Church Lords and English Urban Investment in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Rodney Hilton's seminal article, ‘Some Problems of Urban Real Property in the Middle Ages’, contrasted the small-scale merchant acquisition of urban real property in the thirteenth century with the larger-scale institutional, primarily guild, property accumulations found in the fifteenth century.1 This paper seeks to extend this analysis by looking at the acquisition of property by the church in English towns between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It uses mortmain licences that included grants of property in towns in the midlands in association with other printed medieval material available for the region. It seeks to contribute to the important question of the relationship between lordship and urban development by making some observations about the investment strategies employed by church landlords, and by establishing a comprehensive chronology of church acquisition in medieval towns. Religious institutions were the most important urban landlords of the later middle ages. By the fourteenth century Westminster...