Peoples of the Kingdom
Towns, Traders and Craftsmen Part Two
Towns were distinguished from the countryside which surrounded them by the privileges which their burgesses enjoyed and by the specialised nature of their economy and industry. The names of the earliest town-dwellers, where they are available, were often simple occupational ones such as 'le Pestour' (pistor, baker), Leiper (basketmaker) and Stater, or place-names indicating place of origin, like the twelfth-century Glaswegians John de Govan, Ralph of Haddington and Robert of Mithyngby (Miningsby in Lincolnshire). They underline the narrow range of occupations in Scottish medieval towns and the wide-ranging origins of their inhabitants. Urban industry was still limited and rudimentary, tied almost entirely to animal-based products; much of it was based in the household, in a backyard rather than in a specialist workshop. Its mainstays were wool and leather. Wool spawned a range of specialist occupations, such as fulling, waulking and weaving, but in the larger towns the complicated process was controlled, to their considerable profit, by the dyers who supervised the production of a range of cloth from rough, lost-cost material for peasant consumption to finer, dyed cloths for the nobility. Leather was an even more complex and much longer industrial process involving tanners and souters, but it too seems to have been controlled by one group, the skinners; it provided much of the necessities of life, including shoes, saddles, armour and cooking utensils.
The cloth and leather industries underline an important fact about medieval urban life: towns were set apart from the countryside by their privileges, but town and country fed on each other for materials, labour and capital. The long industrial processes associated with cloth and leather stretched like tentacles into the countryside. The export of wool and hides - the mainstays of Scotland's overseas trade until the sixteenth society - meant, however, that the countryside was also linked to the town by the umbilical cords of trade, coin and exchange. Towns were dangerous places, prone to warfare, disease and fire - there were seven towns including Aberdeen, Montrose, Perth and Stirling which each suffered a serious fire, according to Walter Bower, in 1244 alone. Their populations needed regular human replenishment, which could come only from the countryside.
The most obvious sign of the close connection which tied landowner and burgh merchant together was the presence in many burghs of properties or warehouses belonging to religious orders, who were the single largest wool producers. The largest flock of sheep of any of the religious houses was probably that of Melrose Abbey, which numbered 15,000 in the 1370s. The information drawn from the handbook of an Italian merchant, Francesco Pegolotti for earlier in that century suggests that the eight main Cistercian houses had a combined flock of well over 40,000 sheep. This was the main reason that by the end of the thirteenth century no fewer than fifteen religious houses, ranging from nearby Coldstream and Melrose to distant Arbroath and Kinloss, held property in the premier port of Berwick. Exporters of wool, importers of grain and consumers of urban skills, the monasteries were a vital component in the development of towns.The monastic presence in the major ports, combined with the typical siting of friaries on the edge of towns, gave a highly distinctive character to urban life there.
|
