Even towns which like Rye had known all the calamities of war were only waiting for a moment of peace to win their share of the common prosperity. Burned by the French in 1377, burned and laid desolate again in 1448, Rye long remained on the level of poverty common in the Middle Ages. In 1414 it sheltered a mere handful of struggling people—twenty-one poor householders in Nesse Ward, twenty-eight in Water Melle Ward, and a somewhat larger number in Market Ward equally poor; within its walls, in fact, there was but one man—the lord of the manor—who was assessed at so great a sum as 6_s._ 8_d._, though there was the beginning of a fashionable suburb in the Ward without the Gate, where the Mayor lived with some dozen other well-to-do householders, two of whom besides the Mayor were assessed at the aristocratic figure of 6_s._ 8_d._ By the end of the century, however, Rye fishermen were known on distant seas and Rye traders in the fairs at home and abroad. London merchants had bought property in the thriving town, and new quarters had sprung up with names borrowed from the capital—Paternoster Ward and Bucklersbury Ward. In 1493 five of the burghers were assessed as owning £400 each, and the total value of the property possessed by the inhabitants was £6,303.[17]
Evidence of accumulating wealth indeed gathers on every side. The labour and enterprise which in earlier centuries had covered England with castles and cathedrals and monasteries was now absorbed in the work of covering it with new towns. A journey through any part of the country to-day is enough to show us how ruthlessly the men of the fifteenth century swept away the parish churches which their fathers had built in the fourteenth century, to replace them with the big bare fabrics where size and ostentation too often did service for beauty, and in the building of which prosperous burghers gave more conspicuous proof of wealth and lavish generosity than of taste and feeling. In Canterbury and Worcester and Nottingham and Bristol and a host of other towns we may still admire the new houses that were being raised for the traders, with their picturesque outlines and fine carved work. Waste places in the boroughs were covered with buildings and formed into new wards. On every side corporations instinct with municipal pride built Common Halls, set up stately crosses in the market-place such as we still see at Winchester or Marlborough, paved the streets,[18] or provided new water-supply for the growing population.[19] If we count up the new gates, and quays, and bridges, and wharves, and harbours, and sluices, and aqueducts, and markets of which the town records furnish accounts, we are filled with amazement at an activity which was really stupendous. Public duty and private enterprise went hand in hand. Sometimes the whole commonalty was called out to help at the church-building, or the digging of a new harbour; sometimes the charity once given to religious uses was turned into the channel of civic patriotism, and good citizens left money to found hospitals and almshouses and schools, to pave the streets, to pay the tolls of their town, to fee lawyers to defend its privileges, or buy a charter to protect its rights from invasion. Thus it was two traders of Canterbury who built in 1400 the first private bridge over the river; and in 1485 a mercer from London, William Pratt, constructed at his own expense the first main drain under the Old Street to carry off the rain-water into the river.[20] In Birmingham the whole community formed itself into a “guild and lasting brotherhood” for the doing of works of charity, and chiefly it would seem for the repairing of two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous ways on the high road to Wales—a work which the Corporation was too poor to undertake.[21]