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The
Lands of the Hospital of St Wulfstan
No
complete archive, no cartulary, of the hospital's properties survives.
The collection of deeds and other documents that is now in the Bodleian
Library and which was printed by F.T. Marsh records numerous acquisitions
and provides some details of the hospital's finances during the
fifteenth century; and whilst we have a complete list dating from
the 1480s of its lands in both countryside and city we cannot say
with certainty which constituted the original endowment, how many
others were acquired subsequently, or when that might have been.
A
list of the lands belonging to the hospital is to be found in the
bailiff's account roll for the year 1482/3, and again for 1486/7
(Marsh 1890, pp. 111-25). Unusually for accounts of this sort, full
details of the rents are given - within Worcester they are entered
street by street. In 1483 income from spiritualities was £10 from
the tithes of the rectory of Claynes and £2 from the sale of 'indulgences
of St Godwal' in Herefordshire. The hospital's net temporal income
after allowances was £70 2s 7¸d, of which perhaps £20 or more was
from city rents, some £27 from meadows and pastures around the city,
£17 from assorted rural rents and £11 13s 4d from the manor of Chadswick.
These figures are imprecise because the lands for which the hospital
paid £9 6s 7¸d rent to various lords and others are not specified.
Nevertheless, we can be reasonably certain that urban rents provided
little more than a quarter of the total. The Worcester property
consisted of 47 houses, described as 34 tenements and 13 cottages,
with a further 6 cottages ruined and unlet. There were 3 barns,
6 gardens, 2 crofts and a watermill. There were 2 rents of 8s each
from tenements in the High Street, one of 2s in Eport Street, and
one of 6d in Cooken Street. The notional rental value of the Worcester
property was £28 9s 6d, but over £6 of this this figure was proving
impossible to collect in the 1480s. In contrast with the scattered
nature of the rest of the property, more than half of these houses
were concentrated in the Sidbury district, with 9 along Sidbury
within the walls, and 17 of them situated outside the walls, and
presumably around the hospital itself. (The distribution and value
of these properties are given in Table 10.) How far can the history
of the hospital's property be discovered, and what does it tell
us?
In
all, there is surviving documentation for 27 grants to St Wulfstan's
of property or rents in Worcester. A number were of small rents,
leaving only some 19 recorded grants of urban - mainly suburban
- lands. Of these 10 were made before 1232, as they were confirmed
in Henry III's charter to the hospital that year: they consisted
of only one messuage within the walls of Worcester, in Huckster
Street; three grants of land, one messuage and one windmill outside
Sidbury gate; a messuage in Cripplegate, on the other side of the
river, and land in Losemore; and two messuages described simply
as lying in the suburbs (Cal Chart Rolls 1232, pp. 172-3). Amongst
the clearly very defective collection of deeds from the Hospital,
only 18 grants of Worcester property are recorded, of which one
was a windmill outside Sidbury gate already confirmed in 1232, 8
are rents and only 9 are grants of lands made after 1232 (Marsh
1890, passim). The 9 consisted of 7 messuages or tenements, 6 cottages,
a curtilage, and another windmill outside Sidbury gate (The Cathedral
priory also had a windmill here, on this higher ground to the south
of Worcester, by the 1230s: D&C B1316, 1317, 1318. These are the
earliest known windmills in Worcestershire.) Most of these 13 houses
were within the walls, only one being in the suburbs, and the curtilage
was specifically outside Sidbury gate. It is questionable how representative
these surviving grants are; nevertheless, the very small number
of grants of houses in Sidbury, especially after 1232, is so marked
that it is likely to reflect reality. Considering how much of the
Hospital's Worcester property was in this district in the fifteenth
century, it is strange that after 1232 so many houses elsewhere
in the city should have been acquired when so few were acquired
in Sidbury.
Not
that the total number of grants of suburban land was ever an impressive
proportion of the total, even before 1232. The purpose of the charter
of 1232 was to record and confirm the hospital's entitlement to
lands it had acquired, so that in the event of any subsequent challenge
to its rights its own documentation would be reinforced by a royal
charter bearing the Great Seal. For that reason, we can be sure
that the list is comprehensive, that it records every substantial
donation to St Wulstan's during the three decades or so since its
foundation. There were twenty gifts of lands and rents outside Worcester,
of which some were quite substantial: the manor of Chadwick came
to the hospital in this way, and the advowson of the church of Crowle,
and holdings of land of as much as three virgates. The grants of
rural property to the hospital recorded in the deeds - none of which
were mentioned in the 1232 charter, and so post-date it - similarly
outnumber the grants of urban or suburban property. Against the
17 post-1232 grants of property in and around Worcester, there are
22 of rural property, and again some were substantial. The largest
single grant came as a chantry endowment in 1369, when the hospital
acquired half of the manor of Pirye, in Northwick, as well as other
lands in the vicinity of the city. This was exceptional, however,
not just for its size, but because of its date. Practically every
recorded gift to the hospital, whether from Worcester people or
from others, had been made before 1300 (Marsh 1890, passim).
The
impression that is received - and the lack of a more comprehensive
archive for this instition precludes any firmer conclusion - is
that from the time of its foundation around 1200 St Wulfstan's went
through a period of no more than a century during which it attracted
a large number of pious donations from the gentry and the wealthier
peasants of Worcestershire. The scatter of recorded grants of land
in a score of different locations is clearly the result of unco-ordinated
acts of piety by individuals. The magnitude of the Hospital's properties
in Chadwick and Crowle, however, indicate that in these cases further
factors were at work. In Chadwick, a sub-manor of Bromsgrove, the
acquisition of lands and the manor came about largely through the
generosity of a single family, and can be observed occurring step-by-step
throughout the thirteenth century (VCH Worcs.,iii pp.23-4); in Crowle,
on the other hand, the acquisition of manorial rights by St Wulstan's
is not so easily explained (VCH Worcs.,iii p.1232). The Victoria
County History's view that the manor simply grew through the accretions
of property recorded in the thirteenth century, including the advowson
of the church, confirmed in 1232 (VCH Worcs.,iii pp.332, 1232),
is unsatisfactory; what remains to be explained is why it should
have been the people of this particular village who felt moved to
make so many apparently unrelated grants of land to a religious
house situated five miles away. The most likely explanation is that
St Wulfstan's already had a considerable presence in Crowle, which
had been two manors since the eleventh century but which had previously
been a single estate belonging to the bishops of Worcester (VCH
Worcs.,iii p.330). But only in this instance does the possibility
arise of the rural estate of St Wulfstan's having been formed during
an earlier period; for the rest of these lands, it seems clear that
they had been acquired during the thirteenth century. The rectorial
tithes of Claines, for example, were conveyed to the hospital by
the bishop only between 1234 and 1291 (VCH Worcs.,iii p.306).
Support
from the citizens of Worcester, at least in the form of gifts of
property, was less in evidence. Whilst most or even all of the hospital's
rural property had come to it after 1200 in piecemeal fashion, it
is not so obvious that its houses scattered throughout Worcester
had necessarily all been acquired in this way. What is extremely
unlikely is that individual acts of charity can have accounted for
the large conglomeration of property, amounting to 26 houses in
the 1480s, that the hospital held in Sidbury on both sides of the
city wall. The evidence points to that having been conveyed to the
hospital in one piece, which can only have happened at its foundation
in the tenth century - or at any rate before the building of the
city wall which runs through it. The defences of the Anglo-Saxon
burh ran closer to the centre of the city than did the medieval
wall, and so this length of the wall and the Sidbury gate would
have been later intrusions upon what appears to have been a coherent
unit of land. Was this land vacant at the time it was conveyed?
If, as argued above, St Gudwal's was founded in a part of Worcester
where suburban development had already begun, then presumably some
or all of these house sites were already occupied, and the chapel
had been endowed with an existing urban estate. This could have
been the gift of a lay patron, but given the known patronage of
this institution in later centuries by the bishops of Worcester
these lands in all likelihood already belonged to the Church.
The
existence of such a distinct block of property belonging to the
hospital during the later Middle Ages was argued by Martin Carver
(Carver 1980, pp.214-7). He presented a hypothetical disposition
of fourteenth-century properties along the east side of Sidbury,
which included a substantial estate around St Wulfstan's contained
within a postulated boundary line passing through the town wall
to the north of Sidbury gate. It is necessary to point out that
however plausible the suggested bounds of this estate might be,
the line of analysis followed by Carver has no validity whatsoever.
Although it was never claimed to be other than a hypothesis, it
is nevertheless capable of generating deep confusion, and should
be corrected. Carver's suggestion depended on his mistaken reading
of Bloom's grossly inaccurate calendaring of D&C B1536 (Bloom 1909,
p.139). The charter, of probably the 1290s, conveyed a curtilage
in Sidbury situated between the land of Richard the Mercer, and
a tenement of the hospital of St Wulfstan. The length of the curtilage
from the street is given as 56 yards, and its width as 9 yards;
Bloom characteristically misread the deed in several respects, mistranslated
virga as 'poles', and so tagged '46 poles in width' at the end of
his text. Carver mistook this to mean that it was the tenement of
the hospital that was 46 poles - that is, some 664 feet - in width.
Concluding that this property could only have been the hospital
itself, he suggested that its thirteenth-century bounds lay between
number 57 Sidbury and 5 London Road, a distance of 664 feet. Having
made this identification, Carver then accepted Bloom's reading of
the deed as being wholly erroneous, but continued to identify this
unspecified tenement of St Wulfstan's with the hospital itself -
which reason alone should suggest would have been a most improbable
way for a religious house to refer to itself. He then went on to
attempt to demonstrate that several other charters were referring
to the same block of tenements, an unwarrantable assumption given
the almost total lack of similarity between their terms or their
personnel.
His
suggested identification of these tenements with blocks of property
traced upon the map is equally unfounded. In his own words, both
the tenement boundaries he illustrated and the disposition of the
documented properties were hypothetical; his tenement boundaries
are quite unrealistic, and out of all proportion to the known size
of medieval tenements on this north-eastern side of Sidbury street.
The curtilage conveyed in D&C B 1536 had a frontage of 9 yards 'with
inches interposed'; a tenement of the Prior and Convent was said
in 1310 to have had a frontage of 9¸ yards 'with measured inches'
(D&C B 1537); a tenement of the 1280s or 1290s was 6 yards wide
with measured inches at the street (D&C B 1536) - and this moreover
backed on to the garden of William son of Geoffrey, the presence
of which at the rear of the properties conveyed in D&C B 1536 and
B 1272 was one of the details that persuaded Carver that these latter
were identical. In fact it is not uncommon to find in medieval towns
large urban gardens set back from the street, and on to which a
number of roadside properties are said to abut. Of all the details
of dimensions of medieval tenements contained in the Dean and Chapter
collection, the longest frontage recorded was 40 feet, in Bishops
Street in 1303 (B 1020). Yet the tenement that Carver felt able
firmly to identify was that of Nicholas Salemon, conveyed in 1323
(D&CB 1272), and to which he attributed an improbable street frontage
of some 50 yards. He was sufficiently confident of his reconstruction
of the boundaries of this tenement, and his identification of its
early fourteenth- century owner, to be sure that a barrel-latrine
found on the site of numbers 39-47 Sidbury had been Salemon's. Under
the circumstances, this should be discounted.
Thus
the documents that Carver cites do not support his identification
of any particular solid block of land within the Sidbury gate as
belonging to St Wulfstan's hospital during the later Middle Ages.
And indeed, there is documentation to show that at least part of
the block he identified was the property of another ecclesiastical
lord at this time. The Parliamentary Survey of 1649 listed amongst
the possessions of the Dean and Chapter a tenement called the Bell,
occupying the corner made by the city wall and Sidbury, with a frontage
of 16 yards and 1 foot on the street, and a depth to the city wall
of 30 yards and 2 feet (Cave and Wilson 1924, p.197, D&C B1403).
From Carver's map, (1980, p.216, fig 63) these dimensions fit very
neatly the property shown in that position, and marked as 67 Sidbury.
This inn had been in the hands of the Dean and Chapter since at
least 1556 (Canterbury cathedral Archives, Literary Mss. fo. 3r,
'tenement called the Syne of the Bell in Sudbury'), and whilst it
is not recorded in any surviving medieval documentation, as a property
of the late Priory it had undoubtedly been in the church's possession
for some considerable time.
The
fact that Carver's argument fails to stand up tos examination does
not disprove the existence of the block of property around St Wulfstan's
that he postulated. But if it did exist in the coherent form he
suggested then it did so long before he thought he could identify
it. The alienation in fee, during the thirteenth century or before,
of the Bell and other messuages would have ensured that the block
would survive into the later Middle Ages as no more than an unusual
concentration of properties in the hands of an institution which
otherwise had only scattered houses in the city.
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