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

by Alice Stopford Green

Once more, however, the burghers took heart, and in 1327 broke into the abbey and forced the abbot to concede to them a community, a common seal, a Guild merchant, and custody of their gates, with other liberties. But their triumph was short; utterly defeated by the forces of abbot and king, they were forced in the concord of 1332 to renounce for ever the claim to a community;[553] and when after the Peasant Revolt there was much general begging for pardon, the men of S. Edmundsbury, who were ordered to sue for their pardons specially, had to find surety not only to the King but to their lord the abbot.[554]

If S. Edmundsbury was one of the most unfortunate ecclesiastical towns Reading was perhaps the most fortunate. For Reading was originally a borough on royal demesne, which was granted by Henry the First to the new monastery founded by him.[555] From this time the town lay absolutely in the control of the abbot. He owned all its streams, from which the inhabitants had “chiefly their water to brew, bake, and dress their meat.”[556] The mills were in his hands; he did as he chose with the market, controlled the trade, and had the entire supervision of the cloth manufacture. He appointed the Warden of the Guild or mayor, and the various town officers; and claimed a decisive voice in the admitting of new burgesses or members of the Guild, while from every burgher’s son who entered the Guild he claimed a tax of 4s., and from every stranger one-half of the fine paid as entrance fee—the sum of the fine being fixed in presence of a monk who might raise objections so long as he was not overborne by the joint voices of six legal men of the Guild. Every burgher in the Guild had further to pay to him a yearly tax of chepin gavell for the right of buying or selling in the town.[557] For any breach of the law fines were gathered in to increase his hoard, since all the administration of justice lay in his hands. Before the abbot alone the emblems of supreme authority might be borne, and the mayor when he went in state was only allowed to have two tipped staves carried before him by the abbot’s bailiffs.

From the time of Henry the Third there was unceasing war between the townsmen and their lord. Violent dissensions broke out in 1243, when the burghers “lay in wait day and night for the abbot’s bailiffs,” and “hindered them from performing their duties,” till order was restored by a precept from the King.[558] The townsfolk were appeased by the grant of certain trading privileges; but ten years later the quarrel broke out again. The abbot, as they maintained before the King’s Court at Westminster, had taken away their Guild, summoned them to another place than their own Guild Hall to answer pleas, changed the site of their market, and forced them to render unwonted services. An agreement was drawn up before the judges, by which the burghers won the right to hold their corn market in its accustomed place, to own their common Guild Hall, with a few tenements that belonged to it, and a field called Portmanbrok (the rent of which was set apart for the salary of the mayor), and to maintain their Guild merchant as of old. On the other hand the townspeople conceded that it was the abbot’s right to select the Warden of the Guild from among the guildsmen, and require him to take oath of fidelity to himself as well as to the burgesses. The abbot might tallage the town at certain times, and his bailiffs were still to administer justice, and might at any time claim the keys of the Guild Hall, sit there to hold pleas, carry off all profits to the abbot’s treasury, and fine the burgesses any sum which it was in their power to pay. Finally it was admitted that the meadow beyond the Portmanbrok belonged to the lord.[559]

After an arrangement which left to the abbot all the weighty matters of government, the control of the burghers’ trade and a charge on their profits,[560] it was no wonder that before a hundred years were over the inhabitants of Reading, restless and discontented, were again battling for larger privileges. In 1351 the mayor and commonalty refused obedience to a constable appointed by the abbot’s steward, claiming for themselves the right to choose the constables, and present them to take their oaths before the king’s justices and the justices of the peace instead of before the abbot. At the same time they raised various fundamental questions as to their rights, just as Lynn was doing almost in the very same year. They asked whether the town was not a royal borough and therefore in no way dependent on the abbey; whether the townsmen had not therefore a right to elect their own mayor; and whether that mayor ought not to exercise jurisdiction over the burgesses and commonalty “according to the custom of the borough and Guild”—questions which one and all afforded fair subjects of dispute for the next hundred and fifty years.

The burghers henceforth gave the abbot no rest. In the long quarrel the Merchant Guild became the real centre of the common activity, just as it did wherever a town subject to a lord temporal or spiritual failed to win independent jurisdiction of its own.[561] For if there were free boroughs where the mayor, with his council and the common assembly of the burghers in which the whole conduct of government was centred, were in name and fact the accepted constitutional authorities; on the other hand in dependent towns where political freedom was still incomplete the Merchant Guild appears as ostensibly the only means by which the will of the community could find expression; as men recognized in it the one society in whose disciplined ranks they might be enrolled to fight for the liberties they claimed, its organization was held to be the most important of their privileges and the truest symbol of their common life; and it necessarily became the bond of fellowship, the pledge of future freedom, the school of political energies.[562] In such towns therefore the Merchant Guild had a vitality and a persistent continuity of life which was unknown elsewhere, and was often preserved in full vigour two or three centuries after it had perhaps suffered decay or transformation elsewhere.

This was the case in Reading. The burghers fell back on the Guild as the one authorized mode of association for public purposes, and in its “morghespeche,” or “morning talks,” the leading townsfolk discussed how the independence of the borough might be advanced. Successive mayors of the Guild, though still to all appearance appointed as officers of the abbot, became really the representatives of the town, identified themselves absolutely with its interests, and readily led their fellow citizens in revolt against the convent. In 1378 the burghers paid about £5 for a new charter; and twice sent the mayor to London to assert their privileges, and to insist that the convent should be forced to bear a just share of the burden of taxation, and pay a part of the tenth demanded by the King. The messengers were lavish with their gifts to judges and officers and lawyers who might befriend them, eels and pike, perches and salmon and capons; and succeeded so well that the town charters were confirmed in 1400, in 1418, and in 1427.[563] In 1391 the burghers carried the dispute about the appointment of constables to the king’s judges at Westminster; and seem to have succeeded in this matter too, for in 1417 the mayor elected the constables in the Guild Hall, and the justices of the peace admitted them to office. About 1420 a Guild Hall was built close to the Hallowed Brook, though the burghers complained of being “so disturbed with beating of battle-dores” by the women washing in the brook that they could scarcely hold their courts or do any public business.[564] They made payments for the clock house, and set up a bell for the community,[565] and appointed a permanent salary for the mayor of five marks, to be paid from the Common Chest instead of the uncertain rent of the Portmanbrok. But when they went on to build a new “Outbutchery,” and buy “smiting stocks” for butchers not living in the town, the abbot at once saw an attempt to limit his own market profits which he immediately resented, denying the burghers’ right to hold their new out-butchery or receive rents from it. They on their side protested that their Guild was a body corporate, having a Common Hall, a seal, and the right of possessing common property; that they held also a wharf, a common beam or weighing-machine, and the stocks and shambles; that they had been granted freedom from toll throughout the kingdom; that they returned two burgesses to Parliament; and were freed from shire and hundred courts; and finally they asserted, to sum up all the rest, that they had held of the King long before the monastery was founded.[566] In 1431 lawyers were appointed to search the evidences in the Common Chest as to agreements between the town and the abbot. At the same time a Register of the Acts of the mayor and burgesses was begun, and continued year after year without break. In 1436 and 1439 payments were made for the writing out of certain articles as to the privileges of the town; and counsel were again employed to look over the evidences in 1441.[567]

Throughout these years the mayor and officers were constantly at Maidenhead, London, or Canterbury, holding consultations about legal business with Lyttleton and the most famous lawyers. They succeeded in buying a charter for their Guild Hall with sums contributed by rich citizens; and gratefully adorned the building with a picture of the King. The mayor of the guild became more and more the representative of the burghers’ hopes, and his greatness the symbol of their triumph. They had not only raised his salary in 1459 to ten nobles,[568] but like their brethren at Lynn they got permission from Henry the Sixth to have a mace carried before him; and in 1459 the mace was actually bought.[569] At this extravagance, however, the abbot made a firm stand, and Henry had to send a letter to the Mayor of Reading, just as he had done eleven years before to the mayor of Lynn, ordering that this privilege should remain with the abbot alone as the token of his supremacy. But the mayor possibly gained his point a little later, for in 1487 he was allowed two Mace-serjeants, so it would seem that at least his tipped staves were now borne by his own servants.[570] He secured too for himself and for the burgesses exemption from serving on juries; and in the same year assumed supervision of the cloth trade. In 1480 the burgesses had done away with individual payments of the “chepin gavell” tax to the abbot, by ordering that it should be given from the Town Chest; and in 1486 a citizen bequeathed property for its payment, so that the townsmen were henceforth freed from all personal difficulties in this matter.[571]

Either the question of the cloth-market or that of the mace-serjeants brought the battle to a climax. The abbot absolutely refused to appoint any “master of the guild, otherwise called mayor,” and took upon himself to admit such people as he chose to the office of constable.[572] The guild retorted by choosing a mayor for themselves, who nominated his own officers to keep order, while all alike in this emergency gave their services freely, for in 1493 “nothing was paid to the mayor, because neither he nor any one else charged anything on the office.”[573] In the case of the lesser offices the burghers held their own, and when in 1499 the abbot appointed two constables, the mayor thrust them out of their places.[574]

But the triumph of the people was short-lived, for in the long run they proved powerless against the great spiritual corporation which ruled over them. In the very next year, 1500, the inhabitants were utterly defeated as to the election of the mayor himself; and as they still protested, there was once more an appeal eight years later to the judgment of the King’s Court. The verdict of the judges threw back the whole question almost to the very point where it had stood centuries before at the time of the earlier appeal in 1254, and the brethren of the Guild were declared of ancient time to have had no other right than the power to present from among themselves three persons, of whom the abbot should choose one as mayor. The two constables, and the ten wardmen of the five wards, might be elected by the mayor and commonalty, but they must be sworn in before the abbot. According to ancient custom the name of any proposed burgess must be given to the abbot fourteen days before his election, and a monk must be present for the assessing of his fine of forty shillings, half of which went to the abbot; an alien’s fine might be determined by six burgesses, and if they affirmed on oath that the fine was reasonable the abbot was bound to accept it. The question of the out-butchery still remained undecided; but the dispute as to the cloth-trade was settled by a compromise. As in the case of the mayor, the town was to choose three men and present them to the abbot, who should then appoint one of the three to be the keeper of the seal for sealing the cloth.[575]