Unhappily for “the sweetness of peace” parties were so evenly matched in the committee of eighteen that the reforms were only passed by a majority of one vote.[837] Moreover, the agreement—drawn up by the committee on April 8, 1411, set forth and assented to by the mayor and community in May, signed by their orders in July, and sealed with the common seal in December—was not confirmed by charter till the following November, 1412.[838] Thus, when the burgesses met on August 27, 1411, to choose a new mayor, their ordinances were still but a common agreement and without any sanction of law if they were disputed. Burgesses and non-burgesses gathered in force, some three hundred or so strong, to see what was going to happen. The question was raised as to what form of election should be used, and a proposal was made to delay the business. But the mayor having put it to the meeting that all who wished to proceed with the election were to sit down and the others to rise up, all save six “suddenly as in a moment fell on the forms, benches, and ground”; and a hundred and forty-eight burgesses insisted on going on with the business. The next point was how the electing jury was to be named, and the hundred non-burgesses present begged to have “a little voice” in the matter, which was refused. The alderman of the guild and the inferiores having been thus set aside, the burgesses were left in possession of the field, and they proceeded, with a compromise between the old and new systems, to nominate, as the alderman had formerly done, the first four members of the jury, two jurats and two mediocres, who then added to themselves eight burgesses. In the following year the people again assembled, burgesses and non-burgesses together to the number of three hundred, in spite of a notice on the rolls of process for “quieting these dissensions,” and again carried out the elections after the new mode.[839]
The balance of forces, however, was too even to give the victors any security of tenure, and government worked with great friction. It seems that the mayor of the popular party strengthened the radical vote by admitting to the franchise “foreign” inhabitants (probably some of the inferiores) against the will of the council; while the reformers insulted the guild brethren in their own guild hall; and in 1415 “without consent of the mayor and burgesses” quit-claimed the debts of the town—debts owed, as we have seen, to the guild.[840] By their enemies the new ordinances were declared to have “furnished the fuel of grief and hatred,” and according to the malcontents the late agreement had only caused “immense expenses, charges, losses, and intolerable damage by reason of discords, strifes, and other ills,” and must inevitably “redound to the final destruction and pauperization, but also the desolation and probable overthrowing of all that town.” In 1416 an appeal was made to Henry the Fifth, whose sympathy here, as in Norwich at the same time, was with the oligarchy; and he summoning the parties before him[841] ordered a final concord between them. To “pluck up by the roots and extirpate strifes” the new ordinances were utterly annulled, the former customs of the town recapitulated, and the old constitution restored. The alderman received again his ancient position,[842] the jurats became once more a self-electing body, and the town was subjected to the system dear to the potentiores, and against which the people had risen in vain. From this time the old method of election was resumed and carried on throughout the century.[843] Murmurs of discontent still seem to have been heard occasionally. In 1419 one of the townsmen challenged the alderman of the guild at the election assembly. “We would know,” he said, “by what authority or right you call up four persons to make our mayor”; but he was put down by a speech about “our charter,” and after this meeting it would seem that the public were no longer admitted to the meetings of the corporation.[844]
Defeated on the great issue of the election of the mayor and jurats, the commons fell back on the idea of a chamber of representatives. An attempt had already been made, in 1411, to form a council of nine, which though appointed by the mayor was to be drawn from the three orders of the community, and to act for them; but this scheme came to an end with the annulling of the ordinances. No sooner, however, was the old power of the potentiores restored by Henry the Fifth than the idea of a common council immediately revived among the people, possibly inspired by the example of Norwich which had only a year before secured the charter that gave its common council a permanent status. It was decided that each of the nine constabularies or wards in Lynn should choose three burgesses “having sufficient tenure in the town” who should take part in all business concerning taxes, tenths, fifteenths, allowances, repairs of houses, walls, bridges, water-courses, ditches, all payments, rendering of accounts, and other charges of the borough. This new body of twenty-seven became at once generally known as the common council, and was formally confirmed by the Bishop in 1420. The community bound itself to obey any decree which was issued in the name of the two councils,[845] and from December, 1418, when the noble jurats and the discreet burgesses met for the first time in the guild hall, the whole conduct of town business passed into their hands.[846] Henceforth decrees and ordinances were made with the assent of “the whole congregation”;[847] but it is obvious that the institution of the common council in this form marked the final separation between the interests of the two lower classes of the community, and the irrevocable close of their alliance. As in 1411 the inferiores had been declared incapable of any share in electing officers, so now they remained without any part in legislation, while the mediocres entered happily into their inheritance.
So the revolution of Lynn flickered out. For the new common council cannot be said to have represented after all a very formidable concession to democratic demands. Unlike the council of 1411 it apparently took no account at all of the inferiores. The electorates of the constabularies seldom numbered more than twenty people and sometimes as few as twelve, and the whole body which elected the new council did not consist of more than a hundred and fifty persons.[848] To prevent any trouble, moreover, there was a provision that if any man proved unfit, the mayor and aldermen and the councils of twenty-four and twenty-seven might choose another in his place.[849] With such safeguards the new representatives might be trusted to work in complete harmony with the older body; the potentiores had taken the mediocres into their counsels and formed an alliance with them, and the inferiores, left outside the door of the common hall, deserted by their old confederates, and dependent on a lord whose influence was steadily on the decline, sank into obscurity and silence. In course of time the jurats rose to the full dignity of an upper house, and effectually secured in their own hands the whole administration of the nine constabularies by an order (in 1480) that a jurat must be chosen as alderman in each constabulary, that the alderman and constable together shall keep the peace and settle debates, and that if they could not reduce rebellious persons to quiet, no burgess in that constabulary might be suitor in any court, spiritual or temporal, without the leave of the mayor.[850] Finally, in 1524, the two ruling classes obtained a charter which formed their corporation into a close self-elective body; the mayor was to be elected by the twelve aldermen, and the twelve aldermen by the common council, and the common council by the mayor and aldermen.
In the last state of the council we see the strength given to the upper classes by a common alliance, by the humiliation of the non-burgesses, and by the increasing weakness of the lord of the manor. It would, however, be impossible to maintain that in Lynn a primitive democratic government had been gradually submerged by a usurping oligarchy. If we compare the demands put forward in 1309 by the inhabitants at large—demands for freedom of trade and some assurance that they should not be unjustly taxed—with their claims a century later to be formally represented in the administration of the town, we see what strides had been made in that hundred years in the notion of popular government; and so far as it was not violently thwarted by alien influences the movement of the early fifteenth century was in the direction of widening liberty. In the new governing body more than twice as many members sat as in the old council of the potentiores, and two orders of the community were represented instead of one; while the commonalty lost none of the ancient customary rights which had originally belonged to it. The non-burgesses still made their appearance with the rest when taxes were to be levied or the common property allotted. In 1435, when the mayor was sent to Bruges as one of the king’s ambassadors on commercial matters, his journey and its expenses are ordered “by the full advice and assent of the twenty-four and the common council and of all the burgesses and merchants of Lynn.”[851] During the first years of Henry the Sixth loans of money to the king and the receiving of re-payments was done in the name of and with the consent of the whole community;[852] in 1448 arbitrators to decide on a disputed question about a tenement were in like manner elected by the whole community;[853] and in the levying of taxes the whole three orders acted together as of old, so that in 1463, when a sum of £36 had to be raised, of the eighteen men chosen to assess the tax, six belonged to the jurats, six to the common council, and six to the “communitas.”[854]
Still, however, from the point of view of any real extension of liberty, the revolution had failed, and as in Norwich it had failed from purely external causes. The temporal sovereignty of the Church had destroyed the political freedom of the State. From the time when the Bishop had broken their society into two sections, which could never again unite for civil purposes, an ecclesiastical tradition stood between the people and freedom. The crucial moment for liberty in Lynn had occurred a century before, on that day in 1309 when the Bishop had won from the corporation the right to create as a bulwark of his power a class of inhabitants protected in every material interest of their lives, but cut off from the body of free citizens, and carefully debarred from political independence. For a time the system by which a privileged class was allowed to buy the protection of the borough without paying the fair price, and to maintain a position within its walls by the authority of a power without, seemed to work well for both parties to the cunning bargain—indeed, to offer certain advantages. Dependent on the Bishop for all their rights of trade and privileges, the inferiores were content to let him fight their battles, which he did so effectually that the mediocres themselves were attracted to their party, and made common cause with them to the apparent profit of all concerned. But the only strength of a corrupt alliance utterly false in principle lay in the support given by the Bishop, and no sooner did this begin to fail than the whole scheme utterly collapsed. The question of elections raised at the August meeting of 1411 gave the potentiores their opportunity to break up the confederation from within by detaching the hundred or hundred and fifty mediocres from the rest of the party of resistance, leaving the non-burgesses to shift for themselves; and when these, suddenly alive to their hapless situation, tried to recover ground and begged to be taken into the family of citizen-voters, even by “a little voice,” there was no place found for their repentance. The common council which the community had striven to create finally represented only a handful of privileged people instead of the general body of inhabitants, and any hope of the political developement of Lynn as a free community was once for all arrested. The betrayal of the common cause of civic equality brought its exact recompense on the day when every weapon of the unenfranchised inhabitants was seen to be broken and useless. In the common assembly they had no votes. In the common council they had no representatives. The machinery of all their seventy-five guilds[855] could not in any way be so handled as to further the power of the people; for so long as the great body of craft-holders and artizans lay outside the borough franchise it was impossible for them to employ their organizations in the service of the common cause. Deprived of the close connection between the borough and the craft which existed in other towns, they could neither aspire to send delegates from the trades into the council chamber, nor could they make the crafts the only way of entrance into the freedom of the city.
The main result of this breaking up of the “communitas” of Lynn into three fractions which could never again be united, was the final affirmation of power in the hands of a small ruling class. In Lynn it was always the merchants who conquered. One by one they vanquished their opponents, the Church, the mediocres, the inferiores. A singular and pathetic unity pervades the history of the town from first to last. Lynn had won from land and sea a little space of ground, a little tenure of life, and there, lighted by a passing gleam of beneficent fortune, it made its brief experiment—a single experience consistent from first to last, and scarcely subjected to accident or change. The old borough still retains some subtle charm of a lingering distinction. Even now as we look at the homes of its last traders—the heavy double doors which shut off the great court from the street, the houses built round three sides of the open square, and lifted at the back straight out of the waters of canals cut to give passage to the ships and barges which drifted up on every rising tide, almost brushing as they passed the windows that opened on rich chambers dark with carved work in wood—we seem to breath the strange air of a remote place and time in which this old city of dead merchants lies ever steeped. The very fashion of the place still affirms perpetually that when the end came the ancient rulers of Lynn made a proud exit, bequeathing their heritage to none, and leaving their silent dwellings to suffer indeed the presence of strangers, but with no pretence of acquiescing welcome.