Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

In less than thirty years, however, the burghers were renewing the memory of their old offences – forcing townsmen against their will to go to the hall of the Guild, and take an oath of allegiance to it; levying tolls and taxes, distraining on merchants who sold in the abbot’s market to extort money from them; hindering the execution of justice on merchants suspected of selling goods outside that market; and refusing to allow any member of the guild to bring a plea in the abbot’s court against any other brother of the guild: while the abbot on his side asserted his right to choose the alderman of the town and to appoint the keepers of the gates. In spite of a compromise made before the king’s judges sent the next year to enquire into the case, the same charges were again brought against the men of Bury before a royal commission of judges in 1304. The accused confessed that the abbot was lord of the whole town and its courts, but they still urged a claim to be free burgesses and to have an alderman, and a Merchant Guild with certain rights of justice belonging to it and with an elaborate code of procedure, and asserted their right to hold meetings for the common profit of the burgesses, and to levy taxes from men trading in the town. All this the abbot denied, whether the right to a Merchant Guild, or pleas belonging to it, or a community, or a common seal, or a mayor; according to him the townsfolk only had a right to a drinking feast, which they maliciously turned into an illegal convention, and if they took any fines it was against the merchant law and the King’s peace. The case was given for the abbot. The leaders were fined and put in jail, some of them escaping by payments while others through poverty lay in prison a month.

Once more, however, the burghers took heart, and in 1327 broke into the abbey and forced the abbot to concede to them a community, a common seal, a Guild merchant, and custody of their gates, with other liberties. But their triumph was short; utterly defeated by the forces of abbot and king, they were forced in the concord of 1332 to renounce for ever the claim to a community;⁵⁵³ and when after the Peasant Revolt there was much general begging for pardon, the men of S. Edmundsbury, who were ordered to sue for their pardons specially, had to find surety not only to the King but to their lord the abbot.⁵⁵⁴

If S. Edmundsbury was one of the most unfortunate ecclesiastical towns Reading was perhaps the most fortunate. For Reading was originally a borough on royal demesne, which was granted by Henry the First to the new monastery founded by him.⁵⁵⁵ From this time the town lay absolutely in the control of the abbot. He owned all its streams, from which the inhabitants had “chiefly their water to brew, bake, and dress their meat.”⁵⁵⁶ The mills were in his hands; he did as he chose with the market, controlled the trade, and had the entire supervision of the cloth manufacture. He appointed the Warden of the Guild or mayor, and the various town officers; and claimed a decisive voice in the admitting of new burgesses or members of the Guild, while from every burgher’s son who entered the Guild he claimed a tax of 4s., and from every stranger one-half of the fine paid as entrance fee – the sum of the fine being fixed in presence of a monk who might raise objections so long as he was not overborne by the joint voices of six legal men of the Guild. Every burgher in the Guild had further to pay to him a yearly tax of chepin gavell for the right of buying or selling in the town.⁵⁵⁷ For any breach of the law fines were gathered in to increase his hoard, since all the administration of justice lay in his hands. Before the abbot alone the emblems of supreme authority might be borne, and the mayor when he went in state was only allowed to have two tipped staves carried before him by the abbot’s bailiffs.

From the time of Henry the Third there was unceasing war between the townsmen and their lord. Violent dissensions broke out in 1243, when the burghers “lay in wait day and night for the abbot’s bailiffs,” and “hindered them from performing their duties,” till order was restored by a precept from the King.⁵⁵⁸ The townsfolk were appeased by the grant of certain trading privileges; but ten years later the quarrel broke out again. The abbot, as they maintained before the King’s Court at Westminster, had taken away their Guild, summoned them to another place than their own Guild Hall to answer pleas, changed the site of their market, and forced them to render unwonted services. An agreement was drawn up before the judges, by which the burghers won the right to hold their corn market in its accustomed place, to own their common Guild Hall, with a few tenements that belonged to it, and a field called Portmanbrok (the rent of which was set apart for the salary of the mayor), and to maintain their Guild merchant as of old. On the other hand the townspeople conceded that it was the abbot’s right to select the Warden of the Guild from among the guildsmen, and require him to take oath of fidelity to himself as well as to the burgesses. The abbot might tallage the town at certain times, and his bailiffs were still to administer justice, and might at any time claim the keys of the Guild Hall, sit there to hold pleas, carry off all profits to the abbot’s treasury, and fine the burgesses any sum which it was in their power to pay. Finally it was admitted that the meadow beyond the Portmanbrok belonged to the lord.⁵⁵⁹

After an arrangement which left to the abbot all the weighty matters of government, the control of the burghers’ trade and a charge on their profits,⁵⁶⁰ it was no wonder that before a hundred years were over the inhabitants of Reading, restless and discontented, were again battling for larger privileges. In 1351 the mayor and commonalty refused obedience to a constable appointed by the abbot’s steward, claiming for themselves the right to choose the constables, and present them to take their oaths before the king’s justices and the justices of the peace instead of before the abbot. At the same time they raised various fundamental questions as to their rights, just as Lynn was doing almost in the very same year. They asked whether the town was not a royal borough and therefore in no way dependent on the abbey; whether the townsmen had not therefore a right to elect their own mayor; and whether that mayor ought not to exercise jurisdiction over the burgesses and commonalty “according to the custom of the borough and Guild” – questions which one and all afforded fair subjects of dispute for the next hundred and fifty years.

The burghers henceforth gave the abbot no rest. In the long quarrel the Merchant Guild became the real centre of the common activity, just as it did wherever a town subject to a lord temporal or spiritual failed to win independent jurisdiction of its own.⁵⁶¹ For if there were free boroughs where the mayor, with his council and the common assembly of the burghers in which the whole conduct of government was centred, were in name and fact the accepted constitutional authorities; on the other hand in dependent towns where political freedom was still incomplete the Merchant Guild appears as ostensibly the only means by which the will of the community could find expression; as men recognized in it the one society in whose disciplined ranks they might be enrolled to fight for the liberties they claimed, its organization was held to be the most important of their privileges and the truest symbol of their common life; and it necessarily became the bond of fellowship, the pledge of future freedom, the school of political energies.⁵⁶² In such towns therefore the Merchant Guild had a vitality and a persistent continuity of life which was unknown elsewhere, and was often preserved in full vigour two or three centuries after it had perhaps suffered decay or transformation elsewhere.

This was the case in Reading. The burghers fell back on the Guild as the one authorized mode of association for public purposes, and in its “morghespeche,” or “morning talks,” the leading townsfolk discussed how the independence of the borough might be advanced. Successive mayors of the Guild, though still to all appearance appointed as officers of the abbot, became really the representatives of the town, identified themselves absolutely with its interests, and readily led their fellow citizens in revolt against the convent. In 1378 the burghers paid about £5 for a new charter; and twice sent the mayor to London to assert their privileges, and to insist that the convent should be forced to bear a just share of the burden of taxation, and pay a part of the tenth demanded by the King. The messengers were lavish with their gifts to judges and officers and lawyers who might befriend them, eels and pike, perches and salmon and capons; and succeeded so well that the town charters were confirmed in 1400, in 1418, and in 1427.⁵⁶³ In 1391 the burghers carried the dispute about the appointment of constables to the king’s judges at Westminster; and seem to have succeeded in this matter too, for in 1417 the mayor elected the constables in the Guild Hall, and the justices of the peace admitted them to office. About 1420 a Guild Hall was built close to the Hallowed Brook, though the burghers complained of being “so disturbed with beating of battle-dores” by the women washing in the brook that they could scarcely hold their courts or do any public business.⁵⁶⁴ They made payments for the clock house, and set up a bell for the community,⁵⁶⁵ and appointed a permanent salary for the mayor of five marks, to be paid from the Common Chest instead of the uncertain rent of the Portmanbrok. But when they went on to build a new “Outbutchery,” and buy “smiting stocks” for butchers not living in the town, the abbot at once saw an attempt to limit his own market profits which he immediately resented, denying the burghers’ right to hold their new out-butchery or receive rents from it. They on their side protested that their Guild was a body corporate, having a Common Hall, a seal, and the right of possessing common property; that they held also a wharf, a common beam or weighing-machine, and the stocks and shambles; that they had been granted freedom from toll throughout the kingdom; that they returned two burgesses to Parliament; and were freed from shire and hundred courts; and finally they asserted, to sum up all the rest, that they had held of the King long before the monastery was founded.⁵⁶⁶ In 1431 lawyers were appointed to search the evidences in the Common Chest as to agreements between the town and the abbot. At the same time a Register of the Acts of the mayor and burgesses was begun, and continued year after year without break. In 1436 and 1439 payments were made for the writing out of certain articles as to the privileges of the town; and counsel were again employed to look over the evidences in 1441.⁵⁶⁷

Throughout these years the mayor and officers were constantly at Maidenhead, London, or Canterbury, holding consultations about legal business with Lyttleton and the most famous lawyers. They succeeded in buying a charter for their Guild Hall with sums contributed by rich citizens; and gratefully adorned the building with a picture of the King. The mayor of the guild became more and more the representative of the burghers’ hopes, and his greatness the symbol of their triumph. They had not only raised his salary in 1459 to ten nobles,⁵⁶⁸ but like their brethren at Lynn they got permission from Henry the Sixth to have a mace carried before him; and in 1459 the mace was actually bought.⁵⁶⁹ At this extravagance, however, the abbot made a firm stand, and Henry had to send a letter to the Mayor of Reading, just as he had done eleven years before to the mayor of Lynn, ordering that this privilege should remain with the abbot alone as the token of his supremacy. But the mayor possibly gained his point a little later, for in 1487 he was allowed two Mace-serjeants, so it would seem that at least his tipped staves were now borne by his own servants.⁵⁷⁰ He secured too for himself and for the burgesses exemption from serving on juries; and in the same year assumed supervision of the cloth trade. In 1480 the burgesses had done away with individual payments of the “chepin gavell” tax to the abbot, by ordering that it should be given from the Town Chest; and in 1486 a citizen bequeathed property for its payment, so that the townsmen were henceforth freed from all personal difficulties in this matter.⁵⁷¹

Either the question of the cloth-market or that of the mace-serjeants brought the battle to a climax. The abbot absolutely refused to appoint any “master of the guild, otherwise called mayor,” and took upon himself to admit such people as he chose to the office of constable.⁵⁷² The guild retorted by choosing a mayor for themselves, who nominated his own officers to keep order, while all alike in this emergency gave their services freely, for in 1493 “nothing was paid to the mayor, because neither he nor any one else charged anything on the office.”⁵⁷³ In the case of the lesser offices the burghers held their own, and when in 1499 the abbot appointed two constables, the mayor thrust them out of their places.⁵⁷⁴

But the triumph of the people was short-lived, for in the long run they proved powerless against the great spiritual corporation which ruled over them. In the very next year, 1500, the inhabitants were utterly defeated as to the election of the mayor himself; and as they still protested, there was once more an appeal eight years later to the judgment of the King’s Court. The verdict of the judges threw back the whole question almost to the very point where it had stood centuries before at the time of the earlier appeal in 1254, and the brethren of the Guild were declared of ancient time to have had no other right than the power to present from among themselves three persons, of whom the abbot should choose one as mayor. The two constables, and the ten wardmen of the five wards, might be elected by the mayor and commonalty, but they must be sworn in before the abbot. According to ancient custom the name of any proposed burgess must be given to the abbot fourteen days before his election, and a monk must be present for the assessing of his fine of forty shillings, half of which went to the abbot; an alien’s fine might be determined by six burgesses, and if they affirmed on oath that the fine was reasonable the abbot was bound to accept it. The question of the out-butchery still remained undecided; but the dispute as to the cloth-trade was settled by a compromise. As in the case of the mayor, the town was to choose three men and present them to the abbot, who should then appoint one of the three to be the keeper of the seal for sealing the cloth.⁵⁷⁵

So closed for the moment the long struggle of two hundred and fifty years – a struggle whose gain was small in comparison with all the cost and labour, the civic enthusiasm, the learning and ability which had been lavished on it. The easy passage to freedom by which the royal towns had travelled, the large and regular expansion of their liberties, the liberal admission of their right to supremacy over their own trade and over the higher matters of law and justice, might well kindle in the subjects of abbey and priory a perpetual unrest, and anger deepened against their masters as they saw themselves, in an age of universal movement, bound to the unchanging order of the past, and condemned to perpetual dependence under a galling system of administration which the secular government had abandoned three hundred years before.

CHAPTER X

BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY

When a borough had won from its lord full rights of self-government, its battles were not yet over. The next effort of the town authorities was to secure complete power over all the inhabitants within their walls, so that they might compel all alike to submit to the town courts, and to bear their share of burdensome duties, such as the payment of taxes, the keeping watch and ward, the defence of the town, the maintenance of its trade, or the enlargement of its liberties – in fact to take their part as good citizens in all that concerned the common weal.

For all towns alike, whatever were their chartered rights, had to reckon not only with their own lord of the manor, but with the great people, whether king or noble or bishop or abbot, or perhaps all of them together, who might own a part of the land within their walls, and might all assert their various and conflicting rights, and multiply officials of every kind with courts and prisons and gallows, to vindicate the lord’s authority. Thus in Warwick in the eleventh century, when the population was scarcely over a thousand, the King held a hundred and thirteen houses, and various lords and prelates owned a hundred and twelve, while there were nineteen independent burgesses who had the right of sac and soc. So also in the time of Edward the First there were five gallows in Worcester and the district immediately round the city. One belonged to the town, another to the bishop, and a third to the Earl of Gloucester, while two more were set up by the abbots of Pershore and Westminster who held property in the borough; all of which lords and prelates had the right of hanging thieves and rioters in this little community of about two thousand inhabitants.⁵⁷⁶

A new municipality, face to face with these traditional claims, and powerless before the customary rights of property, could only fall back on friendly treaties by which both sides might win advantage from peaceable compromise. As soon as the burghers had won chartered privileges of trade and freedom from toll throughout the kingdom, they had something to offer to their neighbours, and the bargaining began. They could propose to grant protection and a share in their privileges, and would demand in return that the tenants of alien lords should contribute to their taxes and take part in public duties, and perhaps acknowledge, in some respects at all events, the authority of their courts. But the progress of the negociations and their final result underwent considerable modifications, according as the townspeople had to deal with the constable of the King’s castle; with some lord who held property in the borough; or with an ecclesiastical settlement, whether cathedral or monastery, planted within the liberties.

I. The Castle Fee was a bit of the royal territory altogether independent of the municipality. In Bristol, for example, the castle had its own market at its gate; and its inhabitants were exempt from the town justice, so that if one of the tenants of the fee committed a crime he was sent to Gloucester thirty miles distant instead of being tried in Bristol itself. Since the castle fee lay outside the jurisdiction of the town, its ditches became the refuge of felons and malefactors flying from the bailiffs, and as late as 1627 it was stated that two hundred poor persons were dwelling within the precincts who mostly lived by begging, besides a number of outlaws, excommunicated people, and offenders who found them a hiding place, and when soldiers and sailors were impressed great multitudes of able men “fled thither as to a place of freedom, where malefactors live in a lawless manner.”⁵⁷⁷ From his position as the king’s lieutenant the governor or Constable of the Castle in important frontier or seaport towns was a very great official, with an authority as military commander which gave him the right of interference in local affairs, and whose power might easily prove a real danger to municipal institutions.⁵⁷⁸ In Bristol, where the mayors after their election “did fetch and take their oath and charge at the castle gate” from the constable as the representative of the King, he was practically the official arbiter in any crisis of town politics, and when a revolt of the commons broke out in 1312 against a handful of merchants who controlled the municipal government, the party in power at once claimed the constable’s help against their fellow-townsmen. Thereupon the commons assaulted the castle and built forts against it, so that the forces of three counties which were marched to the rescue by their sheriffs could not quell the riot; but the castle party finally triumphed, the insurrection was violently put down, twelve burgesses banished, the rule of those who had usurped privileges claimed by the whole commonalty confirmed, and the enemy of the Bristol burghers, Lord Maurice of Berkeley, appointed by the King “custos of the castle and town.”⁵⁷⁹

It was only however in a few boroughs that exceptional military difficulties made the post of governor one of great or permanent authority, as for instance in Bristol or Southampton. And even in these towns a good understanding was before long established between king and burghers, and powers exercised by royal officers which impeded the free developement of municipal life were withdrawn without jealous alarms on the sovereign’s side, or prolonged agitation on the part of the town. The Bristol mayors were freed by royal charter from the necessity of taking their oath from the constable in 1345. And in towns such as Norwich, where military considerations early became of comparatively little importance, the castle tenants were made to contribute to the city taxes in the thirteenth century, and in the course of the next hundred years, were put unreservedly under the control of the city authorities.⁵⁸⁰

II. There were not very many cases where a lay lord became a formidable enemy to municipal freedom, either from the extent of his property in a town, or from his power of enforcing his claims. Such disputes as did arise were settled in various ways by purchase or friendly compact, or by gaining from the Crown a charter which conferred such rights of control as were necessary for discipline and order. Boroughs on the royal demesne naturally found themselves supported by the King in urging these demands, but the appeal to force always lay behind the legal settlement, and there was occasionally a serious battle before the question of supremacy was finally decided. A bitter fight was waged between Bristol⁵⁸¹ and the lords of Berkeley, who owned Redcliffe, and claimed the river where they had built a quay as part of their lordship; who had their own courts and their own prison; who held their own markets and fair; and who broke the Bristol weights and measures, and refused to take the measures of assize from the mayor even though in such matters he acted as the King’s marshal. They fought long and fiercely for their power, even after a royal charter in 1240 had given the jurisdiction over Redcliffe to the mayor.⁵⁸² In 1305 an energetic young lord Maurice of Berkeley to whom his father had given Redcliffe Street tried to assert his rights, but at the ringing of the common bell the Bristol men assembled, broke into Maurice’s house, took away a prisoner from him, and refused to allow him to hold any court, or to buy and sell any wares in Redcliffe Street. Upon this the young lord, appearing with “great multitudes of horse and foot,” forced the burgesses to do suit to him, and cast those who refused into a pit, while the women who came to help their husbands in the fray were trodden under foot. He set free prisoners from the Bristol gaol, assaulted Bristol burgesses at Tetbury fair, claimed dominion over the Severn, and seized the Bristol ships. All this did Maurice, “than whom a more martial knight, and of a more daring spirit, of the age of twenty-four years, the kingdom nor scarce the Christian world then had;” and the mayor and burgesses left King and Parliament no rest with their petitions, telling of outrage after outrage committed by him, till commissioners were appointed to examine their complaints, and to Lord Maurice the sequel of this angry business was a fine of 1,000 marks, afterwards commuted to service with the King’s army with ten horsemen. A few years later moreover the Bristol men found opportunity to avenge their bitter grudge, for when he was taken in rebellion the mayor and the commonalty, “out of an inveterate hatred and remembrance of former passages,” threw into the common gaol every man who was even suspected of having adhered to the faction of Maurice.⁵⁸³ Troubles again broke out in 1331, and the mayor and burgesses gathered at the ringing of the common bell for an assault on a Lord Thomas of Berkeley, destroyed his tumbrill and pillory, carried his bailiff to the Guild Hall, and forced him to swear that he would never again execute any judgements in the courts. The next year however the town, “taking the advantage of the time while the said lord was in trouble about the murder of King Edward the Second in his castle of Berkeley,” settled the matter for ever by an opportune payment to the King of £40, for which the mayor and burgesses obtained a confirmation of all their charters, and especially that which granted that Redcliffe Street should be within their jurisdiction.

No sooner was the dispute finally decided than rancour quickly died away, and the burgesses of Bristol settled down into the most friendly relations with Berkeley castle. The lords of Berkeley took to trading in wool and corn and wine, and went partners with Bristol men in robbing carracks of Genoa as well as in lawful traffic.⁵⁸⁴ So far had the wheel of fortune turned that one of the lords who made a treaty of peace with the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury meekly appeared before the mayor and council of Bristol to give surety;⁵⁸⁵ and when he went out to fight at Nibley the Bristol merchants sent men to his help.⁵⁸⁶ The alliance was cemented by marriage when a Berkeley in 1475 took to wife a daughter of the mayor of Bristol;⁵⁸⁷ and when she died in 1517 the mayor, the master of the Guild, the aldermen, sheriffs, chamberlains, and wardens of Bristol, and thirty-three crafts, followed the coffin with two hundred torches – altogether a multitude of five or six thousand people. A “drinking” was made by the family for the mayor and his brethren in St. Mary’s Hall, at which they were entertained with a first course of cakes, comfits, and ale, followed by another of marmalade, snoket, red wine, and claret, and a third of wafers and blanch powder, with romney and muscatel; “and I thank God,” wrote the steward, “no plate nor spoons was lost, yet there was twenty dozen spoons.”⁵⁸⁸

III. Ecclesiastical corporations also nominally held their property in the various towns by the usual feudal tenure, just like the lay lords; and when a borough formally stated its theoretic relations with them both lay and spiritual lords were put on exactly the same level. The “Customs” of Hereford show us the ideal view of these relations as the burghers liked to picture them. “Fees” within the walls⁵⁸⁹ were held by both ecclesiastical and lay lords, whose tenants desired a share in the city privileges, and the Hereford men classed them all together under a common description. “There are some lords and their tenants who are dwellers and holders of lands and tenements within the said bounds, which they hold by a certain service which is called ‘liberum feodum’; because long ago they besought us that they might be of us, and they would be rated and taxed with us, and they are free among us concerning toll and all other customs and services by us made, but concerning their foreign services which they do, or ought to do, and of old have done, their lords are not excluded by us nor by our liberties; for we never use to intermix ourselves with them in any things touching those tenures, but only with those which concern us, or their tenures which for a time hath been of our condition.”⁵⁹⁰ Tenants still bound to render feudal services to their lords were not reckoned among the true aristocracy of the freemen, who in admitting them to a limited fellowship marked their sense of the difference of status between the free burgher and the man who was but half emancipated; “and such men ought not to be called citizens or our fellow citizens … because they are ‘natives,’ or born in the behalf of their lords, and do hold their tenements by foreign services and are not burgesses.” It was only when a tenant bought a house in the city and was in scot and lot with the citizens, that they allowed that he “is free and of our condition; but let him take heed to himself that he depart not from the city to any place into the power of his lord.”⁵⁹¹

But the municipality was perfectly firm in the assertion of the authority which it had a right to exercise over all those who were admitted to the privileges of the common trade, and took a very decided tone with the spiritual as well as with the lay lords. To the Hereford burghers it was obvious that the ecclesiastical tenants only enjoyed a share in the town liberties by the grace of the citizens, and in virtue of “a composition betwixt us and them, which we for reverence to God and to the Church our mother had granted the same unto them; and also for divers alms to be given to our citizens and other poor and impotent of our city in an almshouse by the keeper of the same for ever. And it was not our intentions that these men, the tenants of the bishop, dean, and chapter should have nor enjoy our laws and customs, unless after the same manner as we enjoy them” – that is, as they went on carefully to explain, every one must acknowledge law as well as privilege, and be subject like the citizens to authority. They were all to be obedient to the Bailiff for the execution of the King’s writs; nor could they claim any immunities or independent jurisdiction in the King’s highway, seeing that all offenders taken there were to be judged by the city Bailiff. If the peace or the tranquillity of Hereford was disturbed by the tenants of any fee, the city Bailiff, “taking with him the bailiff of that fee and twelve of the most discreetest and stoutest men of the whole city,” might “by all way of rigour” compel the offenders to come before them, and force them to end their discords and make amends; if they refused, the whole community “shall account and hold them as rebels; and that they come not among them in their congregations.”⁵⁹² All bailiffs, whether of Church estates or others, were bound to help the chief Bailiff of the city in apprehending thieves and malefactors and keeping order. A vagabond, even if he were an ecclesiastical tenant, who made a noise at night “to the terror of his fellow-citizens,” might be taken up by any inhabitant and brought to the city jail till one o’clock the next day; when, in polite recognition of the lower jurisdictions, he was solemnly handed over in a public place to the bailiff of his own fee, by him to be kept in prison for a day and a night, and then returned to the city prison, “there to stay until he hath made amends as the Bailiff and commonalty shall think fit.” The tenants of the various fees were allowed to plead in the town courts at their pleasure, a privilege not granted to aliens; and in matters touching frankpledge, or anything “which could not be amended in the courts of those lords,” the city claimed rights of arbitration, and power to determine such cases “according to the laws of the city and not according to the customs, unless it be by special favour of the commonalty.”⁵⁹³ All questions concerning lands and tenements in the city were to be decided by the free citizens only; and if ecclesiastical tenants refused to submit to the jurisdiction of the city magistrates and absented themselves from the court, “then our chief Bailiff, calling unto him six or more witnesses of his citizens, shall go to the cathedral church, and there before the chapter shall notify or declare the disobedience of their bailiffs and of their tenants.” If the canons would not assist or agree, the Bailiff should announce that he must then proceed himself to administer full justice, though “by his will or knowledge he would not hurt the liberties of their mother the Church.” This concession to ecclesiastical sensibilities was apparently looked on by the men of Hereford as a proof of fine magnanimity. “And it was not wont so to be done, but that there was a composition had between us, which we for the reverence of God and the tranquillity of their tenants and our citizens, had granted unto them.”