The Customs of Old England

by F. J. Snell

Fitzwalter then took the banner in his hand, and the Mayor and the Sheriffs, following him to the door, presented him with a horse of the value of £20, garnished with a saddle of his arms and covered with a sendal of the same. They also delivered to his chamberlain £20 sterling for his charges of that day. Holding the banner in his hand, Fitzwalter mounted the horse presented to him, and, as soon as he was seated, desired the Mayor that a marshal might be chosen straightway out of the host of London. This request having been complied with, he preferred another—namely, that the common signal might be sounded through the City, when it would be the duty of the commonalty to follow the Banner of St. Paul, borne before them by the Castellan, to Aldgate.

In the event of Fitzwalter marching out of the City, he chose from every ward two of the sagest inhabitants to superintend the defence of the City in his absence, and form a council of war, holding its sittings in the Priory of the Trinity adjoining Aldgate. It was supposed that the Army of London might be engaged from time to time in besieging towns or castles; and should a siege exceed a year in duration, the utmost amount Fitzwalter could claim as remuneration was one hundred shillings. If such were the duties of the Castellan in time of war, he had rights hardly less important in time of peace. Here it should be premised that under Norman rule the King's justice or the King's peace was assured by the grant of soke and soken—the former being the power of hearing and determining causes and levying fines and forfeitures, and the latter the area within which soke and other privileges were exercised. In the City of London the Fitzwalters had a soken extending from the wall of the Canonry of St. Paul as a man went down by the "bracine" or brewhouse of St. Paul to the Thames; and thence to the side of the mill that stood on the water running down by the Fleet Bridge, by London Walls, round by the Friars Preachers to Ludgate, and by the back of the friary to the corner of the wall of the said Canons of St. Paul. It embraced, in fact, the whole parish of the Church of St. Andrew, which was in their gift.

Appendant to this soken were various rights and privileges. Fitzwalter might choose from the sokemanry, or inhabitants of the soken, a Sokeman par excellence; and if any of the sokemanry was impleaded in the Guildhall on any matter not touching the body of the Mayor or any of the Sheriffs for the time being, the Sokeman might demand the court of Fitzwalter. But while the Mayor and Citizens had to allow him to hold his court, his sentence was expected to coincide with that of the Guildhall. He exercised, indeed, a co-ordinate rather than an appellate jurisdiction, as may be shown in the following manner:

Suppose that a thief had been taken in the soken, stocks and a prison were in readiness for him; and he was thence carried before the Mayor to receive his sentence, but not until he had been conveyed to Fitzwalter's court and within his franchise. The nature of the sentence, to which the latter's assent was required, varied with the gravity of the offence. If the person were condemned for simple larceny, he was conducted to the Elms, near Smithfield—the usual place of execution before Tyburn was adopted for the purpose—and there "suffered his judgment," i.e., was hanged like other common thieves. If, on the other hand, the theft was associated with treason, the crime, it was considered, called for more exemplary punishment, and the felon was bound to a pillar in the Thames at Wood-wharf, to which watermen fastened their boats or barges, there to remain during two successive floods and ebbs of the tide.

So important a franchise in the City was in itself a high honour, and it carried other distinctions with it. The Fitzwalter of the day, when the Mayor was minded to hold a Great Council, was invited to attend, and be a member of it; and on his arrival, the Mayor or his deputy was required to rise and appoint him a place by his side. During the time he was at the hustings, all judgments were pronounced by his mouth, and such waifs as might accrue whilst he was there were presented by him to the bailiffs of the City or to whomsoever he pleased, by the advice of the Mayor.

Such is the story as we find it in the pages of Blount, in which it appears apropos of nothing—merely as an instance of curious and picturesque usages which had long ceased to exist. Blount, as we have seen, gives as his authority Sir William Dugdale, who alludes to the subject in his "Extinct Baronage of England," and Dugdale seems to have owed the information to the "Collection of Glover, Somerset Herald." Stow also knew of the "services and franchises," and it is thought that he had seen a copy of them in the "Liber Custumarum." The latter is accessible in print in Riley's edition of the "Munimenta Gildhallæ Londiniensis," and corresponds in all or most respects with what we have found in Blount.

So much for the antecedents of the story.

The Fitzwalters are said to have come over with the Conqueror, and to have been invested with the soke before mentioned by his favour and in requital of their services. That the family had at one time extraordinary rights in the City of London is shown by the evidence of the Patent Rolls, from which we learn that in the third year of Edward I. (1275) Robert Fitzwalter received licence from the Crown to transfer Baynard Castle, "adjoining the wall of the City, with all walls and fosses thereunto pertaining, as also the Tourelle called Montfichet," to Robert Kilwardley, Archbishop of Canterbury, for the purpose of founding the House and Church of the Friars Preachers—"provided always that by reason of this grant nothing shall be extinguished to him and his heirs which to his Barony did belong, but that whatsoever relating thereto, as well in rents, landing of vessels, and other franchises and privileges in the City of London or elsewhere, without diminution unto him the said Robert, or to that Barony, have recently belonged, shall henceforth be reserved."

This Robert was the son of Walter Fitzwalter and grandson of his more illustrious namesake, the Marshal of the Army of God and Captain of the Barons in the days of King John; and it may be noted in passing that either to the last-named or his son Walter, as lord of Dunmow in Essex, has been ascribed the institution of the Flitch. Thirty years after the sale of his patrimonial estate Robert Fitzwalter, in 1303, recited and claimed his services "and franchises" before Sir John le Blount, Warden of the City; and as late as 1321, as shown by the "Placita de Quo Warranto," the Justiciars of the Iter were inquiring into the claims of Fitzwalter in relation to the City of London. One of his rights he was prepared to waive—namely, that of drowning traitors at Wood-wharf. The Justiciars refused to take cognizance of the matter, but the Fitzwalters did not soon or easily abandon their demands, which were renewed by John, grandson of Robert Fitzwalter, in 1347. On the feast of St. Matthew in that year it was announced to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens in Common Council "that John, Lord Fitzwalter, claims to have franchises in the Ward of Castle Baynard wholly repugnant to the liberties of the City, and to the prejudice of the estate of his lordship the King, and of the liberties of the City aforesaid. For now of late he has made stocks for imprisonment of persons in the said Ward and [has claimed] to make deliverance of persons imprisoned." Thereupon it was agreed "that the said John had no franchise within the liberties of the City aforesaid, nor was he in future to intermeddle with any pleas holden in the Guildhall of London or with any matters touching the liberties of the City."

Probably this resolution served as a quietus of the efforts of the Fitzwalters to establish or re-establish the right of jurisdiction over the citizens of London. It seems likely that these were endeavours to reinstitute ancient privileges rather than to create new. The document in the "Liber Custumarum," used in support of the claims of Robert Fitzwalter in 1303, contains a reference to the Friars Preachers, which would lead to the supposition that it was drawn up at the time; but Riley believes that it was remodelled, perhaps only to the extent of this interpolation, and that otherwise it was a copy of an earlier pronouncement pertaining to the days of the first Robert Fitzwalter, who would have been the actual owner of Baynard Castle.