Conclusion

This book has roamed widely through the society and space of fifteenth-century London in search of what it meant to be marginal. We have met people from all walks of city life, from those traditionally considered marginal to those with assured positions in urban institutions and society. Being marginal was not simply a fixed aspect of a person’s status but was experienced when their social and economic resources were not equal to a position of jeopardy in which they found themselves, a situation far more common for the poor than for others. Marginality connected urban space and society not simply by displacing certain groups to the city fringe but by acting as a set of constraints on the uses of space and the actions of people. For both places and people, the forces, economic or social, that determined their nature were very similar whether at the centre or on the fringe, but the position of marginality shaped their responses. Marginality could be a force for creativity, making people instrumentalize their knowledge of urban space to maintain a home and living and giving extramural spaces a distinctive built environment and pattern of development. This concluding chapter draws together the new picture of the fifteenth-century city that has emerged from placing marginality at the centre of the narrative. It also traces the implications for the transition between the medieval and early modern city which took place at the end of the period this book has considered. Finally, it reflects on how medieval marginality connects to our own time.

The medieval margins

One of the key contentions of this book has been the complex nature of marginality as a quality of urban space. There was no template to which all neighbourhoods outside the city’s walls conformed and there were spaces within the walls that could be considered peripheral. Nonetheless, there were a set of social and environmental characteristics which marked the city’s fringe, among them lower property values, lower levels of citizenship, open spaces, gardens, noxious trades and a wide field of daily mobility by inhabitants. It is not possible to simply describe the city’s fringe as poor or to take lower property values as an indication that well-off citizens avoided such neighbourhoods altogether because, as this book has shown, they were socially mixed areas. In other words, purely economic assessments cannot capture the total character of urban neighbourhoods. To spatialize our understanding of urban history means to look closely at a range of factors which created particular places, economic as well as social. These include aspects of socio-economic structure as traditionally studied by historians, including the gender, occupations and households of inhabitants, but also more intangible aspects of the use of space, the most important of which considered here is mobility. How people moved around urban space, which services they travelled to use and which they could access near their home are essential in understanding not just marginal spaces but also how the city as a whole functioned, with its multiple social networks and institutions all reliant on the movement of people. Marginal spaces were mobile of necessity, partly because people needed to travel to and from them to take advantage of urban amenities but also because their inhabitants moved very freely between the city and its wider region.

Looking at the city as an agglomeration of social spaces in which people conducted their lives encourages a reassessment of social marginality. Social knowledge was central to determining who was marginalized and, because reputation could change, we cannot see marginality as static and permanent. There were certain identities and behaviours which might predispose someone to encountering suspicion: having a foreign accent, being a woman without male governance, appearing to be poor or wandering around in the streets. However, in a neighbourhood in which someone had friends or a good reputation, those markers could be contextualized or overlooked by the people around them. Moving into a place in which they were unknown, however, made an individual vulnerable to marginalization. Throughout this book, marginality has not been seen as a fixed identity into which individuals were locked, nor as defined by membership of a given social group. The city enabled people to make many social connections and, while some identities did mean exclusion from a social elite or a specific institution, marginality was mutable, dependent on context and primarily experienced when an individual’s social resources were not able to extricate them from a difficult situation. Women, alien immigrants and prostitutes were all subject to exclusions on the basis of identity in certain contexts but, as this book has shown, far more important to whether they were able to build a stable life in the city were the relationships with others they could rely on in times of adversity. Crucial, too, was their knowledge of London itself, its liberties and the limits of the spread of gossip and rumour, which could be instrumentalized in periods of crisis.

Moreover, the narrow social elite that steered local decision-making was not a fixed group; its membership was being constantly negotiated. Certain people by virtue of wealth and status might expect inclusion, but they nonetheless had to cultivate their social capital, often in the form of a good reputation, in order to assure a local position of respect. In other words, everyone, from the poor day labourer to the prosperous guild master, was concerned with social capital, whether their aim was climbing the cursus honorum or simply keeping a roof over their heads. To be sure, wealth was an important bulwark against misfortune, but it could not prevent it totally. Reputation had important social and economic implications for everyone, but while for some it determined their acceptance as a suitable wardmote juror, for others it dictated whether their activity in an unfamiliar parish resulted in an arrest for vagrancy. There was, it should be added, no fundamental change to this model of social inclusion and exclusion as the late medieval period passed into the early modern, although the scale of hardship undoubtedly increased as wages were depressed in the sixteenth century. This description of fifteenth-century society bears much in common with scholarship on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alexandra Shepherd and David Hitchcock have both stressed that the poor had a strong sense of their own status and that the labels that were applied to them by others were often convenient classifications masking complex realities.¹ While our source material is more limited, medievalists need to be alert to the shifting social realities obscured by the Latin of legal records: meretrix, vagabundus and pauper do not represent immutable categories but labels applied by the judgement of a particular set of people in a particular place to a neighbour or stranger.

This book has in addition sought to flesh out and nuance the picture of life beyond the city walls. Mobility and the close connections between the extramural areas and the wider region have already been alluded to. What has also emerged strongly is the importance of immigrant communities outside the walls. They were a growing presence in the fifteenth century and shaped its society and economy in tangible ways that had a lasting impact on the city. One was in the character of the city’s fringe as a space for pleasure and recreation: bowling alleys operated by ‘Dutch’ immigrants and offering the game of cloche were a distinctive aspect of the entertainment on offer to Londoners to the city’s east and north. They often combined games with the opportunity to drink. Such a mix of recreational functions was also characteristic of the precursors of London’s theatres, which emerged in Shoreditch in the mid-sixteenth century.² Immigrants thus contributed towards the long-standing role of the city’s margins as spaces of play and entertainment, as well as the commercial exploitation of leisure. More generally, the large alien population to the city’s east in the fifteenth century is part of a continuity of international migration and settlement of this area stretching from the late medieval period through the Huguenots of seventeenth-century Spitalfields to the Jewish and Bengali immigrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The proximity of London’s port and the persistence of lower rents in the city’s east, which underwrote its attraction to Dutch-speaking immigrants in the fifteenth century, were continuities until the very recent past. Fifteenth-century immigrant communities clearly socialized within their linguistic groups and even preferred compatriots to execute their final wishes in wills, but they were generally not a class apart. The predominantly artisan aliens living in the extramural areas had much in common with their English neighbours, often shared their trades and, unlike later Protestant refugees, worshipped in the same parish churches. There was certainly an undercurrent of anti-alien rhetoric and occasional outbursts of violence but, echoing a recent reassessment of immigrants in late medieval English society, this book has primarily found a ‘reasonably peaceful co-existence’ between natives and incomers.³

Women’s relationship with the spatial margins of the city is another thread that has weaved through this book. This is part of a conscious decision not to hive gender off as a separate category of analysis into its own chapter, because all urban experience was highly gendered. Women navigated a society in which the formal mechanisms of power were assumed to be masculine. This is not to say that they had no power within the city, but they had to work around those mechanisms. Exploiting their knowledge of urban space was one of the ways to do so. Those who faced domestic abuse and widows who no longer could afford city-centre houses with workshops moved into extramural neighbourhoods as a means to deal with their circumstances. For those escaping their husbands, such a move exploited the disconnect in social knowledge between centre and periphery as well as social networks maintained around the city. For widows and perhaps also single women with a trade, the urban periphery afforded opportunities to maintain a household and livelihood with reduced means. The liberties that dotted the city’s fringe represented a mixture of opportunity and limitations for women. They afforded space into which women fleeing poor reputation or looking to work in the sex trade could move and expect less official censure. However, liberties still had their own internal mechanisms of power and authority which could still result in women’s expulsion. Women might even, as we saw with Dorothy Swyndon’s marriage in Chapter Five, find themselves subject to the coercive power of local landowners in their lives. At a broader level, women were engaged in the defence of their reputations and accrual of social capital just as much as men were. However, their exclusion from formal policing meant that their role in marginalization (and indeed in ensuring a good reputation) took alternative forms that touched only occasionally on institutional records.

Underlying much of the discussion in this book has been the extent and limitations of institutions in shaping urban society. While parish and ward office-holding was important, it was a formal expression of policing that contributed to and overlapped with informal exercises of local power. Exclusion from institutions was not synonymous with exclusion from urban society: wardmotes, groups of senior parishioners and guilds were not meant to be representative bodies of Londoners from all walks of life. As much as they did constitute a form of civil society for those who gained access, membership of all came with prerequisites that lay partly in socio-economic status and partly in reputation. For many and even the majority of city-dwellers, maintaining a stable living in the city meant building friendships and resources outside a formal setting. Positive, reputation-building participation in institutions was largely the preserve of those who managed to complete apprenticeships or gain enough credit with their neighbours to be elected to local jury service. However, the poor interacted with institutions as recipients of charity, as employees, in the courts as witnesses or compurgators and, more negatively, as the subject of indictments and complaints. These interactions could well prove socially useful, particularly when institutions could provide support or accommodation. Given the opportunity, people without a formal stake in local government might use the act of witnessing to present themselves as honest and respectable members of the community.

Taking this broad view of the role of institutions in society requires careful reading of their surviving records, often in ways which are ‘against the grain’ of the record’s original purpose. This is an area where the insights of early modern historians could be more readily adopted by medievalists. Court depositions are sources that lend themselves particularly well to this kind of approach, and in this book they have been used to explore experiences of social phenomena such as mobility which were tangential to the purpose of the cases themselves. This is a more common technique among early modernists, who are doing so with increasing sophistication as tools of digital scholarship are more widely adopted.⁴ Many late medieval English ecclesiastical courts have extensive surviving deposition material that could be more widely exploited in similar ways, building on the path broken three decades ago by Jeremy Goldberg.⁵ Another important aspect of setting the role of institutions and society in context in this book has been the use of multiple institutions’ records alongside one another. This is particularly fruitful when looking at the effects of institutional participation on people’s lives and future office-holding careers, as was demonstrated in Chapter Four. Of course, across a whole city, such an approach would be a daunting archival undertaking, but with a focus on individual neighbourhoods the volume of records to consult becomes far more manageable. Indeed, doing so is vital as urban historians pay increasing attention to the nuances of space in the city and therefore can answer questions about how the institutions that governed the whole city interacted with the myriad local communities they encompassed.

From medieval to early modern city

By the early sixteenth century, London was in a state of transition. The city in 1540 was in the midst of great change which eventually transformed a modest late medieval city into a metropolis to rival the greatest in Europe. Population growth was accelerating and was to reach a peak within a few decades. Urban development within and without the walls was intensifying, gradually stripping away the open spaces and pastureland in the immediate extramural zone. New religious ideas had been circulating in the city for almost two decades and England’s painful process of religious reformation already inflected city politics, as it would for a long time to come.⁶ The religious houses that have so dominated the story of the city’s margins told in this book had been recently dissolved or were in the process of dissolution, their estates carved up between the nobility and wealthy citizens.⁷ Citizenship was becoming a majority status among the male inhabitants of the city’s jurisdiction rather than, as it had been in the late medieval period, the preserve of a relative elite.⁸ The following decades were to bring a new wave of migrants across the English Channel, Protestants fleeing religious persecution, economically distinct from their late medieval forebears for their skill in crafting luxury items.⁹ There was a ready market for such goods among an urban elite growing ever more wealthy on the profits of globalizing trade and joint stock companies.¹⁰

Amid all of this change, however, there was a considerable degree of continuity. It has long been acknowledged that many of the institutional traditions that adapted to the new realities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had medieval roots.¹¹ Even the political rhetoric of governance showed remarkable similarities with fifteenth-century rationales for hierarchy.¹² In terms of London’s broader social history, however, the scale of late sixteenth-century population growth, the expansion of citizenship and the crises of the 1590s have resulted in an early modern historiography which focuses on the period after 1550 and sometimes assumes novelty in responses to social phenomena.¹³ These assumptions have begun to be overturned by scholars such as Marjorie McIntosh and Martin Ingram, whose recent work complicates the boundary between the medieval and the early modern and places important themes such as attitudes to poverty and sexual regulation in a broader chronological content.¹⁴ It is now well recognized, for example, that the concerns about poverty that became an increasingly central part of early modern national policy, culminating in the advent of the Poor Law, were in fact part of a long-term development with roots in the late fifteenth century, and harsh treatment of vagrancy really began in the 1530s.¹⁵ In looking to the social and spatial margins of the late medieval city, this book has revealed that many of the great changes wrought in the early modern city had their roots in the late fifteenth century or even earlier.

Neighbourhoods outside the city walls in the fifteenth century were not homogeneously poor. Nonetheless, in the development of cheap alleyway ‘rents’ in the later fifteenth century lay one of the templates for the overcrowded suburbs of the early modern city. The effects of population growth seem to have been felt first in the extramural neighbourhoods in the late fifteenth century. People lived outside the walls because they could afford to do so, and it gave them access to the city’s economy, reasons common to those trying survive on a meagre income as well as those maximizing the premises they could afford to rent. They remained mixed areas well into the early modern era: the wealthier residents of the city’s eastern suburbs ebbed away gradually over the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁶ For some, living beyond the walls enabled them to make a living outside the city’s guilded trades. Those of slender means operating outside or on the periphery of the institutionally-governed economy moved with ease between the immediate extramural areas and parishes slightly farther afield. The development of rhetoric around poverty and vagrancy in both national and civic policy ought to be seen in this context, as the city and its region increased in population from the late fifteenth century onwards. As Ingram argued, royal policy on vagrancy under Henry VIII was formed in response to the situation in the immediate area of London and Westminster.¹⁷ The mobility of the city fringe allowed the poor to move around to areas in which they had little prior reputation and, since local people made judgements about the deserving and undeserving poor based on what they knew of their character and lives, marginalization was intimately linked to space. There was an association between poverty and the city fringe, but it was one in which the poor were not simply pushed to the edge but actively made use of peripheral space to secure their livelihoods. This interpretation encourages a reassessment of the formation of the early modern suburbs that makes the choices of the poor far more central.

One of the great changes between the medieval and the early modern city was the expansion of citizenship in the 1530s, which Steve Rappaport posited more than thirty years ago as the keystone ensuring stability as population grew. Undoubtedly, giving a greater share of the city’s population a stake in its institutions was an important shift. However, given that the mechanisms governing inclusion and exclusion in the city remained local, and perhaps became even more intensely so as wards were divided into precincts to cope with greater population density, there remain many unanswered questions about how that stability was produced. Did, for example, an expansion of citizenship broaden the composition of wardmote juries and create a wider pool of those with a stake in governing their neighbourhood? Were the newly enfranchised majority successful in gaining the same kind of social capital and informal policing power that prominent local men had held previously? Within the companies, a broadened base of membership seems to have accompanied an intensification of divisions between privileged ‘livery’ and company rank and file, with power concentrated at the centre.¹⁸ Another unanswered question is whether the dissolution of the religious houses led to a power vacuum in the extramural neighbourhoods, where they had held so much property, and, if so, how did that affect social relations? These questions are beyond the scope of the present work and it would be unwise to speculate here on potential answers. But what this book has shown is that space was a powerful force in urban society with profound consequences for life in the city which ought to be integrated into the answers to such questions. The neighbourhood was where city-dwellers worked, prayed and socialized. If we want to find answers to questions about change and continuity in urban history, the neighbourhood should therefore be one of the first places we look.

Marginality and the urban experience

The experience of the medieval city was in many ways radically different from that of the modern metropolis. However, marginality is a social phenomenon that recurs through time and space and for which the pre-modern city offers surprising echoes of the present. As Nezar Al Sayyad and Ananya Roy argued, the medieval city offers a model of urban space that is surprisingly similar to that of contemporary cities, particularly in the way that corporate entities were able to co-opt space, leading to a spatialization of urban citizenship.¹⁹ The result was to marginalize certain individuals from urban space, leaving them to improvise their experience in the city, a conclusion borne out in comparative study of early modern and contemporary Italy.²⁰

The comparisons extend beyond the uses of space and into the ways that urban institutions interacted with individuals. Throughout this book, we have seen how far the experience of the majority of medieval Londoners deviated from the standard household form that urban government perceived as the ideal type. Structures of governance assumed that households were headed by a man in charge of his wife and dependents’ behaviour, and also assumed that man was himself governed by an incorporated guild and by local trustworthy men in their roles as churchwardens, jurors and fraternity members. This model persisted in spite of its disconnect from the messy reality of urban society and, at the margins of the city, was particularly far removed from a society with high proportions of women living alone, immigrant aliens and households in essential but unregulated economic activities. In other words, the model of society assumed by government was not representative of the life of the majority they governed, with the result that the spatial fringes of their jurisdiction looked radically different from the image of stability they projected. This situation has echoes in British society in the early twenty-first century, where policy is often predicated on an economic and social model – permanent and stable employment with a single employer, majority home-ownership, stable residence – increasingly out of the reach of many in society, particularly the young and those without inherited wealth. It is difficult to trace the effects of this disjuncture in the lives of medieval London’s non-citizens, though the difficulties of holding down a stable residence when stability and respectability were so closely linked is perhaps a symptom. In contemporary society, the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic draws from a similar disconnect, particularly in the way that government responses have often assumed stable contracted employment, spacious housing and access to private transport. Eventually, the late medieval government decided that drawing more of the population into the city’s institutions was necessary; it did not, of course, end social marginality or economic inequality in London, but it did create a framework for urban society to grow and, theoretically at least, opened up the possibility of economic stability to a wider group. The role of history is not to offer models or lessons for our time, but it is important to understand how a recurring phenomenon such as marginality comes to be and, as this book has demonstrated, how its study can deepen our understanding of urban society as a whole.