Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

But the same geographical position which, under other circumstances, would have made of Nottingham a strategic centre, did under the actual conditions of English life assure the fortunes of the borough in industry and commerce. By land and by water, trade was almost forced to its gates. The bridge which spanned the Trent, after it had fallen into ruins as the property of the kings, was granted by Edward the Third to the townspeople, who willingly undertook the heavy charges of its repair and maintenance; each division of the town territory was made responsible for one or two of its nineteen low arches,[622] and the wardens appointed to oversee the whole appeared from time to time before the municipal officers with laborious and portentous accounts. Over this bridge all traffic from south to north was bound to pass; while boats from Hull and the eastern ports travelled up the river to unload at the quays of Nottingham. Thus the burghers, more fortunate than those of Canterbury, Norwich, or Shrewsbury, had no cause to fear the troubles of a shifting commerce, of manufacturers driven away to seek for brighter prospects, or of merchants forsaking the old ways for some new trade route. A uniform prosperity seems to have reigned in the town. Traders of every kind were in 1395 winning more than the law allowed them,[623] and the market-place, which is said even now to be the largest in England, was covered with booths; there were twenty fish-boards, thirty-two stalls in the Butchers’ House, thirty in the Mercers’ House, twenty in the Drapers’ House, and so on, the rents of which were rapidly rising in the second half of the fifteenth century;[624] and the stately Guild Hall, besides its council room, and its upper prison for felons and gaols for debtors with iron grating to the street, had its storage room for merchandise. Buyers and sellers crowded to the market, for new burgesses were still willingly admitted[625] on the payment of 6s. 8d., and it was only at the close of the next century that the ready hospitality of the town gave way to a jealous exclusiveness. Strangers without number paid for license to trade, besides rents for stalls or shops;[626] and the number of suits between burgesses and “foreigners” or non-burgesses, was so great that sometimes in a single year twenty rolls or more were closely written on both sides with the records of these suits alone – a fact which points to trade dealings with the outer world on a scale quite unknown to previous times.[627] Even the geological position of the town added to its sources of wealth, and the corporation as well as traders made profit from the neighbouring coal-mines.[628] All kinds of industries seem to have flourished. As early as 1155, when probably there were few places in England where cloth was dyed, bales were sent to Nottingham to be coloured red, blue, green, and tawny or murrey; and if their scarlet dye was liable to turn out not scarlet but red[629] even in 1434, we must remember that at this time for a fine scarlet dye English cloth had to be sent to Italy.[630] Nottingham manufacturers made linen as well as woollen goods.[631] Its famous workers in iron lived in Girdler Gate and Bridlesmith Gate. There was a foundry for bells well known in all the neighbouring counties, and the bell-founder, besides his bells, made brazen pots. Moreover, there were artists of repute.[632] Among English churches of the early Perpendicular period, there is none more beautiful than S. Mary’s, lifted high above the market on the steep hill side.[633] The Nottingham goldsmith was sent for to repair the cross in Clifton Church.[634] The town had its own illuminator, Richard the Writer; and its image-maker, Nicolas Hill, who sent his wares as far as London (on one occasion as many as fifty-eight heads of John the Baptist, some of them in tabernacles or niches) and as he worked also in painting or gilding alabaster salt-cellars, was commonly known as the “Alablaster Man.”[635]

The wealth of Nottingham was possibly not equal to that of towns like Bristol or Lynn, where at a time when capital was scanty the burghers had accumulated in their coffers good store of gold and silver. But a general air of substantial comfort and well-being seems to have pervaded the town. The subsidy roll of 1472 which gives a list of 154 owners of freehold property, from one whose tenth was 74s. 7-1/2d. down to one whose tenth was set down at 1/4d.,[636] the inventories of household goods, and the legacies which occur from time to time, show a considerable class of citizens living in wealth and luxury, and a yet larger class of comparatively well-to-do people after the measure of those times. While the richer merchants were building or adorning with handsome carved oak houses which a later age called “palaces of King John,” humbler tradesmen contented themselves with homes such as are described in a builder’s contract of 1479, where the little dwelling with a frontage of 18 feet on the street, was to have two bay windows and to cost altogether about £6.[637] Before the latter part of the sixteenth century[638] at least there is no indication of poverty such as we find in various other towns, in Southampton, or Romney, or Chester, or Canterbury – all places which had to suffer from special causes of distress – and even the wills do not contain the frequent bequests for the relief of the poor and of prisoners which occur in places where the calls of distress were more pressing and insistent. The financial problems of the corporation were perfectly simple and regular, and presented no more formidable difficulty than the keeping in repair of the great bridge. When the ferm of the town was reduced to £20 by Edward the Fourth it was done, so far as the municipal records tell the tale,[639] without any of the complainings of utter misery and desolation by which such favours were commonly won; and in the next half century there is no more serious hint of distress than is marked by the fact that in 1499 two of the butchers’ stalls and a few other holdings were lying vacant, and that the Corporation had borrowed some small sums.[640]

Nottingham was unfretted too by trouble from without. Set on the outskirts of Sherwood Forest, but exempted since the time of John from the Forest laws and the jurisdiction of the Forest officers,[641] its very position tended to free it from the neighbourhood of any powerful lord who could threaten its citizens, diminish its rights, or tax its people with petty wars or law-suits, as Liverpool and Bristol and Lynn were taxed and harassed. In its only trouble – an occasional dispute as to the control of the waters of the Trent – it was invariably supported by the Crown. Sometimes weirs and fishing nets obstructed the river; sometimes when the water was low boats coming from Hull had to be dragged along from the banks, and the river-side owners demanded fines for use of the towing path, so that the price of goods in Nottingham was increased to “a great dearness.” Then the Nottingham men would hasten to move the king by “a clamorous relation”; and forthwith royal commissioners were sent down to inquire into the obstructions; royal proclamations were issued to forbid the exacting of river-side tolls; and royal orders forbade the neighbouring lord of Colwick to divert the waters of the Trent to his own uses to the injury of Nottingham.[642]

Nor were its burghers troubled by claims of any ecclesiastical power within the town walls, such as those which vexed Norwich and Exeter and Canterbury. Ecclesiastical interests indeed play no great part in Nottingham. Two churches already existed under Cnut, and before the fourteenth century one more was added.[643] But no abbey had been founded within its liberties, and the yearly journey of the mayor and his brethren to carry Whitsuntide offerings to the mother church at Southwell was but a picturesque ceremonial that recalled the time when Paulinus first founded there a centre of mission work among the pagans.[644]

As for Court factions and dynastic intrigues, distant traders with much work of their own on hands were generally prompted by a prudent self-interest to side with the dominant power in the State. The burghers easily transferred their sympathies from the Lady Anne of Bohemia to Henry the Fourth;[645] they stood by Henry the Sixth so long as the triumph of the rebels was doubtful, but no sooner were the fortunes of Edward the Fourth in the ascendant than by gifts out of their treasure and little detachments of their militia they testified to a new loyalty, and thus obtained the renewal of their charter and a reduction of their ferm for twenty years, “to have a reward to the town of Nottingham” “for the great cost and burdens, and loss of their goods that they have sustained by reason of those services.”[646] In 1464 they ordered off a little troop in red jackets with white letters sewn on them[647] to join the king at York, and once more at Edward’s restoration in 1471,[648] the town spent about £60 for “loans for soldiers” and liveries, besides many other costs. In October of 1482, the jury “presented” an offender charged with wearing the livery of the intriguing Richard of Gloucester;[649] but before the battle of Bosworth the town hospitably entertained Richard himself, and in its castle he received the Great Seal;[650] while no sooner was the day lost for York than a deputation was sent in hot haste to make peace with Henry the Seventh and obtain a safeguard and proclamation.[651] Stall-holders and burghers, in fact, intent on their own business, only asked that Court quarrels might be settled with the least possible trouble to themselves; and throughout the Wars of the Roses the Nottingham men did just what the men of every other town in England did – reluctantly sent their soldiers when they were ordered out to the aid of the reigning king, and whatever might be the side on which they fought, as soon as victory was declared hurried off their messengers with gifts and protestations of loyalty to the conqueror. Meanwhile they went steadily on with the main business of trade and watched the rents of their booths and the profits of their shops going up and their wealth constantly accumulating.[652]

Like all boroughs that held under the Crown, Nottingham won very early the rights of a free borough. Henry the Second from 1155 to 1165 granted its burgesses freedom from toll, a market, the monopoly of working dyed cloth within the borough, and free passage along the Trent; and further gave them power to tax inhabitants of all fees whatever for common expenses.[653] Originally governed by a reeve who collected its yearly ferm and managed its affairs on behalf of the king, Nottingham obtained by charter from John in 1189 a Merchant Guild, and leave to elect a reeve of the borough who should answer for the ferm to the Exchequer.[654] In 1230 the burgesses were allowed to appoint coroners, and (the ferm being fixed at £52) to levy a tax for weighing at the common scale all goods brought to the town.[655] A charter of 1255 granted them the freedom from arrest for debt which was being so commonly given at this time; the return of writs; and an order that no sheriff or bailiff should interfere in the exercise of justice in Nottingham unless “the burgesses” had not done their duty. And ten years later they were freed from the aid of 100s. formerly paid to the sheriff for his good will and that he should not enter their liberties.[656]

In the reverses of the Welsh war, when Edward the First summoned two great provincial councils of knights and burgesses to bestow a grant for completing the conquest of Wales, Nottingham used his necessities to secure its own profit; for three years the town had been in disgrace, with all its franchises forfeited, but in 1284 it not only regained them, but won permission to elect a mayor “by unanimous consent and will” of “both boroughs of the same town” – that is the French and the English boroughs which from the time of the Conquest had been established side by side, each governed by its own bailiff[657] according to the different laws and customs of the two peoples. During the Scotch war in 1314 their position as masters of the northern road possibly disposed Edward the Second to grant readily any favours they might demand; and immediately after Bannockburn they received power to hold all pleas before the mayor, and alien sheriffs or bailiffs were forbidden to enter the borough.[658] Yet later one of the first acts of Henry of Lancaster, after the deposition of Richard in 1399, was to make interest with the keepers of the stronghold of middle England. He gave lavishly all he had to give: the assize of tenure formerly held before the judges; all fines, forfeitures, and ransoms which had not yet been handed over; the election of four justices of the peace; the placing of the mayor upon all commissions of array of men-at-arms, so that neither sheriff of the county, nor officer of the court could henceforth tax the town for military aid without his assistance and consent.[659] In 1448 Henry the Sixth completed the emancipation of Nottingham by granting it a charter of incorporation under the title of “the mayor and burgesses of the town of Nottingham.” By this charter the town, with the exception of the king’s castle and gaol, was entirely separated from the county and made into a shire; its bailiffs became sheriffs, and were henceforth not to go out of the town to take their oath, but were to be sworn before the mayor; and the mayor himself was made the king’s escheator.[660] If the king in these difficult times, with Normandy almost lost, and England on the eve of rebellion, offered bribes for loyalty, he required a due return; and in 1450 the Nottingham men had to pay their part of the bargain, by hiring men to go to the help of the sovereign at Blackheath against Jack Cade, which they accomplished by leasing some of their common lands for a sum of £20 to be paid in advance.[661]

Unfortunately, owing to the loss of the Old Red Book of Nottingham and other records, it is only by piecing together scattered hints and fragments that we can discern anything of the early constitution of the borough. In the first charters or official dealings with the court, we hear of “the Burgesses” only, with no mention of reeve or bailiff; until after the creation of the mayor in 1284, when the formal style is changed to “the Mayor and Burgesses.” Whatever was the actual significance of the term “burgesses” we know that it already had a technical meaning, for a charter granted by Edward the First to “the Burgesses and Community of our town” in the days before the mayor had replaced the reeve,[662] shows that even then the two words were used in a special sense; and this original distinction remains throughout the records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In general, the business of the town was done in a somewhat elaborate manner by “the mayor, burgesses, and community,” or “the mayor and his co-burgesses and the community”; but it seems that there were some affairs which were given over to the “mayor and burgesses” – an occasional treaty with another town,[663] or the letting of tenements or property acquired by the corporation and set apart for special public purposes such as the ferm, or of lands assigned for the expenses of the bridge; while on the other hand, where the common property of the people in house or land was in question transactions were carried out in the name of the “mayor and community.”[664] There are perhaps no more than two cases before the middle of the sixteenth century in which common lands were leased by the “mayor and burgesses,” and these happened as late as 1511 and 1514, and were probably acts of a specially corrupt administration.

By the Nottingham folk themselves, therefore, the word “burgesses” was from the thirteenth century onwards applied to a body which could be distinguished from the commonalty; and in the use of the words we seem again to catch the double meaning, first of the corporate body of citizens as opposed to the ancient “communitas”; and then of the governing council or assembly as opposed to the whole congregation of the freemen. When this secondary use of the words grew up in Nottingham we cannot say, as we know absolutely nothing of the early government of the town. It is only through one or two brief notices which have been saved from the general destruction of old records that we detect the presence in the council chamber of a recognized group of officials or councillors; and these notices belong to a late time. Meetings were held in the town hall in 1435 and 1443, in which a council of justices of the peace and “trustworthy men” did business with the consent of the commons;[665] and in 1443 we hear of a fine to be paid by “burgesses” who neglected to come to the hall when summoned, the fine being (as we learn from other towns) the customary sum levied from absent members of a regularly appointed council.[666] And from another entry copied from the records of three years later we know certainly that a council of twelve did exist in 1446. “Ordered that twelve and the mayor chosen to order, end, and dispose of as they think meet of all things belonging to the commonalty of the town without interruption or contradiction of any person within the town. All orders are with the consent of the commonalty.”[667]

Whether the order of 1446 was the bringing in of a new method of administration, or an extension of the powers of an established council, or merely a declaration of the law that it should do its business “without interruption or contradiction” of any of the townsfolk, we cannot certainly tell, for the old Red Book is lost and the phrase is only preserved for us in a note made by a town clerk a hundred and fifty years later, whose comment on it, “And there shall you see the erection and election of the council,” is of little value in deciding the matter.[668] In the absence of any direct evidence, the traces of an earlier council certainly suggest the idea that in the twelve we may have the successors of a body resembling the twelve portmen elected in royal boroughs for the general administration of the town, and that from 1399 the four justices of the peace formed part of this council. The commonalty had the right of entering the town hall during the meetings of the council, and of confirming the ordinances of the governing body by their “assent and consent”; and these powers might of course be more or less left in suspense or fully exercized as opportunity required. No doubt in a big and busy borough any frequent gathering of the townspeople was impossible, and it is very probable that (as at Sandwich), when the mayor did business in the borough court, any burghers who happened to be present[669] were taken to represent the general assembly of the commons, and bye-laws or necessary orders passed by them were understood to have received “the consent of the community.” In the majority of instances the numbers who attended were probably few, but their presence is from time to time distinctly marked, as in the meeting of 1435; in the assembly of a hundred and thirty burgesses in 1463 to make laws; and in the calling of the commons together in their common hall in 1480.[670]

If the administration followed this well understood routine, it is probable that the conduct of public business underwent no great change when two new charters, in 1446 and 1448, settled the final order of government in Nottingham, and made it into a county. No mention was made in these charters of the existing council (unless indeed the term “burgesses” was commonly understood to mean the council),[671] but by the second in 1448 it was enacted that “the burgesses” should elect from time to time from amongst themselves seven aldermen (to answer to the seven wards of the town), one of whom was always to be mayor, while all the seven were to be justices of the peace. The aldermen were to hold office for life, and in their scarlet livery with suitable furs and linings, after the fashion of the aldermen of London,[672] were manifestly the leading members of the council; and the six burgesses who completed that body were within a few years known as “common councillors,” to distinguish them from the heads of the wards.[673] The constitution of the Nottingham council seems in fact to have been exactly the same as that of Canterbury or of Southampton; and here no doubt, as in other places, the official governing body did at some time take to itself in a special sense the title of “the Burgesses,” leaving that of “the Community” to the freemen at large.

The new charter, whether it introduced any change in older methods or no, at least seems to have awakened no resistance. A Council of Twelve which ruled before 1448 ruled in like manner afterwards, though now seven justices of the peace sat in it instead of four. As for what may seem to us the crucial fact that henceforward aldermen were elected for life, and elected by their own fellows and not by the people, it is possible that even this change, if indeed it was a change at all, seemed less revolutionary to the men of Nottingham in those days than it does now, for there is no trace of any conflict concerning the matter either at the time or for half a century afterwards. Indeed the same method of election was used for the councillors themselves, who also were appointed for life.[674] It appears that while the aldermen were always selected from among the six councillors, the councillors were chosen from “the clothing” – a very important body composed of sheriffs and chamberlains or treasurers who had passed out of office, but still wore their scarlet robes on great occasions.[675]

The oligarchy thus established was however no more in absolute possession of the field than an oligarchy of the thirteenth century. The people’s right to hold a general assembly was admitted by the governing class as late as 1480, and claimed by the commonalty a century later. The jurors of the Court Leet long acted as representatives of the general body of burgesses for purposes of criticism and remonstrance. For certain kinds of business touching the community the custom of electing special juries was maintained; as in 1458 when “twenty-four upright and lawful men from the aforesaid town of Nottingham, as well as twenty-four upright and lawful men from each wapentake of the county aforesaid”[676] were summoned to report on the state of the bridge. It seems probable that at least six burghers took part in the election of municipal officers; and in 1511 the inhabitants claimed some share in the elections by virtue of “the statute of free elections in such cases ordained.”[677] Above all the burghers exercized their ancient rights over the common property of the people. For in those days Nottingham boasted of great possessions[678] in land. From the low cliff of red sandstone which lifted it out of the floods that constantly swamped the lower grounds, the townsmen looked out over the common fields and closes and Lammas lands that stretched round it on every side, and formed until the Act of 1845 a broad belt of open country which cut off the borough from its surrounding dependent villages, and might in no way be used for building. These wide reaches of pasture were yearly distributed in due proportion among the burghers by common consent of the mayor and the whole community. In the division, and in questions of boundaries and fences and fields, the commonalty were all directly interested; and they never consented to hand over to the undisputed management of a council rights which touched them so nearly.[679] They asserted their claim to attend the meetings when the lands were divided or let out on lease, to take part in all decisions, and to keep a close watch on the councillors lest these should be tempted to pass over their own names when the poor lands were divided and to distribute among themselves all the best closes.[680] At the very end of the fifteenth century their verdict was still decisive. In 1480 the commons being called together to the Common Hall by the mayor on a question as to the common lands, “the said commons would in no wise agree” to his proposal.[681]

It is therefore probable that the charter of 1448 did not mark for Nottingham the moment of a serious constitutional revolution. Such little evidence as we have seems to show that the state of affairs was singularly like that which we have already seen in Southampton at the same date; that things went on pretty much as they had done for years past, and that the burgesses neither suffered, nor thought they suffered, any usurpation of their rights, or any grave loss of customary liberties. The system established in 1448 had been in full working for over half a century before any struggle, so far as we know, took place between the governing class and the people; and even then it was not suggested that the disturbance was caused by any change in the legal form of government.[682] For in 1500 Nottingham was in as sorry a plight as Norwich had been in 1300. It was practically handed over to the rule of publicans and licensed victuallers, who, with or without the law, held their own bravely against all opposition. When brewers and bakers and vintners rose to power they took care that the assize of bread and beer and wine should not be brought to mind; when butchers and cattle-dealers became aldermen and chamberlains they encouraged a confusion which was most profitable to themselves as to the limits of the common pastures, letting gates and bridges fall into ruin, and “although they have been often required by the whole community of the whole town of Nottingham to make common boundary marks, as their predecessors had done, have hitherto refused to do so;”[683] even as common trespassers they put their cattle and sheep in the meadow in the night time unto the great harm of their neighbours.[684] The officers appointed by the council dutifully served the interests of their masters: “We often complain of his demeanour, and have no remedy”[685] is the comment of the Mickletorn jury about the common serjeant. Year after year the protests of the commonalty were heard at the local courts. Jurors of the quarter sessions laid their grievances before the justices of the peace, themselves the main offenders; while the jury of the Mickletorn or Leet asserted their right to address the town council (when they could be persuaded to take their places at the court) and “in the name of the burgesses and commonalty of this town,” to declare the wrongs of the people.[686]