The town clerk, in fact, was to the local government what two centuries earlier the trained lay-lawyers had been to the central administration. From mere superiority of education, as a scholar and linguist, an accomplished lawyer, something of a historian and an antiquary, a skilled accountant, a scribe trained to finer penmanship and more exact views of spelling than the ordinary councillor, or even than the mayor himself, the clerk must have exercized an easy intellectual supremacy.[494] Responsible only to the mayor, holding his post year after year in perfect security, he remained among the changing officers about him a permanent force, a municipal chancellor in whom was embodied a continuous tradition of administration and a fixed jurisprudence.[495] Thriving towns of the fifteenth century vied with one another in seeking out able professionals for the post. Bridgewater engaged a man who seems to have been in practice as attorney or notary public in Oxford; and as early as the fourteenth century a chamberlain of London wrote letters under the common seal at Romney. Winchester looked yet farther afield, and seems to have employed a German.[496] An able lawyer in those days could command the market, as we see by the story of Thomas Caxton (probably a brother of William Caxton the printer), who spent a busy professional career of forty years going from town to town wherever he could best sell his services. A native of Tenterden, he was brought up to the law, and in 1436 was engaged in a plea of debt in Romney against one William-at-the-Mill. In 1454 he was practising as an attorney at Tenterden, and was the leading man of law in its negotiations with Rye to resist the union of the two towns into a single corporation. In 1458 he entered the service of Lydd, which was then in the thick of its troubles about boundaries and franchises, and was paid £2 13s. 4d. a year, or double the salary of his predecessor, and in addition was soon after promised a gown every year, while ultimately his pay was raised to £4—a sum which at that time was only given by great commercial towns such as Bristol or Southampton.[497] On his resignation Lydd returned to its old custom and once more paid to his successor the original salary of 6s. 8d. a quarter, but the corporation still continued to employ Caxton constantly on very profitable terms for himself, often sending him to London on business, or to carry on negotiations with the king. In 1470, when Lydd had been running into danger on every side, first sending men to fight under Warwick, and then paying £9 for another body of troops to go to the help of King Edward, the burghers made Caxton their treasurer, and two years later he was elected bailiff, and a town clerk put under him of his own training. We next find him in 1474 as clerk in Romney; but he was called back again to Lydd in 1476, and employed to write out its “customall” in his fine bold hand. A yet more important town however now cast longing eyes on the successful lawyer, and he was drawn away from Lydd to Sandwich, where he finally settled down as common clerk.
In fact for professional men of talent in the middle class a new and comparatively brilliant career was now opened in the towns.[498] Nicholas Lancaster, town clerk of York from 1477 to 1480, was a bachelor of laws, who in 1483 became one of the king’s council, was in 1484 alderman of York, and in 1485 mayor.[499] Easingwold, who kept the rolls of Nottingham for nearly thirty years (from 1478 to 1506), wrote himself down as “gentleman” among the yeomen, braziers, and smiths, who paid their 6s. 8d. along with him to gain the freedom of the borough,[500] and in his later signatures still kept up the solitary distinction of this title, which scarcely occurs in the records save after his name. An educated man with a very tolerable knowledge of Latin, though he preferred English, he served his adopted town well, and in his time the old court rolls, which had been carelessly kept in paper books for thirty years before his coming, were replaced by parchment rolls with very full and elaborate accounts in a singularly beautiful and exact writing.[501]
It is obvious that in governing bodies whose members were thus distinguished from the common mass of burghers by wealth, social position, culture, who were independent of the people they ruled, very watchful in the matter of their legal or customary rights, and abundantly supplied in case of difficulty with advice in the law by the recorder or the town clerk or the special counsel retained in their service, no influence was wanting which could foster the official spirit in its most extreme form, with its pride of position, its administrative pretensions, its love of legal definition, and its anxiety for “good order.” “The worshipful men of the great clothing” or “the imperial co-citizens” of some very minor borough ruled for their own ends with frankness and capacity; while their natural rallying cry of “good rule and substantial order”[502] was so well understood at court that they could always confidently count on support from that quarter. The alarm of the mob, which since the Peasant Revolt had troubled statesmen at Westminster as well as aldermen in the boroughs, drew the ruling classes generally into close alliance; and towards the end of the fifteenth century, we constantly find the town officers turning with apprehension to the court for aid, and kings anxiously lending succour to the corporations. The Wars of the Roses and dynastic quarrels which once appeared to pass so lightly over the boroughs, scarcely touching them with a passing alarm of material calamity, were not brought to a close before they had left a terrible and abiding impress on the civil life of the people. The shaking of the national security, the wild hopes and the panic-stricken fears of rebellion, had their inevitable conclusion in tightening the hold of authority. In the boroughs the governing bodies, terrified at the signs of bitter discontent in the subject populace, and justly trembling lest under some feint of political obedience, the mass of the people might be arrayed against their rulers and clamour against wrong and injustice might fill the streets, raised a cry for protection against social anarchy; and the cry was eagerly responded to by kings whose title to the crown was their strong will and heavy hand. The progress of liberty was violently arrested by the fears that shook the settled classes before threatenings of revolt. “It seemeth that the world is all quavering; it will reboil somewhere,” onlookers said; men walked with redoubled wariness in an “unstable” and “right queasy” world,[503] and while anxious kings urged the mayor and his council to make good and fearful example of indisposed commons, aldermen gladly locked the doors of the town-hall, and cast into the freeman’s dungeon the burgher who still prated of a free community.
NOTE A.
We do not know when or how the leading men of Bristol assumed a position of special privilege. All we know is that troubles grew out of a quarrel about customs in the port and market, &c., in which fourteen of the citizens “were seen to have the prerogative,” while the community asserted that the burgesses were all of one condition and were equals in liberties and privileges. After many disputes the case was brought before the judges of the king’s court, but the Fourteen so arranged matters that foreigners or aliens were associated with them in the inquisition, which the community alleged to be against the liberties of the town. Seeing that their arguments were rejected and that their cause was going to be lost, not by reason but by favour, the leaders of the people angrily went out of the judgment hall and proclaimed to the mob that the judges were favouring their enemies. The whole people, called out by the ringing of the common bell, flocked into the hall; and there was terrible clamour and a free fight with fists and clubs; twenty men were killed; and terror seized alike on the noble and ignoble, who tried to escape by windows and roofs at the risk of their lives; while even the judges prayed to be allowed to fly by the help of the mayor, who himself could scarcely soothe the “vast crowd of malefactors.” About eighty men were summoned for the riot, and not appearing before the judges were banished, but stayed on nevertheless comfortably in the town and were well cared for by their fellow rebels. It was in fact the Fourteen who judged it wise to leave Bristol, thinking it useless to remain in such a storm. (See the extract from the life of Edward the Second by a monk of Malmesbury given in Seyer’s Bristol, ii. 94.)
To quell this tumult the king in 1312 took the government into his own hand and appointed Bartholomew of Baddlesmere, constable of the castle, as custos; but the mayor and bailiffs, asserting that the letter had not been addressed to the community, and further that the custody of the town had been previously given to them, refused to obey orders, and kept the gates of the castle and town for thirty-five weeks, building a wall against the castle and refusing to let the king’s men go out to fetch victuals save at the will of the community. Of their own authority they made John the Taverner mayor, John of Horncastle and Richard Legate bailiffs, and John Hazard coroner, without making them take their oath of king or constable; and by force of arms seized the custody of the prison, levied for their own purposes the revenues from the town and port which ought to have been collected for the king, and administered justice. The king’s judges and servants were imprisoned or driven from the town; the Fourteen and half a dozen partizans, who had mostly been in office, were not allowed to return to the town in spite of the king’s injunction, and the community seized their goods to the value of £2,000, and drove out their wives, freemen, and tenants.
The rebellion lasted for two years. In 1316 six citizens representing the community of Bristol were summoned before the king’s council to answer for these offences. They denied the charges, and refused to submit unless life and limb, rents and land, were secured to them. The king, looking on the case as one of evil example, ordered Bristol to be besieged by sea and land, and after attempting to hold out for some days in the hope that the troops might be called away to the Scotch war, the town surrendered half in ruins. The leaders were put in prison and the multitude terrified by a series of heavy punishments. The banished party returned in triumph to power, and appeared, twelve of them, before the king’s council, with the allotted fine of four thousand marks to have pardon for all the city’s offences, and to have back the franchise of the town. The rebel mayor and his immediate friends, excluded from mercy, went in their turn into exile. (See the account extracted from Rolls of Parliament 9 Edward II. by Seyer. Memoirs of Bristol, ii. 89 to 105.)
After this matters seem to have gone on as before, a few influential families still taking the leading place. One, Turtle, was mayor ten times, and another, Tilly, held office for four years. But in 1344, the popular party insisted on the appointment of Forty-eight “of the chiefest and discreetest” burgesses, to be the mayor’s councillors and assistants. When Bristol was made into a county in 1373 the new charter recognized the system established in 1344, and provided that the mayor and sheriff with the assent of the commonalty should choose a Council of Forty, whose consent was required for all ordinances, and who took part in municipal elections; while the five aldermen of the wards were chosen by the people from among the ex-mayors or members of the common council. By a later charter of 1499 it was settled that six aldermen were to be elected for life by the mayor and common council, and were to have the authority of London aldermen (Charter Henry VII., 1499. Seyer’s Charters and Letters Patent of Bristol, 123), while the common council itself was to be elected by the mayor and two aldermen chosen by him, with the assent of the commonalty.