Mobility and Marginality in Late Medieval London's Urban Society (2024)

Mobility’s impact on the lives of medieval Londoners and on the sense of neighborhood beyond the walls of the city.

By Dr. Charlotte Berry
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Bath Spa University

Introduction

The theme of mobility is one that unites the margins of society with the margins of the city. Neighbourhoods beyond city walls were criss-crossed by routes into the surrounding countryside. People and goods were able to move with ease between spaces jurisdictionally defined as London and those in surrounding counties. As evidence from bequests indicated, mobile life was a characteristic of communities beyond the walls. While migration and movement were essential drivers of urban life, they were also a source of potential suspicion in a society that prized reputation among neighbours as an arbiter of character. In this essay, we will see in greater detail the extent of that mobility, its impact on the lives of Londoners and on the sense of neighbourhood beyond the walls of the city. This is a new way of looking at mobility in London, which embraces movement around the city as well as long-distance migration and moves beyond the focus of previous scholarship on the city’s apprentices.

There was a complicated relationship between mobility and marginality in an urban society that prized stability yet relied on movement for its prosperity. The settled household was held up by wealthy burgesses as the ideal form of familial organization, enabling proper oversight of dependents and commitment to the community through frankpledge, a system whereby neighbours swore oaths to uphold the law.¹ Historians writing on the late medieval household have shown that there was a culture of idealized domesticity and settledness which could be a compensation for the natal villages left behind by socially mobile town-dwellers or even an act of differentiation from the itinerant lives of the poor.² Indeed, while migration was an experience that united rich and poor in the late medieval town, the movement of the poor was problematized. In the post-Black Death period, attitudes to the wandering poor hardened and royal statutes attempted to limit mobility and curb begging.³ The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw a revival of interest in the issue, perhaps connected to the increasing population in London and its region;⁴ between the 1460s and 1530s, parliamentary statutes and royal proclamations repeated an insistence that the poor should seek alms where they were born or ‘best known’.⁵ The decades around 1500 were thus a time when the figure of the vagrant, which was to loom large in early modern concerns over poverty, was being conceptualized. London’s civic authorities were very active in this period in defining what kinds of movement required censure.⁶ In 1473, ward juries were ordered to make special enquiry into ‘all nightwalkers, vagabonds, faytors [rogues] and mighty beggars as well men [and] women the which may get their living by labour and will not labour, coming or repairing into your said wards’.⁷ Sometimes mobility, particularly that of women, was associated with prostitution and sexual immorality. On 14 April 1482 the city issued two proclamations referring to vagrancy; one complained of ‘strumpets, misguided and idle women daily vagrant and walking about by the streets and lanes’ inducing people to lechery, the other of ‘vagabonds, idle persons and great beggars daily vagrant and going about within the city of London being of might and power for to get their living by the labour of their bodies or other lawful occupation’.⁸ In 1516, the city rounded up thirteen men described as vagabonds. Yellow patches in the shape of a letter V were stitched on to their clothes and they were sent ‘unto their country where they were born or to other places in the country where they may get their living in harvest or making hay’.⁹ The following year, the city responded to a royal proclamation by devising a system of badges to be issued to a thousand settled paupers so as to distinguish them from ‘mighty beggars’; three citizens were also appointed to survey the beggars in the city and report on those entering the city to the aldermen.¹⁰ As David Hitchco*ck has observed of a later period, the attribution of poor migrants as vagrants was highly arbitrary and dependent on local communities or even individual officers executing the law as they saw fit.¹¹ The movement of goods and people were completely necessary for the continuance of urban life, but the decades around the turn of the sixteenth century saw increasing attempts to categorize the mobility of paupers as unlawful and suspicious.

The terms of such complaints show concern with mobility both as a casual, everyday activity (‘vagrant and walking about’) and as a more permanent removal from other places in the country to the city. Both are important for understanding the role of movement in communities outside the city walls. Historians working on urban migration have tended to focus most on migrants who made one large journey to London, particularly of apprentices and non-English (‘alien’) migrants.¹² Immigration from the continent will be discussed in due course within this essay. Apprentice migration is important since it is easily the best-recorded form of mobility by English people to the capital, and careful examination of guild records has shown that London drew apprentices from a far wider field than any other English city.¹³ Yet apprentices were a very specific group: young, overwhelmingly male and, by virtue of their apprenticeship, with some kind of social connection to the city’s central institutions. As has been demonstrated, the extramural neighbourhoods had less connection to the guilds and lower levels of citizenship than areas within the walls, so apprentice migration is particularly unlikely to give the full picture of how people arrived in those communities. To account for the crucial importance of mobility to the town, we need a far broader conception which takes account of the experiences of the poor as well as those on the path to citizenship. Although far less consistently recorded, daily movement and intra-city moves do leave traces in legal material. This essay will show that urban mobility cannot be characterized by a single move, undertaken in youth, after which a person remained in the city more or less their whole life. The picture is far more complex. It is now accepted that London apprenticeships had very high dropout rates, with numbers completing their terms consistently below 50 per cent from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries across a range of trades, and apprentices often leaving London before the end of their training.¹⁴ Adding nuance to our understanding of mobility is very important since it was the vital force that sustained and grew the city. The extramural neighbourhoods are the perfect window through which to achieve a broader view.

The economic and social patterns shown by the suburbs thus far could be sustained only by daily mobility: of customers, workers and those with goods to sell. The servants we saw living as tenants outside Bishopsgate would have needed to travel to their places of work, and many goods stored or produced outside the walls needed to be taken to central markets for sale. The location of alehouses and other recreational facilities outside the walls would have encouraged people from the centre to visit. The social profile of extramural neighbourhoods would also have encouraged mobility. Jeremy Boulton’s analysis of neighbourhood migration in early seventeenth-century Southwark found that poorer residents were less likely to persist in the same neighbourhood from year to year than those eligible to pay poor rates.¹⁵ Aliens tended to cluster close to points of entry to the city and were often temporary residents of the city who expected to return to their places of origin.¹⁶ Mobility of both permanent and temporary kinds shaped life at the margins of the city. Since stability was privileged as a social ideal, there were results for the overall social character of extramural neighbourhoods as well as implications for how mobile individuals negotiated their social position within London.

Church Court Depositions and Mobility

This essay will address issues around mobility mainly using evidence drawn from the bishop of London’s consistory court. It is worth pausing here to explain the processes of the court, since depositions from this court form the main evidence base for the remainder of this book and the legal strategy of parties and witnesses are of real importance when interpreting the court’s records. The consistory was the highest of the church courts within London which heard suits relating to canon law: disputes over tithes, marriages, marital separation and defamation were among the most common matters. Unlike lower ecclesiastical courts, most suits were brought by a named aggrieved party, although cases could also be brought ex officio by order of the court itself.¹⁷ Each party presented a series of witnesses (deponents) who made witness statements (depositions) regarding the disputed events surrounding a case. Depositions were made in response to a series of articles and interrogatories. The articles and interrogatories set out the facts of the case as they were seen by the plaintiff and opposing party respectively. Each was designed by canon lawyers to draw out information that gave credence to either party’s narrative.¹⁸ Both articles and interrogatories often asked witnesses questions not just about the material of the case but also about their knowledge of the opposing party’s witnesses, their places of residence and reputation within the community. Unlike in a modern court, local gossip about a person or a series of events, often termed their ‘fame’, was materially important in the consistory and other canon and Roman law courts.¹⁹ All that survives of the London consistory court in this period are its deposition books, meaning that we know neither the outcome of the cases nor the precise arguments of either party, other than what can be inferred from the witness statements. However, the depositions, with their myriad incidental detail about daily life, personal history and social relations, are a rich seam of material for social historians.

As records of individual voices, depositions are problematic, being mediated through both the requirements of the court and the anticipatory ‘pre-construction’ of witnesses themselves.²⁰ Moreover, as Shannon McSheffrey has argued, they offer no direct window into the events described but instead a series of narratives calculated to appear plausible in court.²¹ Nonetheless, ecclesiastical court depositions are very useful records for mobility and migration in England owing to the fact that, unlike in secular courts, witnesses were regularly required to provide details of their age and places of past and present residence. Such sources have been well used by early modern historians and to a lesser degree by late medievalists to study mobility but are yet to be widely exploited for this theme by urban historians or those studying London before the late sixteenth century.²² Deposition evidence has recently been deployed as a good substitute for random time-use survey data in looking at the gendering of early modern work tasks, and it is for many of the same reasons that it is valuable evidence for day-to-day mobility.²³ Moreover, there was a wide social range of witnesses called by the court, meaning that depositions contain personal residential mobilities for those beyond the boundaries of the groups typically most accessible to historians. Under canon law, the testimony of paupers was supposed to be ineligible.²⁴ Nonetheless, in London, as has been noted in similar records at Marseille, parties seem to have made their own judgements about who was a suitable witness.²⁵ Choice of witnesses and determination of who was sufficient to depose can tell us much about local social standing.²⁶

As Table 3.1 indicates, the depth of detail recorded for the residence history of witnesses varied considerably over time as well as from one case to another. In the late fifteenth-century books and first sixteenth-century book, residence information is usually limited to present parish of residence, accompanied sometimes by one or two previous residences.²⁷ Occasionally, these records note a deponent’s place of birth, although, interestingly, this appears to have been more common for aliens than for English witnesses. For instance, in the case of Agnes Lyddon contra (hereafter c.) Alice Harrys all three witnesses were of a similar humble status, being watermen. However, only Irishman Patrick Mandew was apparently asked to give a place of birth.²⁸ On one occasion, it appears that the alien status of witnesses was raised as an issue by a defendant to be put to witnesses in the interrogatories, as if it might undermine their suitability to depose. In the case of Larke C. Banester the witnesses on the party of Banester all responded to the first interrogatory with their place of birth, a question perhaps intended to discredit Warren Fanbooke, a goldsmith’s journeyman born in Gelderland.²⁹

In the deposition books of the 1520s and 1530s, the recording of places of birth (either a specific settlement or a county of birth) became more frequent, alongside information about present and previous residences. This was perhaps under the influence of Cardinal Wolsey’s drive against immorality in London and its surroundings, which included a crackdown on vagrancy.³⁰ In cases where both residence and long memory of local practice were crucial to the outcome, particularly disputes between rectors of neighbouring parishes over their boundaries, depositions might include residence histories that covered the entire lifetime of a deponent.³¹ In most cases, however, the purpose of residence histories seems to have been part of vetting the individual’s identity and suitability to depose; as will be discussed further in this essay, instability of residence was often used by parties as a means to discredit opponents.³²

The evidence used here is drawn from the deposition books for the court in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Depositions were largely recorded in Latin, although sections of reported speech were often in English; where the records have been quoted, Latin has been translated but English has been left in the original spelling. Unfortunately, no deposition books survive before the 1460s, but in the context of rising population from the later fifteenth century onwards, experiences of mobility are probably better represented than they would have been earlier. The cases selected for research were chosen based on either their location within extramural parishes or for the insight they gave into other aspects of social marginality. In total, seventy-eight cases featuring 401 deponents were chosen for analysis. The selection of neighbourhoods considered was wider and extended into the settlements and parishes in the immediate hinterland of London, where they were illustrative of the relationship between the city and its environs.

This essay considers mobility from a number of different angles. In the next section, London’s wide migration field is explored and the different ways in which people, whether young apprentices or elderly servants, found themselves in the city are introduced. Then the essay moves on to neighbourhood migration within and around the city and the reasons why Londoners moved around. In a society in which personal reputation was highly valued, mobility carried some risk, and the potential reputational damage caused by movement is the next topic of discussion. Finally, the essay returns to a specific focus on London’s extramural areas and the way in which everyday movement around the city rendered them spaces defined by mobility and a particularly wide sense of neighbourhood.

Migration to London

Migrants to London came from far and wide in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Figure 3.1 maps the origins of 109 English and Welsh consistory witnesses who named a specific birthplace, and Figure 3.2 shows the origins of these witnesses alongside those who identified only a county of origin. Thirteen witnesses were born within the city and Middlesex, the largest number in any county. However, those who came from outside the south-east tended to come from northern England, from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Northumberland, or from the west midlands. London had an extraordinarily wide migration field and people travelled from far outside its immediate economic hinterland to live in the city.

This pattern of origins tallies to an extent with the existing literature on London’s migration field in the period, where it has been argued that London at the end of the fifteenth century had an expansive draw within England.³³ Stephanie Hovland noted that the field from which apprentices came widened over the fifteenth century.³⁴ She argued that the widest fields of migration were found among the most prestigious London crafts. However, the circ*mstances of consistory witnesses with northern origins suggests that this was not necessarily the case in the wider pool of London inhabitants. Among the witnesses from Yorkshire were people of solid artisan occupations such as William Wylson, grey tawyer (a kind of leather worker); Richard Smyth, brewer; John Frethe, poulterer; and Joan Fytt, a carpenter’s wife.³⁵ Servant deponents had come from as far afield as Newcastle upon Tyne, Exeter and Newport in Wales.³⁶ Indeed, one of the main advantages of the consistory deposition evidence is that previous studies in this area have relied upon data from apprenticeship records of particular companies, making it difficult to distinguish between craft-specific patterns and change over time.³⁷ The evidence presented here suggests that the wide field detected in apprentice origins from greater crafts at the end of the fifteenth century may well be representative of London’s population as a whole. Matthew Davies has demonstrated the essential role of the labour of the city’s non-citizen population in the many smaller crafts and occupations without a guild, a population who were highly mobile.³⁸ The city’s economy was driven by migrants and mobility at every level, from the regulated trade of citizens to the informally or unorganized trades of non-citizens and, as Davies stresses, the important grey area in between where migrants and failed apprentices worked on the fringes of regulated trades. At all levels, people travelled long distances to take advantage of the city’s prosperity in an era when many other English towns’ fortunes were faltering.

Certain extramural parishes had distinctive fields of migration and mobility. Consistory deposition evidence for cases centred on the parish of St Sepulchre without Newgate, to the north-west of the city walls, shows a similar pattern visualized in Figure 3.3. This map includes both those who lived in the parish at the time of their deposition and those who came from elsewhere to witness events in the parish; for the moment, I will concentrate on the twenty-one resident deponents. These men and women tended to have come from the midlands; eight deponents (of the eleven with a named place of birth) were born within the counties of Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire. As with the relationship between Essex and St Botolph Aldgate, the butchery trade appears to be the driving force in this trend. Six deponents from St Sepulchre were either butchers or butchers’ servants, all of them working or living on St John’s Street close to the West Smithfield cattle and flesh market. St John’s Street was in fact a liberty of the priory of St John of Jerusalem, about which more will be said shortly. This pattern reflects that seen in later sixteenth-century apprenticeship evidence for London’s butchers, where the droving routes to the midlands dominated the pattern of recruitment.³⁹ This was, it seems, part of a wider extramural pattern of migration driven by the economic connections of certain neighbourhoods to a specific hinterland.

As this suggests, it is important not simply to consider migration in isolation. Mobility, far from a one-time movement from country to city, was life-long for many of those who lived in fifteenth-century London and especially for those living in the extramural neighbourhoods. Although less consistently given than the information about places of birth, some witnesses described fuller residence histories that give a sense of mobility over their life course. The All Hallows deponents were a particularly well-documented cohort because of a case based on a tithe dispute between the rectors of that parish and neighbouring St Mary Axe, whose witnesses needed to prove the length of their memory of the parish boundaries. No deponents described having been born in their present parish of residence, with their origins scattered across England. All those who described a second movement ‘epoch’ (that is, a first residence after their birthplace and before moving to their present home) had moved to the city or its suburbs. Most of these moves were to All Hallows itself or its neighbouring parishes, apart from Richard Williams, who had lived at Bermondsey. Most subsequent movements were closer to the parish, although Thomas Norris moved from All Hallows to Stepney, Middlesex, before returning to the city, and William Wylson spent some time in Sussex. Four witnesses had been apprenticed in All Hallows parish, two of whom had moved there for their apprenticeships and never left. One of the former apprentices, William Wylson, related that he had been apprenticed in the parish, moved elsewhere and returned about ten years later to occupy his former master’s house. The map of residences from All Hallows suggests a similar sense of neighbourhood to that in the testamentary evidence, with witnesses demonstrating ties to a part of the city which could extend across a lifetime. Nevertheless, it also suggests that movement between parishes was common, albeit that the witnesses had gravitated towards particular neighbourhoods of the city. Late medieval Londoners primarily encountered urban space through quite small areas which were bound up with sociability and economic activity.

As this suggests, migration was usually not a single journey to a London parish but might consist of several steps. Such a process is well attested among migrants from continental Europe, particularly craftsmen, for whom London was one stop on a wider wanderjahr training route across Europe.⁴⁰ It seems likely that for some of the apprentices who never completed their terms in London, they may have done something similar by moving within the towns of England, or even the parishes in and around the city itself, working for different masters and developing their skills. In her work on London’s seventeenth-century Dutch community, Catherine Wright stresses that for many migrants, and particularly women, family connections facilitated their move to the city.⁴¹ Well-worn routes where family, friends and fellow craftsmen had been before were undoubtedly also important facilitators of mobility in the fifteenth century. In some consistory cases, the sharing of unusual surnames among servants in the same household suggests families sent siblings or cousins to London together. Witnesses Agnes and Thomas Rawlyns were both servants in the household of Agnes Corbe, and Stephen and John Felix were both members of Margaret Harvey’s household.⁴² In these examples, young men and women had been sent perhaps to the house of a relative or friend, or simply had gone together so that they could provide support for one another. Londoners’ wide economic interests and social connections outside the city would have given them a foot in both camps, allowing them to remain in contact with family and using their position to support those who followed them to the city.

However, it is important to note that this type of support network relied on economic connections which were probably not available to the poorest migrants to London. These men and women may have been migrating in response to a sudden worsening in their circ*mstances, rather than for a service position prearranged through family. The poor may also have been moving when they were older than the typical servant or apprentice. For instance, thirty-five-year-old widow Helen Elys lived in St Dunstan in the East at the time of her deposition in 1529 as a servant to Edmund Wright, having moved from the village of Stone in Kent only at the previous Christmas.⁴³ She had lived at Stone for four years. Helen responded to one of the interrogatories ‘that she is poor but honest and would value in goods a little above ten shillings’, and it may have been her impoverished widowhood that prompted her move to London in search of a service position when in her mid-thirties.⁴⁴ Ages given in depositions should be treated as useful approximations, given the propensity of medieval court witnesses to give ages in round decades and the suspiciously high number of alleged octogenarians and even older witnesses.⁴⁵ The examples of John Waldron and William Fryday, to be discussed in greater detail below, also indicate men who moved from southern counties into London who were of particularly low status and who moved when they were older than the typical apprentice. Both had lived elsewhere well into adulthood before moving to London; Waldron lived in Berkshire until his mid-twenties and Fryday lived at Great Gransden in Huntingdonshire until he was about thirty-four.⁴⁶ Alongside those who set out on the well-worn path of service or apprenticeship and failed, we can also locate among London’s poor those who found themselves in the city later in life compelled by economic necessity rather than through familial networks. London’s centrality to the south-east’s economic network would have made it a very likely destination for chain migrants.⁴⁷ The social networks that supported such migrants and helped them find places to work and live were almost certainly so informal as to be unrecoverable in the archives. The gossip of alehouses and inns and chance meetings with old acquaintances may have played a part. Perhaps knowledge of a London religious house through its role as a rural landowner may also have helped, as it did for rural migrants elsewhere in the country.⁴⁸ Among those who were poorer, London’s economic connections with its region were probably less used for arranging secure employment in advance but still shaped their mobility. For poor migrants arriving in pre-modern and modern cities, exploiting social connections and gathering knowledge about the urban environment are crucial to finding a place in the city without formal access to citizenship.⁴⁹

Causes of Movement around the City

Overview

Mobility could be enforced, a response to poverty or other forms of social difficulty or a positive and expected step in the course of an individual’s life. The diversity of reasons why people moved around London, and particularly why the poor found themselves on the move, are demonstrated in many consistory cases. Cases highlight a range of issues related to mobility, including the portability (or otherwise) of reputation around the city, mobility’s relationship to poverty, mobility as a survival strategy and the practicalities of finding new accommodation.

Widowhood

Widowhood Widows had a life-cycle reason for mobility. Alice Bayly was a sixty-nine-year-old widow at the time of her deposition and had lived in the parish of St Michael Bassingshaw just inside the northern city wall for two months.⁵⁰ Bayly was a witness in the case of co*ckerel c. Beckett, which is explored below. Previously, she had lived in the central parish of St Mary Woolnoth for twenty-seven years, and a close reading of her testimony and relationship to another witness is highly suggestive of the cause of the move. Bayly appeared as a witness alongside her former apprentice Richard Holand. The twenty-nine-year-old Holand testified that at the time of the events described, around two months previously, he was still in Bayly’s service in St Mary Woolchurch, but for the past month he had lived at St Giles Cripplegate. He gave his occupation as tailor.⁵¹ The reason for Bayly’s involvement in the case was that she had agreed to let a house in St Mary Woolnoth to a woman of questionable character.⁵² It seems feasible that this was Bayly’s former dwelling house, and a series of events can be plausibly constructed that may have been similar to those which surrounded the widows living beyond the walls. Bayly was of quite advanced years, and without Holand’s labour as her apprentice it would have been difficult for her to continue her business; perhaps failing eyesight made tailoring particularly difficult in her old age. Therefore, once Holand had completed his term, Bayly retired and no longer needed a house in a central parish or the shop which may have been attached to it. She sought to sublet her house at St Mary Woolnoth for the remainder of the lease and move somewhere more affordable without, or with reduced, income from her craft. Moreover, Bayly was anxious to protect her reputation; as will be discussed below, she showed considerable diligence in seeking to establish the character of her prospective tenant, apparently keen to protect herself from being tainted by association with nefarious activity.

Alice Bayly’s case is therefore a good example both of the socio-economic circ*mstances that caused widows to be mobile and the fact that widows could remain highly involved in the protection of their status during mobility. Nonetheless, her anxiety about her reputation was perhaps related to the fact that she was a recent arrival at St Giles. She may also have wanted to maintain good connections with her old home.

Leaving Service or Apprenticeship

Like widows, men in their mid- to late twenties were especially mobile across city parish boundaries. This kind of mobility was not suspicious: it formed part of the ideal career path in the city. This was the age at which prosperous late medieval men generally married and, if they could, began to be masters of their own household. William Grene was a twenty-eight-year-old butcher at the time of his deposition in 1521; two years previously, he had moved from St Nicholas Shambles, where he had lived ‘as a jorney man’, to St Sepulchre. His move involved becoming a householder and his deposition included mention that he was respectfully addressed as ‘neybor Grene’ in conversation with a fellow butcher.⁵³ Henry Bathe, a skinner of the parish of St Antolin, was also twenty-eight at the time of his deposition in 1522 and had also lived in his parish for only two years or so.⁵⁴ Likewise, William Goldsmyth, a haberdasher, was twenty-eight and had also lived in his parish of St Nicholas Lombard Street for two years.⁵⁵ All these men were most likely citizens and all moved between parishes at around the same point in their life. Grene, Bathe and Goldsmyth all testified to having been busily working at the time of the events they described; Bathe even added that ‘at the time he was busy in his shop and did not pay much attention to the [defamatory] words’.⁵⁶ The overall impression is of successful, industrious young men who had recently become masters of their own households, a process facilitated by a move to a new parish. In their cases, neighbourhood migration was very much a process through which they accrued social capital or, at least, the furnishings of a respectable life.

Most who began an apprenticeship never completed it and, even for those who did, they might enter a precarious period of mobile service rather than immediately find the capital to set up their own workshop.⁵⁷ The tailor John Edmound was about thirty years old at the time of his deposition in July 1529 and was described as ‘staying in a certain chamber within the parish of St. Botolph without Bishopsgate’ for the previous two years. Tellingly, in a deleted phrase, the clerk had written ‘having no fixed abode’ (nulla habens certa mansionem) before the description of Edmound’s residential status.⁵⁸ Edmound had apparently moved to the cheaper periphery of the city after his apprenticeship ended, and his inability to establish a permanent household even here is suggestive of meagre resources. In another case from 1493, John Maliber, a glover’s apprentice, was said to have renounced his dead master’s bequest of forty shillings in return for deliverance by the widow from the remaining six years of his apprenticeship. Maliber implored his mistress ‘that if he were freed from the terms of his service he considered that he could gain much more than the bequest in a year’.⁵⁹ He moved to St Botolph Bishopsgate to set himself up,⁶⁰ but the plan evidently went awry and nine years later Maliber sued the widow for the bequest he had so blithely given up. Whether they were left to fend for themselves after dutifully completing or prematurely curtailing an apprenticeship, young men who could not afford to immediately establish a stable household faced a period of mobility and uncertainty in which a move to the suburbs might be an affordable option.

During the terms of their contracts, apprentices and live-in servants were vulnerable to any instability in their masters and mistresses’ lives that disrupted the household and might find themselves on the move sooner than expected. This is particularly apparent in consistory suits for marital separation involving spousal abuse, where servants were often key witnesses whose own lives had been disrupted as a result. In the suit for separation of Agnes Corbe from her husband, John, a butcher, all the deponents on behalf of Agnes were current or former servants within her household. The violent beatings they described John Corbe inflicting on his wife were committed in the presence of ‘diverse servants’.⁶¹ William Williams, Thomas Rawlyns and Agnes Rawlyns, the deponents, had all been servants of Agnes Corbe during her earlier marriage to James Baram. Conspicuously, none of them was still in John Corbe’s employment by February 1516, when the case was heard (eighteen months after the events described); twenty-one-year-old Agnes Rawlyns served Agnes Corbe in her new household in St Giles without Cripplegate, and twenty-one-year-old Thomas Rawlyns and twenty-nine-year-old William Williams had both found employment with new masters.⁶² Thomas and William had remained within the parish of St Nicholas Shambles where John Corbe lived, and both served other butchers. The case of Corbe c. Corbe suggests that the close-quarter relationships involved in late medieval service were potential sources of economic instability; instead of stable and lasting employment, proximity to such a distressing domestic situation evidently encouraged servants to seek employment elsewhere. Living at the heart of the city’s butchery trade, William Williams and Thomas Rawlyns did not have to look far for alternative employers, although in another trade it may well have been that young men in their situation would have needed to leave their parish.

There were many other servants in less fortunate positions. The Irish smith Dennis Grey was living in the parish of St Olave Silver Street when he was called to depose in a testamentary case in January 1512. However, Grey had been resident here for only two months. While usually such a recent incomer would give a previous residence history of about two years, Grey is simply recorded as having been resident before that ‘in several parishes of the city of London for fourteen years’.⁶³ This suggests either that Grey was not sufficiently familiar with everywhere he had lived to give a full account, or that he had lived in too many places for the clerks to bother recording; either way, Grey evidently needed to move frequently and did not have the resources to establish himself more permanently. The circ*mstances of the case further underline Grey’s apparent low status. Grey was witness to an attempt to write a fraudulent will for a priest who had already died. A man named William Wodwarde had asked Grey’s master to bear witness. The master refused but apparently sent Grey in his place to the chamber where the priest’s corpse lay, where Wodwarde asked him ‘to say and depose that Sir John gave instruction to him in his chamber’ to witness a will which made Wodwarde an executor.⁶⁴ Wodwarde offered him the furred coat in which the priest had died as a bribe.⁶⁵ Grey was evidently perceived as a poor enough man that he might perjure himself for the sake of a coat. His master’s manipulation was perhaps the cause of the end of his service, and Grey had moved parish by the time of his deposition.⁶⁶ Like the servants in the Corbe household, Grey moved employer following an incident that strained the master–servant relationship. Unlike John Corbe’s servants, however, Grey was required to uproot himself and find a new master in a new neighbourhood.

Poverty and Vagrancy

For the very poorest in society, their need to move for work left them open to both personal suspicion and classification as part of a social problem perceived to be on the increase in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: vagrancy. The labourer John Fuller was called to bear witness in a disputed marriage case in June 1474. Fuller described himself as living in the parish of Coggeshall, Essex, although his testimony concerned a marriage contract that took place in the parish of St Mary Axe in the city. Fuller was no chance visitor, since two witnesses from St Mary attested to having known him since the previous Christmas, while another reported on his character according to the ‘public voice and fame’ in the parish.⁶⁷ Fuller’s testimony reveals that he had been in service to the family of another witness, William Oldale, ‘and William his father for six years. And before that time this witness kept a family of his own.’⁶⁸ The younger Oldale had moved to London at the most recent Easter, having served previously with a London girdler.⁶⁹ Fuller perhaps acted as a go-between for the Oldale family, moving between Coggeshall and London to bring messages for their son and run errands.⁷⁰ However, the impression of him among the parishioners of St Mary Axe was entirely disreputable, according to counter-witnesses in the suit. Fuller was described as very poor, a vagabond and lacking a fixed place to live. He was ‘always drunk and … is called by many names that he does not always use’.⁷¹ The picture painted is, of course, an attempt to discredit Fuller and the party he spoke for; nonetheless, it is notable how his mobility between London and Essex could be interpreted as homelessness. Further, his mention of previously having ‘kept his own family’ before taking up service is suggestive of a man whose fortunes had faltered somewhat. Fuller’s appearance and possessions may indeed have suggested poverty to the residents of St Mary Axe as it was common for counter-witnesses to make reference to material culture in describing the poverty of fellow deponents.⁷² John Fuller appeared at the consistory the year after Edward IV’s 1473 proclamation against rootless vagabonds, which was probably influential in the casting of his characters by counter-witnesses.⁷³ The connections between mobility, poverty and suspicion were intricate; lacking a full knowledge of Fuller and his circ*mstances, the ‘public voice’ in the parish cast him in the classic image of the vagabond whose suitability as a witness could easily be undermined.

The language of vagrancy legislation and proclamations also seeped into the description of witnesses with plenty of other aspects of dubious character. One counter-witness in a 1491 case described William Alston as ‘a man of ill fame, a vagabond, and an adulterer’ and John Waldron as having ‘consorted with prostitutes and thieves … he is commonly said, held and reputed as a vagabond and an adulterer and a thief ’.⁷⁴ These examples offer insight into the means by which rhetoric around the social underworld of London, as theorized by Frank Rexroth, interacted with the treatment of real poor people in the judgements that others made about their lives.⁷⁵ Thus, mobility attracted suspicion particularly by compelling individuals into new places where their reputation was unknown and their circ*mstances could be reinterpreted to their detriment. Mobility was both a marker of poverty and undermined an individual’s character.

Those on a downward social trajectory might nonetheless turn mobility to their advantage. The opportunities afforded by movement for those at the very fringes of London society are well exemplified by a series of witnesses from a complex marriage case heard at the consistory court in 1491 and 1492. The two competing marriage contracts that formed the subject of the case are not the focus here but instead the proliferation of apparently disreputable deponents (and resulting counter-witnesses) who claimed to have witnessed one of the contracts. Their shady activities would suggest that they occupied Frank Rexroth’s ‘underworld’ of London life and they were notably mobile around the city’s fringes. Margaret Morgan alias Smyth, who lived within St Helen’s Priory at the time of her deposition, was alleged by a counter-witness to have been expelled from both Langbourn and Billingsgate wards as well as from the precinct of St Katharine’s during an attempt to clear it of ‘infamous people and prostitutes’.⁷⁶ Other witnesses who had not been expelled were nonetheless mobile, particularly around the city’s liberties. John Waldron had held three different bawdy houses in turn within the Stews at Southwark and frequently came to the attention of the court held at the Clink and the constable of St Margaret’s parish, before moving to the precinct of St Katharine. William Alston had left the home he shared with his wife in Southwark to run a bawdy house there before moving to St Katharine’s.⁷⁷ Interestingly, in their own testimonies both men claimed that some ten years before they had been heads of their own houses, Waldron at Newbury in Berkshire and Alston at the parish of St Peter by the Tower. It seems likely that these were men who, like John Fuller, had experienced a downturn in their fortunes that had precipitated a mobile life. These witnesses appear to have had a strategy to their movement, choosing to move around the precincts and areas outside the city’s jurisdiction. Transitory life was not just caused by economic necessity; mobility was also a means through which individuals exercised agency in responding to their circ*mstances and mitigating them.

Domestic Abuse

Like those experiencing poverty, women who were subject to domestic abuse engaged in forms of mobility that stood somewhere between compulsion and strategy. As David Hitchco*ck argued for a later period, personal crisis is an often underappreciated reason why those defined by society as ‘vagrant’ started out on the road.⁷⁸ The people undergoing personal crisis most commonly found in the records are those who had been abused by their spouse. These cases were usually brought either by husbands who sued their wives for breaking marriage vows by leaving the marital home or were suits for dissolution of the marriage.⁷⁹ Legally, it was difficult for wives to leave and find a new home with relatives or friends, because those who took in another man’s wife left themselves open to suits of trespass or even abduction and ravishment.⁸⁰ Setting up on their own would also have been challenging, given social anxiety about ungoverned women and formal barriers to participation in a trade. While this is just one kind of personal crisis that caused people to move, the tactics employed by women trying to escape their marriages may well be indicative of how other vulnerable people in medieval society coped with their circ*mstances.

In the case of Corbe C. Corbe discussed above, two servants of the household escaped their violent master John Corbe by finding other masters within the same parish. For many women, their first support network when experiencing abuse was probably within the parish itself, as Tim Reinke-Williams has noted for early modern London.⁸¹ However, as Reinke-Williams makes clear, this depended upon standing in good stead with the community; where a woman lacked a good local reputation, mobility may have been the only option available. Prolonged violence may also have driven some women away, even when they had local friends, simply to avoid discovery; a number of cases show that neighbours were willing to intercede on the part of women who subsequently moved.⁸² The degree to which women were able to establish a new household once they left their husbands varied. Agnes Corbe, for instance, moved to St Giles Cripplegate outside the city walls and took her servant Agnes Rawlyns with her, suggesting that she could support herself independently. It seems likely that she would have continued in the trade of butchery, given the continuity of that trade in her household between her two marriages.⁸³ Elizabeth Spenser, who also suffered cruel treatment at the hands of her husband, Edmund, appears to have moved in the opposite direction, from an extramural parish into the city centre, to escape. The two witnesses in the separation case she brought against Edmund recall their separate dwelling places, Edmund at St Clement without the Bars to the west of the city and Elizabeth at London Stone (probably the parish of St Swithin) in the eastern city centre.⁸⁴ Unfortunately for Elizabeth, this tactic seems not to have worked, as the witnesses recalled Edmund drawing his dagger to threaten her at each house. Nonetheless, it is notable that in both cases, women chose to cross the city walls to find new accommodation and in doing so appear to have been attempting to evade public fame in some way. They seem to have calculated that the social distance between city centre and periphery offered them some protection.

Explusion

Expulsion from a city ward by its alderman was the most socially damaging form of mobility in fifteenth-century London. It was a standard punishment for those who persistently flouted civic authority, more serious than imprisonment and far more common than exemplary trials before the mayor.⁸⁵ Decisions over who to expel appear to have been made by the ward’s alderman rather than by local officers or wardmote juries, although, as we shall see in this essay, it was probably their knowledge and advice which identified potential targets. It is quite striking that throughout the late medieval period the routine means of dealing with offenders remained within the ward itself and generally did not require the expelled to abjure the city totally, other than during concerted morality drives by the civic government and crown.⁸⁶ Even if cases were referred on to the church courts, the most severe punishment available was excommunication, a threat that does not seem to have been especially effective among those whose reputation was already poor.⁸⁷ This suggests that the primary nuisance caused by persistent offenders was perceived to be that to neighbours, a problem that could be solved by moving people along.

One particularly detailed case indicates the effects of expulsion on personal reputation and the practical difficulties faced by the expelled. Agnes co*ckerel appeared as the plaintiff of a defamation case heard in the consistory court in November 1521. co*ckerel had brought the case against John Beckett, capper, and his wife, Elizabeth, of the parish of St Sepulchre without Newgate. Witnesses were questioned about a series of events which began with an argument witnessed by John Gruege, a fletcher. While working in his shop opposite John Beckett’s house in late June 1521, Gruege saw a passionate dispute between Agnes, John and Elizabeth. Standing in the door of John’s shop, Agnes ‘said openly and in an audible voice and an evil and angry manner’ to John:

thow pyllery knave and papyr face knave I shall make the to were a papyr⁸⁸ and make the over dere of a grote and to shytt in thy wyndowes and I have done with the

In response, John told her to ‘gete the hens dame, I pray the hens or ells wyll I’, and his wife added, ‘I defye the dame. I sett not by thy malesse thow art known well, I nowe what though arte.’⁸⁹ Allusions to ‘knowing’ someone’s character were a common way to suggest the publicity of their poor reputation.⁹⁰ The knowledge Elizabeth Beckett alluded to was the local belief that Agnes co*ckerel had some kind of sexual relationship with her servant Robert Dyngley; around this time, Agnes was arrested, imprisoned and expelled from her house in St Sepulchre parish.⁹¹

Two weeks later, the sixty-nine-year-old widow Alice Bayly, introduced above, arrived at the Becketts’ house, accompanied by her apprentice.⁹² Bayly approached John Beckett as he worked in his shop and asked him whether he knew ‘Maystres co*ckerel the midwyff’ who had recently lived in that neighbourhood. Beckett replied in the affirmative, but according to Holand he evaded Bayly’s next question about her character, instead inviting her to ‘come nere and drynke’.⁹³ In the Becketts’ house there followed a conversation about Agnes co*ckerel’s character. Bayly explained, ‘I have letten her a howse off myn and I wolde be glade to knowe off what conversation she wer.’⁹⁴ She had taken a penny from Agnes as surety for her rent but had been concerned by rumours of her new tenant’s ill fame. The house that Bayly had intended to lease to Agnes lay on Lombard Street in the parish of St Mary Woolnoth, from which one would pass through fourteen parishes to reach St Sepulchre; evidently, the rumours of Agnes’ ill fame were remarkably widespread. John Beckett was initially evasive, telling Bayly to go and speak to Agnes’ previous neighbours at Holborn Cross. Implicitly, Agnes had left more than one neighbourhood in disgrace;⁹⁵ she had perhaps chosen St Mary Woolnoth in the hope that its centrality surpassed the reach of networks of knowledge about her reputation. Although Ingram cites this case as an example of the pervasive surveillance in late medieval London society,⁹⁶ it was in fact anxiety about a lack of proper surveillance of a mobile individual that motivated Bayly’s visit. Agnes co*ckerel’s movement around London exposed the difficulty of knowing the character of a stranger in a city with around 50,000 inhabitants and thus the flaws in a social system reliant on personal reputation for everyday transactions such as the letting of a house.

At length, the Becketts were persuaded to speak. They told Bayly that she had been deceived in letting to Agnes, since ‘Dyngley her servaunt kepyth her’, implying that he was her pimp⁹⁷ and Agnes ‘a brothel of hyr taylle’. This probably meant that she sold sex.⁹⁸ They recalled that Agnes had been ‘warnyed ought of the howse she dwelt in for hyr yll name’, following a search of her house made at night.⁹⁹ The Becketts also warned Bayly about Agnes’ reliability as a tenant, and that Bayly ought to be wary ‘that she do not pute yow clene ought of your howse for ye shall fynde hyr a crafty dame’.¹⁰⁰ The hesitancy of the Becketts is suggestive of the distance between the suburbs and the city centre. Reputation in the city was fundamentally made at neighbourhood level and, once Agnes moved to a distant neighbourhood, it was awkward for the Becketts to take the risk of a defamation charge by acting as linchpins between the two parish networks of knowledge about reputation. In moving to a city-centre parish, Agnes perhaps calculated that not just geographic distance but also social distance would insulate her from the consequences of a chequered reputation. She seems to have taken up her case at the consistory court as an attempt to portray this transfer of knowledge outside St Sepulchre as defamation. Knowledge that in one social space was treated as commonly known fact became potentially defamatory when removed from the social context which legitimated it.

Other cases give more insight into how expulsion worked and the role of local lobbying in determining who was to be expelled. Fulk Pygott, of St Andrew Undershaft, deposed that the wives of three other witnesses were biased against the party he appeared in favour of Katharine Mett. Pygott deposed that a witness’s wife had said, ‘we [came] to se her ride in a carte one day or ells we wyll dryve her […] owt of the parishe or she shall dryve us out’ and subsequently made a suit to the wardmote for Mett’s expulsion which the jury judged to be malicious.¹⁰¹ In this case, the failure of the attempt was what, Pygott alleged, had motivated the defamation case against Mett in the consistory court, suggesting that expulsion was a preferred method through which to disgrace a neighbour. If reputation was made at the neighbourhood level, then expulsion represented a failure to successfully establish a good character. However, as we have seen, expulsion was just one of the kinds of mobility undertaken by those Londoners with precarious lives. Those subject to expulsion might just try their luck and drift back to the city.¹⁰² It was one of a range of motivations for moving neighbourhood and may have been ineffective at deterring those engaged in illicit activity because mobility was simply a fact of life for them anyway. Where expulsion made a difference was when individuals were determined to find a place to live within the city wards. It was a punishment designed and carried out by the section of urban society that prized stability and had the means to secure it.

Finding a New Home

All those who moved around London faced the issue of where to go next and how to secure a new home. The circ*mstances which surrounded an individual’s movement would have had a significant impact on their ability to secure a new home. Finding new accommodation for those who had been expelled would have been a considerable challenge. Agnes co*ckerel had apparently told her new landlady that she was a midwife, a legitimate way in which a woman might provide herself with the income to live independently. Certainly by the later part of the sixteenth century, midwives could be highly respected figures with clients across the city and suburbs and a good reputation that extended outside their own parish.¹⁰³ Nonetheless, as the subsequent journey made by Alice Bayly to discover Agnes’ reputation suggests, the character of lessees was of keen interest to landlords or tenants who sublet. A poor reputation and suspicious behaviour by occupying tenants posed an embarrassing risk to the reputation of the property owner.¹⁰⁴ Mobility outside the social space in which one’s reputation was established thus presented difficulties in finding a place to live. Although Agnes seems to have attempted to use this ‘knowledge gap’ between neighbourhoods to her advantage, this presumably would have been a difficulty for everyone who was mobile around the city and speaks, at a basic level, to the importance of personal connections in finding accommodation.

Women who suffered domestic abuse may have faced many of the same issues as Agnes co*ckerel in setting up on their own. Their ability to establish a new household was probably in part determined by their economic resources. Agnes Corbe, the butcher’s wife whose servants bore witness to her abuse at the hands of a new husband, was evidently successful in taking one of her female servants with her to a new household, and perhaps her skill in butchery, like Agnes co*ckerel’s claims to be a midwife, was enough to convince a landlord that she could support herself respectably. For yet others in desperate circ*mstances, the establishment of their own separate household appears not to have been a possibility, and yet the periphery was still an important route of escape. Eleanor Brownynge ran to the house of the sisters within the precinct of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in spring 1463 when her husband, Alexander, chased her with a drawn dagger. The hospital sisters admitted her and closed the door against Alexander, an action which, in the judgement of a brother of the hospital, saved her life.¹⁰⁵ Religious houses were used by lay Londoners to evade the attention of others and conceal morally or legally questionable behaviour. As well as social distance from the city, religious houses had a practical layer of protection in the form of walls and gates, although evidently the presence of lay tenants within the precinct made it possible for Alexander to enter and continue to terrorize his wife.

Other women looking to escape their husbands sought out kin in the environs of London. Joan Yngolsby alias Wryther was involved in a complicated case of disputed marriage after she left her husband, John Wryther. John and Joan’s marriage had been solemnized in St Botolph Bishopsgate, where John continued to live, but Joan now lived at Waltham Cross, one of the towns along Ermine Street, which featured in the testamentary hinterland of Bishopsgate.¹⁰⁶ Joan claimed she had made a pre-contract with a man in her sister’s house at Waltham six years before the case was heard which invalidated her marriage to John, suggesting this was either the place of her birth or at least a place in which she had relatives.¹⁰⁷ Either way, when she sought to leave Wryther it was to relatives that she turned to offer support. This same tactic was used by Joan Wood. The sole surviving witness statement in Joan’s 1519 case against her husband, William Wood, is by Thomas West, beadle of the parish of St Olave Southwark.¹⁰⁸ Joan approached West in the house of a grocer in the parish of St Magnus the Martyr near London Bridge and implored him to help her, saying ‘yonder ys my husband in the church and I dare not goo home for he wel kyll me’.¹⁰⁹ She asked West to escort her to her daughter’s house at the village of Bermondsey, south-east of Southwark. After an altercation with her husband, they proceeded to Bermondsey, where West heard from Joan’s daughter’s neighbours about his cruelty.

In both Wood’s and Yngolsby’s case, the maintenance of family connections outside the city was crucial to their ability to support themselves outside the marital household. The fact that neighbours at Bermondsey could attest to William Wood’s treatment of his wife suggests that Joan visited her daughter with some frequency. Moving between city and hinterland to maintain social connections was not just a matter of overseeing economic interests but also cultivated support networks that might be turned to in times of need. For women who could not establish their own household in the city, moving in with relatives beyond the walls was a pragmatic defence against homelessness.

Those in trouble with the law could also draw on social connections and the connectivity of London’s region to find a safe place to stay. This was evident in the story of John Curlews, whose background came under the scrutiny of counter-witnesses when he was a deponent in a disputed marriage case in 1533. Two years before, the carcasses of two stolen sheep were found in the chamber Curlews rented at Totteridge, Middlesex. Fearing prosecution for theft, he took sanctuary at the churchyard in Totteridge before fleeing to the sanctuary of St Martin le Grand in London.¹¹⁰ Witnesses’ descriptions suggested that Curlews was a poor man; ‘being then unmarried’, he held a chamber in Totteridge and, at the age of about forty¹¹¹ he was no young chamber-holding servant but perhaps a man who had never been able to afford to set up his own household.¹¹² In two depositions, ‘alias Cornyshe’ was appended to his surname, which may well indicate his distant origins.¹¹³ When faced with a charge of theft, Curlews knew that fleeing to St Martin le Grand would enable him to escape prosecution, knowledge that would have been common in the community in which he lived owing to the frequency of movement to and from the north-west of the city occasioned by the midlands droving route. Moreover, Curlews’s strategy worked, as two London butchers interceded with the shepherd he had stolen from and visited Curlews in sanctuary to negotiate an amicable settlement.¹¹⁴ This was an especially mobile community with knowledge of London and its topography and connections to its tradesmen which enabled Curlews to evade prosecution, using mobility to his advantage and exploiting the jurisdictional topography of the city.

Mobility was often enforced through unforeseen or unfortunate circ*mstances. Where an element of strategy is most discernible in the mobility of the marginalized, however, is in the choice of where to go next. Some, such as several of the women faced with spousal abuse, used family connections to escape. For most others it seems that their own knowledge of London’s social topography was key, whether that was Eleanor Brownynge fleeing to a hospital, Agnes co*ckerel moving to the city centre or John Waldron going to St Katharine’s. Although mobility could not always be anticipated, a knowledge of where cheaper rents could be found or where prostitution was only periodically punished was useful when movement became necessary.

Mobility and Reputation

Securing somewhere new to live did not mean automatic acceptance among new neighbours. Mobility could be interpreted as a suspicious activity and used to cast aspersions on an individual’s character. One case suggests that this might even happen to someone who otherwise was well placed in London’s social hierarchy. In May 1532 a meeting of the head parishioners of St Clement Eastcheap descended into acrimony when James Pott grumbled about being imposed with a greater assessment than usual, after everyone else had agreed to the new charges for the parish clerk’s wages.¹¹⁵ His fellow parishioner John Hooke became so frustrated with Pott’s complaints that he angrily proposed paying Pott’s increase himself and removing Pott’s wife from her accustomed pew in church ‘rather then we wyll have all this brablyng’.¹¹⁶ Hooke went on to exclaim:

‘ye made a brablyng her as ye have in other parishes as ye have com from’. Pott asking ‘[what] parishes be that’ [and] Hooke saying ‘from St. Marten Orgor and St. [Christopher] at Stockes for ther men wer glad that they wer ryd of yow’¹¹⁷

In Pott’s own testimony he countered accusations that he had called Hooke a knave and wretch by saying he did so only after Hooke had accused him of being ‘dryven owt of dyvers parishes’. This seems an exaggeration of Hooke’s words but one that shows the insult caused by accusations of expulsion.¹¹⁸ Thus, it was to Pott’s mobility that Hooke turned as a weak point, an aspect of his life that could be reinterpreted as potentially suspicious. Mobility for Pott was a kind of liminal state, open to insinuation. As will be discussed further below, neighbourly oversight was crucial in the establishment of reputation.

An important implication for the relationship between mobility and reputation is the necessity of local context to legitimate movement. Movement which one’s neighbours could ascribe to a clear life-cycle stage was less likely to arouse suspicion. As we have seen, the move from a master’s house to leading a household was one anticipated to accrue wealth and respect for young men. For men and women in later life, age and infirmity may have been a contingency which limited the impact of mobility on reputation, as suggested by the movement of widows into marginal parishes. For all movement, it was the perception of purpose or purposelessness that tipped the balance of acceptance or suspicion. Just as civic authorities stressed that disruptive ‘nightwalkers’ had no good reason for their nocturnal wanderings,¹¹⁹ so could more permanent kinds of mobility be judged in relation to purpose, and thus perceptions of personal status and circ*mstances by neighbours were important.

Indeed, throughout the consistory court records the reporting of residence histories seems to have partly been a method of establishing suitability to depose. Impressions of residential stability offered by individuals in their own depositions were challenged by counter-witnesses; mobility seems to have been one of the ways that reliability as a witness was judged. The suspected thief John Curlews, a poor chamberholder, claimed in his own deposition to have lived in Totteridge, Middlesex, for twelve years, making no mention of his spell in sanctuary at St Martin le Grand well attested by counter-witnesses.¹²⁰ John Waldron deposed that he had lived in St Katharine’s Hospital for just over a year and before that time at Newbury, Berkshire, although the constable of Southwark deposed that he had held brothels there for the previous four years. William Alston claimed to have lived in St Katharine’s for seven years, despite counter-witnesses connecting him with Southwark for the past four or five years.¹²¹ This process of vetting and contesting residence histories is highly suggestive of their importance to status, since presumably the court was interested in this material only in as far as it shored up or cast doubt upon the reliability of a witness’s testimony. Occasionally, witnesses were compelled (or felt compelled) to justify periods of movement. Elizabeth Weston’s deposition begins thus:

Elizabeth Weston of the parish of St. Martin in the Fields where she has lived for eight years and more with her mother, born in the town of co*ckermouth in northern parts. Except that for a time she lived with a certain man named Newton, now deceased, in the parish of St. Dunstan in the West of the city of London for nine months. And she says that consequently she departed from the parish of St. Martin to the said parish of St. Dunstan to fulfil her position in the service of a good man [boni viri]. And she says that she left for nine months, the reason of her return to the parish of St. Martin being mutually agreed [by] she and her master.¹²²

The fact that both Weston’s short period of service and the reason for its conclusion were recorded implies either that the court was interested to know the reason for the breaking of her contract or that Elizabeth was anxious to pre-empt any assumptions. Perhaps she thought it might be assumed that she had been expelled from her master’s house, or that the nine months’ service was in fact time spent lying in for a pre-marital pregnancy.¹²³ In either case, the example speaks to the importance of witnesses being able to demonstrate stability (or the potential for stability) in their residence. Residential stability was being used in the consistory court as one of the means through which character and reliability was assessed. Witnesses felt compelled to edit their own residence histories to appear more stable, which speaks to an acknowledgement that mobility was a mark against their character that required mitigation. As Tom Johnson wrote of the late medieval English legal system, ‘the learned law and the law of the street interacted in such routine ways that it is hardly surprising that they were mutually influential’,¹²⁴ and it seems likely that consistory court witnesses reflected judgements that were commonly made about mobility in London. Poor witnesses anticipated mobility as a factor that could cause their exclusion from the proceedings of the court just as it could cause their marginalization from neighbourhood society.

The connection between mobility and exclusion is also seen in the treatment of immigrant aliens. William Hilton, a skinner’s journeymen, impregnated a Dutch woman called Alice Fantell after promising to marry her.¹²⁵ When he subsequently became engaged to his master’s daughter, Alice challenged him over the contract they had made together. William responded, ‘what wenyst thow that I will for sake this inglisse maide that I am sewer too […] and mary the a doche hore, nay’.¹²⁶ The implication that Alice was expendable when he had a far more advantageous wife in prospect was firmly associated with her alien status and drew on tropes about Dutch women’s engagement in prostitution.¹²⁷ There was also, perhaps, a sense that slighting aliens had fewer repercussions for one’s character because of their less permanent position within London society. Indeed, one of the witnesses to this exchange between Hilton and Fantell was a servant called Barbara Frees, who, by the time the case was heard at the consistory, was ‘living in the country beyond the Rhine’.¹²⁸ There were high levels of transience among alien Londoners; many eventually returned to their countries of birth and even those who stayed several years lived in anticipation of an eventual return.¹²⁹ For aliens, then, their unsettled status probably made them vulnerable to suspicion and mistreatment. Although, as we have seen, English witnesses were also mainly migrants, it was linguistic identity that continued to be the key marker of ‘otherness’ for aliens.¹³⁰ Aside from one reference to a drunk youth calling an elderly man an ‘old peasant’ (senem rusticum), there is little evidence in the church courts for abuse of English migrants based on their place of origin alone.¹³¹ Although aliens found belonging in London in many ways, when they fell out with their neighbours, insults such as ‘horson owtlandyssshe knave’ or ‘Lumberd knave’ were used to mark their difference.¹³²

The concern over stability in residences for witnesses also ought to be related to the mitigating circ*mstances considered for the mobility of ‘respectable’ witnesses. In particular, status and wealth were important elements of the judgements made about the problematic or unproblematic status of witnesses’ mobility. As well as implying stable relationships with one’s neighbours, stability also suggested access to the financial and social resources needed to weather difficult times, a motive that has been suggested for displays of wealth by burgesses.¹³³ Wealth and a profitable craft were bulwarks against uncertainty. The relationship between social marginality and mobility formed an exclusionary circle; on the one hand, maintaining a stable residence necessitated a good local reputation, and on the other, good reputation provided access to the credit and support networks that enabled stability.

Mobility and the Extramural Neighbourhoods

The final part of this essay is focused on the ways in which mobility had an impact upon London’s extramural neighbourhoods. People’s personal frame of reference for urban space, created by their patterns of movement around the city, had an impact on their testamentary bequests. This spatial footprint would have been created not just by neighbourhood migration but also by day-to-day movement in urban space. Consistory court depositions provide a wealth of detail about the circ*mstances surrounding the events of cases, often detailing who was in a certain place, who they were with and why they were there. The depositions thus provide an important insight into day-to-day mobility within and around the city. Through everyday mobility for work and socializing as well as neighbourhood migration, there was a sense of a differentiated and sprawling social space beyond the walls. A sense of social and spatial separation of extramural areas from the central city is evident in the language used by their residents to describe where they lived. In a case from St Botolph Aldersgate, one witness described how she happened to see local women arguing as they washed clothes when she ‘returned from the city of London to her dwelling house’.¹³⁴ Similarly, John Edmound of St Botolph Bishopsgate explained that before living in a chamber outside Bishopsgate he had lived ‘in the city of London with a certain Walter Wright with whom he was apprenticed’.¹³⁵ Both these examples suggest a sense of difference between the extramural neighbourhoods and the city centre. Jurisdictionally, both Conquest and Edmound were residents of the city of London itself, but the sense these depositions give of moving into a differentiated space beyond the walls is borne out elsewhere.

Sociability and other forms of everyday movement evidenced in cases are good indicators of how mobility shaped extramural neighbourhoods. Using GIS, it is possible to map the spread of individuals and events which were associated with cases. In this section, analysis will be based on the mapping of two different kinds of data associated with consistory cases. One is the residence history of deponents, including the present parish of residence provided by witnesses when they gave a deposition. In a few cases, the gap in time between the disputed events of the case and the suit appearing at the consistory might mean that individuals had moved, although this was unusual. The other data mapped, in Figure 3.5, are incidents pertinent to the case. These are usually specific events, such as the witnessing of a contract, that can be placed within an identifiable parish, precinct or street. Occasionally, a more nebulous kind of event is mapped, such as the ‘public fame’ in a parish of an incident or person. All mapping has been undertaken at parish level, although, as we shall see, neighbourhood could sometimes mean smaller or larger social spaces. Figures 4.3–4.5 collate information from all the cases with at least one event in a given parish. This method produces maps that focus on the parties and witnesses who can be sited within that location for at least some of the events associated with a case. Although a few cases had incidents spread over several parishes, as seen in Figure 3.5 (which maps the events themselves for cases associated with St Botolph Bishopsgate), these were usually few. Such cases can tell us something about the movement of people coming to a given parish. Some more complicated cases could involve multiple counter-witnesses who had little to depose about the main events at issue and so the mapping focuses on case studies where this is not a factor distorting the visualization.

There was a clear tendency for people to be mobile around the fringes of the city. This is particularly noticeable in cases that centred on St Botolph Bishopsgate, represented in Figure 3.5. The immediate ‘neighbourhood’ of Bishopsgate drawing in witnesses included Norton Folgate liberty, the precincts of St Mary of Bethlehem and the hospital of St Mary and Shoreditch, all of which acted as settings for events disputed in cases as well as providing witnesses to events in Bishopsgate. The case of the hospital of St Mary Bishopsgate c. Pellet is particularly illustrative of the way that the Bishopsgate neighbourhood crossed jurisdictional boundaries. Robert and Joan Pellet were sued by the hospital for repeated defamation.¹³⁶ The Pellets allegedly called the prior ‘pilled [wretched] prior and knave prior and that he is a mayntener of bawddes and harlottes’ within his precinct and in the surrounding area.¹³⁷ Witnesses recounted that they did so repeatedly and in different places: before the hospital gates in Bishopsgate Street, within the precinct of the hospital, in a nearby garden, outside Bishopsgate itself and in the hospital churchyard. Robert also repeated the accusations in a legal case at the guildhall.¹³⁸ Robert was a former servant of the hospital who was sued for debts incurred while in the prior’s and canons’ employment.¹³⁹ The witnesses called upon to testify against them were nearly all drawn from Bishopsgate, both in Bishopsgate Street as well as residents of the hospital of St Mary and the liberty of Norton Folgate: thirteen in total, the largest set for a single party among the chosen cases. The reasons for this large witness group appear to be twofold. Firstly, the Pellets had annoyed a remarkable number of their neighbours: Joan Pellet was said to have proclaimed many times:

in the king’s highway in the street called Bishopsgate Street that there is no good woman of good and honest conversation in the whole street ‘but hores and bawdes’¹⁴⁰

Such behaviour was bound to have been unpopular, and the Pellets’ accusations against the hospital similarly implicated their neighbours by suggesting that they were the ‘bawddes and harlotts’ that the prior and canons maintained. The case demonstrates how the neighbourhood could be an extended area at the margins of the city, overspilling jurisdictional boundaries. A related aspect is that two witnesses who appeared for the prior were tenants of the hospital’s Bishopsgate properties, as a contemporary rental from their estate reveals.¹⁴¹ This is suggestive of the role that a landlord such as the hospital could play in controlling the neighbourhood where they owned large amounts of property around their precincts.

The services of both suburbs and city centre drove everyday movement between the neighbourhood outside Bishopsgate and intramural London. The parishes that lay along the road within the walls from the gate to London Bridge (via Bishopsgate Street and Gracechurch Street) were home to several witnesses to events here. Hugh Wellys, who was drinking in the White Hert without Bishopsgate when Richard Bek publicly attacked his wife, Anne, there, had travelled to drink from the parish of St Ethelburga just within the gate.¹⁴² John Sawnder, a scrivener of St Edmund Lumbard Street close to Gracechurch Street, was called to Bishopsgate by Richard Ely, who wished Sawnder to witness his marriage contract.¹⁴³ John Nores, a glazier of the parish of St Olave Jewry, was witness to the Pellet case. Interestingly, despite living at the centre of the city, Nores held a shop at Norton Folgate.¹⁴⁴ Movement between centre and periphery for economic reasons can also be seen working in the other direction. The tailor Thomas Wylletts and capper John Brown, both of St., Botolph Bishopsgate, went to Eastcheap market on an autumn morning in 1529 to buy victuals, where they became witnesses to an alleged defamation.¹⁴⁵ In these cases, the economic relationship between centre and periphery served to pull people into networks of knowledge outside their own neighbourhood. Bishopsgate residents who needed scriveners or food markets used the services of the city centre, while residents within the walls looking for affordable industrial property or simply a good time might go to Bishopsgate. Unsurprisingly, this kind of movement was still governed by proximity: just as most of the deponents who saw events in Bishopsgate were from parishes along the main road to that area, so most of the witnesses to St Sepulchre cases (mapped in Figure 3.3) had come from the surrounding extramural parishes. In the case of Austyn c. Hill, two men from outside St Sepulchre happened to witness an incident of defamation because they were having a shave in the shop of barber William Austyn.¹⁴⁶ When one was asked in court to testify to the local ‘fame’ of the incident, he replied that he had nothing to depose ‘because he is unknown in that area’.¹⁴⁷ Nonetheless, both claimed to have known the barber’s wife for four or five years, suggesting that heading to Austyn’s shop for a shave might have been a regular occurrence. Day-to-day movement might be casual with regard to the whole local community but it was still rooted in personal relationships.

Permanent residential moves echoed the pattern of everyday mobility. In several cases, couples whose marriages became subject to a consistory case had moved from the parish where it had been solemnized. Thomas Wulley and Margaret Isot had banns issued for their wedding in their home parish of St Sepulchre and then lived together in St Giles Cripplegate for three years.¹⁴⁸ The marriage of William and Isabel Newport was solemnized in St Botolph Aldgate, from where they subsequently moved to Bishopsgate, where their violent rows became well known.¹⁴⁹ These examples are suggestive of a trend visible elsewhere for witnesses living at the margins of the city to move around in the orbit of London. Richard Bysshopp, who lived in Westminster in January 1524 when he gave a deposition, had been born in the parish of St Mary Whitechapel.¹⁵⁰ John Jervys, who was sued to fulfil a marriage contract he had made in the precinct of St Katharine, was said by one witness to have lived at Rotherhithe at the time of the contract but now to live at Stepney; it seems likely that Jervys was a mariner from his movement around the port.¹⁵¹ Katharine and Thomas Atkynson lived at St James Clerkenwell for twelve or thirteen years, where they ran an alehouse, but by the time of their depositions they had moved to St Giles Cripplegate.¹⁵² Also moving between these two northern suburbs was William Hosyer, a butcher who lived at Clerkenwell at the time of his deposition having previously been resident of St Giles; additionally, Hosyer seems to have travelled to his employment since he described working in the shop of Robert Dunne, his master, in St John Street.¹⁵³

For these men and women, all of apparently low status, moving around in the extramural zone of London presumably enabled them to stay in contact with friends and take advantage of the demand for services and labour in the city and its region, as well as the cheaper accommodation available outside its walls. Given how the Bishopsgate neighbourhood extended across jurisdictional boundaries, for those moving between adjoining parishes such as St Giles Cripplegate and Clerkenwell, the move may not have been very far. As Jeremy Boulton noted for seventeenth-century Southwark, short-range movement was very common, especially for poorer residents, meaning that parish boundaries were often crossed by those who were nonetheless remaining within the same area.¹⁵⁴ A very similar pattern seems to have been in place in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, suggesting that this was a long-term continuity in London’s suburbs across the period of the city’s expansion. Mobility around extramural space connected together suburban settlements decades before urban development did.

Migration connected the extramural parishes to the city’s wider region. The kinds of mobility that created the distinctive hinterlands of Bishopsgate and Aldgate were in evidence in witness depositions. Migration between Bishopsgate and the settlements of the Lea Valley is suggested in the 1514 case of Wryther c. Wryther. John and Joan Wryther had married at St Botolph Bishopsgate but, after learning of an impediment to their marriage, Joan separated from her husband and returned to her family at Waltham Cross.¹⁵⁵ The inset map in Figure 3.5 shows the events of this case in Waltham Cross, in the same area so prominently featured in Bishopsgate wills. At St Botolph Aldgate, more casual forms of movement are recorded eastwards into the area which dominated extramural bequests. Peter at Pele, a butcher of St Mary Magdalene Milk Street, was passing the churchyard at Aldgate on his way to Stepney when he overheard Juliana Bylby’s defamation of her neighbour.¹⁵⁶ John Clyff, who had lived at St Botolph Aldgate for twenty years, evidently maintained social contacts in Stepney, since he was invited by Alice Godard to dinner there on Easter Sunday in 1531, where he witnessed her marriage contract.¹⁵⁷

The complex interconnections of suburbs and their wider region, often just hinted at in wills, are demonstrated clearly in one case from the 1470s which reveals just how interwoven social and economic connections were between St Botolph Aldgate and its hinterland. An action of debt made between Joan Plummere and John Olyve involved two witnesses from the eastern periphery; John Wavery from St Botolph Aldgate and John Godbolt from St Mary Matfelon. They testified to having been present in the town of Stapleford Abbotts in Essex in 1474 when Plummere paid ten shillings to Olyve in satisfaction of a debt owed to him by her father.¹⁵⁸ Wavery and Godbosionlt were both smiths, and it seems likely that they had some involvement in the business related to the debt since Godbolt was questioned in court as to whether he and Wavery were fellow pledges to the debt. Godbolt denied this.¹⁵⁹ Wavery had known Plummere for six years, the same amount of time that he had lived in St Botolph Aldgate.¹⁶⁰ Taken together, this suggests a group with ties of occupation and friendship based in the east of the city and using the routes of transport there to conduct business. Connections outwards from the city were not simply created by one-time migration events but were cultivated through regular economic and sociable contact. Furthermore, the final example suggests the close intertwining of London neighbours, their occupations and the wider region.

Conclusion

Mobility was central to the function of the city. London was a city of migrants, and the meaning of mobility became contested as everyone sought to establish their place in urban society. Individual crafts and extramural neighbourhoods had their own hinterlands, within which intertwined social and economic connections drove migration. Mobility was thus not a marginal process, but it profoundly shaped London’s spatial margins as sites of transit and transition between city and country. The effect of mobility in the extramural parishes was a key aspect of what made them ‘marginal’. The sense of neighbourhood outside the walls, meaning the locality in which people were known and conducted their lives, was very broad and crossed parochial and jurisdictional boundaries. The situation was similar within the walls, with neighbourhood migration taking place around parishes in a particular part of the city, but the key difference at the fringes of the city was both that such migration occurred in parishes that were far larger than those within the walls and that the precincts of religious houses and neighbouring settlements appear to have been included in residents’ field of movement. The lower levels of citizenship among those who lived beyond the walls corresponds to not just the economic status of these neighbourhoods but also their ambiguous social space with connections across jurisdictional lines. This understanding of extramural space also explains the tendency for individuals to move around the urban fringe with little regard for the formal boundaries of London. Already in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the geographical space of London was diffused beyond the walls by the mobility of its inhabitants before the built environment reflected its sprawl.

As the experience of the extramural parishes shows, migration from country to city was not the only meaningful way that mobility shaped urban life. Neighbourhood migration within London, as well as even more transient kinds of movement, were important for shaping senses of social space as well as carrying social meaning for the individual. Those with only fleeting connections to a locality might be interpreted as vagrants. Instability was relatively common among the poor; mobility was a habitual risk born of lack of resources and compounded by the practices of expulsion and illicit trades such as prostitution. Neighbourhood migration around London was undertaken utilizing knowledge of the socio-economic topography of the city and what was advantageous for the trade or life stage of an individual. Such knowledge would undoubtedly have been gained through local social networks and connections to institutions.

Despite the pervasiveness of mobility, for many it was a reputational risk. The greatest risks came for those whose circ*mstances of wealth, status, age and life-cycle stage meant that neighbours might associate their movement with vagrancy, expulsion or a suspiciously unstable lifestyle. This is crucial to understanding social marginality more generally: while anyone might find themselves at risk of exclusion, the less social capital someone had, the more serious the consequences might be. Neighbourhood was a crucial venue for making and substantiating reputation, a process mobility challenged by enabling individuals to detach themselves from the social context in which they were known and their character was established.

See endnotes and bibliography at source.

Chapter 3 (93-136) from The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430-1540, by Charlotte Berry (University of London Press, 03.16.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.