Chapter 24 - The Town

Summary

The modern distinction between municipal and village life had comparatively little force in the Middle Ages. The town was often scarcely more than an overgrown village, and indeed there were few whose population would raise them above village rank in Yorkshire or Lancashire of to-day. In this field, as in many others, many significant indications come from that record which Carlyle has made famous in his Past and Present—the chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond. We see there how the townsfolk of Bury St Edmunds, at the end of the twelfth century, were still not only under village, but even to a great extent under servile, conditions. They paid yearly “reap-silver” as a commutation for the harvest work to which they had formerly been bound. They paid a “sor-penny” for free pasture. There were dunghills in the streets, as in any farmyard. They had ploughing to do for the abbot, a remnant of their past condition as bondmen. Their sheep had to be folded in the abbot's field, in order that he might profit by the dung; and they were still subject to forced labour in the matter of fishing, or of carting eels. “The men of the town were wont, at the cellarer's bidding, to go to Lakenheath and bring a convoy of eels from Southery, and oftentimes to return empty and thus to be vexed without any gain to the cellarer; wherefore they agreed that, in future, each thirty acres should pay one penny yearly, and the men should stay at home. But, in these days of ours, those lands have been divided into so many parts that it is scarce known who owes that due; so that I have seen the cellarer one year take 27 pence, yet now he can scarce get 10½d..”