If London buses come along in twos and threes, so too at the moment do publications from the Yorkist History Trust. Not quite hard on the heels of their recent The King’s Work: the defence of the north under the Yorkist kings (Sutton 2021), they have now given us two more weighty tomes, one a study of a medieval urban community and the other an edition of accounts relating to perhaps the most famous of all Yorkist lordships, that of Middleham.
Peter Fleming’s valuable study of late medieval Bristol seeks to approach its subject from the perspective of a social and cultural historian. Eschewing a conventional account of the social and economic history of the town, he seeks instead to explore what meanings it had for its inhabitants and what sense they felt of its history and its place in the world. Placing his study in a strongly theoretical framework, he says that he interprets ‘time’, as used in the sub-title, to refer to the summation of human histories and memories, ‘space’ as being that void to which humans seek to give meaning and ‘power’ as representing the ability to discipline, constrain and govern. The crucial sense of ‘place’ that humans possess as social beings, he argues, is produced through the confluence of all three of these ideas; and by tracing the process of emplacement he believes he can open up new perspectives on the traditional concerns of urban history and enable us to capture something of the mental world of at least the better recorded Bristolians of the day.
Drawing on a wide range of sources – not just documentary, but also archaeological, literary and artistic – he is able to offer some vivid vignettes of Bristolians’ appreciation of their town and their experience of life in it. According to William Worcestre the antiquary, who was born in Bristol, they invested the place with mythological origins to strengthen their sense of civic pride. Visiting Clifton Downs one day and seeing the remains of the great hill fort there, Worcestre recalled the site’s origins ‘before the time of William the Conqueror’ and the reputed feat of the giant Ghyst in raising up on its summit a big stone-built castle. According to a contemporary of Worcestre, Robert Ricart, Bristol’s borough clerk, the town itself had been founded by Brennius, a descendant of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Brutus, who had settled in England after the fall of Troy. These origin myths were crucial to the Bristolians in that they enabled them to maintain parity of esteem with London, which likewise claimed Brutus as a founder. The Bristolians’ sense of more recent recorded history, however, was altogether more patchy. They had little grasp of the town’s continuous past, and the episodes that they recalled were chiefly ones that either redounded to the town’s benefit or lent weight to its privileged borough and county status. If their outlook was thus to some degree blinkered, nonetheless, because they lived in a port city, they had a strong sense of the wider world. Even after the loss of the cherished Gascon link in 1453, they had a flourishing cloth trade with southern Europe, and their merchants ventured far to the north and west, perhaps even to America; moreover, a sizeable Irish minority was resident in the town, and many different languages, among them Portuguese, Castilian, Gascon and Basque, could be heard on its streets. In his discussion of the town’s religious life, the author suggests that Bristolians may have been more secular-minded than many of their fellow townsmen. Living on the border between two dioceses and without a cathedral or major abbey in their midst, they were remarkably free from the shackles of ecclesiastical authority. If for this reason a minority of Bristol’s craftsmen and labourers may have been tempted by doctrinal radicalism, the majority of the local populace appear to have been of firmly conventional opinion.
Fleming has written a richly rewarding study that is highly innovative in its approach, is rooted in a thorough mastery of the sources and is commendably wide-ranging in its coverage; no aspect of Bristol’s lived experience seems to have escaped the author’s attention. If, for this reason, he may be commended for having succeeded in his aim of creating a ‘new’ medieval urban history, he has nonetheless set dauntingly high standards for those following in his path to match. Writing as he does from the perspective of a cultural historian, his concern is principally with the world of the mind, with people’s perceptions and experiences. He is, however, more than alert to the Bristolians’ built environment and to their sense of their physical surroundings. In a fascinating chapter he takes the reader in William Worcestre’s footsteps on a perambulation, as Pevsner might have termed it, around the streets of the town, commenting on the buildings that lined them, the citizens who lived or worked there and the prosperity or otherwise of the wards and parishes passed through. Fleming also offers us a valuable appendix on the possible artistic sources of the remarkable Iberian-looking outer north porch of St Mary Redcliffe church in which he carefully weighs the evidence for Iberian influence at the same time as suggesting that stylistic influences might also have flowed in the opposite direction. A matter on which he does not offer any comment is why the church, famously described by Queen Elizabeth i as the fairest and goodliest in all England, should have been built on such an extraordinarily ambitious scale, when the majority of Bristol’s churches are by comparison relatively modest. It is worth asking what those who paid for the building were thinking of in commissioning such a structure and what they were trying to achieve. Strangely, these are questions that have never adequately been addressed in print. To have expected Fleming to consider them in the context of this book, however, is probably unrealistic when he is already giving us so much in a study overflowing with ideas.
The other publication offered by the Yorkist History Trust, the edition of accounts from the lordship of Middleham in Yorkshire, although a very different sort of volume concerned with a different sort of community at the opposite end of the country, is nonetheless a volume that could likewise be described as a study of ‘time, space and power’. Its focus is a particular place and community at a particular moment in time, and a major theme running through its pages is the exercise of power, in this case power communicated through the medium of lordship. Middleham lay in the heart of Neville country in the far north of Yorkshire, and its landscape embraced a vast swathe of land stretching from Wensleydale through Arkengarthdale to the River Tees. It was in the ownership of Richard Neville, ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’, from 1460 until his downfall and death in 1471, when it was seized by the Crown and granted to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard iii, the king’s younger brother, and the man with whom it is today so closely associated. Middleham castle was to be Richard’s main seat during the decade or more when he was his brother’s lieutenant in the north, and in 1478 he established an intercessory foundation in the neighbouring church.
The publication of this set of accounts comes at the end of a lengthy and difficult period of gestation marked by deaths and repeated changes of plan. The work of transcribing the later of the two accounts, we are told, was originally begun by Mary O’Regan sometime before 2000 but subsequently taken over and completed by Moira Habberjam some years later. Mrs Habberjam’s work was typed and put on file in 2017. Two years later, Jonathan Mackman of the National Archives was asked by the Richard iii Society to check the transcript against the original and at the same time to make a translation of the earlier 1465–6 account. The plan at that stage was to make both accounts available online; but in the following year the idea was dropped in favour of a printed publication, and the Yorkist History Trust agreed to take the project on. A publication plan was drawn up, and at Anne Sutton’s suggestion it was decided to include Gladys Mary Coles’s much cited 1961 dissertation on the lordship as an introduction to the volume, to set the scene. Following Miss Sutton’s death in 2022 an editorial committee was set up, and its members have now finally seen the volume through to publication. The result is a classic committee job: the work of numerous hands with some occasionally awkward joins, and evidence at times of lack of coordination. But all credit should be given to the editors and to their sponsors, the Yorkist History Trust, for sheer determination in seeing through to publication a book that will undoubtedly be useful to students of both local and national history. Sensibly, a short preface has been included to indicate those areas of Coles’s dissertation that are now out of date and that need to be read in the light of more recent research.
The accounts themselves take the conventional form of arrangement by manor and then, within manors, in orderly succession by arrears, rents and farms, decayed rents, discharges, costs of repairs to buildings and equipment, perquisites of the court, retaining fees charged on the lordship and finally liveries to the lord. The largest sources of profit, as on many northern estates, were accounted for by the leasing of the demesne parks and sales of herbage from those parks and by sales from the numerous vaccaries, or dairy herds, which all told accounted for some seventy per cent of the lordship’s gross income. Other important sources of income were the rents paid by the tenant farmers and the payments from commuted labour services. Since direct agriculture based on the demesnes had been abandoned nearly a century before and the demesnes themselves had been put out to lease, there was no income from sales of arable produce. Income from the important lead mines in the area appears to have been accounted for separately by different officials. Comparison of the two accounts suggests that levels of income, at least from rents and farms, were broadly stable across the period. There was a tendency, however, by the fifteenth century for accounts to become formulaic, with one year’s figures simply being copied from those of the year before, and it might be risky to take what we read here at face value. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century accounts are generally much fuller and more informative than those of the later Middle Ages. It is nonetheless useful to have these accounts in print at last, and students of northern society will be especially indebted to the editors for giving them access to the lists of fees and annuities charged on the lordship, a key source for the study of the Neville and Yorkist retinues.
