Book: Our Legal Heritage, 4th Ed.

S >> S. A. Reilly >> Our Legal Heritage, 4th Ed.




The diet of an ordinary family such as that of a small shopholder
or yeoman farmer included beef, mutton, pork, a variety of fish,
both fresh and salted, venison, nuts, peas, oatmeal, honey,
grapes, apples, pears, and fresh vegetables. Cattle and sheep were
driven from Wales to English markets. This droving lasted for five
centuries.

Many types of people besides the nobility and knights now had
property and thus were considered gentry: female lines of the
nobility, merchants and their sons, attorneys, auditors, squires,
and peasant-yeomen. The burgess grew rich as the knight dropped
lower. The great merchants lived in mansions which could occupy
whole blocks. Typically, there would be an oak-paneled great hall,
with adjoining kitchen, pantry, and buttery on one end and a great
parlor to receive guests, bedrooms, wardrobes, servants' rooms,
and a chapel on the other end or on a second floor. The beds were
surrounded by heavy draperies to keep out cold drafts. In towns
these mansions were entered through a gate through a row of shops
on the street. A lesser dwelling would have these rooms on three
floors over a shop on the first floor. An average Londoner would
have a shop, a storeroom, a hall, a kitchen, and a buttery on the
first floor, and three bedrooms on the second floor. Artisans and
shopkeepers of more modest means lived in rows of dwellings, each
with a shop and small storage room on the first floor, and a
combination parlor-bedroom on the second floor. The humblest
residents crowded their shop and family into one 6 by 10 foot room
for rent of a few shillings a year. All except the last would also
have a small garden. The best gardens had a fruit tree, herbs,
flowers, a well, and a latrine area. There were common and public
privies for those without their own. Kitchen slops and casual
refuse continued to be thrown into the street. Floors of stone or
planks were strewn with rushes. There was some tile flooring. Most
dwellings had glass windows. Candles were used for lighting at
night. Torches and oil-burning lanterns were portable lights.
Furnishings were still sparse. Men sat on benches or joint stools
and women sat on cushions on the floor. Hall and parlor had a
table and benches and perhaps one chair. Bedrooms had a curtained
feather bed with pillows, blankets, and sheets. Clothes were
stored in a chest, sometimes with sweet-smelling herbs such as
lavender, rosemary, and southernwood. Better homes had wall
hanging and cupboards displaying plate. Laundresses washed clothes
in the streams, rivers, and public conduits. Country peasants
still lived in wood, straw, and mud huts with earth floors and a
smoky hearth in the center or a kitchen area under the eaves of
the hut.

In 1442, bricks began to be manufactured in the nation and so
there was more use of bricks in buildings. Chimneys were
introduced into manor houses where stone had been too expensive.
This was necessary if a second floor was added, so the smoke would
not damage the floor above it and would eventually go out of the
house.

Nobles and their retinue moved from manor to manor, as they had
for centuries, to keep watch upon their lands and to consume the
produce thereof; it was easier to bring the household to the
estate than to transport the yield of the estate to the household.
Also, at regular intervals sewage had to be removed from the
cellar pits. Often a footman walked or ran on foot next to his
master or mistress when they rode out on horseback or in a
carriage. He was there primarily for prestige.

Jousting tournaments were held for entertainment purposes only and
were followed by banquets of several courses of food served on
dishes of gold, silver, pewter, or wood on a linen cloth covering
the table. Hands were washed before and after the meal. People
washed their faces every morning after getting up. Teeth were
cleaned with powders. Fragrant leaves were chewed for bad breath.
Garlic was used for indigestion and other ailments. Feet were
rubbed with salt and vinegar to remove calluses. Good manners
included not slumping against a post, fidgeting, sticking one's
finger into one's nose, putting one's hands into one's hose to
scratch the privy parts, spitting over the table or too far,
licking one's plate, picking one's teeth, breathing stinking
breath into the face of the lord, blowing on one's food, stuffing
masses of bread into one's mouth, scratching one's head, loosening
one's girdle to belch, and probing one's teeth with a knife.

Fishing and hunting were reserved for the nobility rather than
just the King.

As many lords became less wealthy because of the cost of war, some
peasants, villein and free, became prosperous, especially those
who also worked at a craft, e.g. butchers, bakers, smiths,
shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, and clothworkers.

An agricultural slump caused poorer soils to fall back into waste.
The better soils were leased by peasants, who, with their
families, were in a better position to farm it than a great lord,
who found it hard to hire laborers at a reasonable cost. Further,
peasants' sheep, hens, pigs, ducks, goats, cattle, bees, and crop
made them almost self-sufficient in foodstuffs. They lived in a
huddle of cottages, pastured their animals on common land, and
used common meadows for hay-making. They subsisted mainly on
boiled bacon, an occasional chicken, worts and beans grown in the
cottage garden, and cereals. They wore fine wool cloth in all
their apparel. Brimless hats were replacing hoods. They had an
abundance of bed coverings in their houses. And they had more free
time. Village entertainment included traveling jesters, acrobats,
musicians, and bear-baiters. Playing games and gambling were
popular pastimes.

Most villeins were now being called "customary tenants" or "copy-
holders" of land because they held their acres by a copy of the
court-roll of the manor, which listed the number of teams, the
fines, the reliefs, and the services due to the lord for each
landholder. The Chancery court interpreted many of these documents
to include rights of inheritance. The common law courts followed
the lead of the Chancery and held that copyhold land could be
inherited as was land at common law. Evictions by lords decreased.

The difference between villein and freeman lessened but landlords
usually still had profits of villein bondage, such as heriot,
merchet, and chevage.

A class of laborers was arising who depended entirely on the wages
of industry for their subsistence. The cloth workers in rural
areas were isolated and weak and often at the mercy of middle-men
for employment and the amount of their wages. When rural laborers
went to towns to seek employment in the new industries, they would
work at first for any rate. This deepened the cleavage of the
classes in the towns. The artificers in the town and the cottagers
and laborers in the country lived from hand to mouth, on the edge
of survival, but better off than the old, the diseased, the
widows, and the orphans. However, the 1400s were the most
prosperous time for laborers considering their wages and the
prices of food. Meat and poultry were plentiful and grain prices
low.

Social mobility was most possible in the towns, where distinctions
were usually only of wealth. So a poor apprentice could aspire to
become a master, a member of the livery of his company, a member
of the council, an alderman, a mayor, and then an esquire for
life. The distance between baron and a country knight and between
a yeoman and knight was wider. Manor custom was strong. But a
yeoman could give his sons a chance to become gentlemen by
entering them in a trade in a town, sending them to university, or
to war. Every freeman was to some extent a soldier, and to some
extent a lawyer, serving in the county or borough courts. A
burgess, with his workshop or warehouse, was trained in warlike
exercises, and he could keep his own accounts, and make his own
will and other legal documents, with the aid of a scrivener or a
chaplain, who could supply an outline of form. But law was growing
as a profession. Old-established London families began to choose
the law as a profession for their sons, in preference to an
apprenticeship in trade. Many borough burgesses in Parliament were
attorneys.

In London, shopkeepers appealed to passers-by to buy their goods,
sometimes even seizing people by the sleeve. The drapers had
several roomy shops containing shelves piled with cloths of all
colors and grades, tapestries, pillows, blankets, bed draperies,
and 'bankers and dorsers' to soften hard wooden benches. A rear
storeroom held more cloth for import or export. Many shops of
skinners were on Fur Row. There were shops of leather-sellers,
hosiers, gold and silver cups, and silks. At the Stocks Market
were fishmongers, butchers, and poulterers. London grocers
imported spices, canvas, ropery, potions, unguents, soap,
confections, garlic, cabbages, onions, apples, oranges, almonds,
figs, dates, raisins, dye-stuffs, woad, madder (plant for medicine
and dye), scarlet grains, saffron, iron, and steel. They were
retailers as well as wholesalers and had shops selling honey,
licorice, salt, vinegar, rice, sugar loaves, syrups, spices,
garden seeds, dyes, alum, soap, brimstone, paper, varnish, canvas,
rope, musk, incense, treacle of Genoa, and mercury. The Grocers
did some money-lending, usually at 12% interest. The guilds did
not restrict themselves to dealing in the goods for which they had
a right of inspection, and so many dealt in wine that it was a
medium of exchange. There was no sharp distinction between retail
and wholesale trading.

In London, grocers sold herbs for medicinal as well as eating
purposes. Breadcarts sold penny wheat loaves. Foreigners set up
stalls on certain days of the week to sell meat, canvas, linen,
cloth, ironmongery, and lead. There were great houses, churches,
monasteries, inns, guildhalls, warehouses, and the King's Beam for
weighing wool to be exported. In 1410, the Guildhall of London was
built through contributions, proceeds of fines, and lastly, to
finish it, special fees imposed on apprenticeships, deeds, wills,
and letters-patent. The Mercers and Goldsmiths were in the
prosperous part of town. The Goldsmiths' shops sold gold and
silver plate, jewels, rings, water pitchers, drinking goblets,
basins to hold water for the hands, and covered saltcellars. The
grain market was on Cornhill. Halfway up the street, there was a
supply of water which had been brought up in pipes. On the top of
the hill was a cage where riotous folk had been incarcerated by
the night watch and the stocks and pillory, where fraudulent
schemers were exposed to ridicule. No work was to be done on
Sundays, but some did work surreptitiously. The barbers kept their
shops open in defiance of the church. Outside the London city
walls were tenements, the Smithfield cattle market, Westminster
Hall, green fields of crops, and some marsh land.

On the Thames River to London were large ships with cargoes; small
boats rowed by tough boatmen offering passage for a penny; small
private barges of great men with carved wood, gay banners, and
oarsmen with velvet gowns; the banks covered with masts and
tackle; the nineteen arch London Bridge supporting a street of
shops and houses and a drawbridge in the middle; quays;
warehouses, and great cranes lifting bales from ship to wharf.
Merchant guilds which imported or exported each had their own
wharves and warehouses. Downstream, pirates hung on gallows at the
low-water mark to remain until three tides had overflowed their
bodies. A climate change of about 1 1/2 degree Celcius lower
caused the Thames to regularly freeze over in winter.

The large scale of London trade promoted the specialization of the
manufacturer versus the merchant versus the shipper. Merchants had
enough wealth to make loans to the government or for new
commercial enterprises. Local reputation on general, depended upon
a combination of wealth, trustworthiness of character, and public
spirit; it rose and fell with business success. Some London
merchants were knighted by the King. Many bought country estates
and turned themselves into gentry.

The king granted London all common soils, improvements, wastes,
streets, and ways in London and in the adjacent waters of the
Thames River and all the profits and rents to be derived
therefrom. Later the king granted London the liberty to purchase
lands and tenements worth up to 2,667s. yearly. With this power,
London had obtained all the essential features of a corporation: a
seal, the right to make by-laws, the power to purchase lands and
hold them "to them and their successors" (not simply their heirs,
which is an individual and hereditary succession only), the power
to sue and be sued in its own name, and the perpetual succession
implied in the power of filling up vacancies by election. Since
these powers were not granted by charters, London is a corporation
by prescription. In 1446, the liverymen obtained the right with
the council to elect the mayor, the sheriff, and certain other
corporate officers.

Many boroughs sought and obtained formal incorporation with the
same essential features as London. This tied up the loose language
of their early charters of liberties. Often, a borough would have
its own resident Justice of the Peace. Each incorporation involved
a review by a Justice of the Peace to make sure the charter of
incorporation rule didn't conflict with the law of the nation. A
borough typically had a mayor accompanied by his personal sword-
bearer and serjeants-at-mace bearing the borough regalia,
bailiffs, a sheriff, and chamberlains or a steward for financial
assistance. At many boroughs, aldermen, assisted by their
constables, kept the peace in their separate wards. There might be
coroners, a recorder, and a town clerk, with a host of lesser
officials including beadles, aletasters, sealers, searchers
[inspectors], weighers and keepers of the market, ferrymen and
porters, clock-keepers and criers, paviors [maintained the roads],
scavengers and other street cleaners, gatekeepers and watchmen of
several ranks and kinds. A wealthy borough would have a chaplain
and two or three minstrels. The mayor replaced the bailiffs as the
chief magistracy.

In all towns, the wealthiest and most influential guilds were the
merchant traders of mercers, drapers, grocers, and goldsmiths.
From their ranks came most of the mayors, and many began to
intermarry with the country knights and gentry. Next came the
shopholders of skinners, tailors, ironmongers, and corvisors
[shoemakers]. Thirdly came the humbler artisans, the sellers of
victuals, small shopkeepers, apprentices, and journeymen on the
rise. Lastly came unskilled laborers, who lived in crowded
tenements and hired themselves out. The first three groups were
the free men who voted, paid scot and bore lot, and belonged to
guilds. Scot was a rateable proportion in the payments levied from
the town for local or national purposes. Merchant guilds in some
towns merged their existence into the town corporation, and their
guild halls became the common halls of the town, and their
property became town property.

In London, the Cutlers' Company was chartered in 1415, the
Haberdashers' Company in 1417, the Grocers' Company in 1428, the
Drapers' and Cordwainers' companies in 1429, the Vintners' and
Brewers' companies in 1437, the Leathersellers' Company in 1444,
the Girdlers' Company in 1448, the Armourers' and Brassiers'
companies in 1453, the Barbers' Company in 1461, the Tallow
Chandlers' Company in 1462, the Ironmongers' Company in 1464, the
Dyers' Company in 1471, the Musicians' Company in 1472, the
Carpenters' Company in 1477, the Cooks' Company in 1481, and the
Waxchandlers' Company in 1483. The Fishmongers, which had been
chartered in 1399, were incorporated in 1433, the Cordwainers in
1439, and the Pewterers in 1468.

There were craft guilds in the towns, at least 65 in London. In
fact, every London trade of twenty men had its own guild. The
guild secured good work for its members and the members maintained
the reputation of the work standards of the guild. Bad work was
punished and night work prohibited as leading to bad work. The
guild exercised moral control over its members and provided
sickness and death benefits for them. There was much overlapping
in the two forms of association: the craft guild and the religious
fraternity. Apprentices were taken in to assure an adequate supply
of competent workers for the future. The standard indenture of an
apprentice bound him to live in his master's house, to serve him
diligently, obey reasonable commands, keep his master's secrets,
protect him from injury, abstain from dice, cards and haunting of
taverns, not marry, commit no fornication, nor absent himself
without permission. In return the master undertook to provide the
boy or girl with bed, board, and lodging and to instruct him or
her in the trade, craft, or mystery. When these apprentices had
enough training they were made journeymen with a higher rate of
pay. Journeymen traveled to see the work of their craft in other
towns. Those journeymen rising to master had the highest pay rate.

Occupations free of guild restrictions included horse-dealers,
marbelers, bookbinders, jewelers, organ makers, feathermongers,
pie makers, basket makers, mirrorers, quilters, and parchment
makers. Non-citizens of London could not be prevented from selling
leather, metalwares, hay, meat, fruit, vegetables, butter, cheese,
poultry, and fish from their boats, though they had to sell in the
morning and sell all their goods before the market closed.

In the towns, many married women had independent businesses and
wives also played an active part in the businesses of their
husbands. Wives of well-to-do London merchants embroidered, sewed
jewelry onto clothes, and made silk garments. Widows often
continued in their husband's businesses, such as managing a large
import-export trade, tailoring, brewing, and metal shop. Socially
lower women often ran their own breweries, bakeries, and taverns.
It was possible for wives to be free burgesses in their own right
in some towns.

Some ladies were patrons of writers. Some women were active in
prison reform in matters of reviews to insure that no man was in
gaol without due cause, overcharges for bed and board, brutality,
and regulation of prisoners being placed in irons. Many men and
women left money in their wills for food and clothing for
prisoners, especially debtors. Wills often left one-third of the
wealth to the church, the poor, prisoners, infirmaries, young
girls' education; road, wall, and bridge repair; water supply,
markets and almshouses. Some infirmaries were for the insane, who
were generally thought to be possessed by the devil or demons.
Their treatment was usually by scourging the demons out of their
body by flogging. If this didn't work, torture could be used to
drive the demons from the body.

The guilds were being replaced by associations for the investment
of capital. In associations, journeymen were losing their chance
of rising to be a master. Competition among associations was
starting to supplant custom as the mainspring of trade.

The cloth exporters, who were mostly mercers, were unregulated and
banded together for mutual support and protection under the name
of Merchant Adventurers of London. The Merchant Adventurers was
chartered in 1407. It was the first and a prototype of regulated
companies. That is the company regulated the trade. Each merchant
could ship on his own a certain number of cloths each year (the
number depending on the length of his membership in the company)
and sell them himself or by his factor at the place where the
company had privileges of market. Strict rules governed the
conduct of each member. He was to make sales only at certain hours
on specified days. All disagreements were to be settled by the
company's governor, or his deputy in residence, and those
officials dealt with such disputes as arose between members of the
company and continental officials and buyers. A share in the
ownership of one of their vessels was a common form of investment
by prosperous merchants. By 1450, the merchant adventurers were
dealing in linen cloths, buckrams [a stiffened, coarse cloth],
fustians [coarse cloth made of cotton threads going in one
direction and linen threads the other], satins, jewels, fine
woolen and linen wares, threads, potions, wood, oil, wine, salt,
copper, and iron. They began to replace trade by alien traders.
The history of the "Merchant Adventurers" was associated with the
growth of the mercantile system for more than 300 years. It
eventually replaced the staples system.

Paved roads in towns were usually gravel and sometimes cobble.
They were frequently muddy because of rain and spillage of water
being carried. Iron-shod wheels and overloaded carts made them
very uneven. London was the first town with paviors. They cleaned
and repaired the streets, filling up pot-holes with wood chips and
compacting them with hand rams. The paviors were organized as a
city company in 1479. About 1482, towns besides London began
appointing salaried road paviors to repair roads and collect their
expenses from the householders because the policy of placing the
burden on individual householders didn't work well. London streets
were lighted at night by public lanterns, under the direction of
the mayor. The residents were to light these candle lanterns in
winter from dusk to the 9 pm curfew. There were fire-engines
composed of a circular cistern with a pump and six feet of
inflexible hose on wheels pulled by two men on one end and pushed
by two men on the other end. In 1480 the city walls were rebuilt
with a weekly tax of 5d. per head.

In schools, there was a renaissance of learning from original
sources of knowledge written in Greek and rebirth of the Greek
pursuit of the truth and scientific spirit of inquiry. There was a
striking increase in the number of schools founded by wealthy
merchants or town guilds. Every cathedral, monastery, and college
had a grammar school. Merchants tended to send their sons to
private boarding schools, instead of having them tutored at home
as did the nobility. Well-to-do parents still sent sons to live in
the house of some noble to serve them as pages in return for being
educated with the noble's son by the household priest. They often
wore their master's coat of arms and became their squires as part
of their knightly education. Sometimes girls were sent to live in
another house to take advantage to receive education from a tutor
there under the supervision of the lady of the house. Every man,
free or villein, could send his sons and daughters to school. In
every village, there were some who could read and write.

In 1428, Lincoln's Inn required barristers normally resident in
London and the county of Middlesex to remain in residence and pay
commons during the periods between sessions of court and during
vacations, so that the formal education of students would be
continuous. In 1442, a similar requirement was extended to all
members.

The book "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" was written about an
incident in the court of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere in which
a green knight challenges Arthur's knights to live up to their
reputation for valor and awesome deeds. The knight Gawain answers
the challenge, but is shown that he could be false and cowardly
when death seemed to be imminent. Thereafter, he wears a green
girdle around his waist to remind him not to be proud.

Other literature read included "London Lickpenny", a satire on
London and its expensive services and products, "Fall of Princes"
by John Lydgate, social history by Thomas Hoccleve, "The Cuckoo
and the Nightengale", and "The Flower and Leaf" on morality as
secular common sense. King James I of Scotland wrote a book about
how he fell in love. Chaucer, Cicero, Ovid, and Aesops's Fables
were widely read. Malory's new version of the Arthurian stories
was popular. Margery Kempe wrote the first true autobiography. She
was a woman who had a normal married life with children, but one
day had visions and voices which led her to leave her husband to
take up a life of wandering and praying in holy possession. There
were religious folk ballads such as "The Cherry Tree Carol", about
the command of Jesus from Mary's womb for a cherry tree to bend
down so that Mary could have some cherries from it. The common
people developed ballads, e.g. about their love of the forest,
their wish to hunt, and their hatred of the forest laws.

About 30% of Londoners could read English. Books were bought in
London in such quantities by 1403 that the craft organizations of
text-letter writers, illuminators, book-binders, and book sellers
was sanctioned by ordinance. "Unto the honorable lords, and wise,
the mayor and aldermen of the city of London, pray very humbly all
the good folks, freemen of the said city, of the trades of writers
of text-letter, limners [illuminator of books], and other folks of
London who are wont to bind and to sell books, that it may please
your great sagenesses to grant unto them that they may elect
yearly two reputable men, the one a limner, the other a text-
writer, to be wardens of the said trades, and that the names of
the wardens so elected may be presented each year before the mayor
for the time being, and they be there sworn well and diligently to
oversee that good rule and governance is had and exercised by all
folks of the same trades in all works unto the said trades
pertaining, to the praise and good fame of the loyal good men of
the said trades and to the shame and blame of the bad and disloyal
men of the same. And that the same wardens may call together all
the men of the said trades honorably and peacefully when need
shall be, as well for the good rule and governance of the said
city as of the trades aforesaid. And that the same wardens, in
performing their due office, may present from time to time all the
defaults of the said bad and disloyal men to the chamberlain at
the Guildhall for the time being, to the end that the same may
there, according to the wise and prudent discretion of the
governors of the said city, be corrected, punished, and duly
redressed. And that all who are rebellious against the said
wardens as to the survey and good rule of the same trades may be
punished according to the general ordinance made as to rebellious
persons in trades of the said city [fines and imprisonment]. And
that it may please you to command that this petition, by your
sagenesses granted, may be entered of record for time to come, for
the love of God and as a work of charity."

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