THE TAILORS OF EXETER
IT was in the fifteenth century, at the very time when the towns
seem to have been most energetic in tightening the bonds that held
the crafts fast to their service, that we find the crafts on their
side most impatient of subjection, and eager to test their strength
in a direct conflict with the civic rulers. Their restless energy
broke down all barriers between trade and politics, and forced each
into the service of the other; for by whatever stratagem the crafts
proposed to compel the constituted authorities to recognize them in a
partnership of power—whether a wealthy guild planned the winning of
a charter which should make it a free and independent corporation in
the town; or whether a combination of less powerful trades demanded
to be officially included in the municipal government which regulated
their business, or in any other way to control its action—in any and
every conflict with the ruling oligarchy the guilds were forced to
enlist the sympathy of the burghers and to become leaders of popular
discontent. On the other hand the commons, with no resource against
the official class save an occasional mass meeting, eagerly welcomed
the aid of the disciplined army enrolled in the guild, and under the
politic guidance of expert leaders, to give weight to their claims for
more power. Thus under the stress of the growing passion for political
emancipation, trading interests constantly seem to merge altogether
into the ambitions and animosities of parties wholly occupied in a
conflict about civic rights. No doubt a prevailing suspicion of some
such intimate connection between the desire of the crafts to escape
from municipal control and a democratic movement in city politics, gave
fire to the discussions which from the first origin of the question
disturbed market-place and council-chamber, law-court and Parliament,
and proclaimed the vehemence of feeling with which so great a matter
was debated.
In the Tailors’ Fraternity of Exeter we have a very curious example of
the part which the Guild organization played in municipal politics.
We have already seen the optimistic view taken by the Mayor and
his Fellowship of “the great commonalty of the city,” united and
harmonious, and worthily represented by the patriotic officers into
whose hands an absolute and unquestioned power had been committed; so
that when John Shillingford sends to the Recorder and the Fellowship an
account of his doings in London in the matter of the Dean and Chapter,
he simply begs them first to make such corrections as they saw fit,
and adds, “This done I pray you to call before you at the Hall the
substance of the commonalty praying every one of them in my name and
charging them in the most straightest wise in the King’s behalf to
come before you in haste for the tidings that I have sent home to you;
and that ye wisely declare before them these answers; so that they
say manly yea and nay _in such points as you think to be done_.”[320]
Throughout the whole of the Mayor’s letters there is not the slightest
indication that he had ever heard of any “impetuous clamours” of a
revolutionary Exeter mob, little mindful of the honour of the city; nor
that after a hundred years or more of gathering discontent a crisis was
close at hand when the commonalty was to measure its strength against
the corporation. Nevertheless the union of the moment was but the union
that comes of confronting a common enemy; and the townsmen seemed
to be only waiting till that strife was temporarily hushed to fling
themselves again into the discussion of their own domestic differences.
It is probable that from the time when the people of Exeter began to
elect their own mayor, bailiff, and eight aldermen of the wards, they
were also accustomed to appoint a body of twelve men to aid the mayor
in all difficult business.[321] As at Colchester, Norwich, and many
other towns, the elections were made by a double jury of Twenty-four;
but how the Twenty-four were themselves elected we do not know. In the
fourteenth century they seem already established, like the Twenty-four
of Norwich, as a permanent council to advise and assist the Mayor; but
the Twelve apparently survived alongside of them, for freemen were
forbidden to assemble for the election of a mayor “in the absence of
the Thirty-six”; and the Twenty-four were unable to perform any act
save in the presence of Twelve men.[322] Until the records of Exeter
are published, however, it is impossible to define the relations of the
two bodies; and the manner in which the Twenty-four took possession of
the Council Chamber is unknown.[323]
In Exeter, as elsewhere, trouble broke out in the middle of the
fourteenth century between the two factions of the community—between
the commons, discontented and rebellious; and the governing class,
who appear, not as innovators or usurpers, but as the conservative
guardians of “the ancient orders and customs of the city.” The quarrel
began in 1339 with “impetuous clamours” of the people against the
constant re-election of one or two men as mayors; and for one year
at least they carried their point, perhaps by some breach of former
customs of election, for a decree was immediately issued that the
people were not to gather together on the day of the mayor’s election
“in the absence of the Thirty-six”; perhaps by some help from the
Church and from country patrons, for it was further ordered that no
clerk of the Consistory Court, nor any man who did not live in the
city should be elected mayor or allowed in any way to meddle with the
election. The decree that no burgher might be excluded from the office
who was resident, had been seneschal and had the hundred shillings of
property which was generally required in all boroughs was, if we may
judge from other boroughs, simply a recapitulation of the common custom.
That the quarrel was still agitating the people’s minds some years
later is shown by the ordinances of 1346 and 1347. The first forbade
that a mayor should be immediately re-elected—an order evidently made
to quiet public opinion but which the Twenty-four had no intention
of observing. The second ordinance of 1347 decreed that the election
should be made “by Twenty-four persons who upon their several and
respective oaths shall make the election”—in fact it declared anew the
custom which had been already recognized for fifty years, and probably
from the first institution of the office, though of late years it had
been called in question.
The victory of the governing body was apparently complete,[324] and
it was indeed inevitable that so long as the city had to keep up its
struggle with Earl and Bishop the needs and discipline of war should
strengthen the position of the leaders and tighten their hold on their
fellow-citizens. In 1427 the Twenty-four appear with the name of “the
Common Council,” ordinances are issued in the name of “the Mayor and
the Common Council,” and “in open court the Mayor and Bailiffs by
the assent of the Twenty-four” transact all manner of town business,
whether it concerned the city franchise, the hearing and carrying out
of the King’s orders, or the voting of money for public purposes.[325]
To them also undoubtedly Shillingford wrote his long letters from
London, respectfully addressing them as the “Fellowship” or “his
Fellows,” with whom he was accustomed to take counsel.
The ordinary burgesses of Exeter therefore, so far back as we can
trace its history, played a modest part in city politics, nor had
their attempt to assert themselves in 1339 won for them any advantage
whatever. In 1460 the townsfolk made a new effort of a different and
singularly interesting kind.
There was in Exeter a certain Tailors’ Guild. Its rules, written or
copied in 1460, ordained that every full tailor worth £20 “shall be
of the Master’s Fellowship and Clothing” and pay as his entrance “a
spoon of silver weighing one ounce and the fashion,” besides buying a
livery once a year and giving twelve pence to the yearly feast. Other
shop-holders were entered as of the Fellowship of the Bachelors, each
paying 8_d._ to the feast and his offering.[326] There were special
charges for the “free sewers”; and every servant who took wages
was also brought into the organization and had to pay his sixpence
yearly to the Guild.[327] The master and wardens sat every Thursday
at nine o’clock to do business, and general meetings of the wardens
and shop-holders were held four times a year, where after they had
dined the free sewers were given the remains of the feast. There was
a council of Eight;[328] and the usual rules for protecting the trade
monopoly, for maintaining discipline, and for collecting funds were
made.
So far the Guild was as other Guilds. But rich, powerful, and well
drilled, it cherished ambitions beyond the perfecting of the tailors’
art.[329] In the struggle between York and Lancaster, the sympathies of
official Exeter were apparently Lancastrian, and when Edward the Fourth
came to the throne[330] he probably found it politic or necessary, by a
generous grant to the Tailors’ Company, to make friends of the trading
classes that had been left outside the governing caste. By the charter
of incorporation which he allowed them they were granted singular
privileges, of a kind which the municipal government bitterly resented.
The charter placed the guild in direct dependence on the King, not
on the mayor. They were given a rare liberty—the right “to make
ordinances among themselves, as to them might beseem most necessary and
behovefull for the said fraternity,” and to “make search” and correct
faults, apparently without need of the mayor’s sanction.[331] Not
only so, but they obtained authority to “augment and enlarge” their
Guild as they chose; and did forthwith begin daily to take into their
company “divers crafts other than of themselves, and divers others not
inhabitants within the same city”—men in fact of every conceivable
trade and occupation, free brethren who swore to be true and loving
brothers of the guild, never to go to law with any of the fraternity,
to pay their fines duly during life to the treasure box, and leave a
legacy to it at their death. The usual rule that no man of the craft
could be admitted to the freedom of the city save by the consent of the
master and wardens gained a new political significance when the bulk
of the inhabitants were thus enrolled under the Tailors’ Guild, and
when consequently it was the master of the Tailors who decided what men
should or should not be made free of the borough.
From this moment the Tailors’ Guild was really a great political
association. The Master and Fellowship of the company were scarcely
less powerful than the Mayor and Fellowship of the Corporation. By
their right of search the guild officers could enter by day or night
almost any house in the city or suburbs. By their authority to amend
defaults they were able to leave the city courts deserted and the city
treasury empty of its accustomed fines. The granting of citizenship
was practically in their hands. Their funds and organization
afforded the means for a steady and ordered attack on the governing
oligarchy. Taking into their ranks all crafts and all classes, they
gathered into one body the overtaxed and discontented populace whose
anger at the authorities had grown big with long suppression; while
they also enlisted members that lay beyond the authority of the
corporation—country people as well as church tenants who, as we know,
were already murmuring at the assessing of their taxes, and prepared to
make common cause with the burghers.
Up to this time the authority of the Mayor over the trades of Exeter
had been unquestioned. Merchants, grocers, drapers, mercers, the
tailors themselves had been subject to his rule as in other towns; till
by this alarming conspiracy the Mayor and Fellowship found themselves
confronted with what naturally seemed to them a “great disorderly body”
of revolutionists, who held conventicles and stirred up commotions in
the town, who even overawed the Mayor and threatened to destroy his
authority—men of “such evil disposition and unpeaceable that the Mayor
of the said city may not guide and rule the people ... nor correct such
defaults as ought by him to be correct,” so that “evil example” was
“likely to grow to subversion and destruction of the same city.”[332]
The royal charter obtained by the Guild was looked upon by the
Corporation as a breach of municipal privilege; and the Guild members
were required to renounce it by oath or to lose the city franchise;
while the Mayor made an example of some of the burgesses who belonged
to the fraternity by striking them off the roll of citizens. The shop
windows of the refractory were fastened down, and inhabitants were
forbidden to have garments made by certain tailors whose names were set
down in a black list, “nor with no other of their opinion.” Members of
the craft who were on the city council were refused the Christmas gifts
of wine and canon bread given to the councillors, and if they held to
the craft were indeed excluded from the Chamber.[333] On the other hand
if a luckless inhabitant sought to make his peace with the Corporation
by withdrawing from the Tailors, and swearing upon the Crucifix and the
Holy Evangelists to renounce their charter as contrary to the liberties
of the city, the armed brethren of the Guild visited his house and
levied his contributions by force of arms, that is to say by jacks,
doublets of defence, swords, bucklers, glaives, and stones.[334] Then
the town officers retorted by “presenting” the guilty tailors at the
next court for the crime of riotously collecting fees, and throwing
them into prison; and so the war went on, evidently at the expense of
the weakest members of the community.
Presently however the quarrel was carried beyond the city courts. The
Corporation appealed to Westminster and was once more plunged into
legal expenses. In 1477 both parties appeared by attorneys before
Edward the Fourth, who used the opportunity of the strife to tighten
the hold of the central authority both on the town and on the craft.
He set aside the contention of Exeter that the Corporation had any
exclusive right of granting charters: the Guild had received its
incorporation from the King and this remained valid; and in future all
disputes between city and guild were to be laid before the King and his
Council. But the royal rights being thus secured, the sympathy of the
central government veered round to the side of the town as against the
craft; and the conditions imposed on the Guild if it would preserve
its charter were such as must necessarily break up the organization
in its actual form. The fraternity was cut down again to the limits
of the tailors’ trade, and might enlist no members and make no search
among those of other occupations, nor beyond the city boundaries; and
even within these limits “saving always the franchises of the Mayor
and Commonalty.” It might issue no order against the rights of Bishop
or Mayor: nor might it admit any man to the freedom of the city by
enrolling him in the craft unless he were first presented to the Mayor.
They suffered indeed a yet further humiliation, for while the Mayor was
given the right of refusing to accept a candidate if he were suspected
of not being of good disposition or conversation; yet if the master and
wardens attempted to prevent a man from gaining the freedom of the city
by refusing to testify in his favour and to make him free of the craft,
the Mayor, bailiffs, and common council might insist on his being
accepted by the Guild.[335]
Provisions such as these, involving the dissolution of the actual
fraternity as it then existed, the ruin of its political position,
and the end of its control over the roll of burgesses, proclaimed
the triumph of the municipal authorities; and “the malice and grief
which was conceived thereof could not in long time be satisfied or
appeased.” The Guild indeed apparently refused to accept defeat; for
ordinances were made in 1479 requiring fresh contributions fixed for
seven years from masters, shop-holders, and free sewers “to the finding
of a priest”[336]—contributions which were assessed so high as to
suggest some “feigned colour of sanctity” in the desire to provide for
a chaplain so unwonted an opulence, in addition to his board at the
Mayor’s cost; and which evidently lasted beyond the seven years, since
in 1500 an order was again made that all serving-men, whether working
by the year, by the week, or by the piece, should pay a penny a quarter
to maintain the priest, and at Michaelmas for the wax. The Guild indeed
was still in good repute and able to hold its own. One of the Tailors
was Mayor before 1482;[337] and in 1481 the Company arrogantly defied
the authority of the Corporation. A tailor summoned to choose between
keeping his place as member of the Guild and retaining the freedom of
the city solemnly renounced his oath to the Guild before the Mayor,
whereupon the master and wardens sued him for perjury; so “by the mean
of gentlemen and money” he made peace with them and was again sworn to
the Guild. But absenting himself from the duties it required of him
“without cause reasonable” he was fetched out of his house, brought
to Tailors’ Hall and set in the stocks, and finally compelled to find
sureties for good conduct in the future.[338] The town councillors of
Exeter learned caution from such incidents; and when in this same year
they granted to the Cordwainers a confirmation of their charter, it was
on condition that the master and wardens of the guild should yearly
come before the Mayor and surrender all their powers, after which on
payment of a fine they should receive them back again by grant of the
Mayor.[339] The next year, 1482, when the Bakers desired to have new
ordinances,[340] the Corporation stipulated that all corn must be
ground in the city mills; that the wardens in making search in bakers’
shops or in hucksters’ houses should always be accompanied by a city
officer or serjeant; and that if any guild rules were made which were
against the city liberties, the Mayor and council might change them at
their will.
The rebellious Tailors, however, had fought their last battle. In 1482
a new petition was laid by the city authorities before Edward the
Fourth praying, in spite of the King’s award, for the total abolition
of the Tailors’ charter; and the Twenty-four voted in this and the
following years over £50 for business in Parliament and legal expenses
“touching the annulling of the charter.”[341] From the history of
other towns about this time, it would seem that considerable anxiety
was beginning to grow up at Court as to the commotions of the populace
and the growth of democracy in the boroughs; the petition was granted
as a matter of course, and the Tailors’ Fraternity sank back into the
subject position of an ordinary craft guild. Discontent and murmurings
were still heard in the city streets, but the corporation had no reason
for fear. In 1496 when one John Atwill was about to be chosen for the
fifth time, “a great division happened amongst the citizens about the
election of the mayor, and for avoiding the like for the future, was
ordered by the mayor and common council hereof, that no man should
be mayor or bear any office here, nor any election hold good, unless
the same were held according to the ancient orders and customs of the
said city, and withal that the Mayor and four and twenty of the said
Common Council should elect the Mayor and all other officers of the
said city.” To make matters quite safe the city got a charter the next
year from Henry the Seventh. The new charter did indeed slightly limit
the claims which the Council had freely set forth in 1496: they were no
longer allowed to elect the Mayor, but were to choose two candidates
for the office, one of whom was to be appointed by the freemen; but
on the other hand they still retained absolute power to fill up their
own vacancies, and to choose the bailiffs. Their name too was for the
first time recognized, and instead of using any longer the old style of
the city, “the Mayor, Bailiffs, and Commonalty of the city,” the king
legislated “by the assent and consent of the Common Council.”[342]
The Tailors, thus beaten in open fight, could only fall back on the
indirect influence of their wealth and compact majority, and make
alliance with the power which they could not destroy. In 1516 the
Master of the craft was also Steward of the city, another member was
Receiver or Treasurer, and others were of the Council of Twenty-four;
while others again had been Mayors or Treasurers of past years. By the
will and consent of these officers of City and Guild, the constitution
of the Tailors’ Company was amended, so as to blot out the last trace
of government by the will of the fraternity; and the Eight men, “the
sent of the occupation,” by whose authority laws had once been made
for the trade, were replaced by a council of those who had once been
masters of the craft, to be summoned by the Master.[343] The full
significance of this step can only be understood by taking it in
connexion with the position which was at this time being given to
“the Clothing” in municipal government.[344] But it is plain that the
ancient strife was now closed by a division of the spoils of power; and
the sorrows of defeat were left to the populace at large. These lay
more hopelessly than before at the mercy of their rulers, for masters
of crafts when they controlled town government had a double reason
for maintaining the authority of the corporation—the instinct of the
master tradesman and the instinct of the town councillor.
The story of Exeter is invaluable from the light it throws on the
mutual attitude of town and craft in the struggle for autonomy. Nothing
is more intelligible than the passionate resistance of a corporation
to royal charters given over the heads of the town officers,[345] if
we realize the quick alarms to which a municipality which had had
experience of the long fight for supremacy with king and church and
baron, was liable when it saw a new enemy, an enemy which it had long
supposed vanquished, springing up in its very midst to threaten with
a fresh danger the unity of the borough. It was speedily discovered
how great an internal weakness must follow from this cleavage in
the political society of the towns; and how the very appeals for
arbitration to the State, and the interference of King and Parliament,
must constantly tend yet further to limit municipal independence; while
there were other hints of danger in the new chances offered for the
country gentry to interfere with the independence of the town life,
when they could make the guild, detached from the town, an engine for
their own political projects.[346] Even for the guilds themselves,
there were to be set against the advantages, whatever these amounted
to, which they actually won by emancipation, grave dangers for the
future—dangers from the difficulty of enforcing discipline without
government support; from the hostility of the corporation and the
annoyances it could inflict by rendering honour to their most unruly
members; and from the encouragement given to a more aggressive
animosity on the part of other companies, rivals in independence and
determined foes in monopoly.[347] The emancipation of the greater
trading companies from local control may have been a necessary step in
setting free a growing national commerce; but it was the evident sign
that the age of municipal freedom and local self-government had entered
on its decline.
Usually, however, it seems that the big trading companies had their own
methods of making terms with authority, or of leading the corporation
captive and peacefully installing themselves in the place of power;
as we may see in the case of the great merchant fraternities and
wholesale dealers who, like the Drapers and Mercers of Coventry,
the Drapers of Shrewsbury, and possibly guilds of the same kind at
Walsall,[348] had made of their combinations the dictators of the
civic administration. But commercial unions such as these, standing in
a group by themselves, somewhat apart from the Exeter Tailors, must be
separately considered. The Tailors’ fraternity may perhaps be taken as
holding a sort of intermediate position—on one side figuring almost
as a merchant company, and on the other as an ordinary manufacturing
craft; and it is in this second aspect that its history indicates
to us the very important part which the trades played in rallying
the elements of revolt, drilling their forces, and lending the guild
organization for the strife. No single instance can ever be taken as
in any way typical or representative, for everywhere the position of
the crafts resolves itself into questions of local circumstances, and
of delicate changes from place to place in the balance of conflicting
forces. Whether there was any town under normal conditions in which
successful resistance was made to a governing oligarchy save with
the help of a good craft organization we cannot as yet say. In every
borough there seem to have been disputes, more or less acute, between
the governing and the governed, whether the conflict took the form
of the attack and defence of a close corporation as at Exeter; or of
a powerful guild merchant controlling the corporation as at Lynn;
or of the great mercantile fraternities as at Coventry. And in some
boroughs in which the commons succeeded in modifying the old oligarchic
system, we can certainly trace the direct action of the manufacturing
crafts. Occasionally the working trades rose against the merchant
societies, and forced their way into the Council Chamber. In Carlisle
the Merchant Guild, while remaining distinct from the municipal body,
gave to the town more mayors and aldermen than any other guild; and as
it admitted no strangers to membership of its society “for no money
whatsoever”[349] its posts and honours became practically hereditary,
until eight crafts or occupations of the town (seven of them being
unions of artificers, and the eighth a union of shopkeepers, seedsmen,
apothecaries, haberdashers, and so on) put an end to this despotism
in the sixteenth century by creating a council of thirty-two, four
from each trade, who joined the council of the mayor and aldermen, and
claiming to act in the name of the whole community took part in making
bye-laws; in choosing the “out-men” who were to be made burgesses;
in auditing accounts; in removing the town officers if necessary;
and in keeping the keys of the common chest.[350] That such powers
as these were voluntarily or even quite peaceably handed over by the
ruling guild is conceivable, though its improbability is shewn by
all analogy. In Newcastle it was after “great commotions, unlawful
assemblies, confederacies,” and general riots that the mercers,
drapers, and corn-dealers were forced in 1516 to admit nine other
crafts to share with them the government.[351] In Norwich, where it
was found possible even for guilds proscribed and forbidden to force
an honourable compromise with their opponents, the settlement was
only brought about after discords by which the city was “divided and
dissolved and in point to have been destroyed.”[352] When Edward the
Fourth, in 1464, sent a royal patent to York ordering that for the
future the craftsmen of the trades should nominate two aldermen, one of
whom was to be chosen mayor, the action must imply that there had been
dissension in the city society, out of which the king perhaps hoped to
make his profit[353] by attaching to himself an important faction in
the community. No doubt there were many cases where the trades had to
confess the entire failure of their attempts, or where their success
was but partial, as in London where the crafts would willingly have
increased their influence if popular opinion could have been taken
out of the way.[354] In a great number of boroughs we know that the
crafts insisted that the only way to the municipal franchise should
lie through their societies;[355] but to what extent this condition
prevailed, to what political uses it was put, and how far it served
as a trial of strength between parties in power and revolutionary
factions, are as yet only matters of guess-work.
The scanty state of our knowledge indeed makes it impossible to sum
up in a phrase the character of a strife which was universal, which
involved every class in a most complicated and highly organized
industrial society, and of which the history has not yet been fully
made out for a single borough. But so far as our evidence yet goes, the
developement of municipal government involved everywhere a struggle
between the classes triumphant and the classes put under subjection.
To discuss whether the subject class who attempted to create new
associations or use old ones to fight their battles, were mere common
burgesses contending with a municipal corporation, or bodies of
artificers resisting a guild of merchants, or an indiscriminate mob
opposed to a religious fraternity of the Holy Trinity or the Holy
Cross, is often a mere juggling with words. For as we shall see, it was
possible for one group of men to bear the three names, and in their
character of “magnates” or “potentiores” to act not only as the Town
Council but also as the Guild Merchant; and to shelter both functions
under a specious colour of sanctity. Under such circumstances it is of
no great consequence under which name they fought, nor by what name
they called the mob, whether commonalty or another; since no change
in their nominal relations materially affected the attitude of men
in power towards those outside, or the policy of merchant and master
tradesmen towards the working people. We must always remember, too,
in discussing the social changes that took place in England, that
the absence of violent dramatic effects, the limited and provincial
character of the contests of classes, were but necessary consequences
of the conditions of English life, at a time when industrial and
political disputes were carried on by the local forces of every little
town independently, in a series of particular conflicts fought out with
varying success by groups of combatants trained in small detachments
for separate service. It would be too much to imagine, because we
read of no open war of classes, no burning of towns or insurrections
quenched in blood, that the whole industrial society of mediæval
England moved together in a harmonious and orderly progression, each
new group as it arrived being peacefully lifted to its destined place
in wealth and council, without the jealousy of predecessors, or the
bitter grudge of after-comers. On the contrary all evidence goes to
show that the tenacity of Englishmen in holding to power, and their
stubbornness in insisting on freedom, were as characteristic of the
race in the fifteenth as in the nineteenth century; that antagonism
between the man who asks and the man who pays a wage, were very much
the same as now; and that class interests were if anything far more
powerful. If therefore we suppose the social and political developement
of the later middle-ages in this country was naturally brought about
by the logical sequence of economic developement, we must allow that
stern sequence to include then, as it would include now, the passionate
efforts of a strong people to turn aside by their might the impending
calamities of fate, and to lay a violent grasp on her uncertain
benefactions.