The general powers for the whole town possessed by the Mayor and his council were quite distinct from the local powers of each Alderman in his district. For my part, I cannot resist the impression that, while the sheriff, bailiff, or reeve represented the power of the Crown, and the Alderman the old local officer, the council of twenty-four, so closely associated with the Mayor, and not the representatives of districts, were a later introduction, of different character, and representing the commercial as against the territorial element. Whether the Aldermen joined the council in later days or not, they were never, I believe, originally or essentially, a part of that body.
The chief objection, probably, to connecting the “commune” of London with the “Établissements de Rouen” will be found in the fact that the latter refer to a system based on a body of a hundred pares, of which body there does not seem to be any trace in England. At Winchester the pares were “the twenty-four.” It is obvious that, in this respect, there is a marked discrepancy; but if the electoral body was different, the executive, at any rate, was the same. And if, as must be admitted, there was a foreign element introduced, it would be naturally from Normandy that it came.[507]
Writing in 1893, before I had discovered the documents on which I have dwelt above, I insisted on the foreign origin of the London “commune,” and pointed out that the close association between London and Rouen at the time suggested that the office of Mayor was derived by the former from the latter.[508] It may be permissible to repeat this argument from presumption, although its form was adapted to a wider circle than that of scholars.
The beffroi of France, to which the jurat looked as the symbol and pledge of independence, is found here also in the bell-tower of St. Paul’s, which is styled in documents either by that name (berefridum), or by that of campanile, which brings before us at once the storm-tost commonwealths of Italy. It was indeed from Italy that the fire of freedom spread. With the rise of mediæval commerce it was carried from the Alps to the Rhine, and quickly burst into flame among the traders and craftsmen of Flanders. Passing into Picardy, it crossed the Channel, according to a theory I have myself advanced, to reappear in the liberties of the Cinque Ports, with their French name, their French “serements” and their French jurats.[509] Foreign merchants had brought it with them to the port of Exeter also, almost as early as the Conquest, and we cannot doubt that London as well was already infected with the movement, and eager to find in the foreign “commune” the means of attaining that administrative autonomy and political independence which that term virtually expressed.
Hostile though our kings might be to the communal movement here, they favoured it for purposes of their own in their Norman dominions. This is a factor in the problem that we cannot afford to overlook, considering the peculiar relation in which Normandy stood to England. As M. Langlois has observed:
Jamais en effet la France et l’Angleterre n’ont été, même de nos jours, aussi intiment en contact ... Jusqu’à la fin du xiime siècle, les deux pays eurent à peu près les mêmes institutions politiques, ils pratiquaient la même religion, on y parlait la même langue. Des Français allaient fréquemment dans l’île comme touristes, comme colons, comme marchands.
Was it not then from Normandy that London would derive her commune? And if from Normandy, surely from Rouen. We are apt to forget the close connections between the two capitals of our Anglo-Norman kings, London on the Thames, and Rouen on the Seine. A student of the period has written of these:
Citizens of Norman origin, to whom London, in no small measure, owed the marked importance which it obtained under Henry I.... Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst.... Norman refinement, Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the English burghers.... The great commercial centre to which the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors, attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign.[510]
It is known from the ‘Instituta Londoniæ’ that, so far back as the days of Æthelred, the men of Rouen had traded to London, bringing in their ships the wines of France, as well as that mysterious “craspice,” which it is the fashion to render “sturgeon,” although there is reason to believe that the term denoted the porpoise and even the whale. The charter of Henry, duke of the Normans, to the citizens of Rouen (1150–1), brings out a fact unknown to English historians, by confirming to them their port at Dowgate, as they had held it from the days of Edward the Confessor. And the same charter, by securing them their right to visit all the markets in England, carries back that privilege, I believe, to the days at least of Henry I.; for, although the fact had escaped notice both in France and England, it could neither have originated with Count Geoffrey nor with Duke Henry his son.