THE PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT
_Bridport_
THE comfortable independence in which the townspeople of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries had stoutly entrenched themselves, was the
reward of a couple of centuries of persistent effort, in which they
had steadily laboured at their double work of emancipation, freeing
themselves on the one hand from the feudal yoke, and on the other
from political servitude. No independent life of the community could
arise so long as the inhabitants of a town acknowledged an absolute
subjection to their feudal lord, and bore the heavy burdens of
services and taxes which, however they might differ according to the
usages of the several manors, weighed upon the people everywhere with
persistent and intolerable force. The lord might destroy their industry
by suddenly calling out the inhabitants to follow him in a warlike
expedition, or demanding services of forced labour or laying on them
grievous taxes; his officers could throw the artizan or merchant into
his prison, or ruin them by fines, or force upon them methods of law
hateful and dangerous to their conceptions of a common life; as he
claimed supreme rights over the soil it was impossible for the burgher
to leave his property by will; and on the tenant’s death officers
visited his house and stables and granaries to seize the most valuable
goods as the lord’s relief. It was necessary to gain his consent before
any new member could be admitted into the fellowship of citizens;
and without his permission no inhabitant might leave the borough to
carry on his trade elsewhere. He could forbid the marriage of children
arranged by the fathers, or refuse to allow a widow to take a new
husband and so make him master of her house and freeman in her town.
He fixed the market laws and the market tolls. He forced the people to
grind at his mill and bake at his oven.
If therefore the burghers were ever to develope commerce, or gather
wealth, or form an organized society, or keep order in their streets,
it was before all things necessary that serfs should be made into
freemen; and the first object of the town communities was to find
deliverance by purchase or negociation from those tyrannous usages by
which their masters pressed most heavily on them. Vexatious feudal
obligations were commuted for fixed payments in one town after another
as their inhabitants grew rich and independent. A bargain was made,
for instance, with the lord of Preston that he should no longer summon
any burgess to follow him on a warlike expedition which lasted more
than one day nor imprison on any accusation whatever a townsman who
found sureties; and he was forced to sell or renounce the right of
compelling the people to carry their corn to the lord’s mill or oven
or kiln, and to allow any householder who chose to build an oven on
his own ground.[374] The burgher everywhere became the acknowledged
guardian of his own children and might betroth them at his pleasure;
the right of widows to re-marry was secured against any interference
from without; and absolute security was given to every citizen that
under no circumstances could his tenement or plot of ground be claimed
by any superior lord.[375] When the burgesses of Hereford were asked
by a neighbouring town to give an account of their constitution they
proudly dwelt upon the freedom they had won. “We do not use,” they say,
“to do fealty or any other foreign service to the lord of the fees for
our tenements, but only the rents arising out of the said tenements;
because we say that we hold our tenements by the service of burgage, or
as burgesses, so that we have not any other lord between our lord the
king and us.” “And we do not so use,” they add, “to give any heriot nor
mortuary to any one at the death of any of the citizens dying within
the said city or suburbs, for any of his tenements.” Moreover “we say
that every citizen of the city or suburbs may give and assign their
tenements freely and quietly as well in health as in sickness, when
and to whomsoever they please, whether those tenements are of their
inheritance or of their purchasing or getting, without any malicious
detracting of their lord, so that they be of such an age and no less,
that they know how to measure a yard of cloth, and to know and tell
twelve pence.”[376]
In these ways and in many others by which personal freedom was checked
and thwarted, the rights of the feudal lord were irresistibly swept
away by the pressure of growing societies of active traders and
artizans.[377] But the need for political emancipation was no less
urgent; and here the way to liberty was neither simple nor easy. A very
hierarchy of powers held the path. The authority which the lord of the
manor did not assume was exercised by the sheriff of the county; and
where the authority of the sheriff ceased the supreme right of the king
began. All government and jurisdiction were divided among powers in
high places; and whatever privileges the burghers might secure must
be won here a little and there a little, bought for money, or snatched
amid the distresses and calamities of their masters, or held as the
reward of importunate persistence, the tribute to successful craft, the
recompense of some timely service rendered.
The case of Bridport illustrates the life of any provincial town in
early times whose burghers still served many masters.[378] It was a
busy little trading community in the thirteenth century. Hemp was grown
in its fields which was sent to Plympton to be made into rope yarn,
returned to Bridport to be woven into ropes, and then sent back again
to Plympton for sale, or fashioned at home into the girths, horse-nets,
and reins for which the Bridport men were famous. The inhabitants had
won a considerable measure of self-rule. They elected the two bailiffs
who were at the head of their local government, presided in the
little town court, and doubtless regulated the market and controlled
the trade. These two had under them under-bailiffs, cofferers, and
constables; and were assisted by twelve jurors chosen every Michaelmas,
who yearly perambulated the town to watch over its boundaries, and
who had charge of the “parish cheste” or coffin and the parish bier,
and of the pillory, whipping post, and cucking stool. Twelve men were
also chosen to conduct any business in which Bridport was concerned.
At the visits of the king’s justices they were summoned with the clerk
in council to assist in the business of the court; they represented
their fellow burgesses if any question was called for trial before the
sheriffs court at Dorchester, or if a dispute arose with the bishop, or
a settlement had to be made with the convent at Abbotsbury.
I. The powers of the burgesses however were shut up within the
narrowest limits. At every moment of their lives some authority from
without stepped in with rigorous control and ceaseless exactions. The
Lord of the Manor (who in this particular case was the king) owned the
soil of the town; therefore his Steward kept the Law Day,[379] judged
the petty offences of the townsmen, summoned them before him to see
that each was properly enrolled under the system of frankpledge, and
swept their fines and forfeitures into the lord’s coffers.[380]
II. Bridport further owed obedience to the officers of the shire.
The coroner[381] came to make inquisition in case of mysterious or
violent death or of fire, judged the cause, seized forfeited goods or
chattels, and assessed the fines. The sheriff of the county exercised
a jurisdiction which extended over the most important affairs of the
community, and touched at every point the daily life of the burghers.
That his supervision might be constant and effectual, he was accustomed
to appoint a deputy or under-sheriff to represent him on the spot,
generally some man of importance in Bridport itself, who living in the
centre of the town could keep a close watch on its affairs and manage
them with a more exact control. It was the sheriff’s business to keep
order, and guard against breaches of the king’s law. At stated times
he called the town bailiff and constable to appear at his court at
Dorchester; crimes which lay beyond the control of the manor court
were brought to judgment before him and fines, or the gifts that
averted fines,[382] reminded the burghers of his power. As head of
the shire forces he ordered at his own will the muster-at-arms of the
townsmen, and in times of disturbance called out the levies for the
king’s service; he fixed the number of archers and fighting men; he
regulated the contribution of bows and arrows, of hemp and cord, of
corn or wine or fish. Year by year he assessed and levied the royal
taxes,[383] and collected the rent due from the borough to the king’s
exchequer. Payments were not made in money in such a town as Bridport;
so when the rent day came near the sheriff or his deputy first drew
up a list of oxen and other goods which were to be given up by the
various inhabitants and ultimately sold on the Monday after Palm Sunday
for the ferm. Meanwhile this list was handed over to the charge of the
“bailiff-errant,” who travelled from town to town with his clerk and
groom[384] on the business of the shire; and certain citizens were
made responsible for the safety of the cattle and goods until the
appointed day. The choice of goods to be taken from each person, the
chance of accident before the day of sale, the naming of citizens who
were to bear the charges of making good any possible loss, the various
fortunes of the auction and of the prices it might bring, the skilful
calculations necessary to ensure that however much the profits might
exceed the needed sum they should never fall short of it—all these
things created at every turn new chances of corruption, new hopes
of profit to those in authority, and new prospects of ruin to those
under the law.[385] The division of powers between the sheriff and his
deputies, and the practical impossibility of fixing any responsibility
or of calling any one of them to account, left the inhabitants mere
creatures at mercy, subject to varied and fortuitous hardship; while
on the other hand the art of government became to every one concerned
in it a mere business of self-preservation. When John in 1216 sent a
commission to collect the ferm of Northampton which had fallen into
arrears, the commissioner was informed that the king could not afford
payment either for himself or for his servants, and that he must
therefore provide as best he could for their salaries and provisions
out of the arrears of the ferm which he was sent to collect.[386] Such
a system quickened zeal on the part of officials, if it did not lighten
the troubles of the people. In those days every officer in the scale,
from the sheriff to the constable, subject to the claims and exactions
of his immediate superior, could only indemnify himself by exercising a
corresponding pressure on those below him, and passing on the tradition
of fraud and tyranny.
It would be hard to say whether the sheriff’s position as tax-gatherer,
as judge, or as recruiting officer and military leader, gave him the
largest opportunities for extortion and tyranny; but so long as every
office that he held added new pretences for arbitrary interference,
the townspeople were driven to win his favour by frequent gifts,
whether to himself or to his wife, which indeed his deputies were
strict in levying when voluntary action proved tardy. He generally
required a “year gift” from towns under his control, either to induce
him not to come within their liberties, or to remind him to “shew his
friendship” to the inhabitants in their necessities;[387] and it was a
common custom, when money fell short, to make collection by means of a
“scot-ale,”[388] and summon the townsfolk to a drinking feast where
they were bound to contribute a supply of provisions, and to spend a
certain sum at the ale-booths set up for the day, while the proceeds
of the whole entertainment went into the sheriff’s pocket. Modes of
extortion, however, might vary infinitely. In Canterbury the sheriff
once broke down the only bridge over the river, and so kept it for
three months, while he put a ferry boat on the water which the people
were forced to use and pay for on his own terms.[389] The confessed
superiority of these officials in the arts of fraud and tyranny was
proclaimed by the universal fear and hate which followed them—passions
which break out in the popular ballads where by a traditional touch
the people’s hero, Robin Hood, is endowed with the hatred of all
sheriffs; and which stir the heart of the writer of Piers Ploughman
as he pictures these officers in the foremost place wherever there is
a gathering of the servants of corruption, and in his parable of the
Lady Meed travelling to the Court tells how it was a sheriff who was
appointed to bear her softly in a litter from Assize to Assize with
tenderest care for her safety, since “sheriffs of shires were shent
(undone) if she were not.”[390]
III. The sheriff however was but the deputy of the crown, and the
sovereign rights of the King lay behind and above all subordinate
authority whatever. When a royal messenger rode through the gates
of a town the officers of the lord of the manor and of the shire
alike acknowledged a higher law; and such messengers were not rare.
The sheriff’s accustomed rule was set aside whenever judges from
Westminster sat in the church or the Guild Hall to administer the
justice of the King’s Court. Sometimes the king’s escheator came to
investigate into lapsed estates, to ascertain whether any socage
tenants had died, and claim the customary fines.[391] From time to
time Court officials “carrying the mace of the lord the king” appeared
to announce statutes or ordinances made in Parliament; or came as
unwelcome commissioners to ask for benevolences and loans. The king’s
clerk of the market[392] might ride into the town with a troop of
horses and followers carrying weights and measures signed with the
sign of the exchequer; he would call for all the town measures, test
them by his models, see that the false ones were burned, and then
claim a fresh relay of horses to carry him on to his next stage. If
the sovereign chose he might send an officer under the assize of
arms to “sit at Bridport to array the men” and call for archers for
the king’s service; or in case of need the king’s “harbinger” or
“sergeant-at-arms” came to judge how many soldiers should be billeted
on the inhabitants. In time of rebellion or civil war,[393] suspicion
of disaffection might fall upon the town, and then commissioners
travelled from London to hold a special “inquisition” on the spot.
IV. All these officers represented the king as supreme head of the law;
but other messengers came from the court, as unbidden and unwelcome as
the last, who claimed for the sovereign a tribute which belonged to
his personal dignity and state. When the monarch travelled he carried
his own law with him; wherever he went the steward and marshal of
his house had jurisdiction for twelve miles to be counted from the
lodging of the king;[394] and their authority superseded all other law
whether of the borough or the shire. The marshal demanded such supply
of horses as was necessary for the king or his messengers;[395] the
purveyors and larderers and officers of the household levied provisions
on all townsfolk,[396] save the few who had been lucky enough to
gain the king’s grant of protection,[397] seized what they needed of
their corn and bread and salted meats, called out the inhabitants for
forced labour, billeted the crowd that made up the royal train on the
various householders,[398] and in fact governed at their own will any
town through which the king passed. A happy obscurity and distance
from the court could alone preserve a little borough like Bridport
from exactions of royal travellers; and its people might bear with
resignation a poverty and insignificance which at least protected them
from evils of so great magnitude to poor and over-tasked workers.
V. There was yet another form in which the power of the crown pressed
upon the inhabitants of a borough. Privileges granted by the king
might be withdrawn at his caprice; and the burghers lay absolutely
at his mercy for all the liberties and rights which they enjoyed. At
the beginning of every reign the confirmation of their charters, and
the affixing of the new king’s seal, had to be won by such payments
and bribes as the officials in high places judged that the burghers
could afford.[399] The king might at any moment raise a question as to
the value of their charters; or he might make some public revolution
or local disturbance the occasion for a revision or a threatened
withdrawal of ancient “customs.”[400] When their rights were menaced
the townsmen had but one resource, and hastily met together, as in the
case of Bridport, to order by the “common assent” that reins and horse
nets should be provided at the public cost and sent to London, for
“furthering the common business.”
For the whole of this complicated system of administration was
kept in working order by a generous system of bribes—bribes given
largely and openly, registered in the public accounts, and granted
indifferently to any official, great or small, who might be induced
by a timely gift to “show his friendship.” Towns won the renewal or
the preservation of their chartered rights by offerings to king or
queen, to chancellors and bishops and great officers of the household,
with whom they interceded by the aid of a “cow-pull” of swans or
cygnets or heronshaws, a porpoise, a store of dried sprats, or a
cask of wine. “The law is ended as a man is friended,” said the wise
folk of the fifteenth century, and if any legal question arose the
town could only “have a verdict” when due “courtesies,” as they were
called, were prepared for justices and their clerks, barons of the
exchequer and sheriffs and counsel and attorneys, besides any sums
required to pay a “friendly” jury.[401] If the king sent pressing
and overwhelming demands for money, a deputation of leading burghers
would hurry up to Westminster, carrying gifts and bribes to the Clerk
of the Rolls and the usher of Parliament as a peace offering.[402]
Or some gracious patron might be persuaded to divert from the town
“a quest of the Admiralty, that it would not come thither as was
intended to come.”[403] When men were called out for war the community
would consult by what gifts or “courtesies” it might arrange “to
have pardoning that we should not ride up so many men as the said
warrant commanded.”[404] At the appearance of the King’s harbinger or
sergeant-at-arms the first thought was to collect a sum which might
induce their formidable guest to limit the number of troops billeted on
the town, or even to march them away altogether.[405] In the same way
if a messenger appeared bearing part of the body of a traitor who had
been executed, which by the King’s orders was to be set up on the gate
of the borough, the inhabitants would give him a present to carry on
his burden to some other town.[406]
Counted among the usual incidents of government, and reckoned in the
ordinary expenditure of the municipality, the payment of such bribes
was to all concerned merely the customary mode of defraying some of
the expenses of administration;[407] and the public sense acquiesced
in a prudent and necessary method of carrying on the affairs of
state. Gifts to great officials were not tokens of servitude required
only from dependent towns, but a tribute levied as rigorously from
the free boroughs. The bribes demanded were not less in number; the
main difference was that they went into different pockets. Thus the
offerings required from Canterbury when its municipal existence was
most vigorous and self-dependent, were naturally on a scale unexampled
in a little place such as Bridport.[408] The gifts of the town were
scattered far and wide; a pike to a London lawyer, wine to Master John
Fineux the justiciar, a conger eel to the Dean of Windsor, wine to
the chancellor of the Archbishop of York, payments to the Bishop of
Winchester that the city might “have his mediation,” gifts to Cardinal
Beaufort to win his help when it was proposed to change the municipal
constitution, offerings to the Bishop of St. David’s—who nominally
got a double supply, one present being provided for the Episcopus
Menevensis and another for the Episcopus de Seynt Taffey[409] to “have
their friendship” with the King in the anxious days of 1483. Royal
dukes and court officers, bishops, chamberlains, notaries, clerks of
the Rolls, knights who had access to the palace, sheriffs, judges of
the king’s court, were sumptuously feasted, and messengers knocked at
the doors of their lodgings laden with pheasants, cygnets, capons,
rams, oxen, geese, with Rhenish wine, wine of Tyre, claret, muscatel,
and red wine and white by thirty or fifty gallons at a time. In the
revolutionary times of 1470 the citizens were unluckily associated
with the party of Henry the Sixth, and for years after their wealth
was lavished in buying back the favour of the court. The Duchess of
York, who had once been accustomed to receive her tribute of Rhenish
wine, red wine, and wine of Tyre, visited the city in 1471, when her
son was in difficulties; but the prudent citizens now only offered
the poor lady “for bread 12_d._” On the other hand when Edward was
again triumphant officers and commissioners of the king of every
degree accepted pheasants, geese, capons and red wine. The burghers
presented to the Duke of Clarence a load of claret and capons which it
took four men to carry. Soon after when the King’s Chamberlain came
to Canterbury, he was given his dinner at the “Swan,” one of the inns
belonging to the corporation, where he feasted off “a wild beast called
a bukk” which had been brought from Westen-hanger; and after the dinner
eight men carried a peace-offering to his inn, two swans, two fat
capons, four capons, four pheasants, fifty-six gallons of red wine, and
half a gallon of muscatel; and shortly after another tribute was sent
up to him in London.[410]
But behind this customary system of bribes and gifts lay the deep
and permanent trouble of perpetual uncertainty and dread. Everywhere
authority came home to the unhappy subjects as a mere matter of
arbitrary and violent caprice, and the main function of government as
that of rough extortion and successful pillage; while the recognition
of privilege on every side blotted out all sense of equality before
the law, and the weak, knowing all their helplessness, were as anxious
to buy the commodity of protection, as the powerful, conscious of
their might, were willing to make a gain of it. Canterbury sought the
patronage of leading people in the county or the court;[411] Norwich
profited, so long as he was in favour, by the protection of Suffolk;
York gratefully recognised the services of the Duke of Gloucester. When
he passed through the city, an order was sent out by the corporation
that every alderman and council man in livery, and every member of any
craft in his best array, should go out to meet him at the gate—the
commoners being in their places by the early dawn, at three of the
morning, the grand people an hour later in consideration of their rank.
In 1482 the Duke acted as mediator between the city and the King in
the matter of the election of a mayor, and the council agreed that
in regard of “the great labour of the good and benevolent lordship,”
that he “have at all times done for the weal of this city,” the whole
community should join in giving him “a laud and thank;” and the
aldermen dressed in scarlet, with the Council of Twenty-four in murrey
or crimson, attended at the mayor’s house to present the Duke with a
gift of all kinds of wine and fish, and lead a procession of the whole
commonalty to his lodging at the Friar Austins.[412]
Patronage and protection, however, were dearly bought at all times,
and at any moment their price, determined by the reckless habits of a
lord, or the necessity of a king, or the greed of a sheriff, might be
raised so as to bring years of confusion to municipal finances. Demands
sudden and irregular, which no wisdom could calculate beforehand and no
prudence could avert, wasted the substance of the people; and thrifty
burghers learned to measure their progress to independence by their
success in limiting the pleas which the great could urge as reasons
for levying toll and tribute on their labour. The love of liberty was
forced on them by the practical needs of life. A people long used to
hardship, dependent on the capricious mercy of their masters, subject
without appeal to impositions laid on them by the stronger hand, they
learned by daily experience that government by laws made without their
own consent, and administered by officers imposed on them against their
will, was the very definition of slavery. By a rude experience of
alien officials they were effectually taught that the first necessity
of a free community was the right of choosing its own governors,
that the control of life and goods and the responsibilities of any
office of honour and profit and trust in the town should no longer
be entrusted to strangers, but committed into the hands of their own
fellow citizens, of whose fidelity, patriotism, and credit they could
assure themselves. It was impossible that all the fortunes of their
commerce should hang on the will of some distant master whose faculty
of ruling them in all their concerns rested on the mere superiority
of power; and traders everywhere demanded authority to order their
own business, and rule their markets. The inhabitants of a town could
not claim the property in their own borough till they had secured the
right of holding it directly from the crown at a yearly rent which
they themselves should pay into the exchequer at Westminster;[413]
and even then their privileged existence was a mere matter of royal
caprice till they found means to have the corporate succession of the
borough legally recognized.[414] Their municipality was threatened with
financial calamities unless they could win exemption from the Statute
of Mortmain, and obtain the right of holding property for the town’s
good.[415] The bondage under which they lay to the sheriff[416] and
tax-gatherer could only be broken when they were given full powers to
assess and collect all their own taxes.[417] Vexed and impoverished by
journeys to distant courts for justice, harassed by the interference
in their most private affairs of some far-off governor, forced in
every recurring emergency to carry appeals for justice or petitions
for favour to an alien power separate from all their interests, they
urged the claim that right should be done to the burghers in their
own courts and by their own officers as of the very essence of any
true liberty. “We are the citizens of our lord the king,” said the
burghers of Hereford, “and have the custody of his city for us and for
his heirs and for our heirs, and we ought not to go out of our city
for the recovering of our debts, for divers dangers and misfortunes
which might happen to our wives and children; and if we ought to spend
our goods and chattels in parts afar off, by impleading and labouring
for that, by that means and the like we shall be impoverished; and
being made poor, we shall not have wherewith to keep the city, and so
disinheritance by such ways would easily fall upon our children.”[418]
And as the burghers claimed that each community should have absolute
control over its members for the peace and order of the commonwealth,
so they were resolute that no powerful patron, within or without the
borough, should on any plea whatever venture to aid or “maintain” a
townsman who had offended against the municipal law, “because by such
maintainers or protectors a common contention might arise amongst
us, and horrible manslaughter be committed amongst us, and the loss
of the liberty or freedom of the city to the disinheritance of us
and our children; which God forbid that in our days by the defect of
us, should happen or fall out in such a manner.”[419] From the first
they were forced to look beyond the question of mere personal regard,
seeing how deeply legal forms of procedure affected their common life
as a separate society, and they had their grave reasons of state for
insisting that the older forms of administering justice in their courts
should be maintained, and trial by combat rejected and abolished from
among them, “by reason of perpetual enmity of us the parents and of our
children, which might turn to the ruin or perdition of the city and
other innumerable accident dangers.”[420] In the same way they were
driven to realize the necessity of having some share in deciding on
the laws by which they were to be governed, and which might have the
gravest results to their little state; as, for example, when the people
of Leicester petitioned for a charter from Henry the Third to do away
with the ancient usage of “borough English,” and grant the right of
inheritance to the eldest son, since owing to defective heirs and their
weakness, the town was falling into ruin and dishonour.[421]
All these privileges and exemptions were matters of negociation
between the borough and the king or the lord of the manor to be
bought for money, or for political support, or for loans in time of
need.[422] The people everywhere simply won such advantages as time
and opportunity allowed, and secured benefits which were measured
by the grace of the king, or by the price they could afford to pay,
or by the show of resistance they could make to their lord. Nor was
there anything startling or revolutionary about the first beginnings
of independent municipal life. The town assemblies which discussed
and inaugurated a new constitution transacted their business with a
completeness and accuracy of methodical routine which might kindle the
sympathy of a Town Council of modern Birmingham. In the organization
of “meetings” the mediæval Englishman seems to have had nothing
to learn, and the doings of the people of Ipswich when they got
their first charter from King John in 1200 carry us into the quiet
atmosphere of a board-room where shareholders and directors of some
solid and old-established company assemble for business with the
decorum and punctuality of venerable habit.[423] The charter granted
those essential privileges which were recognized by all boroughs
as of the very first importance—the right henceforward to deal in
financial matters directly with the Exchequer, and no longer act as a
mere fragment of the shire through the sheriff; to be free of tolls on
trade throughout the kingdom, and have a Guild Merchant with all its
commercial privileges; to carry out justice according to the ancient
custom of the borough; and to elect each year from among themselves
officers to rule over the town, who being thus appointed by common
consent could only be removed from office by the unanimous counsel
of the whole people. The charter was given on May 25, and in the
following month a general assembly of the burghers was summoned. At
this meeting they first elected the chief officers for the year, the
bailiffs and coroners, and then proceeded to decide by common counsel
that a body of twelve “Portmen” should be appointed to assist them;
and three days later these too were formally chosen through another
and more complicated system of election by a select body of citizens
named for the purpose. Having taken an oath faithfully to govern the
borough and maintain its liberties, and justly to render the judgments
of its courts, the new officers then caused all the townsmen to stretch
forth their hands towards the Book, and with one voice solemnly swear
from that hour to obey and assist them in guarding the liberties of
the town. Twelve days after this they met to ordain the most necessary
rules for the administration of the town. Two months were then spent
in drawing up “Ordinances” which were finally solemnly read to the
whole people assembled in the churchyard, and received their unanimous
consent. And lastly a month later, on October 12, the organization of
the Merchant Guild for the regulation of trade was completed and its
officers elected; the newly made Common Seal[424] was inspected; and
the community ordered that a record of all their laws and free customs
should be written for perpetual remembrance in a roll to be called
Domesday. And thus with all the grave ceremony which befitted the
dignity of a new republic, Ipswich started on its independent career as
a free borough.