THE COUNCIL OF SOUTHAMPTON
THERE are two grounds on which Southampton may claim to stand first
among examples of early municipal government. For centuries it was
the great port of the south—the harbour where for England the trade
of the whole world converged, where carracks of Flanders and galleys
from Venice met to pour upon its wharves the treasures of the northern
and the southern seas. And for centuries its government survived, as
perhaps such a government survived nowhere else in England, in the
order appointed by its first planters, with none of its hedges broken
down by compromise, nor its pure springs stained by infiltration of
popular and democratic fervours. It is possible that the two facts
are intimately bound together, and that the destiny of a Channel port
determined the somewhat unusual lot of the Southampton municipality.
The industrial experiences of Southampton had been very felicitous.
Nearly forty trades are mentioned in the town records of the thirteenth
century, and there were many more than these, carried on not only by
the English inhabitants but by settlers come from Burgundy, Flanders,
Denmark, and Lombardy, and the French colony established in Rochelle
Lane and French Street. Wool of all kind was sold in the market,
coarse, black, broken, and lambs’ wool, much of which was sent to the
Isle of Wight to be made up into web. Coloured “Paris candles” were
manufactured as early as 1297. Cheese was made in great quantities, and
cider. Bends of elms for ploughs were brought from Abingdon.[522] Hemp
was grown for the making of cords, and the shipbuilding trade for which
the town was so noted in the time of Henry the Fifth must have been
already practised in far earlier days, to judge from the history of the
Southampton shipping.[523]
Home industries, however, held a very modest position in Southampton
compared with the fine figure made by its foreign commerce. Ships from
the West bringing “cloth of Ireland,” perhaps drugget from Drogheda or
from Sligo, met vessels carrying wine from the French ports, herrings
and wax and tapestry from Brittany, alum from Biscay and from Genoa,
Eastern spices from the depôts of the Rhine, while harbour dues were
paid for salt-fish, pitch, bitumen, charcoal, and wood from the ports
of the Baltic.[524] The great glory of the town lay however in its
direct trade with the Mediterranean. When in the reign of Edward the
Second Venetian and Genoese ships first began to carry their wares
to England they cast anchor in its harbour,[525] and for two hundred
years Southampton became the centre of English traffic with the Italian
republics.[526] An attempt to make it a free port in 1334 came to
a speedy end, but the advantages the scheme offered must have been
practically secured by the privileges which the kings granted both
to the foreign merchants who came to trade and to the town itself
as a commercial centre. In 1337 the merchants of the Society of the
Alberti in Florence did the carrying trade of wool from Southampton to
Gascony,[527] and three years later part of a tenement near the sea
was let to the Society of the Bardi, the Florentine bankers. In 1378
the King allowed merchants of Spain and the Genoese and Venetians who
carried all the Levant trade, to unlade and sell their goods at its
wharfs instead of being forced to go to the staple at Calais;[528]
and again in 1402 Henry the Fourth granted special permission to the
Genoese to disembark at Southampton and carry their goods thence to
London by land.[529] From 1353, when Winchester was made a staple
for wool, Southampton as the port from which alone all its bales
must be shipped to the Continent had a practical monopoly of the
southern export trade.[530] It was the only harbour to which might be
carried “Malmseys and other sweet wines of the growth of Candye and
Rotymoes, and in any other place within the parts of Levant beyond
the Straits of Morocco.” Carracks from Genoa and Venice, ships from
Spain, Portugal, Almayne, Flanders, and Zealand thronged its harbours,
bringing their wines and spices, and carrying away wool for the weavers
of the Netherlands, or cloth for the dyers of Italy and the traders
of the Black Sea.[531] Attracted by its dazzling prospects of wealth,
London vintners and cloth-workers rented great cellars for storage, and
held houses and lands in the town; and so brilliant was the promise of
its future that in 1379 a Genoese merchant got leave from the king,
for the better security of his merchandise, to occupy the castle which
had just been rebuilt, and promised in return to make Southampton the
greatest port of Western Europe. But before he could carry out his
plans the merchants in London, furious at so dangerous a rivalry, had
him assassinated at his own door.[532]
Nor was commercial enterprise left to the foreigner, for even in the
fourteenth century native traders were sending out English ships to
do business in foreign ports.[533] In 1391 one merchant took a lease
for the whole year of the customs of the town by land and water; while
another wealthy burgess, William Soper, put the towers of the Water
Gate in repair at his own cost, and rented them and the adjoining
buildings for a hundred and twenty years, promising to repair and
maintain them. At the end of the fourteenth century the large sums
which passed from hand to hand, and the numerous bonds for payment of
debts from £60 to £100 bore witness to the growth of trade.[534] The
wool dues in the port were able to bear a charge of £100 a year granted
by Henry the Fourth in 1400 for the repairing and fortifying of the
town walls; and in 1417 Cardinal Beaufort, Lord of Southampton and the
greatest wool-merchant in all England, lent £14,000 to Henry the Fifth
on security of customs on wool and other merchandise in the various
ports of Southampton, and before a third of it was repaid he advanced
another £14,000 on the same security.[535]
The prosperity of the citizens was shewn by their refusal any longer to
interrupt business during the Winchester fair. In 1350 they had already
quarrelled with the bishop on the subject; but he had carried the day,
and the town had again submitted to the old rules that while the fair
lasted there should be no weighing and measuring at the great beam in
the market place, that if a merchant came carrying wares he should only
be allowed to remain if he swore that they were not intended for sale,
and that the bishop’s bailiff should live in Southampton during the
fair to see that the contract was carried out. If it was broken the
inhabitants were bound, not only in their lands and houses but in all
their goods and chattels, to pay a penalty of a thousand marks within
three months.[536] From this intolerable state of things the citizens
were strong enough to free themselves by negociations with the bishop
in 1406,[537] and in 1433 they gained the right to have a fair of their
own every year for three days at Trinity Chapel near the town.
Nor had the town yet exhausted its good fortune. A law of 1455 which
forbade merchant strangers from Italy any longer to ride about the
country buying up with ready money wools and wool cloth from the poor
people, and only allowed them henceforth to buy in London, Southampton,
or Sandwich,[538] drove foreign traders to settle in the town if they
wanted to carry on their business at all; and many more were added
to their number the next year when the whole body of Italian dealers
living in London were driven out by a popular riot, and passing by
Winchester, fixed their new homes in Southampton,[539] which must
then have contained within its walls the great majority of all the
Italian merchants in England. The monopoly of the whole export trade of
Southern England was confirmed to the town by law in 1464; and finally
Henry the Seventh created it a staple of metals, and gave the exclusive
right of melting tin ore to its guild.[540]
Smugglers and illegal traders bore their testimony to the profits
to be made in Southampton waters. Light boats[541] pushed by night
into every creek and cove along the coast to land their casks of
wine; and in the town strange tailors were hard at work cutting up
stuff into garments for the foreign market so as to avoid the duty on
exported cloth. It was decreed in 1407 that no alien tailor, coming
in a ship or galley, should have any shop, house, or room in the town
for the making of any “robes, jepone, ne autres garnements” until
he had made agreement with the masters of the craft; so vessels of
“Spayne, Portingall, Almayne, Flanders, Zelonde, and others in their
vyages” came bringing with them “tailors of divers nations,” who now
however simply abode in their ships and cut up the cloth there at
their leisure, and in 1468, four years after the monopoly of the wool
trade had been again secured to Southampton, it had to pass a new
law against these plunderers of the custom house.[542] Indeed, the
magnitude of commerce at the end of the century may be measured by the
scale on which corruption and false dealing could be carried on even
by the town authorities themselves. In 1484 two London citizens, one
a brewer, the other a “gentleman, and clerk of all the King’s ships,”
owed to the mayor, sheriffs, and bailiffs of Southampton £1,200. These
officers, however, had apparently got into some difficulty about the
sale of 1,086 sacks of wool in which they were concerned, and drew up
an agreement with their debtors that they would forgive this debt of
£1,200 if they might have a promise that they should be held “harmless
in their own names, and not as mayor, sheriffs, and bailiffs.”[543]
There was, however, another aspect of Southampton trade. We have a
glimpse of the hidden side of the town life during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries in account books of the Hospital of St. Julian or
God’s House, which owned a hundred and eight tenements inhabited by
working people, the prosperous ones living in houses of their own, the
more luckless seeking shelter in selds or open warehouses. But from
the one class as from the other, the Hospital pressed in vain for a
rent which the tenant scarcely ever paid. One of the richer kind is
pardoned 56_s._ arrears; the attorney is forgiven a sum of 50_s._; the
goldsmith who owes £4 8_s._ 6_d._, manages to pay most of his debt in
salt. Others pledge their carpets; some pay 1_d._ or 1/2_d._ or 3_d._
at a time for large accounts against them; in other cases there is the
brief entry “died in poverty and so nothing;” or poor tenants “run away
from the town in poverty,” and the selds that sheltered them stand
empty. Such is the tale of misery—a misery scarcely alleviated by the
alms distributed by the Hospital to the poor—in 1299 three bushels
of wheat given in Advent; in 1306 one-and-a-half quarters of beans
and twenty-nine quarters of peas; in 1318 thirteen quarters of beans.
After the burning of a great part of the town in 1337 by a fleet of
French, Spaniards, and Genoese, matters grew yet worse, and in 1340
the arrears amounted to four times as much as the yearly rents. The
Abbot of Beaulieu owed five years’ rent for the “cheseseld.” There
was due from the five parishes of Holyrood, St. John, St. Michael,
St. Lawrence, and All Saints within the Bar, £127 in 1340, £155 in
1342.[544] Large tenements were broken up into smaller ones where the
people huddled together in their misery, and the terrible legacy of a
very poor population clinging in extreme destitution to the slums and
low suburbs of the town was apparently handed on to the next century,
for so far as the published records tell, Southampton was the only town
in the fifteenth century that gave regular out-door relief to paupers.
In 1441 the Steward’s book gives an account of £4 2_s._ 1_d._ given
away in alms every week to poor men and women.[545]
In Southampton, in fact, riches did not gather in the people’s coffers
while men slept. Wealth which was hard to win, was harder still to keep
in the great port of the southern coast, where life and goods were
held by a precarious tenure whenever England had a quarrel across the
water. At any moment the plea of military necessity might justify all
kinds of irregular and intermittent interference of royal officers,
and the government of Southampton became a matter of divided authority
and shifting responsibility which was probably unparalleled elsewhere
in England. A special guardian of the king’s ships[546] interfered in
the harbour; and a receiver and victualler to the king’s troops[547]
interfered in the shops and market of the town. The Constable of the
Castle[548] long survived the constables of other towns, and was given
powers determined by the court view of the necessities of the times; so
that in 1369, we find a captain of the castle with authority to arrest
all rebels against the king or the government of the town, and to watch
against regrators, artizans, or workmen who should offend against the
law.[549] At a time when the mayor of most boroughs was commissioner
for array-at-arms, the mayor was here jointly responsible for military
defences with the constable and apparently took quite the second
place.[550]
Military discipline in fact pressed relentlessly at all points on a
place continually vexed by war and alarms of war and calls to arms. On
Sundays and holidays all children from seven years old were called out
to practise shooting with bows on the common, while the town cowherd
kept the cattle out of the way.[551] When war broke out every man had
to go out and take his share of fighting, and no one save the mayor was
even allowed to provide a deputy instead of bearing arms in person. If
the inhabitants had no heart to fight, summary punishment was meted out
as a warning for future times; and when in 1338 the mayor, bailiffs,
and burgesses fled before an attack of the French, the custody of
Southampton was seized into the king’s hands, and its franchises
forfeited for a whole year.[552] Besides the cost of three or four
ships[553] to protect the harbour, with wages for masters and men, and
money for their food and rent, Southampton was bound to have “ready for
defence against the foreign enemy great plenty of armour, weapons, and
other artillery and things needful.” There was a town gunner who was
paid sixpence a day to make gunpowder, gunstones and lathe-guns.[554]
Generation after generation of unwilling tradesmen had to repair and
maintain and defend walls over a mile long and from twenty-five to
thirty feet high, with twenty-nine great towers; and to strengthen
the sea-banks and ditches. The work was divided out among the people;
lightermen and boatmen were bound to bring up every year boatloads of
stones and heap them up against the walls on the sea side, while the
townspeople put in piles and kept them in order.[555] The towers were
manned by the various crafts, one by shoemakers, curriers, cobblers,
and saddlers; another by mercers and grocers; a third by goldsmiths,
blacksmiths, lockyers, pewterers, and tinkers; and so on.[556] But so
heavy was the cost of repairs, that after the burning of the town by
the French, when the king, in 1338 and 1340, ordered the fortifications
to be strengthened and a stone wall fronting the sea built at the
expense of the inhabitants,[557] the people simply fled away; and the
Earl of Warwick and his successors, under the title of “guardians of
the town,” were posted in its castle with men-at-arms and archers, “to
take order” about the wretched fugitives, and compel any inhabitants
who attempted to leave the town to return and live there “according
to their estate,” and if they refused, to seize their houses, rents,
and possessions for the king.[558] And in 1376 the poor commons and
tenants prayed that the king would take the town into his hand and
forgive them the rent, since for the last two years they had spent not
only the whole ferm which he had granted them (nearly £300 a year) on
the walls, but had been forced to give besides £1,000 of their own
money, so that half the people had deserted their homes to escape the
intolerable burdens thrown on them,[559] and the rest were going.
The long miseries of the Hundred Years War were soon followed by the
harassing problems of the Wars of the Roses. For Southampton was
reputed wealthy, with its unusually imposing ferm of £226 and the
big roll of the king’s customs, and there were always people waiting
to dip their hands into so rich treasury. The royal generosities
at its expense were an old story. A large part of the ferm was
settled on successive queens from the thirteenth to the seventeenth
centuries,[560] and however low funds might run the town always tried
to keep well at court by paying at least the Queen’s jointure. Great
nobles and servants of the king’s household were not forgotten, and
took their grants as they could get them, partly in money, partly
in wine or foreign fruits or spices. But when two warring parties
each claimed the treasure of Southampton as its own, the municipal
finances became a perilous matter for the council to deal with, and
the crises of the Wars of the Roses are marked by calamity to the town
budget.[561] In 1457 the ferm was only made up by contributions from
seventeen burgesses amounting to over £42.[562] Matters were more
serious in November, 1458, and the mayor had to go to London, from
whence he writes to entreat the auditors “that ye will, as diligently
as ye can or may, with one heart, one will, and one thought effectually
to labour, that an end be had of the books of the bailiffs in all
haste goodly, and to warn the steward that was to make his book ready
against my coming home, for we must with all the diligence we can or
may make provision of money to be had in short time or we be like to be
sore hurt, and that God defend for we have had too much.” One of the
auditors accounts was over £30 too short, “the which is to me right
strange, so much money as he received the last year and this year too,
I cannot understand it.... I remit it to your wisdoms.” Another account
included nothing but the bare fees. These matters must be thought on
“right specially” but “if ye will with good heart and will undivided
and without any ambiguity every man heartily and diligently put his
hand we shall once be brought out of thraldom.” As to political news
he is as cautious as he is anxious. “And so much to do will be amongst
them, God spede the right.” “I can no more, but I beseech God guide us
in all our work.”[563] A few months after the mayor was summoned to the
Exchequer in London about his accounts, but before the day was fixed
the Lancastrian Lord Exeter suddenly sent his secretary to the town
with a receipt under his seal and sign manual for the last half-year’s
rent. “Milord prayed us so fair to be paid here (that is in Southampton
and not in London) and said he had never so great ‘myster’ ne need that
he is paid,” and promised his help in case of any difficulty in London,
“for we told him what hurt and loss it was unto us.” So the town paid
sadly, and the mayor anxiously wrote to their Recorder in London to
try and get them out of the scrape. “And [we will] make aready all the
money that we may in all haste possible whatsomever befall,” he adds
earnestly.[564]
It was indeed hard to gather money at the moment, for in 1460 the Earl
of Wiltshire, Treasurer of Henry the Sixth, making an excuse to get to
Southampton under pretence of intercepting Warwick, found five great
carracks of Genoa lying in the port, seized them all with all their
wealth, filled them with his soldiers, provided them with victuals from
the town without payment, and fled to Flanders with his booty.[565]
Then came the new rulers, and Edward the Fourth ordered Southampton to
pay the treasurer of his household £133 6_s._ 8_d._, and to the Earl
of Warwick as constable of Dover castle an annuity of £154 out of the
same ferm.[566] What with one trouble and another Southampton fell
into arrears with its rent, and a burgess (the very Richard Gryme who
had been mayor a year before and had made the advance to Lord Exeter)
was thrown into the Fleet in London till it should be paid; two of his
fellow-townsmen were sent riding to Westminster “to labour for his
welfare,” and £20 was at last handed over before he was set free.[567]
The same year the sheriff, also summoned before the Exchequer, rode
to London at the town’s cost; and he only got off by having his debt
paid by the Recorder, who was afterwards repaid by the town.[568] There
was further trouble in 1469-70 when the Kingmaker, as the restored
Constable of Dover under Henry the Sixth, demanded his pension from
the ferm, and the mayor travelled to London “to reckon with the Earl
of Warwick,” and spent twelve days there, “for the which twelve days
the cost cometh to 50_s._ 6_d._”[569] Then a few months later came the
other constable of the victorious Edward the Fourth, and the town had
to pay him too and bear the double charge that year.[570]
All these financial difficulties were made yet more acute by the
character of the municipal wealth. Of the £393 which made up the
revenue of the town in 1428,[571] £302 3_s._ 4_d._ came from tolls;
and the foreign commerce on which such sums were levied had to be
maintained amid wars with France, quarrels with Brittany, attacks of
Hanseatic and Breton and Genoese and Venetian traders always on the
watch to seize ships on any plea of wrong done to their merchants, or
in defiance of pirates that swarmed in the Channel, and of smugglers
that haunted the coast. Again and again the people make complaint that
the foreign merchants that used to bring their goods no longer came,
and for lack of tolls to pay the ferm the burgesses had been forced
to borrow £400 for their rent, and that many citizens had been driven
from the town, and others were going unless something could be done to
lighten their burdens.[572]
These were some of the special problems with which Southampton had to
deal—perils of war, its consequences of military rule and divided
authority within the town, a complicated and difficult finance, a trade
at once wealthy and precarious, heavy expenses to be met in good times
and in bad, a very poor class living side by side with a very rich
one. The form of trouble might vary from year to year, but trouble
was always with them. Bargainings, abject petitionings and arbitrary
favours, concessions now on this side now on that, stern exactions and
lavish gifts, left the town open to endless changes and chances of
fortune.[573]
The general conditions, in fact, must have made the growth of popular
government practically impossible; and from the beginning the town
was probably ruled by a narrow oligarchy. Its first constitution was,
perhaps, framed under the influence of a powerful Merchant Guild,
such as would naturally be formed in a wealthy commercial centre—a
fraternity not unlike the contemporary guild at Lynn or the latter
one at Coventry.[574] It seems that in the twelfth century two king’s
bailiffs had the care of all the royal property, the collection of
the ferm, the gathering in of the king’s debts, and so forth.[575]
Meanwhile the Merchant Guild elected its own aldermen, scavins, usher,
and other officers, to protect the liberties and customs granted
to it by Henry the First and confirmed by Henry the Second and his
sons.[576] In 1199 John granted to “the burgesses” to have their
town at ferm,[577] and it is probable that the alderman of the guild
was charged with the collection and payment of the money, for in the
course of the next generation he appears as mayor of the town.[578]
Both offices, mayor and alderman, were carried on side by side in his
person. He shared the government with the bailiffs, as chief of the
town and the guild, bound to maintain the statutes of both, and having
the first voice in all elections concerning both. If the bailiffs
failed to do justice, he summoned the jurors and judged in their place.
He had charge of the common coffer and the keys of the town gates,
and kept the assize of bread and of ale.[579] By virtue of his old
title and office the mayor was still called alderman in the fourteenth
century,[580] and in 1368 he apparently acted at the head of the guild
organization with its four scavins.[581]
The peculiar position of an alderman of the guild thus turned into a
mayor, is no doubt marked by the fact that he was never, as in other
boroughs, the elect of the whole community, nor even of a jury chosen
by the people. In the fifteenth century it was admitted that from time
immemorial the custom was for the outgoing mayor, in the presence of
the bailiffs and burgesses, to nominate two burgesses, and the assembly
was forced to elect one of these two, unless they chose to re-elect the
mayor himself, which indeed was often done. The system was probably
that which the guild had originally adopted for choosing its aldermen,
and which went on unchanged under the new circumstances. His place as
mayor, indeed, seems to have been an honour slowly and reluctantly
conceded,[582] for in 1249, after “Benedict the son of Aaron” had held
office (possibly for eleven years) the burgesses obtained a royal
patent granting that neither they nor their heirs should ever again
have a mayor in Southampton.[583] Twelve years later, however, the list
begins again, though in a manner as informal as before, for long after
his authority in Southampton was undisputed, the mayor was officially
ignored in that capacity at Westminster, and charters from the time
of Henry the Second to that of Richard the Second were addressed to
“the burgesses.”[584] It was only after a charter of Henry the Fourth,
which among other things appointed the mayor and four aldermen as
justices of the peace,[585] that the style seems to have changed, and
the letters patent of Henry the Fifth are addressed to “the mayor and
burgesses.”[586] At last, in 1445, under Henry the Sixth, Southampton
was made a perpetual corporation to be known by the name of “mayor,
bailiffs, and burgesses,”[587] and this phrase henceforth replaced the
old style.[588]
With the group of officials through whom the alderman ruled the guild
we have no immediate concern. But when the mayor had taken his oath of
office in S. Michael’s Church (perhaps in the north chancel aisle which
was called “Corporation Chapel”), he found himself at the head of an
administrative body of twelve “discreets” and twelve aldermen of the
wards. The aldermen set over the five wards (three of which were ruled
by two aldermen, and the remaining two by three, making twelve in all)
acted as a kind of police to keep the peace in their respective wards,
to enroll the names of all the inhabitants and of their sureties, to
take up malefactors, and to make the round every week or fortnight
to see that all was in good order;[589] and it is possible that they
took part in some work of the mayor’s council in the fourteenth
century.[590] The twelve “discreets” were elected every year by the
whole community in an appointed place, and like the twelve portmen of
Ipswich were sworn to keep the peace, to preserve the town liberties,
to do justice to poor and rich, and to be present at every court.[591]
They had joint charge with the mayor of the treasure and the common
chest of charters and deeds, and no document could be sealed with the
common seal unless at least six of them were present. They themselves
elected the two bailiffs, the common clerk, and the serjeant of the
town.[592] Finally in 1401, two years after the same privilege had been
conceded to Nottingham, the charter of Henry IV. gave the discreets
power to choose out of their own body four aldermen, who together with
the mayor were to be justices of the peace, and were to be aided in
their work by four discreet persons chosen by the mayor and community.
From this time doubtless the mayor and his four brethren became the
chief aldermen of the five wards;[593] and the town council, as in
Nottingham, elected some of its members to sit as aldermen in scarlet
robes, and some to be plain “discreets” or “burgesses.”[594]
The two charters which finally determined the constitution of
Southampton were granted within a year of the similar charters to
Nottingham. The first, in 1445, which formed a deed of incorporation
under the title of mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, recognized elections
by the official body, a custom which appears in the charter of 1401;
while the second made the town into a county, in order to protect the
merchants and mariners who were incommoded by the sheriff of the county
serving writs on them.[595] In the actual government of the place
it does not seem that these charters brought about much change. The
mayor still presided over meetings of aldermen and burgesses at the
Guildhall in Bargate Tower,[596] or in the Audit House which stood in
the middle of the street in the very centre of the fish, poultry, and
pig markets; and the whole community might be gathered together for
the common business at the discretion of the rulers.[597] Nor did the
charter of incorporation alter the old style used in local business.
In affairs that concerned the commonalty, whether it was an agreement
with some other borough about tolls, or ordinances for the town, or a
concord with a neighbour as to the limits of the town’s jurisdiction,
or the leasing of the customs by land and sea for a year, or grants
of land—in all such matters the ancient custom was to use the name
of the “mayor and community”; and even after 1445 the old form “mayor
and community” is still retained in all acts that related to public
property and the town treasure, all leases, water supply, fines due
to the Queen, license to hold a fair, and the like.[598] That the
distinction between burgesses and commonalty was a real one in the eyes
of the people is proved by the fact that on three great occasions when
a solemn consent of the whole town was required, the signature of “the
commonalty” or “the whole community” was formally placed alongside
of that of the official class—once in the treaty with the Archduke
Philip in 1496; once in the treaty with Maximilian as to the marriage
of Prince Charles of Spain to Henry’s daughter the Lady Mary; and once
again in an important transaction concerning the common lands of the
town.[599]
It thus seems probable that administration in Southampton underwent
singularly little change from first to last, save the raising of
councillors into self-elected aldermen and justices of the peace.
Whether the system of close election by the council recognized in the
charters of 1401 and 1445 was new, or whether, as is equally probable,
the custom was already of old standing, it seems plain that no popular
disturbance or protest was excited by these charters. It was not till
fifteen years later, in 1460, that the commons rose in open revolt
under the leadership of the sheriff and five burgesses, and then the
battle raged round the election of the mayor.[600] A hundred or more
rioters rushed to the Guildhall, broke in upon the meeting there with
drawn daggers and loud cries, and proceeding at once to elect their
leader the sheriff as mayor, carried him in triumph on their shoulders,
and set him on the mayor’s seat, while another of the ringleaders was
appointed in his place as sheriff. But the riot had no great results.
The defeated party procured a patent which declared that their old
custom of election was to be observed, and a mayor was lawfully
chosen by it; but as they were unable to displace the usurper, the
quarrel finally ended in a compromise whose only effect was slightly
to increase the part taken by the aldermen in elections. By this new
system the mayor and aldermen met in the audit house a month before
the day of election, and chose four burgesses for nomination; on the
day of election they again met and struck two names off the list. The
remaining two names were proposed to the burgesses and one of them
elected by ballot; the outgoing mayor let it be known which was to be
elected, and the ballot was a matter of form. The people put their
necks once more under the yoke, and the mayor nominated his successor
and handed on to him the traditions of office which he had himself
received.[601]
Twenty years later there seems to have been another impotent effort
to reform the system of election. At this time all such attempts were
watched from the Court with suspicious fear; and Richard the Third
wrote to the mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, pointing out that by
their letters patent they had truly the right both to elect municipal
officers and to remove them for reasonable cause, and directing them,
since “certain indisposed persons are about to trouble and vex you
in due execution of the said grant, so to punish the said indisposed
persons as shall be the good and fearful example of others, and if they
be such persons whom ye may not accordingly punish in that behalf, to
certify us thereof to the intent we may provide such a lawful remedy in
the same as may accord with your said privileges.”[602]
In these dissensions it does not seem that the popular anger was
excited by alleged political usurpations, but simply by corrupt
administration, especially perhaps in relation to public money and the
common lands. There was certainly financial trouble. In 1459, as we
have seen, the auditor’s accounts had fallen short by large sums; and
as from of old one of the auditors was appointed by the mayor, and
the treasure chest was kept in the mayor’s house and the keys by the
mayor and discreets, there was probably ground for suspicion on the
part of the people.[603] The remedy, however, was slowly and hardly
won, and it was not till 1505 that a very moderate reform was carried
out by passing a decree that the mayor’s salary should be paid through
the steward by the auditors; “to the intent following that no mayor
from this day forward take upon him to receive or handle any of the
town’s money, that is, to wit, he shall make no fine except it be at
the audit house, calling to him two or three of the aldermen or of the
discreets at the least, and the money thereof coming to be put into the
Common Box in the said audit house.”[604] In course of time it was also
ordered that the common chest should be kept in the guild hall[605]
instead of the mayor’s own house.
In the same year, 1459, there was probably some alarm also as to the
common lands.[606] The 376 acres of Southampton Common, the various
closes, the God’s House Meadow, and the Saltmarsh, were, as we have
seen, the special care of the “community”;[607] and a quarrel had been
going on for centuries with S. Julian’s Hospital as to a tract of
marsh which was claimed by the town as part of its common in spite of
all the fences raised by the warden of S. Julian’s to vindicate his
claims.[608] In 1459 a new warden perhaps suggested the plan which he
carried out a few years later, after the failure of the popular revolt,
when he disseised the town in 1466 of a part of the great marsh or
common, having bought over the mayor by a grant of some of the land in
question to be held of the hospital. Under a later mayor in 1471 the
burghers again broke down the fences put up by the hospital,[609] and
appealed to the king and council to defend their ancient privileges.
“Ancient men” (one aged 104 and more) gave their depositions as to
boundaries,[610] and an award was finally made in 1504, followed by
the necessary legal settlements, in 1505. A new quarrel arose when
the corporation attempted to raise a tax for keeping up the sea-banks
or cutting sluices to save the fields from floods; and proposed, if
this failed, to enclose and hire out a part of the common land to
pay these expenses.[611] The townsmen, on the alert for danger, sent
in eager declarations that the poor commons “will be ever ready to
withstand all manner of persons with their bodies and goods that
would attempt to usurp upon any point or parcel of the liberties and
franchises of the town.” They would not hear of letting any part of
the common; as to paying any money for sluice, bridge, or cut made
by the corporation, “they pray your wisdoms in that matter to assess
none of them, for they intend to pay none in no wise”; unless indeed
some better and happier times might befall them, “remembering your
poor commons are not as yet at a fordele in riches, trusting to God to
increase under your masterships.”[612] The period of wealth, however,
tarried, and so did the taxes; so a few years later the corporation
ordered part of the marsh to be enclosed. Upon this three hundred
of the commons, men and women, marched out to the waste, broke down
fences and banks, and triumphantly proceeded to the guild hall, making
“presumptuously and unlawfully a great shout” to the annoyance of
the court within. Flushed with success they next walked two and two
in procession with their picks and shovels to the mayor’s house near
Holy Rood Church and Cross, and one cried out, “If master mayor have
any more work for us we be ready”; after which they went home without
doing further harm. Four days later one of the king’s council came
down with letters ordering the arrest of the chief offenders, and
perpetual banishment was proclaimed against the ringleaders who had
fled, while six other men were seized, taken to London, and put in
the Marshalsea. The Southampton rioters were struck with terror and
repentance. Petitions were got up in every parish for the prisoners;
the town promised to restore the banks, and never sin again in like
fashion; the corporation sent out a proclamation that all those who
had taken part in breaking down the banks should go out to build them
up again, and only when this was done was the petition for mercy
forwarded to London. Finally, sentence was given by the cardinal and
the council that the prisoners should be sent home, and at their coming
to Hampton should sit in the open stocks under the pillory, till the
mayor and his brethren and the king’s lieutenant walked down the
street, when the penitents were to plead for mercy and forgiveness and
confess their guilt. All this was done; the mayor, in the name of his
brethren, magnanimously, of his great mercy, accepted the apology and
promised that no grudge should be borne against them. “And thereupponne
[he] commaunded them owt of the stokkes, and hadd them to the audite
hous, and bound them by obligacon to be good aberying ageynst the
kinges grace and the mayor and his brethryn hereafter, and so delyveryd
them.”[613] The municipal dignity was vindicated, though the quarrel
was still left to drag on for the next two hundred years.[614]
In spite of irritation over questions of financial fraud and the
management of the common lands, however, there seems to have been
little political activity in Southampton. The civic life stretches
out before us like stagnant waters girt round by immutable barriers.
Scarcely a movement disturbs its sluggish surface. The twelve
perpetually gather round the mayor and rule the town with a despotic
power which hardly suffers change during the centuries from John to
Henry the Eighth. Even the modest claim of townsfolk for some closer
connexion with their mayor only reveals with what a steady hand the
venerable oligarchy maintained its ancient discipline. Against their
consecrated order the commons from time to time made a riotous and
disorderly protest;[615] but there is no attempt to bring about real
constitutional reform. We scarcely hear of the general Assembly; there
is no appeal to old traditions of freedom; no talk of a representative
council of the commons; no organized resistance of the crafts—possibly
because these, however numerous, were too poor and weak (if we may
judge from their inability to maintain the walls and towers, even when
grouped together) to make head against a very powerful corporation.
Mere outbreaks of unorganized and intermittent revolt, which were
occasionally kindled by some grave scandal, died away fruitlessly
before the steady resistance of the authorities in power, and such
paroxysms of transient activity on the part of the people remained
without permanent result.
Southampton had, in fact, a peculiar history and a fixed tradition in
government, which left its people in a singularly helpless position
before authority. The conditions, political and commercial, of
its municipal life necessarily gave the expert a supreme place in
administration; and it is possible that a compact body of merchants
had from the first imposed their methods of government and election on
a population who had no voice in the matter. The state of affairs was
exactly reflected in the attitude of the mayor, who held a place of
singular pre-eminence and might. Far removed from popular criticism or
control, as direct minister of the king[616] he conducted a vast mass
of business in absolute independence, both of the community and of the
guild, not only as being the king’s escheator, the gauger and weigher
of goods at the king’s standard, and measurer over the assize of cloth,
the mayor of the staple of wool, and mayor of the staple of metals
under the king’s orders, but also as the king’s admiral within the town
and its liberties, with supreme control of the port and coast from
Christ Church Head to the Needles thence to Hill Head at the mouth of
Southampton Water, over the port of Cowes and of Portsmouth;[617] and
even as a sort of secretary for foreign affairs, for we must remember
that nowhere, save in London, was the “foreign” question so big and
important. Settlers from France or the Netherlands, such as those
in Sandwich or Norwich, who took up their dwelling there and became
absorbed in the general body of the townsfolk, formed a very different
class from the merchant visitors who flocked to Southampton to look
after business interests which extended all over the country, and to a
great extent conducted the whole carrying trade of the south; and who,
as strangers under the peculiar protection of the king, constituted
a foreign colony, ruled by special laws and kept under special
supervision.[618] In all these different departments of his government
the mayor ruled by other laws than the municipal ordinances; he did
not need the municipal seal for his decrees, nor the assent of the
community for his acts; and the great departments in which his actions
were removed from all possibility of local criticism, and local control
must have made absolute rule the easier and less singular in all other
relations of his office.
Nor ought we to forget wholly the outer influences which were acting
on Southampton from the world beyond the water. With Flanders it seems
to have had little direct communication. So long as the Mediterranean
galleys carried its wool to the Netherland ports, and returned to
pick up their freight for the homeward journey, the associations and
commerce of Southampton were with the great cities of Italy, too far
removed from it in every conceivable respect to serve as schools of
political freedom; and with the communes of France whose liberties
had long suffered decay, and in the fifteenth century were finally
extinguished by the policy of Louis the Eleventh, the subtle enemy of
popular liberties.[619] It is hard to tell how far Southampton may have
been affected by such foreign associations, but at least they did not
tend to weaken the influences at home which made for oligarchic rule.
Undoubtedly if we compare this town with other English boroughs where
civic life was more free and expansive in its growth, the municipal
record, in spite of its brilliant commercial side, is one of singular
monotony, and leaves us with the sense of a stunted developement in the
body politic. Southampton, in fact, was by its position and dignity
called to play so great a part in the national history, both in war
and commerce, that all claim to private and local independence was
superseded. At a far earlier date than other towns its destiny was
merged in the fortunes of the whole commonwealth,[620] and the king
suffered no deviation from the service required of it to the state. In
a very remarkable way Southampton anticipated the history of boroughs
which under the Tudors were drawn into the same duty and service;
through successive centuries its burghers acquiesced in the expert
administration of a small official class, scarcely fettered by popular
control; and abandoned the pursuit of new ideals of communal life or
new experiments in government.