Charlotte Berry's The Margins of Late Medieval London is a study of the geographical and social margins of late medieval London, focusing mostly on the parishes of St. Botolph Aldgate, St. Botolph Bishopsgate, and St. Botolph Aldersgate and the people who lived there. Berry argues that these neighborhoods were diverse and important, and she offers a fluid and nuanced account of social marginality, contending that all Londoners had to work to maintain their reputations but that social precarity was more commonly experienced by those with fewer resources to begin with, such as women, the poor, and foreign immigrants. She does not focus on marginalized groups, such as prostitutes, beggars, criminals, or vagrants, but attends to social negotiations in general in extramural neighborhoods. The overall picture is one of lively suburban life already predating the rapid early modern expansion of London.
The first chapter provides a useful overview of these extramural neighborhoods. With their more open landscapes, including undeveloped marshy areas and important roads and waterways, they could be home to large, fine houses as well as small, cheap dwellings, and were natural settings for pastures, gardens, inns, breweries, foundries, bowling alleys (greens), and other things that took up more space than could easily be accommodated within the city walls. In this late medieval period, extramural neighborhoods were also the homes of several religious houses with their own legal privileges, resulting in spaces that sometimes ironically fostered prostitution and other activities that the City governors disapproved of. Tax records indicate that extramural neighborhoods were not necessarily uniformly poor, although Aldersgate included more prosperous residents than did the poorer parishes like Bishopsgate.
In the second chapter, on what she calls “socio-spatial networks” (47), Berry examines what social network analysis can reveal about extramural society: she traces the connections between the people testators selected to serve as witnesses, executors, and supervisors of their wills. Social network analysis distills this information into a modularity score, which is to say a measure of whether testators’ will networks were tighter versus being more broadly dispersed among the community. The resulting figures and graphics are impressive but not terribly communicative. The takeaway appears to be that the lower modularity associated with wealthier parishes means that richer people were less likely to have social networks tightly focused in the locality: the reach of their social networks was geographically broader, presumably because of their connections to citywide institutions or mercantile networks. In addition, members of immigrant communities tended to name other immigrants, even if they were not members of the same parish community. Patterns of bequests similarly reveal the importance of neighborhood but also people's mobility and ties to other places in London and in the hinterland.
In chapter 3, using evidence from the Consistory Court, Berry argues that people came to London from all over in England and Wales, even at lower social levels. Specific neighborhoods were connected to specific hinterlands: butchers came from along the Midlands droving routes, for example. Within London, people also moved around: widows might move out from the center to cheaper suburbs, wives tried to escape abusive husbands, apprentices did not always complete their terms. While mobility was the norm, it could also be suspicious: as always, vagrancy was a concern, and so were people suspected of moving to escape bad reputations or following expulsion from their wards. Movement between parishes did not necessarily mean movement between neighborhoods, however: social neighborhoods were not necessarily contiguous with official boundaries, and poor people often moved around between jurisdictions in the same general extramural area.
In chapter 4, on the ward courts, Berry deals with the policing of offenses and misbehavior and paths to civic responsibility. While environmental offenses—blocking the highway, for example—were the most common types of indictments, these do not seem to have necessarily resulted in reputational damage. More damaging indictments for unruly behavior and sexual offenses were disproportionately of women and foreigners. For respectable men, in contrast, serving on a wardmote jury could be the first step in taking on more civic responsibility, though almost 60 percent of jurors served only once, which Berry suggests was due to their failure to adhere to respectable masculine norms, although it may simply have been a matter of sharing the burden and prestige of this comparatively low-level civic office. Men who served as jurors were also involved in informally mediating local disputes. Social capital could be gained or lost through these complex ongoing social interactions: no one's reputation was set in stone.
In the final chapter, Berry focuses again on the making and unmaking of reputations. Berry emphasizes that all people wanted to maintain good fame, especially victualers and others whose trades were a little bit suspect. But society was not hegemonic. Women who were in trouble with the authorities could still maintain supportive social networks, for example. Different people used the different strategies available to them: richer people could sue for defamation, while poorer people could use compurgation to defend themselves from accusations of bad behavior. In addition, in the different jurisdictions and precincts around London, a savvy city-dweller could use uneven legal space strategically to get around regulations or to escape bad fame.
While the path from the comprehensive and balanced assessment of archival evidence to making broader historical claims is not always clear, with Margins of Late Medieval London Berry makes a solid contribution to the history of London, of interest to both medievalists and early modernists. She is extremely effective at bringing out the local and civic importance of the great religious houses (clearly, more work remains to be done to understand the impact of the Reformation on these houses and the neighborhoods they shaped). Ironically, Berry's conceit of the book—that she addresses both the spatial and social margins of London—is somewhat at odds with her contention that the suburbs were economically and socially important to the life of the city. Viewed from Berry's analytical but sympathetic perspective, neither the studied neighborhoods nor their diverse inhabitants end up seeming particularly marginal.
