I do not profess to determine absolutely the sequence of the two agreements, but I think it not impossible that the one recited by Hoveden may prove, after all, to have been the earlier of the two. They have hardly, perhaps, been examined with sufficient care. Dr. Stubbs, for instance, writes that in the agreement described by Richard “each party chooses eleven commissioners,” while in Hoveden, “each chooses seven.”[457] But the latter were merely sureties for the oaths of the parties to observe the agreement,[458] not arbitrators for arranging its terms; while, in the other agreement, the eleven were actual arbitrators, chosen (as for the Provisions of Oxford) for drawing up the agreement independently of the parties. Again, closer investigation shows that the agreement described by Richard of Devizes is, in some ways, more, not less, favourable to the chancellor than the other. Hoveden, for instance, makes John surrender Tickhill and Nottingham, not to the chancellor, but to the archbishop as representing the king. Richard, on the other hand, makes the chancellor not only receive the castles, but personally take hostages from their keepers for their safe custody. In Hoveden, indeed, the possession of these two castles is made, on the contrary, a kind of security for the chancellor’s good behaviour. Richard, to speak more generally, brings the chancellor to the front, and leaves the archbishop in the background, which is precisely what might be expected when Longchamp felt himself strong enough to pose once more as the king’s representative.
Moreover, we have a hint as to the order of these agreements in their provisions as to Gerard de Camville. In Hoveden’s document we read that he is to be provisionally restored, then to have a fair trial, and, if convicted, is to lose his castle and his shrievalty.[459] Richard, on the contrary, describes him as restored to the chancellor’s favour, and, therefore, to the permanent custody of the castle.[460] The latter, surely, is a later stage.
On all these grounds I lean strongly to the view that Richard of Devizes describes the later and final compromise, which, unlike its predecessor, was arranged by formal arbitration. On this hypothesis the archbishop of Rouen had refused to give way about the succession,[461] while the chancellor purchased concessions from John by throwing over Arthur. But as I do not claim to have demonstrated this, I hope my view will be discussed by some duly qualified critic.
On the other hand, the earlier part of this paper does, I hope, demonstrate that the accepted view of the order of events in the year 1191 must be altogether abandoned. This, of course, involves the correction of no fewer than four works in the Master of the Rolls’ series, and of every modern history of England which deals with the period in any detail. Yet the chief interest of the enquiry will be found in its bearing on historical probability and in its demonstration of the value of minute critical study.[462]
XI
The Commune of London
When in 1893, the seventh centenary of the year in which a Mayor of London first appears, I read before the Royal Archæological Institute a paper on “The origin of the Mayoralty of London,”[463] I expressed the hope that some document might yet be discovered which would throw further light upon the Mayor and on his connection with the “Commune” of 1191. Such a document I have since found. Its confirmation of the fact that a “Commune” was actually established in London is as welcome as it is important; but the essential fact which it enables us to determine is that this foreign organization was transplanted bodily to London. It has hitherto been supposed that the only change involved by the erection of the “Commune” was the appearance of its typical officer, the “Mayor,” as an addition to the pre-existent sheriffs and the aldermen of the city wards. It can, however, now be shown that the aldermen of the wards had no part in the “communal” organization, which was modelled exclusively on foreign lines, and was wholly unconnected with the old and English system.
The historian’s time can be profitably spent on minute and thorough examination of London institutions in the 12th century. For the origin and development in England of municipal liberties is still, in spite of their paramount interest, involved in much obscurity. As Dr. Stubbs has truly observed:
London claims the first place in any such investigation, as the greatest municipality, as the model on which by their charters of liberties the other large towns of the country were allowed or charged to adjust their usages, and as the most active, the most political, and the most ambitious. London has also a pre-eminence in municipal history, owing to the strength of the conflicting elements which so much affected her constitutional progress.[464]
And yet, as he reminded his hearers in one of his Oxford lectures, “Mediæval London still waits for its constitutional historian.”
Occupying as it did, among English towns, a position apart, in wealth as in importance, London had a municipal development of her own, a development of which our best historians can only tell us that it is “obscure.” That obscurity, however, has been sadly increased by the careless study and the misapprehension of her great charters of liberties. Broadly speaking, and disregarding for the moment the statements of our accepted authorities, the great want of London, in her early days, was an efficient, homogeneous government of her own. The City—for the City was then London—found itself in fact, during the Norman period, in the same plight as greater London found itself in our own days. “The ordinary system of the parish and the township,” as an accomplished writer has observed, “the special franchises and jurisdictions of the great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds—all these were loosely bundled together.” For the cause of this state of things we should have to go back to the origins of our history, to show that the genius of the Anglo-Saxon system was ill-adapted, or rather, wholly unsuitable, to urban life; that, while of unconquerable persistence and strength in small, manageable rural communities, it was bound to, and did, break down when applied to large and growing towns, whose life lay not in agriculture, but in trade. In a parish, a “Hundred,” the Englishman was at home; but in a town, and still more in such a town as London, he found himself, for administrative purposes, at his wits’ end.