CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
Et civitas Londonie habeat omnes antiquas libertates et liberas consuetudines suas, tam per terras, quam per aquas. Preterea volumus et concedimus quod omnes alie civitates, et burgi, et ville, et portus, habeant omnes libertates et liberas consuetudines suas.
And the citizens of London shall have all their ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water; furthermore, we decree and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs.
A full list of the liberties and customs of London would be a long one; and an account of how each of these grew up and was confirmed by the Crown need not be given here. The most cherished of the privileges enjoyed in John’s day were the right to appoint a civic chief, who bore the name of mayor, and the right to choose sheriffs of their own who should collect the city’s firma[[479]] (or annual rent payable to the exchequer), so as to obviate the intrusion of royal bailiffs. Only a brief account of the way in which the metropolis obtained these two privileges need be here attempted.
The chief feature of London before the Norman Conquest seems to have been lack of proper municipal organisation. Dr. Stubbs describes the capital during the eleventh century as “a bundle of communities, townships, parishes, and lordships, of which each has its own constitution.”[[480]] It was thus a collection of small administrative units, rather than one large unit. Some semblance of legal unity was, it is true, afforded by the folkmoot, in which the citizens regularly assembled; by its smaller council known as “husteng”; and perhaps also by its “cnihtengild” (if, indeed, this third body be not entirely mythical); while the existence of a “portreeve” shows that for some financial purposes also the city was treated as one whole. London, however, prior to the reign of Henry I. was far from possessing machinery adequate to the duties of a local government for the whole community.
The first step towards acquiring a municipal constitution is generally supposed to have been taken by the citizens when they obtained a charter from Henry I. in the last years of his reign (1130-35). This is not strictly accurate. London, indeed, by that grant gained certain valuable privileges and enjoyed them for a short time, but it did not obtain a constitution. The chief rights actually conferred by Henry were as follows:—(1) The firma was fixed at the reduced rate of £300 per annum, the citizens obtaining for this payment a lease in perpetuity of their own city with the surrounding county of Middlesex—the grant being made to the citizens and their heirs; (2) they acquired the right to appoint whom they pleased as sheriffs of London and Middlesex, implying the exclusion of the king’s tax-collectors by men of their own choosing; (3) a similar right of appointing their own nominee as justiciar was also conferred on them, to the exclusion apparently of the royal justices of eyre. Many minor privileges were confirmed which need not here be specified. Mr. J. H. Round[[481]] argues with convincing force that these concessions, important as they were, did not confer a civic constitution upon London. Henry’s charter, in his opinion, confirmed all the already existing separate jurisdictions and franchises, perpetuating the old state of disunion, rather than creating a new principle of cohesion. He proves, further, that these benefits continued in force only for a few years after Stephen’s accession. That king was coerced by the Earl of Essex into infringing the citizens’ chartered rights; and London did not regain the ground thus lost until the reign of Richard I.
Henry II., indeed, granted a charter to the citizens in 1155, which is usually interpreted as a full confirmation of all the concessions of the earlier Henry.[[482]] Mr. Round has conclusively proved the error of this opinion.[[483]] The charter of 1155 restricted, rather than enlarged, the privileges of London, being couched in cautious and somewhat grudging terms. The main concessions of the earlier charter were completely omitted: the citizens no longer elected their own sheriffs or their own justiciar; the reduction of the firma to £300 was not confirmed; and subsequent pipe rolls show that Henry doubled that amount, although the Londoners protested, arguing for the lower rate.
The next crisis came early in Richard’s reign. Then it was that London first obtained its municipal constitution. Then also it regained and secured on a permanent basis the privileges precariously held for a few years under Henry I. and Stephen. The form in which the constitution came at last was borrowed from France, and was neither more nor less than the Commune, so well known on the Continent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The commune of London was possibly modelled upon the commune of Rouen; the chief cities of England and Normandy respectively must have had intimate relations. Mr. Round[[484]] has shown that these concessions were not, as has sometimes been supposed, voluntarily granted in 1189 by Richard I., but were extorted from his younger brother John, when that ambitious prince was bidding high for powerful allies to support his claim to act as Regent. London really got its first constitution on 8th October, 1191, under picturesque and memorable circumstances. While Richard tarried in the Holy Land, a scramble took place at home for the right to represent him. The Chancellor Longchamp had been appointed Regent; but John, wily and unscrupulous, successfully ousted him, with the help of the men of London. At the critical moment the metropolis had offered its support on conditions, which included the restoration of all the short-lived privileges conferred by the charter of Henry I., and, in addition, a municipal constitution of its own in the form of a commune of the continental type.
Mr. Round, in a notable passage, describes the scene. "When, in the crisis of October, 1191, the administration found itself paralysed by the conflict between John, as the king’s brother, and Longchamp, as the king’s representative, London, finding that she held the scales, promptly named the 'Commune’ as the price of her support. The chronicles of the day enable us to picture to ourselves the scene, as the excited citizens, who had poured forth overnight, with lanterns and torches to welcome John to the capital, streamed together on the morning of the eventful 8th October at the well-known sound of the great bell, swinging out from its campanile in St. Paul’s Churchyard. There they heard John take the oath to the ‘Commune,’ like a French king or lord; and then London, for the first time, had a municipality of her own."[[485]]
For any accurate definition of a commune we look in vain to contemporary writers, who are usually carried away by their political bias. Richard of Devizes[[486]] quotes with approval, “Communia est tumor plebis, timor regni, tepor sacerdotii.” Some insight has been gained in recent years, however, into its exact nature. A Commune was a town which had obtained recognition as a corporate entity, as a link in the feudal chain, becoming the free vassal of the king or other lord, and itself capable of having sub-vassals of its own.[[487]] Its chief institutions were a mayor and an elective council, generally composed of twenty-four members, some or all of whom were known as échevins or skivini, a word which in its modern form of “scavengers” has fallen on evil days, no longer denoting the city fathers, but men who perform civic duties of a useful but less dignified nature. Perhaps the chief peculiarity of the commune was the method of its formation, namely, by popular association or conspiracy, involving the taking of an oath of a more or less revolutionary nature by the citizens and its subsequent ratification by those in authority. It is generally admitted that these communes, though revolutionary in their origin, were not necessarily democratic in their sympathies. Under the new constitution of London, the grievous taxation of Richard’s reign was made to fall more heavily on the poor of London than on any other class. The commune thus set up in 1191, tolerated at first rather than encouraged by the Crown, formed thenceforth the municipal government of the capital; the citizens chose not only their own sheriffs, but also their own mayor, although the latter, when once appointed, held office for life.
When John became king, he granted three charters, ratifying the privileges of the capital in return for a gersuma (or slump payment) of 3000 marks.[[488]] All the franchises specified in the old charter of Henry I. were now confirmed, with one exception: the liberty to appoint a justiciar of their own, now seen to be inconsistent with the Crown’s centralizing policy, was abandoned. None of these charters made mention of mayor or commune, but they confirmed some minor privileges gained in Richard’s reign.[[489]]
A fourth charter, dated 20th March, 1201, was merely of temporary interest; but a fifth, granted on 9th May, 1215, little more than a month previous to Magna Carta, is of great importance, and represents the bait thrown by John to the citizens in the hope of gaining their support in this new crisis, as he had previously gained it in the crisis of 1191. The fifth charter not merely confirmed to the citizens in explicit terms the right already enjoyed by them of electing a mayor for life, but allowed them to elect a new one every year. Miss Norgate does not exaggerate, when she describes this concession as “the crowning privilege of a fully constituted municipality, the right to elect their own mayor every year.”[[490]] An annually elected magistrate would, undoubtedly, feel his dependence on the citizens more than one holding office for life; but it seems probable that the chief value of the grant lay in its confirmation by John as king, of the rights conceded by him fourteen years earlier as his brother’s unauthorised representative, and enjoyed meanwhile on an insecure tenure. The charter of May, 1215, by officially recognizing the mayor, placed the commune over which he presided on a legal footing. The revolutionary civic constitution, sworn to in 1191 was now confirmed. The citizens acted on the permission granted them of annually changing their chief magistrate: but in place of supporting the king who made the grant, they opened their gates to his enemies.[[491]]
Such then was the London whose privileges were confirmed by Magna Carta—a city which had slowly grown to greatness, obtaining after many struggles a complete municipal constitution in the form of a commune with annually elected mayor and council, as well as sheriffs of its own appointment, who excluded the Crown’s financial officers not only from the district within its walls but from the whole of Middlesex. The Great Charter, avoiding details, confined itself to a general confirmation to the men of London of their ancient “liberties and free customs,” two words[[492]] whose vagueness ought in this connection to receive a liberal interpretation.[[493]]
London, in this respect, was not to stand alone; a similar concession was explicitly made in favour of all other cities, boroughs, towns, and sea-ports. This was a mere confirmation, however, not to be read as conferring new privileges or exemptions, each borough being left to prove its own customs as best it might. In the reissues of Henry, the distinction of being mentioned by name was shared by these “barons of London,” with “the barons of the Cinque ports,” who from their wealth, their situation, and their fleet, were allies well worth conciliating. They played, indeed, a prominent part in the decisive naval victory gained by Hubert de Burgh on 24th August, 1217.[[494]]
Other portions of John’s Great Charter which specially affected the Londoners were the last clause of chapter 12, and chapters 33 and 41; while many of the privileges granted or confirmed in other chapters were shared by them. The Mayor of London, it should be added, was one of the executive committee of twenty-five, entrusted with wide powers to enforce the provisions of the Charter.[[495]]
Among the most cherished privileges claimed by the chartered boroughs were the rights to exact tolls and to place oppressive restrictions upon all rival traders not members of their guilds, foreigners and denizens alike. The confirmation of these privileges in this chapter has been held to contradict chapter 41, which grants protection and immunities to foreign merchants.[[496]] The inconsistency, however, should not be pushed too far, since the later chapter aimed at the abolition of “evil customs” inflicted by the king, not of those inflicted by the boroughs. At the same time, all favour shown to aliens would be bitterly resented by their rivals, the English traders. If the charter had been put in force in its integrity, the more specific privileges in favour of foreign merchants would have prevailed in opposition to the vague confirmation of borough “liberties” wherever the two came into collision.[[497]]
[479]. Firma is explained infra, c. 25.
[480]. Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. 439. Cf. Round, Commune of London, 220, who is in substantial agreement. Miss Mary Bateson, however, thinks that “there has been a tendency unduly to minimise the measure of administrative unity in the twelfth-century shire of London.” See the evidence produced by her, Engl. Hist. Rev., XVII. 480-510.
[481]. Geoffrey de Mandeville, 356.
[482]. See e.g. Miss Norgate, Angevin Kings, II. 471.
[483]. Geoffrey, 367.
[484]. Commune of London, 222.
[485]. Commune of London, 224.
[486]. Select Charters, p. 252.
[487]. M. Luchaire, Communes Françaises, p. 97, defines it as “seigneurie collective populaire.”
[488]. Miss Bateson, Engl. Hist. Rev., XVII. 508.
[489]. E.g. the removal of obstacles to free navigation in Thames and Medway. Cf. infra, c. 33.
[490]. John Lackland, 228.
[491]. From this date the list of mayors shows frequent, sometimes annual, changes. Thus Serlo the mercer was Mayor in May, 1215, when London opened its gates to the insurgents, while William Hardell had succeeded him before 2nd June, 1216, when he headed the citizens who welcomed Louis to make London his headquarters.
[492]. Both words are discussed infra, c. 39.
[493]. The Charter mentions neither mayor nor commune, but probably by implication confirmed both. Prof. G. B. Adams finds such confirmation, not in c. 13, but in c. 12 (by its application of the word auxilium to London); and maintains that with the omission of this word from subsequent charters "London’s legal right to a commune fell to the ground." Engl. Hist. Rev., XIX. 706.
[495]. See infra, c. 61.
[496]. Cf. Pollock and Maitland, I. 447-8.