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

by Alice Stopford Green

It is impossible not to attribute to the hopeless situation of the municipality before the rival authorities in the city, and especially the powerful lords of convent and cathedral, much of the calamity of its history. For at a time when prosperity was generally increasing, its fortunes steadily sank. In 1450 the citizens drew a terrible picture of the local distress, not in the vague phrases which we meet with elsewhere when for some special purpose happier boroughs put on a temporary show of distress, but with a minute exactness which betrays the truth and the whole measure of their suffering. Winchester, they declared, “is become right desolate.” Nine hundred and ninety-seven houses stood empty, and in seventeen parish churches there was no longer any service. A list is given of eleven streets “that be fallen down in the city of Winchester within eighty years last passed”; and in each case an account is added of the number of householders that had formerly lived in the street, a hundred, a hundred and forty, or two hundred, as the case might be, where there were now but two or three left. Since the last Parliament held there eighty-one households had fallen. “The desolation of the said poor city is so great, and yearly falling, for there is such a decay and unwin, that without gracious comfort of the King our sovereign lord, the mayor and the bailiffs must of necessity cease, and deliver up the city and the keys into the King’s hands.”[606] To produce a distress such as this no doubt industrial causes were at work, and Winchester probably suffered as Canterbury did from changes in the woollen manufacture and in trade routes. But nowhere in any considerable city do we find a parallel to the utter ruin of this unfortunate community. Nowhere, on the other hand, were the conditions of municipal life so fatal, if once prosperity began to dwindle or the pressure of outward circumstances became such as to call on the resources of the people. Through the breaking up of the city into separate and independent fragments the whole burden of any difficulty had to be borne by the little company of inhabitants governed by the mayor; and so heavily did the common municipal charges and expenses fall on the scanty population of burghers shut into the narrow area which was under municipal government, and from which alone the authorities could gather the fee-farm and the royal taxes, maintain the bridge and walls, provide householders for the nightly watch, and furnish men and arms for the defence of the city; and we do not wonder that the inhabitants at last began to renounce, or refuse to accept, a franchise which brought such formidable responsibilities, or that they sought to escape from a city doomed to ruin. An attempt was made in 1430 to revive manufacture and commerce by an invitation to all kinds of traders and artificers to come and do business in Winchester free of toll.[607] But the experiment in free trade was quickly abandoned, probably because the corporation could not meet the heavy yearly expenses without the customary taxes levied on trade;[608] and in 1450 the citizens laid a petition before Henry the Sixth, praying him to consider the extent of their distress. They were bound, they said, to pay yearly a rent of 112 marks to the King, “for the which said fee-farm so to be paid your bailiffs have little or naught of certainty to raise it of, but only of casualties and yearly leases £40 or more.” There was further a sum of £50 10s. 4d. for the tax of the fifteenth, “the which when it is levyable, some one man in the said city is set unto four marks and some five marks, because your said city is desolate of people.” Then came a sum of 60s. to be paid yearly to the Magdalen Hospital;[609] and besides that there were the expenses of two burgesses to Parliament who cost 4s. a day; “and also the great charges and daily costs the which your said poor city beareth about the enclosing and murage of your said city.”[610] To add to all their trouble a grant which the king had made to the municipality in 1439 of forty marks from the ulnage and subsidies of woollen cloths had been withdrawn again; and the commonalty sadly entreat that it may be restored.

The King allowed the payment of the forty marks during the next fifty years, and Winchester made one or two further attempts at mending its fortunes. The people of Southampton had as long ago as 1406 succeeded in obtaining a license from the bishop of Winchester, to buy and sell within their town during the fair of St. Giles;[611] and the mayor and community of Winchester perhaps hoped to follow this example. In 1451 they raised a debate as to the franchises and customs of the fair, and interfered with the bishop’s privileges; but their usual ill luck pursued them and they were obliged to submit and give a promise that he should never again be disturbed from having the keeping of the city and the customs aforesaid.[612] A few years later a transient gleam of hope was cast across the unhappy town when the Italian merchants were driven out of London in 1456, and in this sudden emergency hired the “great old mansions”[613] which the Winchester traders had allowed to fall into decay, putting the owners to heavy expenses for repairs. But they seem never to have occupied the mansions after all. Perhaps they were disheartened by the sense of failing trade and oppressive taxes; or they possibly feared the dangers that might come to them in a town that had never been allowed powers to govern and defend and deal fairly by its own townsfolk. In any case they left the big empty houses to go to Southampton, and Winchester was none the better.[614]

Winchester was an extreme instance of difficulties which were felt in every other town in a greater or less degree. For scarcely any important borough was without some ecclesiastical settlement within its walls, and everywhere the dispute took the gravest form. With the King or with a neighbouring lord the boroughs might make terms of peace, or impose conditions as conquerors, but their most imposing demonstrations were inevitably routed before the power of the Church. Outbreaks of popular fury in which from time to time the irritation of the burghers found expression have often been represented as symptoms of a spirit of malice and misrule by which an ignorant mob was instigated to attack the most beneficent institution known to their society and with no justification save from their lawless temper seek to appropriate to themselves its privileges and possessions. But the causes of the conflict were more valid and serious. As the instances given in the next chapter prove, the burghers learned by a genuine experience to gauge the beneficence of the Church’s claims to temporal authority. There does not seem to have been in England, as there often was abroad, the additional stimulus of religious revolt, for the practical townspeople apparently did not find the slightest difficulty in distinguishing between spiritual influence and secular jurisdiction, mainly perhaps because the power of the ecclesiastical potentates in England was of so limited a kind as to awaken but a moderate fear and equally moderate excitement. But in face of the secular problem created by the presence of a rival authority ruling over half the space enclosed in the town walls—an authority with which no permanent agreement could ever be concluded and which was manifestly fatal to the dignity or the success of municipal government—the boroughs were forced, as a mere matter of self-preservation, into insistent and reiterated demands that this double rule should be abolished, and that there should be but one undivided and supreme control in each community for civil affairs. When the pole-axes and daggers with which they at first sought to enforce their convictions were laid aside, they turned to the law-courts and the paper wars of Westminster to seek a remedy for their grievances; and it is in the records of trials from the middle of the fifteenth century to the Reformation in which the pleadings of both sides may be heard that we find the real justification of the burghers’ claim to civic supremacy, and of their determined assaults on the political independence of ecclesiastical communities.

CHAPTER XI

THE TOWNS AND THE CHURCH

In the history of Winchester we may perhaps find a clue to the explanation of that great controversy which for centuries divided the mediæval municipalities and the religious corporations into two hostile armies,—armies that chafed under the restraints of an enforced and angry truce, and from time to time broke into the brief exhilaration of a free fight. There were certain towns, such as Exeter or Canterbury or Norwich, where the municipality was as free as royal charters could make it and acknowledged no dependence on Cathedral or Priory, and where notwithstanding Town and Church were always in arms against one another, and the task of adjusting their mutual relations presented such insoluble difficulties that every other question seemed of easy settlement in comparison with a problem so insistent, so manifold in its forms, so tremendous in its proportions in the eyes of burgher and of ecclesiastic. The convent or chapter, entrenched behind its circuit of walls and towers, with its own system of laws, its own executive, its independent trade and revenues, had practically no interest either in the prosperity or the security of the town, while its keenest activities, whether from the point of view of business or religion, were enlisted in uncompromising defence of ecclesiastical privilege. On the other hand the body of burghers, conscious of the difficulties of government, with a mass of complicated business thrown on their hands and a heavy financial responsibility, nervously keeping guard over their franchises, inspired by a commanding sense of the importance of strict organization, and an ambition stimulated by tradition, success, and capacity, found in common experience reasons for judging that a double system of law and a double authority was the negation of order, peace, or material prosperity in their little republic. Their avowed object was to put an end to this division of the borough into two camps, and to secure for the community the ultimate control of administration within the city boundaries. Hence the issues raised between the townspeople and the clerical order were direct and clear. Questions of temporal and spiritual power, of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, of the immunities claimed by the “clergy,” of the gulf that separated the servant of the Church from the citizen of the State—all these things were forced home to the people with the sharpness, variety, and force of practical illustration. The war which in the twelfth century had been waged on behalf of the State and the Church by their great representatives, Henry the Second and Archbishop Thomas, was during the next three centuries brought down into every borough and fought out there in more humble fashion by provincial mayors and ecclesiastics of a circumscribed and stinted fame.

And as the quarrel was long so it was practically universal. It was this that made the struggle so momentous. Few boroughs after all were subject to the absolute rule of ecclesiastical lords; and their attempts to win freedom were local, isolated, without national significance. But all the great towns had one or more ecclesiastical bodies established within their boundaries, and all were able to appreciate the character of the conflict entailed on them. Nor were the consequences of the dispute exaggerated by the combatants on either side. During centuries of strife they had abundant opportunity of gauging its importance—from the time of Edward the First, when, by the enclosing of churchyards and ecclesiastical precincts with walls, the attempt was made to shut in religious authorities within their own limits, and give the town undivided responsibility outside these boundaries—till the time when triumphant burghers saw walls and towers levelled to the ground under Henry the Eighth.

For in the war waged by burghers against clerics who used spiritual authority to create temporal sovereignty, and in this temporal power then found means to enforce spiritual claims,—though the combatants were people of no account, fighting their quarrel out in remote and isolated boroughs, and though the noise of the battle no longer resounded as it had once done throughout Europe,—the conflict was still the same, the questions were as vital for the just ordering of human society, and the tenacity of the opponents was as great as ever. The disputes covered the whole field of practical life. In matters of trade there was not only the rivalry of two trading companies under different conditions of wealth, influence, and protection;[615] but even in the case of individuals there was unfair competition, as when a citizen gave up his dwelling in the town, obtained a corrody in some ecclesiastical house, and claimed the benefits of citizenship without bearing its obligations.[616] Sometimes the burghers found themselves called to defend against the ecclesiastical lawyers a right which had been proved essential to their freedom—the right of being tried only in their own courts—and the commonalty would make ordinances that no process-server should carry or cite elsewhere men or women living in the borough, and the jury of the Leet Court kept watch and made their presentment of summoners, commissary, and clerks who had dealt lightly with the liberties or goods of the citizens, or called them to distant courts.[617] Or again, the invaluable privilege of having all matters that concerned the commons of the borough tried by a jury of inhabitants and not of aliens, might be put in jeopardy. In Lincoln the dean and chapter had a special grudge against trials “by people of the same city, which be so favourable one to another that they doubt not to make false oaths, and that because they be encouraged, forasmuch as they have not been before this time convict by foreigners by colour of their franchise.” On their complaint “our lord the King, willing, for the cause aforesaid, to provide for the quietness of the said church, and full right to be done as well to the said bishop, dean, and chapter and their successors,” ordered that henceforth “if any of the parties feel himself grieved of a false oath made by such assize, jury, or inquest, the attaint shall be granted to him, and the record sent by writ into the King’s Bench or into the Common Pleas; and that the sheriff impanel the jury of such attaint of foreigners of the county, without sending to the franchise of the said city, and that the justices shall take the same jury of the same foreigners, notwithstanding any franchise granted to the same city, or other usage to the contrary.”[618] The question of sanctuary, too, remained a standing trouble, and the bailiffs of the borough who sent town clerks and town serjeants to make proclamation for weeks together at the abbey gate calling upon a debtor who had fled from his creditors to appear for judgement, had small sympathy with the abbot’s privileges.[619] Whenever burghers had liberty and opportunity to act on their own judgement they found no difficulty in coming to a decision as to the sanctity imposed by religion on territories consecrated to sacred uses. From old premises they drew new conclusions. “As holiness becomes the Lord’s House,” declared the mayor, jurats, and whole community of Rye in 1483, “in future, to the honour of God and of the glorious Virgin Mary, the parish church of the said town, with the churchyard and the manse of the vicarage thereof, shall be of the same freedom, and with as much liberty as the other houses of the freemen, especially as to arrests and other matters.”[620]

There is perhaps no better illustration of the character and conditions of the controversy between town and church than the story of the quarrel between Exeter city and the Cathedral, which has been preserved for us in the letters of an able mayor, who at a very important crisis conducted the case of his fellow-citizens against the chapter, and whose phrases, written in the heat of battle, carry us back into the very midst of a long-forgotten strife. Descended from an old county family which had thrown in its lot with the burghers of Exeter and become traders in the city and leaders in its counsels, John Shillingford was born into a tradition of civic patriotism. His father served as mayor from 1428 to 1430 and was noted for being learned in the law; and John Shillingford himself was mayor three times, and the distinguished leader from 1445 to 1448 of a struggle for independence which was already a hundred and fifty years old.