Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

The Hanseatic League, however, had now come to an end of its triumphs. From this time the English pressed them hard. A law which forbade the import of silk and the export of undressed cloths struck a heavy blow at their trade. Then came the order that Rhine wine must only be carried in English ships. Officials used their infinite powers of annoyance with hearty good will, and the merchant who landed with his goods, harassed first by the relentless officers sitting at the receipt of custom, and then thwarted in every possible way by the Mayor and corporation,²⁰⁶ was at last driven by public abuse behind the walls of the Steel Yard, so that in 1490 a member of the Hanse dared scarcely show himself in the streets of London.

Meanwhile the great confederation of Commonwealths itself showed grave signs of falling asunder. The bigger towns that no longer needed the protection of the association were quite ready to forsake it, and in 1501 began to refuse to bring their cloth to the Staple at Bruges, and to look for freer conditions of trade. At the same time the monopoly of the League was being threatened on all sides. The Prussian and Livonian towns treated them as enemies. A Dutch fleet competed with them in the Baltic. A Danish trading company had risen to dispute their monopoly in Denmark. The Swedes shut them out. The Norwegians made intermittent experiments at independence. At last in 1478 came the worst calamity that could befall their trade, the capture of Novgorod by the Muscovites, with the destruction of its free government and the ruin of its position as one of the commercial capitals of the world.

With the demolition of the League factory, the loss of all its possessions in the city, and the whole dislocation of the Eastern traffic, the supremacy of the Hanseatic Confederation was shattered, as the supremacy of the Italians in the Southern trade had been shattered half a century before by the conquest of Alexandria. English Adventurers naturally saw in every fresh trouble that assailed their rivals a new argument for aggression, and welcomed in Henry the Seventh a leader equal to the great occasion. Never had they found a better friend, or one who so finely interpreted the popular instinct of his time. How completely his determination to strengthen by every means in his power the position of the Adventurers in Antwerp against the Hanseatic traders at Bruges, and to bind England and Burgundy together into a united commercial state, fell in with the needs and temper of his people was strikingly shown after a two years’ interruption of commerce with the Low Countries caused by the affair of Perkin Warbeck, when a burst of popular joy hailed the renewal of trade, and the wild enthusiasm of the people gave to the treaty of 1496 which restored the old kindly relations the high-sounding name of the Intercursus Magnus.

The big name has, as usual, imposed a little on later generations, and greater treaties have gone unnoticed for want of an equally pompous title. At first, indeed, amid the political disquiet and the trade depression which marked the early years of his reign, Henry went to work slowly and patiently, and in 1486 even confirmed the Utrecht treaty of 1474 which ensured a number of privileges to the Hanse. But this policy of peace was only assumed for a brief space while he was making ready for war. In 1486 he renewed the commercial treaty made by Edward with Britanny in 1467.²⁰⁷ The real campaign, however, may be said to have opened by the Navigation Act of 1489, when the shipping trade was definitely taken under State protection. And what that State protection implied was at once shown in a series of commercial treaties with almost every trading country of Europe, whether its traffic lay in the northern or the southern seas. Building up on every hand alliances against the Hanseatic Confederation he steadily drew to himself the friendship of the Scandinavian peoples tired of the domination of the League. In 1489 he sent an embassy (two of the deputation being Lynn merchants), to make terms for a commercial alliance with Denmark and Norway, and won from the Northern powers freedom of trade for the English in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, with the right to acquire land, to form corporations and choose aldermen, and to be under special protection of the Danish King.²⁰⁸ To defeat the pretensions of Danzig he turned to the Livonian towns, and by treaty with Riga attempted to secure a Russian trade which might open the way of Novgorod and the East to English Adventurers – an attempt which however was frustrated a few years later.²⁰⁹ A conference was held in 1491 at Antwerp with the Hanseatic envoys, whom Henry with diplomatic insolence kept idly waiting for four weeks till the messengers he had sent to Denmark with friendly proposals of a treaty as unfavourable as possible to the interests of the Hanse, returned with their answer. The promise of this inauspicious opening for the League was amply fulfilled in the long negotiations which lasted at Antwerp from 1491 to 1499, and in which the foreigner was consistently humbled before the triumphant Merchant Adventurer, all his compromises rejected so far as they tended to limit the freedom of the English trader, and the League compelled to accept terms ruinous to its interests and disastrous to its great tradition of supremacy.²¹⁰

The story of these Antwerp negotiations gives us a true measure of the place gained during the last hundred years by the Merchant Adventurers in the North, where, having dealt the last blows to the ancient company of the Staple, and broken the power of the Hanseatic League, their fleets now sailed triumphantly on every sea. And yet this was but half their work; for the North was a small thing to win unless they could also load English vessels with the cargoes of the East and the tribute of the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean. Until the middle of the fifteenth century the trade of the eastern Mediterranean had been altogether carried on by Italians.²¹¹ It was only in 1432 that the French merchant Jacques Coeur (the stories of whose wealth and power read like fables beside the modest doings of our native traders), had sent out some ships to take part in the Eastern trade; and the Levant was not really opened to Western merchants till 1442, when the Venetians were driven out of Egypt and the monopoly of the Italians broken up. It was very soon after that a Bristol merchant, Sturmys, fitted out probably the first English ship that visited the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. But the new inheritors of the East were received with bitter jealousies. Rival vessels fought for the spoils and carried off the booty like common pirates; and the Genoese traders in their anger seized Sturmys’ ship on its return voyage and robbed it of its cargo of spices and green pepper. He reckoned his loss at 6,000 francs, and on his complaint to the government all the Genoese merchants in London were thrown into prison until they should give bonds for the payment of this sum.²¹²

The question of the Mediterranean was thus vigorously opened. In London, indeed, the Italians might securely reckon on hard treatment. Merchants just beginning to feel their strength, half-ruined Staplers, London shopkeepers and manufacturers, all alike hated their Italian rivals with a common hatred, and were crying out for the most decisive measures against foreign competition. Less careful than their King of nursing political alliances²¹³ in view of foreign wars and complications, the traders boldly proposed a bill in the Parliament of 1439 to forbid the Venetians from carrying any wares save those of their own manufacture – a measure which if it had passed would have practically annihilated the whole Venetian trade to England. Their next proposal was a law to forbid selling anything to the Genoese or carrying anything to their port. Steadily supported as the Lombards were by the King against the people, they nevertheless saw their privileges from this time limited step by step; and once after the persecution of 1455 in London even attempted to leave the capital for ever. The great days of their trade monopoly were gone. Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third laid heavy burdens on them. Henry the Seventh kept them dependent on his arbitrary will for a very slight increase of freedom, such as he might see fit to grant from time to time, tried to limit their gains, and in the very first year of his reign forbade them to carry French woad or wine, or silk goods, and further hindered them in the export of wool.

At this time the population of the Venetian Republic was bigger than that of all England, and English traders had a good many other affairs on their hands beside their quarrel with Venice. The dispute, nevertheless, did not languish. No sooner were Henry’s regulations proclaimed in 1485 than English merchants set sail for Crete, bought up the stores of malmsey there,²¹⁴ and carried them off to the Netherlands under the very eyes of the Venetian captains. Venice passed a law against such traffic, and in the stress of anxiety as to the English competition took to building better ships to maintain her own carrying trade; while England retorted by setting up a monopoly of her own wool in revenge for the Venetian monopoly of wine.

Meanwhile, the quick-witted Florentines, driven out of traditional routine by the intensity of the long competition for supremacy, had begun to doubt the value for them of the old policy of naval protection which the city had shared with Venice and Genoa; and had frankly adopted in 1480 a system of free-trade. In Constantinople and Egypt Florence began again to hold her own against Venice and to win back command of Eastern markets, and she eagerly welcomed English wool merchants to her port at Pisa.²¹⁵ In 1485, the year when England entered into the lists with Venice, these had become so numerous and powerful a body that a consul was appointed over them; and five years later, Henry made a commercial treaty with Florence which was one of the most remarkable acts of his reign. By its provisions English merchants undertook to carry every year to Florence sufficient wool to supply all the Italian States save Venice, and in return they were given every privilege their hearts desired.²¹⁶ The only resource left to the Venetians was to forbid that any wine should be shipped from Crete to Pisa, so that English vessels which went out laden with wool finding no return cargo should be driven to sail home empty. Henry immediately set such heavy import duties on malmsey in England that the Venetians, seeing their wine-trade on the point of ruin, bowed at last to the inevitable. The victory of the English merchants was finally proclaimed when Henry in 1507 only consented to renew the charter that gave Venetians rights of trade in England on condition that they bound themselves to do no carrying trade between the Netherlands and England, but to leave that to the Merchant Adventurers.²¹⁷

Meanwhile, in all the ports visited by English ships between the Mediterranean and the Channel the same buoyant spirit of successful enterprise vanquished every obstacle. Englishmen had always traded much with their fellow-subjects in Aquitaine. From the days of St. Thomas Canterbury had dealings with the wine-growers of the south.²¹⁸ Ships of Bordeaux were known in every port of the Channel, and in 1350, 141 vessels laden with wine sailed thence to London alone,²¹⁹ while the early wealth of Bristol had been created by the cargoes of wool carried from its port to feed the Gascon manufactories, and the casks of wine sent back to fill its cellars. Conditions so pleasant for the Bristol burghers were rudely changed when in 1445 Bordeaux fell into the hands of the French, and English traders instead of being the masters had to go humbly at the bidding of the men of Bordeaux with a red cross on their backs, doing business only in the town, or going into the country under the guardianship of a police agent. But if the burghers of the later fifteenth century cared nothing for the re-conquest of the French provinces, on the other hand they were determined not to lose their trade. The wool dealers, shut out of Bordeaux, turned to the North, to Rouen and Calais, changed their wool there for the wine of Niederburgund, and so started the woollen manufactures of Normandy, while those of Bordeaux declined. By a succession of commercial treaties²²⁰ and by the Navigation Act of 1489, which shut out Gascon ships from the English wine trade, Henry secured for English merchants in Bordeaux such adequate protection that the efforts of Louis the Twelfth to limit their freedom of trade by passing a Navigation Act of his own were utterly vain. The Bordeaux citizens, filled with impotent rage, watched the English traders going up and down the land, 6,000 to 8,000 of them, as they averred, armed with sticks, and scouring the country for wine.

The ports of Spain and Portugal also were visited by increasing numbers of English vessels on their way to the Mediterranean, and old trading alliances were renewed with countries whose harbours were such valuable resting places.²²¹ There had long been commercial treaties with Castile and Catalonia, who competed for the profits to be won by carrying to England Spanish iron and fruits along with the wine and woad of neighbouring lands. But Henry the Seventh took the occasion of the negotiations for the Spanish marriage in 1489 to stipulate anew for freedom of trade and protection of English ships; while at the same time the English merchants asserted that by the new Navigation Act the whole export trade was now their exclusive right, and under the plea that their ships could not make the voyage to Spain unless they had a certainty of coming back well laden, forbade the carrying of Toulouse woad and Gascony wine in Spanish ships. By this time the Englishman had as usual roused the fear and hatred of the native merchants, and the Spaniards violently resisted the new policy. Heavy tolls were imposed on either side to ruin the trade of the other, and in one season eight hundred English ships were sent home empty from Seville because the patriotic Spanish dealers with one accord refused their wares to the enemy. Again fortune came to help the pertinacity of the Adventurers. In 1492 Spain drove the Jews and Moors from her shores. But their business simply fell into alien hands waiting to receive it, and the hated English merchants flocked to Spanish harbours now swept of their old rivals, and sailed back to England laden with the gold of the New World.²²²

Nor was the good chance that favoured them in Portugal less wonderful. With the traders of Lisbon and Oporto England had entered into a commercial treaty in the middle of the fourteenth century – a treaty which was altered in 1386 to include the whole of Portugal.²²³ But by some happy destiny whose favours strewed the path of English traders, they asked and obtained in 1458 a revision of old agreements so as to secure the utmost advantage for their own interests, and all this had been completed just before the discovery of the Cape route gave to Portugal its enormous naval importance and threw Eastern commerce into a new channel. The quarrel with Venice inspired the English with increased ardour in their friendship for the new masters of the spice trade; and when Portuguese dealers invited English merchants to make their bargains for Eastern wares in Lisbon instead of journeying to Venice, these gathered in such numbers to the new emporium of Indian goods that their own shipping failed to carry the wealth offered to them and the merchants had to hire Portuguese vessels.²²⁴

Thus it was that in the face of the powerful confederations that held the trade of the Northern and the Southern Seas English merchants were laying violent hands on the commerce of the world. They had vanquished their rivals in the north, while in the south they had firmly planted themselves in every important trading port along the western coast of Europe, and competed with the Italian Republics not only for their own carrying trade but for that of the Netherlands as well. If in the reign of Edward the Third practically the whole of the foreign commerce of England was carried in foreign vessels, in the reign of Henry the Seventh the great bulk of the trade had passed into English hands. British merchants were to be found in every port from Alexandria to Reykjavik, and wherever they touched left behind them an organized and firmly established trade. As we have seen, their battle for supremacy in commerce had in its beginnings been fought by free-traders and pirates warring against the orderly forces of organized protection; but the final victory was awarded to them in their later stage of a company of monopolists sustained and cherished by the State. The question, indeed, of how far protection contributed to the success of the English or to the loss of the foreigner is far from being a simple one. For in its first stages the work done by protection may possibly consist for a time mainly in the abolition of privilege, and this process may pass by very slow and imperceptible degrees to its last stage, that of conferring privilege. It is, therefore, hard to decipher the lesson when we are studying a commerce where protection has but begun its work in conflict with a commerce when that work is perfected. In the history of the later fifteenth century, moreover, the problem is yet further complicated by the present working of those vast forces which make or unmake the fortunes of continents, and before which the wisest policies of States, policies of protection or of free-trade or of any other elaborate product of human intelligence, are powerful as an army of phantoms.

CHAPTER IV

THE COMMON LIFE OF THE TOWN

We who have been trained under the modern system have forgotten how people lived in the old days, when the necessity of personal effort was forced home to every single member of the fellowship of freemen who had life or liberties or property to protect. For in spite of the vigour and independence of our modern local administration every Englishman now looks ultimately for the laws that rule his actions, and the force that protects his property, to the great central authority which has grown up outside and beyond all local authorities. He is subject to it in all the circumstances of life; whether it exercises wholly new functions unknown to the middle ages; or takes over to itself powers which once belonged to inferior bodies, and makes them serve national instead of local ends; whether it asserts a new direction and control over municipal administration; or whether, instead of replacing the town authorities by its own rule, it upholds them with the support of its vast resources and boundless strength. By whatever right the State holds its manifold powers, whether by inheritance, or purchase, or substitution, or influence, or the superiority of mere might, he feels its working on every hand. It is to him visibly charged with all the grand operations of government.

But to a burgher of the middle ages the care and protection of the State were dim and shadowy compared with the duties and responsibilities thrown on the townspeople themselves. For in the beginnings of municipal life the affairs of the borough great and small, its prosperity, its safety, its freedom from crime, the gaiety and variety of its life, the regulation of its trade, were the business of the citizens alone. Fenced in by its wall and ditch²²⁵– fenced in yet more effectually by the sense of danger without, and the clinging to privileges won by common effort that separated it from the rest of the world – the town remained isolated and self-dependent. Within these narrow borders the men who went out to win the carrying trade of the world learned their first lessons in organization, and acquired the temper by virtue of which Englishmen were to build up at home a great political society and to conquer abroad the supremacy of the seas – the temper which we recognize in an early confession of faith put forth by the citizens of Hereford as to the duties which a man owed to his commonwealth and to its chief magistrate. “And he to be our head next under the King, whom we ought in all things touching our King or the state of our city to obey chiefly in three things – first, when we are sent for by day or by night to consult of those things which appertain to the King or the state of the city; secondly, to answer if we offend in any point contrary to our oath, or our fellow-citizens; thirdly, to perform the affairs of the city at our own charges, if so be they may be finished either sooner or better than by any other of our citizens.”²²⁶ Public claims were insistent, and under the primitive conditions of communal life, in small societies where every man lived in the direct light of public opinion, no citizen was allowed to count carefully the cost of sacrifice, or stint the measure of his service, when the welfare of his little community was at stake. His duties were plainly laid down before him, and they were rigidly exacted. According to the accepted theory it was understood that all private will and advantage were to be sacrificed to the common good, and Langland speaks bitterly of the “individualists” of his day.

 
“For they will and would as best were for themselves,
Though the King and the commons all the cost had.
All reason reproveth such imperfect people.”²²⁷
 

I. The inhabitants of a mediæval borough were subject to a discipline as severe as that of a military state of modern times. Threatened by enemies on every side, constantly surrounded by perils, they had themselves to bear the whole charges of fortification and defence. If a French fleet appeared on the coast, if Welsh or Scotch armies made a raid across the frontier, if civil war broke out and opposing forces marched across the country, every town had to look to its own safety. The inhabitants served under a system of universal conscription. At the muster-at-arms held twice a year poor and rich appeared in military array with such weapons as they could bring forth for the King’s service; the poor marching with knife or dagger or hatchet; the prosperous burghers, bound according to mediæval ideas to live “after their degree,” displaying mail or wadded coats, bucklers, bows and arrows, swords, or even a gun. At any moment this armed population might be called out to active service. “Concerning our bell,” say the citizens of Hereford, “we use to have it in a public place where our chief bailiff may come, as well by day as by night, to give warning to all men living within the said city and suburbs. And we do not say that it ought to ring unless it be for some terrible fire burning any row of houses within the said city, or for any common contention whereby the city might be terribly moved, or for any enemies drawing near unto the city, or if the city shall be besieged, or any sedition shall be between any, and notice thereof given by any unto our chief bailiff. And in these cases aforesaid, and in all like cases, all manner of men abiding within the city and suburbs and liberties of the city, of what degree soever they be of, ought to come at any such ringing, or motion of ringing, with such weapons as fit their degree.”²²⁸ At the first warning of an enemy’s approach the mayor or bailiff became supreme military commander.²²⁹ It was his office to see that the panic-stricken people of the suburbs were gathered within the walls and given house and food, that all meat and drink and chattels were made over for the public service, and all armour likewise carried to the Town Hall, that every inhabitant or refugee paid the taxes required for the cost of his protection, that all strong and able men “which doth dwell in the city or would be assisted by the city in anything” watched by day and night, and that women and clerics who could not watch themselves found at their own charge substitutes “of the ablest of the city.”²³⁰

If frontier towns had periods of comparative quiet, the seaports, threatened by sea as by land, lived in perpetual alarm, at least so long as the Hundred Years’ War protracted its terrors. When the inhabitants had built ships to guard the harbour, and provided money for their victualling and the salaries of the crew, they were called out to repair towers and carry cartloads of rocks or stones to be laid on the walls “for defending the town in resisting the king’s enemies.”²³¹ Guns had to be carried to the church or the Common House on sleds or laid in pits at the town gates, and gun-stones, saltpetre, and pellet powder bought. For weeks together watchmen were posted in the church towers with horns to give warning if a foe appeared; and piles of straw, reeds and wood were heaped up on the sea-coast to kindle beacons and watch-fires. Even if the townsfolk gathered for a day’s amusement to hear a play in the Court-house a watch was set lest the enemy should set fire to their streets – a calamity but too well known to the burghers of Rye and Southampton.²³²

Inland towns were in little better case. Civil war, local rebellion, attacks from some neighbouring lord, outbreaks among the followers of a great noble lodged within their walls at the head of an army of retainers, all the recurring incidents of siege and pitched battle rudely reminded inoffensive shopkeepers and artizans of their military calling. Owing to causes but little studied, local conflicts were frequent, and they were fought out with violence and determination. At the close of the fourteenth century a certain knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of Stanley, raised eight hundred fighting men “to destroy and hurt the commons of Chester”; and these stalwart warriors broke into the abbey, seized the wine and dashed the furniture in pieces, and when the mayor and sheriff came to the rescue nearly killed the sheriff.²³³ When in 1441 the Archbishop of York determined to fight for his privileges in Ripon Fair he engaged two hundred men-at-arms from Scotland and the Marches at sixpence or a shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman, Sir John Plumpton, gathered seven hundred men; and at the battle that ensued, more than a thousand arrows were discharged by them.²³⁴

Within the town territory the burghers had to serve at their own cost and charges; but when the King called out their forces to join his army the municipal officers had to get the contingent ready, to provide their dress or badges, to appoint the captain, and to gather in money from the various parishes for the soldiers’ pay, “or else the constables to be set in prison to abide to such time as it be content and paid.”²³⁵ When they were sent to a distance their fellow townsmen bought provisions of salt fish and paniers or bread boxes for the carriage of their food,²³⁶ and reluctantly provided a scanty wage, which was yet more reluctantly doled out to the soldier by his officer, and perhaps never reached his pocket at all.²³⁷ Universal conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace. To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the market stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and ungrateful service where reward and plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand; and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which they had measured all the misery.²³⁸ When the common people dreamed of a brighter future, their simple hope was that every maker of deadly weapons should die by his own tools; for in that better time

 
“Battles shall never eft (again) be, ne man bear edge-tool,
And if any man [smithy] it, be smit therewith to death.”²³⁹
 

II. Nor even in times of peace might the burghers lay aside their arms, for trouble was never far from their streets. Every inhabitant was bound to have his dagger or knife or Irish “skene,” in case he was called out to the king’s muster or to aid in keeping the king’s peace. But daggers which were effective in keeping the peace were equally effective in breaking it, and the town records are full of tales of brawls and riots, of frays begun by “railing with words out of reason,” or by “plucking a man down by the hair of his head,” but which always ended in the appearance of a short dagger, “and so drew blood upon each other.”²⁴⁰ For the safety of the community – a safety which was the recognized charge of every member of these simple democratic states – each householder was bound to take his turn in keeping nightly watch and ward in the streets. It is true indeed that reluctant citizens constantly by one excuse or another sought to escape a painful and thankless duty: whether it was whole groups of inhabitants sheltering themselves behind legal pretexts; or sturdy rebels breathing out frank defiance of the town authorities. Thus in Aylesbury, according to the constable’s report, one “Reygg kept a house all the year till the watch time came. And when he was summoned to the watch then came Edward Chalkyll ‘fasesying’ and said he should not watch for no man and thus bare him up, and that caused the other be the bolder for to bar the King’s watch… He saith and threateneth us with his master,” add the constables, “and thus we be over ‘crakyd’ that we dare not go, for when they be ‘may ten’ they be the bolder.” John Bossey “said the same wise that he would not watch for us”; and three others “lacked each of them a night.”²⁴¹ But in such cases the mayor’s authority was firmly upheld by the whole community, every burgher knowing well that if any inhabitant shirked his duty a double burden fell upon the shoulder of his neighbour.

III. All inhabitants of a borough were also deeply interested in the preservation of the boundaries which marked the extent of their dominions, the “liberties” within which they could enforce their own law, regulate trade, and raise taxes. Century after century the defence of the frontier remained one of the urgent questions of town politics, insistent, perpetually recurring, now with craft and treachery, now with violence and heated passion breaking into sudden flame. Every year the mayor and corporation made a perambulation of the bounds and inspected the landmarks;²⁴² the common treasure was readily poured out if lawsuits and bribes were needed to ascertain and preserve the town’s rights; and if law failed, the burghers fell back without hesitation on personal force. In Canterbury the town and the convent of Christ Church were at open war about this question as about many others. The monks remained unconvinced even though the mayor and council of thirty-six periodically “walked the bounds,” giving copper coins at the various turning points to “divers children” that they might remember the limits of the franchise, while they themselves were refreshed after their trouble by a “potation” in a field near Fordwich. At one time the quarrel as to the frontier raged round a gigantic ash-tree – the old land-mark where the liberties of the city touched those of Fordwich – which was in 1499 treacherously cut down by the partizans of Christ Church; the Canterbury men with the usual feastings and a solemn libation of wine set up a new boundary stone. At another time the dispute shifted to where at the west gate of the town the river wound with uncertain and changing course that left frontiers vague and undefined. A low marshy ground called the “Rosiers” was claimed by the mayor as under his jurisdiction, while the prior asserted that it was within the county of Kent; and for thirty years the question was fought out in the law courts. On July 16th, 1500, the mayor definitely asserted his pretensions by gathering two hundred followers arrayed in manner of war to march out to the Rosiers. There certain monks and servants of the prior were taking the air; one protested he had been “late afore sore sick and was walking in the field for his recreation”; another had a sparrow-hawk on his fist, and the servants declared they were but peaceful haymakers; but all had apparently gone out ready for every emergency, for at the appearance of the enemy bows and arrows, daggers, bills, and brigandiers, were produced from under the monks’ frocks and the smocks of the haymakers. In the battle that followed the monks were beaten, and the citizens cut down willows and stocked up the dyke made in the river by the convent; and boldly proceeded the next day²⁴³ to other outrages. The matter was brought to judgement, and a verdict given against the mayor for riot – a verdict which that official, however, lightly disregarded. It was in vain that the prior, wealthy and powerful as he was, and accustomed to so great influence at court, appealed to the Star Chamber to have the penalty enforced, for no further steps were taken by the government. It probably judged wisely, since in such a matter the temper of the citizens ran high; and the rectification of frontiers was resented as stoutly as a new delimitation of kingdoms and empires to-day.