THE TOWNSPEOPLE
NO dispute has raged more fiercely in this century, not only in England
but throughout Europe, than the dispute as to what qualifications
should make a man fit to take part in the government of his state. The
possession of property in land, a fixed yearly income, birth into a
certain rank, a standard of age, some degree of education—these and
other tests of merit have been applied in the hope of securing that
every active citizen shall be distinguished by a fitting capacity,
whether proved by his own attainments or guaranteed by the virtues or
the prosperity of his ancestors. But the anxieties and cares of great
states in this matter are only the repetition on a grand scale of the
perplexities that beset the humble communities who first tried to solve
the problem of how a society of freemen could best rule themselves. In
the early “communitas” of the village or town out of which the later
chartered borough was to grow—a community which possessed common
fields or customary rights of common over surrounding meadows, and
which had doubtless found some regular system for the management of its
own affairs[306]—the obvious course was to count as the responsible
men of the township the land-holders who had a share in the common
property; and when the community had received the charter which made
it into a free borough the same system was naturally continued. Those
who owned a house and a certain amount of land, measured according to
the custom of the borough, formed the society of burghers,[307] and
to the townspeople, as to Swift centuries later, the definition of law
was “the will of the majority of those who have the property in land.”
Equality of possessions brought with it equality of civil rights, and
each community formed a homogeneous body whose members were all subject
to the same conditions and shared in the same interests. When the
burgher’s life was over, the son who inherited his property appeared
before the bailiffs within forty days, to deliver up to them his
father’s sword and take the freeman’s oath;[308] and the common life
went on undisturbed by the intrusion of any foreign element, vagrant,
restless, encroaching.
But such simple conditions of life, only possible in a stationary
agricultural society,[309] disappeared when industry and commerce
brought their revelation of new standards of prosperity. In the course
of a very few generations there was scarcely a trace left of that
primitive relation of equality out of which the early equality of
rights had sprung. As the country folk migrated in increasing numbers
from manor and village to the town[310] old rigid distinctions were
swept away, and the simplicity and uniformity of the burgage tenure
was completely broken up. In Liverpool, for example, the burgages
originally established by John were already in the fourteenth century
divided into small fractions one-eighth or even one-forty-eighth part
of their original size;[311] and the amount of land held by owners
of property in Nottingham in the fifteenth century varied so much
that the taxes levied on them were in some cases as high as £3 14_s._
7½_d._, in other cases as low as a farthing.[312] The owners of capital
began to thrust out the owners of land; the shopkeeper replaced the
agriculturist, the tradesman and the artizan exercised a new power, as
the boroughs quickly adapted themselves to the changing conditions of
the time and opened one door after another for the bringing in of new
members whose wealth or whose skill might benefit the community. The
ownership of land still carried with it its ancient rights.[313] But
the son of a freeman who himself owned no land might be made a burgher
in his father’s lifetime. Aliens might buy the franchise. Craftsmen
were admitted into the circle of the citizens.[314] Recruits from every
class and from every nation pressed into the ranks of burgesses. There
were foreigners from Bordeaux or from Flanders or from Lisbon,[315] and
Irishmen in abundance, in spite of occasional outbursts of hostility
in which Irish burghers were deprived of their freedom, “till they
bought it again with the blood of their purses, and with weeping eyes,
kneeling on their knees, besought the mayor and his brethren of
their grace.”[316] No limit was set, whether of race, or occupation,
or descent, or wealth, if they “are born in the city and be of good
report, and if their presence may be profitable to the city as well as
for his wisdom, as also for any other validity or worth known to the
citizens.”[317] The new society took in alike traders, agriculturists,
bondmen looking for freedom,[318] parish priests,[319] merchants who
owned eight or ten ships and employed over a hundred workmen; small
masters with but a single journeyman or perhaps two; artizans just
released from apprenticeship and enrolled as members of some craft
gild; rich folk who held several burgages, and men who rented a tiny
shop. Everywhere the town communities were fast outgrowing the old
simple traditions of common acquaintance and friendship, and throughout
the fifteenth century the seals of the frequent new comers were so
unfamiliar to their fellow citizens that deeds of sale had constantly
to be brought to the Mayor for the addition of his seal of office to
overcome hesitation and distrust.[320]
The hospitality of the corporations differed from place to place.
Sometimes a borough threw its gates wide open and welcomed any new
comer who would but choose one of the half-dozen avenues to citizenship
that lay before him,—who would buy land, or marry a free woman, or
pay the fixed price for his freedom, or serve his apprenticeship
to a trade, or accept the franchise as a gift from the community;
while a neighbouring town, looking on aliens with jealousy and
hesitation, would close its doors and cling to some narrower system
of enfranchisement which kept its ranks pure from foreign blood, and
its burghers free from anxieties of competition.[321] Each community
in fact had full liberty to order its own political experiment. In
the matter of choosing their fellow burgesses, of framing their own
society and fixing the limits of its growth, the citizens knew no law
and recognized no authority beyond their own,[322] and enjoyed herein
a measure of independence unknown in continental countries where a
powerful feudal system still barred every road to freedom.
When a new comer who desired to be “franchised for a free man, ...
and fellow in your rolls”[323] was accepted by the commonalty he was
summoned before them in a public court, “having with them the common
charter of the city; and then the steward shall take the book, and
bid them lay their right hands thereon, commanding all those that are
standing by, in the behalf of our Lord the King, to keep silence,” and
the oath of obedience to the King and fidelity to the customs of the
town was administered,[324]—perhaps, as at Winchester, the “oath to
swear men to be free, kneeling on their knees.”[325] The candidate had
further to find two or more good men as pledges that he would “observe
all the laws;”[326] and to pay the customary fees, which varied with
the caution or the poverty of the borough from three shillings to five
pounds; while a poor corporation like Wells was content to receive its
payments in wine or gloves or wax when money was scarce.[327]
The new burgess was then required to give security to the town for
payment of taxes or any other municipal claims by proving that he had
either a good yearly revenue or a tenement, or by at once building
himself a house.[328] A wooden framework was put together either
on some building ground or perhaps in a vacant space in the open
street,[329] and was then carried to the new site. The interstices were
quickly filled up with plaster, and the little tenement was complete. A
couple of rough benches and one or two pots and a few tools served as
furniture, and the new burgess entered into possession and began life
as a citizen householder. Henceforth he was bound to live within the
walls of the borough, for his franchise was forfeited if he forsook the
town for a year and a day.[330] Over the house, which was the town’s
security for rent and taxes, the municipality kept a watchful eye: if
it became ruinous and dangerous to the passer-by it was thrown down
at the owner’s cost, or if needful at the cost of the commonalty; if
through neglect or poverty it fell into decay the next heir and the
commonalty together could compel him to put it in order or give it
up.[331] Once or twice a year the burgher had to appear at the Portmote
or Borough Court to prove his presence in the town, and to take his
necessary part in the duties of the court.[332] An unwavering loyalty
and public spirit was demanded of him, and the loss of “frelidge,”
as they said in Carlisle, avenged any breach of public duty, such as
a refusal to help the Mayor in keeping the peace, clamour and undue
disturbance at the election of town officers, revealing the counsels
of the Common Assembly, resistance in word or deed to the municipal
officers, contempt of the Mayor’s authority, or any offence for which
the punishment of the pillory or the tumbrill was adjudged.[333] For
such things the burgher was “blotted out of the book of the bailiff”;
and the forfeiture of his freedom was declared by open proclamation
of the common crier, or by sound of the town bell, or by having his
name written up on a Disfranchised Table in the Guild Hall,[334] so
that all the town should know his shame. In Preston those who betrayed
the municipal confidence or exposed the poverty of the town were not
only deprived of the franchise, but their toll was taken every day as
of forsworn and unworthy persons who could not be trusted beyond the
passing hour.[335]
It was no mean advantage to be a burgher in those days, when nearly all
material benefits and legal aids and political rights were reserved
for the favoured classes, and when it was the towns that opened for
the working man and the shopkeeper a way to take their place too among
the people of privilege. The burghers, of course, shared alike in
rights of common and of pasturage on the town lands, of fishing in
the town waters,[336] of the ferry across the stream or sea channel,
and so forth; but their pre-eminent privilege was the right to trade.
If ordinary inhabitants were allowed to buy and sell food or the bare
necessaries of life, all profitable business was reserved as the
monopoly of the full citizen.[337] Protected from the intrusion and
the competition of the alien,[338] he paid a reduced toll for his
merchandize at the entrance of the town; his stall in the market was
rented at a lower price than that of the stranger; he had the first
choice of storage room in the Guild Hall for his wool or leather or
corn; the town clock which tolled the hour when the market might begin,
struck for the burgher an hour or two earlier than for strangers and
visitors.[339] If a travelling merchant brought his wares to the
town the citizen might claim the right of buying whether the owner
wished to sell or no, and might insist on a share in the profits of
any mercantile venture.[340] He alone might keep apprentices, and
become a master in his craft. If he travelled outside his own town
for the purpose of trade he carried privilege with him everywhere, and
confidently claimed freedom from “pontage” and “passage” and “pesage”
and “shewage,”—that is from tolls for crossing bridges, for passing
into a town, for the weighing of goods, for showing merchandize in the
market,[341]—and from a host of similar imposts. Wherever he went he
was shielded by the protection of his fellow citizens;[342] if he had
an action for debt in any other town he was granted common letters from
the Mayor and Jurats to assist him in his suit;[343] if any wrong was
done him they enforced compensation, or they avenged his injuries by
confiscating the goods of any merchants within their walls who had come
from the offending town.
Legal safeguards and privileges moreover fenced him about on every
side. He could only be impleaded in the courts of his own town, and any
fellow citizen who brought an action against him outside the borough
might be disgraced and disfranchised;[344] while the King himself could
not summon a burgher to appear before his judges at Westminster, save
on the plea that there had been “lack of justice” at the first trial
in the court of his own town. No “foreigner” might meddle in any legal
inquiry in which their houses and property were concerned;[345] while,
on the other hand, every citizen from twelve years old could serve on
juries for the town business.[346] Peculiar favours were extended to
the burgher,[347] as at Worcester where there were special provisions
to protect him from any wrongful fine by the bailiff,[348] and the
city sergeant had to do any legal business required of him at reduced
fees; or at Canterbury, where special formalities of trial assured to
him a more exact and careful justice; or at Sandwich, where he could
be tried only before the mayor, and could not be summoned before his
deputy like a common stranger.[349] Everywhere he could claim the right
of being separated from the common criminals and imprisoned in some
tower or room in the Guild Hall used as the Freeman’s prison.[350]
But all these privileges were far from being a free gift to be enjoyed
in idle security; and to each individual burgher the franchise
practically meant a sort of carefully-adjusted bargain, by which he
compounded for paying certain tolls by undertaking to do work, and
work which might be both costly and laborious, for the community. The
body of citizens was but a small one, and every man in it was liable
at some time or other to be called on to take his part in the public
service. Taxation for the town expenses, watch and ward, service on
juries, the call to arms in defence of the borough, were incidents
as familiar as unwelcome in every burgher’s life; but a more serious
matter was the summons to take office and serve as mayor or bailiff or
town clerk or sergeant or tax-collector or common constable—offices
not always coveted in those days, when the mayor was held personally
responsible for the rent of a town which was perhaps vexed with
pestilence or wasted with fire; when treasurers had to find funds as
best they could for too frequent official bribes or state receptions
of great lords or court officers; when bailiffs had to meet the loss
from failing dues and straitened markets;[351] when the boxes of the
tax-collector were left half empty through poverty, or riots, or
disputed questions of market-rights;[352] and when the constable was
“frayed” day and night by sturdy men, dagger in hand, ready to break
the King’s peace.[353] Many modes of escape were tried. The inhabitants
would refuse to take up the franchise, or they would leave the town
for a time;[354] an elected officer would plead a vow of pilgrimage
to “S. James in Gallice;” or an influential burgess might obtain
letters patent from the King which granted him freedom from serving
any municipal office during his life.[355] But generally a heavy fine
compelled the submission of a refractory citizen, and in the last
resort the community would apply for a writ against him from the Privy
Council.[356] The town allowed no excuses, and everywhere the citizens
were forced by stringent laws to take on them the offices to which they
had been elected by their fellows. In Lydd an order was made in 1429
that any one who had been appointed by the bailiff or jurats to take
any journey on town business should pay a fine if he refused without
reasonable cause.[357] In the Cinque Ports generally if a citizen who
had been elected as mayor or jurat declined to serve, his house was
pulled down;[358] or as at Romney the bailiff with the whole community
went to his dwelling, turned himself, his wife, his children, and all
his household into the street, shut the windows and sealed the door,
and so left matters until “he wished to set himself right by doing
the said duty of jurat.” In Sandwich again, “if a person when elected
treasurer will not take upon him the office he shall not be permitted
to bake or brew, or if he does bake or brew the commons may take his
bread and beer to their own use till he accepts the office.”[359] At
the worst, however, the burgher might thankfully remember that his
public duty practically ceased at the wall and moat that bounded the
town, and that when he had paid down his money towards the buying of
the town charter he was at least safe from the danger of being sent as
tax-collector or constable or juror anywhere throughout the country
round.[360]
The privileges and duties of the free citizen remained, however, the
endowment of the few. That larger conception of the common rights of
man which had begun to make its way in the boroughs, was checked and
hindered at every turn by the complicated conditions of town life, by
the jealousy of established settlers as to new comers, the exclusive
temper which the crafts had begun to show, the terror of the trader
before free competition, the imperfectly developed authority of the
corporations over the space within the town walls, where it had failed
to break the barriers of feudal custom and the claims of ecclesiastical
corporations. Howsoever the towns widened their borders, there was
still a growing population which lingered just outside the circle of
free citizens, shut out by one cause or another from full municipal
liberty. Settlers came who did not care to burden themselves with the
duties and charges of citizenship; there were dwellers in churchyards
and tenants of ecclesiastical estates, who carried on their business
within the town liberties but remained without the town jurisdiction;
landowners from outside the walls brought their corn and wool to the
town market; traders came from time to time with wares to sell; there
were apprentices and journeymen, escaped bondmen, and country-folk
coming to look for work. As all of these alike needed the protection
of the town, so the town needed their services; and by degrees their
respective duties and rights were laid down in charters, in ordinances,
or in friendly compacts.
I. Thus it came about that below the ranks of the burgesses, themselves
secure in their municipal supremacy, were ranged orders of men more
or less highly favoured according to their degree. First came the
inhabitants who had paid for special rights of trade in the town, or
were admitted as members of the Merchant Guild. In times of commercial
prosperity when wandering dealers and artizans were attracted to
some thriving borough for trading purposes they went to swell this
class of independent inhabitants, subject to the jurisdiction of the
town courts, but taking no part in its politics;[361] so that it
occasionally happened, as in Norwich and Worcester, that the town
refused to harbour this body of irresponsible inhabitants and passed
a law ordering them to become citizens.[362] When on the other hand
trade declined and poverty settled down on the town, as in Romney
and Winchester, the failing fortunes of the people were marked by a
steady decrease of the class of “advocantes,” or those who would “avow”
themselves freemen, and inhabitants who in their distress refused
or renounced the franchise,[363] were driven into the ranks of the
politically unfree.
II. So long as the trading inhabitants owned the jurisdiction of the
town courts their presence brought no serious difficulty to the ruling
authorities. But within the town walls there were other groups of men
who lay beyond this jurisdiction, and held an ambiguous position which
was the source of many a quarrel for ascendency and many a struggle
for license in the course of the fifteenth century. These were the
tenants and dependants of bishop or abbot, of some lay lord, or of the
king’s castle—men who lived within the liberties of the borough and
who had the right of trading in the town, but who were bound to do
suit and service at the courts of their own special lord.[364] To some
extent they were forced to recognize the mayor’s authority, since their
rights of trade were guaranteed by his protection, and since he yearly
reminded them of his power to levy taxes on all property within the
liberties of the borough. But their obedience was grudging and their
loyalty was cold. The mayor could not awe them by a summons to his
court, or enforce his demands with threat of pains and penalties; he
could scarcely terrify them into submission with his sergeant and a few
constables. By degrees, it is true, the tenants of the king’s castle or
of feudal lords became merged in the general body of the inhabitants.
But the tenants of ecclesiastical estates[365] were maintained by
lords who were bound by every tradition of their order never to yield
up the least jot of authority to the secular power, and least of all
to the secular power as represented by groups of upstart drapers and
fishmongers and weavers whose humble shops and booths leaned against
the walls of the abbey or the priory, and whose pretensions, loud
and noisy though they might be, were perhaps a century or so old at
the best. The ecclesiastical tenants therefore remained everywhere
an alien body, no true partakers in the life of the town, and when
supported by a powerful bishop or abbot determined to crush the
pretensions of a struggling borough they proved a serious danger
to municipal unity, and one which the authorities found themselves
powerless to conquer till the Reformation settled the question for ever.
III. There was another class of privileged traders,—those who lived
altogether outside the town,[366] who knew nothing of its courts, and
bore none of its charges. We find everywhere these country traders
under various styles and with various privileges according to the
town’s discretion and convenience. Sometimes the citizens sold rights
of trade to cultivators of the surrounding lands and occasional
visitors to fair or market, and nobles and landowners were ready to
give large yearly payments for freedom of the market and for the right
of having granaries in the town. Peasants who owned a plot of land
just outside the borough increased their scanty store by learning some
little handicraft or doing a small trade in the town; or craftsmen
settled down beyond the boundaries to escape the town dues and live
more cheaply. At first the settlement of workmen and traders at their
gates may have seemed a matter of small consequence, but as time went
on the danger which was hidden in these communities of free-traders
became apparent. The manufacturer or dealer was able by one device or
another to protect himself against the enterprising man of the suburbs
who came in with his cheaper goods; it was the journeymen of the towns
who failed before the stress of the battle, driven back from their
poor entrenchments by the masses who pushed forward on all sides to
contest with them admission into the lower ranks of industry where the
scantiest skill sufficed to earn a bare subsistence.
IV. Last of all came the non-burgesses, who had neither any share in
the government, nor any rights to rent a stall in the market, nor to
own shop or workroom in the town. These formed an obscure company of
workers without records or history. They counted among their number
ancient burghers who had fallen into low estate and could no longer pay
their burgage dues, as well as the poor who had never prospered so far
as to buy a tenure or citizenship. But they were not all necessarily
poor or miserable.[367] Rich merchants came from foreign parts to
settle for four or eight months at a time, as the law might allow
them, and bought and sold within the four walls of the room which the
Town Council had ordered in some inn as their dwelling-place, with the
host standing at their elbow to witness every bargain. Foreign workmen
sometimes came to settle, like the Flemish weavers in Bristol, or the
Dutch makers of canals and sluices whom we find in the towns of the
southern coast. Companies of tilers or builders gathered in towns
where stone houses were becoming the fashion, or where the Council
had issued an order that within the next few months every house must
provide itself with roof and chimney of brick or tiles.[368] The
seaports had their uncertain element of sailors, “shipmen that had
nought, and cared never an they were once on the sea whether they come
again or not,” and who at Yarmouth formed a riotous population, so that
it was said that “no thrifty man would live in it.”[369] Labourers
from the country came in to win freedom from serfage. Others came to
look for higher wages, and the hope which town life held out to the
enterprising and the ambitious; so that in 1405 an Act of Parliament
declared that the fields were deserted, and the “gentlemen and other
people of the nation greatly impoverished” by the labourers seeking
apprenticeship in towns, “and that for the pride of clothing and other
evil customs that servants do use in the same.”[370] Children came,
constantly as young as seven, never older than twelve—when they were
expected to begin the work of life just as at that age their brothers
of a better station took on themselves the duties of citizenship, for
“every poor man that hath brought up children to the age of twelve
year waiteth then to be holp and profited by his children.”[371]
Thenceforward they had to fight their own way, looking for assistance
not to their fathers but to their patrons, “whence it proceeds that,
having no hope of their paternal inheritance, they all become so greedy
of gain that they feel no shame in asking almost ‘for the love of God,’
for the smallest sums of money; and to this it may be attributed that
there is no injury that can be committed against the lower orders of
the English that may not be atoned for by money.”[372]
But if apprenticeship ever brought with it “pride of clothing,” the
poor working class of the towns fared roughly and worked hard among
artizans who “hold full hungry house,” who know “long labour and
light winning,” who taste no wine from week to week, whose bed has
no blanket, and on whose board no white bread ever comes.”[373] Once
this rough living and rougher toil had been a sure way of entering
into the privileges of municipal freedom. But even in the fourteenth
century this was no longer the case. The poorer burghers opposed the
admission of new comers to share their common lands, and insisted on
selling the franchise dearly. The crafts had already begun to form
themselves into close companies, and by prohibitive fines shut out all
save the descendants of their own members; while at the same time the
custom was growing up that the town franchise should be given only
to those who were enrolled in a craft or trade guild; and strangers
therefore found the way barred against them; they could neither become
masters in their craft nor burgesses in their town, and went to swell
the general mass of journeymen and serving men. Moreover the Peasant
Revolt had carried with it widespread terror, and from that time some
towns, as for instance York and Bridgenorth, refused to allow any born
bondman, whatever his estate, to receive the freedom of the city. Thus
from one cause or another groups of men were formed in the midst of
every town who were shut out from the civic life of the community,
and whose natural bond of union was hostility to the privileged class
which denied them the dignity of free citizens and refused them fair
competition in trading enterprise. The burghers yearly added to their
number half a dozen or perhaps even a score of members wealthy enough
to buy the privilege, while the increase in the unenfranchised class,
which had begun very early in the town life, proceeded by leaps and
bounds; till presently the old balance of forces in the little state
was overthrown, the ancient constitution of a free community of equal
householders was altogether annulled and forgotten, and a comparatively
small class of privileged citizens ruled with a strong hand over
subject traders and labourers to whom they granted neither the forms
nor the substance of liberty.