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

by Alice Stopford Green

Nor had the town yet exhausted its good fortune. A law of 1455 which forbade merchant strangers from Italy any longer to ride about the country buying up with ready money wools and wool cloth from the poor people, and only allowed them henceforth to buy in London, Southampton, or Sandwich,[538] drove foreign traders to settle in the town if they wanted to carry on their business at all; and many more were added to their number the next year when the whole body of Italian dealers living in London were driven out by a popular riot, and passing by Winchester, fixed their new homes in Southampton,[539] which must then have contained within its walls the great majority of all the Italian merchants in England. The monopoly of the whole export trade of Southern England was confirmed to the town by law in 1464; and finally Henry the Seventh created it a staple of metals, and gave the exclusive right of melting tin ore to its guild.[540]

Smugglers and illegal traders bore their testimony to the profits to be made in Southampton waters. Light boats[541] pushed by night into every creek and cove along the coast to land their casks of wine; and in the town strange tailors were hard at work cutting up stuff into garments for the foreign market so as to avoid the duty on exported cloth. It was decreed in 1407 that no alien tailor, coming in a ship or galley, should have any shop, house, or room in the town for the making of any “robes, jepone, ne autres garnements” until he had made agreement with the masters of the craft; so vessels of “Spayne, Portingall, Almayne, Flanders, Zelonde, and others in their vyages” came bringing with them “tailors of divers nations,” who now however simply abode in their ships and cut up the cloth there at their leisure, and in 1468, four years after the monopoly of the wool trade had been again secured to Southampton, it had to pass a new law against these plunderers of the custom house.[542] Indeed, the magnitude of commerce at the end of the century may be measured by the scale on which corruption and false dealing could be carried on even by the town authorities themselves. In 1484 two London citizens, one a brewer, the other a “gentleman, and clerk of all the King’s ships,” owed to the mayor, sheriffs, and bailiffs of Southampton £1,200. These officers, however, had apparently got into some difficulty about the sale of 1,086 sacks of wool in which they were concerned, and drew up an agreement with their debtors that they would forgive this debt of £1,200 if they might have a promise that they should be held “harmless in their own names, and not as mayor, sheriffs, and bailiffs.”[543]

There was, however, another aspect of Southampton trade. We have a glimpse of the hidden side of the town life during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in account books of the Hospital of St. Julian or God’s House, which owned a hundred and eight tenements inhabited by working people, the prosperous ones living in houses of their own, the more luckless seeking shelter in selds or open warehouses. But from the one class as from the other, the Hospital pressed in vain for a rent which the tenant scarcely ever paid. One of the richer kind is pardoned 56s. arrears; the attorney is forgiven a sum of 50s.; the goldsmith who owes £4 8s. 6d., manages to pay most of his debt in salt. Others pledge their carpets; some pay 1d. or 1/2d. or 3d. at a time for large accounts against them; in other cases there is the brief entry “died in poverty and so nothing;” or poor tenants “run away from the town in poverty,” and the selds that sheltered them stand empty. Such is the tale of misery—a misery scarcely alleviated by the alms distributed by the Hospital to the poor—in 1299 three bushels of wheat given in Advent; in 1306 one-and-a-half quarters of beans and twenty-nine quarters of peas; in 1318 thirteen quarters of beans. After the burning of a great part of the town in 1337 by a fleet of French, Spaniards, and Genoese, matters grew yet worse, and in 1340 the arrears amounted to four times as much as the yearly rents. The Abbot of Beaulieu owed five years’ rent for the “cheseseld.” There was due from the five parishes of Holyrood, St. John, St. Michael, St. Lawrence, and All Saints within the Bar, £127 in 1340, £155 in 1342.[544] Large tenements were broken up into smaller ones where the people huddled together in their misery, and the terrible legacy of a very poor population clinging in extreme destitution to the slums and low suburbs of the town was apparently handed on to the next century, for so far as the published records tell, Southampton was the only town in the fifteenth century that gave regular out-door relief to paupers. In 1441 the Steward’s book gives an account of £4 2s. 1d. given away in alms every week to poor men and women.[545]

In Southampton, in fact, riches did not gather in the people’s coffers while men slept. Wealth which was hard to win, was harder still to keep in the great port of the southern coast, where life and goods were held by a precarious tenure whenever England had a quarrel across the water. At any moment the plea of military necessity might justify all kinds of irregular and intermittent interference of royal officers, and the government of Southampton became a matter of divided authority and shifting responsibility which was probably unparalleled elsewhere in England. A special guardian of the king’s ships[546] interfered in the harbour; and a receiver and victualler to the king’s troops[547] interfered in the shops and market of the town. The Constable of the Castle[548] long survived the constables of other towns, and was given powers determined by the court view of the necessities of the times; so that in 1369, we find a captain of the castle with authority to arrest all rebels against the king or the government of the town, and to watch against regrators, artizans, or workmen who should offend against the law.[549] At a time when the mayor of most boroughs was commissioner for array-at-arms, the mayor was here jointly responsible for military defences with the constable and apparently took quite the second place.[550]

Military discipline in fact pressed relentlessly at all points on a place continually vexed by war and alarms of war and calls to arms. On Sundays and holidays all children from seven years old were called out to practise shooting with bows on the common, while the town cowherd kept the cattle out of the way.[551] When war broke out every man had to go out and take his share of fighting, and no one save the mayor was even allowed to provide a deputy instead of bearing arms in person. If the inhabitants had no heart to fight, summary punishment was meted out as a warning for future times; and when in 1338 the mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses fled before an attack of the French, the custody of Southampton was seized into the king’s hands, and its franchises forfeited for a whole year.[552] Besides the cost of three or four ships[553] to protect the harbour, with wages for masters and men, and money for their food and rent, Southampton was bound to have “ready for defence against the foreign enemy great plenty of armour, weapons, and other artillery and things needful.” There was a town gunner who was paid sixpence a day to make gunpowder, gunstones and lathe-guns.[554] Generation after generation of unwilling tradesmen had to repair and maintain and defend walls over a mile long and from twenty-five to thirty feet high, with twenty-nine great towers; and to strengthen the sea-banks and ditches. The work was divided out among the people; lightermen and boatmen were bound to bring up every year boatloads of stones and heap them up against the walls on the sea side, while the townspeople put in piles and kept them in order.[555] The towers were manned by the various crafts, one by shoemakers, curriers, cobblers, and saddlers; another by mercers and grocers; a third by goldsmiths, blacksmiths, lockyers, pewterers, and tinkers; and so on.[556] But so heavy was the cost of repairs, that after the burning of the town by the French, when the king, in 1338 and 1340, ordered the fortifications to be strengthened and a stone wall fronting the sea built at the expense of the inhabitants,[557] the people simply fled away; and the Earl of Warwick and his successors, under the title of “guardians of the town,” were posted in its castle with men-at-arms and archers, “to take order” about the wretched fugitives, and compel any inhabitants who attempted to leave the town to return and live there “according to their estate,” and if they refused, to seize their houses, rents, and possessions for the king.[558] And in 1376 the poor commons and tenants prayed that the king would take the town into his hand and forgive them the rent, since for the last two years they had spent not only the whole ferm which he had granted them (nearly £300 a year) on the walls, but had been forced to give besides £1,000 of their own money, so that half the people had deserted their homes to escape the intolerable burdens thrown on them,[559] and the rest were going.

The long miseries of the Hundred Years War were soon followed by the harassing problems of the Wars of the Roses. For Southampton was reputed wealthy, with its unusually imposing ferm of £226 and the big roll of the king’s customs, and there were always people waiting to dip their hands into so rich treasury. The royal generosities at its expense were an old story. A large part of the ferm was settled on successive queens from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries,[560] and however low funds might run the town always tried to keep well at court by paying at least the Queen’s jointure. Great nobles and servants of the king’s household were not forgotten, and took their grants as they could get them, partly in money, partly in wine or foreign fruits or spices. But when two warring parties each claimed the treasure of Southampton as its own, the municipal finances became a perilous matter for the council to deal with, and the crises of the Wars of the Roses are marked by calamity to the town budget.[561] In 1457 the ferm was only made up by contributions from seventeen burgesses amounting to over £42.[562] Matters were more serious in November, 1458, and the mayor had to go to London, from whence he writes to entreat the auditors “that ye will, as diligently as ye can or may, with one heart, one will, and one thought effectually to labour, that an end be had of the books of the bailiffs in all haste goodly, and to warn the steward that was to make his book ready against my coming home, for we must with all the diligence we can or may make provision of money to be had in short time or we be like to be sore hurt, and that God defend for we have had too much.” One of the auditors accounts was over £30 too short, “the which is to me right strange, so much money as he received the last year and this year too, I cannot understand it.... I remit it to your wisdoms.” Another account included nothing but the bare fees. These matters must be thought on “right specially” but “if ye will with good heart and will undivided and without any ambiguity every man heartily and diligently put his hand we shall once be brought out of thraldom.” As to political news he is as cautious as he is anxious. “And so much to do will be amongst them, God spede the right.” “I can no more, but I beseech God guide us in all our work.”[563] A few months after the mayor was summoned to the Exchequer in London about his accounts, but before the day was fixed the Lancastrian Lord Exeter suddenly sent his secretary to the town with a receipt under his seal and sign manual for the last half-year’s rent. “Milord prayed us so fair to be paid here (that is in Southampton and not in London) and said he had never so great ‘myster’ ne need that he is paid,” and promised his help in case of any difficulty in London, “for we told him what hurt and loss it was unto us.” So the town paid sadly, and the mayor anxiously wrote to their Recorder in London to try and get them out of the scrape. “And [we will] make aready all the money that we may in all haste possible whatsomever befall,” he adds earnestly.[564]

It was indeed hard to gather money at the moment, for in 1460 the Earl of Wiltshire, Treasurer of Henry the Sixth, making an excuse to get to Southampton under pretence of intercepting Warwick, found five great carracks of Genoa lying in the port, seized them all with all their wealth, filled them with his soldiers, provided them with victuals from the town without payment, and fled to Flanders with his booty.[565] Then came the new rulers, and Edward the Fourth ordered Southampton to pay the treasurer of his household £133 6s. 8d., and to the Earl of Warwick as constable of Dover castle an annuity of £154 out of the same ferm.[566] What with one trouble and another Southampton fell into arrears with its rent, and a burgess (the very Richard Gryme who had been mayor a year before and had made the advance to Lord Exeter) was thrown into the Fleet in London till it should be paid; two of his fellow-townsmen were sent riding to Westminster “to labour for his welfare,” and £20 was at last handed over before he was set free.[567] The same year the sheriff, also summoned before the Exchequer, rode to London at the town’s cost; and he only got off by having his debt paid by the Recorder, who was afterwards repaid by the town.[568] There was further trouble in 1469-70 when the Kingmaker, as the restored Constable of Dover under Henry the Sixth, demanded his pension from the ferm, and the mayor travelled to London “to reckon with the Earl of Warwick,” and spent twelve days there, “for the which twelve days the cost cometh to 50s. 6d.”[569] Then a few months later came the other constable of the victorious Edward the Fourth, and the town had to pay him too and bear the double charge that year.[570]

All these financial difficulties were made yet more acute by the character of the municipal wealth. Of the £393 which made up the revenue of the town in 1428,[571] £302 3s. 4d. came from tolls; and the foreign commerce on which such sums were levied had to be maintained amid wars with France, quarrels with Brittany, attacks of Hanseatic and Breton and Genoese and Venetian traders always on the watch to seize ships on any plea of wrong done to their merchants, or in defiance of pirates that swarmed in the Channel, and of smugglers that haunted the coast. Again and again the people make complaint that the foreign merchants that used to bring their goods no longer came, and for lack of tolls to pay the ferm the burgesses had been forced to borrow £400 for their rent, and that many citizens had been driven from the town, and others were going unless something could be done to lighten their burdens.[572]

These were some of the special problems with which Southampton had to deal—perils of war, its consequences of military rule and divided authority within the town, a complicated and difficult finance, a trade at once wealthy and precarious, heavy expenses to be met in good times and in bad, a very poor class living side by side with a very rich one. The form of trouble might vary from year to year, but trouble was always with them. Bargainings, abject petitionings and arbitrary favours, concessions now on this side now on that, stern exactions and lavish gifts, left the town open to endless changes and chances of fortune.[573]

The general conditions, in fact, must have made the growth of popular government practically impossible; and from the beginning the town was probably ruled by a narrow oligarchy. Its first constitution was, perhaps, framed under the influence of a powerful Merchant Guild, such as would naturally be formed in a wealthy commercial centre—a fraternity not unlike the contemporary guild at Lynn or the latter one at Coventry.[574] It seems that in the twelfth century two king’s bailiffs had the care of all the royal property, the collection of the ferm, the gathering in of the king’s debts, and so forth.[575] Meanwhile the Merchant Guild elected its own aldermen, scavins, usher, and other officers, to protect the liberties and customs granted to it by Henry the First and confirmed by Henry the Second and his sons.[576] In 1199 John granted to “the burgesses” to have their town at ferm,[577] and it is probable that the alderman of the guild was charged with the collection and payment of the money, for in the course of the next generation he appears as mayor of the town.[578] Both offices, mayor and alderman, were carried on side by side in his person. He shared the government with the bailiffs, as chief of the town and the guild, bound to maintain the statutes of both, and having the first voice in all elections concerning both. If the bailiffs failed to do justice, he summoned the jurors and judged in their place. He had charge of the common coffer and the keys of the town gates, and kept the assize of bread and of ale.[579] By virtue of his old title and office the mayor was still called alderman in the fourteenth century,[580] and in 1368 he apparently acted at the head of the guild organization with its four scavins.[581]