the later part of our period.

Peasants and money

Money pervaded the west midlands in the late Middle Ages. Lords promoted towns and markets partly to enable tenants to sell produce and pay their rents and dues in cash. Peasants preferred money rents; for example, customary tenants aspired to pay fixed cash rents like free tenants. Money penetrated deeply into everyday social practices and habits of thought, enabling values to be attached, for example, to damage to a garden. Coins were not very plentiful, leading to forms of barter, and payments were often delayed or made in instalments. In the end cash had to be handed over, and individuals accumulated coins for that purpose.

The use of coins is indicated most directly by the thousands that survive, often worn by handling and after being rubbed against the inside of a purse. Because small sums were needed for everyday transactions, farthings to buy the smallest standard loaf, for example, and because the official mints did not produce enough halfpence or farthing coins, the penny coin would be cut into halves and quarters, and would circulate in that mutilated but useful form. The coins, both whole and cut into fractions, can be identified, counted, and analysed to provide insights into the flow of commerce in the region. Coins that belonged to peasants, or of which peasants had been the last owners before they were lost, can be found in village excavations. Such finds are few. At Upton, for example, a house occupied for a century and a half by a relatively well-off peasant family, and excavated carefully in the twentieth century, yielded two medieval coins. ¹⁰¹ Hundreds of silver pennies must each year have passed through the hands of the members of the family, but each penny was too valuable to lose. Our sample of coins therefore comes mainly not from houses and villages, but from the fields, where coins might have been mislaid by those working the land, or more often lost in the home, and carted with the domestic refuse into the fields.

All of the known medieval coins from the west midlands, 2,186 in total up to 2013, have been analysed in a study of their date of minting and the places where they were found. The sample included Herefordshire alongside our three counties. ¹⁰² Most were found by metal detectorists, and their distribution (mainly in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire), reflects the areas in which these amateurs have chosen to search. Alcester and its vicinity has attracted detectorists because it is known as a major Roman site and therefore rich in finds of that period. As a by-product, 229 medieval coins, an unusually large number for a relatively small area, have been recovered. The quantity does not tell us that medieval Alcester was exceptionally wealthy or commercially active, just that modern detectorists have singled it out for their attention.

In a separate sample, medieval coins recorded from Warwickshire increased in the thirteenth century, peaked around 1300, and fell after 1351 to quite low levels in the next two centuries (Table 8.4). In the region as a whole, the rate of coin loss, and presumably therefore the use of coins, increased dramatically around 1200, and attained a maximum towards the end of the thirteenth century. They reached only low levels in the fifteenth century. The dates refer to the year of minting, not the years of circulation, so although fewer coins were minted after 1351, part of the old stock of coins produced in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries continued in use. Also, more gold coins were circulating, but are not visible among the coin finds because, given that many of them were worth 6s 8d, their owners took even more care than they did with silver to ensure that they were not lost.

Table 8.4 Single coin finds from Warwickshire, 1066–1544

Date	No. of dated coins	%
1180–1247	48	17
1247–1279	50	18
1279–1351	94	34
1351–1412	26	9
1412–1464	32	11
1464–1544	30	11
Total	280	100

Source: Dyer, ‘Peasants and Coins’, pp. 36–8.

Coins in the whole region were found in 295 parishes, though concentrated near urban centres or places where markets were held. Setting aside the extraordinary case of Alcester, whereas the average parish with finds has produced seven coins, fourteen coins or more have been found at small towns: Coleshill, Dymock, Newent, Nuneaton, Pershore, and Stratford. The Alcester series gives us a sense of an especially steep rising curve between 1180 and 1279 (Table 8.5), which should be connected with the expansion of the cultivated area and commodity production in the surrounding countryside. Money circulated in the villages in the payment of wages, the sale of produce, and cash rents and then flowed into the hands of traders and artisans in the market town. The sharp decline in loss of coins minted after 1351 at first seems inconsistent with the apparent lively state of the town as depicted in the fifteenth-century records. While the countryside was experiencing a falling population and a decline in cultivation, the large landholdings and increased pastoralism should have stimulated commercial exchanges. The explanation is partly that old coins and gold were circulating, but also that the reduced population in the country meant that the amount of money per head was not reduced as much as the global figures suggest. ¹⁰³

Table 8.5 Single coin finds from Alcester parish, 1100–1544

Date	No. of dated coins	%
1100–1135	5	2
1135–1158	0	0
1158–1180	6	3
1180–1247	41	18
1247–1279	80	35
1279–1351	61	27
1351–1412	21	9
1412–1464	10	4
1465–1544	5	2
Total	229	100

Source: Andrews, ‘Coin use’.

Town and country: Cultural connections

Towns acquired institutions and cultures which set them apart from those of the countryside. We are impressed by the advanced institutions of Bristol, modelled on those of London, and celebrated in the mayor’s book compiled by Robert Ricart in 1478–9. The book was designed to define the town’s liberties and to enable them to be defended by civic officials. It describes the annual cycle of ceremonies and processions, and gives the text of speeches to be delivered. ¹⁰⁴ A peasant encountering such an occasion might have felt out of place.

Most towns, especially the smaller ones, were governed by their lords. At Alcester each year, the jury of twelve took an oath at the lord’s view of frankpledge (the court leet) and the officers were elected: bailiffs, constables, ale tasters, tasters of meat and fish, and the ‘collectors of the common money’. By a local peculiarity, as a legacy of a time when the lordship of the town was divided between two lords, there were two bailiffs and two constables. Alcester seems to have attracted the attention of the local aristocracy to an unusual extent. In 1444 it was united under a single lord from a branch of the Beauchamp family, who were often resident and could intervene in the town’s affairs, by announcing a by-law for example. A number of other local lords held property in the town and also exercised some influence: these were the Burdets of Arrow, the Rous family of Ragley, the Throckmortons of Coughton, and perhaps Alcester Abbey, though it kept a low profile. An unusual by-law of 1475, during the Wars of the Roses, forbade tenants and residents from wearing clothing (which refers to livery) or signs (that is, badges) of any lord or gentleman other than Richard Beauchamp, the lord of the town. ¹⁰⁵ This suggests that townspeople had been recruited into affinities, seen by Beauchamp as divisive.

A typical compromise allowed the leading townspeople to occupy positions in the lord’s administration, and thus to exercise some authority. Administrative responsibility was not narrowly concentrated, as twenty-six men were involved in the government of the town each year. From its beginning, Northleach was not under the total control of its monastic lord, as in about 1220 a ‘composition’ between the Abbot of Gloucester and the burgesses gave considerable power to the bailiff appointed by the lord, but also allowed two burgesses to ‘see that our officers do not ill treat them’. ¹⁰⁶ In a village the lord was in charge, often rather remotely, and offices of bailiff or reeve, beadle, jurors, affeerers, woodward, ale tasters, and others would have been occupied by senior, experienced, and often better-off men. In both town and country lords’ authority was mediated through local people, and depended on the co-operation and consent of the community.

An important development in civic life was marked by the emergence of fraternities such as ‘the guild of Warwick’ and the Holy Cross fraternities in Birmingham and Stratford. ¹⁰⁷ These began as religious associations, organizing funerals, and maintaining a chantry priest or priests to pray for the souls of the departed. The strength of the fraternity lay in its promotion of sociability, giving opportunities for townspeople to meet, eat and drink together, and settle disputes. Fraternities developed other functions and by the end of the Middle Ages they were funding civic buildings, bridges, roads, public clocks, almshouses, and schools. They had become ‘shadow governments’ in the towns, usually without antagonizing the lords. Alcester lacked such a well-organized fraternity, but townspeople were drawn into managing the St Mary’s chantry attached to the parish church, which funded a school and maintained the town’s two bridges. ¹⁰⁸ In the west midland countryside a few fraternities had a rural base, including the village guild at Aston Cantlow, a few miles from Alcester. The closest parallel to an urban fraternity in a village would be the groups of feoffees who were charged with running the landed endowment of a chantry, employing the priest as a schoolteacher. This is documented at Hanley Castle and Hartlebury in Worcestershire around 1500, but probably originated at an earlier date. Villagers who felt the need to belong to a fully developed fraternity could join those based in towns, so the Stratford fraternity welcomed hundreds of country members. The fraternity of Knowle, a Warwickshire place which did not develop fully into a town, provided a focus for peasants, artisans, and gentry from a wide radius. ¹⁰⁹

Mutual support and opportunities to socialize were functions of the rural parish. Groups within villages based on age cohorts held social gatherings and contributed to parish funds. The social (and fundraising) dimension of the parish was given a stronger institutional focus when churchwardens towards the end of the Middle Ages built church houses to accommodate church ales. Finally, there are enigmatic references to guildhalls in villages, often no more than a passing reference in a field name, which suggests that in the thirteenth century or earlier guilds had existed. There may be a connection with the occasional reference to ‘ales’ meaning drinking sessions which survived into the later Middle Ages as the lord’s fustale and the parish church ale. So villagers congregated to drink together and raise funds but did not form voluntary associations with many functions on the scale or durability of those in towns.

Coventry’s cycle of plays depicting biblical episodes was enacted in the streets, uniting the citizens who through their crafts would organize the performances. ¹¹⁰ Country people would no doubt have come to the city to be impressed by these displays of civic culture. Alcester could obviously not mount such an event, but in 1421–2 Lady Katherine Beauchamp, spending much of the year in her nearby manor house, gave 20d ‘to the players’ for a play (interludum) in Alcester’. ¹¹¹ The term interlude suggests a rather short piece of light entertainment, which was judged to be suitable for an aristocratic lady as well as local people. Villages held their own performances also, and bands of villagers put on plays, dances, and musical events not just for their neighbours but for a more sophisticated audience. Prior More of Worcester between 1518 and 1535 gave rewards to groups of local villagers who visited his household and entertained the assembled clergy, servants, officials, and guests. They included the ‘Martley players’, ‘dancers of Claines’, and men and women of Grimley who ‘syngeth on May morning’. He made a generous donation to the church ale at Grimley ‘and a play’ which suggests that drama contributed to parish fund-raising. Some plays were secular in content, such as those with Robin Hood themes ¹¹² (see ‘Individuals and communities’ in Chapter 10).

Towns developed their own memories of the past so that the inhabitants shared traditions. Coventry’s legend of Lady Godiva unified the people of the city, who would have appreciated its message about successful resistance to taxation. A small town such as Alcester could perpetuate a legend relating to the town’s past that appeared in different versions. The town, it was said, was visited by the bishop of Worcester and founder of Evesham Abbey, St Ecgwine, or alternatively by St Chad, bishop of Lichfield. So the story is set in the remote past, around either 670 or 700. The bishop attempted to preach a sermon but was frustrated either by the loud hammering of smiths, or because people ignored his words. The good bishop cursed those who refused to listen, and the town was swallowed up into the earth. The lessons that the story conveyed include the obvious morals that preaching deserved a respectful hearing, saintly bishops should be received with honour, and that sinners deserved punishment. The legend resembled an origin myth as it explained why Alcester people in the Middle Ages encountered walls and building remains (of Roman date) under their houses and gardens; they quarried the remains to recycle the building stone. Finds of Roman iron slag suggested a link to the noisy smiths. The power of the legend was that it showed local people that Alcester had been important, and encouraged pride in past glories: ‘the town hath been a great thing’. ¹¹³

A quite separate legend concerned a small hill a short distance outside the town on the Roman road to Stratford-upon-Avon, called Alcock’s Arbour, a name first documented in 1480. It was said to have been the place where a notorious robber, Alcock, buried his treasure. The hill is part of a Roman site, and the discovery of Roman coins is likely to have been the basis of the legend. However, there was evidently some connection with the fifteenth-century town, as John Alcock appears in the borough court rolls, mainly as a brewer and seller of ale in the 1460s and 1470s. The legend explained the strikingly prominent hill, and people were engaged by the idea that a notorious criminal had once lived among them. ¹¹⁴

These legends with their false memories embedded in the local landscape contributed to Alcester people’s sense of belonging and their loyalty to a longstanding community. We know about the stories because they were recorded by the monks of Evesham Abbey, by John Leland, and by William Dugdale. The small group of clergy associated with the parish church and its chantries may have helped to perpetuate the memories, but there was clearly a strong oral tradition among the townspeople.

Memories in the countryside are often perpetuated in minor place names which were once connected to legends now forgotten. Puckeput (Puck’s pit) from the thirteenth century is a reference to a supernatural phenomenon, a malicious or mischievous sprite, but we do not know why this word was connected to a pond or depression near Maisemore (Gloucestershire). Clerkenleap in Kempsey (Worcestershire) seems to refer to a real or imagined event, either a suicide or an athletic feat by a clergyman. ¹¹⁵ St Chad, who appears in one version of the Alcester legend, is remembered by a well and chapel for pilgrims at Chadshunt (Warwickshire) and an association is strengthened by the village having been a possession of the bishops of Lichfield. The well predates the saint, however, because the Latin word funta (meaning well or spring) forms part of the place-name. ¹¹⁶ Just as the people of Alcester valued the idea that in a remote past their town had been ‘a great thing’, country people who lived near Roman villas and other sites used long established place names such as those ending in –cester and –chester (Woodchester, for example) or the field name chestles referring to stone buildings. We know that peasants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were aware of the past, because they picked up Roman coins in the fields and kept them. The coins that have been found at Upton and Pinbury (both in Gloucestershire) in peasant houses are likely to have been recognized as belonging to a period before the finders’ time. ¹¹⁷

Although traditions may have encouraged a sense of unity, many commentators have remarked on the amount of interpersonal violence suggestive of underlying tensions in both towns and villages. To indicate the amount of fighting that could occur at Alcester, in 1468 thirteen assaults were reported to the Easter view of frankpledge, and ten in another violent year in 1475. ¹¹⁸ The courts mention the shedding of blood in some of these incidents and refer to weapons such as knives. Assaults were also reported in the views held in villages, but especially acute conflicts were generated by markets and fairs in towns, when country people could have been involved.

Gatherings of large numbers of people carrying goods and money, and consuming much ale, attracted criminals and were occasions for disorder. The anonymity of the marketplace was an opportunity for the sale of stolen property, like the three oxen brought by thieves to Worcester market in 1324. Also those intent on doing harm to an enemy would find him at an event that he was likely to attend: so the notorious gang led by Malcolm Musard beat Thomas of Chetynton at Blockley fair in 1305. ¹¹⁹ However markets had more fundamental reasons for being scenes of contention, as access led to controversy over the payment of toll, and over the tendency of traders to interfere with the flow of goods in search of larger profits. Negotiating a sale was surrounded by controversy over price, payment for the goods, provision of credit, the quality of the goods, and their delivery after purchase.

At Alcester a small example of these problems arose in 1462 in the case of Nicholas Cockes of Cleeve Prior, whose barley was seized in distraint in a dispute with Richard Haselholt of Alcester, an office holder of some substance. Later in the year Haselholt brought a plea of trespass against Cockes, alleging that he had conspired to assault him, valuing the damages at 34s. The sum of money was certainly exaggerated, and the whole affair may have been blown up by Haselholt to make a good case in the court. The incident shows how sales and rather clumsy procedures for the recovery of debts, could lead to threatening behaviour. ¹²⁰

Collective violence on a larger scale was alleged in about 1400, when people from Alcester and Stratford were carrying corn and other foodstuffs northward to Birmingham, Coleshill, Walsall, and Dudley. ¹²¹ This must have been in response to food shortage, as 1400–2 were years of high prices following poor harvests. The south of Warwickshire normally sent wheat and barley to the northern towns, but the inequalities in supply would have made the need for trade and grain more acute in a bad harvest year. Evildoers (in the words of the complaint), covering their faces (which proved their sinister intent), ambushed the packhorses. Women and children riding on the horses fell to the ground, and the sacks were cut and the corn scattered. As usual, the record is concerned to establish that a really serious offence has been committed, rather than offering an explanation. Consumers resentful of the high prices of corn in the market should have welcomed new supplies which would bring prices down. Perhaps the corn was intercepted by farmers and corndealers in the north of Warwickshire who were fearful that competition would reduce their profits? More likely the ‘evildoers’ came from among consumers in the southern part of the Arden, in the vicinity of Henley-in-Arden and Solihull, who were hoping that the corn could be sold in their area and not carried to the northern towns as intended. If this was the reason for the interception, it would have some similarity to the ‘food riots’ of modern times when crowds in times of dearth took measures to bring supplies into the market at reduced prices. An incidental detail was that a journey to a distant market could apparently take on the character of a family outing.

A parallel episode in 1428, another poor harvest year, led to the interception of boats carrying wheat and barley from Worcestershire and Gloucestershire down the River Severn towards Bristol. The boats were seized at Minsterworth near Gloucester and the grain taken away. ¹²² As people from the Forest of Dean had been involved in similar interruptions to the grain trade in 1401 and 1409, it seems that they had been behind the seizure at Minsterworth. This was stated explicitly after an incident in 1433 when boat loads of grain were attacked at a time of high food prices, and Tewkesbury traders denounced the wild people of the Welsh border, and the lawlessness of the community of the Forest of Dean. ¹²³ Again this was not a simple matter of theft, but an attempt to divert supplies to a region without large corn crops.

To return to Alcester, a report of 1408–9 relates to violence in Alcester marketplace when henchmen (yeomen and servants, so members of his household) of Thomas Burdet, lord of the manor of Arrow beat and wounded tenants of the Earl of Warwick from Tanworth-in-Arden. ¹²⁴ Tanworth belonged to Alcester’s hinterland, and its tenants would be expected to have traded in the market. The quarrel may have arisen over the payment of market toll, as a result of Tanworth people claiming that they were exempt. Or was there a rivalry between markets, as Tanworth had a marketplace, but no market charter? Something similar arose at Shipston-on-Stour which was in competition with the earl of Warwick’s borough and market at nearby Brailes. In 1377–80 a Shipston tenant, Margaret atte Broke, was said to have procured men of Brailes to beat the Shipston reeve, and William Smith encouraged the tenants of the earls of Warwick to make a disturbance in Shipston market. Two years later no one in Shipston dared arrest ‘disturbers of the peace’ who were tenants of the Earl of Warwick, it was alleged. ¹²⁵ The Burdet family, who caused trouble at Alcester, held manors near to Shipston, and their aggression spread to the town when the young and disorderly Nicholas Burdet launched attacks in April and June 1413. Both raids took place on Fridays, so the day before market day; in the second event, two Shipston tenants were killed. ¹²⁶ Burdet’s gang seem to have been targeting a faction in the town who were allied to Worcester Priory (see ‘Peasants and lords’ in Chapter 10).

Peasants needed to bring their surplus produce to urban markets, but they were evidently treading into potentially dangerous waters, where arguments were liable to be stirred by issues such as the price of corn in years of scarcity. In addition, access to markets and toll payments were disputed. And a final ingredient was the apparent readiness of gentry like the Burdets to interfere in the political lives of market towns.

Conclusion

An influential view of medieval urbanization portrays the kings, monks, bishops, and secular lords as setting wheels in motion, after which townspeople and country dwellers gave the process momentum. But traders and peasants (often the same people or closely connected) were not just responding to stimuli from above, but gathered at river crossings or near important churches before charters were issued and town plans devised. Towns grew through peasant migration, not just as the pioneering generation, but through a continuing flow of rural recruits. The peasant who remained on the land influenced the development of the towns as producers by keeping the market supplied with surplus crops and livestock, and as consumers by demanding that the townspeople provide a wide range of goods and services. Towns grew as the country expanded, and through reciprocal stimulation, peasants produced and marketed more, and increased their consumption. After 1350 the reduction in the number of those using the towns’ services caused some restructuring, but not disaster. Peasants were fewer but not poorer.

Urban civic consciousness cannot be matched in the country, yet we can find self-government and avoidance of lordly dominance in both towns and villages. There are even rural versions of dramatic performances, unifying myths, and a sense of a common past.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0008

¹ TNA, SC2 175/63.

² D. Palliser, ed., Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 1, 600–1540 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 609–19 on the origins of these towns, with references. Publications since then include J. Maddicott, ‘London and Droitwich, c.650–750: Trade, Industry and the Rise of Mercia’, Anglo-Saxon England 34 (2003), pp. 7–58; N. Baker and R. Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church: Gloucester and Worcester (Aldershot, 2004); S. Bassett, ‘The Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon Defences of Western Mercian Towns’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 15 (2008), pp. 180–239; VCH Staffordshire, 12, pp. 15–16 (for Tamworth).

³ R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1973), pp. 76–94; R.H. Hilton, ‘Lords, Burgesses and Huxters’, P&P 97 (1982), pp. 3–15; R.H. Hilton, ‘The Small Town and Urbanisation—Evesham in the Middle Ages’, Midland History 7(1982), pp. 1–8; R.H. Hilton, ‘Small Town Society in England before the Black Death’, P&P 105 (1984), pp. 53–78; R.H. Hilton, ‘Medieval Market Towns and Simple Commodity Production’, P&P 109 (1985), pp. 1–23; R.H. Hilton, ‘Low Level Urbanisation: the Seigneurial Borough of Thornbury in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Society and the Manor Court, edited by Z. Razi and R.M. Smith (Oxford, 1996), pp. 482–517; R.H.C. Davis, The Early History of Coventry (DS Occasional Paper, 24, 1976).

⁴ M.W. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages. Town Plantations in England, Wales and Gascony, new edition (Gloucester, 1988).

⁵ C. Jones, G. Eyre-Morgan, S. Palmer, and N. Palmer, ‘Excavations in the Outer Enclosure of Boteler’s Castle, Oversley, Alcester, 1992–93’, TBWAS 101 (1997), pp. 1–98.

⁶ Z. Razi, ‘Family, Land and the Village Community in Later Medieval England’, P&P 93 (1981), pp. 3–36, especially p. 30; WCL, E2; E51.

⁷ N. Palmer and J. Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, Warwickshire: A Medieval Market Village (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 44, 2022), pp. 54–70.

⁸ C. Dyer, ‘New Towns in the Middle Ages: Lessons from Bretford in Warwickshire’, TBWAS 120 (2018), pp. 75–92.

⁹ A. Watkins, ed., The Early Records of Coleshill c.1120–1549 (DS, 51, 2018), pp. 30–7; A. Craven and B. Hartland, Cheltenham Before the Spa (London, 2018), pp. 18–25, 133–4, 138.

¹⁰ R. Leech, Small Medieval Towns in Avon. Archaeology and Planning (Bristol, Committee for Rescue Archaeology in Avon, Gloucestershire and Somerset, 1975), pp. 21–5; R. Leech, Historic Towns in Gloucestershire. Archaeology and Planning (Bristol, Committee for Rescue Archaeology in Avon, Gloucestershire and Somerset, 1982), pp. 86–9.

¹¹ R. Bearman, ed., The History of an English Borough: Stratford-upon-Avon, 1196–1996 (Stroud and Stratford, 1997), pp. 1–79.

¹² C. Dyer, Bromsgrove: A Small Town in Worcestershire in the Middle Ages (WHS Occasional Publication, 9, 2000).

¹³ C. Dyer, ‘The Hidden Trade of the Middle Ages: Evidence from the West Midlands of England’, Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992), pp. 141–57.

¹⁴ P. Booth and J. Evans, Roman Alcester: Northern Extra-Mural Area (CBA Research Report 127, 2001); S. Cracknell and M. Jones, ‘Medieval Kiln Debris from School Road, Alcester’, TBWAS 94 (1985–6), pp. 107–22.

¹⁵ D. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art. From the Seventh Century to the Norman Conquest (London, 1984), p. 194; M. Lapidge, ‘The Medieval Hagiography of St Ecgwine’, Vale of Evesham Historical Society Research Papers 6 (1977), pp. 77–94; L. Roach, Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2013), p. 86.

¹⁶ VCH Warwickshire, 2, pp. 59–61; D Styles, ‘The Early History of Alcester Abbey’, TBAS 64 (1941–2), pp. 20–38.

¹⁷ BAH, 272798 (dated to 1545; WCRO, CR1886/218; S. Letters, Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516, part 2 (List and Index Society, Special Series, 33, 2003), p. 357; Cracknell and Jones, ‘Kiln Debris’.

¹⁸ S. Madge, Abstract of the IPMs for Gloucestershire, part 4, 1236–1300 (British Record Society, 30, 1903), pp. 63–9, 80–3.

¹⁹ Hist Glouc, 3, pp. 176–9; VCH Glouc, 9, pp. 106–11.

²⁰ RBW, pp. 300–2, 314–16; GA, D678/Safe 3, fos 21 and 22.

²¹ Hist Glouc, 3, pp. 140–6.

²² RBW, pp. 327–30.

²³ Hilton, ‘Small Town Society’, pp. 60–6.

²⁴ For the general point of complementary hinterlands, see H. Carter, The Study of Urban Geography (London, 1995), pp. 41–51.

²⁵ G. Demidowicz, Medieval Birmingham: the Borough Rentals of 1296 and 1344–5 (DS Occasional Papers 48, 2008).

²⁶ D. Harrison, The Bridges of Medieval England. Transport and Society, 400–800 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 54–9, 138.

²⁷ J.W. Willis Bund and J. Amphlett, eds., Lay Subsidy Roll for the County of Worcester circ 1280 (WHS, 1893), p. 4.

²⁸ S.A.C. Penn, ‘The Origins of Bristol Migrants in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Surname Evidence’, TBGAS 101 (1983), pp. 123–30.

²⁹ R. Goddard, Lordship and Medieval Urbanisation. Coventry, 1043–1355 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 137–55; P. Coss, ed., Early Records of Medieval Coventry (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 11, 1986), pp. 81–2, 97–101, 299–300.

³⁰ B.M.S. Campbell, ‘Benchmarking Medieval Economic Development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.1290’, EcHR 61 (2008), pp. 896–945, for the population of the region; the main source for urban population is Palliser, ed., Cambridge Urban History.

³¹ WA, ref. 009:1, BA2636/175/92482.

³² WA, ref. 009:1, BA2636/169/92372.

³³ WA, ref. 705:56, BA3910/27.

³⁴ SCLA, DR%/2359; P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Late Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1500 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 158–202.

³⁵ R. Goddard, ‘Female Apprenticeship in the West Midlands in the Later Middle Ages’, Midland History 27 (2002), pp. 165–81.

³⁶ D. Hollis, ed., Calendar of the Bristol Apprentice Book 1532–1565 (Bristol Record Soc.,14, 1949).

³⁷ I. Green, Warwickshire Readers, c1520–c1750: Their Schooling and Their Books (DS Occasional Papers 51, 2015), p. 5.

³⁸ WA, ref. 705:4, BA54.

³⁹ S. Appleton and M. Macdonald, eds., Stratford-upon-Avon Wills vol. 1 (DS, 52, 2020), pp. 65–6.

⁴⁰ SCLA BRT 1/2/408; M. Macdonald, ed., The Register of the Guild of the Holy Cross of Stratford-upon-Avon (DS, 42, 2007), p. 359.

⁴¹ SCLA, DR98/31a, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 83, 90, 92, 93, 96.

⁴² VCH Glouc, 4, pp. 46–50.

⁴³ C. Barron, ‘The Fourteenth-Century Poll Tax Returns for Worcester’, Midland History 14 (1989), pp. 1–29.

⁴⁴ C. Dyer, ‘Small-Town Conflict in the Later Middle Ages: Events at Shipston-on-Stour’, Urban History 19 (1992), pp. 183–210, especially p. 189; Dyer, Bromsgrove, pp. 29–31.

⁴⁵ Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 79.

⁴⁶ WCRO, CR1886/156.

⁴⁷ W.F. Carter, ed., The Lay Subsidy Roll for Warwickshire of 6 Edward III (1332) (DS, 6, 1926), p.6; A.J, Gwinnett, A History of Alcester (Alcester, 1953), corrected by BAH, MS 3068/7/1.

⁴⁸ A. Watkins, Small Towns in the Forest of Arden in the Fifteenth Century (DS Occasional Paper, 38, 1998), p. 12.

⁴⁹ J. Davies, Medieval Market Morality. Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace,1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 270–3.

⁵⁰ WCRO, CR1886/144.

⁵¹ WCRO, CR1886/156.

⁵² WCRO, CR1886/167.

⁵³ WCRO, CR1886/176.

⁵⁴ C. Dyer, ‘Market Towns and the Countryside in Late Medieval England’, Canadian Journal of History 31 (1996), pp. 17–35.; Watkins, Small Towns, pp. 24, 25.

⁵⁵ Watkins, ed., Records of Coleshill, p. 48.

⁵⁶ BAH, 3279/346393, 346, 404, 346, 406; CR Romsley, pp. 180, 181, 188–9.

⁵⁷ WA, ref. 705:134, BA 1531/69.

⁵⁸ Watkins, Small Towns, p. 17.

⁵⁹ Watkins, Small Towns, p. 19; BAH, photostatic copy of Droitwich court rolls, vol. 3, no. 296.

⁶⁰ E.G. Kimball, ed., Rolls of the Warwickshire and Coventry Sessions of the Peace, 1377–1397 (DS, 16, 1939), pp. 37, 38, 43, 48, 54.

⁶¹ WCL, E51.

⁶² Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 89.

⁶³ Watkins, Small Towns, p. 16.

⁶⁴ WCRO, CR1886/143.

⁶⁵ F.B. Bickley, ed., The Little Red Book of Bristol (Bristol, 1900), pp. 15–16.

⁶⁶ M.D. Harris, ed., The Coventry Leet Book, part 3 (Early English Text Society, Original Series 188, 1909), pp. 659, 704–5, 723.

⁶⁷ Carter, ed., Lay Subsidy, pp. 43, 50, 53, 60; PT, part 2, pp. 653, 688–9.

⁶⁸ M. Sharp, ed., Accounts of the Constable of Bristol Castle in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Bristol Record Society, 34, 1982), p. 37; S.A.C. Penn, ‘A Hidden Workforce: Building Workers in Fourteenth-Century Bristol’, TBGAS 109 (1991), pp. 171–8.

⁶⁹ T.H. Lloyd, ‘The Medieval Gilds of Stratford-upon-Avon and the Timber-Framed Building Industry’ (MA dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1961), 154, 169; SCLA, DR37/76. A tiler from Lapworth, Thomas Staffordshire, was another Arden-based worker employed by the guild.

⁷⁰ H. Dalwood and R. Edwards, Excavations at Deansway, Worcester, 1988–9: Romano-British Small Town to Late Medieval City (CBA Research Report 139, 2004), pp. 107–10, 187–90, 378–86, 432–5.

⁷¹ G. Egan, ‘Urban and Rural Finds: Material Culture of Country and Town c.1050–1500’, in Town and Country in the Middle Ages, edited by K. Giles and C. Dyer (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 22, 2005), pp. 199–210.

⁷² SCLA, DR37/114; PT, part 2, p. 674.

⁷³ PT, part 1, pp. 290, 294–7.

⁷⁴ Corpus Christi College, Oxford, B/14/2/3/4.

⁷⁵ PT, part 2, p. 669.

⁷⁶ SRO, D641/1/2/270, 271.

⁷⁷ SRO, D641/1/2/274.

⁷⁸ WAM, 21940; F.J. Eld, ed., Lay Subsidy Roll for the County of Worcester 1 Edward I (WHS, 1893), p. 50.

⁷⁹ E.A. Gooder, ‘Clayworking in the Nuneaton Area’, in Pottery Kilns at Chilvers Coton, Nuneaton, edited by P. Mayes and K. Scott (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 10, 1984), pp. 10–11.

⁸⁰ Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend; the pottery report can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492.

⁸¹ WCL, E51; Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend; small finds report can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492; W. Burnett, ‘Barston: An Archaeological Survey of an Arden Parish’, TBWAS 112 (2008), p. 28; whetstone and stoneware from Weston are finds made by the author.

⁸² For harvest workers receiving fish, WCL, C705 (Overbury); WAM 27694 (Knowle); for Pinbury, see J. Hart and others, Living Near the Edge (Cotswold Archaeology Monographs 9, 2016), p. 187; Chaddesley shop: SCLA, DR5/2798.

⁸³ TNA, SC2 210/71 (Wastel bread at Pershore); WA, ref. 009:1, BA2636/165/92225 4/8.

⁸⁴ T.R. Slater, ‘English Medieval New Towns with Composite Plans: Evidence from the Midlands’, in The Built Form of Western Cities, edited by T.R. Slater (Leicester, 1990), pp. 60–82; K.D. Lilley, ‘A Warwickshire Medieval Borough: Brinklow and the Contribution of Town-Plan Analysis’, TBWAS 95 (1993–4), pp. 51–60.

⁸⁵ Hilton, ‘Evesham’, pp. 3–4; Madge, ed., IPMs for Gloucestershire, 63–4, 80–3; Bearman, ed., Stratford-upon-Avon, p. 44; Demidowicz, Medieval Birmingham, p. 26; Hist Glouc, vol. 3, pp. 176–9.

⁸⁶ Beresford, New Towns, p. 441.

⁸⁷ Letters, Gazetteer, part 1, pp. 139–50; part 2, pp. 357–64, 380–4.

⁸⁸ C. Dyer, ‘Landscape and Society at Bibury, Gloucestershire, to 1540’, in Archives and Local History in Bristol and Gloucestershire, edited by J. Bettey (BGAS, 2007), pp. 75–6.

⁸⁹ Hilton, ‘Evesham’, p. 7; L. Toulmin Smith, ed., Leland’s Itinerary in England and Wales (London, 1909), vol. 5, p. 100.

⁹⁰ TNA, SC2/210/72,73, 74; WA, ref.705:139, BA 8397/1.

⁹¹ VCH Glouc, 7, pp. 78,115,117.

⁹² W. Barker, ‘Warwickshire Markets’, Warwickshire History 6 (1986), pp. 161–75.

⁹³ SRO, D641/1/2/269, 272, 274, 275; Bearman, ed., Stratford, pp. 50–3.

⁹⁴ VCH Glouc, 9, pp. 107, 110–11, 128.

⁹⁵ Palliser, ed., Cambridge Urban History, pp. 636–7.

⁹⁶ Dyer, ‘Hidden Trade’.

⁹⁷ Z. Razi, ‘The “Big Fire” of the Town of Birmingham’, TBWAS 88 (1976–7), pp. 135; C. Dyer, ‘Recovering from Catastrophe: How Medieval Society in England Coped with Disaster,’ in Waiting for the End of the World? New Perspectives on Natural Disasters in Medieval Europe, edited by C. Gerrard and others (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 43, 2021), pp. 227–31.

⁹⁸ C. Given-Wilson and others, eds., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504 (Woodbridge, 2005), vol. 13 p. 11; vol 14, p. 459.

⁹⁹ M. Mellor, ‘Oxfordshire Pottery’, Oxoniensia 59 (1994), pp. 17–217, especially pp. 111–40; Chilvers Coton, edited by Mayes and Scott, pp. 62, 68, 159, 164.

¹⁰⁰ M.R. McCarthy and C.M. Brooks, Medieval Pottery in Britain AD 900–1600 (Leicester, 1988), pp. 471–6.

¹⁰¹ C. Dyer, ‘Peasants and Coins: The Uses of Money in the Middle Ages’, British Numismatic Journal 67 (1998), pp. 30–47.

¹⁰² M. Andrews, ‘Coin Use and Circulation in the Medieval West Midlands, c.1066–1544AD’ (MA dissertation, University College, London, 2013).

¹⁰³ J.L. Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489 (Manchester, 2012), pp. 258–95.

¹⁰⁴ P. Fleming, ed., The Maire of Bristowe is Kalender (Bristol Record Society, 67, 2015).

¹⁰⁵ VCH Warw, 3, pp. 12–17; WCRO, CR1886/173D.

¹⁰⁶ N. Herbert, ‘Northleach: New Light on the Making of a Gloucestershire Town’, in Archives and Local History, ed. Bettey, pp. 17–26.

¹⁰⁷ VCH Warw, 8, pp. 423–4, 479; R.A Holt, The Early History of the Town of Birmingham 1166–1600 (DS Occasional Paper, 30, 1985), pp. 12–13; Bearman, ed., Stratford-upon-Avon, pp. 59–79.

¹⁰⁸ VCH Warw, 3, pp. 9, 19–20.

¹⁰⁹ W.B. Bickley, ed., Register of the Guild of Knowle (Walsall, 1894).

¹¹⁰ R.W. Ingram, ed., Coventry (Toronto, Records of Early English Drama, 1981), pp. xv–xviii.

¹¹¹ WA, ref. 705:99, BA5540/2.

¹¹² E.S. Fegan, ed., Journal of Prior William More (WHS, 1914), pp. 88, 91, 308, 309, 327, 405.

¹¹³ VCH Warw, 3, p. 12; J. Sayers and L. Watkiss, eds., Thomas of Marlborough. History of the Abbey of Evesham (Oxford, 2003), pp. 45–51; Toulmin Smith, Leland’s Itinerary, 2, p. 51.

¹¹⁴ VCH Warw, 3, p. 110; WCRO, CR1886/164, 170C, 173d.

¹¹⁵ A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire (English Place-Name Society, 38-41, 1960–5), part 3, p. 262; A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Worcestershire (English Place-Name Society, 4, 1927), p. 145.

¹¹⁶ VCH Warw., 5, p. 34; M. Gelling, Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England (London, 1978), pp. 83–6.

¹¹⁷ Smith, Gloucestershire, part 3, p. 110; P.A. Rahtz, ‘Upton, Gloucestershire, 1964–8’, TBGAS 88 (1969), p. 110; Hart and other, Living near the Edge. p. 178.

¹¹⁸ WCRO, CR 1886/170C, 173D.

¹¹⁹ Hilton, Medieval Society, pp. 255, 261.

¹²⁰ WCRO, CR1886/156.

¹²¹ Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry IV, vol. 1 1199–1401, pp. 552–3.

¹²² B. Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. The Regulation of Grain Marketing, 1256–1631 (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 137–9.

¹²³ T. Johnson, Law in Common. Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford, 2020), p. 126.

¹²⁴ British Library, Egerton Roll 8772.

¹²⁵ WCL, E27, E30.

¹²⁶ Dyer, ‘Small-town Conflict’, pp. 205–7.