There are 203 Mayors thus accounted for in 210 years. Re-elections and obscurity of birth account for the missing seven years:—
| 1. Of those who were born in the country there are | 156 |
| 2. Of those who were born in London there are | 34 |
| 3. Of those who came from other towns there are | 13. |
Out of 203 citizens who achieved the position of Mayor, 156 came from the country. These figures are very remarkable. Actually 77 per cent of the citizens who rose to the highest honours were born in the country. If the same proportion was observed among all the masters, there were 77 per cent of those who were the merchant adventurers, wholesale dealers, importers, exporters, and what we should now call the heads of firms, capitalists, and employers of labour, in the City, who were immigrants born in the country. I would not, however, insist on the latter proportion, for the simple reason that the country lad has generally shown more ability than the son of the wealthy townsman, and this, not because he was born and bred in the country, but because the son of the Alderman is prone to believe that wealth comes of its own accord, not understanding his father’s early struggles, while the country lad understands that Fortune helps those who help themselves. If we make a large deduction on this ground, we may fairly admit that fully 50 per cent of the merchants came from the country.
Look a little more closely into the accompaniments of this fact. What is meant by coming from the country? A village of the fourteenth century contained the Lord of the Manor, the Priest, and the tenantry, hinds, or cultivators of the soil, with such craftsmen as were necessary for agriculture. Now it was absolutely impossible for one of the latter class to find the apprentice fee for a great company or even the journeyman apprentice fees for a craft company. If he could, none of the great companies would admit the son of a hind. And in the craft companies there was always the greatest unwillingness among the craftsmen of London to admit outsiders at all. The Priest, after the fourteenth century, was presumably childless, the old custom of marriage or concubinage being gradually repressed. The Lord of the Manor remained. He knew that the City offered the chance of fortune and rank; he knew that his neighbours, his cousins, his friends, had sent their boys up to the City; he could learn from them how to find a master for his boy, what fees he would pay, how to get him introductions, a company, and a career.
But since a very small number of those yearly apprenticed could rise to the City offices, we may assume that for every Mayor there were hundreds of apprentices, and we may conclude with absolute certainty that it was not an uncommon thing, but a well-recognised and widely-spread practice, for country lads to be sent to London, and that these country lads were sons of country gentlemen. And this properly understood, we understand also why London never for a moment thought of separating herself from the country, and why London, in the truest sense of the word, was always the very heart of England.
If it be asked why these young fellows were always welcomed in London, the answer is ready. First, they came to their relations as the two sons of John Chichele came to their cousins, as Whittington came to his. Next, the great City had then, as it has now, the custom of devouring her children; it must always be recruited with fresh blood; in his energy and strength, stimulated by his poverty and his resolution and his ambition, the country lad easily rises above the Londoner of the second generation, and in his turn produces boys who lack their father’s stimulus, even when they inherit their father’s strength; they cannot compete with the boy from the country.
COURT OF KING’S BENCH. TEMP. HENRY VI.
From an illumination of the fifteenth century.
In London at this day, in every great town, in every little town, even, the same rapid rise, the same decline and fall, of the middle class goes on perpetually. The successful man has died; the sons throw away or lose what their fathers gained. Look for them in the third generation; they are gone; they are lost in the huge flood of the unknown, the unfortunate, the incapable, the obscure. Perhaps after many generations one may again emerge; he will be ignorant of the past, he will begin a family anew—I please myself when I look down the City lists with thinking that Robert Besaunt, Sheriff in 1195, was perhaps my own ancestor: a theory for which there is no proof at all; the very tradition of that descent, if it is a descent, has long been lost. What has become of the three-and-twenty generations between him and me? I know not; for six hundred years they have been unknown outside the village, outside the town, where they were born, and the nameless mounds that covered their bones have long since been levelled with the grass around, like those of the descendants of Orgar the Proud, Henry of London Stone, the Bukerels, the Hardels, the Haverels, and the Buccointes.