Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Alice Stopford Green

It was no mean advantage to be a burgher in those days, when nearly all material benefits and legal aids and political rights were reserved for the favoured classes, and when it was the towns that opened for the working man and the shopkeeper a way to take their place too among the people of privilege. The burghers, of course, shared alike in rights of common and of pasturage on the town lands, of fishing in the town waters,[336] of the ferry across the stream or sea channel, and so forth; but their pre-eminent privilege was the right to trade. If ordinary inhabitants were allowed to buy and sell food or the bare necessaries of life, all profitable business was reserved as the monopoly of the full citizen.[337] Protected from the intrusion and the competition of the alien,[338] he paid a reduced toll for his merchandize at the entrance of the town; his stall in the market was rented at a lower price than that of the stranger; he had the first choice of storage room in the Guild Hall for his wool or leather or corn; the town clock which tolled the hour when the market might begin, struck for the burgher an hour or two earlier than for strangers and visitors.[339] If a travelling merchant brought his wares to the town the citizen might claim the right of buying whether the owner wished to sell or no, and might insist on a share in the profits of any mercantile venture.[340] He alone might keep apprentices, and become a master in his craft. If he travelled outside his own town for the purpose of trade he carried privilege with him everywhere, and confidently claimed freedom from “pontage” and “passage” and “pesage” and “shewage,”—that is from tolls for crossing bridges, for passing into a town, for the weighing of goods, for showing merchandize in the market,[341]—and from a host of similar imposts. Wherever he went he was shielded by the protection of his fellow citizens;[342] if he had an action for debt in any other town he was granted common letters from the Mayor and Jurats to assist him in his suit;[343] if any wrong was done him they enforced compensation, or they avenged his injuries by confiscating the goods of any merchants within their walls who had come from the offending town.

Legal safeguards and privileges moreover fenced him about on every side. He could only be impleaded in the courts of his own town, and any fellow citizen who brought an action against him outside the borough might be disgraced and disfranchised;[344] while the King himself could not summon a burgher to appear before his judges at Westminster, save on the plea that there had been “lack of justice” at the first trial in the court of his own town. No “foreigner” might meddle in any legal inquiry in which their houses and property were concerned;[345] while, on the other hand, every citizen from twelve years old could serve on juries for the town business.[346] Peculiar favours were extended to the burgher,[347] as at Worcester where there were special provisions to protect him from any wrongful fine by the bailiff,[348] and the city sergeant had to do any legal business required of him at reduced fees; or at Canterbury, where special formalities of trial assured to him a more exact and careful justice; or at Sandwich, where he could be tried only before the mayor, and could not be summoned before his deputy like a common stranger.[349] Everywhere he could claim the right of being separated from the common criminals and imprisoned in some tower or room in the Guild Hall used as the Freeman’s prison.[350]

But all these privileges were far from being a free gift to be enjoyed in idle security; and to each individual burgher the franchise practically meant a sort of carefully-adjusted bargain, by which he compounded for paying certain tolls by undertaking to do work, and work which might be both costly and laborious, for the community. The body of citizens was but a small one, and every man in it was liable at some time or other to be called on to take his part in the public service. Taxation for the town expenses, watch and ward, service on juries, the call to arms in defence of the borough, were incidents as familiar as unwelcome in every burgher’s life; but a more serious matter was the summons to take office and serve as mayor or bailiff or town clerk or sergeant or tax-collector or common constable—offices not always coveted in those days, when the mayor was held personally responsible for the rent of a town which was perhaps vexed with pestilence or wasted with fire; when treasurers had to find funds as best they could for too frequent official bribes or state receptions of great lords or court officers; when bailiffs had to meet the loss from failing dues and straitened markets;[351] when the boxes of the tax-collector were left half empty through poverty, or riots, or disputed questions of market-rights;[352] and when the constable was “frayed” day and night by sturdy men, dagger in hand, ready to break the King’s peace.[353] Many modes of escape were tried. The inhabitants would refuse to take up the franchise, or they would leave the town for a time;[354] an elected officer would plead a vow of pilgrimage to “S. James in Gallice;” or an influential burgess might obtain letters patent from the King which granted him freedom from serving any municipal office during his life.[355] But generally a heavy fine compelled the submission of a refractory citizen, and in the last resort the community would apply for a writ against him from the Privy Council.[356] The town allowed no excuses, and everywhere the citizens were forced by stringent laws to take on them the offices to which they had been elected by their fellows. In Lydd an order was made in 1429 that any one who had been appointed by the bailiff or jurats to take any journey on town business should pay a fine if he refused without reasonable cause.[357] In the Cinque Ports generally if a citizen who had been elected as mayor or jurat declined to serve, his house was pulled down;[358] or as at Romney the bailiff with the whole community went to his dwelling, turned himself, his wife, his children, and all his household into the street, shut the windows and sealed the door, and so left matters until “he wished to set himself right by doing the said duty of jurat.” In Sandwich again, “if a person when elected treasurer will not take upon him the office he shall not be permitted to bake or brew, or if he does bake or brew the commons may take his bread and beer to their own use till he accepts the office.”[359] At the worst, however, the burgher might thankfully remember that his public duty practically ceased at the wall and moat that bounded the town, and that when he had paid down his money towards the buying of the town charter he was at least safe from the danger of being sent as tax-collector or constable or juror anywhere throughout the country round.[360]

The privileges and duties of the free citizen remained, however, the endowment of the few. That larger conception of the common rights of man which had begun to make its way in the boroughs, was checked and hindered at every turn by the complicated conditions of town life, by the jealousy of established settlers as to new comers, the exclusive temper which the crafts had begun to show, the terror of the trader before free competition, the imperfectly developed authority of the corporations over the space within the town walls, where it had failed to break the barriers of feudal custom and the claims of ecclesiastical corporations. Howsoever the towns widened their borders, there was still a growing population which lingered just outside the circle of free citizens, shut out by one cause or another from full municipal liberty. Settlers came who did not care to burden themselves with the duties and charges of citizenship; there were dwellers in churchyards and tenants of ecclesiastical estates, who carried on their business within the town liberties but remained without the town jurisdiction; landowners from outside the walls brought their corn and wool to the town market; traders came from time to time with wares to sell; there were apprentices and journeymen, escaped bondmen, and country-folk coming to look for work. As all of these alike needed the protection of the town, so the town needed their services; and by degrees their respective duties and rights were laid down in charters, in ordinances, or in friendly compacts.

I. Thus it came about that below the ranks of the burgesses, themselves secure in their municipal supremacy, were ranged orders of men more or less highly favoured according to their degree. First came the inhabitants who had paid for special rights of trade in the town, or were admitted as members of the Merchant Guild. In times of commercial prosperity when wandering dealers and artizans were attracted to some thriving borough for trading purposes they went to swell this class of independent inhabitants, subject to the jurisdiction of the town courts, but taking no part in its politics;[361] so that it occasionally happened, as in Norwich and Worcester, that the town refused to harbour this body of irresponsible inhabitants and passed a law ordering them to become citizens.[362] When on the other hand trade declined and poverty settled down on the town, as in Romney and Winchester, the failing fortunes of the people were marked by a steady decrease of the class of “advocantes,” or those who would “avow” themselves freemen, and inhabitants who in their distress refused or renounced the franchise,[363] were driven into the ranks of the politically unfree.

II. So long as the trading inhabitants owned the jurisdiction of the town courts their presence brought no serious difficulty to the ruling authorities. But within the town walls there were other groups of men who lay beyond this jurisdiction, and held an ambiguous position which was the source of many a quarrel for ascendency and many a struggle for license in the course of the fifteenth century. These were the tenants and dependants of bishop or abbot, of some lay lord, or of the king’s castle—men who lived within the liberties of the borough and who had the right of trading in the town, but who were bound to do suit and service at the courts of their own special lord.[364] To some extent they were forced to recognize the mayor’s authority, since their rights of trade were guaranteed by his protection, and since he yearly reminded them of his power to levy taxes on all property within the liberties of the borough. But their obedience was grudging and their loyalty was cold. The mayor could not awe them by a summons to his court, or enforce his demands with threat of pains and penalties; he could scarcely terrify them into submission with his sergeant and a few constables. By degrees, it is true, the tenants of the king’s castle or of feudal lords became merged in the general body of the inhabitants. But the tenants of ecclesiastical estates[365] were maintained by lords who were bound by every tradition of their order never to yield up the least jot of authority to the secular power, and least of all to the secular power as represented by groups of upstart drapers and fishmongers and weavers whose humble shops and booths leaned against the walls of the abbey or the priory, and whose pretensions, loud and noisy though they might be, were perhaps a century or so old at the best. The ecclesiastical tenants therefore remained everywhere an alien body, no true partakers in the life of the town, and when supported by a powerful bishop or abbot determined to crush the pretensions of a struggling borough they proved a serious danger to municipal unity, and one which the authorities found themselves powerless to conquer till the Reformation settled the question for ever.

III. There was another class of privileged traders,—those who lived altogether outside the town,[366] who knew nothing of its courts, and bore none of its charges. We find everywhere these country traders under various styles and with various privileges according to the town’s discretion and convenience. Sometimes the citizens sold rights of trade to cultivators of the surrounding lands and occasional visitors to fair or market, and nobles and landowners were ready to give large yearly payments for freedom of the market and for the right of having granaries in the town. Peasants who owned a plot of land just outside the borough increased their scanty store by learning some little handicraft or doing a small trade in the town; or craftsmen settled down beyond the boundaries to escape the town dues and live more cheaply. At first the settlement of workmen and traders at their gates may have seemed a matter of small consequence, but as time went on the danger which was hidden in these communities of free-traders became apparent. The manufacturer or dealer was able by one device or another to protect himself against the enterprising man of the suburbs who came in with his cheaper goods; it was the journeymen of the towns who failed before the stress of the battle, driven back from their poor entrenchments by the masses who pushed forward on all sides to contest with them admission into the lower ranks of industry where the scantiest skill sufficed to earn a bare subsistence.

IV. Last of all came the non-burgesses, who had neither any share in the government, nor any rights to rent a stall in the market, nor to own shop or workroom in the town. These formed an obscure company of workers without records or history. They counted among their number ancient burghers who had fallen into low estate and could no longer pay their burgage dues, as well as the poor who had never prospered so far as to buy a tenure or citizenship. But they were not all necessarily poor or miserable.[367] Rich merchants came from foreign parts to settle for four or eight months at a time, as the law might allow them, and bought and sold within the four walls of the room which the Town Council had ordered in some inn as their dwelling-place, with the host standing at their elbow to witness every bargain. Foreign workmen sometimes came to settle, like the Flemish weavers in Bristol, or the Dutch makers of canals and sluices whom we find in the towns of the southern coast. Companies of tilers or builders gathered in towns where stone houses were becoming the fashion, or where the Council had issued an order that within the next few months every house must provide itself with roof and chimney of brick or tiles.[368] The seaports had their uncertain element of sailors, “shipmen that had nought, and cared never an they were once on the sea whether they come again or not,” and who at Yarmouth formed a riotous population, so that it was said that “no thrifty man would live in it.”[369] Labourers from the country came in to win freedom from serfage. Others came to look for higher wages, and the hope which town life held out to the enterprising and the ambitious; so that in 1405 an Act of Parliament declared that the fields were deserted, and the “gentlemen and other people of the nation greatly impoverished” by the labourers seeking apprenticeship in towns, “and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs that servants do use in the same.”[370] Children came, constantly as young as seven, never older than twelve—when they were expected to begin the work of life just as at that age their brothers of a better station took on themselves the duties of citizenship, for “every poor man that hath brought up children to the age of twelve year waiteth then to be holp and profited by his children.”[371] Thenceforward they had to fight their own way, looking for assistance not to their fathers but to their patrons, “whence it proceeds that, having no hope of their paternal inheritance, they all become so greedy of gain that they feel no shame in asking almost ‘for the love of God,’ for the smallest sums of money; and to this it may be attributed that there is no injury that can be committed against the lower orders of the English that may not be atoned for by money.”[372]

But if apprenticeship ever brought with it “pride of clothing,” the poor working class of the towns fared roughly and worked hard among artizans who “hold full hungry house,” who know “long labour and light winning,” who taste no wine from week to week, whose bed has no blanket, and on whose board no white bread ever comes.”[373] Once this rough living and rougher toil had been a sure way of entering into the privileges of municipal freedom. But even in the fourteenth century this was no longer the case. The poorer burghers opposed the admission of new comers to share their common lands, and insisted on selling the franchise dearly. The crafts had already begun to form themselves into close companies, and by prohibitive fines shut out all save the descendants of their own members; while at the same time the custom was growing up that the town franchise should be given only to those who were enrolled in a craft or trade guild; and strangers therefore found the way barred against them; they could neither become masters in their craft nor burgesses in their town, and went to swell the general mass of journeymen and serving men. Moreover the Peasant Revolt had carried with it widespread terror, and from that time some towns, as for instance York and Bridgenorth, refused to allow any born bondman, whatever his estate, to receive the freedom of the city. Thus from one cause or another groups of men were formed in the midst of every town who were shut out from the civic life of the community, and whose natural bond of union was hostility to the privileged class which denied them the dignity of free citizens and refused them fair competition in trading enterprise. The burghers yearly added to their number half a dozen or perhaps even a score of members wealthy enough to buy the privilege, while the increase in the unenfranchised class, which had begun very early in the town life, proceeded by leaps and bounds; till presently the old balance of forces in the little state was overthrown, the ancient constitution of a free community of equal householders was altogether annulled and forgotten, and a comparatively small class of privileged citizens ruled with a strong hand over subject traders and labourers to whom they granted neither the forms nor the substance of liberty.