A new book places Chester at the centre of Medieval Britain. Laura Davis reports

‘IT WAS very unhealthy, dirty and smelly,” says Jane Laughton about the place that has been her obsession for two decades.

Some of it remains, less well known than the black and white 19th- century facades or the city’s Roman ruins – traces of Medieval Chester in a shop’s cellar or in a drainage system underneath the Cathedral green.

“It would have been quite overcrowded at times,” reveals Jane. “It had no sanitation and no water supply and problems of what to do with the rubbish all piling up.

“I don’t think we would have liked it too much.”

From the safety of the present day, however, Medieval Chester is a place where the local historian very much enjoys to reside.

It’s the people who fascinate her, she says, real people whose names she knows and whose lives can be uncovered in the Court Rolls, records of those courts which provided justice at a local level.

“One was a man who originated in Wales, came to Chester as an immigrant and became the mayor of Chester eight times,” explains Jane.

“Then there was a shoemaker called John Pinchware – I like his name because it sounds like it’s a joke that the shoes he made weren’t very comfortable. He was based in Eastgate and you can trace all his life from becoming a freeman and a journeyman in the Guild of Shoemakers, then progressing to become a master craftsman in his own right and having a son who followed him into the business.”

She also uncovered details of women of the period.

“There was one very wealthy woman who was related to the Stanley family and her son married a niece of the Earl of Derby – you couldn’t get much higher in the social hierarchy of Chester than that.

“That contrasted with an alewife who was based in Foregate Street, an area of the town filled with drinking establishments – in the late 1480s, there were 21 brewers and 33 places that sold ale.

“She married twice and was quite successful, but as soon as she was widowed she became vulnerable to accusations of brothel keeping.

“The last 10 years of her life can’t have been a very happy experience but they didn’t drum her out of the city, she just paid a fine every year.”

To research her new book, Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester 1275-1520, Jane spent many hours going through hundreds of Court Rolls, lots of which were in very poor condition and had to be read under ultra-violet light.

As the entries are very short, she had to hunt for the same names on several different rolls before being able to put together a picture of their lives.

This laborious process can have its rewards, however.

“It’s quite boring looking at these day after day, but a friend of mine was looking at some Court Rolls for a different city and found that the scribe who had written them had put in the margin that it was his sex life that kept him going,” laughs Jane, who often goes into the cellars of 38-42, Watergate Street, now a row of shops, to see the Medieval arched doorways.

“It’s this sort of thing that keeps the Medieval period alive. We think of it as a long way away, but although the lifestyle was different the people are recognisable.”

At the beginning of the period of Jane’s research, Chester had become of political significance to the country because of its geographical position.

The city became a military command post for Edward I’s wars against Wales.

Although it lost some of its importance during later reigns, it continued to serve as a regional capital throughout the Middle Ages.

“At the beginning of the book, there’s an illustration of the Mappa Mundi, a map of the world made in about 1300, which shows the known world at the time. You can see Chester in very large letters,” says Jane.

“I think Chester in the Middle Ages was more important to the world than Roman Chester was. If you had a map of the Roman Empire, I don’t think you’d see Chester on it so prominently.” Yet, while traces of Deva are easy to find, you have to look more closely for a hint of the Chester of the Middle Ages.

JANE LAUGHTON’S book, Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester 1275-1520, is published by Windgather Press, priced £20.

FOR more features about the history of Merseyside and Cheshire, visit www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/heritage

lauradavis