BATTLE FOR FREEDOM
(2) _Towns on Feudal Estates_
ON the King’s lands, as we have seen, the interests of the monarch
never came into collision with the interests of his burghers, and
the townsfolk found an easy way to liberty. From time to time
they presented a petition for freedom, brought their gifts to win
the sovereign’s favour, and joyfully carried back to their fellow
citizens a new charter of municipal privileges. But the condition of
the towns that belonged to noble or baron was doubly depressed from
the standpoint of their happier neighbours. Of secondary importance
alike in numbers, in wealth, or in influence, as compared to those
on royal demesne, they for the most part never emerged into any real
consequence; while their lord had every reason to oppose the growth
of independence in his boroughs, and lacked nothing for its complete
suppression but the requisite power. New franchises were extorted
from his weakness rather than won from his good will, and where
acquiescence in the town’s liberties was not irresistibly forced on him
his opposition was dogged and persevering.
The dispute was none the less intense because under the conditions of
English life the controversy between the town and the feudal lord was
limited within a very narrow field; for the burghers saw well how the
lord’s claims to supremacy might permanently fetter an active community
of traders, and on this point townspeople fought with a pertinacity
determined by the conviction that all their hopes of prosperity
depended on victory. To manufacturers and merchants the rule of an
alien governor was fatal; trade died away before vexatious checks and
arbitrary imposts, and enterprising burghers hastened to forsake the
town where prosperity was stunted and liberty uncertain, and take up
citizenship in a more thriving borough. Success and emancipation went
hand in hand; for the effects of a maimed and imperfect freedom were
always disastrous and far-reaching, and there is not a single instance
of an English town which remained in a state of dependence and which
was at the same time prosperous in trade.
One or two instances will be enough to show the extent and character
of the traders’ claim for “liberties.” The burghers of Totnes, who
had been fined for having a Guild by Henry the Second, had no sooner
succeeded in securing its authorisation from John than they at once
made it a weapon of offence, and a formidable weapon too with its roll
of more than three hundred members, against their lord’s control of
the town market and of the shopkeepers. The Guild claimed the right to
admit non-residents to their company, so that these might freely trade
without paying any tribute to the lord for one year, after that giving
six pence annually; and pretended to have authority to test weights and
measures without orders from the lord’s bailiff; to hold the assize of
bread and ale and receive fines; and apparently to deal out justice for
petty offences. These usurpations of his rights were discussed between
the lord and his tenants with riots and contentions, in which the lord
proved victorious in 1304, forcing the burghers to submit on every
point in which the Guild tried to bring in customs which lay beyond
the ancient rights of the community. They were forbidden to admit to
the Guild anyone who had not a house in the town, and non-residents
had to take oaths before his bailiff to pay a yearly fine to the lord.
No trial of weights and measures could take place till orders had been
issued to the Seneschal of the Guild by the lord’s bailiff; when the
trial came on bailiff and town provost sat beside him in the Guildhall
to hear the charges, and even then all false or suspected measures were
to be kept by the provost till the lord’s next court. On the other hand
the bailiff might hold a trial of measures whenever he judged that he
could do the business better. So also the assize of bread was given to
the lord’s bailiff sitting with the provost of the town; all suspected
bread and weights were to be seized by him, the offenders to be fined
in the lord’s court, all punishments by tumbril or pillory inflicted by
his orders, and all proceeds of fines given over to him. Lastly when
small thefts and riots were to be judged the bailiff sat by the town
officers and as many burgesses as chose to come, and took his share in
the proceedings—though occasionally in his absence the town officers
might act by common consent of the community.[471]
Such was the comparative helplessness of a community which, with all
its tenacity of purpose, could neither urge custom nor tradition on its
side in pleading for independent rights. In the borough of Barnstaple,
on the other hand, which had been granted by the King[472] to Sir John
Cornwall and his wife the Countess of Huntingdon, we have an instance
of the immense advantages possessed by a town which though now in
private ownership, inherited the tradition of privilege which its
people had won as tenants of ancient demesne.[473] In 1423 the Mayor,
Aldermen, and capital burgesses drew up a list of byelaws for the good
government of the borough, which apparently stirred the apprehensions
of its lords. For a few years later, reviving ancient traditions
of feudal authority in a suit against the borough, they complained
that the mayor and burgesses had of their own authority admitted as
“Burgesses of the Wynde” “foreign” merchants and victuallers who merely
visited the town; and had turned to their own use the fines from
denizens pertaining to their lord; that they had taken the correction
of bread and ale, and unlawfully seized fines and tolls; that they
would not suffer his officers to take custom after ancient usage from
the people of Wales for their merchandise; and that they even seized
fines belonging to him for heaps of rubbish in the streets. Moreover
they did not render the suit and service due to the lord’s court
from all the inhabitants of the borough, for without his leave they
themselves held a court every Monday, and instead of coming to every
court of the lord’s steward they did not come oftener than twice a
year; nor would they suffer the lord’s officers to make attachments in
the borough at the Nativity of Our Mother after the ancient custom. In
other words the townsfolk, just like the people of Totnes two hundred
years before, were bent on regulating their trade and spending the
money collected in their courts and markets; but they were happier
than they of Totnes in being able to claim that all these so-called
usurpations were ancient rights of the burgesses, by virtue, as they
said, of a charter granted by King Athelstan 500 years before. As this
charter however had unluckily been “casualiter amissa,” the town had to
fall back on the verdict of an inquisition held about 1300 as to the
usages and franchises to which it was entitled, and the payments which
were due by the mayor and commonalty in place of old feudal services.
Here the Barnstaple men held their own successfully, and in 1445 they
secured a charter from Henry the Sixth, “for accommodation of the
burgesses in doing their business quietly,” which confirmed to them the
fullest rights of self-government.[474]
The struggle of the boroughs with their feudal lords was however a
matter of little significance in England, where since the Conquest
feudalism from the point of view of the noble had so unsatisfactory a
record. Fallen from the high estate of his brethren on the Continent,
despoiled of his might by one strong king after another, he saw
himself condemned to play in England a comparatively modest part, and
from his less exalted plane was even constrained to assume in his
relations to burghers and traders a conciliatory, almost at times a
deprecating tone, not because he was lacking in “a high and pompous
mind,” but simply because his fortunes had sunk low. Hence the conflict
in England was of a very different character from the conflict abroad.
Fashions of careful ceremonial indeed long preserved the traditional
sense of impassable barriers set between the dignity of the great
whose daily needs were supplied by the labour of others, and the low
estate of those who had to depend upon their own toil. “Whensoever
any nobleman or peer of the realm passed through any parish, all the
bells were accustomed to be rung in honour of his person, and to give
notice of the passage of such eminency; and when their letters were
upon any occasion read in any assemblies, the commons present would
move their bonnets in token of reverence to their names and persons.”
Burghers and journeymen with an irreverent laugh at men “evermore
strutting who no store keep,”[475] gathered to see the noble go by “in
his robe of scarlet twelve yards wide, with pendent sleeves down on
the ground, and the furrur therein set amounting unto £20 or better,”
while a train of followers crowded after him anxiously holding up with
both hands out of the filth of the mediæval streets the wide sleeves
made to “slide on earth” by their sides, and eagerly watching lest
the ladies should forget to admire “the plaits behind;” and the busy
mockers of the market-place guessed that tailors and skinners must
soon carry their cloths and skins out into the fields if they would
find space enough to cut out robes like these.[476] But the fine
garments and leisurely state of the great folk, the hollow ornaments
of a vanquished feudalism, were matters of little significance; the
forces of the future lay rather with the crowd of workers to right
and left—with the men who watched the brave procession sweep by, and
then gathered in their Common House to decree that any burgher who put
on the livery of a lord, or accepted his maintenance and protection,
should be blotted out of the book of burgesses, and driven from their
market-place and assembly hall, and “that he come not among them in
their congregations.”[477]
For the moment, indeed, the noble class was as it were thrown aside
by the strong current of the national life, nor could the handful of
families that held half the soil of England and the lesser baronage
who followed in their train be recovered of their impotence, of their
impoverishment of intellect and decay of force, even by the greatest
landholder and the most typical member of their body, Warwick the
Kingmaker. Sated with possessions, forced into a position of leadership
mainly by the imposing list of his great relations and the surprising
number of his manors—a patriot who consecrated his services to the
cause of a faction and the unrestrained domination of a family group of
blood relations—a general who never got beyond an already antiquated
system of warfare, devoid according to public rumour of personal
courage, deserted in a crisis by the one organised military force in
the public service—a commander with all the ready instincts of the
common pirate—a statesman made after an old ancestral pattern, who
had learned his politics a couple of centuries before his time, and to
the last remained absolutely blind to the great movements of his own
day—an administrator who never failed at a critical moment to put in
jeopardy the most important national interests—an agitator restless
for revolution, but whose influence in the national counsels was
practically of no account when there was a pause in mere fighting—it
is thus that Warwick stands before us, a consummate representative of
his demoralized class.
The conditions under which the great landowners were living at this
time were indeed singularly unfavourable. With the new trade they had
comparatively little to do,[478] and the noble, with his throng of
dependents and his show of state, was really living from hand to mouth
on the harvests from his fields and the plunder he got in war.[479]
After the fashion of the time the treasure of the family was hoarded
up in his great oak chests; splendid robes, cloth of gold, figured
satins, Eastern damasks and Sicilian silks, velvets and Flemish cloths,
tapestries and fine linen, were heaped together with rich furs of
marten and beaver. Golden chains and collars of “the old fashion” and
“the new,” rings and brooches adorned with precious stones, girdles of
gold or silver gilt by famous foreign makers, were stored away in his
strong boxes, or in the safe rooms of monasteries, along with ewers
and goblets and basins of gold and silver, pounced and embossed “with
great large enamels” or covered with silver of “Paris touch.”[480] But
the owner of all this unproductive treasure scarcely knew where to turn
for a little ready money. The produce of the estate sufficed for the
needs of the household, and if the lord was called away on the king’s
service, or had to attend Parliament, a supply of oats was carried
for the horses “to save the expenses of his purse”; and an army of
servants rode backwards and forwards continually to fetch provisions
from fields and ponds and salting tubs at home, so that he should never
be driven to buy for money from the baker or at the market.[481] The
crowd of dependents who swelled his train, easily content to win an
idle subsistence, a share of booty in time of war, “maintenance” in
the law courts, and protection from all enemies, either received no
pay at all, or accepted the most trifling sums—a few shillings a year
when they could get it, with a “livery” supplied like their food from
the estate.[482] For money which was scarce everywhere was nowhere
so scarce as in the houses of the landed proprietors, who amid their
extravagant display found one thing always lacking—a few pounds to
pay an old debt or buy a new coat. Sir John Paston, the owner of broad
estates in Norfolk, was forced more than once to pawn his “gown of
velvet and other gear” in London to get a few marks; when it occurred
to him to raise money on his father’s funeral pall, he found his
mother had been beforehand with him, and had already put it in pawn.
During an unwonted visit to Westminster in 1449, the poor Lady of
Berkeley wrote anxiously to her husband, one of the greatest landowners
in England, “At the reverence of God send money, or else I must lay my
horse to pledge and come home on my feet”; and he managed to raise £15
to meet her needs by pawning the mass book, chalices, and chasubles of
his chapel.[483] So also the Plumptons, in Yorkshire, were in perpetual
money difficulties; servants were unpaid, bills not met, debts of £2
10_s._ and £4 put off from term to term, and at last a friend who had
gone surety for a debt of £100 to a London merchant was arrested.
“Madam,” a poor tradesman writes to Lady Plumpton, “ye know well I have
no living but my buying and selling, and, Madam, I pray you send me my
money.” One of the family tried in vain to get a friend to buy him some
black velvet for a gown. “I pray you herein blame my non-power, but not
my will,” the friend answers from London, “for in faith I might not
do it but if I should run in papers of London, which I never did yet,
so I have lived poorly thereafter.”[484] When times grew pressing the
country families borrowed freely from their neighbours and relations;
no one, even the sister of the Kingmaker, felt any hesitation in
pleading poverty as a reason for being off a bargain or asking for a
loan;[485] and those who were in better case lent readily in the hope
of finding a like help themselves in case of difficulty.[486] Year by
year debts accumulated, till the owner’s death allowed the creditors
to open his coffers and scatter his treasured stores, when the “array,
plate, and stuff of the household and of the chapel” scarcely sufficed
to meet the legacies and bills, the charities deferred, and the masses
required for his soul’s safety.[487]
There were indeed instances in which the growing poverty of the nobles
opened an easy way for the emancipation of the towns, since it was
sometimes possible, under the pressure of poverty or bankruptcy, to
convince the lord of a borough, even though he had but such a measure
of good wit in his head
“As thou shouldest mete of a mist from morn till even,”[488]
that the balance of profit lay on the side of freedom. For to some
extent the difficulties of the landowners arose from the fact that
on their estates the commutation for feudal services, or dues to be
rendered for the holding of land, had been settled in early times when
money was scarce and demands for profit modest, and these charges
remained fixed when prices were rising and when the need of ready money
was keenly felt.[489] But while the lord could look for no increase
from his lands, a new source of profit had been opened to him in the
boroughs on his estate. He could find money surely and easily by
leasing out rights of trade, collection of tolls, and other privileges
to the townspeople. In the middle of the thirteenth century the mayor
and burgesses of Berkeley obtained from their lord freedom from all
kinds of toll which he either demanded or might demand of them;[490]
and in the fourteenth century he rented to them the tolls of the
wharfage and of the market, and received larger profits from this
transaction than he gained from all the rent of the borough.[491]
The weakest corporation moreover had a persistence and continuity
of life which gave it incalculable advantages in the conflict with
individuals subject to all the chances and changes of mortality.
For the nobles indeed the fight with the town was in many ways an
unequal one. Driven hither and thither by urgent calls of war or of
the King’s business, the lord was scarcely ever at home to look to
his own affairs. In the frequent absences of the masters of Berkeley,
perpetually called away by “troubles of state,” when the King summoned
them to his aid whether for civil war or war of conquest,[492] the
neighbouring towns of Bristol and Gloucester found opportunity to
escape from their control; and the march of the baron and his retainers
from Berkeley was a subject of much greater gladness to the townsmen
of Bristol than to the lord of the castle himself; for “the household
and foreign accounts of this lord,” we are told, “reveal a marvellous
unwillingness in him to this Scottish war, dispatching many letters and
messages to the King, and other lords and favourites about him, for
excuses.”[493] When, as a reward for his services, one of the Berkeleys
was given the custody and government of the town of Gloucester,[494]
he was also charged with the government of Berwick, and was moreover
called away whenever the King found himself in military difficulties;
so that the Gloucester burgesses cannot have had much to fear from
him. The care of the great estates, in fact, was constantly left to
the women of the house and to stewards, while the master, pressed
by ambition, or quite as often by the driving necessity of getting
money, was fighting in Wales or Scotland, or was looking for plunder
in France, or for place at court. For three generations the lands of
the Pastons in Norfolk were managed by the capable wives of absentee
landlords—of the judge who must have spent most of his time in London
or on circuit; of his son the sharp London lawyer; and of his grandson,
Sir John, the gay young soldier who hovered between London and Calais,
and whose only care for his property was to press anxiously for its
rents. The story of the Plumpton family was much the same. One of the
Plumptons spent his last years and died in France; and no sooner did
the young Sir William reach his majority in 1426, than he also left his
Yorkshire estates and set off to join the French campaign.[495]
On the noble class too fell the heavy consequences of the rebellions
and civil wars of which they were the main supporters. If the lord
died in battle his estates might pass to a minor; if he died on the
scaffold they passed to the crown; or long imprisonment might thwart
his best laid plans for strengthening his hold over his boroughs. The
young Lord Maurice of Berkeley, for instance, was drawn into rebellion
against Edward the Second, and died in prison four and a half years
later. During the whole time that he held his estates he was only
in freedom for four months; and his eldest son, who was imprisoned
with him, was not set at liberty till some months after his father’s
death.[496] Meanwhile the towns were always quick to make their profit
in such times of disturbance and revolution, as for example when the
Earl of Devonshire was attainted by Edward the Fourth after the battle
of Towton for his support of the Lancastrian cause, and the citizens of
Exeter seized so favourable an opportunity to claim the restitution of
a suburb stretching down to the riverside which the earls had held to
strengthen their hold on the navigation of the Exe.[497]
Nor was the lord’s position made more hopeful by the furious feuds
between noble and noble which distracted the provinces in the fifteenth
century, and the incessant lawsuits by which the landowners sought to
mend their fortunes. In 1463 James Lord of Berkeley made an agreement
with the Countess of Shrewsbury that they would have no more battles
at law; for he was then sixty-nine, and she fifty-two, and neither
of them since their ages of discretion had “enjoyed any three months
of freedom from lawsuits.”[498] Nor did they wage their fight in the
law-courts only, but carried on an open war by which Gloucestershire
had been distracted since 1421, and which proved one of the most deadly
of the many provincial conflicts of the fifteenth century. Appeased at
intervals to break out again with renewed force, and with the usual
incidents of hangings and finings and imprisonments and ransomings, it
finally culminated in 1470 in a pitched battle on Nibley Green, where
the Berkeleys triumphantly maintained their cause at the head of about
1,000 fighting men, and Lord Lisle, the son of Lady Shrewsbury, who
led the enemy’s army, was killed. To country folk and traders this
feud of the nobles carried with it, we are told, “the ill-effects and
destructions of a petty war, wherein the borough town of Berkeley,
for her part, saw the burning and prostration of many of her ancient
houses, as her old rent which till that time was £22 by the year and
upwards, and by those devastations brought down to £11 and under,
where it sticketh to this day, without recovery of her ancient lustre
or greatness.”[499] Such a strife was by no means singular or without
parallel, and the histories of Norfolk, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, or
Lancashire have their records of similar outrages. Exeter was thrown
into alarm by a great fight on Clistheath in 1453 between the Earl
of Devon and Lord William Bonvil where many persons were grievously
wounded and much hurt done: “the occasion whereof was about a dog;
but great displeasure thereby came to the city, where presently after
the fight the Lord Bonvil sheltered himself, which the Earl took
amiss, thinking it had been so done by the city in some displeasure to
himself.”[500] The mere instinct of self-protection naturally drove
the towns to detach their interests from nobles whose alliance brought
disaster and ruin to simple traders, and in every borough statute
after statute forbidding the inhabitants to wear the “livery”[501] of
any lord whatever, testified to the determination of the towns to cut
off from the great people of the country round every possibility of
stirring up faction within their borders.
But if boroughs in the ownership of a private lord might secure
advantages through his poverty, his misfortune, or his weakness, their
position was one of essential inferiority as compared with towns on
the public demesne.[502] In the story of Liverpool we have a curious
illustration of the fortunes of a borough whose lot it was to fall at
one time into the charge of the state, and at another to be thrown into
the hands of a noble—and whose vicissitudes at last left it in a sort
of indeterminate condition where it owed a deferential obedience to
patrons or masters on every side.
Liverpool, which had been granted by Henry the Second to the constable
of Lancaster Castle, was resumed in 1207 by John, who granted it a
charter of trading privileges. A new charter of Henry the Third, in
1229, gave it a guild merchant and hanse, with freedom from toll, and
the rights of a free borough; and on the very next day after this grant
Henry gave the lease of the fee-farm to the burgesses for four years at
£10 a year.[503] The true foundations of municipal independence were
thus laid. The town had its common seal; one of its two bailiffs was
apparently elected by the people, and charged with the collecting of
tolls for the ferm; and the busy trade with Ireland at that time, and
the later advantage of a secure place of embarkation for troops, which
became very important as the harbour of Chester silted up, promised
prosperity. In the same year, however, the town was granted away by the
King to the Earl of Chester, then passed in 1232 to the Earl of Derby;
and in 1266 was given to Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, and
under the Lords of Lancaster Liverpool remained till a century later,
when in 1361 it passed by marriage to John of Gaunt.
All hope of freedom for Liverpool died away under its new lords. The
grant of the ferm was not renewed for over a hundred years; and at an
enquiry of “Quo Warranto” in 1292 under Edward the First “certain men
of the Borough of Liverpool came for the commonalty, and say that they
have not at present a bailiff of themselves, but have been accustomed
to have, until Edmund the King’s brother impeded them, and permits
them not to have a free borough.” Wherefore they claim only “that they
may be quit of common fines and amercements of the county, &c., and
of toll, stallage, &c., through the whole kingdom,” for “as to the
other liberties” which they used to have “the aforesaid Edmund now has
them.” They quote charters, to show that their ancient liberties had
been held direct from the crown, and the court decided that “Edmund
hath usurped and occupied the aforesaid liberties,” and ordered him to
appear before it; but no action seems to have been taken against him,
and for forty years he and his successors went on themselves collecting
the tolls.[504] At last in 1356 the lord Henry allowed the townsmen to
elect a mayor every year, and the next year the first Duke of Lancaster
(father-in-law of John of Gaunt) leased the ferm to the mayor and
others to hold for the burgesses for ten years,[505] and Liverpool
was thus restored to the same position in which the King had put it a
hundred and thirty years earlier. But even now its limited privileges
rested simply on the will and caprice of the lord; he might give the
lease of the ferm with the right of collecting tolls for the rent to
the mayor, or an ex-mayor, or whomever he would; he might grant it for
a year, or for ten years, or he might take it all back into his own
hands. As a matter of fact questions of convenience and profit seem
to have made it advisable to leave the collections of taxes mainly
with the town officers. When John of Gaunt granted his lease, at the
request of the “honest and discreet men of the burgesses” the articles
were embodied in a patent “to ourselves, to the mayor, and to the
bailiffs,”[506] and in his time the lease was commonly granted for ten
years.[507]
However some of the evils of such a system might be mitigated by the
prudence of rulers bent on securing the utmost possible profits from
their subjects, there was no real guarantee of freedom or security
to the people. But when at the death of John of Gaunt in 1399, the
Duchy of Lancaster was united to the crown, there was a new gleam of
hope. The ferm of Liverpool, like that of Leicester, was now again
paid to the King; an effort seems to have been made to abolish the old
uncertain[508] system, and in 1421 Henry V. granted the fee-farm for
one year to the corporation, while an inquiry was held as to the value
of the property and the terms of its tenure since the time of John of
Gaunt. The King’s death however stopped the proceedings, and the rising
fortunes of the town were extinguished by the two great families who
were from this time definitely settled down on it.[509]
For Liverpool was now hemmed in between two rival fortresses. Sir
John Stanley with an army of followers was encamped in a great square
embattled fort, with subordinate towers and buildings forming three
sides of a quadrangle, the whole planted on the river edge, and
commanding both the town and the Mersey, where the Stanleys’ ships
were moored, and whence they set sail for their new kingdom, the Isle
of Man.[510] Sir Richard Molyneux, as hereditary Constable, held
the King’s castle a little further along the river, with its area of
fifty square acres defended by four towers, and surrounded by a fosse
thirty yards wide, much of which was cut in the solid rock.[511] When a
quarrel broke out in 1424 between the lords of these rival fortresses,
Stanley collected a multitude of people in the town to the number of
2,000 or more, for he declared that Sir Richard Molyneux “will come
hither with great congregations, riots, and great multitude of people
to slay and beat the said Thomas (Stanley), his men and his servants,
the which he would withstand if he might.” On the other hand Sir
Richard had gathered his forces near the West Derby fen, “and there
on a mow within the said town we saw the said Sir Richard with great
congregations, rout and multitude to the number of 1,000 men and more,
arrayed in manner as to go to battle, and coming in fast towards
Liverpool town.” A pitched battle was only prevented by the sheriff of
the county, who hastened to the rescue at the head of his forces, and
succeeded in seizing first Stanley in his tower, and then Molyneux as
he rode towards the town.[512]
Such scenes of riot and disorder were fatal to the prosperity and
municipal hopes of Liverpool; but there was no escape from their
unwelcome patrons. Both the great houses fought for York; and in
return Edward the Fourth granted to Stanley the borough of Liverpool
and other estates formerly belonging to the Duchy of Lancaster; while
Molyneux was made chief forester of West Derby, steward of West Derby
and Salford, and constable of Liverpool castle. Richard the Third again
gave to the Stanleys large grants in Lancashire, and confirmed the
Molyneux people in their offices,[513] and Henry the Seventh favoured
their claims. The lords were great and important people in those days,
and the little town of no account. Its independence died away, and
the troubles of the ferm revived in their old bad form. The question
of the lease was never settled, but in any case it passed out of the
hands of the corporation. From 1495 it was for many years granted to
David ap Griffith, who when he became mayor in 1502 had it renewed
to him. Henry the Eighth leased it in 1525 and 1529 to his widow and
son-in-law for terms which were to expire in 1566. In 1537, however,
it was let to Thomas Holcraft, who sublet it to Sir William Molyneux.
The mayor and corporation under Edward the Sixth declared the authority
of the Molyneux family to be illegal, and claimed under the old lease
granted to Griffith. For many years they fought obstinately in the
case, holding perhaps that the house of their old mayor more nearly
represented the town and its interests than the house of Molyneux; and
one of them was thrown into prison for his resistance under Mary.[514]
The ferm was not finally granted to the corporation till 1672; and
Liverpool was for a couple of centuries so sorely tried by the
necessity of keeping well with the two great families that overawed it
as well as with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster,[515] whether
in the collecting of its scanty taxes or the choosing of its burghers
for Parliament, that the history of its civic developement long
remained of no importance.[516]