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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Walter Besant's Medieval London (Vol. 1 & 2) reconstructs the city from Norman consolidation to the late Middle Ages. Volume I, History, traces civic government, wards and liberties, guilds and livery companies, markets, law courts, and Thames-borne commerce, interlacing chronicles with charters and records. Volume II, Ecclesiastical, surveys cathedral, parish, monastery, and friary, the liturgical calendar, cults, and schooling, relating sacred topography to daily life. In lucid Victorian prose, Besant marries archival precision to narrative verve, supported by plans and illustrations. A novelist-turned-antiquary and tireless walker of London, Besant combined literary craft with meticulous research in Stow and the civic archives, while campaigning for urban reform and authors' rights. His firsthand acquaintance with the metropolis shaped his interest in the medieval institutions beneath its modern streets. Published posthumously, the work distills decades of collecting notes, maps, and anecdotes into an authoritative, accessible synthesis. Essential for medievalists, urban historians, genealogists, and curious Londoners, these volumes remain a landmark of topographical scholarship. Read them to see how streets, parishes, and guilds cohered into a city whose medieval frameworks still underwrite London's modern character. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Medieval London (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of Medieval London lies the drama of a community negotiating liberty and order as mercantile ambition meets sacred obligation, civic custom moderates royal power, and the press of daily labor transforms a fortified riverside town into a self-conscious city whose life is measured by guildhalls and markets as much as by cloisters and bells, where streets, wards, docks, and parishes trace a living map of privilege and duty, and where the bonds of neighborhood and belief, trade and testimony, fashion an urban character that is at once practical and ceremonial, local in texture yet expansive in influence.
Walter Besant, an English novelist and historian active in the late nineteenth century, offers in this two-volume study a work of historical non-fiction devoted to London in the Middle Ages. The setting is the city itself—its lanes, wards, river, and institutions—observed across centuries when custom, ordinance, craft, and church gave structure to urban life. Written with the breadth of a survey and the focus of urban history, the volumes situate medieval London within its civic and social frameworks, speaking to readers who seek a clear, patient account rather than an antiquarian miscellany or a purely archival catalogue.
The premise is straightforward yet generous: to reconstruct how medieval London worked, from the rhythms of trade and household to the architecture of government and the presence of the sacred within the secular city. Besant’s voice is confident, explanatory, and attentive to the ordinary; the style balances narrative sweep with careful enumeration; the tone is formal, humane, and curious. Without demanding specialist knowledge, he guides readers through institutions and practices—markets, courts, wards, fraternities—showing how they shaped daily experience. The reading experience alternates between broad panoramas of civic development and close descriptions of places and customs, always tethered to the city’s material and social realities.
Several themes recur with clarifying force. Citizenship and corporate identity emerge as the engine of urban autonomy, while law and custom provide both shield and discipline. Commerce is presented not as mere exchange but as a social fabric woven from guild ethics, apprenticeship, and regulation. Religious life, far from being a backdrop, infuses civic time, charity, memory, and space. Geography matters: the Thames connects and enriches, the walls define and protect, and the wards organize responsibility. Throughout, continuity and change are placed side by side, revealing a city that evolves without losing the habits and ceremonies that anchor its sense of self.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance is immediate. It illuminates how cities negotiate authority between local actors and distant power, a question that still shapes governance. It examines migration, labor, and regulation in ways that echo present debates about mobility, training, and fairness. It shows how public rituals and shared narratives foster cohesion, even as inequality and contingency test communal bonds. It clarifies the roles of infrastructure, public health measures, and marketplaces in building resilient urban life. Most of all, it offers a vocabulary for thinking about citizenship as a lived practice grounded in place, duty, and mutual obligation.
Besant’s method is synthetic yet concrete: he draws together chronicles, municipal records, traditions, and topographical observation to craft a readable, orderly portrait. Chapters are arranged to move from institutions to everyday practices, building understanding through steady accumulation rather than sensational revelation. Prose remains lucid and measured, with occasional panoramic passages that situate a custom or building within the city’s larger pattern. The result is a book that invites paced reading, encouraging reflection on how small mechanisms—tolls, oaths, ordinances, guild rules—produce large civic outcomes, and how memory, embedded in streets and ceremonies, guides a community across generations.
Across the two volumes, readers encounter a coherent architecture of topics that begins with civic and social structures and extends to the city’s religious and charitable frameworks, allowing the lay and the sacred to clarify each other without confusion. The arrangement makes the whole greater than the parts: institutions become intelligible through their functions, and places become memorable through their uses. By the end, the city’s medieval foundations appear neither remote nor quaint but intelligible and instructive. Medieval London endures as a patient, capacious introduction to how an urban society is built, sustained, and remembered—and why that story still commands attention.
Synopsis
Medieval London (Vol. 1 & 2) by Walter Besant presents a comprehensive study of the city’s growth across the Middle Ages, arranged into a civic and social survey followed by an ecclesiastical counterpart. Besant assembles evidence from chronicles, charters, and municipal records to reconstruct institutions, spaces, and habits that shaped London’s identity. He begins with the city’s inherited walls and market nucleus, then traces how a merchant community, wards, and corporate officers organized collective life. The twin volumes balance narrative and description, moving from the formation of civic authority and urban economy to the religious foundations, parishes, and charitable houses that anchored belief and daily practice.
In the first volume, Besant charts the emergence of self-government, detailing how charters confirmed liberties, how wards and aldermen divided responsibilities, and how a mayoralty and sheriffs coordinated justice, finance, and defense. He explains the uses of city courts and assemblies, the function of the Guildhall, and the negotiation of power with kings, nobles, and neighboring jurisdictions. The account tracks gradual institutional consolidation rather than dramatic rupture, emphasizing continuity in procedure, custom, and oath. Through this lens, medieval London appears as a corporate body, protective of its privileges yet responsive to pressure from outside powers and to the demands of trade and security.
Besant’s social portrait centers on work and exchange. He describes the marketplace as the city’s pulse, supplied by river traffic and roads, and governed by ordinances that policed measures, quality, and prices. Crafts matured into fraternities and companies that trained apprentices, guarded techniques, and organized charity, creating networks of mutual obligation. The Thames figures as highway and boundary, with the bridge and wharves enabling long-distance commerce while concentrating tolls and oversight. Foreign traders, regional suppliers, and local shopkeepers interact within a dense regulatory framework that aims to balance profit with public order, revealing how economic specialization and civic oversight grew together.
Attention to the city’s fabric complements these institutions. Streets, lanes, and riverfront are mapped through functions: markets, docks, courts, and halls ordering movement and encounter. Domestic life appears in glimpses of dwellings, furnishings, and provisions, set against restrictions on fire, waste, and night traffic. Besant traces how water, light, and victuals reached households via conduits, vendors, and regulated stalls. He notes the calendar of observances that structured leisure and obligation, from civic processions to seasonal fairs, and the charitable routines that sustained the poor, the sick, and travelers. The result is a cityscape where regulation and custom meet the improvisations of daily habit.
Questions of order and risk thread through the civic survey. Besant outlines mechanisms for watch and ward, wardmote deliberations, and penalties designed to deter fraud, violence, and nuisance. He considers hazards endemic to dense towns—periodic disease, shortages, and fire—and the practical reforms they encouraged, from building rules to provisioning schemes. Civic identity emerges from collective responses to such pressures: processions of thanksgiving, defensive musters, and careful record-keeping. Rather than isolating drama, the narrative emphasizes routine enforcement and the everyday practice of jurisdiction, showing how legal custom, officeholding, and neighborhood duty knit together a resilient, if often contested, urban order.
In the second volume, Besant turns to the ecclesiastical city. He situates the cathedral and its officers at the center of worship, learning, and jurisdiction, then surveys parishes whose churches framed neighborhood life from baptism to burial. Monastic and mendicant houses appear as spiritual and economic actors, managing endowments, hosting guests, and dispensing alms. Hospitals and confraternities embody organized charity, while church courts and clerical immunities complicate the city’s legal map. The interplay between civic magistrates and ecclesiastical authorities—cooperative, rival, and negotiated—structures the narrative, revealing how doctrine, ritual, and property shaped space, discipline, and assistance within medieval London’s many precincts.
Across both volumes, Besant’s method combines close reading of records with topographical reasoning to show how institutions and streets reinforced one another. The synthesis avoids romanticized legend in favor of procedure, usage, and corporate memory, presenting continuity alongside change. By pairing civic administration with ecclesiastical organization, he argues that London’s medieval character rests on interlocking jurisdictions, shared ceremonies, and an ethic of regulated exchange. The study’s lasting value lies in mapping that interplay at multiple scales—from ward to parish, hall to cloister—providing a durable framework for understanding the city’s later transformations without relying on anecdote or nostalgia, and inviting readers to connect structures with lived experience.
Historical Context
Walter Besant’s Medieval London (Vol. 1 & 2) surveys the City of London across the Middle Ages, chiefly from the Norman Conquest to the early Tudor period. A Victorian historian and novelist (1836–1901), Besant drew heavily on municipal archives and antiquarian sources, including the City Letter-Books, the Liber Albus, and John Stow’s Survey of London. The two volumes divide the material into civic and social institutions on one side and ecclesiastical life on the other. Set within the square mile under the City’s jurisdiction, his narrative treats London as England’s leading urban center, whose civic autonomy, economic power, and religious foundations shaped national life.
The physical city that frames Besant’s account was defined by its Roman wall and gated entries—Aldgate, Ludgate, Newgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, and others—containing dense parishes and wards. The Tower of London anchored royal authority to the east. London Bridge, rebuilt in stone from 1176 and completed early in the thirteenth century, connected the City to Southwark and facilitated river trade. Cheapside and Smithfield served as major market spaces. Wharves lined the Thames. The medieval Guildhall, substantially rebuilt in stone in the fifteenth century, symbolized civic governance, while conduits from the thirteenth century brought water to the streets and markets.
Besant emphasizes the evolution of urban self-government. Londoners secured notable privileges under royal charters, including one granted by Henry I, and the commune was recognized in 1191. The mayoralty emerged at the end of the twelfth century, with Henry Fitz-Ailwin recorded as the first Lord Mayor. The City’s institutions—Court of Husting, sheriffs, aldermen, Common Council, wardmotes—regulated trade, property, and public order. Tensions with the Crown periodically flared; in 1392 Richard II seized the City’s liberties temporarily. Nevertheless, the City’s legal identity endured through its courts, customs, and the routine confirmation of charters by successive monarchs.
Commerce structures Besant’s narrative. London functioned as England’s primary port, its customs houses overseeing imports and exports. The wool and cloth trades linked the City to continental markets; the establishment of the wool staple at Calais in the fourteenth century reshaped mercantile routines. Foreign merchants operated within the City, notably the Hanseatic League at the Steelyard (Stalhof). Craft guilds—later livery companies such as the Mercers, Fishmongers, Drapers, and Goldsmiths—regulated apprenticeship, quality, and prices. The Tower mint coined money, while Cheapside’s shops, riverside quays, and specialized markets made London the kingdom’s commercial engine.
Urban society, as Besant presents it, was ordered by guild membership, apprenticeship, parish life, and neighborhood watch. By-laws sought to control nuisances, waste, and night-time disorder, while the watch and ward patrolled streets and gates. Public health measures were limited but visible in conduit maintenance and river cleanup orders. Hospitals and religious foundations provided care: St Bartholomew’s Hospital (founded 1123), St Thomas’ in Southwark (twelfth century), and the hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem (founded 1247). Fairs, especially at Smithfield and St Bartholomew’s, combined trade, spectacle, and civic ceremony, reinforcing the City’s rhythms across the year.
Major crises tested the City’s institutions and cohesion. The Black Death of 1348–1349 decimated population and disrupted labor and trade. In 1381, rebels entered London during the uprising associated with Wat Tyler; prominent officials were killed, and the City’s defenses and allegiances were strained. London’s politics figured in baronial conflicts, including support within the City for Simon de Montfort in 1264, and episodes such as the Crown’s 1392 seizure of civic liberties. The City’s role in 1215 was significant: Londoners aided the baronial cause, and the City’s liberties were recognized in Magna Carta, embedding municipal rights in national law.
Religious life—treated extensively in Volume II—centered on Old St Paul’s Cathedral, rebuilt after the 1087 fire and completed over centuries, with Paul’s Cross serving as a renowned open-air pulpit. Monastic and mendicant houses dotted the City: Blackfriars (Dominicans), Greyfriars (Franciscans), Austin Friars (Augustinians), and Whitefriars (Carmelites). Parishes, chantries, and fraternities structured devotion and charity; ecclesiastical courts handled moral and testamentary matters. The late medieval book trade clustered around St Paul’s Churchyard, while William Caxton’s press at Westminster (established 1476) helped shape London’s literary culture, extending the City’s influence in English religious and intellectual life.
Composed from a late nineteenth-century perspective, Besant’s work celebrates civic continuity while foregrounding documentary evidence. By pairing municipal governance with ecclesiastical institutions, he presents medieval London as the matrix of modern urban identity—its guilds, courts, parishes, and hospitals laying durable foundations. His narrative reflects contemporary interest in municipal reform, archival research, and urban heritage. Without romanticizing catastrophe, he emphasizes resilience after plague, revolt, and political intervention. Medieval London (Vol. 1 & 2) thus reads as both reconstruction and critique, measuring the City’s autonomy and public spirit against recurrent pressures from monarchy, market forces, and social change.
Medieval London (Summarized Edition)
Volume 1
Henry II ascends in 1154 at twenty-three, and the City breathes peace. He roams the realm with bulldog resolve and immediately orders every alien to quit the streets. At dawn Londoners look; the foreigners are gone “as though they had been phantoms.” The King visits rarely—twenty-seven brief stops in thirty-five years—but his presence is felt. He holds his first Christmas in marshy Bermondsey and there decrees that the Flemings, William of Ypres[2] included, must leave. Revered for mercy, light taxes, and firm justice, he crowns his son Henry in 1170; the Young King rebels and dies of fever in 1183.
His charter parallels Henry I’s yet omits the clause on sheriffs, showing royal grip. “Know that I grant my citizens of London Middlesex for three hundred pounds yearly, and they may choose their own sheriffs and justiciar,” the earlier promise had said, but Henry keeps the office for “my sheriff.” Still, prosperity surges; aldermanic wards act like baronies, checked by the Folk-Mote[3]’s noisy gatherings. Craftsmen unite: licensed guilds emerge, led by the Weavers, while unlicensed fraternities are fined in 1180. Goldsmiths pay forty-five marks, Pipemakers sixteen, Bakers one, and a dozen more surrender heavy sums.
German heretics called Publicans[1]—thirty led by Gerard—mock marriage and the Sacraments. Unmoved by Scripture, they are branded, whipped, expelled, yet march out singing, “Blessed are ye when men do hate you,” and freeze to death. Night crime next enrages the King. After Earl Ferrers’s brother is slain, a gang raids a rich stone house; the owner severs Andrew Bucquinte’s hand and shouts “Theeves!” Pardon buys Andrew’s confession; some flee, rich John the Olde offers five hundred marks, but Henry hangs him and London goes quiet. Peter of Colechurch[4] rebuilds a timber bridge in 1164, lays stone foundations in 1176, and the King fines corrupt moneyers.
Thomas à Becket[5], born in a house where Mercers’ Chapel[6] now stands, was London-bred; his father Gilbert, a Caen-blooded portreeve under Stephen, raised the Pardon Churchyard chapel beside St Paul’s. Holinshed repeats the tale that Gilbert’s wife was a ‘Saracen by religion’, yet Thomas was born lawfully of true Christian wedlock. Gilbert died rich in houses and land. His daughter Agnes, wife to Thomas Fitz Theobald de Heiley, cried ‘all—all must be given’ and poured the whole inheritance into a hospital dedicated to her brother, Saint and Martyr, sealing the family’s proud, grief-stricken lifelong devotion.
On 3 September 1189 Richard I was crowned. To thwart sorcery the Abbey barred women and Jews, yet Jews gathered outside with gifts, pressed for entry, were shoved back, and a whisper spread that the King had decreed their deaths. Clubs, stones, and knives flew; houses blazed; the slaughter raged from noon till two the following afternoon. Meanwhile the City’s chief magistrate, acting as royal butler, poured wine at the banquet. Soon afterward the King ordered London to supply armour, spears, tents, wine, and silks for his crusading host, binding the citizens ever tighter to his venture.
During Richard’s absence, Chancellor William Longchamp[7] fortified the Tower, dug a moat, seized land, jailed Bishop Pudsey, taunted Archbishop Geoffrey. John marched in; citizens, furious, offered entry only for a Commune. John agreed, swore oaths in St Paul’s; the first Mayor rose, other towns copied, though Richard later ignored it. His 1194 charter repeated his father’s; the 1197 charter declared “For it is manifest to us…wears,” abolishing Thames weirs. In 1195 an agitator led the poor and fell; in 1198 sheriffs spread standard measures. When the King came home, German lords admired London’s bright streets and cheers.
"When they saw London's riches," foreigners murmured during Richard’s triumphant entry, "Surely, O King, your people are shrewd; they feared poverty while you languished in captivity, yet display treasure now. Had the Emperor guessed England so wealthy, you would not have slipped his grasp so cheaply." Richard stayed in London only a few weeks around his coronation. Soon John took the crown and, on 17 June 1199, confirmed Henry II’s liberties; on 5 July he restored Henry I’s Middlesex farm for £300 a year and the election of sheriffs. Other charters guarded Thames fisheries, suppressed the Weavers’ Guild, and, on 9 May 1215, officially recognised the mayor and Commune.
Barons, merchants, and crafts vied for the mayor’s chair. The aristocracy struck first: the Weavers’ guild was disfranchised, crippling the trades. In 1209 the king’s purveyor tried to carry off corn; Sheriffs Roger Winchester and Edmund Hardell halted him to prevent riot, but John jailed them until the council’s appeal softened him. Needing money, he convened abbots, abbesses, Templars, Hospitallers, and landlords at St Bride’s; they paid £100,000, the Cistercians £40,000, and lost permission to meet. During the six-year Interdict churches fell while John confiscated property and exclaimed when a priest-killer was caught, "He hath slain an enemy of mine. Release him, and let him go
In 1210 a ditch was cut to strengthen the walls. Three years later Robert FitzWalter[10], standard-bearer of London and "Marshal of the Army of God and of Holy Church," fled to France rather than swear loyalty; John ordered Baynard’s Castle[8], his Thames-side fortress, razed. FitzWalter owned Dunmow and a city soke, and as Castellain supervised the drowning of traitors. In war he rode from St Paul’s west door with nineteen knights, received the civic banner and a charger worth £20, then, after the mote bell tolled, conferred with mayor and aldermen at Holy Trinity—rites soon echoed in the baronial march toward Magna Carta[9].
The barons besieging Northampton under FitzWalter received letters from Londoners inviting them in. A troop entered—some say at night, others through Aldgate on Sunday—seized the gates, proclaimed rebellion, killed royal partisans. The barons followed; courts stopped, sheriffs fled, taxes ceased, and the King, with six followers, had to yield; on 15 June 1215 he sealed Magna Carta. The barons held London a year, wary as John wooed Rome and sailors. Recovered, he tried to besiege the city; citizens sallied and he withdrew. Excommunicated, the barons called Prince Louis[11]; John died. Magna Carta fixed courts, ordered yearly circuits, barred taxes without consent, and declared, “Nullus liber homo….
John’s nine-year-old son Henry inherited. Forty barons swore to him; the rest followed, leaving Louis and his Frenchmen stranded in London, their pride offending the English. After defeat at Lincoln Louis found the Thames and roads closed, a relief fleet smashed off Dover by Hubert de Burgh. He negotiated amnesty for the citizens, borrowed five thousand marks, and sailed home. London welcomed Henry with joy; Parliament met, guardianship passed to the Bishop of Winchester, launching new works at Westminster. On St James’s Day 1221 youths beat Westminster wrestlers in St Giles’s Fields. The steward sought revenge, staged a rematch at Tothill; Londoners were ambushed, wounded, driven back.
The bell rang. Mayor Robert Serle pleaded for legal redress, yet Constantine FitzArnulfe whipped the crowd, crying for revenge. They leveled Westminster’s abbot houses as he shouted, “Mount Joy! Mount Joy! God aid us and our sovereign Lewes!” Hubert de Burgh marched in, seized Constantine, his nephew, and Geoffrey. At dawn Fawkes de Brent ferried them on the Thames and hanged them, despite an offer of fifteen thousand marks. Henry maimed citizens and dismissed city officers. In 1227 he proclaimed his majority and issued five charters: sheriffwick and liberties, elections of mayor and sheriffs, removal of Thames and Medway weirs, and the Staines warren.
In 1229 the papal Nuncio Stephen landed, demanded a tenth of every estate, and bent bishops with threats of excommunication. Lay lords resisted; the Earl of Chester blocked collectors from his lands. Stephen’s seizure of chalices when money failed, and the grasping “Caursines” he employed, bred nationwide hatred. Rome likewise thrust foreign priests into parishes; unable to speak English, they left flocks untaught. Meanwhile Henry III squeezed fresh money: a poll and ward tax in London, then £20,000 after a great fire. In 1231 Jews built a synagogue; citizens seized it, dedicated it to the Virgin, and the King raised the Rolls chapel for converts.
Portents followed fast. On 25 January 1230 thunder rent St Paul’s; a “savour and stinke” drove choir, priests, and crowd screaming out, all but the bishop and one deacon. Mass resumed once calm returned. The summer of 1233 spoiled harvests. Soon four suns circled in a ring, dragons fought over the South, phantom armies marched and sank, and a star blazed. In 1236 Henry’s bride, Eleanor of Provence, entered a city “adorned with silkes,” citizens bearing “golden or silver cuppes” as trumpets sounded. That year pipes brought Tyburn water to nineteen conduits; the mayor inspected the heads, then hunted hare and fox by Marylebone.
In 1238 Oxford scholars rose when a cook scalded an Irish student; a Welshman slew the offender, the legate hid, then laid an interdict. Masters and youths, ungirded, bareheaded, barefoot, walked to Durham House and won pardon. In 1250 Henry promised, “I will no longer oppress you,” yet seized civic liberties, set a custos, and demanded heavy fines for a new charter. His wall round the Tower, riddled with cells, alarmed London; twice it collapsed. In a dream St Thomas smote the stones crying, “Why do ye rebuild them?” The priest asked, “Who is this archbishop?”—“It is St. Thomas the martyr,” the clerk replied.
King Henry squeezes vast sums from Aaron of York—14,000 marks for himself, 10,000 for the Queen, after earlier demands totalling roughly 60,000 more—then in 1252 seizes half the goods of every Jew. Beyond plunder come blood-charges: Norwich Jews, jailed in 1225 for allegedly circumcising a boy to crucify him at Easter, are condemned and burned or hanged; in 1239 another murder accusation costs the community a third of its wealth; in 1255 one hundred forty-three Jews stand at Westminster over Hugh of Lincoln, eighteen swing and the rest languish. Papal collectors Stephen and then Martin keep stripping England nonetheless.
At Dunstable the nobles, knights, and gentlemen unite, send word to Martin: he must leave England. Trembling, he races to court and asks, “Sire, did you command this, or have your people acted without warrant?” Henry answers that he gave no order, adding, “My barons can scarcely refrain from rising because I let you rob them; I have had hard work to keep them from tearing you to pieces.” Martin begs safe passage “for God’s love and the Pope’s honour.” The King snaps, “The devil that brought you in carry you out, even to hell for me,” and appoints Robert North to escort him seaward.
After Martin departs, barons vow to pay Rome no more; though the Pope forces bishops to seal King John’s tribute charter, Henry thunders that not a penny shall leave England while he lives. Parliament in Lent 1246 debates the quarrel, city and kingdom stand firm. Meanwhile monks of Canterbury, fearing royal veto, elect Queen Eleanor’s uncle Boniface, bishop-elect of Basle; the King circulates a glowing testimonial and bullies bishops to seal it, yet several refuse and some monks leave in remorse. Nine years later Boniface visiting Saint Bartholomew’s snarls, “Indeed, English traitors!” strikes the subprior, rips his cope, and brawls with armed Provencals.
From every shire, Earls Richard of Cornwall, Simon de Montfort, De Bohun, Bigod, Gloucester, Winchester, Albemarle, Oxford and countless barons, seamen, clergy and commons address Innocent, supreme Pontiff. They hail him ‘most holy Father, chariot of Israel and its charioteer,’ remind him that a true mother feeds her children and a true father cherishes his sons. England, they say, is starved by papal exactions. ‘Listen to those who cry after you,’ they plead; ‘remove our burdens, or we must, sword and buckler in hand, defend Church and realm. Fail, and peril will overhang Rome and our king—God forbid.
Henry III’s long rule proves that parchment alone cannot guard ancient liberties. When a monarch who scorns oaths commands the strength to seize what he wants, rights shrivel. London, split by faction, swings from fury to lethargy, and the Crown exploits the breach: foreigners pour in, Italian usurers suck coin, trade withers, pirates prowl. The Queen, blamed as the fountain of alien swarms, is pelted from her barge with stones and cries of “Drown the witch!” The King strips the City of mayor and sheriffs, levies ruinous fines and taxes, yet sometimes soothes discontent, addressing folk-motes or paring his own household.
In Westminster Hall the clergy confront him, demanding free elections and the liberties his father swore. Henry places a hand upon his breast, hears John’s charter recited, and, as tapers are dashed to the floor, all thunder, “So may whoever breaks this sentence stink in hell.” He answers, “Amen, Amen,” gains a subsidy, then breaks faith anew. War follows: London sends twelve thousand to the barons; Lewes brings their rout by Prince Edward, Evesham their ruin. Victor, the King installs a Custos, jails Thomas FitzThomas, seizes wealth, fines twenty-thousand marks, grants the insulted Bridge to Eleanor, and mints golden pennies, allowing subjects to refuse them.
With the Tower’s Legate urging, Earl Gilbert de Clare rides to London. “Gloucester is the King’s friend; open the gates,” the Legate declares. Citizens plead, “Do not quarter inside.” The earl lodges in Southwark, yet next dawn grabs the keys, ushers in the wandering “disherisoned” from Ely, and takes the city. Gentlefolk flee; their goods vanish. Craftsmen styling themselves the Commons depose mayor and sheriffs, install three custodians, jail aldermen, recall exiles, free all prisoners, and sack Westminster Palace. Nobles, foreigners and resolute Jewish families defend the Tower until peace costs 1,000 marks. 1267 brings Edward’s custody, a bloody craft riot, and revenues of £364.
Prince Edward restores mayor and sheriffs in 1271, secures a charter, then sails east with the Cross. When the Countess of Flanders seizes English wool, Henry III bans exports, confiscates Flemish goods, and expels the owners; the spoil offsets English losses, and Chancellor Merton keeps the ban after Henry dies. Homeward, Edward hears the countess’s plea, calls Henry Waleys, Gregory de Rokesley, John Horn and Luke de Battencourt, and signs peace in 1274. London hangs with silk, fountains run wine; Edward and Eleanor are crowned, Alexander of Scotland does homage, and five hundred unbridled horses send the crowd scrambling.
In the city patricians push Philip le Taillour, but commoners elect Walter Hervey; after royal mediation he sits as mayor. Fresh bylaws set fair weights and pure food, yet no officers make them stick. Ward juries complain that aldermen’s private charters dodge tallage while the charge smothers the poor. Every usurer must wear a round badge; Italians shrug, Jews are ruined, coin clipping spreads, and 280 are hanged. By 1281 London Bridge is rotten; winter ice rips out five piers. Edward orders a three-year penny toll and land grants for repairs, while Hanse merchants[12] finally restore the long-ruined Bishopsgate.
Prince Llewelyn’s severed head, topped with a silver circlet, was paraded on a lance through London amid trumpets, drums and cheering, then fixed on the Tower with a mock crown, a brutality recalling the insults once heaped on Simon de Montfort’s corpse. In 1284 the goldsmith Lawrence Ducket, after stabbing Ralph Crepin, fled into Bow Church tower for sanctuary; Crepin’s allies climbed in by night, hanged him from a window to mimic suicide and escaped a coroner’s jury that ruled self-murder. A hidden boy later named the killers; a scheming woman burned alive, sixteen accomplices hanged, many abettors fined—vengeance linked to the Goldsmith–Tailor feud.
1285 saw Cheapside’s castellated conduit erected: a lead cistern fed by wooden pipes from Paddington, the City’s first reservoir amid private wells and the foul Fleet. That same year the Archbishop ordered every synagogue levelled, proof of rising fury against Jews. Thomas Piwilesdon, once a ringleader for the barons, was seized with fifty followers and exiled for life, while twenty foreign traders, caught weighing goods on private beams and using false measures, languished in the Tower until paying a thousand-pound fine. Robber bands prowled nightly, crafts brawled, government failed, yet only two merchants—goldsmith Gregory Rockesley and vintner Henry Waleys—alternated as mayor for thirteen years.
On 29 June 1285 the Treasurer summoned Mayor Rockesley to the Tower. He halted at Barking Church, shed gown, collar and rings, dismissed his officers, then entered as a man, stating he was not bound to answer outside City bounds. The justices jailed him and citizens; Edward, “finding the City without a mayor,” named Sir Ralph Sandwich Custos. Sandwich barred aliens from bearing arms, closed shops and fencing schools after curfew, patrolled wards, locked wanderers in the Tun, banished fifty-eight rogues, ordered twice-yearly armour reviews and gate guards till dawn. Meanwhile twelve judges were condemned; the chief stripped and exiled, the rest mulcted huge sums.
Sir Ralph Sandwich, the King’s custos, hammered respect for law into London. Foreign merchants caught with false weights were locked in the Tower and fined a thousand pounds, and fearful shopkeepers scraped the pitch from quart pots until they held the lawful measure again. When three citizens attacked the Sheriff and freed a prisoner, they were instantly seized, tried, and lost their right hands, the raw stumps warning every passer-by. Soon afterward leading townsmen smashed the Tun prison and released its inmates; the offenders were jailed themselves, and the City paid a crushing twenty-thousand-mark fine.
In 1295 Sir Thomas Turbevile, 'escaped' from a French prison, was welcomed at court but secretly corresponded with France. His messenger exposed him, handing over the letter: “Know that the King sends to Gascoigne twenty ships of wheat, oats, money, and great lords; while he wrestles with Scotland and Wales. Send powerful men into Scotland, and you will hold it forever.” Turbevile fled, was seized, and Saturday rode from the Tower on a hack, feet tied beneath, ringed by six fiends and the hangman. At Westminster Sir Roger Brabazon condemned him to be drawn on an ox-hide and to hang in iron until nothing remained.
After Queen Eleanor died in 1290, Edward set crosses along the funeral road, ending at Charing. That year he expelled the Jews, seizing lands but sparing movable goods. Wealthy refugees on a hired ship were coaxed onto Queenborough sands; the master mocked, “Cry to Moses, who once led you through the Red Sea!” The tide drowned them; some sailors were hanged. A 1298 charter restored London’s right to elect Mayor and Sheriffs, yet Edward kept taxing, raiding church hoards, and demanding ships and soldiers. Victorious from Scotland, he entered a scarlet-draped city while guilds staged marvels; fishmongers bore fish and forty-six riders before Saint Magnus.
August 10, 1305, Westminster Hall filled as Sir William Wallace, thirty and unbowed, arrived from the parish house of William de Leyre. Stow noted, “Great numbers, both men and women, came out to wonder upon him.” Escorted by knights, civic leaders and a throng on foot, he sat on the south bench, laurel-crowned because rumor said he had once sworn to bear a crown there. Sir Peter Mallorie arraigned him; Wallace declared, “I was never traitor to the King of England; I owe him no allegiance.” Convicted, he was hauled on a hurdle to Smithfield, hanged, gutted, quartered, his head set upon London Bridge.
