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The English Borough in the Thirteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. H. Martin
G. H. Martin
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Leicester.
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Extract

The thirteenth century was a crucial time in the history of the English borough. It saw towns at the height of their prosperity before the calamities of depression and plague, and the last burst of town-making until the spas of the seventeenth century inaugurated our present urban society. It saw an apparent attempt by Edward I's government to define a hierarchy of towns, in which that which was not a borough would be seen plainly to be something else. It marks the time during which the continental commune was tamed and assimilated to English politics, and commune, gild and portmanmote fused together, in as many different ways as there were boroughs, to make the communities for which the Common Law had evolved the doctrine of incorporation. It also produced for us the first substantial quantity of original records written in the towns themselves, records which are from that time onward our principal source of information about municipal affairs. The purpose of this paper is to display the nature and scope of borough archives before 1300, both as a guide to the mass of material that survives from later centuries, and as a commentary upon the thirteenth-century borough. It is confined to those towns, such as the shire boroughs of Domesday Book, which may be presumed to have recruited their own clerks, and not, like the numerous enfranchised manorial towns of this time, to have had someone else provide them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 13 , December 1963 , pp. 123 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1963

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References

page 126 note 1 Weinbaum, M., The Incorporation of Boroughs (Manchester, 1937)Google Scholar; British Borough Charters, 1307–1660 (Cambridge, 1943).Google Scholar

page 126 note 2 Coornaert, E., ‘Les ghildes médiévales’, Revue Historique, cxcix (1948), pp. 22–55, 208–43.Google Scholar

page 127 note 1 Tait, J., The Medieval English Borough (Manchester, 1936), pp. 232–33.Google Scholar

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page 128 note 1 Tait, , op. cit., p. 226.Google Scholar

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page 129 note 2 For Leicester, see Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Bateson, Mary, i (Cambridge, 1899)Google Scholar; The Records of the Corporation of Leicester (Leicester, 1956)Google Scholar; Martin, G. H., ‘The Origins of Borough Records’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, ii, no. 4 (10 1961)Google Scholar. The Dublin rolls are printed and discussed in Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, 1172–1320, ed. J. T. Gilbert (Rolls Series, 1870Google Scholar), and the Newcastle customs in Archaeologia Aeliana, Fourth Series, i (1925), pp. 169–78.Google Scholar

page 129 note 3 Calendar of the Shrewsbury Borough Records (Shrewsbury, 1896)Google Scholar; Trans. Shropshire Archaeol. and Natural History Soc, Second Series, viii (1896), pp. 21–43Google Scholar; Hist. MSS Comm., Sixth Report, Appendix, Part I (Wallingford), pp. 572–77.

page 129 note 4 The Anglo-Norman Custumal of Exeter, ed. Schopp, J. W. (History of Exeter Research Group, Monograph no. 2, 1925)Google Scholar; Hist. MSS Comm., [Report on the Records of the City of]Exeter (1916)Google Scholar. Jones, P. E. and Smith, R., A Guide to the Records in the Corporation of London Records Office … (London, 1951)Google Scholar. Martin, G. H., The Early Court Rolls of the Borough of Ipswich (Leicester, 1954Google Scholar). Gross, C., The Gild Merchant (Oxford, 1890), ii, pp. 3–12, 235–44Google Scholar (Andover and Totnes); Hist. MSS Comm., Third Report, Appendix, p. 297 (Totnes).

page 130 note 1 Hist. MSS Comm., Thirteenth Report, Appendix iv (Hereford); Canter bury Corporation Archives, F/Z/2; Furley, J. S., City Government of Winchester … (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar. I am obliged to Dr William Urry for information about the records of Canterbury and Fordwich.

page 130 note 2 Hist. MSS Comm., Ninth Report, Part I, Appendix (Barnstaple), pp. 203–16. Bridport Borough Archives, no. 1465: the roll is for 6–7 Edw. I, not 2–3 Edw. I as in the manuscript calendar. Fordwich Archives (in Canterbury Cathedral Library), bundle 1, no. 121.

page 130 note 3 Selected Rolls of the Chester City Courts, ed. Hopkins, A. (Chetham Soc, Third Series, ii, 1950), p. xvGoogle Scholar. Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, ed. Salter, H. E. (Oxford Hist. Soc, lxxi, 1917)Google Scholar; the introduction discusses lost documents: Brian Twyne used hustings rolls from 1278. Repertory of Deeds and Documents relating to Great Yarmouth (Yarmouth, 1855)Google Scholar; the earliest rolls of Edward I's reign have been lost since J. C. Jeaffreson reported on the borough in Hist. MSS Comm., Ninth Report, Part I, Appendix, pp. 299–324. Cambridge Borough Documents, ed. Palmer, W. M., i (Cambridge, 1931).Google Scholar

page 130 note 4 Reading Records, ed. Guilding, J. M., i (London, 1892), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar. Hist. MSS Comm., Eleventh Report, Appendix, Part III, p. 210 (King's Lynn). Stevenson, W. H., Calendar of the Records of the Corporation of Gloucester (Gloucester, 1893), p. 456.Google Scholar

page 131 note 1 Borough Customs, ed. Bateson, Mary, i (Selden Soc, 1904), pp. xx, xli–xlii.Google Scholar

page 131 note 2 P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice], Assize Roll no. 82. Hunniset, R. F., The Medieval Coroner (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 100–03Google Scholar. Norwich has a fifteenth century text of the presentments to the justices in eyre in 1250, and Colchester once had records of inquests, the oldest of which seemed to Philip Morant to be as early as Richard I's or John’s reign (Records of the City of Norwich, ed. Hudson, W. and Tingey, J. C., i (Norwich, 1906), pp. 199–202;Google ScholarMorant, P., History and Antiquities of Colchester (Colchester, 1748), Book 2, p. 19, n. L).Google Scholar

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page 134 note 2 Maitland, F. W., Township and Borough (Cambridge, 1898), p. 80.Google Scholar

page 136 note 1 Shrewsbury Borough Records, Box LXXVI, 2686 (assay roll); Box VIII, 302 ff. (murage accounts).

page 136 note 2 As late as 1537 the clerks of the mayor's court of London kept the rolls on which they were working in their own custody, and the city records have suffered accordingly (Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London, A, LetterBook, ed. Sharpe, R. R. (London, 1899), pp. iii–ivGoogle Scholar). At Worcester in the fifteenth century the town clerk was enjoined to make up the bailiffs' records and yearly acquittances in his own hand and to keep them ‘for laufulle remembrance to be left to the said comynalte’ (Smith, L. Toulmin, English Gilds (E[arly] E[nglish] T[ext] S[ociety], xl, 1870), pp. 399–400).Google Scholar

page 137 note 1 Berkshire Records Office, W/FC/1.

page 137 note 2 Ibid.,, W/FT/1.

page 137 note 3 Ibid., W/JBe/1 (estreats); W/JBa/1 (burghmoot).

page 137 note 4 Ibid., W/RTa.

page 138 note 1 Anglo-Norman Custumal of Exeter, ed. Schopp, pp. 8–10.

page 138 note 2 Guide to the Records …of London, p. 64.

page 139 note 1 Martin, , Early Court Rolls…of Ipswich, pp. 28–29.Google Scholar

page 139 note 2 Ibid., pp. 12–14.

page 140 note 1 Trans. Devonshire Assoc, xii (1880), p. 183Google Scholar; Hist. MSS Comm., Third Report, Appendix, p. 343.

page 141 note 1 For the Yarmouth letter rolls, see Martin, , Early Court Rolls…of Ipswich, p. 37Google Scholar. Not many early municipal letters have survived, but there is an interesting one at Lancaster sent by Northampton, c. 1 zoo, in answer to an enquiry about the liberties of Northampton; see Pape, T., The Charters of the City of Lancaster (Lancaster, 1952), pp. 12–13Google Scholar. For the customs rolls, see Hist. MSS Comm., Exeter, p. 413, and Ipswich Borough Records, Great Court Roll 29–31 Edw. I, m. 2.

page 141 note 2 Nor were they, apparently, on the Continent. The celebrated Annates de Toulouse derive from notices of consular elections that begin as late as 1295; see Wolff, P., Histoire de Toulouse (Toulouse, 1958), p. 13Google Scholar. M. Schneider implies that there were no regular tables in Metz before that time (Jean Schneider, La ville de Metz aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Nancy, 1950), p. 511; cf. p. 161).

page 142 note 1 Archaeologia Cantiana, xviii (1889), p. 92.Google ScholarMunlmenta Civitatis Oxonie, ed. Salter, p. xii.

page 142 note 2 Clericus communis (e.g. in Ricart's Calendar) seems to be the general medieval usage, although occasionally clericus communitatis is used, as of Roger de Scaddisdem at Leicester, c. 1280 (Leicester City Records, BR II/8a/i). At Lincoln, c. 1230, there were two clerici civitatis, both called John and apparently equal in other respects (Registrum Antiquissimum, viii, ed. Major, K. (Lincoln Record Soc, li, 1958), pp. 132, 198Google Scholar). It is difficult to say when the habit of using deputies began, but it may well have been early. The town clerk of Worcester was enjoined in 1467 to keep certain records and to attend to his business in person (Smith, L. Toulmin, English Gilds (E.E.T.S., xl, 1870), pp. 399–400Google Scholar), but the common clerk of Bristol had a paid clerk (ibid., p. 423). Ricart, who called himself ‘Toune clerk’ in English and ‘communis clericus’ in Latin, refers to his assistant's official livery but not to a customary stipend (The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar, ed. Smith, L. Toulmin(Camden Soc, 1872), pp. 81–82).Google Scholar

page 142 note 3 Bartholomew the chaplain was made vicar of Totnes in 1269 (Trans. Devonshire Assoc, xii, p. 183Google Scholar). By the fourteenth century gilds usually named a clerk amongst their officers (Smith, op. cit., passim). The Leicester gild merchant seems to have had two clerks; see above, p. 132.

page 142 note 4 Schickle, C. W., Calendar of Ancient Deeds belonging to the Corporation of Bath (Bath, 1921), pp. 3, 7.Google Scholar

page 143 note 1 Early Deeds relating to Newcastle on Tyne (Surtees Soc., cxxxvii, 1924), pp. 94, 171–72.Google Scholar For a contemporary regulation against such family connexions among the parochial amanuenses of Metz, see Schneider, , op. cit., p. 163.Google Scholar

page 143 note 2 ‘The Greenwell Deeds’, Archaeologia Æliana, Fourth Series, iii (1927), p. 24Google Scholar; Schickle, , op. cit., p. 28.Google Scholar

page 143 note 3 The medieval chapters of the Victoria County History, Yorkshire, The City of York (1961), are an example of what can be done with material of this kind in default of ordinary municipal records.

page 144 note 1 Registers are only one test of professionalism, and a good deal can be said about bishops' chanceries before registers appear (Cheney, C. R., English Bishops' Chanceries, 1100–1250 (Manchester, 1950), pp. 2–4Google Scholar). The history of towns on the Continent opens a very wide field for comparison, but in northern Europe their apparently superior evidences are often the product of their religious houses. The documents discussed in this paper are mostly earlier than the earliest town records in the northern Netherlands; see De Oudste Stadsrekeningen van Dordrecht, 1284–1424, ed. Dozy, C. M. (The Hague, 1891)Google Scholar. Even at Toulouse the magistrates' decisions were not formally registered before 1225, but were left in notaries' copies in private hands (Wolff, Histoire de Toulouse, p. 12).Google Scholar