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 13_s._ 4_d._ 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 6_s._
8_d._ 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 6_s._ 8_d._ 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]
It is obvious that in governing bodies whose members were thus
distinguished from the common mass of burghers by wealth, social
position, culture, who were independent of the people they ruled,
very watchful in the matter of their legal or customary rights, and
abundantly supplied in case of difficulty with advice in the law
by the recorder or the town clerk or the special counsel retained
in their service, no influence was wanting which could foster the
official spirit in its most extreme form, with its pride of position,
its administrative pretensions, its love of legal definition, and its
anxiety for “good order.” “The worshipful men of the great clothing” or
“the imperial co-citizens” of some very minor borough ruled for their
own ends with frankness and capacity; while their natural rallying
cry of “good rule and substantial order”[502] was so well understood
at court that they could always confidently count on support from
that quarter. The alarm of the mob, which since the Peasant Revolt
had troubled statesmen at Westminster as well as aldermen in the
boroughs, drew the ruling classes generally into close alliance; and
towards the end of the fifteenth century, we constantly find the town
officers turning with apprehension to the court for aid, and kings
anxiously lending succour to the corporations. The Wars of the Roses
and dynastic quarrels which once appeared to pass so lightly over the
boroughs, scarcely touching them with a passing alarm of material
calamity, were not brought to a close before they had left a terrible
and abiding impress on the civil life of the people. The shaking of
the national security, the wild hopes and the panic-stricken fears of
rebellion, had their inevitable conclusion in tightening the hold of
authority. In the boroughs the governing bodies, terrified at the signs
of bitter discontent in the subject populace, and justly trembling
lest under some feint of political obedience, the mass of the people
might be arrayed against their rulers and clamour against wrong and
injustice might fill the streets, raised a cry for protection against
social anarchy; and the cry was eagerly responded to by kings whose
title to the crown was their strong will and heavy hand. The progress
of liberty was violently arrested by the fears that shook the settled
classes before threatenings of revolt. “It seemeth that the world is
all quavering; it will reboil somewhere,” onlookers said; men walked
with redoubled wariness in an “unstable” and “right queasy” world,[503]
and while anxious kings urged the mayor and his council to make good
and fearful example of indisposed commons, aldermen gladly locked the
doors of the town-hall, and cast into the freeman’s dungeon the burgher
who still prated of a free community.
NOTE A.
We do not know when or how the leading men of Bristol assumed a
position of special privilege. All we know is that troubles grew out
of a quarrel about customs in the port and market, &c., in which
fourteen of the citizens “were seen to have the prerogative,” while
the community asserted that the burgesses were all of one condition
and were equals in liberties and privileges. After many disputes
the case was brought before the judges of the king’s court, but the
Fourteen so arranged matters that foreigners or aliens were associated
with them in the inquisition, which the community alleged to be
against the liberties of the town. Seeing that their arguments were
rejected and that their cause was going to be lost, not by reason but
by favour, the leaders of the people angrily went out of the judgment
hall and proclaimed to the mob that the judges were favouring their
enemies. The whole people, called out by the ringing of the common
bell, flocked into the hall; and there was terrible clamour and a free
fight with fists and clubs; twenty men were killed; and terror seized
alike on the noble and ignoble, who tried to escape by windows and
roofs at the risk of their lives; while even the judges prayed to be
allowed to fly by the help of the mayor, who himself could scarcely
soothe the “vast crowd of malefactors.” About eighty men were summoned
for the riot, and not appearing before the judges were banished, but
stayed on nevertheless comfortably in the town and were well cared for
by their fellow rebels. It was in fact the Fourteen who judged it wise
to leave Bristol, thinking it useless to remain in such a storm. (See
the extract from the life of Edward the Second by a monk of Malmesbury
given in Seyer’s Bristol, ii. 94.)
To quell this tumult the king in 1312 took the government into his
own hand and appointed Bartholomew of Baddlesmere, constable of the
castle, as custos; but the mayor and bailiffs, asserting that the
letter had not been addressed to the _community_, and further that
the custody of the town had been previously given to them, refused to
obey orders, and kept the gates of the castle and town for thirty-five
weeks, building a wall against the castle and refusing to let the
king’s men go out to fetch victuals save at the will of the community.
Of their own authority they made John the Taverner mayor, John of
Horncastle and Richard Legate bailiffs, and John Hazard coroner,
without making them take their oath of king or constable; and by
force of arms seized the custody of the prison, levied for their own
purposes the revenues from the town and port which ought to have been
collected for the king, and administered justice. The king’s judges
and servants were imprisoned or driven from the town; the Fourteen
and half a dozen partizans, who had mostly been in office, were not
allowed to return to the town in spite of the king’s injunction, and
the community seized their goods to the value of £2,000, and drove out
their wives, freemen, and tenants.
The rebellion lasted for two years. In 1316 six citizens representing
the community of Bristol were summoned before the king’s council to
answer for these offences. They denied the charges, and refused to
submit unless life and limb, rents and land, were secured to them. The
king, looking on the case as one of evil example, ordered Bristol to
be besieged by sea and land, and after attempting to hold out for some
days in the hope that the troops might be called away to the Scotch
war, the town surrendered half in ruins. The leaders were put in
prison and the multitude terrified by a series of heavy punishments.
The banished party returned in triumph to power, and appeared, twelve
of them, before the king’s council, with the allotted fine of four
thousand marks to have pardon for all the city’s offences, and to have
back the franchise of the town. The rebel mayor and his immediate
friends, excluded from mercy, went in their turn into exile. (See the
account extracted from Rolls of Parliament 9 Edward II. by Seyer.
Memoirs of Bristol, ii. 89 to 105.)
After this matters seem to have gone on as before, a few influential
families still taking the leading place. One, Turtle, was mayor ten
times, and another, Tilly, held office for four years. But in 1344,
the popular party insisted on the appointment of Forty-eight “of the
chiefest and discreetest” burgesses, to be the mayor’s councillors
and assistants. When Bristol was made into a county in 1373 the new
charter recognized the system established in 1344, and provided that
the mayor and sheriff with the assent of the commonalty should choose
a Council of Forty, whose consent was required for all ordinances, and
who took part in municipal elections; while the five aldermen of the
wards were chosen by the people from among the ex-mayors or members of
the common council. By a later charter of 1499 it was settled that six
aldermen were to be elected for life by the mayor and common council,
and were to have the authority of London aldermen (Charter Henry VII.,
1499. Seyer’s Charters and Letters Patent of Bristol, 123), while the
common council itself was to be elected by the mayor and two aldermen
chosen by him, with the assent of the commonalty.