Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

III. Nor was there any serious difficulty as to the exercise of the sovereign rights of the crown. To the King it mattered little whether he sent a special deputy direct from the court, or whether he delegated powers to the mayor, and used him as an official immediately responsible to the crown; while on the other hand such a change meant much present solace to the townsfolk. A compromise was therefore easily brought about between the monarch and the people. The mayor was invariably appointed as the King’s Clerk of the Market, the Measurer and Gauger at the King’s Standard, the Manager of the King’s Assize; he became the representative of the sovereign in the most important charges of administration, as one of the King’s Justices437 in the town, as Admiral,438 as Mayor of the Staple. Administrative changes such as these left the power of the sovereign untouched and cost him nothing; while on the other hand the central government was by this means provided with a ready-made staff of trained officials, – a staff which the King could not possibly have created,439 nor paid out of his empty exchequer even if he had been able to create it – but which had become absolutely essential for carrying out the supervision of local affairs at a time when such supervision was growing more important every day, from the point of view both of the King and of the people. The towns on their side, relieved by the new system from miseries440 under which they had suffered, readily forgot distinctions between laws made by them and made for them, so long as these were administered by officers of whom they were allowed the election and control.441

IV. Finally if the towns suffered from the officers of the royal household, a remedy was easily granted them. The sovereign found no personal inconvenience in transferring the duties of these officers to the governors of the boroughs themselves; and the mayor or bailiff became the King’s Steward, and Marshal of the King’s Household in the borough. In short, as the towns advanced to independence, all manner of powers and responsibilities were heaped together on their chief officer, with no clear discrimination between his various and oddly mingled functions. Men did not pause to ask which of his masters the mayor at any given moment was serving, whether he was acting as head of the city government to carry out the burghers’ will, or as the officer appointed by the sovereign to execute his laws;442 and nice questions as to the exact division of authority which had really taken place were so manifestly irrelevant in presence of the harmonious concentration of all power in a single hand, that jealousies and suspicions on both sides were allayed, to the great furtherance of peace and concord. To the mediæval poet who drew a picture of Love as “the leader of our Lord’s folk in Heaven,” standing as a “mean” or mediator of peace, there was one obvious comparison – even “as the mayor is between the King and the commons.”443

The history of the royal boroughs, therefore, so far as their relations with the King are concerned, reduces itself into a long list of favours asked and given. Frequent troubles of state no doubt stimulated the generosity of sovereigns; and times of political disturbance and revolution proved occasions when the towns rose into independence through the necessities of kings, who confirmed old franchises and granted new ones, and “right largely made charters thereof, to the intent to have the more good-will and love in their land.”444 The civil wars under Henry the Second,445 the money difficulties of Richard and John, the troubled minority of Henry the Third, the disorders under Edward the Second, the commercial policy of Edward the Third, the political insecurity of Henry the Fourth after his seizure of the throne, the financial needs of Henry the Fifth, the tumults and fears of the reign of Henry the Sixth, the anxiety of Edward the Fourth to conciliate the kingdom, – all these were so many heaven-sent opportunities for the burghers to win new instalments of local liberty; while the two periods of reaction brought about by the fear of the Peasant Revolt under Richard the Second, and the nervous apprehensions of Richard the Third, were themselves made use of by the governing class in the boroughs to confirm and tighten their authority. So monotonous indeed is the record of the burghers on the royal demesne, all moving together along the same well-beaten road to independence, winning the same privileges, even winning them at the same time,446 that a brief statement of liberties secured by any single city will serve to illustrate the general history of all.

Up to the time of Henry the Second Norwich enjoyed certain liberties and privileges, but its citizens were practically feudal servants of the King, who appointed their governors, took the profits of their courts, and looked on the city as a private possession of his own. Their true freedom began with the charter granted them in 1194 by Richard the First.447 They were to have the customs of London; the burgesses might not be summoned to answer any plea outside the city; they were henceforth to elect their own Provost, “such as may be fitting to us and to them;” and they were allowed to hold their city at a ferm rent of £108 a year, which they themselves, instead of the sheriff, should collect and pay to the Exchequer. For the confirmation of their rights, “and for having the city in their hand,” the Norwich people paid 200 marks.448 From this time the provost took the place of the officer formerly appointed by the King, presided over the Borough Court in the Tolbooth and possibly held the view of frankpledge, and paid the fines of the courts into the city treasury. The sheriff of the county, however, still held a higher court, the Curia Comitatus, within the enclosure of the castle, where he exercised criminal jurisdiction, and jurors made the presentments ordered by the assize of Clarendon.449

But this power of the sheriff only lingered on for a few years. In 1223 a new arrangement was made between the citizens and Henry the Third. Norwich consisted of four distinct divisions which had been naturally formed out of the four hamlets created by the first settlers and which had by degrees become united into a single town: —Conesford, where the earliest comers gathered round the ford over the river, protected by the stream on one side, and on the other by the mound on which the castle stood in later days; the Westwick, whose name shews its later foundation, and which lay on the further side of the fortifications, within the bend of the river; the Magna Crofta or big field of the castle, lying below the entrenchments midway between Conesford and Westwick, which was made at the Conquest into a new ward, Mancroft Ward; and the Ward-over-the-Water on the further bank of the river, somewhat cut off from the rest of the town.450 For the government of these “leets,” as the divisions came to be called, it was decided in 1223 that the burghers should elect four bailiffs, one for each district.451 There was no longer to be any provost, since the bailiffs were to take his place in joint government of the town, and were further to take over the criminal jurisdiction hitherto exercised by the sheriff in his court at the castle. From this time therefore most of the social, commercial, and criminal affairs of the city lay in the burghers’ own hands.

The four bailiffs, however, had still no control over the castle and its entrenchments, nor over a wide reach of land that lay along the river, stretching past Conesford and Mancroft and Westwick – land owned by the prior and convent; nor had they any authority over the cathedral, the priory, and the bishop’s palace that lay within Westwick, nor over property owned by them or by other ecclesiastical bodies which penetrated into the heart of the city; while on the other hand tenants of castle and prior and bishop were all making their profit out of the city trade, and enjoying its peace and protection. Therefore the next claim of the burghers necessarily was that the King should give to the municipality authority to tax for the common expenses all inhabitants alike, under whatever lord they held; and in 1229 they obtained a royal grant that all “who should partake of the liberties which we have granted to the said citizens of Norwich … shall be taxed and give aid as the said citizens;” and that “if anyone has withdrawn from their customs and scots, he shall return to their society and custom, and follow their scot, so that no one shall be quit therefrom.”452 There was no trifling with the municipal authority in this matter; in 1236 and 1237 when the tenants of castle and prior attempted to resist the claim on their moneys, the sheriff was ordered to summon them before him to show by what right or warrant they claimed acquittance from payments to the city treasury; and again in 1276, when the tenants of the castle refused to pay their share of taxes, the case was brought before the barons of the exchequer, and an order came from Westminster that the sheriff was forthwith to levy the sum due and hand it over to the city.453

Henry the Third granted many other favours “to our beloved citizens of Norwich,” feeling perhaps the advantage of their friendship amid the increasing troubles of his reign; and the burghers of Norwich certainly, like those of Winchester, took sides with him in the war against Simon de Montfort.454 In 1253 they had been allowed to enclose their city with a ditch.455 In 1255 (twenty years before a general law was passed to this effect for all Englishmen), they were freed from arrest for debt of which they were not sureties or principal debtors. And in 1256 Henry granted a charter which ordered that the “citizens shall answer at our exchequer by their own hands for all debts and demands … and that no sheriff or other bailiff of ours shall henceforth enter the city aforesaid to make distresses for any debts;” which decreed further that all merchants who shared in the Norwich liberties and merchandises were to pay the city taxes “wheresoever they shall make their residences;” and which ordained lastly that “no guild shall henceforth be held in the aforesaid city to the injury of the said city.”456 The sheriff was thus finally shut out from all land or houses held by the citizens; and absent merchants were subjected to their lot and scot.

From Edward the First the citizens in 1305 obtained the right to hold the Leet of Newgate in Norwich, which the King had “lately recovered against the Prior of Holy Trinity”; and further paid a fine down, and promised to pay £10 yearly into the Exchequer for ever, for a charter granting that they should not be impleaded outside the city; that they should not be convicted by any foreigners but only by their co-citizens, save in matters touching the King or the whole commonalty; that the bailiffs should have power to assess tallages and other reasonable aids “by the assent of the whole of the commonalty, or of the greater part of the same” for the protection and advantage of the city, and to make “reasonable distresses” for the levying of these tallages as was done in other cities; and that they should hold the Leet of Newgate which the Crown had “lately recovered against the Prior of Holy Trinity.”457 Further the burghers remembered a trouble into which they had fallen in the case of a thief who had stolen some cloth and brought much sorrow on the city; for having fled to the church of St. George he finally escaped out of it though the door was guarded by four parishes, who were all fined for their lax vigilance; then being caught and condemned by the bailiffs and commonalty he was condemned to be hung, but at his burial found to be still alive, and the man who had cut him down was thrown into prison; and lastly the bailiffs were accused of illegal action in hanging him “without any man’s suit and without capture in the act,” and of “taking up thieves and malefactors for trespasses done outside the city and executing judgement on them in the city,” and the city liberties had been seized into the King’s hands, and a royal officer set to rule over them.458 So the burghers in 1307 presented a petition that the right of infang theof and outfang theof, which they had used at all times “whereof memory runneth not,” might now be definitely inserted in their charter. Further, since the sheriff “by malice” still found means on one excuse or another to arrest a citizen from time to time – and this though the Norwich people had the return of all manner of writs459 so that neither the sheriff nor any foreign bailiff had any right to meddle with them – they required of the King that at their demand every citizen thus seized should be delivered over to them out of the hands of the alien. Likewise they prayed that so long as a burgher lived in the city he should never be required to attend any foreign court whatever by reason of any foreign tenure he might hold; and that no foreign tenement should give the right to sheriffs or foreign bailiff to summon him to be in juries or inquests outside the city. Lastly, as a protection against any danger of forfeiting their franchise by failure to pay the ferm rent, they asked permission for the corporation to hold in perpetual possession certain lands and houses the profits of which might be set apart for the rent.460

Under Edward the Third the sheriff of the county was deprived of his last plea for interference within the city walls. Up to this time he had still collected rents and taxes and done justice for the tenants of the Castle Fee; and the ditches of the Castle and the Fee, thus freed from city rule, had been made a sort of refuge for felons and malefactors flying from the jurisdiction of the city officers. All this, however, was in 1346 handed over to the bailiffs, and the sheriff was in no wise to interfere.461 Moreover, in consideration of the cost to which the citizens had gone in enclosing the city, they were set free for ever from the jurisdiction of the clerk of the market of the King’s household.462 Norwich was further given its own Admiral, who sailed about in the “admiral’s barge,” and who held admiralty courts and administered its law.463 In 1331 it became a Staple town, and its mayor was made a mayor of the Staple, with a salary of £20 and a seal given by the king.464

Meanwhile the Norwich people had been gradually perfecting their own internal system of government – a system which will be described in a later chapter – and in the difficulties of Henry the Fourth they found opportunity to complete their work. A sum of £1,000 given to the King, besides heavy fines paid in bribes on all sides, secured in 1403 a charter which finally guaranteed to them the constitution of their choice.465 Norwich was made into a county of itself. A mayor was appointed, who was given supreme rights of jurisship.” in the city, and received from the King himself a sword which was to be carried before him with the point erect, along with the gold or silver maces borne by the serjeants-at-mace. The four bailiffs were replaced by two sheriffs, also elected by the burgesses, who were charged with matters concerning the interests of the crown which had formerly been the business of the bailiffs, and were responsible for the yearly rent of the city. The mayor was appointed the King’s escheator, and thus the last office which had been reserved in alien hands was given over to the municipality. Finally in token of the consummation of the municipal hopes the old seal of the bailiffs was abolished to make way for a new city seal.

Norwich was but one among a number of boroughs whose inhabitants quietly and steadily gathered to themselves the liberties that made them free, for in the fellowship of towns holding of the King under a uniform tenure throughout the “ancient demesne,” the list of privileges granted to any one became the model for its neighbours near and far.466 With orderly progression, unbroken by any of the violent and dramatic incidents that indicate a time of conflict, all the bigger towns won by gradual instalments complete local independence. Such changes of method as we observe are simply changes made necessary by new national legislation, such as the form of incorporation required after the Statute of Mortmain,467 or the right to elect Justices of the Peace when one power after another had been given to these officers by law.468 We do not distinguish seasons of plentiful harvest and periods barren of all growth; in one century as in another Kings stooped to accept the “courtesies” offered, and granted the favours solicited. Nor do we find records of advantages hastily given and timidly withdrawn; or, until the reign of Richard the Third,469 is there any suggestion of anxiety on the part of Kings to check or limit the free action of the boroughs.470 Up to that time rulers of the state seem to have had no apprehension of peril to public order, of jeopardy to trading interests, of injury to the administration of justice, of possible usurpations by the municipalities which might bring them into collision with the ordered forces of the world; and for three hundred years statesmen freely allowed the growth of municipal ambition, and gave full scope for the developement of all the various systems of local self-government. The full importance of these facts only becomes clear when we turn to the history of the towns that were under subjection to other lords than the nation itself; and compare the peaceful negotiations by which matters were arranged between the royal boroughs and the State, with the violence of feeling aroused when the misgivings and alarms of private owners were brought into the controversy.

CHAPTER VIII

Battle for Freedom(2) Towns on Feudal Estates

On the King’s lands, as we have seen, the interests of the monarch never came into collision with the interests of his burghers, and the townsfolk found an easy way to liberty. From time to time they presented a petition for freedom, brought their gifts to win the sovereign’s favour, and joyfully carried back to their fellow citizens a new charter of municipal privileges. But the condition of the towns that belonged to noble or baron was doubly depressed from the standpoint of their happier neighbours. Of secondary importance alike in numbers, in wealth, or in influence, as compared to those on royal demesne, they for the most part never emerged into any real consequence; while their lord had every reason to oppose the growth of independence in his boroughs, and lacked nothing for its complete suppression but the requisite power. New franchises were extorted from his weakness rather than won from his good will, and where acquiescence in the town’s liberties was not irresistibly forced on him his opposition was dogged and persevering.

The dispute was none the less intense because under the conditions of English life the controversy between the town and the feudal lord was limited within a very narrow field; for the burghers saw well how the lord’s claims to supremacy might permanently fetter an active community of traders, and on this point townspeople fought with a pertinacity determined by the conviction that all their hopes of prosperity depended on victory. To manufacturers and merchants the rule of an alien governor was fatal; trade died away before vexatious checks and arbitrary imposts, and enterprising burghers hastened to forsake the town where prosperity was stunted and liberty uncertain, and take up citizenship in a more thriving borough. Success and emancipation went hand in hand; for the effects of a maimed and imperfect freedom were always disastrous and far-reaching, and there is not a single instance of an English town which remained in a state of dependence and which was at the same time prosperous in trade.

One or two instances will be enough to show the extent and character of the traders’ claim for “liberties.” The burghers of Totnes, who had been fined for having a Guild by Henry the Second, had no sooner succeeded in securing its authorisation from John than they at once made it a weapon of offence, and a formidable weapon too with its roll of more than three hundred members, against their lord’s control of the town market and of the shopkeepers. The Guild claimed the right to admit non-residents to their company, so that these might freely trade without paying any tribute to the lord for one year, after that giving six pence annually; and pretended to have authority to test weights and measures without orders from the lord’s bailiff; to hold the assize of bread and ale and receive fines; and apparently to deal out justice for petty offences. These usurpations of his rights were discussed between the lord and his tenants with riots and contentions, in which the lord proved victorious in 1304, forcing the burghers to submit on every point in which the Guild tried to bring in customs which lay beyond the ancient rights of the community. They were forbidden to admit to the Guild anyone who had not a house in the town, and non-residents had to take oaths before his bailiff to pay a yearly fine to the lord. No trial of weights and measures could take place till orders had been issued to the Seneschal of the Guild by the lord’s bailiff; when the trial came on bailiff and town provost sat beside him in the Guildhall to hear the charges, and even then all false or suspected measures were to be kept by the provost till the lord’s next court. On the other hand the bailiff might hold a trial of measures whenever he judged that he could do the business better. So also the assize of bread was given to the lord’s bailiff sitting with the provost of the town; all suspected bread and weights were to be seized by him, the offenders to be fined in the lord’s court, all punishments by tumbril or pillory inflicted by his orders, and all proceeds of fines given over to him. Lastly when small thefts and riots were to be judged the bailiff sat by the town officers and as many burgesses as chose to come, and took his share in the proceedings – though occasionally in his absence the town officers might act by common consent of the community.471

Such was the comparative helplessness of a community which, with all its tenacity of purpose, could neither urge custom nor tradition on its side in pleading for independent rights. In the borough of Barnstaple, on the other hand, which had been granted by the King472 to Sir John Cornwall and his wife the Countess of Huntingdon, we have an instance of the immense advantages possessed by a town which though now in private ownership, inherited the tradition of privilege which its people had won as tenants of ancient demesne.473 In 1423 the Mayor, Aldermen, and capital burgesses drew up a list of byelaws for the good government of the borough, which apparently stirred the apprehensions of its lords. For a few years later, reviving ancient traditions of feudal authority in a suit against the borough, they complained that the mayor and burgesses had of their own authority admitted as “Burgesses of the Wynde” “foreign” merchants and victuallers who merely visited the town; and had turned to their own use the fines from denizens pertaining to their lord; that they had taken the correction of bread and ale, and unlawfully seized fines and tolls; that they would not suffer his officers to take custom after ancient usage from the people of Wales for their merchandise; and that they even seized fines belonging to him for heaps of rubbish in the streets. Moreover they did not render the suit and service due to the lord’s court from all the inhabitants of the borough, for without his leave they themselves held a court every Monday, and instead of coming to every court of the lord’s steward they did not come oftener than twice a year; nor would they suffer the lord’s officers to make attachments in the borough at the Nativity of Our Mother after the ancient custom. In other words the townsfolk, just like the people of Totnes two hundred years before, were bent on regulating their trade and spending the money collected in their courts and markets; but they were happier than they of Totnes in being able to claim that all these so-called usurpations were ancient rights of the burgesses, by virtue, as they said, of a charter granted by King Athelstan 500 years before. As this charter however had unluckily been “casualiter amissa,” the town had to fall back on the verdict of an inquisition held about 1300 as to the usages and franchises to which it was entitled, and the payments which were due by the mayor and commonalty in place of old feudal services. Here the Barnstaple men held their own successfully, and in 1445 they secured a charter from Henry the Sixth, “for accommodation of the burgesses in doing their business quietly,” which confirmed to them the fullest rights of self-government.474