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Last edited by IdentifierBot. August 6, History. An edition of Medieval European Society Not in Library. Libraries near you: WorldCat. Medieval European Society First published in A contemporary estimate of based on muster calculated that 55 per cent of clothiers in Gloucestershire and 36 per cent of weavers and 26 per cent of broadweavers lived in the towns.
However, using evidence from all sources between the s and the s, Michael Zell calculates that a third of the clothiers in the whole of the Weald of Kent lived in Cranbrook alone; and the muster of counted thirty-three clothiers in Lavenham out of a total population of only Carus-Wilson made a similar point about the Wiltshire clothiers, although she argued that while production may have taken place in their mills just outside the towns, their business headquarters would have been in the towns.
Judging by the patronage some of the wealthier clothiers lavished on these towns before , and the modern survival of their substantial town houses, this must have been the case. The growing political influence of these clothiers generated a qualitative change, as did their activities and strategies in investment, production and marketing. They controlled all aspects of production and marketing from the production and acquisition of raw materials to the semi-finishing, and finally selling of the cloths mostly to merchants in London by the late fifteenth century for export to the rising Antwerp entrepot.
They derived their wool from their own large sheep flocks, supplemented by that of local and non-local graziers. They put it out to hundreds of spinners and weavers in the local districts, and as skilled fullers and often dyers, they or their servants semi-finished the woven cloth at their own mills and premises.
All studies identify the relentless investment by clothiers of the profits from the textile industry into land and other property such as town houses.
Profits from industrial production were invested in a steady process of accumulation of property and this was rented out. But, in what was a symbiotic, interdependent process, the rents supported increased industrial investment. Moreover, while famous clothier families such as the Springs of Lavenham in Suffolk bought themselves into the gentry, as merchants of the large provincial towns and London were fond of doing, this does not appear to have been typical of clothiers generally.
Zell selects Stephen Sharp and Alexander Dence of Cranbrook, who both died in the early s and were the sons of earlier clothiers, as typical of the most successful Wealden clothier families.
While they accumulated large landholdings of hundreds of acres, the income from renting was used to expand the textile business and not for ambitions within the squirearchy. He argues that the de- industrialization of the Weald during the seventeenth century was the result of a long- term failure of entrepreneurship in that region, holding on as it did to its exceptionally high quality but heavy broadcloths despite earlier innovation in design and colour.
Cloth production in Gloucestershire in the second half of the sixteenth century successfully responded in line with the demand for lighter cloths. It did not finally collapse until the s, when it was unable to compete with the growing agglomerations of small towns and industrial villages that made up the industrial metropolises of modern Manchester and Birmingham.
So the significance of the survival of high densities of small towns in England into the early sixteenth century for the transition was not simply the comparatively large measure of commercial activity at this level. Certainly, close networks of small towns and their districts provided for an environment in which the agents of agrarian and industrial specialization had easy access to markets and labour.
However, crucially, the significance lies in the extent to which a qualitative change in both economic and political structural terms was generated. Factors determining the densities of the original foundation of small towns were the nature of terrain, land fertility and particular regional economies and cultures.
Indeed, it has been argued in a recent study that significant structural changes towards agrarian capitalism in England occurred only after It emphasizes an important aspect of the multi-occupational character of artisan households, and the significance of a measure of independent non-market sources of food in urban household economies.
It included access to common land as well as additional cultivated plots. This significance of access to land in England was brought out in the bitter conflicts over common pasture rights in the larger English towns between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries in towns such as Cambridge, York, Durham, Coventry and Bristol, the result of enclosure of common pasture land in the fields around the towns by wealthy merchants and ecclesiastical landowners based in the towns.
This was hardly an exaggeration given the serious decline of Coventry, and the extent of the conflict that was only finally put down in by a state military force. To take the case of Coventry again, the hundred within which Coventry was situated was the most enclosed in Warwickshire, and this county was the most enclosed in the midlands. But what was most significant was that the commoners of the town - middling artisans and traders - lost an important measure of non-market access to food with the loss of holdings, seriously affecting the balance of their household economies and having knock-on effects for craft production and the prosperity of the city as a whole.
In this way the enclosure movement can be seen to have had a negative effect on the larger provincial towns in England. I have indicated above in general terms how accumulation of land and enclosure by small town clothiers drove further investment in the textile industry. But what happened to small towns more generally? Dengemarsh, for which most evidence survives, was a substantial manor of approximately acres including a acre demesne farm extending from the town to the coast.
The rents exhibited increased fragmentation from the s thereby revealing the popularity of the area at a time of demographic downturn. This was possibly due to diverse occupational opportunities and relatively representative governing institutions. Despite being enclosed, holdings were not consolidated but, on the contrary, were typically scattered to take advantage of diverse land-use.
The eighty-three landholders in included at the very least thirty-six townsmen whom we know by their performance of offices in Lydd, and there were probably many more who do not appear in the official record. Of Lydd wills examined between the s and s, 39 per cent of testators bequeathed land and a similar number bequeathed livestock, and this figure should be increased significantly because many testators used their wills simply to make provision for prayers and debts.
These plots supported a relatively prosperous population of petty traders, craftsmen, fishermen and mariners. Some husbandmen were also present along with a few relatively large farmers who benefited from the availability of seigneurial demesne and other land within and outside Lydd parish from the late fourteenth century.
Romney Marsh became the main source of wool for the Weald of Kent textile industry. In the s pressure, often violent, for enclosure on Dengemarsh began, and caused middling and poorer townsmen and women to defend their holdings on Dengemarsh in the borough court from encroachment against improving manorial demesne farmers. These farmers were also townsmen of Lydd, and were backed by Battle Abbey to which the manor belonged, and its merchant sub-stewards.
The highly organized resistance failed and, following an extremely violent period in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the eighty-three holders had been reduced to thirty-two, holdings had been consolidated and large farms had been carved out of the old structure besides an enlarged demesne farm.
By the s social relations in the town had undergone a process of polarization, and this process was clearly congruent with the context of enclosure.
As markets linked to a wider urban hierarchy and increasingly within the orbit of London, they served as a practical organizational focus for the cloth industry and wool trade. As centres of administration they provided a power base that served to facilitate practical organization. For the farmers and clothiers of the small towns, to a greater or lesser extent in alliance with other groups such as merchants and landlords, the accumulation and enclosure of land on the one hand, and the consolidation of political power on the other, formed an interdependent, symbiotic process.
Of course, the stimulus for these developments came from continental demand and the growth of London, but the agricultural supply response, at once both rural and urban, was, to paraphrase Robert Brenner, conditioned by the existing property structures and balance of class forces.
The example of Lydd, and the activities of clothiers outlined above, suggests that small towns may have provided a context for early, enforced enclosure. Increasing allegations of illegal evictions of villagers and enclosure of arable land for pasture, led to the Commission of However, like the Act that followed, it was only equipped to investigate cases that took place after , and yet the evidence, particularly the perceptions of high-profile contemporaries, suggests that serious damage had been done in the decades before that year.
Moreover it is notable that the preamble to draft leading up to Commission blamed the decay of farms and village depopulation in the previous decades on town investors and speculators who encroached on the land to enclose it for pasture. Did small towns become a context for struggle between lords experiencing a crisis of income by the third quarter of the fifteenth century and peasants migrating to areas of freer tenure and diverse occupational opportunities?
And did this context facilitate the separation of the peasant elite in the form of farmers and clothiers from the rest of the peasantry as a class? Hoppenbrouwers and Jan Luiten van Zanden eds , Peasants into farmers?
The transformation of rural economy and society in the low countries middle Ages — 19th century in light of the Brenner debate Turnhout, Belgium, , pp. Hilton ed. Aston and C. Philpin eds , The Brenner debate: agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe Cambridge, , pp.
See Wood, Origin of capitalism, pp. Hilton, English and French towns in feudal society: a comparative study Cambridge, , pp. At the Birmingham conference , Helil Berktay, with the benefit of conversations with Hilton, suggested that he increasingly saw the role of merchant capital as more complex than his published view suggests.
Epstein ed. Palliser ed. I, Cambridge, , pp. Rollison, The local origins of modern society: Gloucestershire London, , pp. Crittall ed. Dyer, Making a living in the middle ages: the people of Britain New Haven and London, , pp.
Zell, Industry in the countryside: Wealden society in the sixteenth century Cambridge, , pp.
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