An investigation of lord–tenant relationships in medieval societies implies examining how, fundamentally, estate owners were sustained by their estates. The social relations surrounding lords who lived from tributes of produce were different from those in a regime of predominantly cash rents and other dues, or in one of agricultural production on demesne farms. In northern England and lowland Scotland we have a clearly defined starting-point for our investigations, thanks in large measure to Geoffrey Barrow and Glanville Jones. Their explorations of the topographical and social structures of the units of lordship referred to as ‘shires’ or ‘multiple estates’ give us a demonstrable common foundation for forms of lordship across what became the Anglo-Scottish Border. Characteristically such estates contained a grouped hierarchy of separate settlements, of which one was the estate centre and others were dependencies with varying obligations to render labour or produce, or both, to the lord and his retinue. Geographically they often covered a more or less compact tract of territory, including both lowland and upland terrain. A fertile, lowland location formed a core area containing the institutional focal points of local society: the estate centre and (in many cases) an early religious site nearby. Shires also provided a framework to patterns of economic exploitation, with belts of particular resources (especially pasture or woodland) to which communities across the estate might share access. Such estates show considerable diversity of size, composition and administrative purpose. As units of lordship they had a twofold aspect, as economic structures for the maintenance of a lord and his entourage, and as units for the administration of law, custom and seigneurial power. By the twelfth century they survived most evidently where they operated as units of local government, as small shires, thanages or sokes. Some had become seigneurial liberties, outside the regular course of royal administration, such as the bishop of Durham's liberties of Bedlingtonshire, Islandshire and Norhamshire.

Not only are shires or multiple estates equally in evidence in northern England and lowland Scotland in the historical record, but their history has become closely associated with that of ancient forms of tribute from dependants that also occur on both sides of the Border.

After the disasters that followed the collapse of Roman authority, trade, both international and internal, eventually grew, but its institutional infrastructure needed to be recreated. Even where towns eventually revived on old sites they operated with newly devised trading institutions and new monetary systems. During the eighth and earlier ninth centuries overseas commerce increased, especially through London, Southampton, Ipswich and York, and wider trading interests prompted currency reform as well as co-operation between the principal English monarchies. A single standard of currency established by the kings of Mercia and Wessex, together with the archbishop of Canterbury, implied a common interest in trade. But the later ninth and early tenth centuries experienced a temporary setback in parts of England as the Danish invasions of eastern England disrupted established institutions and practices. The level of international trade stagnated in the wics through which merchandise had previously passed, and the money supply diminished. Danish rulers ultimately proved no less interested than the English kings in fostering trade, but the coins they minted were of lower quality. No common standard of currency was re-established until King Edgar's new coinage of 973. The year 900 is accordingly a useful point at which to take stock of the institutional provision for trade, before proceeding to examine the subsequent revival of commerce in the Late Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods.

The use of French in medieval English towns has no simple explanation. Amongst highly born and better-educated members of English society, French was known as a high-status, international language of conversation, and as a means of access to literature of high quality. In the king's courts it was also an argot of common lawyers, and continued in use as a written language after it had ceased to be spoken in the courts. An explanation of these phenomena in terms of the sociology of social stratification, symbolic representation and social closure would seem to present few problems. But these considerations come nowhere near explaining why French should have been used in the business of urban communities, whose membership was not drawn from the aristocratic or better-educated classes of society, on the whole, and most of whom spoke nothing but English.

Like their counterparts in the shires, urban elites made use of another nonnative language, Latin, as the principal language of administration. Their most burdensome task was the management of borough law-courts, and some English boroughs began using written records to keep track of judicial business early in the thirteenth century. The Wallingford rolls date from the 1230s. We have enough surviving evidence to suppose that the keeping of borough court rolls became increasingly widespread during the course of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The normal language of all this legal recording was Latin, and this continued well into the early modern period.

THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Medieval English towns, though much smaller than those of today, were sufficiently distinct from rural communities to justify separate consideration. They were trading centres, where employment was heavily dependent on non-agrarian activities. Though this implies that they should be identified primarily by economic criteria, towns developed distinctive characteristics, and the largest ones created political and cultural institutions without parallel in rural communities. There was no medieval word corresponding closely to our word ‘town’, but most of the places that need consideration for their urban characteristics were described in contemporary documents as ‘boroughs’, a word packed with a complex amalgam of economic, legal and cultural significance. Many different aspects of development were apparent in the physical shape and appearance of towns, so that a survey of the urban environment leads some way to an appreciation of what it meant to be a medieval town-dweller.

Though towns varied greatly in population and complexity, their size and layout alone distinguished them from rural settlements. The principal street or streets were lined with a distinctive configuration of properties, often of half an acre or less, held by money rents and freely transferable by sale or lease. These were the characteristics of ‘burgage tenure’, the form of freehold most characteristic of the urban environment, and many boroughs were so called simply because they contained properties of this kind.

This volume contains papers delivered at the tenth Thirteenth Century England Conference, which met at St Aidan's College, Durham in September 2003. Speakers addressed a variety of themes in social, political, economic, ecclesiastical and cultural history, though (refreshingly) papers often move across two or more of those categories. Some contributors took up the customary invitation to deal with a ‘long’ thirteenth century (from late Henry II to early Edward III), or to look beyond the confines of England itself.

David Carpenter uses a minute investigation of some of the meetings between Henry III and Louis IX, and their wives, to develop a wide-ranging discussion of the similarities and differences between French and English kingship, and between the sources and approaches employed by historians on either side of the Channel. He counterpoints, on the one hand, the close ties, similar values and shared etiquette of the English and French courts, and, on the other, the sharply contrasting political skills of the two kings.

Four papers deal with aspects of English government, politics and society. Nick Barratt traces the long-term significance of the defence, and subsequent loss, of Normandy for royal finances. Only in the reign of Edward I did the monarchy again find a viable fiscal base after the dispersal of royal demesne begun by Richard I and the financial constraints imposed by Magna Carta in response to King John's exactions. Emilia Jamroziak analyses grants of markets and fairs under Henry III. Their variable frequency was linked to changing patterns of royal patronage and the crown's need for cash payments; but the demand for charters, particularly from lesser landholders, reflected the economic and social aspirations of recipients.

demand for urban goods and services

There is a striking contrast between any analysis of changing demand in the late middle ages and that of earlier centuries. Changes in the period 600–1300, at least at the level of generalisation attempted in Chapter 5, may be summarised with the broad statement that the rising income of landlords, the growth of rural demand and the expansion of long-distance trade were all favourable to the growth of urban incomes over long periods of time. For most of that long period the evidence is not good enough for any much more subtle refinement. No comparable simplicity is viable for the shorter and much better documented period from 1300 to 1540, and it is difficult to generalise about the performance of late medieval urban economies with any firm assurance.

As in the past, the urban households of landlords often contributed a large and distinctive part in the composition of demand affecting townsmen. This was not true only of the small episcopal or monastic towns where it is most obvious. One of the most striking instances is Westminster, where the royal Court with its associated institutions of government, together with Westminster Abbey, and the visitors to both, generated trade both in Westminster itself and in London nearby. Besides numerous manufacturing industries that could prosper in this context, the victualling trades conspicuously benefited. The court and the abbey generated an exceptional demand for meat and so created local employment in grazing and butchering. Heavy dependence upon the presence of large households was the lot of many smaller towns.

demand for urban goods and services

No definition of the word town is very convenient for the analysis of medieval economies. It is tempting to take the contemporary term burh or burgus as a proxy, but this needs resisting because there was so little consistency or stability in the way the word was used. Population levels might serve as a guide if they were reliably known for each town, but they are not. Differences of taxable wealth are on record, and for 1334 can be charted for most of England, but they depend upon the size of the assessed area and the social distribution of wealth to such an extent that there is considerable overlap between places with ‘urban’ features (craftsmen, traders, marketing institutions) and places dependent solely on rural pursuits. It will be assumed here, first, that a necessary condition for being considered a town is that a settlement should have some institutional apparatus for regular local or long-distance trade; from the eleventh century onwards this would normally mean at least a weekly market. Secondly, a settlement with this institutional provision is classifiable as a town if its income depends to a perceptible degree upon the sale of manufactures and services to buyers external to the body of townsmen. Buyers external to the urban community, in this context, may mean large households or bodies of administrative personnel adjacent to the town; describing such purchasers as external is justifiable because large households of all kinds normally drew most of their income from outside the town in which they were placed.