In 1553 “the mayor and burgesses” of Gloucester claimed to have had power time out of mind to ordain, constitute, and hold a court in their Council House, and to call many and divers men to their council at the same court and to compel and swear them in of their council. This summoning of additional councillors seems to have made up the “Common Council.” In 1526 it was stated that “it has been the custom time out of mind to elect certain chief burgesses, sometimes more sometimes less in number,” to form a common council; and the number was then fixed at forty, twelve of whom were to be aldermen.
CHAPTER XII
THE COUNCIL OF SOUTHAMPTON
There are two grounds on which Southampton may claim to stand first among examples of early municipal government. For centuries it was the great port of the south—the harbour where for England the trade of the whole world converged, where carracks of Flanders and galleys from Venice met to pour upon its wharves the treasures of the northern and the southern seas. And for centuries its government survived, as perhaps such a government survived nowhere else in England, in the order appointed by its first planters, with none of its hedges broken down by compromise, nor its pure springs stained by infiltration of popular and democratic fervours. It is possible that the two facts are intimately bound together, and that the destiny of a Channel port determined the somewhat unusual lot of the Southampton municipality.
The industrial experiences of Southampton had been very felicitous. Nearly forty trades are mentioned in the town records of the thirteenth century, and there were many more than these, carried on not only by the English inhabitants but by settlers come from Burgundy, Flanders, Denmark, and Lombardy, and the French colony established in Rochelle Lane and French Street. Wool of all kind was sold in the market, coarse, black, broken, and lambs’ wool, much of which was sent to the Isle of Wight to be made up into web. Coloured “Paris candles” were manufactured as early as 1297. Cheese was made in great quantities, and cider. Bends of elms for ploughs were brought from Abingdon.[522] Hemp was grown for the making of cords, and the shipbuilding trade for which the town was so noted in the time of Henry the Fifth must have been already practised in far earlier days, to judge from the history of the Southampton shipping.[523]
Home industries, however, held a very modest position in Southampton compared with the fine figure made by its foreign commerce. Ships from the West bringing “cloth of Ireland,” perhaps drugget from Drogheda or from Sligo, met vessels carrying wine from the French ports, herrings and wax and tapestry from Brittany, alum from Biscay and from Genoa, Eastern spices from the depôts of the Rhine, while harbour dues were paid for salt-fish, pitch, bitumen, charcoal, and wood from the ports of the Baltic.[524] The great glory of the town lay however in its direct trade with the Mediterranean. When in the reign of Edward the Second Venetian and Genoese ships first began to carry their wares to England they cast anchor in its harbour,[525] and for two hundred years Southampton became the centre of English traffic with the Italian republics.[526] An attempt to make it a free port in 1334 came to a speedy end, but the advantages the scheme offered must have been practically secured by the privileges which the kings granted both to the foreign merchants who came to trade and to the town itself as a commercial centre. In 1337 the merchants of the Society of the Alberti in Florence did the carrying trade of wool from Southampton to Gascony,[527] and three years later part of a tenement near the sea was let to the Society of the Bardi, the Florentine bankers. In 1378 the King allowed merchants of Spain and the Genoese and Venetians who carried all the Levant trade, to unlade and sell their goods at its wharfs instead of being forced to go to the staple at Calais;[528] and again in 1402 Henry the Fourth granted special permission to the Genoese to disembark at Southampton and carry their goods thence to London by land.[529] From 1353, when Winchester was made a staple for wool, Southampton as the port from which alone all its bales must be shipped to the Continent had a practical monopoly of the southern export trade.[530] It was the only harbour to which might be carried “Malmseys and other sweet wines of the growth of Candye and Rotymoes, and in any other place within the parts of Levant beyond the Straits of Morocco.” Carracks from Genoa and Venice, ships from Spain, Portugal, Almayne, Flanders, and Zealand thronged its harbours, bringing their wines and spices, and carrying away wool for the weavers of the Netherlands, or cloth for the dyers of Italy and the traders of the Black Sea.[531] Attracted by its dazzling prospects of wealth, London vintners and cloth-workers rented great cellars for storage, and held houses and lands in the town; and so brilliant was the promise of its future that in 1379 a Genoese merchant got leave from the king, for the better security of his merchandise, to occupy the castle which had just been rebuilt, and promised in return to make Southampton the greatest port of Western Europe. But before he could carry out his plans the merchants in London, furious at so dangerous a rivalry, had him assassinated at his own door.[532]
Nor was commercial enterprise left to the foreigner, for even in the fourteenth century native traders were sending out English ships to do business in foreign ports.[533] In 1391 one merchant took a lease for the whole year of the customs of the town by land and water; while another wealthy burgess, William Soper, put the towers of the Water Gate in repair at his own cost, and rented them and the adjoining buildings for a hundred and twenty years, promising to repair and maintain them. At the end of the fourteenth century the large sums which passed from hand to hand, and the numerous bonds for payment of debts from £60 to £100 bore witness to the growth of trade.[534] The wool dues in the port were able to bear a charge of £100 a year granted by Henry the Fourth in 1400 for the repairing and fortifying of the town walls; and in 1417 Cardinal Beaufort, Lord of Southampton and the greatest wool-merchant in all England, lent £14,000 to Henry the Fifth on security of customs on wool and other merchandise in the various ports of Southampton, and before a third of it was repaid he advanced another £14,000 on the same security.[535]
The prosperity of the citizens was shewn by their refusal any longer to interrupt business during the Winchester fair. In 1350 they had already quarrelled with the bishop on the subject; but he had carried the day, and the town had again submitted to the old rules that while the fair lasted there should be no weighing and measuring at the great beam in the market place, that if a merchant came carrying wares he should only be allowed to remain if he swore that they were not intended for sale, and that the bishop’s bailiff should live in Southampton during the fair to see that the contract was carried out. If it was broken the inhabitants were bound, not only in their lands and houses but in all their goods and chattels, to pay a penalty of a thousand marks within three months.[536] From this intolerable state of things the citizens were strong enough to free themselves by negociations with the bishop in 1406,[537] and in 1433 they gained the right to have a fair of their own every year for three days at Trinity Chapel near the town.