THE COMMON COUNCIL OF NORWICH
WHEN we turn from the southern to the eastern coast the first
impression is that of being transported to a new atmosphere. It is not
only that the outer forms of administration are different, for these
differences, however interesting, are but the changes rung on a common
system of local self-government. But in the political temper, the
vitality of the popular institutions, the vigour of reform, we breathe
a bracing air unknown in the Southampton docks and slums.
For the traders and artizans of the eastern coast lived in an
exhilarating clime. Across the water the towns with which they traded
were full of the movement of a free expansive life, very different from
the political depression of the communes which the Southampton traders
knew best. It was to the eastern coast that immigrants came flying from
tyranny and clamorous for freedom; and traders from the eastern towns
who watched in the streets of Ghent and Bruges and Ipres and Dinant,
the violent and tumultuous life of cities where the people were still
fighting for liberty, doubtless brought back from oversea tales of the
passionate temper of independence which swept through the manufacturing
boroughs of the Netherlands.
But however this may be, the towns of the east were distinguished by
an intense vitality; and among the eastern boroughs where civic life
was keenest and most fertile in experiment, Norwich was the pioneer
in the way of freedom,—twenty or forty years ahead of Yarmouth
in time[718]—beyond Colchester in the generosity with which the
commonalty was called to share in the work of government[719]—happier
and stronger than Lynn in having secured the union of its people into
one undivided community for civil purposes. It is not impossible indeed
that it stands in the forefront of all the English boroughs for the
quality and value of its political experiments, and the elaborate
finish of its constitution.
Originally, as we have seen, four bailiffs ruled the four great leets
of the city, from 1223 to 1403. Their mode of administration has been
very minutely described.[720] Each leet was for convenience’ sake
divided into sub-leets, the lesser divisions being at first probably
twelve in number and afterwards ten. The sub-leet was itself composed
of as many parishes as grouped together would contain at least twelve
tithings, and could therefore produce sufficient capital pledges to
hold a leet court. For all purposes of business every tithing was
supposed to be represented by its own capital pledge, who was probably
chosen by the tithing men, but who, once elected, seems to have
held his post for years, perhaps for life. He lived in the parish,
perhaps in the very street of his tithing, and was generally a man
of substance, one of the respectable middle class of the city, and
occasionally might even aspire to enter the official body. In the
whole city the number of capital pledges was probably a hundred and
sixty.[721]
The business of each sub-leet was taken in its turn before the four
bailiffs all sitting together in the little thatched tolbooth that
stood in the central market place. There the capital pledges appeared
to answer for their tithings at the view of frankpledge; and when this
business was over they served as a jury for “presenting” offences at
the leet court.[722] Year after year there came up the same body of
comfortable well-to-do burghers, who did their business quietly,
without thought of entering into any controversy with the government,
like the juries of Nottingham and Southampton.[723] Whether this was
the result of summoning the pledges in small groups from one sub-leet
at a time, or due to the fact that in Norwich the people already
possessed other means of expression, there is not as yet enough
evidence from other towns to show, but the fact is important.
In later records we learn what was doubtless true in 1223 as well as
in 1365, that one of the bailiffs was chosen for each great leet;
and we also have the first account of the manner of their choosing.
A body of twenty-four men, six from each leet, was elected by the
whole community, and the twenty-four then chose the bailiffs.[724] The
first mention of a custom in fragmentary records by no means implies
its first institution, and this mode of election may have dated from
the earliest times. It also appears that before the close of the
thirteenth century the bailiffs were assisted in judicial business
by a select body of citizens, whose share in considering the case
of offenders seems to show that they were “present in the court as
informal assessors to the bailiffs, or, in other words, forming the
court of which the bailiffs were the sole executive;”[725] and it is
possible that for other business also some of the leading citizens were
summoned to attend at assemblies, and their name affixed to deeds,
separately or collectively.[726] A complaint of “the mean people of the
commonalty”[727] shows that administration and taxation had even at
that early time fallen into the hands of a small body—the bailiffs and
“the rich”; and the “customs” of the city (which were perhaps drawn up
about 1340, but which must in many respects contain traditional usages
of an earlier date) give us some idea who were “the rich” here spoken
of. A body of twenty-four men elected by the community, six from each
of the four great leets, is there described as forming a court for the
control of the whole trade of the city. It appointed supervisors over
the various crafts, and received reports of fraud in trade—charges
which, if it had not been for the intervention of the twenty-four,
would have gone to the leet juries. And the same body of twenty-four
had official supervision of the city finances and received all accounts
of the treasurers and collectors of taxes or town money.[728] Once
more, in 1344, we find them exercising yet another function—“the
twenty-four in the same year elected and ordained by the whole
communitas, in the presence of whom, or of the greater part of them, if
all cannot be present, the business of the city touching the communitas
might be enrolled.”
Lastly it appears that the twenty-four gradually assumed the power of
making laws for the community, and “used this custom that they might
remedy new defaults and mischiefs arising by making new ordinances for
the common profit of the town and the citizens and of others coming
or conversant there.”[729] Apparently the assembly itself was almost
superseded, for on the plea that when assemblies were summoned for the
common good of the city and the country, the citizens did not take the
trouble to come, to the great hindrance of public business, it had been
ordained some time before 1340 that for the calling together of the
commonalty the bailiff’s serjeant should summon certain of the most
worthy and discreet men of each leet who were to be fined two shillings
if they failed to obey the summons.[730]
A council of leading citizens, though it was already organized in
this elaborate way early in the fourteenth century, scarcely appears
in records of the later thirteenth century, and even then dimly in a
vague inchoate form. It is, however, important to notice that from the
very beginning two official styles were in use in the city documents,
which seem at no time to have been interchangeable one with another.
In the Pipe Roll of 1255 there seems to be a distinction between “the
citizens” and “the men of Norwich”;[731] and both in this year and
later, whenever the borough has any dealings with Westminster it is
“the citizens” who ask for favours, and it is to “our beloved citizens,
they and their heirs,” or to “the bailiffs and citizens their heirs
and successors” that grants are made throughout the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries.[732] Exceptions to this form are rare. In 1347
when Edward the Third asked for soldiers to be furnished for the
French war he addressed himself to “the mayor, bailiffs, and the whole
community”;[733] but as there was at that time no mayor in Norwich, the
phrase was possibly that of a new clerk brought into the War Office
in a hurried rush of business. In 1355 he sent a close letter to the
“bailiffs and commonalty” of Norwich to provide him with a hundred and
twenty armed men; and in 1371 a letter to the “bailiffs, good people,
or commons” of Norwich to fit him out a ship. In all these cases it is
obvious that the king’s claim on the people was altogether independent
of any obligations resting on them as citizens of a chartered borough.
Very rarely did the community address the king. In 1304 and 1307[734]
the “mean people of the commonalty of the city” asked his aid; and
once “the commune of the town of Norwich” sent a special petition
to Parliament. The city liberties had been forfeited into the King’s
hands in 1285, and the royal officer set over it had wrongfully
distrained the people’s goods to the value of £300;[735] but since
“the citizens” in the technical sense of a corporate body possessing
certain rights ceased to exist when the city lost its franchise, the
Norwich people had to fall back on that which lay behind all chartered
corporations—on that out of which all other rights had sprung; it
was to “the commune of the town” that wrong had been done, and “the
commune” appealed against it. On the other hand, whenever a question
arose as to common lands or common property the business was always
done in the name of “the commonalty” or “the bailiffs and commonalty,”
and in such cases the style of “the citizens” was never used.[736]
There seems, therefore, ground for thinking that from first to last
the Norwich burghers officially described themselves by two distinct
styles, which to the common understanding had different meanings, and
were not used at hazard. I venture to suggest that here and elsewhere
“cives” was the term used for the corporate body of citizens possessing
chartered rights; while “communitas” stood for the citizens in another
aspect, as the community which held property and enjoyed privileges
by immemorial custom, before the charter of a free borough had been
obtained. The holding of common property was probably the signal
survival of customary rights, the others being gradually merged in the
privileges enjoyed by charter; and hence it was in deeds relating to
land that the traditional form of “cives et communitas” was chiefly
preserved. In every town in England, however, whatever might be its
special constitution, we find other rights universally claimed by the
commons, which carried an authority that their opponents never dared
in any single instance to gainsay, even when they sought to evade
it. We may, perhaps, date back to a distant past the claim of the
whole community to have all laws ratified by their “entire assent
and consent,” to be made privy and consenting to all elections, to
know verily how the town moneys were raised and spent, to admit new
burgesses by the common vote of the people. These were rights which the
oligarchies constantly endeavoured to make void from the time of Henry
the Third to the time of Henry the Eighth; yet no attempt was ever made
to deny or to revoke them. It may be that their authentic force was
derived from that obscure time of which no memory is, when the ancient
“communitas” slowly built up the great tradition of its customary
rights; and that when the remembrance of the primitive community had by
lapse of time fallen into the background its power was still present,
and to the last the name was one of dignity and carried with it a
mandate from an older world. No doubt, however, in the vulgar tongue
“commonalty” came to be used in a popular sense, and sometimes with an
air of obloquy or contempt, to describe the general mass of citizens
who had the right of meeting in common assembly, as distinguished from
the official class. For by degrees old lines of division between the
ruling and the subject classes were drawn sharper and deeper—when
government by the select few took legal form; when a council of
twenty-four sat as assessors in the courts, audited the town accounts,
controlled its trade, and claimed to make its laws; when the assembly
was reduced to a gathering of special men called by the bailiff’s
serjeant; and when even the attendance at the leet began to fall off as
at the end of the fourteenth century[737] its business passed more and
more into the hands of the twenty-four. Then the word “communitas” took
a new shade of meaning. Before 1378 “the citizens” had come to mean in
common talk the governing council, as opposed to the “commonalty” who
were left outside.
It is true that the legal privileges of the community still remained.
They had a claim on part at least of the public property. No new
burgher could be admitted save by the act of the whole commonalty, or
of twelve of them who might be taken to represent the entire body.[738]
Taxes might only be assessed by will of the whole commonalty[739] or
of the greater part of the same. Whatever might be the prevailing
habit, the twenty-four had no legal right to act in the name of the
whole people, and if the commons refused to obey their ordinances they
could not appeal to any court of law to enforce their submission.
In the Assembly Rolls the burghers are mentioned as sharing in the
business of elections, grants of money, and taxation.[740] That they
asserted their rights in a way which seemed to the governing class
“contrarious” we gather from the fact that in 1378 “the citizens” (who
in this case must certainly have meant a very limited body) presented
a petition to Richard the Second in which they declared that of late
“many of the commonalty of the said town have been very contrarious,
and will be so still unless better remedies and ordinances be made
for good government”; and they pray that the bailiffs and twenty-four
citizens to be elected yearly by the commonalty may have power to make
ordinances and to amend them from time to time when necessary.[741] A
ship which they had just built at the king’s orders possibly commended
their request to his judgment, and the grant of the desired charter
placed the council in a position of absolute authority, having power to
issue ordinances without the consent of the people, and to enforce them
by appeal to the royal courts.
What controversies and threats of revolution agitated the men of
Norwich for the twenty-five years that followed this great change
we do not know. The exact position of the twenty-four in the
municipal assembly is not easy to trace from the paucity of existing
documents.[742] The rolls which survive might be expected to shew
some sign of the effect of the charter of 1378 by which the official
authority of the twenty-four was established. Yet such is not the
case. The description of the Assembly both before and after remains
exactly the same. A select group of citizens attends at every
meeting, and takes the whole charge of administration. Yet it is
worthy of notice that neither before nor after 1378 is any order or
resolution ever attributed to the twenty-four, though such orders are
constantly referred to the action of the “tota communitas.” Throughout
these rolls the only authorities mentioned are the bailiffs and the
commonalty.[743] If it is possible to believe, as I have suggested,
that the right of the community to give or withhold consent in
legislation was an immemorial custom which could not be abrogated
by charter, the failure of the twenty-four to carry their point can
be understood. No doubt party feeling on both sides ran high. It
became necessary for a settlement to have a new charter; and in 1403,
probably, at the instance of the ruling class, the city bought a fresh
constitution at the heavy price of £1,000.[744] By this charter Norwich
was made into a county; the four bailiffs were replaced by a mayor and
two sheriffs, to be elected by the citizens and commonalty; and, in
confirming previous grants, the customary phraze used in the charters
of earlier centuries, “the citizens” was replaced by “the citizens and
commonalty”—a term which is recognized in the charter as being already
in use,[745] but which had not until now been invariably employed as
the official style.
The charter of Henry the Fourth seems to have been in effect a
confirmation of the charter given by Richard the Second, and to have
set the victorious conclusion to the whole system of oligarchical
government expressed by the council of twenty-four. The people were
quick to appreciate the difficulty of making use of the powers which
had been attributed to them and to perceive the tendency of the
charter. A crisis was brought about by the very first elections held
under the new constitution. The charter ordered that the sheriffs
were to be elected, not as the old bailiffs had been by the electors
of the four Leets, but by “the citizens and commonalty.” In the
ordinary assemblies, however, made up of the twenty-four and “others
of the community,” at which Parliament men, city treasurers, and
officials, had been chosen, the twenty-four were practically supreme,
and elections carried out in these gatherings were, as a matter of
fact, in their hands. On March 1st, 1404, a mayor was chosen, and
twelve days later two of the bailiffs were made sheriffs (the mayor’s
book says by the “cives”).[746] The altered mode of appointing the
sheriffs, as compared with the more popular custom of electing the old
bailiffs, immediately roused the commons. An assembly was called to
frame ordinances for the new state of things, and the people determined
by their own authority to create a representative council of the
burghers at large. It was ordered that eighty persons should be elected
to attend all assemblies and act in the name of the people. To this
council was given the right of nominating the sheriffs; the eighty were
to go apart by themselves and name three persons, but if the commons
did not approve of their choice they had again to retire and choose
other names until their masters were content. Then the town clerk
and some of the eighty carried the three names to the mayor and the
twenty-four “probi homines”; the mayor chose one and the twenty-four
the other.[747] The new council took part in the Michaelmas elections
of that same year 1404, when the mayor was reappointed, and two new
sheriffs were chosen.
This settlement evidently excited violent hostility, and in 1415 a
Composition was framed to put an end to the discords by which the city
was “divided and dissolved and in point to have been destroyed.”[748]
This document did not err on the side of any lax notions as to the
seriousness of a written constitution. With pedantic nicety it touched
almost lovingly on the minutest details of ceremony and dress, as well
as on the greater problems that vexed the state—the position of the
twenty-four; the rights of the commons; and the share which the two
parties were to have in appointing the officers of the city.
The effect of this Composition of 1415 was to create a miniature
copy of the English kingdom, a little community governed by its
three estates, the mayor, the co-citizens of the mayor’s council,
and the commons. The twenty-four “probi homines” now became “the
twenty-four co-citizens of the mayor’s council,” the mayor having the
same authority over them “as the mayor of London hath,”[749] and the
dignity of the municipal House of Lords was fitly marked by their
dress, a livery “furred and lined as the estate and season of the year
asketh.”[750] Above all it was decreed that they should no longer be
a body elected yearly but should “stand corporate perpetually,” and
even if this should accidentally not be embodied in the charter to be
asked for later, “the citizens” declared that they could establish that
law for themselves and not by point of charter, in virtue of the right
given them in 1378, to make such ordinances as they chose in difficult
or defective cases for which no remedy clearly existed in the city
constitution.[751]
On the other hand the organization of the lower chamber was made more
complete, and the relative position and authority of the two houses
of the mimic parliament were defined with punctilious exactness. The
common council was reduced from eighty to sixty members,[752] to be
elected from the four wards by all citizens “inhabiting and having
houses on their own account.” It had its Speaker,[753] its own mode
of procedure, its system of elaborate etiquette in all dealings with
the upper house. Henceforth it was to take a part in legislation
which entirely annulled any claim “the citizens” might have put
forward by virtue of their charter of 1378; for though the mayor and
the twenty-four preserved the right of proposing all new laws, “they
shall nothing do nor make that may bind or charge the city without the
assent of the commonalty.” All ordinances made by the upper body must
therefore be formally laid before the common council, and if it seemed
to them that the matter “needeth longer advice and deliberation of
answer, they shall ask it and all that seemeth expedient for the city
by the common speaker of the mayor and of his council.” If needful they
could ask for “a bill of the same matters to be delivered to them,”
that they might give their answer in the next assembly; and “the mayor
shall be beholden as ofttimes as they ask it to grant them for to go
together in an house by themselves without any denying, and none other
with them but the common speaker, and if they will have more to them as
oft as they ask, the mayor shall be beholden to send for them without
any withsaying. And in matters that seem to the aforesaid sixty persons
for the common council that needeth not great nor long advice, be it
lawful if they will, to go apart by themselves or in to the floor with
their common speaker, and goodly and speedily, without great delay to
come in with their answer as them seemeth speedful and needful to the
purpose.” Finally, in “all other points that be necessary to be had for
the welfare of the city that come not now to mind, it is committed to
the whole assembly thereupon to ordain and make remedy by ordinance and
assent of the whole commonalty for profit of all the city.”[754]
In the matter of elections, however, the general assembly reappeared
in full force. When a new mayor was to be chosen the two councils
were summoned to the hall; “and also all the citizens dwellers
within the same city unto the aforesaid election shall freely come as
they are beholden, and the doors of the hall to all citizens there
willing to enter and come in shall be open and not kept, nor none from
thence forbarred nor avoided but foreigners.” After the mayor and the
twenty-four had proclaimed the election from the bench they withdrew
to the chamber, and the whole people in the hall then chose from among
those who had already been mayors or sheriffs two names of “sufficient”
persons, “and if that any variance happen among the commons in the hall
that it may not clearly be known to the common speaker by no manner of
form by him unto them, for to be put or showed, which two hath the most
voices, then the common speaker and the common clerk shall go up to the
mayor and to him shall declare the variance of the people in the hall.
And then the mayor shall give to the common speaker in commandment
for to call together the sixty persons for the common council of the
city, or as many as there be there into an house by themselves. Which
there shall try the aforesaid variance in the same form as it hath
been and yet is used in the city of London.” The names were carried to
the chamber by the common clerk, the common speaker, and the recorder,
with six of the common council; the six commons returned to the hall,
leaving the three officers to take the votes of the mayor and council,
and bring back to the commonalty the name of the elected mayor.
The election of all other municipal officers was carefully divided
between the two parties in the state. The mayor and the twenty-four
elected the common clerk, one sheriff, one chamberlain, one treasurer,
one coroner, two keepers of the keys, two auditors, and eight
constables. The common council chose the common speaker, a second
sheriff, chamberlain, treasurer, and coroner, two keepers of the keys,
two auditors, and eight constables. The whole assembly appointed the
common serjeant, the recorder, the bell-man, and the ditch-keeper; they
also chose the men who were to gather in the king’s taxes, appointing
four men in each ward to assess the tax and two to collect it. The
new mayor named two sword-bearers, of whom the assembly chose one; in
the same way the mayor nominated four persons for serjeants, and the
assembly chose two of them.[755] Members of Parliament were chosen by
the common assembly.
Thus the commons of Norwich made their decorous entry on the official
stage, with a punctilious care to secure their dignity and make fast
their liberties by countless ceremonial ligatures. The Composition
which vindicated their right against the oligarchy proved, however,
like the Ordinances of 1404, a hard saying to many; and disputes
between the mayor’s council and the commonalty were so violent[756]
that the citizens appealed to Henry the Fifth in 1417 for a charter
which should make the late agreement legally binding. The mayor’s
council no doubt brought influence to bear in high places, for their
position was now somewhat bettered. By the charter, for which the
city had to pay over £100,[757] the twenty-four, now first called
aldermen, got rid of one serious difficulty in their way by securing
the clause that they “shall stand perpetually as they do in London,”
and henceforth the old ceremony of annual election was simply recalled
by the custom of reading out the names every year before the wards.
In the composition it had been settled that in making “new ordinances
for the welfare of the city that come not now to mind it is committed
to the whole assembly thereon to ordain by ordinance and assent of the
whole commonalty,”[758] but the new charter decreed that the mayor and
aldermen should have full power to amend the laws and constitution with
assent of the sixty of the common council.[759]
For the rest of the century the government of the city[760] remained
of this pattern. The four great leets which had once elected the
bailiffs now became the four wards, and were ultimately divided into
twelve small wards. Each of these was represented in the upper council
by two aldermen chosen for it by the electors of its own great ward.
Each great ward also elected a fixed proportion of the members of
the common council. The sheriffs held their “tourns” for the four
wards, and appointed for each ward a jury drawn from the “men of good
name and fame.” Meanwhile the leet courts of the sub-divisions over
which the bailiffs used to preside carried on an obscure and feeble
existence, and the capital pledges which formed the leet juries sank
into insignificance[761] under the combined usurpations of the sheriffs
and the two councils. Once when the capital pledges attempted to
secure to the small trader some advantage in landing their goods at a
staith where apparently they escaped some city tolls, the governing
body promptly repressed their insubordination.[762] Evidently the
administration of the city was neither more lax nor more popular
because its governing body was enlarged.
In the obscure years of conflict between 1378 and 1415 we are told
nothing about the men or the organizations of men that made the
revolution. But we know that a very important movement was going on
in Norwich itself in the growth of the craft guilds. Long forbidden
by the civic government because of the loss to the city chest when
the craftsmen were withdrawn from the common courts, they apparently
made matters easy for themselves by regular payment of fines, and
continued to flourish.[763] Between 1350 and 1385[764] a number of
guilds were either founded or reconstituted so as to obtain public
recognition in the city,[765] and the one fact that we catch sight of
in their ordinances amid the absolutely monotonous and formal recital
of religious duties, is that they were in some cases allowed to choose
their own aldermen and council, instead of being subjected as before
to the twenty-four. The importance of this is at once evident in the
ordinances of 1404, where the guilds take a very prominent place; and
in the composition of 1415, when they were finally sanctioned and given
a completed form.[766] Not only was the power of choosing their own
officers granted to every trade, but it was decreed that “citizens
of the city shall be enrolled of what craft he be of” on pain of
forfeiture of his franchise; and that all “that shall be enfranchised
from this time forth shall be enrolled under a craft and by assent of
a craft.” Such a rule practically made the craft-masters the judges of
a new candidate for the city privileges, for if they refused to admit
him to the guild he could never become a burgess.[767] On the other
hand it was commanded that all the members of a craft must become
freemen; foreigners were to hold shops under tribute and fine for two
years and a day, and were then forced to buy the franchise of the
city. “The master of the craft shall come honestly to him and give him
warning to be a freeman or else spear in his shop-window.” If he did
not obey within fourteen days the master with an officer of the mayor
again visited him with his spear, “and he so speared in, nor no other,
shall not hold his craft within house nor without.” Thus no trader or
shopkeeper could remain exempt from the dues and charges of the city,
and the whole commonalty was placed under the police supervision of the
craft masters. The very dress of the crafts was made a matter of strict
definition; all liveries and hoods of former days were to be given up,
and the crafts were to wear liveries the same as those of London.[768]
If, however, during the years of conflict the craft associations may
have done good service to the commonalty, they were met by a counter
organization of the merchants and upper class. It seems to have become
common after the Peasant revolt, when a new terror was stirred as to
what the poor commons might do if left to follow their own will and
appetite, for the richer sort to unite for self-protection and the
preservation of their authority. In Norwich a Guild of S. George was
founded in 1385 as a fraternity with the usual religious colour, and
a - “going each Monday about in the city remembering and praying for
the souls of the brethren and sisters of the said guild that be passed
to God’s mercy.”[769] At first an informal body, consisting apparently
of the wealthier and more powerful people, both lay and ecclesiastic,
of Norwich and the surrounding country, its weakness lay in the fact
that it was “desevered by constitutions and ordinances made within the
city,” and according to the old rule by which the formation of any
guild was forbidden, it was, in fact, an illegal body. The governing
class, however, probably enlisted considerable sympathy at court in
the negociations for the charter of 1417; and the associates of S.
George won from Henry the Fifth in 1418 permission to constitute
themselves into a permanent society, and received a sword of wood
with a carved dragon’s head to be carried before their alderman on S.
George’s day.[770] The great people of the county and their wives
entered the order, bishops, monks and rectors, counts, knights, and
merchants—something like four hundred of them—all men of substance
who rode on horseback to the guild assembly, where the uniform of
S. George was varied by the mayors, sheriffs, aldermen, or masters
of crafts, riding in the garments of their order. The government of
the society was put in the hands of a very close corporation, and
the alliance between Church and State in the guild is manifested by
the association of the prior, mayor, and sheriffs of the city in its
government.[771]
The real danger of such a fraternity lay in the peculiar position
of Norwich, and the impossible task of local government which had
been thrown on its burghers. Beyond the city territory lay a great
manufacturing district—a whole county studded with villages where
weaving and worsted making were carried on in every house—and over all
this district Norwich had the supervision of the woollen trade. The
difficulties of the arrangement by which, in 1409, at the request of
the commons, the mayor, sheriffs, and commonalty were granted the right
of measuring and sealing all worsteds made in Norwich or Norfolk,[772]
must have been extreme. The great employers settled in the city who
organized the country labour and supplied cloth for the export trade
were thus given a certain judicial authority in the county; while
the great wool sellers—land-owners whose vast flocks of sheep[773]
pastured on the broad downs of undulating chalk, and who were turning
into traders on their own account—were forced in their own interest to
meddle with Norwich politics. Besides the general commercial questions
which affected both city and county, there must have been many a vexed
question as to the tenants who owed suit and service to the courts of
their lords, but who as artizans were subject to Norwich rule and whose
fines were swept into the Norwich treasury. On every hand the door was
thrown open to trouble. If the Norwich corporation was to busy itself
in county affairs, the county was bound to exert some control over
the Norwich corporation, whether by guilds of St. George, by securing
office in Norwich for sympathetic mayors, recorders, or sheriffs, by
winning the help of the Earl of Suffolk or of bishop or prior, by
choosing the Norwich members for Parliament, or if all other means
failed, by bribery and violence and the stirring up of street factions.
From one point of view, therefore, the story of the long years of
strife and calamity which followed the reformation of the Norwich
constitution in 1415 is singularly interesting. In presence of a
foreign foe internal dissension is suppressed, and the main story is
no longer, as in Nottingham, that of a struggle between the two classes
of the community itself. When a mayor of alien interests is imposed on
Norwich by a foreign faction he stands alone, and aldermen and commons
hold apart from him as betrayer of the common interests. The enemies
whom Norwich had to fear came from without the community itself, and if
the story of the city remained a singularly troubled one, the troublers
of its peace were not those of its own household. Factions of the State
and factions of the shire flung confusion into the city politics, and
the old burning question of ecclesiastical rights embittered every
local dispute.[774] Norwich was befriended by the Duke of Gloucester
and had a persistent enemy in the Earl of Suffolk, and its fortunes
swung backwards and forwards with the rise and fall of court parties.
From the day when the recorder, John Heydon, betrayed the city into
their hands, the county despots whom we know so well in the Paston
Letters, meet us in its streets and assembly hall, ever followed by
the curses of the people. Heydon of Baconsthorpe, Esq., sheriff in
Norwich in 1431, and recorder from 1441-3,—the man whose putting away
of his wife had created such a scandal that the very mention of it made
him turn pale, the land-jobber, the smuggler of wool, the exactor of
bribes, the parasite of the great lords whose support he could buy, the
organizer of outrages and murder, the audacious schemer willing to
spend two thousand pounds rather than lose the control of the Norwich
sheriff, the patron of liveried followers, the “maintainer” in the
courts of men who defied the law, the overbearing bully whose very
presence was enough to cow the commons into refusing to present their
complaints to the king’s judges,[775]—can be pictured by every one
who tracks his tortuous ways through the letters of the Pastons. In
conjunction with Sir Thomas Tuddenham and others he overwhelmed the
city with extortions, oppressions, and wrongs. These men “through their
great covetousness and false might oppressed all such citizens as would
not consent to make such mayors and sheriffs as they liked,” “purposing
for great lucre to have as well the rule of the city of Norwich as they
had of the shire of Norfolk,”[776] and “trusting in their great might
and power which they had and have in the country by the means of the
stewardship of Lancaster and other great offices and for divers other
causes that no man at that time durst make resistance against them,
knowing their great malice and vengeance without dread of God or shame
of the world.” Even when the people sought to buy the favour of Sir
Thomas, he took their money “by briberous extortion against all faith
and conscience,” and yet showed them no mercy.[777]
It is just possible that the danger to the city called into being a
fraternity to confront the society of S. George, and that the burghers
in their turn seized on the machinery of the religious guild. We catch
one passing glimpse of a curious association known as “Le Bachery”;
which was declared by the mayor and commons to be merely a company of
citizens who out of pure devotion kept up a light in the chapel of the
Blessed Virgin in the Fields (the ancient place for the assembly of the
people) and from mere motives of decency had chosen a livery; but in
whose pious and decent union the hostile fraternity saw an association
fashioned to break the power of S. George, and made haste to use
against it the old argument applied to its own youth—the charge of
being an “illegal guild.”[778]
The association was founded in stormy days. After Heydon was turned
out of office by the people for betraying their interests to the
prior,[779] his friend of S. George’s guild, the mayor Wetherby, an
ally of Tuddenham and a “hater of the commons,” led the party of the
county and the priory, and till his death fourteen years later the city
knew no peace. Four times between 1433 and 1444 its franchises were
forfeited for riot or stormy elections; twice the common seal was
violently taken out of the treasury by aldermen and commons to prevent
the sealing of proposals rejected of the people. Wetherby forced on the
election, as his successor, of a mayor refused by aldermen and commons.
John Qwerdling, falsely pretending to be common speaker, had carried
to the chamber a name not set down by the commons for election; Hawk
the town clerk had written down a wrong return; Nicholas Waleys had
taken bribes enough to win him the name of “ambidexter”; the two city
serjeants had packed juries, and the gaoler had threatened and struck
the resisting commons on the head with his mace. The mayor’s faction
held the guild hall, while the aldermen’s party retired to a private
house, and having elected another candidate, put the offending officers
out of their places, took the common seal out of the guild hall into
their own keeping, and lest by any chance their election should be
held invalid, refused to disperse till the mayor came down to confirm
it, and called the bishop to join them in opposition to the prior. For
the moment Wetherby yielded, but revenged himself by applying for a
commission from the king to examine into the state of the city.[780]
The enraged citizens kept up the broil till 1436, when another
commission was appointed which forced the commons to submit, to restore
the seal to its accustomed place in the treasury, and to put back the
officers they had displaced in 1433.[781]
At the next election, in 1437, commissioners were sent by the privy
council to see that all was done in order according to the charter, and
in case of riot to seize the franchises of the city into the king’s
hand;[782] and thus quiet was secured. But Norwich was not to keep its
restored franchise long. Riots and daily disturbances “concerning their
liberties” broke out between the city and the prior;[783] in June the
inhabitants of Norwich had to appear before the Privy Council, and in
July the franchises of the city were seized and the place committed
to the custody of John Welles, a London alderman who was made citizen
and alderman of Norwich.[784] At the prayer of the bishops of Norwich
and Lincoln the liberties were once more restored in 1439, to be as
quickly lost again.[785] For Thomas Wetherby “who bare a great hatred
to the commons” watched for an opportunity of making fresh trouble.
By his counsel the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm prosecuted the city
in 1441 for certain mills it had built on the Wensum; and Thomas
Tuddenham, John Fray, and William Paston (a friend of the abbot’s),
judged the case at Thetford and gave it against the the city, ordering
the commons to pay £100 damages to the abbot and £50 to the prior. At
this the assembly gathered in great numbers, crowded to the hall, in
January, 1442, and took away the common seal that the award might not
be sealed. By the influence of the Earl of Suffolk, the abbot, and
Wetherby, the city was prosecuted for rebellion, and in spite of the
protection of the Duke of Gloucester the mayor was ordered to appear
in London, where he was fined £50 and imprisoned in the Fleet, and the
liberties of the city were again seized into the king’s hands. The
mayor being thus fast in the Fleet, Wetherby got the common seal out of
the chest, sealed the bond of £100 to the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm,
£50 to the bishop, and £50 to the prior, without the knowledge of the
mayor, sheriffs, or commons; and then destroyed the new mills.[786]
This led to fresh troubles. On the Shrove Tuesday of 1443 the mayor
and commonalty, at this time united in the mysterious guild of “Le
Bachery,” raised an insurrection, declaring they had power enough in
the city and adjacent country to slay Thomas Brown the bishop,[787]
the abbot of Holm, and the prior of Norwich. John Gladman, a merchant,
rode with a paper crown as king at the head of a hundred and thirty
people on horseback and on foot. At the ringing of the city bells
three thousand citizens assembled, armed with swords, bows, arrows,
and helmets, surrounded the priory, laid guns against it, and at last
won a glorious victory, and forced the monks to deliver up the hateful
deed falsely sealed with the common seal which bound the people to pay
4_s._ a year to the prior and to abandon claims to jurisdiction over
certain priory lands.
Such a triumph was naturally followed by a fresh visit of royal
commissioners in 1444.[788] Wetherby and the prior brought a long
list of charges against the mayor;[789] while the city protested that
Tuddenham and Heydon alone had made mischief out of their peaceful
show; and that Gladman had only “made a disport with his neighbours,
having his horse trapped with tynnsoyle and other nice disguisy things,
crowned as king of Christmas,” while “before him went each month
disguised after the season required, and Lent clad in white and red
herring skins and his horse trapped with oyster shells after him.”[790]
Meanwhile the king had his own grievance against Norwich, for the city
had unluckily brought a suit for £100 which it had formerly lent him,
and now refused to advance any more money when he sent to solicit
it.[791] Once more, therefore, in 1444, its liberties and franchises
were confiscated. But now at last troubles began to lighten. Thomas
Wetherby died, as well as the bishop who had supported him,[792] and
the new bishop, of an old Norwich family, was for peace. In 1447 the
liberties were restored, and in 1448 the king visited the city.[793]
Two years later however, Heydon was again to the front, ready with
Tuddenham to spend £2,000 in buying favour in high quarters in
London, and £1,000 to secure a sheriff in Norwich committed to his
interest.[794] It was suggested that the Norwich folk, the mayor with
the aldermen and all the commons, should ride to meet the Duke of York
when he visited the city, “and all the women of the same town be there
also, and cry out on them also, and call them extortioners, and pray
my Lord that he will do sharp executions upon them ... and let that be
done in the most lamentable wise, for Sir, but if my Lord hear some
foul tales of them, and some hideous noise and cry, by my faith they
are else like to come to grace.”[795] The commission of judges[796]
finally sent to try Heydon for felony, his defiant ride through the
town into the abbey, the rumours that he was to bear rule once more,
his mode of meeting and outwitting or terrorising the commissioners
by turns, all these are told from day to day almost in the Paston
Letters. Finally, in 1452, Judge Yelverton arranged some kind of peace
in Norwich,[797] helped possibly by the poverty and exhaustion of the
city.[798] By giving a loan to the king and a present to the queen with
a promise to befriend her in her anxieties, Norwich got a new charter
in 1452.[799] In this the guild of S. George, which seems to have been
united to the corporation about 1450, was apparently victorious.[800]
It was agreed that the day after the mayor left office he should be
chosen alderman of the guild, and the common council was taken into the
council of the guild.
For the next seventy years the citizens were occupied by strife with
the prior, which dated back to the day when the Norwich burghers were
given the city into their hands.[801] The bickerings of three centuries
ended in a compact drawn up in 1524, when questions of jurisdiction,
tolls, pasturage, water, and rights of way were settled; and it was
admitted that the mayor, sheriffs, citizens, and commonalty might
go to the cathedral church on feast days and occasions of solemn
processions, the mayor with sword and maces borne before him, on
condition that he claimed no jurisdiction, while the prior and monks
“of their amiable favour shall forbear as far as they lawfully can or
may” to arrest any of the corporation or the citizens during these
great processions.[802]
Such stories of local wranglings might well be left forgotten and
obscure if there lay in them nothing more than vulgar quarrels. But the
political experiment of Norwich was one of such serious purpose and
such singular quality, that even in its failure it kindles our sympathy
with men who for two hundred and fifty years had been laboriously
working out the problem of administration. With an admirable political
sagacity they had used in turn every form of local organization to
perfect their experiment in self-government. They had taken the
principle of an elected jury and adapted it for use in their courts,
their council chamber, and their legislative assembly. They had
turned to the problem of the general assembly, altogether useless in
its primitive and unwieldy form, and developed out of it (taking a
pattern from London) a representative council which should guide its
deliberations and express its will. The craft-guilds were organized,
and it is possible that in the struggle their discipline gave order
and strength to the commonalty. When the battle grew hot the machinery
of the religious guild was brought into play on either side, and S.
George measured his force with the Virgin of the Fields. No doubt these
various methods have no claim to originality, being frankly copied
from customs known elsewhere; nor is it in the discovery of a new path
that the merit of the Norwich burghers lies, but in the sound political
instinct by which they steadily directed their way into the broad track
whose ultimate goal is civil freedom, rather than the narrow road of
privilege. As we watch the growth of the house of representatives
which was established among them, an independent deliberative assembly
elected by the commons; and compare it with the chamber of magnates at
Nottingham that by a fine mockery was supposed to typify a gathering
of the whole community; we have a just measure given us of the value
of this more liberal experiment in municipal politics—an experiment
so early in time, so serious in conception, so strong and orderly in
execution, that it might have justified an enduring success.
But in spite of all the ingenuity and sagacity and resolution which
the men of Norwich brought to their fine attempt at ordering public
life, misfortune still waited on their steps, and from the outset the
disaster of the fifteenth century darkens and throws long shadows.
For Norwich was fighting with its doom already proclaimed—harassed
by the harsh dry climate in which fine cloth needed for the foreign
market could not be woven; by the hurry of the new export trade which
drove masters to set up their mills by the streams of Yorkshire and
Gloucestershire, where labour was free and cheap; by changes in
methods of making worsted which shifted the manufacture over to the
Netherlands; and by the false economy which to help a failing trade,
made English weavers refuse Norfolk yarn to foreign buyers—the Norwich
burghers had still to endure the last calamity of pestilence, and
the sweating sickness, which first burst on them in 1485, filled up
the tale of disaster. Industrial difficulties alone might have been
conquered. But a more insidious danger threatened all their liberties.
By a fatal accident of position and circumstances the city, as we have
seen, had been invaded and conquered by the county—by a society wholly
separate from it in political developement. It had bitterly proved
the truth of the extreme apprehension with which men of the towns at
that time looked on the intrusion among them of “foreigners,” bringing
into their newly ordered civic life the feudal traditions of the
county magnates, scattering liveries among their people, and pouring
into their law courts a commanding army of retainers—“because,” to
use their own words, “by such maintainers and protectors a common
contention might arise among us, and horrible manslaughter be committed
among us, and the loss of the liberty or freedom of the city, to
the disinheritance of us and of our children; which God forbid that
in our days by the defeat of us should happen or fall out in such a
manner.”[803] The story of Norwich shows that in a provincial town, as
in a greater state, a constitution framed for home uses and needs may
be shattered by the violence of foreign affairs over which it has no
power, against which it has no arms, and for the guidance of which it
has no instructions.
NOTE A.
Mr. Hudson believes that in Norwich the word “citizen” at first meant
merely an enfranchised equal, being frequently described as “par
civitatis,” and that from the thirteenth century onwards the most
prominent idea which it imported was that of a privileged trader,
in which sense it is used through the series of Leet Rolls. In one
class of documents, however, at the close of the thirteenth century,
he finds it apparently restricted to a limited body of substantial
burghers, into whose hands the management of the public business had
gradually passed. In enrolled deeds which have been examined for the
years 1285-1298 a great number of persons are described merely as
drapers, tanners, fishmongers and so on, while others are mentioned
as “merchant citizen of Norwich,” or “tanner, citizen of Norwich,”
and others again are put down simply as “citizen of Norwich.” Out of
the hundred and fifty persons to whom the words “citizen of Norwich”
are applied there are fifty who are apparently of no trade; and of
the remaining hundred, thirty-two are merchants, twenty-four drapers
and linendrapers, and the rest, about fifty, belong to a variety of
occupations, but generally to the skilled handicrafts. No smith is
mentioned as citizen, and very few among the butchers and bakers. From
these facts the general conclusion is drawn that the word “citizen”
was being gradually restricted by the most important burghers to
themselves, the lower classes of those who held the freedom of the
city being massed together as the “communitas.” (Arch. Journ. xlvi.
No. 184, 318-319.)
The argument, however, rests on entries made in the last years of the
thirteenth century, between 1285 and 1298, at a time when the state of
things in Norwich was exceptional. The city rule was that every man
who bought and sold in Norwich should have “made his ingress” into the
town and become of the “franchise” or “liberty.” How often the law
was evaded we see from the presentments of the leet courts. (For the
last ten years of the thirteenth century see Town Close Evidences,
12-15.) It would seem that as the prosperity of the city increased
new inhabitants had begun to flock to it who were far more concerned
in making their own bargains than in carrying out the laws and customs
of the borough; and who, especially the poorer sort engaged in humble
trades, were anxious to escape the payments and responsibilities
of citizenship. Blomefield (iii. 73) states that about 1306, owing
to difficulties in paying the ferm, it was ordered that every one
who had traded for a year and a day in the city must take up his
freedom, paying for it a fine of 40_s._ if he were not entitled to the
franchise by birth or service. Since every citizen was bound to have a
house, building went on fast, and can be measured by the increase of
rents from houses. For “in 1329 Simon de Berford the King’s escheator
on this side Trent gave the city much trouble concerning a number of
houses, shops and tenements lately erected by grant of the city on
the waste grounds of the said city, on pretence that all the waste
belonged to the King and not to the citizens, and that the rents of
all such buildings should belong to the Crown (Custom Book fo. 2) by
which means great part of the city rents, namely all the rents _de
novo incremento_ or new increased rents, would have been lost from the
city to the value of £9 11_s._ 8_d._ a year, by which we may calculate
the surprising increase of the inhabitants of this place from the
beginning of Edward II. to this time. The small rents or old rents of
houses erected upon the city waste from its original to Edward the
Second’s time amounted to but 9_s._ 2_d._, so that if we compare the
new increased rents with the old ones we shall find in about thirty
years’ time nineteen times as many houses erected upon the waste as
there were before, an argument sufficiently showing how populous it
grew by its flourishing trade, and indeed its increase continued as
surprisingly till that fatal pestilence in 1349.
“To remedy this imposition the citizens sent to Thomas Butt and John
Ymme, their burgesses in Parliament, then held at Winchester, to
complain of the usage to the King and Parliament; upon which the King
afterwards directed his writ to the said Simon, certifying him, that
by the grants of his progenitors, Kings of England, the citizens held
the city and all the waste ground by fee-farm, in inheritance, and
that therefore he had nothing to do to molest them in letting out such
void grounds to be built upon for their profit and advantage towards
paying their fee-farm. This writ bears date at Reading March 25, in
the 4th of his reign.” (Blomefield, iii. 80-1.)
These facts seem to indicate that citizenship was a less frequent
thing among the inhabitants of Norwich at the end of the thirteenth
century than in the first half of the fourteenth century—and was at
that time possibly confined in practice to those who gained it by
birth or service, and that purchase was rare.
For the very different law made by the Bishop of Norwich in 1307 for
Lynn see p. 408. He may have desired to secure for Lynn the small
traders who found themselves hard pressed by the Norwich decree of
1306.