Feet of Fines: Selected Cases Relevant to the Town of Cambridge

Introduction

Chapter 2 demonstrated that variation in rent levels between parishes was one characteristic of the Cambridge property market. This chapter examines the economic topography of late 13th-century Cambridge and considers the features that may have contributed to that variation. It analyses both the occupational structure and the parochial structure of the town, and relates the two. It presents a statistical profile of occupations and parishes, based on the information in the Hundred Rolls. It examines locational specialization in both trades and professions. It distinguishes between parishes that specialized mainly in trade and those that were mainly professional. It compares the Cambridge evidence with that for other towns and identifies similarities and differences.

The second part of the chapter provides profiles of every parish in the town (Figure 3.1). This is the first comprehensive set of parish profiles ever published for the town because it is the only one that is based on a complete set of the Cambridge Hundred Rolls. In particular, it conveys important new information about the parishes to the south and east of the town. The evidence on parishes revealed in the Hundred Rolls is compared with the relative wealth of the town's parishes as revealed in the valuations of the income of the English Church produced during the 13th century.

Overall, the chapter affords insights into occupational diversity and geographical clustering of occupations, and the extent to which particular parishes specialized in particular trades and professions. It considers some of the factors that may explain the specific patterns of specialization found in Cambridge.

The diversity of occupations

The Commercial Revolution of the 13th century generated a remarkable increase in the variety of occupations within the English economy, which led to successful specialization for some and to increased casualization of work for others. Medieval towns with the greatest range of skills and specialities in this period were those where opportunities coexisted for serving large households, supplying the surrounding region and servicing overseas trade. In the case of Cambridge, Barnwell Priory and the nascent university generated demand; the town was a natural market centre for its surrounding region and the riverside trade with its coastal links provided opportunities for overseas trade.

The sheriff renders account for £53 3s 10d for the mercy of the men of the town and hundred [of Cambridge] whose names and debts and the causes of their debts are given in the following roll and how much they have delivered to the treasury.

This volume provides a translation from the original of the Hundred Rolls for Cambridge, TNA SC5/CAMBS/TOWER/1, Parts 1–3 and Barnwell SC5/CAMBS/TOWER/2. Each part corresponds to a particular roll. The rolls are in reasonably good condition, although some of the text is darkened and a few small portions of text (indicated in the translation by a row of dots) are missing.

The transcriptions from which the translation was made were checked against the Record Commission edition, with the exception of Cambridge part 3, which was not available to the Commission. The sequencing of the responses to the enquiry makes it clear that part 3 actually follows part 1 and precedes part 2. However, we have retained the sequence used by TNA to avoid confusion and to maintain correspondence with the Record Commission edition. The fact that it was the middle roll rather than the final roll that was missing probably explains why the omission was not recognized until fairly recently.

Each item (or paragraph) has been given a reference number. The use of reference numbers simplifies the referencing of the rolls in the main text of the book, and it should be of value to future researchers. Some numbers are prefaced by a letter. No letter signifies an individual property or a pair of linked properties (e.g. a messuage with land attached, or a pair of adjacent messuages). A preface R indicates a stream of rental income; P indicates a portfolio of properties where only the total rent is given and individual rents are difficult to impute; A indicates that there is no information on either location or rent; and F indicates contextual information that is not directly relevant to specific properties. Numbering is sequential within each category. All items prefaced R, P and A are excluded from the regression analysis of rents in Chapter 2 ‘Dynamics of the Property Market’ in Compassionate Capitalism: Business and Community in Medieval England; they are examined elsewhere in the main text. For items with no letter the reference number corresponds to a row in an Excel spreadsheet of rental payments; because the Excel spreadsheet has headings in row 1, the numbering begins at 2.

This book is a team effort. One of the authors is interested in the history of English towns; another in the history of the Cambridge region; a third in the history of religious institutions and their royal patrons; and the fourth in the use of statistical methods in economic history. They were colleagues and friends before they began working on this book.

One of the team noticed a pair of handsome leather-bound books on the shelves beside them when studying in the Bodleian Library one day about four years ago. They had found the Rotuli Hundredorum: 1,800 pages of statistical information relating to property rents. These rolls, better known as the Hundred Rolls, were prepared c.1279 for King Edward I. A printed edition was published by the Record Commission in 1818, using the original medieval Latin, in a special typeface designed to replicate the abbreviated script of medieval scribes. It is this edition, shelved in the Bodleian, that has formed the basis for most (though not all) subsequent research on property holding at that time.

The Hundred Rolls are well known and often cited. Their place in the development of royal administration has been thoroughly examined. They have been used to analyse manorial organisation, feudal landholding, population and family structure, and to inform local and family histories. But their numerous statistics of property rents have rarely been analysed in a systematic way. The distinguished legal historian Frederic Maitland pioneered statistical analysis of the Hundred Rolls in the appendix to his book Township and Borough, published in 1898. This book focused on the early history of towns and the fields that surrounded them. At the time he wrote, however, correlation analysis was in its infancy, and he was therefore unable to discover all the fascinating patterns hidden within this data.

Maitland chose to study Cambridge. The obvious explanation is that he was a Cambridge graduate and a professor there. There is another possible reason for his choice, however. The geographical coverage of the rolls is incomplete, and Cambridge has better coverage than almost all other towns of similar size in England. Good coverage, combined with the opportunity to build on Maitland's work, made Cambridge the obvious choice for this study of medieval property.

Ancient Places in Cambridge

Introduction

This chapter analyses the successes and failures of Cambridge family dynasties. The evidence is derived from the family profiles presented in the preceding chapter and in Casson, Casson, Lee and Phillips, Business and Community, Appendix 14. The chapter begins by considering the concepts of success and failure. Two main dimensions of success are distinguished, namely wealth and reputation. The wealth of a family is assessed from its property portfolio, while its reputation is assessed by using the indicators of civic office holding, a responsible job in a prestigious institution and the title of Master.

Different family characteristics are then identified: these include the age of the family (the number of generations that it can be traced back), its size (the average number of people in each generation), gender balance (the ratio of brothers to sisters in a given generation), sources of income (trade, royal service, etc), philanthropic activity (gifts to charitable institutions) and vulnerability to debt, crime and litigation. Each of these family characteristics can be derived from the family profiles.

The chapter then explores whether certain types of family were more successful than others. Some characteristics emerge as particularly important; source of income, for example, was very important, while gender balance was not. Overall, the evidence from Cambridge suggests that there were a number of key resources to which families needed to gain access in order to be successful. These resources were both economic and social; they included the skills to work in various industries and occupations, membership of social networks where useful contacts could be made and the ability to manage property portfolios efficiently. Families did not need to have access to all of these resources, but they did require access to some of them, and the more of them they accessed the more successful they seem to have been.

Families faced various risk factors. In many respects medieval life was subject to greater risks than modern life, and so risk management was very important for medieval families. Some risks were external to the family, such as wars, taxes and diseases, but others were internal, such as sibling rivalry and disputes over inheritance, which could lead to a general lack of family cohesion.

The analysis in this chapter suggests a trade-off involving size of family.

The purpose of this book

The ‘future of capitalism’ emerged at the beginning of the new millennium as an important topic of political debate – a debate recently intensified by the banking crisis of 2007. Discontent with capitalism has been reinforced by rising income inequalities and job insecurity and has led to increasing populism and political instability reminiscent of the 1930s.

There are, however, different varieties of capitalism. It is generally agreed that modern capitalism emerged from the decline of feudalism. This was a lengthy process, and historians disagree about the most critical stages in the emergence of capitalism and their timing. For many historians the key turning point was the Industrial Revolution, commencing c.1760, or the Agricultural Revolution and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689 that preceded it. In England, however, the market system was well established by the Elizabethan period of 1558 to 1603. Weber and Tawney dated the emergence of capitalism even earlier, to the start of the Reformation in c.1520, while Schumpeter dated it to the spread of international merchant banking, c.1400.

Evidence clearly indicates, however, that an international network of market towns had developed throughout much of Western Europe by c.1300. Markets are an indispensable component of the capitalist system, and so the origins of capitalism may be found at about this time. There was undoubtedly a Commercial Revolution in England in the period 1100–1350, which involved the emergence of organized markets for agricultural commodities and artisan production. However, there remain outstanding questions about whether markets in land operated in tandem with markets in manufactured and agricultural goods.

Entrepreneurs and firms have been credited with playing an important role in those markets from 1600 onwards. Medieval businesses were generally structured as a single trader or as a partnership. While some medieval businesspeople did exhibit the entrepreneurial characteristics of risk, innovation and judgement, the terminology of ‘entrepreneur’ has rarely been used in relation to the medieval period. Those differences in business structures and terminology, coupled with the relevance absence of specific business records, have often resulted in the exclusion of the Middle Ages from studies of the history of capitalism. However, as this book will demonstrate, medieval business activity can be traced through a range of sources, beyond businesses, and the presence of entrepreneurs and family business units discerned.

Introduction

This chapter explores the economy and society of Cambridge between the Hundred Rolls of 1279 and the midst of the great depression of the mid-15th century, c.1450. In doing so it connects the chronological coverage in this book to the literature on Cambridge from the period 1450 onwards and considers to what extent trends identified in the Hundred Rolls continued into the 14th century. The chapter focuses principally on the period after the Black Death of 1349 and considers its impact on Cambridge's property market and its wider economy. This outbreak of plague probably halved both the population of the country as a whole and the population of Cambridge. Traditional interpretations have often described this as a bleak period of decline for the town: ‘for Cambridge, as for most English towns, a period of retrogression and decay’. Even the growth of the colleges and university do not appear to have benefited the wider economy of the town: ‘For neither university town was the erection of growing centres of learning on the rubble of former streets an unmitigated blessing, let alone an immediate compensation for the loss of wealth-creating citizens.’ Indeed Cambridge's borough government made pleas for reductions to their tax quota and other payments to the Crown. On the other hand, some historians have seen the late 14th century more generally as a ‘golden age’ of new economic opportunities with rising living standards and the beginnings of a ‘consumer economy’. This chapter will reassess these views and suggest that a more nuanced picture is required, of both growth and decline in Cambridge.

The general consequences of the Black Death included reduced demand for urban property from a smaller population. The extent of this reduction varied between different towns, and within individual towns it varied over time and between different properties. In the property markets of some provincial towns and in London, for example, there appears to have been a phase of growth between about 1380 and 1420 in response to growing manufacturing, particularly within the cloth industry, and the rapid increase in the disposable income of wage earners. Even in these towns, though, the balance between the supply and demand for urban property appears to have been reached in c.1420, and thereafter there was a slow fall in urban land values.

Introduction

The cornerstone of this book is a set of three rolls in The National Archives that make up the Cambridge Hundred Rolls of 1279. The Hundred Rolls as a whole are important because they are the first royal survey that comprehensively and systematically itemized very small plots of land. Anglo-Saxon charters transferring land go back to the 9th century in several counties, but the lands to which they refer were typically large plots held by royalty, aristocrats or powerful religious institutions. The coverage in the Domesday Book in 1086 was superficial in comparison with the detail given in the Hundred Rolls. When investigating issues such as the incidence of hawgable, the Hundred Rolls provide some of the earliest written evidence.

The Hundred Rolls have long been recognized by historians as an important source. Raban noted that:

This book has aspired to fulfil these expectations. The Cambridge Rolls are a good starting point because, together with the Huntingdon Rolls, they provide the most detailed and comprehensive account of property holdings in any large town.

The importance of property transactions

The first question addressed in this book was whether the urban property market in late 13th-century Cambridge was a direct antecedent of property markets today. In particular, how common was the buying and selling of property? How were property rents determined? Were there professional speculators, and if so how did they operate?

The evidence shows that the property market was well developed by 1279, and indeed quite sophisticated. Demand for property was especially strong in elite residential areas, where the supply of property was limited and rents were consequently high. About half of all property transfers were effected through sale and purchase.

Properties were held by perpetual rents. Where properties increased in value additional rents could be added by vendors. Many properties carried multiple rents, suggesting that they had changed hands several times.

Cambridge Debts: Selected Cases From the Exchequer of the Jews, 1219–81

Introduction

Cambridge had an important agricultural property market and an active property market, as previous chapters have demonstrated. This chapter considers Cambridge's performance as a town relative to its local and regional competitors. It examines the factors that contributed to making the town an attractive place for investment by existing residents, residents of the Cambridge region and even those from outside the region.

The first part of the chapter, sections 6.1 to 6.4, focuses on the regional context of the town. It examines competition between rival urban settlements in the Cambridge region, with special reference to river and road transport networks. It begins by looking at five important towns within about 20 miles of Cambridge, including some outside the county. It then looks at market centres within the county, and finally considers three satellite villages close to the town. The five large towns were all inland ports involved in wholesale trade. Like Cambridge, they were all on the River Great Ouse or its tributaries; so this river system is considered first. The market centres within the county were mainly concerned with retail trade and were all connected to Cambridge by road (though some had river connections as well); so the road system is considered next. Finally, the discussion focuses on three satellite villages within walking distance of Cambridge. While these villages could, in principle, have been competitors, they were also well positioned to support the town's activities.

The second part of the chapter focuses on the national context. The previous chapters have shown that Cambridge not only had important agricultural markets, but an active property market too. Section 6.5 considers the extent to which these markets operated in isolation from other urban markets or were integrated into national markets. We examine if agricultural prices in Cambridge closely follow national trends or were governed by purely local circumstances. Section 6.6 demonstrate that Cambridge's property market had a national context. A combination of its economic dominance, administrative role as a county town and function as an administrative centre for the Bishop of Ely, and the misfortunes of some of its leading families, attracted external investors to the town.