Peoples of the Kingdom
Towns, Traders and Craftsmen Part Three
The general conditions of life and diet in towns were probably little different
from those in the small rural townships. The size of towns is to be measured usually in hundreds rather than thousands. Berwick is unlikely to have had much more than 6,000 or 7,000 inhabitants in the thirteenth century. Most town-dwellers probably lived in crudely constructed one-storey dwellings built of post and wattle walls, often covered in daub or clay for insulation, and thatched with straw, rushes or heather; most lasted little more than twenty-five years. Few houses would have been of two storeys, although some may have had a cellar below and, by the fourteenth century, a solar above. Fewer still would have have been built in stone before 1500; they were unusual enough to have been merited special mention in charters. Few towns spilled outside their original town plan as their economies developed and populations increased - Perth was the only known example of a burgh to develop suburbs before the sixteenth century. A process called repletion, not dissimilar to the infilling of congested rural settlement patterns, took place; the original burgage plots, strips of a standard width, were developed into their backlands. A short walk along a close from the merchant's house typically sited on the market frontage to the workshop or yard at the back of the rig was a progress through the ordered hierarchy of a medieval burgh; it would have begun with the most privileged of the burgesses who by the thirteenth century were organising themselves into an exclusive guild, past the ordinary burgesses who might be master craftsmen or small traders, to the unrecorded majority of 'unfree' made up of journeymen, day labourers and, it is likely, a large number of widowed or single women.
The symbols of the burgh were the market cross, the tolbooth and the parish church, each in its way a token of the role of the community of the burgh. It was to the community that privileges were granted by the king and the burgh community remained in being, largely unaltered, from the twelfth century to the brink of the seventeenth. The twelfth-century Burgh Laws, carefully copied out by an Inverness burgess as late as the 1560s, and the thirteenth-century Statutes of the Guild of Berwick, transcribed for the Dunfermline guildry in the fifteenth century, linked burghs and burgesses in 1200 and 1600 and gave a far greater uniformity to Scottish burghs than their English counterparts. Yet the homogeneous nature of burgh law and institutions needs to be set against the diversity of Scottish towns, each of which had its own distinctive range of industry and trade. There was no such thing as a 'typical' medieval town. The boom years of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought prosperity, especially to the cloth centres of Berwick and Perth. The sharp contraction of overseas trade with the onset of the Wars of Independence, combined with the loss of Berwick to the English in 1333, brought an increasing struggle amongst the other burghs for their share of a much reduced volume of exports. Life in most towns, as a result, was a good deal harder and more unpredictable in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than it had been in the previous two centuries.
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