History of England 1-6

So the long period in which towns prospered, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was also one in which the sense of urban community was most highly developed. In some respects the notion of a community is specious, however, since the richer townspeople known as ‘the better sort’ created an oligarchy of power concentrated in a small network of families. In Norwich 60 per cent of the wealth had devolved into the hands of 6 per cent of the population. These were the men who would serve as jurors in the town court and who took up the offices of the local administration. Nevertheless a feeling of common interest was aroused in the maintenance of newly acquired privileges and traditions. In the Commune of London, forged at a time when mutual antagonism between merchants and craftsmen was intense, the voices of the citizens could still be heard shouting ‘Ya Ya!’ or ‘Nay Nay!’ in their assemblies.

This sense of corporate identity was strengthened by the belief that towns were areas of relative freedom. The people who gathered there were drawn together in a commercial pact, and were not subject to the rules of labour service that obtained in the countryside. By the early twelfth century it was established that if a villein resided in a town for a year and a day, he acquired his freedom. The air of the town was different.

We may envisage wooden houses and wooden shops, with vacant plots between them where the hens scratched and where the small horses of the period were tethered. Many of the wooden houses were of two storeys, with the shop on the ground floor and the living quarters above it. Permanent shops were erected, but stalls could be set up and taken down from day to day. In any town perhaps two or three stone houses were owned by the richer merchants.

In Chester a wooden footway was raised above the street of beaten earth so that it became a ‘first floor’ sheltered by the houses above; from there, the pedestrians could ‘window-shop’. In the towns of England dirt and refuse were scattered everywhere, partly scavenged by pigs and kites. The streams running above ground were often filthy with industrial waste and excrement. The noise of bargaining, and of argument, was intense. It was busy, always busy, with the particular stridency and excitability of the medieval period in England.

How much the king’s advisers revised the administration of justice, and how much was Henry II’s own contribution, is a nice question. It is reported that he spent many sleepless nights debating with his advisers over points of law, but that may be a pious fiction. It is undoubtedly true that in the course of his reign the rule of law was amplified in England; one of his contemporaries, Walter Map, noted that the king was ‘a subtle deviser of novel judicial processes’. He decreed, for example, that royal justices should make regular visits to the shires and take over legal business previously reserved for the sheriff or the county justice. Six groups of three judges each toured between four and eight counties so that the whole country came under their purview. They were based at Westminster, but the central administration was reaching out.

Their activities were of course designed principally for the king’s own profit, as he gathered up fines and other payments; it was well known that the royal courts loved money more than justice, and the king expected ‘presents’ at every stage of the judicial proceedings. A wealthy man, accused of a crime, would offer a large sum ‘for having the king’s love’. In a rough and violent society, it was considered to be perfectly natural. You paid money to see a doctor. You paid money to see a judge. Law was another form of power. It was just becoming swifter and more efficient.