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Where the claims of local life were so exacting and so overpowering we can scarcely wonder if the burgher took little thought for matters that lay beyond his “parish.” But within the narrow limits of the town dominions his experience was rich and varied. While townsmen were forced at every turn to discover and justify the limits of their privileges, or while controversies raged among them as to how the government of the community should be carried on, there was no lack of political teaching; and all questions “touching the great commonalty of the city” for whose liberties they had fought and whose constitution they had shaped, stirred loyal citizens to a genuine patriotism. Traders too, intent on the developement of their business, were deeply concerned in all the questions that affected commerce, the securing of communications, or the opening of new roads for trade, or the organization of labour. In such matters activity could never sleep; for the towns anticipated modern nations in the faith that the advantage of one community must be the detriment of another, and competition and commercial jealousy ran high.³⁰³ Never perhaps in English history was local feeling so strong. Public virtue was summed up in an ardent municipal zeal, as lively among the “Imperial Co-citizens” of New Sarum³⁰⁴ as among the “Great Clothing” of bigger boroughs. In those days indeed busy provincials but dimly conscious of national policy found in the confusion of court politics and the distraction of its intrigues, or in the feuds of a divided and bewildered administration, no true call to national service and no popular leader to quicken their sympathies. Civil wars which swept over the country at the bidding of a factious group of nobles or of a vain and unscrupulous Kingmaker left, and justly left, the towns supremely indifferent to any question save that of how to make the best terms for themselves from the winning side, or to use the disasters of warring lords so as to extend their own privileges.³⁰⁵ Meanwhile in the intense effort called out by the new industrial and commercial conditions and the reorganization of social life which they demanded, it was inevitable that there should grow up in the boroughs the temper of men absorbed in a critical struggle for ends which however important were still personal, local, limited, purely material – a temper inspired by private interest and with its essential narrowness untouched by the finer conceptions through which a great patriotism is nourished. Such a temper, if it brought at first great rewards, brought its own penalties at last, when the towns, self-dependent, unused to confederation for public purposes, destitute of the generous spirit of national regard, and by their ignorance and narrow outlook left helpless in presence of the revolutions that were to usher in the modern world, saw the government of their trade and the ordering of their constitutions taken from them, and their councils degraded by the later royal despotism into the instruments and support of tyranny.

NOTE A

There are many instances of the responsibility of individual citizens for costs of various kinds which were the charge of the whole borough. In 1212 the townsmen of Southampton got hold of the King’s money that came from Ireland, and two bailiffs and six principal men were charged with its payment to the King. (Madox Firma Burgi, 158.) A bailiff of Chichester was fined in 1395 for not attending at a session of the peace, and as he had no lands and chattels to seize for the debt, two citizens were charged with the payment of the fine. (Ibid. 187.) In 1256, when Warwick had to pay a fine of forty marks to the King for a trespass, the sheriff was ordered to raise the fine both from the townsmen and from all men of the suburb, both within and without the liberty, who did merchandise in the city of Warwick. (Ibid. 183.) In 1431 the bailiffs of Andover were held responsible for various escapes from prison. They were declared insolvent and the charge thrown back upon the town. The townsmen, however, pleaded that two of the officers charged had quite enough goods and chattels either in the town or in the country to pay themselves, and as for the third they had never chosen him. (Madox, 210. Other instances, ibid. 182, 184, &c.; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 173.) In 1456 the Mayor and Common Council of Leicester agreed that all actions brought against them in the King’s Court by the bailiff should be paid for by the whole town. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 422.)

This method of raising money was never a popular proceeding, and in almost every case where there is an account of goods seized from a community or guild for the payment of ferm or fine, the sheriffs seem to make the return that these goods remain on their hands for want of buyers. (Madox, 188, 212, 214, 217, 218.) It is evident that the responsibility of the private citizens was almost extinguished in later times (see Madox, 217), at least in some cases – a fact which may be referred to “the mayor and burgesses” replacing for official purposes “the community,” and being licensed to hold corporate property.

It is necessary to distinguish between the responsibility for the borough expenses and the responsibility for the trading debts of the burghers. In the latter case the “community” was also responsible, but the guarantee was strictly confined to burghers and not shared by inhabitants. For the inconvenience to which burghers were subject by being seized for debts whereof they were neither debtors nor pledges, see Derby. (Rep. on Markets, 58.) Mr. Maitland points out that the doctrine that traders form a society in which each member is answerable for the faults of the others, which is shown in early charters, was gradually wearing out, and in 1275 a law was passed that no Englishman could be distrained for any debt unless he was himself the debtor or the pledge, though possibly this law still left members of a community in the position of pledges. But long before this law was passed all the bigger towns had already obtained charters to the same effect. See the charter of Norwich in 1255. “We have granted, and by this our Charter confirmed, to our beloved citizens of Norwich, that they and their heirs for ever shall have this liberty through all our land and power, viz. that they or their goods found in whatever places in our power shall not be arrested for any debt of which they shall not be sureties or principal debtors.” (Stanley v. Mayor, Norwich Doc. 1884, 7.) In 1256 goods belonging to the Norwich freemen were arrested for the debts of others that were not free at Boston fair. Norwich however produced its charter of the year before, making their goods free from arrest for any debt unless they were the principal debtors, or the debtors were of their society. (Blomefield, iii. 50, 51.)

Mr. Maitland (Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Selden Society, ii. 134-5) in discussing this question of the trading guarantee points out the difference between the responsibility of the “communitas” and of the “cives” or “burgesses” of a town, showing that the “communitas” did not form a juristic person, while “the citizens” of a town could sue and be sued collectively by a common name. He thinks that the “communitas” may mean the merchant guild “though not perhaps in all cases a duly chartered guild.” Of this there is no proof, and many serious difficulties lie in the way of accepting the hypothesis. In the case of Leicester, where there was a merchant guild, it is never mentioned, the responsibility lies on the “members of the community of Leicester,” (p. 145-7) and Thomas pleads, not that he was not in the merchant guild, but that he was from Coventry. So also “the whole community of Norwich” is spoken of in exactly the same way, but in Norwich there was no guild merchant, (p. 149, 152. See also on this point Hudson’s Mun. Org. 36. Notes on Norwich in the Norfolk Archæology, xii. “The city and feudalism.”) In Nottingham, John Beeston (p. 153-4) brings a counter-charge against the community of Stamford, (p. 159); he was probably one of the very numerous licensed traders of Nottingham and not a burgher. (Nott. Rec. ii. 102-4, 240-4; iii. 349-52.) It is important to notice the words of the charter by which in 1255 the Nottingham burghers had obtained freedom from arrest, “except in case the debtors are of their commune and power, having whereof their debts may be wholly or partly satisfied, and the said burgesses shall have failed in doing justice to the creditors of the same debtors.” (Nott. Rec. i. 41.) For Wiggenhall, (Select Pleas, pp. 157-8.) The mutual responsibility must be considered in connection with the inter-municipal treaties (see Vol. ii. ch. iii.) which were always drawn up in the name of “the community” at this early time, and never at any time in the name of the guild merchant. I have suggested in vol. ii. (see Norwich, Lynn, Nottingham, Southampton) another meaning of “communitas,” which seems to me to apply also to the instances here mentioned by Mr. Maitland.

CHAPTER V

THE TOWNSPEOPLE

No dispute has raged more fiercely in this century, not only in England but throughout Europe, than the dispute as to what qualifications should make a man fit to take part in the government of his state. The possession of property in land, a fixed yearly income, birth into a certain rank, a standard of age, some degree of education – these and other tests of merit have been applied in the hope of securing that every active citizen shall be distinguished by a fitting capacity, whether proved by his own attainments or guaranteed by the virtues or the prosperity of his ancestors. But the anxieties and cares of great states in this matter are only the repetition on a grand scale of the perplexities that beset the humble communities who first tried to solve the problem of how a society of freemen could best rule themselves. In the early “communitas” of the village or town out of which the later chartered borough was to grow – a community which possessed common fields or customary rights of common over surrounding meadows, and which had doubtless found some regular system for the management of its own affairs³⁰⁶– the obvious course was to count as the responsible men of the township the land-holders who had a share in the common property; and when the community had received the charter which made it into a free borough the same system was naturally continued. Those who owned a house and a certain amount of land, measured according to the custom of the borough, formed the society of burghers,³⁰⁷ and to the townspeople, as to Swift centuries later, the definition of law was “the will of the majority of those who have the property in land.” Equality of possessions brought with it equality of civil rights, and each community formed a homogeneous body whose members were all subject to the same conditions and shared in the same interests. When the burgher’s life was over, the son who inherited his property appeared before the bailiffs within forty days, to deliver up to them his father’s sword and take the freeman’s oath;³⁰⁸ and the common life went on undisturbed by the intrusion of any foreign element, vagrant, restless, encroaching.

But such simple conditions of life, only possible in a stationary agricultural society,³⁰⁹ disappeared when industry and commerce brought their revelation of new standards of prosperity. In the course of a very few generations there was scarcely a trace left of that primitive relation of equality out of which the early equality of rights had sprung. As the country folk migrated in increasing numbers from manor and village to the town³¹⁰ old rigid distinctions were swept away, and the simplicity and uniformity of the burgage tenure was completely broken up. In Liverpool, for example, the burgages originally established by John were already in the fourteenth century divided into small fractions one-eighth or even one-forty-eighth part of their original size;³¹¹ and the amount of land held by owners of property in Nottingham in the fifteenth century varied so much that the taxes levied on them were in some cases as high as £3 14s. 7½d., in other cases as low as a farthing.³¹² The owners of capital began to thrust out the owners of land; the shopkeeper replaced the agriculturist, the tradesman and the artizan exercised a new power, as the boroughs quickly adapted themselves to the changing conditions of the time and opened one door after another for the bringing in of new members whose wealth or whose skill might benefit the community. The ownership of land still carried with it its ancient rights.³¹³ But the son of a freeman who himself owned no land might be made a burgher in his father’s lifetime. Aliens might buy the franchise. Craftsmen were admitted into the circle of the citizens.³¹⁴ Recruits from every class and from every nation pressed into the ranks of burgesses. There were foreigners from Bordeaux or from Flanders or from Lisbon,³¹⁵ and Irishmen in abundance, in spite of occasional outbursts of hostility in which Irish burghers were deprived of their freedom, “till they bought it again with the blood of their purses, and with weeping eyes, kneeling on their knees, besought the mayor and his brethren of their grace.”³¹⁶ No limit was set, whether of race, or occupation, or descent, or wealth, if they “are born in the city and be of good report, and if their presence may be profitable to the city as well as for his wisdom, as also for any other validity or worth known to the citizens.”³¹⁷ The new society took in alike traders, agriculturists, bondmen looking for freedom,³¹⁸ parish priests,³¹⁹ merchants who owned eight or ten ships and employed over a hundred workmen; small masters with but a single journeyman or perhaps two; artizans just released from apprenticeship and enrolled as members of some craft gild; rich folk who held several burgages, and men who rented a tiny shop. Everywhere the town communities were fast outgrowing the old simple traditions of common acquaintance and friendship, and throughout the fifteenth century the seals of the frequent new comers were so unfamiliar to their fellow citizens that deeds of sale had constantly to be brought to the Mayor for the addition of his seal of office to overcome hesitation and distrust.³²⁰

The hospitality of the corporations differed from place to place. Sometimes a borough threw its gates wide open and welcomed any new comer who would but choose one of the half-dozen avenues to citizenship that lay before him, – who would buy land, or marry a free woman, or pay the fixed price for his freedom, or serve his apprenticeship to a trade, or accept the franchise as a gift from the community; while a neighbouring town, looking on aliens with jealousy and hesitation, would close its doors and cling to some narrower system of enfranchisement which kept its ranks pure from foreign blood, and its burghers free from anxieties of competition.³²¹ Each community in fact had full liberty to order its own political experiment. In the matter of choosing their fellow burgesses, of framing their own society and fixing the limits of its growth, the citizens knew no law and recognized no authority beyond their own,³²² and enjoyed herein a measure of independence unknown in continental countries where a powerful feudal system still barred every road to freedom.

When a new comer who desired to be “franchised for a free man, … and fellow in your rolls”³²³ was accepted by the commonalty he was summoned before them in a public court, “having with them the common charter of the city; and then the steward shall take the book, and bid them lay their right hands thereon, commanding all those that are standing by, in the behalf of our Lord the King, to keep silence,” and the oath of obedience to the King and fidelity to the customs of the town was administered,³²⁴– perhaps, as at Winchester, the “oath to swear men to be free, kneeling on their knees.”³²⁵ The candidate had further to find two or more good men as pledges that he would “observe all the laws;”³²⁶ and to pay the customary fees, which varied with the caution or the poverty of the borough from three shillings to five pounds; while a poor corporation like Wells was content to receive its payments in wine or gloves or wax when money was scarce.³²⁷

The new burgess was then required to give security to the town for payment of taxes or any other municipal claims by proving that he had either a good yearly revenue or a tenement, or by at once building himself a house.³²⁸ A wooden framework was put together either on some building ground or perhaps in a vacant space in the open street,³²⁹ and was then carried to the new site. The interstices were quickly filled up with plaster, and the little tenement was complete. A couple of rough benches and one or two pots and a few tools served as furniture, and the new burgess entered into possession and began life as a citizen householder. Henceforth he was bound to live within the walls of the borough, for his franchise was forfeited if he forsook the town for a year and a day.³³⁰ Over the house, which was the town’s security for rent and taxes, the municipality kept a watchful eye: if it became ruinous and dangerous to the passer-by it was thrown down at the owner’s cost, or if needful at the cost of the commonalty; if through neglect or poverty it fell into decay the next heir and the commonalty together could compel him to put it in order or give it up.³³¹ Once or twice a year the burgher had to appear at the Portmote or Borough Court to prove his presence in the town, and to take his necessary part in the duties of the court.³³² An unwavering loyalty and public spirit was demanded of him, and the loss of “frelidge,” as they said in Carlisle, avenged any breach of public duty, such as a refusal to help the Mayor in keeping the peace, clamour and undue disturbance at the election of town officers, revealing the counsels of the Common Assembly, resistance in word or deed to the municipal officers, contempt of the Mayor’s authority, or any offence for which the punishment of the pillory or the tumbrill was adjudged.³³³ For such things the burgher was “blotted out of the book of the bailiff”; and the forfeiture of his freedom was declared by open proclamation of the common crier, or by sound of the town bell, or by having his name written up on a Disfranchised Table in the Guild Hall,³³⁴ so that all the town should know his shame. In Preston those who betrayed the municipal confidence or exposed the poverty of the town were not only deprived of the franchise, but their toll was taken every day as of forsworn and unworthy persons who could not be trusted beyond the passing hour.³³⁵

It was no mean advantage to be a burgher in those days, when nearly all material benefits and legal aids and political rights were reserved for the favoured classes, and when it was the towns that opened for the working man and the shopkeeper a way to take their place too among the people of privilege. The burghers, of course, shared alike in rights of common and of pasturage on the town lands, of fishing in the town waters,³³⁶ of the ferry across the stream or sea channel, and so forth; but their pre-eminent privilege was the right to trade. If ordinary inhabitants were allowed to buy and sell food or the bare necessaries of life, all profitable business was reserved as the monopoly of the full citizen.³³⁷ Protected from the intrusion and the competition of the alien,³³⁸ he paid a reduced toll for his merchandize at the entrance of the town; his stall in the market was rented at a lower price than that of the stranger; he had the first choice of storage room in the Guild Hall for his wool or leather or corn; the town clock which tolled the hour when the market might begin, struck for the burgher an hour or two earlier than for strangers and visitors.³³⁹ If a travelling merchant brought his wares to the town the citizen might claim the right of buying whether the owner wished to sell or no, and might insist on a share in the profits of any mercantile venture.³⁴⁰ He alone might keep apprentices, and become a master in his craft. If he travelled outside his own town for the purpose of trade he carried privilege with him everywhere, and confidently claimed freedom from “pontage” and “passage” and “pesage” and “shewage,” – that is from tolls for crossing bridges, for passing into a town, for the weighing of goods, for showing merchandize in the market,³⁴¹– and from a host of similar imposts. Wherever he went he was shielded by the protection of his fellow citizens;³⁴² if he had an action for debt in any other town he was granted common letters from the Mayor and Jurats to assist him in his suit;³⁴³ if any wrong was done him they enforced compensation, or they avenged his injuries by confiscating the goods of any merchants within their walls who had come from the offending town.

Legal safeguards and privileges moreover fenced him about on every side. He could only be impleaded in the courts of his own town, and any fellow citizen who brought an action against him outside the borough might be disgraced and disfranchised;³⁴⁴ while the King himself could not summon a burgher to appear before his judges at Westminster, save on the plea that there had been “lack of justice” at the first trial in the court of his own town. No “foreigner” might meddle in any legal inquiry in which their houses and property were concerned;³⁴⁵ while, on the other hand, every citizen from twelve years old could serve on juries for the town business.³⁴⁶ Peculiar favours were extended to the burgher,³⁴⁷ as at Worcester where there were special provisions to protect him from any wrongful fine by the bailiff,³⁴⁸ and the city sergeant had to do any legal business required of him at reduced fees; or at Canterbury, where special formalities of trial assured to him a more exact and careful justice; or at Sandwich, where he could be tried only before the mayor, and could not be summoned before his deputy like a common stranger.³⁴⁹ Everywhere he could claim the right of being separated from the common criminals and imprisoned in some tower or room in the Guild Hall used as the Freeman’s prison.³⁵⁰

But all these privileges were far from being a free gift to be enjoyed in idle security; and to each individual burgher the franchise practically meant a sort of carefully-adjusted bargain, by which he compounded for paying certain tolls by undertaking to do work, and work which might be both costly and laborious, for the community. The body of citizens was but a small one, and every man in it was liable at some time or other to be called on to take his part in the public service. Taxation for the town expenses, watch and ward, service on juries, the call to arms in defence of the borough, were incidents as familiar as unwelcome in every burgher’s life; but a more serious matter was the summons to take office and serve as mayor or bailiff or town clerk or sergeant or tax-collector or common constable – offices not always coveted in those days, when the mayor was held personally responsible for the rent of a town which was perhaps vexed with pestilence or wasted with fire; when treasurers had to find funds as best they could for too frequent official bribes or state receptions of great lords or court officers; when bailiffs had to meet the loss from failing dues and straitened markets;³⁵¹ when the boxes of the tax-collector were left half empty through poverty, or riots, or disputed questions of market-rights;³⁵² and when the constable was “frayed” day and night by sturdy men, dagger in hand, ready to break the King’s peace.³⁵³ Many modes of escape were tried. The inhabitants would refuse to take up the franchise, or they would leave the town for a time;³⁵⁴ an elected officer would plead a vow of pilgrimage to “S. James in Gallice;” or an influential burgess might obtain letters patent from the King which granted him freedom from serving any municipal office during his life.³⁵⁵ But generally a heavy fine compelled the submission of a refractory citizen, and in the last resort the community would apply for a writ against him from the Privy Council.³⁵⁶ The town allowed no excuses, and everywhere the citizens were forced by stringent laws to take on them the offices to which they had been elected by their fellows. In Lydd an order was made in 1429 that any one who had been appointed by the bailiff or jurats to take any journey on town business should pay a fine if he refused without reasonable cause.³⁵⁷ In the Cinque Ports generally if a citizen who had been elected as mayor or jurat declined to serve, his house was pulled down;³⁵⁸ or as at Romney the bailiff with the whole community went to his dwelling, turned himself, his wife, his children, and all his household into the street, shut the windows and sealed the door, and so left matters until “he wished to set himself right by doing the said duty of jurat.” In Sandwich again, “if a person when elected treasurer will not take upon him the office he shall not be permitted to bake or brew, or if he does bake or brew the commons may take his bread and beer to their own use till he accepts the office.”³⁵⁹ At the worst, however, the burgher might thankfully remember that his public duty practically ceased at the wall and moat that bounded the town, and that when he had paid down his money towards the buying of the town charter he was at least safe from the danger of being sent as tax-collector or constable or juror anywhere throughout the country round.³⁶⁰

The privileges and duties of the free citizen remained, however, the endowment of the few. That larger conception of the common rights of man which had begun to make its way in the boroughs, was checked and hindered at every turn by the complicated conditions of town life, by the jealousy of established settlers as to new comers, the exclusive temper which the crafts had begun to show, the terror of the trader before free competition, the imperfectly developed authority of the corporations over the space within the town walls, where it had failed to break the barriers of feudal custom and the claims of ecclesiastical corporations. Howsoever the towns widened their borders, there was still a growing population which lingered just outside the circle of free citizens, shut out by one cause or another from full municipal liberty. Settlers came who did not care to burden themselves with the duties and charges of citizenship; there were dwellers in churchyards and tenants of ecclesiastical estates, who carried on their business within the town liberties but remained without the town jurisdiction; landowners from outside the walls brought their corn and wool to the town market; traders came from time to time with wares to sell; there were apprentices and journeymen, escaped bondmen, and country-folk coming to look for work. As all of these alike needed the protection of the town, so the town needed their services; and by degrees their respective duties and rights were laid down in charters, in ordinances, or in friendly compacts.

I. Thus it came about that below the ranks of the burgesses, themselves secure in their municipal supremacy, were ranged orders of men more or less highly favoured according to their degree. First came the inhabitants who had paid for special rights of trade in the town, or were admitted as members of the Merchant Guild. In times of commercial prosperity when wandering dealers and artizans were attracted to some thriving borough for trading purposes they went to swell this class of independent inhabitants, subject to the jurisdiction of the town courts, but taking no part in its politics;³⁶¹ so that it occasionally happened, as in Norwich and Worcester, that the town refused to harbour this body of irresponsible inhabitants and passed a law ordering them to become citizens.³⁶² When on the other hand trade declined and poverty settled down on the town, as in Romney and Winchester, the failing fortunes of the people were marked by a steady decrease of the class of “advocantes,” or those who would “avow” themselves freemen, and inhabitants who in their distress refused or renounced the franchise,³⁶³ were driven into the ranks of the politically unfree.

II. So long as the trading inhabitants owned the jurisdiction of the town courts their presence brought no serious difficulty to the ruling authorities. But within the town walls there were other groups of men who lay beyond this jurisdiction, and held an ambiguous position which was the source of many a quarrel for ascendency and many a struggle for license in the course of the fifteenth century. These were the tenants and dependants of bishop or abbot, of some lay lord, or of the king’s castle – men who lived within the liberties of the borough and who had the right of trading in the town, but who were bound to do suit and service at the courts of their own special lord.³⁶⁴ To some extent they were forced to recognize the mayor’s authority, since their rights of trade were guaranteed by his protection, and since he yearly reminded them of his power to levy taxes on all property within the liberties of the borough. But their obedience was grudging and their loyalty was cold. The mayor could not awe them by a summons to his court, or enforce his demands with threat of pains and penalties; he could scarcely terrify them into submission with his sergeant and a few constables. By degrees, it is true, the tenants of the king’s castle or of feudal lords became merged in the general body of the inhabitants. But the tenants of ecclesiastical estates³⁶⁵ were maintained by lords who were bound by every tradition of their order never to yield up the least jot of authority to the secular power, and least of all to the secular power as represented by groups of upstart drapers and fishmongers and weavers whose humble shops and booths leaned against the walls of the abbey or the priory, and whose pretensions, loud and noisy though they might be, were perhaps a century or so old at the best. The ecclesiastical tenants therefore remained everywhere an alien body, no true partakers in the life of the town, and when supported by a powerful bishop or abbot determined to crush the pretensions of a struggling borough they proved a serious danger to municipal unity, and one which the authorities found themselves powerless to conquer till the Reformation settled the question for ever.