Buch lesen: «Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2», Seite 19

The main result of this breaking up of the “communitas” of Lynn into three fractions which could never again be united, was the final affirmation of power in the hands of a small ruling class. In Lynn it was always the merchants who conquered. One by one they vanquished their opponents, the Church, the mediocres, the inferiores. A singular and pathetic unity pervades the history of the town from first to last. Lynn had won from land and sea a little space of ground, a little tenure of life, and there, lighted by a passing gleam of beneficent fortune, it made its brief experiment – a single experience consistent from first to last, and scarcely subjected to accident or change. The old borough still retains some subtle charm of a lingering distinction. Even now as we look at the homes of its last traders – the heavy double doors which shut off the great court from the street, the houses built round three sides of the open square, and lifted at the back straight out of the waters of canals cut to give passage to the ships and barges which drifted up on every rising tide, almost brushing as they passed the windows that opened on rich chambers dark with carved work in wood – we seem to breath the strange air of a remote place and time in which this old city of dead merchants lies ever steeped. The very fashion of the place still affirms perpetually that when the end came the ancient rulers of Lynn made a proud exit, bequeathing their heritage to none, and leaving their silent dwellings to suffer indeed the presence of strangers, but with no pretence of acquiescing welcome.

CHAPTER XVI
THE COMMON COUNCIL OF SANDWICH

The attempt in various boroughs to create a municipal house of commons for the protection of popular liberties is so striking a fact in the town history of the fifteenth century that, for the sake of again observing the experiment under a new set of conditions, we may take one last example of the building up of a representative council. The case of Sandwich differs considerably from that either of Norwich or of Lynn, though one significant fact is common to all three boroughs. In each of these towns the effort to work out the new constitution was frustrated; and, singularly enough, it was frustrated in every case, not by any evidence of inherent weakness in the scheme itself, but by the operation of external and accidental causes. In Norwich the system was possibly wrecked by difficulties in the working of what we may call foreign affairs – that is by the ill-defined and impossible relations of the town to the country, when the town claimed to interfere with interests over which its authority was limited, while these interests had no regular representation in its councils, so that intrigue came in to replace recognized and orderly influence, and the natural distinctions of parties within the town were submerged in factions more or less external and artificial, and in the corrupt political ambitions to which these gave opportunity. In Lynn an equally artificial state of parties was created and maintained by the miniature strife between the Church as a temporal power and the civil government. The existence of a large body of commons delivered by the Bishop from taking up the just burdens of citizenship, as dependents on his protection, withdrawn from a full share in the responsibilities of their fellow-townsmen and used as a sort of occupying army for the maintenance of his rights over the borough, was fatal to the healthy developement of municipal self-government. But in Sandwich an altogether new problem is suggested – the problem of local self-government in the members of a confederated state, in which the several communities might tend towards democracy while the central administration remained the stronghold of aristocratic tradition.

For Sandwich must not be considered as if it stood alone like Norwich, independent and self-contained. Under the constitution of the Cinque Ports, as we have seen, certain weighty matters, such as military defence, finance, foreign trade and foreign traders, the higher matters of justice, and so on, were under a central government represented either at Dover or at the Brodhull, and the several towns were mainly concerned with local affairs. It is possible that in the conduct of daily business of a comparatively simple kind there was less necessity than in the greater boroughs for the supremacy of experts, and apparently administration did not so soon harden into the despotism of an oligarchy. There was much, moreover, which was favourable to popular movements in the general conditions of Kent and Sussex, which, even as early as the twelfth century, were centres of important mining and manufacturing industries, and in whose midst there arose more than once movements of liberal and radical thought like those which in our days have come from the coal-fields and iron mines of the north. The trading vessels which put out from the ports across the German Ocean kept the people in constant touch with the commercial towns of the north European coast where municipal life was most vigorous and enduring. And of the strangers to whom Sandwich gave shelter, till at last almost a third of its streets were occupied by foreigners, the main body were traders or artizans from the Netherlands who, wherever they sought refuge after their desperate battle against oligarchy in their own country, must have carried with them their sturdy creed of independence and freedom of political discussion, and would have inevitably ranged themselves on the popular side of town politics, whether as enfranchised voters or as unenfranchised talkers.

Thus the men of the Cinque Ports long preserved a fine tradition of vigorous independence; and in Sandwich, as in the other ports, the burghers actually maintained in practice something of the early democratic theory of government. The mayor, jurats, and other officers, elected by the whole commonalty,⁸⁵⁶ carried on the administrative and judicial work, but when a question arose as to the making of new laws or the granting of cesses the whole people were called together to a hornblowing,⁸⁵⁷ and “the mayor and commonalty at a common assembly may make such decrees as they think proper.” Any gathering of freemen, no matter how small, who assembled with the mayor, was “deemed a meeting of the whole body,” and its ordinances were consequently binding; but the mayor might send the common wardman, or whom he pleased, to shut up all the windows of cellars and shops and so forcibly persuade dealers and artizans to join the congregation.⁸⁵⁸

This mode of government by a single council of twelve checked by the referendum lasted unchanged till the middle of the fifteenth century; and it was certainly less difficult for the system that in larger boroughs so quickly developed into the rule of a plutocracy, to keep its democratic character in a small community which had only increased from the three hundred and eighty-three inhabited houses of the Conqueror’s time to four hundred and twenty households in 1565,⁸⁵⁹ and in which the forces that made for freedom and popular government were strong. It would seem indeed that the mayor’s difficulty was not so much to force the freemen to fulfil their civic duties, as to check the too active zeal of inhabitants not enfranchised, and Sandwich had to reiterate its laws that only free “barons,” indwellers, and householders, should attend at elections, and at last had to inflict on any offender a fine of 21d. and the loss of his upper garment.⁸⁶⁰

In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, there was a movement to amend the primitive constitution of the town. The first change was probably intended to bring Sandwich into harmony with the prevailing fashion. In 1437 its eight wards were made into twelve, and a jurat sat over each, with power to appoint every year his own constable and deputy constable.⁸⁶¹ Other reforms followed under the auspices of Richard Cok, who was mayor five times in thirteen years, and who was again chosen for the sixth time in 1470 to make peace with Edward the Fourth after his triumph over Henry the Sixth.⁸⁶² During his first mayoralty (in 1441) an order was issued that no one might sit on the bench at court but the mayor, the jurats, and the king’s bailiff; in other words the dignity of the upper chamber was asserted, and all intrusion and interference with its consultations made impossible. The increasing authority of the council was immediately met by an organization of the commons to protect their own interests, such as we have seen at Norwich and Lynn half a century earlier. During Cok’s fifth term of office, in 1454, a representative council of seventy commons was formed, who, with the consent of the mayor and jurats, were to make all manner of elections and all scots and lots. In this way about one citizen householder out of every six was given a share in the government – a scheme so different from that of either Norwich or Lynn that it suggests how far Sandwich must have outstripped those towns in the habit of popular government.

From this time we can trace a steady conflict between the two parties in the town, the official or governing class and the commonalty. The common council was remodelled ten years later, in 1464, and its members reduced to thirty-six. It is very probable that this change was brought about by the policy of the governing class; for at the same time the mayor and jurats set up a claim to be the authoritative judges of the fitness of men sent by the commonalty to serve as councillors, and it was ordained that the people should henceforth nominate forty-eight persons, sixteen out of each parish, and that the mayor and jurats should then choose thirty-six of these to be of the common council. Their triumph, however, was short, for in 1471, immediately after Cok’s last mayoralty, the controlling choice of mayor and jurats was set aside, and it was decided that the commonalty should elect for themselves, without any interference or dictation, twelve men from each of the three parishes to be of the common council, to consult with the mayor and jurats “whenever the mayor pleases” for the benefit and utility of the town, and to make and establish decrees for its profit.⁸⁶³

For over half a century the democratic party had their way. Popular representation was recognized as part of the Sandwich constitution, and so far as the town itself was concerned, it would seem that liberal ideas of government and civic freedom prevailed in a far greater degree than in either Norwich or Lynn. All went well till the time of Henry the Eighth. Then a singular danger declared itself, and the story of the sixteenth century is that of the ruin of popular liberties in Sandwich. The governing class had in each of the Cinque Ports a source of peculiar strength. Out-numbered and out-voted as they might be in each separate port, they reigned supreme in the Brodhull court, where their majority was certain, and where they could carry matters with a high hand; and it was there that the governing bodies of the various ports, all alike threatened with public criticism of their acts and limitation of their powers, formed a combination for the protection of their common interests. All devices to establish freely elected common councils, or any representative bodies to express popular opinion, received their quietus at the Brodhull court in 1526. The respectable assembly of mayors, jurats, and delegates there gathered passed a resolution that the duties of electing the mayor and jurats, receiving the king’s bailiff, and appointing the bailiffs to Yarmouth, should be given over in each port to a committee of thirty-seven persons; and in each corporate town to a body of twenty-four, who were to be nominated by the mayor and jurats.⁸⁶⁴ In 1528 a new mayor of Sandwich was elected after the new fashion, the whole commonalty nominating three jurats, one of whom was then chosen by the appointed committee of thirty-seven.⁸⁶⁵ That the freemen did not give up their rights without a fight we may judge from the fact that in 1535 they again elected their mayor after the ancient custom of the town; but it was a losing battle, and as a matter of fact no popular liberties survived this century. The common council was reduced to twenty-four members, and both the upper and lower councils alike were appointed by the mayor and jurats. The election of the mayor was taken from the people, and the jurats succeeded in turn to the post by order of seniority.⁸⁶⁶ Finally even the right of the commons to vote at assemblies was taken from them in 1595, to be restored in 1599, and again taken away “for their insolence and disorder” in 1603.

In Sandwich, therefore, it is obvious that the reform movement failed, not through inherent vice or defect of its own, but by the overpowering pressure of an external force – on this occasion by the federal council of the united states that made up the confederation of the Cinque Ports. No doubt the easy victory of the whole confederation was made possible by the decaying fortunes of the town; for at the time of its defeat the vigour and the glory of Sandwich had departed. Works for the preservation of the port had been constantly going on since the thirteenth century when the artificial canal known as the Delf was dug, and put under the charge of overseers; though after a brave struggle of two hundred years diggers and sluice-makers could no longer hold their own against winds and sands that silted up their harbour. In 1483 the town, under the threat of breaking up the whole wall they had built, ordered the gentlemen and yeomen of the country who had pastures by the stream to scour their dykes and make sluices; though neither the forced efforts of the county squires, nor the royal grant to the town in 1548 of all the plate and treasures of the parish churches to carry on the works of the harbour;⁸⁶⁷ nor a later Act of Parliament for deepening the Stour, could rescue Sandwich from its doom. In its decrepitude liberty slipped from its grasp. But the disaster of a later time must not wholly obscure with its shadow the records of days when Sandwich was rejoicing in brighter fortunes. If in the decay of its prosperity and hope the oligarchy fixed their yoke on the neck of the people, and inaugurated the rule of the plutocrats, their victory was not quickly won; for throughout the fifteenth century, as we have seen, when by the necessity of the times the question of stricter organization of public life was here as elsewhere forced into prominence, the commons of Sandwich neither renounced their rights to self-government, nor failed to take an adequate part in moulding the new constitution. It is indeed not impossible that the oligarchic congregation of the Brodhull mainly drew its force for the suppression of popular independence from the support or even the instigation of the Court; for we can easily understand that at a time when under the policy of the Tudors England figured as a great power in Europe, laden with obligations and with hatreds, her ministers were driven to look anxiously to her first line of defence against foreign foes. The policy of securing the main ports in the hands of a little group of loyal officials, easily controlled from headquarters, and no friends to common riots or rebellions, must inevitably have followed the revival of the ancient tradition which saw in the safety of the realm the whole purpose of the Cinque Port confederation.

CHAPTER XVII
CONCLUSION

With the reign of Henry the Eighth a wholly new chapter opens in the history of the towns. In the preceding centuries we have traced their gradual rise out of obscure poverty into an illustrious opulence and dignity. Already in the time of Langland the poet’s imagination was arrested by the exalted position of the mayor, the “days-man” who could lay his hand upon the highest and the lowest – on the royal majesty and the mean people of the commune. When, a hundred and fifty years later, another poet pictures the court of Fame, where she sits he sees in the crowd of applicants who press round the throne to solicit her favours the men of Dartmouth and Portsmouth and Plymouth, the burgesses and bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, mingling with messengers from Thrace and Rounceval. Nor were their claims to stand in such a court but a fantastic fiction of poetry. We have seen how the commune and the borough – originally in spite of their collective character mere feudal lordships like the rest, introduced under the sanction and protection of ordinary feudal custom and according to the fictions of feudal law – became in course of time a potent force for the rending asunder of the mediæval framework of society. Patronized and encouraged by the king, nourished in great measure at the expense of the baronage, lay and ecclesiastical, these insidious communities of the people had gradually revealed a character of their own alien to the whole feudal tradition. Under the shelter of their walls the forces of the middle class were mustered for battle against the ancient supremacy of the nobility and the Church. Charters “for the accommodation of the burgesses in doing their business quietly” became the cover for their irresistible attack; and the common bell which rang out to assemble the congregation of enfranchised burghers perpetually announced in every borough of the kingdom the ultimate triumph of “the common people of the realm.”

 
“Under a glorious cloth of estate …
Encrowned as empress of all this world of fate.”⁸⁶⁸
 

We have also noted the manner in which during these centuries the boroughs remained strongholds of a robust faith in political freedom.⁸⁶⁹ Theories of liberty taught by statesmen and philosophers, and debated by barons and knights in their own manner at Runnymede, on the battle-field, or in the council chamber, assumed in the towns homelier forms, and became the vulgar property of the people. The burgher too had his notion of an ideal freedom – a freedom which had never entered within the range of his experience, but in which he still believed with a transcendent faith. In what manner the faith had come to him it is hard to say, through what legal fiction, from what mysterious tradition, by what dominant instinct of race. To quell the enemy and the accuser he might call to witness Domesday or Magna Charta, or liberties registered in the Old Red Book of the town “as we do think,” or in the customs of the elders; or for lack of better authority, the fable of a lost charter of the Saxon House, or a shadowy local legend, or tale of freedom “long before the Conquest,”⁸⁷⁰ served as evidence of repute. But for the believer testimony was superfluous; the very vagueness of his faith was not without advantages, since the fancied world of the past might be adequately furnished with types of all that was desired in the present. Imagination was stimulated by the rivalry of factions, and political discussion never ceased. No doubt the vulgarization of the notion of freedom, thus thrown into the market-place for burghers to cut and trim to their own needs, has had a permanent effect on English thought.⁸⁷¹ In communities where strictly personal ambition in government was reduced to its lowest expression, where the only possible tyranny was that of a class or of a group, and where the whole society of burghers was nourished on a tradition of equal and indestructible rights, the privilege coveted by ordinary folk was not the pleasure of exercizing authority, but the right to suffer no coercion. Among the townsfolk the “gentleman” was not the man who ruled his neighbour, but the enfranchised equal among his fellows. It may not be altogether fanciful to detect, in the noble translation of a church collect, not only the fine intuition of the scholar, but an echo of the spirit of free and equal liberty that was quickening among the people at large. If the phrase “Cui servire est regnare” carried to English ears a foreign thought, the English words introduced a new and characteristic meaning – “Whose service is perfect freedom.”

Lastly we have seen how chequered was the fate of liberty – how often it was obstructed and impaired in its passage through the market-place and the bye-lanes of the city, driven from shelter to shelter, banished from the Guildhall, mocked by a false homage. Between the twelfth century, when the trading communities had represented a new democracy and led the attack on the then established magnates of society; and the sixteenth century, when a ruling oligarchy had been formed out of their ranks, a vast change had taken place in the political relations of the prosperous middle class. In their conduct of the great struggle for emancipation from the county potentates, feudal or official, and in their development of a general freedom of trade, the more prosperous burghers who had first come to the front in affairs had proved the champions of a new liberty. The strong government which they had established through the administration of a select body of experts had abundantly justified itself in setting the independence of the towns beyond attack; and long before the fifteenth century had opened the boroughs, represented by their magistrates and councillors, held an impregnable position. Meanwhile, however, the wave of industrial progress began slowly to lift up out of their dumb helplessness the masses who had till now learned obedience of poverty and despair, for “While hunger was their master would none strive.” Imperceptibly the whole scene was changed, and a new conflict was seen to be preparing. By the slow changes of time what had been the democracy of 1200 had become the oligarchy of 1500. On the one hand the plutocrats of the boroughs had made their way into the circle of the privileged classes; in a thousand points their interests now coincided with those of the officials and the gentry in the counties; and their conservative instincts had won the confidence and sympathy of the court. On the other hand the humbler sort of traders and artizans, congregated more and more thickly at the busy centres of industry, made familiar with the uses and methods of association, and impatient both of tyranny and of want, were beginning to form a new democracy, and to constitute to the comfortable classes an alarming social danger. In every borough the problems which confront the modern world were formulated. On all side agitators proclaimed the right of the workers to have a voice in the organization of trade, and the right of the common burghers to share in the control of municipal affairs. The demand of the people that government should really be carried on by their consent, so easily stifled in the thirteenth century, became in the fifteenth loud and persistent; and riotous confederacies of labourers and artizans added excitement to the political demonstrations in the streets. A new terror invaded the council-chamber of the Guildhall – the terror of the mob. While the craft-masters hastened to fortify the guild against the forces of misrule, town councillors made strong the borough administration in the interests of good order. The history of the municipalities in the fifteenth century is far from indicating an era of political apathy, or of mere civic indolence and corruption. In the records of the trade fraternities we see the opening of an industrial war. In the constitutions and ordinances of the towns we see the foreshadowing of a political revolution. The original struggle with feudal forces had closed in triumph for the boroughs, and a new conflict now takes its beginning. Faction fights, crafty intrigues, intricate constitutional changes, these signalise the opening of a new controversy – the controversy between the middle and the lower classes.

At the very moment however when this division of social forces had declared itself, and when it seemed as though the attention of England was to be concentrated on the new social problem, the whole movement was suddenly arrested. All speculation as to what might have happened in the course of a natural evolution is utterly vain. It is probable indeed that the poorer classes, unfed, untaught, and undisciplined, were at that time wholly unprepared to enter on any struggle for industrial and political emancipation, and if the battle had been really fought out, must have suffered a crushing defeat. Centuries of discipline have been needed to consolidate their forces, and very possibly the course of freedom was best served by delay. As a matter of fact however the social question was cast aside by external and arbitrary forces. It was engulfed in the political revolution inaugurated by the early Tudors. So violent was the change that it is only in our own age that the controversies which were opening in the fifteenth century have again taken the foremost place.

For from the moment when the history of national politics begins under the Tudor kings, the whole character and significance of the local centres of government undergo a profound change. Henry the Seventh, as we have seen, had laid the foundation of a vast commercial policy; but until the reign of Henry the Eighth, England, unconscious of its capacity and of its destiny, stood aloof from European affairs; and with her small population, her inadequate navy, her somewhat old-fashioned army, her feeble political influence, was little more than an upstart in the august society of continental nations. From this position she was raised by the genius of Wolsey into a State of which it might be said that its Crown “is this day more esteemed than the Emperor’s Crown and all his Empire;” and of whose minister a Venetian ambassador reports that “he is seven times more powerful than the Pope.”⁸⁷² In a very few years England, courted by French and Spanish kings, and able to treat on equal terms with Pope and Emperor, boasted of being mediator and arbiter of European politics. The pride of a great mission exalted the imagination of her people, and a poet of the Renascence in his vision of “all manner of nations” who dwelt on the field of fame, marked the gate of chalcedony which gave entrance to “Anglia.”

 
“The building thereof was passing commendable;
Whereon stood a leopard, crowned with gold and stones,
Terrible of countenance and passing formidable, …
As fiercely frowning as he had been fighting.”⁸⁷³
 

By the royal courage and appetite of Henry the Eighth, bent on making the whole people his accomplices for the carrying out of his personal will, the work of Wolsey was continued, though in a very different temper, and the national pride and confidence pushed to the highest point. If the policy of Cromwell had been fully carried out, the history of the Reformation and the fortunes of Europe might have been reversed by the intervention of England. We can well understand that amid these tremendous schemes local aspirations were forgotten and local quarrellings silenced. To perfect the policy of the new Monarchy the destinies of the several towns were submerged in the destinies of the whole Commonwealth. Sovereigns no longer viewed with interested regard or with indifferent tolerance, as of old,⁸⁷⁴ the growth of borough franchises and the developement of local governments. Street riots were no longer matters of the parish, but of the State. The king’s hand was stretched out over the wealthy corporations whose liberties had grown into such vast proportions, and like the baronage and the Church, the boroughs were laid prostrate before the throne.

For under the Tudor system of government the king was the necessary centre of every interest in the country.⁸⁷⁵ He alone could impose a common policy and give expression to a national will. To him all classes looked to defend their cause and ensure their prosperity, in the implicit faith that he lived for them alone and to perform their will. In the royal power lay the one force by which England could be held together. At an earlier time, indeed, the common folk had repudiated the doctrine of the king’s absolute supremacy as it was now understood. “They say that the king should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods are his: the contrary is true, for then needed him never to set Parliament and to ask good of them.”⁸⁷⁶ But now new maxims were scattered abroad – “that the king can do no wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no more than the king’s goodness thinks fit not to take from him.” Parliament almost ceased to exist, until in course of time, packed with members carefully nominated, and by the craft of the king elaborately duped, it was turned into a mere instrument by which the most ruthless acts of royal aggression could be given the stamp and semblance of law.⁸⁷⁷

The new centralized government was carried on by means of a vast official system which extended from the highest to the lowest departments, and reached out to the farthest limits of the country. In its efficient form it was practically the creation of the first Tudor king. With Warwick the baronial leaders of an earlier time had passed away; and the weakened remnant of the baronage which emerged from the civil wars had been carefully depressed by Henry the Seventh. At the council-board their places were taken by officials who received their orders directly from the king; and when the barons returned to office and council they returned as fellow servants with the new officials, and holding the same functions. Henry the Eighth carried out the same policy. The great nobles might complain of “low-born knaves” who surrounded the king; but when the minister “clapped his rod upon the board” silence fell on an obsequious council – and barons and commons alike trembled before the son of an Ipswich merchant or a Putney blacksmith.