Lords and Landlords Sample

All right, Z did another episode on urbanization.

This time, it's on lords and landlords.

And like last time, we ended up talking for about an hour and a half.

And it occurred to me that giving you a little intro on what you're going to be hearing is probably a good idea because these episodes aren't at all like the main show.

What you're about to hear is us.

Like, this is just who we are and how we talk.

It's basically hanging out with us at the pub.

And what you might not realize listening to the main show is that Z is half my brain.

I do a lot of research for the show, but time is finite and my brain is even more so.

So while I'm juggling the billions of Williams, Z is tackling cultural matters and sociological and economic matters.

And for good reason, while I'm a former lawyer and can spin a pretty good narrative, Z is a doctor of sociology from the London School of Economics.

And so she is well suited for exactly this kind of work.

And so I wanted to give you about a 15-minute sample of that larger, about 90-minute conversation on lords and lordship.

So here we go.

All right, we're back with part two of SimCity medieval style.

I mean, honestly, that actually kind of works because today we're going to be talking about how lordship does work through the urban environment.

At least that's going to be the first part of this talk.

Townspeople, as we spoke about in that first episode, were way more powerful than I think the records give credit for, but also more powerful than their rural counterparts in a lot of ways.

It'd be hard not to be.

Yeah.

That said, urbanization was a big part of medieval lordship, and that process was being pushed by lords.

They very much profited from it.

And in some cases, it was a very deliberate strategy against each other and against foreign enemies.

So we're going going to be talking about that a little bit.

And then we're going to go in and go ahead and talk about like how that informed the actual structure of towns and the buildings inside it.

Okay.

So we largely focused our talk the last time about how urbanization was happening in established towns, the chartering of established towns and how people in those areas had a lot of power existing because they'd already been organized, they'd already been working, there'd already been really important economic engines in place.

But one of the things that the Normans did and why they get credit for urbanization just as a concept is they were establishing towns like crazy.

Part of the reason for that is because it was actually a tool of colonization.

So historians call this burgle colonization as a strategy, as a thing that was happening.

Building new towns or occupying existing towns.

Both.

So they would take over an existing town if there was one there, but then they would start plonking in other towns.

And often they get credit for this in sort of popular imagination as just making castles, but usually make a castle and a town would pop up next to it because all the services that needed to go around those castles.

Okay, was that deliberate?

Because a lot of times,

I mean, since the Roman times, we've seen

the construction of military buildings, and then you'd have essentially like a town, kind of a suburb that would pop up around it.

But that wasn't part of the plan.

That just kind of happened because you had a lot of concentration of wealth happening.

In this case, it appears to be part of the plan because they immediately enacted laws.

So follow me through this because actually we're going to be talking about very specific names that at this point we know really well.

Okay.

So one of the places we see this really going on are along the borderlands of Wales.

So Wales was a problem.

Wales is going to continue to be a problem.

Wales is fine, but they're a problem for the Normans.

And so, three major nobles that came up either with William or

just post-William, so in the post-1066 era.

So, Hugh Lupus, I'm going to say Roger de Montgomery, and

it's going to be his bestie, Fitz Osborne, right?

Oh, three for three.

That's awesome.

Yes.

So, on the southernmost end of that, you got Fitz Osborne, who got lands along the border of Wales.

He became the Earl of Herefordshire and he took the castle and town of Hereford.

Am I saying that right?

Hereford.

Hereford.

I just want everyone to know that I got shit for this while I lived in the UK.

I didn't realize how strong my accent was until I lived there.

And even while I tried really hard and people were telling me the correct way to pronounce things, I still got it wrong half the time because I just have to fight what I now realize is just this very intense cowboy accent that I didn't even know I had.

But I do want to just say, I'm trying very hard.

I'm not trying to be offensive, but I do find it just really hard to pronounce things correctly.

Some people are really good at switching accents, and I am just not.

So I apologize in advance.

I am trying.

But yes, William FitzOsborne took Hereford and he took the castle there.

And there was already a town there.

That was pre-existing.

But then he moves out into the countryside and continues to establish towns and castles.

Roger de Montgomery held Shrewsbury.

And then further to the north again, you get Hugh Lupis, who got the area of Chester.

Right.

And they're all building castles.

You've got like Hugh Lupus putting in Ridland Castle, Roger Montgomery building Montgomery Castle, that sort of thing.

Exactly right.

And all three of those, they don't invent this strategy here.

They'd been doing the same thing down in Normandy.

They were all borderlords in the area of Maine, which was really hotly contested.

And basically, when they were transplanted, they were transplanted specifically for the

plan of taking what they'd been doing so well down there and doing it on the borderlands of Wales.

That's why those three were placed there.

How well did that go?

I mean, well enough.

Not really.

Like, I feel like Wales.

England still exists as far as...

Yes, but like, Maine wasn't as much of a threat to Normandy as Normandy was a threat to Maine.

And they were effective at imposing Norman will upon Maine.

Wales, during their lives, did a pretty good job of telling them to stuff it.

Yeah, I guess one thing that's pretty clear about the Normans, not unlike the Romans, weirdly, is that these were not revolutionary thinkers.

Yeah.

The point is, is that these three guys in particular were high up in the aristocracy and experienced at this strategy in particular.

And Normans don't really make new strategies.

They just continue to employ the same strategies with bigger and bigger power behind them.

That's what they're doing on these borderlines of Wales.

And that's where we weirdly get a bunch of really classic English towns, is from this thing of making cities and towns as a colonization tool.

Like, and you're like, how?

Here's how.

So back in Maine, in Normandy, William Fitz Osborne in particular is given this area of Bretuis.

Yep.

He puts a castle and a town there.

He ends up giving it to his son, William of Bretuis.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's a charter of Bretuis that in it has a bunch of really fun rights that people who would live live in the town would have.

Tell me if these sound familiar.

The right of burghage tenure, the right of free marriage, the right of being able to take certain amounts of wood from the remaining, the surrounding forests for building, freedom from villainage after living in the town for a year and a day, et cetera, et cetera so forth.

Right.

Sounds familiar?

Yeah.

So they're just copy and pasting.

They are copy and pasting.

So the laws of Bratweet in particular seems to be like the basic package that turns into urban rights in Britain.

Interesting.

And Roger de Montgomery and Hugh Lupus are doing the same things in the areas that they control.

So, okay.

But these are a break from noble power, right?

These are

grants of power to

non-nobles,

which generally nobles don't want to do.

So why would they be copying and pasting a bunch of giveaways?

To attract settlers.

Right, because towns are dirty.

Towns are dirty, and also in this case, they're wanting to bring in Normans specifically.

Oh, right, right, right.

Okay.

So these charters only apply to Normans then who are coming in, or do they also apply to any Englishmen who come in?

I'm going to get to that.

So let me give you some more details on how this, well, how this actually

looks.

So Hereford.

Again, this is an old town.

This was established at least by the 9th century.

This Osborne takes it over.

He gives them the laws of Bertuis.

Bertuet.

Roger de Montgomery gave those same laws to Shrewsbury after he took that from Erdric the Wild.

And Hugh Lupus is recorded in the Doomsday Book specifically as having given Ridlin the Bertuet customs, like in those words.

Specifically, not Chester, Ridlin specifically, because Ridlin was a castle.

This is exactly how it's happening.

So he makes the castle, but also gives the customs of anyone coming to the castle to live as a citizen the Bertuet customs because he's trying to draw people to it and settle it.

Okay.

This became so common that that like basic package of laws became known in shorthand as the Law of Hereford.

And that the Law of Hereford was then copy and pasted and pushed into Wales throughout the 12th century.

And you would think it's kind of, like you said, it's kind of weird that these are a basic package of freedoms that made people freer than they would be out in rural areas directly under a lord.

Why would you do that as a way to

colonize an area?

If you are just giving them to Normans, that does make a hell of a lot of sense.

That is a trick.

And then because some of these towns are already established, that meant that in some of these towns, the English who are already living there, so the English who are already in Hereford, would be living under the existing previous English customs and did not have the new package of rights and often lighter taxes that the new Norman settlers got.

God, I mean, that is definitely a way to structurally ensure

that the Normans, for that point forward, will have an advantage over everyone else.

It's like, even if you're just a peasant who has been plonked into a city, you now have a structural advantage.

that will go generation to generation.

That sucks.

In the doomsday book, there's actually a note in the Shrewsbury entry that says, the English burgesses state that it is very hard on them that they pay as much tax as they paid before 1066.

Okay.

But that could be read multiple different ways.

Is that implying that there was a tax break and they're just not given one?

Or are they saying we all need a tax break because you broke our economy?

No, they're specifically saying that the new Norman settlers and the new burgal tenure plots are cheaper than the ones that they have.

Trevor Burrus: And they're not allowed to go and purchase one of the Norman burgal areas.

Yep.

So it's redlining, but like in the 11th century.

Yes.

That sucks.

And you're right that this would have conferred a lot of power to the new Norman settlers.

It's interesting that it seems to, you know, in some cases, in other areas of major colonization periods, that can persist for hundreds of years.

This seems to dissipate pretty quickly.

Within 150 years, you're just not seeing, you're seeing huge class differences, but you couldn't tell necessarily who the Normans were versus the original English.

But if you followed them, if you like,

if there was a 12th century My Heritage thing, would you be able to be like, oh, yeah, well, on balance, the Normans are all wealthier.

You could probably chase down some of that, but it's not as bright-lined as it is in other cases of colonization.

Some cases, you really can still see hundreds-year-old lines between people that were established

a long time ago.

And in this case, they merge pretty quickly, and class becomes the sifter.

Still is.

But okay, so in that case,

why?

Why weren't they able to entrench a Norman, essentially, apartheid structure?

They do.

At the very top, obviously, the aristocrats remain almost entirely Norman.

But once you get past that, it seems to be a numbers problem.

So in Shrewsbury, even with these really advantageous laws that would have been just for them, you only have 43 French burghesses tallied in the doomsday book by 1086.

And it doesn't seem like there's a huge in-migration after that.

So no one wants these jobs.

Well, and there's just not that many people.

Like the population is growing, but it's not growing that fast.

There's not like a bunch of out pressure from France because their population is exploding.

Right.

So they bring in some because obviously there's an opportunity there, but it's not enough to do replacement.

And so as we talked about in the education episodes, French as the language disappears actually pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Especially since they already are using Latin for all their formal documents.

And the same thing's happening here where there's this initial influx and there's certainly a French culture or Norman culture is considered sort of the fancier culture, but they just don't replace.

enough.

Right.

And with the sort of population turn, especially that happens in urban centers, you just don't have like the fancy area populated exclusively by French speakers that persist for 300 years, which could have maybe happened had more come in.

Was there even a fancy area?

Because these places were kind of dirty.

I mean, everything's relative, right?

There were, there do appear to be French areas that were popping up in these cities, especially if something was already established.

So back into Shrewsbury, there was a area that was a newer suburb at the end of the 11th century that was called Frankwell, which was probably just a bastardization of Frankville

or the French village area.

And that's sort of the assumption is that that's where those new Norman burgesses were.

There's new plots.

It was farther down the road, which usually suggests that it's newer construction in the way these areas were built out.

If it was fancier, it is a little bit contested because it's further down the road and closer to the bridge, which might have been slightly advantageous for like market placement.

But it also was to the west, which means it would have been the first thing to get hit if it was being raided by the Welsh.

All right, I hope you enjoyed that.

And that was just a small part of what is going to be a three-part series.

So, if you'd like to hear more, please sign up for membership at the BritishHistory Podcast.com, and you'll get instant access to that episode and all the other members' episodes.

Thanks for listening.