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

by Alice Stopford Green

For the rest of the century the government of the city[760] remained of this pattern. The four great leets which had once elected the bailiffs now became the four wards, and were ultimately divided into twelve small wards. Each of these was represented in the upper council by two aldermen chosen for it by the electors of its own great ward. Each great ward also elected a fixed proportion of the members of the common council. The sheriffs held their “tourns” for the four wards, and appointed for each ward a jury drawn from the “men of good name and fame.” Meanwhile the leet courts of the sub-divisions over which the bailiffs used to preside carried on an obscure and feeble existence, and the capital pledges which formed the leet juries sank into insignificance[761] under the combined usurpations of the sheriffs and the two councils. Once when the capital pledges attempted to secure to the small trader some advantage in landing their goods at a staith where apparently they escaped some city tolls, the governing body promptly repressed their insubordination.[762] Evidently the administration of the city was neither more lax nor more popular because its governing body was enlarged.

In the obscure years of conflict between 1378 and 1415 we are told nothing about the men or the organizations of men that made the revolution. But we know that a very important movement was going on in Norwich itself in the growth of the craft guilds. Long forbidden by the civic government because of the loss to the city chest when the craftsmen were withdrawn from the common courts, they apparently made matters easy for themselves by regular payment of fines, and continued to flourish.[763] Between 1350 and 1385[764] a number of guilds were either founded or reconstituted so as to obtain public recognition in the city,[765] and the one fact that we catch sight of in their ordinances amid the absolutely monotonous and formal recital of religious duties, is that they were in some cases allowed to choose their own aldermen and council, instead of being subjected as before to the twenty-four. The importance of this is at once evident in the ordinances of 1404, where the guilds take a very prominent place; and in the composition of 1415, when they were finally sanctioned and given a completed form.[766] Not only was the power of choosing their own officers granted to every trade, but it was decreed that “citizens of the city shall be enrolled of what craft he be of” on pain of forfeiture of his franchise; and that all “that shall be enfranchised from this time forth shall be enrolled under a craft and by assent of a craft.” Such a rule practically made the craft-masters the judges of a new candidate for the city privileges, for if they refused to admit him to the guild he could never become a burgess.[767] On the other hand it was commanded that all the members of a craft must become freemen; foreigners were to hold shops under tribute and fine for two years and a day, and were then forced to buy the franchise of the city. “The master of the craft shall come honestly to him and give him warning to be a freeman or else spear in his shop-window.” If he did not obey within fourteen days the master with an officer of the mayor again visited him with his spear, “and he so speared in, nor no other, shall not hold his craft within house nor without.” Thus no trader or shopkeeper could remain exempt from the dues and charges of the city, and the whole commonalty was placed under the police supervision of the craft masters. The very dress of the crafts was made a matter of strict definition; all liveries and hoods of former days were to be given up, and the crafts were to wear liveries the same as those of London.[768]

If, however, during the years of conflict the craft associations may have done good service to the commonalty, they were met by a counter organization of the merchants and upper class. It seems to have become common after the Peasant revolt, when a new terror was stirred as to what the poor commons might do if left to follow their own will and appetite, for the richer sort to unite for self-protection and the preservation of their authority. In Norwich a Guild of S. George was founded in 1385 as a fraternity with the usual religious colour, and a - “going each Monday about in the city remembering and praying for the souls of the brethren and sisters of the said guild that be passed to God’s mercy.”[769] At first an informal body, consisting apparently of the wealthier and more powerful people, both lay and ecclesiastic, of Norwich and the surrounding country, its weakness lay in the fact that it was “desevered by constitutions and ordinances made within the city,” and according to the old rule by which the formation of any guild was forbidden, it was, in fact, an illegal body. The governing class, however, probably enlisted considerable sympathy at court in the negociations for the charter of 1417; and the associates of S. George won from Henry the Fifth in 1418 permission to constitute themselves into a permanent society, and received a sword of wood with a carved dragon’s head to be carried before their alderman on S. George’s day.[770] The great people of the county and their wives entered the order, bishops, monks and rectors, counts, knights, and merchants—something like four hundred of them—all men of substance who rode on horseback to the guild assembly, where the uniform of S. George was varied by the mayors, sheriffs, aldermen, or masters of crafts, riding in the garments of their order. The government of the society was put in the hands of a very close corporation, and the alliance between Church and State in the guild is manifested by the association of the prior, mayor, and sheriffs of the city in its government.[771]

The real danger of such a fraternity lay in the peculiar position of Norwich, and the impossible task of local government which had been thrown on its burghers. Beyond the city territory lay a great manufacturing district—a whole county studded with villages where weaving and worsted making were carried on in every house—and over all this district Norwich had the supervision of the woollen trade. The difficulties of the arrangement by which, in 1409, at the request of the commons, the mayor, sheriffs, and commonalty were granted the right of measuring and sealing all worsteds made in Norwich or Norfolk,[772] must have been extreme. The great employers settled in the city who organized the country labour and supplied cloth for the export trade were thus given a certain judicial authority in the county; while the great wool sellers—land-owners whose vast flocks of sheep[773] pastured on the broad downs of undulating chalk, and who were turning into traders on their own account—were forced in their own interest to meddle with Norwich politics. Besides the general commercial questions which affected both city and county, there must have been many a vexed question as to the tenants who owed suit and service to the courts of their lords, but who as artizans were subject to Norwich rule and whose fines were swept into the Norwich treasury. On every hand the door was thrown open to trouble. If the Norwich corporation was to busy itself in county affairs, the county was bound to exert some control over the Norwich corporation, whether by guilds of St. George, by securing office in Norwich for sympathetic mayors, recorders, or sheriffs, by winning the help of the Earl of Suffolk or of bishop or prior, by choosing the Norwich members for Parliament, or if all other means failed, by bribery and violence and the stirring up of street factions.

From one point of view, therefore, the story of the long years of strife and calamity which followed the reformation of the Norwich constitution in 1415 is singularly interesting. In presence of a foreign foe internal dissension is suppressed, and the main story is no longer, as in Nottingham, that of a struggle between the two classes of the community itself. When a mayor of alien interests is imposed on Norwich by a foreign faction he stands alone, and aldermen and commons hold apart from him as betrayer of the common interests. The enemies whom Norwich had to fear came from without the community itself, and if the story of the city remained a singularly troubled one, the troublers of its peace were not those of its own household. Factions of the State and factions of the shire flung confusion into the city politics, and the old burning question of ecclesiastical rights embittered every local dispute.[774] Norwich was befriended by the Duke of Gloucester and had a persistent enemy in the Earl of Suffolk, and its fortunes swung backwards and forwards with the rise and fall of court parties. From the day when the recorder, John Heydon, betrayed the city into their hands, the county despots whom we know so well in the Paston Letters, meet us in its streets and assembly hall, ever followed by the curses of the people. Heydon of Baconsthorpe, Esq., sheriff in Norwich in 1431, and recorder from 1441-3,—the man whose putting away of his wife had created such a scandal that the very mention of it made him turn pale, the land-jobber, the smuggler of wool, the exactor of bribes, the parasite of the great lords whose support he could buy, the organizer of outrages and murder, the audacious schemer willing to spend two thousand pounds rather than lose the control of the Norwich sheriff, the patron of liveried followers, the “maintainer” in the courts of men who defied the law, the overbearing bully whose very presence was enough to cow the commons into refusing to present their complaints to the king’s judges,[775]—can be pictured by every one who tracks his tortuous ways through the letters of the Pastons. In conjunction with Sir Thomas Tuddenham and others he overwhelmed the city with extortions, oppressions, and wrongs. These men “through their great covetousness and false might oppressed all such citizens as would not consent to make such mayors and sheriffs as they liked,” “purposing for great lucre to have as well the rule of the city of Norwich as they had of the shire of Norfolk,”[776] and “trusting in their great might and power which they had and have in the country by the means of the stewardship of Lancaster and other great offices and for divers other causes that no man at that time durst make resistance against them, knowing their great malice and vengeance without dread of God or shame of the world.” Even when the people sought to buy the favour of Sir Thomas, he took their money “by briberous extortion against all faith and conscience,” and yet showed them no mercy.[777]

It is just possible that the danger to the city called into being a fraternity to confront the society of S. George, and that the burghers in their turn seized on the machinery of the religious guild. We catch one passing glimpse of a curious association known as “Le Bachery”; which was declared by the mayor and commons to be merely a company of citizens who out of pure devotion kept up a light in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the Fields (the ancient place for the assembly of the people) and from mere motives of decency had chosen a livery; but in whose pious and decent union the hostile fraternity saw an association fashioned to break the power of S. George, and made haste to use against it the old argument applied to its own youth—the charge of being an “illegal guild.”[778]

The association was founded in stormy days. After Heydon was turned out of office by the people for betraying their interests to the prior,[779] his friend of S. George’s guild, the mayor Wetherby, an ally of Tuddenham and a “hater of the commons,” led the party of the county and the priory, and till his death fourteen years later the city knew no peace. Four times between 1433 and 1444 its franchises were forfeited for riot or stormy elections; twice the common seal was violently taken out of the treasury by aldermen and commons to prevent the sealing of proposals rejected of the people. Wetherby forced on the election, as his successor, of a mayor refused by aldermen and commons. John Qwerdling, falsely pretending to be common speaker, had carried to the chamber a name not set down by the commons for election; Hawk the town clerk had written down a wrong return; Nicholas Waleys had taken bribes enough to win him the name of “ambidexter”; the two city serjeants had packed juries, and the gaoler had threatened and struck the resisting commons on the head with his mace. The mayor’s faction held the guild hall, while the aldermen’s party retired to a private house, and having elected another candidate, put the offending officers out of their places, took the common seal out of the guild hall into their own keeping, and lest by any chance their election should be held invalid, refused to disperse till the mayor came down to confirm it, and called the bishop to join them in opposition to the prior. For the moment Wetherby yielded, but revenged himself by applying for a commission from the king to examine into the state of the city.[780] The enraged citizens kept up the broil till 1436, when another commission was appointed which forced the commons to submit, to restore the seal to its accustomed place in the treasury, and to put back the officers they had displaced in 1433.[781]

At the next election, in 1437, commissioners were sent by the privy council to see that all was done in order according to the charter, and in case of riot to seize the franchises of the city into the king’s hand;[782] and thus quiet was secured. But Norwich was not to keep its restored franchise long. Riots and daily disturbances “concerning their liberties” broke out between the city and the prior;[783] in June the inhabitants of Norwich had to appear before the Privy Council, and in July the franchises of the city were seized and the place committed to the custody of John Welles, a London alderman who was made citizen and alderman of Norwich.[784] At the prayer of the bishops of Norwich and Lincoln the liberties were once more restored in 1439, to be as quickly lost again.[785] For Thomas Wetherby “who bare a great hatred to the commons” watched for an opportunity of making fresh trouble. By his counsel the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm prosecuted the city in 1441 for certain mills it had built on the Wensum; and Thomas Tuddenham, John Fray, and William Paston (a friend of the abbot’s), judged the case at Thetford and gave it against the the city, ordering the commons to pay £100 damages to the abbot and £50 to the prior. At this the assembly gathered in great numbers, crowded to the hall, in January, 1442, and took away the common seal that the award might not be sealed. By the influence of the Earl of Suffolk, the abbot, and Wetherby, the city was prosecuted for rebellion, and in spite of the protection of the Duke of Gloucester the mayor was ordered to appear in London, where he was fined £50 and imprisoned in the Fleet, and the liberties of the city were again seized into the king’s hands. The mayor being thus fast in the Fleet, Wetherby got the common seal out of the chest, sealed the bond of £100 to the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm, £50 to the bishop, and £50 to the prior, without the knowledge of the mayor, sheriffs, or commons; and then destroyed the new mills.[786]

This led to fresh troubles. On the Shrove Tuesday of 1443 the mayor and commonalty, at this time united in the mysterious guild of “Le Bachery,” raised an insurrection, declaring they had power enough in the city and adjacent country to slay Thomas Brown the bishop,[787] the abbot of Holm, and the prior of Norwich. John Gladman, a merchant, rode with a paper crown as king at the head of a hundred and thirty people on horseback and on foot. At the ringing of the city bells three thousand citizens assembled, armed with swords, bows, arrows, and helmets, surrounded the priory, laid guns against it, and at last won a glorious victory, and forced the monks to deliver up the hateful deed falsely sealed with the common seal which bound the people to pay 4s. a year to the prior and to abandon claims to jurisdiction over certain priory lands.