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Green Alice Stopford
Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1

PREFACE

In the twenty years which have passed since Mr. Green drew his brilliant sketch of the early life of English towns, and of their influence on the history of English liberty, the study of the subject in this country has advanced but little; and it is not, I think, too much to say that the pages of his History still present the most vivid and suggestive picture which we possess of the mediæval boroughs – a picture inspired by ardent sympathy and emotion. In this rapid and original survey the true proportions of civic history in our national life are boldly drawn; and the burghers and shopkeepers of the towns, long neglected and despised, take their place in the distinguished ranks of those by whom our freedom has been won by their sturdy battle against oppression, leading the way in the growth and elevation of the English people, and carrying across the ages of tyranny the full tradition of liberty. But the history of this great civic revolution, which in Mr. Green’s day cannot be said to have existed at all, has since then remained strangely neglected among us. While in foreign countries the study of the origin and growth of municipal institutions has been recognized as of overwhelming importance, and has already employed the erudition and tried the ingenuity of a long succession of scholars, English historians have stood aloof. No English name figures in the contests of the schools; nor is any English authority called to witness when a learned theory is advanced to solve the riddle; and if from time to time foreign scholars attempt to draw English towns within the range of their generalizations, the lack of sufficient or trustworthy materials at their disposal makes the result vain and unfruitful. No country indeed has been so backward as our own in municipal history, whether we take it from the popular or from the scientific side. The traveller who has asked at the bookshop of a provincial town for a local history or even for a local guide is as well able to realize the distance which parts us from France, Italy, or Germany, as is the student who inquires for a detailed account of how civic life or any one of its characteristic institutions grew up among us. A certain number of town histories do indeed exist, but they by no means always deal necessarily or even mainly with the life of the borough itself. To a considerable number of local antiquaries the buried relics of the Roman dominion have proved a permanent and pre-occupying interest. For the student of mediæval times the monastery and cathedral tower high above the squalid market-place and thatched town-hall which lie dwarfed and obscured under their vast shadow; and in modern as in older history the butchers and brewers who represent the secular corporations of York and Winchester are practically bid to stand aside before the presence of the spiritual corporations to whom the fame of S. Mary’s or S. Swithun’s is committed. Where ecclesiastical monuments of historic greatness are wanting, a fervent apologist may still find an excuse for the meanness and dulness of the municipal story, in the fact that at some time or other the town has lent its streets to serve as the stage for a critical scene in the national drama, and thus – through the lifting of a royal standard, or the tragedy of a conspicuous adventurer – derives a borrowed title to our interest. That the story of convent and chapter and solemn pageant should be told with full detail I do not question. I only urge that when the tale is finished we still wait for some notice of the city itself and the humble details of its common life. There are, it is true, signs of increasing interest in such matters, and some admirable studies in our municipal records have lately been made in England; nevertheless the work is still at its beginning, and how much need there is for further study I have had occasion to know in the course of an attempt to trace the developement of some forty or fifty provincial boroughs, so as to gain some idea of the condition of our mediæval towns, and the general drift of their history. The preparatory work which the foreign student finds already finished and organized for his use, the English worker has in almost every case to do for himself. Even the briefest sketch of a town history too often implies the long labour of seeking out a mass of scattered and isolated details, which must first be drawn together into some connected sequence before it is possible to study the general bearing and significance of the story in relation to the growth of neighbouring boroughs. Those who have attempted to find their way through the uncertainty and confusion of the materials as they at present exist, will probably be the most lenient judges of inevitable errors of detail such as must creep into the performance of so delicate and difficult a task.

It is evident, indeed, from the nature of the subject, that any writer who desires to give a survey of provincial town life as we can now picture it – from printed materials scattered in county histories, archæological journals, reports of commissions, imperfect abstracts of town documents, parliamentary records, charters, and stray pamphlets – must inevitably remain exposed to much correction in matters of detail from experts with local knowledge. At the same time it seems to me that without some effort to obtain a comprehensive view of the general subject, the student may leave himself open to the still graver errors that spring from the want of some ascertained measure of proportion, and from the incapacity to distinguish in each town that which is normal from that which is strange or characteristic. The question of origins I have deliberately set on one side, from the conviction that the beginnings of a society may be more fruitfully studied after we know something of its actual life. Avoiding therefore many dark questions, I have dealt in the first volume rather with the simpler and less contentious aspects of the growth of the borough to wealth and independence. In the second volume, however, the subjects which arise have long been familiar as matters of acute discussion; and it has sometimes happened, that in going over again the sources from which all our knowledge is derived, I have found myself gradually compelled to entertain views contrary to those which are commonly accepted. Thus, for example, in tracing the growth of self-government within the borough itself, I seem to discover in the phrazes of the town records a new explanation for the position of the “communitas” side by side with the “cives” – a problem which, so far as I know, has never been really stated, and the difficulties of which are in no way met by the universally received interpretation. Moreover the theory of an early triumph and rapid decay of democratic government appears to me impossible to maintain, and I have suggested that in the growth of the common council we may find some evidence of a popular movement towards more effectual self-government which seems to have stirred the industrial classes of the fifteenth century. There are other burning questions in which impetuous economists have outrun the historians, and have not found it premature to set in order by the help of accepted theories the obscure chaos of social history in the Middle Ages. In spite of their zealous efforts, however, the whole problem (including even the ascertaining of the facts on which it depends) of the developement of English commerce and manufactures and of its effects on social life, still awaits the student; and it is in the confusion and ignorance which at present prevail, that I may find my best excuse for the fact that with regard to many questions – such, for instance, as the relation of internal traffic to free trade and protection, the general organization of labour, the position of the guild towards the hired worker, the attitude of the municipality to the industrial system, and of the capitalist to the town councillor – I have ventured to differ from conclusions which are commonly put forward.

I would add but one word of personal explanation before I close. The only training or guidance which I have ever had in historical work was in a very brief period during which I was able to watch the method and understand the temper in which Mr. Green’s work was done. I never had the opportunity of visiting any English towns with him, or of following his studies in that direction. The most fruitful lesson which remains in my memory is that of a day spent in Ancona between two stages of an invalid journey, when I was able to see the intense enthusiasm with which, as was his habit, he made his way first to the Town-hall, and from the fragments of Greek and mediæval carving built into its walls, from harbour and pier, from names of streets, and the cathedral crypt, he extracted century by century some record of the old municipal life. It was doubtless some such remembrance as this that unconsciously led me in the course of reading, to turn to the story of the English boroughs. At the same time I have no doubt that I should always have been restrained from any idea of writing by my consciousness of the entire lack of adequate preparation for such a task, if I had not felt bound by an imperative obligation to make the attempt. When Mr. Green’s work was over he asked of me a promise that I would try to study some of those problems in mediæval history where there seemed to him so much that still needed to be done, and so much to be yet discovered. In this book I have made my first beginning toward the fulfilling of that promise. Such a work can only be closed with feelings of compunction and dismay.

Alice Stopford Green.

14, Kensington Square,

March, 1894.

CHAPTER I

THE ENGLISH TOWNS

There is nothing in England to-day with which we can compare the life of a fully enfranchised borough of the fifteenth century. Even the revival of our local institutions and our municipal ambition has scarcely stirred any memory of the great tradition of the past, of the large liberties, the high dignities and privileges which our towns claimed in days when the borough was in fact a free self-governing community, a state within the state, boasting of rights derived from immemorial custom and of later privileges assured by law.

The town of those earlier days in fact governed itself after the fashion of a little principality. Within the bounds which the mayor and citizens defined with perpetual insistence in their formal perambulation year after year it carried on its isolated self-dependent life. The inhabitants defended their own territory, built and maintained their walls and towers, armed their own soldiers, trained them for service, and held reviews of their forces at appointed times. They elected their own rulers and officials in whatever way they themselves chose to adopt, and distributed among officers and councillors just such powers of legislation and administration as seemed good in their eyes. They drew up formal constitutions for the government of the community, and as time brought new problems and responsibilities, made and re-made and revised again their ordinances with restless and fertile ingenuity, till they had made of their constitution a various medley of fundamental doctrines and general precepts and particular rules, somewhat after the fashion of an American state of modern times. No alien officer of any kind, save only the judges of the High Court, might cross the limits of their liberties; the sheriff of the shire, the bailiff of the hundred, the king’s tax-gatherer or sergeant-at-arms, were alike shut out. The townsfolk themselves assessed their taxes, levied them in their own way, and paid them through their own officers. They claimed broad rights of justice, whether by ancient custom or royal grant; criminals were brought before the mayor’s court, and the town prison with its irons and its cage, the gallows at the gate or on the town common, testified to an authority which ended only with death.¹ In all concerns of trade they exercised the widest powers, and bargained and negotiated and made laws as nations do on a grander scale to-day. They could covenant and confederate, buy and sell, deal and traffic after their own will; they could draw up formal treaties with other boroughs, and could admit them to or shut them out from all the privileges of their commerce; they might pass laws of protection or try experiments in free trade. Often their authority stretched out over a wide district, and surrounding villages gathered to their markets and obeyed their laws;² it might even happen in the case of a staple town that their officers controlled the main foreign trade of whole provinces. In matters that nearly concerned them they were given the right to legislate for themselves, and where they were not allowed to make the law, they at least secured the exclusive right of administering it; the King and the Parliament might issue orders as to weights and measures, or the rules to be observed by foreign merchants, but they were powerless to enforce their decrees save through the machinery and with the consent of the town. Arduous duties were handed over to them by the state – the supervision of the waters of a river basin, the keeping of the peace on the seas. They sent out their trading barges in fleets under admirals of their own choosing, and leaned but lightly on state aid for protection or revenge, answering pillage with pillage, and making their own treaties with the mariners of other countries as to capture and ransom and redemption of goods, and the treatment of common sailors or of “gentlemen” prisoners.³ The necessity of their assent and co-operation in greater commercial matters was so clearly recognized that when Henry the Seventh in 1495 made a league of peace and free trade with Burgundy the treaty was sent to all the chief towns in England, that the mayor might affix to it the city seal, “for equality and stableness of the matter;” and the same form was observed at the marriage of the Lady Mary.⁴ Two hundred and twenty-six burghers sat in Parliament⁵ beside the seventy-four knights of the shire; and each borough freely decided for itself what the qualifications of its members should be, and by what manner of election they should be chosen, at a time when for country folk all such matters were irrevocably settled by the king’s law. While the great lords with their armed bands of liveried retainers absolutely ruled the elections in the shires, in spite of all statutes of Parliament, the towns asserted their freedom to elect without fear or favour, and sent to the House of Commons the members who probably at that time most nearly represented the “people,” that is so far as the people had yet been drawn into a conscious share in the national life.

Four hundred years later the very remembrance of this free and vigorous life was utterly blotted out. When Commissioners were sent in 1835 to enquire into the position of the English boroughs, there was not one community where the ancient traditions still lived. There were Mayors, and Town Councils, and Burgesses; but the burgesses were for the most part deprived of any share whatever in the election of their municipal officers, while these officers themselves had lost all the nobler characteristics of their former authority. Too often the very limits of the old “liberties” of the town were forgotten; or if the ancient landmarks were remembered at all it was only because they defined bounds within which the inhabitants had the right of voting for a member of Parliament; and in cases where the old boundaries now subsisted for no other reason, it was wholly forgotten that they might ever have had some other origin. In other boroughs where the right of voting was determined in another way, the townspeople had simply lost all remembrance of the ancient limits of their territory; or else, guided by some dim recollection of a former greatness with broader jurisdiction and wide-reaching subject estates, the corporation still yearly “walked the bounds” of lands over which they now claimed no authority. As the memory of municipal life died away there were boroughs where at last no one suspected that the corporate body had ever existed for any larger purpose than to choose members of Parliament. Knowing no other public honour or privilege and called to no other public service, the freemen saw in a single degraded political function the sole object of their corporate constitution; the representation of the people was turned by them into “a property and a commerce,” and this one privilege, fed on corruption and private greed, survived the decay of all the great duties of the ancient civic life.⁶

There were it is true exceptions to this common apathy, and towns like Lynn might still maintain some true municipal life, while others like Bristol might yet show a good fighting temper which counted for much in the political struggles of the early nineteenth century. But the ordinary provincial burghers had lost, or forgotten, or been robbed of the heritage bequeathed by their predecessors of the fifteenth century. With the loss of their municipal independence went the loss of their political authority; and the four hundred or so of members whom they sent to Parliament took a very different position there from that once held by their ancestors. In the Middle Ages the knights of the shire were the mere nominees of the wealthy or noble class, returned to Parliament by the power of the lord’s retainers, while the burgesses of the towns preserved a braver and freer tradition.⁷ At the time of the Reform Bill, on the other hand, a vast majority of the town members sat among the Commons as dependents and servants of the landed aristocracy, whose mission it was to make the will of their patrons prevail, and who in their corrupt or timid subjection simply handed back to the wealthier class the supreme political power which artisans and shopkeepers and “mean people” of the mediæval boroughs had threatened to share with them.

The true story of this singular growth of independence in the English boroughs and of its no less singular decay would form one of the most striking chapters in all our national history. But the materials for such a story, obscure, fragmentary, and scattered as they are, still lie hidden away in municipal archives, state rolls, and judicial records, as though the matter were one with which Englishmen had nothing to do. It is true indeed that the many ingenious expedients which the burghers devised to meet the peculiar difficulties of a past age would ill serve as models for our use to-day, nor can their success or failure be urged on either side of our modern controversies. They tell us nothing of the advantages or drawbacks of protection in our own time, or of the uses of state regulation of labour, or of the advisability of trade guilds. We cannot revive their courts or their privileges, any more than we can set up their gallows or call out modern citizens to dig a moat that shall be their defence from a hostile world. We cannot borrow their experience and live idly on the wisdom of the dead. But there is no more striking study of the perpetual adjustment and contrivance by which living communities adapt themselves to the changing order of the world than the study of our provincial boroughs in the Middle Ages; and Englishmen who now stand in the forefront of the world for their conception of freedom and their political capacity, and whose contribution to the art of government has been possibly the most significant fact of these last centuries, may well look back from that great place to the burghers who won for them their birthright, and watch with a quickened interest the little stage of the mediæval boroughs where their forefathers once played their part, trying a dozen schemes of representation, constructing plans of government, inventing constitutions, with a living energy which has not yet spent its force after traversing a score of generations.

There is no better starting point for the study of town life in England than the fifteenth century itself, when, with ages of restless growth lying behind them, and with their societies as yet untouched by the influences of the Renascence or the Reformation or the new commercial system, the boroughs had reached their prosperous maturity. It would be vain to attempt any reconstruction of their earlier history without having first stood, as it were, in the very midst of that turbulent society, and by watching the infinite variety of constitutional developement learned to search out and estimate the manifold forces which had been at work to bring about so complex a result; and no study of their later history is possible without an understanding of the prodigious vitality of the mediæval municipalities. There were the workshops in which the political creed of England was fashioned, where the notion of a free commonwealth with the three estates of king, lords, and commons holding by common consent their several authority, was proved and tested till it became the mere commonplace, the vulgar property of every Englishman. There the men who were ultimately to make the Reformation were schooled in all the vexed questions between church and state, and in the practical meaning of interference in civic matters by an alien power, so that the final crisis of religious excitement was but the dramatic declamation on a grand scale of lessons diligently repeated class by class for many a generation beforehand. There, too, long before the great national struggles of later centuries between England and the continental powers exalted patriotism to its highest ardour, men were already inspired by the vision of the English nation holding its post against the world, and by a passionate allegiance to its great destiny; and in every market and harbour the love of country was quickened by the new commerce with its gigantic ambition to win for England the dominion of the seas, its federations of merchants held together by the desperate struggle for supremacy, and its hordes of pirates who swept the ocean with the wild joy of their Norse ancestors. There is no break in our history when the old world merged into the new, for the spirit of the fifteenth century was the spirit of the sixteenth century as completely as it is the spirit of to-day.

The towns as we find them in the fifteenth century were the outcome of centuries of preparation. It was by a very slow and gradual process that England was transformed from a purely agricultural country, with its scattered villages of dependent tillers of the soil, into the England we know to-day – a land of industrial town communities, where agricultural interests are almost forgotten in the summing up of the national wealth. Our modern towns, indeed, can almost all trace back their history into the obscurity of a very distant past; but their record as we find it in Domesday, or under the Norman kings, is simply that of little country hamlets, where a few agricultural labourers gathered in their poor hovels, tilling by turns their lord’s land and their own small holdings; or of somewhat bigger villages which lay at the branching of a great road, at a river ford, or at a convenient meeting-place for fair or market, and thus grew into some little consequence as the centres of a small local trade; while along the coast a few seaports were just beginning to draw merchants with their wares to a land that had long been almost forgotten by the traders of the Continent. It was not till the twelfth century⁸ that our boroughs began to have an independent municipal history – from the time, that is, when the growth of the wool trade under Henry the First gave them a new commercial life; and the organization of local government under Henry the Second opened for them the way into a new world of political experiment and speculation.⁹ From this time all went well with the municipalities for three hundred years. In the course of the thirteenth century the great majority of towns obtained rights of self-government, until finally these grants came to an end simply because there were no unenfranchised towns left.¹⁰ Not indeed that the flow of royal charters ceased, for burghers who had got the first instalments of independence were constant in pressing for all such further privileges as could magnify their authority or protect their dignity; and successive generations of patriotic citizens gathered into their town chests under the safe keeping of half a dozen locks piles of precious parchments, each of which conferred some new boon or widened the borders of liberty. Determined as it was by local circumstances the struggle for independence was carried on after an irregular fashion, first in one town, then in another; here the burghers pressed forward riotously, and there loitered indifferently or stopped discouraged on their way. Some towns were allowed to elect their mayor before 1200,¹¹ others did not win the right till three or four centuries later; Bristol was made a shire in 1375, more than a hundred years before Gloucester; and in the fifteenth century there were still boroughs which had to gain their first charters, or else to exchange narrow and insufficient rights for full emancipation. But the forward movement never ceased; every victory counted for liberty, and every success justified faith and inspired new zeal. The burghers went on filling their purses on the one hand, and drawing up constitutions for their towns on the other, till in the fifteenth century they were in fact the guardians of English wealth and the arbiters of English politics.

At first indeed municipal life, even at its best, was on a very humble scale. The biggest boroughs could probably in 1300 only make a show of four or five thousand inhabitants, and of enfranchised burgesses a yet smaller number;¹² while the mud or wood-framed huts with gabled roofs of thatch and reeds that lined their narrow lanes sheltered a people who, accepting a common poverty, traded in little more than the mere necessaries of life.¹³ It was not till the middle of the fourteenth century that the towns as they entered on a larger industrial activity began to free themselves from the indescribable squalor and misery of the early Middle Ages; but from this time forward we begin to detect signs of stirring prosperity, at first under the guise of a frugal well-being, and later carrying its luxury with happy ostentation. In the course of the next hundred years we see trading ports such as Lynn, Sandwich, Southampton, or Bristol, and centres of inland traffic such as Nottingham, Leicester, or Reading, and manufacturing towns like Norwich, Worcester, York, heaping up wealth, doubling and trebling their yearly expenditure, raising the salaries of their officers, building new quarters, adorning their public offices and churches, lavishing money on the buying of new privileges for their citizens, or on the extension of their trade. And while the bigger boroughs were thus enjoying their harvest of blessing and fat things, the small seaports and market towns also gathered in their share of the general good fortune by which all England was enriched.

Take, for example, the town of Colchester, where from the time of the Conquest a population of about 2,200 had found means to live, but in those two hundred and fifty years had never added to their numbers. Of their manner of life we can tell something from the records of a toll levied on their goods about 1300. One of the wealthiest tradesmen in the town was a butcher, whose valuation came to £7 15s. 2d.; while the stock-in-hand of his brethren in the trade consisted mostly of brawn, lard, and a few salting tubs, though one had two carcases of oxen at two shillings each, and another had meat worth thirty shillings in his shop. If we add to the butchers thirteen well-to-do tanners, and fourteen mercers who sold gloves, belts, leather, silk purses, and needle-cases, besides cloth and flannel, and one even girdles (which, with their silver ornaments, were costly articles), we have exhausted the list of the Colchester plutocrats. In the course of the fourteenth century, however, the makers of cloth came to settle beside the tanners and butchers. Card-makers, combers, clothiers, weavers, fullers, and dyers gathered to the town, and spread their trade out into the neighbouring villages. Wool-mongers pushed their business, till in 1373 the bailiffs made the under-croft beneath the old Moot Hall into a Wool Hall for the convenience of dealers, and added a fine porch with a vault overhanging the entrance to the Moot Hall, and some shops with solars over them. Before the century had closed the population had more than doubled. The poor houses that once lined the streets were swept away, and wealthy men built shops in the new style with chambers over them fronting the street, and let them to shopkeeping tenants.¹⁴

In the little trading town of Bridport we have the same story. In 1319 Bridport, with its one hundred and eighty burgesses, could not at a “view of arms,” or muster of fighting men, produce a single burgher who bore bow and arrows, and sent out its motley regiment equipped with the universal knife or dagger, or, as it might chance, with staves, hatchets, pole-axes, forks, or spears, while an aristocrat or two actually bore a sword. Only sixty-seven burgesses out of the one hundred and eighty paid taxes, and the general poverty seems to have been extreme. The richest man had one cow, two hogs, two brass platters, a few hides, and a little furniture – the whole worth £4 8s.; and one of the most respectable innkeepers of the place owned two hogs, two beds, two table-cloths, two hand napkins, a horse, a brass pot, a platter, a few wooden vessels, and some malt.¹⁵ In 1323 things were a trifle better, for eighty persons were then taxed, the property of some of them being valued only at six shillings, and this under a system in which the whole of each man’s possessions was exactly reckoned up – his cards, yarn, shoes, the girths he was making or trying to sell, even his store of oatmeal. A century later, however, we find a new Bridport. Traders from Bristol had settled in its streets, and men of Holland and foreign merchants and craftsmen; and the townsfolk had grown prosperous and began to bind themselves together in fraternities – the brotherhood of S. Nicholas, the brotherhood of S. Mary and S. James, the brotherhood of the Two Torches, a brotherhood of the Light of the Holy Cross in S. Andrew’s, and another in S. Mary’s, and the brotherhood of the Torches in the Church of the Blessed Mary – apparently the offspring of the first half of the fifteenth century. The Toll Hall was repaired, the houses in the town set in order, and a new causeway made. The Guild Hall got its clock; the church was rebuilt and fitted up with organs, and sittings in it were let out to the wealthy burghers. When, finally, a “view of arms” was again held in the town in 1458, there was not a single name left of those who had appeared in the list of 1319. But these new traders came bravely set out with bows and arrows, as well as with daggers, bills, pole-axes, or spears, or marching proudly with their mails, jacks, salets, and “white harness with a basenet.” The Bridport standard had changed, and one man who came carrying quite an armoury – a gun, besides a bow, twelve arrows, a sword, and a buckler – was ordered to have twelve more arrows at the next muster.¹⁶