Southampton had, in fact, a peculiar history and a fixed tradition in government, which left its people in a singularly helpless position before authority. The conditions, political and commercial, of its municipal life necessarily gave the expert a supreme place in administration; and it is possible that a compact body of merchants had from the first imposed their methods of government and election on a population who had no voice in the matter. The state of affairs was exactly reflected in the attitude of the mayor, who held a place of singular pre-eminence and might. Far removed from popular criticism or control, as direct minister of the king[616] he conducted a vast mass of business in absolute independence, both of the community and of the guild, not only as being the king’s escheator, the gauger and weigher of goods at the king’s standard, and measurer over the assize of cloth, the mayor of the staple of wool, and mayor of the staple of metals under the king’s orders, but also as the king’s admiral within the town and its liberties, with supreme control of the port and coast from Christ Church Head to the Needles thence to Hill Head at the mouth of Southampton Water, over the port of Cowes and of Portsmouth;[617] and even as a sort of secretary for foreign affairs, for we must remember that nowhere, save in London, was the “foreign” question so big and important. Settlers from France or the Netherlands, such as those in Sandwich or Norwich, who took up their dwelling there and became absorbed in the general body of the townsfolk, formed a very different class from the merchant visitors who flocked to Southampton to look after business interests which extended all over the country, and to a great extent conducted the whole carrying trade of the south; and who, as strangers under the peculiar protection of the king, constituted a foreign colony, ruled by special laws and kept under special supervision.[618] In all these different departments of his government the mayor ruled by other laws than the municipal ordinances; he did not need the municipal seal for his decrees, nor the assent of the community for his acts; and the great departments in which his actions were removed from all possibility of local criticism, and local control must have made absolute rule the easier and less singular in all other relations of his office.
Nor ought we to forget wholly the outer influences which were acting on Southampton from the world beyond the water. With Flanders it seems to have had little direct communication. So long as the Mediterranean galleys carried its wool to the Netherland ports, and returned to pick up their freight for the homeward journey, the associations and commerce of Southampton were with the great cities of Italy, too far removed from it in every conceivable respect to serve as schools of political freedom; and with the communes of France whose liberties had long suffered decay, and in the fifteenth century were finally extinguished by the policy of Louis the Eleventh, the subtle enemy of popular liberties.[619] It is hard to tell how far Southampton may have been affected by such foreign associations, but at least they did not tend to weaken the influences at home which made for oligarchic rule. Undoubtedly if we compare this town with other English boroughs where civic life was more free and expansive in its growth, the municipal record, in spite of its brilliant commercial side, is one of singular monotony, and leaves us with the sense of a stunted developement in the body politic. Southampton, in fact, was by its position and dignity called to play so great a part in the national history, both in war and commerce, that all claim to private and local independence was superseded. At a far earlier date than other towns its destiny was merged in the fortunes of the whole commonwealth,[620] and the king suffered no deviation from the service required of it to the state. In a very remarkable way Southampton anticipated the history of boroughs which under the Tudors were drawn into the same duty and service; through successive centuries its burghers acquiesced in the expert administration of a small official class, scarcely fettered by popular control; and abandoned the pursuit of new ideals of communal life or new experiments in government.
CHAPTER XIII
THE COUNCIL OF NOTTINGHAM
Problems of government sat lightly on the people of Nottingham. Singularly favoured as it was by fortune compared with many other towns, there is something phenomenal in the record of a town so tranquil, so uniformly prosperous, so exempt from apprehension, with so complacent a record of successful trading and undisturbed ease. Administration was carried on in its simplest form, and few sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants, whether of labour or of money, compared with the efforts which were required of less fortunate towns. The interest, in fact, of its history lies in the quiet picture that is given of a group of active and thriving traders, at peace with their neighbours, and for the most part at peace with themselves.
The position of Nottingham was one of great military importance; for lying almost at the centre of the kingdom, the town held the approach to the one bridge over the Trent by which the main road from the south struck northward: and further commanded the navigation of the river from the point where, broadened by the confluence of the Derwent and the Soar, it became a great highway of internal communication. Throughout its history, therefore, from the time of the Danes down to the time of the Civil War, Nottingham could not be left out of account when any fighting was going on. But England was in the main a land of peace, and the occasional and intermittent importance of an internal fortress was wholly different from the consequence that attached to a border castle like that of Bristol, or to outposts against foreign foes such as the walled seaport towns of the coast. Hence the military advantages of its site made but little mark on the character and history of the town, and the castle which crowned the sandstone cliff that rose precipitously from the waters of the river Lene played no great part in the life of the mediæval borough. Lying well out of reach of all foreign foes, it fell into no misfortunes such as Rye, which was destroyed by fire twice in half a century, nor was it impoverished by taxes for defence against the French such as threatened to leave Southampton desolate; and its merchants were only occasionally required to make contribution towards the protection of the coast and the safety of the sea-borne trade which added to their wealth and luxury. Thus, when the keeping of the sea was given in 1406 to the English merchants, their elected Admiral of the Fleet, Nicholas Blackburn, wrote a peremptory order to Nottingham for £200 as its share of the cost;[621] but the merchants’ experiment failed, and they were relieved of their responsibility before they had levied any second toll.
But the same geographical position which, under other circumstances, would have made of Nottingham a strategic centre, did under the actual conditions of English life assure the fortunes of the borough in industry and commerce. By land and by water, trade was almost forced to its gates. The bridge which spanned the Trent, after it had fallen into ruins as the property of the kings, was granted by Edward the Third to the townspeople, who willingly undertook the heavy charges of its repair and maintenance; each division of the town territory was made responsible for one or two of its nineteen low arches,[622] and the wardens appointed to oversee the whole appeared from time to time before the municipal officers with laborious and portentous accounts. Over this bridge all traffic from south to north was bound to pass; while boats from Hull and the eastern ports travelled up the river to unload at the quays of Nottingham. Thus the burghers, more fortunate than those of Canterbury, Norwich, or Shrewsbury, had no cause to fear the troubles of a shifting commerce, of manufacturers driven away to seek for brighter prospects, or of merchants forsaking the old ways for some new trade route. A uniform prosperity seems to have reigned in the town. Traders of every kind were in 1395 winning more than the law allowed them,[623] and the market-place, which is said even now to be the largest in England, was covered with booths; there were twenty fish-boards, thirty-two stalls in the Butchers’ House, thirty in the Mercers’ House, twenty in the Drapers’ House, and so on, the rents of which were rapidly rising in the second half of the fifteenth century;[624] and the stately Guild Hall, besides its council room, and its upper prison for felons and gaols for debtors with iron grating to the street, had its storage room for merchandise. Buyers and sellers crowded to the market, for new burgesses were still willingly admitted[625] on the payment of 6s. 8d., and it was only at the close of the next century that the ready hospitality of the town gave way to a jealous exclusiveness. Strangers without number paid for license to trade, besides rents for stalls or shops;[626] and the number of suits between burgesses and “foreigners” or non-burgesses, was so great that sometimes in a single year twenty rolls or more were closely written on both sides with the records of these suits alone—a fact which points to trade dealings with the outer world on a scale quite unknown to previous times.[627] Even the geological position of the town added to its sources of wealth, and the corporation as well as traders made profit from the neighbouring coal-mines.[628] All kinds of industries seem to have flourished. As early as 1155, when probably there were few places in England where cloth was dyed, bales were sent to Nottingham to be coloured red, blue, green, and tawny or murrey; and if their scarlet dye was liable to turn out not scarlet but red[629] even in 1434, we must remember that at this time for a fine scarlet dye English cloth had to be sent to Italy.[630] Nottingham manufacturers made linen as well as woollen goods.[631] Its famous workers in iron lived in Girdler Gate and Bridlesmith Gate. There was a foundry for bells well known in all the neighbouring counties, and the bell-founder, besides his bells, made brazen pots. Moreover, there were artists of repute.[632] Among English churches of the early Perpendicular period, there is none more beautiful than S. Mary’s, lifted high above the market on the steep hill side.[633] The Nottingham goldsmith was sent for to repair the cross in Clifton Church.[634] The town had its own illuminator, Richard the Writer; and its image-maker, Nicolas Hill, who sent his wares as far as London (on one occasion as many as fifty-eight heads of John the Baptist, some of them in tabernacles or niches) and as he worked also in painting or gilding alabaster salt-cellars, was commonly known as the “Alablaster Man.”[635]
The wealth of Nottingham was possibly not equal to that of towns like Bristol or Lynn, where at a time when capital was scanty the burghers had accumulated in their coffers good store of gold and silver. But a general air of substantial comfort and well-being seems to have pervaded the town. The subsidy roll of 1472 which gives a list of 154 owners of freehold property, from one whose tenth was 74s. 7-1/2d. down to one whose tenth was set down at 1/4d.,[636] the inventories of household goods, and the legacies which occur from time to time, show a considerable class of citizens living in wealth and luxury, and a yet larger class of comparatively well-to-do people after the measure of those times. While the richer merchants were building or adorning with handsome carved oak houses which a later age called “palaces of King John,” humbler tradesmen contented themselves with homes such as are described in a builder’s contract of 1479, where the little dwelling with a frontage of 18 feet on the street, was to have two bay windows and to cost altogether about £6.[637] Before the latter part of the sixteenth century[638] at least there is no indication of poverty such as we find in various other towns, in Southampton, or Romney, or Chester, or Canterbury—all places which had to suffer from special causes of distress—and even the wills do not contain the frequent bequests for the relief of the poor and of prisoners which occur in places where the calls of distress were more pressing and insistent. The financial problems of the corporation were perfectly simple and regular, and presented no more formidable difficulty than the keeping in repair of the great bridge. When the ferm of the town was reduced to £20 by Edward the Fourth it was done, so far as the municipal records tell the tale,[639] without any of the complainings of utter misery and desolation by which such favours were commonly won; and in the next half century there is no more serious hint of distress than is marked by the fact that in 1499 two of the butchers’ stalls and a few other holdings were lying vacant, and that the Corporation had borrowed some small sums.[640]