The towns were nevertheless the centre of commerce and of administration; they were the sites of assembly and of public entertainment. The market cross was the place where proclamations were made concerning the affairs of the town and the kingdom; this was the cross to which royal heralds would come with news of battle. Here, too, were the town stocks and the ‘pound’ or cage for offenders. Some towns were built in the shade of a castle or abbey, in which they found their most reliable and prosperous customers. Relations were not always harmonious, however, and the monks and citizenry of Bury St Edmunds were engaged in several violent confrontations; abbots did not make good landlords.
Other towns were built at the confluence of rivers, where trade was assured. A number of towns had a whole range of purposes. They grew organically without any plan or coordination; a new street would be laid out when traders multiplied; huts and houses were built outside the walls according to demand. They persisted and became hallowed by time. In towns as diverse as Winchester and Saffron Walden the building plots, the width of the streets, the topography of the market, still persist and are still visible.
The inhabitants of any town were deemed to be free after the residence of a year and a day, as we have observed, but the towns themselves were not centres of freedom. Many of them were subject to lords and bishops who took the proceeds of rents and taxes. Their internal administration was controlled by a hierarchy as rigid and as severe as any to be found in the nominally feudal areas of the countryside; the mayor and councillors were taken from the class of the richest merchants, and they effectively dominated all aspects of the town’s life. They ran the guilds; they organized the courts; they regulated the markets. The merchants, owning property, were the ‘freemen’ or citizens. They lived in the same quarter of the town, often side by side, and their families intermarried as a matter of habit.
Specifically or predominantly urban crafts were in demand. The potter worked beside the mason and the tiler; the glover and the draper may have been found in the same small street; the skinner and the tanner were closely allied; the carpenter and the cooper frequented the same timber-yard. In the market at Salisbury were Oatmeal Row, Butchers’ Row and Ox Row. In Newcastle there were Skinnergate, Spurriergate and Saddlergate. These men formed their own craft guilds, in part to defend themselves from the claims of the merchant guilds, but they were far inferior in status to the richer merchants who supervised and generally organized their working practices. Resentment, and even open confrontation, often arose between various members of the two groups; but the ties of commerce guaranteed that no general or permanent collapse of order could occur.
Beneath the craftsmen and the traders were the apprentices, the labourers and the household servants. There were always potentes and inferiores. Nothing in medieval England existed outside a formal social discipline of high and low. That was the nature of the world. At the lowest level of all were the poor or diseased people, attracted to the town by the possibility of begging or charitable relief. The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represented the great age of the almshouses and the hospitals. The larger towns had acquired schools by the fourteenth century, and in the following century one or two of them even possessed lending libraries. That is one pertinent difference between town and country; the level of literacy was higher in one than in the other. These public buildings in themselves expressed the civic pride of the town, exemplified also in the growing emphasis on civic ritual and procession. The mayor had become ‘my lord mayor’, preceded in ceremonial array by the sergeant carrying the sword and mace of the city. Spectacle and squalor resided, as always, on the same streets.
The Angelus or Gabriel bell rang at dawn to awaken the townspeople. Scores of bells pealed in each town, their particular sound alerting the people to begin or to end various tasks. After the Angelus had sounded, business began almost at once; the water-carriers congregated at the wells, and the butchers prepared the meat for their first purchasers. No traders were allowed to open their shops until six o’clock, however, and no goods could be sold before that time. In London no fish could be sold in the streets before Mass had been celebrated at certain stated churches. In the larger towns other bells rang out at nine or ten o’clock to signify that ‘foreigners’, or outsiders, could now begin to bargain in the markets. This was the hour when the first meal of the day was taken. The bells rang at midday for the consumption of the ‘noonschenche’ or noon-drink. This was also the time when builders and other labourers were allowed to sleep for an hour.
