BATTLE FOR FREEDOM
(3) _Towns on Church Estates_
THE towns on ecclesiastical estates form a distinct group, whose
lot was materially different from boroughs on ancient demesne or on
feudal lands. All lay property was subject only to laws and customs
which had been ultimately determined by the necessities of social or
political expediency, and which, dealing with secular possessions
for secular purposes, were capable of being unmade as they had been
made. But the towns which were reckoned among ecclesiastical estates
lay under the special conditions that governed those estates, where
religious and supernatural influences had been forced into the service
of material wealth, and the attempt was made by spiritual authority
to fix fluctuating political conditions into perpetual immutability.
Prelates of the Church professed to rule with a double title, not only
as feudal lords of the soil, but as guardians of the patrimony of S.
Peter, holding property in trust for a great spiritual corporation,
and exercising an authority maintained by formidable sanctions. If
the watchwords of property are always impressive, among lay folk they
are still open, under sufficiently strong pressure, to reasonable
discussion; and it is admitted that temporal rights may be plausibly
exchanged for others more expedient, or may be fairly bartered away
as a means of buying a continued and secure existence. The Church,
however, by a fruitful confusion of the terms ecclesiastical and
religious, assumed to hold property by another tenure than any temporal
owner; girt round about by tremendous safeguards to which the lay world
could not aspire, and leaning on supernatural support for deliverance
from all perils, it could the better refuse to discuss bargains
suggested by mere political expediency.
The difficulty of reconciling this assumption of permanent and
indivisible supremacy with the actual facts of life became very
apparent with the passage of the centuries, when from a variety of
causes it was no longer possible for the clerical order to maintain the
place it had once held as the advanced guard of industry and learning,
and its tendency was to sink into the position of a parasite class,
producing nothing itself, but clinging to the means of wealth developed
by the labour of a subject people. With the wisdom born of experience
the Church was ready to give to its tenants all trading privileges, and
any liberties that directly made for the accumulation of wealth;[517]
but the flow of its liberality was suddenly dried up when townspeople
proposed to add political freedom to material gain, nor was it likely
to be quickened again by the crude simplicity with which the common
folk resolved the question of the lordship of canons and monks.
“Unneth (scarcely) might they matins say,
For counting and court holding;”
* * * * *
“Saint Benet made never none of them
To have lordship of man nor town.”[518]
The rising municipalities on the other hand, even if they had a history
but a century or two old, were endowed with all the young and vigorous
forces of the modern world; nor is there a single instance of a town
where a lively trade went hand in hand with a subservient spirit, or
where a temper of unconquerable audacity in commercial enterprise
did not throw its exuberant force into the region of government and
politics. With all their abounding energy, however, burghers had still
to discover that freedom might be won anywhere save at the hands of
an ecclesiastical lord. If Norwich received from the bounty of Kings
one privilege after another in quick succession till its emancipation
was complete, its neighbour Lynn, equally wealthy and enterprising,
but subject to the Bishop of Norwich, was fighting in 1520 to secure
just such control of its local courts as Norwich had won for the
asking three hundred years before. The royal borough of Sandwich had
been allowed to elect its mayor and govern itself for centuries, while
Romney, also one of the Cinque Ports but one which happened to be owned
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, did not gain the right to choose its
own mayor till the time of Elizabeth, and was meanwhile ruled by any
one of the archbishop’s squires or servants whom he might send as
its bailiff, and forced to adopt any expedient by which while under
the forms of bondage it might win the practice of freedom. A dozen
generations of Nottingham burghers had been ordering their own market,
taking the rents of their butcheries and fish stalls and storage rooms,
supervising their wool traders and mercers, and admitting new burgesses
to their company by common consent, while the men of Reading were still
trying in vain every means by which they might win like privileges from
the abbot who owned the town. Everywhere the same story is repeated,
with varying incidents of passion and violence. The struggle sometimes
lasted through centuries: in other cases it was brought to an early
close. Some boroughs won a moderate success, while others wasted their
labour and their treasure for small reward. In one place ruin settles
down on the town, in another gleams of temporary success kindle new
hopes, in a third the dogged fight goes on with monotonous persistence;
but everywhere anger and vengeance wait for the day of retaliation,
when monastery and priory should be levelled to the ground.
I. There was a distinct difference in the lot of towns under the
control of a bishop, and others which were subject to a convent.
Burghers who owed allegiance to a bishop had to do with a master whose
wealth, whose influence, whose political position, whose training, made
him a far more formidable opponent than any secular lord. On the other
hand he probably lived at some distance from the borough, and, charged
as he was with the administration of his bishopric and the estates of
the see, besides all the business of a great court official occupied
in weighty matters of state, he had but limited attention to give to
its affairs. As the see passed from hand to hand, a resolute fight with
an over-ambitious borough which was begun by one bishop might die away
under the feebler rule, the indifference, or the wiser judgement of his
successor. In the case therefore of towns on episcopal estates, if the
struggle was arduous and costly, still its issue was not irrevocably
determined beforehand, and the burghers might hope for at least partial
victory. But the emancipation of the townsmen was long deferred, and in
the fifteenth century there were boroughs where the bishop’s hand still
pressed heavily on the inhabitants.[519]
One of the greatest trading towns in England gives such a record of
ceaseless contention carried on to win rights which had been peacefully
granted long before to every prosperous borough on the royal demesne.
The Bishop of Norwich had been lord of Lynn since its earliest
history.[520] It is true that about 1100 A.D., one Bishop Herbert made
a grant of the Church of S. Margaret and the little borough that lay
around it—between Millfleet and Purfleet—to the monks of Norwich. But
the land beyond these boundaries still belonged to the see. Lying as it
did at the mouth of the Ouse, and forming the only outlet for the trade
of seven shires, Lynn was destined to be one of the great commercial
ports of the east coast, and the bishops proved good stewards of their
property. As population outgrew the Lynn of older days, with its little
market shut in between the Guildhall and S. Margaret’s where the booths
then as now leaned against the walls of the parish church, and its
tangle of narrow lanes leading to the river side, houses began to reach
out over the desolate swamp that stretched to the north along the river
side. Under the energetic rule of the prelates the sea which ebbed and
flowed over the marsh was driven back, and a great wall raised against
it, 340 feet long and nine feet thick at the base; while another stone
wall ran along the eastern side to protect the town from enemies who
might approach it by land. In the second half of the twelfth century
the “Bishop’s Lynn” rose on the newly won land along the river bank,
with its great market-place, its church, its Jewry, its merchant
houses; and soon in the thick of the busiest quarter by the wharves
appeared the “stone house” of the bishop himself, looking closely out
on the “strangers’ ships” that made their way along the Ouse, laden
with provisions and merchandise.
Lynn was now in a fair way to become the Liverpool of mediæval times.
Under King John its prudent bishop obtained for the town charters
granting it all the liberties and privileges of a free borough, saving
the rights of its lords;[521] and then at once proceeded by a bargain
with the convent at Norwich to win back for the see the whole of
the lay property in the old borough, leaving to the monks only the
churches and spiritual rights. Once more sole master of the town,
his supremacy was only troubled by the lords of Castle Rising who,
by virtue of a grant from William Rufus, claimed half the profits
of the tolbooth and duties of the port, while the bishop had the
other half. In 1240 however an exact agreement was drawn up between
prelate and baron as to their respective rights; and the bailiffs of
both powers maintained a somewhat boisterous jurisdiction over the
waters of Lynn,[522] collected their share of dues paid by the town
traders on cargoes of herrings, or on the wood, skins, and wine they
imported from foreign parts, and in their own way made distresses
for customs, plaints, and so forth. Thus Robert of Montault, in the
time of Edward the Second, set up a court under his own bailiff at
one of the bridges, and caused the merchants “rowing and flowing to
the said town of Lynn with their ships and boats, laden as well with
men as with merchandise,” to be summoned, distrained, and harassed,
“both by menacing them with hurling of stones that they come to land
and tarry, and by extorting heavy fines from them,” till at last in
despair the traders gave up their business, and sold all their ships
and boats. And when the exasperated burghers in their turn set upon
these alien officers in 1317 and threw Robert himself into prison,[523]
this outbreak only brought upon them new calamities, for they were
condemned by the King’s judges to make atonement for their crime
by paying to the offended lord within the next six or seven years
a fine of four thousand pounds; which was practically equal to the
confiscation of the whole of the municipal expenditure for about thirty
years. Soon after this, however, the rights of the lords of Rising were
sold to the Queen Dowager Isabella and passed through her to Edward
the Third; so the rough and ready methods of their bailiffs came to an
end.[524]
The power of the bishop on the other hand was still untouched. He held
the Hall Court through his steward; and held further the Court Leet and
view of frankpledge; and owned the Tolbooth Court. There was indeed a
mayor,[525] but his authority was small, for the bishop who had been
eager to grant his burghers the privileges of trade[526] was less
eager to see them set up any real self-government. Owing his post to
the bishop’s approval and nomination, if the mayor failed in obedience
or respect his place might be at once forfeited. His power of levying
taxes was limited and subject to his lord’s control, nor could he make
distress for sums levied on the commonalty. He was not charged with the
custody or the defence of the town; it was the bishop who had command
of the town gates, who could order them to be shut at his own will,
and with a following of men-at-arms could enforce the order.[527] What
was far more important, the bishop on the plea of protecting the poor
from tyranny had withdrawn from him the power of compelling inhabitants
to take up the franchise, and by thus establishing in the borough a
population dependent on himself had permanently divided its forces.[528]
As in other towns, however, so here the Guild Merchant proved itself a
most powerful organization for the winning of local independence.[529]
Lynn was already in the thirteenth century becoming one of the richest
towns in the country, and the mayor was supported by a Guild as
masterful and as wealthy as any in England. When once the question was
raised whether he or the bishop was really to command within its gates,
two equally matched and formidable forces were brought into play; and a
war of two hundred years was conducted on either side with violence and
craft, and remained of doubtful issue to the last. The bishop narrowly
watched every effort made by the mayor to enlarge his powers or exalt
his state; and the mayor was no less jealous of the pretensions of his
lord. In the course of many experiments in the making of constitutions
for its government, Lynn was again and again torn with disputes, and
harassed by the difficulties of rightly adjusting the powers of its
various classes; and in every constitutional struggle the bishop
interfered anew, and often almost dictated the final settlement. The
burghers treated him as occasion served. Constant gifts were offered to
soften his heart. A pipe of red wine, a vessel of Rhine wine, portions
of oats with a sturgeon, pike and tenches, formed one of these peace
offerings;[530] at another time it would be a costly gift of wax. But
what they gave with one hand they were ready to take away with the
other; and when chance happily favoured them appropriated without
scruple a house, 100 acres of land and twenty acres of pasturage which
the bishop held in right of his church of Holy Trinity at Norwich.[531]
As disputes grew hot, now over one point, now over another, prelate
and town alike called the king’s authority to their aid. If a sea-wall
was washed away by a high tide, the burghers would cry to the Privy
Council to compel the bishop to rebuild it;[532] or they would demand
justice against him on the plea that he had usurped their own officers’
right to hold the Leet Court and the Tolbooth Court. The decision of
the crown was given sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other; or
the sovereign might for a time take the disputed authority into his own
hands. But it was inevitable that the final gain should fall to the
king, whose authority was strengthened by every appeal to his supreme
jurisdiction; while lesser profits came to the court by the way—gifts
to high officials and great people, and to the royal judges when they
came to hold their assizes in the Guild Hall, and the town lavished its
treasures in costly dinners and varied wines and presents to them and
to their clerks.
From the beginning of the fourteenth century we can trace the progress
of the long strife as the town gradually perfected its municipal
organization. First came the necessary financial precautions. In 1305
the Guild established itself more firmly by a charter which secured
to it all its lands and tenements; and the mayor obtained power to
distrain for sums levied on the commonalty.[533] Then at an assembly
held in the Guildhall in 1314 authority was given to twenty-six persons
to elect twelve of the more sufficient of the town to make provision
for all business touching the community in the King’s parliament and
elsewhere.[534] But the real struggle seems to have begun about 1327
when much money was spent on lawyers, negotiations with the bishop,
and a new charter, and the business was still going on in 1330 with
more counsels’ fees and messengers to London. Finally in 1335 the town
bought a new charter from the king at a cost of £55 and a multitude of
gifts to king and queen and bishop.[535] In this year or the next it
obtained, among other things, the right to have all wills that affected
property in the town proved in the Guild Hall before the mayor and
burgesses.[536] The bishop seems to have found means of defeating the
burghers’ intention in this particular claim; but there still remained
the one important question which lay behind all minor struggles—that
of the administration of justice in the town—the question whether it
was the mayor or an ecclesiastical officer who should preside in the
courts, and whether their profits, fines, and forfeitures should go
to enrich the treasury of the bishop or of the municipality. The mayor
held a court in the Guild Hall twice a week, and had jurisdiction over
all transgressions and debts arising by water between the limits of
S. Edmondness and Staple Weyre,[537] and he seems now further to have
laid claim to the view of frankpledge and the criminal jurisdiction of
the Leet Court. The bishop answered with a vigorous retort. In 1347
he assumed the view of frankpledge of the men of Lynn and tenements
formerly held by the corporation, and withdrew or threatened to
withdraw from the burghers the right of electing their mayor. On this
an appeal was made to the king, who sent a royal commission to enquire
into the dispute, and meanwhile seized with his own hand the view of
frankpledge and the lands, giving the first over for the time to the
sheriff of the county and the second to the king’s escheator.[538]
Possibly there was some attempt at a compromise, but the new charter
of 1343 in which the bishop confirmed the liberties granted by his
predecessors,[539] even if it may have allowed the mayor’s election,
left the great question of the courts unsolved. The burghers still
debated whether the town officers were not entitled to hold the view of
frankpledge, and the husting court, and to have cognizance of pleas—in
fact to exercise all the more important rights now monopolized by the
bishop; and insisted on the election of their own mayor. It was in
vain that Edward the Third ordered the mayor and community under pain
of forfeiture of their liberties to alter their demeanour and not cause
prejudice and damage to the bishop;[540] and the whole matter was at
last brought before the King’s Court in 1352, when the judges decided
against the town in every question raised. In spite of the verdict,
however, there was one point on which the people refused to submit; and
the bishop was compelled to confirm their right to elect yearly one of
themselves as mayor, though he enforced a significant confession of
subjection by requiring that the mayor should immediately after the
election appear before himself or his steward, and swear to maintain
the rights of the church of Norwich.[541]
But the burghers never yielded their consent to the decision of the
King’s justices, and at every provocation loudly renewed their protest.
When the bishop visited Lynn in 1377, he demanded that in recognition
of his supremacy the town serjeant should carry before him the wand
tipped at both ends with black horn, which was usually borne before the
mayor himself. For their part they were heartily willing, answered the
courteous mayor and aldermen, but they feared that at such a flagrant
breach of their ancient customs and liberties, the commons, “always
inclinable to evil,” would certainly fall on the bishop’s party with
stones and drive them out of the town. But the bishop roughly rebuked
the mayor and his brethren for “mecokes and dastards,” thus fearing
the vulgar sort of people, as if it mattered to him what the common
folk should say; and set out on his ride with the rod borne before
him. He rode alone with his followers, however, for no burghers would
accompany him; and as he went the whole people rose, and with their
bows and clubs and staves and stones broke up the brave procession,
and put the bishop and his men to flight, carrying off many hurt and
wounded.[542] It seems possible that the fray was really excited by the
astute mayor and council as a means of making a final breach between
the bishop and the common people. But their opponent was too strong
for them. The bishop carried his complaint to the King’s Council, and
“for the transgression done to him in the town” the burgesses barely
escaped punishment by spending a sum equal perhaps to two years of the
town revenues in fines and gifts to the king, his mother, and others
who had “laboured for the community”; besides paying £116 10_s._ 0_d._
for the expenses of the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses, in going to
London on the business.[543] Seventy years later, after a series of
constitutional troubles, the old quarrel as to rights of jurisdiction
and the use of the symbols of supreme authority broke out anew. The
mayor in 1447 got a grant from the King allowing a sword to be carried
before him[544] with the point erect, the last and highest emblem
of absolute jurisdiction. At this outrage to his dignity the bishop
interfered promptly and resolutely, and the next year the King had
to write that in spite of his good inclinations he must remember his
coronation oath to observe the rights of the Church, and that the mayor
must henceforth cease from having any sword or mace borne before him.
In 1461, however, whether the town had got a new grant from Edward,
or was taking advantage of troubled times to re-assert its claim, the
common accounts register a payment of 4_d._ for the “cleaning of the
mayor’s sword,” and 6_s._ 8_d._ for “crimson velvet for the sword
and for making it up.”[545] And when in 1462 the bishop came to the
town with a following of sixty armed men, and ordered the gates to be
shut after him, the attitude of the people was not to be mistaken,
“the mayor and all the commonalty of Lynn keeping their silence” when
the bishop was openly defied in the streets by the lord of Oxenford
with his fellowship, even though “the bishop and his squires rebuked
the mayor of Lynn, and said he had shamed both him and his town for
ever, with much other language.” So clear was the state of things to
the bishop’s sixty men-at-arms that “when we met there bode not with
him over twelve persons at the most with his serjeant-at-arms, _which
serjeant was fain to lay down his mace_; and so at the same gates we
came in we went out, and no blood drawn, God be thanked.”[546]
The incident was not one to soften passions or conciliate rivals; but
the issue of the strife as compared with the hostilities in the last
century shows how the balance of power was shifting. The bishop’s
resources were being exhausted faster than his pretensions; every
trader in Lynn was perpetually reminded that in Norwich, only fifty
miles or so distant, the citizens had held their own borough court
since 1194, and the higher court with view of frankpledge since 1223.
For these privileges they themselves had waited now for three hundred
years, and only one settlement was possible. In 1473 the quarrel as
to the view of frankpledge was still going on,[547] but the bishop
was driven at last to a compromise which preserved his historic
claims untouched in theory, while it handed over the real power to
the municipality. For the sake of peace he consented in 1528 to lease
to the mayor and burgesses the yearly Leet, the Steward’s Hall Port,
and the Tolbooth Port;[548] besides various dues from fairs and
markets, with waifs and strays, and some other rights. A ruder and more
effective close was before long put to the quarrel by the sharp methods
of the Reformation, when Bishop’s Lynn became finally the King’s Lynn.
II. If boroughs attached to a bishopric were in a difficult position,
the difficulty was vastly increased in the case of those subject to
the lordship and rule of a monastery. Towns owned by abbot or prior
were like all the rest stirred by the general zeal for emancipation,
but they were practically cut off from any hope of true liberty. The
power with which they had to fight was invincible. Against the little
lay corporation was set a great ecclesiastical corporation, wealthy,
influential, united, persistent, immortal. All the elements which went
to make up the strength of the town were raised in the convent to a yet
higher degree of perfection, and the struggle was prolonged, intense,
and at the best remained a drawn battle, setting nothing beyond dispute
save the animosity of the combatants. Sometimes the defeat of the
borough in the fifteenth century was as complete as it had been two
hundred years before. Cirencester which had won extended privileges
from Henry the Fourth in return for political services in his time of
difficulty, was utterly beaten at last,[549] and fell back under the
control of the Abbey as completely as St. Alban’s had done in earlier
times.[550] In other cases the resistance was more energetic and
sustained, and some slight measure of success was its reward.[551]
As in the case of towns on feudal estates, any borough that possessed
traditions of freedom handed down from a state of larger liberties
might have some hope of ultimate success, but otherwise rebellion could
only issue in defeat so final and decisive as to leave no further room
for argument. Under the impulse of the popular movement which seems
to have agitated many towns after the rising that took place in the
days of Simon de Montfort, the men of S. Edmundsbury kept up for about
seventy years a desperate struggle with the abbot who ruled them. For
in 1264 it happened that “the younger and less discreet” of the town
organized a conspiracy under colour of a Guild called “the Guild of
Young Men,” and despising altogether the ancient horn of the community
set up a new common horn of their own. Three hundred and more of
these hopeful conspirators, known by the name of “bachelors,” having
bound themselves to obey no bailiff save the aldermen and bailiffs
of their own Guild, to answer to the sound of their new common horn
instead of the old moot horn, and to count all who did not join them as
public enemies,[552] soon found themselves engaged in riotings and in
violently resisting the abbot from behind closed gates. On the abbot’s
appeal to the Crown, however, the town grew frightened; the Guild was
annihilated by the help of the more prudent sort, and the insurrection
suppressed.
In less than thirty years, however, the burghers were renewing the
memory of their old offences—forcing townsmen against their will to go
to the hall of the Guild, and take an oath of allegiance to it; levying
tolls and taxes, distraining on merchants who sold in the abbot’s
market to extort money from them; hindering the execution of justice on
merchants suspected of selling goods outside that market; and refusing
to allow any member of the guild to bring a plea in the abbot’s court
against any other brother of the guild: while the abbot on his side
asserted his right to choose the alderman of the town and to appoint
the keepers of the gates. In spite of a compromise made before the
king’s judges sent the next year to enquire into the case, the same
charges were again brought against the men of Bury before a royal
commission of judges in 1304. The accused confessed that the abbot was
lord of the whole town and its courts, but they still urged a claim
to be free burgesses and to have an alderman, and a Merchant Guild
with certain rights of justice belonging to it and with an elaborate
code of procedure, and asserted their right to hold meetings for the
common profit of the burgesses, and to levy taxes from men trading in
the town. All this the abbot denied, whether the right to a Merchant
Guild, or pleas belonging to it, or a community, or a common seal, or
a mayor; according to him the townsfolk only had a right to a drinking
feast, which they maliciously turned into an illegal convention, and
if they took any fines it was against the merchant law and the King’s
peace. The case was given for the abbot. The leaders were fined and put
in jail, some of them escaping by payments while others through poverty
lay in prison a month.
Once more, however, the burghers took heart, and in 1327 broke into
the abbey and forced the abbot to concede to them a community, a
common seal, a Guild merchant, and custody of their gates, with other
liberties. But their triumph was short; utterly defeated by the
forces of abbot and king, they were forced in the concord of 1332 to
renounce for ever the claim to a community;[553] and when after the
Peasant Revolt there was much general begging for pardon, the men of S.
Edmundsbury, who were ordered to sue for their pardons specially, had
to find surety not only to the King but to their lord the abbot.[554]
If S. Edmundsbury was one of the most unfortunate ecclesiastical towns
Reading was perhaps the most fortunate. For Reading was originally
a borough on royal demesne, which was granted by Henry the First to
the new monastery founded by him.[555] From this time the town lay
absolutely in the control of the abbot. He owned all its streams, from
which the inhabitants had “chiefly their water to brew, bake, and dress
their meat.”[556] The mills were in his hands; he did as he chose with
the market, controlled the trade, and had the entire supervision of
the cloth manufacture. He appointed the Warden of the Guild or mayor,
and the various town officers; and claimed a decisive voice in the
admitting of new burgesses or members of the Guild, while from every
burgher’s son who entered the Guild he claimed a tax of 4_s._, and from
every stranger one-half of the fine paid as entrance fee—the sum of
the fine being fixed in presence of a monk who might raise objections
so long as he was not overborne by the joint voices of six legal men
of the Guild. Every burgher in the Guild had further to pay to him a
yearly tax of _chepin gavell_ for the right of buying or selling in the
town.[557] For any breach of the law fines were gathered in to increase
his hoard, since all the administration of justice lay in his hands.
Before the abbot alone the emblems of supreme authority might be borne,
and the mayor when he went in state was only allowed to have two tipped
staves carried before him by the abbot’s bailiffs.
From the time of Henry the Third there was unceasing war between the
townsmen and their lord. Violent dissensions broke out in 1243, when
the burghers “lay in wait day and night for the abbot’s bailiffs,” and
“hindered them from performing their duties,” till order was restored
by a precept from the King.[558] The townsfolk were appeased by the
grant of certain trading privileges; but ten years later the quarrel
broke out again. The abbot, as they maintained before the King’s Court
at Westminster, had taken away their Guild, summoned them to another
place than their own Guild Hall to answer pleas, changed the site of
their market, and forced them to render unwonted services. An agreement
was drawn up before the judges, by which the burghers won the right to
hold their corn market in its accustomed place, to own their common
Guild Hall, with a few tenements that belonged to it, and a field
called Portmanbrok (the rent of which was set apart for the salary of
the mayor), and to maintain their Guild merchant as of old. On the
other hand the townspeople conceded that it was the abbot’s right to
select the Warden of the Guild from among the guildsmen, and require
him to take oath of fidelity to himself as well as to the burgesses.
The abbot might tallage the town at certain times, and his bailiffs
were still to administer justice, and might at any time claim the keys
of the Guild Hall, sit there to hold pleas, carry off all profits to
the abbot’s treasury, and fine the burgesses any sum which it was in
their power to pay. Finally it was admitted that the meadow beyond the
Portmanbrok belonged to the lord.[559]
After an arrangement which left to the abbot all the weighty matters
of government, the control of the burghers’ trade and a charge on
their profits,[560] it was no wonder that before a hundred years were
over the inhabitants of Reading, restless and discontented, were again
battling for larger privileges. In 1351 the mayor and commonalty
refused obedience to a constable appointed by the abbot’s steward,
claiming for themselves the right to choose the constables, and present
them to take their oaths before the king’s justices and the justices
of the peace instead of before the abbot. At the same time they raised
various fundamental questions as to their rights, just as Lynn was
doing almost in the very same year. They asked whether the town was not
a royal borough and therefore in no way dependent on the abbey; whether
the townsmen had not therefore a right to elect their own mayor;
and whether that mayor ought not to exercise jurisdiction over the
burgesses and commonalty “according to the custom of the borough and
Guild”—questions which one and all afforded fair subjects of dispute
for the next hundred and fifty years.
The burghers henceforth gave the abbot no rest. In the long quarrel the
Merchant Guild became the real centre of the common activity, just as
it did wherever a town subject to a lord temporal or spiritual failed
to win independent jurisdiction of its own.[561] For if there were free
boroughs where the mayor, with his council and the common assembly of
the burghers in which the whole conduct of government was centred, were
in name and fact the accepted constitutional authorities; on the other
hand in dependent towns where political freedom was still incomplete
the Merchant Guild appears as ostensibly the only means by which the
will of the community could find expression; as men recognized in it
the one society in whose disciplined ranks they might be enrolled to
fight for the liberties they claimed, its organization was held to
be the most important of their privileges and the truest symbol of
their common life; and it necessarily became the bond of fellowship,
the pledge of future freedom, the school of political energies.[562]
In such towns therefore the Merchant Guild had a vitality and a
persistent continuity of life which was unknown elsewhere, and was
often preserved in full vigour two or three centuries after it had
perhaps suffered decay or transformation elsewhere.
This was the case in Reading. The burghers fell back on the Guild as
the one authorized mode of association for public purposes, and in its
“morghespeche,” or “morning talks,” the leading townsfolk discussed
how the independence of the borough might be advanced. Successive
mayors of the Guild, though still to all appearance appointed as
officers of the abbot, became really the representatives of the town,
identified themselves absolutely with its interests, and readily led
their fellow citizens in revolt against the convent. In 1378 the
burghers paid about £5 for a new charter; and twice sent the mayor
to London to assert their privileges, and to insist that the convent
should be forced to bear a just share of the burden of taxation, and
pay a part of the tenth demanded by the King. The messengers were
lavish with their gifts to judges and officers and lawyers who might
befriend them, eels and pike, perches and salmon and capons; and
succeeded so well that the town charters were confirmed in 1400, in
1418, and in 1427.[563] In 1391 the burghers carried the dispute about
the appointment of constables to the king’s judges at Westminster;
and seem to have succeeded in this matter too, for in 1417 the mayor
elected the constables in the Guild Hall, and the justices of the peace
admitted them to office. About 1420 a Guild Hall was built close to the
Hallowed Brook, though the burghers complained of being “so disturbed
with beating of battle-dores” by the women washing in the brook that
they could scarcely hold their courts or do any public business.[564]
They made payments for the clock house, and set up a bell for the
community,[565] and appointed a permanent salary for the mayor of five
marks, to be paid from the Common Chest instead of the uncertain rent
of the Portmanbrok. But when they went on to build a new “Outbutchery,”
and buy “smiting stocks” for butchers not living in the town, the
abbot at once saw an attempt to limit his own market profits which he
immediately resented, denying the burghers’ right to hold their new
out-butchery or receive rents from it. They on their side protested
that their Guild was a body corporate, having a Common Hall, a seal,
and the right of possessing common property; that they held also a
wharf, a common beam or weighing-machine, and the stocks and shambles;
that they had been granted freedom from toll throughout the kingdom;
that they returned two burgesses to Parliament; and were freed from
shire and hundred courts; and finally they asserted, to sum up all
the rest, that they had held of the King long before the monastery was
founded.[566] In 1431 lawyers were appointed to search the evidences
in the Common Chest as to agreements between the town and the abbot.
At the same time a Register of the Acts of the mayor and burgesses was
begun, and continued year after year without break. In 1436 and 1439
payments were made for the writing out of certain articles as to the
privileges of the town; and counsel were again employed to look over
the evidences in 1441.[567]
Throughout these years the mayor and officers were constantly at
Maidenhead, London, or Canterbury, holding consultations about legal
business with Lyttleton and the most famous lawyers. They succeeded in
buying a charter for their Guild Hall with sums contributed by rich
citizens; and gratefully adorned the building with a picture of the
King. The mayor of the guild became more and more the representative
of the burghers’ hopes, and his greatness the symbol of their triumph.
They had not only raised his salary in 1459 to ten nobles,[568] but
like their brethren at Lynn they got permission from Henry the Sixth
to have a mace carried before him; and in 1459 the mace was actually
bought.[569] At this extravagance, however, the abbot made a firm
stand, and Henry had to send a letter to the Mayor of Reading, just as
he had done eleven years before to the mayor of Lynn, ordering that
this privilege should remain with the abbot alone as the token of his
supremacy. But the mayor possibly gained his point a little later, for
in 1487 he was allowed two Mace-serjeants, so it would seem that at
least his tipped staves were now borne by his own servants.[570] He
secured too for himself and for the burgesses exemption from serving on
juries; and in the same year assumed supervision of the cloth trade.
In 1480 the burgesses had done away with individual payments of the
“chepin gavell” tax to the abbot, by ordering that it should be given
from the Town Chest; and in 1486 a citizen bequeathed property for its
payment, so that the townsmen were henceforth freed from all personal
difficulties in this matter.[571]
Either the question of the cloth-market or that of the mace-serjeants
brought the battle to a climax. The abbot absolutely refused to
appoint any “master of the guild, otherwise called mayor,” and took
upon himself to admit such people as he chose to the office of
constable.[572] The guild retorted by choosing a mayor for themselves,
who nominated his own officers to keep order, while all alike in this
emergency gave their services freely, for in 1493 “nothing was paid to
the mayor, because neither he nor any one else charged anything on the
office.”[573] In the case of the lesser offices the burghers held their
own, and when in 1499 the abbot appointed two constables, the mayor
thrust them out of their places.[574]
But the triumph of the people was short-lived, for in the long run they
proved powerless against the great spiritual corporation which ruled
over them. In the very next year, 1500, the inhabitants were utterly
defeated as to the election of the mayor himself; and as they still
protested, there was once more an appeal eight years later to the
judgment of the King’s Court. The verdict of the judges threw back the
whole question almost to the very point where it had stood centuries
before at the time of the earlier appeal in 1254, and the brethren of
the Guild were declared of ancient time to have had no other right
than the power to present from among themselves three persons, of
whom the abbot should choose one as mayor. The two constables, and
the ten wardmen of the five wards, might be elected by the mayor and
commonalty, but they must be sworn in before the abbot. According to
ancient custom the name of any proposed burgess must be given to the
abbot fourteen days before his election, and a monk must be present for
the assessing of his fine of forty shillings, half of which went to
the abbot; an alien’s fine might be determined by six burgesses, and
if they affirmed on oath that the fine was reasonable the abbot was
bound to accept it. The question of the out-butchery still remained
undecided; but the dispute as to the cloth-trade was settled by a
compromise. As in the case of the mayor, the town was to choose three
men and present them to the abbot, who should then appoint one of the
three to be the keeper of the seal for sealing the cloth.[575]
So closed for the moment the long struggle of two hundred and fifty
years—a struggle whose gain was small in comparison with all the
cost and labour, the civic enthusiasm, the learning and ability which
had been lavished on it. The easy passage to freedom by which the
royal towns had travelled, the large and regular expansion of their
liberties, the liberal admission of their right to supremacy over
their own trade and over the higher matters of law and justice, might
well kindle in the subjects of abbey and priory a perpetual unrest,
and anger deepened against their masters as they saw themselves, in
an age of universal movement, bound to the unchanging order of the
past, and condemned to perpetual dependence under a galling system of
administration which the secular government had abandoned three hundred
years before.