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

by Alice Stopford Green

It is true that the legal privileges of the community still remained. They had a claim on part at least of the public property. No new burgher could be admitted save by the act of the whole commonalty, or of twelve of them who might be taken to represent the entire body.[738] Taxes might only be assessed by will of the whole commonalty[739] or of the greater part of the same. Whatever might be the prevailing habit, the twenty-four had no legal right to act in the name of the whole people, and if the commons refused to obey their ordinances they could not appeal to any court of law to enforce their submission. In the Assembly Rolls the burghers are mentioned as sharing in the business of elections, grants of money, and taxation.[740] That they asserted their rights in a way which seemed to the governing class “contrarious” we gather from the fact that in 1378 “the citizens” (who in this case must certainly have meant a very limited body) presented a petition to Richard the Second in which they declared that of late “many of the commonalty of the said town have been very contrarious, and will be so still unless better remedies and ordinances be made for good government”; and they pray that the bailiffs and twenty-four citizens to be elected yearly by the commonalty may have power to make ordinances and to amend them from time to time when necessary.[741] A ship which they had just built at the king’s orders possibly commended their request to his judgment, and the grant of the desired charter placed the council in a position of absolute authority, having power to issue ordinances without the consent of the people, and to enforce them by appeal to the royal courts.

What controversies and threats of revolution agitated the men of Norwich for the twenty-five years that followed this great change we do not know. The exact position of the twenty-four in the municipal assembly is not easy to trace from the paucity of existing documents.[742] The rolls which survive might be expected to shew some sign of the effect of the charter of 1378 by which the official authority of the twenty-four was established. Yet such is not the case. The description of the Assembly both before and after remains exactly the same. A select group of citizens attends at every meeting, and takes the whole charge of administration. Yet it is worthy of notice that neither before nor after 1378 is any order or resolution ever attributed to the twenty-four, though such orders are constantly referred to the action of the “tota communitas.” Throughout these rolls the only authorities mentioned are the bailiffs and the commonalty.[743] If it is possible to believe, as I have suggested, that the right of the community to give or withhold consent in legislation was an immemorial custom which could not be abrogated by charter, the failure of the twenty-four to carry their point can be understood. No doubt party feeling on both sides ran high. It became necessary for a settlement to have a new charter; and in 1403, probably, at the instance of the ruling class, the city bought a fresh constitution at the heavy price of £1,000.[744] By this charter Norwich was made into a county; the four bailiffs were replaced by a mayor and two sheriffs, to be elected by the citizens and commonalty; and, in confirming previous grants, the customary phraze used in the charters of earlier centuries, “the citizens” was replaced by “the citizens and commonalty”—a term which is recognized in the charter as being already in use,[745] but which had not until now been invariably employed as the official style.

The charter of Henry the Fourth seems to have been in effect a confirmation of the charter given by Richard the Second, and to have set the victorious conclusion to the whole system of oligarchical government expressed by the council of twenty-four. The people were quick to appreciate the difficulty of making use of the powers which had been attributed to them and to perceive the tendency of the charter. A crisis was brought about by the very first elections held under the new constitution. The charter ordered that the sheriffs were to be elected, not as the old bailiffs had been by the electors of the four Leets, but by “the citizens and commonalty.” In the ordinary assemblies, however, made up of the twenty-four and “others of the community,” at which Parliament men, city treasurers, and officials, had been chosen, the twenty-four were practically supreme, and elections carried out in these gatherings were, as a matter of fact, in their hands. On March 1st, 1404, a mayor was chosen, and twelve days later two of the bailiffs were made sheriffs (the mayor’s book says by the “cives”).[746] The altered mode of appointing the sheriffs, as compared with the more popular custom of electing the old bailiffs, immediately roused the commons. An assembly was called to frame ordinances for the new state of things, and the people determined by their own authority to create a representative council of the burghers at large. It was ordered that eighty persons should be elected to attend all assemblies and act in the name of the people. To this council was given the right of nominating the sheriffs; the eighty were to go apart by themselves and name three persons, but if the commons did not approve of their choice they had again to retire and choose other names until their masters were content. Then the town clerk and some of the eighty carried the three names to the mayor and the twenty-four “probi homines”; the mayor chose one and the twenty-four the other.[747] The new council took part in the Michaelmas elections of that same year 1404, when the mayor was reappointed, and two new sheriffs were chosen.

This settlement evidently excited violent hostility, and in 1415 a Composition was framed to put an end to the discords by which the city was “divided and dissolved and in point to have been destroyed.”[748] This document did not err on the side of any lax notions as to the seriousness of a written constitution. With pedantic nicety it touched almost lovingly on the minutest details of ceremony and dress, as well as on the greater problems that vexed the state—the position of the twenty-four; the rights of the commons; and the share which the two parties were to have in appointing the officers of the city.

The effect of this Composition of 1415 was to create a miniature copy of the English kingdom, a little community governed by its three estates, the mayor, the co-citizens of the mayor’s council, and the commons. The twenty-four “probi homines” now became “the twenty-four co-citizens of the mayor’s council,” the mayor having the same authority over them “as the mayor of London hath,”[749] and the dignity of the municipal House of Lords was fitly marked by their dress, a livery “furred and lined as the estate and season of the year asketh.”[750] Above all it was decreed that they should no longer be a body elected yearly but should “stand corporate perpetually,” and even if this should accidentally not be embodied in the charter to be asked for later, “the citizens” declared that they could establish that law for themselves and not by point of charter, in virtue of the right given them in 1378, to make such ordinances as they chose in difficult or defective cases for which no remedy clearly existed in the city constitution.[751]

On the other hand the organization of the lower chamber was made more complete, and the relative position and authority of the two houses of the mimic parliament were defined with punctilious exactness. The common council was reduced from eighty to sixty members,[752] to be elected from the four wards by all citizens “inhabiting and having houses on their own account.” It had its Speaker,[753] its own mode of procedure, its system of elaborate etiquette in all dealings with the upper house. Henceforth it was to take a part in legislation which entirely annulled any claim “the citizens” might have put forward by virtue of their charter of 1378; for though the mayor and the twenty-four preserved the right of proposing all new laws, “they shall nothing do nor make that may bind or charge the city without the assent of the commonalty.” All ordinances made by the upper body must therefore be formally laid before the common council, and if it seemed to them that the matter “needeth longer advice and deliberation of answer, they shall ask it and all that seemeth expedient for the city by the common speaker of the mayor and of his council.” If needful they could ask for “a bill of the same matters to be delivered to them,” that they might give their answer in the next assembly; and “the mayor shall be beholden as ofttimes as they ask it to grant them for to go together in an house by themselves without any denying, and none other with them but the common speaker, and if they will have more to them as oft as they ask, the mayor shall be beholden to send for them without any withsaying. And in matters that seem to the aforesaid sixty persons for the common council that needeth not great nor long advice, be it lawful if they will, to go apart by themselves or in to the floor with their common speaker, and goodly and speedily, without great delay to come in with their answer as them seemeth speedful and needful to the purpose.” Finally, in “all other points that be necessary to be had for the welfare of the city that come not now to mind, it is committed to the whole assembly thereupon to ordain and make remedy by ordinance and assent of the whole commonalty for profit of all the city.”[754]

In the matter of elections, however, the general assembly reappeared in full force. When a new mayor was to be chosen the two councils were summoned to the hall; “and also all the citizens dwellers within the same city unto the aforesaid election shall freely come as they are beholden, and the doors of the hall to all citizens there willing to enter and come in shall be open and not kept, nor none from thence forbarred nor avoided but foreigners.” After the mayor and the twenty-four had proclaimed the election from the bench they withdrew to the chamber, and the whole people in the hall then chose from among those who had already been mayors or sheriffs two names of “sufficient” persons, “and if that any variance happen among the commons in the hall that it may not clearly be known to the common speaker by no manner of form by him unto them, for to be put or showed, which two hath the most voices, then the common speaker and the common clerk shall go up to the mayor and to him shall declare the variance of the people in the hall. And then the mayor shall give to the common speaker in commandment for to call together the sixty persons for the common council of the city, or as many as there be there into an house by themselves. Which there shall try the aforesaid variance in the same form as it hath been and yet is used in the city of London.” The names were carried to the chamber by the common clerk, the common speaker, and the recorder, with six of the common council; the six commons returned to the hall, leaving the three officers to take the votes of the mayor and council, and bring back to the commonalty the name of the elected mayor.

The election of all other municipal officers was carefully divided between the two parties in the state. The mayor and the twenty-four elected the common clerk, one sheriff, one chamberlain, one treasurer, one coroner, two keepers of the keys, two auditors, and eight constables. The common council chose the common speaker, a second sheriff, chamberlain, treasurer, and coroner, two keepers of the keys, two auditors, and eight constables. The whole assembly appointed the common serjeant, the recorder, the bell-man, and the ditch-keeper; they also chose the men who were to gather in the king’s taxes, appointing four men in each ward to assess the tax and two to collect it. The new mayor named two sword-bearers, of whom the assembly chose one; in the same way the mayor nominated four persons for serjeants, and the assembly chose two of them.[755] Members of Parliament were chosen by the common assembly.

Thus the commons of Norwich made their decorous entry on the official stage, with a punctilious care to secure their dignity and make fast their liberties by countless ceremonial ligatures. The Composition which vindicated their right against the oligarchy proved, however, like the Ordinances of 1404, a hard saying to many; and disputes between the mayor’s council and the commonalty were so violent[756] that the citizens appealed to Henry the Fifth in 1417 for a charter which should make the late agreement legally binding. The mayor’s council no doubt brought influence to bear in high places, for their position was now somewhat bettered. By the charter, for which the city had to pay over £100,[757] the twenty-four, now first called aldermen, got rid of one serious difficulty in their way by securing the clause that they “shall stand perpetually as they do in London,” and henceforth the old ceremony of annual election was simply recalled by the custom of reading out the names every year before the wards. In the composition it had been settled that in making “new ordinances for the welfare of the city that come not now to mind it is committed to the whole assembly thereon to ordain by ordinance and assent of the whole commonalty,”[758] but the new charter decreed that the mayor and aldermen should have full power to amend the laws and constitution with assent of the sixty of the common council.[759]