Chapter Nine
THE LATER FOURTEENTH, FIFTEENTH AND EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURIES
Into a New Age?

The unfortunate monks who died at such a young age in Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the fifteenth century exemplified one of the period's problems for such institutions, that of maintaining a reasonable number of inmates. Fewer monks meant lower costs, however, which was some compensation for hard-pressed estate managers in a period of increasing wages, reduced rents and unstable prices. Nevertheless, although some abbeys contracted, and the Cistercians rearranged their houses because they could no longer find lay-brothers, buildings had to be maintained and many new works were undertaken: at the cathedral, for instance, transepts were rebuilt and a new library was constructed. Then, at the end of the fifteeenth century, the great central tower, ‘Bell Harry’, celebrated the archbishopric of Cardinal Morton, and was followed by a new gatehouse between the precinct and the town. Gatehouses, abbots’ lodgings and other refurbishments expressed the status of a great late-medieval magnate of the Church. Greater comfort and privacy for a community's other inmates were also sought, as they were in the secular world.

The cathedral priory's income seems to have halved in the first half of the fifteenth century, yet it was not acceptable to counter such problems by any reduction in building. To try to recoup the position, the priory was prepared to make considerable outlays, such as in the drainage of Appledore Marsh. Another investment was ‘The Bull’, a building project apparently of c. 1449– 68 immediately outside the precinct, where timber-framed ranges were erected over cellars round a courtyard; there were probably shops on the ground floor, and ten or a dozen lodging chambers above, each reached by a separate stair. If these were for visitors, they were built at a time when pilgrims to Canterbury were beginning to become fewer, with the waning in popularity of Thomas à Becket's tomb. The appeal of his shrine from the end of the twelfth century is shown by the large number of lead ampullae and badges that pilgrims took home with them, which other shrines sought to emulate. They provide an excellent indication of the quantities of travellers that there were on the medieval roads.1

Houses were also a form of investment. A remarkable terrace of nine ‘Wealden’-type houses has recently been recognised in Battle, built by the abbey to attract tenants. They were probably intended as accommodation for craftsmen, whose small workshops would front the street. Shops could be very profitable, and there are examples like those at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where nineteen of the original row of twenty-four survive. Behind the front room was a small two-storey hall with an open hearth, and a single-storey room behind that. The terrace runs along the edge of the abbey churchyard, so that the houses had only very short gardens. Fourteenth-century terraces in York had similarly been allowed to encroach on churchyards. Licensed encroachment of another sort can often be recognised in marketplaces where previously open space has been taken up by permanent buildings, as lockable shops gave a greater security and stability than did stalls. This was part of a process of sedentarism which affected towns throughout late-medieval Europe and can be seen also in the decline of the great fairs, although smaller ones continued. Inns were much-favoured investments. In Gloucester the ‘New Inn’ is a courtyard building constructed as a benefaction for St Peter's Abbey by one of its community. Although it must have been built by 1441, it was still referred to as ‘lately built’ in 1455, which cautions against taking such phrases too literally. The arrangement of the lodgings was different from that at ‘The Bull’ in Canterbury, for the division was horizontal, with chambers entered from corridors. The ‘New Inn’ and their ilk were organised as commercial lodgings that could provide travellers with an individual room. Merchants and pilgrims no longer felt safe in the communal dormitories of a monastic guest-house, from fear presumably of both infection and theft; nor did traditional accommodation offer the privacy that was becoming the social norm, as is shown by the guest-suites in castles. Furthermore, the monasteries could less well afford to offer hospitality to visitors: there were more people on the roads, many of them probably rootless, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by low rents and high wages to leave places where their lord might try to enforce customary obligations upon them. Others, however, were well-to-do merchants, particularly those involved in the wool and cloth trades. Revival of the cloth industry meant that there were native producers to be supplied, with dyes and raw or spun wool. As their houses show, be it in a small town like Lavenham, Suffolk, or in the country round Halifax, West Yorkshire, they were working in small units, and although many were wage-earning ‘out-workers’ weaving the yarn that others supplied, there were only a few men who controlled large units and bought in huge quantities. Consequently there were many individual transactions to be effected, with more opportunities for both markets and middlemen. Moreover, many monasteries were by the fifteenth century leasing a greater proportion of their estates, reducing their own direct involvement with great merchants like the Italian Peruzzis and Bardis of the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries. Some therefore closed their guest-houses altogether, and many saw inns as a sound investment, not only in big towns like Gloucester but also in smaller markets such as Norton St Philip, Somerset, where a local charterhouse built ‘The George’ in the late fourteenth century and found it well worth maintaining and reconstructing in the fifteenth (9, 1). Norton is an example of a small place which had the added attraction of two annual, three-day fairs of the sort that remained profitable despite the decline of the longer and larger fairs.²

Documents that refer to the ‘New Inn’ at Gloucester are part of an excellent archive about that town in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was an active port, with overseas as well as internal contacts. Several wealthy citizens were investing in house ownership, and were rebuilding their properties to attract tenants, as Battle Abbey was doing. Such investment did not bring in a high return, but it was relatively safe and the buildings could be used as loan security. Because of such factors, analysis of a town's buildings may not be an absolute guide to its late-medieval prosperity. The Gloucester citizens’ caution was probably typical of a general reluctance to invest in trade and industry, which would have been a severe limitation on economic growth.

9, 1. The George Inn, Norton St Philip, Somerset. Originally a completely stone-walled building, it was altered c. 1500 when the jettied timber framing was added to the two upper storeys. At this time the top floor may have been used for storage of wool and cloth, with guest chambers below for the dealers. The Fleur de Lis represents a more ordinary licensed village ale-house, of the sort proliferating in the later Middle Ages as the peasantry tended to have more money to spend and were less likely to brew in their own houses.

Unfortunately the Gloucester documents are less detailed after the middle of the fifteenth century, but there are complaints about decaying property and inability to pay taxes, and a fall in population by about a third has been suggested. Such complaints were frequently made by towns in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and their validity has been much discussed. Although it seems that nearly all suffered population loss, the extent of this varied and the relative prosperity of the surviving citizens can only be measured by comparisons between incomplete sources. Until a range of evidence becomes available from a wider spectrum of towns than at present, a series of individual case-studies has to be evaluated within an inadequate overall pattern. Many of the period's problems stemmed from its politics, such as difficulties of dealing in international markets during the French wars, and internal disruption of the Wars of the Roses, in which a town could be seriously disadvantaged if it supported the wrong side. Towns might also be more susceptible than the countryside to bacterial disease, despite many impovements to drains and water-supplies, because infection could spread more quickly from contact to contact.³

9, 2. The Hamel, Oxford. In its late fourteenth-century phase, the site was still predominantly composed of single-storey houses (cf. 7, 8). The early sixteenth century saw a change to more substantial, two-storey timber-framed houses, each with a chimney stack allowing fire-places to heat four rooms.

Towns which did not have a significant cloth industry seem to have been less likely to thrive, but there is no uniformity. In Oxford, for instance, the suburban site in the Hamel remained in occupation (9, 2); there was no significant new building until the very end of the fifteenth century, nor were stone-lined drains or cess-pits constructed, but evidence of post-holes and internal walls shows that buildings were kept in repair, and one large tenement was even sub-divided. Around 1500, some completely new cottages were erected, with stone-wall footings that probably supported timber-framed, two-storey superstructures with fireplaces and chimneys. They were built for tenants, not owner-occupiers. Close by, however, there was at least one very much larger and more substantial house, of ‘Wealden’ type, quite probably built in the middle of the fifteenth century, which is known only from nineteenth-century pictures. In another of Oxford's suburbs, the evidence is very different: structural evidence included one fifteenth-century building, but vacant properties are also recorded, and there was much less fifteenth-century than earlier pottery. In an unrestricted area, where pit-digging was still practised in the post-medieval period, different methods of rubbish disposal are unlikely to be the cause of the paucity of late-medieval wares. The area only recovered slowly during the sixteenth century.⁴

Intra-mural Oxford also has its contrasts. The main commercial area was maintained, and one property was probably divided into two towards the end of the fifteenth century, showing that investment was still worthwhile. The ‘new tenement’ of Henry Mychegood in the 1480s seems to have been semidetached and timber-framed, with two shops over cellars, and two full-height storeys above. Behind them, the existing hall may have been retained. There was a particular demand in Oxford for halls and chambers, because of the university, and many seem to have had a fringe of shops in front. The university would obviously have contributed to Oxford's trade, but its establishment is in part a symptom of the town's economic difficulties as early as the thirteenth century, as only low rents would have permitted the students to lodge in the town. By the fifteenth century, pressure on space had reduced to the point that some colleges could be established on main-street frontages, albeit not in central locations.⁵

Like Oxford, Canterbury has a suburban ‘Wealden’ house, in this case still surviving. Here too, therefore, not all the substantial citizens lived within the walls. Excavations in the centre of Canterbury have not produced a great deal of late-medieval evidence, but such as there is suggests stone buildings constructed in the fourteenth century being maintained in the fifteenth. There does not seem to have been much competition for space, however, as one area only a block away from a main street remained vacant, although used for pit digging.⁶

One town which was certainly prospering on the cloth industry was Lavenham, where timber-framed buildings include shops and the houses of very wealthy merchants and of weavers earning high wages. Although one of the country's most highly taxed towns, Lavenham had a population of under a thousand people. Those who lived there could proclaim their advantages by their display in building, but there were not very many of them overall. Nor, of course, do surviving buildings give an indication of short-term fluctuations, since material evidence of that sort is not normally recognisably responsive to such things as cloth-price variations. Only long-term decay, which came to Lavenham in the sixteenth century, can be identified, in that case because stagnation brought new building to a halt.

Another, larger, town which benefited from the cloth industry was Norwich: excavations away from the town centre have shown late-medieval pressure on space even in back-land areas, some of which had not been intensively used until the fourteenth century; indeed, on one site, Pottergate, there is some conflict between documentary and archaeological evidence, for whereas the former indicates the existence of ‘cottages’ even in the thirteenth century, the latter shows structures only from well into the second half of the fifteenth, with a range of houses and cellars. The objects recovered included windowglass and Italian terracotta, suggesting occupants wealthy enough to obtain well-lit housing with superior internal decoration. The whole site had been burnt, an episode plausibly attributed to the known fire of 1509, when nearly half of Norwich was said to have been destroyed: certainly what had occurred at Pottergate was not a piecemeal fire, affecting only one or two properties. Complete rebuilding did not take place there for a century. A similar fire ravaged St Peter's Street, Northampton, which was also not rebuilt in the early sixteenth century. This failure to rebuild contrasts with the evidence from two sites north of the river at Norwich, apparently untouched by the 1509 fire or any other. At Alms Lane, six fifteenth-century tenement plots with clay-walled houses were recognisable in the archaeological record; these were rebuilt at the start of the sixteenth century with brick and rubble dwarf walls suggesting more substantial timber-framed superstructures, a process similar to one that occurred a little earlier on a site near-by. As in Canterbury and Oxford, open hearths were replaced by fireplaces, which imply chimneystacks. This indicates abandonment of the open hall as the principal room and two- or three-storey houses becoming general, the beginning of a process that became increasingly common during the course of the sixteenth century, and which is part of the trend in living conditions to greater personal privacy.7

The differences between the various Norwich sites demonstrate the need to have an adequate sample within a town, as well as between towns, to obtain a representative picture. It would seem that even Norwich had some problems in the early sixteenth century, with insufficient buoyancy in the richer area to recover completely from the 1509 fire. It was not that wealthy citizens abandoned the town, while lesser artisans prospered, for some very fine private houses survived such as ‘Strangers Hall’ and the ‘White Swan’. Many of them were set back from the street, which is not usual in England, and suggests that there could still be considerable variations in building arrangements between different towns. Similarly, Norwich has a large number of undercrofts which could not be entered directly from the street, unlike most of those in other towns. The undercrofts are not usually closely datable. Another form of building of which Norwich again has many survivals is churches: thirty-two remain of the sixty known to have existed in the late thirteenth century. The structure of the great majority is later-medieval: neither their fabric nor their fittings suggest any general diminution in building around the end of the fifteenth century.8

Although churches may be one general guide to a town's ability to maintain its profitability their rebuilding is as likely to result from individual benefactions as from those of congregations acting collaboratively, particularly since tax returns indicate what the quality of private houses like ‘Strangers Hall’ and the ‘White Swan’ also demonstrates, that towns such as Norwich had a small upper stratum of outstandingly wealthy citizens. Nor can abandonment of urban churches, which occurred quite widely in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, be an absolute guide to poverty or population loss, since some parish amalgamations may have resulted from ecclesiastical reorganisation to create bigger units, not directly from changes in local demography. The same is broadly true of guildhalls, which have also been used as an index of urban prosperity. Norwich, for instance, has one surviving from the first half of the fifteenth century, which is typical because it is claimed that few if any were built anywhere after c. 1450. This could possibly, however, be from lack of need, not a declining ability to maintain the guilds, which were certainly fundamental to urban life, with their feasts, mystery plays and manipulation of commerce. Their ‘good unity, concord and charity’ stressed social order and harmony.⁹

The condition of town defences is potentially another physical indicator of urban prosperity, but again it is one of which the significance is hard to evaluate. Norwich, for instance, already had a complete wall circuit: there are few references to it in the fifteenth-century records, suggesting that maintenance was minimal. This need not have been from poverty, however: there was less threat of invasion on the east coast, and the walls were probably seen as enough to deter roaming bands of pillaging soldiers skulking home from defeats in France. Against sustained bombardment, walls would no longer suffice. Norwich constructed towers on both sides of the River Wensum so that a boom could be strung between them, and at the end of the fourteenth century built what has been claimed as the earliest purpose-built detached gun tower in England. This, the Cow Tower, had two internal floors and also allowed for quite heavy guns to be mounted on the roof. The intention was probably primarily to fire upon ships attempting to get up-river to the landing stages. Twenty years later, Southampton was providing itself with an artillery tower which projected from one corner of the walls so that ships coming up Southampton Water could be prevented from getting close to the town. Emphasis was upon stopping an enemy from landing or from bombarding a town from ships. As cannonry increased in effectiveness, so this became more of a threat and, in consequence, walls became less useful as they could not resist sustained pressure unless strengthened with earth ramparts, which were both costly and used up a lot of space.10

Only three or four towns are recorded as in receipt of privileges to enable them to build completely new walls in the fifteenth century, such as Alnwick, on the coast near the Scottish border, and Poole in Dorset. The latter was a growing south coast port which was thoroughly ravaged by the French and Spanish in 1405, and was a base for English expeditions into France in the 1420s and 1430s. The ‘Town Cellars’, surviving though diminished, may well have been rebuilt to accommodate war supplies. How much defensive wall was actually constructed is not clear, though there was certainly a town gate by 1524, the massive foundations of which have been investigated. Poole also has Scaplen's Court, a very fine example of a stone-built courtyard house, probably fifteenth-century in origin, and assumed to have been the property of a rich townsman. It was not inevitable that a busy port like Poole should have such housing, for it could often happen that the main profits of trade were controlled by outsiders, giving a port many small service tasks to perform, but not necessarily giving its citizens the opportunity to create the sort of wealth that would purchase a Scaplen's Court. Warehouses like the ‘Town Cellars’, even if not Crown property, could also be built and owned by outsiders. It may be symptomatic of change that a large stone warehouse built in Southampton at the end of the fourteenth century by one of its wealthiest merchants had become a property of Beaulieu Abbey by 1454.¹¹

Evidence of the upkeep of town walls in the fifteenth century is extremely sparse: the Wars of the Roses do not seem to have caused many flurries of repairs, although the rubble that still blocks Canterbury's Queningate is so irregular that it looks as though it was hastily done, and may well be the work recorded in 1466/68. Excavations have shown that some of the walltowers are fifteenth-century work also. Evidence of this sort is spasmodic from other towns; Southampton's ‘Catchcold’ Tower is documented and it is also one of the very few which is horseshoe-shaped, the most effective design for cover of the base of the walls. If this was a specifically fifteenth-century plan, then its rarity suggests that very few other towns added walltowers, just as very few bothered to insert gunloops. All this need not have been from inability to pay the costs as much as from recognition that walls were obsolescent in serious warfare, and what existed already was enough for local peace-keeping. Lack of interest in maintenance is strongly suggested by the way that Canterbury's town ditch had been allowed to fill with rubbish by the sixteenth century.¹²

One element in the defences which were more likely to be maintained were gatehouses. The town gate was a traffic control and a toll-collecting point, and the rooms over the gate might serve as guildhall, jail or other civic function. Furthermore, travellers approaching a town gained their first impression of it from its gate, so that a display of heraldry, banners and even models of sentries on the roof all proclaimed a town's status. Southampton remodelled the façade of its main road gate, which was projected forward without regard to the detrimental effect this had on the defensive rôle of the flanking fourteenth- century drumtowers. Lynn also altered one of its main gates. It may be a real measure of urban problems in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that few other towns went to such lengths.

Another way in which towns’ provisions for war might be used as a measure of their prosperity is consideration of the rôle of the urban castle. Four of these in shire towns were privately-owned, including Warwick, which shows that some great lords felt it worthwhile to maintain a presence in towns, retaining an alliance which integrated mercantile and aristocratic interests. Most shire-town castles were royal and, as they were not well sited for hunting expeditions, had had less money spent on their accommodation facilities than many rural palaces. At the same time, centralisation of government reduced the kings’ need to travel to administer justice. Nevertheless, castles were retained as much for administrative as for defensive reasons, since law-court sessions were held in them and they also served as jails. Sometimes, part of the castle was ceded by the Crown to the town: in 1345, some of the bailey area at Norwich was transferred in this way, although other parts were kept even though only for meadow grazing. This sort of encroachment might have become more frequent if towns had continued to grow, but Norwich seems to have been exceptional: in Gloucester, for instance, a zone called ‘Bareland’ apparently added to the castle in the thirteenth century was not thereafter handed back to the town despite its important position adjoining the quay area. One reason why Norwich was exceptional was that the castle was in the centre of the city, whereas most castles were peripheral, abutting the wall circuit: consequently there was less demand for their space, which might remain unbuilt on even though ‘void’ as Bedford's was in the fourteenth century.

Castles in a few smaller towns had already been abandoned. Dorchester, Dorset, although a shire town, had an outer bailey ditch which has been shown to have been filled at least in part by the fourteenth century, and was compacted sufficiently to be built over in the fifteenth. This was permissible because the castle had been sold off before 1309, when it was donated for use as a friary, a similar situation to that recorded at Chichester. These cases do not therefore really throw light on the late-medieval position. The difficulty of interpreting the evidence from documents alone is shown by another Dorset town's castle, Wareham. A lease of the site in 1461 might seem the most likely moment for the outer bailey ditch to have been filled in and built over. Excavations, however, suggested that this had happened much earlier, in the thirteenth century, perhaps when the castle passed from the Crown into baronial ownership. Whether the ditch was built over then by private houses, as it is today, is not known. At Devizes there is a strong possibility that the outer bailey of the castle was used in the later Middle Ages as the town's marketplace, in preference to an older market area outside the castle. This may have been a thirteenth-century development, however, not one which reflects later-medieval pressures. Devizes Castle was a property of the bishops of Salisbury, who presumably did not feel a need to maintain such a large area. In Banbury, however, the bishops of Lincoln retained their castle despite any temptation to rent out new tenements in a town which, though small, was doing very well as a market for a cloth-producing area. Excavations here have shown that after rebuilding in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, the castle remained at its full size, however ruinous the buildings, with its outer ditch not filled in until the seventeenth century: this was despite fronting directly onto the marketplace.13

Less archaeological work has been carried out within ‘the Banburys of England’ than in larger towns. Results from them are likely to vary as much: in Newbury, Berkshire, which like Banbury was doing well on cloth, excavation has shown that adjoining tenements had very different histories. One which had had structures on it in the thirteenth century lay vacant as garden space in the fourteenth, but was rebuilt towards the end of the fifteenth. The other had a building sub-divided in the fourteenth century which remained in use until the seventeenth. Excavation on the edge of the market area in another small town, Alton in Hampshire, produced a rather more uniform picture, with four tenements developed as a terraced row in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, an indication of commercial pressure near the central focus of the town.¹⁴

Towns which had neither cloth industry nor port had only a commercial function left to them, and reduction in population was bound to affect the volume of trading even if there was some compensation to be had from any greater purchasing capacity within the surviving population. Very many places, both boroughs and villages, which had received a market grant did not emerge as active markets in the post-medieval period, and a considerable shake-up in the commercial network must have occurred even if a lot of the grant recipients had never established much of a market in the first place.¹⁵ Some indication of the sort of evidence that might be expected comes from recent work in Yarm, Yorkshire, a small port founded in the thirteenth century, where an area initially used for building had reverted to open backland for wells and pits by the end of the Middle Ages. Another site in Yarm produced an iron-smelting furnace, which ceased operations in the early fifteenth century.¹⁶

For a town to have had even a small-scale iron-producing capacity seems to have remained unusual. Reduced pressure on space did not lead to industries being established on the vacant properties in early sixteenth-century Norwich or Northampton, although even anti-social activities might have been allowed if a worthwhile rent could have been achieved. Iron-smelting was not reintroduced to Norwich, despite production there in the early fifteenth century. Presumably higher quality or more cheaply refined ores were available from elsewhere. The same is true of salt in the ‘wich’ towns: the Nantwich excavations suggested sporadic production continuing into the sixteenth century, but on a much reduced level, presumably because imports from the Bay of Bourgneuf were cheaper than the native product. Although many towns were known for particular products, none but London seems to have been sufficiently specialised to give it a rôle as a centre of enough significance to exist independently of its cloth industry and its retail and exchange function. Sheffield was already known for its knives, for instance, Walsall for its horse-bits and spurs, Chellaston, Nottinghamshire, for its alabaster carvings, but none sustained a large or steadily expanding population.17

Some of the problems of English industrial output in the later Middle Ages are epitomised by Wealden iron. Only Chingley has yet produced incontrovertible evidence that water power was being used, although over thirty sites have been located where ore residues occur with later medieval pottery: some of these may just be dumps, not production centres, but they suggest a fair number of small operations, quite probably moving from site to site as woodland management created new areas for charcoal production, as seems to have happened earlier in Northamptonshire. One site which has been excavated, at Rotherfield, Sussex, was in use long enough for its original furnaces to have been replaced. In its final phase, it was a fairly substantial complex, with a roasting hearth, a smelting furnace enclosed within a stone-footed timber-framed building, a hut, and bins for storing charcoal. The furnace was bigger than some of the bowl furnaces known from earlier centuries, but was only just over a metre wide internally even so, and the technology was not fundamentally different. Indeed, limestone found at the site is thought to have been used simply as walling material, not as a flux, which is how it can be utilised if the technology is understood. Although Rotherfield is larger than Alsted had been, and suggests production of ore for more than just use on the owner's estate, its activity was brief, and despite its location beside a small stream, it does not appear to have utilised water power. It was probably typical of the low-output, small individual units operating in the Weald in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This is a considerable contrast to documentary evidence from the north-east of England, where the bishop of Durham set up a large estate industry at Weardale, capable of producing twenty-four tons of iron in a week, using thirteen tons of charcoal in the process; but it did not thrive. There was probably still insufficient demand to sustain production in such quantity, and thus to justify the expenditure in setting up the plant and paying for specialised craftsmen to operate it. Extraction pits still survive, demonstrating the efforts that went into obtaining the ores, with concomitant labour costs.¹⁸

Demand for iron did increase, but not because of internal economic growth. Instead it was the king's wars which were to make investment worthwhile, as guns and cannonballs came increasingly to be demanded. Even so, it was not until 1496 that the first English blast furnace is recorded, at New-bridge, initially to make fittings for artillery carriages and shot. Cast-iron guns followed soon afterwards. Many French immigrants were involved in the Wealden industry, although its development during the early sixteenth century remains difficult to assess, and archaeologically obscure. Proximity to the naval bases in the Thames and on the south coast gave the Weald an advantage over iron producers in northern England.

The best evidence about early sixteenth-century guns is from the Mary Rose which sank in 1545 almost as publicly as she was raised again in 1982. On board when she foundered were guns of cast bronze, and of both wrought and cast iron. The number of wrought-iron guns was surprising, since they should seemingly have been obsolete by 1545: presumably replacing them was a slow process. The quantity of yew-wood bows, and arrows for them, suggests that gunnery had by no means replaced older weaponry in English minds. Nevertheless, the importance of heavy guns on fighting ships is very clearly brought out by the adaptation of the Mary Rose in 1536 from her original construction of overlapping (‘clinker’) to edge-to-edge (‘carvel’) planks. This would have facilitated the piercing of the ship's sides for gunports, so that she was in effect a floating, tiered artillery platform. New hull designs were also needed for more elaborate rigging and multi-masted ships. An earlier royal naval vessel, Henry V's Grace Dieu, parts of which lie in mud in the River Hamble, was triple-clinkered, but not yet fully adapted to bombard as well as to resist bombardment. She was, however, too large and heavy to sail economically as a commercial vessel, so that she could not be hired out to merchants in times of peace. This increasing specialisation, although never absolute, emphasizes royal expenditure on warfare, as well as the increasing size of ships generally.19

The Mary Rose was originally completed in 1510, a year after another royal vessel, the Sovereign, is recorded as having been rebuilt. What little survives of the latter indicates that either then or later she too was converted from clinker to carvel construction. A smaller vessel which sank outside Plymouth in about 1530 was carvel-built from the first. This process involved building the ‘skeleton’ of the ship, its keel and ribs, before the planks were attached, rather than adding the ribs into a ‘carcase’ of planks as in clinker building, a considerable change in construction methods, which increased strength and rigidity; uncertainty in them is apparently indicated by the use of both iron and wooden nails. It is, of course, difficult to be sure of the country of origin of an unnamed wreck, but the Plymouth vessel had English stones in her ballast, and was probably primarily a coasting vessel, able to carry some two or three hundred tons of cargo.²⁰

There were wrought-iron guns aboard the Plymouth wreck, as she would have had to be prepared to repel pirates. Building and equipping individual ships became more and more expensive as efforts were made both to reduce bulk carrying-costs and to ensure that vessels were large enough to avoid easy capture. More complex sails as well as defensive needs meant that larger crews had to be carried, with higher wage costs, and greater losses would be incurred if entire cargoes were lost at sea. These inter-connected factors had led to joint-stock funding ventures in Italy and other countries, a major development in mercantile risk-spreading. Facilities such as insurance and bills of exchange made international trade more flexible, and could also be used to get round any canonical bans on usury. But despite England's strong Italian connections from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards, English merchants took little part in such early capitalistic activities, allowing other nations not only to discover new worlds but to usurp most of the existing world's carrying-trade in the fifteenth century. Although in the early fourteenth century England had been able to muster a thousand ships to carry wine from Bordeaux, import levels fluctuated violently, and in the fifteenth century never reached even half of the early fourteenth-century quantity, partly because of the widespread consumption of strong beer, as the pottery cisterns show. It is estimated that only half even of England's own exports and imports were transported in English ships during the earlier part of the sixteenth century.21

One factor which may have limited English interest in commercial complexities was the high quality of the English coinage, which was readily acceptable overseas and thus obviated part of the need for paper transactions.²² This perhaps dubious advantage was not entirely lost even though the weight of the penny was eventually reduced to fifteen grains in 1411 and twelve in 1464. Despite some native production, for instance in Devon, shortage of silver was part of a general European problem, and gold supplies were erratic. There were still some poor-quality European coins being imported, but there seem to be fewer of these found in excavations than of the earlier ‘crockards’ and their ilk, which does not suggest that they created any more of a problem. There is a possibility that fewer coins were circulating generally in the fifteenth century: although there are plenty of jettons, actual coins are perhaps scarcer in coin lists-in Exeter, only a Scandinavian ‘sterling’; a single Edward IV penny from two sites in Northampton; a halfpenny and a quarter noble in the Trig Lane waterfront, London; a half groat of Henry VI from Oxford's Hamel; York has only ten fifteenth-century English coins, against some twenty-two of the previous century. These totals tend to confirm that silver shortages and population decline meant that there were fewer coins in use in the fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century towns.²³ Whether jettons and tokens were circulating as unofficial currency remains unknown, but is correspondingly more likely as actual coins became scarcer. Furthermore, greater awareness of coins and coin-use is demonstrated by the large number of metal frames from purses, and of money boxes that are one of the new ceramic products of the period (9, 3). Indeed, Oxford has produced a novel type of hoard-a hoard of money boxes of the fifteenth/sixteenth century, found in a pit behind one of the main commercial streets.²⁴

The Oxford money boxes did not all come from the same source: some were from Brill, Buckinghamshire, which had long traded its pottery over the ten-mile trip into Oxford, but others had come from the Surrey/North Hampshire potting area which was now making inroads into what was a fairly distant market, particularly with small tableware such as mugs and bowls in fine white wares. Especially distinctive are the misnamed ‘Tudor Green’ wares, actually made from at least a century before Henry VII's accession, which were used for vessels such as finely-made lobed cups with glossy green glazes, the most technically accomplished English pottery since Stamford ware (9, 3). Another contemporary fineware, but using red clays, suffers another misnomer as ‘Cistercian ware’, because it was first recognized on Cistercian abbey sites: it was, however, no more made by monks than any other pottery, being a normal commercial venture. The wide distribution of these products may be evidence of a change in marketing patterns, a reversion to the late Saxon Stamford type of organisation, since the distances involved are too great for potters to have travelled in a day in order to sell their own wares in a local market. Middleman involvement is implied-and this may have quickened responsiveness to change, since such men would want what was regarded as the most desirable, fashionable product.²⁵ Even so, fashions did not necessarily spread quickly: Exeter never made use of bowls like those quite common further east, and was slow to adopt the use of drinking mugs, which only appeared there towards the end of the fifteenth century. Despite this relative parochialism, early sixteenth-century kiln waste found in Exeter shows a range of vessel forms most comparable to pots from the Low Countries. It would seem that an immigrant may have tried and failed to set up a business.²⁶

9, 3. A selection of fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century pottery products, typically smaller and more delicate than earlier types (cf. 7, 2 and 7, 7). They include (left to right) a tripod handled bowl, perhaps for warming food; a small drinking-jug; a lamp; a money-box with a thin slit for the coins—it had to broken to get at them again; a whistle; a drinking-beaker; and a ‘Tudor Green’ lobed cup.

Exeter's is among the few urban kilns known in the late Middle Ages. The town was getting most of its pots from north Devon and south Somerset, trade which must have used overland routes. The Somerset industry was centred at Donyatt, and is one of a number of such industries becoming established in the late Middle Ages which were to continue for a long period. Others, however, were closing down, and no very obvious explanation for such volatility is forthcoming, although it may well be seen as a sign of the instability of the period generally. If middlemen were involved in the wider sale of the potters’ wares, they would have been more interested in involvement with producers sited where distribution was easy: it is argued that Donyatt's location was partly caused by proximity to a well-used main road. It may also have been important further north to be close to coal supplies, as multi-flue kilns suggest that this was increasingly used as fuel. If there were no seams near the kilns, an adequate transport system for bringing the coal would have been needed. There is also fairly good general evidence that decoration was important again. More uniform and evenly spread glazing was applied to the fine wares, requiring specialist skills which would have tended to concentrate at particular centres, cutting down on the proliferation of kilns seen earlier in the villages of Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. Even so, small-scale operations still occurred: Lower Parrock, East Sussex, is an example of an attempt early in the sixteenth century to establish a small industry, copying northern French pottery from the Beauvais area, sherds found there perhaps being from pots that functioned as models. Like its nearest known rival, Hareplain, it was not sited with an obvious market to target, and was probably one of several small-scale operations in the Weald forest. By contrast, West Sussex had at Graffham a much bigger industry, which dominated its local markets. The East Sussex potters may have expected to take advantage of any established system for distributing Wealden iron by pack transport. If so, they had only a limited success because of differences in demand between the two products. A distinction also needs to be made between the likely distribution of the fine wares and the presumably cheaper kitchen earthenwares such as the baking trays, which would have been much more difficult to transport.27

Despite transport costs, pottery was being imported in relatively large amounts during the fifteenth century, for the first time since the Roman period, and not only tablewares.²⁸ Stoneware drinking vessels from the Rhineland are the most commonly found, but there are also Dutch ‘red-wares’-the stonewares were also probably transported by Dutch carriers, since they would have been found in bulk earlier if traded by the German Hanse merchants who dominated North Sea trade until the fifteenth century. Even in the east coast towns, however, the proportions of German and Dutch imports are not enormous-probably no more than 10 per cent except at a few waterside landing sites. This is, however, considerably more than the 1 or 2 per cent of earlier centuries, and there is more imported pottery inland also, suggesting that there was a definite trade in it, not that just a few vessels were scattered accidentally by travellers. There is, however, no obvious pattern, such as a proportion of imports diminishing as a factor of distance. Lynn, for instance, has produced almost no pottery from overseas even though it is a port, perhaps because the local Grimston potters managed to stave off the competition, by lower prices or possibly by restraint, if they were sufficiently structured into the town to uphold a monopoly.

In London, German and Dutch imports increased in quantity from the middle of the fourteenth century. Imports from France and Iberia-the latter high-quality tin-glazed lustreware, probably brought in by Italian merchants- continued to arrive; there are sherds of pottery from Italy itself, and from Egypt or Syria, also probably coming in via Italy. The actual quantities of these southern wares do not increase, however, and although they are an indication of occasional luxuries and exotica, they are not like the north European wares which are frequent enough in the fifteenth century to suggest bulk importing. A comparable pattern has been found in Exeter, but over a different timescale. In the thirteenth century, there were in effect no Low Countries or German pottery imports, just as there were no lava querns from the Mayen area or Norwegian honestones, a factor of distance. Jugs from France were not uncommon, although never more than 10 per cent of the pottery in use in the town. Saintonge pottery from the Bordeaux region was still 5 per cent of the total in the fifteenth century, but was down to just over 1 per cent in the sixteenth, which is in line with records of declining wine imports from that part of France. There are also occasional sherds from Iberia. Dutch redware pottery was never introduced, and even German stonewares did not arrive until the end of the fifteenth century, but they then became quite common. There is a very interesting contrast between the sources of continental pottery used in sixteenth-century Exeter, and the records of the places with which its merchants were actually trading. The excavated pottery gives little indication of the latter: almost all of it must have been brought into London or another port, and then redistributed. This was probably also happening in the fifteenth century, which would help to explain why different ports have such different proportions of imports. Inland towns may have fewer imports, but nevertheless have enough to show that such pottery was more likely to be taken away from the ports for resale than previously.29

Because of abandonments, fifteenth-century evidence from rural sites is less than complete, but at Wharram Percy, where occupation on both the crofts so far excavated extended to around 1500, it is notable that the village was receiving some of its pottery from further away than it had done previously, with York becoming a supplier. Three sherds of French pottery are recorded from two Wharram house sites in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, but there are some thirty-one Rhenish stonewares of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A similar though less clear-cut trend is shown at Goltho, where one sherd of Dutch redware and one of stoneware are late-medieval finds—there is also a single undated French sherd—and the village may have reduced its reliance on Toynton products since ‘Humber ware’ is found. At Foxcotte, the thirteenth-fourteenth-century deposits produced pottery sherds from east Wiltshire, north Hampshire and Berkshire, a fifteen-mile radius, whereas a fifteenth-sixteenth-century house yielded pottery from west Sussex, and ‘Tudor Green’ from the north Hampshire/Surrey industry, twice as far away. Although there were no imports, there were several fragments of copper-alloy skillets and other metal vessels, and none of the earlier coarse cooking-pots. There were also three fifteenth-century coins as well as jettons. Evidence like this points towards higher rural living standards, and greater involvement in the market system and a money economy. The distances travelled by, and the quality of, the goods obtained could indicate not only a greater choice of markets, but also more use of the markets at the larger and more specialised centres. Far more evidence is needed, since another possibility is that itinerant middlemen were bringing such goods directly to the rural sites, thus in fact bypassing at least the smaller markets, partly accounting for the disappearance of many of them.30

Similarly, more evidence is needed to assess whether villages were becoming more self-reliant than previously. A smithy building at Goltho, for instance, could be taken as a response to a greater peasant demand for iron products caused by their greater expenditure levels and the reduction in manorial requirements, creating a rôle for a specialist craftsman, perhaps at the expense of urban production. A saw pit at Goltho may indicate more village carpenters at work—or it may just indicate that the saw pit was a new phenomenon, introduced as splitting and adzing gave way to sawing, which makes more economical use of timber at the cost of weakening the grain structure. If there was a time when village-based specialists should have flourished, it was the fifteenth century. More buildings for storage and more grain-drying facilities may indicate greater ability to benefit from processing and retaining agricultural products that could then be released onto the market when higher prices could be obtained than at harvest time. Diversification from agriculture is not demonstrated, however, activities such as lead mining in Somerset and Derbyshire, or coal mining in the Midlands, remaining as marginal rural activities. Evidence of cloth weaving, recorded in some villages in the second half of the fifteenth century, has not been recognised in excavations, although it may account for rural buildings and prosperity in East Sussex and elsewhere.³¹

Changes in the rural economy are shown by the evidence of increased emphasis on livestock farming. The ‘cow yards’ for cattle at Barton Blount and Goltho are examples; further north, Low Throston in Northumberland seems to have evidence of a fenced cattle yard associated with a fifteenth-century farm unit. Direct evidence of this sort is generally lacking: more frequently the evidence is indirect, with the abandonment of farms, villages and hamlets, and of their associated field systems. This landscape change is usually associated with the enclosure movement—although without excavation it would be very difficult to prove in most cases that there was no time interval between the two processes, and thus that they are causally linked; the assumption is made because documentary records provide evidence. The same dating question applies in many cases where settlements survived, but with their ploughlands reduced, as the ridge and furrow remaining visible in pasture fields in many parts of England demonstrates. Many parks, too, were reduced in size or converted from their original purpose.³²

The large number of surviving substantial houses is an indication that changed agricultural régimes were to the advantage of many producers. It was not only wool sales that they benefited from, for any reduction in bulk demand caused by population loss could be compensated for by the increased purchasing power of wage earners for better cereals and more meat. Environmental analyses sometimes indicate what was required. Increased consumption of wheat in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Winchester is reported to have been accompanied by a decline in the quantities of coarser cereals. In Exeter, there were rather more younger cattle, suggesting that less tough beef was eaten. Carcase size increased slightly, but this may not be significant, just as the introduction of some long-horned cattle cannot be taken as evidence that new breeds were being developed to cater for the meat market by producing animals that would fatten quickly and not be needed for cart and plough haulage. A decrease in pig bones may indicate that swine were not being allowed onto the pastureland which had previously been arable and grazed by them when it was fallow. Increased numbers of deer bones at castles may be because consumption of venison had become more prestigious at a time when other meat was more widely available to the rest of the population. The cooking vessels and sauce bottles indicate new ways of preparing food, emphasizing that it was not profligate consumption that marked status, but also lavish expenditure on creating rarified flavours. The symbolic importance of the table can be seen in more refined use of cutlery. Pewter spoons became quite common, and it has been noticed that in London there are many fewer scabbards in the later Middle Ages, as people kept their eating knives at home rather than carrying them round all the time.33

One animal which is quite frequently recorded in bone assemblages is the cat, kept as a vermin-hunter and as a pet, and which could then as now provide acceptable fur: bones with skinning marks have been found in several towns. Fur was much sought after and is one commodity which late-medieval sumptuary laws sought to restrict: anyone could wear cat or rabbit, but imported skins were for the élites, carefully graded by rank. Such laws are difficult to evaluate: they may reflect real concern that status should be maintained and made visible, or they may just be part of a general European concept of what was proper, since sumptuary legislation emanated from Italy and was widely copied. Nevertheless, they are an important expression of social values: noblesse must survive in an age of opportunity. The sumptuary laws also laid down prohibitions on the wrong people wearing precious-metal jewellery, and there are enough fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gold finger-rings to suggest that they at least were worn without too much fine regard for the letter of the law. This sort of concern about display and personal appearance probably accounts for the wearing of pointed rather than rounded leather shoes and for the large number of small mirrors that have been found. The earliest known portraits, of Edward III and Richard II, suggest the same awareness of self.³⁴

One jewel which in particular expresses the ethos of the period is the Dunstable Swan, a gold and enamel brooch which was the badge of the Bohun family, becoming a Lancastrian emblem after Henry IV had taken the throne from Richard II. Richard's use of badges to foster courtly cliques was one reason for his downfall: these things were not just tokens to be worn at tournaments as they had been under Edward III, but were political symbols which expressed factional allegiances. The hoards of coins and jewellery from Thame, Oxfordshire (9, 4), and Fishpool, Nottinghamshire, show the huge sums available to be spent on lavish display, but they were also portable, and their owners could take them out of the country if the world turned against them. They were not just a sign of wealth, but of insecurity, since the retribution of a rival faction could mean loss of life and land in a way that had not pertained under the feudal régime. There was also the insecurity of new blood: despite emphasis on lineage and family honour, few old-established families managed to survive. Those achieving noble status from the ranks of the lesser gentry needed to display their new position. Hence the continued building of new houses, many called castles though their military capacity was only skin deep, like Lord Cromwell's keep at Tattershall, Lincolnshire, built in brick and stone so that it was an essay in polychromy on a huge scale, as the jewels were in miniature. Expenditure on these edifices was another reason for high wages, since even unskilled labourers were in demand.³⁵

The jewellery of the fifteenth century also demonstrates the continuing social importance of the long-distance supply of luxuries: pearls, semiprecious stones and by now even diamonds from the Far East. Much of the gold for the settings came from West Africa, via Spain. Was it a contemporary exchange network that took a fine copper-alloy jug, made in London during Richard II's reign and decorated with his badges, to the ‘Gold Coast’ where it was found in the palace of the Ashanti King Prempeh in 1895? Italian glass, increasingly found at least in ports like London and Southampton, and tin-glazed pottery are other examples; the internal distribution of these is not yet fully established, nor is the extent of native glass production in the Weald. Consequently the balance between the importance, or value, to towns of their rôle as suppliers of luxury goods to the élite and of domestic consumables to the wider populace cannot be quantified.³⁶

9, 4. The gold rings found in the Thame hoard. Although with coins which show that they were not deposited before c. 1457, the rings may all have been fifty years old or more. The biggest has a bezel which can be opened for use as a reliquary; the ring next to it has flowers engraved on the hoop, and a hexagonal peridot in a claw setting. Below left is another claw setting, holding a toadstone—actually a fossilised tooth, though popularly believed to come from a toad's mouth. Next to it is a very common type of later medieval ring, a stirrup-shaped hoop holding a stone, in this case a turquoise. The final ring is inscribed with a common-place love motto ‘Tout pour vous’ (All for you), and sprays of flowers, probably originally enamelled.

The importance of London as the principal distributor of luxury goods reflects its importance as more than just the largest city, for by the later Middle Ages it was in every sense the capital of the nation: hence the royal and other palaces grouped in and around it—Shene, Kensington, Savoy, Westminster. Access to the king's favour, to Parliament and to courts of law was more important in the rise of most new families than was involvement in the City's commerce. As such people advanced, they did not invest in trade or industry but bought land to secure status, just as they had in the fourteenth century. With land went houses and ‘castles’ such as Cromwell's Tattershall of the 1430s or Buckingham's Thornbury which was unfinished when he was executed in 1521, its size having alarmed the jealousy of Henry VIII. Men like this clearly thought of themselves as magnates striving for territorial dominance. The use of brick at Tattershall made a stronger statement by the way its colour contrasted with the grey stone of surrounding buildings. Cromwell also built a vast country mansion at Wingfield, Derbyshire, to a double-courtyard plan: ‘castles’ were not the only houses that such men built, although nearly all made a ‘castle’ their first priority. Some placed them in a parkland setting, as Lord Hastings intended to do at Kirby Muxloe, out of appreciation of the concept of landscape, to emphasize scale of expenditure, and to extend the distance between noble and folk. What survives today at Kirby Muxloe shows considerable provision for gunnery: many late fifteenth-century houses were more defensible than their predecessors, a reflection of the reality of the period's politics.³⁷

Despite their new status, the Cromwells and the Buckinghams were thinking along conservative lines in their buildings and their jewellery. Their burial fashions changed a little, with tombs stressing the corruptibility of the flesh rather than seeking its perpetuation, but chantries received the same emphasis as before. The choice of burial place also usually continued to stress a family's associations and its landed rôle: alternatively, they might seek burial in London because of the capital's particular status. Embellishments, such as the use of terracotta at the end of the fifteenth century for decoration, might change, but underlying ambitions did not alter from the pursuit of position through control of resources that gave status and supporters, but through patronage not ties of service. When new estates were acquired, the new owners did not invest in them by trying to increase agricultural productivity or to encourage new industries. Consequently the ultimate profit on cloth exports and such other advantages as late-medieval England had did not make social changes as fundamental as those brought about by demographic processes.

Only in the Church can new ideas be seen. Structurally, this is not apparent. Although the Perpendicular style is different from Gothic in its use of glass, fan vaulting and tall towers, it is difficult to see it as qualitatively different. When Canterbury Cathedral built its new gatehouse in the early sixteenth century, it was doing no more than to maintain the same separation of the town from the ecclesiastical enclave that Salisbury had established in the thirteenth century. But it was in the churches that new, scientific thought was being adopted: an understanding of ‘the inner meaning of hidden things’ was being actively sought. The evidence of broken alembics used in distilling at Selborne Priory and other houses is an indication of the sort of experimentation being practised. Other evidence at least of education is not just the foundation of schools and colleges, but more widespread ownership of books: larger numbers of late-medieval copper-alloy clasps are not simply the result of new binding methods. Printing, higher standards of music—facilitated by increased use of glass which improved resonance in buildings—and knowledge of Greek were beginning to make inroads and to spread ‘Renaissance’ concepts. Arabic numerals show access to new concepts in mathematics; clocks introduced new ideas about the regularity of time, independent of the length of daylight; the use of the vernacular for funerary inscriptions suggests that literacy was spreading. A remarkable example of the use of the vernacular at all social levels is the recent discovery of a door jamb at a peasant's house in Warwickshire at Burton Dassett with the owner's family name, Gormand, inscribed on it (9, 5).³⁸

To a large degree, Henry VIII delayed the progress of the Renaissance by his split with Rome and his dissolution of the monasteries. England was still on the edge of the world, despite the discovery of America, and remained there until the New World became economically exploited by more than just a brief attempt at cod fishing off Newfoundland by Bristol merchants. The Crown's politics did nothing to build England's continental contacts, and the dynamic potential of the Church was vitiated. Some of the most efficient medieval estate management had been by the monasteries: their rôle could have redeveloped as sixteenth-century population growth swung the advantage in labour control back to the landlords. As it was, Henry VIII handed most Church land over to private individuals whose ambitions with it remained much as they would have been in the fifteenth century; investment received no spur, nor did the Crown increase its long-term buying power by any permanent increase in its revenues. The coastal defences that the king built against yet another threat of French invasion took up most of the immediate profit.³⁹

The Henrician ‘castles’ such as Camber and Hurst which are strung out along the south coast are very different from medieval residential castles, as they are elaborate artillery works with no function other than defence, foreshadowed by municipal enterprises such as Norwich's Cow Tower. The Crown built them without relying on its subjects to assist by building personal castles of their own, in the way that Cooling and perhaps Bodiam had been built in the fourteenth century. Potentially, therefore, the new fortifications could have been as symbolic of a new order as eleventh- and twelfth-century castles had been of feudalism, but in this case of a growing state monopoly. But Henry VIII sold off and gave away monastic estates without ensuring first that he had new sources of taxation revenue from which to recoup his loss. Consequently he had no funds with which to continue the momentum of war-related investment, be it in building or in armament industries, and so he failed to achieve any monopolistic control. The first half of the sixteenth century therefore saw England only superficially different. Fundamentally, social relations were scarcely affected by Henry's politics and protestantism: physical evidence shows how deeply-rooted society remained in the traditional attitudes of the past.

Above and opposite: 9, 5. Drawing and photograph of a stone door-jamb inscribed with the name ‘Gormand’, found in excavations at Burton Dassett, Warwickshire, by N.Palmer in 1987. The Gormands were a family named in thirteenth—to fifteenth—century records from various local parishes. Even though the inscription does not prove their literacy, it shows that they could expect many of those passing their house to have sufficient familiarity with letters to recognise their name.