Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

CHAPTER X
THE TOWN OLIGARCHY

It is evident that if the towns had been called on for a confession of faith, the declaration of a pure and unadulterated freedom would have been in every mouth. There remains the question of how far it was found possible to carry that faith into the common practice of daily life.

We have seen how freedom was enthroned at Ipswich before the whole community of townsmen, who with outstretched hands and loud unanimous voice swore before heaven to maintain the liberties of the new republic. If, however, we glance again at Ipswich when it next comes clearly into view, a century after it had obtained its grant of privileges, there is very little trace of a golden age save for publicans and portmen. For in 1321 we find a narrow official class in the noontide of their power. Since there was no fixed day for elections they had been used by “lordly usurpation and private covin” to make bailiffs at their own pleasure secretly without consent of the people; they grievously taxed and amerced the commons for their own private purposes; they used the common seal without the common consent to the great burden and damage of the commonalty; and made new burgesses at their own pleasure without the public knowledge, so as to divide the entrance money among themselves; and by a regular system of forestalling and secret sale, merchants and inn-keepers had combined to rob the commons of their right to free and equal trade.^[450] Against these abuses the burgesses sought to repeat and reinforce the ordinances of the town, but it may well be doubted whether the customary defiance of the laws of 1200 was likely to be corrected by the mere re-enactment or amendment of rules in the book of ordinances.

For it was not in Ipswich alone that the commonalty were held at the mercy of a handful of men in power, without hope of redress through their assemblies or constitutional methods at home. In 1304 justices were sent down from Westminster to inquire into a complaint of “the poor men of our city of Norwich,” where, according to the petition of the commons, the rich, in defiance of all laws against forestalling, bought up victuals and goods before they came into the market, and daily inflicted other grievances on the said poor men “to the manifest deterioration of the city.”^[451] And again in 1307, “les menes gentz de la communaute de la ville de Norweiz” appeal to the king on the ground that an inquiry by justices had been promised them concerning the fines and tallages which weighed them down; the poor people, they said, had been unjustly taxed by the bailiffs and the rich (“les riches”), “but on the hearing, the bailiffs and the rich spoke so fair to the said poor people, promising them redress and that they should have no cause to complain in future, and that no tallage should be levied from them without their common assent, that the poor men ceased from their suit. But now the said bailiffs and rich have levied two hundred marks without warrant and threaten to levy a still higher tallage.”^[452] The law of the matter was clear enough, for only a year or two before the principle that the bailiffs could only assess taxes “by the assent of the whole of the commonalty or of the greater part of the same” had been re-affirmed;^[453] and the king accordingly sent answer, “If tallage have been made without assent of the commonalty, let them have a writ against those who have imposed such tallage to answer before the king, and that henceforth it be not done.”

It is, however, hard to say what amount of relief to the mean folk was actually given by such an order from high quarters. At the very same time, in 1304, the people of the neighbouring borough of Lynn were seeking protection against the ruling burgesses, and charged them with the usual trespasses – with assessing tallages without the unanimous consent of the community; levying these tallages and other great sums of money from the poor and but moderately endowed men of the community; employing the sums thus raised for their own use and not for the advantage of the community or the reparation of the town; forestalling goods on the way to market; and establishing and using corruptions contrary both to common and to merchant law. The great people of Lynn, however, easily put themselves beyond all fear of justice by simply buying from the king in 1305^[454] letters of pardon and release for the crimes of which they were accused – letters which evidently left them free to go on in the same course. Upon which the people instinctively turned to their natural ally, the lord of the manor himself, and through the powerful aid of the Bishop, and his aid only, were able to win from the mayor in 1309 the composition which became the charter of their liberties, according to which all the “unreasonable grievous” tasks and tallages laid by “the great men of the town upon the mean people and the poor” – or as the Latin version has it by the potentiores on the mediocres and inferiores – and their “grievous distressing so violently of them,” were to come to an end, and taxes were henceforth to be assessed in due measure according to the three degrees of prosperity.^[455]

It is evident that we need not wait for the fifteenth century to discover an oligarchical system of administration which was in its full strength in the English boroughs as early as 1300, and can even be traced back at least fifty years earlier. In the middle of the thirteenth century the commons of Lincoln, having a dispute with the lord of S. Botolph’s fair about tolls, formally withdrew altogether from the fair till they should obtain a remedy from the king; but two sons of the mayor and two other burghers, rich traders who did not want their business interrupted, and who were evidently town officials with command of the common seal, gave the lord a charter promising a yearly rent of £10 from the Lincoln citizens, and this “without any assent or consent of the commonalty.” It was in vain that the people made remonstrance; the charter was still binding in 1276,^[456] and in 1325 the inhabitants of Lincoln were still without defence against the “great lords of the said city” who formed the corporation. While “les grauntz Seigneurs” themselves paid nothing, the “mean people” were arbitrarily taxed without their own consent; they alone were forced to keep the nightly watch; they paid their murage tax for the building of the wall, and the rulers used the money for their own purposes and rendered no accounts to the people;^[457] and the pitiful appeal of the commonalty to the king praying him to provide some remedy for their grievances only proved how helpless they were to influence the governing body which was supposed to rule solely by their consent. In like manner the mayor and other officers of Oxford were charged in 1294 with exacting tallages without the king’s order or the town’s consent, applying the town revenues to their own uses, raising loans without proper receipts, and collecting money for expenses of the rich on juries and assizes while the poor were left to pay their own costs.^[458] Probably the richer party secured the jury, for the verdict was given against the burgher who had instituted the suit; but his complaint is so absolutely similar to those raised in other towns at the same time that we can scarcely doubt its truth.^[459]

The inner contentions of Bristol^[460] and of Andover^[461] in the early years of the fourteenth century repeat in varying forms the same story of a few rich burghers managing the whole machinery of administration, and of a commonalty whose voice was often scarcely heard in elections, who were unable to secure the just assessment of taxes, or to prevent the money from being devoted to improper uses, and who daily saw the laws of trade – the assize of bread or beer, the injunctions against forestalling and regrating and a thousand tricks of commerce – diverted to the convenience of the rich officials, while the common folk patiently expiated their sins before the judgment seat of the great offenders who sat in careless immunity on their high places.

It is manifestly hard to find in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the happy age of the historian’s dream, when “there was a warmer relation between high and low, when each class thought more of its duties than its interests, and religion, which was the same to all, was really believed in. Under such conditions,” we are told, “inequality was natural and wholesome;” and apparently an age of innocence and peace attested the fostering care of a universal faith; for according to this theory, so highly commended and so widely believed, it was only “when religion became opinion, dubious more or less and divorced from conduct, while pleasures became more various and more attainable, the favoured classes fell away from the intention of their institution, monopolized the sweets of life and left the bitter to the poor.”^[462] Whatever “the intention of their institution” may have been, however, there is not a particle of proof that the intention of the favoured classes themselves did at this time differ sensibly from that which prevailed at the Reformation; nor were the dominant folk of town or country disposed voluntarily to nail their interests on the cross of duty – whether we consider the knight “hunting hardily” hares and foxes,^[463] and wholly regardless of his oath to the labourer “to keep him and his chattel as covenant was between them;”^[464] or the lord with his loud laugh calling for his rent;^[465] or the trader filling his pockets in “deceit of the poor commons,” the alderman adding field to field, the cook and brewer building their burgages out of the pence of the poor. The relations of inequality, in the exceedingly bitter form in which they were then known, may have seemed natural, or perhaps supernatural, to an age when all life, social, economic, and political, was brought under the universal sway of dogma and superstition; but it is certain that they were not held to be wholesome by those who suffered, and whose struggles to win the freedom so long promised to them in ordinance and charter fill the town records of succeeding centuries.

For in these young republics formidable difficulties lay in the way of securing any popular control whatever over administration. In the first place the general assembly, which was to be the pledge of the people’s liberties, and to assure to them the final word about the taxes they had to pay and the manner in which they were to be governed, proved in its actual working but a poor security for freedom. It would seem sometimes that in the hurry and excitement of expanding trade, men busy in their shops had as little time or attention to bestow on serious politics as American citizens of a later date; or perhaps the very opposite accident might befall the borough, and a heterogeneous and unmanageable mob gathered at the place of assembly, where strangers and unenfranchised journeymen pushed their way in among the lawful citizens. But a tumultuous gathering of ignorant and over-tasked artizans and poor householders crowding from the narrow lanes of the borough must manifestly have been a very rare and occasional expedient, and at the best meant an assembly incapable of real business. In general it would seem that any small number of burgesses who happened to be present at a meeting in the common hall or at the court leet, or a select group of the better class specially summoned by the mayor,^[466] were taken to represent the general body of inhabitants, and their consent was legally counted as conveying the assent of the burghers at large. From the very first, and under the most favourable circumstances, it is evident that the assembly gave no real security to the commonalty, that through its gatherings they could never hope to bring sustained or efficient pressure to bear on the governing class, and that “the entire assent and consent of the whole community” was for the most part simply taken for granted. If the theory of government by the people for the people already existed in law books and ordinances the means of realizing such an ideal had yet to be found.

Nor must it be forgotten that from the very first no man of the people could hope to aspire to any post in the administration of the town. All important public offices were confined to persons of a certain station, and “the rank of a mayor” or “the rank of a sheriff” were well-known mediæval phrases which expressed a comfortable social position maintained by an adequate income. Councillors and chief officers were chosen from the class of “magnates”^[467]– men not bound by the law of frankpledge and possibly holding a position of some authority – of whom there are traces in Norwich and possibly in other cities; or from the “good and sufficient” men of the borough; or from the class who were technically known as the “probi homines,” the “good” or “credible” or “lawful men” privileged to serve as legal assessors in the civic courts and “credible witnesses” to bargains, and who had probably come to be regarded as an official class and gradually organized into a separate caste.^[468] This choice of wealthy officials ultimately depended of course on the custom of those days by which the chief officers and the townsfolk were held mutually responsible for defaults; so that in the interests of the people themselves, as well as of the king, it was important to secure men of substance whose possessions formed a guarantee to both parties – a guarantee which was by no means originally a figure of speech, as we see from the case of the Lincoln bailiffs in 1276, when the receipts for paying the ferm were diminished, “wherefore they who have once been bailiffs of Lincoln can scarcely rise from poverty and misery.”^[469] The opulent class who bore the chief burden of responsibility shared the compensating pleasures of power. We have seen the primitive simplicity with which at Ipswich twelve portmen divided among themselves all the posts of bailiffs, coroners, and councillors; and in fact among the handful of “worthy” men which could be produced in modest little market-towns,^[470] whose clustered dwellings of wood and plaster, bordering narrow alleys that ran to the central market-place, lay almost hidden in fields and gardens, the burghers had actually no great choice of rulers. From generation to generation the chief municipal offices were handed down in the few leading families of the place. A great merchant would take the command again and again while the whole town lay at his discretion, for though a universal law forbade the continuous holding of office and usually fixed an interval of two or more years before re-election, either the law was persistently ignored, or as soon as the period of retirement had elapsed, power inevitably fell back to its former possessor.^[471] How greatly this state of things was determined by economic conditions we may see from the fact that in a place like Nottingham, where wealth was widely distributed, it does not seem that any single family rose to very marked supremacy;^[472] and in general a comparison of lists of town officers indicates that as the growth of trade in the fifteenth century increased the numbers of well-to-do burghers and merchants, there was a corresponding variety in the names of men entrusted with office. At the best however the upper class was but a little one, and usually the corporation with its one or two councils composed of twelve and twenty-four members, or even of twenty-four and forty-eight, as well as the retired magnates who constituted “the clothing,” and a whole army of officials of various kinds, recorder, town clerk, chamberlains or treasurers, aldermen, decennaries of the market, bailiffs, coroners, arbitrators, jurors, and the like, must have absorbed a very considerable proportion of the well-to-do inhabitants. A close caste was easily developed out of the compact body of merchants and thriving traders who formed the undisputed aristocracy of the town, and whose social pre-eminence doubtless went far to establish their political dominion.

And if very little space was practically found in mediæval times for democratic theories of government, whether in the conception of a governing class, or in the working of the general assembly, still less are they to be found in the prevailing views as to representation. In the case of Ipswich we have seen how rapidly the great body of the townspeople retire from the scene when they have fulfilled their first simple function of electing bailiffs and coroners. It is the bailiffs and coroners who nominate the committee to elect the portmen,^[473] and then the twelve between them take charge in a general way of the borough and its affairs, while the commons go back to attend to their own business and are henceforth only from time to time summoned for a general assembly, where they gather like a Greek chorus to view with official eyes the progress of the drama, and to applaud in due form the action of the ultimate executive or express an expected and resigned acquiescence with all their will. People talked, it is true, of election by the whole community, and this was the theory of ordinance and charter, but the universal fashion of the day in all ranks and classes was to adopt some more or less complicated system of indirect election which, whether intentionally or not, was admirably suited to the use and convenience of the minority. The nobles who under the provisions of Oxford formed the council of Fifteen to assist Henry the Third used exactly the same devices as were of common experience among merchants and artizans and burghers; for not only in trading or in social-religious guilds were the members accustomed to choose their governor through a select committee of four, five, seven, eight, or twelve men; but in the boroughs themselves the plans by which the sovereign people delegated their power to a few “worthy and sufficient” citizens were so ingenious and elaborate that we may well doubt whether the majority had ever any chance at all of making their will prevail. In some cases indeed the leading people of the town were altogether independent of popular election, and hereditary owners of the wards sat in the high places of the hall in virtue of their landed property,^[474] not of the people’s will; while in others a guild merchant apparently imposed its own council on the community at large.^[475]

Nor can we wonder at anxiety to secure an efficient governing class if we consider for a moment the work that lay before the council. From the affairs of a pig-market and the letting of butchers’ stalls they were required to pass to business of the most complicated kind – to constitute a Board of Trade concerned with inland and foreign commerce; a Foreign Office constantly busied with the external relations of the town, whether to overlord, or king, or rival boroughs; a legal committee responsible for all the complicated law business that might arise out of any one of these relations, or out of the defence of the chartered privileges of the borough; a Treasury Board whose incomings were drawn in infinitesimal proportions from the most varied and precarious sources, and whose outgoings included every possible payment with which any public body has ever had to deal. The king might call on them for the supervision of the staple trade, the management of river basins, the draining of marshes, the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, the local carrying out of laws framed by Parliament, the guarding of the coast, the provisioning and training of detachments of the national army. The responsibility thrown on them by the central government was constantly increased as time went on; and there was probably nothing which proved so important in tightening the hold of the oligarchy on government as the appointment of a certain number of the upper council to be justices of the peace, having a formidable authority over the working classes, besides the power to draw into their own hands a mass of business which had once gone to the court leet of the burghers.

No doubt the official caste from the beginning sufficiently appreciated the pleasures of power not to deprecate their increase; but apart from any question of greedy usurpation, it was inevitable under such conditions that a strong government should have been formed of experts who need not necessarily be changed every year or elected by a popular vote. The date at which some custom of this kind became established is probably much earlier than is commonly supposed; and there is evidence to shew that it often preceded by a long time the charters which make it legally binding. Possibly indeed the administrative despotism of a narrow oligarchy was often as old as the independence of the borough itself. The need for capable rulers may have been even greater at the perilous outset of its life than in its later times of confident strength; and when we remember the imperfection of the primitive machinery for ascertaining the popular will, the weakness of the general assembly, and the limitations put on public election, it is evident that the theory of a free and equal people electing their own government by the unanimous consent of the whole community, and controlling administration by a constant criticism, was a theory which could never have been practically carried into effect; which as a matter of fact the governing class had no wish to encourage, and which the mass of the governed had neither the cohesion nor the intelligence to enforce.

Once in authority it must be admitted that the ruling class carried themselves bravely, shirking neither responsibility nor power. In their splendid robes of office, with furs and stripes and rich colours changed at every great occasion to make a more imposing show, the municipal officers were the dazzling centre of every procession and public function in the town – at Advent services, at the bull-baiting and public games,^[476] at the pageant of Corpus Christi, or the yearly solemnity of recounting to the people the ordinances and liberties of the borough. Strict discipline, unquestioned authority, a belief in firm government, were prominent in their administration. Of the general body of burgesses and craft guilds implicit obedience was required, and the corporation allowed neither discussion nor interference with its decrees. Windows through which inquisitive townsmen peeped into the chamber where they consulted were blocked up; listeners under the eaves “to hear the words of the council” were violently discouraged; severe rules forbade the meddling of too active citizens, and fines and imprisonment fell on those who “in an abusive manner” called a councillor a “Fliperarde,”^[477] or who wickedly “wished that all the jurats had been burnt in the common ship,” or with “opprobrious and crooked words” declared that they were “false thieves,” or that they “were looked upon at Dover as so many grooms.”^[478] Administrative capacity went hand in hand with the self-assertion and exclusive temper of a successful class. To the townspeople, amid the confusion of national revolutions and civil war, the mayor remained a standing witness to the enduring forces of an order triumphant over discord and confusion; as in Exeter, where between 1477 and 1497 the citizens had seen a skilfully organized revolt shattered before the municipal power, and a victorious mayor holding office undisturbed under four successive kings, three of whom had come to the crown by the violent death or deposition of their predecessors.^[479]

There is perhaps no better type of the superior town official than the Common Clerk, in his dress of sanguine cloth striped with violet rays, or of more sober green bordered with fur.^[480] The business of his office came into great consideration with the growth of local liberties. In the fifteenth century there was scarcely a single town which did not require to have its “Custumal” written out afresh from the faded and worn-out copies made in earlier centuries,^[481] while in a vast number of cases, where the old French or Latin was no longer understood by the townsfolk, the writer had not only to decipher and copy the old tattered roll, but to translate it.^[482] Perhaps portions of the gospels were needed – “enough to swear by.”^[483] Every town also instituted the making of its own “Domesday Book,” its black book or white book or red book as the case might be, with copies of all deeds, wills, and charters relating to municipal affairs;^[484] and whenever a legal question arose or local liberties were imperilled new search was made in the chest containing the town “evidences” on which the municipal privileges depended, and copies were written out of Acts of Parliament,^[485] extracts from Domesday, Magna Charta,^[486] or legal documents such as the New Tenures by Lyttleton.^[487] The clerk must be able to translate and to read in the mother tongue to the community any letters or orders sent from Westminster. He had to expound legal technicalities to the council, and to use them effectively in the town’s interest, not only at Westminster, but in the innumerable disputes that arose between borough and borough as to the interpretation of conflicting charters.^[488] Elaborate accounts of municipal expenditure were made yet more arduous by the system of Roman numerals which constantly baffled his best efforts at exact addition. The keeping of the town rolls in general was a very serious occupation; in the time of Edward the Fourth the yearly rolls of Ipswich (called Dogget Rolls from the clerk’s docquet or table of contents) form bundles as big as a garden roller;^[489] and in Nottingham twenty rolls were covered within and without in a single year with the list of pleas against foreigners alone. In fact, the supply of parchment began to fall short of the prodigious demands of the town clerks, who were driven to take to paper, either to economize the trifling sum allowed them for the expense of parchment, or in obedience to a direct order from the corporation.^[490] As they added roll to roll and book to book, they from time to time relieved the tedious labour by adorning the town accounts with sketches and ornaments, with a snatch of French song or a few quibbles or catches of very moderate wit,^[491] with a rugged ballad on the evils of over-eating,^[492] or a final sigh of satisfaction from a German copyist, “Explicit hic totum; pro Christo da mihi potum!”^[493]

The town clerk, in fact, was to the local government what two centuries earlier the trained lay-lawyers had been to the central administration. From mere superiority of education, as a scholar and linguist, an accomplished lawyer, something of a historian and an antiquary, a skilled accountant, a scribe trained to finer penmanship and more exact views of spelling than the ordinary councillor, or even than the mayor himself, the clerk must have exercized an easy intellectual supremacy.^[494] Responsible only to the mayor, holding his post year after year in perfect security, he remained among the changing officers about him a permanent force, a municipal chancellor in whom was embodied a continuous tradition of administration and a fixed jurisprudence.^[495] Thriving towns of the fifteenth century vied with one another in seeking out able professionals for the post. Bridgewater engaged a man who seems to have been in practice as attorney or notary public in Oxford; and as early as the fourteenth century a chamberlain of London wrote letters under the common seal at Romney. Winchester looked yet farther afield, and seems to have employed a German.^[496] An able lawyer in those days could command the market, as we see by the story of Thomas Caxton (probably a brother of William Caxton the printer), who spent a busy professional career of forty years going from town to town wherever he could best sell his services. A native of Tenterden, he was brought up to the law, and in 1436 was engaged in a plea of debt in Romney against one William-at-the-Mill. In 1454 he was practising as an attorney at Tenterden, and was the leading man of law in its negotiations with Rye to resist the union of the two towns into a single corporation. In 1458 he entered the service of Lydd, which was then in the thick of its troubles about boundaries and franchises, and was paid £2 13s. 4d. a year, or double the salary of his predecessor, and in addition was soon after promised a gown every year, while ultimately his pay was raised to £4 – a sum which at that time was only given by great commercial towns such as Bristol or Southampton.^[497] On his resignation Lydd returned to its old custom and once more paid to his successor the original salary of 6s. 8d. a quarter, but the corporation still continued to employ Caxton constantly on very profitable terms for himself, often sending him to London on business, or to carry on negotiations with the king. In 1470, when Lydd had been running into danger on every side, first sending men to fight under Warwick, and then paying £9 for another body of troops to go to the help of King Edward, the burghers made Caxton their treasurer, and two years later he was elected bailiff, and a town clerk put under him of his own training. We next find him in 1474 as clerk in Romney; but he was called back again to Lydd in 1476, and employed to write out its “customall” in his fine bold hand. A yet more important town however now cast longing eyes on the successful lawyer, and he was drawn away from Lydd to Sandwich, where he finally settled down as common clerk.

In fact for professional men of talent in the middle class a new and comparatively brilliant career was now opened in the towns.^[498] Nicholas Lancaster, town clerk of York from 1477 to 1480, was a bachelor of laws, who in 1483 became one of the king’s council, was in 1484 alderman of York, and in 1485 mayor.^[499] Easingwold, who kept the rolls of Nottingham for nearly thirty years (from 1478 to 1506), wrote himself down as “gentleman” among the yeomen, braziers, and smiths, who paid their 6s. 8d. along with him to gain the freedom of the borough,^[500] and in his later signatures still kept up the solitary distinction of this title, which scarcely occurs in the records save after his name. An educated man with a very tolerable knowledge of Latin, though he preferred English, he served his adopted town well, and in his time the old court rolls, which had been carelessly kept in paper books for thirty years before his coming, were replaced by parchment rolls with very full and elaborate accounts in a singularly beautiful and exact writing.^[501]