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

by Alice Stopford Green

II. There were not very many cases where a lay lord became a formidable enemy to municipal freedom, either from the extent of his property in a town, or from his power of enforcing his claims. Such disputes as did arise were settled in various ways by purchase or friendly compact, or by gaining from the Crown a charter which conferred such rights of control as were necessary for discipline and order. Boroughs on the royal demesne naturally found themselves supported by the King in urging these demands, but the appeal to force always lay behind the legal settlement, and there was occasionally a serious battle before the question of supremacy was finally decided. A bitter fight was waged between Bristol[581] and the lords of Berkeley, who owned Redcliffe, and claimed the river where they had built a quay as part of their lordship; who had their own courts and their own prison; who held their own markets and fair; and who broke the Bristol weights and measures, and refused to take the measures of assize from the mayor even though in such matters he acted as the King’s marshal. They fought long and fiercely for their power, even after a royal charter in 1240 had given the jurisdiction over Redcliffe to the mayor.[582] In 1305 an energetic young lord Maurice of Berkeley to whom his father had given Redcliffe Street tried to assert his rights, but at the ringing of the common bell the Bristol men assembled, broke into Maurice’s house, took away a prisoner from him, and refused to allow him to hold any court, or to buy and sell any wares in Redcliffe Street. Upon this the young lord, appearing with “great multitudes of horse and foot,” forced the burgesses to do suit to him, and cast those who refused into a pit, while the women who came to help their husbands in the fray were trodden under foot. He set free prisoners from the Bristol gaol, assaulted Bristol burgesses at Tetbury fair, claimed dominion over the Severn, and seized the Bristol ships. All this did Maurice, “than whom a more martial knight, and of a more daring spirit, of the age of twenty-four years, the kingdom nor scarce the Christian world then had;” and the mayor and burgesses left King and Parliament no rest with their petitions, telling of outrage after outrage committed by him, till commissioners were appointed to examine their complaints, and to Lord Maurice the sequel of this angry business was a fine of 1,000 marks, afterwards commuted to service with the King’s army with ten horsemen. A few years later moreover the Bristol men found opportunity to avenge their bitter grudge, for when he was taken in rebellion the mayor and the commonalty, “out of an inveterate hatred and remembrance of former passages,” threw into the common gaol every man who was even suspected of having adhered to the faction of Maurice.[583] Troubles again broke out in 1331, and the mayor and burgesses gathered at the ringing of the common bell for an assault on a Lord Thomas of Berkeley, destroyed his tumbrill and pillory, carried his bailiff to the Guild Hall, and forced him to swear that he would never again execute any judgements in the courts. The next year however the town, “taking the advantage of the time while the said lord was in trouble about the murder of King Edward the Second in his castle of Berkeley,” settled the matter for ever by an opportune payment to the King of £40, for which the mayor and burgesses obtained a confirmation of all their charters, and especially that which granted that Redcliffe Street should be within their jurisdiction.

No sooner was the dispute finally decided than rancour quickly died away, and the burgesses of Bristol settled down into the most friendly relations with Berkeley castle. The lords of Berkeley took to trading in wool and corn and wine, and went partners with Bristol men in robbing carracks of Genoa as well as in lawful traffic.[584] So far had the wheel of fortune turned that one of the lords who made a treaty of peace with the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury meekly appeared before the mayor and council of Bristol to give surety;[585] and when he went out to fight at Nibley the Bristol merchants sent men to his help.[586] The alliance was cemented by marriage when a Berkeley in 1475 took to wife a daughter of the mayor of Bristol;[587] and when she died in 1517 the mayor, the master of the Guild, the aldermen, sheriffs, chamberlains, and wardens of Bristol, and thirty-three crafts, followed the coffin with two hundred torches—altogether a multitude of five or six thousand people. A “drinking” was made by the family for the mayor and his brethren in St. Mary’s Hall, at which they were entertained with a first course of cakes, comfits, and ale, followed by another of marmalade, snoket, red wine, and claret, and a third of wafers and blanch powder, with romney and muscatel; “and I thank God,” wrote the steward, “no plate nor spoons was lost, yet there was twenty dozen spoons.”[588]

III. Ecclesiastical corporations also nominally held their property in the various towns by the usual feudal tenure, just like the lay lords; and when a borough formally stated its theoretic relations with them both lay and spiritual lords were put on exactly the same level. The “Customs” of Hereford show us the ideal view of these relations as the burghers liked to picture them. “Fees” within the walls[589] were held by both ecclesiastical and lay lords, whose tenants desired a share in the city privileges, and the Hereford men classed them all together under a common description. “There are some lords and their tenants who are dwellers and holders of lands and tenements within the said bounds, which they hold by a certain service which is called ‘liberum feodum’; because long ago they besought us that they might be of us, and they would be rated and taxed with us, and they are free among us concerning toll and all other customs and services by us made, but concerning their foreign services which they do, or ought to do, and of old have done, their lords are not excluded by us nor by our liberties; for we never use to intermix ourselves with them in any things touching those tenures, but only with those which concern us, or their tenures which for a time hath been of our condition.”[590] Tenants still bound to render feudal services to their lords were not reckoned among the true aristocracy of the freemen, who in admitting them to a limited fellowship marked their sense of the difference of status between the free burgher and the man who was but half emancipated; “and such men ought not to be called citizens or our fellow citizens ... because they are ‘natives,’ or born in the behalf of their lords, and do hold their tenements by foreign services and are not burgesses.” It was only when a tenant bought a house in the city and was in scot and lot with the citizens, that they allowed that he “is free and of our condition; but let him take heed to himself that he depart not from the city to any place into the power of his lord.”[591]

But the municipality was perfectly firm in the assertion of the authority which it had a right to exercise over all those who were admitted to the privileges of the common trade, and took a very decided tone with the spiritual as well as with the lay lords. To the Hereford burghers it was obvious that the ecclesiastical tenants only enjoyed a share in the town liberties by the grace of the citizens, and in virtue of “a composition betwixt us and them, which we for reverence to God and to the Church our mother had granted the same unto them; and also for divers alms to be given to our citizens and other poor and impotent of our city in an almshouse by the keeper of the same for ever. And it was not our intentions that these men, the tenants of the bishop, dean, and chapter should have nor enjoy our laws and customs, unless after the same manner as we enjoy them”—that is, as they went on carefully to explain, every one must acknowledge law as well as privilege, and be subject like the citizens to authority. They were all to be obedient to the Bailiff for the execution of the King’s writs; nor could they claim any immunities or independent jurisdiction in the King’s highway, seeing that all offenders taken there were to be judged by the city Bailiff. If the peace or the tranquillity of Hereford was disturbed by the tenants of any fee, the city Bailiff, “taking with him the bailiff of that fee and twelve of the most discreetest and stoutest men of the whole city,” might “by all way of rigour” compel the offenders to come before them, and force them to end their discords and make amends; if they refused, the whole community “shall account and hold them as rebels; and that they come not among them in their congregations.”[592] All bailiffs, whether of Church estates or others, were bound to help the chief Bailiff of the city in apprehending thieves and malefactors and keeping order. A vagabond, even if he were an ecclesiastical tenant, who made a noise at night “to the terror of his fellow-citizens,” might be taken up by any inhabitant and brought to the city jail till one o’clock the next day; when, in polite recognition of the lower jurisdictions, he was solemnly handed over in a public place to the bailiff of his own fee, by him to be kept in prison for a day and a night, and then returned to the city prison, “there to stay until he hath made amends as the Bailiff and commonalty shall think fit.” The tenants of the various fees were allowed to plead in the town courts at their pleasure, a privilege not granted to aliens; and in matters touching frankpledge, or anything “which could not be amended in the courts of those lords,” the city claimed rights of arbitration, and power to determine such cases “according to the laws of the city and not according to the customs, unless it be by special favour of the commonalty.”[593] All questions concerning lands and tenements in the city were to be decided by the free citizens only; and if ecclesiastical tenants refused to submit to the jurisdiction of the city magistrates and absented themselves from the court, “then our chief Bailiff, calling unto him six or more witnesses of his citizens, shall go to the cathedral church, and there before the chapter shall notify or declare the disobedience of their bailiffs and of their tenants.” If the canons would not assist or agree, the Bailiff should announce that he must then proceed himself to administer full justice, though “by his will or knowledge he would not hurt the liberties of their mother the Church.” This concession to ecclesiastical sensibilities was apparently looked on by the men of Hereford as a proof of fine magnanimity. “And it was not wont so to be done, but that there was a composition had between us, which we for the reverence of God and the tranquillity of their tenants and our citizens, had granted unto them.”

All this story, however, comes to us from the side of the town, and has something of the ring of a lordly municipal pride; it almost sounds like an ideal view of the compromise between the contracting powers as conceived by the burghers, and one to which the Church party must have demurred. At any rate by whatever means the municipality of Hereford had won a jurisdiction of this sort over the bishop’s tenants, it was singular in the possession of such authority, which has no parallel in towns like Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Exeter, and many more. But the situation, even as the citizens put it, is so complicated in its arrangements that we could scarcely wonder if a state of truce depending on provisions so elaborate should under provocation be transformed into a state of open war; nor can we question the wisdom of townspeople everywhere in making it their fixed purpose to establish one undivided and supreme law for the government of each community. How important the question at issue really was to the town’s life we may see from the story of Winchester.

The mayor of Winchester was at the head of what seems, on paper at least, a powerful and elaborate corporation, worthy of a great city which held itself to have been built “in the age of the world 2995, ninety-nine years before the building of Rome,” and “environed with stone walls” exactly 533 years later.[594] A common assembly met twice a year. There were two coroners and two constables, six aldermen of the wards with their six beadles, a town clerk and four serjeants, a council of twenty-four elected every year, and four auditors of this council, besides a body of twelve jurors chosen whenever there was necessity, who sat at “the Pavilion,” and with whom the mayor perambulated the liberties to view the rivulets and rivers.[595] The boundaries of the city were apparently marked out by a rough square formed by the walls and ditch; but to the mayor and aldermen of the fifteenth century, the idea that their authority should reach as far as the limits allowed by the girth of the walls would have seemed a far-off counsel of perfection.

For right across the city from the east to the west gates stretched the High Street, cutting the town into two equal halves; and to the south of the High Street one may say roughly that the mayor had no authority at all. Near the west gate stood the King’s castle, where municipal law of course did not run. Beside the castle lay the great convent of S. Swithun, and next to it the cathedral, both fenced round by a wall which shut out all lay jurisdiction or intrusion of any kind. Nearer to the east gate lay the palace of the bishop, who was also of course exempt from secular interference, and who ruled with supreme authority over the bishop’s Soke that stretched away beyond the gate, and took tolls of all merchandise that passed along the river.[596] His tenants while remaining outside municipal control had still the right to buy and sell all kinds of merchandize in the city which according to the burghers’ complaint was to their hurt and loss; and the exceeding difficulty of any regulation of trade in the midst of this competition of privileged workers, with the ruin of the city treasury which it threatened, are shown by a quarrel between the bishop and the burghers as to a street which the bishop had claimed as his property in 1275; for when people discovered that in that liberty so appropriated they paid nothing, since the city bailiff could not enter it to make distraint, nearly all the clothworkers forthwith withdrew themselves from the other streets and went to live there to the manifest loss of the community, and the great profit of the bishop.[597]

The northern part of the town was more than half given up to fields and gardens, the shops and houses of traders and artizans forming but a narrow settlement that gathered closely along the central street and the lanes that opened from it. And even of this district a part was wholly withdrawn from the city jurisdiction. The Queens, whose “morning gift” Winchester was, lived “tax free” in the Queen’s House opposite the King’s palace near the west gate, and took rent and tolls from the row of Queen’s stalls on the High Street. At the east gate was another belt of ecclesiastical property—the settlements of the Franciscans and Dominicans,—and next to them a group of poor houses depending on S. Swithun’s.[598] Right in the middle of the town, opposite the Guild Hall in the High Street, was the liberty of “Godbeate” belonging to S. Swithun’s, where the writ of the King or the authority of the city had no power; and whose church formed a sanctuary always open for ill-doers flying from municipal justice. The very curfew-bell which hung in its tower rang out from land that defied the mayor’s authority.[599]

Winchester had not even control of its own gates. The bishop had charge of one; and two were in the hands of the convent, which in times of civil war could freely admit within the city walls the armies of the side opposed to the townsfolk.[600] Even the commerce of the place was taken out of the burghers hands. Not only did the bishop take tolls of the river traffic, but once a year when the great fair of S. Giles’ took place he assumed supreme command in Winchester; for the time all civic government was altogether suspended; the bishop closed all shops in and round the town; traders coming with their cloth and woollen goods, their wines, their pottery, their brass-work, or their eastern spices, were subject to his jurisdiction, and handed over to him the biggest share of the profits, which he divided with the various religious establishments in the city.[601] At other times the King’s chamberlains and the King’s clerk of the market regulated business in their master’s interest, and collected the dues of the market and tolls on every load carried by man or horse into the town.[602]

Winchester suffered also from the memory of its ancient state as the capital and residence of the West Saxon Kings; and its mayor almost alone among the mayors of English towns in the fifteenth century had to go to London to take his oath of office from the King’s judges,[603] just as the mayor of London does to this day. He could win neither freedom nor independence. At home he was beset with dangers; he might be imprisoned by the King for one offence, and punished by the bishop for another.[604] Against such odds as the burghers had to face it was almost hopeless for any corporation to contend; and the helpless townsfolk could but show their impatience and discontent in petty quarrels with the convent as to the site of a market, or blindly do battle for worthless Kings such as Henry the Third or Edward the Second if the monks took up the opposite party.[605] The struggle for independence has no fine record of stirring incidents; but that there should have been any conflict at all before the settling down of quiescence and final apathy is a striking instance of the vitality and persistence of municipal institutions.