Church Lords and English Urban Investment in the Later Middle Ages

Rodney Hilton's seminal article, 'Some Problems of Urban Real Property in the Middle Ages', contrasted the small-scale merchant acquisition of urban real property in the thirteenth century with the larger-scale institutional, primarily guild, property accumulations found in the fifteenth century.¹ This paper seeks to extend this analysis by looking at the acquisition of property by the church in English towns between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It uses mortmain licences that included grants of property in towns in the midlands in association with other printed medieval material available for the region. It seeks to contribute to the important question of the relationship between lordship and urban development by making some observations about the investment strategies employed by church landlords, and by establishing a comprehensive chronology of church acquisition in medieval towns. Religious institutions were the most important urban landlords of the later middle ages. By the fourteenth century Westminster Abbey's urban estate is thought to have covered over 60 per cent of the area of Westminster.² In the early fourteenth century Londoners believed (although one must suspect some exaggeration) that a third of all city rents went to the church.³ Rodney Hilton noted that over 60 per cent of Gloucester's fifteenth-century tenements were held by religious institutions and that, in 1486, Coventry's Holy Trinity Gild, one of the city's most powerful landlords, was receiving rents from nearly four hundred tenants.⁴

The church and urban acquisitions

Can the acquisition by the church of urban property be considered investment, in the sense of purchase with the expectation of some future material reward? In 1387, St. Bartholomew's Hospital in Gloucester exchanged a messuage (a plot of land containing a house and outbuildings) and 10 acres of land in the manor of Hardwicke for a shop in Gloucester's city centre suggesting some awareness of the potential profitability of urban property.⁵ The rent per acre of urban land far exceeded that of rural land. Agricultural land in the thirteenth century could be rented out at between 4d. and 1s. or more per acre. Quit rents in towns—those owed to the chief overlords—were commonly 1s. for a plot roughly a quarter of an acre in area. Economic and leasehold rents in towns were much higher with larger towns commonly having higher rental values. Five shillings a year for a cottage and between £2 and £3 for an imposing merchant's house were not unusual. Population densities were also higher in towns with a constant flow of new migrants on the lookout for places to live.⁶ Thus the potential for remunerative investment certainly existed. Furthermore, land was rarely simply granted to monastic houses. In many cases new urban property was bought for cash in a continuing attempt to increase profits via urban rents.⁷ This can be seen with reference to Westminster Abbey's acquisition of properties in Westminster. In 1289 the abbey purchased a house, along with a number of other properties, in the small urban community outside their gates.⁸ They paid the donor, Stephen de Cornhill, £35 6s. 8d. for what must have been a substantial tenement. Coventry Cathedral Priory's acquisition of Coventry properties demonstrates how this was often achieved. One of the priory's city-centre messuages, granted in late 1329, was a (so-called) gift from Simon and Alice Childe to a clerk, William Passenham, here acting as an agent on the priory's behalf.⁹ He passed it on to the priory in March 1330. However, a copy of the charter reveals that for this 'gift' William Passenham (and hence the priory) had paid Simon Childe 100s.¹⁰ This method of acquisition was typical of many of the major religious urban investors, including Reading and Malmesbury Abbeys, and several religious houses in London, Bristol and Southampton,¹¹ and suggests a businesslike attitude towards investment.

One of the key components of the seigneurial economy was rent. Many of the most able urban portfolio managers, commonly Benedictine monasteries that were sited in towns, carefully...