Read the book: «Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2», page 13

CHAPTER XII
THE COUNCIL OF SOUTHAMPTON

There are two grounds on which Southampton may claim to stand first among examples of early municipal government. For centuries it was the great port of the south – the harbour where for England the trade of the whole world converged, where carracks of Flanders and galleys from Venice met to pour upon its wharves the treasures of the northern and the southern seas. And for centuries its government survived, as perhaps such a government survived nowhere else in England, in the order appointed by its first planters, with none of its hedges broken down by compromise, nor its pure springs stained by infiltration of popular and democratic fervours. It is possible that the two facts are intimately bound together, and that the destiny of a Channel port determined the somewhat unusual lot of the Southampton municipality.

The industrial experiences of Southampton had been very felicitous. Nearly forty trades are mentioned in the town records of the thirteenth century, and there were many more than these, carried on not only by the English inhabitants but by settlers come from Burgundy, Flanders, Denmark, and Lombardy, and the French colony established in Rochelle Lane and French Street. Wool of all kind was sold in the market, coarse, black, broken, and lambs’ wool, much of which was sent to the Isle of Wight to be made up into web. Coloured “Paris candles” were manufactured as early as 1297. Cheese was made in great quantities, and cider. Bends of elms for ploughs were brought from Abingdon.⁵²² Hemp was grown for the making of cords, and the shipbuilding trade for which the town was so noted in the time of Henry the Fifth must have been already practised in far earlier days, to judge from the history of the Southampton shipping.⁵²³

Home industries, however, held a very modest position in Southampton compared with the fine figure made by its foreign commerce. Ships from the West bringing “cloth of Ireland,” perhaps drugget from Drogheda or from Sligo, met vessels carrying wine from the French ports, herrings and wax and tapestry from Brittany, alum from Biscay and from Genoa, Eastern spices from the depôts of the Rhine, while harbour dues were paid for salt-fish, pitch, bitumen, charcoal, and wood from the ports of the Baltic.⁵²⁴ The great glory of the town lay however in its direct trade with the Mediterranean. When in the reign of Edward the Second Venetian and Genoese ships first began to carry their wares to England they cast anchor in its harbour,⁵²⁵ and for two hundred years Southampton became the centre of English traffic with the Italian republics.⁵²⁶ An attempt to make it a free port in 1334 came to a speedy end, but the advantages the scheme offered must have been practically secured by the privileges which the kings granted both to the foreign merchants who came to trade and to the town itself as a commercial centre. In 1337 the merchants of the Society of the Alberti in Florence did the carrying trade of wool from Southampton to Gascony,⁵²⁷ and three years later part of a tenement near the sea was let to the Society of the Bardi, the Florentine bankers. In 1378 the King allowed merchants of Spain and the Genoese and Venetians who carried all the Levant trade, to unlade and sell their goods at its wharfs instead of being forced to go to the staple at Calais;⁵²⁸ and again in 1402 Henry the Fourth granted special permission to the Genoese to disembark at Southampton and carry their goods thence to London by land.⁵²⁹ From 1353, when Winchester was made a staple for wool, Southampton as the port from which alone all its bales must be shipped to the Continent had a practical monopoly of the southern export trade.⁵³⁰ It was the only harbour to which might be carried “Malmseys and other sweet wines of the growth of Candye and Rotymoes, and in any other place within the parts of Levant beyond the Straits of Morocco.” Carracks from Genoa and Venice, ships from Spain, Portugal, Almayne, Flanders, and Zealand thronged its harbours, bringing their wines and spices, and carrying away wool for the weavers of the Netherlands, or cloth for the dyers of Italy and the traders of the Black Sea.⁵³¹ Attracted by its dazzling prospects of wealth, London vintners and cloth-workers rented great cellars for storage, and held houses and lands in the town; and so brilliant was the promise of its future that in 1379 a Genoese merchant got leave from the king, for the better security of his merchandise, to occupy the castle which had just been rebuilt, and promised in return to make Southampton the greatest port of Western Europe. But before he could carry out his plans the merchants in London, furious at so dangerous a rivalry, had him assassinated at his own door.⁵³²

Nor was commercial enterprise left to the foreigner, for even in the fourteenth century native traders were sending out English ships to do business in foreign ports.⁵³³ In 1391 one merchant took a lease for the whole year of the customs of the town by land and water; while another wealthy burgess, William Soper, put the towers of the Water Gate in repair at his own cost, and rented them and the adjoining buildings for a hundred and twenty years, promising to repair and maintain them. At the end of the fourteenth century the large sums which passed from hand to hand, and the numerous bonds for payment of debts from £60 to £100 bore witness to the growth of trade.⁵³⁴ The wool dues in the port were able to bear a charge of £100 a year granted by Henry the Fourth in 1400 for the repairing and fortifying of the town walls; and in 1417 Cardinal Beaufort, Lord of Southampton and the greatest wool-merchant in all England, lent £14,000 to Henry the Fifth on security of customs on wool and other merchandise in the various ports of Southampton, and before a third of it was repaid he advanced another £14,000 on the same security.⁵³⁵

The prosperity of the citizens was shewn by their refusal any longer to interrupt business during the Winchester fair. In 1350 they had already quarrelled with the bishop on the subject; but he had carried the day, and the town had again submitted to the old rules that while the fair lasted there should be no weighing and measuring at the great beam in the market place, that if a merchant came carrying wares he should only be allowed to remain if he swore that they were not intended for sale, and that the bishop’s bailiff should live in Southampton during the fair to see that the contract was carried out. If it was broken the inhabitants were bound, not only in their lands and houses but in all their goods and chattels, to pay a penalty of a thousand marks within three months.⁵³⁶ From this intolerable state of things the citizens were strong enough to free themselves by negociations with the bishop in 1406,⁵³⁷ and in 1433 they gained the right to have a fair of their own every year for three days at Trinity Chapel near the town.

Nor had the town yet exhausted its good fortune. A law of 1455 which forbade merchant strangers from Italy any longer to ride about the country buying up with ready money wools and wool cloth from the poor people, and only allowed them henceforth to buy in London, Southampton, or Sandwich,⁵³⁸ drove foreign traders to settle in the town if they wanted to carry on their business at all; and many more were added to their number the next year when the whole body of Italian dealers living in London were driven out by a popular riot, and passing by Winchester, fixed their new homes in Southampton,⁵³⁹ which must then have contained within its walls the great majority of all the Italian merchants in England. The monopoly of the whole export trade of Southern England was confirmed to the town by law in 1464; and finally Henry the Seventh created it a staple of metals, and gave the exclusive right of melting tin ore to its guild.⁵⁴⁰

Smugglers and illegal traders bore their testimony to the profits to be made in Southampton waters. Light boats⁵⁴¹ pushed by night into every creek and cove along the coast to land their casks of wine; and in the town strange tailors were hard at work cutting up stuff into garments for the foreign market so as to avoid the duty on exported cloth. It was decreed in 1407 that no alien tailor, coming in a ship or galley, should have any shop, house, or room in the town for the making of any “robes, jepone, ne autres garnements” until he had made agreement with the masters of the craft; so vessels of “Spayne, Portingall, Almayne, Flanders, Zelonde, and others in their vyages” came bringing with them “tailors of divers nations,” who now however simply abode in their ships and cut up the cloth there at their leisure, and in 1468, four years after the monopoly of the wool trade had been again secured to Southampton, it had to pass a new law against these plunderers of the custom house.⁵⁴² Indeed, the magnitude of commerce at the end of the century may be measured by the scale on which corruption and false dealing could be carried on even by the town authorities themselves. In 1484 two London citizens, one a brewer, the other a “gentleman, and clerk of all the King’s ships,” owed to the mayor, sheriffs, and bailiffs of Southampton £1,200. These officers, however, had apparently got into some difficulty about the sale of 1,086 sacks of wool in which they were concerned, and drew up an agreement with their debtors that they would forgive this debt of £1,200 if they might have a promise that they should be held “harmless in their own names, and not as mayor, sheriffs, and bailiffs.”⁵⁴³

There was, however, another aspect of Southampton trade. We have a glimpse of the hidden side of the town life during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in account books of the Hospital of St. Julian or God’s House, which owned a hundred and eight tenements inhabited by working people, the prosperous ones living in houses of their own, the more luckless seeking shelter in selds or open warehouses. But from the one class as from the other, the Hospital pressed in vain for a rent which the tenant scarcely ever paid. One of the richer kind is pardoned 56s. arrears; the attorney is forgiven a sum of 50s.; the goldsmith who owes £4 8s. 6d., manages to pay most of his debt in salt. Others pledge their carpets; some pay 1d. or 1/2d. or 3d. at a time for large accounts against them; in other cases there is the brief entry “died in poverty and so nothing;” or poor tenants “run away from the town in poverty,” and the selds that sheltered them stand empty. Such is the tale of misery – a misery scarcely alleviated by the alms distributed by the Hospital to the poor – in 1299 three bushels of wheat given in Advent; in 1306 one-and-a-half quarters of beans and twenty-nine quarters of peas; in 1318 thirteen quarters of beans. After the burning of a great part of the town in 1337 by a fleet of French, Spaniards, and Genoese, matters grew yet worse, and in 1340 the arrears amounted to four times as much as the yearly rents. The Abbot of Beaulieu owed five years’ rent for the “cheseseld.” There was due from the five parishes of Holyrood, St. John, St. Michael, St. Lawrence, and All Saints within the Bar, £127 in 1340, £155 in 1342.⁵⁴⁴ Large tenements were broken up into smaller ones where the people huddled together in their misery, and the terrible legacy of a very poor population clinging in extreme destitution to the slums and low suburbs of the town was apparently handed on to the next century, for so far as the published records tell, Southampton was the only town in the fifteenth century that gave regular out-door relief to paupers. In 1441 the Steward’s book gives an account of £4 2s. 1d. given away in alms every week to poor men and women.⁵⁴⁵

In Southampton, in fact, riches did not gather in the people’s coffers while men slept. Wealth which was hard to win, was harder still to keep in the great port of the southern coast, where life and goods were held by a precarious tenure whenever England had a quarrel across the water. At any moment the plea of military necessity might justify all kinds of irregular and intermittent interference of royal officers, and the government of Southampton became a matter of divided authority and shifting responsibility which was probably unparalleled elsewhere in England. A special guardian of the king’s ships⁵⁴⁶ interfered in the harbour; and a receiver and victualler to the king’s troops⁵⁴⁷ interfered in the shops and market of the town. The Constable of the Castle⁵⁴⁸ long survived the constables of other towns, and was given powers determined by the court view of the necessities of the times; so that in 1369, we find a captain of the castle with authority to arrest all rebels against the king or the government of the town, and to watch against regrators, artizans, or workmen who should offend against the law.⁵⁴⁹ At a time when the mayor of most boroughs was commissioner for array-at-arms, the mayor was here jointly responsible for military defences with the constable and apparently took quite the second place.⁵⁵⁰

Military discipline in fact pressed relentlessly at all points on a place continually vexed by war and alarms of war and calls to arms. On Sundays and holidays all children from seven years old were called out to practise shooting with bows on the common, while the town cowherd kept the cattle out of the way.⁵⁵¹ When war broke out every man had to go out and take his share of fighting, and no one save the mayor was even allowed to provide a deputy instead of bearing arms in person. If the inhabitants had no heart to fight, summary punishment was meted out as a warning for future times; and when in 1338 the mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses fled before an attack of the French, the custody of Southampton was seized into the king’s hands, and its franchises forfeited for a whole year.⁵⁵² Besides the cost of three or four ships⁵⁵³ to protect the harbour, with wages for masters and men, and money for their food and rent, Southampton was bound to have “ready for defence against the foreign enemy great plenty of armour, weapons, and other artillery and things needful.” There was a town gunner who was paid sixpence a day to make gunpowder, gunstones and lathe-guns.⁵⁵⁴ Generation after generation of unwilling tradesmen had to repair and maintain and defend walls over a mile long and from twenty-five to thirty feet high, with twenty-nine great towers; and to strengthen the sea-banks and ditches. The work was divided out among the people; lightermen and boatmen were bound to bring up every year boatloads of stones and heap them up against the walls on the sea side, while the townspeople put in piles and kept them in order.⁵⁵⁵ The towers were manned by the various crafts, one by shoemakers, curriers, cobblers, and saddlers; another by mercers and grocers; a third by goldsmiths, blacksmiths, lockyers, pewterers, and tinkers; and so on.⁵⁵⁶ But so heavy was the cost of repairs, that after the burning of the town by the French, when the king, in 1338 and 1340, ordered the fortifications to be strengthened and a stone wall fronting the sea built at the expense of the inhabitants,⁵⁵⁷ the people simply fled away; and the Earl of Warwick and his successors, under the title of “guardians of the town,” were posted in its castle with men-at-arms and archers, “to take order” about the wretched fugitives, and compel any inhabitants who attempted to leave the town to return and live there “according to their estate,” and if they refused, to seize their houses, rents, and possessions for the king.⁵⁵⁸ And in 1376 the poor commons and tenants prayed that the king would take the town into his hand and forgive them the rent, since for the last two years they had spent not only the whole ferm which he had granted them (nearly £300 a year) on the walls, but had been forced to give besides £1,000 of their own money, so that half the people had deserted their homes to escape the intolerable burdens thrown on them,⁵⁵⁹ and the rest were going.

The long miseries of the Hundred Years War were soon followed by the harassing problems of the Wars of the Roses. For Southampton was reputed wealthy, with its unusually imposing ferm of £226 and the big roll of the king’s customs, and there were always people waiting to dip their hands into so rich treasury. The royal generosities at its expense were an old story. A large part of the ferm was settled on successive queens from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries,⁵⁶⁰ and however low funds might run the town always tried to keep well at court by paying at least the Queen’s jointure. Great nobles and servants of the king’s household were not forgotten, and took their grants as they could get them, partly in money, partly in wine or foreign fruits or spices. But when two warring parties each claimed the treasure of Southampton as its own, the municipal finances became a perilous matter for the council to deal with, and the crises of the Wars of the Roses are marked by calamity to the town budget.⁵⁶¹ In 1457 the ferm was only made up by contributions from seventeen burgesses amounting to over £42.⁵⁶² Matters were more serious in November, 1458, and the mayor had to go to London, from whence he writes to entreat the auditors “that ye will, as diligently as ye can or may, with one heart, one will, and one thought effectually to labour, that an end be had of the books of the bailiffs in all haste goodly, and to warn the steward that was to make his book ready against my coming home, for we must with all the diligence we can or may make provision of money to be had in short time or we be like to be sore hurt, and that God defend for we have had too much.” One of the auditors accounts was over £30 too short, “the which is to me right strange, so much money as he received the last year and this year too, I cannot understand it… I remit it to your wisdoms.” Another account included nothing but the bare fees. These matters must be thought on “right specially” but “if ye will with good heart and will undivided and without any ambiguity every man heartily and diligently put his hand we shall once be brought out of thraldom.” As to political news he is as cautious as he is anxious. “And so much to do will be amongst them, God spede the right.” “I can no more, but I beseech God guide us in all our work.”⁵⁶³ A few months after the mayor was summoned to the Exchequer in London about his accounts, but before the day was fixed the Lancastrian Lord Exeter suddenly sent his secretary to the town with a receipt under his seal and sign manual for the last half-year’s rent. “Milord prayed us so fair to be paid here (that is in Southampton and not in London) and said he had never so great ‘myster’ ne need that he is paid,” and promised his help in case of any difficulty in London, “for we told him what hurt and loss it was unto us.” So the town paid sadly, and the mayor anxiously wrote to their Recorder in London to try and get them out of the scrape. “And [we will] make aready all the money that we may in all haste possible whatsomever befall,” he adds earnestly.⁵⁶⁴

It was indeed hard to gather money at the moment, for in 1460 the Earl of Wiltshire, Treasurer of Henry the Sixth, making an excuse to get to Southampton under pretence of intercepting Warwick, found five great carracks of Genoa lying in the port, seized them all with all their wealth, filled them with his soldiers, provided them with victuals from the town without payment, and fled to Flanders with his booty.⁵⁶⁵ Then came the new rulers, and Edward the Fourth ordered Southampton to pay the treasurer of his household £133 6s. 8d., and to the Earl of Warwick as constable of Dover castle an annuity of £154 out of the same ferm.⁵⁶⁶ What with one trouble and another Southampton fell into arrears with its rent, and a burgess (the very Richard Gryme who had been mayor a year before and had made the advance to Lord Exeter) was thrown into the Fleet in London till it should be paid; two of his fellow-townsmen were sent riding to Westminster “to labour for his welfare,” and £20 was at last handed over before he was set free.⁵⁶⁷ The same year the sheriff, also summoned before the Exchequer, rode to London at the town’s cost; and he only got off by having his debt paid by the Recorder, who was afterwards repaid by the town.⁵⁶⁸ There was further trouble in 1469-70 when the Kingmaker, as the restored Constable of Dover under Henry the Sixth, demanded his pension from the ferm, and the mayor travelled to London “to reckon with the Earl of Warwick,” and spent twelve days there, “for the which twelve days the cost cometh to 50s. 6d.”⁵⁶⁹ Then a few months later came the other constable of the victorious Edward the Fourth, and the town had to pay him too and bear the double charge that year.⁵⁷⁰

All these financial difficulties were made yet more acute by the character of the municipal wealth. Of the £393 which made up the revenue of the town in 1428,⁵⁷¹ £302 3s. 4d. came from tolls; and the foreign commerce on which such sums were levied had to be maintained amid wars with France, quarrels with Brittany, attacks of Hanseatic and Breton and Genoese and Venetian traders always on the watch to seize ships on any plea of wrong done to their merchants, or in defiance of pirates that swarmed in the Channel, and of smugglers that haunted the coast. Again and again the people make complaint that the foreign merchants that used to bring their goods no longer came, and for lack of tolls to pay the ferm the burgesses had been forced to borrow £400 for their rent, and that many citizens had been driven from the town, and others were going unless something could be done to lighten their burdens.⁵⁷²

These were some of the special problems with which Southampton had to deal – perils of war, its consequences of military rule and divided authority within the town, a complicated and difficult finance, a trade at once wealthy and precarious, heavy expenses to be met in good times and in bad, a very poor class living side by side with a very rich one. The form of trouble might vary from year to year, but trouble was always with them. Bargainings, abject petitionings and arbitrary favours, concessions now on this side now on that, stern exactions and lavish gifts, left the town open to endless changes and chances of fortune.⁵⁷³

The general conditions, in fact, must have made the growth of popular government practically impossible; and from the beginning the town was probably ruled by a narrow oligarchy. Its first constitution was, perhaps, framed under the influence of a powerful Merchant Guild, such as would naturally be formed in a wealthy commercial centre – a fraternity not unlike the contemporary guild at Lynn or the latter one at Coventry.⁵⁷⁴ It seems that in the twelfth century two king’s bailiffs had the care of all the royal property, the collection of the ferm, the gathering in of the king’s debts, and so forth.⁵⁷⁵ Meanwhile the Merchant Guild elected its own aldermen, scavins, usher, and other officers, to protect the liberties and customs granted to it by Henry the First and confirmed by Henry the Second and his sons.⁵⁷⁶ In 1199 John granted to “the burgesses” to have their town at ferm,⁵⁷⁷ and it is probable that the alderman of the guild was charged with the collection and payment of the money, for in the course of the next generation he appears as mayor of the town.⁵⁷⁸ Both offices, mayor and alderman, were carried on side by side in his person. He shared the government with the bailiffs, as chief of the town and the guild, bound to maintain the statutes of both, and having the first voice in all elections concerning both. If the bailiffs failed to do justice, he summoned the jurors and judged in their place. He had charge of the common coffer and the keys of the town gates, and kept the assize of bread and of ale.⁵⁷⁹ By virtue of his old title and office the mayor was still called alderman in the fourteenth century,⁵⁸⁰ and in 1368 he apparently acted at the head of the guild organization with its four scavins.⁵⁸¹

The peculiar position of an alderman of the guild thus turned into a mayor, is no doubt marked by the fact that he was never, as in other boroughs, the elect of the whole community, nor even of a jury chosen by the people. In the fifteenth century it was admitted that from time immemorial the custom was for the outgoing mayor, in the presence of the bailiffs and burgesses, to nominate two burgesses, and the assembly was forced to elect one of these two, unless they chose to re-elect the mayor himself, which indeed was often done. The system was probably that which the guild had originally adopted for choosing its aldermen, and which went on unchanged under the new circumstances. His place as mayor, indeed, seems to have been an honour slowly and reluctantly conceded,⁵⁸² for in 1249, after “Benedict the son of Aaron” had held office (possibly for eleven years) the burgesses obtained a royal patent granting that neither they nor their heirs should ever again have a mayor in Southampton.⁵⁸³ Twelve years later, however, the list begins again, though in a manner as informal as before, for long after his authority in Southampton was undisputed, the mayor was officially ignored in that capacity at Westminster, and charters from the time of Henry the Second to that of Richard the Second were addressed to “the burgesses.”⁵⁸⁴ It was only after a charter of Henry the Fourth, which among other things appointed the mayor and four aldermen as justices of the peace,⁵⁸⁵ that the style seems to have changed, and the letters patent of Henry the Fifth are addressed to “the mayor and burgesses.”⁵⁸⁶ At last, in 1445, under Henry the Sixth, Southampton was made a perpetual corporation to be known by the name of “mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses,”⁵⁸⁷ and this phrase henceforth replaced the old style.⁵⁸⁸

With the group of officials through whom the alderman ruled the guild we have no immediate concern. But when the mayor had taken his oath of office in S. Michael’s Church (perhaps in the north chancel aisle which was called “Corporation Chapel”), he found himself at the head of an administrative body of twelve “discreets” and twelve aldermen of the wards. The aldermen set over the five wards (three of which were ruled by two aldermen, and the remaining two by three, making twelve in all) acted as a kind of police to keep the peace in their respective wards, to enroll the names of all the inhabitants and of their sureties, to take up malefactors, and to make the round every week or fortnight to see that all was in good order;⁵⁸⁹ and it is possible that they took part in some work of the mayor’s council in the fourteenth century.⁵⁹⁰ The twelve “discreets” were elected every year by the whole community in an appointed place, and like the twelve portmen of Ipswich were sworn to keep the peace, to preserve the town liberties, to do justice to poor and rich, and to be present at every court.⁵⁹¹ They had joint charge with the mayor of the treasure and the common chest of charters and deeds, and no document could be sealed with the common seal unless at least six of them were present. They themselves elected the two bailiffs, the common clerk, and the serjeant of the town.⁵⁹² Finally in 1401, two years after the same privilege had been conceded to Nottingham, the charter of Henry IV. gave the discreets power to choose out of their own body four aldermen, who together with the mayor were to be justices of the peace, and were to be aided in their work by four discreet persons chosen by the mayor and community. From this time doubtless the mayor and his four brethren became the chief aldermen of the five wards;⁵⁹³ and the town council, as in Nottingham, elected some of its members to sit as aldermen in scarlet robes, and some to be plain “discreets” or “burgesses.”⁵⁹⁴

The two charters which finally determined the constitution of Southampton were granted within a year of the similar charters to Nottingham. The first, in 1445, which formed a deed of incorporation under the title of mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, recognized elections by the official body, a custom which appears in the charter of 1401; while the second made the town into a county, in order to protect the merchants and mariners who were incommoded by the sheriff of the county serving writs on them.⁵⁹⁵ In the actual government of the place it does not seem that these charters brought about much change. The mayor still presided over meetings of aldermen and burgesses at the Guildhall in Bargate Tower,⁵⁹⁶ or in the Audit House which stood in the middle of the street in the very centre of the fish, poultry, and pig markets; and the whole community might be gathered together for the common business at the discretion of the rulers.⁵⁹⁷ Nor did the charter of incorporation alter the old style used in local business. In affairs that concerned the commonalty, whether it was an agreement with some other borough about tolls, or ordinances for the town, or a concord with a neighbour as to the limits of the town’s jurisdiction, or the leasing of the customs by land and sea for a year, or grants of land – in all such matters the ancient custom was to use the name of the “mayor and community”; and even after 1445 the old form “mayor and community” is still retained in all acts that related to public property and the town treasure, all leases, water supply, fines due to the Queen, license to hold a fair, and the like.⁵⁹⁸ That the distinction between burgesses and commonalty was a real one in the eyes of the people is proved by the fact that on three great occasions when a solemn consent of the whole town was required, the signature of “the commonalty” or “the whole community” was formally placed alongside of that of the official class – once in the treaty with the Archduke Philip in 1496; once in the treaty with Maximilian as to the marriage of Prince Charles of Spain to Henry’s daughter the Lady Mary; and once again in an important transaction concerning the common lands of the town.⁵⁹⁹