Towns and Trade
| Author | Christopher Jessel |
| Pages | 351-361 |
Chapter 21
Towns and Trade
21.1 TOWNS AND BOROUGHS
The lord of a manor may also be lord of a borough. He may have market rights and own the town square or parts of nineteenth-century housing estates. The mayor and burgesses may themselves have acquired the manor in which their borough is situated and the title may belong to the corporation or to an official as nominee.
Manors are usually associated with country villages, and most of this book has been concerned with these. However, they could not exist without trade or the towns that trade created. If the manor depended on the heavy plough drawn by eight oxen, where did the peasant get his iron ploughshare? A few villages were located near outcrops of iron ore and many had a village blacksmith, but ploughs and harnesses were traded over long distances. To pay the quitrent or merchet the peasant had to find the cash by selling something he had produced in the local market town.
Several towns date back to Anglo-Saxon times and are described as such in Domesday Book. They were sometimes regarded as entities separate from lordships and holding direct from the king. In other cases they were comprised within manors or a lordship might include as an outlier property within a town. It appears that some great towns, notably London, may have been seen as having some form of corporate status.
In the early Middle Ages many towns were founded to exploit their commercial potential. An abbot or great lord might petition the king and pay a substantial sum for the franchise of a market with right of toll within his manor. He might then lay out a market square on some demesne land or land taken from an open field with a number of building plots around it. The boundaries of some of those plots (which may exist to this day) often have slightly curving sides reflecting their origin in enclosed strips. Other towns may have developed by expansion of
352 The Law of the Manor
villages although the lord must have been involved in some way. Some of these ventures did not work out and the project had to be abandoned although there may be relics such as an unusual layout for a village and perhaps an unexercised right of market. In such cases the lord continued to own any land which was not held by someone else.
In order to run their affairs towns developed a variety of local courts. As described in 13.1 courts originally had a general function although it appears that in many towns courts were judicial from the beginning. There was always a need to provide an impartial forum for townsmen to resolve their disputes, collect debts and enforce contracts. That was particularly important where traders from far away might come to a fair or a regular market as if there was a risk they would not get justice that might deter them from coming. Most boroughs had borough courts, which might have a variety of local names. The mayor was a magistrate and would sit, as a justice of the peace, to hear criminal cases. However, as contract law became more complex these magistrates would tend to leave hearing commercial cases to professional lawyers. Other courts included pie-powder (21.2), which determined disputes in markets. Where the town was comprised within a manor some of these courts may have belonged to the lord although if the town obtained a borough charter it would often seek to acquire the courts and the manor.
If the town flourished its inhabitants developed a sense of identity as a community and sought independence from any controlling lord. If they did not have corporate status (16.4) they might apply for a charter to grant them the franchise so that they could operate as a body, typically the mayor and burgesses, but there were many variations in name, with perpetual succession, a common seal and other rights such as power to make byelaws. Later the corporation might seek to acquire either the manor itself or, if not, the manorial rights, specifically including market rights or tolls. In addition to their involvement in trade and commerce, many burgesses remained farmers, at least part time, and some, such as butchers, depended on agricultural products. As a result burgesses often retained or acquired rights in the surrounding countryside, specifically grazing rights over nearby waste or open fields comprising Lammas lands. These rights might belong to the freemen collectively rather than to specific tenements in the town, and the benefit might be shared out among them or sold to the highest bidder with the proceeds applied to the town funds.
At the Dissolution urban manors that belonged to abbeys passed to the Crown and many were sold so that the new lord acquired the rights formerly held by the abbey.
In the nineteenth century many towns expanded through sales and leases from local landowners, often including the lords of adjoining manors. They might also become involved with canals and railways. In 1894 local government was reorganised and many boroughs became urban districts while still retaining their borough status.
21.2 MARKETS
A market is a franchise conferring a monopoly right to hold (and prevent other people holding) a gathering of buyers and sellers in a common place.
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