3 - Classes of the commune before the Black Death

Summary

In late medieval England, as later, ‘wealth in towns was distributed with extreme inequality’. At Cirencester, the wealthy elite and the most substantial shopkeepers and tradesmen lived close to the market; the poorest lived in tenements, cottages and hovels stretched along the roads that led southwest out of the market-place towards Cricklade, Tetbury, Bristol and Bath, and west across the Wolds towards Gloucester. In a military assessment of 1522, 34 men in ‘Chipping Street’ (then more commonly known as Dyer Street), along which travellers from London entered the town, were assessed as holding £1,260 in goods and stock. Dyer Street was Cirencester's High Street; its residents were the wealthiest. Travellers entering the town from (or travelling to) Northleach, Burford, Oxford, Reading and London passed a great cross situated ‘near the extremity of the borough, at the first stream of water’, proceeding along Dyer Street to its opening into the still-spacious market-place in front of the church. In 1522 the taxpayers of Dyer ward paid far more tax than those of Abbot Street (9 men, £120), Cricklade Street (9 men, £121), Gosditch Street (16 men, £293), St Cecily Street (4 men, £8), Castle Street (7 men, £152) and St Lawrence Street (6 men, £3). The size of the place was such that no-one in the parish (more extensive than the town) lived more than ten minutes away from the centre.