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

by Alice Stopford Green

On the great day when the Yarmouth fair was under discussion the Court of Brotherhood sat alone; but on the following days when other work was to be done—the distribution between the various towns of the taxation[756] ordered at Shepway, the discussion of commercial relations,[757] the care of the common corporate privileges of the confederation[758]—the Court of Brotherhood was joined by the Court of Guestling, probably a descendant of the ancient Hundred Court once held in the old town of Gestlinges near the border-line of Kent and Sussex.[759] To this court each town might send the mayor, two jurats, and two commoners; so that if all the delegates came the number of the united assemblies would be seventy-seven; as a matter of fact however in the time of Henry the Sixth the business was done by about thirty members.[760] All the important affairs of the Cinque Ports practically lay in their hands, and their decisions, registered as Acts of the Brodhull by the Common Clerk of the Cinque Ports,[761] became the law of the whole confederation.

Constantly reminded of their ancient covenant and confederation by imminent perils, arduous exertions and recurring taxes, trained to habits of vigilance and mutual support, the Cinque Ports kept a jealous watch against the slightest infraction of the privileges of their united body. But there was one matter with which the confederation had nothing whatever to do. Subject to a variety of jurisdictions, some of them depending on the King, some on the Archbishop, some on a bigger neighbouring town, the special liberties of each borough had been developed under very different conditions; and the whole association took no heed of the defence of the liberties of any single Port against its lord, or the enlargement of the privileges of any one member of their society as apart from the whole.[762] The corporate existence of the united Cinque Ports was a thing altogether apart from the corporate existence of each town within it; and indeed combination for any purpose of securing local liberties would have been out of the question in a confederacy where a certain outward uniformity was but the screen of endless diversity, and towns bound together by special duties and privileges were widely separated from one another in all the conditions of government.[763] This is very evident if we compare the situation of Sandwich and Romney—much more so if we consider the position of any of the subordinate members of the Ports.

I. For many centuries Sandwich belonged to the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, and so long as it was a humble little port powerful kings like Eadgar, Cnut, Henry the First, and Henry the Second had been content to have it so, and with indifferent acquiescence confirmed the monastic rights over the town. But when in the course of time Sandwich became the port through which almost the whole of the continental trade with England passed, when its commerce and revenue increased till it stood far before Dover in importance,[764] when it was the chief harbour from which monarchs or their ambassadors set sail for France, or from which armies were sent forth in time of war, the King began to look more seriously on the powers exercised over it by the convent. An inquest ordered by the Crown in 1227 reported in favour of the rights of Christ Church over Sandwich, but by judicious bargaining matters were finally arranged to the royal satisfaction. At the price of a grant of lands in Kent Edward the First bought the town, and though the monks were still allowed certain lands and houses free from municipal charges, and continued to receive large sums from the wharf which was known as Monkenkey with its crane for loading and unloading ships,[765] and from the warehouses enclosing it, they had to abandon their powers of taxing at discretion all passengers and goods which crossed the bounds of their territory.[766]

The Sandwich people had elected their own mayor since the beginning of the thirteenth century; while the royal interests were now looked after by a bailiff appointed by the King.[767] The townsmen however kept a jealous watch over their own prerogatives. When in 1321 Christ Church obtained a royal writ to protect their property from the town taxes the mayor and community refused to accept it because it had been issued to the King’s bailiff, and the convent had to get a new writ.[768] The bailiff’s powers were carefully defined and kept in strict subordination to those of the mayor. He collected the King’s dues on goods brought into the town;[769] and it was he who summoned the Hundred Court every three weeks to meet in S. Clement’s church for view of frankpledge, for pleas of land, questions of trespass, covenant, debt, battery, bloodshed, and so on;[770] but he could not hold the court without the mayor’s leave, nor issue the summonses without the mayor’s orders.[771] The mayor for his part, if he was elected in S. Clement’s, the church where the courts of the King were held, had his seat of government in S. Peter’s, a church that stood in the very centre of the town near the Market-place and Common Hall, and in whose tower the “Brande goose bell” hung which summoned jurats and council men to the Common Assembly, and rang out the hours for the market. He gathered the Town Council for business to S. Peter’s, and in S. Peter’s he sat every Thursday, and if business required it on other days, to judge the people.[772] Though the bailiff sat by his side and took part in the business of the court, yet for offences against the corporation the mayor and jurats might punish the freemen “without consulting the bailiff or any one else.”[773] To them belonged the entire regulation of trade and the management of weights and measures, for “the bailiff has nothing to do with this business.” In no case was he allowed to interfere with the town market; “that business belongs wholly to the mayor and jurats,” the town customs declared.[774]

II. Sandwich in fact after it had passed to the Crown enjoyed the full freedom common to the royal boroughs. Bound only by allegiance to the general law of the Cinque Ports it long maintained, as we shall see later, a real independence of local life and a vigorous democratic temper. But in Romney, in the very port where the general assembly of the Cinque Ports held its deliberations, the conditions were wholly different. For a moment Romney like other towns enjoyed its share of profits in the growing trade of the country.[775] The vintners engaged in the wine trade rose from ten in 1340 to forty-eight who headed the list of taxpayers in 1394; a new ward was called after its cloth-dealer Hollyngbroke;[776] and merchants from Prussia, Holland, Spain, and Flanders, citizens of Bristol and of London, men from York and from Dorset gathered within its walls. But a doom was already on the town. As early as 1381 it had begun its vain struggle against winds and tides which silted up its port, destroyed its river channel, and forced the Rother into a new bed. Dutch and Flemish engineers had been called over to make scientific sluices and barriers, and the whole population had been summoned out to dig a water-course, but in spite of incessant efforts the men of Romney saw their trade driven into other ports.[777] The forty-eight vintners of 1394 had sunk to forty-four in 1415, to five in 1431, and to one in 1449.[778] The burghers were being steadily ruined, and the story of their decay remains registered in the long lists of citizens who pledged their goods for debt, giving in promise of payment saddles, cups, table-cloths, helmets, cloths, which were delivered by the creditor into the hands of the bailiff for keeping in the Common Hall “according to custom,” and when the day of payment had passed were appraised by bailiff and jurats, often at half or a quarter of the value at which they had been first declared, and handed over to the creditor.[779]

Through good and evil fortune moreover Romney had to maintain a constant struggle for freedom. The Archbishop of Canterbury was lord of the manor, and appointed, subject to the ratification of the Lord Warden, the bailiff of the town,[780] choosing if it seemed good to him one of his own servants or squires, and by a curious exception from the general law having liberty to select a publican.[781] The bailiff fixed the days for holding the market. He gathered in the Archbishop’s dues, made sure that his share of any wax, or wine, or goods cast on the shore from wrecks was handed over, and that the jurats collected in proper time the capons and swans and cygnets which had to be sent to him, or that a porpoise taken by the fishermen should be duly despatched to the lord. The common horn sounded twice at the market-place and at the cross to summon the people to his court.

The question of government and of the bailiff’s position was however always in debate. The “best men of the town” rode to Archbishop Courtenay “to know his will and what he proposed to do against their liberties”; and for the following century the Romney men were always on the watch, and heavily taxed in gifts and bribes “to protect the liberty of the town that the said lord might not usurp it.”[782] The bailiff’s power indeed was strictly limited. So far as the administration of justice went he was absolutely controlled by the twelve jurats who were yearly elected “for to keep and govern the port and town;”[783] and “in case the bailiff do other execution than the sworn men have judged against the usage of the town” they might fine him £10 to the commons.[784] But this was not enough. In 1395 the jurats made suit to the Lord Archbishop to “put his bailiwick into the hands of the community of Romney at ferm,”[785] and for the century which followed they were always seeking for some means of gaining complete control of the government. For lack of better security a simple expedient was discovered. The townspeople allowed a custom to grow up that the Archbishop should not be expected to appoint a new officer every year, but that whoever was sent to the town should be understood to hold his post permanently. When in 1521 the prelate complained that the jurats would not let his bailiff enter Romney[786] they answered that when there was no bailiff in the town the Archbishop might send a new one, but that the accustomed bailiff who had been admitted seven or eight years ago was still living and was “of good name and fame,” and so the place was not void; moreover, they said, a bailiff must make his appearance with certain formalities and “be of good opinion,” but this new man had not been sent with the proper forms. The fixity of tenure[787] which the townsfolk thus raised to the dignity of a “customary” right was a real guarantee that the bailiff should no longer be a mere dependent holding his post at the pleasure of a distant master, trembling under the apprehension of hazarding his employment by preferring the interests of the commonalty to those of his lord, and only intent on heaping up treasure against the day when his credit and employment should come to an end. He became more and more identified with the townsfolk among whom he lived, and on whose approval he was made dependent by their contention that he should hold office so long as he was, in their opinion, “of good name and fame.”

But the burghers were still dissatisfied with so precarious a tenure of independence. There was a proposal which came to nothing to unite the bailiff and jurats of the town with the bailiff and jurats of the marsh; but in 1484 the people profited by the troubles of Richard’s reign to plan a thoroughgoing revolution.[788] They set up a mayor for themselves, and sent to have a silver mace made at Canterbury under the very walls of the Cathedral precincts. The Archbishop called in the help of the Crown and the great people of the London law courts, and after much battling and negotiation the matter was ended before the year was out by a Privy Seal being sent down to Romney to depose the mayor. Before a generation had passed away however the struggle broke out again with new vigour, and in 1521 town and prelate were again quarrelling over all the old grievances.[789]

The main point of the burghers’ argument was to deny the Archbishop’s assertion that “the town is all bishopric.” The jurats contended that “from all time” they had had the privileges of one of the capital Five Ports, that their grant of “streme and strond” of the sea and all other rights came to them from the King and not the Archbishop; and that they held the greater part of their town directly from the Crown,[790] on which land the Archbishop had no right to enter, and the commonalty had rights of justice. So also the Archbishop had no right to the marsh and pasturage of four hundred acres which had once been creek and haven, but had been left dry land since about 1380 by the withdrawal of the sea a good half-mile from the town, for this “void place” left by the main course of the stream through the town belonged to the King. Arguing therefore from this fiction of being on royal soil the jurats went on to claim the popular control of justice which was used in royal boroughs, and frowardly kept the courts without the bailiff, boldly asserting in their own defence that he was at the best but a minister of the King’s courts in Romney and not a judge; for if the town courts were in fact courts of the King, they were under the royal grants and charters which ordained that mayor and jurats, or bailiff and jurats, elected by the people, were to hold courts, hear pleas, and have fines and amercements and other profits of leets and law-days; and therefore since the bailiff of Romney was not elected by the commons he was clearly excluded and had nothing to do in the said courts save as minister and executioner, and any record of pleas before him was void. In times past, they declared, he had merely been allowed to sit among them by favour, and not of duty. The fines raised at leets and law-days they claimed for the town’s use, saying that these had only been given to the most Reverend Father by the favour of the jurats to obtain his good lordship; but that he had never any right whatever to leet or law-day, fine or amercement. So persistent were their protestations of independence that it seems as though ultimately the Archbishop’s heavy wrath settled down to rest on the town. When Cranmer leased out the bailiwick of Hythe to the townspeople,[791] he refused to give to Romney a similar lease—a gift which it had begged of Courtenay a hundred and fifty years before. Cranmer’s lordship indeed came to an end at the Reformation, but even then Romney was for a time governed by its senior jurat, and it was not until 1563 that it seemed to have sufficiently purged its iniquity, and that Elizabeth finally allowed its people to elect a mayor.

III. From the instances of Sandwich and Romney it is evident that the bond which existed between the chief Ports only served certain definite ends, and had no influence whatever on the developement of local liberties or the intimate relations of a borough to its lord. And if this was the case with the leading Ports, still less was it possible for the subordinate members of the confederation to look for aid in their private controversies. Romney itself for example in the midst of its struggle with the Archbishop was engaged in a resolute effort to retain its own hold over its dependent town of Lydd. There also the Archbishop of Canterbury was lord of the manor, both of the town and of a great part of the grazing land round it known as Dengemarsh, in which lay the fishing-station of Lydd, Denge Ness; while the rest of Dengemarsh was divided between the Abbot of Battle, the Castle of Rochester, and Christ Church, Canterbury, all alike ready to raise at any time questions of disputed rights. As far as the Archbishop was concerned the townsmen had commuted their services at his court of Aldington for a yearly payment, and became “lords in mean” of their own borough—possibly in the time of Henry the Sixth when they first began formally to use the style of Bailiffs, Jurats, and Commonalty of Lydd; but the Archbishop’s seal with the mitre was still used in deeds for selling or letting land.[792]