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

by Alice Stopford Green

CHAPTER IX

Battle for Freedom

(3) Towns on Church Estates

The towns on ecclesiastical estates form a distinct group, whose lot was materially different from boroughs on ancient demesne or on feudal lands. All lay property was subject only to laws and customs which had been ultimately determined by the necessities of social or political expediency, and which, dealing with secular possessions for secular purposes, were capable of being unmade as they had been made. But the towns which were reckoned among ecclesiastical estates lay under the special conditions that governed those estates, where religious and supernatural influences had been forced into the service of material wealth, and the attempt was made by spiritual authority to fix fluctuating political conditions into perpetual immutability. Prelates of the Church professed to rule with a double title, not only as feudal lords of the soil, but as guardians of the patrimony of S. Peter, holding property in trust for a great spiritual corporation, and exercising an authority maintained by formidable sanctions. If the watchwords of property are always impressive, among lay folk they are still open, under sufficiently strong pressure, to reasonable discussion; and it is admitted that temporal rights may be plausibly exchanged for others more expedient, or may be fairly bartered away as a means of buying a continued and secure existence. The Church, however, by a fruitful confusion of the terms ecclesiastical and religious, assumed to hold property by another tenure than any temporal owner; girt round about by tremendous safeguards to which the lay world could not aspire, and leaning on supernatural support for deliverance from all perils, it could the better refuse to discuss bargains suggested by mere political expediency.

The difficulty of reconciling this assumption of permanent and indivisible supremacy with the actual facts of life became very apparent with the passage of the centuries, when from a variety of causes it was no longer possible for the clerical order to maintain the place it had once held as the advanced guard of industry and learning, and its tendency was to sink into the position of a parasite class, producing nothing itself, but clinging to the means of wealth developed by the labour of a subject people. With the wisdom born of experience the Church was ready to give to its tenants all trading privileges, and any liberties that directly made for the accumulation of wealth;[517] but the flow of its liberality was suddenly dried up when townspeople proposed to add political freedom to material gain, nor was it likely to be quickened again by the crude simplicity with which the common folk resolved the question of the lordship of canons and monks.

“Unneth (scarcely) might they matins say,
For counting and court holding;”
······

“Saint Benet made never none of them
To have lordship of man nor town.”[518]

The rising municipalities on the other hand, even if they had a history but a century or two old, were endowed with all the young and vigorous forces of the modern world; nor is there a single instance of a town where a lively trade went hand in hand with a subservient spirit, or where a temper of unconquerable audacity in commercial enterprise did not throw its exuberant force into the region of government and politics. With all their abounding energy, however, burghers had still to discover that freedom might be won anywhere save at the hands of an ecclesiastical lord. If Norwich received from the bounty of Kings one privilege after another in quick succession till its emancipation was complete, its neighbour Lynn, equally wealthy and enterprising, but subject to the Bishop of Norwich, was fighting in 1520 to secure just such control of its local courts as Norwich had won for the asking three hundred years before. The royal borough of Sandwich had been allowed to elect its mayor and govern itself for centuries, while Romney, also one of the Cinque Ports but one which happened to be owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, did not gain the right to choose its own mayor till the time of Elizabeth, and was meanwhile ruled by any one of the archbishop’s squires or servants whom he might send as its bailiff, and forced to adopt any expedient by which while under the forms of bondage it might win the practice of freedom. A dozen generations of Nottingham burghers had been ordering their own market, taking the rents of their butcheries and fish stalls and storage rooms, supervising their wool traders and mercers, and admitting new burgesses to their company by common consent, while the men of Reading were still trying in vain every means by which they might win like privileges from the abbot who owned the town. Everywhere the same story is repeated, with varying incidents of passion and violence. The struggle sometimes lasted through centuries: in other cases it was brought to an early close. Some boroughs won a moderate success, while others wasted their labour and their treasure for small reward. In one place ruin settles down on the town, in another gleams of temporary success kindle new hopes, in a third the dogged fight goes on with monotonous persistence; but everywhere anger and vengeance wait for the day of retaliation, when monastery and priory should be levelled to the ground.

I. There was a distinct difference in the lot of towns under the control of a bishop, and others which were subject to a convent. Burghers who owed allegiance to a bishop had to do with a master whose wealth, whose influence, whose political position, whose training, made him a far more formidable opponent than any secular lord. On the other hand he probably lived at some distance from the borough, and, charged as he was with the administration of his bishopric and the estates of the see, besides all the business of a great court official occupied in weighty matters of state, he had but limited attention to give to its affairs. As the see passed from hand to hand, a resolute fight with an over-ambitious borough which was begun by one bishop might die away under the feebler rule, the indifference, or the wiser judgement of his successor. In the case therefore of towns on episcopal estates, if the struggle was arduous and costly, still its issue was not irrevocably determined beforehand, and the burghers might hope for at least partial victory. But the emancipation of the townsmen was long deferred, and in the fifteenth century there were boroughs where the bishop’s hand still pressed heavily on the inhabitants.[519]