The main evidence as to the possession of lands lies in the town archives and not in public records. It is a question for lawyers why disputes concerning them apparently were not brought before the judges of the King’s Bench, but seem to have been settled at home by fighting or by arbitration. Possibly because the “communitas” had no power to sue in the law courts as a legal person. In any case it must have had all kinds of dangers to fear—the danger of having local customary law overridden by Westminster law, the danger of advertising the amount of their possessions, and a danger which is constantly present in town records, of encroachments under one pretence or another by the corporation or members of it, and the fear of which, in days when “the law is ended as a man is friended,” would give reason enough for keeping out of the courts.
CHAPTER X
THE TOWN OLIGARCHY
It is evident that if the towns had been called on for a confession of faith, the declaration of a pure and unadulterated freedom would have been in every mouth. There remains the question of how far it was found possible to carry that faith into the common practice of daily life.
We have seen how freedom was enthroned at Ipswich before the whole community of townsmen, who with outstretched hands and loud unanimous voice swore before heaven to maintain the liberties of the new republic. If, however, we glance again at Ipswich when it next comes clearly into view, a century after it had obtained its grant of privileges, there is very little trace of a golden age save for publicans and portmen. For in 1321 we find a narrow official class in the noontide of their power. Since there was no fixed day for elections they had been used by “lordly usurpation and private covin” to make bailiffs at their own pleasure secretly without consent of the people; they grievously taxed and amerced the commons for their own private purposes; they used the common seal without the common consent to the great burden and damage of the commonalty; and made new burgesses at their own pleasure without the public knowledge, so as to divide the entrance money among themselves; and by a regular system of forestalling and secret sale, merchants and inn-keepers had combined to rob the commons of their right to free and equal trade.[450] Against these abuses the burgesses sought to repeat and reinforce the ordinances of the town, but it may well be doubted whether the customary defiance of the laws of 1200 was likely to be corrected by the mere re-enactment or amendment of rules in the book of ordinances.
For it was not in Ipswich alone that the commonalty were held at the mercy of a handful of men in power, without hope of redress through their assemblies or constitutional methods at home. In 1304 justices were sent down from Westminster to inquire into a complaint of “the poor men of our city of Norwich,” where, according to the petition of the commons, the rich, in defiance of all laws against forestalling, bought up victuals and goods before they came into the market, and daily inflicted other grievances on the said poor men “to the manifest deterioration of the city.”[451] And again in 1307, “les menes gentz de la communaute de la ville de Norweiz” appeal to the king on the ground that an inquiry by justices had been promised them concerning the fines and tallages which weighed them down; the poor people, they said, had been unjustly taxed by the bailiffs and the rich (“les riches”), “but on the hearing, the bailiffs and the rich spoke so fair to the said poor people, promising them redress and that they should have no cause to complain in future, and that no tallage should be levied from them without their common assent, that the poor men ceased from their suit. But now the said bailiffs and rich have levied two hundred marks without warrant and threaten to levy a still higher tallage.”[452] The law of the matter was clear enough, for only a year or two before the principle that the bailiffs could only assess taxes “by the assent of the whole of the commonalty or of the greater part of the same” had been re-affirmed;[453] and the king accordingly sent answer, “If tallage have been made without assent of the commonalty, let them have a writ against those who have imposed such tallage to answer before the king, and that henceforth it be not done.”
It is, however, hard to say what amount of relief to the mean folk was actually given by such an order from high quarters. At the very same time, in 1304, the people of the neighbouring borough of Lynn were seeking protection against the ruling burgesses, and charged them with the usual trespasses—with assessing tallages without the unanimous consent of the community; levying these tallages and other great sums of money from the poor and but moderately endowed men of the community; employing the sums thus raised for their own use and not for the advantage of the community or the reparation of the town; forestalling goods on the way to market; and establishing and using corruptions contrary both to common and to merchant law. The great people of Lynn, however, easily put themselves beyond all fear of justice by simply buying from the king in 1305[454] letters of pardon and release for the crimes of which they were accused—letters which evidently left them free to go on in the same course. Upon which the people instinctively turned to their natural ally, the lord of the manor himself, and through the powerful aid of the Bishop, and his aid only, were able to win from the mayor in 1309 the composition which became the charter of their liberties, according to which all the “unreasonable grievous” tasks and tallages laid by “the great men of the town upon the mean people and the poor”—or as the Latin version has it by the potentiores on the mediocres and inferiores—and their “grievous distressing so violently of them,” were to come to an end, and taxes were henceforth to be assessed in due measure according to the three degrees of prosperity.[455]
It is evident that we need not wait for the fifteenth century to discover an oligarchical system of administration which was in its full strength in the English boroughs as early as 1300, and can even be traced back at least fifty years earlier. In the middle of the thirteenth century the commons of Lincoln, having a dispute with the lord of S. Botolph’s fair about tolls, formally withdrew altogether from the fair till they should obtain a remedy from the king; but two sons of the mayor and two other burghers, rich traders who did not want their business interrupted, and who were evidently town officials with command of the common seal, gave the lord a charter promising a yearly rent of £10 from the Lincoln citizens, and this “without any assent or consent of the commonalty.” It was in vain that the people made remonstrance; the charter was still binding in 1276,[456] and in 1325 the inhabitants of Lincoln were still without defence against the “great lords of the said city” who formed the corporation. While “les grauntz Seigneurs” themselves paid nothing, the “mean people” were arbitrarily taxed without their own consent; they alone were forced to keep the nightly watch; they paid their murage tax for the building of the wall, and the rulers used the money for their own purposes and rendered no accounts to the people;[457] and the pitiful appeal of the commonalty to the king praying him to provide some remedy for their grievances only proved how helpless they were to influence the governing body which was supposed to rule solely by their consent. In like manner the mayor and other officers of Oxford were charged in 1294 with exacting tallages without the king’s order or the town’s consent, applying the town revenues to their own uses, raising loans without proper receipts, and collecting money for expenses of the rich on juries and assizes while the poor were left to pay their own costs.[458] Probably the richer party secured the jury, for the verdict was given against the burgher who had instituted the suit; but his complaint is so absolutely similar to those raised in other towns at the same time that we can scarcely doubt its truth.[459]