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

by Alice Stopford Green

CHAPTER XI

THE TOWN COUNCIL

The fifteenth century has been popularly taken as the time when victory crowned the local oligarchies and liberty fled from the English boroughs, and the restriction of popular rights has sometimes been attributed to the charters of incorporation given under Henry the Sixth. In this, as in many other respects, the luckless age has long lain under a heavy weight of accusations which might more fairly be distributed among other centuries; for in most towns the work of adapting the primitive town constitutions to oligarchic government had practically been accomplished long before the days of Henry.[504] Indeed it seems as though the characteristic movement of this time, a movement which naturally sprang out of the industrial developement of the Middle Ages, was the effort to enlarge the sphere of political activity. Far from being a time of apathy in local politics, it was a time of acute excitement. Townspeople on all sides were awakening to the sense that the free community of which their fathers had talked had still to be created; and were making perhaps the first organized attack on the monopoly of “the magnates,” and the first practical attempt to deal with the problem which confronts Englishmen to-day—the problem of how to combine popular control with good administration. Traditions of ancient rights which the commonalty theoretically held by law and charter mingled with the ambitions of a new world of enterprise, and, as we have seen, the manufacturing classes by asserting their right to have some share in the work of government, did here and there for the first time bring the commonalty into the council chamber.

The problem of government was indeed no longer so simple as it had been when “the magnates” first easily assumed the control of the town destinies. As the centuries went on, bringing their commercial and industrial revolutions, the growth of capital and the organization of labour, new standards of administration and a more anxious vigilance on the part of the central authority, the balance of power in local governments began to sway to one side or the other under the pressure of contending forces. Every political tendency of the time went to strengthen the administrative body, and maintain the authority of the select council. But, on the other hand, the mass of the commons were neither so poor nor so helpless as they had once been. The manufacturing classes waxed fat and kicked. Enriched by trade and disciplined by industrial training, organized in guilds, and practised in such self-government as this implied, restless under growing taxation, clamorous for advancement in well-being, tormented by petty tyranny, they were growing into a real power; and amid all the ugliness and violence and suffering of the troubled crowd which Langland brings before us at the close of the fourteenth century, we cannot but feel the stir of the coming revolution, and of a world transforming itself under the power of some new force. To the eye of the contemporary observer the merchants have become too clever at their business, the lawyers too shrewd, the common people everywhere too independent; the poor are less content to starve, and are looking for the easiest ways of getting hot meat and ale and comfortable chimney corners; the ploughman will not work till hunger has buffeted him so “that he looked like a lantern all his life after”;[505] if the peasant was for a moment safe from actual starvation, he was ready to defy the very Statute of Labourers itself.[506] On all sides there is the movement of a growing discontent[507]—the criticism and impatience that are born of a new hope. We have a sense of the vague trouble of a people grown too rich and too busy and too energetic for the old restraints—a people that had outgrown its “childish things.” Nature itself seemed to have been dragged within the circle of some mysterious change, and its old stately courses turned into confusion—

“Neither the sea nor the sand nor the seed yieldeth
As they wont were....
······
Weatherwise shipmen now and other witty people
Have no belief to the lyft nor to the lode star.
Astronomers all day in their art failen
That whilom warned men before what should befall after.”[508]

In presence of such a world—a world in restless and perpetual movement—it is difficult to make general statements of what was likely or “natural” to happen. In some cases the governing class, terrified by the new force which was stirring the masses of the people, eluded any serious conflict by making terms with the upper groups of the middle class, thus detaching to their own side the leaders of revolt; and a new oligarchy was formed out of the upper and middle sections of the community—an oligarchy stronger and wider than the old, and with promise of more permanent existence. In other cases the people had the advantage, and a more liberal settlement was for a time brought about in the interests of the commonalty; so that while the Town Council of one borough appears as a chosen band ostentatiously arrayed for the protection of a successful oligarchy, we may see it figuring in another as the advanced guard of the commons entrenched in the enemy’s country. Never, in fact, did any people endeavour to solve the difficulty of creating an efficient government with such endless resource and ingenuity as the mediæval burghers, who as need arose, flung themselves into the art of constitution making with all the persistence, temperance, energy, and economy in patching up ancient models and finding new use for old materials in which Englishmen for centuries have found their pride.[509] The charters granted to them allowed wide limits within which they might try their experiments and plan their own mode of government at their will. A local scheme of administration was devised; and when they had framed their system it might depend on the sanction of local custom, or for greater security and authority it might be defined and ordained by a new charter; and if again the chartered constitution proved unsatisfactory, the townsfolk had only to agree among themselves on new methods, and have them once more embodied in a fresh grant from the Crown.

The whole character of municipal government was thus indefinitely modified by local circumstances—by the position or the special industry of the borough, the nature of its tenure and its compact with the lord of the manor, the power of the merchants or the owners of property within its walls; and nothing is more surprising than the variety and intricacy of political systems with which the mediæval burghers were familiar. As free in theory as they were free in practice, under bondage to no fixed democratic creed, they adopted indiscriminately any method that commended itself—whether of election direct or indirect, election tempered by nomination, minority representation, public voting, or arrangements by which voters recorded their will secretly one by one.[510] Every borough, for example, had its own fashion of choosing its mayor. We have seen that in Sandwich the whole people made the election; but in Winchester the council of twenty-four chose two men and the outgoing mayor nominated one of them as his successor;[511] while in Southampton the plan was reversed and the outgoing mayor in the presence of bailiffs and council nominated two burgesses from whom the assembly was bound to elect one,[512] nor could an occasional outbreak of popular discontent do more than convince the commons afresh of their true impotence. Midway between these extremes came an endless variety of customs, often of elaborate complexity.[513] When the selection of the mayor was nominally left to the whole “people in the hall,” their choice was often limited and checked in one way or another. They must take him from among the upper council; or from among men who had already served as mayors or sheriffs; or they must send two names to the first chamber for approval, of whom this discreet company might choose one; or perhaps the council itself nominated two or three candidates for the freemen’s choice, as a curb to the license of popular judgment; or the matter was yet more effectually settled by a decision that the council alone should elect the mayor.[514] In some boroughs a special jury was chosen by the citizens for the purpose of electing the chief officers—either a single jury of twelve as at Bridgnorth,[515] or a double jury of twenty-four as at Colchester or Preston;[516] and the election of the jury itself was often far from being a simple matter, as we see at Lynn. Occasionally the necessity of recognizing various interests within the town and giving to them special influence in the municipal constitution seems to have added a local complication, as in Canterbury, where the aldermen were in early times hereditary owners and lords of the several wards of the town, and retained in consequence rights which were not finally extinguished till the reign of Henry the Eighth; here two “triours” were chosen, one by the two outgoing bailiffs together with the aldermen, the other by the commons or “council of the thirty-six”; these two triours then appointed twelve men from among the council, and the twelve finally chose the bailiffs for the next year.[517]

In appointing the other members of the corporation there was the same diversity of method, with a free use of the plan of nomination, so that a mixed system was sometimes evolved where half the corporation was elected by the people and the remainder nominated by the mayor or council. The town councillors might be chosen yearly by the burgesses, or by a jury nominated for the purpose; they might be turned into a new class of permanent officials by being elected for life; or made into an exclusive aristocratic body by being allowed to fill up all vacancies themselves; and in towns with a double council any two of these plans might be tried together; or both bodies might be chosen by some one system. An inevitable tendency to make themselves as independent as possible of the people over whom they ruled naturally guided the councillors to the belief that the manner of their election was best managed by themselves, and there were cases where not only the upper but the lower chamber became self-electing bodies in which the members held office for life.[518]