We have spoken of the first Mayor of London, and what we know about him has been summed up by Round for the Dictionary of National Biography. We do not know his parentage. It has been conjectured that he was the grandson of Leofstan, Portreeve of London before the Conquest. But there were three or four Leofstans. It is suggested by Stubbs that he was descended from Ailwin Child, who founded or endowed Bermondsey Abbey in 1082. It is also suggested that he was an hereditary Baron of London. In the “Pipe Roll” of 1165, a Henry FitzAylwin, Fitz Leofstan, with Alan his brother, pay for succeeding to land in Essex or Hertfordshire. Now FitzAylwin the Mayor did hold land in Hertfordshire by tenure of serjeantry. The name appears in four documents as Henry Fitz Ailwin, or Æthelwine, before he was Mayor, and in many documents after he was Mayor. In the former name the latest date is 30th November 1191, and under the latter the first is April 1193. It would therefore seem as if the Mayoralty was not established at first on the concession of the grant. It may well be that it took time for the citizens to assume their full organisation. We may fairly assume that his office, if not his election, dates from the day of that concession.
FitzAylwin was one of the Treasurers for the King’s ransom in 1194. He was also called Henry of London Stone, because his house stood on the north side of Candlewick Street, near St. Swithin’s Church, over against London Stone. He presided over a meeting of citizens on 24th July 1212, and died a few weeks later. He left children from whom many persons can still trace descent. Among them, as the two living representatives of the first Mayor, are, I believe, Lady Beaumont and the Earl of Abingdon. Fifty years ago a learned antiquary, Stapleton, drew up a list of all the descendants of Henry FitzAylwin.
King Richard took no hostile proceedings against the Mayoralty. He never recognised it; but he never tried to abolish it, and as the enemies of the Commune observed that nothing disloyal to the King, nothing dangerous to the Church, was set up in the City, they learned to regard the institution without disfavour or suspicion, so that when the Mayoralty was at last recognised by King John, there was no longer any hostility, or even any misgiving. The old order had passed, giving way to the new. How necessary this new order was; how it fitted in with the old order, so that there was revolution without dislocation, is proved by its adoption in all our towns and cities, by its long continuance, and by its present vitality.
CHAPTER IV
THE WARDS
The large area included by the Roman Wall was parcelled out, after the Saxon occupation, into manors, socs, or estates, held by private persons. Some of them passed into the possession of the Church; some into possession of the City; some changed hands. That these manors included the most densely populated parts of the City, or Thames Street, and the streets north of that main artery, proves that the first allotment took place very early in the Saxon occupation, when the City was still deserted; this fact, indeed, affords another proof of that desertion, because we cannot believe that a populous quarter, covered with warehouses and merchants’ residences, should have been assigned to one man or to a dozen men. The value of the manor, comprising gardens lying among ruined foundations, shut off from the river and its fish by a high and thick stone wall, could have been no more than that of a manor lying beside the north wall, on which corn was growing and orchards were planted. Just as the Bedford Estate in London began with the fields of Bloomsbury; just as the Westminster Estate began with the marshes round Thorney Island, so the original manors of London, at first gardens and wastes, became built over or sold for building purposes. What, then, were manorial rights? Let us read the instructions of Archdeacon Hall on this point. He says:—
“Manorial property was a possession differing in many respects from what is now called landed estate. It was not a breadth of land, which the lord might cultivate or not as he pleased, suffer it to be inhabited, or reduce it to solitude and waste; but it was a dominion or empire, within which the lord was the superior over subjects of different ranks, his power over them not being absolute, but limited by law and custom. The lord of a manor, who had received by grant from the crown, saca and soca, tol and team, was not merely a proprietor, but a prince; and his courts were not only courts of law, but frequently of criminal justice. The demesne, the assised, and the waste lands were his; but the usufruct of the assised land belonged, on conditions, to the tenants, and the waste lands were not so entirely his, that he could exclude the tenants from the use of them. It was this double capacity, in which the lord stood, to his tenants, as the arbiter of their rights, as well as the owner of the land, which rendered it necessary to the due discharge of the duty of his station, that the lord of a manor should be such a person as Fleta describes: Truthful in his words, faithful in his actions, a lover of justice and of God, a hater of fraud and wrong, since it most concerns him not to act with violence, or according to his own will, but to follow advice, not being guided by some young hanger-on, some jester or flatterer, but by the opinion of persons learned in the law, men faithful and honest, and of much experience. Manors were petty royalties; the court and household of the lord resembling in some degree that of the King. In Fleta an account is given of the officers of the royal household, the Senescallus Hospitii Regis, who held his court in the palace; the Marescallus, the Camerarius, the Clericus panetarii; but in the latter part of the book, which treats of the management of manors, we find the lord of the manor attended by the Senescallus, who held his courts, by the Marescallus, who had the charge of his stud, and by the Coquus, who rendered an account of the daily expenditure to the Senescallus.”
ALDGATE HOUSE, BETHNAL GREEN
Drawn by Schnebbelie and engraved by Warren for Dr. Hughson’s Description of London.