Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

IV. All these officers represented the king as supreme head of the law; but other messengers came from the court, as unbidden and unwelcome as the last, who claimed for the sovereign a tribute which belonged to his personal dignity and state. When the monarch travelled he carried his own law with him; wherever he went the steward and marshal of his house had jurisdiction for twelve miles to be counted from the lodging of the king;394 and their authority superseded all other law whether of the borough or the shire. The marshal demanded such supply of horses as was necessary for the king or his messengers;395 the purveyors and larderers and officers of the household levied provisions on all townsfolk,396 save the few who had been lucky enough to gain the king’s grant of protection,397 seized what they needed of their corn and bread and salted meats, called out the inhabitants for forced labour, billeted the crowd that made up the royal train on the various householders,398 and in fact governed at their own will any town through which the king passed. A happy obscurity and distance from the court could alone preserve a little borough like Bridport from exactions of royal travellers; and its people might bear with resignation a poverty and insignificance which at least protected them from evils of so great magnitude to poor and over-tasked workers.

V. There was yet another form in which the power of the crown pressed upon the inhabitants of a borough. Privileges granted by the king might be withdrawn at his caprice; and the burghers lay absolutely at his mercy for all the liberties and rights which they enjoyed. At the beginning of every reign the confirmation of their charters, and the affixing of the new king’s seal, had to be won by such payments and bribes as the officials in high places judged that the burghers could afford.399 The king might at any moment raise a question as to the value of their charters; or he might make some public revolution or local disturbance the occasion for a revision or a threatened withdrawal of ancient “customs.”400 When their rights were menaced the townsmen had but one resource, and hastily met together, as in the case of Bridport, to order by the “common assent” that reins and horse nets should be provided at the public cost and sent to London, for “furthering the common business.”

For the whole of this complicated system of administration was kept in working order by a generous system of bribes – bribes given largely and openly, registered in the public accounts, and granted indifferently to any official, great or small, who might be induced by a timely gift to “show his friendship.” Towns won the renewal or the preservation of their chartered rights by offerings to king or queen, to chancellors and bishops and great officers of the household, with whom they interceded by the aid of a “cow-pull” of swans or cygnets or heronshaws, a porpoise, a store of dried sprats, or a cask of wine. “The law is ended as a man is friended,” said the wise folk of the fifteenth century, and if any legal question arose the town could only “have a verdict” when due “courtesies,” as they were called, were prepared for justices and their clerks, barons of the exchequer and sheriffs and counsel and attorneys, besides any sums required to pay a “friendly” jury.401 If the king sent pressing and overwhelming demands for money, a deputation of leading burghers would hurry up to Westminster, carrying gifts and bribes to the Clerk of the Rolls and the usher of Parliament as a peace offering.402 Or some gracious patron might be persuaded to divert from the town “a quest of the Admiralty, that it would not come thither as was intended to come.”403 When men were called out for war the community would consult by what gifts or “courtesies” it might arrange “to have pardoning that we should not ride up so many men as the said warrant commanded.”404 At the appearance of the King’s harbinger or sergeant-at-arms the first thought was to collect a sum which might induce their formidable guest to limit the number of troops billeted on the town, or even to march them away altogether.405 In the same way if a messenger appeared bearing part of the body of a traitor who had been executed, which by the King’s orders was to be set up on the gate of the borough, the inhabitants would give him a present to carry on his burden to some other town.406

Counted among the usual incidents of government, and reckoned in the ordinary expenditure of the municipality, the payment of such bribes was to all concerned merely the customary mode of defraying some of the expenses of administration;407 and the public sense acquiesced in a prudent and necessary method of carrying on the affairs of state. Gifts to great officials were not tokens of servitude required only from dependent towns, but a tribute levied as rigorously from the free boroughs. The bribes demanded were not less in number; the main difference was that they went into different pockets. Thus the offerings required from Canterbury when its municipal existence was most vigorous and self-dependent, were naturally on a scale unexampled in a little place such as Bridport.408 The gifts of the town were scattered far and wide; a pike to a London lawyer, wine to Master John Fineux the justiciar, a conger eel to the Dean of Windsor, wine to the chancellor of the Archbishop of York, payments to the Bishop of Winchester that the city might “have his mediation,” gifts to Cardinal Beaufort to win his help when it was proposed to change the municipal constitution, offerings to the Bishop of St. David’s – who nominally got a double supply, one present being provided for the Episcopus Menevensis and another for the Episcopus de Seynt Taffey409 to “have their friendship” with the King in the anxious days of 1483. Royal dukes and court officers, bishops, chamberlains, notaries, clerks of the Rolls, knights who had access to the palace, sheriffs, judges of the king’s court, were sumptuously feasted, and messengers knocked at the doors of their lodgings laden with pheasants, cygnets, capons, rams, oxen, geese, with Rhenish wine, wine of Tyre, claret, muscatel, and red wine and white by thirty or fifty gallons at a time. In the revolutionary times of 1470 the citizens were unluckily associated with the party of Henry the Sixth, and for years after their wealth was lavished in buying back the favour of the court. The Duchess of York, who had once been accustomed to receive her tribute of Rhenish wine, red wine, and wine of Tyre, visited the city in 1471, when her son was in difficulties; but the prudent citizens now only offered the poor lady “for bread 12d.” On the other hand when Edward was again triumphant officers and commissioners of the king of every degree accepted pheasants, geese, capons and red wine. The burghers presented to the Duke of Clarence a load of claret and capons which it took four men to carry. Soon after when the King’s Chamberlain came to Canterbury, he was given his dinner at the “Swan,” one of the inns belonging to the corporation, where he feasted off “a wild beast called a bukk” which had been brought from Westen-hanger; and after the dinner eight men carried a peace-offering to his inn, two swans, two fat capons, four capons, four pheasants, fifty-six gallons of red wine, and half a gallon of muscatel; and shortly after another tribute was sent up to him in London.410

But behind this customary system of bribes and gifts lay the deep and permanent trouble of perpetual uncertainty and dread. Everywhere authority came home to the unhappy subjects as a mere matter of arbitrary and violent caprice, and the main function of government as that of rough extortion and successful pillage; while the recognition of privilege on every side blotted out all sense of equality before the law, and the weak, knowing all their helplessness, were as anxious to buy the commodity of protection, as the powerful, conscious of their might, were willing to make a gain of it. Canterbury sought the patronage of leading people in the county or the court;411 Norwich profited, so long as he was in favour, by the protection of Suffolk; York gratefully recognised the services of the Duke of Gloucester. When he passed through the city, an order was sent out by the corporation that every alderman and council man in livery, and every member of any craft in his best array, should go out to meet him at the gate – the commoners being in their places by the early dawn, at three of the morning, the grand people an hour later in consideration of their rank. In 1482 the Duke acted as mediator between the city and the King in the matter of the election of a mayor, and the council agreed that in regard of “the great labour of the good and benevolent lordship,” that he “have at all times done for the weal of this city,” the whole community should join in giving him “a laud and thank;” and the aldermen dressed in scarlet, with the Council of Twenty-four in murrey or crimson, attended at the mayor’s house to present the Duke with a gift of all kinds of wine and fish, and lead a procession of the whole commonalty to his lodging at the Friar Austins.412

Patronage and protection, however, were dearly bought at all times, and at any moment their price, determined by the reckless habits of a lord, or the necessity of a king, or the greed of a sheriff, might be raised so as to bring years of confusion to municipal finances. Demands sudden and irregular, which no wisdom could calculate beforehand and no prudence could avert, wasted the substance of the people; and thrifty burghers learned to measure their progress to independence by their success in limiting the pleas which the great could urge as reasons for levying toll and tribute on their labour. The love of liberty was forced on them by the practical needs of life. A people long used to hardship, dependent on the capricious mercy of their masters, subject without appeal to impositions laid on them by the stronger hand, they learned by daily experience that government by laws made without their own consent, and administered by officers imposed on them against their will, was the very definition of slavery. By a rude experience of alien officials they were effectually taught that the first necessity of a free community was the right of choosing its own governors, that the control of life and goods and the responsibilities of any office of honour and profit and trust in the town should no longer be entrusted to strangers, but committed into the hands of their own fellow citizens, of whose fidelity, patriotism, and credit they could assure themselves. It was impossible that all the fortunes of their commerce should hang on the will of some distant master whose faculty of ruling them in all their concerns rested on the mere superiority of power; and traders everywhere demanded authority to order their own business, and rule their markets. The inhabitants of a town could not claim the property in their own borough till they had secured the right of holding it directly from the crown at a yearly rent which they themselves should pay into the exchequer at Westminster;413 and even then their privileged existence was a mere matter of royal caprice till they found means to have the corporate succession of the borough legally recognized.414 Their municipality was threatened with financial calamities unless they could win exemption from the Statute of Mortmain, and obtain the right of holding property for the town’s good.415 The bondage under which they lay to the sheriff416 and tax-gatherer could only be broken when they were given full powers to assess and collect all their own taxes.417 Vexed and impoverished by journeys to distant courts for justice, harassed by the interference in their most private affairs of some far-off governor, forced in every recurring emergency to carry appeals for justice or petitions for favour to an alien power separate from all their interests, they urged the claim that right should be done to the burghers in their own courts and by their own officers as of the very essence of any true liberty. “We are the citizens of our lord the king,” said the burghers of Hereford, “and have the custody of his city for us and for his heirs and for our heirs, and we ought not to go out of our city for the recovering of our debts, for divers dangers and misfortunes which might happen to our wives and children; and if we ought to spend our goods and chattels in parts afar off, by impleading and labouring for that, by that means and the like we shall be impoverished; and being made poor, we shall not have wherewith to keep the city, and so disinheritance by such ways would easily fall upon our children.”418 And as the burghers claimed that each community should have absolute control over its members for the peace and order of the commonwealth, so they were resolute that no powerful patron, within or without the borough, should on any plea whatever venture to aid or “maintain” a townsman who had offended against the municipal law, “because by such maintainers or protectors a common contention might arise amongst us, and horrible manslaughter be committed amongst us, and the loss of the liberty or freedom of the city to the disinheritance of us and our children; which God forbid that in our days by the defect of us, should happen or fall out in such a manner.”419 From the first they were forced to look beyond the question of mere personal regard, seeing how deeply legal forms of procedure affected their common life as a separate society, and they had their grave reasons of state for insisting that the older forms of administering justice in their courts should be maintained, and trial by combat rejected and abolished from among them, “by reason of perpetual enmity of us the parents and of our children, which might turn to the ruin or perdition of the city and other innumerable accident dangers.”420 In the same way they were driven to realize the necessity of having some share in deciding on the laws by which they were to be governed, and which might have the gravest results to their little state; as, for example, when the people of Leicester petitioned for a charter from Henry the Third to do away with the ancient usage of “borough English,” and grant the right of inheritance to the eldest son, since owing to defective heirs and their weakness, the town was falling into ruin and dishonour.421

All these privileges and exemptions were matters of negociation between the borough and the king or the lord of the manor to be bought for money, or for political support, or for loans in time of need.422 The people everywhere simply won such advantages as time and opportunity allowed, and secured benefits which were measured by the grace of the king, or by the price they could afford to pay, or by the show of resistance they could make to their lord. Nor was there anything startling or revolutionary about the first beginnings of independent municipal life. The town assemblies which discussed and inaugurated a new constitution transacted their business with a completeness and accuracy of methodical routine which might kindle the sympathy of a Town Council of modern Birmingham. In the organization of “meetings” the mediæval Englishman seems to have had nothing to learn, and the doings of the people of Ipswich when they got their first charter from King John in 1200 carry us into the quiet atmosphere of a board-room where shareholders and directors of some solid and old-established company assemble for business with the decorum and punctuality of venerable habit.423 The charter granted those essential privileges which were recognized by all boroughs as of the very first importance – the right henceforward to deal in financial matters directly with the Exchequer, and no longer act as a mere fragment of the shire through the sheriff; to be free of tolls on trade throughout the kingdom, and have a Guild Merchant with all its commercial privileges; to carry out justice according to the ancient custom of the borough; and to elect each year from among themselves officers to rule over the town, who being thus appointed by common consent could only be removed from office by the unanimous counsel of the whole people. The charter was given on May 25, and in the following month a general assembly of the burghers was summoned. At this meeting they first elected the chief officers for the year, the bailiffs and coroners, and then proceeded to decide by common counsel that a body of twelve “Portmen” should be appointed to assist them; and three days later these too were formally chosen through another and more complicated system of election by a select body of citizens named for the purpose. Having taken an oath faithfully to govern the borough and maintain its liberties, and justly to render the judgments of its courts, the new officers then caused all the townsmen to stretch forth their hands towards the Book, and with one voice solemnly swear from that hour to obey and assist them in guarding the liberties of the town. Twelve days after this they met to ordain the most necessary rules for the administration of the town. Two months were then spent in drawing up “Ordinances” which were finally solemnly read to the whole people assembled in the churchyard, and received their unanimous consent. And lastly a month later, on October 12, the organization of the Merchant Guild for the regulation of trade was completed and its officers elected; the newly made Common Seal424 was inspected; and the community ordered that a record of all their laws and free customs should be written for perpetual remembrance in a roll to be called Domesday. And thus with all the grave ceremony which befitted the dignity of a new republic, Ipswich started on its independent career as a free borough.

CHAPTER VII

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM(1.) Towns on Royal Demesne

So auspicious a beginning of municipal life as was granted to Ipswich did not however fall as a matter of course to the lot of every English town, nor was political liberty by any means an inevitable consequence of favourable commercial conditions, or necessarily withheld from boroughs in a humbler way of trade. In a society where all towns alike depended upon some lord of the manor who owned the soil and exercised feudal rights over his tenants, that which mainly determined for each community the measure of independence it should win, and the price which its people should pay for liberty, was the form of lordship to which it was subject. By the decisive accidents of position and tenure the fate of the town was fixed, rather than by the merits or exertions of the burghers.

First among the boroughs in number and importance were those in “ancient demesne” – that is, boroughs which held directly from the king, and were therefore reckoned as being a part of the national property, such as Canterbury, York, Winchester, Southampton, Yarmouth, Nottingham, Gloucester, and so on. A second group was formed by the towns which belonged to a lay noble, like Morpeth, Berkeley, or Leicester; or were held by him as a special grant from the king, as Barnstaple or Liverpool. Finally there were the towns on ecclesiastical estates, whether they were the property of a bishopric like Lynn, which was under the Bishop of Norwich, Wells under the Bishop of Wells, Romney and Hythe under the Archbishop of Canterbury; or whether they owed suit and fealty to a convent, as the towns of Reading and St. Albans, which belonged to the abbots of those monasteries respectively, Fordwich to St. Augustine’s at Canterbury, Weymouth to St. Swithun’s at Winchester.425 In all these various groups the towns were equally willing to relieve their feudal superior, king or lord or bishop, of the cares of government, and the only question was how far the king would go in supporting these demands, or how far the noble and ecclesiastic could be compelled to acquiesce in a re-distribution of feudal jurisdiction and privileges in favour of traders and “mean” people.

Happily for the national wealth and freedom the great majority of towns in England, and almost all those of importance, were part of the royal demesne, and the king was lord of the soil. Fenced in by privileges which had been devised to protect the interest of the King, and which they gradually found means to transform into institutions for the protection of their own interests, the burghers on ancient demesne were bound into one fellowship by the inheritance of a common tradition and common immunities;426 and regarding their towns as the very aristocracy among the boroughs, enjoyed a self-conscious dignity such as the Great Powers of Europe might feel towards the less favoured minor States. There is the ring of a haughty spirit in the answer sent by the men of Hereford when the people of Cardiff begged for a copy of their “customs” to help them in deciding on the constitution of their own government. “The King’s citizens of Hereford,” they say, “who have the custody of his city (in regard that it is the principal city of all the market towns from the sea even unto the bounds of the Severn) ought of ancient usage to deliver their laws and customs to such towns when need requires, yet in this case they are in no wise bound to do it, because they say they are not of the same condition; for there are some towns which hold of our Lord the King of England and his heirs without any mesne lord; and to such we are bound, when and as often as need shall be, to certify of our laws and customs, chiefly because we hold by one and the same tenure; and nothing shall be taken of them in the name of a reward, except only by our common town clerk for the writing and his pains as they can agree. But there are other market towns which hold of divers lords of the kingdom wherein are both natives and rustics of ancient time, who pay to their lords corporal service of divers kinds, with other services which are not used among us, and who may be expelled out of those towns by their lords, and may not inhabit in them or be restored to their former state, but by the common law of England.427 And chiefly those and others that hold by such foreign services in such towns are not of our condition; neither shall they have our laws and customs but by way of purchase, to be performed to our Capital Bailiff as they can agree between them, at the pleasure and to the benefit of the city aforesaid.”428

I. Singular advantages, indeed, fell to the lot of towns thus happily situated on the national estate. The King was a Lord of the Manor too remote to have opportunity for overmuch meddling, and too greatly occupied with affairs of state to concern himself with the details of government in his numerous boroughs.429 County magnates might cling passionately to the right of holding local courts as sources of power, and yet more important sources of wealth; but such rights were of small consequence to a powerful sovereign, who as supreme head of the law could call up criminals to his own judgement seat from every court in the country.430 Confidence of supremacy made him careless to put it to the test by abrupt assertions of authority, as private owners, apprehensive and uncertain, might be tempted to do; and in his indifference to small uses of power and devices for paltry gain, he held loosely to rights that brought much trouble and little profit.431 So long as his yearly ferm was punctually paid,432 he was ready to grant to the townsfolk leave to gather into their own treasury the petty sums collected at the borough or manor courts,433 or to make their mayor the king’s escheator; and while he thus won their gratitude and friendship he lost nothing by his generosity. In surrendering local claims for a fixed payment, he not only relieved himself of the charge of salaries to a multitude of minor officials, but he had no longer to suffer from the loss of fines and dues and forfeitures which were nominally levied for the King, but which had a constant tendency to find their way into the pockets of the town officers or the tax-collectors rather than into his exchequer. In many cases, moreover, he may have gained considerably by the price which he demanded for his favours; and the royal accounts possibly give a very inadequate record of the number of special gifts of money and yearly annuities paid by boroughs to the King in return for liberties granted to them.434

II. As lord of the manor, therefore, the King was a liberal master, always ready to arrange a compromise with his tenants as to vexatious feudal claims. But he was equally ready to listen to their prayers for freedom from the control of officers of the Shire and the Hundred. So long as it was to the benefit of the central authority to break up and weaken provincial governments, to curtail the powers of the sheriff, to confound ambitious designs of local magnates, and shatter pretensions on the part of the nobles which might tend to strengthen hereditary enemies of the crown, so long the townspeople might count on the sovereign’s support in the struggle for independence. In questions therefore that arose as to rival jurisdictions, in claims put forward by a borough against neighbouring lords for rights of navigation or pasturage or fishing, in all disputes which were carried in the last resort to the arbitration of the king, his sympathy, especially if a fitting “courtesy” was offered by the burghers, was with his borough.435 Powers won from local governments or from feudal lords were divided between the King and the municipality; and under shelter of the royal authority large rights of local self-government were rapidly gathered into the burghers’ hands. Functions once exercised by the bailiff of the hundred and the sheriff of the county were handed over to the mayor; he collected the fee-ferm, held the view of frankpledge, levied taxes,436 mustered the men-at-arms, and presided over civil and criminal courts.