Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

END OF VOL. I

1

The right of pit and gallows was never formally revoked. The last case was under Charles I. (Rogers’s Agriculture and Prices, i. 132). The gallows at Southampton stood on the common; in Colchester at the end of East Street.

2

The Inquisition de quo Warranto, Ed. I., proves that S. Martin’s and other villages were under the jurisdiction of Canterbury; inquests at these places were held by the city coroner. York had a territory of 2,700 acres. (Agric. and Prices, iv. 579.) The burgesses of Dorchester claimed the right to weigh all goods within twelve miles of the town. A special statute was passed in 1430 “that they shall not be disturbed of their right,” in consequence of the Act of 1429 ordering weights and measures in every town. (9th Henry VI. cap. vi.) Other instances, such as Norwich, Nottingham, &c., are too numerous to give.

3

The mariners of the Cinque Ports drew up treaties with “French shipmen,” as to ransom for mariners, sailors, or fishing boats that might be captured on either side; the people of the coast were to be set free without charge, while “gentlemen” and merchants were to pay whatever the captors chose to ask. The shipowners and merchants of each port signed the compact; and all the towns of the coast from Southampton to Thanet joined the league. The document which was drawn up was handed over to the keeping of the Lord Warden in Dover, and in case of dispute messengers from the Ports rode there to see its provisions, or to make a copy for their own guidance. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 537-8; iv. i. 434.

4

Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 146; xi. 3, pp. 12-13, 171, 113. For 1340 see Ashley’s Arteveldes, 126-7.

5

Stubbs Const. Hist. iii. 484-488. Hallam Const. Hist. iii. 36. Gneist, who gives different figures, considers that one of the greatest dangers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the irrational and meaningless increase of town representation. (Constitution Communale, tr. by Hippert, i. 333, 338; ii. 9.)

6

Rep. of Com. on Mun. Corp., 1835, 20, 21; 29-34; Papers relating to Parl. Representation, 93, 94. Vol. ix. No. 92. ii.; 31 x.

7

See Paston Letters, i. 160-1, 337, 339-40; ii. 78, 28, 31, 35-36; iii. 52-3. Richard the Redeless, passus iv. The great people occasionally exercised influence in towns; Hist. MSS. Com. v. 497; ix. 138. For various modes of voting in towns see Lynn, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 146-151; Chichester, Gross. Gild Merchant, ii. 48; Reading, Coates, 459; Sandwich, Boys, 402; Exeter, Freeman, 152; Worcester, Eng. Guilds, 373, 393; Bristol, Hunt, 86; Cinque Ports, Boy’s Sandwich, 774, 796.

8

The first mention of burgesses in the Empire is in 1066 at Huy, in the bishopric of Liege. Pirenne, Dinant, 18.

9

Dr. Gross gives a list of 150 towns which had gained the right of having a merchant gild – most of them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

10

Edward the First in the thirty years of his rule created fifty-four new boroughs. In the first eighty years of the fifteenth century the kings only issued nine charters of this kind.

11

London was not apparently before other cities in the winning of liberties. (Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville, 372.) There were reasons enough for especial caution of Henry the Second in the matter of London.

12

Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 73, note; Archæologia, vii. p. 337-347; Stubbs, ii. 486.

13

Burgage rents in the earliest times were accounted for by the officers not in a lump sum but “as the pennies come in.” Rep. on Markets, 13.

14

Cutt’s Colchester, 111-117, 126-7.

15

Two other innkeepers had much the same stock-in-trade.

16

Hist. MSS. Com. vi. part i. 491-2, 478, 489. In Reading at the muster roll of 1311 there appeared eight men armed with sword, bow, arrows, and knife; thirty-three with bows, arrows, and knives; and over two hundred and thirty-five (besides some names lost at the foot of the roll) with hatchets and knives. In 1371 the town was able to raise a body of archers for service abroad; and under Edward the Sixth it sent fifty soldiers armed with bills, swords, daggers, bows, and arrows, and paid each soldier forty pence “for the King’s affairs into Boulogne.” Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 7, 171, 182.

17

Ibid. v. 497.

18

Act of Parliament for paving Gloucester, 1455; Fosbrooke’s Gloucestershire, i. 157. For Exeter in 1466; Freeman’s Exeter, 91. For Canterbury in 1474, because the “evil report” carried away by pilgrims “would be stopped if the roads were properly pitched with boulders and Folkestone stone”; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 168, 144, 174. For Southampton in 1477, after a century of vain attempts to pave the streets; Davies, 119, 120; in 1384 a tax was levied for pavage; in 1441 accounts were rendered of paving stones provided; payments were made in 1457 to a London paviour. By the Act each citizen was ordered to pave before his own door as far as the middle of the street since “the town was full feebly paved and full perilous and jeopardous to ride or go therein, and in especial in the High Street,” so that “strangers thither resorting have been oftentimes greatly hurt and in peril of their lives.” For Bristol in 1491 when the whole town seems to have been new paved. Ricart, 47-48.

19

To take a single instance, in 1421 the water-supply of Southampton was undertaken by the council, and new leaden pipes provided by the grant of a burgess who had thus bequeathed his money “for the good of his soul.” An aqueduct was made at considerable expense in 1428; 261 days’ work at it was paid at from 4d. to 6d. a day; over £12 more was spent on an iron grating for it, and 27s. 2d. given to the plumber who fixed it; great stones from Wathe called “scaplyd stonys” were carried, with loads of chalk, quicklime, pitch, rosin, solder, wax, and wood. In 1490 a new well was made with a “watering-place for horse and a washing-place for women.” Davies, 115, 117; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 138-40. In many towns wells were repaired, enclosed with a wall and covered with a roof and put under the care of wardens.

20

Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 137, 145. See Paston, i. 434; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 7, 169; x. 4, 529-30.

21

English Guilds, 241, 249.

22

For the contrast in this respect between the shire and the borough see Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 356-7.

23

Luchaire, Communes Françaises, 22-25. See Piers Ploughman, passus i. 139-146; ii. 90-99; ix. 19-76; x. 223-227.

24

Piers Ploughman, passus xvi. 248-255.

25

“The Jews that were gentlemen, Jesus they despised,Both his lore and his law, now are they low churls,As wide as the world is woneth (dwelleth) there noneBut under tribute and tallage as tikes and churls.And those that become Christian by counsel of the BaptistAre franklins and free…And gentlemen with Jesus.”

(Piers Ploughman, ed. by W. Skeat for Early English Text Society, part iii.; pass. xxii. 34.) I have ventured to give quotations from mediæval writers in modern spelling, as I am here concerned neither with philology nor the history of literature: and there are many to whom the old methods of spelling only serve to obscure the sense.

26

Stubbs, ii. 137-144, 239-244.

27

Ibid. ii. 560, 671.

28

Stubbs, ii. 332-4.

29

Ibid. ii. 257; iii. 16.

30

The former devices for illegal taxation on the King’s part broke down when the commons looked so sharply after these matters that no attempt at unauthorised taxation of merchandise was made after the accession of Richard the Second. Stubbs, ii. 574-578. How completely the relation of King and commons had been reasoned out by the people we see in Langland’s writings.

“Then came there a King, and ‘by his crown,’ said,

‘I am a king with crown the commons to rule,

And holy Church and clergy from cursed men to defend.

And if me lacketh to live by, the law wills that I take

There I may have it hastelokest; (quickest) for I am head of law,

And ye be both members, and I above all.’

···········

‘On condition,’ quoth conscience, ‘that thou conne defend

And rule thy realm in reason right well, and in truth;

Then, that thou have thine asking as the law asketh;

Omnia sunt tua ad defendendum, sed non ad deprehendendum.’”

(Piers Ploughman, passus xxii. 467-472, 478-481.)

31

Stubbs, iii. 77; Rogers, Agric. and Prices, iv. viii.

32

See the description of a session of Parliament in Richard the Redeless, passus iii. A.D. 1399.

33

Piers Ploughman, passus iv. 376, &c.

34

Ibid. passus v. 176.

35

Ibid. passus vi. 181. M. Jusserand (Epopée Mystique du Moyen Age, 101-118), justly points out what a typical representative of common opinion Langland was. Compare the popular manifesto of 1450. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 267.) “They say the King should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods are his; the contrary is true, for then needed him never to set Parliament and to ask good of them.”

36

The burden of taxation was gradually being transferred from one class to another as subsidies on moveables, and customs on import and export were found more productive and more easily managed. Stubbs, ii. 570.

37

Reductions of rent are too numerous to give; they occurred everywhere, and were sometimes apparently bought at a considerable price. (See Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 366.) Loans from the towns seem to have been voluntary. In 1435 the Sandwich commonalty refused to lend money to the King; and further excused themselves from sending him soldiers for the defence of Calais, “having all the men they can spare already employed in the service of the Duke of York.” (Boys, 672.) A grant to the King was again refused in 1486. (Ibid. 678.) The Norwich citizens got into trouble for instituting a suit to have their loan returned (Blomefield, iii. 147, 152). In 1424 Lynn lent 400 marks, and in 1428 the council agreed that burgesses of parliament should receive from executors of the late king a hundred pounds for a pledged circlet of gold because they could not get more (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 161). In 1491 the king was at Bristol, where he had a benevolence of £1,800 (Ricart, 47-48). At the coming of Richard the Third in 1484, York, to gain a reduction of the fee-ferm, agreed to give him 100 marks in a cup of gold, and to the queen £100 in a dish. A list is given of the citizens who subscribed – the mayor giving £20, the recorder £100, and so on. The whole sum subscribed was £437 (Davis’ York, 167-9, 174). It would be quite impossible to mention all the loans, but the instance of Canterbury is curious as the first foreshadowing of the national debt. In 1438 £40 was lent to the king, and in 1443 £50; in these cases private individuals advanced the money in various amounts according to their taste for speculation, and probably got certificates promising interest and redemption at par (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. part 1, 139).

38

Luchaire, 288-9.

39

Luchaire, 64, 137.

40

M. Jusserand in his Epopée Mystique du Moyen Age has well pointed out that the war with France was royal rather than national. Pp. 7-9, 117.

41

Stubbs, Lectures on Mediæval History, p. 342; Friedman, Anne Boleyn, i. pp. 1-4; Gneist, La Constitution Communale, trans. by Hippert, i. p. 334, &c. “England at the accession of Henry the Seventh was far behind the England of the thirteenth century.” (Denton, Lectures on the Fifteenth Century, 120, 118.) “This low and material view of domestic life had led to an equally low and material view of political life, and the cruelty which stained the Wars of the Roses was but the outcome of a state of society in which no man cared much for anything except his own greatness and enjoyment. The ideal which shaped itself in the minds of the men of the middle class was a king acting as a kind of chief constable, who, by keeping great men in order, would allow their inferiors to make money in peace.” (Gardiner’s Student’s History, 330-1.) “The despondency of the English people, when their dream of conquest in France was dissipated, was attended with a complete decay of thought, with civil war, and with a standing still or perhaps a decline of population, and to a less degree of wealth.” (National Life and Character, by Charles Pearson, p. 130-1.) “There are few more pitiful episodes in history. Thirty-five years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had both soured and demoralised the nation.” “England had entirely ceased to count as a naval power.” As for the burgesses, “if not actively mischievous they were sordidly inert.” (Oman’s Warwick, 4-11, 67, 133.)

42

In Ricart’s Calendar in Bristol he enters duly the fact that a battle had been fought and that one side or other was victorious without further comment. He misplaces the date of the murder of Suffolk three years, though he might well have remembered it; and he writes as a sort of after-thought in the margin of his record, “and this year the two sons of King Edward were put to silence in the Tower of London.” (Ricart, 40-46.) In 1460 Norwich had its captain and 120 soldiers with King Henry in the north, and all the rest of its available forces had to hurry off to Edward at his accession. (Blomefield iii. 162-163.) The city raised £160 for the coming of Richard the Third to the city, and £140 for the coming of Henry the Seventh. (Ibid. 173-174.) For Nottingham, see vol. ii. There is no mention of Bosworth in Canterbury, and Henry the Seventh was received with the same pomp as former kings. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 145.) For Bosworth, where men stood afar off waiting to join the victorious side, see Fabyan, 672-673. The policy of the burghers was the same in this respect as that of the great Churchmen, who were entirely passive in the real crises of the civil war, and so ready to serve every king, that not one of them suffered loss from fidelity to any side. (Rogers’ Agricul. and Prices, iv. 9, 10.) The people in general were equally indifferent. “I have read thousands of documents penned during the heat of the strife, and have found only one allusion to the character of the times in the earlier, and one about the later war of 1470-1.” (Ibid., 19.) An interesting parallel to the indifference of the trading communities of the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses may be seen in the action of the Merchants’ Company in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. (Lambert’s Gild Life, 177-178.)

43

See vol. ii. ch. i.

44

In Lydd corn was given to the poor at Christmas and Easter, and gifts to lepers; payments made from 1480-1485 for Goderynge’s daughter, “poor maid,” “hosen, shoes, her keep, kertyl-cloth and for making thereof;” also in 1490, “paid to the poor man keeping the poor child 12 pence.” After a long list of expenses for a thief and making stocks for him and a halter, “paid for one pair of shoes to his daughter 3d.,” and “given to the quest of women 4d.”; summoned perhaps in reference to the daughter. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 527, 526.) In Rye sums were paid to the poor on opening the box of maltotes. (Ibid. 494.) For Southampton, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 112; the steward’s book in 1441 contains a list of alms, £4 2s. 1d., given away every week to poor men and women. (Davies, 294.) According to the usual calculation at this time in almshouses of a penny a day for living, this sum would mean that the corporation paid weekly for the mere subsistence of 140 persons. For Bristol, Ricart’s Kalendar, 72-80, 82, &c. For Chester, Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 371. For Romney, Hist. MSS. Com. v. 535-6. The Mayor of Sandwich had to manage the hospitals of S. Bartholomew and S. John, to appoint their officers, to audit their accounts, and administer their estates made up of innumerable parcels of land and houses left by pious people. (Boys, 17-21, 526.) The municipal council of Exeter appointed every year a Warden of the Poor to look after their many charitable foundations. It had charge of Magdalen Hospital, of the Ten Cells Hospital for Poor, founded in 1406 by Simon Grendon, Mayor; the Combrew Almshouse, founded by Sir William Bonville, 1408; and an almshouse founded by John Palmer. (Freeman’s Exeter, 175-6.) There was a municipal almshouse in Hereford supported by way of payment to the corporation from ecclesiastical tenants for a share in the city’s privileges. (Arch. Ass. Journ. xxvii. 481.) In the fifteenth century bequests by burgesses for these purposes were very frequent and were usually left to the management of the corporation. In all large towns the mayor and aldermen presided over the court of orphans. (Davies’s Southampton, 239.) The indications of poor relief by the towns must modify Mr. Ashley’s conclusion (Economic History, I. part ii. 338) that “no attempt was made by the State as a whole, or by any secular public authority, to relieve distress. The work was left entirely to the Church, and to the action of religious motives upon the minds of individuals.” It seems difficult to follow in this connexion his distinction drawn between the craft associations which had or had not grown out of religious fraternities (p. 325).

45

Besides the customary Latin prayers a Norfolk guild used English prayers for Church and State, harvest and travellers, like our Litany. (English Guilds, 111-114.) The play of the Lord’s Prayer was performed by a York guild. “They are bound to find one candle-bearer, with seven lights, in token of the seven supplications in the Lord’s Prayer.” “Also they are bound to make, and as often as need be to renew, a table showing the whole meaning and use of the Lord’s Prayer, and to keep this hanging against a pillar in the said cathedral church near to the aforesaid candle-bearer.” (Ibid. 137-9.) See also Hibbert’s Shrewsbury Guilds, 62. For Pecok as “the first author of the Middle Ages who propounded reason as a judge of faith,” and one who “might be claimed as at once the forerunner of the Erastian theory of the church, and of the Rationalist interpretation of its theology”; and for the place now given to general councils see Rogers’s Agriculture and Prices, iv. 11-13. For the first signs that the revenues of monastic houses were to be devoted to other purposes. (Ibid. 101.)

46

Agriculture remained stationary during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was in fact but little changed from the time when Walter of Henley published his treatise until the time when Fitz Herbert wrote his work about 1523 embodying most of the rules which Walter had given before him. The real progress lay not in the country but in the town.

47

Nott. Records, ii. 143, 145, 167, 179, 191; iii. 21, 29.

48

Clément, Jacques Cœur, 196-7. Nicholas Sturgeon was ordered by the Privy Council in 1442 “to go and choose six singers of England such as the messenger that is come from the Emperor will desire for to go to the Emperor.” Proceedings and Ordinances of Privy Council, ed. Sir Harris Nicholas, 1834, v. 218.

49

Mr. Jacobs tells me that he has found no direct evidence of Jews lending to townspeople in the twelfth century; there are only some indications such as that they sought for debtors in S. Paul’s; (The Jews of Angevin England, p. 45) and that they claimed to attend the assizes at Bury. (Ibid. 142.) If their business lay, as it seems, with nobles and landowners, it would prove the absence of any demand for capital in the towns.

50

For an account of the Staple see Schanz, i. 327 et seq.; von Ochenkowski, Englands Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters, 220; Stubbs, ii. 446-8.

51

Schanz, i. 329, &c.

52

Ibid. 657.

53

Schanz, i. 543; von Ochenkowski, 216-7. For the Law Merchant see Mr. Maitland’s Pleas in Manorial Courts (Selden Soc.), p. 137. For Staple Statutes see 14 R. II. cap. 3, 4.

54

Schanz, i. 332, 338.

55

See Paston Letters, iii. 166.

56

Schanz, i. 501.

57

Von Ochenkowski, 202, 210; Schanz, 495-500. Petition of merchants in 1442 to be relieved from these rules refused. Proc. Privy Council, v. 217.

58

In 1442 the merchants of the Staple of Calais begged that payment should be made to the soldiers for the surety of the merchants’ wools. (Proceedings of Privy Council, v. 215, 216.) When the lords seized Calais in 1459, “they shifted with the Staple of Calais for £18,000” to carry on the war with. After Edward’s accession, in 1462, the merchants claimed repayment. Edward refused, and after long efforts the merchant who represented them and had borne the chief charges died a ruined man in sanctuary at Westminster (Fabyan, 635, 652-3).

59

A sack was 364 lbs. of 16 oz. each (Schanz, ii. 569).

60

Stubbs, iii. 69, Stat. 27, H. VI. c. 2.

61

Schanz, ii. 15.

62

Under the system of paying a fixed sum in good and bad years alike the poor merchants became bankrupt, and in the middle of the sixteenth century the number of wool exporters fell enormously (Schanz, ii. 17). An extremely interesting statement by the Staplers of the causes of their decay is given by Schanz in vol. ii. 565-9.

63

In the years from 1485 to 1546 general trade had increased by one-third, while the wool trade had decreased by one-third (Schanz, ii. 12).

64

In the Paston Letters there is even in the fifteenth century complaint of the quality of Norfolk cloth, i. 83.

65

Ashley’s Woollen Industry, 39, afterwards expanded in his Economic History, part ii., chap. iii. This book was published after these pages had been printed. Riley’s Mem. London, 149-50; Schanz, i. 436-440, 588-9.

66

The first charter to the company of drapers or dealers in cloth in London was in 1364.

67

This statement is made by Schanz, i. 441, and his reasons are given, ii. 1-7. 31 H. VI. c. 8.

68

4 H. VII. c. 11; Schanz, i. 449.

69

Schanz, i. 11; ii. 17, 18.

70

Schanz, ii. 571-2.

71

In 1472 the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, buys from a London alderman two pieces of cloth for gentleman’s livery, nine for yeoman’s, and five for groom’s, the price, £39 14s.; from a “raymaker” in New Salisbury he buys similar cloths in 1475 and 1480; again from Hadley, in 1499, he got eighteen pieces, and russet cloths from a Cranbrooke clothier. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 436-7, 459.) Fastolfe bought cloth for his soldiers at Castlecoombe, Wilts (Paston Letters). The Warden of Merton, Bishop Fitz James, bought for his fellows and himself at Norton Mandeville in Essex. (Rogers’ Economic Interpretation of History, 151.)

72

Paston Letters, ii. 235. 1465.

73

Debate between the Heralds of France and England, probably published from 1458 to 1461, translated by Pyne, p. 61. Published in French by the Société des Anciens Textes Français. In 1454 the commons petitioned that silver mines in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, should be worked (Schanz, i. 493). For coal see Paston, iii. 363. Nottingham Records, i. 145. In 1307 there were complaints about the corruption of London air by use of coal. Cruden’s Gravesend, 84-5.