The First Half-Century of the Borough of Stratford-upon-Avon

Abstract

O_ ur knowledge of the medieval English borough, like that of the medieval manor, has been much influenced by the legal preoccupations of its first historians. Today we possess many learned studies of burgess status and burgage tenure, of borough 'customs', borough courts, and the law merchant, and many published collections of borough charters and custumals. But although some boroughs have published large and varied selections from their records rangeing far beyond charters and custumals, we still know little of the social and economic realities behind the legal formulas of the origin of the burgesses, for instance, of how they made their living, and of the economic functions of urban communities in the life of the community as a whole. The prevailing approach to borough history, as shown even in some of the best recent histories of English towns, and in the general plan adopted by the Victoria County History, is that of fragmentation, with separate sections on topographical, constitutional, and ecclesiastical developments, and in conclusion perhaps, quite unrelated to the rest, an isolated 'social and economic' section, often anecdotal and much less scholarly in character. But the inhabitants of the boroughs were not themselves thus fragmented. They were at one and the same time occupiers and sometimes builders of houses and shops, suitors at the borough courts and perhaps members of its governing body, and parishioners attending, regularly or irregularly, one of its churches; and for the greater part of each week most of them were concerned with the humdrum job of earning a living. In old age and retirement they were, perhaps, founders of a chantry or inmates of a local hospital. If we would understand any part of their history we must look at it as a whole and be prepared to consider their ordinary avocations, commonplace as the subject may seem. Nowhere, probably, is our ignorance greater than in the case of those smaller English boroughs, founded after the Norman Conquest, which are often regarded as being distinguished from villages merely by the different legal status of their inhabitants a difference which seems sometimes to have neither purpose nor meaning. It may therefore be of interest to look briefly at the formative period of one of them one which today is better known and more sought after by visitors from all parts of the world than any other, since it was Shakespeare's birthplace. The Domesday Survey of Io86 found no burgesses at Stratford-on-Avon, but only a small rural settlement, as in early Saxon days, close to the 'streetford' where the Roman road crossed the Avon.1 This settlement, however, would 1 0. E. 'Straetford', i.e. ford by which a Roman road crossed a river. All the Stratfords are on Roman roads, and in this case the reference is to an important cross-road linking Fosse Way, via Stratford-onAvon, with Ryknield Street at Alcester.