Late Medieval Gloucester: Some Data from a Rental of 1455

Abstract

Information abstracted from a rental concerning types of property, rents, landholding and occupations is described and mapped. There was considerable crowding on the main street fronts of late medieval Gloucester. Competition for housing was expressed in'subdivided tenements and the spatial patterning of rents, and it gave rise to investment in real estate develop- ment, probably by church as well as lay landholders. Much of the city was owned by the church, but it does not seem to have been in economic decline: on the evidence of the rental, the converse was true. Like most medieval towns, Gloucester contained considerable areas of open ground, but most of it was in side streets and suburbs. Craftsmen clustered tightly along the main thoroughfares in reasonably distinct occupational zones, and there is some evidence that a socially select area already existed in the eastern part of the town. THE towns of late medieval England were very small except for London and only in the six- teenth century did the population of the second ranking English city pass definitely and per- manently above io ooo.1 Little is known of the geographical patterns that existed within these long-lived urban forms beyond the succession of burgage land uses and plan units revealed by the topographical researches of M. R. G. Conzen.2 It cannot be expected that the models and hypo- theses concerning the pre-industrial city which are current in urban geographical literature will apply to such small places.3 But how far and in what ways they fail to apply cannot even be safely guessed in the present state of knowledge. The history of the town in late medieval England has been more thoroughly researched. The interpretation which has almost assumed the status of orthodoxy is one of degeneration from the churning vitality and political promise of earlier times. War and agrarian 'retreat' into peasant subsistence farming sapped at the foundations of urban economies; much urban land had fallen into the 'dead hand' of the church, whose indifference to economic considerations prevented real estate development and urban capital accumulation; urban rents collapsed; empty tenements abounded; gilds became restrictive societies for the jealous protection of dwindling markets, and oligarchies crystallized to preserve what was left for a privileged few. However, widely accepted though it seems to be, this interpretation has been completely turned upon its head by one authority on late medieval England and subjected to less stressful question- ing by others.4 The historical debate has largely been conducted through syntheses of evidence carefully selected from wide arrays of instances. It might prove useful to examine the topic from the other direction, from a detailed reconstruction of a particular late medieval town which was in no major way untypical of the rest. Whether or not such an analysis can make a worthwhile con- tribution to the historians' debate, it can certainly provide the sort of geographical information which is at present at a premium. The survival of an exhaustive and meticulous rental of* Gloucester makes such an exercise possible.