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

by Alice Stopford Green

The inner contentions of Bristol[460] and of Andover[461] in the early years of the fourteenth century repeat in varying forms the same story of a few rich burghers managing the whole machinery of administration, and of a commonalty whose voice was often scarcely heard in elections, who were unable to secure the just assessment of taxes, or to prevent the money from being devoted to improper uses, and who daily saw the laws of trade—the assize of bread or beer, the injunctions against forestalling and regrating and a thousand tricks of commerce—diverted to the convenience of the rich officials, while the common folk patiently expiated their sins before the judgment seat of the great offenders who sat in careless immunity on their high places.

It is manifestly hard to find in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the happy age of the historian’s dream, when “there was a warmer relation between high and low, when each class thought more of its duties than its interests, and religion, which was the same to all, was really believed in. Under such conditions,” we are told, “inequality was natural and wholesome;” and apparently an age of innocence and peace attested the fostering care of a universal faith; for according to this theory, so highly commended and so widely believed, it was only “when religion became opinion, dubious more or less and divorced from conduct, while pleasures became more various and more attainable, the favoured classes fell away from the intention of their institution, monopolized the sweets of life and left the bitter to the poor.”[462] Whatever “the intention of their institution” may have been, however, there is not a particle of proof that the intention of the favoured classes themselves did at this time differ sensibly from that which prevailed at the Reformation; nor were the dominant folk of town or country disposed voluntarily to nail their interests on the cross of duty—whether we consider the knight “hunting hardily” hares and foxes,[463] and wholly regardless of his oath to the labourer “to keep him and his chattel as covenant was between them;”[464] or the lord with his loud laugh calling for his rent;[465] or the trader filling his pockets in “deceit of the poor commons,” the alderman adding field to field, the cook and brewer building their burgages out of the pence of the poor. The relations of inequality, in the exceedingly bitter form in which they were then known, may have seemed natural, or perhaps supernatural, to an age when all life, social, economic, and political, was brought under the universal sway of dogma and superstition; but it is certain that they were not held to be wholesome by those who suffered, and whose struggles to win the freedom so long promised to them in ordinance and charter fill the town records of succeeding centuries.

For in these young republics formidable difficulties lay in the way of securing any popular control whatever over administration. In the first place the general assembly, which was to be the pledge of the people’s liberties, and to assure to them the final word about the taxes they had to pay and the manner in which they were to be governed, proved in its actual working but a poor security for freedom. It would seem sometimes that in the hurry and excitement of expanding trade, men busy in their shops had as little time or attention to bestow on serious politics as American citizens of a later date; or perhaps the very opposite accident might befall the borough, and a heterogeneous and unmanageable mob gathered at the place of assembly, where strangers and unenfranchised journeymen pushed their way in among the lawful citizens. But a tumultuous gathering of ignorant and over-tasked artizans and poor householders crowding from the narrow lanes of the borough must manifestly have been a very rare and occasional expedient, and at the best meant an assembly incapable of real business. In general it would seem that any small number of burgesses who happened to be present at a meeting in the common hall or at the court leet, or a select group of the better class specially summoned by the mayor,[466] were taken to represent the general body of inhabitants, and their consent was legally counted as conveying the assent of the burghers at large. From the very first, and under the most favourable circumstances, it is evident that the assembly gave no real security to the commonalty, that through its gatherings they could never hope to bring sustained or efficient pressure to bear on the governing class, and that “the entire assent and consent of the whole community” was for the most part simply taken for granted. If the theory of government by the people for the people already existed in law books and ordinances the means of realizing such an ideal had yet to be found.

Nor must it be forgotten that from the very first no man of the people could hope to aspire to any post in the administration of the town. All important public offices were confined to persons of a certain station, and “the rank of a mayor” or “the rank of a sheriff” were well-known mediæval phrases which expressed a comfortable social position maintained by an adequate income. Councillors and chief officers were chosen from the class of “magnates”[467]—men not bound by the law of frankpledge and possibly holding a position of some authority—of whom there are traces in Norwich and possibly in other cities; or from the “good and sufficient” men of the borough; or from the class who were technically known as the “probi homines,” the “good” or “credible” or “lawful men” privileged to serve as legal assessors in the civic courts and “credible witnesses” to bargains, and who had probably come to be regarded as an official class and gradually organized into a separate caste.[468] This choice of wealthy officials ultimately depended of course on the custom of those days by which the chief officers and the townsfolk were held mutually responsible for defaults; so that in the interests of the people themselves, as well as of the king, it was important to secure men of substance whose possessions formed a guarantee to both parties—a guarantee which was by no means originally a figure of speech, as we see from the case of the Lincoln bailiffs in 1276, when the receipts for paying the ferm were diminished, “wherefore they who have once been bailiffs of Lincoln can scarcely rise from poverty and misery.”[469] The opulent class who bore the chief burden of responsibility shared the compensating pleasures of power. We have seen the primitive simplicity with which at Ipswich twelve portmen divided among themselves all the posts of bailiffs, coroners, and councillors; and in fact among the handful of “worthy” men which could be produced in modest little market-towns,[470] whose clustered dwellings of wood and plaster, bordering narrow alleys that ran to the central market-place, lay almost hidden in fields and gardens, the burghers had actually no great choice of rulers. From generation to generation the chief municipal offices were handed down in the few leading families of the place. A great merchant would take the command again and again while the whole town lay at his discretion, for though a universal law forbade the continuous holding of office and usually fixed an interval of two or more years before re-election, either the law was persistently ignored, or as soon as the period of retirement had elapsed, power inevitably fell back to its former possessor.[471] How greatly this state of things was determined by economic conditions we may see from the fact that in a place like Nottingham, where wealth was widely distributed, it does not seem that any single family rose to very marked supremacy;[472] and in general a comparison of lists of town officers indicates that as the growth of trade in the fifteenth century increased the numbers of well-to-do burghers and merchants, there was a corresponding variety in the names of men entrusted with office. At the best however the upper class was but a little one, and usually the corporation with its one or two councils composed of twelve and twenty-four members, or even of twenty-four and forty-eight, as well as the retired magnates who constituted “the clothing,” and a whole army of officials of various kinds, recorder, town clerk, chamberlains or treasurers, aldermen, decennaries of the market, bailiffs, coroners, arbitrators, jurors, and the like, must have absorbed a very considerable proportion of the well-to-do inhabitants. A close caste was easily developed out of the compact body of merchants and thriving traders who formed the undisputed aristocracy of the town, and whose social pre-eminence doubtless went far to establish their political dominion.

And if very little space was practically found in mediæval times for democratic theories of government, whether in the conception of a governing class, or in the working of the general assembly, still less are they to be found in the prevailing views as to representation. In the case of Ipswich we have seen how rapidly the great body of the townspeople retire from the scene when they have fulfilled their first simple function of electing bailiffs and coroners. It is the bailiffs and coroners who nominate the committee to elect the portmen,[473] and then the twelve between them take charge in a general way of the borough and its affairs, while the commons go back to attend to their own business and are henceforth only from time to time summoned for a general assembly, where they gather like a Greek chorus to view with official eyes the progress of the drama, and to applaud in due form the action of the ultimate executive or express an expected and resigned acquiescence with all their will. People talked, it is true, of election by the whole community, and this was the theory of ordinance and charter, but the universal fashion of the day in all ranks and classes was to adopt some more or less complicated system of indirect election which, whether intentionally or not, was admirably suited to the use and convenience of the minority. The nobles who under the provisions of Oxford formed the council of Fifteen to assist Henry the Third used exactly the same devices as were of common experience among merchants and artizans and burghers; for not only in trading or in social-religious guilds were the members accustomed to choose their governor through a select committee of four, five, seven, eight, or twelve men; but in the boroughs themselves the plans by which the sovereign people delegated their power to a few “worthy and sufficient” citizens were so ingenious and elaborate that we may well doubt whether the majority had ever any chance at all of making their will prevail. In some cases indeed the leading people of the town were altogether independent of popular election, and hereditary owners of the wards sat in the high places of the hall in virtue of their landed property,[474] not of the people’s will; while in others a guild merchant apparently imposed its own council on the community at large.[475]

Nor can we wonder at anxiety to secure an efficient governing class if we consider for a moment the work that lay before the council. From the affairs of a pig-market and the letting of butchers’ stalls they were required to pass to business of the most complicated kind—to constitute a Board of Trade concerned with inland and foreign commerce; a Foreign Office constantly busied with the external relations of the town, whether to overlord, or king, or rival boroughs; a legal committee responsible for all the complicated law business that might arise out of any one of these relations, or out of the defence of the chartered privileges of the borough; a Treasury Board whose incomings were drawn in infinitesimal proportions from the most varied and precarious sources, and whose outgoings included every possible payment with which any public body has ever had to deal. The king might call on them for the supervision of the staple trade, the management of river basins, the draining of marshes, the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, the local carrying out of laws framed by Parliament, the guarding of the coast, the provisioning and training of detachments of the national army. The responsibility thrown on them by the central government was constantly increased as time went on; and there was probably nothing which proved so important in tightening the hold of the oligarchy on government as the appointment of a certain number of the upper council to be justices of the peace, having a formidable authority over the working classes, besides the power to draw into their own hands a mass of business which had once gone to the court leet of the burghers.

No doubt the official caste from the beginning sufficiently appreciated the pleasures of power not to deprecate their increase; but apart from any question of greedy usurpation, it was inevitable under such conditions that a strong government should have been formed of experts who need not necessarily be changed every year or elected by a popular vote. The date at which some custom of this kind became established is probably much earlier than is commonly supposed; and there is evidence to shew that it often preceded by a long time the charters which make it legally binding. Possibly indeed the administrative despotism of a narrow oligarchy was often as old as the independence of the borough itself. The need for capable rulers may have been even greater at the perilous outset of its life than in its later times of confident strength; and when we remember the imperfection of the primitive machinery for ascertaining the popular will, the weakness of the general assembly, and the limitations put on public election, it is evident that the theory of a free and equal people electing their own government by the unanimous consent of the whole community, and controlling administration by a constant criticism, was a theory which could never have been practically carried into effect; which as a matter of fact the governing class had no wish to encourage, and which the mass of the governed had neither the cohesion nor the intelligence to enforce.

Once in authority it must be admitted that the ruling class carried themselves bravely, shirking neither responsibility nor power. In their splendid robes of office, with furs and stripes and rich colours changed at every great occasion to make a more imposing show, the municipal officers were the dazzling centre of every procession and public function in the town—at Advent services, at the bull-baiting and public games,[476] at the pageant of Corpus Christi, or the yearly solemnity of recounting to the people the ordinances and liberties of the borough. Strict discipline, unquestioned authority, a belief in firm government, were prominent in their administration. Of the general body of burgesses and craft guilds implicit obedience was required, and the corporation allowed neither discussion nor interference with its decrees. Windows through which inquisitive townsmen peeped into the chamber where they consulted were blocked up; listeners under the eaves “to hear the words of the council” were violently discouraged; severe rules forbade the meddling of too active citizens, and fines and imprisonment fell on those who “in an abusive manner” called a councillor a “Fliperarde,”[477] or who wickedly “wished that all the jurats had been burnt in the common ship,” or with “opprobrious and crooked words” declared that they were “false thieves,” or that they “were looked upon at Dover as so many grooms.”[478] Administrative capacity went hand in hand with the self-assertion and exclusive temper of a successful class. To the townspeople, amid the confusion of national revolutions and civil war, the mayor remained a standing witness to the enduring forces of an order triumphant over discord and confusion; as in Exeter, where between 1477 and 1497 the citizens had seen a skilfully organized revolt shattered before the municipal power, and a victorious mayor holding office undisturbed under four successive kings, three of whom had come to the crown by the violent death or deposition of their predecessors.[479]

There is perhaps no better type of the superior town official than the Common Clerk, in his dress of sanguine cloth striped with violet rays, or of more sober green bordered with fur.[480] The business of his office came into great consideration with the growth of local liberties. In the fifteenth century there was scarcely a single town which did not require to have its “Custumal” written out afresh from the faded and worn-out copies made in earlier centuries,[481] while in a vast number of cases, where the old French or Latin was no longer understood by the townsfolk, the writer had not only to decipher and copy the old tattered roll, but to translate it.[482] Perhaps portions of the gospels were needed—“enough to swear by.”[483] Every town also instituted the making of its own “Domesday Book,” its black book or white book or red book as the case might be, with copies of all deeds, wills, and charters relating to municipal affairs;[484] and whenever a legal question arose or local liberties were imperilled new search was made in the chest containing the town “evidences” on which the municipal privileges depended, and copies were written out of Acts of Parliament,[485] extracts from Domesday, Magna Charta,[486] or legal documents such as the New Tenures by Lyttleton.[487] The clerk must be able to translate and to read in the mother tongue to the community any letters or orders sent from Westminster. He had to expound legal technicalities to the council, and to use them effectively in the town’s interest, not only at Westminster, but in the innumerable disputes that arose between borough and borough as to the interpretation of conflicting charters.[488] Elaborate accounts of municipal expenditure were made yet more arduous by the system of Roman numerals which constantly baffled his best efforts at exact addition. The keeping of the town rolls in general was a very serious occupation; in the time of Edward the Fourth the yearly rolls of Ipswich (called Dogget Rolls from the clerk’s docquet or table of contents) form bundles as big as a garden roller;[489] and in Nottingham twenty rolls were covered within and without in a single year with the list of pleas against foreigners alone. In fact, the supply of parchment began to fall short of the prodigious demands of the town clerks, who were driven to take to paper, either to economize the trifling sum allowed them for the expense of parchment, or in obedience to a direct order from the corporation.[490] As they added roll to roll and book to book, they from time to time relieved the tedious labour by adorning the town accounts with sketches and ornaments, with a snatch of French song or a few quibbles or catches of very moderate wit,[491] with a rugged ballad on the evils of over-eating,[492] or a final sigh of satisfaction from a German copyist, “Explicit hic totum; pro Christo da mihi potum!”[493]