The teaching of the Christian Church on work and leisure was distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, were doomed to a life of perpetual toil, Adam tilling the ground and Eve bearing children in pain. Yet labour was also a means of developing the spiritual life of an individual. With labour, a man could produce goods that enabled him to give rather than receive charity. The willing adoption of labour, as in the case of monks, served as a form of penance. Above all, not working rendered men and women spiritually vulnerable and prey to the devil. Discussion of the sin of acedia (sloth), from the time of its earliest interpretation by Cassian, included both the internal, psychological state of spiritual dryness and the behaviour that might flow from such a state – the failure to perform one's spiritual duties to God. Over time, however, the aspect of laziness in the religious life came to predominate. By the end of the middle ages what had started as a monastic and spiritual vice had become the plain laziness of Everyman. As part of this transformation, the state of not working (otiositas), which in the eighth century had been almost synonymous with acedia, came to mean both idleness and time spent on pleasurable activities known as leisure.

Both social class and gender affected the work that people did and the amount of time that they had for leisure.

IN the mid fifteenth century wages — at least for building craftsmen — were higher than they had been before the Black Death, and food prices were generally low. Real wages thus increased significantly. Wives and children were employed more frequently, and their wages swelled the family income. At the same time an active land market allowed the lowest category of villagers — the landless or cottagers with less than an acre — to acquire land or to expand their holdings. Christopher Dyer succinctly summed up current thinking when he wrote, ‘Every change favored the wage earners.’ None the less, the well-being of any particular family depended on a variety of circumstances, such as the form in which the wages were paid, the number of days in a year they were employed, their access to the resources of the wild, and how much land they had, if any. The position of wage-earners, moreover, did not remain unchanged in the next hundred years. During bad harvests, when prices soared, wages did not always keep pace. Industrial developments such as the spread of hopped beer, or the rise and fall of the cloth market, could affect the opportunities for women to earn extra money through brewing and spinning. In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, rising prices and changes in the land market eroded the earlier favorable position for some workers.

ESTIMATES for the population of London in 1500 vary between 50,000 and 70,000, but it is generally agreed that in parts of the metropolis it had been rising since the late fifteenth century and continued to rise for the next fifty years. Even more importantly, London by 1530 enjoyed a greater share of the national wealth and a higher concentration of people. Pamela Nightingale estimates, for example, that whereas possibly one in 66 people in England had lived in London in 1300, one in 40 probably did so in 1500. Furthermore, over the period 1450–1550 London merchants captured an ever-growing share of the import–export trade, and by 1500 they clearly dominated the cloth trade. At the same time London was becoming a cultural as well as a political capital, with the court spending more time at palaces like Richmond and Greenwich along the Thames, and with parliament meeting regularly at Westminster. Londoners also became a major source of credit and used their own resources to buy up land in neighboring counties. The capital's influence was undoubtedly felt by all the surrounding areas, but whereas developments in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century north of the Thames have already been studied, much less is known about what was happening south of the Thames. This chapter will focus on the interaction between the metropolis and the three counties of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex in two areas: first, on the need to provision the city with basic foods and with fuel ; secondly, on its role as a distributive center for the goods that had been imported or manufactured within it.

IN 1450 south-east England, along with the rest of the country, was in the midst of a deep recession. Dependent on the production of wool for export, it was badly hit by the interruption of overseas trade. Landlords could not find lessees for their demesnes, tenant farmers reduced or eliminated their sheep flocks, rents and entry fines fell, and still land often lay unused for lack of takers. A century later, while the north of England still lay submerged in economic problems, recovery in the south-east had begun, helped by a number of interlocking factors. The growth of the Kentish cloth industry from the 1480s provided a new market for local wool. At the same time, the development of the new industry of beer-brewing increased the demand for barley and malt. The expansion of London's population, perhaps as many as 15,000 new people, encouraged the flow of fuel and food — both grain and meat — into the metropolis from northern Kent and Surrey, while the need to provision Calais similarly stimulated the economy of south-east Kent and east Sussex. This expansion, however, could not have taken place without changes in the customary-land market that allowed lesser gentry, enterprising peasants (the yeomen), and merchants to build up substantial holdings. The greater availability of credit, and the willingness to make bargains backed by obligatory bonds, in their turn facilitated trade in larger quantities.

DURING the great slump of the 1440s and 1460s, overseas trade contracted: the number of broadcloths exported and the receipts from the payment of poundage fell by about 40 per cent from earlier in the century, wine imports dropped, wool prices slumped, and buyers were hard to find. Kent and Sussex ports could not escape the general malaise. Furthermore, in August 1457 several thousand French troops attacked Sandwich, burning, killing, and looting. Resources that might have been invested in trade were diverted to repair the damaged walls. On the other hand, ports in both counties had long exported grain and wood (especially firewood), and in the mid fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the volume of these exports grew as trade with the Low Countries, Normandy, and Brittany expanded.

Behind this expansion of cross-Channel trade lay the rise of small vessels of under 100 tons as the common carrier of northern Europe. The really large ship was uneconomical in anything but the most distant trades. She was slow, difficult to freight, and required a large crew. A smaller boat was much easier to load, its shallower draft made it less affected by silting, it could be turned around quickly, and it was ideally suited for cross-Channel hauls. Small boats could also be used for fishing, and several masters switched back and forth between fishing and overseas trade depending on the season of the year.

IN 1450 the most common drink was ale, brewed primarily by women, many of whom were known as common or public brewers. These women brewed in much larger quantities than earlier brewsters, but were still brewing primarily within their homes. Although a few not-married women (usually widows) did support themselves by their brewing, the majority of common brewers were married women. Customers took the brew away in their own jugs or consumed it on the spot, often in a cellar or basement that became an alehouse, where men could also buy food and talk with their fellows. Over the next century brewing became more commercialized, carried out in a separate brew-house by servants rather than by household members. Then in the 1450s and 1460s the introduction of hopped beer began to revolutionize the industry. Its fairly rapid spread in south-east England distinguished that region from other parts of the country. None the less, beer did not immediately replace ale, which continued to be produced by female brewsters.

The highly commercialized brew-houses were usually owned by men, who might not manage them directly but appoint a professional brewer (again usually male). Young women might work there as servants, assisting in the brewing or selling the ale, but most of the ale that was produced was retailed elsewhere by female tapsters. At Canterbury in 1381, according to the poll-tax, there were 14 brewers — 11 males and 3 females (probably widows) — and between them they had hired 30 female servants, some brewers with one and others with two or more.

THE question whether late medieval and early modern towns were declining or prospering has long been debated, and no general pattern of growth or decay has been found. The number of shrinking towns is roughly balanced by those that were expanding. It is, however, generally agreed that most towns had fewer inhabitants in the 1520s than in the 1340s before the outbreak of plague, and that a higher proportion of national taxed wealth was probably located in towns in the sixteenth century than in the fourteenth. In the south-east, in particular, towns such as Lewes, Sandwich, Rye, Kingston, and Maidstone may have increased their share of the region's taxed wealth by three or more times. Much less is known about the economic fortunes of small towns, although looking at a broad national sample Christopher Dyer found that the majority either grew or maintained their numbers. How they compared in other ways, one with another, is not known.

Distribution of Wealth

From an economic standpoint, what primarily distinguished the town from the countryside was the wide variety of non-agricultural occupations that was possible within it. Small towns might not house a goldsmith, an overseas merchant, or a scrivener, but would contain people involved in some aspect of the clothing, textile, and leather trades, as well as building workers and victuallers. Such artisans usually ran a family business, with the work being carried out by themselves and their wives, with the help of servants and perhaps one or two apprentices.

Customary Land

BY 1450 personal bondage had disappeared in all but a few places in south-east England. Lords rarely tried to collect merchet and chevage or to force villeins who had left the manor to come home. In addition, tenurial obligations such as weekly labor services had been permanently commuted into money, although on some manors tenants were still expected to help bring in the harvest or carry out other seasonal works. In places where tenants had been required to serve their turn as reeve or rent collector, that obligation too had often been converted into an additional money rent. Finally, tenants who wanted to avoid attending the manorial and leet courts could pay a small fine — usually 4d or 6d. As the disabilities attached to bond tenure became mitigated, people who were legally free were willing to hold it. The most common wording used to grant out former bond-land was ‘hold at the will of the lord according to the custom of the manor’. One of the major developments occurring in the century 1450-1550 was the movement of outsiders — merchants, yeomen, and even gentry — into manorial holdings. By 1550 one cannot categorize customary tenants under the general term ‘peasants’. Some tenants, as in the past, did farm primarily for subsistence, relying on family labor, but others who built up large holdings simply leased their land.

AS in many other parts of the country, the basic infrastructure of towns and markets in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex was well established by 1348. A string of ports along the southern and northern coasts allowed goods to be transported by sea from one place to another within the region and along the Thames to London. Cross-Channel markets were equally accessible, and raw materials and luxury items flowed into and out of the major ports. In addition the region had an excellent road system, the main framework of which, radiating from London, was inherited from the Roman period. As trade had expanded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new markets and towns had sprung up to cater to the needs of travellers as well as local inhabitants. By 1348 151 places within the three counties had received a royal charter that allowed them to establish a market. Other markets existed by prescription rights and had never been confirmed by charter. Some of these markets, however, may never have taken off and functioned for just a few years at best. One guide to the major markets in the late fourteenth century is the map of Great Britain known as the Gough map (c.1360). It shows 45 places in south-east England, of which 41 are known to have had markets, and all stood on important roads (see Map 1). How many of these markets had actually developed into towns?

In looking at the early fourteenth century, and using a variety of criteria, James Masschaele identified four settlements within these counties that he believed functioned ‘as central nodes of regional exchange’ — Canterbury, Guildford, Kingston-on-Thames, and Chichester.

TO understand how society in south-east England changed during the century 1450–1550, it is imperative to start with the depth of the recession in 1450. Agriculture, the bedrock of the medieval economy, was suffering under deflation. Land dropped out of cultivation and was soon to revert to shrub and waste, as thorns and brambles crept over former arable and pasture, and, in the Weald, the work of assarting was undone. In addition, the contraction in overseas trade, especially in the export of wool and cloth, discouraged the keeping of sheep. Tenant farmers were particularly affected, and in many places large tenant flocks geared towards production for the market disappeared, although families may have kept a few animals to satisfy household needs. With few surplus goods available, trade within markets was inevitably curtailed, and the smaller ones, especially within Surrey and Sussex, were abandoned. A shortage of coin encouraged a return to barter, as producers and consumers made private agreements to satisfy mutual needs. So too ecclesiastical houses, when their demesne estates were leased out, were willing to receive animals and grain, not money, in payment from their lessees. Agriculture promised so little in the way of monetary rewards that demand for land dropped. Lords had difficulty in attracting lessees and keeping customary tenants.

Yet these changes gradually worked to the benefit of families living at the bottom end of the social structure. To try to attract tenants, some lords reduced rents and entry fines. Non-inheriting children and the former landless had no trouble acquiring holdings on good terms. The low prices for agricultural goods did not concern those who held just a few acres since they consumed much of what they grew. Many also enjoyed grazing rights that allowed them to keep a cow and a few sheep. They were not dependent on the market for the whole of their sustenance. This decline in the number of food purchasers was another reason behind the disappearance of many small markets. Goods such as salt and manufactured articles that had to be bought in the market cost less than in the past because of the deflation, whereas wages had risen with the general shortage in population.

TOWN and country lived in a symbiotic relationship, with the country supplying needed raw materials and the town in its turn providing necessary manufactured goods. If the inhabitants of the rural hinterland increased their wealth, then they might spend more on urban products and expect a greater variety of goods. By the mid sixteenth century, grocers and drapers, not just in major urban centers but in small towns like Appledore and Small Hythe, stocked wares such as white pepper, saffron, prunes, sugar, silk, and Holland cloth. Conversely, if a town grew in size, then its increased demand for foodstuffs and fuel could stimulate production in the countryside and encourage the use of more intensive methods. The expansion in ale consumption and the manufacture of beer encouraged the planting of barley. New tastes led to greater diversification in agriculture. Animals — cattle, sheep, rabbits — were being raised for their meat. In parts of the region, hemp and saffron were grown alongside the more traditional grain crops, and fruit trees were valued for their crops as well as the beauty of their flowers. Bruce Campbell, following on from the ideas of J. H. von Thunen, stressed that it was the market that determined the ‘character and intensity’ of production.

With the disappearance of demesne accounts, as lords increasingly leased their estates, it is very difficult to find out what was happening on the ground. Legal sources, such as wills and indictments before the law courts, can, however, sometimes provide clues. By looking at all available information, it is possible to come up with a partial picture of agricultural and industrial developments in the hinterlands of a few towns and in a few areas that supplied goods and services to more than one town.