Introduction

In 1432, poet John Lydgate was commissioned to commemorate the triumphal entry of Henry VI to London. Setting the scene, Lydgate wrote of ‘this Citee with laude, pris, and glorie/For joye moustred lyke the sonne beem’.¹ He described the participants in this civic muster in terms of their clothing: the mayor in red velvet, the sheriffs and aldermen in scarlet furred cloaks and ‘the citizenis echoon [each one] of the Citee’ wearing a white livery and ranked in their crafts.² Lydgate paused also ‘forto remembre of other alyens’,³ naming the great merchants of Genoa, Florence, Venice and the ‘Esterlings’ (of the Hanseatic League) who joined the procession to meet the king outside the city at Blackheath. This was an orderly image of the city, represented by its body politic and its wealthy international traders. This was the London that dominated not only ceremonial occasions like the one Lydgate commemorated but also the records of the civic government. It was the city as represented by, in the language of the time, ‘the more sufficient’, ‘the more wise and discrete’ or the trustworthy men (probi homines). Because of its prominence in the civic records, it is also the version of the city that looms largest in histories of late medieval London. This book looks past the ranked citizens and officers in white and red to the crowds who thronged the route in 1432 and yet whom Lydgate’s poem, much like the civic records, pays little regard.

In order to look past the urban body politic, this history of late medieval London puts at its heart places on the city’s fringe which are similarly absent from its contemporary and modern representations. We have few contemporary visual representations of late medieval London – the Agas map (Figure 0.2) is a mid-sixteenth-century image of a city undergoing transformational growth. In the fifteenth century, cities were often represented as walled fortresses with little beyond their bounds. Yet for the largest of European urban centres in the middle ages, and indeed for many smaller ones too, the city overspilled its walls. These extramural neighbourhoods might have been geographically marginal but for city dwellers they were essential places, for the production of food, for recreation and for spiritual foundations which saved citizens’ souls. To understand better the course of urban history, we need to consider the suburbs as crucial parts of the city and pay close attention to their role in urban development. In this book, I argue that in marginal neighbourhoods the full range of urban society, from the ‘wise and discrete’ citizens to the casual day labourer and the poor widow, lived alongside one another in communities which were adjacent to urban institutional structures and the body politic but which were not defined by them. Poverty, work, landscape, mobility, regulation of behaviour and reputation were all important forces in these communities, which must be centred in order to understand the full complexity of urban life.

In London before the mid-sixteenth century, citizenship was limited to just a quarter of the male population. Even if we take a more generous definition and include wives and widows of citizens as de facto beneficiaries of their husbands’ status, we are still left with a majority of Londoners largely marginalized in most of the existing histories of the city. In focusing on the social and spatial fringes of the city, this book presents a new view of the late medieval city beyond this relative social elite. It also contributes to a growing recognition of the importance of spatial difference and of neighbourhood in urban history. Classically, historians defined medieval cities through their institutional structures, particularly guilds and civic governments or magistracies which centrally organized the city around a body of citizens who thereby accrued wealth and power.⁴ However, scholars in recent years have begun to centre space and spatial difference as defining features of the medieval and early modern city. The shift is rooted in revised conceptual understandings of cities, influenced by geographers, which recognize plurality of jurisdiction and diversity of land use as essential to the city rather than aberrations. By spatializing the social history of late medieval London, I focus on its inhabitants as primarily neighbours, new arrivals or, occasionally, suspected outsiders rather than through the institutional binary of citizen and non-citizen.

Margins and marginality

Relating the social to the spatial margins of the city is no anachronism; it was a relationship which medieval people often drew themselves.⁵ Civic authorities decreed that those who threatened both the health of citizens’ bodies and the welfare of the community were to be turned away from city gates or live on the urban fringe. Such regulations affected lepers and prostitutes but also laundresses and those in polluting industries.⁶ London’s gates were closed each night to prevent the movement of thieves and other malefactors into the city. Over the early modern period, the growth of the city’s suburbs contributed to the breakdown of the livery companies’ economic control,⁷ but even in the late medieval period we can locate anxiety about ungoverned suburbs. As Frank Rexroth has argued, the city’s government implicitly considered its extensive extramural neighbourhoods less important, legally part of the city and yet in a realm not governed by civic morals.⁸ Definitions of centre and margin were reinforced by ceremonial uses of city space, where civic celebrations, royal procession routes and sites of official proclamations converged on urban commercial hubs such as marketplaces and central shopping streets.⁹ The use of the same sites for prestigious events and high-value commerce reflects key aspects of Henri Lefebvre’s theories about space and place. According to Lefebvre, the use of space by people (social space) and the concepts of and depiction of space (representational space) are highly interrelated, producing one another.¹⁰ The conduct of public executions on waste ground at city fringes and royal processions through the busiest shopping streets reinforced the symbolic roles of those respective spaces in the cityscape – and who belonged there. As we shall see, social and economic reality was far more complex but, in terms of symbolic uses of space by urban elites, the centre–periphery divide reinforced an urban moral topography privileging certain town-dwellers over others.¹¹

Within urban society, the boundary between the centre and the margins is far more complex to establish. The concept of social marginality has been debated and nuanced by generations of historians. Bronisław Geremek’s The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, originally published in 1976, defined the social margins of the city in two ways: those who were socially excluded due to the unpalatability of their activities and those who engaged in criminal activity.¹² He thus relied on legal records as a means to identify marginal individuals and study their lives. Similarly, Frank Rexroth’s work on deviance in London worked within the parameters set by the civic government itself.¹³ While Geremek’s work has been very influential, his conception of marginality has come in for some criticism. One problem with identifying marginality on the basis of court records is that socially marginal categories and identities ‘invariably pre-exist those that inhabit them’.¹⁴ A good example is that classic marginal figure, the prostitute. In England, there were few places with formally sanctioned brothels, and women in all kinds of extramarital sexual relationships were indicted in court records as ‘whores’ (meretrices in the Latin of the court records).¹⁵ The identity of a prostitute was one which courts ascribed to all kinds of women with different lives, the accusation ‘whore’ being an interpretation of their behaviour rather than necessarily a profession. Practices of exclusion by authorities could be influenced by stereotypes drawn from literature, which, for example, drew connections between begging and bawdry.¹⁶ A criminal or legal definition of marginal groups can only be part of the story: how people came to be marginalized was down to the interpretation within local communities of the laws made by mayors and magistrates.

If legal categories need to be set in a broader social context, then another approach is to relate marginality to the organizing structures of the pre-modern city. Much twentieth-century scholarship of pre-modern cities, implicitly or explicitly, centred Marxist structuralist models to describe urban society. Urban historians worked within a paradigm where towns were organized through institutional structures, particularly guilds, overseen from the top by a wealthy governing class of merchants.¹⁷ Institutional exclusion as a definition of marginality was implicit in Geremek’s Margins of Society, in which he included study of casual labourers as marginal figures and excluded artisans on the basis that their guild membership drew them into mainstream society.¹⁸ Guilds provided not just craft regulation and support for training but also political rights and important opportunities for socializing. In London from the early fourteenth century, citizenship was predicated on guild membership and so not belonging to a guild meant exclusion from the city’s wider legal and economic privileges.¹⁹ As social historians have increasingly adopted the concept of social capital from sociologists, guilds have been reinterpreted as institutions which assisted urban dwellers in the accrual of personal credit.²⁰ Pierre Bourdieu defined social capital as ‘the aggregate of the actual and potential resources which are linked to … membership in a group’, a framework which fits well with the benefits of guild membership.²¹ As a result, guilds have retained their explanatory power even as urban historians have shifted away from Marxist structural models of the city, towards approaches influenced by network and actor–network theory.²² Other institutional roles available in the city, such as religious fraternities, civic offices and parish governance, were often occupied by guild members, and these overlaps created networks of personal connections through which individuals might accrue both enhanced personal reputation and business opportunities.²³ All these groups were dominated politically by men, even where women were able to participate, and the interchange of social capital from one context to another was highly gendered, anchored in an understanding of good governance (of money, a household or a community) as part of ideal masculinity.²⁴ These overlaps mean that urban historians, often influenced by the work of sociologist Barry Wellman, have adopted the concept of the network as a means to account for the role of institutions in urban prosperity.²⁵ This has become far more prevalent in the last two decades as Social Network Analysis (SNA) software has become more accessible, enabling historians to visualize and quantify those networks.²⁶ It is thus tempting to define marginality in terms of those excluded from the institutional networks which formed the core of urban life.

However, an institutional definition of marginality can only go so far in accounting for the lived experience of urban life, especially in medieval London. Around three quarters of adult men living in fifteenth-century London were not citizens, making institutional inclusion the exception rather than the rule.²⁷ The primary route to guild membership (and thus citizenship) was apprenticeship, but dropout rates for apprentices were very high, with more than half not completing their training.²⁸ For many, the benefits of joining guilds seem not to have justified tolerating a long period in unpaid service. It was perfectly possible to get by in the city without any formal role in its central institutions. Many, both householders and servants, worked in an institutional grey area as tolerated unenfranchised or semi-incorporated labour on the fringes of guilds.²⁹ Yet others would have been like the ‘unsettled’ poor discussed by Patricia Fumerton who came to the city as casual labourers in droves in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with no foothold at all in institutions.³⁰ Institutional marginality thus covered people of very different statuses, modes of employment and wealth. On the other hand, the idea of the institution as a network should not obscure the very real power differentials that existed even among ‘insiders’: guild members themselves were divided between livery and yeomanry, with differing levels of influence, even if ostensibly connected by joint membership. Status and wealth mattered in medieval society and all people did not have equal access to networks, nor could being part of a network alone guarantee social inclusion in all contexts.

As a case in point, a focus on institutional membership and non-membership as definitions of inclusion and marginality is highly problematic with regards to the position of half the urban population – women. Women were very active in the economy, either on the fringes of institutional structures or in informal settings: some learned and practised trades and many more were engaged in retail. The idea that there was a ‘golden age’ of economic opportunity for women in towns in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, which was proposed principally by Jeremy Goldberg and Caroline Barron, has been treated with scepticism in recent literature.³¹ More recent work emphasizes that formal barriers to inclusion held firm: few women became citizens, and in London only widows of freemen were technically allowed to continue their husbands’ occupations, so women were on most counts institutionally marginalized despite their evident engagement in the economy more broadly.³² Similarly, women socialized in ways which sometimes intersected with masculine networks and social capital, particularly in their role within the parish, but often did not.³³ To focus solely on marginality based on exclusion from citizenship and governance would be to ignore the more complicated experience of the vast majority of the city’s population, who had to secure their place in the city through other means. There were also those who lived in the city who did not need citizenship to get by or advance in their careers, particularly the clergy, who would have been very numerous, but also smaller groups such as members of the gentry and aristocracy. Some were simply ineligible for full citizenship, such as the 6–10 per cent of Londoners who had immigrated from outside the kingdom of England.³⁴ Simply put, the circumstances of those marginalized from the city’s institutional networks were diverse, with wildly different levels of social capital.

In the face of these many exceptions, what is needed, as Barbara Hanawalt suggests, is a conception of marginality as a multifaceted and flexible category.³⁵ The concept has been very much nuanced by the scholarship of the last two decades. The work of Simona Cerutti has been very important in francophone early modern urban history, emphasizing as she does the difference between an essentialist view of marginality rooted in personal characteristics and the condition of exteriority which was produced by the structures of ancien régime society.³⁶ Recently, scholarship in history and geography has acknowledged that individuals with no formal rights in the city were nonetheless able to instrumentalize knowledge of urban space to make, in the words of Eleonora Canepari and Elisabetta Rosa, a ‘quiet claim to citizenship’.³⁷ The work of Erik Spindler, who focused on marginality in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century London and Bruges, provides a useful framework for reimagining marginality.³⁸ He foregrounded the importance of networks and connections in achieving inclusion but also the pervasive instability of medieval life. Thus, a visiting merchant might have wealth and influential friends at home but through misfortune might find himself imprisoned and friendless in London. On the reverse of the coin, Spindler also rejected the notion that those in supposed marginal groups had a permanent marginalized status. For those who resorted to prostitution ‘marginality was not an inevitable result of involvement in the sex industry’³⁹: women might do so as a way to avoid worse outcomes, or combine sex work with other kinds of occupation and be fined rather than forced out of business. ‘Marginality … is most usefully defined as a situation of simultaneous jeopardy and instability,’ according to Spindler.⁴⁰ Institutional networks and accrued social capital were important buffers against the effects of instability, while undesirable occupations and criminal activity clearly left individuals vulnerable to prosecution and chastisement by their neighbours. However, there were other kinds of network – kinship and friendship not dependent on institutional contexts – which could also act as support structures. As Derek Duncan argued, historians of the ‘fringes’ of society ought to be alert to ‘the shifting parameters within which power operates and the provisional contingency of identity in a given situation’.⁴¹ This is just as true of spaces as it is of individuals and groups. Just as a drop in fortunes could turn a respected craftsman into a seeker of alms, so an economic decline might turn busy urban streets into overgrown lanes.⁴² To be marginal and marginalized meant to suffer a hardship which could not be mitigated by one’s existing social resources.

Suburbs and extramural spaces

Marginality is an explicitly spatial term, and one of the central issues of this book is whether, as influential urban historian Derek Keene thought, the fringes of a city were dominated by socially marginal people. This was something Keene felt applied widely across Europe⁴³ as well as within medieval England, of which he said that

In the larger towns the fringes were perhaps too remote from markets and hiring places for all but the unemployed, the disabled, and those carters, drovers, gardeners and tanners whose trade suited a suburban environment.⁴⁴

However, as with understandings of the social fringe, historians have done much since to nuance the meaning and understanding of suburbs and peripheral urban spaces. Urban history has experienced a marked spatialization in which ‘places previously accorded a bricks-and-mortar inertness are viewed as alive with generative capacity’.⁴⁵ Increased application of Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping to historical sources and digital humanities approaches more generally has opened up the possibilities for closer attention to the texture of urban space and easier analysis of spatial aspects of the urban economy such as property prices and craft clustering.⁴⁶ In turn, as Colin Arnaud has argued, sociability and the strength of interaction with neighbours could be sharply contrasting from area to area of the same city.⁴⁷ Influenced particularly by Lefebvre and others, a conceptually nuanced approach to the urban fringe has emerged among historians of pre-modern cities.⁴⁸ As Lefebvre wrote, ‘visible boundaries such as walls or enclosures in general give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity’.⁴⁹ A re-examination of the role of suburbs for several European cities has located this ‘ambiguous continuity’ in the economic importance of the city’s immediate hinterland and the mobility of people between urban areas.⁵⁰ In Bremen, the vorstadt performed many essential urban functions, including housing craftsmen and their workshops, labourers and farmers producing for the city market.⁵¹ In seventeenth-century Rome, the fringes of the city were distinctive for the mobility of their population and for their semi-rural economy based in viticulture, in which people from the city centre were often non-resident property owners and investors.⁵² Nuancing the picture even further, Boris Bove argued in his work on medieval Paris that using measures such as population density and types of occupation practised, places within the city’s walls could also be peripheral.⁵³ Greater understanding of the essential functions of peripheral spaces led Moritz Wedell, reviewing the literature on German cities, to argue that the connection between social and spatial marginality is primarily a semantic one rather than a reflection of the social reality of suburbs.⁵⁴

The spatial turn has also had a significant impact on legal history and on understandings of how urban governance was spatialized. For geographers Ananya Roy and Nezar Al Sayyad, medieval cities were models of the spatialization of citizenship with many parallels to modern experience.⁵⁵ Cities were distinguished from surrounding territory by the privileges which attached to membership of their institutions, and within urban space there was a patchwork of different sovereignties, the contestation of which was a crucial part of the articulation of citizenship.⁵⁶ Historians have begun to see this multiplicity of jurisdictions and patchwork texture as an essential part of defining the pre-modern city.⁵⁷ For English cities, the recent work of Tom Johnson, Christian Liddy and Shannon McSheffrey highlights how these multiple jurisdictions worked alongside one another, often uneasily.⁵⁸ This is a point at which social marginality, or at least institutional marginality, intersected with urban space. The concept of sanctuary, expanded vastly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enabled immigrants ineligible for guild membership and citizenship to reside in and practise trades in the precincts of urban religious houses, often living alongside those escaping prosecution for debt or felonies.⁵⁹ More broadly, as Johnson observes, ‘spatial order, enforced by law, was foundational to the way that late medieval townspeople imagined the legal community in which they lived’.⁶⁰

The focus on plurality invites a reassessment of the role of suburbs, because they were places where matters of jurisdiction were particularly pressing. European cities varied considerably in the extent and nature of the jurisdiction they held outside their walls.⁶¹ Outside London’s wall was a zone extending as far as the city ‘bars’, wooden barriers across the road, at most a few hundred metres from the gates, which nominally marked the end of the civic government’s jurisdiction. However, the area was dotted with the precincts of religious houses and open ground. In some parts, residents of this extramural zone belonged to parishes which extended out of the city’s jurisdiction and into the surrounding county of Middlesex, meaning they were simultaneously residents of the city and neighbours of those not bound by its governance. Throughout this book, I prefer the term ‘extramural’ to ‘suburban’ and ‘extramural neighbourhoods’ to ‘suburbs’. The simple reason for this is that London had two well-defined suburban settlements, Southwark to the south of the river and Westminster, along the Thames to the west, which had clear jurisdictional independence from the city. Both had their own focuses of development while benefiting economically from their proximity to the city. These have been the subject of extensive study by Gervase Rosser, Martha Carlin and Katherine French and so will not be re-examined here.⁶² In using the term ‘extramural’, my field of study is confined to the neighbourhoods which immediately surrounded the city walls. It is this area that forms the focus of this book, although such neighbourhoods were intimately connected to London’s wider region, which will form a key part of discussion in Chapter Three.

Late medieval London

London was a city of some 50,000 souls in the fifteenth century. The population had been perhaps as high as 100,000 before the Black Death, but the city experienced terrible mortality in the plague of 1348–50 and smaller outbreaks which recurred into the fifteenth century.⁶³ Neighbourhoods outside the city’s western and eastern walls were remodelled by plague as vast burial sites were hastily established. Soon after, religious houses were built alongside them to pray for the city’s dead, adding to London’s already numerous hospitals, friaries and priories.⁶⁴ The spiritual welfare of city inhabitants was also attended to by over a hundred parish churches. By 1548, when totals of communicants were collated for Edward VI’s chantry commissioners, the city’s parishes were estimated to vary greatly in size, from 98 to 3,400 people in receipt of communion.⁶⁵ For administrative purposes, from 1394 London was divided into twenty-five wards.⁶⁶ Each ward was governed by an alderman, elected from among the wealthiest citizens, and each year one alderman was elected as mayor. The mayor was the point of contact between city and crown, ranking equal to an earl during his term of office, and by the early sixteenth century was often knighted on his exit from the post. London was the principal city of the kingdom and provided much revenue to the king through taxation and loans, so the crown took a keen interest in city politics and would intervene in mayoral elections where it suited royal interests.⁶⁷ In return, the city had a range of privileges, including jurisdiction over a wide range of disputes normally heard in the royal courts and the annual election of the sheriff of London and Middlesex, the king’s legal representative, with the power to try felonies.⁶⁸ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, social distinctions in the civic hierarchy were becoming more marked, an experience common to many urban and rural communities in the period.⁶⁹ Only rarely were citizens from artisan guilds elevated to the aldermanry and the guilds themselves developed more hierarchical structures.⁷⁰ Although all guild members were citizens, power was increasingly reserved to the livery, a subset of the membership who were usually older, wealthier and required nomination to join.⁷¹ The majority of the membership began to be referred to as the yeomanry or the ‘young men’, notwithstanding that they might spend their whole career without achieving the livery. These institutional hierarchies developed in a situation of relative population stability. High mortality ensured that the population remained stable from around 1370 until the final quarter of the fifteenth century, when there are indications of recovery, and increased by around 40 per cent in the first half of the sixteenth century.⁷² By 1550, London was home to about 70,000 people, a total which was to more than double before the turn of the seventeenth century.⁷³

One of the main contentions of this book is that many of the patterns of expansion and coping mechanisms seen in the early modern city were established in the fifteenth century and developed in the early sixteenth. The extramural zone is a good place to look for such patterns, as it was to be these neighbourhoods which experienced the most radical transformation in the course of the early modern period as they accommodated the majority of the city’s swelling population.⁷⁴ My period also coincides with that in which historians have argued that urban decline set in across many regions of England. This was one of the major debates in urban history in the late twentieth century, much influenced by Charles Phythian-Adams’s work on Coventry.⁷⁵ A recent return to the issue by archaeologist Ben Jervis, incorporating insights from the spatial turn, argued that decline versus growth is an unhelpful dichotomy where we might more usefully focus on the ways in which towns and cities adapted to the new economic realities of the post-Black Death era.⁷⁶ This new economic situation certainly seems to have benefited London, and the city cemented its dominance of the country’s urban hierarchy. From the late fourteenth century onwards international trade, particularly the lucrative export of wool, became more concentrated in the capital and its share of the burden of national taxation was greatly increased.⁷⁷ Despite this, the city’s central Cheapside neighbourhood appears not to have experienced much investment in the fifteenth century,⁷⁸ a paradox which suggests the potential spatiality of the city’s economic fortunes and the need to re-examine the periphery as potential alternative spaces of expansion. Explanations of London’s early modern transition to one of the largest cities in Europe with relatively little social unrest have focused almost exclusively on the institutional structures of the government and guilds.⁷⁹ Steve Rappaport’s Worlds within Worlds, published in 1989, argued that there was a massive expansion of access to citizenship in the 1530s which accounts for the way in which the city’s economy was able to integrate huge numbers of new migrants in the later sixteenth century. In many ways this present book has been influenced by Rappaport’s approach to the sixteenth century. However, this book explores how people navigated life in the city before citizenship became a majority status and emphasizes the importance of spatial difference in urban development. The city’s development in the fifteenth century was foundational to the assumption of its early modern role as an engine of world trade, colonization and social mobility.

The spatial and social margins of the late medieval city have been relatively little explored, despite London having considerable surviving primary sources. Those sources were produced largely by the institutions which shaped city life, particularly the civic government and guilds, and to an extent those institutions have created the history of the medieval city in their own image. The wide-ranging work of Caroline Barron from the 1970s to date has meticulously elaborated the workings of the city’s government and the lives of its mercantile elite, men and women, who held political power.⁸⁰ As Barron observed in an article on London’s ‘small people’, even artisans of modest means with citizenship left few archival traces, despite being a comparatively small elite in the wider population.⁸¹ The lives of those even further down the social scale are largely lost to the historian’s view. However, it is not impossible to explore their experiences; there have been excellent studies of individual non-citizen groups and the relationship between the unenfranchised and civic institutions.⁸² What these have in common, however, is that they tend to focus on one group in isolation or on the civic government’s approach to those groups rather than placing them in the wider context of experience of life outside the citizenry. Frank Rexroth’s Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London considered marginality beyond a single group but nonetheless focused on the rhetorical construction of a criminal underworld by the city’s ruling class as a bolster to their own power; he was ambivalent about whether such a connected underworld actually existed.⁸³ Historians have utilised the records of London’s myriad courts to explore Londoners’ lives beyond their guild halls, counting houses and civic government, particularly in terms of the regulation and experience of sex and marriage. Studies by Shannon McSheffrey and Martin Ingram have illuminated the legal instruments of punishment and how they intersected with civic culture.⁸⁴ This book reconsiders many of the same records and concepts, particularly in Chapters Four and Five, with the intention of looking from the other end of the telescope at what they can tell us about the lives of those who were marginalized and places which were considered, as Rexroth argued, outside the city’s moral boundary.

Topographic histories of the city have tended to focus on its wealthiest parts. In the 1980s, Derek Keene and Vanessa Harding conducted a massive survey of the wealthy Cheapside neighbourhood, mapping all its properties and documenting their histories up to the Great Fire of 1666.⁸⁵ A follow-up project on the extramural parish of St Botolph Aldgate was begun but never completed, the unpublished findings of which were consulted in the process of research for this book.⁸⁶ More recently, the innovative work of Justin Colson demonstrates that the Bridgehead neighbourhood was a social and economic hub for the city’s fishmongers, who invested in its property as well as conducting their economic and social lives in the area.⁸⁷ The extramural area is, however, well represented in the work of archaeologists, largely due to excavations undertaken during the extensive redevelopment of the city since the 1990s. The sites of plague burial grounds, medieval hospitals and religious houses have been excavated, and many of the findings published by the Museum of London Archaeology Service and used by Nick Holder in his history of London’s medieval friaries.⁸⁸ Chapter One draws on this scholarship to make important connections between urban development and the economic profile of extramural neighbourhoods.

Localities were more than collections of buildings; they were social spaces in which people worked, lived and died, all in close proximity to other Londoners. There were several potential city communities to which people could belong, with varying levels of spatiality: neighbourhood, parish, guild, citizenry. Community can be something of a fraught term, controversial among historians because of its sometimes implicit assumption of social harmony and inclusivity and association with the now outdated notion that the late medieval period was a paradise of neighbourliness destroyed by the Reformation.⁸⁹ Even the spiritual community of the parish, ostensibly a grouping of all Christian souls within particular geographic boundaries, was not all-embracing. As Clive Burgess has shown, formal participation through the roles of churchwarden and assistant was restricted to those who were fairly wealthy and socially ambitious.⁹⁰ This sense of a restricted hierarchy has been somewhat tempered by Katherine French, who argues that there were multiple informal ways in which others could participate in the parish.⁹¹ Nonetheless, even in a spiritual community, hierarchies still meant that the majority were excluded from decision-making, even if they could participate in wider ritual and celebratory aspects of the parish. This was a marked feature of English society in the period, as Ian Forrest has argued; after the Black Death, communities across the country developed hierarchies which were more rigid, in which a group of ‘trustworthy men’ held considerable sway. These men were usually wealthier than their neighbours, and their increasing prosperity allowed them to cement their local influence.⁹² In towns this group might be called burgesses and they had a distinctive material culture to match their modestly elevated social position.⁹³ As we have already seen, hierarchies were a marked feature of other urban communities in the fifteenth century. When the terms ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ are used in this book, then, these are not meant to imply groups of equals. Community was a stratified and contested thing in the medieval and early modern city and a Londoner might belong to multiple communities, some of which overlapped.⁹⁴ In Chapter Three and Chapter Five, I will discuss in more depth these multiple communities and the processes of social differentiation which went on within them, particularly as it served to marginalize certain individuals.

This book contends that by using a nuanced concept of marginality, in its social and spatial senses, the totality of urban life comes more sharply into focus. In a city where exclusion from citizenship was the norm for men and women alike, it is only by thinking with margins and marginality that we can make sense of how people got by and made their lives. Even for those who ended up as citizens, migration into the city was the majority experience. Almost everyone had to work to get from the outside in, but they did so from differing positions of privilege in terms of social connections, personal status, wealth and origin. Likewise, the complex and ambiguous status of the city’s extramural neighbourhoods made them places where people could benefit from the urban economy and society while navigating difficulties around their own legal status and financial resources. This approach is a break from previous scholarship, which has usually (though, as we have seen, not always) followed the surviving sources in their concentration on citizens, guilds and the mechanisms of government. In order to realize this new conceptual approach, the book utilizes a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodologies which extract the maximum information about topics on which the records are often silent or obtuse. This includes digital methodologies, such as mapping and social network analysis, which establish overarching spatial and social patterns. The elusive nature of the subject means I also on occasion extrapolate from the very individual circumstances of those who fortuitously wandered from the obscurity of the social margins into the written record of late medieval London, to imagine how a brief glimpse might fit with wider experience. I make no apology for being a methodological magpie because big conceptual questions about elusive subjects require answers from multiple angles.

Sources and approaches

The sources and methodologies employed will be discussed as they arise, so for the moment it will suffice to give a brief overview and establish some of the basic background to each, which may be useful to the reader. There are three core types of sources used in this book: wills, property records and legal records drawn from a variety of courts. These have been chosen for their capacity to illuminate details of the lives of Londoners on the city’s social and spatial margins.

The following two chapters make extensive use of testamentary evidence. Enrolments of last wills and testaments survive plentifully from some, but sadly not all, of the church courts which covered the city. Technically, the term ‘will’ referred to the testator’s written disposal of their movable goods and ‘testament’ to their property but, in practice, documents combined these functions. Testamentary records discussed in this book are drawn from two of the higher ecclesiastical courts which handled probate administration in the period, the bishop of London’s commissary court and the archbishop of Canterbury’s prerogative court. The prerogative court of Canterbury handled wills from estates with property in more than one diocese, or with wealth above £10. The commissary court handled wills for many London parishes, while others were proved in the archdeacon’s court or, for larger estates, the bishop of London’s consistory court. The archdeaconry and consistory records survive only patchily for the fifteenth century and have therefore not been used here. Wills were presented in one of these courts by the executors of the deceased, who paid a fee and were formally given dispensation to carry out the wishes of the testator. Any disputes over how the estate was handled were heard in the same courts. Wills are limited sources for social history as they naturally reflect a group with goods and property to bequeath and are certainly not complete records of individual estates. Nonetheless, their depth of description about the occupation and status of testators and the fact that they often give clues to not just the parish someone was living in when they died but also the places they had lived through their life make wills highly relevant to several key topics of this book: patterns of wealth, poverty, mobility and the extramural economy.

Also plentiful but rather more scattered are the records of property in the city, which play a significant role in Chapter One. London property was a lucrative income source for many institutions and private individuals, then as now. Urban property in cities and towns across England was divided into plots known as tenements. The arrangement of a tenement might vary hugely, however, and a single tenement might contain multiple houses or other structures.⁹⁵ Records of the buying and selling of tenements survive from the twelfth century onwards and rentals showing residents and tenants survive periodically in the archives of institutions.⁹⁶ Records of property transactions in fifteenth-century London fall into three main categories: deeds, leases and rentals or accounts.⁹⁷ The first two give information about a property at a particular point of time, in the case of deeds when a tenement changed ownership and of a lease when a new tenant agreed to pay what was known as ‘firm’ rent for the property for a specified length of time. Rentals and accounts of estate management record a quarterly or annual view of the income and tenants of a property owner’s tenements, vacancies and any repairs made. Structures of property ownership were highly complex, with property owners usually being non-resident and often themselves owing annual duties called quit rents to institutions and individuals.⁹⁸ Moreover, sub-letting of all or parts of a property by tenants was widespread, which makes it hard to be certain that even a named tenant in a lease or rental was actually resident. Many people, especially those who were poor, probably held tenancies at will rather than drawing up a formal lease with their landlord and had few formal rights in their property.⁹⁹ All of these complications are a caveat to the certainty of reconstructing society from records of property. Nonetheless, leases and rentals are the closest we can get to understanding the homes and workplaces of extramural residents, so these form the focus of my analysis.

Chapters Three, Four and Five mainly make use of legal records. Those used are drawn from two very different kinds of court: the civic courts, particularly the city’s wardmotes, and the ecclesiastical courts, with supplementary material from manor courts which had jurisdiction over liberties. These courts operated in different legal systems, although with many overlaps in subject matter and status of those appearing as witnesses or jurors.¹⁰⁰ Manor courts worked in the English common law tradition, relying on the appointment of local juries. Ecclesiastical courts adhered to canon law, a very different legal tradition with its roots in Roman law. City courts worked on a mixture of civic custom and common law.¹⁰¹ Wardmotes, while a civic tradition, shared much in common with manor courts in being essentially local, overseen by one external authority figure (an alderman in London and a lord elsewhere) and with business presented by juries who reported offences carried out by their neighbours.¹⁰² Ecclesiastical courts were staffed by trained canon lawyers and presided over by members of the clergy, who judged the outcomes of cases.¹⁰³ Their remit included matters pertaining to the welfare of the soul, but in many areas these overlapped with the interests of common law and civic courts, particularly debt and sexual indiscretions. These were by no means all the courts that operated in late medieval London, but they are the ones which give us some of the most detailed information about how people got along with their neighbours, conducted their lives and the quotidian business of keeping order. They thus shed light on issues around social marginality which are central to this book.

In order to make the most of the available sources, I have taken a range of approaches in my analysis. Quantification of information from sources is useful to give a broad overview of the character of neighbourhoods. Admittedly, this is not without its problems, since many of the record sets are incomplete, shaped by both chance loss of documents during the past half millennium and the choices of contemporaries about what was worthy of preservation. However, particularly in the case of wills, the volume of survivals is consistent enough that the approach is justified and indeed necessary to discern patterns of difference around the city and of change over time. I have endeavoured throughout to make this book transparent about the number of records used in quantification and, where a sample is small, to use multiple kinds of evidence to test and reinforce the arguments I make. The process of quantification was greatly aided by building databases for each set of records, which in turn enabled the application of digital methodologies in the analysis. In Chapters Three and Four, social network analysis and GIS have been applied and are key to the arguments surrounding extramural sociability and mobility. The ability to make connections between records over time and thus to pull together scattered information about individuals makes databases particularly useful to a study focused on the social margins, where prosopography is all the more difficult to undertake. While some chapters rely more heavily on quantification to give an overview of social and economic conditions, this is a book which tries to get to the heart of lived experience. Throughout, therefore, I have tried to balance these general views with the individual and particular, nowhere more so than in Chapters Three to Five, which mainly draw on witness statements given in the bishop of London’s consistory court. Writing a history of the social and spatial margins of the city requires this balance of approaches, if the inherent institutional perspective of each set of records is to be overcome.

Preview

This book focuses on three extramural neighbourhoods and two parishes which were just inside the walls of the city. The three beyond the walls all had parish churches dedicated to the same saint: St Botolph Aldgate, St Botolph Bishopsgate and St Botolph Aldersgate. These lay, respectively, outside the east, north-east and north-west of the city and are marked on Figure 0.1. Chapters One and Two also include evidence from parishes within the walls: All Hallows on the Wall, St Katharine Cree and St Lawrence Jewry. All Hallows was a small parish containing no major thoroughfares in the city’s north-eastern corner while St Katharine lay just inside Aldgate, along a busy street leading to the city centre. St Lawrence Jewry was at the heart of the city, near the Guildhall and the mercantile Cheapside district and is discussed in this book mainly as a point of comparison to the other parishes. Spatial marginality was by no means confined to the city’s extramural area, many of the features which made these places marginal being shared by neighbourhoods just inside the city walls.

Figure 0.1 Parishes of the City of London, c.1520. The primary parishes discussed in this book are highlighted.

Figure 0.2 Sheet from the ‘Agas’ map of London showing the north-east of the city, including Bishopsgate Street and Aldgate Street, c.1561. Published c.1633. Image © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

In Chapter One, these parishes and the areas adjoining them are the focus of an exploration of the economic, topographic and social characteristics of marginal neighbourhoods. The chapter addresses whether such areas were always poorer than the city centre and the levels of citizenship and occupations of their residents. It argues that the picture is far more complex than has been hitherto acknowledged, with each neighbourhood having a different social character and none being homogeneously poor. This chapter also argues the importance of religious houses in the development of the extramural area, which had an impact on the form of the city’s early modern expansion. Chapter Two goes on to discuss in depth the social and spatial networks shaping the lives of those living on the urban periphery, questioning how marginal their lives were to the structures of the city. Focused on an innovative social network analysis of wills made by residents of the same parishes, it establishes the influence of institutional and other connections in shaping sociability, drawing residents into the wider city but also tying them to London’s region. Chapter Three looks at this theme of connections in the context of a much broader social spectrum, focusing on the nature and experience of mobility on the fringes of the city. In doing so, it provides an important augmentation to previous scholarship, which has focused on apprentice migration, arguing instead that mobility was a near-universal experience. Drawing on evidence from a wider range of neighbourhoods, it establishes the central role of mobility outside the city walls and its effects on the lives and reputations of the poor, for whom it was a necessity which left them vulnerable to marginalization. Chapter Four establishes further how neighbourhoods policed themselves and determined who was to be socially excluded. The chapter concerns the role of the wardmote and ecclesiastical courts but sets these alongside the informal authority exercised by some prosperous Londoners which both underlay and derived from them. These systems overlapped as part of the constant negotiation of the centre and the periphery of the local community. Chapter Five looks at these processes from the other side, exploring the ways in which people who found themselves on the end of communal judgement could rebuild their reputations or mitigate the effects of punishment. Central to this process, as the chapter argues, was the careful use of space to manage the spread of gossip, and the extramural neighbourhoods provided multiple opportunities for doing so. The book thus progresses from a close focus on the extramural neighbourhoods to a broader view of social networks and marginality and how they intersected with urban space.