Scholarship on the maritime economy of medieval Kent has focused largely on the overseas trade of individual ports, although of late there has been more interest in marine fishing and coastal communities, especially on Romney Marsh. The special privileges and strategic importance of the Cinque Ports have also drawn much attention. Rather less emphasis has been placed on ‘maritime industry’, here defined as collecting and processing resources from the sea or the manufacture and maintenance of the infrastructure needed to facilitate exploitation of the sea’s resources. This chapter summarises the main patterns of overseas trade in Kent and sketches the types and economic impact of such maritime industries as marine fishing, shipbuilding, and harbour works, primarily in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. While documentary research takes centre stage, evidence from recent archaeological publications is also crucial in enriching our understanding of maritime trade and industry in medieval Kent.

Maritime Trade

To assess the volume and value of overseas trade in medieval England, scholars turn first to the enrolled customs accounts of the royal exchequer, which record totals by customs jurisdiction for wool exports from 1279 and for other cargoes from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. Calculating any totals for Kent’s overseas trade, however, is hazardous since the county’s ports can appear under five different customs headport jurisdictions. Gravesend and other Kent ports on the Thames, for example, were always included under the totals for London, while the stretch of coast from Gravesend to Sandwich usually appeared under Sandwich, except for periods when Queenborough or Dover were reckoned as headports. Trade through the south Kent ports of Hythe and New Romney could be entered in the Sandwich customs accounts, but in many years they were recorded with Chichester. These record-keeping practices must be taken into consideration in attempts to evaluate trends in the overseas trade of Kent.

The best way to distinguish commercial traffic in individual ports is by consulting the so-called particular customs accounts, which offer detailed accounts of each ship’s cargoes and merchants. But particular accounts have their own problems because their survival is sporadic, they often record only certain types of trade depending on the custom being collected, and the accounts for Kentish ports frequently omit the name and home port of the ship.

Medieval town or borough court records have rarely been printed in extenso because they are so long and contain more names than details of legal matters. As a result, many of the borough courts in print consist of extracts, abstracts or abbreviated summaries. These transcriptions and translations can, however, still offer instructive material, so this appendix provides annotations on town courts in print or available online in order to illustrate their wide variety, provide examples of the types of business they treated, and stimulate more comparative studies. Town courts are defined here as meetings identified as ‘courts’ by contemporaries, which included ‘legal’ matters (such as presentments, indictments or pleas) and operated under the authority of town officials – a definition that excludes most guild courts, unless they were meetings of a guild merchant that essentially served as the town's government. The bibliography, which is organised alphabetically by town, encompasses town courts in England, Scotland and Wales, up to about 1500. The second part of the appendix lists references to extracts of borough courts printed in the appendices of the Reports of the Royal Commission of Historical Manuscripts.

Those interested in borough courts for which no or few records are extant should also be aware of detailed references to business in these courts collected by scholars of English common law, who have tracked writs of error that required the local court to provide a record of a particular case to the appellate central court.

Annotated List

Aberdeen

Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, ed. Elizabeth Gemmill, Scottish History Society, 5th series, 17 (Edinburgh, 2005). Transcription of the proceedings of the court of the guild of the burgh, which handled both guild and burgh business, including admission of new guild members and burgesses, enforcement of guild and burgh trading regulations, leasing of burgh property and presentments of offences (particularly forestalling), but no personal pleas. The alderman and/or dean of the guild presided over the court, which met at least once a week in between meetings of the town council (which was elected by the guild). Entries in Latin and increasingly in Scots.

This chapter aims to provide a practical introduction to the jurisdictions, format, procedure and business of town courts, particularly for those seeking to employ this source to understand the economic, political and social life of medieval English towns. Scholars have paid more attention to manorial and common law courts than to town courts, and there have been few attempts to provide comparative studies that categorise their jurisdictions and business. This failure is due in large part to the tremendous variety of town courts and their reliance on local customary law, which have made them more a focus of specialists writing about a particular town. There is also no consensus – indeed, little sustained discussion at all – about how to define a town or ‘borough’ court, although the contributions to this volume should go some way towards addressing this lacuna.

The difficulty in defining a borough court rests in part on scholarly debates about the term ‘borough’, which has often been narrowly and legally construed by medievalists to mean a community recognised as a ‘free borough’ by the crown. This identification usually came in the form of a charter, although other signs – such as a parliamentary summons, taxation at the urban rate, or burgage tenure – are also considered evidence of borough status. Scholars continue to find it difficult to identify the specific characteristics that set boroughs apart from other communities, but most agree that the enjoyment of burgage tenure, whereby property could be freely bought, sold, leased and bequeathed, is considered the chief characteristic of borough status. Even so, there were recognised boroughs whose chief court was manorial, and communities with no substantive claim to borough status that had courts whose business and procedures resemble what happened in borough courts. Another problem is that ‘borough’ can be used as a synonym for ‘town’ – that is, a settlement in which most residents were engaged in non-agricultural occupations, even if the settlement lacked a borough charter and was no larger than most villages. This question of definition requires more systematic investigation, but in what follows, ‘borough courts’ (and ‘town courts’) denote legally-sanctioned meetings that included presentments of offences and/or personal pleas, and that were run under the authority (partial or complete) of officials acknowledged as representatives of an urban community.

Mary Erler's scholarship has been at the forefront of what has been called a “remarkable efflorescence” or “second wave” in studies of the history of the book and the material text that began in the last decade of the twentieth century. Her vision has expanded the scope of questions that can be asked – and answered – and has helped to break down traditional boundaries between periods, genres, media, social classes, religious states, and genders. Her approach is focused and distinctive enough to constitute a method in itself, but it also engages a variety of other methods to analyze and assess the larger picture. Her interdisciplinary work has interacted with and contributed to book studies, literary studies (new philology, new historicism, feminism), social history, ecclesiastical history, and good old-fashioned intellectual history, among others. Erler's work realigns earlier ideas about periodization: much of it is situated in the unsettled times of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, and so deals with early printed books as well as late manuscript codices. Her writings consider a broad range of groups, including Catholics (lay and religious), Lollards and Anglicans, men and women, aristocrats and bourgeoisie.

The material object, be it printed volume, manuscript, or legal document, is invariably the starting point of her enquiry, but the primary object of interest is always the human subject who produced, read, shared, inherited, bequeathed, or treasured it. The term Erler associates with her work – “bibliographical study” – may strike some as old-fashioned or even pedestrian, but in Erler's hands “bibliographical study” is cutting-edged, nuanced, and deeply revealing. “Bibliography” is tellingly the first word of her ground-breaking study, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (2002):

Scholars of medieval England have rarely discussed language socialization as part of the immigrant experience, focusing instead on the political and economic tensions created between natives and foreign migrants to England. When discussed at all, language socialization has been treated in the context of languagelearning strategies, especially in terms of how the English learned French and Latin, rather than how French-language speakers coped in England. This essay adopts a slightly different approach to understanding language socialization and the survival of spoken French in later medieval England by contextualizing the integration of native French-speakers into English society, particularly in the south-western county of Devon. It attempts to overcome the paucity of direct evidence about French-speaking migrants, most of whom were of low status and probably illiterate, by drawing on the records of taxes imposed on alien residents of medieval England in the mid-fifteenth century, supplemented by additional prosopographical information.

The starting point for this analysis is the so-called ‘alien subsidy’ of 1440, a tax assessed on foreign or ‘alien’ residents of medieval England, whose records have now been made available online in a searchable database by the England's Immigrants project. The taxpayers recorded in the returns of 1440 and later alien subsidies (the last one was approved in 1487), along with the aliens singled out in the first Tudor subsidy of 1523, account for the bulk of the project's almost 65,000 names of foreign-born residents in England from 1330 to 1550. These taxes on first-generation foreigners were the culmination of anti-alien sentiment that had been mounting in England for some time, evident in a series of restrictive measures aimed initially at foreign merchants and clergy. Because the coverage of the alien subsidies declined over time as local assessors grew lax and particular foreign groups (such as the Irish, Bretons, Channel Islanders, Spanish and French living under English rule in Normandy and Gascony) became exempt, the 1440 tax offers the best picture of England's foreign population at one moment in time. Its listings separate householders (heads of households taxed at 16d each) from non-householders such as servants and general laborers (taxed at 6d), although the default rates were enormous, especially among non-householders.

Maritime historians have spent more time studying those who labored at sea than those who worked on shore, even though port laborers played an essential role in the smooth functioning of maritime trade and enterprise and probably outnumbered those who went to sea. Medievalists have had especially little to say about port laborers, in contrast to the fuller scholarship on late modern quayside workers such as stevedores and porters, among others. The problem is exacerbated by the scanty extant documentation for these largely un-organized, poorly remunerated, and low-status workers. Some progress has been made recently, however, in archaeological publications on the physical structure and topography of medieval ports. This chapter aims to redress this gap by bringing together the scarce documentary evidence with recent archaeological research to assess the types of work, remuneration, status, and regulation of those who labored on English waterfronts from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. It is centered around a typology of port labor with six categories.

The first is port administration, which had the highest status of the six groups, but also represented the smallest number of workers (barely totaling ten to thirty men in most ports), which helps explain why they never formed any guilds.

The successful shipmaster or magister of a medieval ship possessed many skills: navigational expertise to guide the vessel to its destination; commercial acumen to dispose of cargoes in his charge; management ability to employ, victual and direct a crew of men who were often of disparate backgrounds and ethnicities; business savvy to cope with wily seamen, shore-side workers and merchants in foreign ports; initiative to handle the dangers and risks that pervaded life at sea; and a basic understanding of law and international politics to steer his ship, cargo and crew through the dangerous waters of the medieval seas. This essay focuses on the entrepreneurial skills that medieval English shipmasters needed to be successful, particularly in terms of shipowning, naval service, remuneration, trade, managerial skills and the hazy border between privateering and piracy. Shipmasters often had an important stake in individual trading voyages, particularly when they owned all or part of the ship or had some share of the cargo. Even when their ownership stake was small, their ability to react quickly to ever-changing circumstances — whether a shift in the wind that kept them in a foreign port for weeks on end, or the loss of cargo in a storm, attacks by pirates, a shortage of the goods customers wanted or the loss of crewmen to illness or death — was essential since they were most responsible for the ultimate profit or loss of the voyage.

One of the long-standing issues in the study of the French of England revolves around who exactly could speak, write, and read French in medieval England. Most scholars accept that few below the level of the aristocracy, upper gentry, and the clerical elite spoke French regularly, even in the heyday of French literary culture in England which stretched from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century. We know too that lawyers and judges, most of gentry status but some from the upper bourgeois or even prosperous yeoman class, could read and speak French because it was the language of legal treatises and pleading in the royal courts. We are, moreover, starting to learn about the use of French in other social groups, as the essays in this volume by Marilyn Oliva (on nuns) and Richard Britnell (on townspeople) attest. My contribution follows on from this work in exploring non-elite, non-literary communities of French in medieval England by focusing on the use of French among sea-going populations, particularly mariners and fishermen, but also shipmen/merchants and other port-town residents who made their living from the sea. I look at three types of evidence: (1) the Laws (or Rolls) of Oléron, the dominant maritime law code of the medieval Atlantic world; (2) other types of port-town records, such as maritime courts, custumals, and customs accounts that were written in Anglo-French; and (3) indications that French may have been spoken or understood by many English overseas merchants and shipmasters and even a good number of mariners into the fifteenth century.