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

by Alice Stopford Green

When we turn from the southern to the eastern coast the first impression is that of being transported to a new atmosphere. It is not only that the outer forms of administration are different, for these differences, however interesting, are but the changes rung on a common system of local self-government. But in the political temper, the vitality of the popular institutions, the vigour of reform, we breathe a bracing air unknown in the Southampton docks and slums.

For the traders and artizans of the eastern coast lived in an exhilarating clime. Across the water the towns with which they traded were full of the movement of a free expansive life, very different from the political depression of the communes which the Southampton traders knew best. It was to the eastern coast that immigrants came flying from tyranny and clamorous for freedom; and traders from the eastern towns who watched in the streets of Ghent and Bruges and Ipres and Dinant, the violent and tumultuous life of cities where the people were still fighting for liberty, doubtless brought back from oversea tales of the passionate temper of independence which swept through the manufacturing boroughs of the Netherlands.

But however this may be, the towns of the east were distinguished by an intense vitality; and among the eastern boroughs where civic life was keenest and most fertile in experiment, Norwich was the pioneer in the way of freedom,—twenty or forty years ahead of Yarmouth in time[718]—beyond Colchester in the generosity with which the commonalty was called to share in the work of government[719]—happier and stronger than Lynn in having secured the union of its people into one undivided community for civil purposes. It is not impossible indeed that it stands in the forefront of all the English boroughs for the quality and value of its political experiments, and the elaborate finish of its constitution.

Originally, as we have seen, four bailiffs ruled the four great leets of the city, from 1223 to 1403. Their mode of administration has been very minutely described.[720] Each leet was for convenience’ sake divided into sub-leets, the lesser divisions being at first probably twelve in number and afterwards ten. The sub-leet was itself composed of as many parishes as grouped together would contain at least twelve tithings, and could therefore produce sufficient capital pledges to hold a leet court. For all purposes of business every tithing was supposed to be represented by its own capital pledge, who was probably chosen by the tithing men, but who, once elected, seems to have held his post for years, perhaps for life. He lived in the parish, perhaps in the very street of his tithing, and was generally a man of substance, one of the respectable middle class of the city, and occasionally might even aspire to enter the official body. In the whole city the number of capital pledges was probably a hundred and sixty.[721]

The business of each sub-leet was taken in its turn before the four bailiffs all sitting together in the little thatched tolbooth that stood in the central market place. There the capital pledges appeared to answer for their tithings at the view of frankpledge; and when this business was over they served as a jury for “presenting” offences at the leet court.[722] Year after year there came up the same body of comfortable well-to-do burghers, who did their business quietly, without thought of entering into any controversy with the government, like the juries of Nottingham and Southampton.[723] Whether this was the result of summoning the pledges in small groups from one sub-leet at a time, or due to the fact that in Norwich the people already possessed other means of expression, there is not as yet enough evidence from other towns to show, but the fact is important.

In later records we learn what was doubtless true in 1223 as well as in 1365, that one of the bailiffs was chosen for each great leet; and we also have the first account of the manner of their choosing. A body of twenty-four men, six from each leet, was elected by the whole community, and the twenty-four then chose the bailiffs.[724] The first mention of a custom in fragmentary records by no means implies its first institution, and this mode of election may have dated from the earliest times. It also appears that before the close of the thirteenth century the bailiffs were assisted in judicial business by a select body of citizens, whose share in considering the case of offenders seems to show that they were “present in the court as informal assessors to the bailiffs, or, in other words, forming the court of which the bailiffs were the sole executive;”[725] and it is possible that for other business also some of the leading citizens were summoned to attend at assemblies, and their name affixed to deeds, separately or collectively.[726] A complaint of “the mean people of the commonalty”[727] shows that administration and taxation had even at that early time fallen into the hands of a small body—the bailiffs and “the rich”; and the “customs” of the city (which were perhaps drawn up about 1340, but which must in many respects contain traditional usages of an earlier date) give us some idea who were “the rich” here spoken of. A body of twenty-four men elected by the community, six from each of the four great leets, is there described as forming a court for the control of the whole trade of the city. It appointed supervisors over the various crafts, and received reports of fraud in trade—charges which, if it had not been for the intervention of the twenty-four, would have gone to the leet juries. And the same body of twenty-four had official supervision of the city finances and received all accounts of the treasurers and collectors of taxes or town money.[728] Once more, in 1344, we find them exercising yet another function—“the twenty-four in the same year elected and ordained by the whole communitas, in the presence of whom, or of the greater part of them, if all cannot be present, the business of the city touching the communitas might be enrolled.”

Lastly it appears that the twenty-four gradually assumed the power of making laws for the community, and “used this custom that they might remedy new defaults and mischiefs arising by making new ordinances for the common profit of the town and the citizens and of others coming or conversant there.”[729] Apparently the assembly itself was almost superseded, for on the plea that when assemblies were summoned for the common good of the city and the country, the citizens did not take the trouble to come, to the great hindrance of public business, it had been ordained some time before 1340 that for the calling together of the commonalty the bailiff’s serjeant should summon certain of the most worthy and discreet men of each leet who were to be fined two shillings if they failed to obey the summons.[730]

A council of leading citizens, though it was already organized in this elaborate way early in the fourteenth century, scarcely appears in records of the later thirteenth century, and even then dimly in a vague inchoate form. It is, however, important to notice that from the very beginning two official styles were in use in the city documents, which seem at no time to have been interchangeable one with another. In the Pipe Roll of 1255 there seems to be a distinction between “the citizens” and “the men of Norwich”;[731] and both in this year and later, whenever the borough has any dealings with Westminster it is “the citizens” who ask for favours, and it is to “our beloved citizens, they and their heirs,” or to “the bailiffs and citizens their heirs and successors” that grants are made throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[732] Exceptions to this form are rare. In 1347 when Edward the Third asked for soldiers to be furnished for the French war he addressed himself to “the mayor, bailiffs, and the whole community”;[733] but as there was at that time no mayor in Norwich, the phrase was possibly that of a new clerk brought into the War Office in a hurried rush of business. In 1355 he sent a close letter to the “bailiffs and commonalty” of Norwich to provide him with a hundred and twenty armed men; and in 1371 a letter to the “bailiffs, good people, or commons” of Norwich to fit him out a ship. In all these cases it is obvious that the king’s claim on the people was altogether independent of any obligations resting on them as citizens of a chartered borough. Very rarely did the community address the king. In 1304 and 1307[734] the “mean people of the commonalty of the city” asked his aid; and once “the commune of the town of Norwich” sent a special petition to Parliament. The city liberties had been forfeited into the King’s hands in 1285, and the royal officer set over it had wrongfully distrained the people’s goods to the value of £300;[735] but since “the citizens” in the technical sense of a corporate body possessing certain rights ceased to exist when the city lost its franchise, the Norwich people had to fall back on that which lay behind all chartered corporations—on that out of which all other rights had sprung; it was to “the commune of the town” that wrong had been done, and “the commune” appealed against it. On the other hand, whenever a question arose as to common lands or common property the business was always done in the name of “the commonalty” or “the bailiffs and commonalty,” and in such cases the style of “the citizens” was never used.[736]

There seems, therefore, ground for thinking that from first to last the Norwich burghers officially described themselves by two distinct styles, which to the common understanding had different meanings, and were not used at hazard. I venture to suggest that here and elsewhere “cives” was the term used for the corporate body of citizens possessing chartered rights; while “communitas” stood for the citizens in another aspect, as the community which held property and enjoyed privileges by immemorial custom, before the charter of a free borough had been obtained. The holding of common property was probably the signal survival of customary rights, the others being gradually merged in the privileges enjoyed by charter; and hence it was in deeds relating to land that the traditional form of “cives et communitas” was chiefly preserved. In every town in England, however, whatever might be its special constitution, we find other rights universally claimed by the commons, which carried an authority that their opponents never dared in any single instance to gainsay, even when they sought to evade it. We may, perhaps, date back to a distant past the claim of the whole community to have all laws ratified by their “entire assent and consent,” to be made privy and consenting to all elections, to know verily how the town moneys were raised and spent, to admit new burgesses by the common vote of the people. These were rights which the oligarchies constantly endeavoured to make void from the time of Henry the Third to the time of Henry the Eighth; yet no attempt was ever made to deny or to revoke them. It may be that their authentic force was derived from that obscure time of which no memory is, when the ancient “communitas” slowly built up the great tradition of its customary rights; and that when the remembrance of the primitive community had by lapse of time fallen into the background its power was still present, and to the last the name was one of dignity and carried with it a mandate from an older world. No doubt, however, in the vulgar tongue “commonalty” came to be used in a popular sense, and sometimes with an air of obloquy or contempt, to describe the general mass of citizens who had the right of meeting in common assembly, as distinguished from the official class. For by degrees old lines of division between the ruling and the subject classes were drawn sharper and deeper—when government by the select few took legal form; when a council of twenty-four sat as assessors in the courts, audited the town accounts, controlled its trade, and claimed to make its laws; when the assembly was reduced to a gathering of special men called by the bailiff’s serjeant; and when even the attendance at the leet began to fall off as at the end of the fourteenth century[737] its business passed more and more into the hands of the twenty-four. Then the word “communitas” took a new shade of meaning. Before 1378 “the citizens” had come to mean in common talk the governing council, as opposed to the “commonalty” who were left outside.