Rural and urban elites in England during the later Middle Ages

Richard Britnell

RURAL ELITES

English society throughout the Middle Ages was overwhelmingly based on the land. Though recent research into English medieval history has placed more emphasis on urban development than past historians did, the fact remains that the wealthiest families derived their income for the ownership of land, and that any study of English elites has to begin in the rural sector. There was a recognised hierarchy of status in the later Middle Ages that roughly corresponded to different levels of income, and which tended to become more rigid and more institutionalised during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Statistical profiles of this hierarchy vary considerably, and are not very secure. Nicholas Mayhew's representation of the rural lay elite about 1300 has the following shape:

Table 1. The English rural elite c. 1300, numbers and incomes (after Mayhew)
rank	no.	average income (£)
earls	13	3000
barons	136	200
knights	1100	50
'lesser gentry'	10,000-20,000	20
Source: Mayhew (1995), p. 58.

The category of the 'lesser gentry' is an anachronism for this period, since the 'gentry' corresponds to no contemporary status concept, and can only be justified by the desire to make comparisons with later periods. A comparable representation of English rural society from 1524, based more reliably upon taxation returns, represents it in the following way:

Table 2. The English rural elite in 1524: numbers and incomes (after Cornwall and Lander)
rank	no.	income (£)
dukes, earls, barons	60	400-1400
knights	500	120-200
esquires	800	50-80
gentlemen	5000	10-20
Source: Cornwall (188), pp. 144-7; Lander (1977), p. 168n.

Though these descriptions of the English elite were never designed to be compared, they suggest interesting differences. The contrast between them suggests that the top ranks of the English nobility became thinner during the late Middle Ages. The noble ranks (rows 1+2 in table 1, and row 1 in table 2) declined from 149 families to 60. Meanwhile the number of knightly families seems to have shrunk from 1,100 to 500, though this does not apparently correspond with any significant shift in the normal income of such families.

These comparisons across social ranks are complicated by the fact that new distinctions came into existence in the late Middle Ages. In addition, ranks became much more clearly defined, and to some extent more politically controlled, than ever before. Even the nobility became more sharply defined and more precisely divided by differences of rank. In the thirteenth century the peers had been loosely understood as those who held baronies from the crown, and the only grade of nobility above that of baron was that of earl, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries everything was much more precise, and more subject to royal intervention. Peers of England were identified as those who merited a personal summons to parliament, a privilege that the king could accord to favoured newcomers who had sufficient income to maintain that status. Furthermore, the nobility became more formally stratified in the course of time: dukes were invented in 1337, marquises in 1385, baronies by letters patent in 1387 and viscounts in 1440. The knightly class became more exclusive, and below the knights the status of 'esquire' and 'gentlemen' became demarcated in ways quite unknown in 1300. Although comparison between tables 1 and 2 suggests that the number of esquires and gentlemen was smaller in 1524 than in 1300, problems of definition mean that it is difficult to attribute precise significance to this comparison.

Between the different ranks of the landed elite, differences of class (as opposed to differences of status) were always less clearly defined. Its members were all landowners and landlords, resident at least much of the year in the countryside and deriving most of their income from the land. At all levels of the lordly class landlords were likely to derive at least some of their income from rent, and increasingly this meant money rent even for the large estates that had held on longest to labour services. It was quite common for gentry family to lease out their home farms. Some difference in the structure between different groups can tentatively be identified. In the course of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the largest estates became more dependent on leaseholders than in the past. From then on, the commercial acumen of the larger noble estates was to be gauged by the efficiency with which lords found tenants, negotiated terms of tenure and recovered arrears of rent. Smaller estates, by contrast, often had a larger component of agricultural enterprise. Indeed gentlemen and esquires often leased property from large lay and ecclesiastical estates, and some took leases on favourable terms from their social superiors as a form of patronage. It may be the case that small landlords, being more directly concerned with production, were more sensitive to rising wage levels, and more concerned than larger landlords to enforce statutory controls. But the significance of these distinctions for differences of economic mentality or interest was not profound, and formal differences between rentiers and entrepreneurs was too socially indistinct to permit any very safe deductions to be made concerning differences of class interest.

When we speak of the nobility, knights, gentry and esquires of the late Middle Ages, we are talking of perhaps 1 per cent of the adult males who derived their income primarily from the land. They clearly owed their power over tenants and lesser neighbours primarily to landownership, but their collective weight was buttressed by particular forms of co-operation between families of different types. The lesser landlords of late medieval England were frequently drawn into the service of noblemen in the creation of those structures of clientship that English historians commonly describe as 'affinities'. Such affinities might have a military dimension, especially in border areas like the far north of England, where local landlords had special responsibilities for border defence. More usually affinities had a more peaceful aspect, as lesser landlords were drawn into the service of the great as councillors, household officers, estate managers, attendants or mere tenants. The coherence and power of such affinities varied very considerably from area to area and from time to time, and there is no single model of aristocratic patronage ('bastard feudalism', as it is sometimes called) that would describe all regions of the kingdom. In some regions a single noblemen was dominant so that a pyramidal structure of local ascendancy was established; such was the case when Richard, duke of Gloucester, the king's brother, became dominant in northern England between 1471 and 1483. In other places and at other times, local lords and their retinues competed for power, as in the 1450s when East Anglia was a battleground between the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. Elsewhere there was neither a dominant noble presence nor noble competition for power, and county politics depended more upon a working consensus amongst those involved, as in fifteenth-century Derbyshire. In the course of the late fifteenth century minor landlords became increasingly disillusioned with the advantages of political association with the nobility as a result of the hazards that the had been led into during the Wars of the Roses between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist dynasties. Such disillusionment, indeed, seems, together with the expansion of royal patronage, to explain why the political autonomy of the nobility against the crown was weaker under the Tudors than it had been a century before.

The groups we are describing here also constituted the political and administrative elite for royal government the English shires in the later Middle Ages. Participation in royal service was one of the salient characteristics of this elite, and a significant element in personal prestige, even if some of its members were more committed than others. In effect the king depended upon their local power and influence for the enforcement of his law and his commands. The administration of royal justice from the fourteenth century rested heavily upon the amateur services of those of the county elite who were appointed to royal commissions of the peace to hold judicial sessions four times a year (the Quarter Sessions). The size of these commissions increased during the fifteenth century, increasing the proportion of local landowners who were engaged. Other duties, in the largely unprofessional administration of local government involved the assessment and collection of taxes, Sir John Hopton, a Suffolk gentlemen of whom Colin Richmond has written a detailed study, is characterised by his reluctance to get involved in the administration of the shire, but even he was a justice of the peace for all but two years between 1445 and 1468 and was appointed sheriff in 1436 and 1444. In the process of expanding their stake in local administration since 1300 local elites significantly expanded their power and influence at the expense of the central administration of the kingdom. 'The upper ranks of landed society had gained at the expense of the monarchy'. A similar extension of the role of this county elite, and a source of growing self-confidence, derived from its role in parliament, which from the end of the thirteenth century had a responsibility of critical political importance in the control of taxes on the laity.

URBAN ELITES

Until the twelfth century, at least outside London, it is difficult to define an English urban elite distinct from the rural elite. This is because the towns were characteristically administered directly to the profit of the king or of noblemen and leading churchmen. But from the point when towns started to acquire significant rights of self-government in the twelfth century the emergence of a separate urban elite was inevitable. Townsmen elected their officers from their own number, and that invariably meant from the wealthiest among them. Borough officers and councillors were expected to be chosen 'from the more discreet men of the city' (London, 1200), 'from the better, more discreet and more powerful (potenciores) of the town' (Ipswich, c. 1200), 'from the more discreet and better of their town' (Northampton, 1215). In this context 'better' (meliores) means 'more powerful' or 'more influential'. As in the countryside, therefore, there was a close correspondence between economic and political power amongst the urban elite. But the leading officers of each borough were never autonomous authorities; they were always directly responsible to the king or some other lord.

Between 1200 and 1550, however, it also became more common for borough affairs to be managed by elected councils, often of twelve or twenty-four members. This development gave elites more formal definition; the size of the council could be tailored to correspond to the size of the town, to the point that membership of the council virtually defined elite status. Borough councils are recorded in London, Ipswich and Northampton by the time of King John's death in 1216, and at nine other English towns by 1300. Such councils became a usual feature of urban government in the following centuries, no doubt under the influence of increasingly commonplace ideas about the importance of the king's council in the government of the realm. Often they were created in the first instance to resolve some particular problem. In Winchester the need for a formal council was apparently born from political tensions within the city in the 1260s and 1270s. At Colchester, where an elected council was first instituted in 1372, the reason was specifically to monitor borough finances. In some cases, as at Grimsby, where a council is first recorded in 1403, there was little apparent need for this extra formality, and the innovation was probably no more than a way of enhancing the honour of the leading burgesses by bringing them into line with their peers elsewhere.

In the course of the later Middle Ages the structuring of urban political elites through conciliar organisation became increasingly deliberate. Borough constitutions depended on both written and unwritten rules to establish a cursus honorum that would restrict high office to a well-defined group. This tightening of status distinctions in urban society parallels in some respects the finer ranking of nobility and gentry to which I referred earlier. Historians, not surprisingly, have seen the increasing formalisation of office-holding in boroughs as a widespread tendency towards more oligarchic government, but its precise significance is debatable. One context for change was an increased threat of political challenges from below, as most dramatically realised in the revolt of 1381, in which many townsmen were involved. Another impetus to protect the standing of urban elites by written rules came from the greater burden of office in the fifteenth century, when many town suffered from declining community incomes from rents and tolls.

The scale of wealth among members of the higher levels of urban elites undoubtedly overlapped with that of rural elites. Mayhew's estimates of nation income in c.1300 build in the supposition that the country's 2,000 richest merchants had an average income of £50 a year, an income equivalent to that of a knight. Cornwall's evidence similarly suggests that in 1524 the incomes of prosperous merchants ran parallel to those of knights and gentlemen. Even so, the profiles of rural and urban elites, when ranked by wealth, were very different; peaks of urban wealth rarely approached the peaks of rural wealth. In fact, especially in smaller and poorer towns, the existence of urban administrative autonomy frequently brought into public prominence men who would never have achieved equivalent authority in rural society. In the towns law courts were held, the king's instructions were received and obeyed, by men of distinctively lower rank than obtained equivalent powers in the countryside. To the end of the Middle Ages the leaders of society in the smallest towns, having little concentration of personal wealth, included petty traders, and craftsmen. Men of this class were unlikely to achieve high rank in more honourable towns, where the highest urban incomes derived from property ownership, long-distance trade and legal skills. Even these ranks, however, could not compare with the wealth of the county elites whose income was derived principally from land.

The same contrast holds good when we examine the sort of men who were sent to parliament by the shires and the boroughs. From the reign of Edward II knights and burgesses were summoned to parliaments as a matter of course and the wording of writs of summons became a routine formula. There was no definitive list of parliamentary boroughs and the number represented varied. On average about 80-90 towns had been represented in each of Edward I's parliaments with two representatives each, but it has been calculated that 166 different towns were represented at different points. In spite of this imprecision the average number of towns in each parliament remained at about 80-90 until the later fifteenth century, after which it started to creep upwards. Judging from those parliaments for which the figures are known, under Richard II the average representation was 83 boroughs, and in the fifteenth century the number continued to vary around that level; the average was 75 under Henry IV, 80 under Henry V, 87 under Henry VI. However, the figure rose to 98 under Edward IV, and there was representation for 117 towns in the Reformation Parliament that first met in 1529. Many of the urban communities represented were very small towns with a couple of thousand inhabitants and not much of a merchant class. Whereas the bigger towns were represented by the kingdom's bigger merchants, many smaller towns were represented by very inland traders of very modest means. Some of them had craft names or designations. Evidently much more modest characters were elected from the boroughs than were turned up by county elections.

As these comments imply, not only was the wealth of urban elites characteristically different in scale from that of rural elites; it was also derived from a different source. there were, of course, property-owners in towns. But since urban government was rarely a source of income for those responsible, elites were characteristically eager to share the burden with new wealth whatever its origin. Openness to new wealth meant that in the more dynamic towns the composition of ruling groups changed with the economic developments of the period. As native English overseas trade grew during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, especially in wool and wine, a merchant estate became institutionally more self-confidant and became more prominent in town government.

The relationship between wealthier men and borough office was not solely a recognition of their material resources, because there were significant practical considerations as well. Urban elites, at least at the rank of office-holders - had to be men who had a considerable amount of time to spend in the performance of their duties. In the absence of payment for officials, this was inevitable, given that the business of managing borough courts was likely to take up at least two mornings a week in larger towns, and there were numerous other duties associated with the regulation of trade and the handling of government business. It was this need for spare time that, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries meant that property owners were characteristically at the fore. In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, the growth of commerce led to the expansion of new urban groups whose income derived from employing other people, and who were therefore free to attend to public business. These groups included overseas traders, who increasingly operated through middlemen and servants rather than by having to travel. Developments in institutional organisation allowed wealthier merchants to stay at home and trade through intermediaries, so that they became available for office in an increasing number of towns. From the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the growth of the woollen textile industry similarly contributed to a growth in some towns in the number of cloth manufacturers who similarly employed others rather than working with their hands.

For these reasons in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ruling elites came increasingly to represent trade, often to the point that the larger towns were dominated by a merchant class. At Colchester, for example, twelve men shared office as bailiff in the years 1391-1400, some of them more than once (there were two bailiffs elected each year), and trading activities can be identified for ten of them. Four of them occur in the customs accounts as overseas traders and six others were vintners, who probably imported wine on their own account. Of the 24 councillors elected in 1395, 20 occur in the royal records as sellers of cloth and 10 of these also were vintners. The idea that this was a commercial, mercantile elite is irresistible. The weight of public responsibilities borne by merchants and lawyers, together with their propensity to invest in property, contributed considerably to their rising social stature in the later Middle Ages.

INTERACTION BETWEEN THE RURAL AND URBAN ELITES

I have represented the secular elites of English society as twofold - essentially rural and urban - with different structures of status and class, and different if parallel relationships with the central government. I shall conclude by examining some of the ways in which these two elites interacted. I shall briefly examine first movement between elites and then social interaction between the two elites, and finally conflict between the two elites.

Although the English nobility was constantly being renewed in the later Middle Ages through the recruitment of new wealth into it, it was extremely unusual for that new wealth to derive directly from trade. The upper ranks of the rural elite were renewed much more commonly from the lower ranks. The most striking case of a family entering the nobility from a trading background was the de la Pole family. Michael de la Pole, who became lord de la Pole from 1366, and was created earl of Suffolk in 1385, was the son of a wealthy merchant and financier, William de la Pole, who had been prominent in the king's service and accumulated a large estate. Few merchants were ever as wealthy as William or left such a vast inheritance to their sons.

Lower down the social scale, however, the acquisition of land by merchants was common, particularly amongst London merchants. It is true that when wealthy merchants invested in land they often did so for short-term gains of security or speculative profit, and gentrification was far from being a universal goal. Yet for some townsmen gentle status was earned by an elite role or professional occupation within urban society. Others deliberately sought higher status through the acquisition of land. Merchants had the capacity to become minor landlords by purchase if they so wished, and many gained the status of gentlemen and esquires by that route while continuing to operate as active townsmen. Some men of this type would describe themselves alternatively as 'merchant' or 'gentleman' according to context. Indeed this situation was so common, and the parity of wealth and status between the upper ranks of the urban elite and the lower ranks of the rural elite was so widely perceived, that the status of 'merchant' and 'gentlemen' were about equivalent in the late Middle Ages. It should be understood that by this time the word 'merchant' was used to describe only relatively wealthy members of the urban elite who engaged in overseas trade.

Social interaction between rural and urban elites was very smooth at this particular level of wealth. The cultural affinities between merchants and gentry were close. Both groups had an interest in education that was become more marked during the late Middle Ages. Members of landed society valued in the social contacts provided by the more prestigious urban fraternities - St. George's Guild in Norwich, St. Helen's Guild in Colchester, the Palmers' Guild in Ludlow, the Corpus Christi and the St. Christopher and St. George's Guild in York. In the other direction, wealthy townsmen copied the symbolic code of rural society in acquiring heraldic armorials and displaying them on both civic and family occasions. Marriages between gentry and merchant families were not uncommon, and this sometimes served further to encourage the recruitment of merchants' sons into the ranks of the county squirearchy.

Conflicts between rural and urban elites were indeed a feature of English social history in certain contexts, though it needs stressing that they were confined to local disputes. The commonest of these contexts by far was confrontation between an urban elite and a landlord who in some way had acted against the collective interests of townspeople. This might be because the landlord was proprietor of the borough - such feudal or seigniorial boroughs were numerous. Other conflicts involved landlords who had accumulated substantial properties in or near a town and developed them in ways that opposed burgesses' interests - by obstructing common rights, for example, or by encroaching on public thoroughfares . Both landlords and urban leaders in these situations generally had reason to pursue moderation and compromise. Some powerful lords of boroughs enjoyed remarkably harmonious relations with the urban elite, so far as we can tell - like the abbots of Westminster who lived in peace with the wealthy borough of Westminster. However, there are enough examples of landlord-burgess conflict to demonstrate that the defence of communal interests against local landlords, whether through litigation or through violence, was frequently an unavoidable responsibility of urban elites. Since the issues concerned the particular rights of particular townsmen, such disputes were rarely generalised. Even in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 the various urban revolts that occurred were very different, and had no common agenda. Violent aggression was seemingly more common between urban elites and religious corporations (bishoprics, abbeys, colleges) than with lay landlords, partly because such landlords were sedentary and had a greater incentive to control their immediate environment. Disputes of this kind do little to qualify the generally harmonious picture of relations between urban and rural elites that the incidence of social intermingling implies.

This paper was written for the Workshop on Urban and Rural Elites, University of Ghent, 24 November, 2000.

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