Shrewbury: Topography and Domestic Architecture to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century
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-259- THE JEDIEVAL TOWN ... HOUSE. The early medieval stone houses and the late timber-framed halls described in chapters IV and V may sometimes depart from the customary plan and structure of comparable buildings elsewhere, but they are recognisable variants of widespread types, common alike to town and &1 country. The only kind of medieval building which is really characteristic of towns and virtually confined to : (", them is that which has one or two upper storeys projecting forward beyond the ground floor; it is a type rarely found in the open countryside and only occasionally in '"* "" villages. The impression gained from random personal observation and from- "! .books is that all the obviously early examples of this kind of structure are in towns* It will be appropriate therefore to consider the special conditions of town life which may have given rise to a peculiar architectural development. First and foremost we must remember that all medieval towns which were intended to be towns - and this comprises all but a very few - were laid out according to a predetermined plan to achieve some clearly defined purpose. In the case of Shrewsbury we have seen two motives behind its early development. Defence -260- needs caused Aethelflaed to establish a burn with its obvious tendency in a favourable situation to attract a resident and to some extent commercial population; the tendency was carefully fostered by Anglo-Saxon rulers. The Normans saw in the market towns the opportunity to establish their civilisation more securely than was possible by military conquest alone* And in later centuries, the twelfth and thirteenth especially, lay and spiritual lords alike fostered the development of towns primarily as a source of revenue, a motive, though a subsidiary one, which had not been lacking in earlier periods* The Abbot of Shrewsbury provides a local example of such activity. Whatever the aim behind any particular attempt at town development a plan was necessary. We have seen that even in Shrewsbury a street layout which has apparently grown up haphazardly is in fact almost entirely a creation of planning. Very many English towns have much more the air of being built to a planned street pattern, though this may not be of any formal geometrical shape like a gridiron- Accompanying the laying out of streets went the allocation to new settlers of building plots of standard widths - not necessarily of the same width throughout the town, but the same in one street, or in a market-place. The plots were usually fairly narrow, presumably with the double object of gaining a high rent value and of attracting -261- as many people as possible by the offer of a good central site. Examples are to be found in Salisbury, Winchelsea, the Edwardian towns of Wales, and abroad in French "bastides", Such a plan no doubt governed the development of the thirteenth century market place in Shrewsbury, where the / narrowness of the original plots may still be dimly discerned on the O.S. ?5-i*ich map. It is quite likely that some of the earlier Norman development wa.s controlled similarly; an example was not lacking in Bury St. Edmunds. In any town which managed to grow and prosper, land values tended to rise. As a town increased in size, so the building plots fronting the market place and main streets became more valuable to traders and shopkeepers. This development, true of even small towns which developed from an unplanned settlement was inevitably hastened by medieval methods of town-planning. Where there was no planning but rather gradual growth or ribbon development of a street, competition for the most favourable sites /would raise their value to a high level and tend to the subdivision of plots to the smallest useful size. This factor may have operated in Prankwell in the Middle Ages although the area may well have been laid out originally as a piece of town-planning. The accessibility of the 1. Margaret E. Wood. -262- river was the important consideration here, so that sites on the south side of the street were more favourable than on the north, but the lower part of Frankwell near the Welsh Bridge was better than the higher ground further west. This tendency is conjectural; no attempt has been made to prove it from deeds. In any case it represents the way in which values must have altered. One other factor contributed to raise rents and land values, the necessity of fortification. Shrewsbury was perhaps fortunate in this respect, in that the tactical considerations which governed the siting of the walls compelled the builders to enclose very much more ground within the river loop than had been built upon. Nevertheless, although building development would still have been possible had the medieval town grown to twice its size, much of the enclosed land was of little value to the trader who naturally sought space on the main streets. The building of fortifications may well have enhanced the value of sites near the gates, but since two of the approaches to Shrewsbury - Prankwell and Abbey Poregate - had other ad vantages besides their nearness to the town gates, it is hard to assess what development was due to this factor. The third road, Castle Foregate, may have grown up because it offered the possibility of a trading site without the heavy rents and dues associated with the town proper. -263- From all this it is clear that town "building was frequently confined to narrow plots of ground, usually very long in proportion to their width, because frontages determined land values. This basic condition has to be considered along with the special requirements of urban tenants. Many of them were merchants, traders, and shopkeepers, requiring business premises. Their require ments did not necessitate any great architectural complexity but they would not be easily forced within the framework of the basic medieval house plan, comprising hall, solar, screens passage and service room. The type of house having a first floor hall with screens bay and solar above an undercroft, the latter used probably for storage of goods, seems to have suited the greater merchants, to judge by Bennetts Hall, and is indeed simply a trans ference to the town of a widely distributed plan known in an earlier rural setting at Boothby Pagnell. Although such an arrangement served admirably on a spacious site the entrance placed in a long side made it unsuitable for the usual narrow plots which faced the street and were fronted with shops; such ample accommodation, moreover, though excellent for the great wool merchant of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was too large for the 1, Margaret E. Wood, Twelfth-»Qentury Domestic Architecture in England; Arch. J«. XCII (19.15). 198-9QO. -264- small retail trader. His more modest business required a shop or stall fronting the street with premises behind it in which the goods for sale were prepared or produced. Bakers, for instance, required at least ovens and storage space fo£ fuel and flour. Butchers' requirements seem to have been very slight - beasts were slaughtered in the streets until 1724 - but shoemakers and tanners must have required more. The actual process of manufacture was no doubt carried on, as it still is today in small-scale shoemaking, in the shop, but tanpits and space for dressing and storing hides must have been necessary in most cases. Such needs were presumably met by the provision of separate small and simple buildings rather than by developing a more complex structure adapted to a special function* This was the usual medieval way of dealing with new architectural requirements - Henry Ill's directions to his architect suggest that even great palaces were usually clusters of independent simple structures 2 - and it was V emphasised by the medieval habit of thinking of buildings in terms of bays, not of complete structures adapted to special functions. Building back from the street would normally entail provision for access from the front independent of the ground-floor premises, thus reducing 1. Owen Anc« and Pres, State, 450, 2. Margaret E, Wood, Thirteenth Century Domestic Architecture in England;Arch- J, CV ( Supplement) JL, and passim. -265- still further the useful width of an already narrow plot, A further condition imposed by the need for natural lighting in all rooms as well as "by the need for space was that building had to be upwards on the street frontage as well as away from it. Reference has been made to shops. The word shop in the middle ages does not imply a pretentious structure but something more akin to a stall or booth. In default of direct evidence from Shrewsbury it will be relevant to quote at length the description of a shop in Burford; "A grant of 1404 gives the dimensions of a shop in the High Street. It was 17* feet long, 7 feet broad and 7 feet high. The curiously shallow depth, taken in con junction with the separate sale of the shop, without a tenement, indicates that the shop cannot have been an entirely separate structure, and yet was part of a house proper. But being sold thus it must have had some permanence of building. If, as seems therefore likely, it was a kind of lean-to erection against the front of a house, it may be suggested that the stone-slated penthouses, which are a feature of several houses in the High Street, represent the very early shop,,,,. Originally they would be mere shelters on wooden uprights, just wide enough to protect a counter for the display of a tradesman's goods,,, 0 1.