So closed for the moment the long struggle of two hundred and fifty years—a struggle whose gain was small in comparison with all the cost and labour, the civic enthusiasm, the learning and ability which had been lavished on it. The easy passage to freedom by which the royal towns had travelled, the large and regular expansion of their liberties, the liberal admission of their right to supremacy over their own trade and over the higher matters of law and justice, might well kindle in the subjects of abbey and priory a perpetual unrest, and anger deepened against their masters as they saw themselves, in an age of universal movement, bound to the unchanging order of the past, and condemned to perpetual dependence under a galling system of administration which the secular government had abandoned three hundred years before.
CHAPTER X
BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY
When a borough had won from its lord full rights of self-government, its battles were not yet over. The next effort of the town authorities was to secure complete power over all the inhabitants within their walls, so that they might compel all alike to submit to the town courts, and to bear their share of burdensome duties, such as the payment of taxes, the keeping watch and ward, the defence of the town, the maintenance of its trade, or the enlargement of its liberties—in fact to take their part as good citizens in all that concerned the common weal.
For all towns alike, whatever were their chartered rights, had to reckon not only with their own lord of the manor, but with the great people, whether king or noble or bishop or abbot, or perhaps all of them together, who might own a part of the land within their walls, and might all assert their various and conflicting rights, and multiply officials of every kind with courts and prisons and gallows, to vindicate the lord’s authority. Thus in Warwick in the eleventh century, when the population was scarcely over a thousand, the King held a hundred and thirteen houses, and various lords and prelates owned a hundred and twelve, while there were nineteen independent burgesses who had the right of sac and soc. So also in the time of Edward the First there were five gallows in Worcester and the district immediately round the city. One belonged to the town, another to the bishop, and a third to the Earl of Gloucester, while two more were set up by the abbots of Pershore and Westminster who held property in the borough; all of which lords and prelates had the right of hanging thieves and rioters in this little community of about two thousand inhabitants.[576]
A new municipality, face to face with these traditional claims, and powerless before the customary rights of property, could only fall back on friendly treaties by which both sides might win advantage from peaceable compromise. As soon as the burghers had won chartered privileges of trade and freedom from toll throughout the kingdom, they had something to offer to their neighbours, and the bargaining began. They could propose to grant protection and a share in their privileges, and would demand in return that the tenants of alien lords should contribute to their taxes and take part in public duties, and perhaps acknowledge, in some respects at all events, the authority of their courts. But the progress of the negociations and their final result underwent considerable modifications, according as the townspeople had to deal with the constable of the King’s castle; with some lord who held property in the borough; or with an ecclesiastical settlement, whether cathedral or monastery, planted within the liberties.
I. The Castle Fee was a bit of the royal territory altogether independent of the municipality. In Bristol, for example, the castle had its own market at its gate; and its inhabitants were exempt from the town justice, so that if one of the tenants of the fee committed a crime he was sent to Gloucester thirty miles distant instead of being tried in Bristol itself. Since the castle fee lay outside the jurisdiction of the town, its ditches became the refuge of felons and malefactors flying from the bailiffs, and as late as 1627 it was stated that two hundred poor persons were dwelling within the precincts who mostly lived by begging, besides a number of outlaws, excommunicated people, and offenders who found them a hiding place, and when soldiers and sailors were impressed great multitudes of able men “fled thither as to a place of freedom, where malefactors live in a lawless manner.”[577] From his position as the king’s lieutenant the governor or Constable of the Castle in important frontier or seaport towns was a very great official, with an authority as military commander which gave him the right of interference in local affairs, and whose power might easily prove a real danger to municipal institutions.[578] In Bristol, where the mayors after their election “did fetch and take their oath and charge at the castle gate” from the constable as the representative of the King, he was practically the official arbiter in any crisis of town politics, and when a revolt of the commons broke out in 1312 against a handful of merchants who controlled the municipal government, the party in power at once claimed the constable’s help against their fellow-townsmen. Thereupon the commons assaulted the castle and built forts against it, so that the forces of three counties which were marched to the rescue by their sheriffs could not quell the riot; but the castle party finally triumphed, the insurrection was violently put down, twelve burgesses banished, the rule of those who had usurped privileges claimed by the whole commonalty confirmed, and the enemy of the Bristol burghers, Lord Maurice of Berkeley, appointed by the King “custos of the castle and town.”[579]
It was only however in a few boroughs that exceptional military difficulties made the post of governor one of great or permanent authority, as for instance in Bristol or Southampton. And even in these towns a good understanding was before long established between king and burghers, and powers exercised by royal officers which impeded the free developement of municipal life were withdrawn without jealous alarms on the sovereign’s side, or prolonged agitation on the part of the town. The Bristol mayors were freed by royal charter from the necessity of taking their oath from the constable in 1345. And in towns such as Norwich, where military considerations early became of comparatively little importance, the castle tenants were made to contribute to the city taxes in the thirteenth century, and in the course of the next hundred years, were put unreservedly under the control of the city authorities.[580]