The social lives of medieval Londoners reveal how far they were drawn into the centralizing forces of urban life.
By Dr. Charlotte Berry
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Bath Spa University
Introduction
Neighbourhoods are not just points on maps but are formed by social interactions rooted in a particular place.1 Neighbours often had much in common with one another, whether they were communities of women sharing an alleyway or butchers living and working near the same market. Londoners’ experience of the city was shaped by the friendships they made with their neighbours, the churches they worshipped in and the work they did; all drew them into social networks which were associated with particular urban spaces. Some networks were rooted in the neighbourhood and others encompassed the entire city. The social lives of Londoners living beyond the city walls reveal how far they were drawn into the centralizing forces of urban life. However, social lives are ephemeral things; few of the records left to us by medieval people about their world explicitly tell us about their friendships and acquaintances. Even fewer can tell us much about social life outside of institutions. Presented with this problem, the approach here is to take a relatively abundant and well-used source – last wills and testaments – and apply the methodologies of social science to extract answers about patterns of sociability among those on the urban margins. By doing so, I trace the effects of places and networks in people’s lives as inscribed in their testamentary wishes.
In a book concerned with marginality, it may seem strange to devote so much attention to documents such as wills which reflected the propertied section of society. However, the socio-spatial networks found in wills tell us much about the fundamental nature of marginal neighbourhoods, and especially the complex sense in which they related to the urban whole. They indicate the networks that carried the greatest social capital in the extramural areas and set the stage for closer attention to wider neighbourhood society. They also give a nuanced picture of the differences between parishes outside the city walls, which were similar, but by no means homogeneous. The groups of people who lived in each had slightly different patterns of affiliation to central aspects of the city: institutions, neighbourliness and mobility.
Between Networks: Neighbourhood, City, Region
London’s society was a patchwork of neighbourhoods and institutions; while some institutions were based within a locality, others operated across the whole city. All were vital parts of the medieval ‘civil society’, as Gervase Rosser has argued, in which individuals acted collectively to negotiate their position.2 These institutions were integrative of locals and newcomers and inculcated common civic values, a necessity in cities because of the high number of immigrants needed to maintain a stable urban population.3 Collective endeavours that knitted together urban society included craft and fraternity organizations, worship in the parish church, local jury service and participation in parish administration and civic government.4 There were thus multiple kinds of social networks which Londoners participated in, seeking to find and cement their place in the city. In this essay, we will see how Londoners from the city’s margins interacted with neighbourhood social networks as well as the networks which connected the whole city. Social network analysis and mapping of testamentary bequests illustrate these socio-spatial networks. Being spatially peripheral did not preclude engagement with civic and craft institutions, although citizens were less prevalent in extramural neighbourhoods. People’s interactions with the central institutions of urban life affected the character of sociability in their neighbourhood and influenced what kind of relationships they formed.
Social networks of all kinds were, moreover, no trivial matter. Gervase Rosser argues that support networks could be so strained by the instability and risk of medieval life that building trusting relationships was vital to people’s survival.5 Trusting relationships were essential for a whole range of socio-economic purposes: to gain access to monetary credit, to enable the collaborative production of goods and to avoid the pariah status attached to the marginalized ‘stranger’.6 To build a social network and establish a ‘creditworthy’ reputation was thus highly important in order to insulate oneself against the vicissitudes of medieval life. Perhaps the most obvious opportunity for social networks were those based on locality, the neighbourhood and the parish. Scholars have argued that the concept of the parish community in London was a relatively restricted one, the term ‘parishioners’ referring to a group of householders of some standing in the local area and office-holders being drawn from a small select group.7 Therefore, although the sources used here are grouped by parish, it is important to make a distinction between the parish as a local institution and the neighbourhood as a community based on spatial proximity. The will-making section of the population naturally consisted of the better-off, so those considered senior parishioners are more likely to be represented within the sample. Some networks will therefore have been formed or reinforced through common involvement in parish institutions. However, simply the act of being neighbours will have formed yet other connections, and in some cases may make the artificially designated bounds of the parish meaningless in terms of social networks. In some extramural parishes, bounded by the city walls on one side and sparsely populated areas at their fringes, this complication may be less applicable. While only a minority of witnesses, executors and supervisors (hereafter referred to as testamentary officials) are identified by parish of residence, of the 339 (out of a total 1,649) whose residence was identified, 276 (81 percent) lived in the same parish as the testator. Locality was thus one of the focal points around which the social networks of testators formed.
The remaining witnesses, executors and supervisors reflect social connections created in other ways. The craft guilds (known as companies by the later part of the period) had firmly established their central role in controlling access to and supporting the political power of the civic government in the fourteenth century.8 The majority of citizens gained their entrance to the freedom of the city through apprenticeship in one or other craft; on successful completion of their term of service they became both a freeman of the city and a member of a company. Companies and guilds actively fostered social and economic bonds between members through both the institutions of apprenticeship and office-holding and in communal activities such as feasting and the attendance of one another’s funerals.9 Craft was thus another focal point for strong social networks that provided access to the kind of respectable men likely to act as testamentary officials. While there were some small craft clusters within the marginal parishes, none was dominated by a single trade, and so craft guilds were on the whole ‘central’ London institutions to which individuals belonged, although the Fishmongers who concentrated in the parishes north of London Bridge were a notable exception.10 The small groups with shared occupations in parishes outside the walls suggest the potential overlap between local and central social networks. In such cases, where the same group of respectable men occupied office-holding positions in both craft and parish, social capital could be transferred between contexts. Nonetheless, guild connections represent an important means through which residents of the margins participated in social networks that extended across London.
Social connections might also be maintained into London’s hinterland and beyond. The high levels of in-migration London experienced and its widespread economic connections are reflected in bequests. In the sampled wills, 18 percent of bequests to institutions were to those which lay outside London. Some were explicitly directed towards the parish where the testator was born, such as the forty shillings left for works to the nave of St Mary’s Church at Allingbourne, Sussex, by the widow Sibyl Bret of St Botolph Aldersgate.11 Such specificity in the reason for a bequest is unusual, however. John Jacob, a brewer also from Aldersgate, requested that ‘five marks are spent on the church of the parish of St Hilary, Cornwall where I was born’, but also made bequests of land at West Ham, Essex, a house at Stanbridge, Bedfordshire and left twenty shillings’ worth of charcoal to the poor of the parish of Tottenham, Middlesex.12 Jacob’s property and charity show the connections he had developed to places close to London but far removed from his original home. As we shall see in this essay, bequests outside London might reflect business interests and social connections built up over the testator’s lifetime as well as their place of birth. London’s central role in the economy of England prompted both migration and the building of long-distance business networks.13 These connections, while more patchily recorded, suggest that in addition to local and city-wide networks the hinterland also exerted an influence on the sociability of residents at the margins.
Analysing Testamentary Networks
The main sources used in this essay are the wills and testaments of people who lived in the extramural parishes of St Botolph Aldgate, St Botolph Aldersgate and St Botolph Bishopsgate, St Katharine Cree just inside London’s wall and, for comparison, the wealthy central parish of St Lawrence Jewry. I described the samples selected for the period 1390–1540, and the same wills, sampled in twenty- to–thirty-year cohorts, are utilised here. Their interpretation in this essay is primarily undertaken with digital methodologies, the most important of which is Social Network Analysis (SNA). SNA is a quantitative methodology for the analysis of interactions between a set of ‘nodes’ (points within the network) which enables both the visualization of those interactions as a network graph and the statistical expression of a network’s characteristics. Originally developed by social scientists for research into contemporary human interactions, SNA is a methodology with much to offer historians.14 Although a historian cannot interview medieval people about their subjective experience of personal relationships in the same way as a sociologist would when building a picture of a social network, for certain kinds of formal interaction historians with archival sources are at an advantage.15 Putting together the archival traces of social actions can open up a new explanatory paradigm for historical phenomena. A classic example is John Padgett and Christopher Ansell’s study of the rise of the Medici, which used SNA to demonstrate that the family consolidated its power by building marriage alliances, patronage and business networks which spanned the fault lines in Florence’s political elites.16
While SNA is not yet a common tool among urban historians, the idea of the network as a driver of urban social relations is quite widely diffused; the language of SNA (‘network’, ‘ties’, ‘embeddedness’) has become popular in historical analysis even among those not using its formal methods.17 Its ascendance has primarily been at the expense of structural approaches to the medieval city, which centred on the power of institutions. The decline of structural explanations has had two strands. First, historians have stressed the caveats to institutional power and the compromises they made. The membership of institutions such as the London livery companies is now seen not to have played such an all-encompassing role in granting economic opportunity as previously thought, and the key route to membership – apprenticeship – was as likely to result in dropouts as it was to produce new freemen.18 Second, the focus shifted to the power of interpersonal connections. The work of Justin Colson on the Fishmongers, for instance, suggests that while the company acted as an integrative body enabling the economic advancement of members, it also had a split structure reflecting two spatially and socially separate groups of fishmongers.19 Thus, urban historians utilizing network analysis are able to produce nuanced answers to questions about the role of structure and institutions in city life.20 This essay considers networks with a spatial element by centring on the range of types of connections which a Londoner might make: neighbourly, urban and regional. It also uses the quantitative potential of networks to compare and contrast how neighbours acted as a group in the different parishes. This is a real strength of network analysis for the historian, as it makes it possible to set the particular and the personal in the context of the behaviour of a group and then to compare the ways that different groups act.
Testamentary data lends itself well to the use of SNA since wills describe a range of interactions between a testator and their social group, whether individuals acted as beneficiaries to wills, executors or supervisors of the testator’s estate or as witnesses to the act of making a will itself. Beneficiaries listed in wills were probably an incomplete picture of those benefiting from an estate. Therefore this essay primarily uses testators and their witnesses, supervisors and executors, since even the shortest will named at least an executor to ensure its contents were carried out. Each will describes what is, in network terms, an ‘egocentric network’ for its testator. In network analysis terms, the people named in wills (including testators, witnesses and executors) are nodes and the relationships between them edges. The drawback in focusing on testamentary officials is that they were more likely to have been drawn from the better-off, respectable sections of society. This was due to the fact that executors and supervisors were expected to be trustworthy and, ideally, to have experience in handling money. In addition, respectable people were favoured as witnesses so that in the event of the will being disputed their testimony would be accepted in court.21 This serves to exaggerate the tendency of testamentary evidence to represent the better-off by excluding those who may have been socially close to a testator but not considered suitable to act as an official. However, the great advantage of the approach is that it provides a sense of who those ‘central’ individuals were who could be relied upon to act as officials in any parish. We can thus approach the question of whether, when testators came to make a choice about who would best represent their interests after death, they relied upon their respectable neighbours or on relationships formed through other means.
In answering this question, the analysis uses the modularity score of different cohorts of testators as a means of comparison. Modularity is the measurement of the extent to which nodes in a network graph can be divided into densely connected communities known as modules. A lower modularity score indicates that connections are spread more evenly through a network, while a higher score means that nodes fall into modular groups which are internally well connected but weakly connected to the wider network. Scores fall on a range between –1 (least modular) and 1 (most modular). Scores are comparable between networks of different sizes, and the statistically defined modules are represented in each graph by assigned colours. Another advantage of modularity is that it effectively tests statistical significance as part of the calculation, since the score is derived by comparing the number of connections for each node against the expected number of connections if edges were distributed randomly. Testamentary networks are naturally modular, since testators named as their officials people with a personal connection to them, some of whom were unlikely to feature in the wills of others, particularly surviving widows and other family members. Similarly, even samples taken at twenty-year intervals cannot fully account for the fact that many of the officials named may have died early in the sample period or reached their majority or moved to the parish only late within it. Thus, the circumstances of will-making and the sampling process make it highly unlikely that any neighbourhood would have equal connections between all testators and officials and thus a modularity score close to –1.
Modularity is highly relevant for the analysis of wills, since it essentially expresses the degree of overlap between the communities found in each will within a parish. Admittedly, the chance loss of wills over time means there is a degree of uncertainty and imprecision; we will never know if lost wills might have named individuals who now appear unimportant in their parish networks. Some wills could have been proved in error in one of the London archdeaconry courts whose records are now lost. Archival loss as well as the natural modularity of testamentary networks means that modularity scores will tend to bunch at the higher end: the parish samples presented here all fall in a range between 0.76 and 0.93. With these caveats in mind, the main focus in this essay is the comparison of the whole network’s qualities and the use of those comparisons to ask questions about the relationship between testamentary networks and underlying patterns of social interaction, identifying the different varieties of social experience which influenced testators.
This is, admittedly, a narrow range of scores, but it provides a useful focus point for understanding the differences between parishes and the will-making behaviour of different kinds of people. Figures 2.1–3 show graphs for three parish samples and provide good examples of different network structures. Figure 2.1, which depicts the network for St Botolph Aldgate testators in 1515–40, has the highest modularity score of the three networks, at 0.916. The lowest of the three is the network for St Botolph Aldersgate in 1465–95, with a score of 0.812. What principally drove the higher modularity of the Aldgate sample was the number of wills that did not overlap with any others, that is, did not name another testator as an official or share an official with a fellow parishioner. This was the case for fifteen of the thirty wills in the sample. The score was also affected by the exceptionally large number of officials named by brazier William Culverden (twelve), of whom only one was shared with a neighbour.
This effect is also seen in Figure 2.2, with the will of Bishopsgate’s alderman William Marow. Marow named ten officials, none of whom appeared in the wills of his fellow parishioners.22 His circle of officials was so large that it increased the modularity score of the whole St Botolph Bishopsgate 1465–95 sample from 0.803, which would have been the lowest score in that sample period, to 0.825.
The lower score in the St Botolph Aldersgate sample in Figure 2.3 is down to the size of the ‘giant component’ in the network: that is, the largest number of nodes that can be connected together. Seven of the fifteen wills fell in this group. While a similar proportion of the wills were isolated with no shared connections to the Aldgate network in Figure 2.3, what made the difference in score is that when Aldersgate testators in this sample were connected to another person it was most likely to be a connection that had onward links to many other wills. More important than individual scores, however, are the reasons for these differences, which can be revealed only by looking more closely at individual testators, officials and their backgrounds. For instance, in Figure 2.3 the goldsmith John Friend was named by two testators. Reference to the register of the parish fraternity shows that he and the two testators who named him (Thomas White and John Jacob) were all members of the local Fraternity of SS Fabian and Sebastian, and that Jacob and Friend acted as wardens together in 1482–3.23 By contrast, the will of Nicholas Bailey, gentleman, from the same sample shows that while he, too, was a member of the parish fraternity, he apparently did not choose his officials from among its membership.24 Bailey, Friend and Jacob were all connected by a local institution, but they were Londoners of different statuses who made different kinds of choice about their testamentary officials. The graphs and scores thus provided a stepping-off point in researching parish testamentary networks, inviting further research to explain and contextualize the connections between individuals and of the group as a whole.
Influence on Social Interactions
Overview
All of the parishes were complex social spaces, part of socio-spatial networks at the level of the neighbourhood, city and region. Testamentary social networks are an indication of the strength of local ties. There were some broad socio-economic similarities among parishes beyond the walls. However, testamentary networks reveal important local differences. There were several social circumstances which will be used as explanations for modularity scores in this essay. These can be divided into three broad categories:
- Neighbourly integration: the effect of informal sociability prompted by proximity and formal local institutions such as parish and ward in creating a basic cohesiveness in local social networks.
- Cultural connections/disconnections: the influence of social and cultural differences in creating modularity in local networks. These differences might centre on differences of language or social status. In some cases, cultural differences may be closely related to the third category – occupational connections – particularly where trades which required a high degree of mobility mitigated against neighbourly integration.
- Occupational connections/disconnections: craft and trade ties around which social networks were formed and which thus limited or enhanced neighbourly integration. Occupation often appears to have competed against locality as a focus for ties, but the presence of a trade cluster might in some instances decrease local modularity where elements of a trade’s infrastructure were present.
Testamentary networks in each parish were impacted by a balance of these factors, meaning that no two places were the same.
Neighbourhood Ties
Trying to quantify something as nebulous as social interaction poses a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one with such imperfect sources standing at half a millennium’s remove from their subjects. However, one thing is quite clear: people in different parishes relied on their neighbours as testamentary officials to quite different extents. We have seen how modularity scores can indicate the quality of connections between people in a network: lower scores show more even ties across a whole network; higher scores indicate more isolated will communities. Table 2.1 shows the modularity scores for each graph produced from the will samples. On average, St Botolph Bishopsgate had the lowest score and St Botolph Aldgate the highest, followed by St Lawrence Jewry. St Botolph Aldersgate’s testators changed their habits over time, with far more even connections between their wills in the early sixteenth century than a hundred years before. St Katharine Cree testators, by contrast, were quite consistent over time and fell in the middle of most samples. The historical circumstances which caused these results were complex and need to be carefully teased out to throw light on the relationship between quantification of testamentary networks and real social interactions.
It is very important to bear in mind that this kind of analysis does not directly measure sociability but the practices involved in making a will. While much can be inferred about society from will-making, circumstances out of a testator’s control could also influence their actions. Given that most wills were made when death was shortly anticipated (rather than in advance), we might expect conditions of epidemic disease and high mortality to be just such a circumstance. Evidence from both chronicles and bonds of debt suggest that the 1430s was a period of recurrent plague in London, exacerbated by food shortages.25 Perhaps as a result, sample 2 is an anomaly in most parishes, with generally higher modularity scores despite an increase in the sample sizes of testators from sample 1. Within the sample, modularity was higher in every parish in 1430–39 than in 1440–50.26
There are several potential ways in which epidemic disease could change will-making practices. A testator’s first choice of executor or supervisor might have already died, forcing them to use other friends to fulfil these positions. Higher mortality could also reduce the overlap between wills, with important local contacts named by one testator dying before they could be named by another neighbour. There is even some indication that people named fewer officials in this period, perhaps because wills had to be written at shorter notice.27 While there were notable periods of epidemic disease during other samples, in particular in the 1460s and during the first sweating sickness of 1485, the longer time span of the later samples may serve to even out the effects. The effect of epidemic disease is an important reminder that this essay considers testamentary networks and not complete social networks, and indicates how cautious the historian must be not to conflate the two.
Nonetheless, the modularity of testamentary networks does offer us some important clues to the wider context of social relationships. In Bishopsgate, the dense connections between testators and executors were relatively evenly distributed through the sample, when compared to other parishes. Figure 2.2 shows the network graph for Bishopsgate in 1465–95. Seven individuals named in two or more wills form important nodes in the network, including a parish chaplain, William Nolath, a notary public, who would have assisted in writing wills, William Chant and a prominent brewer (later sergeant of the king’s larder), Henry Rycroft. However, also important to the linkages through the sample are a number of testators who were named by others as officials (and thus have an in-degree of one) such as two more brewers, John Wilcox and Robert Broad, and the minstrel John Ingham. This suggests that people living in Bishopsgate tended to look to their neighbours to act as testamentary officials and, perhaps, that social relationships were quite closely tied to the neighbourhood. This was the case from the earliest to the latest wills, and so seems to have been a long-standing characteristic of will-making in Bishopsgate.
How can we relate this tendency back to neighbourhood society more generally? Some assistance is provided by the exceptionally unconnected will of William Marow, grocer and alderman of Bishopsgate ward. As noted above, this is despite his naming ten testamentary officials. In fact, Marow’s will shows greater overlap with the contemporary sample from St Lawrence Jewry, since he named as one of his executors the city recorder, Thomas Urswick. Marow’s estate was large and, in addition to bequests to the church and clergy of St Botolph Bishopsgate, he left money for forgotten tithes to the parish of St Mary at Hill, indicating prior residence there, as well as bequests to the poor of Essex, Kent and Stepney, Middlesex. As a prominent man in city politics and a successful merchant, Marow’s social connections extended well beyond Bishopsgate. It was the poorest of the parishes considered in this book. While its testators would still have been of middling wealth, they were certainly lower status than Marow and less wealthy as a group than in other parishes, hence they relied on trusting relationships with their neighbours rather than higher-prestige connections which spanned the city. Marow’s style of will-making contrasted sharply with his neighbours’ but was similar to Aldersgate’s aristocratic and gentry residents, as discussed below, so it was perhaps typical of the most wealthy and well-connected individuals. While perhaps an extreme example, it serves to illustrate the point that the wealthier an individual was, the less reliant they were probably to be on local networks.
Local institutions underlay and supported neighbourhood sociability. This can be seen at Aldersgate, which has surviving churchwardens’ accounts, wardmote inquest returns and a parish fraternity register. The third sample of wills from St Botolph Aldersgate is shown in Figure 2.3, when the parish had the lowest modularity of any in the sample period. Several of those featured had leading roles within local institutions. Alan Johnson and Nicholas Lathell, both of whom were named twice by fellow parishioners, feature in the churchwardens’ accounts for the parish: Johnson was churchwarden many times between 1468 and his death while in the post in 1497–8, and Lathell was fined for absence from the presentation of the accounts in 1487–8. Lathell and Johnson were also both sometime wardens of the parish fraternity of SS Fabian and Sebastian. Other men named as officials who also feature as parishioners, churchwardens or fraternity wardens include Thomas Wymark, John Symond and William Keningthorpe.29 Jury service at the wardmote in both St Botolph Aldgate (that is, in Portsoken ward) and Aldersgate was a powerful creator of social connections, enabling social mobility and forging friendships.30 For many men, officiating a neighbour’s will was the endpoint of associations that had lasted throughout their adult lives.
This middling sort who were highly engaged with the parish’s institutions, was evidently strong in the late fifteenth century at St Botolph Aldersgate. However, the parish seems to have undergone significant social change over the period, which can be charted through its testamentary networks. In 1390–1410, there were no shared officials at all between wills. In 1430–50, the only connections were in the wills of John and Felicia Mason, a married couple who both selected the same executors, and John Clement, tailor, who appeared both as a testator and as executor to the widow Margaret Morris. Accordingly, modularity was higher in these earlier samples than in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This is an intriguing contrast, and setting this shift alongside the economic and social circumstances of the parish provides some answers as to why it might be as indication of a wider pattern of social relations. Aldersgate was a popular location for the grand city houses of the aristocracy and gentry, who had few neighbourly ties in the area and so were isolated within testamentary networks. This group remained present throughout the fifteenth century, but their effects on the social network graphs is mitigated in the latter part of the period by their far more connected, middling neighbours who, on the whole, had a similar profile to will-makers in Bishopsgate. By the later fifteenth century, the make-up of the parish’s population seems to have changed, gaining a more prominent group of those of middling but comfortable status.
The importance of local institutions is also demonstrated by the prominence of parish fraternities in the wills of those from every neighbourhood. Fraternities in receipt of bequests were by and large those within the testator’s parish itself or in parishes close by. Caroline Barron suggested that parish fraternities were particularly popular and important in extramural areas and perhaps performed some of the functions of local government.31 It seems safe to assume that those leaving bequests to fraternities had been members in life, some bequests giving details which confirm this. For example, John de Bee of St Katharine Cree left to the parish fraternity a hood of their livery, and John Jacob of St Botolph Aldersgate ten marks ‘for the payment of my debts’ to the local fraternity of SS Fabian and Sebastian, of which he had been a warden.32 In St Botolph Aldgate, the largest number of fraternity bequests (twenty-one) went to the Jesus Fraternity based in the parish church, although three testators left money to the Corpus Christi fraternity in neighbouring St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel. At St Botolph Aldersgate fourteen testators left money to a variety of fraternities based in the parish (the number of which appears to have changed over time) and four to fraternities based nearby: the fraternity of Holy Mary at St Bride, St Giles at St Giles Cripplegate, St Lucy at St Nicholas Shambles and Holy Mary of Graces at St Paul’s Cathedral. In St Botolph Bishopsgate, thirty-eight testators left money to one of the several parish fraternities, one to St Botolph Aldgate’s Jesus fraternity and one to the guild of Our Lady at St Leonard Eastcheap. Locality was evidently of primary importance in choice of fraternity. Some fraternities may have had a certain cachet to their membership, such as SS Fabian and Sebastian at St Botolph Aldersgate, which was briefly fashionable among gentry and royal officials, while Henry IV convalesced at nearby priories in 1408–9.33 However, mainly it seems that testators chose fraternities which lay within or close to their own ‘patch’ of the city. Fraternities of varying levels of status may indeed have been available within a single parish. This was evidently the case at St Lawrence Jewry, where a ‘penny brotherhood’ was the recipient of a number of bequests alongside the other parish fraternities dedicated to St Ursula and the Holy Cross.
In each parish, locality served as an integrative force within testamentary networks. Fostered by the kinds of institutional involvement recorded by parish, ward and fraternity records as well the less thoroughly recorded although no less important sociability born of proximity to neighbours. The institutions of parish, fraternity and ward were common to all London neighbourhoods, as were prominent local clerical figures such as the parish rector. The local connections forged in these circumstances are precisely the kind of friendships and acquaintances likely to be considered reliable enough to feature in testamentary networks. Locality was therefore a factor in social relations that lowered modularity within testamentary network graphs, albeit that the strength of local ties varied from place to place.
At St Botolph Aldgate, locality appears less important. The parish’s networks show the highest average modularity score of any parish. The parish’s circumstances seem likely to have fostered fewer shared social connections. First, it was large and had areas of sparse population. By the calculation of the chantry certificates of 1548, it contained 1,100 communicants, 200 more than nearby intramural St Dunstan in the East and yet more than twice St Dunstan’s geographical size.34 Even its houses seem to have been built in something of a rural style. It may well be that, with a more diffused population, sociability outside the formal structures of the parish and ward was weaker, and people were more likely to rely on other connections to administrate their will. The roads of Aldgate Street, Minories and Houndsditch may have formed their own neighbourhoods, and this may also have been the case with the area around East Smithfield within the Abbot of St Mary Grace’s liberty. Indeed, part of the parish was detached and lay outside the jurisdiction of the city. In such a potentially multicentred neighbourhood, parish-level sources have real limitations. The overall modularity score is also closest to the parish of St Lawrence Jewry, where, as will be discussed in the following section, craft and trade connections appear to have played a greater role in the formation of testamentary networks. If craft ties were stronger outside Aldgate, this may have served to reinforce the effects of a less concentrated population. The local population of immigrant aliens showed their own pattern of sociability, which tended to weaken the structure of the testamentary network. The final sample of wills contains six testators who were aliens with few connections within the parish. Migrant identity and background, then, could be a fault line through local society that served to create a kind of cultural disconnection within the neighbourhood, as will be discussed further below. There were other outlying wills in the sample, but this was the only group of outlying testators with a clear trait in common. The potential for locality to act as a fulcrum of testamentary networks outside Aldgate may have been lessened by the presence of individuals with close ties to other communities as well as divisions into spatially distinct neighbourhoods.
Bequests tell a different story, one that is more focused on affective ties than high-status social connections. Neighbours were important as friends, and testators often remembered them in their wills. As Table 2.2 indicates, of more than 400 individuals named in wills (both beneficiaries and officials) who were stated to live within London, the majority lived within the parish of the testator. This was most apparent in Aldgate and Bishopsgate parishes, where 79 percent and 82 percent respectively were drawn from the same parish, and at its lowest at Aldersgate, with 69 percent. This contradicts the higher modularity of St Botolph Aldgate’s testamentary networks, suggesting that even if choices of testamentary officials did not overlap, testators still had important local friendships, perhaps made within their patch of the multicentred parish.
Bequests to those outside the testator’s own household were only rarely given with a clear description of the relationship between testator and legatee. Among the most popular and easily identified local figures to receive bequests or act as officials were clergy associated with the local parish church. While this was often a formulaic bequest, some testators named specific clergymen, often asking to be remembered in their prayers. For instance, the butcher Richard Hartlepool left twenty pence to Sir Henry Markham, chaplain of the parish of St Botolph Aldersgate, to pray for his soul.35 Other recipients were evidently lay friends and neighbours, such as Joan Capper, who received twelve pence from the will of her fellow parishioner at Aldersgate, the widow Margaret Morris. Maurice Clerk, a chandler, was left sixteen pence by his neighbour Walter Spencer in 1477.36 Constance Gates of St Lawrence Jewry left a bequest to an unnamed woman who was described as her ‘pewfellow’.37 At St Katharine and St Lawrence, a considerable minority of individuals were simply described as being ‘of London’, usually as part of a designation of their citizenship and company membership. This may well indicate the greater importance of citizenship and craft in the parishes within the walls, a factor that is explored more thoroughly in the following section.
In summary, local circumstances produced testamentary networks of different characters. Within this diversity, certain themes can be seen in the factors that affected the connectedness of each network to a greater or lesser degree, as measured in its modularity score. The effect of locality or neighbourly integration served to lower modularity by fostering connections through formal and informal social interaction within the parish. This effect might be reduced where the geography of a parish meant that it could contain smaller, more ‘natural’ neighbourhoods. Cultural disconnection could also balance the impact of local integration, as social groups with a differing identity to their neighbours sought out other networks.
Cultural Disconnections
As has already been alluded to, the wills of immigrants expressed a cultural disconnection to their fellow parishioners. The presence of aliens in the final Aldgate sample increased the modularity of the network. There were six testators in this sample whom circumstantial evidence suggests were Dutch or German immigrants: Jacob Johannes, Tuse Bolybrand, Gerard Sleipen, Henry Johnson, Martin Danswick and John Nicholas.38 Aside from local curate Richard Bostock, who acted as witness to Bolybrand’s will, none of these men’s circle of officials overlaps with other testators in the parish (or indeed with one another’s). Other immigrant wills echoed this pattern. The most extreme example was that of Genoese merchant Giorgio Spinulla, whose will, proved in 1470, named two executors and two witnesses, all from his home city. Spinulla died in the parish of St Katharine Cree but requested burial at Austin Friars.39 Giles de Hare, a beer brewer of St Botolph Aldgate whose will was proved in 1442, named three executors: his wife, Eleanor; William Billington, who lived in ‘Makkyng’; and Guibert Panser, a goldsmith of Southwark. He also left 3s 4d to the ‘Dutch fraternity’ of St Crispin.40 Josh Ravenhill, in his recent study of aliens and their experience of belonging in late medieval London, argued that immigrants made a range of social connections with other city dwellers, many of whom were neighbours.41 In the light of his analysis, the cultural disconnection seen in testamentary networks is perhaps best understood as primarily a function of how aliens might gather social capital differently. When it came to making a will, their most trusted and highest status connections were often outside the parish or, where they were within the parish, with local clergy rather than neighbours.
The connections made by aliens outside their parish were fostered by socializing with those who shared their language and origins. That they did so in both informal and institutional settings can be seen in cases heard at the consistory court. For instance, a 1514 marriage contract made in French between two Normans at a house in St Martin le Grand was witnessed by Stephen Sawner, a sheath maker born at Saint-Lô who had come from his home in Southwark to see the contract made.42 St Martin le Grand was home to a large community of alien craftsmen, and other well-known locations acted as ‘hubs’ to draw together immigrants resident across the city. The city’s friaries served this purpose, particularly in acting as the venues for alien religious fraternities such as the fraternity of St Crispin named in Giles de Hare’s will (although the will does not mention the venue of that fraternity). The friaries were popular meeting places for alien fraternities because they often provided religious services and confession in immigrants’ native tongues, being able to do so because many friars were migrants themselves.43 We shall see later in this essay that English parish fraternities attracted a highly localized membership, but the pattern among alien fraternities was very different. A 1523–4 consistory case concerned the alien fraternity of St Barbara, based at the house of Dominican friars known as Blackfriars: the fraternity’s membership were natives of Brabant and Lorraine.44 The case was brought by the fraternity wardens, who sued two former members apparently for refusing to pay their fraternity dues, with six members appearing as witnesses. The parishes of residence given by the members were spread across the city with no two witnesses originating in the same parish, from St Andrew Castle Baynard in the west to St Dunstan in the East by the Tower. Blackfriars did not form a geographic centre point for the fraternity members; they probably chose it based more on their origins than on proximity to their homes. It is also notable that the only English witness who spoke in one of the members’ defence was a barber surgeon who treated the defendant’s wife’s chronic illness, suggesting that when a rupture occurred within the alien community reliable character witnesses might be those known in a professional capacity rather than English neighbours. While aliens may have had affective relationships with neighbours, they gathered the kinds of social connection that manifested in testamentary networks in a manner which minimized the role of fellow parishioners.
The most elite testators showed a similar lack of connection to their neighbours or even to those of their own rank. Esquires John Newport and John Aystow and the gentlemen John Rous, Nicholas Bailey and John Taverham were unconnected to other testators in their respective parish networks. Although gentry and aristocratic men still cited artisans (probably Londoners) such as tailors, shearmen, a pinner and a brewer as their officials, their officials were rarely shared with fellow parishioners. In these cases, their elevated social status, as well as their probable mobility between London and other residences, probably meant that the social circle and networks formed by these men were largely external to their final parishes of residence. These cases are similar to that of William Marow, alderman of Bishopsgate, whose will was discussed above; while for Marow his success in city politics meant that his circle of testamentary officials was disconnected from locality, for the gentry and aristocracy it was their position in a national elite which divided them from neighbours. The greater presence of such individuals at St Botolph Aldersgate and St Katharine Cree may well be a determining factor in the apparently greater modularity of testamentary network in those parishes and the reason for a low average in-degree among officials in Aldersgate.
Those classed as nobility or gentry cited more textile manufacturers (tailors, shearmen, etc.) as officials than they did those of their own rank. This probably reflects the importance of London as a centre for the production of clothing for the wealthy and fashionable and their trust in men of business in practical matters of handling money. When the gentleman Nicholas Bailey named William Browning, tailor, as his executor and left him a gown and doublet in 1486, it was perhaps because he had been a frequent patron of Browning in life.45 Those with high status and immigrants had different patterns of will-making to their neighbours, and this was perhaps connected with their not having anticipated death in a city far from their home country or estate.
Occupational Ties
Marginal areas attracted particular occupations, especially those which were unwanted within the city walls or which benefited from lower rents for large premises. The kind of occupations found in a neighbourhood affected not just its economy but also the character of its social relations. Occupations could act as the ‘central ties’ of the city, the key networks supported by the social activities of the craft guilds that connected people from across London and assisted social mobility. Ties based on craft are one of the more easily identifiable kinds of network displayed within the testamentary sample, since occupation is one of the few pieces of information given about many officials and legatees.
There was also a clear tendency to name officials with a similar or shared craft. Table 2.3 indicates the proportion of officials with each occupation type for testators falling into each occupation category. This was most dramatic among the mercantile testators, for whom 31 percent of their officials were drawn from those with the same kind of occupation. As will be discussed, these testators were mainly mercers living in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry. Among metal workers, too, there was common citation of those with similar occupations. For metal workers, cooperation between allied trades was evidently important in fostering social connections that featured in testamentary networks. The bellfounder William Powtrell named a brazier, Geoffrey Bride, as an executor, and John Robertson, a coppersmith, named Richard Hill, a founder, his executor.46 Such trades required similar equipment and, especially in the case of bellfounding, a staff of founders and braziers to shape the metal and stoke the furnaces. Metalworkers might have come to know and trust each other as much through working together in the same workshops as through the formal organization of a craft guild.
A notable exception was those who provided services, who evidently gathered wide social connections, which they reflected in their wills. The barber William atte Hill was evidently a wealthy and well-connected man, as he left more than £1 in forgotten tithes and had a girdler and two drapers among the officials to his will. At the more modest end of the scale, John Ingham the minstrel (who left twenty pence in tithes) named a brewer as supervisor to his will, a lute player as one of his witnesses and two barbers among his friends receiving bequests, one of whom was given a small lute.47 In general, outside of these exceptions, shared and similar occupations played an important role in the formation of testamentary networks.
Shared occupations sometimes reinforced the strength of local testamentary networks. In several of the parishes under discussion here, clusters can be seen to have been formed by those with shared occupations, both in central St Lawrence Jewry and in extramural parishes. For instance, in the third Aldgate sample the butchers William Stallon, Robert Nore, John Roke junior and Thomas Russell were all closely connected. Roke’s will was witnessed by both Nore and Stallon, and Nore acted as supervisor for Stallon and executor for Russell.48 Stallon and Nore appear to have been men of some personal standing in the parish even outside the community of butchers. They were two of the men most commonly chosen as officials in the sample, named by non-butchers and people with unknown occupations. Likewise, at St Lawrence Jewry the sizeable group of mercers often cited those who shared their occupation and, occasionally, they also seem to have shared a connection to the parish. Mercers Geoffrey Fielding and Philip Agmondesham both named Richard Fielding, Geoffrey’s son and a fellow company member, as an official.
However, while in some cases shared occupation strengthened local ties, on the whole it appears that it served to create testamentary networks that extended outside the neighbourhood. Fielding and Agmondesham were unusual in sharing an official, in spite of the fact that mercers formed the largest occupational grouping among the St Lawrence Jewry testators. While 31 percent of the officials chosen by mercers and other mercantile occupations shared their occupation, only two of the fifteen fellow mercers they chose were also cited by another resident of the same parish. Testators here seem to have chosen officials they knew through the Mercers’ Company rather than the parish, the company hall being located a short distance away on Poultry. In St Lawrence Jewry, then, the modularity of the network was increased by the existence of a sizeable minority who had close occupational ties which caused their testamentary network to face outwards from the parish. By contrast, for the members of the Fishmongers’ Company who lived in the Bridgehead neighbourhood institutional affiliation reinforced and created local testamentary ties.49 Unlike the Fishmongers, members of the Mercers’ Company were residing in increasingly dispersed locations across the city in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.50 This was the usual pattern for London guildsmen in the period, and the evidence of the Mercers’ wills suggests that declining craft clustering may have made London guild members increasingly likely to choose their testamentary officials from across the city.
Unfortunately, outside St Lawrence Jewry the identification of occupations was less consistent. This makes it difficult to identify with certainty the extent to which this effect impacted upon networks among craftsmen of humbler status. Nonetheless, there are some revealing contrasts between members of the same parish who had different occupations. Comparing the number of times individuals were named as officials (their in-degree) is very suggestive. The higher the in-degree of named officials, the more frequently they feature in the wills of neighbours and thus the higher the likelihood that those ties were based on locality rather than craft or some other factor peculiar to the circumstances of individual testators. St Botolph Aldgate had the same average in-degree to St Lawrence Jewry: officials, excluding widows of the testator, were named 1.12 times, on average. However, there were significant differences by occupation. A good example of this are those working in food preparation, the most common occupation type in extramural parishes. Butchers (sixteen) named as officials by Aldgate testators had an average in-degree of 1.6, while others who prepared food for a living (brewers: three; and bakers: four) had an average of 1. When butchers are excluded, the average in-degree for all Aldgate officials was 1.09, suggesting that they were much more likely to be chosen as officials. Living near East Smithfield market, butchers such as Stallon and Nore seem to have been part of a densely connected local occupational community, unlike brewers and bakers. These are, admittedly, very small subsets of the wills sampled, and the results could simply be down to chance, but they are suggestive when combined with the evidence from St Lawrence Jewry. Some trades, such as the mercers, encouraged the building of connections across the city, while others, such as the butchers and fishmongers, built densely connected craft clusters. The effects of occupation on local testamentary networks were complex and varied from trade to trade. The evidence presented here is suggestive of patterns which might well have been replicated across the city wherever parishes were not so dominated by one trade as to become the social centre for that occupation in themselves. Occupational connections were a factor influencing the structure of parish testamentary networks, which seem, in general, to have increased modularity. It is likely that the structure and nature of different trades and the presence of local infrastructure (such as markets or company halls) determined the degree to which this was the case.
In some cases, occupation could marginalize people from parish networks. Thomas Kent of St Botolph Aldgate, for instance, is described in his 1432 will as a mariner, and neither his two witnesses nor his executors feature in any of the wills of his neighbours.51 While proximity to the Thames might have determined his residence at the time of his death, the practicalities of his occupation presumably necessitated long periods of absence and thus a lack of participation in neighbourhood life. Despite the gulf in social status between the mariner Kent and the esquire Newport, both chose officials for their wills in comparable ways. It can be inferred that each held a position which made them part of a group similar to the ‘portable communities’ described by Erik Spindler who did not depend on a fixed locality for their sociability and networks.52 Therefore, their impact on modularity can be considered similar to that seen among the aliens of Aldgate parish as a factor of cultural disconnection from their neighbours.
Economic connections were often also social connections in fifteenth-century London, both at the margins and elsewhere. However, unlike among the highly clustered fishmongers, the structures of neighbourhood, parish and craft did not always serve to reinforce one another where occupations were more spread across the city. Those with access to wider economic networks might prefer to use such connections when choosing men of status to carry out or bear witness to their final will. Given that access to financial credit and social status were heavily intertwined, the most respectable executors were also likely to be those with the greatest resources and experience in handling money. These networks would for some at least provide access to men of greater social standing than they might meet as neighbours and fellow parishioners. This raises an important question for the peripheral areas of the city, which were generally poorer and whose populations had fewer ties to the structures of craft and citizenship which drove such economic ties. In the absence of access to these city-wide networks, those at the margins developed alternative networks of support.
City-Wide Ties
Craft connections represent one kind of centralizing network in the fifteenth-century city, but attachment to London was not just expressed in terms of guild allegiances. Bequests were markers of testators’ own sense of urban space. By grouping bequests together, a footprint of each parish cohort of testators’ understanding of city space can be mapped. This both sheds light on the role of centralizing networks and builds a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of locality beyond the parish. Experiences of urban space were markedly localized, even if they did not always respect institutional boundaries. Nonetheless, Londoners also moved around the city during their lifetime and retained connections to previous neighbourhoods.
When making their wills, testators selected locations with which they had a particular connection as focuses for bequests. Scholars have sometimes assumed, in the absence of other information about testators’ lives, that bequests located outside the testator’s place of residence indicate prior residence or places of origin.53 However, analyses of spiritual bequests to religious foundations have revealed more complex patterns of giving, based both on proximity to the testator’s residence as well as to their conceptions of space, such as Sheila Sweetinburgh’s work on bequests to medieval English hospitals and Anne Lester’s on testators in Champagne.54 Lester wrote that a testator’s ‘description reflects her own frame of reference, her experience of the urban environment’.55 Testamentary records cannot be read as unmediated documents of an individual’s situation. However, even if not complete, wills are one of the few documents that do partially express a spatial frame of reference for ordinary medieval people, even if greater wealth meant greater freedom for that expression. For example, not all bequests to St Paul’s Cathedral can be directly assumed to suggest regular attendance at masses there, since some such gifts could be aspirational statements about how and where the testator wished to be remembered after their death, related to both the perceived status of the object of the bequest, its location and the testator’s self-image.56 The discussion here follows this conception of the will by reading it as a partial record of a testator’s spatial frame of reference. In this interpretation, gifts left outside the parish of residence express connections which may well indicate prior residence and migration but also other kinds of personal connection and suggest the prominence of institutions as elements of the urban landscape.
Choosing where to be buried was the most common way in which testators showed attachment to places in the city. The parish church or churchyard was the most common choice, with 75 percent or more making this choice in most parishes.57 The strength of social ties to neighbours also meant a strong spiritual connection; people wanted to be buried and remembered in the community which had meant the most to them in life. St Lawrence Jewry testators were the most likely to ask for burial in the parish; in fact, of those who made a request for their burial place, only one chose to be buried at any distance from the parish (in Waltham, Essex), while another asked for burial at the Guildhall Chapel, which lay very close to the northern boundary of the parish. The picture was quite different at St Katharine Cree, where the lowest proportion (69 percent) of testators chose burial in the parish church or churchyard. Sites at neighbouring Holy Trinity Priory were requested by 13 percent of testators. St Katharine Cree had an unusual arrangement in that its parish church lay in the grounds of Holy Trinity Priory, which was also a major landowner in the parish. It was not just in burial choice that testators showed attachment to the priory. Trusting relationships between the clergy and laity are suggested in the testamentary networks: clergy and staff of the priory were named by local parishioners including rent collector John Fulbourne (seven times), prior Thomas Pomeroy (twice) and canon John Upton (once). The priory was very much knitted into parishioners’ experiences of their neighbourhood.
Although to a slightly lesser degree, similar attachment to local religious institutions within or close to the parish was evident in wills from all the extramural parishes. At St Botolph Aldgate, after the parish church, the Abbey of St Mary Graces at Tower Hill was the most popular location for burial, and at St Botolph Bishopsgate 6 percent of testators chose the hospital of St Mary. At St Botolph Aldersgate, St Paul’s Cathedral was the next most popular, and the cathedral was also a significant beneficiary of bequests. Neighbouring parishes and other close institutions also garnered a handful of burial requests, such as the house of Franciscan nuns known as the Minoresses and St Mary Matfelon at Aldgate, St Bartholomew’s Hospital and St Giles Cripplegate at St Botolph Aldersgate and the Austin Friars at St Katharine.
Burial locations expressed attachment mainly to places within the testators’ neighbourhood, perhaps reinforcing connections with those institutions built in life or expressing ambitions of status through the prestige of being so permanently associated with high-profile religious institutions. Some demonstrated a detailed knowledge of their places of burial, such as the widow Margaret Butler of St Katharine Cree parish, who asked to be buried ‘in the church of [the Priory of ] Holy Trinity London in front of the cross between the high altar and the chapel of Holy Mary’.58 The religious houses and hospitals of London would have been especially visible to the inhabitants of London’s margins in their daily lives, acting as physical reminders of Christian duties of piety and charity, and perhaps it was this constant presence that inspired testators here to request burial within their grounds.
The popularity of local religious houses as recipients of bequests as well as burial locations may also reflect familiarity built through their role as landlords. For instance, among the Bishopsgate testators the hospital of St Mary was more popular than St Mary Bethlehem, both of which lay along Bishopsgate Street.59 Perhaps the extensive landholdings of the former in the parish meant it was more familiar to local residents. The prominence of a rent collector for Holy Trinity Priory in the wills of St Katharine Cree parishioners has already been mentioned. Generally, the proximity of many burial requests to the resident parish of the testator indicates the importance of locality and community in their lives; even when choosing burial in apparently more prestigious locations, testators still made a choice based on their own experience of urban space.
People also demonstrated this close sense of neighbourhood in their bequests to institutions outside their own parish. Figures 3.4–7 represent such bequests made by testators in each sample parish overlaid on to the parish map of London. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, bequests have been grouped by quantity on to a map of the parishes and liberties of London, with any institutions not attached to a parish church or liberty subsumed into their surrounding parishes. Although bequests to the testator’s own parish church have been excluded, it can be seen that, in each, parish institutions located in the immediate environs still dominated the largesse of testators. These included parish fraternities and local religious houses such as the hospital of St Mary at Bishopsgate and the Minoresses at Aldgate. As we have seen, testators were often fraternity members at their own or a neighbouring parish church. There were several institutions which garnered bequests from all parishes, in particular the friaries, prisons and St Paul’s Cathedral. However, even here proximity seems to have guided Londoners’ choices. The white (Carmelite), black (Dominican) and grey (Franciscan) friars were all located in the west of the city, as was St Pauls’, and at Aldersgate these institutions were all prominent recipients of bequests. By contrast, at Bishopsgate, the crossed friars, located in the east near Tower Hill, and the Augustinian friars, located within the walls close to Bishopsgate itself, were each equally as popular as the grey friars. Since the friaries, prisons and cathedral were popular in all parishes, including St Lawrence Jewry, they can be thought of as institutions which were central for London testators as common touchpoints for testamentary charity. Testators who left money to central institutions typically left larger than average sums for forgotten tithes to their own parish churches; among this group, the median tithe left was eighty pence, well above the normal range. Such bequests may thus have been aspirational expressions of identity by association with high-status targets for pious giving.
In line with its wealthier local social networks, central locations for charity were somewhat more important for Aldgate parishioners and local institutions less dominant. The grey friars, St Paul’s and the prisons of Ludgate and Newgate were relatively popular among testators despite their distance from the parish. A closer look at the evidence suggests that these bequests were not spread equally amongst all testators from St Botolph Aldgate. It was a small group who showed a preference in their charity for those institutions which identified them more clearly with London as a whole than with their immediate neighbourhood. This group was a wealthy subset of parishioners who spread their charity not just across London but also the wider region. Some of these testators, such as the widow Elizabeth Wells, left large bequests to extramural and London institutions while ignoring the parish completely. Wells bequeathed money for prayers and masses for her soul at three religious houses outside London as well as the five London friaries. She did not mention her parish church.60 Another widow, Joan Nore, showed closer connections to the parish with bequests both to the church and the parish fraternity of Jesus. Nore also demonstrated extra-urban connections, with a torch to St Mary Matfelon and 6s 8d to the repairs of St Dunstan, Stepney. She also left a torch to the grey friars and twelve pence in bread to prisoners incarcerated in four city jails.61 Wealthy residents of fringe parishes often expressed an urban identity encompassing more than their immediate neighbourhood. Their charity thus projected a self-image as wealthy Londoners served by a common set of urban institutions but also attached to the city’s wider region.
Examining evidence from London-wide bequests indicates that, in general, testators expressed the greatest attachment to institutions that had a physical presence in their neighbourhood. Burial patterns, too, suggest a close attachment to the parish church and its churchyard. Testators’ experience of the city as expressed in their bequests appears to have consisted primarily of their immediate environment, and their bequests usually reinforced commitments to their local community. ‘Central’ institutions that were symbolic of London, such as the Guildhall, the friaries or St Paul’s, or civic targets for charity such as the prisons and London Bridge, were popular with a wealthier minority whose wills suggest a broader identification with London as a whole.
The pattern of bequests to parish churches excluding a testator’s own varied from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. In general, people left bequests to churches close to their home parish. Bishopsgate residents were the most likely to leave bequests to parishes outside their own, with bequests to fourteen London parishes. The parishes close to the walls inside Bishopsgate were well represented, although parishes close to the river also feature. Two Bishopsgate chandlers, William Bateman and William Blackman, left bequests to the church of St Ethelburga just within the gate; Blackman was explicit that he was a former parishioner, since he left 3s 4d for tithes there.62 There was a similar, local pattern of giving amongst Aldersgate parishioners. The widow Sibyl Bret left bequests to both mural St Anne Aldersgate and St Thomas the Apostle on Knightrider Street between Cheapside and the Thames.63 Among both the Aldgate and Bishopsgate testators, most of the recipient parishes lay in the eastern half of the city, while in the Aldersgate sample they all lay west of the bridge. In general, the spatial pattern is similar to that demonstrated in Figures 3.4–7, reflecting bequests across all London institutions.
Bequests to external parish churches were often a result of the fact that people moved around London over the course of their lives, gathering connections to individuals and institutions across the city. This is especially apparent where sums were left for forgotten tithes outside the parish testators resided in at the point of making their will, which are reflected in the maps above. Such bequests were notably more popular in the extramural parishes. One in six testators chose to leave money to London parishes churches other than their own at Aldersgate and Bishopsgate, compared to less than one in twenty within the walls. Most bequests to parish churches around the city probably indicated a prior residence of the testator. Occasionally individuals were explicit about their movement. For instance, Margaret Waldern, a widow, left tithes both to St Katharine Cree and to St Andrew Baynard’s Castle, ‘where I was formerly a parishioner’.64 Likewise, John Ording, citizen and pasteler (pasty maker) of St Botolph Bishopsgate, left ‘to the high altar of St. Leonard in Eastcheap for my tithes when I was a parishioner there twenty pence’. Ording appears to have maintained his connections at St Leonard despite moving, as he also left twenty pence to the fraternity of Our Lady there for prayers for his soul.65 The butcher Richard Hartlepool of St Botolph Aldersgate, who wished to be buried within the church of St Nicholas Shambles, also left torches for the church and money to the fraternity of St Lucy there.66 Given that St Nicholas was home to one of the city meat markets and many butchers, it is very likely that Hartlepool was a former parishioner.
The remembrance of former parish churches was a noticeably gendered pattern of giving. Women, almost all of them widows, were most likely to show such evidence that they had moved; of the forty-one wills that include bequests to city parishes outside the testator’s own, 34 percent were made by women (29 percent were explicitly by widows), despite women having made just 19 percent of wills overall. The circumstances of such women were apparently quite diverse, and thus a number of different motivations for their movement can be inferred. In some cases, such as the widow Margery Boyden, it appears that reduced circumstances in widowhood may have driven the move; Margery wished to be buried next to her late husband, Robert, in St Leonard Eastcheap and, although she left sums to clergy and the church fabric in her parish of residence (St Botolph Bishopsgate), she left no sum for forgotten tithes at Bishopsgate, and her bequests to St Leonard’s were of similar value.67 She most likely moved to the parish after Robert’s death, perhaps to take advantage of the lower cost of housing here. We ought to be cautious in ascribing poverty to this group of women, however. The average tithe left by those who made such bequests is high, at seventy-two pence for men and forty-eight pence for women;68 Margery herself left forty pence to the rector of St Botolph. More properly, we ought to think of them as perhaps a better-off sort looking to maintain their standard of living by a move outwards. As with the artisans who moved there seeking commercial premises, moving to a cheaper extramural parish could be a strategic choice for women.
Some widows seem to have moved beyond the walls because it explicitly suited the needs of their business. For example, the widow Joan Wymark of St Botolph Aldersgate left a brass pot to the parish church of Holy Trinity the Less in her will. She also passed on two cows and a bullock as well as land in Islington which lay a couple of miles out along the main approach road to Aldersgate. For her, easy access to her extramural property, which might have been used for agricultural purposes, perhaps made Aldersgate a good option when she moved from Holy Trinity.69 In the case of the bellmaker Joan Hill, her bequest to St Mary Axe can be quite closely tied to her craft since this parish lay very close to Founders Hall and there is archaeological evidence of metalworking in the area in this period.70 Although a widow, it seems likely that Hill’s move came during the lifetime of her husband, Richard, since they operated a large foundry, many of whose staff received bequests.71 A move outside the walls for the Hills would probably have enabled them to run a larger premises and expand their business.72 There were thus a variety of life-cycle and economic reasons for moves to the extramural areas reflected in bequests. The over-representation of women leaving such bequests, however, suggests that such movement, or at least a wish to reflect it in charitable giving, was particular to women’s experiences.
The movement of Londoners around the city has been little considered, and it is difficult to generalize based on the apparently diverse circumstances of testators who left such bequests. What is definite, however, is the degree to which such bequests were more frequent in extramural parishes. Since movement outwards was probably motivated by the practicalities of living costs in one way or another, the new parish does not seem to have wholly provided a substitute for the friendships and spiritual community of the old. At St Botolph Aldgate, the popularity of institutions in nearby Whitechapel and Stepney reflects connections in the immediate area of London that crossed the city’s line of jurisdiction into its commercializing hinterland. Everyday movement around the neighbourhoods on the city fringe paid little heed to formal boundaries.
Extra-Urban Ties
Londoners did not, however, confine themselves to the city. In their wills, they remembered family, friendships and economic interests that extended beyond London itself. These connections were formed both by migration and by London’s central role in the economy of England in the fifteenth century. For those living on the margins of the city, routes of transport outwards dominated their local environment and also, as will be demonstrated, their lives. Figures 2.8 and 2.9 map the bequests to individuals and institutions outside the city, along with any extra-urban land bequeathed by testators. Bequests to parishes, religious foundations and other establishments outside London formed 12–23 percent of all institutional bequests in each parish, and there were some striking differences in the geographical spread of the destinations in each which suggest parish communities had strong ties to particular hinterlands.
St Botolph Bishopsgate showed the most distinctive and well-defined geographical spread of extra-urban connections, as indicated in Figure 2.9. The spread of landholding, bequests to institutions and individuals lay mainly to the north-east of London, within the valley of the River Lea on the border between Essex and Hertfordshire and along Ermine Street, the main approach road to the city at Bishopsgate (marked in purple on the map). The bequests to these areas cover the full chronological span of the sample of testators, from John Shoreditch senior, who left a missal book and other goods to the parish church of Hackney in 1410, to Henry Adam, salter, who left money to the churches of Bengeo and Cheshunt in Hertfordshire in 1522.73 Three testators expressly bequeathed money for the repair of sections of the highway at settlements on or near Ermine Street; the same Henry Adam left a similar bequest, also at Cheshunt, as did John Wilcox, brewer, at Stamford Hill, Middlesex, and John Mortimer, another brewer, for two sections of road near Stanbridge, Bedfordshire, and Enfield, Middlesex. The familiarity with the route and its present condition that these gifts imply are strongly suggestive of individuals who made frequent use of Ermine Street. John Mortimer requested burial at Enfield, ‘where my father and mother are buried’, and one of his executors, John Bristow, was from that town.74 Mortimer’s family had evidently lived along the immediate route to Bishopsgate. However, the fact that he named an executor from Enfield and that he and other Bishopsgate testators showed knowledge of the present state of the roadway indicated that testators did not simply remember old family ties in the locations of their bequests but affirmed connections which had been maintained or created in their adult lives. Thus, business and migration went hand in hand among those living outside Bishopsgate.
At St Botolph Aldgate, too, extra-urban bequests left by testators show attachments to particular areas of London’s hinterland. In this case, it is specifically to parts of the county of Essex and eastern Middlesex. Some of these were very close to the Aldgate neighbourhood itself, with six testators leaving bequests in Whitechapel and three in Stepney. Londoners played an important role in developing the city’s eastern hinterland during the fifteenth century, investing in pasture and crop-growing lands in Essex, Hertfordshire and eastern Middlesex.75 These economic connections are also suggested by their bequests. Butchers especially indicated strong ties to the east in their wills. One, Nicholas Long, requested burial at St Peter’s church, Hornchurch, Essex, and John Roke junior was to be buried at St Mary Matfelon in Whitechapel.76 John Edward and Thomas Russell left torches or cash to parish churches east of Aldgate in Middlesex and Essex.77 Extra-urban giving was indeed motivated by links forged through business concerns rather than migration alone, particularly in a trade which relied on Essex pastureland.78
Other Aldgate parishioners also made bequests in the immediate hinterland that suggest connections maintained or built in adulthood. Four testators left sums to the parish fraternities of St Mary Matfelon in Whitechapel, and John Vardon left money for the repair of the highway at Stratford.79 These were all within five miles of the parish, lying along the old Roman route from Aldgate to Colchester (again marked in purple on the map). The remaining bequests in Essex spread along the south of the county close to the Thames at West and East Ham, the marshy areas around Tilbury and in the areas between the rivers Lea and Roding in the west, suggesting the importance of river as well as road transport in London’s eastern region. Once again, it is only occasionally that an explicit familial link can be identified. John Gardener, tallow chandler, pardoned his brother (also named John) who lived at East Ham all the debts he was owed and left to his brother, niece and nephew lands in Essex (at East Ham and Rainham) described as formerly belonging to John’s grandfather Roger Gardener.80 Gardener was evidently a migrant to London with family in southern Essex, as well as landholding concerns which probably drew him to travel home at least occasionally. Gardener’s situation indicates that imposing hard-and-fast boundaries between bequests indicative of migration and of business ties is impossible. The economic connections that Londoners cultivated with the hinterland, including landholding, debt and purchase of raw materials, must often have relied on family or, as in Gardener’s case, on inherited family property.
That parishioners living outside both Bishopsgate and Aldgate displayed close links to particular areas suggests that these parishes provided the kinds of personal and economic connections which have been observed to structure apprenticeship migration.81 The patterns raise the possibility that these parishes may have been deliberately sought as destinations by newcomers from those hinterlands. The contrast to other parish samples suggests that this was somewhat unusual within London, and perhaps not general to all extramural parishes, given the lack of such a strong pattern within the Aldersgate sample. Justin Colson has noted the importance of Fishmongers’ trade links with east- and south-coast ports in driving migration to parishes where that craft dominated.82 Similarly, studies of London’s migration field have tended to view its size in relation to the status of different crafts. In general, the more prestigious companies had the widest migration fields, while lesser crafts were more reliant on the south-east for new apprentices.83 The fact that these artisan crafts were more prevalent in the Aldgate and Bishopsgate sample of testators suggests a complex relationship between locality, craft and migration in which the connection between certain trades and the extramural areas may have been reinforced by the economic bonds between a neighbourhood and its hinterland.
Testamentary evidence suggests that at Aldgate and Bishopsgate parishes the hinterland of the parish and its routes of transit were more dominant in the lives of inhabitants than elsewhere. When testators in these parishes remembered people and institutions outside the city, they demonstrated a field of activity and connections which focused closely on the immediate territory. As with bequests to ‘central’ London institutions, the wealthiest testators had the widest horizons, but the close focus of bequests from the Aldgate and Bishopsgate samples suggests not poverty but parishes with a defined hinterland in which residents conducted their business, held property and most likely migrated.
The remaining parishes showed far less distinctive patterns of bequests; inhabitants had connections all over England. Many of these were made in very different ways to the kinship ties of those who had been economic migrants. Single wealthy individuals might demonstrate a widespread range of connections, such as the mercer Philip Agmondesham from St Lawrence Jewry who left sums to eight churches outside London, four in Buckinghamshire (including the parish from which his surname originates, Amersham) and four in Surrey.84 John Geryn, a minor royal official from St Botolph Aldersgate, demonstrated an even wider reach in his bequests, leaving seven bequests for highway repairs, the poor of the parish and repairs to the church at Ashford in Kent as well as bequests to each order of friars at Chester as well as Canterbury.85 Geryn had been an auditor of Chester for the crown, which explains his bequests to the friaries and chaplain of the castle there.86 Aside from the distinctive patterns in St Botolph Aldgate and Bishopsgate, extra-urban bequests reflected wealthy Londoners’ wide reach across country as a whole. As demonstrated within testamentary social networks, exceptionally wealthy figures such as Agmondesham and Geryn developed wide-ranging social connections during their lifetimes which extended far beyond their neighbourhood of final residence. In making their wills they remembered places they had accumulated estates and held office.
Conclusions
Being a spatially marginal neighbourhood in London did not have a single, defining effect on the social and spatial networks of residents. Instead, living at the fringe of the city had multiple effects which varied from parish to parish and between groups within the neighbourhood itself. Take, for instance, the citizens who lived in extramural parishes. A butcher living in St Botolph Aldgate resided and sold his wares at East Smithfield market alongside men with whom he travelled to the company hall on the other side of the city for shared guild feasts, elections and funerals. He joined those same butchers when they worshipped together in St Botolph’s parish church, participated in the parish fraternity of the name of Jesus or held office together, either in that fraternity or as jurors of the wardmote. He was part of a city-wide institution but one in which many of his interactions with fellow members were local and took place in a range of social settings. He was, however, unusual among citizens living outside the city walls. A tailor or a brewer living in an extramural parish might well live near a few of his fellow company members. However, if he spent his adult years dutifully attending his company hall and building alliances and giving service there, then by the time he came to make his will it was to fellow guildsmen across the city that he likely entrusted his affairs. All these forms of institutional participation might overlap in advancing a man’s career. This kind of citizen network was more common by 1500 than it had been in 1400, due to the waning of traditional craft clusters, and was not exclusive to the extramural neighbourhoods but present throughout the city.
For less well-connected citizens and non-citizens who nonetheless had an estate to bequeath at their death, local connections were more important. Through their lives, these women and men joined fraternities, assisted their neighbours, got to know their clergy and served on juries and, in their last wishes, relied on those trusted connections made within their patch of the city. Circumstances differed in every neighbourhood. Because the parish outside Bishopsgate was generally poorer than elsewhere, its will-makers tended to be less integrated in guild networks. A carpenter or barber living here had many neighbours of a similar status who participated in the same local institutions and, naturally, chatted in the street over the years too. At the end of their lives, their trusted connections were peculiarly local. A widow living in St Katharine Cree worshipped in a parish church almost within the precinct of a priory, the same priory that probably owned the house in which she lived. In making her will, her choice of canons or lay staff such as the priory rent collector as witnesses or executors reflected the respect she had developed for them through her life and the multiple ways she interacted with them in her neighbourhood.
Yet others found their trusted connections across the city due to a disconnection of culture or status from their immediate neighbours. An immigrant Dutch speaker might wish to make his final wishes in his native language and so call for a friar from a religious house to whom he had given confession in Dutch during his life. He would have other trusting relationships with people from his country of origin living in London, not just in his part of the city, and may well have been a member of a Dutch-speaking confraternity which bolstered those bonds. For members of the gentry with London houses, their geographically closest trusting relationships were unlikely to be with their immediate neighbours but might be with Londoners of lower status than themselves with whom they had business dealings.
People who lived on the fringes of the city had personal and economic connections with London’s immediate region. The reasons for this are likely to be manifold; economic ties may have reinforced routes of migration and settlement in the city and the economic interests of particular crafts fuelled investment in easily accessible rural areas. These connections were not the result of a single event, the movement from city to country, but of repeated visits and the mutual interconnection of London with its region. This is a point where testamentary networks on the city’s spatial fringe overlapped with processes of social marginality. The mobility which these connections caused drew newcomers into the city, people outside its social networks and unfamiliar to the people of the neighbourhoods which they passed through or settled in. Although, as we have seen in this essay, many began their lives in London as migrants before setting down roots and building a place for themselves in the community, that did not mean urban society was always welcoming to the newcomer. By contrast, there were social barriers to inclusion of the newly arrived which people overcame with more or less ease depending on their gender, wealth, status and reputation.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 2 (47-92) 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.