The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Read Online Free PDF Page B

example, on the arrival of the captive king of France in 1357, or to celebrate the coronation of Henry IV in 1399.
Small Towns
    You might think that a small settlement with three or four streets and about a hundred houses and twenty or so stables does not deserve tobe called a town. You would probably describe it as a village, and—with a population of perhaps just five hundred—a small one at that. You would not necessarily be wrong: there are many places this size which are certainly best described as villages. But similarly there are many such settlements which are undoubtedly towns. What distinguishes them as such is their market.
    All the reasons for emphasizing the importance of the city to its hinterland also apply to small towns. If they have a market, people will come to buy and sell. Farmers regularly need new plowshares, for which they must come into town. They also need to sell their livestock and grain. They or their wives need to buy bronze or brass vessels for cooking, and salt, candles, needles, leather goods, and other items. If you happen to live in a remote manor, perhaps twenty-five miles from the nearest city, you do not want to travel that far for minor commodities, such as a few nails to mend a broken trestle. It would take you two days to get there and back and the cost of a night’s accommodation. Hence the need for so many small market towns—by 1300 almost nowhere in England is more than eight miles from one, and most places are within six miles. That is a far more manageable journey for the man in need of a few nails or a plowshare.
    The small towns of medieval England are unlike the cities and large towns. They do not have eighteen-foot-high stone walls around the perimeter. Nor do they have substantial gatehouses. They tend to be gathered around a marketplace, with the parish church on one side (usually the east), with the houses themselves and their garden walls marking the boundaries. The center is generally the market cross. The other principal structures, apart from the church, are the manor house, the rectory or vicarage, and the inns. You will find no guildhall here, nor a monastery or friary, although it is possible there is a hospital, for the accommodation of poor travelers. If not, there may well be a church house, fulfilling much the same purpose.
    The streets are muddy, rutted, and uneven, the center of each one being a drain carrying whatever detritus has been discarded by townsmen and market visitors. As for the marketplace itself, it has probably been partially filled with ramshackle wooden houses. Over the years, lines of market stalls have become rows of two- and three-storey houses in which traders live above their shops. They have little or no outside space. Hence they add to the density of even the smallesttown, making the once-spacious marketplace into a series of narrow alleys. The strict orders stopping unsavory trades being carried on in the main streets do not apply in a small town. There is every likelihood that as you glance into the workshops you will see piles of animal entrails being slopped into a bucket. Similarly there are normally no rules preventing roofs from being thatched (unlike in a city or large town). Hence these rows of cheap houses in marketplaces present a huge fire risk, being built of wood and cob (a mixture of clay, straw, dung, and animal hair) with roofs of thatch. When one catches alight, the whole line tends to go up in flames. Unsurprisingly such a conflagration only encourages the lord to build a replacement row on similarly shaky principles. Within a few months, the streets are foul with debris again and the alleys partially blocked by empty barrels and broken crates, the conflagration all but forgotten.
    Small towns are not just muddy carbuncles on the medieval landscape. Each preserves at least part of its original open market square, and in summer, when the stalls are all set up, and the shops are open, with the sunlight shining onto