Mediæval London, Volume 2: Ecclesiastical

by Walter Besant

Some of these manors belonged to the Bishop or to a Church or to a religious foundation, but the rights and the government and the management of all were alike. Again to quote Archdeacon Hall:—

“Manors, whether royal and baronial, or episcopal and ecclesiastical, were to their owners sources of wealth, derived from two distinct sources—the exercise of a legal jurisdiction and the rent of cultivation of land. The Ecclesiastical Manors differed in no respect from those which were in lay hands. They were the sources of income, not the field of spiritual labour. They contributed to the support of the Bishop or of the Chapter, and of the religious household of the Cathedral, by profits and revenues no way different from those derived by the Sovereign and the Lords from other Manors. It is remarkable that neither the Exchequer Domesday, nor the Domesday of St. Paul’s contains any evidence, that the Ecclesiastical Manors had any superior religious privileges, or were the centres from which religious knowledge was diffused to the neighbourhood. The Manors of the religious houses were in reality secular possessions; and their history, as shown in the Domesday of St. Paul’s, is valuable as illustrating the social, rather than the religious, condition of the time.”

It must be noted, however, that none of the City manors were royal; nor did any of their manors at any time belong to any noble great or small. The nobles had their town houses, many of them large and stately palaces covering a broad area, but they were never Lords of any London Manor. And the Church property in the City included, after a time, only the site of the various religious foundations and the house property which they happened to possess. The Ward of Portsoken, of which mention has already been made, is the only exception to this rule.

The manors, then, became the wards of the City.

The earliest list of the wards is contained in a document found among the archives of St. Paul’s, entitled: “The measurements of the land of St. Paul’s within the City of London.” The date is early in the twelfth century.

The list is not, unfortunately, complete; nor can all the wards be identified. But it is most valuable for what it does contain. A facsimile is published in J. E. Price’s Guildhall. Thus, the first ward is “Warda Episcopi,” the Bishop’s Ward, Cornhill. Then we have Warda Haco, i.e. of St. Nicholas of Acon, in Lombard Street; Warda Alwold (Cripplegate); Warda Fori—of the Market-place—Chepe; Warda Ralph, son of Algod; Warda Osbert Dringepinne; Warda Hugh, son of Ulgar; Warda Brocesgange; Warda Liured; Warda Reimund; Warda Herbert; Warda Edward, son of Wizel; Warda Sperling; Warda Brichmar the Moneyer; Warda Brichmar the Cottager; Warda Godwin, son of Esgar; Warda Alegate; Warda Rolf, son of Liviva; Warda Algar Manningestepsunne; Warda Edward Parole.[5]

There are twenty wards in all. It will be observed that they are all named after single persons except the Ward of the Market Place and the Ward of Alegate. These single persons were the proprietors, the barons, the owners of the land; the wards were the private manors into which the City was divided. (See Appendix I.)

It is impossible to say how many wards there were in the whole City. The owners were barons of right, a rank which afterwards descended to their successors, the elected Aldermen. The first governing body of London consisted of the owners of these estates, to whom were added the more important merchants. In the changes and chances of fortune, the estates changed hands; families died out and were replaced; we find, in the fourteenth century, for instance, that all the old families, whose names we know, had by that time disappeared, left the City, or become merged in the general population. But the manors themselves seem to have remained for the most part unbroken. It is difficult even at the present day to cut up a manor. The Lord of the Manor, called the Alderman, formed part of the ruling body by virtue of possession. In other words, the government of London, despite the survival of the Folk Mote, was a territorial aristocracy. In the Liber Albus (p. 30), Carpenter calls attention to the fact that although in his day—the beginning of the fifteenth century—the wards were known by their own names, they had formerly borne the names of their Aldermen. Thus, he says that the Ward of Candelwyk Street was formerly the Ward of Thomas Basyng; the Ward of Castle Baynard was the Ward of Simon Hadestok; Tower Ward was the Ward of Henry le Frowyk; Vintry Ward was the Ward of Henry le Covyntre; Farringdon Ward Without was the Ward of Anketill de Auvern. So also, as W. J. Loftie points out, the Ward of the Bridge was at one time that of John Horn; the Cordwainers’ Ward was that of Henry le Waleys; Langbourne Ward that of Nicolas de Winton; Aldgate that of John of Northampton; Walbrook of John Adrian; Broad Street of William Bukerel; Aldersgate of Wolman de Essex; Bread Street of William de Denham. Not one of these names can be found in the list just quoted.

By the time of Carpenter, the wards were clearly defined. Up to the reign of Edward the First their boundaries were unsettled.

The Ward Mote has been held from time immemorial, according to Stow. That is to say, whenever a manor became settled and populated, it was the interest of the Alderman to have a court of Assistants who could act as his Police, his Constables, his Detectives.