How Did a Place Become a Town? Somebody Wrote It Down

A charter transferred specified rights from the person who held them to the community of a place, in exchange for money paid once and rent paid annually. The rights concerned self-government and trade rather than anything abstract, so a chartered place could hold a market on named days, run its own court for local matters, collect its own tolls, elect its own officers and admit people to membership on its own terms. Inhabitants gained a legal status distinct from that of people in the surrounding countryside, holding their property by a form of tenure that could be bought and sold freely and owing money rents rather than labour services, which is the substantive change underneath everything else.

The contents recur across thousands of surviving examples:

• •The right to hold a market on stated days and a fair at a stated season
• •Freedom from tolls when trading elsewhere in the realm
• •A court dealing with local disputes and minor offences
• •The right to elect officers and to make binding local regulations
• •Tenure of property by burgage, held for a money rent and freely transferable
• •In many cases, the right to pay a fixed annual sum in place of assorted royal dues

The motive was revenue and the calculation was straightforward. A lord with an area of unproductive land could found a town on it, lay out plots, offer attractive terms to settlers, and collect rents and market tolls that greatly exceeded what the land yielded as fields. Hundreds of such foundations were made deliberately across Europe between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, with surveyed street grids that are still visible in the plans of those places. For a king, chartering an existing town produced a large immediate payment and a reliable annual sum, and created a body with an interest in royal protection against local magnates. The transaction suited both sides, which is why so many were made.

These grants survive in enormous numbers and they are among the most useful sources for the period, for reasons beyond what they say directly. They are dated and located precisely, which is unusual, so they fix when a place acquired a particular status. They name the granting authority and frequently the witnesses, which maps political relationships at a moment. The price paid indicates what such rights were thought to be worth, and comparing prices across time and place tracks changing economic conditions. Repeated confirmations by successive rulers, which were bought again each time, show which communities had the money and the motive to protect their position. And the specific rights requested reveal what a particular community was worried about.

The freedoms granted were freedoms for members of the community rather than for everybody present, and the distinction was sharply enforced. Full membership required admission, which came by inheritance, by completing an apprenticeship, or by payment, and it carried the right to trade, to vote for officers and to be judged by the town's own court. Everybody else living there, which in most towns was the majority, had none of that, could not trade freely, and worked for those who could. Women were largely excluded from full membership, with widows of members occupying an anomalous position that varied by place. The romantic idea that town air makes a person free describes a real legal principle about escaping serfdom and not a general condition.

A charter transferred market rights, a local court, elected officers and freely transferable property tenure to a community, in exchange for a payment and an annual rent. Lords founded hundreds of towns deliberately because rents and tolls exceeded what the land yielded as fields. The freedoms belonged to admitted members rather than to everyone present, and most inhabitants of most chartered towns had none of them.