Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300-1525

Abstract

This is a study of one of England's principal cloth towns during the late Middle Ages. It draws extensively upon unpublished records in Colchester and elsewhere, and is the first history of a medieval English town to analyse in conjunction the relationships between overseas trade, urban development and changes in rural society. First it describes Colchester in the earlier fourteenth century, its trade, its agricultural setting and its form of government. The book then shows how cloth-making grew in Colchester after the Black Death and how the population increased until about 1414. The implications of this for the government of the borough and for the town's role in the local economy are discussed. The last section shows that Colchester's growth was not sustained through the fifteenth century, and examines some of the causal links between economic contraction, institutional change in the borough and agrarian depression in the surrounding countryside.

Medieval British Towns

“…Britnell's study of Colchester led him to conclude that, in that town at least, it was not; Colchester's growth in the later middle ages was not a result of a better and more broadly-based demand in the home market, but rather generated by the growing export trade in cloth. 98 There are problems reconciling this interpretation of the urban economy with the role of a town as a central place, a role which lays emphasis on the level of demand for goods and services in the region served by the town. In contrast, Kowaleski has argued that in Exeter the late medieval boom was achieved in concert with a growth in the economy of its hinterland.…”

“…The entrepreneur might also own the tools of the trade which he hired out, looms, for example, or even spinning wheels; the wife of Richard Taillour, a poor Colchester townsman, only surfaces in the records because she owed IOd for the lease of a spinning wheel. 79 It was in fact the textile industry which provided the most scope for entrepreneurs and which best exemplifies the subdivision of processes and the extent to which work was put out at piece rates. It should first be said that for all the great amount of information on the medieval textile industry there is still a great deal that is unknown.…”

“…In this respect Britnell describes the industrial organisation in Colchester as 'primeval' compared to the huge enterprises of Flemish cloth entrepreneurs. 83 But the fifteenth century saw a growing concentration of textile manufacture in the hands of bigger operators, men calling themselves clothmakers, with artisans increasingly dependent on wage labour. And it was often the big entrepreneurs who controlled cloth production in the new centres of manufacture such as Lavenham.…”

'Fyne worsted whech is almost like silke': Norwich's Double Worsted

“…30 Norwich produced far fewer woollens than Salisbury, Bristol, London, Winchester, York and Coventry, but production was comparable to the other important East Anglian cloth town, Colchester. 31 The transition from woollens to worsteds was critical to Norwich's economic future. Urban textile industries could only prosper, in the face of expanding rural cloth-making in the fi fteenth century, if they could re-position themselves to make superior cloths that could bear the higher costs of urban manufacture.…”

The Black Death in English towns

“…35 High urban mortality is suggested by some of such little evidence as survives from the south and the midlands. 45 In Oxford, where three or four wills were enrolled in a normal year, there were at least fifty-seven between November 1348 and June 1349. 36 In Rochester about half Rochester Priory's tenants died.…”