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

by Alice Stopford Green

Such was the comparative helplessness of a community which, with all its tenacity of purpose, could neither urge custom nor tradition on its side in pleading for independent rights. In the borough of Barnstaple, on the other hand, which had been granted by the King[472] to Sir John Cornwall and his wife the Countess of Huntingdon, we have an instance of the immense advantages possessed by a town which though now in private ownership, inherited the tradition of privilege which its people had won as tenants of ancient demesne.[473] In 1423 the Mayor, Aldermen, and capital burgesses drew up a list of byelaws for the good government of the borough, which apparently stirred the apprehensions of its lords. For a few years later, reviving ancient traditions of feudal authority in a suit against the borough, they complained that the mayor and burgesses had of their own authority admitted as “Burgesses of the Wynde” “foreign” merchants and victuallers who merely visited the town; and had turned to their own use the fines from denizens pertaining to their lord; that they had taken the correction of bread and ale, and unlawfully seized fines and tolls; that they would not suffer his officers to take custom after ancient usage from the people of Wales for their merchandise; and that they even seized fines belonging to him for heaps of rubbish in the streets. Moreover they did not render the suit and service due to the lord’s court from all the inhabitants of the borough, for without his leave they themselves held a court every Monday, and instead of coming to every court of the lord’s steward they did not come oftener than twice a year; nor would they suffer the lord’s officers to make attachments in the borough at the Nativity of Our Mother after the ancient custom. In other words the townsfolk, just like the people of Totnes two hundred years before, were bent on regulating their trade and spending the money collected in their courts and markets; but they were happier than they of Totnes in being able to claim that all these so-called usurpations were ancient rights of the burgesses, by virtue, as they said, of a charter granted by King Athelstan 500 years before. As this charter however had unluckily been “casualiter amissa,” the town had to fall back on the verdict of an inquisition held about 1300 as to the usages and franchises to which it was entitled, and the payments which were due by the mayor and commonalty in place of old feudal services. Here the Barnstaple men held their own successfully, and in 1445 they secured a charter from Henry the Sixth, “for accommodation of the burgesses in doing their business quietly,” which confirmed to them the fullest rights of self-government.[474]

The struggle of the boroughs with their feudal lords was however a matter of little significance in England, where since the Conquest feudalism from the point of view of the noble had so unsatisfactory a record. Fallen from the high estate of his brethren on the Continent, despoiled of his might by one strong king after another, he saw himself condemned to play in England a comparatively modest part, and from his less exalted plane was even constrained to assume in his relations to burghers and traders a conciliatory, almost at times a deprecating tone, not because he was lacking in “a high and pompous mind,” but simply because his fortunes had sunk low. Hence the conflict in England was of a very different character from the conflict abroad. Fashions of careful ceremonial indeed long preserved the traditional sense of impassable barriers set between the dignity of the great whose daily needs were supplied by the labour of others, and the low estate of those who had to depend upon their own toil. “Whensoever any nobleman or peer of the realm passed through any parish, all the bells were accustomed to be rung in honour of his person, and to give notice of the passage of such eminency; and when their letters were upon any occasion read in any assemblies, the commons present would move their bonnets in token of reverence to their names and persons.” Burghers and journeymen with an irreverent laugh at men “evermore strutting who no store keep,”[475] gathered to see the noble go by “in his robe of scarlet twelve yards wide, with pendent sleeves down on the ground, and the furrur therein set amounting unto £20 or better,” while a train of followers crowded after him anxiously holding up with both hands out of the filth of the mediæval streets the wide sleeves made to “slide on earth” by their sides, and eagerly watching lest the ladies should forget to admire “the plaits behind;” and the busy mockers of the market-place guessed that tailors and skinners must soon carry their cloths and skins out into the fields if they would find space enough to cut out robes like these.[476] But the fine garments and leisurely state of the great folk, the hollow ornaments of a vanquished feudalism, were matters of little significance; the forces of the future lay rather with the crowd of workers to right and left—with the men who watched the brave procession sweep by, and then gathered in their Common House to decree that any burgher who put on the livery of a lord, or accepted his maintenance and protection, should be blotted out of the book of burgesses, and driven from their market-place and assembly hall, and “that he come not among them in their congregations.”[477]

For the moment, indeed, the noble class was as it were thrown aside by the strong current of the national life, nor could the handful of families that held half the soil of England and the lesser baronage who followed in their train be recovered of their impotence, of their impoverishment of intellect and decay of force, even by the greatest landholder and the most typical member of their body, Warwick the Kingmaker. Sated with possessions, forced into a position of leadership mainly by the imposing list of his great relations and the surprising number of his manors—a patriot who consecrated his services to the cause of a faction and the unrestrained domination of a family group of blood relations—a general who never got beyond an already antiquated system of warfare, devoid according to public rumour of personal courage, deserted in a crisis by the one organised military force in the public service—a commander with all the ready instincts of the common pirate—a statesman made after an old ancestral pattern, who had learned his politics a couple of centuries before his time, and to the last remained absolutely blind to the great movements of his own day—an administrator who never failed at a critical moment to put in jeopardy the most important national interests—an agitator restless for revolution, but whose influence in the national counsels was practically of no account when there was a pause in mere fighting—it is thus that Warwick stands before us, a consummate representative of his demoralized class.

The conditions under which the great landowners were living at this time were indeed singularly unfavourable. With the new trade they had comparatively little to do,[478] and the noble, with his throng of dependents and his show of state, was really living from hand to mouth on the harvests from his fields and the plunder he got in war.[479] After the fashion of the time the treasure of the family was hoarded up in his great oak chests; splendid robes, cloth of gold, figured satins, Eastern damasks and Sicilian silks, velvets and Flemish cloths, tapestries and fine linen, were heaped together with rich furs of marten and beaver. Golden chains and collars of “the old fashion” and “the new,” rings and brooches adorned with precious stones, girdles of gold or silver gilt by famous foreign makers, were stored away in his strong boxes, or in the safe rooms of monasteries, along with ewers and goblets and basins of gold and silver, pounced and embossed “with great large enamels” or covered with silver of “Paris touch.”[480] But the owner of all this unproductive treasure scarcely knew where to turn for a little ready money. The produce of the estate sufficed for the needs of the household, and if the lord was called away on the king’s service, or had to attend Parliament, a supply of oats was carried for the horses “to save the expenses of his purse”; and an army of servants rode backwards and forwards continually to fetch provisions from fields and ponds and salting tubs at home, so that he should never be driven to buy for money from the baker or at the market.[481] The crowd of dependents who swelled his train, easily content to win an idle subsistence, a share of booty in time of war, “maintenance” in the law courts, and protection from all enemies, either received no pay at all, or accepted the most trifling sums—a few shillings a year when they could get it, with a “livery” supplied like their food from the estate.[482] For money which was scarce everywhere was nowhere so scarce as in the houses of the landed proprietors, who amid their extravagant display found one thing always lacking—a few pounds to pay an old debt or buy a new coat. Sir John Paston, the owner of broad estates in Norfolk, was forced more than once to pawn his “gown of velvet and other gear” in London to get a few marks; when it occurred to him to raise money on his father’s funeral pall, he found his mother had been beforehand with him, and had already put it in pawn. During an unwonted visit to Westminster in 1449, the poor Lady of Berkeley wrote anxiously to her husband, one of the greatest landowners in England, “At the reverence of God send money, or else I must lay my horse to pledge and come home on my feet”; and he managed to raise £15 to meet her needs by pawning the mass book, chalices, and chasubles of his chapel.[483] So also the Plumptons, in Yorkshire, were in perpetual money difficulties; servants were unpaid, bills not met, debts of £2 10s. and £4 put off from term to term, and at last a friend who had gone surety for a debt of £100 to a London merchant was arrested. “Madam,” a poor tradesman writes to Lady Plumpton, “ye know well I have no living but my buying and selling, and, Madam, I pray you send me my money.” One of the family tried in vain to get a friend to buy him some black velvet for a gown. “I pray you herein blame my non-power, but not my will,” the friend answers from London, “for in faith I might not do it but if I should run in papers of London, which I never did yet, so I have lived poorly thereafter.”[484] When times grew pressing the country families borrowed freely from their neighbours and relations; no one, even the sister of the Kingmaker, felt any hesitation in pleading poverty as a reason for being off a bargain or asking for a loan;[485] and those who were in better case lent readily in the hope of finding a like help themselves in case of difficulty.[486] Year by year debts accumulated, till the owner’s death allowed the creditors to open his coffers and scatter his treasured stores, when the “array, plate, and stuff of the household and of the chapel” scarcely sufficed to meet the legacies and bills, the charities deferred, and the masses required for his soul’s safety.[487]

There were indeed instances in which the growing poverty of the nobles opened an easy way for the emancipation of the towns, since it was sometimes possible, under the pressure of poverty or bankruptcy, to convince the lord of a borough, even though he had but such a measure of good wit in his head

“As thou shouldest mete of a mist from morn till even,”[488]

that the balance of profit lay on the side of freedom. For to some extent the difficulties of the landowners arose from the fact that on their estates the commutation for feudal services, or dues to be rendered for the holding of land, had been settled in early times when money was scarce and demands for profit modest, and these charges remained fixed when prices were rising and when the need of ready money was keenly felt.[489] But while the lord could look for no increase from his lands, a new source of profit had been opened to him in the boroughs on his estate. He could find money surely and easily by leasing out rights of trade, collection of tolls, and other privileges to the townspeople. In the middle of the thirteenth century the mayor and burgesses of Berkeley obtained from their lord freedom from all kinds of toll which he either demanded or might demand of them;[490] and in the fourteenth century he rented to them the tolls of the wharfage and of the market, and received larger profits from this transaction than he gained from all the rent of the borough.[491]

The weakest corporation moreover had a persistence and continuity of life which gave it incalculable advantages in the conflict with individuals subject to all the chances and changes of mortality. For the nobles indeed the fight with the town was in many ways an unequal one. Driven hither and thither by urgent calls of war or of the King’s business, the lord was scarcely ever at home to look to his own affairs. In the frequent absences of the masters of Berkeley, perpetually called away by “troubles of state,” when the King summoned them to his aid whether for civil war or war of conquest,[492] the neighbouring towns of Bristol and Gloucester found opportunity to escape from their control; and the march of the baron and his retainers from Berkeley was a subject of much greater gladness to the townsmen of Bristol than to the lord of the castle himself; for “the household and foreign accounts of this lord,” we are told, “reveal a marvellous unwillingness in him to this Scottish war, dispatching many letters and messages to the King, and other lords and favourites about him, for excuses.”[493] When, as a reward for his services, one of the Berkeleys was given the custody and government of the town of Gloucester,[494] he was also charged with the government of Berwick, and was moreover called away whenever the King found himself in military difficulties; so that the Gloucester burgesses cannot have had much to fear from him. The care of the great estates, in fact, was constantly left to the women of the house and to stewards, while the master, pressed by ambition, or quite as often by the driving necessity of getting money, was fighting in Wales or Scotland, or was looking for plunder in France, or for place at court. For three generations the lands of the Pastons in Norfolk were managed by the capable wives of absentee landlords—of the judge who must have spent most of his time in London or on circuit; of his son the sharp London lawyer; and of his grandson, Sir John, the gay young soldier who hovered between London and Calais, and whose only care for his property was to press anxiously for its rents. The story of the Plumpton family was much the same. One of the Plumptons spent his last years and died in France; and no sooner did the young Sir William reach his majority in 1426, than he also left his Yorkshire estates and set off to join the French campaign.[495]

On the noble class too fell the heavy consequences of the rebellions and civil wars of which they were the main supporters. If the lord died in battle his estates might pass to a minor; if he died on the scaffold they passed to the crown; or long imprisonment might thwart his best laid plans for strengthening his hold over his boroughs. The young Lord Maurice of Berkeley, for instance, was drawn into rebellion against Edward the Second, and died in prison four and a half years later. During the whole time that he held his estates he was only in freedom for four months; and his eldest son, who was imprisoned with him, was not set at liberty till some months after his father’s death.[496] Meanwhile the towns were always quick to make their profit in such times of disturbance and revolution, as for example when the Earl of Devonshire was attainted by Edward the Fourth after the battle of Towton for his support of the Lancastrian cause, and the citizens of Exeter seized so favourable an opportunity to claim the restitution of a suburb stretching down to the riverside which the earls had held to strengthen their hold on the navigation of the Exe.[497]