CHAPTER IX
THE GOVERNMENT OF EARLY LONDON
The kynges chambre of custom men this calle.—Lydgate.
The Kings Peace.—When Alfred took over London it must have been in the main a decayed Roman city. In giving the great burh into the hands of the Mercian Ealdorman, Ethered, he was but restoring its capital to Mercia, but he must also, and mainly, have had in view the need for providing means of defence to the frontier fortress of the March country. Even so, alongside of a supreme military rule a more domestic organisation of a customary nature must have been carried on or reintroduced. It is probable that this, following the shire model, was constituted with hundreds or wards; the people met in wardmote and folkmote, and the king was represented by a Sheriff or Portreeve. London, however, was and remained pre-eminently a royal burh, and must have shared in all the characteristics of the burhs, drawing on certain shires for upholding its defences, having a Witan, coining money, having special privileges as to residence, gilds, and markets, and being subject to the King’s Peace. As to the contributions for defence, Dr. Maitland, as we have seen on [p. 105], says, “There were shires or districts which from of old owed work of this kind to Londonbury.”[204] Regarding the King’s Peace, it was provided by the laws that every crime committed, in a street which ran right through the city and likewise without the walls for a distance of over a league, was a crime against the king. In London the man who was guilty had to pay the king’s burh-bryce of five pounds. The burh was to be sacred from private quarrels—“the King’s house-peace prevails in the streets.”[205] Some such fact as this is probably the origin of that almost mythical phrase applied to the city by Lydgate and earlier writers—“the king’s chamber of London.” It is to this aspect as the great model burh that the Saxon laws of London printed by Thorpe refer.
There must have been a Burh Witan meeting periodically. A Crediton charter of 1018 was made known to the Witans of Exeter, Barnstaple, Lidford, and Totness, i.e. the Devonshire burhs. The Witan was thus a court of record or witness. Probably the Hustings court is a form of the same assembly.
Portreeves.—Fabyan says that at the coming of William the Conqueror and before, the rulers of the city were named Portgreves. “These of old time, with the laws and customs then used within the city, were registered in a book called Domysday in Saxon tongue then used, but of later days when the said laws and customs altered and changed and for consideration that the said book was of small hand and sore defaced and hard to be read or understood, it was the less set by, so that it was embezzled or lost, so that the remembrance of such rulers as were before the days of Richard the First (i.e. the institution of the mayoralty) were lost and forgotten.”
The office of Portreeve probably goes back nearly to the first settlement of the English. Bishop Stubbs, speaking generally of town organisation, says, “The presiding magistrate was the gerefa.” The king’s wic-gerefa in Lundonwic is mentioned in the Saxon Laws of c. 685 (Thorpe).[206] The charter of the Conqueror ran, “I, King William, greet William the Bishop and Gosfregth the Portreeve,” and two of the Confessor’s charters were addressed to bishop and portreeve. In the Judicia Civitatis Londoniæ of Athelstane a reference is found to “the bishops and gereves that to London borough belong.” Norton says that these Laws show that in Athelstane’s time the bishops and reeves were the chief magistrates of London, and they likewise presided at county courts with a jurisdiction precisely similar. This conjunction of the spiritual and temporal powers probably explains why it is that St. Paul’s has always been linked in such a special way to the Guildhall. At St. Paul’s was kept the city banner, grants of money from city funds are made for its repair, and the mayor is a trustee of the church. This dual control seems to bear the mark of Alfred’s thought. The Portreeve certainly represented the king, and was responsible for the farm of the city. In the Blickling Homilies Agrippa is called Nero’s Burhgerefa. It would seem as if the bishop represented the collective citizens. Mr. Round has recently shown that the Portreeve disappeared in the Sheriff or Vicecomes of London and Middlesex. The Waltham Chronicle says that the Conqueror placed Geoffrey de Mandeville in the shoes of Esegar the Staller, and Mr. Round conjectures that this Geoffrey is the actual “Gosfregth Portirefan” to whom the Conqueror’s charter was addressed. He also points out how the Sheriff had the custody of the Tower; and in this we may find a further suggestion as to the probability of a connection between the Portsoken of the Cnihten Gild, the Portreeve, and the pre-Conquest citadel. Mr. Round seems not to have known that his suppositions were all taken for granted by Stow, who calls the Portreeve of the Conqueror’s charter Godfrey, and then writes, “In the reign of the said Conqueror, Godfrey de Magnaville was Portgrave (or Sheriff); ... these Portgraves (after the Conquest) are also called Vicecounties or Sheriffs.” Mr. Round shows that the Sheriff, and by inference the Portreeve, represented London and Middlesex taken together. “The city of London was never severed from the rest of the shire. As far back as we can trace them they are one and indivisible.”[207] The author just quoted accounts for this distinction between London and other county towns by the relative importance of London; but I cannot think, as before suggested, that Middlesex was not specially dependant on London, and probably Ethered’s authority as commandant of the great burh extended over Middlesex. The acquisition of the farm of the county by the city may be an echo of this.