Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

But the municipality was perfectly firm in the assertion of the authority which it had a right to exercise over all those who were admitted to the privileges of the common trade, and took a very decided tone with the spiritual as well as with the lay lords. To the Hereford burghers it was obvious that the ecclesiastical tenants only enjoyed a share in the town liberties by the grace of the citizens, and in virtue of “a composition betwixt us and them, which we for reverence to God and to the Church our mother had granted the same unto them; and also for divers alms to be given to our citizens and other poor and impotent of our city in an almshouse by the keeper of the same for ever. And it was not our intentions that these men, the tenants of the bishop, dean, and chapter should have nor enjoy our laws and customs, unless after the same manner as we enjoy them” – that is, as they went on carefully to explain, every one must acknowledge law as well as privilege, and be subject like the citizens to authority. They were all to be obedient to the Bailiff for the execution of the King’s writs; nor could they claim any immunities or independent jurisdiction in the King’s highway, seeing that all offenders taken there were to be judged by the city Bailiff. If the peace or the tranquillity of Hereford was disturbed by the tenants of any fee, the city Bailiff, “taking with him the bailiff of that fee and twelve of the most discreetest and stoutest men of the whole city,” might “by all way of rigour” compel the offenders to come before them, and force them to end their discords and make amends; if they refused, the whole community “shall account and hold them as rebels; and that they come not among them in their congregations.”592 All bailiffs, whether of Church estates or others, were bound to help the chief Bailiff of the city in apprehending thieves and malefactors and keeping order. A vagabond, even if he were an ecclesiastical tenant, who made a noise at night “to the terror of his fellow-citizens,” might be taken up by any inhabitant and brought to the city jail till one o’clock the next day; when, in polite recognition of the lower jurisdictions, he was solemnly handed over in a public place to the bailiff of his own fee, by him to be kept in prison for a day and a night, and then returned to the city prison, “there to stay until he hath made amends as the Bailiff and commonalty shall think fit.” The tenants of the various fees were allowed to plead in the town courts at their pleasure, a privilege not granted to aliens; and in matters touching frankpledge, or anything “which could not be amended in the courts of those lords,” the city claimed rights of arbitration, and power to determine such cases “according to the laws of the city and not according to the customs, unless it be by special favour of the commonalty.”593 All questions concerning lands and tenements in the city were to be decided by the free citizens only; and if ecclesiastical tenants refused to submit to the jurisdiction of the city magistrates and absented themselves from the court, “then our chief Bailiff, calling unto him six or more witnesses of his citizens, shall go to the cathedral church, and there before the chapter shall notify or declare the disobedience of their bailiffs and of their tenants.” If the canons would not assist or agree, the Bailiff should announce that he must then proceed himself to administer full justice, though “by his will or knowledge he would not hurt the liberties of their mother the Church.” This concession to ecclesiastical sensibilities was apparently looked on by the men of Hereford as a proof of fine magnanimity. “And it was not wont so to be done, but that there was a composition had between us, which we for the reverence of God and the tranquillity of their tenants and our citizens, had granted unto them.”

All this story, however, comes to us from the side of the town, and has something of the ring of a lordly municipal pride; it almost sounds like an ideal view of the compromise between the contracting powers as conceived by the burghers, and one to which the Church party must have demurred. At any rate by whatever means the municipality of Hereford had won a jurisdiction of this sort over the bishop’s tenants, it was singular in the possession of such authority, which has no parallel in towns like Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Exeter, and many more. But the situation, even as the citizens put it, is so complicated in its arrangements that we could scarcely wonder if a state of truce depending on provisions so elaborate should under provocation be transformed into a state of open war; nor can we question the wisdom of townspeople everywhere in making it their fixed purpose to establish one undivided and supreme law for the government of each community. How important the question at issue really was to the town’s life we may see from the story of Winchester.

The mayor of Winchester was at the head of what seems, on paper at least, a powerful and elaborate corporation, worthy of a great city which held itself to have been built “in the age of the world 2995, ninety-nine years before the building of Rome,” and “environed with stone walls” exactly 533 years later.594 A common assembly met twice a year. There were two coroners and two constables, six aldermen of the wards with their six beadles, a town clerk and four serjeants, a council of twenty-four elected every year, and four auditors of this council, besides a body of twelve jurors chosen whenever there was necessity, who sat at “the Pavilion,” and with whom the mayor perambulated the liberties to view the rivulets and rivers.595 The boundaries of the city were apparently marked out by a rough square formed by the walls and ditch; but to the mayor and aldermen of the fifteenth century, the idea that their authority should reach as far as the limits allowed by the girth of the walls would have seemed a far-off counsel of perfection.

For right across the city from the east to the west gates stretched the High Street, cutting the town into two equal halves; and to the south of the High Street one may say roughly that the mayor had no authority at all. Near the west gate stood the King’s castle, where municipal law of course did not run. Beside the castle lay the great convent of S. Swithun, and next to it the cathedral, both fenced round by a wall which shut out all lay jurisdiction or intrusion of any kind. Nearer to the east gate lay the palace of the bishop, who was also of course exempt from secular interference, and who ruled with supreme authority over the bishop’s Soke that stretched away beyond the gate, and took tolls of all merchandise that passed along the river.596 His tenants while remaining outside municipal control had still the right to buy and sell all kinds of merchandize in the city which according to the burghers’ complaint was to their hurt and loss; and the exceeding difficulty of any regulation of trade in the midst of this competition of privileged workers, with the ruin of the city treasury which it threatened, are shown by a quarrel between the bishop and the burghers as to a street which the bishop had claimed as his property in 1275; for when people discovered that in that liberty so appropriated they paid nothing, since the city bailiff could not enter it to make distraint, nearly all the clothworkers forthwith withdrew themselves from the other streets and went to live there to the manifest loss of the community, and the great profit of the bishop.597

The northern part of the town was more than half given up to fields and gardens, the shops and houses of traders and artizans forming but a narrow settlement that gathered closely along the central street and the lanes that opened from it. And even of this district a part was wholly withdrawn from the city jurisdiction. The Queens, whose “morning gift” Winchester was, lived “tax free” in the Queen’s House opposite the King’s palace near the west gate, and took rent and tolls from the row of Queen’s stalls on the High Street. At the east gate was another belt of ecclesiastical property – the settlements of the Franciscans and Dominicans, – and next to them a group of poor houses depending on S. Swithun’s.598 Right in the middle of the town, opposite the Guild Hall in the High Street, was the liberty of “Godbeate” belonging to S. Swithun’s, where the writ of the King or the authority of the city had no power; and whose church formed a sanctuary always open for ill-doers flying from municipal justice. The very curfew-bell which hung in its tower rang out from land that defied the mayor’s authority.599

Winchester had not even control of its own gates. The bishop had charge of one; and two were in the hands of the convent, which in times of civil war could freely admit within the city walls the armies of the side opposed to the townsfolk.600 Even the commerce of the place was taken out of the burghers hands. Not only did the bishop take tolls of the river traffic, but once a year when the great fair of S. Giles’ took place he assumed supreme command in Winchester; for the time all civic government was altogether suspended; the bishop closed all shops in and round the town; traders coming with their cloth and woollen goods, their wines, their pottery, their brass-work, or their eastern spices, were subject to his jurisdiction, and handed over to him the biggest share of the profits, which he divided with the various religious establishments in the city.601 At other times the King’s chamberlains and the King’s clerk of the market regulated business in their master’s interest, and collected the dues of the market and tolls on every load carried by man or horse into the town.602

Winchester suffered also from the memory of its ancient state as the capital and residence of the West Saxon Kings; and its mayor almost alone among the mayors of English towns in the fifteenth century had to go to London to take his oath of office from the King’s judges,603 just as the mayor of London does to this day. He could win neither freedom nor independence. At home he was beset with dangers; he might be imprisoned by the King for one offence, and punished by the bishop for another.604 Against such odds as the burghers had to face it was almost hopeless for any corporation to contend; and the helpless townsfolk could but show their impatience and discontent in petty quarrels with the convent as to the site of a market, or blindly do battle for worthless Kings such as Henry the Third or Edward the Second if the monks took up the opposite party.605 The struggle for independence has no fine record of stirring incidents; but that there should have been any conflict at all before the settling down of quiescence and final apathy is a striking instance of the vitality and persistence of municipal institutions.

It is impossible not to attribute to the hopeless situation of the municipality before the rival authorities in the city, and especially the powerful lords of convent and cathedral, much of the calamity of its history. For at a time when prosperity was generally increasing, its fortunes steadily sank. In 1450 the citizens drew a terrible picture of the local distress, not in the vague phrases which we meet with elsewhere when for some special purpose happier boroughs put on a temporary show of distress, but with a minute exactness which betrays the truth and the whole measure of their suffering. Winchester, they declared, “is become right desolate.” Nine hundred and ninety-seven houses stood empty, and in seventeen parish churches there was no longer any service. A list is given of eleven streets “that be fallen down in the city of Winchester within eighty years last passed”; and in each case an account is added of the number of householders that had formerly lived in the street, a hundred, a hundred and forty, or two hundred, as the case might be, where there were now but two or three left. Since the last Parliament held there eighty-one households had fallen. “The desolation of the said poor city is so great, and yearly falling, for there is such a decay and unwin, that without gracious comfort of the King our sovereign lord, the mayor and the bailiffs must of necessity cease, and deliver up the city and the keys into the King’s hands.”606 To produce a distress such as this no doubt industrial causes were at work, and Winchester probably suffered as Canterbury did from changes in the woollen manufacture and in trade routes. But nowhere in any considerable city do we find a parallel to the utter ruin of this unfortunate community. Nowhere, on the other hand, were the conditions of municipal life so fatal, if once prosperity began to dwindle or the pressure of outward circumstances became such as to call on the resources of the people. Through the breaking up of the city into separate and independent fragments the whole burden of any difficulty had to be borne by the little company of inhabitants governed by the mayor; and so heavily did the common municipal charges and expenses fall on the scanty population of burghers shut into the narrow area which was under municipal government, and from which alone the authorities could gather the fee-farm and the royal taxes, maintain the bridge and walls, provide householders for the nightly watch, and furnish men and arms for the defence of the city; and we do not wonder that the inhabitants at last began to renounce, or refuse to accept, a franchise which brought such formidable responsibilities, or that they sought to escape from a city doomed to ruin. An attempt was made in 1430 to revive manufacture and commerce by an invitation to all kinds of traders and artificers to come and do business in Winchester free of toll.607 But the experiment in free trade was quickly abandoned, probably because the corporation could not meet the heavy yearly expenses without the customary taxes levied on trade;608 and in 1450 the citizens laid a petition before Henry the Sixth, praying him to consider the extent of their distress. They were bound, they said, to pay yearly a rent of 112 marks to the King, “for the which said fee-farm so to be paid your bailiffs have little or naught of certainty to raise it of, but only of casualties and yearly leases £40 or more.” There was further a sum of £50 10s. 4d. for the tax of the fifteenth, “the which when it is levyable, some one man in the said city is set unto four marks and some five marks, because your said city is desolate of people.” Then came a sum of 60s. to be paid yearly to the Magdalen Hospital;609 and besides that there were the expenses of two burgesses to Parliament who cost 4s. a day; “and also the great charges and daily costs the which your said poor city beareth about the enclosing and murage of your said city.”610 To add to all their trouble a grant which the king had made to the municipality in 1439 of forty marks from the ulnage and subsidies of woollen cloths had been withdrawn again; and the commonalty sadly entreat that it may be restored.

The King allowed the payment of the forty marks during the next fifty years, and Winchester made one or two further attempts at mending its fortunes. The people of Southampton had as long ago as 1406 succeeded in obtaining a license from the bishop of Winchester, to buy and sell within their town during the fair of St. Giles;611 and the mayor and community of Winchester perhaps hoped to follow this example. In 1451 they raised a debate as to the franchises and customs of the fair, and interfered with the bishop’s privileges; but their usual ill luck pursued them and they were obliged to submit and give a promise that he should never again be disturbed from having the keeping of the city and the customs aforesaid.612 A few years later a transient gleam of hope was cast across the unhappy town when the Italian merchants were driven out of London in 1456, and in this sudden emergency hired the “great old mansions”613 which the Winchester traders had allowed to fall into decay, putting the owners to heavy expenses for repairs. But they seem never to have occupied the mansions after all. Perhaps they were disheartened by the sense of failing trade and oppressive taxes; or they possibly feared the dangers that might come to them in a town that had never been allowed powers to govern and defend and deal fairly by its own townsfolk. In any case they left the big empty houses to go to Southampton, and Winchester was none the better.614

Winchester was an extreme instance of difficulties which were felt in every other town in a greater or less degree. For scarcely any important borough was without some ecclesiastical settlement within its walls, and everywhere the dispute took the gravest form. With the King or with a neighbouring lord the boroughs might make terms of peace, or impose conditions as conquerors, but their most imposing demonstrations were inevitably routed before the power of the Church. Outbreaks of popular fury in which from time to time the irritation of the burghers found expression have often been represented as symptoms of a spirit of malice and misrule by which an ignorant mob was instigated to attack the most beneficent institution known to their society and with no justification save from their lawless temper seek to appropriate to themselves its privileges and possessions. But the causes of the conflict were more valid and serious. As the instances given in the next chapter prove, the burghers learned by a genuine experience to gauge the beneficence of the Church’s claims to temporal authority. There does not seem to have been in England, as there often was abroad, the additional stimulus of religious revolt, for the practical townspeople apparently did not find the slightest difficulty in distinguishing between spiritual influence and secular jurisdiction, mainly perhaps because the power of the ecclesiastical potentates in England was of so limited a kind as to awaken but a moderate fear and equally moderate excitement. But in face of the secular problem created by the presence of a rival authority ruling over half the space enclosed in the town walls – an authority with which no permanent agreement could ever be concluded and which was manifestly fatal to the dignity or the success of municipal government – the boroughs were forced, as a mere matter of self-preservation, into insistent and reiterated demands that this double rule should be abolished, and that there should be but one undivided and supreme control in each community for civil affairs. When the pole-axes and daggers with which they at first sought to enforce their convictions were laid aside, they turned to the law-courts and the paper wars of Westminster to seek a remedy for their grievances; and it is in the records of trials from the middle of the fifteenth century to the Reformation in which the pleadings of both sides may be heard that we find the real justification of the burghers’ claim to civic supremacy, and of their determined assaults on the political independence of ecclesiastical communities.

CHAPTER XI

THE TOWNS AND THE CHURCH

In the history of Winchester we may perhaps find a clue to the explanation of that great controversy which for centuries divided the mediæval municipalities and the religious corporations into two hostile armies, – armies that chafed under the restraints of an enforced and angry truce, and from time to time broke into the brief exhilaration of a free fight. There were certain towns, such as Exeter or Canterbury or Norwich, where the municipality was as free as royal charters could make it and acknowledged no dependence on Cathedral or Priory, and where notwithstanding Town and Church were always in arms against one another, and the task of adjusting their mutual relations presented such insoluble difficulties that every other question seemed of easy settlement in comparison with a problem so insistent, so manifold in its forms, so tremendous in its proportions in the eyes of burgher and of ecclesiastic. The convent or chapter, entrenched behind its circuit of walls and towers, with its own system of laws, its own executive, its independent trade and revenues, had practically no interest either in the prosperity or the security of the town, while its keenest activities, whether from the point of view of business or religion, were enlisted in uncompromising defence of ecclesiastical privilege. On the other hand the body of burghers, conscious of the difficulties of government, with a mass of complicated business thrown on their hands and a heavy financial responsibility, nervously keeping guard over their franchises, inspired by a commanding sense of the importance of strict organization, and an ambition stimulated by tradition, success, and capacity, found in common experience reasons for judging that a double system of law and a double authority was the negation of order, peace, or material prosperity in their little republic. Their avowed object was to put an end to this division of the borough into two camps, and to secure for the community the ultimate control of administration within the city boundaries. Hence the issues raised between the townspeople and the clerical order were direct and clear. Questions of temporal and spiritual power, of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, of the immunities claimed by the “clergy,” of the gulf that separated the servant of the Church from the citizen of the State – all these things were forced home to the people with the sharpness, variety, and force of practical illustration. The war which in the twelfth century had been waged on behalf of the State and the Church by their great representatives, Henry the Second and Archbishop Thomas, was during the next three centuries brought down into every borough and fought out there in more humble fashion by provincial mayors and ecclesiastics of a circumscribed and stinted fame.

And as the quarrel was long so it was practically universal. It was this that made the struggle so momentous. Few boroughs after all were subject to the absolute rule of ecclesiastical lords; and their attempts to win freedom were local, isolated, without national significance. But all the great towns had one or more ecclesiastical bodies established within their boundaries, and all were able to appreciate the character of the conflict entailed on them. Nor were the consequences of the dispute exaggerated by the combatants on either side. During centuries of strife they had abundant opportunity of gauging its importance – from the time of Edward the First, when, by the enclosing of churchyards and ecclesiastical precincts with walls, the attempt was made to shut in religious authorities within their own limits, and give the town undivided responsibility outside these boundaries – till the time when triumphant burghers saw walls and towers levelled to the ground under Henry the Eighth.

For in the war waged by burghers against clerics who used spiritual authority to create temporal sovereignty, and in this temporal power then found means to enforce spiritual claims, – though the combatants were people of no account, fighting their quarrel out in remote and isolated boroughs, and though the noise of the battle no longer resounded as it had once done throughout Europe, – the conflict was still the same, the questions were as vital for the just ordering of human society, and the tenacity of the opponents was as great as ever. The disputes covered the whole field of practical life. In matters of trade there was not only the rivalry of two trading companies under different conditions of wealth, influence, and protection;615 but even in the case of individuals there was unfair competition, as when a citizen gave up his dwelling in the town, obtained a corrody in some ecclesiastical house, and claimed the benefits of citizenship without bearing its obligations.616 Sometimes the burghers found themselves called to defend against the ecclesiastical lawyers a right which had been proved essential to their freedom – the right of being tried only in their own courts – and the commonalty would make ordinances that no process-server should carry or cite elsewhere men or women living in the borough, and the jury of the Leet Court kept watch and made their presentment of summoners, commissary, and clerks who had dealt lightly with the liberties or goods of the citizens, or called them to distant courts.617 Or again, the invaluable privilege of having all matters that concerned the commons of the borough tried by a jury of inhabitants and not of aliens, might be put in jeopardy. In Lincoln the dean and chapter had a special grudge against trials “by people of the same city, which be so favourable one to another that they doubt not to make false oaths, and that because they be encouraged, forasmuch as they have not been before this time convict by foreigners by colour of their franchise.” On their complaint “our lord the King, willing, for the cause aforesaid, to provide for the quietness of the said church, and full right to be done as well to the said bishop, dean, and chapter and their successors,” ordered that henceforth “if any of the parties feel himself grieved of a false oath made by such assize, jury, or inquest, the attaint shall be granted to him, and the record sent by writ into the King’s Bench or into the Common Pleas; and that the sheriff impanel the jury of such attaint of foreigners of the county, without sending to the franchise of the said city, and that the justices shall take the same jury of the same foreigners, notwithstanding any franchise granted to the same city, or other usage to the contrary.”618 The question of sanctuary, too, remained a standing trouble, and the bailiffs of the borough who sent town clerks and town serjeants to make proclamation for weeks together at the abbey gate calling upon a debtor who had fled from his creditors to appear for judgement, had small sympathy with the abbot’s privileges.619 Whenever burghers had liberty and opportunity to act on their own judgement they found no difficulty in coming to a decision as to the sanctity imposed by religion on territories consecrated to sacred uses. From old premises they drew new conclusions. “As holiness becomes the Lord’s House,” declared the mayor, jurats, and whole community of Rye in 1483, “in future, to the honour of God and of the glorious Virgin Mary, the parish church of the said town, with the churchyard and the manse of the vicarage thereof, shall be of the same freedom, and with as much liberty as the other houses of the freemen, especially as to arrests and other matters.”620