_The Corporation and the Guilds_
After the Settlement of 1355 the figure of the head of the great
religious house at Coventry fades into comparative insignificance,
and all further quarrels between city and convent hardly rise above
the level of petty squabbles of no historical moment. The prior is no
longer lord of the place; he merely appears as host of the royal folk,
kings, and kings' sons, representatives of the ancient line of the
Earls of Chester, when they sojourn within the city. The rent of the
Earl's-half[128] now swells the revenue of the Princes of Wales, hence
the appellation "Camera Principis," or the prince's (Treasure) chamber,
the familiar motto on the city arms.[129]
With the disappearance of earl and prior from the foreground of the
picture there emerges another figure, the city merchant, type of a
newly-enriched class, the future guide of the destinies of the place.
Curiously enough, it is this man's work in stone that has best survived
the test of time. What has become of the castle of Hugh and Ranulf? It
has utterly disappeared; indeed, its very existence has been sometimes
doubted; the name "Broadgate" alone recalls the entrance (_latam
portam_) whereto reference is made in one of Earl Hugh's charters.[130]
Where is the priory of Irreys and Brightwalton? Mean streets cover the
site, and of the cathedral nought remains but a few bases of clustered
shafts in Priory Row and a portion of the North-West tower converted
into a dwelling-place. But the outline of S. Michael's spire[131] built
by the people is still the wonder of Coventry, and the guild-hall of S.
Mary with its glorious roof and window has behind it five hundred years
of continuous civic life.
Coventry was now a free and independent corporate borough. The townsmen
had power to elect their own officers, and hold their own courts,
taking for the common use the profits of jurisdiction, so long as
they paid into the royal exchequer the annual fee-ferm of £50 and the
prior's ferm of £10. The leading men of the place, most likely the
wealthy merchants and others, who had won the charter of liberties
from Queen Isabel,[132] now set to work to reorganise courts, elect
officials, in short to shape the whole administration to fall in with
the new order of things.[133] We know nothing of the manner in which
this was done, and as so many of the early records have been lost we
can give no account in many cases of the form of municipal rule chosen
by the citizens. Here and there curious documents give us a glimpse
of the working of certain courts, or the municipal action of this
or that body of men. But the information concerning very important
points is unfortunately lacking. We are referred, for instance, to the
"old custom" of electing officials, but we do not know what the old
custom was, and are hence left in ignorance of the manner in which the
election was made.
What part the poorer folk--menus gentz--smaller craftsfolk, and
working-people played in the struggle for liberty is dark to us,
but we may infer from the analogy of other towns,[134] and from the
subsequent history of Coventry, that they had but little effective
power under the new constitution. The growth of oligarchy[135] in towns
is a matter of much debate. How early the few in Coventry engrossed
the governing power of which the whole community was--in theory at
least--the source, it is impossible in our present state of knowledge
to determine. We have testimony as early as 1450 of the great influence
of the leading crafts, mercers, and drapers. The evidence--though not
always so clear as we could wish--points to a gradual absorption of the
conduct of affairs during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a
small official class. In the end this clique succeeded so effectually
in freeing itself from every device framed to ensure some regard for
the popular will, that the charter of 1621 vested all power--and
incidentally considerable official emolument--in a close select body
"entirely independent of the rest of the community."[136] How early
the citizens became aware of the trend of affairs we know not, but it
is, maybe, significant that that popular discontent began to manifest
itself within a generation after the incorporation of the city. In the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the commonalty set order
at defiance, reviled the mayor in the guild hall, and sought occasion
to break out in riot and tumult, while under the veil of religious
societies, industrial combinations--akin to the modern strike--formed
again and again, and were with difficulty suppressed.
After 1420, when the graphic chronicle contained in the _Leet
Book_[137] begins to be available for our researches, a glimpse is
given of a fully evolved constitution in working order. On January 25,
the feast of the Conversion of S. Paul, the mayor, chamberlains, and
wardens were annually elected, the permanent officials, the recorder,
legal adviser of the corporation, and the coroner re-appointed, the
justices of the peace selected, while the bailiffs, according to
ancient custom, received nomination at the Michaelmas assembly of
the court leet. The justices of the peace--with the exception of the
recorder--served also as key-keepers of the chest containing the common
treasure. The court of portmanmote, mentioned in Ranulf's charter,
still survived under various names, and in it pleas for debt were
tried by the presiding officers, the mayor, and bailiffs. At quarter
sessions the mayor, recorder, and three other late mayors, justices
of the peace, dealt with criminal offences, and it was, probably, the
activity of these comparatively recently created officials,[138]that
brought about the degeneration of the leet or view of frankpledge,
normally a court of justice for the trial of minor criminal offences,
particularly evasions of the assize of bread and beer.[139] By the
fifteenth century, the Coventry leet had retained little or nothing
of its judicial functions, and merely survived as a court wherein
by-laws, binding on the whole community, and grounded on petitions of
grievances, received the sanction of the jurats of the leet. Another
body, which also possessed legislative functions, was the mayor's
council of forty-eight, later known as the common council. While it is
from a small select body called the council-house, of which the mayor
and aldermen appear to have been ex-officio members, that there sprang
the close, corrupt corporation of later times.
[Illustration: COURTYARD, ST MARY'S HALL, COVENTRY]
There are certain officials whose elections or appointments are not
entered in the regular municipal records, but who, nevertheless, had
great weight in the councils of the city. Such were the aldermen, who
first appear in 1477.[140] These officials discharged certain police
duties in their respective wards and were of the inner council of the
mayor. Under the charter of James I. they became permanent justices
of the peace, and members of the corporation. While as justice of the
peace, key-keeper, head of the electoral jury and jury of the leet, the
master of the Trinity guild was one of the foremost figures among the
municipal rulers. His connection, and that of his fellow, the master of
the Corpus Christi guild, with the mayoralty was very close. Two years
before entering office each mayor was master of the Corpus Christi, and
two years after quitting it, master of the Trinity guild. The control
they exercised over the revenues of the guilds, which were often put to
municipal uses, gave these masters much power and authority with the
magnates of the city. The guilds joined their funds with those of the
wardens to pension deserving townsfolk[141] and pay the salary of the
recorder.[142] Before 1384 the Trinity guild discharged the ferm of
£10 due to the prior, receiving a share of common land to be held in
severalty[143]--that is separate from the lands of the community--as
compensation. Indeed, the guild officers were so clearly considered
as officers of the corporation that when they, together with the city
wardens and chamberlains, neglected to present their accounts at the
annual audit[144] they were one and all brought to book by the leet,
and ordered to remedy their neglect under pain of punishment.
The origin of societies known as guilds is involved in controversy,
but they were common throughout all Europe in the Middle Ages, bearing
eloquent testimony to the fortifying power of combination. They
afforded mutual protection to their members, frequently making good any
loss sustained from an insurance fund to which all were contributory,
and devoting other portions of their revenues to feasts, almsgiving,
and public works. Guilds are best remembered, however, in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, as monopolist organisations, and a third of
all the towns in England, with the possible exception of London, had
their merchant guild, or body of traders and handicraftsmen, engrossing
the local commerce to the exclusion of all men without their ranks. The
craft guild was a century behind the merchant guild in its rise and
development. Its members met together to make rules, by which all who
practised a particular calling in the locality were to be directed in
all affairs connected with their trade or handicraft. They devoted some
of their revenue to religious uses, the members frequently supporting
some church or chapel, or providing candles for altar or processional
lights. Other local guilds not definitely commercial, but rather
social, in character, often called after some saint, were active in
the performance of all good works; they clad the poor in their livery,
supported churches, colleges of priests and grammar schools, and
pensioned decayed and deserving members. At Coventry, in the later
fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries, guilds rose rapidly, and
as rapidly coalesced, or, in the case of those "yeomen" or journeymen
fraternities, which served to focus the prevailing industrial
discontent, failed to maintain themselves in face of the hostility
of other powerful previously existing associations. Two fraternities
survived to play a great part in the city's mediæval history, the
Corpus Christi guild, founded in 1348, and the better-known society
of the Holy Trinity, S. Mary, S. John the Baptist, and S. Catherine,
properly a fusion of four different fraternities, founded between 1340
and 1364, and known for brevity's sake as the Trinity guild.
[Illustration: MINSTREL GALLERY ST MARY'S HALL]
It is possible that it was to the foundation of the merchant guild of
S. Mary[145] in 1340, the kindred associations which sprang up around
it, and to the gifts of their members in lands and money that the
townsfolk owed the purchase of the incorporation charter.[146] It is
frequently found that the same man serves in different years as mayor
and master of the merchant fraternity.[147]
The town hall of S. Mary, in which not only the guild feasts were
held, but municipal business[148] was transacted, and the town chest,
as well as the guild plate,[149] stored, tells by its name of its
connection with S. Mary's brotherhood. The vaulting of the entrance
porch of this building still bears on its central boss a carving
which represents the coronation of the Virgin; another of the porch
carvings--now weather-worn--recalled the Annunciation, and a scene on
the famous tapestry within the hall, the Assumption,[150] so that the
guild brethren, could be everywhere reminded of the scenes in the life
of their chief patroness. No church, however, recalls the Virgin's
name, though materials from an unfinished building, which should have
borne that dedication, were transported from Cheylesmore to Bablake,
where the stately, early Perpendicular church of S. John the Baptist
was rising on ground granted by Queen Isabel in 1342 to the fraternity
called after that saint.[151] Both S. John the Baptist's guild and S.
Catherine's--the latter connected with S. Catherine's chapel in S.
John's Hospital,[152] coalesced between 1364-5 with the guild merchant,
to be absorbed later by the all-embracing Trinity fraternity. This
fusion of the guilds, which had certainly taken place informally
before 1384,[153] was ratified by patent in 1392,[154] when the united
revenues were increased to the amount of £86, 13s. 4d. a year. The
completion of S. John's church became the especial care of the Trinity
guild, and the dues taken at the Drapery, where cloth was sold, were
devoted to that purpose, while a college of priests, whose number was
in 1393 increased to nine, officiated at this church, and lived on the
bounty of the brotherhood.[155]
[Illustration: SMITHFORD STREET]
The priests of the merchant guild, as was meet, occupied from the
beginning the most honourable place of all. They sang their "solemn
antiphonies" in the lady-chapel of S. Michael's, the great parish
church of the Earl's-half, a practice which was still continued
after the title of the guild became merged in the society of the
Trinity;[156] while the guild of the Corpus Christi, composed, it would
seem, of the prior's tenants, occupied the corresponding chapel in the
parish church of the Trinity.[157]
One guild, that of the fullers and tailors, called after the Nativity,
carried on an obscure existence in connection with the since demolished
chapel of S. George outside the Gosford gate. The formation of this
society was violently opposed by the powers that were in 1384 on the
ground that the purpose of its members--"labourers and artificers
of the middling sort" and strangers--was to withstand the mayor and
officers of the city, and not to promote the welfare of souls.[158]
After 1400, further guild-making had come to have little favour with
the ruling men of the city. Three several times did the mayor and
bailiffs obtain patents forbidding the formation of guilds other than
those already existing within Coventry.[159] While the close alliance
of the older fraternities and the corporation is shown in the fact
that the meetings of the guilds of S. Anne and S. George, formed by
journeymen tailors in the first quarter of the century, were suppressed
by royal command under the pretext that their meetings were to the
manifest destruction of the ancient foundations, the guilds of Holy
Trinity and Corpus Christi.[160]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 128: See above, page 70.]
[Footnote 129: _Cf._ the expression "queen's-chamber" as applied to
Bristol, where the ferm was paid to the queen-consort.]
[Footnote 130: The "Casteldich" is mentioned Corp. MSS. C. 61.]
[Footnote 131: On the belfry as continental symbol of independence, see
Round, _Commune of London_, 244.]
[Footnote 132: For instance, one of the twelve whose names are handed
down in the mayor-lists as winners of the freedom of the city was
Walter Whitweb. He was master of the guild merchant in 1353 (Corp.
MS. C. 148). Four of the twelve served afterwards as mayor, some
others as bailiffs of the city. We may note that the leading families
under the prior still continue to take the foremost place after the
incorporation. Thus to Lawrence de Shepey, member of Edward I.'s
assembly of merchants (_Parl. Writs_, i. 135), and in 1300 member for
the borough (_Ib._, I. lii.), succeeded Jordan de Shepey whose name is
yet commemorated in Jordan Well, second mayor of the city and first
master of the guild merchant (Gross, ii. 49). A parallel case is shown
in the Kelle family. Robert was burgess in 1298 (_Parl. Writs_, I.
lii.), and Henry one of the founders of the Trinity guild in 1364, and
four times mayor of the city.]
[Footnote 133: On the solemn consultations thus involved in the case of
Ipswich, see Gross, _Gild Merchant_, i. 23.]
[Footnote 134: On the troubles attending the grant of a charter to
Norwich in 1380, where the commonalty were "very contrarious," see
Hudson, _op. cit._, I. liv. _sqq._]
[Footnote 135: Bateson, _op. cit._, II, lxvi.]
[Footnote 136: Charter 17 Jas. I. On the corruption of the Coventry
corporation, see _Munic. Corp. Report_ (Coventry, 1835) 12; Webb,
_Local Government_.]
[Footnote 137: _Coventry Leet Book_, 1420-1555, edited for the Early
English Text Society by the present writer; part i. 1907, part ii.
1908, part iii. 1909, part iv. in progress.]
[Footnote 138: The mayor, recorder, and four lawful men of the city are
allowed to exercise all that appertains to the office of justice of the
peace for labourers and artificers in the county of Warwick, _i.e._ fix
the rate of wages (Charter 22 Rich. II. Burton MS. f. 253). For a trial
of felons by the justices of the peace, see Sharp, _Antiq._, 212.]
[Footnote 139: Hearnshaw, _Leet Jurisdiction_, _passim_.]
[Footnote 140: _Leet Book_, 420.]
[Footnote 141: _Leet Book_, 59.]
[Footnote 142: _Ib._, 681.]
[Footnote 143: We learn in 1384 that the annual ferm of £10, due to
the prior according to the terms of the Tripartite, was drawn from the
coffers of the guild (_Leet Book_, 2-6). Directly the guild lands were
confiscated in 1545 the corporation made a great outcry concerning
their poverty. They had, they declared, no lands whence they might
derive an income to meet the yearly ferm of £50, and in trying to
discharge it one or two of the citizens were yearly ruined (Vol. of
Correspondence, f. 63, Corp. MS. A. 79).]
[Footnote 144: _Leet Book_, 295.]
[Footnote 145: Gross, _Gild Merchant_, ii. 49; Toulmin Smith, _Eng.
Gilds_, 231. In the return of 1389 it is stated that several messuages
worth £37, 12s. 4d. a year are waiting for the licence of the King
and the mesne lords to be given to the guild. No doubt the Statute of
Mortmain was often evaded. The corporation records show that the guild
held house property as early as 1353 (Corp. MS. C. 148).]
[Footnote 146: The foundation of the guild has evidently a municipal
reason, since the statute of 1335, by declaring that all merchants
might traffic with whomsoever they would, and in what vendibles they
chose, effectually did away with this monopoly of the merchant guild
(Ashley, _Econ. Hist._, i. pt. i. 84).]
[Footnote 147: Many early mayors were masters of the guild merchant;
the cases of Jordan de Shepey and Walter Whitweb have been noted. In
William Holm, master in 1356 (Corp. MS. C. 153), we have undoubtedly
William Horn of the mayor-lists.]
[Footnote 148: Sharp, _Antiq._, 211. The guild hall was used for
municipal purposes as early as 1388.]
[Footnote 149: _Ib._, 212.]
[Footnote 150: In Mantes the guild "aux marchands" was one with
the "confrèrie de l'assomption de la Vierge" (Luchaire, _Communes
Françaises_, 34).]
[Footnote 151: _Vict. County Hist._, ii. 120.]
[Footnote 152: Sharp, _op. cit._, 159.]
[Footnote 153: _Leet Book_, 3.]
[Footnote 154: _Rot. Pat._ 16, Ric. II., pt. i. m. 19. The guilds of S.
Mary and S. John were united as early as 1362 (Corp. MS. C. 159). Sharp
says that the union took place between 1365 and 1369 (_op. cit._, 131);
but in a deed executed in 1372 the guilds mentioned are SS. Mary, John
the Baptist, and Catherine (Corp. MS. C. 165).]
[Footnote 155: Sharp, _op. cit._, 130-2.]
[Footnote 156: Sharp, _op. cit._, 24-5.]
[Footnote 157: _Ib._, 81.]
[Footnote 158: See _Vict. County Hist. Warw._, ii. 154-6.]
[Footnote 159: Corp. MS. B. 35. Letters patent against the formation
of new guilds, dated Nov. 18, 8 Hen. IV. (1406), confirmed in 1414 and
1441 (B. 38 and 47). A great deal of confusion and wrong dating exists
in the Hist. MSS. Com. Catalogue with regard to this point.]
[Footnote 160: Corp. MS. B. 40 (1406); B. 41 (1414); B. 43 (1424).]