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THE CREATION OF A MEDIEVAL
‘NEW TOWN’, 1086–1300

Origins

Boston was one of the great success stories of the High Middle Ages. Famously unmentioned in Domesday Book in 1086, it was to become, in little more than a hundred years, the busiest provincial wool-exporting port in the country. Its merchants would pay more taxation to the Crown than those of any other port except London itself, and by the late thirteenth century its fair was to be one of the largest in the country and of international importance, visited by merchants from across Europe. In 1334 it was the fifth richest town in England and, in 1377, the tenth largest.

The town’s remarkable growth in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries owed much to its position at the mouth of the River Witham. The river’s importance as the principal means of communication between the city of Lincoln and the North Sea was the chief reason for Boston’s foundation and early growth as a port. In the eleventh century Lincoln was already a rapidly growing metropolis, handling a considerable trade in wool and corn, both of which were regularly shipped down the river. Boston would also benefit from its position as an island of higher ground in an area prone to flooding, and from being the lowest bridging point on the river.

In 1086, Boston was already in existence but it was as yet only a very small, unnamed hamlet, growing up as a western extension of the older and larger settlement of Skirbeck. It would seem, however, that it was already large enough to have its own church and its own priest. Domesday Book lists two churches and two priests in Skirbeck Hundred. It can probably be assumed that one church would have been that of St Nicholas in Skirbeck proper and the other that of St Botolph, which would later give its name to the new town. Nothing can be seen today of the original church – the great church that now stands was largely completed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – but the foundations of a smaller, earlier stone church about 4ft beneath the present building were found during restoration work in the 1850s. From this evidence, the architect responsible for much of the restoration work, G.G. Place, felt able to describe the Norman church as ‘very similar to the church at Sibsey. It consisted of a nave, with aisles, tower, and chancel … the nave about twenty-five feet by sixty, aisles twelve feet by sixty, and tower nine feet square.’ This, of course, is a description of the church as it would have appeared at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The church of 1086 was almost certainly smaller than this. The original church would probably have lacked the aisles that Place found. As the town grew rapidly in the thirteenth century, however, it would have been necessary to increase the size of the church and it was probably at this time that the aisles were added.¹

To the north and west of the little settlement at the beginning of the twelfth century stretched the vast, flat, undrained Fens, which for much of the year were marshy and full of dark bogs which would swallow up the unsuspecting traveller. But Boston was not entirely without road communications, for here the river was both shallow and narrow enough to be fordable. Consequently it was close to this site that two ancient trackways met, one running south from the Wolds, approximately followed today by the A16, and the other running roughly parallel with the coast, linking the Townlands villages of Leverton, Benington, Butterwick and Freiston, a route followed at least in part today by the A52. Both tracks followed a line of slightly higher ground. The Townlands are a broad stretch of land lying between the inland Fens and the Wash, just a few feet above both. The Wolds road across the Fens followed a causeway known as ‘the stick’, from the Old English word sticca. This name still survives in the names of two of the villages that grew up along it: Stickney and Stickford, which can be interpreted respectively as ‘the island called Sticca’ and ‘the ford in the narrow island called Sticca’. The original island nature of Sibsey, the village closest to Boston on this route, is also preserved in its name, which is also Old English: ‘Siegebald’s island’. This was a very ancient route used in prehistoric and Roman times.²

Just how long Skirbeck’s little western suburb had been in existence by 1086 cannot be known. There is no evidence at all that the seventh-century missionary St Botolph founded a monastery on the site, as has been claimed, but his missionary work – which seems to have been focused on Suffolk – may have extended as far north as the Lincolnshire Fens. The name Boston is a combination of the Old English personal name Botwulf, the Saint’s Anglo-Saxon name, and the Old English stan, a stone. Although little is known about his life, St Botolph was by the eleventh century an extremely popular saint, especially venerated in East Anglia; sixty-nine other churches and four other towns and villages are dedicated to him. The name, ‘Botolph’s stone’, may refer to the foundation stone of the first church, and to its dedication shortly before the compilation of Domesday Book, or it may have earlier origins, if St Botolph did preach in this area. Although he dismissed the idea that St Botolph was buried at Boston, as some had claimed, Eilert Ekwall in 1936 stated that he believed: ‘Boston no doubt got its name from a stone or a stone cross at which St Botolph preached Christianity to the Middle Angles’.³

The parish church of St Nicholas in Skirbeck today.

The name Skirbeck is Scandinavian, from the Old Norse words skirr and bekkr, meaning the ‘clear brook’ or ‘bright brook’. The stream to which it referred would later form part of the defences of the growing town of Boston. It would also mark the boundary between Boston and Skirbeck, although part of its original course was lost when the Maud Foster drain was constructed in the sixteenth century. It entered the Witham approximately where the drain does today, and its outfall came to mark the southern boundary of the new town. The village of Skirbeck may, however, be older than its Scandinavian name suggests. Professor Kenneth Cameron believes that its current name may well have replaced an Old English name with the same meaning.⁴

Domesday Book entry for Skirbeck and the neighbouring settlements of Wyberton and Frampton.

By 1086 the larger part of the Skirbeck Hundred – the manor of Hallgarth (on the east bank of the River Witham) – had been given by William the Conqueror to his cousin Count Alan Rufus as part of a very substantial land grant. This later became known as the Honour of Richmond, and included ninety-seven holdings in Lincolnshire alone. He was the highest ranking layman in Lincolnshire and William had rewarded him handsomely for his support in taking and holding the English throne. As well as his numerous Lincolnshire estates he had also been given nearly 350 manors in Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Hampshire and Dorset. He was the son of Eudo, Count of Penthièvre in Brittany and he had commanded the Breton contingent at the Battle of Hastings. As Count of Brittany he was ‘first subject’, next in rank to the Royal Family.⁵

Although neither market nor tolls are mentioned in 1086, it is possible that at least some unofficial trading was already occurring here, and that at least some of the nineteen freemen listed at Skirbeck made a living partly by providing the services needed at a small port. Early in the tenth century, when Lincoln’s trade began to grow and prosper under its new Danish lords, the site of the later town would simply have been a trans-shipping point, but the advantages of a proper port, with some warehousing facilities to store the goods awaiting transhipment, must always have been apparent.

However, Count Alan’s Anglo-Saxon predecessor as owner of Skirbeck (and one of Edward the Confessor’s greater thanes), Ralph the Constable, had apparently done little to develop the potential of the site. Not only was it still unnamed; it was also extremely small. Domesday Book lists only thirty-two families in Count Alan’s portion of Skirbeck Hundred, plus two priests. If even half the inhabitants were living at the port, there could not have been more than a total population of about seventy.⁶

The Development of the Port in the Twelfth Century

The building of the church of St Botolph was the count’s first step towards the development of his new town. Domesday Book captures a snapshot of the settlement very early in its development, but the next steps must have followed soon afterwards. One would have been the building of a manor house for the count’s bailiff to live in while he supervised the little port’s development. We know that this stood approximately where the Boys’ Grammar School stands today, several hundred yards south of the new church, on what became South Street and was probably already an ancient trackway running from the ford to Skirbeck. The distance of the manor house from the church seems surprising but it perhaps indicates the ambition of the new Norman lords and their confidence in the success of their new venture.

The earliest known reference to the Market Place appears in the early thirteenth century, but it is likely that it was laid out early in the town’s history, probably in the early twelfth century. The earliest market area may have been in front of the manor house, what later became known as the mart yard, or the hallgarth. It stood close to where the Grammar School playground stands today. The first mention of a fair at Boston only appears in a charter of 1125 but it may already have been established by this time. Between 1088 and 1093 the count gave the church of St Botolph, together with a mill and at least eighty acres of farmland to the Abbey of St Mary at York, a Benedictine house which he had also recently founded. The later charter was given by one of his successors – his brother Stephen – to the monks of the abbey, confirming his brother’s gift and giving them permission to erect their market stalls both inside and outside the churchyard, beside St Botolph’s during fair time, and to lease them to visiting merchants. It is quite possible that the monks were already doing this, but sought the charter to confirm their right to do so. Count Alan and his immediate successors may also have encouraged the growth of the little port by settling fellow Bretons in the town. Documents relating to Boston in the late twelfth century contain a number of Breton names.⁷

The expansion of the town in the twelfth century can be traced, at least approximately, through the evidence of surviving charters as the town’s lords sought to profit from the growing trade of the port and had their surveyors set out streets and divide up their lands into building plots. The nucleus of the settlement, including St Botolph’s church, its churchyard and the rest of the area set out for the market and fair, lay on the east side of the river. It lay entirely within the lands of Count Alan’s successors, known from about 1136 as the Earls of Richmond. In the last decades of the eleventh century, and probably well into the twelfth, the new town stood entirely on the east bank and was wholly the property of the earls. However, by the middle of the twelfth century the town was growing sufficiently rapidly for other Norman lords, whose families had been granted lands by William the Conqueror to the west of the river, to also ‘cash in’. These were the descendants of two Norman lords listed in Domesday Book as Guy de Creoun and Eudo, son of Spirewic, both of whom had been granted substantial estates in Lincolnshire. Their lands in Boston would become known as the Creoun Fee, which lay immediately across the river from the church and, a little to the south of this, the Tattershall Fee (as Eudo was also Lord of Tattershall and this part of Skirbeck came under that manor’s control). The latter was sometimes also referred to as the Skirbeck Quarter, a term which survives today.

By about 1160, the town’s eastern boundary, not including its fields, was delineated by a bank and ditch – the Barditch. This ran from where it joined the River Witham, about 300 yards north of the church, round the north and east sides of the church in a wide arc, to Strait Bargate, and then southwards for about another half a mile until it rejoined the Witham, close to where the Skirbeck Road joins South End today, just south of the Boys’ Grammar School. This may have been part of the original layout of the Count of Brittany’s planned development; alternatively, it may have been added later to give the town and its fair at least some form of defence on this exposed side. If this was the case, it was probably dug during the dangerously anarchic years of Stephen’s reign (1135–54). A town wall is mentioned in the thirteenth century, when tolls were levied for their upkeep, but this was probably the earth bank wall of the Barditch. Neither timber nor stone were easily available in this area and it is therefore quite likely that any wall would simply be an earthen one, like the walls frequently being thrown up at this time as river banks and sea banks. If it was an earthen wall it would also explain why no trace of it has ever been found.

The earliest plots laid out were immediately to the north of the church along a lane running out towards a deep tidal pit, known as the Depol, which was probably a deep pool at a bend in the River Witham, where the northern part of the Barditch was constructed. The mill given to St Mary’s of York by Count Alan was probably on the Depol. The pool gave its name to this part of the town but the lane may have later become known as Withamgate, and later still as Wormgate, a name that happily still survives in the town today. Plots also seem to have been marked out very early on the east side of the area set out for the fair. These first plots seem to have been of uniform length and width, as at Louth, where the bishops of Lincoln were at this time developing their town. The plots that ran from the Market Place to the Barditch were all approximately 200ft long and about 24–25ft wide, or 12 perches by 1½ perches: the surveyors used long poles, each about 16½ feet long (or one perch) to measure the plots. The earls were also able to keep close control over what was built on them, at least in the early stages of the town’s growth. Earl Stephen gave his representative in the town, Geoffrey d’Auredus (1125–1135), permission to build whatever house he wished on the plot granted to him, but thirty years later his grandson and successor, Earl Conan, gave instructions to the monks of Easby that the house they wished to build must be comparable to the one already constructed by the monks of Kirkstead.

By the mid-twelfth century we find plots being subdivided and broken up into smaller ones, with arrangements, therefore, being needed to ensure access for a horse and cart to and from the new sub-plot. Thus in 1160, Nigel, son of Halden of Boston, granted to Ralf the tailor of Norfolk part of his plot ‘next on the west to one given by his brother to Ralph … in which Nigel’s father dwelt, being fifty feet long, and of the same width as the front building … (and) Ralf (the tailor) is to have free access at fair times and at other times with cart and horses, from the great street to the land’. This subdivision of plots was so common by this time that the original, full-length plots were by now being called vicus to distinguish them from the new, smaller plots.

As the town grew, attracting more and more inhabitants, we find development across the river, on the west bank. A bridge is not mentioned until 1191, when reference is made in a charter of that year which conveyed a small plot of land on the west side of the river ‘to Alexander the clerk … at Bridgend’ but it might have been built many years before this (probably in 1142). In that year, Alan de Creoun was said to have built a sluice or cataract on the river, and it is likely that the first bridge was built at the same time. The sluice would have improved the port by scouring the outfall, thus reducing any silting-up of the river, which might otherwise prevent the larger ships reaching the port. A quay must already have been built on the west side of the river as well as on the east side, for both river craft and larger sea-going ships; the de Creoun family was keen to both exploit and protect the opportunities that the growth of the town presented. The bridge was probably built over the sluice and would come to mark the limit for sea-going ships and river craft.

At the end of the twelfth century, the town was still located mainly on the east bank. The west bank was still only sparsely populated, but a new road had been laid out on the west side running down to the bridge, close to the river, and plots were marked out ready for tenants. A charter from about 1184 tells us that in that year Maurice de Creoun granted to Hubert of Lynn ‘a plot on the river bank between Robert son of William and Alan son of Toly, with a road seven feet wide between the plots and the water’. Hubert of Lynn, like his new neighbours, Robert and Alan, was almost certainly a merchant, keen to have his house close to the river. He may also have had his own private staithe and he seems to have prospered sufficiently to have acquired another plot nearby a few years later. In about 1190 another charter recorded that one of his neighbours had granted ‘to Roger son of William … a plot of the fee of Maurice de Creoun between Hubert of Lynn’s holdings … running from the road to the water’. A third charter also from about 1190 refers to a grant of land ‘where the ships tie up’. These would be prime sites, running down to the river and the quayside and close to the road and the bridge. The little ‘seven feet wide’ road was presumably one of the many little lanes which by now ran between the plots; in this case the road ran from the quay on the west side of the river to the new road which ran parallel with the river. It would later become known as Gowt or Goat Street, surviving as High Street.⁸

By the late twelfth century we also know from the survival of a Durham charter that among Hubert’s other neighbours on the west bank were Lincoln merchants who unloaded their wares, especially wool, on the quay on the west bank, upriver from the bridge. In the 1190s Godwin Rich made a grant of a house to the priory of Durham ‘west of the Witham, in the fee of Guy de Creoun, where the Lincoln men dwelt’. Here, immediately behind the quay, the Lincoln men had their storehouses, where they could keep their merchandise safely until the arrival of the sea-going ships, south of the bridge. There was often much rivalry and bad feeling between Boston and Lincoln merchants, and it may have been for reasons of security that the latter chose to make the west bank the area for their base, a little away from the houses and warehouses of most of the Boston merchants, on the east bank. An echo of their former presence survives even today in the street name, Lincoln Lane.

Among those who acquired houses and warehouses in the town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were numerous monasteries. Many of the great sheep-breeding, wool-dealing monastic houses of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire had property in Boston, and many of the charters that have survived are from monastic records. They included Kirkstead, Revesby, Louth Park, Stixwold, Furness, Bridlington, Whitby and Malton. They could store their wool here, ready for export, and also the purchases made at the fair.⁹

Although there are no statistics for the country’s wool trade in the twelfth century, there can be little doubt that the growth of Boston in these years owed a great deal to the expansion of wool exports, and especially to Flanders. By the reign of Henry I (1100–1135) there was probably already a thriving trade between England and Flanders, and although this may have suffered a setback in the troubled years of Stephen’s reign, under the strong government instituted by Henry II in the second half of the century there is no doubt that the wool trade underwent a considerable expansion, and Boston was ideally placed to benefit from it. Its proximity to Flanders as an east-coast port, its excellent river communications with Lincoln and, above all, the abundance of high-quality Lincolnshire wool, meant that it would soon become one of the principal wool-exporting ports of the country, eventually – in the thirteenth century – even overtaking London.

Apart from wool, the other principal exports from Boston in the twelfth century were probably wheat, sea-salt from the salterns close to Boston and from around the Wash, woollen cloth from Stamford and Lincoln, and lead and iron from Derbyshire and Yorkshire, mainly brought down the Witham from Lincoln. This trade was given a considerable boost by the reopening of the ancient Foss Dyke in 1121, connecting the Witham to the Trent and therefore also to the Humber and the Ouse, giving access to Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and to towns such as Nottingham, Hull and York. Although most of the county’s wool was sold in its raw state, in the second half of the twelfth century Lincoln and Stamford both developed a reputation for the production of excellent cloth, including ‘scarlets’ and the famous ‘Lincoln Green’, supposedly beloved of Robin Hood.¹⁰

Most of the wool was exported to the Low Countries to be turned into cloth which was then imported back into the country, partly through Boston. The other major import at this time was wine, brought into the port mainly by German merchants, from Hamburg, Cologne, Bruges and Danzig. Merchants from Cologne were particularly favoured by Henry II (1154–1189), who gave them special privileges to trade in all English ports as part of his attempt to foster trade with the Holy Roman Empire. In 1157 it was reported that Rhenish wine was being brought into Boston by Cologne merchants ‘to be sold at the same price as the French’. During the second half of the century, however, most of the better quality wines reaching Boston were coming from Auxerre and Gascony.¹¹

In this period, much of the port’s foreign trade was handled by foreign merchants. The wool export trade was largely controlled by Flemish and German merchants, and English merchants confined themselves mainly to coastal and inland trade. There was, however, one major exception to this rule. Trade with Norway was extremely important in the second half of the twelfth century and this was largely in English hands. The historian Eileen Power claims that ‘the prosperity of Boston, Lynn and other east-coast ports was largely due to trade with Norway’. Norway had no wool or cloth and relied heavily on imports paid for by exporting huge quantities of fish, and English merchants ranked among their most important traders. In 1186, a Norwegian document, Sverris Saga, includes a passage in which the Norwegian king thanks the English merchants ‘who have brought hither linen and flax, wax and cauldrons’. For English monarchs and nobility, Boston’s links with Norway in the twelfth century were also important for the import of birds of prey, especially falcons and hawks. Both were on sale at Boston fair in the twelfth century, and were so acceptable that in Lincolnshire payments to the Crown were frequently made in birds, instead of currency.¹²

For the transport of heavy and bulky items such as corn, wool and lead around the country, coastal communications were vital. The coast was the chief highway of medieval England, and Boston’s growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries must have been partly due to its important role in the coastal trade. More is known about the shipping of Derbyshire lead through Boston in the thirteenth century, but in the 1170s it is recorded that Henry II had 265 cartloads of lead shipped from Boston to London for the building of Waltham Abbey, one of the acts of penance to which he was committed following the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. We also know that lead was shipped abroad in the late twelfth century; in 1184 a large quantity of Derbyshire lead was sent to Rouen from Boston. The town’s coastal trade also benefitted considerably from the remarkable transformation of the Holland Fens in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1086 Domesday Book shows the Fens to be one of the poorest areas in the country, but by the early fourteenth century, they were one of the wealthiest and most populous, producing surpluses of grain and dairy produce. The reclamation of large parts of the Fens, and the consequent growing population of south Lincolnshire, was also extremely important for the growth of Boston’s local market, where horses, oxen, cows, pigs, wethers and other agricultural commodities could be bought and sold.¹³

Before the end of the twelfth century the town’s fair was also growing rapidly in importance, and beginning to attract many foreign merchants. However, much depended on the maintenance of peace and tranquillity, and consequently the income from the tolls charged could vary enormously. In periods of civil disturbance or war, the tolls collected fell dramatically. In 1172 it was recorded that £67 1s 6d was collected, but a year later, when Henry II’s sons rose in revolt against their father, supported by Louis of France and the Count of Flanders, the tolls totalled a mere £22 2s 5d, and the following year they halved again. During the next few years however, with peace and good order restored, the fair recovered and in 1183 the tolls totalled an unprecedented £104 19s 5d.¹⁴

It is not known for how many days the fair was held in the early twelfth century but by 1172 it had been established that, in theory at least, it should run for seven days, from St Botolph’s day to the Feast of St John the Baptist; that is from 17–24 June. Only five other fairs are known to have been established in the county before the end of the century: at Lincoln, Louth, Sleaford, Scotter and Stow. Many more would be set up in the next century, but most would be for only three or four days, and none would achieve the international importance enjoyed by the Boston fair.¹⁵

During the time of the fair, and for some weeks before and after, Boston at the end of the twelfth century would have been teeming with ships and boats; the larger ships to the south of the bridge and the smaller boats to the north. It would have been a very noisy, smelly, busy place, full of tradesmen and craftsmen, market stalls, carts and horses, and men labouring to load and unload their masters’ cargoes and prepare their ships for the forthcoming voyage. For local villagers coming in for the weekly market, or for the fair, Boston at these times must have seemed an exciting, bustling place, full of wonders, not least of which were the numerous foreign languages that might be heard.

The Thirteenth Century: Continuing Growth and the Famous Boston Fair

Two events early in the thirteenth century signalled the great advances made by the town in the previous hundred years. The first came in 1204, when the town’s leading citizens felt sufficiently confident and wealthy enough to apply to King John for a charter which would give them a degree of self-government. The estates of the Honour of Richmond, including Boston, were at this time under royal control and the charter gave some protection from royal interference while this remained the case. It stated that the townsmen could elect their own bailiff, with responsibility for assessment and collection of royal taxes within the town. In the words of the charter, it guaranteed to the ‘free men of St Botolph’:

that no High Sheriff or his Bailiffs shall enter therein but that they may themselves appoint a Bailiff who shall account to our Exchequer for the pleas and dues as they have been accustomed to account to the Count of Brittany when they were in his hands.

To obtain the charter, the town had to pay the exchequer £100 as well as making a gift to the Crown of two palfrey horses.

In this case the townsmen’s success proved only temporary, and the charter was a less important step than is sometimes suggested. The earldom was shortly afterwards relinquished by the Crown and Boston became again a seigniorial borough. The charter was therefore soon a dead letter, and quickly forgotten. The townsmen continued to enjoy (as they always had) many of the privileges of burgess status – freedom from tolls, the right to buy and sell property, the right to hold markets and fairs – but Boston would remain a seigniorial borough until the sixteenth century, administered by the appointed officials of its overlords, rather than by officers elected by the townsmen.¹⁶

Another, more telling indication of the town’s growth and success came the following year when the king imposed a 1/15th tax on all imports and exports traded at thirty-four ports. This was hardly welcome but the preceding valuations, completed during the previous two years, demonstrate clearly the importance of the town and its international trade. Boston’s trade was valued at £11,710, second only to London itself, whose trade was valued at £12,550, and the taxation to be paid was set at £780, only a little less than London’s £840. In third place, behind Boston, came Southampton, followed by Lincoln, Lynn and Hull.¹⁷

In the decades that followed, the town and the value of its trade would continue to expand; more ships than ever before would fill the port and the town’s fair became one of the most celebrated and most visited in the country – so important, in fact, that the Court of Hustings of the City of London had to suspend its sittings during the fair weeks. As the town prospered it also grew, drawing in merchants and craftsmen seeking customers, and labourers seeking work. By the end of the thirteenth century it was probably one of the largest towns in the county, second only to Lincoln. Population figures cannot be calculated until the introduction of the Poll Tax in 1377, when Boston had a population of about 5,500. The size of the town at the time the Black Death struck in 1349 cannot be known, but some indication of Boston’s relative size at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the national population was at its peak, is provided by the surnames listed in Boston’s 1327 and 1332 taxation rolls. The place-name surnames suggest that Boston’s catchment area extended 25 miles from the town. By comparison, the catchment areas of Nottinghamshire villages and smaller market towns usually only extended about 7 miles, and those of Nottingham and Grimsby only 15 miles. Even the catchment areas of Lincoln, Norwich, Winchester and York (among the largest towns in the country) only extended 20 miles. Only London itself seems to have had a larger catchment area, reaching 40 miles from the centre of the city.¹⁸

During the thirteenth century, Boston expanded steadily southwards, along South Street to the east of the river and along High Street to the west. Infilling behind existing properties also continued apace, as burgesses took the opportunities to sell off backyards and gardens to profit from the demand for housing and warehouse space in the town. The fair, meanwhile, spread over the bridge and came to occupy a larger space than ever, the west side becoming known as the Fair of Holland, where tolls for stalls were payable to the de Creoun family. Moreover, as early as 1200 a horse fair had also been established to the north-east of the town, across the bridge over the Barditch, along the south side of the main road. This area, occupying the space between what were originally two separate roads, would later become known as Wide Bargate. From early in the thirteenth century the built-up area also began to extend outside the Barditch; first along Strait Bargate and then along Wide Bargate, and by 1218 the Abbey of St Mary at York had built the Hospital of St John, with its own chapel, to the south of the Barditch.¹⁹

Plan of Boston in around 1250. (Reproduced with permission from G. Harden, from Medieval Boston and its Archaeological Implications. (MB & AI))

Merchants came to the fair from many different towns throughout England. In 1240, when Flemish cloth merchants were assaulted at the fair, those accused of being involved included merchants from Winchester, Beverley, York, Northampton, London, Oxford and Lincoln. It was also a fair of international importance, and merchants came particularly from the Low Countries, Italy, Norway, the Baltic ports, Germany, Gascony and Spain. Goods for sale produced in England included wool, cloth, hides, fells, lead, grain, salt, livestock and fish. Much arrived by river craft and coastal boats, but goods also came by cart along the causeway and Townlands roads as well as from the south and west – across the town bridge – from Spalding, London and the villages of south Lincolnshire. Goods would be arriving for weeks before the fair to be unloaded and stored in readiness in the merchants’ warehouses. The roads would also be filled with animals being driven to the fair, many travelling considerable distances. The fourteenth-century Gough map shows roads radiating from Boston to Bolingbroke, and on to Barton-upon-Humber, Spalding and Wainfleet.

Many luxury items could be found at the fair, particularly among the goods imported from distant countries. Furs could be bought including beaver, ermine, sable and squirrel; vast quantities of wines were shipped from the Rhineland and Gascony in time for the fair; a considerable variety of spices were imported, including ginger, cinnamon, aniseed, saffron and pepper; soap and olive oil could also be purchased. Hawks, falcons and other hunting birds continued to be imported from Scandinavia; in 1242 Henry de Hanvill was authorised to have fifteen marks to buy the king’s gerfalcons (very large falcons) at the fair, and he was back again in 1253 and 1255, again purchasing falcons for the king. Every item of merchandise and all merchants were welcome, for it was the variety of goods for sale that made Boston fair so special, and attracted buyers from afar. By about 1260 the Hanseatic League of north European cities had a steelyard, or warehouse, at the southern end of the town, on what is now the South Terrace.²⁰

Archaeological excavations have revealed a particularly wide range of pottery imports. The wealth of many of the town’s inhabitants, together with its position as an important port, have meant that considerably more medieval pottery has been found in recent years in Boston than at any other location in the county. Highly decorated Aardenburg Flemish pottery of the thirteenth century, for instance, has only been found in Boston, perhaps purchased by a wealthy merchant for his own private use. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries pottery was imported into Boston from North Africa, Spain, south-western and northern France, the Low Countries and Germany, and much of the pottery that has been found on a great number of other sites, both in the county and beyond, would have been imported through Boston and purchased at the fair, often by merchants who would then travel to other, smaller fairs. Much of the imported pottery found at Lincoln and Tattershall, for instance, would have been brought into Boston for the fair and purchased there by merchants, who then shipped it upriver for sale again at the Lincoln and Tattershall fairs. The Wainfleet and Spalding fairs were similarly supplied with goods, including much pottery, imported at Boston and purchased at the fair.²¹

Bulky items such as timber, sea coal and pitch could also be bought, as well as a wide range of foodstuffs, including salt, stockfish (cod that had been dried and salted), sugar, honey, rice, nuts, raisins, figs and liquorice. A wide range of wooden artefacts, Flemish cloth, woad from Picardy, and Spanish wax were also for sale. In the mid-thirteenth century, Bishop Robert Grosseteste advised the Countess of Lincoln to buy from Boston fair her ‘wine, wax and wardrobe’. The king’s tailor was allowed £400 for purchasing cloth and robes at the fair in 1227, and further substantial royal purchases of cloth and other goods were made at the fair throughout the century. A considerable range of cloth was available, from hair shirts to silk and cloth of gold.

The fair was also a place where debts could be settled, when merchants met up with one another again. In 1261, for instance, the king’s representatives gave a bond of £221 8s to merchants of Douai and Lyons for cloth purchased at other fairs in the two previous years, stipulating that the money was to be paid at the next Boston fair. When it was claimed that outstanding debts had not been settled on time, goods were sometimes seized from either the offending party or, if that was not possible, from other merchants of the same town. It was for this reason that some merchants from Norwich had their goods seized at Boston in 1255. Other ‘old scores’ could also be settled, sometimes with violence, although all merchants were supposed to be under the protection of the seigniorial lord whose fair it was. In 1309, for instance, Flemish merchants were seized at Boston fair and only released after payment of compensation of £300 for the alleged robbery of English merchants by Flemings some months before.²²

Fairs also attracted travelling entertainers. Wandering minstrels travelled from one fair to another, providing music, reciting tales, telling jokes – the rudest were usually the most popular – performing magic tricks, juggling and tumbling. One thirteenth-century poem defines a true minstrel as one who can ‘speak and rhyme well, be witty, know the story of Troy, balance apples on the point of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, play the citole, mandora [a large mandolin], harp, fiddle and psaltery’. He is also advised to learn the art of imitating birds, become a skilled puppeteer, and be able to put on a show of performing dogs and asses. Not surprisingly, minstrels with such talents were usually welcomed by the officials responsible for the fair because they brought in more customers. For villagers and townspeople alike the arrival of the fair must have been the highlight of the year, much looked forward to by people of all ages.²³

Fairs were also, however, frequently plagued by criminality and violence. Assaults and even murders are recorded at the fair in the thirteenth century, but the most spectacular example was an attack on the fair by a gang led by a Boston resident, Robert Chamberlain, on 26 July 1288. As part of their plan, and perhaps to create a diversion while they carried out their robbery, the gang set fire to a number of the merchants’ booths, but the fire quickly spread and burnt down much of the town. To conceal their weapons and their identities, some of the gang had entered the town dressed as monks. Many of the merchants were murdered and robbed before their assailants escaped by boat along the River Witham, and only Chamberlain was caught. He was hanged for the offence, but none of his gang was ever apprehended. As Stowe’s Chronicle tells us: ‘The Captaine of this confederacye … would never confesse hys fellows.’ His body was then hung from a gibbet just to the south of the town, but next to the river, so that for many years it would be seen by all shipping entering the harbour: a grim warning for any potential evil-doers.²⁴

Prostitutes were also much in evidence at all fairs, some making a career from travelling from one fair to another, with the jugglers and minstrels. We know that local people, including the clergy, made money at fair time by letting lodgings to prostitutes. So common was the practice that in 1291 Bishop Sutton of Lincoln felt it necessary to forbid the Boston clergy from doing so on pain of excommunication.

Boston’s fair owed much of its success to its position as a focal point for the wool trade. However, this was not merely a consequence of its geographical position as an east-coast port in the heart of a major wool-producing area. Also important was the timing and length of the fair. Until 1218 the fair was held for a week in the second half of June, but in that year it was extended for another eight days into the beginning of July, when the fair at Lynn began. By 1232, however, so many merchants were said to be staying on in the town after the official end of the Boston fair that the Lynn fair was suffering decline. In 1275 it was still being held on 8 July and in 1288, when it was attacked by Chamberlain and his gang, it was clearly still being held at the end of July. Later still, in the early fourteenth century, it was claimed that the fair sometimes continued into late August and sometimes even into September and October.

The fair was important to the export trade mainly as the place where wool that had already been bargained for and partly paid for could be delivered and shipped out. Most Flemish and Italian merchants did not buy their wool at the fair, unless they did not wish to spend long in the country. Instead they usually contracted either directly with the wool growers, or with a middleman who made his own arrangements with the growers. In both cases at least some payment would already have been made long before the fair, and arrangements agreed for the delivery of the wool to the port, packed and ready for shipment to its destination. It was a convenient place for both buyer and seller, for the fair had plenty of goods on sale for those with cash in hand from the sales they had made.

When the first tax on wool was imposed, in 1275, Boston was probably already the country’s premier export port. The earliest customs accounts show that in the 1280s between 32 and 43 per cent of all the country’s wool exports passed through the port. In 1284, 11,208 sacks (1,821 tons) were exported from Boston, and the port could boast that it was by far the greatest wool-exporting port in the country. Throughout the decade Boston was exporting an annual average of about 10,000 sacks, or about 3 million fleeces, worth perhaps between £60,000 and £100,000, nearly half as much again as went out from London. As wool was virtually the only major export from England, the importance of the port at this time to the country’s economy can hardly be over-stated. So crucial a centre of the wool trade was it by this time that wool was being brought to the port from far beyond its immediate hinterland, even from Cheshire monasteries such as Stanlaw and Combermere.²⁵

Most of the merchants who organised the export of wool came from Italy, Germany, Flanders and Brabant. In 1287–88, when 9,373 sacks were exported from Boston, approximately a third was exported by Italian merchants and most of the rest by Germans, Flemings and Brabanters. Signor F.B. Pegolotti, a member of the Italian merchant house of Bardi, listed thirty-four monastic houses in the county that annually supplied Italian merchants in the last decades of the thirteenth century. Between them they supplied about 570 sacks each year. The largest non-Italian merchant family exporting from Boston in 1287–88 was the Lo family of Ypres. Nicholas exported 110 sacks, John Sr thirty-five sacks and John Jr seventy-three sacks. In 1290 they had between them at least 224 sacks. As yet, few English merchants operated abroad on this scale. Only three Englishmen were among the larger merchants in 1287, exporting more than thirty sacks, and none were Boston men. Thomas de Ludlow had thirty-two sacks, Robert de Basing of London had seventy-six sacks, and Gilbert de Chesterton of Grantham eighty-seven.²⁶

Owing to war with France, much less wool was sent abroad in the 1290s, and in 1294–95 Boston lost its position as number one export port to London, and would never regain it. The dominance of foreign merchants, however, continued. The customs records for 1297 again show Italians, Brabant, Flemish and German merchants each shipping much more than the English merchants. While the Brabanters, who were mainly from Brussels, handled 478 sacks, for instance, and the Germans 357, the fifteen English merchants – mostly from Lincoln and Grantham – exported only 144 sacks. The largest English exporter shipping wool from Boston at this time was Roger de Belneyr of Grantham, with forty-two sacks.²⁷

The role of Boston’s own merchants in the wool trade at this time was less prominent. Some were almost certainly acting as middlemen for the foreign merchants, using their local knowledge to organise their purchases from the growers, and others may have been buying wool on their own account for direct sale at the fair. What we can be certain of, however, is that the growth of trade generally during the previous two centuries had made a number of local families quite prosperous. In terms of income per head, Boston was probably the wealthiest town in the county by 1300, and thirty years later this would be confirmed by taxation records, as we will see in the next chapter.

In 1260 five of the town’s wealthier merchants – Andrew de Gote, Walter Tumby, Galfrid de Gotere, Robert Leland and Hugh Spaigne – came together to establish the first guild in the town, the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This would become a very wealthy and influential body, although its original objects were essentially religious and charitable: to pay for two priests to celebrate a daily service in St Botolph’s church, to pay for wax candles to be burnt before the altar of the Blessed Virgin, to organise the funeral obsequies of members, and to distribute substantial quantities of bread and herring to the poor of the town. Later members of the Tumby and Spaigne families would also figure prominently as merchants in the fourteenth century, and the latter’s name survives today in a corrupted form in the Boston street name Spain Lane, where the family’s house and warehouse was once situated. It can be found off South Street, close to the site of the family’s private staithe on the Witham quayside.²⁸

Many of the town’s foreign merchants rented houses in the town for a few months each year during the fair period. A valuation of the Earl of Richmond’s property in the town in 1283 shows that he received, in total, a little over £70 per year for houses rented annually to the merchants of Ypres, Cologne, Caen, Ostend and Arras. He was also receiving £89 10s for ‘stalls and places not engaged by the year’, and, altogether, his rents, market fees and tolls, profits from the town court and ‘perquisites of the court during the mart’ were worth approximately £330 per year. By comparison, his agricultural holdings in the parish, which included 206 acres of arable land in demesne, forty-two acres of meadow, forty-seven acres of pastureland, a windmill and six saltpans, brought in altogether less than £60 per year.²⁹

The seal of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Although wool was by far the largest export from the port throughout the thirteenth century, very large quantities of high-quality English cloth were also exported. English and foreign merchants shipped cloth from Stamford, Lincoln, Louth, Leicester, Northampton and Yorkshire from Boston. When taxes were first imposed on cloth carried by foreign merchants, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, half of all their shipments from Boston – other than wool – consisted of woollen cloth.

Another major export was salt. All around the low-lying shores of the Wash, but especially in Lincolnshire, great quantities of salt were produced, either by the evaporation of sea water or by burning salt-impregnated peat. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a growing population meant that the demand for salt, for preserving meat, dairy produce and, above all, fish, increased considerably, and the numbers of salterns close to Boston grew to meet the demand. During the thirteenth century ships were coming to the port from Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Low Countries, and other parts of England to load up with sometimes nothing but salt. It is likely that by 1300 more salt was being shipped out of Boston than from any other English port.³⁰

Boston remained an important marketplace for local agricultural produce and local crafts as well as salt, and it served a wide area. Pottery made from across the county, as well as imported ware, was probably on sale both at the weekly market and at the fair. Discoveries of medieval pot shards in the town centre, dating from the late thirteenth century, have been identified as coming from kilns at Bourne (25 miles), Potterhanworth (25 miles), Toynton-all-Saints (15 miles), Lincoln (32 miles) and Grimston in Norfolk (34 miles).³¹

The town supported a considerable range of craftsmen and traders. Those that are mentioned in the thirteenth century include drapers and vintners, a spicer, a tanner and a goldsmith. Archaeological excavations in the town, however, have added a few more to the list, and we can also include butchers, boot and shoe makers, manufacturers of bone tools, wooden buttons and bronze buckles and rings. A tile kiln was also discovered just outside the town centre in the 1960s and it is known that bricks and tiles were being manufactured in the town in the thirteenth century, although the earliest surviving example of their use in Boston (the Guildhall) dates only from the 1390s. It is also highly likely that there was at least some shipbuilding and repairing on the Witham, close to the port.³²

An indication of the growth and importance of the town in the thirteenth century was the arrival and settlement of four different orders of friars; three at various times during the century, and a fourth early in the fourteenth century. Boston was one of only a dozen towns in the country to have four friaries. The first to establish themselves in the town were probably the Dominicans, or Blackfriars, as they are more popularly known. Although their house is not mentioned until 1288, when it was destroyed in the terrible fire of that year, they had probably first come to Boston not long after the order had been first introduced into England in 1221. The Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (1235–53) was keen to employ friars in his diocese because he admired their abilities as preachers and teachers, as well as their willingness to take the gospel to ordinary people. It is likely that they found a ready and appreciative audience in the town, but it was precisely these skills that also made them natural rivals to the parish clergy. Conflict between clergy and friars would become a frequent occurrence in English towns, including Boston. Their first house is thought to have been on the same site as the later friary, rebuilt after the fire of 1288. This was a prime site on the east side of the river, close to the Market Place, and facing the quay. The plot, which ran back from the quay to the Barditch, is thought to have been given by the wealthy Tilney family. The reconstructed friary was completed before 1300, when Edward I is known to have dined in the refectory. At this point it housed twenty-nine friars.

The remains of the Dominican friary in Spain Lane as they appeared in around 1850. (Drawn by J.W. Archer)

A second friary, belonging to the Franciscan order, had been established by 1268. This was founded by German merchants who were already living in the town. They acquired land for the friars towards the southern end of the town, also on the east side, just to the north of the Mart Yard and not far from their own steelyard. In 1293, the Carmelites, famed for their piety and self-denial, established their house in the south-west corner of the town, to the west of the High Street, and in 1317 a group of Augustinian friars also established their house in the far south of the town, south of the Franciscan friary, in a narrow strip of land close to where the Barditch entered the Witham.³³

The Franciscan, Carmelite and Augustinian houses have long since vanished, but a part of the rebuilt Dominican friary can still be seen today. It is almost the sole survivor of the thirteenth-century town, for nothing else survives from these years other than the medieval street plan. The long plots running eastwards from the Market Place are still discernable, even though – as we have seen – infilling behind the front properties has been going on almost since the original property lines were first put down in the twelfth century. Although we can assume that many of the wealthiest families of the 1290s had built fine houses for themselves, none have survived. The medieval houses in Boston today date only from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, the Dominican’s refectory building, which stood at the southern end of the cloister, stands today in Spain Lane and is now the Blackfriars’ Arts Centre. Five of the corbels that once supported the adjacent cloister can be seen on the outside wall. A few other fragments of the friary are also still visible, including part of the north wall of the friary church, complete with medieval doorway, which is now incorporated into the wall of a modern building that stands on South Street. Also, next door, in what is now No.12 South Street, can be found a row of three arches carried on slender pillars with decorated capitals; these were almost certainly the arches of the nave of the church.³⁴

Such was the wealth of the townsmen in the first half of the fourteenth century that they preferred to demolish the old Norman church of St Botolph completely and build an entirely new one: the great church we see today. As the town had grown in the previous two centuries, the little Norman church had become quite inadequate, although part of the growing demand would have been met by the friaries and by the church of St John, which was to be found at the southern end of the town, on the Skirbeck road, together with a hospital and almshouse. Like most of the friaries, this too has long since vanished, although its churchyard remained in use until the nineteenth century. Today, it is recalled only in the street name St John’s Road.³⁵