TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
VOL. I
[Illustration: LOGO]
TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
BY
MRS. J. R GREEN
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOL. I
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.
IN MEMORY OF
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
MARCH, 1894
PREFACE
IN the twenty years which have passed since Mr. Green drew his
brilliant sketch of the early life of English towns, and of their
influence on the history of English liberty, the study of the subject
in this country has advanced but little; and it is not, I think, too
much to say that the pages of his History still present the most vivid
and suggestive picture which we possess of the mediæval boroughs—a
picture inspired by ardent sympathy and emotion. In this rapid and
original survey the true proportions of civic history in our national
life are boldly drawn; and the burghers and shopkeepers of the towns,
long neglected and despised, take their place in the distinguished
ranks of those by whom our freedom has been won by their sturdy battle
against oppression, leading the way in the growth and elevation of
the English people, and carrying across the ages of tyranny the full
tradition of liberty. But the history of this great civic revolution,
which in Mr. Green’s day cannot be said to have existed at all, has
since then remained strangely neglected among us. While in foreign
countries the study of the origin and growth of municipal institutions
has been recognized as of overwhelming importance, and has already
employed the erudition and tried the ingenuity of a long succession
of scholars, English historians have stood aloof. No English name
figures in the contests of the schools; nor is any English authority
called to witness when a learned theory is advanced to solve the
riddle; and if from time to time foreign scholars attempt to draw
English towns within the range of their generalizations, the lack of
sufficient or trustworthy materials at their disposal makes the result
vain and unfruitful. No country indeed has been so backward as our
own in municipal history, whether we take it from the popular or from
the scientific side. The traveller who has asked at the bookshop of a
provincial town for a local history or even for a local guide is as
well able to realize the distance which parts us from France, Italy,
or Germany, as is the student who inquires for a detailed account of
how civic life or any one of its characteristic institutions grew up
among us. A certain number of town histories do indeed exist, but
they by no means always deal necessarily or even mainly with the life
of the borough itself. To a considerable number of local antiquaries
the buried relics of the Roman dominion have proved a permanent and
pre-occupying interest. For the student of mediæval times the monastery
and cathedral tower high above the squalid market-place and thatched
town-hall which lie dwarfed and obscured under their vast shadow; and
in modern as in older history the butchers and brewers who represent
the secular corporations of York and Winchester are practically bid
to stand aside before the presence of the spiritual corporations
to whom the fame of S. Mary’s or S. Swithun’s is committed. Where
ecclesiastical monuments of historic greatness are wanting, a fervent
apologist may still find an excuse for the meanness and dulness of the
municipal story, in the fact that at some time or other the town has
lent its streets to serve as the stage for a critical scene in the
national drama, and thus—through the lifting of a royal standard, or
the tragedy of a conspicuous adventurer—derives a borrowed title to
our interest. That the story of convent and chapter and solemn pageant
should be told with full detail I do not question. I only urge that
when the tale is finished we still wait for some notice of the city
itself and the humble details of its common life. There are, it is
true, signs of increasing interest in such matters, and some admirable
studies in our municipal records have lately been made in England;
nevertheless the work is still at its beginning, and how much need
there is for further study I have had occasion to know in the course of
an attempt to trace the developement of some forty or fifty provincial
boroughs, so as to gain some idea of the condition of our mediæval
towns, and the general drift of their history. The preparatory work
which the foreign student finds already finished and organized for his
use, the English worker has in almost every case to do for himself.
Even the briefest sketch of a town history too often implies the long
labour of seeking out a mass of scattered and isolated details, which
must first be drawn together into some connected sequence before it is
possible to study the general bearing and significance of the story
in relation to the growth of neighbouring boroughs. Those who have
attempted to find their way through the uncertainty and confusion of
the materials as they at present exist, will probably be the most
lenient judges of inevitable errors of detail such as must creep into
the performance of so delicate and difficult a task.
It is evident, indeed, from the nature of the subject, that any
writer who desires to give a survey of provincial town life as we
can now picture it—from printed materials scattered in county
histories, archæological journals, reports of commissions, imperfect
abstracts of town documents, parliamentary records, charters, and
stray pamphlets—must inevitably remain exposed to much correction in
matters of detail from experts with local knowledge. At the same time
it seems to me that without some effort to obtain a comprehensive view
of the general subject, the student may leave himself open to the still
graver errors that spring from the want of some ascertained measure
of proportion, and from the incapacity to distinguish in each town
that which is normal from that which is strange or characteristic.
The question of origins I have deliberately set on one side, from the
conviction that the beginnings of a society may be more fruitfully
studied after we know something of its actual life. Avoiding therefore
many dark questions, I have dealt in the first volume rather with the
simpler and less contentious aspects of the growth of the borough to
wealth and independence. In the second volume, however, the subjects
which arise have long been familiar as matters of acute discussion;
and it has sometimes happened, that in going over again the sources
from which all our knowledge is derived, I have found myself gradually
compelled to entertain views contrary to those which are commonly
accepted. Thus, for example, in tracing the growth of self-government
within the borough itself, I seem to discover in the phrazes of the
town records a new explanation for the position of the “communitas”
side by side with the “cives”—a problem which, so far as I know, has
never been really stated, and the difficulties of which are in no way
met by the universally received interpretation. Moreover the theory
of an early triumph and rapid decay of democratic government appears
to me impossible to maintain, and I have suggested that in the growth
of the common council we may find some evidence of a popular movement
towards more effectual self-government which seems to have stirred the
industrial classes of the fifteenth century. There are other burning
questions in which impetuous economists have outrun the historians, and
have not found it premature to set in order by the help of accepted
theories the obscure chaos of social history in the Middle Ages. In
spite of their zealous efforts, however, the whole problem (including
even the ascertaining of the facts on which it depends) of the
developement of English commerce and manufactures and of its effects on
social life, still awaits the student; and it is in the confusion and
ignorance which at present prevail, that I may find my best excuse for
the fact that with regard to many questions—such, for instance, as the
relation of internal traffic to free trade and protection, the general
organization of labour, the position of the guild towards the hired
worker, the attitude of the municipality to the industrial system, and
of the capitalist to the town councillor—I have ventured to differ
from conclusions which are commonly put forward.
I would add but one word of personal explanation before I close. The
only training or guidance which I have ever had in historical work was
in a very brief period during which I was able to watch the method and
understand the temper in which Mr. Green’s work was done. I never had
the opportunity of visiting any English towns with him, or of following
his studies in that direction. The most fruitful lesson which remains
in my memory is that of a day spent in Ancona between two stages of an
invalid journey, when I was able to see the intense enthusiasm with
which, as was his habit, he made his way first to the Town-hall, and
from the fragments of Greek and mediæval carving built into its walls,
from harbour and pier, from names of streets, and the cathedral crypt,
he extracted century by century some record of the old municipal life.
It was doubtless some such remembrance as this that unconsciously
led me in the course of reading, to turn to the story of the English
boroughs. At the same time I have no doubt that I should always have
been restrained from any idea of writing by my consciousness of the
entire lack of adequate preparation for such a task, if I had not felt
bound by an imperative obligation to make the attempt. When Mr. Green’s
work was over he asked of me a promise that I would try to study some
of those problems in mediæval history where there seemed to him so much
that still needed to be done, and so much to be yet discovered. In
this book I have made my first beginning toward the fulfilling of that
promise. Such a work can only be closed with feelings of compunction
and dismay.
ALICE STOPFORD GREEN.
14, KENSINGTON SQUARE,
_March, 1894_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE ENGLISH TOWNS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 35
CHAPTER III.
THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 75
CHAPTER IV.
THE COMMON LIFE OF THE TOWN 124
CHAPTER V.
THE TOWNSPEOPLE 169
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT 197
CHAPTER VII.
BATTLE FOR FREEDOM (TOWNS ON ROYAL DEMESNE) 226
CHAPTER VIII.
BATTLE FOR FREEDOM (TOWNS ON FEUDAL ESTATES) 250
CHAPTER IX.
BATTLE FOR FREEDOM (TOWNS ON CHURCH ESTATES) 277
CHAPTER X.
BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY 309
CHAPTER XI.
THE TOWNS AND THE CHURCH 333
CHAPTER XII.
CONFEDERATION 384
TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
THE ENGLISH TOWNS
THERE is nothing in England to-day with which we can compare the
life of a fully enfranchised borough of the fifteenth century. Even
the revival of our local institutions and our municipal ambition has
scarcely stirred any memory of the great tradition of the past, of the
large liberties, the high dignities and privileges which our towns
claimed in days when the borough was in fact a free self-governing
community, a state within the state, boasting of rights derived from
immemorial custom and of later privileges assured by law.
The town of those earlier days in fact governed itself after the
fashion of a little principality. Within the bounds which the
mayor and citizens defined with perpetual insistence in their
formal perambulation year after year it carried on its isolated
self-dependent life. The inhabitants defended their own territory,
built and maintained their walls and towers, armed their own soldiers,
trained them for service, and held reviews of their forces at appointed
times. They elected their own rulers and officials in whatever way
they themselves chose to adopt, and distributed among officers and
councillors just such powers of legislation and administration as
seemed good in their eyes. They drew up formal constitutions for the
government of the community, and as time brought new problems and
responsibilities, made and re-made and revised again their ordinances
with restless and fertile ingenuity, till they had made of their
constitution a various medley of fundamental doctrines and general
precepts and particular rules, somewhat after the fashion of an
American state of modern times. No alien officer of any kind, save
only the judges of the High Court, might cross the limits of their
liberties; the sheriff of the shire, the bailiff of the hundred, the
king’s tax-gatherer or sergeant-at-arms, were alike shut out. The
townsfolk themselves assessed their taxes, levied them in their own
way, and paid them through their own officers. They claimed broad
rights of justice, whether by ancient custom or royal grant; criminals
were brought before the mayor’s court, and the town prison with its
irons and its cage, the gallows at the gate or on the town common,
testified to an authority which ended only with death.[1] In all
concerns of trade they exercised the widest powers, and bargained and
negotiated and made laws as nations do on a grander scale to-day. They
could covenant and confederate, buy and sell, deal and traffic after
their own will; they could draw up formal treaties with other boroughs,
and could admit them to or shut them out from all the privileges of
their commerce; they might pass laws of protection or try experiments
in free trade. Often their authority stretched out over a wide
district, and surrounding villages gathered to their markets and obeyed
their laws;[2] it might even happen in the case of a staple town that
their officers controlled the main foreign trade of whole provinces.
In matters that nearly concerned them they were given the right to
legislate for themselves, and where they were not allowed to make
the law, they at least secured the exclusive right of administering
it; the King and the Parliament might issue orders as to weights and
measures, or the rules to be observed by foreign merchants, but they
were powerless to enforce their decrees save through the machinery
and with the consent of the town. Arduous duties were handed over to
them by the state—the supervision of the waters of a river basin, the
keeping of the peace on the seas. They sent out their trading barges in
fleets under admirals of their own choosing, and leaned but lightly on
state aid for protection or revenge, answering pillage with pillage,
and making their own treaties with the mariners of other countries as
to capture and ransom and redemption of goods, and the treatment of
common sailors or of “gentlemen” prisoners.[3] The necessity of their
assent and co-operation in greater commercial matters was so clearly
recognized that when Henry the Seventh in 1495 made a league of peace
and free trade with Burgundy the treaty was sent to all the chief
towns in England, that the mayor might affix to it the city seal, “for
equality and stableness of the matter;” and the same form was observed
at the marriage of the Lady Mary.[4] Two hundred and twenty-six
burghers sat in Parliament[5] beside the seventy-four knights of
the shire; and each borough freely decided for itself what the
qualifications of its members should be, and by what manner of election
they should be chosen, at a time when for country folk all such matters
were irrevocably settled by the king’s law. While the great lords with
their armed bands of liveried retainers absolutely ruled the elections
in the shires, in spite of all statutes of Parliament, the towns
asserted their freedom to elect without fear or favour, and sent to
the House of Commons the members who probably at that time most nearly
represented the “people,” that is so far as the people had yet been
drawn into a conscious share in the national life.
Four hundred years later the very remembrance of this free and vigorous
life was utterly blotted out. When Commissioners were sent in 1835
to enquire into the position of the English boroughs, there was not
one community where the ancient traditions still lived. There were
Mayors, and Town Councils, and Burgesses; but the burgesses were for
the most part deprived of any share whatever in the election of their
municipal officers, while these officers themselves had lost all the
nobler characteristics of their former authority. Too often the very
limits of the old “liberties” of the town were forgotten; or if the
ancient landmarks were remembered at all it was only because they
defined bounds within which the inhabitants had the right of voting
for a member of Parliament; and in cases where the old boundaries
now subsisted for no other reason, it was wholly forgotten that they
might ever have had some other origin. In other boroughs where the
right of voting was determined in another way, the townspeople had
simply lost all remembrance of the ancient limits of their territory;
or else, guided by some dim recollection of a former greatness with
broader jurisdiction and wide-reaching subject estates, the corporation
still yearly “walked the bounds” of lands over which they now claimed
no authority. As the memory of municipal life died away there were
boroughs where at last no one suspected that the corporate body
had ever existed for any larger purpose than to choose members of
Parliament. Knowing no other public honour or privilege and called
to no other public service, the freemen saw in a single degraded
political function the sole object of their corporate constitution; the
representation of the people was turned by them into “a property and a
commerce,” and this one privilege, fed on corruption and private greed,
survived the decay of all the great duties of the ancient civic life.[6]
There were it is true exceptions to this common apathy, and towns like
Lynn might still maintain some true municipal life, while others like
Bristol might yet show a good fighting temper which counted for much
in the political struggles of the early nineteenth century. But the
ordinary provincial burghers had lost, or forgotten, or been robbed of
the heritage bequeathed by their predecessors of the fifteenth century.
With the loss of their municipal independence went the loss of their
political authority; and the four hundred or so of members whom they
sent to Parliament took a very different position there from that once
held by their ancestors. In the Middle Ages the knights of the shire
were the mere nominees of the wealthy or noble class, returned to
Parliament by the power of the lord’s retainers, while the burgesses of
the towns preserved a braver and freer tradition.[7] At the time of the
Reform Bill, on the other hand, a vast majority of the town members sat
among the Commons as dependents and servants of the landed aristocracy,
whose mission it was to make the will of their patrons prevail,
and who in their corrupt or timid subjection simply handed back to
the wealthier class the supreme political power which artisans and
shopkeepers and “mean people” of the mediæval boroughs had threatened
to share with them.
The true story of this singular growth of independence in the English
boroughs and of its no less singular decay would form one of the most
striking chapters in all our national history. But the materials for
such a story, obscure, fragmentary, and scattered as they are, still
lie hidden away in municipal archives, state rolls, and judicial
records, as though the matter were one with which Englishmen had
nothing to do. It is true indeed that the many ingenious expedients
which the burghers devised to meet the peculiar difficulties of a
past age would ill serve as models for our use to-day, nor can their
success or failure be urged on either side of our modern controversies.
They tell us nothing of the advantages or drawbacks of protection in
our own time, or of the uses of state regulation of labour, or of
the advisability of trade guilds. We cannot revive their courts or
their privileges, any more than we can set up their gallows or call
out modern citizens to dig a moat that shall be their defence from
a hostile world. We cannot borrow their experience and live idly on
the wisdom of the dead. But there is no more striking study of the
perpetual adjustment and contrivance by which living communities adapt
themselves to the changing order of the world than the study of our
provincial boroughs in the Middle Ages; and Englishmen who now stand in
the forefront of the world for their conception of freedom and their
political capacity, and whose contribution to the art of government has
been possibly the most significant fact of these last centuries, may
well look back from that great place to the burghers who won for them
their birthright, and watch with a quickened interest the little stage
of the mediæval boroughs where their forefathers once played their
part, trying a dozen schemes of representation, constructing plans of
government, inventing constitutions, with a living energy which has not
yet spent its force after traversing a score of generations.
There is no better starting point for the study of town life in England
than the fifteenth century itself, when, with ages of restless growth
lying behind them, and with their societies as yet untouched by the
influences of the Renascence or the Reformation or the new commercial
system, the boroughs had reached their prosperous maturity. It would
be vain to attempt any reconstruction of their earlier history without
having first stood, as it were, in the very midst of that turbulent
society, and by watching the infinite variety of constitutional
developement learned to search out and estimate the manifold forces
which had been at work to bring about so complex a result; and no
study of their later history is possible without an understanding of
the prodigious vitality of the mediæval municipalities. There were
the workshops in which the political creed of England was fashioned,
where the notion of a free commonwealth with the three estates of king,
lords, and commons holding by common consent their several authority,
was proved and tested till it became the mere commonplace, the vulgar
property of every Englishman. There the men who were ultimately to
make the Reformation were schooled in all the vexed questions between
church and state, and in the practical meaning of interference in
civic matters by an alien power, so that the final crisis of religious
excitement was but the dramatic declamation on a grand scale of
lessons diligently repeated class by class for many a generation
beforehand. There, too, long before the great national struggles of
later centuries between England and the continental powers exalted
patriotism to its highest ardour, men were already inspired by the
vision of the English nation holding its post against the world, and
by a passionate allegiance to its great destiny; and in every market
and harbour the love of country was quickened by the new commerce with
its gigantic ambition to win for England the dominion of the seas, its
federations of merchants held together by the desperate struggle for
supremacy, and its hordes of pirates who swept the ocean with the wild
joy of their Norse ancestors. There is no break in our history when the
old world merged into the new, for the spirit of the fifteenth century
was the spirit of the sixteenth century as completely as it is the
spirit of to-day.
The towns as we find them in the fifteenth century were the outcome of
centuries of preparation. It was by a very slow and gradual process
that England was transformed from a purely agricultural country, with
its scattered villages of dependent tillers of the soil, into the
England we know to-day—a land of industrial town communities, where
agricultural interests are almost forgotten in the summing up of the
national wealth. Our modern towns, indeed, can almost all trace back
their history into the obscurity of a very distant past; but their
record as we find it in Domesday, or under the Norman kings, is simply
that of little country hamlets, where a few agricultural labourers
gathered in their poor hovels, tilling by turns their lord’s land and
their own small holdings; or of somewhat bigger villages which lay at
the branching of a great road, at a river ford, or at a convenient
meeting-place for fair or market, and thus grew into some little
consequence as the centres of a small local trade; while along the
coast a few seaports were just beginning to draw merchants with their
wares to a land that had long been almost forgotten by the traders
of the Continent. It was not till the twelfth century[8] that our
boroughs began to have an independent municipal history—from the time,
that is, when the growth of the wool trade under Henry the First gave
them a new commercial life; and the organization of local government
under Henry the Second opened for them the way into a new world of
political experiment and speculation.[9] From this time all went well
with the municipalities for three hundred years. In the course of
the thirteenth century the great majority of towns obtained rights
of self-government, until finally these grants came to an end simply
because there were no unenfranchised towns left.[10] Not indeed that
the flow of royal charters ceased, for burghers who had got the first
instalments of independence were constant in pressing for all such
further privileges as could magnify their authority or protect their
dignity; and successive generations of patriotic citizens gathered
into their town chests under the safe keeping of half a dozen locks
piles of precious parchments, each of which conferred some new boon
or widened the borders of liberty. Determined as it was by local
circumstances the struggle for independence was carried on after
an irregular fashion, first in one town, then in another; here the
burghers pressed forward riotously, and there loitered indifferently
or stopped discouraged on their way. Some towns were allowed to elect
their mayor before 1200,[11] others did not win the right till three
or four centuries later; Bristol was made a shire in 1375, more than
a hundred years before Gloucester; and in the fifteenth century there
were still boroughs which had to gain their first charters, or else to
exchange narrow and insufficient rights for full emancipation. But the
forward movement never ceased; every victory counted for liberty, and
every success justified faith and inspired new zeal. The burghers went
on filling their purses on the one hand, and drawing up constitutions
for their towns on the other, till in the fifteenth century they were
in fact the guardians of English wealth and the arbiters of English
politics.
At first indeed municipal life, even at its best, was on a very humble
scale. The biggest boroughs could probably in 1300 only make a show of
four or five thousand inhabitants, and of enfranchised burgesses a yet
smaller number;[12] while the mud or wood-framed huts with gabled roofs
of thatch and reeds that lined their narrow lanes sheltered a people
who, accepting a common poverty, traded in little more than the mere
necessaries of life.[13] It was not till the middle of the fourteenth
century that the towns as they entered on a larger industrial activity
began to free themselves from the indescribable squalor and misery of
the early Middle Ages; but from this time forward we begin to detect
signs of stirring prosperity, at first under the guise of a frugal
well-being, and later carrying its luxury with happy ostentation. In
the course of the next hundred years we see trading ports such as Lynn,
Sandwich, Southampton, or Bristol, and centres of inland traffic such
as Nottingham, Leicester, or Reading, and manufacturing towns like
Norwich, Worcester, York, heaping up wealth, doubling and trebling
their yearly expenditure, raising the salaries of their officers,
building new quarters, adorning their public offices and churches,
lavishing money on the buying of new privileges for their citizens, or
on the extension of their trade. And while the bigger boroughs were
thus enjoying their harvest of blessing and fat things, the small
seaports and market towns also gathered in their share of the general
good fortune by which all England was enriched.
Take, for example, the town of Colchester, where from the time of the
Conquest a population of about 2,200 had found means to live, but in
those two hundred and fifty years had never added to their numbers.
Of their manner of life we can tell something from the records of a
toll levied on their goods about 1300. One of the wealthiest tradesmen
in the town was a butcher, whose valuation came to £7 15_s._ 2_d._;
while the stock-in-hand of his brethren in the trade consisted mostly
of brawn, lard, and a few salting tubs, though one had two carcases of
oxen at two shillings each, and another had meat worth thirty shillings
in his shop. If we add to the butchers thirteen well-to-do tanners,
and fourteen mercers who sold gloves, belts, leather, silk purses, and
needle-cases, besides cloth and flannel, and one even girdles (which,
with their silver ornaments, were costly articles), we have exhausted
the list of the Colchester plutocrats. In the course of the fourteenth
century, however, the makers of cloth came to settle beside the tanners
and butchers. Card-makers, combers, clothiers, weavers, fullers,
and dyers gathered to the town, and spread their trade out into the
neighbouring villages. Wool-mongers pushed their business, till in 1373
the bailiffs made the under-croft beneath the old Moot Hall into a
Wool Hall for the convenience of dealers, and added a fine porch with
a vault overhanging the entrance to the Moot Hall, and some shops with
solars over them. Before the century had closed the population had more
than doubled. The poor houses that once lined the streets were swept
away, and wealthy men built shops in the new style with chambers over
them fronting the street, and let them to shopkeeping tenants.[14]
In the little trading town of Bridport we have the same story. In 1319
Bridport, with its one hundred and eighty burgesses, could not at a
“view of arms,” or muster of fighting men, produce a single burgher
who bore bow and arrows, and sent out its motley regiment equipped
with the universal knife or dagger, or, as it might chance, with
staves, hatchets, pole-axes, forks, or spears, while an aristocrat
or two actually bore a sword. Only sixty-seven burgesses out of the
one hundred and eighty paid taxes, and the general poverty seems to
have been extreme. The richest man had one cow, two hogs, two brass
platters, a few hides, and a little furniture—the whole worth £4
8_s._; and one of the most respectable innkeepers of the place owned
two hogs, two beds, two table-cloths, two hand napkins, a horse, a
brass pot, a platter, a few wooden vessels, and some malt.[15] In 1323
things were a trifle better, for eighty persons were then taxed, the
property of some of them being valued only at six shillings, and this
under a system in which the whole of each man’s possessions was exactly
reckoned up—his cards, yarn, shoes, the girths he was making or trying
to sell, even his store of oatmeal. A century later, however, we find
a new Bridport. Traders from Bristol had settled in its streets,
and men of Holland and foreign merchants and craftsmen; and the
townsfolk had grown prosperous and began to bind themselves together
in fraternities—the brotherhood of S. Nicholas, the brotherhood of S.
Mary and S. James, the brotherhood of the Two Torches, a brotherhood
of the Light of the Holy Cross in S. Andrew’s, and another in S.
Mary’s, and the brotherhood of the Torches in the Church of the Blessed
Mary—apparently the offspring of the first half of the fifteenth
century. The Toll Hall was repaired, the houses in the town set in
order, and a new causeway made. The Guild Hall got its clock; the
church was rebuilt and fitted up with organs, and sittings in it were
let out to the wealthy burghers. When, finally, a “view of arms” was
again held in the town in 1458, there was not a single name left of
those who had appeared in the list of 1319. But these new traders came
bravely set out with bows and arrows, as well as with daggers, bills,
pole-axes, or spears, or marching proudly with their mails, jacks,
salets, and “white harness with a basenet.” The Bridport standard had
changed, and one man who came carrying quite an armoury—a gun, besides
a bow, twelve arrows, a sword, and a buckler—was ordered to have
twelve more arrows at the next muster.[16]
Even towns which like Rye had known all the calamities of war were
only waiting for a moment of peace to win their share of the common
prosperity. Burned by the French in 1377, burned and laid desolate
again in 1448, Rye long remained on the level of poverty common in
the Middle Ages. In 1414 it sheltered a mere handful of struggling
people—twenty-one poor householders in Nesse Ward, twenty-eight in
Water Melle Ward, and a somewhat larger number in Market Ward equally
poor; within its walls, in fact, there was but one man—the lord of
the manor—who was assessed at so great a sum as 6_s._ 8_d._, though
there was the beginning of a fashionable suburb in the Ward without
the Gate, where the Mayor lived with some dozen other well-to-do
householders, two of whom besides the Mayor were assessed at the
aristocratic figure of 6_s._ 8_d._ By the end of the century, however,
Rye fishermen were known on distant seas and Rye traders in the fairs
at home and abroad. London merchants had bought property in the
thriving town, and new quarters had sprung up with names borrowed from
the capital—Paternoster Ward and Bucklersbury Ward. In 1493 five of
the burghers were assessed as owning £400 each, and the total value of
the property possessed by the inhabitants was £6,303.[17]
Evidence of accumulating wealth indeed gathers on every side. The
labour and enterprise which in earlier centuries had covered England
with castles and cathedrals and monasteries was now absorbed in the
work of covering it with new towns. A journey through any part of the
country to-day is enough to show us how ruthlessly the men of the
fifteenth century swept away the parish churches which their fathers
had built in the fourteenth century, to replace them with the big bare
fabrics where size and ostentation too often did service for beauty,
and in the building of which prosperous burghers gave more conspicuous
proof of wealth and lavish generosity than of taste and feeling. In
Canterbury and Worcester and Nottingham and Bristol and a host of other
towns we may still admire the new houses that were being raised for the
traders, with their picturesque outlines and fine carved work. Waste
places in the boroughs were covered with buildings and formed into
new wards. On every side corporations instinct with municipal pride
built Common Halls, set up stately crosses in the market-place such
as we still see at Winchester or Marlborough, paved the streets,[18]
or provided new water-supply for the growing population.[19] If we
count up the new gates, and quays, and bridges, and wharves, and
harbours, and sluices, and aqueducts, and markets of which the town
records furnish accounts, we are filled with amazement at an activity
which was really stupendous. Public duty and private enterprise went
hand in hand. Sometimes the whole commonalty was called out to help at
the church-building, or the digging of a new harbour; sometimes the
charity once given to religious uses was turned into the channel of
civic patriotism, and good citizens left money to found hospitals and
almshouses and schools, to pave the streets, to pay the tolls of their
town, to fee lawyers to defend its privileges, or buy a charter to
protect its rights from invasion. Thus it was two traders of Canterbury
who built in 1400 the first private bridge over the river; and in 1485
a mercer from London, William Pratt, constructed at his own expense
the first main drain under the Old Street to carry off the rain-water
into the river.[20] In Birmingham the whole community formed itself
into a “guild and lasting brotherhood” for the doing of works of
charity, and chiefly it would seem for the repairing of two great stone
bridges and divers foul and dangerous ways on the high road to Wales—a
work which the Corporation was too poor to undertake.[21]
Nor was this growth in wealth the only, or indeed the most striking
part of the town’s history during these three centuries from the
time of Henry the Second to the time of Henry the Seventh. Trade is
pretty much the same wherever it exists at all, and from its narrow
dominion much of human energy will always make a way to escape. When
Englishmen had spent a measure of their force in creating a nation of
shopkeepers, there was still enough of buoyant and exuberant strength
left to elaborate an art of government which has affected the history
of the world; and the truly characteristic part of the mediæval story
is that which enables us to measure the political genius with which the
forerunners of our modern democracy shaped schemes of administration
for the societies they had created of free workers. There was much
to be done in the new ordering of life.[22] Already in the twelfth
century a new force had declared itself when in France the middle and
lower classes for the first time found a voice in literature. From that
time onwards poets of the people and teachers of socialism, writing in
the vulgar tongue for common folk, proposed startling questions and
boldly pressed home their conclusions. Nothing was safe from their
criticism; as they discussed the original rights of men, the “social
contract” between the people and their lords, the tyranny of nobles, or
the rights of peasants,[23] these new thinkers among the people gave
warning of growing energies too big and passionate to live at ease in
the narrow bondage of mediæval custom and tradition. The inevitable
changes however came slowly, and those who lived in the midst of the
movement were themselves unconscious of the real transformation that
was going on. Even at the end of the fourteenth century the writer of
Piers Ploughman, when he paints for us the picture of the feudal world
as it then was, has no dream that its bondage can ever be broken, that
there is any escape out of the prison-house of mediæval society. For
the first time we there see England, not as it appeared to historians
and satirists of the court or the monastery, but as it looked to one
standing in the very midst of that vast “field full of folk from end
to other”—to the poet who walked among the people with his heart full
of charity and pity, who by day mixed with the crowd at the fair, or
watched the bargainings in the market-place, or travelled along country
by-ways and entered the hovels of the poor, and at night sat in the
ale-house among beggars and mendicant friars. But while he shows us
all the trouble and confusion of that tumultuous crowd, the social
order remains to him simple and unchangeable—fixed, in his belief, as
firmly as the decrees of God and nature could establish it. He could
only repeat the old time-honoured counsels of work and obedience as the
final remedy for all social ills: “Counsel not the commons the King to
displease.” But it was more than possible that work and obedience might
still leave, as it had left before, life empty of all but misery. Then
the last solace lay in resignation.
“Yea, quoth Patience, and hente out of his poke
A piece of the Pater Noster and proffered to us all.
And I listened and looked what livelihood it were;
Then was it ‘Fiat voluntas tua’ that should find us all.
‘Have, Actyf,’ quoth Patience, ‘and eat this when thee hungreth
Or when thou clomsest for cold or clyngest for drought;
And shall never gyves thee grieve nor great lord’s wrath,
Prison nor other pain for—_patientes vincunt_.”[24]
Such was Langland’s final solution for the disorders of his time.
But the English were not a patient people, and the problem of the
reorganization of society had become a very serious one towards the
close of the Middle Ages, and was perhaps more urgent to men’s fears
and consciences in the fifteenth century than it had ever been before,
or was to be again till our own day. It was a pressing question for
humble folk, for shopkeepers and traders and artisans and journeymen
who in the absence of privilege were driven to think of liberty; and in
the crowded lanes, the mean workshops, the disorderly market-place, the
little thatched Common Hall of the mediæval town, great principles of
freedom found their early home, and fought their way to perfection and
supremacy. It was not enough that the burghers should create societies
of free men—”_gentlemen_,” as Piers Ploughman would have said,[25]
to whom the great difference that distinguished between man and man
was not wealth or poverty, labour or ease, but freedom or bondage.
This was the easier part of their task, and was practically finished
early in their history. It was a longer and more difficult business
to discover how the art of government should be actually practised in
these communities, and to define the principles of their political
existence. But in these matters also the burghers became the pioneers
of our liberties, and their political methods have been handed down as
part of the heritage of the whole people. As by degrees the multitude
of privileges promised and confirmed left the important towns with no
more demands to make, they turned their energies to the work of framing
those elaborate and highly artificial constitutions which mark the
highest point to which their proud and self-sufficient independence had
attained. Instead of tamely accepting the pattern or the theory of its
neighbours, every town was making its own peculiar experiment in the
art of governing, with a vivacity and a restless ingenuity proper to
the culminating moment of their activity.
Meanwhile by a happy coincidence the boroughs were called to take part
in the great movement by which the House of Commons was created, at a
time when the discipline and experience of local self-government had
prepared them to exercise a very real influence in the moulding of
the English constitution into its present form. Having for the most
part secured their fundamental liberties just before Simon de Montfort
in 1265 summoned the middle class to take their share in the work of
Parliament, and having steadily strengthened their position during
all the thirty years of changing counsels and tentative experiments
which followed, they saw the representation of the boroughs definitely
established in 1295—the very year after county representation had
been at last perfectly acknowledged.[26] If for a time they played
apparently a small part in political battles, if the separate action
of the borough members is scarcely mentioned,[27] the fact still
remains that throughout the century during which the House of Commons
was being fashioned[28] members sent from these free self-governing
communities formed almost two-thirds of that House. Edward the First
sent Parliamentary writs to 166 towns, and in the Parliament of 1399,
176 representatives of boroughs sat by the seventy-four knights of the
shire.[29] Silent and acquiescent as they were for a while, there are
significant instances to show the steady growth of their importance,
and the way in which statesmen had begun to appreciate the new force
with which governments had henceforth to reckon.[30] By the close of
the fourteenth century their influence was marked; and it was doubtless
through its vigorous burghers that the House of Commons in the early
part of the fifteenth century laid hold of powers which it had never
had before, nor was to have again for two hundred years.[31] In the
list of petitions and statutes throughout the century in which their
influence on legislation was plainly dominant, we may look for the
true beginning of democratic government in England.[32] Indeed at a
yet earlier time, when the House of Commons was not seventy years old,
its power had been already measured and men’s imaginations kindled by
its mighty destiny. If supreme over all the King kept his state at
Westminster,
“him lord antecedent,
Both their head and their King, holding with no party,
But stand as a stake that sticketh in a mire
Between two lands for a true mark”;
if his power was absolute, and he could
“claim the commons at his will
To follow him, to find him, and to fetch at them his counsel,”[33]
yet even then Conscience warned the sovereign that to frame a righteous
government “without the commons’ help it is full hard, by my head”;[34]
and Reason
“counselled the King his commons to love,
For the commons is the King’s treasure.”[35]
The whole part however played by the towns in national politics, the
degree of influence they exercised, in what ways it differed from that
of the aristocratic class, how it affected matters of administration,
finance, foreign policy, commercial laws, the strength of the monarchy,
and the forms of the constitution—all these questions have still to
be investigated. What is perfectly clear is that wise rulers in those
days saw the tremendous change that was taking place in the balance of
forces in the State, as even the most foolish among them felt that the
power of the purse at least was passing from the country magnates to
the town merchants;[36] and they gave expression to their convictions
by a change in the whole character of their policy. To kings and
statesmen the friendship of the burghers even in times of comparative
quiet was daily becoming a matter of greater consequence to be bought
at their own price. It was no longer the nobles whom they sought to
bribe to their interest, but the towns; and as gifts and pensions to
Court favourites declined, courtesies and gracious remissions of rent
were lavished on the boroughs.[37] From this time, even when the towns
had fallen to their lowest estate, their heritage of power was never
wholly lost, and through their later humiliation and corruption we may
still discover the evidence of their political consequence, since the
measure of their influence was in fact the price set on their obedience.
If such a tale of long centuries of national growth ending in a
satisfied maturity carries its suggestion of dull monotony, we need
only turn to the history of towns in other times and places to discover
that in this very monotony is hidden a real element of singularity.
The most striking contrast lies perhaps close at hand, in the brilliant
and dramatic story of the communes in France—the shortest lived of all
the feudal independent lordships in Europe.[38] Of earlier origin than
the English, their history goes back to the first part of the twelfth
century, fifty years before the movement had effectively begun in
England; and the story of their liberties is, taken all together, but a
brief tale of some two hundred years, from 1130 to 1330. Their progress
was rapid and their decay as swift. Indeed decline had already set in
by 1223, at the very time when Norwich, Nottingham, and a number of the
greater English towns were just receiving for the first time powers
of choosing their own rulers and administering their own justice. In
1280 their condition was almost hopeless,[39] and half a century later
the life of the free communities was over and their liberties utterly
extinguished, saving always the liberty to carry on trade.
And yet we can only wonder that the attempt lasted for two hundred
years, set as they were amid difficulties wholly unknown to English
burghers, or with the ghosts or dim reflections of which these at the
worst had only to contend in a kind of phantom fight. What were the
far-off echoes of foreign conquest or defeat heard on our side of the
water, or the report of an occasional local rising, compared to the
devastating wars that swept the plains of France, and amid the miseries
of which the communes were struggling into life? The necessities
of war proved fatal to local liberty, and that in more ways than
one. If warring kings and lords created independent communities for
their own purposes, with the sole idea of forming fortified centres
capable of self-defence, such communes could hardly prove strongholds
of freedom, and the self-government of the people soon fell in fact
before the requirements of military discipline. Sometimes the death of
freedom was brought about by more violent methods; and the trembling
inhabitants who made their way back from the woods to their ruined
homes after a town had been sacked and burned by the enemy, would
pray to be disenfranchised that they might thus be delivered from
the burdens and dues of a commune which they were no longer able to
maintain. Abroad moreover feudalism retained the authority which had
been torn from it here by Norman kings, and was yet more dangerous
to the burghers than war itself. Against the might of their feudal
lord, king or noble or ecclesiastic, they could make in the long run
but a sorry fight, and perhaps after a century of desperate struggle
for emancipation in which the peasants saw their brethren slain in
thousands, their farms devastated, their wealth torn from them, their
emigrants driven back starving to plundered homesteads, the outcome
of all their misery was finally to gain a few trading privileges by
consenting to a charter which once more laid them bound at the feet
of their master. Too often the lord avoided open violence by calling
political craft to his aid, and devised for his burghers some form of
charter which while it admirably suited his own purposes robbed the
communal government of any true democratic element and made the name
of liberty a mockery. As for the vast number of towns big and little
under ecclesiastical dominion, they contended in vain against princes
of the Church whose mighty state was measured on the grand scale of the
Continent—princes with the Pope always in the background, ready at
their complaint to fulminate the decree of excommunication which left
all the burghers’ goods at the mercy of their lord. Whether the prelate
sought to annihilate rebellious serfs with fire and sword, whether
with more subtle intention he devised some cunningly delusive form of
charter, or contrived to hinder all the operations of free government,
to thwart its developement, and to check the spread of its influence,
the tragic close was always at hand—political slavery and degradation.
Amid the innumerable troubles that compassed the French communes round
about, the administrative difficulties, the financial cares, the public
bankruptcy of town after town, the evil moments when the king’s fiscal
officer and the starving people made alliance to destroy the privileges
of the burghers, civic freedom failed. Time and fate were allied
against the commune, and the issue of the battle was decided before the
fight had well begun.
Against the century of growth and the century of decay which made up
the record of the French communes, we have to set three hundred years
of unbroken prosperity and privilege in which the English burghers
added charter to charter and filled their “common chests” with a
regularity that knew no check. It is not necessary, however, to assume
that Englishmen reached that happy state wholly by virtue of their
native superiority; it would perhaps be truer to thank the good fortune
of insignificance that so long waited on them. England, in fact, was
lagging far away in the rear, where there was little of the noise and
dust of battle. It was not there that the idea of municipal liberty was
first proclaimed; for in the Dark Ages of riot and disorder and piracy,
Celts, Latins, Teutons, all the members of the European brotherhood in
fact, found in association their natural succour against danger and
aid to labour; and along the great trade routes that traversed Europe
the more important societies of men confederated for protection and
assistance were formed before ever Englishmen had begun to organize
themselves into self-governing communities. In that European drama,
everything took great continental proportions; men disputed for
tremendous stakes, and in the long battle the mighty lords of the old
world were never wholly routed, but still laid their grip on the modern
society that was struggling to usher in a new order. In the great
fight there were great defeats, such as we have seen in France, and
liberty had to begin its course afresh and lead men along new roads
in search of freedom and content. But we in our distant island had
throughout the Middle Ages all the advantages of obscurity. According
to any valid method of determining our place in the European order,
whether by yearly income, or size of merchant fleets, or strength of
armies, or number of inhabitants, we remained for a time after the loss
of Normandy and Anjou unimportant in the eyes of Europe-of little
account among the peoples; and as far as popular feeling went ourselves
heedless of what went on on the Continent.[40] Tranquil and secure
because no one took the trouble to think of us while we were regardless
of their quarrels, we were left to learn our lessons as slowly as we
would, to lay sure, if lowly, foundations, to practise our skill by
safe experiments till our art was mastered. The humble display which
we made in our national capacity was repeated in our municipal story.
There indeed the tiny dominion of the community, the sparse population,
the poor little treasure-box, the solitary “common barge,” the handful
of militia passing in review with their clubs and forks, present a
sorry figure beside the majestic state of the big corporations over
sea. But this humble condition was their true security. Set from the
first in pleasant places where by conquering kings the lofty had been
brought low and the humble lifted up, and where no enemy of invincible
strength lay any longer across their path, the burghers might carry on
their own business without care. Within the narrow area enclosed by
the city wall and ditch, amid a scanty population scarcely bigger than
that of a small country town to-day, experiments which would have been
impossible on a great scale were tried with every conceivable variety
of circumstance and expedient; and the boroughs owed to their early
insignificance and isolation a freedom from restraint and dictation in
which real political experience became possible.
Thus in England, as elsewhere, the character of the nation and the
mould of its political thought were ultimately shaped by outward
circumstance; and the forms of our freedom have been profoundly
affected by the way which the towns took to liberty, by the manner in
which they modified its expression according to the peculiar conditions
to which each community was subject, and by the use they made of their
power. But since the very existence of the towns as important centres
of life, as well as the character of their development, depends on the
complete transformation which English society underwent in the later
Middle Ages, I venture, before beginning my real story, to give a very
brief and rapid sketch of the Industrial and Commercial Revolution in
which mediæval England was buried and modern England born.