Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

But if the Trinity Guild was in this complete sense the governing body of the town – if its legislation was at once so characteristic and so irresistible – by what strange access of modesty was it restrained from taking to itself the glory, and letting its name blot out all others on the city roll?[414] Such renunciation, we can scarcely doubt, whether in Coventry or in other places where the problem presents itself, was more likely to spring from the “grace of guile” than from modesty. From the point of view of worldly wisdom, indeed, the arguments for a diplomatic self-effacement were overwhelming; for it was easy to discern the dangers to its hoarded treasure which a guild must incur from the moment when in the eyes of the law or of its officers it became confounded with the municipality. Safety lay in silence, and if the name of the guild lingered in the Guildhall, it did not pass the precincts; while by a wise precaution the actual mayor of the borough was never allowed to be the same person as the actual master of the guild,[415] lest the higher authorities should in some emergency make an easy confusion between the keys with which he opened the treasure-box of the community, and those which unlocked the coffers of the guild.[416] If there were any doubt before 1392[417] about the meaning of thus carefully preserving the double aspect of the fraternity, there seems but little after it. For in that year when the Coventry Guild got its new formal patent and its increased income, it was only following a somewhat common fashion of the day.[418] In 1392 the bailiffs and commonalty of Birmingham obtained leave to have their Guild of the Holy Cross – “a guild and brotherhood of bretheren and sisteren among themselves in that town … and men and women well disposed in other towns and in the neighbourhood” – which might hold lands in mortmain, and which was intimately connected with the governing body of the town. The Town Hall or Guild Hall was built by it, and charities were distributed “according to the ordering and will of the bailiffs and commonalty”; and it “kept in good reparacioune two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous highways, the charge whereof the town of itself is not able to maintain.”[419] In the same year, 1392, “the seneschalls of the Guild Merchant of Bridgewater and of the community of the same town” obtained a grant to assign certain lands in mortmain,[420] and an indenture which probably belongs to the beginning of the reign of Edward the First[421] proves that there was a close relation of this guild on one side to the fraternity of S. Mary or of the Holy Cross, and on the other to the corporation of the town. The brotherhood of the Holy Cross at Abingdon, which was established under Richard the Second, seems to have been practically the governing body of the borough, owned most of the landed property in the town in the fifteenth century, and spent money liberally in the building of churches and the market cross.[422]

Such guilds as these seem to have been the quick retort of the towns to the Act of 1391, which for the first time extended to cities and boroughs the Statute of Mortmain passed in 1279, and placed them in a position where they could thenceforth boast of no advantage over religious corporations, and like them had to buy leave to hold property. But it seemed beyond the wit of man to put English traders into a difficulty which was not by their very touch turned into a new opportunity for gain. If right to hold corporate property must now be bought, whatever claimant appeared, then why should it not be bought by a private society of merchants, sheltered under the Holy Cross or the Trinity, rather than by the town community or the burgesses? On the one hand the leading citizens, the intelligent and prosperous men of the town, thus secured an indestructible claim to guide its fortunes aright; on the other hand the town funds were by the same measure garnered once for all in a safe hiding-place – in other words, if troublesome officers from the exchequer should come with demands for inconvenient rent or forfeitures, they were met by the fact that the men of the town had nothing, while the men of the guild owed nothing. The system seems to have worked as effectively as the British constitution itself. We know that the Coventry Guild, besides the property it already held, had taken over yet more at its incorporation in 1392. But in 1468, Coventry being then the fourth city in the kingdom, it was £800 in arrears for its ferm; and since the goods of “the mayor and men of Coventry” only amounted to 106s., and since the said “mayor and men” had no other goods or lands within the bailiwick that could be taken into the king’s hands, no further payment was then made.[423] If we remember the wealth of the Trinity and Corpus Christi Guilds, the fact that they probably held the main portion of the common property,[424] and their close connexion with the city government,[425] it is plain that the town was doing very good business in withdrawing its funds from the reach of the king’s officers; and that the traders had adequately realized their purpose in setting up in their Townhall one of those familiar companies which was admitted at home to be in effect the corporation, but which was officially known at Westminster only as a “simple” social-religious fraternity that yearly carried S. George and his Dragon or some other poetic emblem through the streets with solemn festival, or kept great tendrilles of wax burning before the Holy Cross in the parish church.

That the Trinity society of Coventry was not the last of these astute fraternities of traders we know;[426] that it was not the first we may safely believe. Indeed, it might well have been modelled on the fraternity of the Trinity at Lynn[427]– an older company by a hundred and fifty years, whose members would at no time have found any trouble in discussing the secrets of their policy with the merchants of Coventry. It may be that the texture of society was never so simple or so uniform as historians have believed, that the humble mediæval merchant loomed big in the eyes of his yet humbler fellow-citizens, and that in many a trading town the Guild Merchant was the monument of the successful capitalists of the village, and of a triumph so complete that the petty details of its progress fell out of memory. How many typical forms the early guild may have taken from town to town, as it squeezed its way with or without a welcome into communities of every shape and consistence, we have not yet materials to say; nor do we yet know by what varieties of compact it may have become the indispensable minister or the master of the municipal authority; or what was its common relation to the lesser forms of trade. It is indeed conceivable that later research may show us that in many cases the subjection of the crafts to the town – a subjection so astonishing in the silence, the calm, the rapidity with which it is affected – was carried out by the indissoluble union of guild and corporation. Organized in days when the way to wealth lay in the buying and selling of raw material, and in consequence by its constitution destitute of powers to follow the artizan into his workroom and meddle with his tools and the stuff of his trade, the Guild Merchant must very early have seen its officers falling behind the officers of the town before whom all bars and doors were thrown open; but if, suiting their policy to the necessities of the situation, seneschals and scavins of the Guild preserved their power by becoming bailiffs and councillors of the borough, not by laying down their authority before the wardens of the cobblers or the tailors, or even by taking them into its councils; such a guild might make its end neither by resigning to the crafts its cherished prerogatives nor by a spontaneous death, but by a consecrated alliance, in which it only seemed to merge its identity in the borough corporation, while in reality it secured the preservation of its ancient name and guaranteed the traditions and authority of its order. As in Coventry, the force which had first served to overthrow the mastery of the lord of the soil might be employed later to enforce its own despotism over a subject people; and the question whether it used an old or a new name was a matter of little consequence to the inferior and dependent class. In either case the control of the town rested in the hands of an oligarchy of the richer sort of traders, who by combination were able to exact from the mass of the working people an unlimited submission, and practically held at their mercy the fortunes of the free commons of the city.

NOTE A

The satisfactory working of the system may be inferred from its continued use in the next century. Plymouth may serve as an illustration. Among the three little fishing hamlets, the Augustinian Priors’ Sutton or South Town at the mouth of the Plym, and two King’s Suttons which had been granted out to noble families, the first stirrings of independent life seem to have begun about 1282, when the Sutton people, wanting to be free burgesses and to have their fair and market, begged for a piece of waste ground near the port, five perches long and one broad, and a piece of land “in the withdrawal of the sea” six acres big, where the King’s bailiff held his court in a certain house, and where every fishing boat coming to dry nets or sails paid toll to the King. They set up a stone cross and a stall for their market; in 1311 they made a final agreement with the Prior, and then or very soon after began yearly to elect a “Præpositus, or Custos Ville de Sutton Priors, which did then rule and govern under the King.” (In the time of Edward the Third he was called mayor; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 274-5, 279, see also 297.) In 1411 the townsmen petition that they may yearly elect a mayor and be incorporated so as to be able to buy tenements without royal license (Gross, i. 94); but apparently it was not till 1440 that they really gained their wish by the efforts of a rich merchant of Bristol, Richard Trenode, who traded with Plymouth, and of his sister Thomasine, widow of a Plymouth citizen; who at great cost and labour won for the group of hamlets their final union into the free borough of Plymouth “with one Mayor and one perpetual Commonalty”; for which the town in gratitude bound itself in a sum of £200 to maintain a chaplain in the parish church of S. Andrew to pray daily for their souls.

The important point is, however, that it was in this year, 1440, that the Plymouth Guild Merchant was either first established, or formally confirmed and given a definite position. (Gross, i. 15.) On one side a religious guild, on the other it was the governing body of the town, very jealous of its monopoly of power, as we see from the order of 1472, that every man made a freeman should be either a whole or a half-brother in Our Lady and S. George’s Guild, a whole brother paying 12d. yearly, and a half-brother 6d.; and that if any of the commons was made one of the Twenty-four he must pay 8d. yearly to the Guild, while if one of the Twenty-four was made one of the Twelve he must pay 1s. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 272.) Like the Guild at Coventry of a century earlier the fraternity seems to have been at first an organization of the more enterprising inhabitants to secure the liberties promised by charter, to make a stand against any aggressions of the Earl of Devon, and to rid themselves of some of their obligations to the Prior, on the plea of a convenient poverty, and a subtle appeal to the new King Edward the Fourth to revise arrangements made by Henry the Sixth “late in deed and not of right King of England.” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 272.) The ancient Guild of Totnes, known as the “Guild of the Commonalty” as late as 1333, survived in full power in 1449, when it was ordered that no one shall carry the mace before the mayor save a member of the Merchant Guild (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 344-5).

CHAPTER IX

THE TOWN DEMOCRACY

According to a theory which is commonly accepted the English borough in its first condition, and probably during a considerable part of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, did actually realize the ideal of a true democratic society; the spirit of popular liberty penetrated the whole community, pervading the council and assembly of the town, the leet court, the guild merchant, the companies of artizans; and under the favouring influences of equality and fraternity government was guided by common consent of the burgesses, by whom elections were conducted and administration controlled. Elsewhere it is known that the early communes, however strong their protest against the tyranny of alien despots, were within their own circle far from democratic in temper or practice; but it has been believed that in England, possibly by virtue of her people’s passionate instinct for liberty, town societies wore a more popular character and expressed a loftier freedom. If this theory be exact, however, the reign of the democracy was brief, and the later history of the towns from the fourteenth century onwards is the tale of a swift decline from the enjoyment of primitive liberty into impotent subjection to the rule of a narrow and selfish oligarchy, the usurpers of the people’s rights.[428] The hypothesis of a constant degradation of municipal liberty from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries becomes invested with extraordinary interest, since all our judgments of the part that England has played in the history of free government must be coloured and determined by the ideas we accept as to the kind of civil freedom in which her people have really believed, the classes who have held to that faith, and the means by which they have pursued it. In the absence of some strong compulsion, forcing men to yield obedience to a “select” body, we question what outward influences or what inward apathy could have led the boroughs, at the moment when wealth and prosperity crowned their vast activity, thus unanimously to betray the privileges of their constitution and to deny their early faith; for in view of the whole drift of English history, and remembering how great a part the men of the towns played at this time in English life, it may well seem inconceivable that the mental and political emancipation of the sixteenth century should have been attained by a people who in the conduct of their own local affairs had already universally abandoned a noble tradition of ancient rights and idly consented to the tyranny of a mere plutocracy.

To find an example of the primitive form of municipal institutions, and how they were at the outset understood by the people, we naturally turn to the well-known story of Ipswich. On June 29, 1200, “the whole community of the borough” elected the two bailiffs by whom it was to be governed, and four coroners, whose business it was to keep the pleas of the crown and see that the bailiffs treat rich and poor justly; and on the same day by common counsel of the town it was ordered that there should be “twelve sworn capital portmen, just as there are in other boroughs in England, who are to have full power to govern and uphold the said borough with all its liberties, to render the judgments of the town, and to ordain and do all things necessary for the maintenance of its honour.” From this moment “the community” as it were unclothed itself of power to lay it on the shoulders of the bailiffs and coroners, who thereupon proceeded to act with all the authority with which they had been endued. They first appointed four approved and lawful men of each parish, who in their turn elected the twelve portmen. This being done, bailiffs, coroners, and portmen met – a little company of twelve, since bailiffs and coroners had all been appointed capital portmen too – to make ordinances about the collection of customs and the police officers by whom their decrees were to be carried out. In due time the whole community was called together to give their assent and consent to these ordinances; and they once more assembled to bestow a portion of their common land on the portmen in return for their labour in the common service, and to agree that all the laws and free customs of the town should be entered in a doomsday roll to be kept by the bailiffs.[429]

Here then we have the simplest form of early government – a council of twelve “worthy and sufficient men” to assist the mayor or bailiffs in the administration of the town, controlled by a referendum to the general body of burghers. The doors of the common house or the church where the councillors met stood open to all the freemen of the borough who might attend to hear discussions, even in cases where they were not allowed to join in them.[430] And in the original idea of the free borough every public act was legally supposed to require the whole consent of the community from which theoretically at least all power was ultimately derived; so that whether a new distribution of the common fields was made, or soldiers were called out and a settlement agreed upon as to their payment, or guns bought or hired for the common house or the church tower; whether an inquiry was ordained about the “livelihood” of the inhabitants and the taxes to be imposed on them, or a new law proposed, or new freemen admitted to the city liberties, or municipal officers elected, it was officially assumed that the unanimous assent of the whole people had been given in their common assembly.

The privileges of the common assembly are perhaps best defined in the customs of Hereford, drawn up in 1383, but which doubtless embody customs of older times. There we learn that at the great meetings held at Michaelmas and Easter, to which the whole people were gathered for view of frankpledge (in other words at the court leet), “the pleas of the court being finished, the bailiff and steward, on the behalf of our lord the king and the commonalty, may command that all those which are not of the liberty should go out of the house and depart from the court; and then the bailiff and steward may take notice if there are any secrets or business which may concern the state of the city or the citizens thereof, and let them proceed therein as they ought to do.”[431] To these assemblies, according to the custom of Hereford, the people ought to come, and if there was anyone “which will complain of any trespasses committed, or any other thing touching the state of the city or themselves, they ought to speak the truth upon their own peril, not bringing with them any stranger … because we do not use that strangers shall come and implead amongst us and know the secrets of the court for divers dangers that thereby may ensue.”[432] In case of necessity the bailiff “by all kinds of rigour” might compel the discreeter citizens to come to the court and take their due part in its labours; and in Sandwich we know that if the burgesses summoned by bell or horn failed to appear, the “rigour” of the mayor might go as far as the sending of a serjeant to shut up all shops and work-rooms in the town, and thus compel the burghers’ attention to public instead of private business.

In the general assembly there was always present the most conspicuous, if the most unwieldy, symbol of the authority of the people, and of the supreme power which was theirs, not only by law, but by an ancient customary right which to the last remained independent of statute or charter. It is true that the common gathering of the people – without executive authority, without power to initiate laws, called together merely to give or refuse assent to the deeds of the government – would in itself have given the democracy very little hold on the town magistrates in the exercise of their office. The theory of the constitution, however, was that those who were mainly charged with making and administering the laws should be yearly chosen for their work by the people whom they were called to govern. The mayor who stood at the head of the administration was, according to the common formula which pointed back to the fundamental right and first intention of the institution, elected “by assent and consent of the whole community of the town,” and “in the place from of old accustomed;”[433] and as each community was allowed to decide for itself how this “assent and consent” should be ascertained, there were perhaps towns where the practice followed the theory. Thus in Sandwich the unanimous consent of the whole town was given by public vote in a general assembly. On the first Monday in December at one o’clock of the day, the town serjeant sounded the common horn, and made his cry at the fourteen accustomed places, “Every man of twelve years or more go to St. Clement’s Church; there our commonalty hath need. Haste, haste!”; and when the people had gathered in the church, having first ordered the mayor to withdraw, they named him and three other natives of the town to be “put in election,” one of whom was then appointed by the whole assembly voting after their degree, jurats first and freemen afterwards.[434]

This practice was no doubt rare, but the theory that the mayor was the elected servant of the whole people, enshrined in the town book of customs, in ordinance and statute, never died out of the common speech and belief of the people. “We must obey our chief bailiff as one presenting the person of the king,” the burghers of Hereford say deferentially, and proceed to make him swear on assuming office “that he shall do all things belonging to his office by the counsel of his faithful citizens”; and to order that if he refused to answer complaints he should be proceeded against as for perjury; that if his accounts were not faithfully rendered all his goods should be seized; and that if “he shall be dishonest or proclaimed or suspected or convicted of any crime, he shall forthwith be put out of his place.”[435] And as the mayor was the people’s servant, so in theory at least his election was supposed to be of their pure free-will. “From this time forth,” say the inhabitants of Wycombe in 1505, “no burgess nor foreigner make no labour, nor desire no man to speak before the day of election of the mayor for no singular desire, but every man to show their voices at their own mind, without trouble or unreasonable doing there in the time of their election.”[436]

The chosen head of the people was thus to the popular sentiment the type and symbol of their freedom, and a Bristol chronicler tells us how, the mayor being accused by an enemy of the king’s household, the townspeople followed after him as he was led to prison, lamenting and weeping “as sons for their natural father.”[437] He was assisted by councillors also chosen to uphold the liberties of the borough; and the frequent use of elected juries in public business served still further to maintain the ancient tradition of rights vested in the people. In the manor courts of the country the jury made its way slowly and with difficulty, but in the town courts it seems to have taken complete hold very early, and to have been worked constantly and elaborately.[438] The system was applied to all manner of local business. Not only did the Leet jury in some towns, as in Nottingham and Andover, occupy itself with a vast range of affairs connected with government and legislation; but it was a universal custom to appoint representatives of the community for any special purpose. Everywhere we have glimpses of bodies of jurors chosen to elect officers, to assess taxes, to make statements as to a broken bridge, to hold discussions about tallages or about disputed boundaries[439]– transient apparitions supposed, when their work is done, to dissolve into their constituent householders, and which appear and vanish again as the centuries pass, till the burghers, recognizing in them an admirable machinery for larger uses, fix or seek to fix them into permanent existence as town councils. To a people inheriting the high and inalienable prerogatives of a chartered borough, with the right of free meeting and free speech in their general assembly, presided over by a “natural father” of their own choosing, the jury system might seem to afford the final safeguard of liberty.

Such was the ideal of a self-governing community in early times – an ideal to which in later ages men looked back wistfully, as summing up the faith and practice of a golden age. Whenever the mayor was summoned to take his oath to the people on “the Black Book” of the city, instead of the Gospels;[440] whenever according to custom the ancient ordinances of the town were yearly read before the people gathered together, the ideal of a noble liberty was proclaimed anew. The boast that the borough’s rights were founded and grounded upon franchises, liberties, and free ancient customs, and not upon common law,[441] remained a living faith; and a tradition of independence sanctioned and enjoined by authority was handed down from generation to generation, by men who believed themselves born into a birthright of freedom for which they need plead neither the law of nature nor the law of Rome,[442] since it was the honest handicraft of English kings and English lawyers, and paid for in hard cash out of their own grandfathers’ pockets.