There was a constant negotiation of status and authority in the community.
By Dr. Charlotte Berry
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Bath Spa University
Introduction
Finding your place in London meant navigating a complex system of social control that scrutinized behaviour in pursuit of peaceful community.1 Neighbours could and did force people to leave a city ward if their behaviour or reputation was deemed unacceptable. This essay demonstrates the wider system of marginalization that expulsion sat within as one of the most severe punishments. It sets out what behaviour was unacceptable and the means by which that unacceptability was decided within urban neighbourhoods. Collective determination of who was to be excluded or punished was socially significant. It developed a sense of community as well as allowing certain individuals to assert their moral worth and right to exert authority.2 My focus here is not exclusively on the extramural areas of the city, because it is necessary to see how the system functioned as a whole in order to understand how some people became marginalized from local society.
Determining who to exclude and punish also involved the constant negotiation of status and authority in the community. This encompassed both the definition of who was respectable and, for those who aspired to the local elite, who was worthy to hold office and pass judgement on others. This essay establishes these dual processes of marginalization and inclusion as they played out in London neighbourhoods. Local officers, jurors and neighbours without an official role had a considerable degree of flexibility in determining who to marginalize. Drawing on records of ward courts alongside wills, I will show the beneficial effects that participation in the jury could have for the few men who succeeded in becoming regular members of their local wardmotes.
This negotiation was carried out in a complex legal landscape where royal, civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions overlapped and combined with informal modes of community regulation. Royal and civic jurisdictions in London intertwined: felonies and trespasses were reserved to the king’s courts, but the city held the right to nominate the local royal officers, the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, who were usually already aldermen of the city or set to become one soon after. Offences which in other parts of England were heard in leet courts, such as the regulation of standards of bread and ale, environmental ‘nuisances’ and behavioural misdemeanours such as scolding, fell under the jurisdiction of the mayor and aldermen. The scope of civic regulation also overlapped with the ecclesiastical courts. The church handled matters pertaining to the soul and the clergy, such as marital disputes, defamation and tithes, but also sexual misdemeanours, which were also counted as nuisances in civic jurisdiction. Indeed, cases were sometimes referred by ward officers to the church’s commissary court, effectively meaning that offenders faced punishment in two systems for the same incident.3 The boundaries between all these jurisdictions were contested, in legal and spatial terms. This contestation was not a peculiar product of London’s population density but a marked feature of law in all late medieval English towns and cities.4
This essay makes use of the court records which give the greatest direct insight into local dynamics of marginalization. The lowest level of civic courts – the ward courts, or wardmotes – are thus central because presentations were made by juries of neighbours. I also make extensive use of records from the consistory court, London’s highest ecclesiastical court, because witnesses and parties in this court often articulated otherwise unspoken aspects of community regulation by pointing to failures of alternative legal avenues or unsuccessful neighbourly mediation in their explanations of how a dispute had escalated to its present state. In this essay the records of the lower ecclesiastical court – the commissary – are also occasionally touched upon. This court, like the wardmotes, brought cases largely based on local suspicion and information rather than the party-and-party suits typical of the consistory. I do not dwell on the commissary records, however, as they are usually very brief in their description of offences and have been dealt with extensively by other historians, particularly in the work of Martin Ingram, Richard Wunderli and Shannon McSheffrey.5 The offences with which this essay concerns itself largely exclude felonies and trespasses such as theft, homicide and violent assaults, which fell into royal jurisdiction, although a token of the intertwining of royal and civic jurisdiction in London is the fact that trespasses were heard in both the mayor’s and the sheriff’s courts.6 The records for these more serious offences survive only patchily, though it should be borne in mind that local disputes might result in suits in several courts under multiple categories of offence. The only area where more serious offences are considered is in liberties where jurors cited nuisances alongside felonies and trespasses, represented here by the records of Norton Folgate. This small area of Bishopsgate Street was both a manor held by St Paul’s Cathedral and a liberty, with surviving records of its annual view of frankpledge, which are used here to show the particular circumstances and challenges of regulating behaviour in a liberty.
The practice of community regulation in London was often highly localized. In 1473, in the midst of a morality drive that saw the unusual copying of wardmote presentments into the journals of the city’s common council, ward jurors were sworn to make presentment of a wide range of offenders. These included ‘all manner [of ] persons by whom any manner of treason, murder, felony or robbery in your wards hath been now late committed or done’, alongside vagrants, tellers of ‘false or feigned’ seditious tales, adulterers and keepers of ‘petty hostry’ (unregistered lodging houses).7 The offences cited were covered by a mixture of civic and royal jurisdiction (and, in the case of adultery, could have fallen into the church courts’ purview), indicating the fuzzy boundaries between jurisdictions in the initial local detection of misdemeanours. While more serious offences under royal jurisdiction would be referred to higher courts, in a normal year the punishment of vagrants, keepers of petty hostry and other minor civic offences seems to have remained within the ward itself – or, to the chagrin of jurors, not punished formally at all beyond indictment.8 Referral to higher courts of these misdemeanours appears to have been sporadic; while there are occasional records of such offenders being prosecuted by central civic courts, these are relatively few compared to the number of citations in wardmotes, which could extend to over a hundred presentments in a single ward in a year.9 This is comparable to the situation across England, where what Marjorie McIntosh calls ‘social misbehaviour’ was largely dealt with locally rather than troubling the travelling assize justices or royal courts at Westminster.10 The procedures and scope of London’s higher courts have been brilliantly set out by Penny Tucker. Tucker largely excluded wardmotes from her account because they ‘formed at most the preliminary stage of legal proceedings’.11 While this is absolutely true, the purpose here is similar to McIntosh’s approach to local courts elsewhere in England, in framing wardmotes as embedded in processes of community management in which they could be a preliminary legal tool for escalating local disputes and concerns. As shall be shown, their flexibility and broad scope was crucial to that function.
Apprehending the culprits of all kinds of offences relied on the watchfulness and knowledge of neighbours. Building on the work of scholars who have looked in particular at sexual regulation, this essay makes a novel contribution by demonstrating the importance of local power dynamics in determining who was to be included and who was to be excluded in London society. The testamentary relationships discussed there were often rooted in joint participation in the instruments of local regulation, and the social capital evidenced by citation as a testamentary official was accrued through years of demonstrating local authority. There was, however, no immutable set of individuals who exercised local authority but a constant negotiation of position in which the odds were stacked in favour of some over others.
Defining Anti-Social Behavior
As both Marjorie McIntosh and Sandy Bardsley argued, the definition of problematic behaviour in fifteenth-century England was variable according to location and social context. Both stressed that presentations in local courts were highly influenced by local circumstance and concerns, although Bardsley argued that they were even more specific in being driven by individuals.12 Ian Forrest has argued that the trustworthy men who reported on local affairs to bishops walked a difficult line between the ‘self-interest or the perspective of the parish elite’ and ‘the will of “the parishioners”’ in their choice of offences to report.13 The London wardmotes operated in a similar way to the local courts elsewhere in relying on a jury of twelve men to report local misdemeanours. Although the civic precepts or ‘articles’ of the wardmote broadly shaped what was to be presented, jurors also exercised quite a degree of autonomy in their choices. Jurors might, during periods of civic or royal anxiety about particular issues, have been encouraged to focus on particular types of offence.14 However, it is probable that juries responded to neighbourhood politics to a significant degree, just as they did in other English towns and villages.
The local issues indicted at the wardmote fell within a very wide range, and they have been categorized for the purposes of considering trends, as in Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1. Common environmental nuisances included blockages in the highway and unsafe buildings as well as gates left open overnight. Unruly behaviour included disruptive speech such as scolding or being a ‘noyer’ of one’s neighbours, and sexual offences included adultery, bawdry or ‘misgovernment’ of the body. Failures to uphold proper household order fell under unruly behaviour and included accusations of ‘keeping ill rule’, ‘receiving suspicious persons’ or being a ‘maintainer’ of those who were poorly behaved. Such misgovernment was occasionally difficult to distinguish from those who were accused of bawdry (which fell under sexual offences) or of keeping foreigners in their houses. Economic offences were mainly indictments for breaching the statutes of ale and bread, which featured little after the 1420s. Not all offences were considered equally damaging to personal reputation. As Christine Winter noted in her analysis of the Portsoken presentments, indictments for environmental nuisances appear not to have affected one’s opportunity to join the jury, whereas few who were accused of immoral behaviour or selling without the freedom of the city were ever jurors.15 Nonetheless, as we shall see, membership of the jury was an important means of defining the ‘respectable’ group in neighbourhood society, and jurors could mitigate the impact of previous indictments on their reputation in order to serve.
What behaviour caused most concern shifted over time and varied between neighbourhoods. Figure 4.1 and Table 4.1 demonstrate how the proportions of different types of presentment at the ward courts varied over time. These have been categorized into economic, environmental and sexual offences and those related to unruly behaviour and foreigners living or trading in the city without either citizenship or frankpledge.16 The chart prioritizes trends over time, so some years include returns from many parts of the city and some from single wards. Where there are returns only from a single ward, it is evident in the Portsoken (1466–1507) and Aldersgate (1510, c.1512–24 and 1528) presentments that even juries in the same place varied year to year in the balance between the different offences they presented. There were also considerable differences between wards; the presentment for Broad Street in 1528 contained no indictments for sexual offences, compared with between 13 per cent and 25 per cent in other sixteenth-century presentments from Aldersgate and Portsoken. Sometimes intensely local issues might dominate a presentment for just a single year, as in the undated Aldersgate wardmote where forty-nine stranger craftsmen living in St Martin le Grand were indicted. While the wardmote was undoubtedly part of a wider civic justice system, jurors often responded to local concerns rather than simply exercising the will of the mayor and aldermen.
There were also broader changes over time. For instance, Caroline Barron has pointed out that regulation of wages, which featured in wardmote precepts in the 1370s and the Liber Albus of the 1420s despite no indictments in the surviving presentments, was removed from precepts produced in the 1470s.17 Likewise, the indictments for breaking the assize of bread and ale that were dominant in the earlier surviving presentments are absent in the Portsoken, Aldersgate and Broad Street presentments in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This was despite a restatement of this precept by the common council in 1508.18 Behavioural concerns also shifted somewhat across the period; sexual immorality was indicted in every surviving presentment bar 1373, but in the early presentments unruly behaviour indictments outnumbered sexual offences, a ratio reversed from the 1460s onwards. On the whole, these behavioural offences became more dominant over time. In the early presentments recorded in the Plea and Memoranda Rolls, an average of just 11 per cent of indictments were for sexual offences or unruly behaviour, compared to 27 per cent in the mid- to late fifteenth-century Portsoken presentments and 36 per cent in the early sixteenth-century documents. However, there were some important continuities across the long fifteenth century. Concern with foreigners and evading the city’s jurisdiction, which Barron notes were novelties in the wardmote precepts in the 1470s,19 were already apparent in the presentments from the 1420s (see Figure 4.1), suggesting the degree to which juries could make indictments which did not conform to the precepts put to them by the civic government.
Consistory court depositions reveal definitions of marginal and antisocial behaviour in other ways, many of which were similar to the categories in wardmote indictments. The deposition of George Barretson, who gave testimony against the characters of an opposing party’s witnesses in 1523, has a revealing depth in its description of why they were unfit to depose:
… he says that John Pruddon is accustomed to be drunk and spreads gossip amongst his neighbours and is very poor and needy and has little or nothing in goods in as much as this witness can tell. Further he says that Richard Trussyngton was indicted at the ‘warmolquest’ this last year for a quarrelsome person and also is a pauper as he believes. And he says that Thomas Plowghe is a pauper as he says that [deleted: he is ‘le water man’ travelling the sea] save that he is an honest pauper. And moreover he says that William Rede is quarrelsome and also violent with his neighbours and he says that around the feast of Christmas last passed this witness saw him fighting with some of his neighbours.20
Barretson gave a wide range of descriptors indicating that the opposing witnesses were not respectable: drunkenness, quarrelling, gossiping, violence, itinerant occupation and poverty. The reference to indictment at the wardmote served as proof of his description of Trussyngton’s character. It is interesting that, even though he stated that Plowghe was an ‘honest pauper’, his poverty and that of Pruddon and Trussyngton was still relevant to assessment of their suitability as witnesses. In canon and Roman law courts such as the consistory, the word of a pauper could be discounted, although there is ample evidence that parties nonetheless presented pauper witnesses and defended their right to depose.21
This raises the question of how far the characteristics that were held to make an unreliable witness can be used as proxies for marginalization outside the court. Was it simply that counter-witnesses were using objections based on advice from canon lawyers, or did such characteristics truly mean exclusion from neighbourhood society on a day-to-day basis? Similarly, did a wardmote indictment for keeping foreigners or adultery really mean one had become a social pariah? This is a difficult issue, as in some sense court records shape and define our sense of exclusion and inclusion because they are the closest we can get to the lived experiences of these complex social processes. A plausible answer is offered in Erik Spindler’s framework for marginality, in which he proposes no binary mainstream/marginal divide but instead that marginality is a condition of being between social groups caused by a combination of jeopardy and instability.22 An individual who was an outsider to the local community could find their position and behaviour portrayed as suspicious. Mobility was particularly associated with the poor and also jeopardized reputation. Sandy Bardsley argues that prosecutions for scolding were dependent on varying local priorities and officers: while gossiping and chiding were common and would no doubt have been considered unpleasant by their object, prosecution relied upon local circumstance.23 Exclusion and inclusion were thus constantly being negotiated, rather than every neighbourhood having a fixed social ‘margin’, and the indictment of problematic behaviours was a part of that process. They brought local knowledge about reputation into the court, a fame which itself might have contradictory or contested aspects, and used it to define their opponent as an unfit witness or a person who should be punished. This constant negotiation is a process to which I will return over the course of this essay, as it was central to the management of community. Maintaining a good reputation for the poor would have been an important but challenging task, given that they were both vulnerable to the changes of fortune which engendered mobility (and thus suspicion) and ineligible for the leadership roles which could cement good reputation.
The Wardmote
The wardmote was the primary formal means of raising concerns about those who broke civic regulations or ‘the king’s peace’ in London. It was also, as an institution reliant on local knowledge, embedded within neighbourhood society. Wardmotes were flexible institutions, responsive to local concerns. This meant they could accommodate political dissent, usually sidelined from civic government.24 Their responsiveness was rooted, as Sarah Rees Jones argued, in the elastic discourse of ‘nuisance’ which entrusted all kinds of environmental hazards and moral misdemeanours to the judgement of ordinary people.25 This flexibility meant that the wardmote itself was arranged to reinforce local social hierarchies. Surviving presentments from many wards list nuisances by their separate parish of location, suggesting that the presentation of complaints was organized along parish lines, a unit which in most of the city was probably closer to the neighbourhood in which knowledge of issues circulated than the whole ward.26 Over the course of the sixteenth century, wards were divided into small precincts, presumably for similar reasons.27 Furthermore, it was common practice to repeat annually indictments for persistent environmental nuisances or individuals who continued to misbehave, a process that reinforced such local networks of knowledge. Although Richard Wunderli argued that this repetition shows that the wardmote was an ineffective means of policing the neighbourhood, depositions made at the consistory in fact suggest this repetition served a useful purpose in defining marginal individuals.28 Martin Ingram argued that the very act of recording offenders on parchment was a valuable part of wider communal policing which might result in harsher punishment down the line.29 While this may have been a valuable aspect of wardmotes from the view of the alderman, for those who were indicted it was probably not the written record of the event that mattered so much as the popular local memory of their indictment. Counter-witnesses often used memory of indictments at the wardmote as a means to discredit individuals and their testimony. For instance, when a counter-witness accused Henry Fyt of being ‘a man of ill fame’ in 1529 he substantiated this claim by reference to Fyt’s indictment for quarrelling with his neighbours at the wardmote four years previously.30 Likewise, in 1512, John Saunderson’s reliability as a witness was undermined by a counter-witness who recalled that he had been ‘compelled to appear before the wardmote inquest’ for abusing his wife and turning her out of their house.31 Fyt and Saunderson’s misgovernment of themselves and their households was apparently felt to be material evidence of their unreliability as witnesses, and the memory of their indictment was proof of this. By repeating indictments each year, the wardmote thus attempted to fix this knowledge of character within local networks of knowledge, an appearance before the jury being itself a reputational punishment. Ingram argued that the wardmote and church courts, through referrals from one to the other, were mutually reinforcing.32 The importance of the memory of indictment further suggests that the wardmote had a significance for punishment within the local community itself, serving as a verification of reputation and in the process legitimating what would otherwise be gossip or rumour about an individual.
The use of repeated indictments also reflected the mutability of reputation. Looking at the various interactions an individual might have with the wardmote shows just how far local reputation was constantly renegotiated. Although Henry Fyt had been indicted for quarrelling with his neighbours in 1525, he also served as a member of the jury in 1528 and 1529, suggesting a degree of rehabilitation before the time of the consistory court case.33 In this instance, utilization of a previous indictment by a counter-witness sought to fix his character based on an earlier point in time, ignoring the fact that he had apparently (and unusually) overcome the reputational damage of an indictment in the intervening period. Repeating indictments year after year may thus have sought to avoid this kind of use of old judgements, making it clear that there were some individuals who continued to disrupt the neighbourhood while implying that others had amended their ways or left. Nonetheless, a single indictment seems to have had a powerful enough effect in local memory to be useful in the description of reputation a number of years later; it is difficult to imagine how a person without Fyt’s long parish residence and householder status, which enabled him to participate positively in the wardmote as a juror, would have recovered their reputation from an indictment.34
The profile of those indicted at the wardmote for their behaviour suggests that those most vulnerable were women. Four of the five most common categories of behavioural indictment were dominated by women: strumpet (eighty-three indictments for women; none for men), scold (fifty-three women; three men), bawd (fifty-two women; twenty-five men) and harlot (thirty-nine women; seven men). Moreover, it is notable that both apparently single women and wives were mentioned in the second most common category of indictment, receiving suspicious people (fifty-nine indictments), even where a husband’s legal identity ought to have covered the whole household. Women were thus commonly complained about for a failure to maintain proper control over others and their households. The wardmote was used to express jurors’ discomfort about women with power to ‘keep ill rule’ in their house, no great surprise in the context of an institution that was an expression of masculine moral authority.35 Women never participated in the jury, were barred from office-holding and, as Shannon McSheffrey has argued, respectable women were defined by their total absence from the wardmote.36 The only capacity in which women legitimately participated in ward procedures was as appointed ‘tipplers’ (testers) of ale and beer. At Aldersgate in an undated early sixteenth-century presentment, Annes Sawnderson, ‘Fereby’s wife’, ‘the good wife Alyn’ and Mother Dolbye were among the named tipplers.37 Most were men but, since brewing could be a domestic activity, tippling was evidently seen as a legitimate extension of female expertise. Male behaviour that attracted wardmote complaints was most likely to centre on a man’s failure to govern himself by acting as a baratour, nightwalker or a non-specific ‘noyer of neighbours’, a trend that fits with contemporary expectations of male behaviour in which, for instance, abusive husbands had to be proved to be incapable of governing themselves (let alone their wives) for a separation to be granted.38 The wardmote presentments thus indicate gendered patterns of indictment in which women’s ability to govern themselves and their households was frequently challenged.
Alongside women, immigrants were another group who dominated indictments. There are indications that many of those who were cited for being a ‘foreigner occupying as a freeman’ were continental aliens, despite the fact that technically a ‘foreigner’ was meant to distinguish English non-citizens resident in the city, with ‘alien’ being the correct term for the legal status of migrants from outside the kingdom. At Portsoken names such as Sote Dutchwoman, John Leflaimder and Michell Milpekkar among the indicted suggest this was the case.39 The German and Dutch population at Portsoken, which grew across the fifteenth century. Conveniently coinciding with the dating of the surviving Portsoken presentments, the mixed reception of this community is suggested by the wardmote records. As well as being indicted for breaching the privileges of the freedom, Portsoken’s immigrants seem to have been commonly indicted for disruptive behaviour, although most have to be identified by their Germanic, French or Dutch-sounding names rather than any greater affirmation of their status. Trewde Stutfold and her husband, Thomas, were indicted as common bawds, Margaret Olasson was named a common bawd, Reynold Fremet was a common strumpetmonger and four women given the surname ‘Dutchwoman’ were indicted for being a leper, a harlot, a strumpet and a bawd.40 The association between aliens and sexual immorality or disruptive behaviour is borne out in other presentments. Guyse and Willyman Pawnser of Broad Street were accused of keeping a stew in Broad Street at the 1421 wardmote, and in 1422 Gerard Clayson and his wife from Cripplegate Without were accused of an extensive list of offences including being ‘evildoers’ who received and maintained harlots, bawds, strumpets and ‘an evil coven’.41 Indeed, it may be that prostitutes were often alien immigrants, as was the case in Bruges, where English and other foreign women commonly worked in brothels.42 In a legal context, where prostitution and other forms of fornication were not distinguished, and where the epithet ‘whore’ often implied general loose sexual mores rather than definite engagement in prostitution,43 it is also likely that many of these presentments simply reflect women who were believed to have sex outside marriage or people whose control of dependents’ sexuality was lax. Thus, there was considerable room for xenophobia and misogyny, as much as any real connection to the sex trade, to lead to presentation of immigrants.
Nonetheless, what is perhaps surprising about the Portsoken presentments is that, despite a growing community of immigrants, indictments of foreigners trading without the freedom formed only 2–8 per cent of indictments most years, except in 1476, 1479 and 1480, when they were 10–15 per cent, as Figure 4.1 indicates. This suggests that concern tended to fluctuate year on year, independent of sheer immigrant population size; alongside the economic adaptation of the area to serve the alien community, it seems that relations were in general cordial though punctuated by occasional concern. In 1508, a new clause was added to the wardmote precepts that no ‘stranger born’ (another term for alien which became more common in the sixteenth century), even those granted letters of denization, was to be elected to any ward office or wardmote jury.44 While undoubtedly an example of civic xenophobia, it is striking that it took so long for such a precept to be added; it also suggests that some aliens had actually been elected jurors by their neighbours. At Aldersgate in an early sixteenth-century wardmote presentment there was a mass indictment of aliens, residents in the neighbouring precinct of St Martin le Grand. This was highly unusual for the ward: the other surviving wardmote presentations in this period from Aldersgate contain just two indictments each of foreigners infringing on the freedom: 3–4 per cent of total complaints. The indictment in which multiple aliens are named unfortunately lacks its dating preamble and jury list, which would allow it to be precisely dated, but by chance a presentment mentions the alderman as ‘Master [Robert] Fenrother’, who held this office from 1512 to 1524. During this period the city was making efforts to challenge the legal basis for the sanctuary at St Martin le Grand, the precinct in which the indicted aliens probably lived, and tensions spilled over when alien-owned shops in St Martin’s were attacked on Evil May Day in 1517.45 The precinct was a long-standing thorn in the side of the city, but local jurors indicted its immigrant residents only in a climate of acute tension in the city over alien craftsmen.
The wardmote records thus suggest that those vulnerable to indictment were most often people who challenged gendered conventions of behaviour or whose identity or circumstances made them vulnerable to the present concerns of the jury. As Shannon McSheffrey has argued, the wardmote was a process through which the community defined ‘which men were respectable, worthy, and of a certain stature’ to the exclusion of those who appeared indicted.46 This aspect of the wardmote has significant implications for understanding the inquest within the broader context of social marginalization in London neighbourhoods. She noted how the wardmotes allowed middling households to control misbehaviour and impose their own model of respectability on others.47 As well as determining who was excluded from the community, the inquest was also a public demonstration of the jurors’ right and ability to govern, and thus who was included within the ‘respectable middle’ of local society.
A comparison of the jury lists from Aldersgate and Portsoken wards with the testamentary social networks suggests the role that the wardmote played in the definition of the respectable portion of a local community. Figures 4.2 and 4.3 show these networks in the periods which coincide with jury lists with those who featured as jurors (or as officers where this information survives at Portsoken) circled in red. Both graphs indicate that those who had served as ward jurors were very likely to be mentioned by others; all jurors in the Aldersgate network bar one had an in-degree of one or more, as did sixteen out of twenty-four jurors and officials in the Aldgate parish network. Within these limited samples, there is thus a sense that ward jurors were somewhat more likely to be the kind of men trusted by their neighbours to take on important testamentary roles.
Participation in institutions was part of London’s cursus honorum, the hierarchy of city offices. Both Marjorie McIntosh and Dana Durkee have shown that such participation was a route to the accrual of social capital, the gathering of contacts and the development of cooperative government and financial management skills, the same men often taking on roles in several institutional contexts.48 Tracing the careers of a number of jurors who also feature in testamentary networks suggests that the wardmote played a specific, early role in the process of accruing social capital. The wealthy bladesmith Richard Stotfold (juror, constable and probable second-generation immigrant) held office or was a ward juror four times between 1474 and 1481. Stotfold’s will, dated 1493, named two adult children and one son, John, who was still a minor.49 It seems reasonable to conjecture that the date of Stotfold’s initial involvement in the ward some nineteen years before his death had thus come while his children were still young, within a few years of marrying and becoming a householder. One of the men who named him as witness to their will was Thomas Dalston, a glover, who had served as ward constable in the late 1460s and then as one of the ward’s representatives on the city common council ten times from 1470 to 1483, when he died. Another of the men who named Stotfold as witness to their will was John Mansfield, who served on the jury three times in the late 1460s and was then five times constable of the ward in the 1470s. Office-holding within the ward was, as Christine Winter noted in her analysis of the Portsoken presentments, often preceded by a period of jury service.50 The evidence from Portsoken suggests that participation in a jury could thus be a route to advancement through the holding of local positions of responsibility within the ward itself. All three men would probably have become well known among their neighbours as constables, responsible for the apprehension of local offenders as well as raising the hue and cry and organizing juries.51 The benefits accrued to one’s creditworthiness as a result of participation in the jury thus derived both from the opportunity to become acquainted with wealthy and influential men like Stotfold as well as, in the longer term, through progression to greater positions of local respect and responsibility.
Wardmote jury service seems to have been an early rung in the ladder of local office-holding, associated with the first few years of householding. Two more constables of Portsoken ward, Philip Thomson, a brewer, and William Pywale, a barber, who also held office in the 1460s and 1470s are shown connected in Figure 4.3. Thomson named Dalston and Pywale as supervisors to his will. Thomson’s will was proved in December 1471, just after his first year as constable of the ward following three stints on the jury in 1466–8. He left an apparently modest estate with just twelve pence set aside to the parish church for forgotten tithes.52 His will mentions his surviving wife, Hawys, but no children were explicitly named. Comparison between Thomson and Pywale’s wills as contemporaries suggests that Thomson died relatively young before having the opportunity to amass much wealth; by contrast, Pywale’s will, proved seventeen years later in May 1488, includes twenty shillings for forgotten tithes and detailed requirements for memorial masses and doles to the poor.53 Thomson thus appears to have died young, before his emerging office-holding career could afford him the success that his testamentary supervisors Dalston and Pywale went on to achieve. Likewise, Thomas Warren appeared on the jury for the first time in 1479, a year after he married Marion Roke and received her portion of inheritance held as a bond by three prominent Portsoken ward officials, Dalston, Stotfold and Andrew Todd.55
While these are all examples of men who successfully navigated wardmote service and accrued social capital, it is important to remember that there was no guarantee that early service led smoothly to higher office. A list of ordinances regulating the behaviour of jurors drawn up by the Aldersgate inquest in 1540 demonstrates that participation in the jury was a test of masculine virtues rather than its proof. The ordinances ranged from not speaking up in favour of offenders while they were being examined to the fines paid if jurors violently confronted one another ‘either with weapon or withoute as smyting with hand or fist, violent plucking, wrastling, hurlyng, tearing or punching’.56 The regulations suggest that, while disagreement was to be expected within the inquest, calm self-government was prized among jurors.57 This accords well with both McSheffrey’s and McIntosh’s conceptions of the jury as a space in which social capital was accrued through the demonstration of proper masculine authority. It was not simply through the distinction between those indicted and those who were called to jury service that the wardmote shaped inclusion and exclusion but also through the testing of jurors themselves. As Table 4.2 shows, 59.2 per cent of Aldersgate jurors appeared only once during the period 1467–1540, while those who did appear again were more likely to serve three or more times than to remain at just two appearances. At any one time the disparity between the pool of those who served and the number asked back could be more dramatic: of the eighty-seven jurors who served at Aldersgate in 1486–96, sixty-one appeared only once and eleven twice, leaving just fifteen regular members of the inquest in a decade. In this decade, between two and four members of each year’s jury reappeared in the next, perhaps to ensure some continuity and memory of the previous year’s indictments, as well as oversee the behaviour of more inexperienced jurors.58 The majority who appeared perhaps failed to meet the required standards of behaviour to be trusted a second time. By governing themselves properly, jurors demonstrated their adherence to dominant values of masculine behaviour, standards which were transgressed by those indicted as offenders.
If a man was successful, wardmote jury service could be a doorway to other kinds of local office-holding and institutional involvement. The parish of St Botolph Aldersgate, which made up most of the geographical extent of Aldersgate ward, left considerable surviving records of both its churchwardens’ accounts and the parish fraternity. Between 1468 and 1540, 52.7 per cent of those who featured in the churchwardens’ accounts (either as wardens or as parishioners who were expected to sign off the accounts) were also Aldersgate wardmote jurors.59 The timelines of involvement for many of these men suggest that acting as a juror was a precursor to parochial office. Robert Woodhouse served five times as a member of the ward inquest between 1490 and 1501 and was then churchwarden four times between 1501 and his death in office sometime in 1504 or 1505. Similarly, Roger Russell served twice on the jury in the 1470s and went on to be churchwarden in 1483–4 and another four times in the early 1500s, including serving as deputy for Woodhouse in the year of the latter’s death. When Russell died around 1513 he was a wealthy enough man to be commemorated in one of the windows in St Botolph Aldersgate’s parish church.60
In joining the jury a new householder might expect to meet men who formed part of the parish elite that steered local decision-making. Wardmote service thus served as a route for making connections with the respectable men of the neighbourhood. For the successful, this could result in building the social capital necessary to progress to a prominent local role as churchwarden or, indeed, to take on greater responsibility in the ward as an officer and perhaps eventually a common councilman. Even for the many who do not appear to have been involved in other institutions, participation in the wardmote may have been socially useful. Just as Dana Durkee has shown juries to be essential venues for young Norwich weavers looking to establish their businesses, so too would the London wardmote have provided young men with important connections.61 As well as economic benefits, these men could prove to be important allies and witnesses in the event of an individual becoming subject to accusations in the church or civic courts, or be sureties to debts, and so access to them in itself could have positive social and economic benefits. In the act of judgement of their neighbours, jurors could display their sound governance and adherence to conventional morality in the presence of an influential group of men. Ultimately, the successful juror might expect to earn his own place among the worthy of the neighbourhood. In London’s cursus honorum, wardmote jury service was a small step, less time-consuming than full office-holding, and yet participation formed part of one of the routes to advancement.
It was not just participation in the wardmote which made the difference to a man’s career, but how he conducted himself within it. As discussed below, the right of an individual to participate in the jury could be challenged, and the wardmote was an early opportunity for men to demonstrate their capacity to exercise authority, a venue in which they often seem not to have succeeded. The wardmote was therefore a very active part of processes of marginalization and social capital formation, where both the jury and the offenders presented were subject to assessment of their reputation. For the jurors, the good governance they demonstrated at the wardmote might transfer into informal authority in policing the neighbourhood throughout the year, as the following section will discuss. Becoming ‘central’ to the neighbourhood group was no linear process but a negotiation involving the accrual of social capital in which there was no hard-and-fast boundary between the local elite and the rest.
‘Wo worth them that gave me cowncell first to go to the law’: Informal Mediation
On a day-to-day level, the punishment of disruptive behaviour in the neighbourhood fell to a combination of ward officers and informal attempts to ostracize individuals and mediate between neighbours. Control of behaviour operated through ongoing, local exertions of power of which formal punishment through the courts might just be a part or endpoint. The detailed depositions of the consistory court are excellent sources for these forms of local control which might otherwise easily slip under the historians’ radar. Deponents recounted the investigations of constables and the interventions of concerned friends as ways to substantiate their narratives or assessments of character. The depositions reveal that ward officers and jurors brought their accrued social capital to bear on informal modes of reconciliation and that legal redress might be the result of the failure of such informal processes.
The role of the officials appointed by the ward – the constables and beadles – were formally defined and yet relied on informal interpersonal relationships to carry out their duties. The 1488 deposition of John Calton recalled an incident seventeen years earlier when he, the constable of the liberty of St John, was asked by a local man named Wulley to apprehend the Wulleys’ son Thomas, who was fornicating with a local girl in a neighbour’s house.62 By calling the constable on his own son, perhaps the intended result was for Wulley to preserve the family’s reputation by publicly expressing his disapproval of his son’s actions and demonstrating his own continued adherence to communally expected standards of behaviour. Collecting a party of neighbours into a ‘watch’ to assist a constable in an arrest was normal process,63 a further indication of the blurred line between formal and informal exercise of authority.
Women had no formal access to local authority but occasionally they were able to influence its exercise, despite contemporary norms of gender and governance. At the parish of St Andrew Hubbard in 1533, two women were alleged to have said they were determined to see their neighbour, Katharine Mett, expelled from the parish and together with their husbands set about petitioning their alderman.64 In the consistory case against Mett, it was female rivalries that drove her marginalization, despite the plaintiff and his witnesses all being male. Deponent Henry Rolf told the consistory that ‘the wives of those witnesses [for the plaintiff] and Katharine are enemies’.65 Although women were excluded from the wardmote, female social networks nonetheless could appeal to men with formal and informal policing power to ostracize individuals. This is one of the ways in which authority could be exercised by households rather than just male householders, thus giving women a stake in the operation of formal authority, which was notionally masculine. What we see in consistory depositions is perhaps just a glimpse of the extent of women’s informal local power to make or break the reputations of their neighbours.
Even when exercised by men, informal attempts to admonish neighbours could be highly divisive. One case reveals that the activities of ward officers could be both partisan in their execution and contentious in their outcomes. In 1529 Thomas Hoskyns, constable of Aldersgate ward, was encouraged to raid the alehouse of Henry Fyt by the carpenter William Bowser.66 Sixty-year-old Bowser had sat on the Aldersgate wardmote jury six times during the 1510s and 1520s, including in the year before the case was heard.67 It was claimed by Fyt that Bowser harboured grudges against a number of the men and women who had been drinking together in Fyt’s house that evening, including the target of his arrest and eventual consistory plaintiff Dorothy Swyndon.68 In this example we see the potentially blurred line between formal and informal management of the community, with Bowser apparently exploiting his seniority and connections to encourage punishment of those he personally deemed disruptive. As shall be discussed further, this case had a complex history in both the consistory court and local attempts at arbitration. The consistory case emerged from a situation where neighbours, friends and fellow jurors were at odds, and the act of witnessing itself engendered further divisions. The line between formal and informal control was not fixed, it had to be contested, and both forms of managing community might fail to produce concord.
William Bowser was by no means extraordinary in expecting to manage local concerns beyond the formal setting of a court. Certain senior individuals within a community expected to take a leading role in mediating relationships between their neighbours. Thomas Wornegey, a mercer of St Katharine Cree, deposed at the consistory in a case which concerned defamatory accusations of fornication in 1475. Wornegey stated that he had warned a young man named Thomas Hay ‘not to resort to the house of Agnes Howell because of the suspicion that many men had against him due to the manner of his evening visits’.69 Although Hay angrily rejected his advice, Wornegey evidently felt a responsibility for advising Hay to watch his behaviour. Similarly, the grocer Robert Haskyn deposed in 1474 that Agnes Roger, who he stood as witness for, could not have contracted a marriage as the plaintiff alleged ‘because … if the said Agnes had intended that [marriage] then Agnes would have spoken to this witness’.70 Personal status probably played a role in both men’s sense of responsibility. Both Wornegey and Haskyn were older men (Wornegey described himself as over forty at the time of his deposition, and Haskyn was forty-eight) with prestigious mercantile occupations. Their age and status were very similar to those of the ‘trustworthy men’ described by Forrest who were relied upon by bishops as local administrators, arbitrators and agents of church business.71 These men expected their advice to be respected and sought by their neighbours. In these examples, we can see something of the boundary between the formal and informal exertion of authority within the neighbourhood. The same kind of men who offered this personal advice were those who joined wardmote juries to judge their neighbours.
Local, informal networks of arbitration allowed such men to exercise their personal judgement in a way which enhanced their own power. This kind of solution to disputes might well have been preferable to the processes of a deposition court such as the consistory in which counter-witnesses called into question the status of each party’s deponents. Returning to the case of Swyndon c. Hoskyns provides evidence of both the damage depositions could do and local attempts at arbitration. During the original testimonies, Henry Fyt had recounted his neighbour William Bowser’s affair with a servant as evidence of Bowser’s poor character. He knew the story because Bowser had asked him to be godfather to the child born as a result, suggesting a past friendship between the two men which his deposition can only have damaged.72 Fyt himself found his reputation challenged by counter-witnesses through reference to a previous wardmote indictment, as discussed above. The rehearsal of embarrassing histories was very likely damaging to local relationships, especially when the reputation of a prominent man such as Bowser was called into question. The process of giving counter-testimony often exploited local forms of knowledge about reputation, particularly of those who were known to be highly mobile. However, as the case in question shows, counter-testimony at the consistory might also undermine the basis on which individuals claimed to be respectable among their neighbours. In January 1531, nearly two years after the original depositions, the case returned to the consistory. The witnesses who appeared this time attested to a local mediation process which they thought had resolved the dispute. In October 1530 several local men called a meeting with Dorothy Swyndon and ‘warned Dorothy for her to cause an amicable conclusion’ to the case.73 With the intercession of the parish curate, an agreement was drawn up that she would be paid ten shillings to withdraw her suit.74 Swyndon was said to have exclaimed ‘wo worth them that gave me cowncell first to go to the law’.75 This exclamation, whether real reported speech or a legal fiction, seems to express a communal regret at the damage a messy consistory case could wreak to social relations. By contrast, informal resolutions avoided both expense to the parties and the potential embarrassment to the whole community which could be brought about by a consistory case. Such a case posed a threat to those who exerted local decision-making power, unlike informal resolutions, in which they could demonstrate and extend that authority.
Ecclesiastical Courts and the Failure of Informal Mediation
If a consistory case risked undermining the basis on which local respectable men asserted informal power, why did they resort to them at all? Litigants in the consistory had to pay for advocates and, in marriage cases at least, were most likely to have a comfortable standard of living76 – that is, precisely the group that had the most to lose through exposure of their behaviour to counter-witnessing and the most to gain by resort to informal policing or their formalized roles within the wardmote. An answer seems to be offered by cases such as Swyndon c. Hoskyns, where more localized mechanisms of mediation and marginalization had failed. Although eventually Dorothy Swyndon was called to resolve her dispute by mutual agreement, the complex history of the case and its counter-testimonies suggests that it was originally born out of a situation of considerable communal discord in which even the local trustworthy men were at odds. Likewise, in the defamation case of Kyrkham c. Mett, a witness argued that the suit was brought because the plaintiff was persuaded by a neighbour:
rather thene the mater should stope thus (menyng by way of entreatie) he wold complain hier [the consistory] and make all that ever he cowld rather then she shuld skape unpunyshed.77
The case came after a number of appeals to the alderman for the same woman to be expelled were ignored.78 The vagaries of informal resolutions, reliant as they were on the personal exercise of authority and unspoken overlaps between ward and parish administration, meant that they were likely to be partial and influenced by local factions. The wardmote’s non-specific indictments against those who were ‘noyers of their neighbours’ may also have driven victims to become consistory plaintiffs. Similarly, those who felt troublesome neighbours were getting off lightly from ex officiocases at the commissary court could escalate to a personal suit to the consistory.79 Those who felt aggrieved by or dissatisfied with informal policing or communal accusations at the wardmote or commissary court could instead turn to the consistory as a legal mechanism that bypassed local networks, albeit at some personal risk of reputation through the process of counter-witnessing. Most suits in the consistory were party-and-party, enabling the pursuit of personal animosities. Even the lower commissary court was shifting towards a far larger number of party-and-party suits in the early sixteenth century, suggesting the increasing popularity of this kind of redress.80 In Hoskyns c. Swyndon, key witnesses switched sides away from Dorothy Swyndon when she attempted to revive her case two years later, suggesting that in the end the power of local informal authority was reasserted and few wanted to risk their reputation with a repeat of the mud-slinging of the earlier depositions.
Divisions within the group who exerted informal power thus necessitated the removal of disputes from the neighbourhood, and the consistory provided a useful (if risky) outlet. For instance, in 1523 there was dissension over the choice of jurors for the wardmote in Farringdon Within. At the selection of grocer Roger Wryght as a juror, several witnesses claimed that Roger Newesse called ‘nay he ys nott worthy to have yt’ and, when asked why, Newesse said, ‘ye shall knowe ferder here after for there ys a padde yn the strawe’, meaning a lurking danger.81 Newesse resolutely refused to clarify what he meant by this,82 but nonetheless rumours spread about Wryght’s wife.83 Wryght launched a defamation suit against Newesse in the consistory court in an attempt to defend his wife’s reputation, dispel the doubt which Newesse had sowed about his character and, implicitly, regain his potential future status as a wardmote juror. Unusually, it is possible to evidence the causes of Newesse’s accusations. Wryght and his wife, Constance, had reputations for illicit sexual behaviour: Constance successfully sued for defamation a women who called her a priest’s whore in 1516, and Roger was indicted at the Queenhithe wardmote in 1520 for keeping a stew in that ward.84 At the time of his consistory case, Wright would have been about thirty years old, just the age when men seeking an office-holding career would expect to sit as wardmote jurors and thus want to guard their reputations against these past incidents.85 A consistory court case could result from either a failure of informal local arbitration or from a division among those who would normally exert local power, or both. Furthermore, the intertwining of personal standing, informal and formal policing power meant that the choice of venue to pursue grievances might be differentiated by status: Wryght needed to protect his position as a juror and chose a defamation suit as a route to achieve that aim.
Alternative Authorities Outside the Walls
So far this essay has been concerned with the mechanisms of policing that prevailed throughout London. As we have seen, the neighbourhood was central and the ward court allowed neighbours to set local priorities, suggesting at least a degree of differentiation across the city. There were also alternative authorities in the extramural neighbourhoods of London which complicated the range of actors exerting social power and the apprehension and punishment of those deemed to have violated acceptable standards. These alternative poles of authority and understandings of neighbourhood have an important bearing on how the formal and informal modes of authority set out here operated in extramural areas.
Space was a meaningful dimension to the definition of community and so to the exercise of exclusion. In a 1521 defamation case, Thomas Hodgson was said to have exclaimed to Margaret Fyfeld ‘thow skotts drab I will bere never a shert to my back but I will have thy husband owte of this strete’.86 Hodgson’s insistence that it was the street that he wanted to see the Fyfelds leave suggests that senses of community, and thus instances of marginalization, could be highly localized. St John Street, where the parties lived, was the centre of an occupational community (the butchery trade, attached to nearby Smithfield market) as well as a liberty.87 However, senses of community and jurisdictional boundaries might not always overlap. Sometimes witnesses spoke of expelling people from their parish even though, technically, expulsion was enacted at the ward level.88 The physical proximity of fellow parishioners and the collective experience of worship probably meant that the parish was closer to a sense of neighbourhood in most parts of the city than a ward, although senses of community in extramural space might be very flexible. Therefore, the legal inaccuracy of statements about expulsion ‘from the parish’ probably reflects a perception of the spatial bounds of the community from which an individual was to be removed rather than a strict technical understanding of local jurisdiction.
Beyond the walls, the presence of religious houses and particularly their attendant liberties provided alternative poles of formal authority and complications to the bounds of communal control. In the neighbourhood outside Bishopsgate people from a wide area encompassing Bishopsgate Street, the liberty of Norton Folgate and the precinct of the hospital of St Mary all seem to have been aware of one another’s comings and goings. The formal boundaries between the three are somewhat hazy in the records and were perhaps ambiguous on the ground. The legal basis and boundaries of Norton Folgate’s liberty are obscure; while the manor itself dated to at least the eleventh century, the area considered a liberty was smaller and seems to have consisted only of the parts within the precinct of the hospital of St Mary east of Bishopsgate Street, established in the late twelfth century.89 The legal situation was ambiguous even to contemporaries. In 1501, a terrible incident involving the rape and murder of two young girls was presented by the Norton Folgate view of frankpledge jury to the court of the king’s bench in Southwark. However, the defendants (who included the prior of St Mary’s Hospital alongside the men accused of direct involvement) claimed that the case could not be heard because ‘there is no such town, hamlet, or other place called Seyntmaryspetyll where the aforesaid felony was said to have been committed’.90 This is a curious defence which suggests that there was an unclear relationship between the manor and liberty known as Norton Folgate and the status of the hospital within it.
It was a busy place, and the manor’s officials were kept occupied with the misdeeds of incomers at least as much if not more than those of its hundred or so residents. As part of his duties the constable arrested suspected felons for offences committed outside Norton Folgate. In 1445 an unnamed man was arrested by the manor’s constable on suspicion of theft because he was carrying 300 smoked eels worth 16d. The suspected thief was subsequently taken to jail at Finsbury, Middlesex.91 In 1455, constables apprehended a London apprentice wanted within the city for theft from his master.92 These wanted men may have simply been passing through on their escape from the city, but many others cited in the court rolls deliberately came to Norton Folgate for recreation. The small manor housed numerous alehouses and bowling alleys which brought in people from the city and surrounding areas to drink, socialize and occasionally get into trouble. In 1448, three people all described as living in Shoreditch were fined for affray in Norton Folgate, and there were repeated indictments for keeping ‘closhbanes’, alleys for a Dutch form of bowling, and for brewing.93 Norton Folgate’s residents used the manor court to name the troublemakers who came from its surroundings, like John Deraunt of Golding Lane, Middlesex, who attacked a man with a bill hook, and John Gebon, gentleman, of London, who made affray against William Drayton of Tottenham, another gentleman, all in incidents within Norton Folgate in 1461.94 The manor court records do not appear to make distinctions between parts of the manor deemed a liberty and those not, and it seems that Norton Folgate was no clearly segregated liberty but a space moved to and through by outsiders with freedom.
Aside from the officers of liberties, in extramural neighbourhoods the religious houses could exert power over social relations. In part this came from their extensive local landholding: religious houses might be the landlords for significant parts of their neighbourhood. This authority went even further in Portsoken ward, where the prior of Holy Trinity acted as alderman, but religious houses and their officers could also exert informal power over local laity. For example, the marriage of Joan Floraunce of St Botolph Aldgate to Robert Partridge appears to have been mediated by the abbot of St Mary Graces at Tower Hill. Henry Chamberley, servant of the abbot, presided over the creation of the contract in Joan’s yard, asking her, ‘how say ye Johan, ar ye the same woman that ye wer an as ye promised my lord abbot of Towr Hill?’95 The contract appears unusual in the profile of its witnesses as well as in the apparent resistance of Joan’s friends. Most witnesses were outsiders to the parish; one of them was apparently a cleric as he lived within the city’s Whittington college. The witnesses in favour of the marriage to Partridge revealed that a servant girl who objected was detained in another room while Joan swore to the contract in the yard.96 The servant was not the only one of Joan’s acquaintances hostile to the match, and three local witnesses appeared in favour of a rival suitor who claimed pre-contract with Joan.97 A contemporary rental of the abbey’s London estates shows that Robert Partridge, the bridegroom, was a tenant of the abbey of St Mary Graces in East Smithfield and thus of the aforesaid ‘lord abbot of Towr Hill’. Other probable tenants of the abbey’s estate, John Colfox and Henry Chamberley, witnessed the contract.98 The marriage contract thus seems to have been arranged under the influence of the abbot, using the mediation of at least one wealthy tenant to bring pressure on the couple to contract and bear witness. This kind of authority is comparable to that of respectable local laymen, like the mercer mentioned above who expected a local widow would consult him about her remarriage, suggesting that through their role as landowners and employers the heads of religious houses could exert some pressure on those in their localities.
For Joan Floraunce, this relationship with a religious house may have been rather one-sided. However, more prominent tenants could turn this role to their own advantage. As has been argued of Westminster Abbey, the relationship between a religious house and a wealthy tenant could be mutually beneficial, and so the abbot viewed tenants as potentially influential friends in the laity.99 It was perhaps this kind of relationship which led to the prior of Holy Trinity Aldgate evicting William Smyth and his family from a substantial property in St Botolph Aldgate in August 1510 in favour of William Culverden, a wealthy bellfounder and wardmote jurist whom the prior would have known through his role as Portsoken alderman.100 Smyth refused to leave the house and launched a campaign of abuse against Culverden, which resulted in a defamation case at the consistory, where many witnesses recounted Smyth’s dramatic eviction.101 Culverden was presumably able to pay higher rents than Smyth and exploited the connections he had with the prior to get a property that he wanted. In this case, the ability of a religious house to favour certain residents over others was a source of disharmony. A case where the prior of St Mary’s hospital, Bishopsgate, sued a former employee named Robert Pellet was discussed. The case shows another example of religious houses’ local power as landowners in that thirteen Bishopsgate residents, including two tenants of the hospital, were lined up to testify against Pellet. The close economic ties between religious houses and their local neighbourhoods fed into local power dynamics in complex ways.
It would be reductive, however, to say that religious houses played a purely coercive role in the lives of individuals on the fringes of the city. The local laity were able to contest the local authority of religious houses and even royal liberties. The wardmote, with its malleable agenda, was an opportunity to do so. The wardmote jurors of Portsoken were particularly vociferous in their opposition to the neighbouring abbey of St Mary Graces, hospital of St Katherine and the royal Tower liberty. Their complaints centred on access to the river Thames by the ward’s inhabitants: disputes over river access were recurrent features of Portsoken wardmote presentment from 1370 until the 1470s. Complaints were raised against the constable of the Tower for charging Londoners for access to the river stairs and against the master of St Katharine’s hospital for similarly charging wharfage or for blocking the highway to the hospital’s water mill.102 These presentments suggest resistance to religious and royal precincts’ liberties and that, alongside their power as landowners, came a degree of local resentment. In addition to the tensions inherent in the exercise of informal power in the neighbourhood, the religious houses were another source of authority in marginal neighbourhoods. While this secular power might be contested, we should not underestimate the deep spiritual relationships expressed between laity and extramural houses which were present in the wills. It was a complex relationship and the laity were able to make use of religious houses’ precincts as spaces for evading sanction of their behaviour.
Conclusion
In a face-to-face society, detection of unwanted behaviour relied on the eyes and ears of neighbours as well as on their judgement of what constituted antisocial activity. As a result, the process of identifying offenders could in fact boost the reputations of those whom it involved, in turn enhancing their ability to participate in the informal exercise of authority over neighbours that would have suffused community life. The bounds of acceptable behaviour were set, and continually adapted, by neighbours.
These were processes which affected everybody, not just those whom we might consider to be classic marginal groups. Marginalization happened along a sliding scale, but the experience of the disadvantage of personal status was situational and fluctuating. Gender, status and place of origin all factored into judgements of individual character. They also influenced the possible extent of rehabilitation. People who aspired to inclusion in the office-holding section of local society could find themselves excluded because their reputation and behaviour were subject to just as much scrutiny as others, particularly when they sat on the wardmote jury. All were engaged in negotiating their position in society, improvising in response to the situations that faced them. Social marginality was therefore not a status that was simply assigned based solely on membership of a group, with everyone else automatically included in the local community by default. Marginality was contingent on individual behaviour, status, gender and background, as well as on the social resources which an individual could bring to bear when faced with a challenge to their behaviour or their right to live in a neighbourhood.
The relationship that individuals had with institutions of social control also had a significant impact on how likely they were to find themselves effectively marginalized. For men of sufficient social status, participation in local ward juries reinforced their reputation. For others, their relationship to institutions was more complicated. Women were formally excluded and yet they could evidently have influence on community management, although this would greatly depend on their social connections to the men who participated formally. For others, exclusion from institutions meant having to negotiate their inclusion in local society through alternative means. In liberties and extramural neighbourhoods with powerful local religious houses a different set of institutions affected people’s lives and could exert personal and coercive power in a manner similar to the ward officers whose power also rested on a mix of the institutional and the informal.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 4 (137-169) 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.