TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
VOL. II
[Illustration]
TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
BY
MRS. J. R. GREEN
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOL. II
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE TOWN MANNERS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE TOWN MARKET 24
CHAPTER III.
THE TOWN TRADER 57
CHAPTER IV.
THE LABOUR QUESTION 86
CHAPTER V.
THE CRAFTS 110
CHAPTER VI.
THE CRAFTS AND THE TOWN 134
CHAPTER VII.
THE TAILORS OF EXETER 167
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GUILD MERCHANT 190
CHAPTER IX.
THE TOWN DEMOCRACY 221
CHAPTER X.
THE TOWN OLIGARCHY 240
CHAPTER XI.
THE TOWN COUNCIL 269
CHAPTER XII.
THE COUNCIL OF SOUTHAMPTON 288
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COUNCIL OF NOTTINGHAM 322
CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMMON COUNCIL IN NORWICH 360
CHAPTER XV.
THE COMMON COUNCIL OF LYNN 402
CHAPTER XVI.
THE COMMON COUNCIL OF SANDWICH 427
CHAPTER XVII.
CONCLUSION 437
TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
THE TOWN MANNERS
THE controversy concerning the bounds and limits of their freedom,
which the English boroughs were forced to maintain with powerful
organizations already settled in the land—with the monarchy,
the baronage, or the Church—represented in the history of each
municipality that which in the case of States of greater magnitude
we call the foreign policy of the commonwealth. But whatever may be
the compass of a dominion, whether it be a borough or an empire, no
influence is more potent in shaping the character and destiny of the
community than the nature of its external relations. It was in the
single-handed conflict with foreign powers, whether superior lord or
insidious rival, that the drapers and mercers, the smiths and butchers
and weavers of every country town were forced, with a patriotism
quickened by necessity, to meddle in matters of State and to concern
themselves about the public weal; their ardours were stirred by legends
of an ancient freedom, while their political instinct was trained
by incessant discussion of legal precedent and right; and in the
strain of perpetual taxation, in heavy burdens imposed upon a people
whose prosperity was new, uncertain, or shifting; above all in the
strengthening of certain forms of narrow municipal despotism born of
the struggle against external danger, they paid the price of a bracing
public discipline.
But there is another side of the town history which is not less
important, and which is far more complicated than the question of its
foreign relations and policy—that is, the problem of its own nature,
of the spirit by which it was animated and the inherent resources
of its corporate life. In the town a new world had grown up with an
organization and a polity of its own wholly different from that of the
country. Members who joined its community were compelled to renounce
all other allegiance and forego any protection from other patrons. The
chief magistrate set over its inhabitants must be one of their own
fellow-citizens—“not a far dweller” unless in time of special need,
such as war, and then only “by the pleasure of the commonalty.”[1]
Adventurers from the manor-houses of the neighbourhood and strangers
in search of fortune were equally shut out; and it was only when a
county squire was willing to throw in his lot with the burghers, to
turn into a good citizen and honest tradesman, and to prove his credit
and capacity by serving in a subordinate post,[2] that he could hope to
rise to the highest office. It is true that country folk were welcome
to pay a double price for having a stall in the market, or a store-room
in the Common House for their wool; while the impoverished knight
might come in search of a renewal of his wasted fortunes through the
dowry of some rich mercer’s daughter. But otherwise the town carried
on its existence apart, in a watchful and jealous independence. Its
way of life, its code of manners, its habits, aims, and interests,
the condition of the people, the local theories of trade by which its
conduct of business was guided, the popular views of citizenship and
government under the influence of which the burghers regulated their
civic policy—all these things must be kept in view if we would gain a
clear idea of the growth of the borough from within.
The way of thinking and acting of the new world of traders and
shopkeepers and artizans lives again for us in a wholly new literature
which first sprang up in England about the middle of the fifteenth
century—in Books of Courtesy and popular rhymes as to the conduct
of daily life. The first English manual of etiquette appeared about
1430. Germany had had its book of courtesy more than two hundred years
before, a set of rules composed for a distinguished society by equally
fastidious writers, one of whom laments that his pen had been made
“common” by writing about masters and servants, and explains that it
was never happy save in describing knights and ladies. In northern
Italy a similar book drawn up in the thirteenth century had taken a
very different character. There the merchants and shopkeepers of the
towns, impatient of “new ceremonies” brought in from over the mountains
which they deemed contrary to all the traditions of the traders of
Lucca and Florence and only fit for the degenerate Neapolitans, framed
rules to suit their own needs and aspirations. The French followed
rather later, at the end of the fourteenth century; and then last of
all came the English experiment.[3]
The very appearance of such a book at this time is most significant.
The nobles had already their own literary traditions handed down
from an older world; and in the ideal of chivalrous conduct which
was enshrined for them in the “Morte d’Arthur,” the Knights of the
Round Table still served as a standard of social virtue and good
bearing for the upper classes—a standard with which the burghers
had nothing whatever to do. But the new literature was for the
townsfolk themselves, and it bore on every line the impress of its
origin. A growing sense of dignity and self-respect in the middle
class of traders and artizans wakened aspirations for polite manners,
and intercourse with strangers abroad gave fresh stimulus to social
ambition. Englishmen who visited Flanders towards the end of the
century were as much impressed by the Flemish manners as by the Flemish
wealth: “they can best behave them and most like gentlemen,” was their
comment.[4] In England the new society, with no heritage of tradition
and no recognized array of models in the past, had to create its own
standard of behaviour, to shape its own social code, to realize for
itself the art of life. Compilers worked busily in the service of the
middle-class aspirants. One book of courtesy after another was adapted
for the vulgar use. The “Rules of S. Robert,” the good Bishop of
Lincoln, whereby “whosoever will keep these rules well will be able to
live on his means and keep himself and those belonging to him,” were
put into English in a brief form, after wearing a more courtly garb of
French or Latin for three centuries.[5] A Latin treatise on manners
was translated for the unlearned by a writer who prayed for help in
his work from Him who formed man after His own image, from Mary the
gracious Mother, and from Lady Facetia the Mother of all virtue.[6]
Sound codes of morals were put in the form of an A B C.[7] The right
conduct of life, especially as it concerned polite behaviour, was set
out in little songs “made for children young, at the school that bide
not long.”[8] Plain directions in verse pointed out the duties of
girls, of young men, of housewives, of wandering youths looking for
service. The rhymes are of the homeliest kind, with trite and prosaic
illustrations taken from the common sights of the market-place, the
tavern, the workshop, or the street with its wandering pigs and its
swinging signs; it is in their very rudeness and simpleness that
their interest lies. Meanwhile political and satirical songs which
had been so common in the foregoing centuries mostly died out of
fashion and were heard no more, as the burghers, quickened into a new
self-consciousness, began to be concerned for a time with matters
nearer home.
These fragments of old speech and song lead us into the very midst of
the lanes and workshops of a mediæval town. They recall for us the
countless political and social troubles amid which the trader was
slowly fighting his way upward, and which left their deep impress on
his character and view of life. A pervading suspicion, a distrustful
caution, are the ground-note of many a song. Rude proverbs of daily
speech, jingling rhymes of wise counsel, all are profoundly marked by
the narrow prudence of people set in the midst of pit-falls, to whom
danger was ever present, whether at the council chamber or at the
tavern or at a friend’s dinner table, and among whom talk and clatter
with the tongue were looked on as an unspeakable indiscretion.[9] They
picture a life anxious and difficult, whose recognized condition is
one of toil that knows no relaxation and no end, of hardship borne
with unquestioning endurance—a life amid whose humble prosperity
family affection and the family welfare are best assured by having
one roof, one entrance door, one fire, and one dining table, and a
“back door” is looked on as an extravagance which would bring any
household to ruin. After a man had lived hard and worked strenuously
he still stood in need of the constantly recurring warning against any
bitterness of envy at the prosperity of a lucky dealer next door. The
limits of his ambition and his duty are bounded by rigid lines; and the
standard of conduct is one framed for a laborious middle class, with
its plain-spoken seriousness, its sturdy morality, its activity and
rectitude and independence, its dulness and vigilance and thrift. It is
the duty of good men to set their people well to work, to keep house
carefully, to get through any heavy job steadily and swiftly, to pay
wages regularly, to give true weight, to remember ever that “Borrowed
thing must needs go home.” They are not to ape their betters in dress,
only
“Be as pure as flour taken from the bran
In all thy clothing and all thine array.”
With one whom “thou knowest of greater state” there should be no
easy fellowship, no dining or betting or playing at dice; above all
there must be no show of overmuch “meekness” or servility, “for else
a fool thou wilt be told.”[10] A practical religion adds its simple
obligations.[11] Men ought to pay their tithes, to give to the poor, to
be strong and stiff against the devil. The prayer on awaking, the daily
mass before working hours, the duties of self-control and submission,
must ever be kept in mind. For the trader indeed the way of virtue was
a narrow one and straight. Three deaths ever stand menacingly before
him. First comes the common lot, the mere severing of soul and body.
“The tother death is death of Shame,
If he die in debt or wicked fame;
The third death, so saith the clerks,
If he hath no good works.”[12]
But side by side with directions about mercy, truth, and fulfilling
the law, come other warnings—warnings about carving meat and cutting
bread and dividing cheese, about a formal and dignified bearing, how
to walk and stand and kneel, how to enter a house or greet a friend in
the street—all carefully and laboriously shaped into rhyme. In the
new sense of changing customs, of fashions that came and went with
the revolutions of society,[13] training and thought and conscious
endeavour were called in to replace the simplicity of the old unvarying
forms. Manners became a subject of serious anxiety. Throwing aside
the mass of tradition handed down from century to century, when every
usage was consecrated by custom, and determined by immemorial laws as
to the relations of class to class, the burghers, side by side with
the professional and middle classes all over the kingdom, were tending
towards the realization of a new social order, in which men were no
longer obliged as formerly to pass through the door of the Church to
find the way of social advancement, but might attain to it along the
common high road of secular enterprise. The notion of the worth of the
individual man was none the less important for the homely and practical
form given to it in their rude and untrained expression. No one, they
declared simply, need be shamefaced, of whatever lowly position he
might come, for
“In hall or chamber, or where thou gon,
Nurture and good manners maketh man.”
In whatever society he might find himself, the humblest citizen should
therefore so order his behaviour that when he left the table men would
say “A gentleman was here.”[14] The practical divinity of plain people
easily drew the graciousness of outward demeanour within the sphere of
religion, and “clerks that knew the seven arts” explained
“That courtesy from heaven came
When Gabriel our Lady grette
And Elizabeth with Mary mette.”[15]
Since “all virtues are closed in courtesy and all vices in villany” or
rudeness, the best prayer one could make was to be well-mannered, for
the virtues of a fine behaviour reached as far as thought could go.
“In courtesy He make you so expert,
That through your nurture and your governance,
In lasting bliss He may yourself advance.”
These books of courtesy show us one side of the great change that
passed over society[16] when the mediæval theory of _status_ was broken
down by the increase of riches which trade brought with it, and the new
chances of rising in the world through wealth. The yeoman might become
a gentleman by getting into a lord’s household, and “spending large and
plenty.” The squire who would be a knight without the danger of bearing
arms need only go to the king’s court with his purse full of money. The
man of letters, the merchant, the seeker after pleasure, whoever and
whatever a man might be, he could win neither degree nor worship “but
he have the penny ready to take to.”[17] When the acquisition of wealth
or the passage from one class to another was practically impossible,
poverty and a low estate might still be dignified. But as soon as
fortune and position had been brought within the reach of all, the man
who remained poor might be looked on as idle or incapable. A new test
of superiority was applied, a test of material prosperity, and by this
measure the townsman was judged by his neighbours and naturally judged
himself. On all sides we find indications of the excited ambition which
had begun to stir in every class,
“Now every boy will counterfeit a knight,
Report himself as good as he.”[18]
New distinctions of rank and caste began to appear, and an aristocracy
of energy and skill constantly recruited and invigorated made its
influence felt in every borough, as public honour was attached to trade
in proportion to the wealth which its followers could win. The wool
trade especially held a place of distinction in common esteem; and
people who took to the selling of cloth were supposed to “live like
gentlemen” and rejoice in a really superior station.[19] More and more
the enriched burgher hastened to give proof that he had risen into the
leisured class by donning the fine dress whose cumbrous folds bespoke
a sedate idleness and luxury, so that whereas “sometime afar men might
lords know by their array from other folk, now a man shall stand or
muse a long throw which is which.”[20]
As the chance of rising in the world stirred in the trader a new
ambition, so it stirred too the sense of the power of knowledge. When
the writer of Piers Ploughman counts up the gifts of the Spirit that
were distributed among the commons at the descent of the Holy Ghost as
“treasure to live by to their lives’ end,” and “weapon to fight with
when Anti-Christ assaileth,” he carefully reckons in with the rest
the wit to use words skilfully as preachers and prentices of law who
live leally by labour of tongue, the crafts and “connynge” of sight by
which men win their livelihood with selling and buying, the wisdom to
till and thatch and cook as their wit would when the time came; the
art of divining and dividing numbers, and all such learning of the
schools.[21] Already the workers of the town were reaching forward, as
some of their rough rhymes show, to a true love of learning.[22] Their
zeal took very practical form. Side by side with the great movement for
education which was going on under the patronage of kings and queens,
of archbishops and bishops, and great lords and ladies, humbler work
was taken in hand by burghers and tradesmen for the teaching of their
own people.[23] The founding of free grammar schools all over England
was the work of the trading classes themselves. Sometimes the schools
were founded by Guilds.[24] Sometimes townsmen who had thriven in
the world remembered gratefully the place of their birth or their
education. “By some divine chance” a “teacher of grammar learning” came
to live in Rotherham about the beginning of the fifteenth century, and
one of the town boys, Thomas Scott, who had been taught by him about
1430, became in 1474 Lord Chancellor, and in 1480 Archbishop of York.
In 1483 he founded a college in his old home with a Provost and three
Fellows who were to teach freely any one who came to them. One was to
give lessons in grammar, poetry, and rhetoric; the second in music,
especially singing, playing, and broken song; and if possible these
two were to be priests, or at least one of them. The third Fellow
was to teach writing and arithmetic to youths who were not intended
for the priesthood, but for trades and other employments; for among
the children of Rotherham, said the archbishop, there were many who
were “valde acuti in ingenio.”[25] In the same way bishop Alcock of
Rochester, the son of a Hull merchant, established a free grammar
school at Hull, where the master was to “teach all scholars thither
resorting without taking any stipend or wages for the same, and should
have for his own wages £10.”[26]
So in one way or another the work of education went on throughout the
fifteenth century—a work whose magnitude and importance have been too
long obscured by the busy organizers of the Reformation days, who, for
the giving of a new charter or adapting the school to the new system
established by law, clothed themselves with the glory of founders and
bore away from their silent predecessors the honour of inaugurating a
new world. Not only in the busy centres of commerce, but in the obscure
villages that lay hidden in forest or waste or clung to the slopes of
the northern moors, the children of the later middle ages were gathered
into schools. Apparently, reading and writing were everywhere common
among the people,[27] and as early as the reign of Richard the Second
the word “townsmen” had come to mean people instructed and trained,
and no longer ignorant rustics.[28] But the most remarkable thing
about the growth of the new grammar schools was the part taken in their
foundation by laymen—by the traders and merchants of the towns. The
great benefactor of Sandwich, Thomas Elys, left provision in 1392 for
one of the chaplains of his chantry to serve as schoolmaster for the
town boys; and the son of a draper who had had his education in this
school afterwards founded a grammar school. Sir Edmund Shaa, goldsmith
and once Lord Mayor of London, established a school at Stockport by
will in 1457, and appointed a chantry priest of the parish church,
who, being “cunning in grammar,” should “freely without any wages or
salary asking or taking of any person, except only any salary hereunder
specified, shall teach all manner persons, children and other, that
will come to him to learn as well of the said town of Stopford as of
other towns thereabouts, the science of grammar as far as lieth in him
for to do.” And another London mayor, Sir John Percyvale, who had been
born close to Macclesfield, left money in 1502 to endow a free grammar
school there, because there were few schoolmasters in that country and
the children for lack of teaching “fall to idleness and so consequently
live dissolutely all their days.”[29] It seems also that the
Manchester Grammar School was first planned by a Manchester clothier,
who at his death left money for its foundation; and was completed in
1524 by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, a native of Oldham;[30] the
children were to be taught “after the manner of the school of Banbury,”
and inhabitants of the town were compelled to contribute to its support
by being forced to grind their corn at the school mills—a custom which
was kept up till 1759.
The new movement marked the beginning of that revolution which was
ultimately to take education out of the exclusive control of the
Church and hand it over to the people themselves. Up to this time the
privileges and profits of teaching had been practically a monopoly
of the clergy, and there was no possible competition save that which
might spring up between licensed and unlicensed teachers within the
ecclesiastical order.[31] A document drawn up by order of the abbot
of Walden tells how the clergy of the parish church there had taught
some children of the village the alphabet, and even more advanced
lessons, without leave from the abbot, who claimed by the statutes and
customs of the monastery a perpetual monopoly of teaching or licensing
schoolmasters. A petition was made by the inhabitants in favour of the
priests, and in consequence of this petition the abbot, to the great
satisfaction of the townsfolk, graciously allowed that every priest of
the Church might (during the goodwill of the abbot and convent) receive
one “very little child” of each inhabitant, and might teach the child
in “alphabete et graciis”[32] but not in any higher learning; a legal
instrument embodying this concession was drawn up by a clerk of the
York diocese, and signed with a beautiful notarial monogram which must
have cost him the greater part of a day to draw.[33]
But under the new state of things another element was brought into
the controversy. The town itself occasionally became the aggressive
party, and took the teaching straight out of the hands of the priest.
An order was made at Bridgenorth in 1503 “that there shall no priest
keep no school, save only one child to help him to say mass, after
that a schoolmaster cometh to town, but that every child to resort to
the common school in pain of forfeiting to the chamber of the town
twenty shillings of every priest that doeth the contrary.”[34] Burghers
accustomed to manage their own affairs easily assumed the direction of
education, and the control of schools gradually passed from clerical to
lay hands and became the charge of the whole community. In Nottingham,
where there had been a grammar school before 1382 at which it would
seem that a boy’s education cost eightpence a term,[35] a new free
school was founded in 1512, probably by the widow of a former mayor,
and was put directly under the management of the mayor and town
council,[36] and as these apparently proved somewhat negligent in the
business the Leet jury constantly interfered in the most officious way
in the government of the school and the choice and supervision of its
teachers. “It will be a credit,” they said, “to have a good master and
a good ussher in one school.”[37]
Of the intellectual life of the towns we know scarcely anything, and
there is perhaps not much to be known. Scholars naturally drifted away
to the Universities or London, and the society of the borough was
occupied with other matters than learning. In Nottingham, in spite of
the educational zeal of the jury, the first evidence we have of a town
clerk who knew enough of the classics to quote a line of Vergil and
a line of Horace is in 1534-1545; while it is not till 1587 that we
find a clerk who had learned Greek.[38] On the other hand Bristol was
evidently a centre of radiant light. An excellent education was given
in its school, if we judge from the famous Grocyn, who was brought up
there and left the school in 1463;[39] and its society was adorned by
men of culture and wide intellectual curiosity. William of Worcester,
the enquirer after universal knowledge, a man of science who practised
medicine and cultivated his garden of herbs, as well as a man of
letters, who at forty-three “hath gone to school to a Lombard called
Karoll Giles to learn and to be read in poetry or else in French,”
and to whom “a good book of French or of poetry” seemed as fine a
purchase as “a fair manor,” might be seen in his later days at Bristol,
practising the art of annalist, in which character he surveyed the
whole town and carefully measured it by paces from end to end.[40] His
friend Ricart, town clerk and historian, spent the twenty-seven years
of his clerkship in writing his Calendar or Chronicle of 332 leaves in
six carefully arranged parts, the first three being devoted to history
and the last three to local customs and laws, in which he carried the
story of Bristol through 3,000 years from the days of Brut to the reign
of Edward the Fourth.[41]
It was inevitable that the purpose and theory of education should
ultimately be modified by the change of masters, as well as by the
change of manners, and already fervent reformers like Caxton began to
look beyond “the alphabet and humanities” and discuss training in the
mysteries of the English tongue itself. Among the “fathers ancient” who
should command the reverence of scholars they counted the famous men of
their own race and speech—men removed from them by but a generation
or two—Chaucer “the father and founder of ornate eloquence,” Lydgate,
the maker of “volumes that be large and wide,” and Occleve; and it
is touching to see men, on the very eve of the heroic age of English
literature, wistfully looking back to the vanished glories of their
grandfather days, when, as it seemed to them, all the “fresh flowers”
of style had been reaped by this handful of ancient worthies, and
“of silver language the great riches” stored away in their treasury,
so that the painful toiler who came after in search of “the embalmed
tongue and aureate sentence,” could now get it only by piece-meal, or
at the most might glean here and there by busy diligence something
to show that he had reverently visited the fields of the blest.[42]
The enlightened zeal of the learned indeed had still to wage a long
warfare with the pedants of the schools and the barbaric notions of
education that governed men’s minds; and the training vouchsafed to the
poor boys of the fifteenth century was then and for many a century
afterwards a rude and brutal one.[43] No doubt, too, the trader’s view
of education, practical as it was, had a touch of unashamed vulgarity.
“To my mind,” says the Capper in the Commonweal, “it made no matter if
there were no learned men at all,” for “the devil a whit good do ye
with your studies but set men together by the ears;” what men wanted
was “to write and read, and learn the languages used in countries
about us, that we might write our minds to them and they to us.”
Scholars, on the other hand, trembled at the results to civilization
and knowledge of the crude ideals of the mere man of business, who if
he had his way would “in a short space make this realm empty of wise
and politic men, and consequently barbarous, and at the last thrall and
subject to other nations; for empire is not so much won and kept by the
manhood or force of men as by wisdom and policy,[44] which is gotten
chiefly by learning.” But whatever were their faults it was in the
schools as much as in the council-chamber or shop that the revolution
of the next century was being prepared; and the wide-reaching results
of the spread of education in town and village were potent factors
in the developement of a later England. “The fault is in yourselves,
ye noblemen’s sons,” wrote Ascham, “and therefore ye deserve the
greater blame, that commonly the meaner men’s children come to be the
wisest counsellors and greatest doers in the weighty affairs of this
realm.”[45]