Distinctive laces in the cityscape in geographic and economic terms.
By Dr. Charlotte Berry
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Bath Spa University
Introduction
A walk through fifteenth-century London, from its centre to its very fringes, would have taken less than half an hour. If our traveller began her journey at London’s heart, the conduit in Poultry where three major city streets converged, she would have found herself amid the cries of a busy market and the bustle of incessant cart traffic. Travelling north-east, she would have followed many of these carts and their horses clattering towards one of the city’s gates, dodging under low-hanging roof corners and weaving between the huckster women who carried bread and ale door to door. As she approached Bishopsgate, the pace of traffic would have slowed as the road narrowed between the ancient city walls. Past the gate, much would have seemed similar to the city within the walls. She would have seen a parish church immediately to her left and a mix of large and small houses lining the street, some with alleyways running between them, the sounds and smells of craftsmen working in their shops emerging from them. But our traveller could not have failed to have noticed that this was a different kind of neighbourhood. For one thing, the smell of discarded waste in the city ditch would have hit her as soon as she passed through the gate. Visible behind the churchyard and beyond the houses lay the open spaces of marshy Moorfields to the west and pastures to the east. There were two large, walled hospital complexes a hundred or so metres apart on either side of the road. If she had kept walking, she would have seen the houses becoming more widely spaced. Carts would have trundled along the ancient route, taking their loads to and from places in the countryside many miles away. She would have made her way beyond the bars marking the end of the city’s legal boundary and through the village of Shoreditch before completely open countryside dominated her view.
This essay will unpick what it was that marked out Bishopsgate and other extramural neighbourhoods as distinctive places in the cityscape in geographic and economic terms and sketch out the structures which shaped local society. As they were on the periphery of the city, natural features played a part in shaping the character and contours of these neighbourhoods. Much of the economic activity which provided the most lucrative aspects of the urban economy, such as markets and wharves, were sited elsewhere. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the extramural neighbourhoods were uniformly poor places. Their society was economically stratified and their marginal location provided opportunities for economic activity difficult to carry out within the more cramped city centre. These were important factors in the development of London as a whole, particularly the transition from the late medieval to the early modern city. The city’s northern and eastern peripheries were to become extremely populous and challenged by high levels of poverty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Until the end of the period considered here, demographic pressures were not a major factor in peripheral development, and yet in the economic topography of the fifteenth-century city lay the structures of inequality which produced early modern London.
Sources for Local Economic and Social Structure
The focus of this essay is on establishing the character of extramural spaces, whether extramural areas were generally poorer than the city centre, what kinds of people lived there and what were the distinctive features of the extramural economy. It does so through a focus on two main sources: testamentary and property records, carefully selected and sampled. As discussed in the introduction, most of the property records used are drawn from estate rentals, which are excellent sources of evidence for economic trends in cities. Catherine and Mark Casson have demonstrated for fourteenth-century Hull how differences in rent levels around the city related to the relative desirability of neighbourhoods.1 The analysis of ‘firm’ rents, which were the amounts actually owed by tenants as opposed to quit rents and other duties associated with property, has the advantage of suggesting the demand for property not as an investment for the owner but as a place of residence. Even though it is likely that some of the tenants recorded were not resident, the amount of firm rent owed on a property will have borne relation to the ability of tenants to pay and thus to the wealth of those who could afford to live in a given area. My analysis refers to rents across the whole period of study for this book, 1370 to 1540. This is a very long period over which to consider a cost like rent, but there are some justifications for doing so. Uneven distribution of records across the time period would hinder any attempt to consider rent in time series which could be adjusted for inflation: there is no consistency in the volume of records surviving from year to year and far more records exist for the final fifty years of the period, owing to the seizure of monastic property and associated documentation in the 1530s. Moreover, this was a period of relative stability: Keene and Harding’s study of Cheapside rents showed little change from around 1400 until the mid-sixteenth century, and national price and wage series suggest similar stability.2 Patchy survival of data is a problem for any historical quantitative analysis, especially when relying on the records of many institutions over such an extended duration. Proceeding with caution and paying attention to the nuances and gaps in the data is the best way to work with what we have rather than do nothing for lack of more perfect sources.
Extracting meaningful data about rent levels from the surviving sources requires some careful reading and handling of the records. Firstly, rentals often exist without deeds or leases to provide precise details of what property each tenant’s rental payment referred to. Indeed, some of the smallest sums probably related to tenancies-at-will for small units of an overall tenement plot, for which such documents most likely never existed. Secondly, these smaller units might change in their constitution and value over time, as they were periodically knocked together to be let as larger properties or subdivided into smaller ones, or the whole plot could be let out to a tenant who might or might not have sublet the smaller units. These issues create uncertainty, which presents challenges for long-running quantitative analysis, but these are not insurmountable. As part of the research for this book, a relational database was built to record information about the rents, leases, repairs and vacancies for properties in several areas of London from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Some properties were tagged as ‘multiple’ where it was clear that a rental charge covered a property with a number of units. All the information was linked over as many years as possible with a single property record. Where it was hard to trace a single property year to year (for instance, because both rental amounts charged and tenants names changed), to err on the side of caution a new property record was created each time a ‘new’ rental unit could not be connected to any other previous property. Where contextual information is available from leases and deeds, the database entry for properties was augmented with details such as whether they were in a thoroughfare or alleyway, whether they had a garden and clues to their economic function, such as a brewhouse or oven.
Throughout this book, I use a range of terms to describe parts of the city: ‘neighbourhoods’, ‘parishes’, ‘zones’ and ‘wards’. Some have more precision than others. ‘Parishes’ and ‘wards’ were contemporary terms and both had recognized legal boundaries, but ‘neighbourhood’ is an elastic term, rooted in people’s individual perceptions of their local social space. ‘Neighbourhood’ is nonetheless no anachronism: court depositions indicate that people spoke of their ‘neybors’, or vicini,and of their vicinia (neighbourhood), as it was rendered in the Latin of the records. What court deponents meant by ‘neighbourhood’ was contextual and malleabl.3 While ‘parish’ or ‘ward’ might be precise terms, it would be misleading to stick too firmly to institutional units of space: after all, a parish might contain a hundred people or two thousand people, while a ward spanned multiple parishes. Social and economic space did not map precisely within such arbitrary bounds. In researching this essay, in order to make the most of the surviving property records and to understand underlying trends in rent levels, records of properties which lay in eastern and northern areas of the city in and around the parishes which form the main focus of this book were gathered and grouped into zones. This reflects the fact that some properties were described by local landmarks or by their street rather than by their parish. Zones are divided within or without the walls, and the parishes and streets each zone covers are shown in Table 1. ‘Zone’ is my own term, applied as a means of grouping the records and this reflects the fact that parts of the city had differing economic characteristics and fortunes which did not conform to institutional boundaries.
The records of fourteen different estates that held property in these areas have been used: six were religious houses, four were parish churches and the remainder consisted of a craft guild, a cathedral, a chantry and a civic endowment. Since the records of properties held by individuals have rarely survived, institutional estates are far better represented. It could be that institutions charged higher or lower rents than individuals, were more or less active in maintaining property or attracted tenants of greater or lesser status. It may also be that the types of properties held by institutions were unrepresentative of their neighbourhoods as a whole.
However, given that many properties came to institutions via testamentary bequests from individuals, it seems unlikely that the properties described here were exceptional. Using the example of one group of properties that passed from private to institutional management suggests some of the possible differences and similarities between private and institutional management of property. The Black Horse (off Aldersgate Street) was in private hands until the 1480s, when it became part of the estate managed by the local churchwardens of St Botolph Aldersgate. Deeds from the 1430s copied into the records of the parish estate show that it was formed of a large street-front property with an alleyway containing multiple dwellings behind. The alley had a communal privy and well. The deeds also set out that the alley, hitherto managed by an individual as one sublet property, was to be divided in two between two owners, although it was reunited when given to the churchwardens.4 Larger properties may have presented more of a burden for individuals to maintain, particularly where multiple poor residents had to be chased for rent, as in Black Horse Alley. The churchwardens’ accounts reveal that they maintained the existing subdivision of the property. In the early sixteenth century they made an ill-fated attempt to farm the alley out to one individual, Gilbert Alanson, who was to collect rent from residents and pay the full annual rent regardless of vacancies. This attempt to reduce the burden of administration in fact proved an expensive mistake when the churchwardens had to take Alanson to court to recover some of the money.5 In sum, both private and institutional managers of the Black Horse maintained its subdivided arrangement and attempted to farm out the difficult business of rent collection to a single subtenant. Perhaps the greatest difference was in organizing and paying for repairs, which remained the responsibility of the churchwardens during Alanson’s subtenancy. This aspect of property management was perhaps the least attractive for individuals, whereas the churchwardens and other London institutions could simply use the same labourers who worked on their church or wider estate.
While individual inhabitants can be difficult to identify in property records, this essay uses them alongside wills, which give a far better picture of individual residents of a parish. As with all analyses based on testamentary bequests, the results will be representative of a small section of society that was wealthier than the broad population. Information about the individuals named in a will, even the testator themself, can be frustratingly incomplete: in a sizeable number of wills, the testator gave no indication of their occupation. For example, the 1440 will of William Curle from St Katharine Cree makes no reference to his occupation, nor to his being a citizen, and yet he very probably was one, since he left the custody of his underage children’s inheritance to the mayor and aldermen.6 Nonetheless, this is not too great a hindrance to the purpose of drawing a broad outline of local social structure. While a raft of lower-status occupations and individuals are likely to be under-represented in the results, there were will-makers in the sample who worked in a range of artisanal, mercantile and service trades. Despite their limitations, wills are some of the best sources for establishing urban economic and spatial patterns.7
As with property records, the analysis in this essay draws on a relational database of 450 wills drawn from four sample periods (1390–1410, 1430–50, 1465–95, 1515–40).8 Each will was identified either within the document itself or in the margin of the register as made by a testator who lived in a parish either outside or just inside the city walls: St Botolph Aldgate, St Botolph Aldersgate, St Botolph Bishopsgate and St Katharine Cree. A smaller set of wills was collected for the parish of St Lawrence Jewry for the period 1465–95 and 1515–40 to provide a point of comparison. It has not been assumed that St Lawrence Jewry was in any sense a ‘typical’ central parish or that its wills form a neutral ‘control group’. Nonetheless, the comparison with a central location helps to develop a sense of the distinctiveness of peripheral neighbourhoods and to provide a reference point for the analysis of differences between them. This essay explores what this dataset reveals about the economic and social structure of extramural neighbourhoods. This also draws on archaeological investigations and local court and taxation records, which provide considerable depth to the picture of topography and economy in fifteenth-century London.
Wealth and Poverty
At the outset, it is important to address one of the main assumptions about the extramural neighbourhoods that historians have made: that they were poor parts of the city.10 Was this the case? There are a number of different approaches through which we can assess the relative poverty or wealth of London’s neighbourhoods, none of them perfect. One of the most appealing is through records of taxation and levies for loans to the crown, which were, in the fifteenth century, administered by delegation to each ward of the city. The standard form of taxation was the fifteenth and tenth, charged in London at a rate of a fifteenth of a citizen’s moveable goods. The same principle of collection was applied for raising loans or grants to the crown and other sums.11 Wards were granted reductions to the amount they owed based on pleas of poverty. These are a very tempting means by which to assess relative wealth since, in theory, all areas were assessed against their inhabitants’ property. Similar records have been used elsewhere in the country in this way, with Mark Forrest utilizing fifteenth and tenth returns for the south-west to track economic decline during the fifteenth century.12 Forrest paid attention to the reductions allowed to settlements, arguing that commissioners used local knowledge of changes in wealth to determine where allowances would be made.13 Table 2 shows proportionate assessments for fifteenths (or parts of fifteenths) and loans or aids to the crown in London made between 1441 and 1462, drawn from assessments by ward which were copied into the journals of the city’s common council. Information about reductions is available only for the three earlier assessments. Figure 1.1 maps the average proportion of assessments borne by city wards. In general, there was a disparity between wards within and without the walls as well as between the west and the east of the city. Thus, Farringdon Without and Cripplegate in the west were the most heavily assessed extramural wards, while both Aldgate and Portsoken wards in the east were among the most lightly assessed in the city. The commercial centres of the city around Cheapside and London Bridge were where a greater proportion of assessed wealth lay.
The reductions applied to the assessments in the 1440s and 1453 give nuance to this pattern. Although Portsoken and Aldersgate were given very similar levels of assessment, Portsoken each time received a reduction to its contribution ranging between a third and a half. Aldersgate was apparently able to meet its assessment comfortably and saw its share double in the 1462 assessment. Cheap and Cordwainer Street were the most heavily assessed wards in the city, but they received considerable reductions of up to 27.5 percent. Out of all the wards deemed to have 4 percent or more of the city’s assessed wealth, only Farringdon Without, Bridge and Billingsgate were apparently able to pay their assessment with no reduction, and by the 1460s all three had duly seen their share of the assessment increase. The commercial districts near St Paul’s Cathedral and London Bridge and the attraction of wealthy customers to areas around the Inns of Court and routes to Westminster seem to have determined where the assessed wealth resided. The neighbourhoods focused on in this book all had a lesser share of those eligible for tax. Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Portsoken and Aldersgate wards, where the sample parishes lay, were in the lower half of wards for all the assessments studied. Their combined assessments contributed less than 10 percent of London’s total. The pattern indicated in Figure 1 shows a striking similarity to the spread of hearth tax assessments in the city in 1666, suggesting that the broad distribution of wealth in the city was resilient even as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrought great changes in London.14
However, ward level assessments are very crude measures of patterns of wealth. Since fifteenths assessed moveable goods but not wages, they are probably most effective at indicating the distribution of wealthy merchants around the city rather than the prosperity of the wider population. As a result, assessment levels could be dependent on a very small number of wealthy local residents contributing. The 1449 assessment in the ward of Portsoken was gathered from just six local residents, of whom Henry Jordan paid more than a third (twenty shillings) of the total assessment.15 The lay subsidy of 1512, which included wage-earners over fifteen years old, showed a similar distribution of assessment across the city to the earlier fifteenths, albeit that the proportionate assessment of extramural wards was slightly higher (around 3 percent each), as would be expected from a wider base of payers.16 It is clear with the fifteenths that it was common practice to charge prominent citizens with the deficit left by ward reductions. Notes after the 1441 assessment indicate that Nicholas Blome, the mayor Robert Clopton and John Houghton paid the deficit of Tower, Langbourn and Aldgate wards respectively.17 This suggests that we should be cautious about how comprehensive the recorded reductions to fifteenths are, as deficits might have been paid personally without being recorded in the city’s journals. However, the most important limitation to taxation evidence, demonstrated by Figure 1, is the inability to distinguish between different areas of a ward. This is a particular problem for Bishopsgate and Cripplegate wards, which extended from busy intramural shopping streets to extramural areas, and it seems likely (but is impossible to prove) that their assessed wealth was heavily concentrated within the walls. Wards or parishes might contain pockets responding to very different economic stimuli, especially where part of them lay outside the walls. The evidence from assessments can only ever be indicative, and the differences which could exist even within an administrative unit such as the ward or parish require consideration.
Utilizing evidence from property records gives a different and more geographically precise view of patterns of wealth around the city, although the information still requires sensitive handling. Table 3 indicates the mean and median annual rent values of properties found in each zone. This data excludes years when reported rent for a property was zero because it was vacant and also excludes properties that were clearly multiple dwellings being let to a single tenant who most likely sublet them to others. This latter exclusion has some impact on the average values but does allow for the best possible view of the costs of letting a single dwelling for an inhabiting tenant or household. There are significant divergences between the median and mean values of rents in many areas, most dramatically in the eastern extramural zone, which is indicative of the effect that small numbers of high-value properties have on the mean. The median takes into account the quantity of given values in a dataset and is thus a more appropriate measure, but even here caution is required.
Property records give a far more detailed picture of patterns of wealth and poverty than taxation. In the eastern part of the city there was a clear gap between the cost of renting in intramural St Katharine Cree than in the neighbouring areas outside the city wall. Living within the walls here cost more than double living without. In the north-east the picture is different because the intramural area studied was of a different character. Rental values were highly dependent on street frontage and were highest on the busiest thoroughfares.18 All Hallows on the Wall and St Augustine Papey followed the line of the city defences and, as a result, the median rental values were similar and even lower than in the neighbouring area outside Bishopsgate. It is important to recognize that all of these rental figures are far below those in the Cheapside area, the commercial heart of the city, where it was the norm to let substantial houses for over £3 (720 pence) a year.19 Rather than subdivide those properties into cheaper units when demand was low, landlords preferred to keep Cheapside properties as large complexes in the hope of attracting wealthy tenants.20 It can be reasonably concluded that rents were lower at the periphery of the city but that there was considerable variance between properties and areas. An intramural area without a major thoroughfare such as All Hallows on the Wall could, at a broad average, be as inexpensive as an extramural location. Moreover, there were significant differences in cost within and between extramural neighbourhoods which, to be fully explained, demand a much closer look at the distribution of rent costs within each zone.
The box and whisker chart in Figure 2 plots the spread of annual rent instances within each zone up to 1,000 pence per year. The solid box area reflects the range of costs in which half of the rents fell (the second and third quartiles of values), while the whiskers show the range of distribution of 99 percent of the rents, excluding outlying values, which are plotted as small circles. The mean value is shown with a cross and the median with a line. Effectively, the smaller the area covered by the box, the more homogeneous rental values were within that zone, and the larger the box, the greater were local disparities of cost. There are considerable differences between the box plots for each zone which reflect far more complex patterns of rental cost than simple averages. Most strikingly, the North-east Without zone was far more homogeneous in its low rents than any other area, while North-west Without, despite an overall lower median rent, had a much wider spread of costs. In effect, outside Bishopsgate, tenants tended to pay rents of a similar low value, while outside Aldersgate there were lots of tenants paying low rents living alongside many who paid much higher sums. The box plot also helps to clarify the similarities and differences between the Eastern Within and Eastern Without zones. While their average values were quite different, the range of rents was similar within and without Aldgate. In other words, there were proportionately more low-value rents outside Aldgate, but there were also many tenants paying higher costs similar to those inside the walls. The reasons for these patterns will be explored in the course of this essay, but for the moment it suffices to say that while tenants on the city’s periphery seem to have paid lower rents on the whole, some neighbourhoods, such as the city’s north-west, were highly stratified, with dwellers of high- and low-value properties side by side.
This sense of stratification within neighbourhoods and real differentiation between areas outside the city walls is reinforced by evidence from wills. Testamentary records cannot be considered simple proxies for wealth. As Clive Burgess argued, many or even most wills are only a partial representation of a testator’s final wishes, as it was common to made pre-mortem verbal arrangements.21 This was made clear by one testator, a pinner named Geoffrey Wade, who in his will warned his children against suing one another over his estate ‘in so much that I [have] given and bequeathed unto [them] … their parts of my goods afore this time beside the bequests’.22 However, by comparing conventional bequests that are shared in common across many wills it is possible to make something of an assessment of wealth. It was customary for testators to leave a sum to their parish church for tithes forgotten or underpaid in their lifetime, and this has been used as a rough measure of testator wealth in studies of London and Bury St Edmunds.23 Robert Dinn’s analysis of Bury found a high degree of correlation between forgotten tithe bequests and individual subsidy assessments,24 which suggests that we can be fairly confident in them as a measure of personal wealth.
While not all wills included a sum for forgotten tithes, the lack of these sums can be indicative of interesting social patterns. Although Robert Wood assumed that a lack of a bequest for tithes indicated extreme poverty,25 the wills of the 165 testators who left no tithe in the sample gathered in the course of research for this book suggest there may have been many other reasons for their omission. John Newport, Esquire, left no tithe to his parish church of St Botolph Aldersgate. He was no pauper, however, but a man with land at Calais and Chrishall Magna in Essex as well as in Golding Lane outside Aldersgate who requested burial in the chapel of Roger Walden, future archbishop of Canterbury, at St Bartholomew’s hospital. He seems to have been a minor official in royal administration who would thus have been very mobile and probably just happened to die at his London home in a parish to which he had little personal attachment.26 Indeed, the parish of St Botolph Aldersgate had the highest level of failure to make a bequest for forgotten tithes, at 46 percent of all wills. It was probably the significant presence of London houses of the gentry and aristocracy in the neighbourhood that drove this trend. St Lawrence Jewry had the lowest level, at 23 percent, and the remaining parishes all fell in the range of 36–40 percent. Forgotten tithe sums were usually fairly small in the context of other bequests, so it seems unlikely that their lack was always related to poverty. Particularly for those with otherwise large estates, not leaving money for forgotten tithes is more likely to indicate that a testator did not feel they owed their final parish of residence such an obligation.
The box and whisker graph at Figure 3 plots the sums for forgotten tithes, excluding wills where no such bequest was made, in a similar manner to the treatment of rents in Figure 2. The amount of data here is smaller than for rents, but there are interesting similarities which suggest a pattern. The parish of St Botolph Bishopsgate, which made up the bulk of the North-east Without rental data, again has the narrowest spread indicating homogeneously lower sums bequeathed for forgotten tithes than elsewhere. Combined with evidence from rents, it can be said with some confidence that this parish had a population which was, on the whole, poorer than other neighbourhoods and without great disparities of wealth. The pattern at St Botolph Aldersgate also echoes the stratification of rents, with a wider range of forgotten tithe sums than in other extramural parishes. The central parish St Lawrence Jewry looks far more similar to St Botolph Aldersgate and St Katharine Cree in its distribution than to the remaining extramural parishes, albeit that Aldersgate had a wider total range than either. The difference in the east between the parishes within and without the walls was more pronounced than with rents, with a far more homogeneous band of low forgotten tithe amounts in St Botolph Aldgate than in St Katharine Cree.
The peripheral areas were generally less wealthy than parishes within the walls by each of these measures. While, taken in isolation, each source has its pitfalls, in combination they give a nuanced impression of the distribution of wealth around the city. The neighbourhood outside Aldersgate was home to some of the wealthiest residents, while still containing property affordable to far humbler Londoners. Bishopsgate, at the other end of the spectrum, was on the whole the least wealthy of the three extramural areas. This suggests the problems inherent in the evidence of ward taxation assessments as, in these, Bishopsgate ward (which had a significant proportion within the walls) was assessed quite highly in comparison to other extramural wards. The exceptionally low taxation assessments for the area outside Aldgate are not fully reflected by other measures of wealth but, as we shall see, this was a neighbourhood with a very varied social composition. The city within the walls, as represented by St Lawrence Jewry and St Katharine Cree, was wealthier, but the low value of rental properties in the North-east Within zone are a reminder that there were places where poorer Londoners could afford to live. No single parish was homogeneously poor or wealthy, but there were real differences in relative wealth which underpinned many of the social and economic characteristics of the neighbourhoods.
The Natural and Built Environment
The natural and built environment of the urban periphery was distinctive. Roads, walls and watercourses differentiated the margins of the city from the centre visually and economically. In turn, the buildings, gardens and open spaces in extramural areas reflected the particular economy of the city’s fringe. The evidence of property records as well as local wardmote and assize of nuisance presentments, which dealt with complaints about shoddily built structures and incursions on to public land, reveal a wealth of detail about the local environment and the ways in which it was used by Londoners. More so than poverty, it was the character of extramural space which defined its marginal nature between city and countryside.
London’s wall and gates were an imposing feature of the fifteenth-century city, although not much called on for military defence. Participants in both the Jack Cade (1450) and Warwick (1470–71) rebellions approached the city from the south of the Thames and were kept out by defences on London Bridge.27 The notable failure of London’s defences during the 1381 Rising was due to the opening of the city’s gates to the rebels by Londoners. Even during the intermittent civil war of the fifteenth century, military defence for Londoners never seems to have been taken all that seriously and the walls were allowed to fall into disrepair several times.28 This is perhaps a sign of the co-dependency of city and crown: what point would there be in a rival for the crown sacking London, after all, when it was so important for the national economy and the royal coffers? The walls fell into decay from the later fourteenth century and were substantially rebuilt in the late fifteenth century with an enlarged entry at Moorgate and the addition of supports to protect against cannon fire.29 The defensive ditch which surrounded the walls had to be frequently re-cut owing to its use by Londoners as a rubbish dump.30 Far more common than defensive need, however, was the use of the gates by the city government as sites to demonstrate their authority and to police incomers. Civic-appointed wardens guarded the gates and were responsible for denying entry to those considered undesirable. In 1454, these men (who in most cases were also ward beadles) were sworn to prevent lepers and vagrants from entering the city. The list of those sworn suggests that at four gates (Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate and Newgate) there was an additional assistant warden (custos valletus).31 These were presumably the busiest gates, where greater traffic necessitated an extra pair of eyes. The wardens’ position at the city’s gates also marked the symbolic importance of the wall as a moral boundary. Prostitutes expelled from the city were paraded to the city gates, not its bars, by civic officers, and felons and heretics were executed beyond the walls at Smithfield. The city beyond the gates was left undefended militarily and, symbolically, was surrendered to those who might corrupt the city with disease or immorality.
Waterways were also important elements of the extramural environment. The Walbrook stream was covered and built over within the walls but ran openly to the north of the city.32 It created a large area which seems to have been too damp and prone to flooding to be much developed in this period. To the west of the stream Moorfields was pastureland completely free of building until the later sixteenth century, with just an access causeway to Moorgate constructed in 1511 and tentergrounds for the stretching of cloth.33 Archaeological excavation on the west side of Bishopsgate Street near the stream has revealed that, up until c.1400, this was vacant ground with a pond which regularly flooded.34 It was not until after 1450 that the landlord, the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate, constructed brick buildings, including one which covered the former pond. Yards, gardens and cesspits were in use here in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.35 The character of the area north of the city wall was shaped by the Walbrook stream, encouraging the retention of open ground here and making its development uneconomical until there was sufficient demand in the late fifteenth century. To the east of the city, too, the numerous streams and the marshy ground were initial reasons why suburban development was sparser there than in the west.36 Here, the moat of the Tower of London was filled by the Thames and, according to complaints at the Portsoken wardmote court, attracted an ‘accumulation of refuse, filth and other fetid matter on Tower Hill, whereby the air [was] foully corrupted and vitiated and the lives of those dwelling or passing there were endangered’.37 On the Thames itself, St Katharine’s Wharf and Tower Wharf allowed ships to dock while stairs enabled locals to collect water from the river and do their washing. The commercial activity associated with the wharves provided lucrative income for St Katharine’s Hospital and the holder of the farm of Tower Wharf.38 The noxious fumes produced by rubbish dumped in the city ditch and the presumed disorderliness of gathering laundresses at extramural water sources served to underline the association between extramural areas and ‘dirt, prostitution, poverty and disorderly conduct’.39
More than either the walls or the waterways, it was roads that dominated the topography and economy of extramural areas. Despite the beginnings, described above, of more intensive development in the later fifteenth century, the roadway at Bishopsgate appears to have retained its status as the dominant draw for development well into the sixteenth century. The map of London known as the copperplate or ‘Agas’ map (dated to c.1560) in Figure 2 still shows a neighbourhood where the land behind the street-facing houses was mainly gardens and tenteryards.40 The parish of St Botolph Aldersgate was similar in that its institutional boundaries followed the course of the approach road, and land behind houses to the east of the street was laid out as gardens. Unlike Bishopsgate, however, lanes to the west connected the parish to well-developed neighbourhoods around Smithfield and Clerkenwell. Ribbon development drew urbanization out along the approach roads in a manner which complicates our view of where London itself can be deemed to end. At Whitechapel and Norton Folgate, urban development extended past the bars marking the end of the city’s jurisdiction. To the north-west it was Smithfield market, rather than a major entry to the city, that attracted development across jurisdictional boundaries.41
The Infrastructure of Mobility
Routes of transport also profoundly shaped the economy of the city’s periphery by connecting it with the economy of the wider region. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the area of the River Lea valley in Essex and Hertfordshire to London’s north and east became far more commercialized in supply of the city’s markets.42 Commercialization was driven by the demand of London markets but also by the active investment of Londoners in pasture and crop-growing land in the hinterland.43 Produce and livestock from the region were transported via Ermine Street, which ended at Bishopsgate, or were conveyed down the River Lea, transferred to carts at Stratford some three miles from the city and then transported on the approach road terminating at Aldgate, with livestock taken for sale and slaughter at East Smithfield market.44 To the northwest, driving routes from the midlands ended at Clerkenwell and West Smithfield market. The livestock markets necessitated pastureland in the immediate environs of the city and other goods were simply more convenient to process outside the walls. On Aldgate Street, a property described as a timberyard contained a yard and two storehouses would have been well positioned to process wood coming in via the route from Stratford. At just five shillings rent per year this kind of land use would perhaps have been profitable only in an extramural area with less intensive development.45
Large properties in extramural neighbourhoods often seem to have had facilities for keeping horses. The Axe without Aldgate had a stable, as did a number of other large properties with multiple functions such as the Hert’s Horn, which was on the same street and also had shops, a melting house and a ‘sopehouse’, and a tenement owned by St Paul’s in Barbican which, in addition to a stable, had its own mill.46 The nature of the records means that it is difficult to tell whether stables were solely used by the tenants or if they served as livery stables. Nonetheless, stables were also rented as standalone properties in George Alley outside Bishopsgate and within London Wall in the parish of All Hallows.47 Stabling, pasturing and storage were necessitated by the flow of goods and people along city approach roads and were important effects of routes of transit on the extramural built environment and economy.
Roads outside city walls were so busy that they struggled to handle the volume of traffic. The maintenance of the road surface was a constant difficulty, owing to the lack of central organization of paving. Instead the city relied on householders or tenants to repair the section of road lying outside their house. This system was particularly difficult to enforce on wide extramural approach roads, where the demand on individuals to repair heavily trafficked highways to a point a couple of metres before their front door was unworkable.48 As a result, complaints about broken pavements and highways full of dangerous potholes were the most numerous indictments in the returns of Bishopsgate and Farringdon Without wardmotes in 1421–3, with more complaints in Bishopsgate ward than in the rest of the city combined.49 Sometimes, as in this extract from the presentment of the Aldersgate wardmote jury in 1510, one can gain a sense of the scale of the problem from the volume and geographical specificity of the complaints:
Seint Botollph [Aldersgate]
Item we pressente the pamentt before the parsonage and a chimney ayen the parsonage. Item we pressent the paments before John Bone gardeyn to the Spittyll rente. Item we pressente the pament of the Spyttyll rents fro John Honys garden unto thynke [sic] before Seint Bartylmews gate. Item we pressent all the pentyse and the paments of the Bolle rents. Item we pressent all the pament of the Lyon Rentys to the Brethered [brotherhood] halle. Item we pressent all the pament fro the Blakehorsse to the Pryorie of Hownselow rents. Item we pressent al the paments fro the Pekoc to Henmarsshe howse. Item we pressent all the paments of Master Darnolde rents fro the barrys [city bars] to the Anteloppe corner.50
And so it goes on. The task which faced wardmote juries in the periphery attempting to ensure the maintenance of roads was formidable. It was perhaps made harder by the lower value of property, which may have made landlords unwilling to invest in expensive repairs to larger expanses of road than would have been necessary within the walls.
All that traffic produced a huge demand in the extramural neighbourhoods for lodgings. These ranged from officially sanctioned inns to informal hostelries and lodgings for the sick, including lepers, who would have been turned away by the wardens on the gates. Innkeeping was held by the civic government to be a position of great responsibility: all those who lodged a newcomer beyond a day and a night were to stand surety for their guest’s good behaviour.51 In larger towns and cities, innkeepers were generally men of substance and in London were expected to be members of the guild of hostellers (incorporated as the Innholders Company from 1516).52 Though we lack numbers, London undoubtedly had the largest concentration of inns of any city in England: Southwark south of the city had twenty-two inns alone at the time of the 1381 poll tax.53 Identifiable inns close to the city gates in extramural neighbourhoods include the George and the Harp outside Bishopsgate and the Axe outside Aldgate.54 Inns were substantial premises, requiring serious investment from their owners and tenants to maintain facilities, and at the highest end catered for the city’s visiting gentry. There was, however, considerable demand for cheaper lodgings and for accommodation for those whom innkeepers, in their role as part of the city’s surveillance system, would be unwilling to take in. Such places were known by the early sixteenth century as ‘petty hostries’, and they are best documented in complaints about them at the wardmote. In 1528 George Brown of St Anne and St Agnes parish, within Aldersgate ward, was complained of for keeping ‘petty ostry’ and the resorting of men’s servants to his house.55 In a presentment dated c.1512–24, in the same ward Thomas Burger and his wife were indicted for ‘keeping of petty ostry of seke and laser people [i.e. lepers]’, and Alice Epps and John Bott were complained of for ‘keeping of people of the poxe and other diseased persons’.56 There were regulations, discussed above, which ordered the city gate wardens to turn away those suspected of leprosy and other diseases, though, intriguingly, all these presentments were from parishes in the small portion of Aldersgate ward within the city walls, suggesting that the wardens were not particularly effective. Perhaps sick people came to the city hoping for lodging in one of its many hospitals and, unable to enter one, turned to lodging houses near the gates. The shadowy world of petty hostelries is difficult to recover, but taking in a weary traveller or two would undoubtedly have been an attractive business on the fringes of a city like London, particularly for the poor, if they had the space. Taking in lodgers was a common strategy for widows and single women seeking to supplement their incomes in the medieval and early modern periods.57 It is important to remember that the infrastructure of mobility was just as much made up of the economy of makeshifts, the hundreds of people taking one or two newcomers into their homes leaving no documentary trace, as it was by the large inns and wide roads that fell into civic oversight. The fundamental mobility of extramural neighbourhoods relied on the presence of this infrastructure.
Open Spaces and Gardens
Alongside the busy roads and impromptu rubbish dumps, there were aspects of extramural space which were more pleasant and even semi-rural in character. Until the later seventeenth century, there was a ring of open spaces and gardens around the city.58 Southwark’s 1381 Poll Tax return numbers a small but significant proportion of gardeners among residents, and gardens were a feature of that neighbourhood until their development in the sixteenth century.59 North of the river, evidence from cases brought under the assize of nuisance suggests that space dedicated to gardens declined within the walls across the fifteenth century, making it a more distinctive feature of the city fringe. In cases heard between 1370 and 1431 where a garden was mentioned, six of twenty-eight of the properties in question were outside the walls, compared to twelve of fifteen viewers’ reports that mention gardens in 1500–1530.60 As a result, there was a demand for dedicated market gardening plots outside the city walls. There were gardens on Tower Hill owned by the churchwardens of St Mary at Hill from at least the late fifteenth century, composed of a mixture of cottages with gardens, small gardens, a tennis court and a ‘great garden’.61 Gardens were also a feature of St Botolph Bishopsgate. Rentals from the local hospital of St Mary grouped rents from the gardens and other open plots of land into a separate list. In 1468, there were eleven tenants, some of whom leased more than one garden, with a variety of occupations. Richard Bray, fuller, rented two gardens, and the widow of John Thorp, scrivener, paid 2s 6d for her garden for a year.62 John Roke, butcher, rented a pasture from the hospital called ‘Wodelane’ at Whitechapel.63 In a couple of cases, it is clear that the gardens were let by those who lived elsewhere in the city: Roke’s will shows that he was resident in St Botolph Aldgate, and another garden tenant is named as ‘Baker bocher in Eschepe [Eastcheap]’.64
It was not just gardens which brought people out to the city fringe: recreation was an important aspect of their utility to the wider city. Much of this was informal. John Stow remembered that people went to the city’s eastern fringe during his childhood in the 1530s ‘therein to walke, shoote, and otherwise to recreate and refresh’.65 There were also commercial venues for leisure here. In a 1511 consistory court case, St Botolph Aldersgate’s parishioners complained that one of their parish chaplains neglected his duties and instead ‘attended cock fights in the house of Master Pikton and inside Aldgate and at “le boutts” [archery butts] also in the cemetery in the same place’.66 The best-documented commercial leisure activities at the fringes of the city were those that catered to London’s large Dutch-speaking community. Closhbanes were playing areas for a bowls-like game which originated in the Low Countries.67 In the Portsoken wardmote presentments, closhbanes were indicted thirty-four times between the 1460s and 1480s.68 Closhbanes or alleys were also frequently noted in the court rolls of the liberty of Norton Folgate along Bishopsgate Street. Simon Richard was fined multiple times in the 1440s for keeping a closhbane in his garden, a notorious local dive described as the cause of many affrays which local residents were ordered not to visit in 1442 on pain of a 20-shilling fine.69 Richard himself was an immigrant, probably from the Low Countries,70 and given that the city’s eastern suburbs and Norton Folgate both had considerable immigrant communities, as discussed below, it is unsurprising that closhbanes should proliferate.
The urban margins could provide space and recreation to those who lived within the walls. That extra space also influenced the size and character of the buildings. Although we lack plans for extramural properties at this early date, it is evident that some properties were large, with multiple potential commercial functions. For example, the Axe, a tenement on Aldgate Street just outside the gate, was an inn with a brewhouse and a bakehouse. The dean and chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral owned the property as part of John of Gaunt’s chantry, and their workmen were responsible for maintaining the fabric of the building as well as the fittings, such as vats, barrels, taps and the oven, which enabled the tenants to carry on their business.71 Four of the Axe’s fifteenth-century tenants were brewers, and John Brice, who leased the property in the 1470s and 1480s, was a butcher. Given that repairs in 1456 note fourteen shillings paid to three carpenters for ‘repairs and amendments of diverse of the houses and chambers in the same place’, it is most likely that even the brewers did not occupy the whole of the Axe and sublet a number of other domestic units on the property to tenants of whom we have no record.72 Other large extramural properties could be very fine houses rather than commercial properties; an early sixteenth-century house excavated on the west side of Bishopsgate Street was well built with a mixture of cream Flemish and red London bricks and backed on to gardens and yards.73 It is difficult to gauge the grandeur of such houses from their description in property records, but it is easy to imagine that, for example, the great inn with hall, several chambers, a mill, solar, garden and stable at Barbican which the dean and chapter of St Paul’s regularly spent large sums repairing from the 1390s to the 1470s was probably impressive.74
The rus in urbe quality of London’s extramural neighbourhoods was enhanced by the style of its buildings. In Portsoken, by far the most numerous wardmote charges in the late fifteenth century were against sheds covered with reeds and wooden chimneys, which Christine Winter argued evidences a preoccupation with risk from fire.75 However, given the sparse population of Portsoken, it also suggests the persistence of construction materials that were better suited to rural areas, in spite of building regulations against such practices being long established in London.76 Perhaps, although jurors were aware that the wardmote precepts bound them to report roofs of thatch and wooden chimneys,77 the inhabitants and landlords of Portsoken did not perceive their neighbourhood as a dense urban space in need of protection from fire. This would explain the very large number of charges – 449 across the Portsoken presentments, which equates to 19 percent of all charges of any type for the period 1373–1528 – and their continuance of complaints year after year with seemingly little change.
Housing the Poor
In some neighbourhoods outside the walls, additional space was used to build complexes of alleyway housing which led away from major roads. These small, cheap properties were to become a dominant feature of London’s development as population pressure prompted subdivision across the city in the sixteenth century.78 Commonly, the alley was placed behind a larger property which occupied valuable street frontage. The whole complex was often named for the sign that hung on its street front. This was the case for the Black Horse, the property discussed above which was owned by the churchwardens of St Botolph Aldersgate. In the 1490s it contained three properties along Aldersgate Street with annual rents between ten shillings and 13s 4d which were arranged across a gateway to an alley behind and where there were fourteen rents let for four shillings per annum each.79 These fourteen small houses had a communal well and privy.80 In the neighbourhood outside Bishopsgate, the hospital of St Mary had built at least one alleyway on its lands on the main road by the 1460s and five by the 1490s, named as George, Bell, Harp and Stuard alleys, and one simply known as the alley ‘before the well’.81 Rents were uniformly four or five shillings per annum, compared to costs ranging from five shillings to £3 for properties in front of the alleys or elsewhere along Bishopsgate Street. A number of these alleys led to the hospital’s garden plots.82 Detailed rentals in 1493–1506 for the Black Horse and the hospital of St Mary’s Bishopsgate properties allow insight into patterns of vacancy and occupation during that time.
As Table 4 indicates, vacancies were 10 percent more common among thoroughfare properties than those in alleyways. London’s population was beginning to rise in this period, but it was small properties that were most in demand. At Cheapside, property owners preferred to maintain large tenements rather than subdivide into small houses, so repaired and kept them vacant until a tenant could be found for the whole property.83 As the city’s precipitous population rise got under way in the sixteenth century, it was to be these modest dwellings that housed the majority of newcomers. The pace of development was different across the city, with alleyways first appearing in St Botolph Aldgate in the 1540s.84 The changes in fifteenth-century Bishopsgate Street with its increasing number of alleys were a microcosm of later patterns of urban development and of how property owners would cater to poor newcomers. At four or five shillings per annum, extramural alleyway ‘rents’ were affordable in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, even for day labourers who might earn £3 in a good year in the same period.85
Religious Houses and Their Impact
Directing much extramural urban development were London’s religious houses, which lay mainly outside or at the edges of the walled city. Many houses owned much of the property surrounding their precincts: in 1539, Holy Trinity Priory’s estate had eighty-one named tenants in the surrounding parish of St Katharine Cree.86 Growing from sometimes just a single tenement plot, over time they acquired neighbouring land and accrued property elsewhere within and outside the city, often by gifts and bequests from the laity, which provided rental income to support the religious community and its activities.87 Extramural houses acted as nuclei for local urban development in London and other cities but were also, crucially, active in the shaping of the local property market.88 In the fifteenth century, many houses and hospitals increasingly looked to lay tenants as a source of income. Within the precincts, this resulted in a proliferation of structures built or repurposed for the use of lay tenants. At the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate, areas of the outer precinct which had previously been used for crops and grazing animals were instead built on and leased out.89 By the time the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces, East Smithfield, was built in the late fourteenth century, it was evidently thought unnecessary to construct many buildings for ancillary activities (such as food processing) traditionally included in religious precincts and by at least 1425 it had lay tenements.90 Initially tenants were of high status, attracted by large tenements with special access to church services in the precinct.91 Lay tenements became common in almost all houses and hospitals by the early sixteenth century, by which time they had become a lucrative income stream.92
In this later period, development of low-status housing became a common strategy in their estate management. As we have already seen, the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate used its lands in the parish of St Botolph Bishopsgate to build alleyways containing cheap, probably small houses called ‘rents’.93 It also built a set of alms houses between the precinct wall and Bishopsgate Street called Crown Rents.94 At Austin Friars, parts of the outer precinct were developed into small tenements in the later fifteenth century.95 On a similarly cramped intramural plot, Holy Trinity Priory had also added lay housing to the fringes of its precinct by 1500.96 In parishes like St Botolph Bishopsgate and St Katharine Cree, where a single local institution also owned much of the land, there was great potential for the priorities of a house or hospital to shape the character of a neighbourhood through its building programme and the kinds of tenants it chose to attract. Their legal privileges, discussed further below, allowed for the continuation of prostitution as well as the residence of those avoiding craft regulations such as immigrants, who were (officially at least) barred from citizenship of London.
The houses would have consumed considerable provisions and other resources which they could not wholly source from their estates in the countryside or produce within their increasingly crowded precincts. Westminster Abbey, whose accounts have been well studied, provides a model which was probably similar to London’s extramural houses. The abbey generally preferred to buy in London’s main markets rather than rely on local middlemen in Westminster. A notable exception was meat, where the abbey made use of local butchers, and it seems likely that this pattern may have been repeated in neighbourhoods such as those outside Aldgate and Aldersgate with suburban butchers’ markets.97 Economic ties with religious houses could also be reciprocal. In 1524, the renter of the Abbey of St Mary Graces noted two tenants who paid their rents not in cash but in the products of their crafts: Owen Williams, a baker who gave his full annual rent of £4 13s 4d to the abbey in bread, and Peter Curteys, pewterer, who gave 32s 8d worth of vessels.98 Direct employees might also be their tenants. In a 1473 rental for the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate, a tenant called Deonisia (Denise?) was described as a former porter or gatekeeper of the hospital (nuper servientem ianitorem hospitalis). She paid four shillings per annum for a property in St Botolph Bishopsgate parish.99 Another possible employee was a tenant described as ‘Floraunce Porter’, in the 1524 rental for the Abbey of St Mary Graces, who also paid a low rent (five shillings).100 While not plentiful, the surviving evidence is suggestive of the existence of economic ties between the houses and their surrounding lay communities. More broadly important for the extramural economy is that religious houses’ property-management strategies would have had a real impact on who could afford to live in a neighbourhood and what occupations were practised there, particularly when they were landlords for large parts of the area. It is likely that they used some of their properties for charitable purposes, which blurred the line between alms houses and cheap ‘rents’, of which the case of the former porter may be an example. In sixteenth-century Venice, the charitable use of property by landlords is well documented and endowments for the provision of housing to poor people were a relatively common bequest among the city elites.101 In the absence of the information networks that developed through print culture in the early modern period, finding property to rent must have relied on word of mouth and thus pre-existing connections to an institution seem a probable means through which to find accommodation.102
Another tangible impact of religious houses on the city’s periphery was the persistence of prostitution there. The legal exemptions which removed religious houses from civic and royal jurisdiction allowed the continuance of the sex trade as well as other illicit activities. Prostitution in Southwark has been well studied by historians, with its regulated brothels and ordinances governing the contractual relationship between pimps and prostitutes.103 Westminster, too, developed districts associated with prostitution.104 Closer to the city, the precinct of St Katharine’s Hospital and the Abbey of St Mary Graces, both near Tower Hill, seem to have been particular hotspots, with a ‘stewhouse’ mentioned in the court roll of the abbey’s precinct for 1434, together with many complaints about prostitutes in both institutions’ liberties.105 London’s civic authorities banned prostitution within the city, although when they conceded that not all prostitution could be kept out of their jurisdiction it was to the suburbs that they looked as the appropriate space for a limited area of tolerated brothels (Cock Lane in the parish of St Sepulchre without Newgate).106 Even beyond liberties, prostitution seems to have been more common outside the walls. This sense is suggested in the records of the London commissary court, an ecclesiastical court to which sexual misdemeanours were sometimes referred from the wardmote.107 Out of 104 cases heard at the commissary between March and June 1515, thirteen were for offences relating to prostitution and pimping; ten were in extramural parishes, with six in St Botolph Aldgate alone.108 Extramural parishes including St Botolph Aldgate and St Botolph Bishopsgate dominated accusations of sexual misdemeanours at the commissary court more generally.109 The proximity of liberties and, in the east, the maritime community at St Katharine’s may well have been the cause. The extramural neighbourhoods may have offered venues where it was easier to evade detection. However, not all those living outside the walls accepted pimping and prostitution as part of the local economy. As Martin Ingram has argued, even in Southwark local householders frequently complained about and sought to end their neighbours’ brothel-keeping.110 The embeddedness of religious houses in the fabric of extramural neighbourhoods is a recurring theme in this book. Their local role is a powerful reminder of how inextricable institutional, social and economic ties were in the city.
Household and Economy
Turning from the institutions which shaped extramural neighbourhoods towards their society and economy requires a return to the analysis of property and wills. Of course, the limitations outlined at the start of this essay about the surviving property records and wills mean we cannot be sure that, for example, named tenants in rentals were in fact resident, and the poorest households are no doubt under-represented. There are nonetheless meaningful observations which can be made on society and economy outside the walls. The gender balance among tenants is one such area where limited sources can lead to interesting conclusions about the kinds of households occupying the urban margins. Women made up 12 percent of the 1842 tenants in the sample, men 87 percent, and a small number were not identifiable based on their name. Since named tenants were most likely heads of household, if they were resident, this imbalance is to be expected. Women named as tenants would probably have been widows or single women who had never married heading their own households, rather than wives.111 In every neighbourhood, women paid lower rents than men as shown in Figure 4. The median annual rent where a woman was named as tenant was 48 pence (four shillings) against 108 pence (nine shillings) for men. Lower rents among women probably indicate smaller houses, fewer people in their households and smaller means of support. This pattern recurs across all the neighbourhoods, but with great variation in the size of the gender gap. The greatest gap was in the North-east Within zone, where women paid just 39 percent of the rent that men did, but the smallest difference was just over the wall in the area outside Bishopsgate, where women paid 83 percent of the median rent for male tenants. In other neighbourhoods, women paid between roughly a half and two thirds.
This gender rent gap had many causes, one of which was probably the charitable use of housing by institutions. The female tenants in the North-east Within zone almost all had the same landlord, the Carpenters’ Company. All but three of the properties they rented were part of the company’s cheap ‘rents within the Hall’, costing less than six shillings per year in the parish of All Hallows on the Wall. These were part of a complex of properties attached to the company hall, and many or even most of the tenants were most likely company members or their widows. Of 106 tenants named in 1440–1500 within the company accounts, 30 percent were mentioned as receiving or making payments in various other roles such as enrolling apprentices, receiving alms or paying for their freedom. Many tenants were widows who, if they had a connection to the company through their husbands, would be unlikely to feature in the records before their widowhood, suggesting that this is a significant undercount. Until 1458, these chambers were described in the company accounts as an alms house.112 Even after this date, the properties still served a charitable function. The company was an extremely lenient landlord: many tenants ‘within the hall’ were permitted to pay rent ‘old and new’ at the same time, gave sums in part payment, or even had their rent paid for them by other tenants. In at least one case, a tenant paid with household goods in lieu of cash.113 The women living here, then, were poor, probably company widows, and were housed partly out of charity, and poor widows often made use of institutional connections to support them in their old age.114 The Carpenters’ rents also had male tenants, but the average rent for men in the North-east Within zone as a whole is raised by the amounts paid for properties elsewhere, including a house with a garden and stable and a number of cottages with gardens.115 The same kind of difference drove the disparity between men and women elsewhere; in the North-west Without zone, thirty-five of the forty-two female tenants lived in Black Horse Alley. While both men and women of small means rented cheap properties, men on the whole had access to greater resources and therefore were more likely to find themselves in a position to occupy larger houses with greater amenities and the potential to house more servants or a workshop. The same was true in Coventry, where Charles Phythian-Adams found that the poorest houses were more likely to be female-headed and with an average household size of just 1.8 people.116 Sarah Rees Jones has described similar small properties, typically in alleyways, in York as ‘a form of dormitory style housing provided for people who were expected to sell their labour to others’. In York, too, they had a higher than usual number of female-headed households.117 She argued that these tenants were excluded from the late medieval urban polity and were denied the status of householder, making a clear connection between access to domestic space and urban social status.118 For the women who lived here, however, their residency could be viewed more positively as enabling them to live in a city which was often hostile to female labour as well as perhaps giving them a sense of safety and community in the enclosed space of the alleyway.
The women of the neighbourhood outside Bishopsgate provide a fascinating and somewhat contrasting case. In this area, women made up the joint highest proportion of testators (22 percent), and 14 percent of all testators were explicitly described as widows. Women constituted 18 percent of all tenants, a little higher than in the total sample. However, as the median rent disparity for this area shown in Figure 1.4 suggests, women paid rents dramatically closer to those of men than in other neighbourhoods. What was so unusual about these women and their households? Many seem to have been widows: fifteen of the forty-six women tenants were described as widows in the rentals and others probably were too, without this identification being made in the property records. Avice Shrewsbury, whose will was proved in 1489, twenty-eight years after that of her husband, John, was a Bishopsgate tenant in her widowhood, although this status was never mentioned in rentals. She is in fact emblematic of the more varied kinds of property that women rented in this area. In 1469 she rented a tenement on Bishopsgate Street for £1 per year, and Agnes Buckby leased an inn called the George on the same street for five shillings; the pair also paid 13s 4d between them for a third tenement on the street.119 By 1473, Agnes was no longer mentioned, but Avice paid 33s 4d ‘for her rent’.120 Avice’s tenement was probably the ‘shop with all its instruments and necessaries pertinent to it’ left to her by her husband, who was a blacksmith. Under John Shrewsbury’s will, Avice was allowed to retain his shop and tools ‘from which to sustain her and her children’ so long as she remained unmarried.121 She seems to have done so until her death, and through co-tenancy with Agnes Buckby was perhaps engaged in some kind of commercial partnership on the side of her business as a blacksmith.122 Other women with more modest means also lived in the neighbourhood, many clustered in the alleys which ran away from the main street. For instance, in Stuard Alley in 1505, four of the six occupied houses had female tenants (Margaret Brown, Elene Thorpe, Margaret Luffdale and Joan Nutte), all paying an annual rent of four shillings.123 What was different about Bishopsgate Street, however, was that women rented properties with a range of costs which were fairly similar to those of local men: for every Margaret Brown in a cheap ‘rent’ there was an Agnes Buckby occupying a major thoroughfare property. Probably because of its general cheap housing, female artisans such as Avice Shrewsbury could afford to make the choice to keep their own households here and preserve the resources left to them in their widowhood.
This was a more general pattern among all Bishopsgate tenants, male and female. There were only five tenants who worked as servants in the whole sample; four were labourers and one was a retired porter, and all lived in the area outside Bishopsgate. The most expensive property between them was rented by labourer John Bramsgrove outside George Alley for ten shillings a year.124 Lower property values made housing affordable for those with the most precarious occupations as well as those who, despite moderate resources, might have struggled to find city-centre accommodation.
There were, however, many in more prosperous households living outside the walls, which corresponded far more closely with the medieval urban ideal. The ‘model’ late medieval household, headed by a married couple engaged in a trade and also perhaps containing children, servants, apprentices and journeymen, required at least a modest amount of capital or stable occupation (or mix of occupations) in order to support its members.125 As Table 5 indicates, over 70 percent of male testators named a living wife in their will. Some households were very large, with numerous servants as well as a married couple. While we cannot be certain any children named in a will were resident, numbers of servants named can give an impression of household size. William Boste, a glover from St Botolph Aldgate with a large estate, left money to a maid and two apprentices; since he also named a living wife, Boste’s household numbered at least five individuals. Boste’s will was later subject to a consistory court case, when one of the apprentices sued his widow.126 The household of William Marow, alderman of Bishopsgate ward, must have been exceptionally large, given the eleven servants, including a cook, named in his will.127 Phythian-Adams’s study of Coventry found that citizens’ households contained an average of four or five people, with only victuallers and merchants having households any larger.128 Although lacking material as in depth as Coventry’s 1522 census, households in London appear to have followed a very similar pattern.
Sometimes wills reveal more unusual domestic arrangements. Nicholas Long, a butcher from St Botolph Aldgate, left the house in which they dwelled to his wife for the term of her life, and described it as lying between the highway in the south and ‘the tenement brewhouse that John Raulyn and Anne my daughter hold on the west side’.129 It seems likely that with his daughter and son-in-law so close by, the boundaries between their properties may have been legal formalities. As Long’s example suggests, the descriptions of household relationships in wills often seem to simplify a complex reality. Margaret Brere of St Botolph Bishopsgate left an exceptionally large amount of household goods in her 1438 will to a woman described as her servant named Agnes Fulk. The bequests included the bed she slept in, soft furnishings, silverware and kitchen apparatus. Margaret’s will was also unusual in that she named her occupation as a weaver, and she left Agnes ‘two instruments together of my craft called the looms with all their apparatus’.130 Although Margaret described Agnes as a servant, it does not seem too great a leap to imagine that the relationship between these two women was in fact much closer. Household arrangements very different to the late medieval ideal are perhaps buried beneath the wording of many wills from neighbourhoods all over the city.
More distinctive to the areas outside the city walls, however, were communities of immigrants from outside England, known as aliens. Only a handful of surviving wills could be identified as made by aliens, but this is to be expected, given the profile of immigrant communities in London. There was a constant stream of new arrivals to the city, of whom only a minority became permanent residents.131 Immigrants were often young and thus would be less likely to either becomes heads of household or die in their London parish.132 Service migration, such as the system of artisan training known as the wanderjahr, brought craftsmen to the city for a few years before moving on elsewhere to hone their skills.133 The impact of their presence can be felt in local court records, such as the complaints about closhbanes, and in taxation. Analysis of the fifteenth-century alien subsidy records has shown that the east of the city was particularly favoured by ‘Doche’ (Dutch- and German-speaking) migrants and that the community in Portsoken grew across the fifteenth century to become by far the largest in the city.134 This population was very much still in evidence in the eastern extramural zone in the early sixteenth century. Of ninety-seven inhabitants of East Smithfield liberty assessed for the 1524 subsidy, two thirds (sixty-four) were classed as aliens.135 Norton Folgate, which probably had a population of around one hundred people, was the residence of seventeen aliens taxed in the 1440 subsidy.136 Liberties were important hubs for immigrant communities, partly because they enabled alien craftsmen to continue their business without interference from London’s guilds but also perhaps because living surrounded by those who spoke one’s language was comforting.137 Moreover, we should not draw too hard and fast a line between immigrants and guilds, since by the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries several London companies had oversight of immigrants’ work and even offered quasi-guild member status to trusted craftsmen.138 The imperative to escape guild control thus depended on the circumstances of individual trades rather than being experienced by all aliens. Immigrants were an integral part of extramural society and as such they will recur throughout this book.
In the later fifteenth century, anxiety about non-citizens trading illicitly without the freedom of the city seems to have increased. It is hardly a coincidence that this coincided with a period in which English religious houses began to more actively acquire privileges for those living in their precincts.139 The tensions which built up are evident in the increasing complaints about foreign workers in guild ordinances of the later fifteenth century and the complaints about non-English immigrants which resulted in both the Evil May Day riots of 1517 and the city’s dogged legal challenge of St Martin le Grand’s sanctuary in the 1530s.140 The sanctuary at St Katharine’s and liberty at the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate were also subject to civic complaints from the mid-fifteenth century.141 This hardening of attitudes does not seem to have produced specific complaints against all the other extramural houses and their lay populations. It may be that residents infringing the franchise here were seen as part of a wider problem with those living in the ribbon development that led up to the city bars. Indeed, from the 1480s the city claimed rights to regulate all craft production within two miles, a power it sporadically enforced.142
Despite the expansion of the city and companies’ rights beyond the bars, historians traditionally assumed that the economy of London’s extramural neighbourhoods was based on avoidance of civic regulations, the responsibilities of citizenship and control exerted by guilds.143 However, wills provide a salutary reminder that there was a community of citizens outside the walls, even if overall levels of citizenship here were lower. Following the 1413 Statute of Additions, which required suitors at law to declare their occupation and status, it became more common for individuals to declare personal details in all kinds of other legal documents. Testators frequently began their wills with the formula ‘citizen and [occupation/guild affiliation] of London’. As demonstrated in Table 6, statements of citizenship were noticeably less common outside the walls; while over 55 percent of testators said they were citizens in central St Lawrence Jewry, only 31–42 percent did so in the extramural parishes and St Katharine Cree. Statements about what craft a testator practised (a good indicator of guild membership) followed a similar pattern. Seventy-five percent of St Lawrence Jewry testators named their occupation, compared to 42–57 percent outside the walls. Citizens and guild members were thus residents outside the walls, but in lower numbers.
Far from evading regulation, many of these non-citizens were either ineligible for guild membership or did not need it to support themselves. In this period, guild membership was a prerequisite for citizenship of London and the gap between the numbers of those with a declared occupation and those with citizenship is to an extent accounted for by those with occupations which simply lacked a guild. These included two minstrels and a gardener in St Botolph Bishopsgate and a corser (horse dealer) and mariner in St Botolph Aldgate. Aside from the minstrels, it should be noted that, given the proximity of major roads and gardens, these were occupations where living at the fringe of the city would have been an advantage. Members of the gentry and people with positions reliant on royal and aristocratic patronage also lived in peripheral areas, particularly in St Botolph Aldersgate and St Katharine Cree. These included esquires and gentlemen in both parishes, as well as Robert Biggerstaff, clerk of the earl of Northumberland’s kitchen, who lived outside Aldersgate. Aside from within liberties, evasion of city regulations was not a significant facet of the appeal of living in the city’s immediate environs, especially after 1470, when guild jurisdiction extended two miles beyond London. Lower property values, access to major roads and larger properties encouraged those whose occupations were either precarious or unincorporated into the civic hierarchy to live there. Citizens, many of them prosperous, still formed a sizeable portion of the resident population. The rest of the population was diverse. Much of the non-citizen population either lacked the resources to participate in a craft or earned their living in ways which meant civic and craft institutions were of limited relevance. As we saw in the introduction, citizenship was a minority status in the city as a whole before the 1530s and guilds were increasingly hierarchical organisations in the fifteenth century. The labourers who did much of the work in London were peripheral to or excluded from institutional membership. London’s poor were not evading citizenship; it was simply not intended to include them. The urban economy was simply too complex for guilds to fully encompass it, a fact which attention to the extramural neighbourhoods brings sharply into focus. As the complex situation of alien workers in relation to the companies demonstrates, to frame all urban work in terms of either guild-control or evasion is to assume a rigidity of institutions which was simply impractical.
Nonetheless, there were economic advantages to be gained from living outside the walls for people with certain occupations. Food producers seem to have chosen to locate themselves in extramural neighbourhoods in significant numbers. In both St Lawrence Jewry and St Katharine Cree, bakers, brewers, butchers, cooks and similar workers formed 3 percent or less of testators, while in all the extramural parishes they formed 15 percent or more of the total. This is largely accounted for by the number of brewers in the sample from St Botolph Aldersgate (ten), St Botolph Aldgate (thirteen) and St Botolph Bishopsgate (fourteen). From the early part of the fifteenth century, brewing moved away from being a primarily domestic activity to one of commercial scale as beer overtook ale in popularity, and London’s brewing industry was commercialized to a far greater degree than other towns.144 The larger premises available outside the walls, such as the aforementioned Axe outside Aldgate, would have been able to produce beer in profitable quantities. Dutch and Flemish immigrants also brought significant brewing expertise, and no doubt made up much of the workforce in this industry.145 Butchers were the second-largest group with a named occupation in the St Botolph Aldgate sample. They may partly have lived there because of availability of large premises but most important was probably the flesh market at nearby East Smithfield and the availability of local pasturing; we have already seen that John Roke, butcher, leased pastureland in Whitechapel from the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate. Butchers’ bequests indicate that they had family and business connections related to the trade in livestock to the east and north of London and that extramural residence was also attractive owing to the ease of transport outwards.
Tenants were far less likely to have a named occupation than testators, but what information can be gleaned from property records is helpful in understanding the complex series of factors which both pushed and pulled those with certain occupations to the peripheries of the city. Table 7 compares the rent levels paid by different kinds of trade in parishes within and without the city walls. Those working in food preparation outside the walls (brewers, bakers, butchers, cooks, etc.) paid on average over eleven shillings (160 pence) per year more than those who produced clothing and textiles (dyers, weavers, cappers, shearmen, etc.). Residential patterns at the margins were created by a localized balance of push and pull factors, with some opting to spend more to live outside the walls. Food producers without Aldgate rented properties costing a median of 560 pence a year, while the same group outside Bishopsgate paid a median of 96 pence, a pattern repeated with metalworkers, textile manufacturers and those providing services. Metalworking had a long association with the area and the desirability of specialized premises for this purpose was vividly demonstrated in a 1511 consistory court case. William Culverdon, a brazier, had secured lease of a house in St Botolph Aldgate from the prior of Holy Trinity apparently against the wishes of the sitting inhabitant, William Smyth, who made defamatory complaints, including exclaiming ‘cokwold [cuckold] knave bawde and hormonger thow hast hired my howes ower my hede’.146 The prior’s rent collector and a canon evicted Smyth, his wife and children by accessing the property through the yard of the neighbouring ‘Belhouse’, leased to bellfounder Thomas Bullesdon, ‘where there were new bells suspended and hanging’.147 The area outside Aldgate seems to have been quite attractive, pulling in artisans who needed sizeable premises and clustering those with shared occupations. Some trades actively paid more to live in extramural neighbourhoods. This is particularly notable for those in manufacturing trades, such as chandlers, tawyers and dyers, whose processing activities were noxious and who were encouraged to remove to extramural areas.148 Tenants with high social status, like gentlemen Bartholomew Willesdon and Thomas Cavendish, paid large sums for extramural properties which might provide them with a convenient London residence when needed. Both were tenants, in the 1480s and 1500s respectively, of a large tenement with three shops and a garden called Rothes Place on Aldersgate Street, paying between £1 13s 4d and £2 for the privilege.
There were multiple economic reasons why people lived in extramural neighbourhoods. Attempting to carry on a trade outside guild regulation was probably not a significant one outside of liberties. A combination of push and pull factors created neighbourhoods where clusters of prosperous artisans existed alongside those whose existence was precarious. The precarious are no doubt under-represented in the surviving sources, but what we can tell is that they by no means made up the total extramural population. Those who could afford the space and had less need to live close to the commercial networks of the city might choose residence in the extramural areas, and different neighbourhoods appealed to different groups. Religious houses held considerable potential power over the shape of the extramural economy, which can be most clearly seen in their influence over the property market via investment in lay housing within and outside their precincts. On the whole, as with patterns of wealth, each parish was varied, but the occupational structure of peripheral neighbourhoods suggests that they were loosely bound to the economic basis of civic structure – the guilds.
A balance of choice and necessity shaped the society and economy of extramural neighbourhoods. These areas were for many a resort of necessity. Lower average rents meant that the poor could establish a home while remaining close to the markets and social networks offered by the city. However, residence outside the walls was also desirable to some. The availability of open space afforded flexibility in land use which produced both cheap alley rents as well as gardens and larger houses. Larger houses were desirable for those who could afford to invest in practising their craft on a large scale, such as brewers and founders, as well as those who wanted an impressive home for reasons of status. The differences between localities at the periphery were caused by the weighting of the balance of desirability and necessity; while nowhere was homogeneous, that balance influenced the overall character of the neighbourhood.
Spatial marginality was marked by diversity of land use, economic functions and plurality of jurisdictions. The variation represented even within the small number of neighbourhoods discussed here shows the importance of thinking of the pre-modern city as a place of great texture and spatial differentiation. There were no homogeneous ‘quarters’ dedicated to a particular economic function in London, but subtle differences of topography and economy marked each neighbourhood. In the large parish of St Botolph Aldgate, availability of open space produced sizeable premises and gardens alongside humbler dwellings. As a result, it was characterized by occupations and land uses that required space or took advantage of its outward connections via Aldgate Street. Its neighbour within the walls, St Katharine Cree, was wealthier and had higher property values. The small parish of All Hallows London Wall provides a useful contrast; despite its mural location, the fact that it contained no major thoroughfare produced a built environment similar to peripheral urban spaces and lower property values. Its extramural neighbour St Botolph Bishopsgate was poorer but provided opportunities for women and others of modest and comfortable means to set up home. At St Botolph Aldersgate there was a neighbourhood of even more dramatic contrasts. A significant minority of testators were exceptionally wealthy but lived alongside alleyways of poorer residents, a stratification also borne out in the wills of its inhabitants. The overriding similarity between all the peripheral parishes lies in weakened connection between testators and the institutions of citizenship, highlighted by the contrast to St Lawrence Jewry. Whether by choice or not, residents at the peripheries were more likely to be those outside such institutions. The differentiation of extramural from intramural space, and the smaller gradations of social space and jurisdictional boundaries which divided neighbourhoods, had tangible social consequences. In particular, the economic power of the religious houses in their immediate neighbourhood underlay and reinforced their role as alternative poles of authority on the fringe of the city.
The religious houses and other property owners were active in developing these neighbourhoods in the fifteenth century in ways which set the pattern for the poor suburbs of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the later fifteenth century, they had seen the profitable potential of developing small extramural dwellings to serve the city’s poor. The landlords who acquired the houses’ estates after the Dissolution created suburbs characterized by small, cheap housing in alleyways and courts.149 Religious houses also pockmarked the city government’s legal territory beyond the walls, and even the surrounding neighbourhoods that lay within the mayor’s jurisdiction were by no means civic-controlled spaces, in the sense that the great majority of their inhabitants were not citizens and had little say in London’s government. Their mixed economies, accompanied by lower citizenship levels, are a salutary reminder of just how much of the urban economy took place adjacent to or outside guild-regulated trade even before the decline of the livery companies’ control of the economy in later centuries. Spatial patterns of society and economy were evident in the late medieval period and would be exacerbated and intensified by the population boom of the mid- to late sixteenth century. The non-citizen-dominated suburbs of the fifteenth century set a pattern for urban expansion which was to take place largely after the expansion of citizenship in the 1530s. A focus on the urban margins shows that the framework of expansion came not just from guilds and institutional membership, as shown by Steve Rappaport, but also in the generative potential of extramural space.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 1 (1-45) from The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430-1540, by Charlotte Berry (University of London Press, 03.16.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
