The foundation of a new town was not a guarantee of its success, but the
east coast was a prosperous location and Lynn rapidly became one of the
most thriving of England's new towns. Under the patronage of the bishop,
the young town was doing sufficiently well in regional commerce for
merchants to build riverside quays. The
diversion of the Great Ouse towards Lynn
served to improve its access both to the hinterland and to the sea.
Its coastal trade (e.g. fish,
pottery, coal) made it one of the most prosperous ports in England
during the thirteenth century. At this time the long list of
exported goods was dominated by agricultural produce – notably
wool, grain and salt. Fish, furs, cloth, iron, timber, and
especially wine were among its imports; spices reached it from Spain,
hawks from Norway. Its trading range covered principally
Scandinavia, the Baltic, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Flanders,
and northern France, and some of its own leading families were
immigrants from those parts. In the
following two centuries its imports increasingly diversified, although
the wine trade became focused more on London in the fifteenth century, and
during the Scottish and French wars of the fourteenth century Lynn was
an important market for provisioning royal armies.
The Merchant Gild must have had a
good deal of influence over the borough's economic policy (insofar
as there was any), since the personnel of government and gild
overlapped a great deal. Occasionally, in the fifteenth century, the
borough assembly held special sessions to discuss mercantile matters and
the deliberations were restricted to merchants of the town (although this
was not the Merchant Gild per se). Full membership in the gild gave
the right to trading with outsider merchants on non-market days as well
as wholesaling privileges. It was also possible to buy membership only
for the spiritual and socio-religious benefits, which was also open to
mothers, wives or widows (Margery Kempe being an example) of members, and
even deceased persons. The sons of members were able to join for a much
reduced fee.
To support its activities, the Gild had (like that at
Ipswich) a monopoly of trade in millstones
and possibly on some other types of stone and marble – certainly it was
active in trade in stones – as well as control of the
Common Staith, or quay, (rented from the
Bishop); the latter brought it modest annual revenues from quayage and
cranage. It also acquired numerous properties,
from which an annual income in rents was obtained. Further revenue came
from entrance fees, the membership including not only local merchants, but
also non-resident gentry and merchants from the region who through their
membership apparently acquired certain trading rights in Lynn; this was
in some regards comparable to the admission of
foreign burgesses" at Ipswich. By 1421
the Gild had accumulated a wealth of £1,403, although 86% of this
was in the form of debts due it, from loans to its members or the borough.
The types of activities or services into which some of this income
was fed included:
public announcements of the deaths of members;
divine celebrations for the souls of deceased members and
for the "founders" of the town – King John and his contemporary, Bishop
John Grey;
charitable works in the form of alms – sometimes as annuities that
make them similar to pensions – not only to members who had fallen on bad
times but also to widows of members, the aged, paupers, hermits and
anchorites;
maintenance of a public privy on the Common Staith, and (by the late
1430s) a customs house and common warehouse there.
The borough government's own fiscal resources were well below those of the
Merchant Gild's. Its budget during the thirteenth century, when courts and
their profits were not in borough hands, was founded upon local taxations
mentioned above; they were assessed only on
moveables – perhaps only on commercial goods owned – and typically at the
rate of between 3d. and 12d. per £. By the end of the century, from
which time taxation records have survived (without any hint that they were
an innovation) the tallages were
being levied annually and the tallage rolls were being elaborated to the
point where they have the appearance of draft financial accounts for the
borough: other incomes were being recorded, such as freeman entrance
fines, trade licences, and fines for market
offences; some assessments due were being assigned to payment of
particular borough expenses; and numerous outgoings were recorded as
deductions from the assessments of individuals who were owed money by
the borough. The tallages might bring in between £70-£90 each,
but still do not seem to have sufficed to avoid borough deficits at a time
when many expenses were being incurred to assert, defend or expand borough
jurisdictions and liberties. This messy approach to book-keeping
contributed to popular discontent with the taxation system, which in
turn led to the clause of the 1309 composition
that tried to limit the frequency and suspected
abuses of tallage. Only a couple of examples of tallage rolls are
found post-1309, and they are more straightforward lists of assessments
only.
Ten years after the composition a very good series
of Lynn chamberlains' accounts appears, although an earlier such account
(1297/98) appears only like a more organized version of the tallage roll
(leading to its possible misclassification in that archival series).
Although borough financial management may have been reorganized, local
tallages remained the mainstay of the budget; by at least the 1330s they
were again being levied annually, and sometimes two in a year – amounts
raised ranged roughly between £100 to £300 annually, with a
single "great tax" in 1346/47 yielding £330. Other sources of income
were insignificant by comparison, although mention of rents bringing
in £73 in 1338/39 is inexplicable for its uniqueness unless that
income was normally separately accounted for. As the century wore on,
sources of borough income diversified to include profits from the leet
court (beyond the farm paid the Bishop) resulting partly from a "new"
leet, gifts and legacies, sale of surplus or confiscated materials or of
unredeemed pledges, fines for
transgressions against the community (e.g. wandering
pigs, failure to answer summonses to attend
assembly meetings), leases of lands and butchers stalls, revenues
from the half of the Tolbooth (tronage,
mensurage and lovecup) farmed from the Black Prince after 1373, and a
share from hostage after 1378.
Lynn also faced some very heavy costs in the 1360s and '70s, largely due
to the war with France; there were huge expenditures on the building of
a ship and a barge for royal expeditions, the town had to contribute
towards war aids, and money had to be pumped into upgrading the town
defences. This placed an onerous tax burden on townsmen (taxation had
been extended beyond burgesses to resident non-burgesses). Perhaps in
part because of this, and inspired by the example of the Merchant
Gild, from about 1380 onwards fiscal strategy focused on the
acquisition of real estate and/or rents as a
foundation for a relatively reliable annual income; a large bequest of
rents from properties once owned by prominent townsman
John Burghard helped set the ball rolling.
Community taxation continued to the turn of the century, but was abandoned
during a period of popular unrest when borough
finances were in disarray. After this, rents and leases of lands,
tenements, shops, market stalls, and the town mills were the backbone of
borough revenues, which fluctuated around the £100 mark annually; and
there were renewed efforts in the 1420s to oblige aliens living in Lynn to
buy licences to trade.
In the fourteenth century the limits of agricultural expansion
had been reached in East Anglia and there were now a much
larger number of market towns and ports competing for trade. Even
so, at mid-century Lynn remained among the top dozen towns and among
its merchants were some of the leading
capitalists of England. In 1373 its advantageous location for
waterborne trade between the Midlands and the continent led to its
selection as one of the official staple ports through which foreign
commerce had to be channelled.
However, its export trade was already being adversely affected by
several factors:
agricultural production, especially after the Black Death, went
into decline;
raw wool (whose export was highly taxed) was diverted into domestic
cloth production;
cheaper salt became available from Portugal and France;
the German Hanse towns were coming to dominate trade in the North Sea.
Despite decline in its key trade in wool and wine (the latter due to the
effects of the Hundred Years War), Lynn was able to weather the economic
recession in late fourteenth century, thanks largely to trade with the
Baltic through Hanseatic ports (notably cloth exports), which established
their own warehouses in Lynn in the early
fifteenth century. Wine imports recovered somewhat in the first half of
the fifteenth century, during which period Lynn's involvement in the
export of cloth exports also peaked, compensating for the negligible wool
trade, although London was dominating the cloth trade and grain export
remained at least as important to Lynn. None of the exported cloth was
produced in Lynn itself; there does not seem to have been any real effort
to introduce manufacturing industries into the town, other than to serve
local needs. There is no evidence of any residential clusterings of
particular crafts that might suggest areas of significant industrial
activity, with the possible exception of
Damgate in the latter half of the
fourteenth century, where we find a number of individuals active in the
cloth-making industry, with a fulling mill
built in the 1390s near the north-eastern end, while the western end of
Damgate connected with Webster Row and Listergate, names both indicative
of activities associated with cloth-making. Nor do craft gilds have a
very conspicuous role in the medieval history of the town, although we
know of a number of socio-religious gilds, some of which appear to have
had a craft basis.
In the early fifteenth century, Lynn was trading as far afield as
Iceland, although not all the trade was
in legitimate goods. Commerce with Scandinavian countries was evidently
of much importance to Lynn, and the efforts to capture a share in trade
with Iceland jeopardised this. For one thing, it antagonized the Hanse
merchants trying to monopolize that trade; in 1415 they complained to the
king of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, who persuaded Henry V to prohibit
English ventures to Iceland. A prohibition was also in effect when voyages
to Iceland are evidenced again in 1429; the borough council feared that
breaking this prohibition would lead the Danish king to arrest the
merchandize of Lynn merchants trading (only) with the Baltic countries.
This in fact occurred, and Lynn responded both by a retaliation against
Danes in the town and by sending ambassadors to treat with the king of
Denmark. The situation was exacerbated by a complaint of the Bishop of
Iceland to the king that Lynn merchants were involved in trading
Icelandic children into slavery.
Lynn had long outgrown its expansion phase, but was able to maintain
itself. This is reflected in the continued rebuilding of houses,
enlargement of churches, and repairs to town wall and gates
during the Late Middle Ages, and the building of new halls for
the two leading merchant gilds, begun in
1406 and 1424.
However, the reduction of the number of constabularies at some point around
the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century may reflect depopulation in
some part of the town (perhaps around St. James). Despite another
economic slump in the latter half of the fifteenth century, Lynn was able
to adapt to changing circumstances better than nearby Boston, and it was
not until the post-medieval period that Lynn's important role in commerce
really declined.
History of
medieval Lynn
