Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

Under Edward the Third the sheriff of the county was deprived of his last plea for interference within the city walls. Up to this time he had still collected rents and taxes and done justice for the tenants of the Castle Fee; and the ditches of the Castle and the Fee, thus freed from city rule, had been made a sort of refuge for felons and malefactors flying from the jurisdiction of the city officers. All this, however, was in 1346 handed over to the bailiffs, and the sheriff was in no wise to interfere.⁴⁶¹ Moreover, in consideration of the cost to which the citizens had gone in enclosing the city, they were set free for ever from the jurisdiction of the clerk of the market of the King’s household.⁴⁶² Norwich was further given its own Admiral, who sailed about in the “admiral’s barge,” and who held admiralty courts and administered its law.⁴⁶³ In 1331 it became a Staple town, and its mayor was made a mayor of the Staple, with a salary of £20 and a seal given by the king.⁴⁶⁴

Meanwhile the Norwich people had been gradually perfecting their own internal system of government – a system which will be described in a later chapter – and in the difficulties of Henry the Fourth they found opportunity to complete their work. A sum of £1,000 given to the King, besides heavy fines paid in bribes on all sides, secured in 1403 a charter which finally guaranteed to them the constitution of their choice.⁴⁶⁵ Norwich was made into a county of itself. A mayor was appointed, who was given supreme rights of jurisship.” in the city, and received from the King himself a sword which was to be carried before him with the point erect, along with the gold or silver maces borne by the serjeants-at-mace. The four bailiffs were replaced by two sheriffs, also elected by the burgesses, who were charged with matters concerning the interests of the crown which had formerly been the business of the bailiffs, and were responsible for the yearly rent of the city. The mayor was appointed the King’s escheator, and thus the last office which had been reserved in alien hands was given over to the municipality. Finally in token of the consummation of the municipal hopes the old seal of the bailiffs was abolished to make way for a new city seal.

Norwich was but one among a number of boroughs whose inhabitants quietly and steadily gathered to themselves the liberties that made them free, for in the fellowship of towns holding of the King under a uniform tenure throughout the “ancient demesne,” the list of privileges granted to any one became the model for its neighbours near and far.⁴⁶⁶ With orderly progression, unbroken by any of the violent and dramatic incidents that indicate a time of conflict, all the bigger towns won by gradual instalments complete local independence. Such changes of method as we observe are simply changes made necessary by new national legislation, such as the form of incorporation required after the Statute of Mortmain,⁴⁶⁷ or the right to elect Justices of the Peace when one power after another had been given to these officers by law.⁴⁶⁸ We do not distinguish seasons of plentiful harvest and periods barren of all growth; in one century as in another Kings stooped to accept the “courtesies” offered, and granted the favours solicited. Nor do we find records of advantages hastily given and timidly withdrawn; or, until the reign of Richard the Third,⁴⁶⁹ is there any suggestion of anxiety on the part of Kings to check or limit the free action of the boroughs.⁴⁷⁰ Up to that time rulers of the state seem to have had no apprehension of peril to public order, of jeopardy to trading interests, of injury to the administration of justice, of possible usurpations by the municipalities which might bring them into collision with the ordered forces of the world; and for three hundred years statesmen freely allowed the growth of municipal ambition, and gave full scope for the developement of all the various systems of local self-government. The full importance of these facts only becomes clear when we turn to the history of the towns that were under subjection to other lords than the nation itself; and compare the peaceful negotiations by which matters were arranged between the royal boroughs and the State, with the violence of feeling aroused when the misgivings and alarms of private owners were brought into the controversy.

CHAPTER VIII

Battle for Freedom

(2) Towns on Feudal Estates

On the King’s lands, as we have seen, the interests of the monarch never came into collision with the interests of his burghers, and the townsfolk found an easy way to liberty. From time to time they presented a petition for freedom, brought their gifts to win the sovereign’s favour, and joyfully carried back to their fellow citizens a new charter of municipal privileges. But the condition of the towns that belonged to noble or baron was doubly depressed from the standpoint of their happier neighbours. Of secondary importance alike in numbers, in wealth, or in influence, as compared to those on royal demesne, they for the most part never emerged into any real consequence; while their lord had every reason to oppose the growth of independence in his boroughs, and lacked nothing for its complete suppression but the requisite power. New franchises were extorted from his weakness rather than won from his good will, and where acquiescence in the town’s liberties was not irresistibly forced on him his opposition was dogged and persevering.

The dispute was none the less intense because under the conditions of English life the controversy between the town and the feudal lord was limited within a very narrow field; for the burghers saw well how the lord’s claims to supremacy might permanently fetter an active community of traders, and on this point townspeople fought with a pertinacity determined by the conviction that all their hopes of prosperity depended on victory. To manufacturers and merchants the rule of an alien governor was fatal; trade died away before vexatious checks and arbitrary imposts, and enterprising burghers hastened to forsake the town where prosperity was stunted and liberty uncertain, and take up citizenship in a more thriving borough. Success and emancipation went hand in hand; for the effects of a maimed and imperfect freedom were always disastrous and far-reaching, and there is not a single instance of an English town which remained in a state of dependence and which was at the same time prosperous in trade.

One or two instances will be enough to show the extent and character of the traders’ claim for “liberties.” The burghers of Totnes, who had been fined for having a Guild by Henry the Second, had no sooner succeeded in securing its authorisation from John than they at once made it a weapon of offence, and a formidable weapon too with its roll of more than three hundred members, against their lord’s control of the town market and of the shopkeepers. The Guild claimed the right to admit non-residents to their company, so that these might freely trade without paying any tribute to the lord for one year, after that giving six pence annually; and pretended to have authority to test weights and measures without orders from the lord’s bailiff; to hold the assize of bread and ale and receive fines; and apparently to deal out justice for petty offences. These usurpations of his rights were discussed between the lord and his tenants with riots and contentions, in which the lord proved victorious in 1304, forcing the burghers to submit on every point in which the Guild tried to bring in customs which lay beyond the ancient rights of the community. They were forbidden to admit to the Guild anyone who had not a house in the town, and non-residents had to take oaths before his bailiff to pay a yearly fine to the lord. No trial of weights and measures could take place till orders had been issued to the Seneschal of the Guild by the lord’s bailiff; when the trial came on bailiff and town provost sat beside him in the Guildhall to hear the charges, and even then all false or suspected measures were to be kept by the provost till the lord’s next court. On the other hand the bailiff might hold a trial of measures whenever he judged that he could do the business better. So also the assize of bread was given to the lord’s bailiff sitting with the provost of the town; all suspected bread and weights were to be seized by him, the offenders to be fined in the lord’s court, all punishments by tumbril or pillory inflicted by his orders, and all proceeds of fines given over to him. Lastly when small thefts and riots were to be judged the bailiff sat by the town officers and as many burgesses as chose to come, and took his share in the proceedings – though occasionally in his absence the town officers might act by common consent of the community.⁴⁷¹

Such was the comparative helplessness of a community which, with all its tenacity of purpose, could neither urge custom nor tradition on its side in pleading for independent rights. In the borough of Barnstaple, on the other hand, which had been granted by the King⁴⁷² to Sir John Cornwall and his wife the Countess of Huntingdon, we have an instance of the immense advantages possessed by a town which though now in private ownership, inherited the tradition of privilege which its people had won as tenants of ancient demesne.⁴⁷³ In 1423 the Mayor, Aldermen, and capital burgesses drew up a list of byelaws for the good government of the borough, which apparently stirred the apprehensions of its lords. For a few years later, reviving ancient traditions of feudal authority in a suit against the borough, they complained that the mayor and burgesses had of their own authority admitted as “Burgesses of the Wynde” “foreign” merchants and victuallers who merely visited the town; and had turned to their own use the fines from denizens pertaining to their lord; that they had taken the correction of bread and ale, and unlawfully seized fines and tolls; that they would not suffer his officers to take custom after ancient usage from the people of Wales for their merchandise; and that they even seized fines belonging to him for heaps of rubbish in the streets. Moreover they did not render the suit and service due to the lord’s court from all the inhabitants of the borough, for without his leave they themselves held a court every Monday, and instead of coming to every court of the lord’s steward they did not come oftener than twice a year; nor would they suffer the lord’s officers to make attachments in the borough at the Nativity of Our Mother after the ancient custom. In other words the townsfolk, just like the people of Totnes two hundred years before, were bent on regulating their trade and spending the money collected in their courts and markets; but they were happier than they of Totnes in being able to claim that all these so-called usurpations were ancient rights of the burgesses, by virtue, as they said, of a charter granted by King Athelstan 500 years before. As this charter however had unluckily been “casualiter amissa,” the town had to fall back on the verdict of an inquisition held about 1300 as to the usages and franchises to which it was entitled, and the payments which were due by the mayor and commonalty in place of old feudal services. Here the Barnstaple men held their own successfully, and in 1445 they secured a charter from Henry the Sixth, “for accommodation of the burgesses in doing their business quietly,” which confirmed to them the fullest rights of self-government.⁴⁷⁴

The struggle of the boroughs with their feudal lords was however a matter of little significance in England, where since the Conquest feudalism from the point of view of the noble had so unsatisfactory a record. Fallen from the high estate of his brethren on the Continent, despoiled of his might by one strong king after another, he saw himself condemned to play in England a comparatively modest part, and from his less exalted plane was even constrained to assume in his relations to burghers and traders a conciliatory, almost at times a deprecating tone, not because he was lacking in “a high and pompous mind,” but simply because his fortunes had sunk low. Hence the conflict in England was of a very different character from the conflict abroad. Fashions of careful ceremonial indeed long preserved the traditional sense of impassable barriers set between the dignity of the great whose daily needs were supplied by the labour of others, and the low estate of those who had to depend upon their own toil. “Whensoever any nobleman or peer of the realm passed through any parish, all the bells were accustomed to be rung in honour of his person, and to give notice of the passage of such eminency; and when their letters were upon any occasion read in any assemblies, the commons present would move their bonnets in token of reverence to their names and persons.” Burghers and journeymen with an irreverent laugh at men “evermore strutting who no store keep,”⁴⁷⁵ gathered to see the noble go by “in his robe of scarlet twelve yards wide, with pendent sleeves down on the ground, and the furrur therein set amounting unto £20 or better,” while a train of followers crowded after him anxiously holding up with both hands out of the filth of the mediæval streets the wide sleeves made to “slide on earth” by their sides, and eagerly watching lest the ladies should forget to admire “the plaits behind;” and the busy mockers of the market-place guessed that tailors and skinners must soon carry their cloths and skins out into the fields if they would find space enough to cut out robes like these.⁴⁷⁶ But the fine garments and leisurely state of the great folk, the hollow ornaments of a vanquished feudalism, were matters of little significance; the forces of the future lay rather with the crowd of workers to right and left – with the men who watched the brave procession sweep by, and then gathered in their Common House to decree that any burgher who put on the livery of a lord, or accepted his maintenance and protection, should be blotted out of the book of burgesses, and driven from their market-place and assembly hall, and “that he come not among them in their congregations.”⁴⁷⁷

For the moment, indeed, the noble class was as it were thrown aside by the strong current of the national life, nor could the handful of families that held half the soil of England and the lesser baronage who followed in their train be recovered of their impotence, of their impoverishment of intellect and decay of force, even by the greatest landholder and the most typical member of their body, Warwick the Kingmaker. Sated with possessions, forced into a position of leadership mainly by the imposing list of his great relations and the surprising number of his manors – a patriot who consecrated his services to the cause of a faction and the unrestrained domination of a family group of blood relations – a general who never got beyond an already antiquated system of warfare, devoid according to public rumour of personal courage, deserted in a crisis by the one organised military force in the public service – a commander with all the ready instincts of the common pirate – a statesman made after an old ancestral pattern, who had learned his politics a couple of centuries before his time, and to the last remained absolutely blind to the great movements of his own day – an administrator who never failed at a critical moment to put in jeopardy the most important national interests – an agitator restless for revolution, but whose influence in the national counsels was practically of no account when there was a pause in mere fighting – it is thus that Warwick stands before us, a consummate representative of his demoralized class.

The conditions under which the great landowners were living at this time were indeed singularly unfavourable. With the new trade they had comparatively little to do,⁴⁷⁸ and the noble, with his throng of dependents and his show of state, was really living from hand to mouth on the harvests from his fields and the plunder he got in war.⁴⁷⁹ After the fashion of the time the treasure of the family was hoarded up in his great oak chests; splendid robes, cloth of gold, figured satins, Eastern damasks and Sicilian silks, velvets and Flemish cloths, tapestries and fine linen, were heaped together with rich furs of marten and beaver. Golden chains and collars of “the old fashion” and “the new,” rings and brooches adorned with precious stones, girdles of gold or silver gilt by famous foreign makers, were stored away in his strong boxes, or in the safe rooms of monasteries, along with ewers and goblets and basins of gold and silver, pounced and embossed “with great large enamels” or covered with silver of “Paris touch.”⁴⁸⁰ But the owner of all this unproductive treasure scarcely knew where to turn for a little ready money. The produce of the estate sufficed for the needs of the household, and if the lord was called away on the king’s service, or had to attend Parliament, a supply of oats was carried for the horses “to save the expenses of his purse”; and an army of servants rode backwards and forwards continually to fetch provisions from fields and ponds and salting tubs at home, so that he should never be driven to buy for money from the baker or at the market.⁴⁸¹ The crowd of dependents who swelled his train, easily content to win an idle subsistence, a share of booty in time of war, “maintenance” in the law courts, and protection from all enemies, either received no pay at all, or accepted the most trifling sums – a few shillings a year when they could get it, with a “livery” supplied like their food from the estate.⁴⁸² For money which was scarce everywhere was nowhere so scarce as in the houses of the landed proprietors, who amid their extravagant display found one thing always lacking – a few pounds to pay an old debt or buy a new coat. Sir John Paston, the owner of broad estates in Norfolk, was forced more than once to pawn his “gown of velvet and other gear” in London to get a few marks; when it occurred to him to raise money on his father’s funeral pall, he found his mother had been beforehand with him, and had already put it in pawn. During an unwonted visit to Westminster in 1449, the poor Lady of Berkeley wrote anxiously to her husband, one of the greatest landowners in England, “At the reverence of God send money, or else I must lay my horse to pledge and come home on my feet”; and he managed to raise £15 to meet her needs by pawning the mass book, chalices, and chasubles of his chapel.⁴⁸³ So also the Plumptons, in Yorkshire, were in perpetual money difficulties; servants were unpaid, bills not met, debts of £2 10s. and £4 put off from term to term, and at last a friend who had gone surety for a debt of £100 to a London merchant was arrested. “Madam,” a poor tradesman writes to Lady Plumpton, “ye know well I have no living but my buying and selling, and, Madam, I pray you send me my money.” One of the family tried in vain to get a friend to buy him some black velvet for a gown. “I pray you herein blame my non-power, but not my will,” the friend answers from London, “for in faith I might not do it but if I should run in papers of London, which I never did yet, so I have lived poorly thereafter.”⁴⁸⁴ When times grew pressing the country families borrowed freely from their neighbours and relations; no one, even the sister of the Kingmaker, felt any hesitation in pleading poverty as a reason for being off a bargain or asking for a loan;⁴⁸⁵ and those who were in better case lent readily in the hope of finding a like help themselves in case of difficulty.⁴⁸⁶ Year by year debts accumulated, till the owner’s death allowed the creditors to open his coffers and scatter his treasured stores, when the “array, plate, and stuff of the household and of the chapel” scarcely sufficed to meet the legacies and bills, the charities deferred, and the masses required for his soul’s safety.⁴⁸⁷

There were indeed instances in which the growing poverty of the nobles opened an easy way for the emancipation of the towns, since it was sometimes possible, under the pressure of poverty or bankruptcy, to convince the lord of a borough, even though he had but such a measure of good wit in his head

 
“As thou shouldest mete of a mist from morn till even,”⁴⁸⁸
 

that the balance of profit lay on the side of freedom. For to some extent the difficulties of the landowners arose from the fact that on their estates the commutation for feudal services, or dues to be rendered for the holding of land, had been settled in early times when money was scarce and demands for profit modest, and these charges remained fixed when prices were rising and when the need of ready money was keenly felt.⁴⁸⁹ But while the lord could look for no increase from his lands, a new source of profit had been opened to him in the boroughs on his estate. He could find money surely and easily by leasing out rights of trade, collection of tolls, and other privileges to the townspeople. In the middle of the thirteenth century the mayor and burgesses of Berkeley obtained from their lord freedom from all kinds of toll which he either demanded or might demand of them;⁴⁹⁰ and in the fourteenth century he rented to them the tolls of the wharfage and of the market, and received larger profits from this transaction than he gained from all the rent of the borough.⁴⁹¹

The weakest corporation moreover had a persistence and continuity of life which gave it incalculable advantages in the conflict with individuals subject to all the chances and changes of mortality. For the nobles indeed the fight with the town was in many ways an unequal one. Driven hither and thither by urgent calls of war or of the King’s business, the lord was scarcely ever at home to look to his own affairs. In the frequent absences of the masters of Berkeley, perpetually called away by “troubles of state,” when the King summoned them to his aid whether for civil war or war of conquest,^[492] the neighbouring towns of Bristol and Gloucester found opportunity to escape from their control; and the march of the baron and his retainers from Berkeley was a subject of much greater gladness to the townsmen of Bristol than to the lord of the castle himself; for “the household and foreign accounts of this lord,” we are told, “reveal a marvellous unwillingness in him to this Scottish war, dispatching many letters and messages to the King, and other lords and favourites about him, for excuses.”^[493] When, as a reward for his services, one of the Berkeleys was given the custody and government of the town of Gloucester,^[494] he was also charged with the government of Berwick, and was moreover called away whenever the King found himself in military difficulties; so that the Gloucester burgesses cannot have had much to fear from him. The care of the great estates, in fact, was constantly left to the women of the house and to stewards, while the master, pressed by ambition, or quite as often by the driving necessity of getting money, was fighting in Wales or Scotland, or was looking for plunder in France, or for place at court. For three generations the lands of the Pastons in Norfolk were managed by the capable wives of absentee landlords – of the judge who must have spent most of his time in London or on circuit; of his son the sharp London lawyer; and of his grandson, Sir John, the gay young soldier who hovered between London and Calais, and whose only care for his property was to press anxiously for its rents. The story of the Plumpton family was much the same. One of the Plumptons spent his last years and died in France; and no sooner did the young Sir William reach his majority in 1426, than he also left his Yorkshire estates and set off to join the French campaign.^[495]

On the noble class too fell the heavy consequences of the rebellions and civil wars of which they were the main supporters. If the lord died in battle his estates might pass to a minor; if he died on the scaffold they passed to the crown; or long imprisonment might thwart his best laid plans for strengthening his hold over his boroughs. The young Lord Maurice of Berkeley, for instance, was drawn into rebellion against Edward the Second, and died in prison four and a half years later. During the whole time that he held his estates he was only in freedom for four months; and his eldest son, who was imprisoned with him, was not set at liberty till some months after his father’s death.⁴⁹⁶ Meanwhile the towns were always quick to make their profit in such times of disturbance and revolution, as for example when the Earl of Devonshire was attainted by Edward the Fourth after the battle of Towton for his support of the Lancastrian cause, and the citizens of Exeter seized so favourable an opportunity to claim the restitution of a suburb stretching down to the riverside which the earls had held to strengthen their hold on the navigation of the Exe.⁴⁹⁷

Nor was the lord’s position made more hopeful by the furious feuds between noble and noble which distracted the provinces in the fifteenth century, and the incessant lawsuits by which the landowners sought to mend their fortunes. In 1463 James Lord of Berkeley made an agreement with the Countess of Shrewsbury that they would have no more battles at law; for he was then sixty-nine, and she fifty-two, and neither of them since their ages of discretion had “enjoyed any three months of freedom from lawsuits.”⁴⁹⁸ Nor did they wage their fight in the law-courts only, but carried on an open war by which Gloucestershire had been distracted since 1421, and which proved one of the most deadly of the many provincial conflicts of the fifteenth century. Appeased at intervals to break out again with renewed force, and with the usual incidents of hangings and finings and imprisonments and ransomings, it finally culminated in 1470 in a pitched battle on Nibley Green, where the Berkeleys triumphantly maintained their cause at the head of about 1,000 fighting men, and Lord Lisle, the son of Lady Shrewsbury, who led the enemy’s army, was killed. To country folk and traders this feud of the nobles carried with it, we are told, “the ill-effects and destructions of a petty war, wherein the borough town of Berkeley, for her part, saw the burning and prostration of many of her ancient houses, as her old rent which till that time was £22 by the year and upwards, and by those devastations brought down to £11 and under, where it sticketh to this day, without recovery of her ancient lustre or greatness.”⁴⁹⁹ Such a strife was by no means singular or without parallel, and the histories of Norfolk, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, or Lancashire have their records of similar outrages. Exeter was thrown into alarm by a great fight on Clistheath in 1453 between the Earl of Devon and Lord William Bonvil where many persons were grievously wounded and much hurt done: “the occasion whereof was about a dog; but great displeasure thereby came to the city, where presently after the fight the Lord Bonvil sheltered himself, which the Earl took amiss, thinking it had been so done by the city in some displeasure to himself.”⁵⁰⁰ The mere instinct of self-protection naturally drove the towns to detach their interests from nobles whose alliance brought disaster and ruin to simple traders, and in every borough statute after statute forbidding the inhabitants to wear the “livery”⁵⁰¹ of any lord whatever, testified to the determination of the towns to cut off from the great people of the country round every possibility of stirring up faction within their borders.

But if boroughs in the ownership of a private lord might secure advantages through his poverty, his misfortune, or his weakness, their position was one of essential inferiority as compared with towns on the public demesne.⁵⁰² In the story of Liverpool we have a curious illustration of the fortunes of a borough whose lot it was to fall at one time into the charge of the state, and at another to be thrown into the hands of a noble – and whose vicissitudes at last left it in a sort of indeterminate condition where it owed a deferential obedience to patrons or masters on every side.

Liverpool, which had been granted by Henry the Second to the constable of Lancaster Castle, was resumed in 1207 by John, who granted it a charter of trading privileges. A new charter of Henry the Third, in 1229, gave it a guild merchant and hanse, with freedom from toll, and the rights of a free borough; and on the very next day after this grant Henry gave the lease of the fee-farm to the burgesses for four years at £10 a year.⁵⁰³ The true foundations of municipal independence were thus laid. The town had its common seal; one of its two bailiffs was apparently elected by the people, and charged with the collecting of tolls for the ferm; and the busy trade with Ireland at that time, and the later advantage of a secure place of embarkation for troops, which became very important as the harbour of Chester silted up, promised prosperity. In the same year, however, the town was granted away by the King to the Earl of Chester, then passed in 1232 to the Earl of Derby; and in 1266 was given to Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, and under the Lords of Lancaster Liverpool remained till a century later, when in 1361 it passed by marriage to John of Gaunt.

All hope of freedom for Liverpool died away under its new lords. The grant of the ferm was not renewed for over a hundred years; and at an enquiry of “Quo Warranto” in 1292 under Edward the First “certain men of the Borough of Liverpool came for the commonalty, and say that they have not at present a bailiff of themselves, but have been accustomed to have, until Edmund the King’s brother impeded them, and permits them not to have a free borough.” Wherefore they claim only “that they may be quit of common fines and amercements of the county, &c., and of toll, stallage, &c., through the whole kingdom,” for “as to the other liberties” which they used to have “the aforesaid Edmund now has them.” They quote charters, to show that their ancient liberties had been held direct from the crown, and the court decided that “Edmund hath usurped and occupied the aforesaid liberties,” and ordered him to appear before it; but no action seems to have been taken against him, and for forty years he and his successors went on themselves collecting the tolls.⁵⁰⁴ At last in 1356 the lord Henry allowed the townsmen to elect a mayor every year, and the next year the first Duke of Lancaster (father-in-law of John of Gaunt) leased the ferm to the mayor and others to hold for the burgesses for ten years,⁵⁰⁵ and Liverpool was thus restored to the same position in which the King had put it a hundred and thirty years earlier. But even now its limited privileges rested simply on the will and caprice of the lord; he might give the lease of the ferm with the right of collecting tolls for the rent to the mayor, or an ex-mayor, or whomever he would; he might grant it for a year, or for ten years, or he might take it all back into his own hands. As a matter of fact questions of convenience and profit seem to have made it advisable to leave the collections of taxes mainly with the town officers. When John of Gaunt granted his lease, at the request of the “honest and discreet men of the burgesses” the articles were embodied in a patent “to ourselves, to the mayor, and to the bailiffs,”⁵⁰⁶ and in his time the lease was commonly granted for ten years.⁵⁰⁷