AN ELIZABETHAN RECORDER.
“I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were.”
—Walt Whitman.
Many years ago, when I happened upon a few extracts from the letters of Mistress Dorothy Osborne, I wondered how they had escaped the grasp of the historian learned in the domestic annals of the Commonwealth. And in the same way it has always surprised me that the correspondence of William Fleetwood, Recorder of London from 1571 to 1591, should have been left hidden in the scarce but charming collection of Elizabethan Letters edited by that excellent antiquary and man of letters, Thomas Wright.
Some day, perhaps, popular interest may demand a Life and Letters of Fleetwood; but, meanwhile, a mosaic of the man and his work, pieced together from his own written words, may interest latter-day readers. His career was similar to that of many another minor Elizabethan official, and the records show him to have been an honest, active Protestant magistrate, full of zeal for his religion, honour for his Queen, and integrity in his office. In his letters we have a twenty years experience of an Elizabethan Quarter Sessions which we may use as a base to measure our progress in law and humanity during the last four hundred years.
And first a word or two of the man himself that his message may be the more clearly understood. The Recorder was a descendant of the ancient Lancashire Family of the Fleetwoods of Hesketh, in which village Baines, Lancashire’s historian, thinks our Recorder was born, and the probable date of his birth seems to be 1535. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of Robert Fleetwood, third son of William Fleetwood of Hesketh, who married Ellen Standish, daughter of another old Lancashire family. Their second son, Thomas, came to Buckinghamshire, and was known as Thomas Fleetwood of the Vache in Chalfont St. Giles. He was Master of the Mint, and Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. The Recorder must have been recognised by the family, and no doubt visited his uncle Thomas, for he himself married a lady of a well known Buckinghamshire family, Mariana, daughter of John Bailey of Kingsey. He was educated at Oxford, and was of Brazenose College, but he took no degree, and came to London to study law at the Middle Temple, where at the age of twenty-eight we find him appointed Reader. In Mary’s reign he was member for Lancaster, and afterwards sat in the House for Marlborough and the City of London. The Earl of Leicester was his patron, and it is said to be through his influence that in 1571, at the early age of thirty-six, he became Recorder of the City of London.
This office he held for twenty years, when he retired on a pension of £100 a year, and becoming Queen’s Serjeant the following year, did not live to enjoy the further honour, for he died at his home in Noble Street, Aldersgate, in February, 1593, and was buried at Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have had considerable estates.
Altogether he stands before us as a type of successful professional lawyer coming from the ranks of the county families into the larger world of London, bringing with him a certain amount of Lancashire grit and humour, and a strong sense of duty to the Government and the public. Nor does he seem to have been in any way a hide-bound, dry-as-dust, technical minded official, but there is evidence that he had a wide sympathy with many social movements of the time. He was an eager Protestant, but I cannot find that he was fanatical in his dislike of the Roman Catholics, whom it was his duty to prosecute. Anthony Wood describes him as “a learned man and a good antiquary, but of a marvellous merry and pleasant conceit”; and it is said he contributed much to the last of the old editions of Holinshed. Strype, the annalist, speaks of him in reference to a speech in the House of Commons as “a wise man,” and he seems to have combined wisdom and humour with a stern sense of official duty. That he was not a mere creature of Leicester’s and the Court is shown in his examinations of one Bloss, who had uttered terrible scandals concerning Elizabeth and her favourite, but Fleetwood reports upon his conscience as a lawyer, that it is “a clear case of no treason.” A weak man would have been tempted to strain the law against the prisoner, who was an undeserving and dangerous person. There is a pleasant incident, too, of his writing to Secretary Walsingham about some young orphans whose Catholic mother had committed suicide, begging him to acquaint Peter Osborn, the Lord Treasurer and the Master of the Wards, with the details of the unfortunate case, in order that their monies may be kept for them. “Such was the care,” writes Strype, “of this good Recorder, of the Children of the City.”
There was one exciting incident in his life when in 1576 he was cast into the Fleet Prison. Lord Burghley seems to have suggested a raid upon the Charterhouse, where unlawful Mass was being celebrated. The Recorder carries out his instructions, and writes a vivid account of his proceedings. Unfortunately, Lady Geraldi, the wife of the Portuguese Ambassador, was present, and her husband carries his complaint of her treatment to Court, with the result that Elizabeth—after the manner of all rulers of all times—promptly disavows her agent, and by way of a pleasant apology to Portugal, throws Fleetwood into gaol. The Recorder, who probably thoroughly understands that he is only in the Fleet, “without prejudice” and for purely Pickwickian state purposes, writes to Lord Burghley: “I do beseech you thank Mr. Warden of the Fleet for his most friendly and courteous using of me, for surely I thank God for it. I am quiet and lack nothing that he or his bedfellow are able to do for me.” And after a short experience of gaol he sums up the situation much as Mr. Stead did after a similar experience: “This is a place wherein a man may quietly be acquainted with God.”
It is in passages like these in the man’s own letters that his figure becomes dimly discernible to us across the ages of time, and when our eyes grow accustomed to the sight, we see before us the form of an Englishman not unlike many we have known in our own time. The more one studies the unaffected domestic documents of any period written without afterthought of publication, the more convinced one is that social progress moves like the tide and the rocks and the trees; its growth is nearly imperceptible, and four hundred years in the development of mankind is but a small moment of time.
The correspondence of William Fleetwood with Lord Burghley commences in 1575, when my Lord Burghley was at Buckestones—what a charming spelling of the prosaic Buxton—for his health. In those days an English Premier got rid of his gout in his own country, and knew not Homburg. The knowing ones in the political circles of London whispered with emphasis that the Prime Minister was “practising with the Queen of Scots,” then in custody at Sheffield, but the historical evidence points to mere gout.
Our Recorder, being Leicester’s creature, and being also a man of the world and looking for promotion as his deserts, writes careful reports to my Lord Burghley, telling him of London that from a police point of view “the state of the city is well and all quiet.” The Star Chamber had received the city fathers, and my Lord Keeper with the Chancellor of the Duchy, the Master of the Rolls and others had met the Recorder, and Master Nicholas the Lord Mayor, and divers Aldermen who had reported to them of city affairs. And as is the way of official men, they reported all to be well.
“And as,” writes the Recorder, “my Lord Keeper’s order is to call for the book of misbehaviours of masterless men, rogues, fencers, and such like, we had nothing to present for London, for Mr. Justice Southcot and I had taken fine of six strumpets such as haunt the hedge and which had lately been punished at the Assizes at Croydon, and two or three other lewd fellows, their companions, whom we despatched away into their countries. As for Westminster, the Duchy (the Savoy), St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John’s Street and Islington, (they) were never so well and quiet for neither rogue nor masterless man dare once to look into those parts.” Could Scotland Yard make a better report than that to-day? No doubt Fleetwood believed with the optimism of a modern Home Office official that he and his fellows had purged London of crime.
Crime being well in hand, these good men set out with feverish energy to put down the source of crime, and like the social reformer of to-day, thinking that pimples were the origin of disease rather than mere evidence of a disordered system, commenced a crusade on the alehouse.
One is apt to think of the Star Chamber as merely a Court for the oppression of English freedom and the abolition of Magna Charta, but in Elizabeth’s day it was busying itself with much the same problems that are troubling Parliament and the magistrates to-day. It is very modern reading to learn that my Lord Keeper and the residue of the Council at the Star Chamber have set down in writing certain orders for the reforming of certain matters, and that the very first of these is “for the suppressing of the over great number of alehouses, the which thing upon Wednesday last my Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward and myself for the liberties of Southwark, and Mr. Justice Southcot and myself for Lambeth town, Lambeth Marsh, the Mint, the Bank, Parr’s Garden, the Overground, Newington, Bermondsey Street and Kentish Street, sitting altogether, we have put down, I am certain, above two hundred alehouses and yet have left a sufficient number, yea, and more, I fear than my Lord Keeper will well like of at his next coming.”
All this was done on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday there was an influential dinner party at Mr. Campion, the brewer’s—one wonders if he owned tied houses in those days and whether their licenses were spared—and “at after dinner, Mr. Deane and I went to Westminster, and there in the Court we had before us all the officers of the Duchy and of Westminster, and there we have put down nearly an hundred alehouses. As for St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John Street, and Islington, Mr. Randall and I mean this Saturday at afternoon to see the reformation, in like manner Mr. Lieutenant and Mr. Fisher deal for the East part. I am sure they will use great diligence in this matter.”
One may piously hope that the souls of these good men are not vexed to-day with the knowledge of the futility of their work on earth and that they know nothing of our modern licensing system. Could Master Fleetwood return to listen to the procedure of a local licensing bench in the twentieth century he would perhaps laugh in his sleeve to think that the methods of the Star Chamber were yet with us and that magistrates of austere mind were still using “great diligence in these matters.”
Fleetwood’s earliest letter is dated from Bacon House, August 8th, 1575. The vacation is on, yet it seems the Temple is full of students. For as Richard Chamberlayne tells us this is the “second learning vacation” which began on Lammas Day. Readings continued for “three weeks and three days,” and the Recorder seems to think my Lord Burghley would take an interest in the matter of legal education, which is not an affair that has troubled the mind of any minister of modern times. The plague is with them and the study of the law has to give way to the plague, for the Recorder tells us that “as touching the Inns of Court it so fell out that at Gray’s Inn there was no reading this vacation because one died there of the plague. At the Inner Temple there hath been a meeting, but by means that the plague was in the house, the reading being scarce half done, is now broken up. In Lincoln’s Inn yesterday being Friday, at afternoon one is dead of the plague and the company are now to be dispersed. In the Middle Temple, where I am, I thank God we have our health and our reading continually. I am always at the reading, and I have taken stringent order upon the pain of putting out of commons, that none of the Gentlemen of our house or their servants shall go out of the house except it be by water and not to come in any place of danger, the which order is well observed.”
“Our house” is the old world phrase familiar to Templars and means the Middle Temple, and “putting out of commons” was in that day a serious penalty. The “readings” took the form of “moots” or arguments on a case put by the reader, and argued not only by students but by lawyers of position. They must have been of considerable educational value and have always been prized by the older generation of lawyers. I remember well an old learned Judge solemnly exhorting me in the days of my youth, to become a good “put-case,” a phrase which one does not hear used nowadays. Moots and readings might, one would think, be revived especially in the interest of the newly called barrister, who can say with but too much truth as Fleetwood wrote in August, 1575, “For my own part I have no business but go as quietly to my book as I did the first year that I came to the Temple.”
In July, 1577, Lord Burghley is again at “Buckstons” [sic] and the faithful recorder sends him a budget of news. He has been at the Mercers’ feast “and there were we all very merry ... and I told them that I was to write privately to your Lordship; and they required me all to commend them to your good Lordship; at which time the Master of the Rolls, who is no wine drinker, did drink to your Lordship a bowl of Rhenish wine and then Sir Thomas Gresham drank another, and Sir William Demsell the third and I pledged them all.” It reads like a page from the Book of Snobs.
And after the “great and royal banquet” which took place at the house of the new Master, some time we may suppose about mid-day, Fleetwood, as he tells us “walked to Powle’s to learn some news.” For in that day St. Paul’s was the Exchange and the club and the Market Place of the men of the world where news came from all quarters of the world and where news passed from lip to lip and thence out into the corners of England in such letters as this of Fleetwood’s to Lord Burghley. The extraordinary uses to which the Cathedral was put in Elizabeth’s time, are a constant theme of reproach from religious-minded men. Idlers and drunkards used to sleep on benches at the choir door, and porters, butchers and water bearers were suffered in service time, to carry and re-carry their wares across the nave, and in the upper choir itself irreverent people walked about with hats on their heads, whilst if any entered the Cathedral booted and spurred, the gentlemen of the choir left their places and demanded “spur-money” and threatened their victim with a night’s imprisonment in the choir if the tax were not paid. Such was “Powle’s” on this July afternoon when Recorder Fleetwood went down in search of news, and indeed he heard terrible tidings; for there “came suddenly into the church Edmund Downing, and he told me that he was even then come out of Worcestershire and that my Lord Chief Baron died at Sir John Hubbard’s house and that he is buried at Leicester. And he said that the common speech of that country is that Mr. Serjeant Barham should be dead at Worcester, but that is not certain. The like report goeth of Mr. Fowler, the Clerk of the same Circuit ... and a number of other gent that were at the gaol delivery at Oxon are all dead. The inquest of life and death are almost all gone. Such Clerks servants and young gent, being scholars as were at the same gaol delivery, are either dead or in great danger. Mr. Solicitor’s son and heir being brought home to his father’s house at Woodstock, lieth at the mercy of God. Mr. Attorney’s son and heir was brought very sick from Oxon to his father’s house at Harrow, where he lieth in as great danger of death as might be, but now there is some hope of amendment. The gaol delivery of Oxon, as I am told, was kept in the Town Hall, a close place and by the infection of the gaol as all men take it, this mortality grew.”
We know now all about the Oxford Black Assizes of the 5th and 6th of July, 1577, and how Judges, Sheriffs, Knights, Squires, Barristers and members of the Grand Jury were stricken down with what was probably typhus. The disease spread to the Colleges. Masters, Doctors and heads of houses left almost to a man. “The Master of Merton remained longe omnium vigilantissimus ministering to the sick. The pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind of confection.” Wild rumours spread abroad that it was the result of a Papist plot. In a few weeks of the Assizes, some five hundred perished, nearly all men of the better class. The disease did not attack the poor or women. There seems little doubt that the infection was among the prisoners and there is a record that two or three thieves had died in chains shortly before the Assizes. One would have supposed that such a visitation would have been a signal for prison reform, but those who have read of Howard’s experiences, know how little was done to mitigate the horrors of life in gaol until a much more recent date.
Fleetwood tells us a great deal about his own activity at this time. He is holding an oyer and terminer at the Guildhall in the vacation “to keep the people in obedience.” He sits with the Justices to discuss the abolition of alehouses and the advancement of archery, he is constant in his search after rogues and masterless men and there being cases of plague in the Savoy, he takes occasion to pass with all the constables between the bars and the tilt-yard in both the liberties, to see the houses shut, which he notes with pride “neither the Master of the Rolls nor my cousin Holcroft the Bailiff, would or durst do.” At the same time he was writing a book on “The Office of a Justice of the Peace” which was printed a hundred years later. Amidst these various employments however, he finds room for the lighter social duties and spends an afternoon with the Shoemakers of London, who “having builded a fair and a new hall, made a royal feast there for their friends, which they call their housewarming.”
A really heavy sessions must have been a terrible experience since this is what the Recorder evidently regards as a light one. “At the last Sessions,” he writes, “there were executed eighteen at Tyburn, and one, Barlow, born in Norfolk but of the house of the Barlows in the county of Lancashire, was pressed. They were all notable cut-purses and horse-stealers. It was the quietest Sessions that ever I was at.” At the beginning of the year he makes an audit of known criminals “that I may know what new may be sprung up this last year and where to find them if need be” and he makes out a list of “receivers and gage takers and melters of stolen plate and such like.”
Part of his duty was the actual police work of “searching out of sundry that were receptors of felons.” In the course of this duty he tells Burghley on another occasion of the discovery of a den that Dickens might have used as a model in Oliver Twist, so little had the ways of criminals altered from Elizabeth to Victoria. “Amongst our travels this one matter tumbled out by the way, that one, Walters, a gentleman born and some time a merchant of good credit, who falling by time into decay, kept an alehouse at Smart’s Keye (Quay) near Billing’s Gate, and after some misdemeanour being put down he reared up a new trade of life and in the same house he procured all the cut-purses about this city to repair to his same house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys to cut purses. There were hung up two devices, the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters and was hung about with hawk’s bells, and over the top did hang a little sacring bell; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed to be a publique foyster, and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without the noise of the bells, he was adjudged a judicial nipper.” Note that a foyster is a pick-pocket, and a nipper is termed a pick-purse or a cut-purse.
The path of an honest judge in the days of Elizabeth was beset with difficulties. Although bribes were not actually offered to the individual magistrate, yet he was written to by influential persons about the Court, and he had to choose between doing his duty and incurring the dislike of powerful men. Fleetwood complains “that when by order we have justly executed the law ... we are wont either to have a great man’s letter, a lady’s ring, or some other token from some other such inferior persons as will devise one untruth or another to accuse us of if we prefer not their unlawful requests.” Our honest Recorder is strong to maintain the principle that all men are equal in the sight of the law.
Here is a typical case of which he complains: “Mr. Nowell of the Court hath lately been in London. He caused his man to give a blow unto a carman. His man hath stricken the carman with the pommel of his sword and therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man are likely to be indicted thereof, I am sure to be much troubled with his letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like case heretofore, I have been even with the same man. Here are sundry young gentlemen that use the Court that most commonly term themselves gentlemen; when any of them have done anything amiss, and are complained of or arrested for debt, then they run unto me and no other excuse or answer can they make but say—‘I am a gentleman, and being a gentleman I am not thus to be used at a slaves and a colion’s (scullion’s) hands.’ I know not what other plea Mr. Nowell can plead. But this I say, the fact is foul.”
A “gentleman” in England in Elizabethan days seems to have thought himself as little amenable to law as an American millionaire, but Fleetwood had the English gist of the matter in him when he says “the fact is foul.”
But though the Recorder stood firm against the hangers on of the Court, London was not a happy soil for judicial integrity. He never attained to the promotion he deserved, and maybe it was because he could not dishonour his office to serve his friends at Court. Such mercy as the Recorder could honestly show to a prisoner, he was only too ready to exercise. “Truly, my Lord,” he writes, “it is nothing needful to write for the stay of any to be reprieved for there is not any in our commission of London and Middlesex but we are desirous to save or stay any poor wretch if by colour of any law or reason we may do it. My singular good Lord, my Lord William of Winchester was wont to say: ‘When the Court is furthest from London then is there the best justice done in all England.’ I once heard as great a personage in office and authority as ever he was and yet living say the same words. It is grown for a trade now in the Court to make means for reprieves; twenty pounds for a reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days. I see it will not be holpen unless one honoured gentleman who many times is abused by wrong information—and surely upon my soul not upon any evil meaning—do stay his pen. I have not one letter for the stay of a thief from your Lordship.”
But Elizabethan mercy was not a very vigorous virtue and did little to temper the wind to the criminal lamb. Here is a typical day’s work and its terrible results. “Upon Friday last we sat at the Justice Hall at Newgate from seven in the morning until seven at night when were condemned certain horse-stealers, cut-purses and such like to the number of ten, whereof nine were executed and the tenth stayed by a means from the Court. These were executed on Saturday in the morning. There was a shoemaker also condemned for wilful murder committed in the Black friars, who was executed upon the Monday in the morning.” The superior criminal dignity of murder over larceny appears to have given the murderer two days further life.
The Recorder’s main work however, was a constant warfare with rogues and masterless men. The Elizabethan vagabonds were to be “grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear” unless they could find someone who under penalty of five pounds would keep them in service for a year. Rogues and vagabonds were all those able-bodied men having no land or master practising no trade or craft and unable to account for the way in which they earned their living, and further included actors, pedlars, poor scholars and labourers who would not work for what employers called “reasonable wages.” London swarmed with these vagabonds, and Fleetwood seems to have been the official who was made responsible if they committed any excesses.
One January afternoon in 1582, Her Majesty at even was taking of the air in her coach at Islington, in which suburb she had a Lodge. During her drive, writes Fleetwood, “Her Highness was environed with a number of rogues. One, Mr. Stone, a footman, came in all haste to my Lord Mayor, and after to me and told us of the same.” No mention is made of any molestation, but the complaint rouses the Recorder to extraordinary efforts. “I did, the same night,” he writes, “send warrants out to the said quarters and in the morning I went abroad myself and I took seventy-four rogues whereof some were blind, and yet great usurers and very rich.” All these were sent to the Bridewell, and the next day “we examined all the said rogues and gave them substantial payment, (a euphemism for grievous whipping), and the strongest we bestowed in the mylne (mill) and the lighters. The rest were dismissed with a promise of double pay if we met with them again.” In the Southwark district, forty rogues, men and women, were taken and “I did the same afternoon peruse Poole’s (St Paul’s) where I took about twenty cloaked rogues.” All these went to the Bridewell and to punishment. The constables of the Duchy (the Savoy), brought in “six tall fellows that were draymen unto brewers. The Master did write a very courteous letter unto us to pardon them. And although he wrote charitably unto us, yet they were all soundly paid and sent home to their masters”; which seems to have been in excess of the Recorder’s jurisdiction, as the draymen were clearly not “masterless.” Another day a hundred lewd people were taken and the Master of Bridewell received them and immediately gave them punishment. The bulk of these poor wretches were unemployed seeking work in the City, which they could not obtain in their own counties. And Fleetwood writes: “I did note that we had not of London, Westminster nor Southwark, nor yet Middlesex nor Surrey above twelve, and those we have taken order for. The residue for the most were of Wales, Salop, Chester, Somerset, Buckingham, Oxford and Essex and that few or none of these had been about London above three or four months. I did note also that we met not again with any in all our searches that had received punishment. The chief nursery of all these evil people is the Savoy, and the brick-kilns near Islington.” It is curious to remember that a hundred and fifty years afterwards Defoe writes of the beggar boys getting into the ash-holes and nealing arches of the glass houses in Ratcliff Highway, and that to-day one of the difficulties of Manchester magistrates is to keep vagabonds from sleeping in suburban brick-kilns. Truly the ways of the vagabond seem to be a force of nature which centuries of progress and reform have done very little to amend.
The history of the Bridewell which was filled with so many generations of evil-doers, is a very curious one. An ancient palace of the Kings of England, it was in the reign of Edward VI. standing empty. The suppression of the monasteries and other religious houses filled London with multitudes of necessitous and to some extent dissolute persons. It was Bishop Ridley who wrote to Sir William Cecil: “Good Mr. Cecil I must be a suitor unto you in our Master Christ’s cause,” and pointed out that “there is a wide, large empty house of the King’s Majesty called Bridewell, that would wonderfully serve” to house these poor wanderers. Thus in a spirit of pure charity, did the good Bishop open the doors of one of the most miserable prisons that ever disgraced humanity. Already we see in Fleetwood’s time how it had fallen away from the Bishop’s ideal Christian home to shelter the hungry, naked and cold. What it was then it remained for more than a hundred and fifty years, as we may see in Hogarth’s print in the “Harlot’s Progress,” with its pillory and its whipping post, and the heavy log to be fastened on the prisoner’s leg and the gaoler with his rod standing over the wretched woman beating out the hemp with her mallet.
The Recorder seems to have had absolute power in dealing with prisoners charged with offences, to use force to obtain confessions. Here is a very horrible story which Fleetwood reports to Lord Burghley as a matter of every day routine. A French merchant charged a carrier’s wife with stealing £40. After great search the money was found and restored. The carrier’s wife denied all knowledge of it. “Then,” says Fleetwood, “I examined her in my study privately, but by no means, she would not confess the same, but did bequeath herself to the devil both body and soul if she had the money or ever saw it.” After much cross-examination, the woman refused to answer anything further. “And then,” continues Fleetwood, “I took my Lord Mayor’s advice and bestowed her in Bridewell, where the Masters and I saw her punished, and being well whipped she said that the devil stood at her elbow in my study and willed her to deny it, but so soon as she was upon the cross to be punished he gave her over. And thus, my singular good Lord, I end this tragical part of this wretched woman.”
But Fleetwood did not spend all his days in the Criminal Courts. As a Serjeant-at-law, he is present when his “brother” Sir Edmund Anderson, was made Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he took part in the ceremony by following the “ancient” in the ceremony of putting a case to the new Judge. And the way of it was thus: “my Lord Chancellor did awhile stand at the Chancery bar upon the side of the hall, and anon after that the Justices of the Common Place (Pleas) were set, his Lordship came to the Common Place and there sat down and all the Serjeants, my brethren, standing at the bar, my Lord Chancellor my brother Anderson called by name and declared unto him Her Majesty’s good liking and opinion of him, and of the place and dignity that Her Majesty had called him unto, and then my Lord Chancellor made a short discourse what the duty and office of a good Justice was, and in the end his Lordship called him up unto the midst of the Court and then Mr. Anderson kneeling, the commission was read, and that done, his Lordship took the patent into his hand, and then the clerk of the Crown, Powle, did read him his oath, and after he himself read the oath of his supremacy, and so kissed the book, and then my Lord Chancellor took him by the hand and placed him upon the bench. And then Father Benloos, because he was “ancient” did put a short case, and then myself put the next. To the first my new Lord Chief Justice did himself only argue, but to the next that I put, both he and the residue of the Bench did argue. And I assure your good Lordship he argued very learnedly and with great facility delivered his mind. And this one thing I noticed in him, that he despatched more orders and answered more difficult cases in this the fore-noon than were despatched in one whole week in his predecessor’s time.”
So too, when the Lord Mayor was sworn in in the Exchequer, the Recorder presented him in the name of the City, and they “did such services as appertained viz.: in bringing a number of horse-shoes and nails, chopping knives and little rods.” These customs were antiquarian even in Elizabeth’s days, but they are with us still.
And no doubt Fleetwood loved to take part in these things, for he was a good antiquary himself, and we must not think of him merely as a harsh persecutor of the “rogues and masterless,” for away from his work we hear record of his merry and pleasant conceit, and note that he is an eloquent and witty speaker at City banquets. And there is evidence in these letters that he did not love much of his work, as indeed what man can take pleasure in so unfortunate a task, but to him it was a duty, and one to be done like all duties—thoroughly. And that he did it to the best of his ability and with honesty seems clear, but that he longed to be removed from the intolerable toil of it, even as early as 1582, is shown by this pathetic appeal to Lord Burghley. “Truly, my singular good Lord, I have not leisure to eat my meat, I am so called upon. I am at the least the best part of one hundred nights in a year abroad in searches. I never rest. And when I serve Her Majesty, then I am for the most part worst spoken of and that many times. In the Court I have no man to defend me, and as for my Lord Mayor, my chief hand, I am driven every day to back him and his doings. My good Lord, for Christ’s sake! be such a mean for me as that with credit I may be removed by Her Majesty from this intolerable toil. Certainly I serve in a thankless soil. There is, as I learn, like to fall a room of the Queen’s Serjeant; if your Lordship please to help me to one of these rooms, I assure your honour that I will do Her Majesty as painful service as six of them shall do. Help me, my good Lord, in this my humble suit, and I will, God willing, set down for your Lordship such a book of the law as your Lordship will like of.”
The offer of a new law book did not tempt Lord Burghley, and the end did not come until nearly ten years afterwards, when in 1591 Fleetwood resigned with a pension of £100 a year, which the Common Council voted him. And in the next year he obtained the wished for post of Queen’s Serjeant, which he held for scarcely two years, as he died on February 28th, 1594.
And this is the last piece of writing I have found of his, written the day he gave up his Recordership. Even with his resignation upon his mind he notes down for Lord Burghley’s satisfaction the excellent punishment awarded to two lewd people for misconduct against the public health.
“This day I rode to the Yeld (Guild) Hall to sit on the commission for strangers and in the lower end of Cheapside towards Poole’s (St. Paul’s) there stood a man and a woman both aged persons with papers upon their heads. The man was keeper of the conduit there. These two lewd people in the night entered into the Conduit and washed themselves, et ad hunc et ibidem turpiter exoneraverunt ventres eorum, etc.
This day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office. The lot is now to be cast between Mr. Serjeant Drew and one Mr. Fleming of Lincoln’s Inn. This present Saturday.
Your good Lordship’s most bounden
W. Fletewoode.”
This picture of the old Recorder riding out to the Guild Hall for his last sitting and reporting to my Lord the common sights of the City brings back to us a real picture of his days. So that we can almost feel that we are living on “this present Saturday” and regretting with all good citizens that “this day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office.”