Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

Nor must it be forgotten that from the very first no man of the people could hope to aspire to any post in the administration of the town. All important public offices were confined to persons of a certain station, and “the rank of a mayor” or “the rank of a sheriff” were well-known mediæval phrases which expressed a comfortable social position maintained by an adequate income. Councillors and chief officers were chosen from the class of “magnates”[467]– men not bound by the law of frankpledge and possibly holding a position of some authority – of whom there are traces in Norwich and possibly in other cities; or from the “good and sufficient” men of the borough; or from the class who were technically known as the “probi homines,” the “good” or “credible” or “lawful men” privileged to serve as legal assessors in the civic courts and “credible witnesses” to bargains, and who had probably come to be regarded as an official class and gradually organized into a separate caste.[468] This choice of wealthy officials ultimately depended of course on the custom of those days by which the chief officers and the townsfolk were held mutually responsible for defaults; so that in the interests of the people themselves, as well as of the king, it was important to secure men of substance whose possessions formed a guarantee to both parties – a guarantee which was by no means originally a figure of speech, as we see from the case of the Lincoln bailiffs in 1276, when the receipts for paying the ferm were diminished, “wherefore they who have once been bailiffs of Lincoln can scarcely rise from poverty and misery.”[469] The opulent class who bore the chief burden of responsibility shared the compensating pleasures of power. We have seen the primitive simplicity with which at Ipswich twelve portmen divided among themselves all the posts of bailiffs, coroners, and councillors; and in fact among the handful of “worthy” men which could be produced in modest little market-towns,[470] whose clustered dwellings of wood and plaster, bordering narrow alleys that ran to the central market-place, lay almost hidden in fields and gardens, the burghers had actually no great choice of rulers. From generation to generation the chief municipal offices were handed down in the few leading families of the place. A great merchant would take the command again and again while the whole town lay at his discretion, for though a universal law forbade the continuous holding of office and usually fixed an interval of two or more years before re-election, either the law was persistently ignored, or as soon as the period of retirement had elapsed, power inevitably fell back to its former possessor.[471] How greatly this state of things was determined by economic conditions we may see from the fact that in a place like Nottingham, where wealth was widely distributed, it does not seem that any single family rose to very marked supremacy;[472] and in general a comparison of lists of town officers indicates that as the growth of trade in the fifteenth century increased the numbers of well-to-do burghers and merchants, there was a corresponding variety in the names of men entrusted with office. At the best however the upper class was but a little one, and usually the corporation with its one or two councils composed of twelve and twenty-four members, or even of twenty-four and forty-eight, as well as the retired magnates who constituted “the clothing,” and a whole army of officials of various kinds, recorder, town clerk, chamberlains or treasurers, aldermen, decennaries of the market, bailiffs, coroners, arbitrators, jurors, and the like, must have absorbed a very considerable proportion of the well-to-do inhabitants. A close caste was easily developed out of the compact body of merchants and thriving traders who formed the undisputed aristocracy of the town, and whose social pre-eminence doubtless went far to establish their political dominion.

And if very little space was practically found in mediæval times for democratic theories of government, whether in the conception of a governing class, or in the working of the general assembly, still less are they to be found in the prevailing views as to representation. In the case of Ipswich we have seen how rapidly the great body of the townspeople retire from the scene when they have fulfilled their first simple function of electing bailiffs and coroners. It is the bailiffs and coroners who nominate the committee to elect the portmen,[473] and then the twelve between them take charge in a general way of the borough and its affairs, while the commons go back to attend to their own business and are henceforth only from time to time summoned for a general assembly, where they gather like a Greek chorus to view with official eyes the progress of the drama, and to applaud in due form the action of the ultimate executive or express an expected and resigned acquiescence with all their will. People talked, it is true, of election by the whole community, and this was the theory of ordinance and charter, but the universal fashion of the day in all ranks and classes was to adopt some more or less complicated system of indirect election which, whether intentionally or not, was admirably suited to the use and convenience of the minority. The nobles who under the provisions of Oxford formed the council of Fifteen to assist Henry the Third used exactly the same devices as were of common experience among merchants and artizans and burghers; for not only in trading or in social-religious guilds were the members accustomed to choose their governor through a select committee of four, five, seven, eight, or twelve men; but in the boroughs themselves the plans by which the sovereign people delegated their power to a few “worthy and sufficient” citizens were so ingenious and elaborate that we may well doubt whether the majority had ever any chance at all of making their will prevail. In some cases indeed the leading people of the town were altogether independent of popular election, and hereditary owners of the wards sat in the high places of the hall in virtue of their landed property,[474] not of the people’s will; while in others a guild merchant apparently imposed its own council on the community at large.[475]

Nor can we wonder at anxiety to secure an efficient governing class if we consider for a moment the work that lay before the council. From the affairs of a pig-market and the letting of butchers’ stalls they were required to pass to business of the most complicated kind – to constitute a Board of Trade concerned with inland and foreign commerce; a Foreign Office constantly busied with the external relations of the town, whether to overlord, or king, or rival boroughs; a legal committee responsible for all the complicated law business that might arise out of any one of these relations, or out of the defence of the chartered privileges of the borough; a Treasury Board whose incomings were drawn in infinitesimal proportions from the most varied and precarious sources, and whose outgoings included every possible payment with which any public body has ever had to deal. The king might call on them for the supervision of the staple trade, the management of river basins, the draining of marshes, the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, the local carrying out of laws framed by Parliament, the guarding of the coast, the provisioning and training of detachments of the national army. The responsibility thrown on them by the central government was constantly increased as time went on; and there was probably nothing which proved so important in tightening the hold of the oligarchy on government as the appointment of a certain number of the upper council to be justices of the peace, having a formidable authority over the working classes, besides the power to draw into their own hands a mass of business which had once gone to the court leet of the burghers.

No doubt the official caste from the beginning sufficiently appreciated the pleasures of power not to deprecate their increase; but apart from any question of greedy usurpation, it was inevitable under such conditions that a strong government should have been formed of experts who need not necessarily be changed every year or elected by a popular vote. The date at which some custom of this kind became established is probably much earlier than is commonly supposed; and there is evidence to shew that it often preceded by a long time the charters which make it legally binding. Possibly indeed the administrative despotism of a narrow oligarchy was often as old as the independence of the borough itself. The need for capable rulers may have been even greater at the perilous outset of its life than in its later times of confident strength; and when we remember the imperfection of the primitive machinery for ascertaining the popular will, the weakness of the general assembly, and the limitations put on public election, it is evident that the theory of a free and equal people electing their own government by the unanimous consent of the whole community, and controlling administration by a constant criticism, was a theory which could never have been practically carried into effect; which as a matter of fact the governing class had no wish to encourage, and which the mass of the governed had neither the cohesion nor the intelligence to enforce.

Once in authority it must be admitted that the ruling class carried themselves bravely, shirking neither responsibility nor power. In their splendid robes of office, with furs and stripes and rich colours changed at every great occasion to make a more imposing show, the municipal officers were the dazzling centre of every procession and public function in the town – at Advent services, at the bull-baiting and public games,[476] at the pageant of Corpus Christi, or the yearly solemnity of recounting to the people the ordinances and liberties of the borough. Strict discipline, unquestioned authority, a belief in firm government, were prominent in their administration. Of the general body of burgesses and craft guilds implicit obedience was required, and the corporation allowed neither discussion nor interference with its decrees. Windows through which inquisitive townsmen peeped into the chamber where they consulted were blocked up; listeners under the eaves “to hear the words of the council” were violently discouraged; severe rules forbade the meddling of too active citizens, and fines and imprisonment fell on those who “in an abusive manner” called a councillor a “Fliperarde,”[477] or who wickedly “wished that all the jurats had been burnt in the common ship,” or with “opprobrious and crooked words” declared that they were “false thieves,” or that they “were looked upon at Dover as so many grooms.”[478] Administrative capacity went hand in hand with the self-assertion and exclusive temper of a successful class. To the townspeople, amid the confusion of national revolutions and civil war, the mayor remained a standing witness to the enduring forces of an order triumphant over discord and confusion; as in Exeter, where between 1477 and 1497 the citizens had seen a skilfully organized revolt shattered before the municipal power, and a victorious mayor holding office undisturbed under four successive kings, three of whom had come to the crown by the violent death or deposition of their predecessors.[479]

There is perhaps no better type of the superior town official than the Common Clerk, in his dress of sanguine cloth striped with violet rays, or of more sober green bordered with fur.[480] The business of his office came into great consideration with the growth of local liberties. In the fifteenth century there was scarcely a single town which did not require to have its “Custumal” written out afresh from the faded and worn-out copies made in earlier centuries,[481] while in a vast number of cases, where the old French or Latin was no longer understood by the townsfolk, the writer had not only to decipher and copy the old tattered roll, but to translate it.[482] Perhaps portions of the gospels were needed – “enough to swear by.”[483] Every town also instituted the making of its own “Domesday Book,” its black book or white book or red book as the case might be, with copies of all deeds, wills, and charters relating to municipal affairs;[484] and whenever a legal question arose or local liberties were imperilled new search was made in the chest containing the town “evidences” on which the municipal privileges depended, and copies were written out of Acts of Parliament,[485] extracts from Domesday, Magna Charta,[486] or legal documents such as the New Tenures by Lyttleton.[487] The clerk must be able to translate and to read in the mother tongue to the community any letters or orders sent from Westminster. He had to expound legal technicalities to the council, and to use them effectively in the town’s interest, not only at Westminster, but in the innumerable disputes that arose between borough and borough as to the interpretation of conflicting charters.[488] Elaborate accounts of municipal expenditure were made yet more arduous by the system of Roman numerals which constantly baffled his best efforts at exact addition. The keeping of the town rolls in general was a very serious occupation; in the time of Edward the Fourth the yearly rolls of Ipswich (called Dogget Rolls from the clerk’s docquet or table of contents) form bundles as big as a garden roller;[489] and in Nottingham twenty rolls were covered within and without in a single year with the list of pleas against foreigners alone. In fact, the supply of parchment began to fall short of the prodigious demands of the town clerks, who were driven to take to paper, either to economize the trifling sum allowed them for the expense of parchment, or in obedience to a direct order from the corporation.[490] As they added roll to roll and book to book, they from time to time relieved the tedious labour by adorning the town accounts with sketches and ornaments, with a snatch of French song or a few quibbles or catches of very moderate wit,[491] with a rugged ballad on the evils of over-eating,[492] or a final sigh of satisfaction from a German copyist, “Explicit hic totum; pro Christo da mihi potum!”[493]

The town clerk, in fact, was to the local government what two centuries earlier the trained lay-lawyers had been to the central administration. From mere superiority of education, as a scholar and linguist, an accomplished lawyer, something of a historian and an antiquary, a skilled accountant, a scribe trained to finer penmanship and more exact views of spelling than the ordinary councillor, or even than the mayor himself, the clerk must have exercized an easy intellectual supremacy.[494] Responsible only to the mayor, holding his post year after year in perfect security, he remained among the changing officers about him a permanent force, a municipal chancellor in whom was embodied a continuous tradition of administration and a fixed jurisprudence.[495] Thriving towns of the fifteenth century vied with one another in seeking out able professionals for the post. Bridgewater engaged a man who seems to have been in practice as attorney or notary public in Oxford; and as early as the fourteenth century a chamberlain of London wrote letters under the common seal at Romney. Winchester looked yet farther afield, and seems to have employed a German.[496] An able lawyer in those days could command the market, as we see by the story of Thomas Caxton (probably a brother of William Caxton the printer), who spent a busy professional career of forty years going from town to town wherever he could best sell his services. A native of Tenterden, he was brought up to the law, and in 1436 was engaged in a plea of debt in Romney against one William-at-the-Mill. In 1454 he was practising as an attorney at Tenterden, and was the leading man of law in its negotiations with Rye to resist the union of the two towns into a single corporation. In 1458 he entered the service of Lydd, which was then in the thick of its troubles about boundaries and franchises, and was paid £2 13s. 4d. a year, or double the salary of his predecessor, and in addition was soon after promised a gown every year, while ultimately his pay was raised to £4 – a sum which at that time was only given by great commercial towns such as Bristol or Southampton.[497] On his resignation Lydd returned to its old custom and once more paid to his successor the original salary of 6s. 8d. a quarter, but the corporation still continued to employ Caxton constantly on very profitable terms for himself, often sending him to London on business, or to carry on negotiations with the king. In 1470, when Lydd had been running into danger on every side, first sending men to fight under Warwick, and then paying £9 for another body of troops to go to the help of King Edward, the burghers made Caxton their treasurer, and two years later he was elected bailiff, and a town clerk put under him of his own training. We next find him in 1474 as clerk in Romney; but he was called back again to Lydd in 1476, and employed to write out its “customall” in his fine bold hand. A yet more important town however now cast longing eyes on the successful lawyer, and he was drawn away from Lydd to Sandwich, where he finally settled down as common clerk.

In fact for professional men of talent in the middle class a new and comparatively brilliant career was now opened in the towns.[498] Nicholas Lancaster, town clerk of York from 1477 to 1480, was a bachelor of laws, who in 1483 became one of the king’s council, was in 1484 alderman of York, and in 1485 mayor.[499] Easingwold, who kept the rolls of Nottingham for nearly thirty years (from 1478 to 1506), wrote himself down as “gentleman” among the yeomen, braziers, and smiths, who paid their 6s. 8d. along with him to gain the freedom of the borough,[500] and in his later signatures still kept up the solitary distinction of this title, which scarcely occurs in the records save after his name. An educated man with a very tolerable knowledge of Latin, though he preferred English, he served his adopted town well, and in his time the old court rolls, which had been carelessly kept in paper books for thirty years before his coming, were replaced by parchment rolls with very full and elaborate accounts in a singularly beautiful and exact writing.[501]

It is obvious that in governing bodies whose members were thus distinguished from the common mass of burghers by wealth, social position, culture, who were independent of the people they ruled, very watchful in the matter of their legal or customary rights, and abundantly supplied in case of difficulty with advice in the law by the recorder or the town clerk or the special counsel retained in their service, no influence was wanting which could foster the official spirit in its most extreme form, with its pride of position, its administrative pretensions, its love of legal definition, and its anxiety for “good order.” “The worshipful men of the great clothing” or “the imperial co-citizens” of some very minor borough ruled for their own ends with frankness and capacity; while their natural rallying cry of “good rule and substantial order”[502] was so well understood at court that they could always confidently count on support from that quarter. The alarm of the mob, which since the Peasant Revolt had troubled statesmen at Westminster as well as aldermen in the boroughs, drew the ruling classes generally into close alliance; and towards the end of the fifteenth century, we constantly find the town officers turning with apprehension to the court for aid, and kings anxiously lending succour to the corporations. The Wars of the Roses and dynastic quarrels which once appeared to pass so lightly over the boroughs, scarcely touching them with a passing alarm of material calamity, were not brought to a close before they had left a terrible and abiding impress on the civil life of the people. The shaking of the national security, the wild hopes and the panic-stricken fears of rebellion, had their inevitable conclusion in tightening the hold of authority. In the boroughs the governing bodies, terrified at the signs of bitter discontent in the subject populace, and justly trembling lest under some feint of political obedience, the mass of the people might be arrayed against their rulers and clamour against wrong and injustice might fill the streets, raised a cry for protection against social anarchy; and the cry was eagerly responded to by kings whose title to the crown was their strong will and heavy hand. The progress of liberty was violently arrested by the fears that shook the settled classes before threatenings of revolt. “It seemeth that the world is all quavering; it will reboil somewhere,” onlookers said; men walked with redoubled wariness in an “unstable” and “right queasy” world,[503] and while anxious kings urged the mayor and his council to make good and fearful example of indisposed commons, aldermen gladly locked the doors of the town-hall, and cast into the freeman’s dungeon the burgher who still prated of a free community.

NOTE A

We do not know when or how the leading men of Bristol assumed a position of special privilege. All we know is that troubles grew out of a quarrel about customs in the port and market, &c., in which fourteen of the citizens “were seen to have the prerogative,” while the community asserted that the burgesses were all of one condition and were equals in liberties and privileges. After many disputes the case was brought before the judges of the king’s court, but the Fourteen so arranged matters that foreigners or aliens were associated with them in the inquisition, which the community alleged to be against the liberties of the town. Seeing that their arguments were rejected and that their cause was going to be lost, not by reason but by favour, the leaders of the people angrily went out of the judgment hall and proclaimed to the mob that the judges were favouring their enemies. The whole people, called out by the ringing of the common bell, flocked into the hall; and there was terrible clamour and a free fight with fists and clubs; twenty men were killed; and terror seized alike on the noble and ignoble, who tried to escape by windows and roofs at the risk of their lives; while even the judges prayed to be allowed to fly by the help of the mayor, who himself could scarcely soothe the “vast crowd of malefactors.” About eighty men were summoned for the riot, and not appearing before the judges were banished, but stayed on nevertheless comfortably in the town and were well cared for by their fellow rebels. It was in fact the Fourteen who judged it wise to leave Bristol, thinking it useless to remain in such a storm. (See the extract from the life of Edward the Second by a monk of Malmesbury given in Seyer’s Bristol, ii. 94.)

To quell this tumult the king in 1312 took the government into his own hand and appointed Bartholomew of Baddlesmere, constable of the castle, as custos; but the mayor and bailiffs, asserting that the letter had not been addressed to the community, and further that the custody of the town had been previously given to them, refused to obey orders, and kept the gates of the castle and town for thirty-five weeks, building a wall against the castle and refusing to let the king’s men go out to fetch victuals save at the will of the community. Of their own authority they made John the Taverner mayor, John of Horncastle and Richard Legate bailiffs, and John Hazard coroner, without making them take their oath of king or constable; and by force of arms seized the custody of the prison, levied for their own purposes the revenues from the town and port which ought to have been collected for the king, and administered justice. The king’s judges and servants were imprisoned or driven from the town; the Fourteen and half a dozen partizans, who had mostly been in office, were not allowed to return to the town in spite of the king’s injunction, and the community seized their goods to the value of £2,000, and drove out their wives, freemen, and tenants.

The rebellion lasted for two years. In 1316 six citizens representing the community of Bristol were summoned before the king’s council to answer for these offences. They denied the charges, and refused to submit unless life and limb, rents and land, were secured to them. The king, looking on the case as one of evil example, ordered Bristol to be besieged by sea and land, and after attempting to hold out for some days in the hope that the troops might be called away to the Scotch war, the town surrendered half in ruins. The leaders were put in prison and the multitude terrified by a series of heavy punishments. The banished party returned in triumph to power, and appeared, twelve of them, before the king’s council, with the allotted fine of four thousand marks to have pardon for all the city’s offences, and to have back the franchise of the town. The rebel mayor and his immediate friends, excluded from mercy, went in their turn into exile. (See the account extracted from Rolls of Parliament 9 Edward II. by Seyer. Memoirs of Bristol, ii. 89 to 105.)