Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу  Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (vol 1 of 2)

автор Alice Stopford Green

TOWN LIFE

IN

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

VOL. I

TOWN LIFE
IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

BY

MRS. J. R GREEN

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1894

The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved

Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, london and bungay.

IN MEMORY OF

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

March, 1894

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.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

THE ENGLISH TOWNS

1

CHAPTER II.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

35

CHAPTER III.

THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

75

CHAPTER IV.

THE COMMON LIFE OF THE TOWN

124

CHAPTER V.

THE TOWNSPEOPLE

169

CHAPTER VI.

THE PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT

197

CHAPTER VII.

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM (TOWNS ON ROYAL DEMESNE)

226

CHAPTER VIII.

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM (TOWNS ON FEUDAL ESTATES)

250

CHAPTER IX.

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM (TOWNS ON CHURCH ESTATES)

277

CHAPTER X.

BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY

309

CHAPTER XI.

THE TOWNS AND THE CHURCH

333

CHAPTER XII.

CONFEDERATION

384

TOWN LIFE

IN

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

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 Parliament[5] 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 century[8] 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]

Even towns which like Rye had known all the calamities of war were only waiting for a moment of peace to win their share of the common prosperity. Burned by the French in 1377, burned and laid desolate again in 1448, Rye long remained on the level of poverty common in the Middle Ages. In 1414 it sheltered a mere handful of struggling people—twenty-one poor householders in Nesse Ward, twenty-eight in Water Melle Ward, and a somewhat larger number in Market Ward equally poor; within its walls, in fact, there was but one man—the lord of the manor—who was assessed at so great a sum as 6s. 8d., though there was the beginning of a fashionable suburb in the Ward without the Gate, where the Mayor lived with some dozen other well-to-do householders, two of whom besides the Mayor were assessed at the aristocratic figure of 6s. 8d. By the end of the century, however, Rye fishermen were known on distant seas and Rye traders in the fairs at home and abroad. London merchants had bought property in the thriving town, and new quarters had sprung up with names borrowed from the capital—Paternoster Ward and Bucklersbury Ward. In 1493 five of the burghers were assessed as owning £400 each, and the total value of the property possessed by the inhabitants was £6,303.[17]

Evidence of accumulating wealth indeed gathers on every side. The labour and enterprise which in earlier centuries had covered England with castles and cathedrals and monasteries was now absorbed in the work of covering it with new towns. A journey through any part of the country to-day is enough to show us how ruthlessly the men of the fifteenth century swept away the parish churches which their fathers had built in the fourteenth century, to replace them with the big bare fabrics where size and ostentation too often did service for beauty, and in the building of which prosperous burghers gave more conspicuous proof of wealth and lavish generosity than of taste and feeling. In Canterbury and Worcester and Nottingham and Bristol and a host of other towns we may still admire the new houses that were being raised for the traders, with their picturesque outlines and fine carved work. Waste places in the boroughs were covered with buildings and formed into new wards. On every side corporations instinct with municipal pride built Common Halls, set up stately crosses in the market-place such as we still see at Winchester or Marlborough, paved the streets,[18] or provided new water-supply for the growing population.[19] If we count up the new gates, and quays, and bridges, and wharves, and harbours, and sluices, and aqueducts, and markets of which the town records furnish accounts, we are filled with amazement at an activity which was really stupendous. Public duty and private enterprise went hand in hand. Sometimes the whole commonalty was called out to help at the church-building, or the digging of a new harbour; sometimes the charity once given to religious uses was turned into the channel of civic patriotism, and good citizens left money to found hospitals and almshouses and schools, to pave the streets, to pay the tolls of their town, to fee lawyers to defend its privileges, or buy a charter to protect its rights from invasion. Thus it was two traders of Canterbury who built in 1400 the first private bridge over the river; and in 1485 a mercer from London, William Pratt, constructed at his own expense the first main drain under the Old Street to carry off the rain-water into the river.[20] In Birmingham the whole community formed itself into a “guild and lasting brotherhood” for the doing of works of charity, and chiefly it would seem for the repairing of two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous ways on the high road to Wales—a work which the Corporation was too poor to undertake.[21]

Nor was this growth in wealth the only, or indeed the most striking part of the town’s history during these three centuries from the time of Henry the Second to the time of Henry the Seventh. Trade is pretty much the same wherever it exists at all, and from its narrow dominion much of human energy will always make a way to escape. When Englishmen had spent a measure of their force in creating a nation of shopkeepers, there was still enough of buoyant and exuberant strength left to elaborate an art of government which has affected the history of the world; and the truly characteristic part of the mediæval story is that which enables us to measure the political genius with which the forerunners of our modern democracy shaped schemes of administration for the societies they had created of free workers. There was much to be done in the new ordering of life.[22] Already in the twelfth century a new force had declared itself when in France the middle and lower classes for the first time found a voice in literature. From that time onwards poets of the people and teachers of socialism, writing in the vulgar tongue for common folk, proposed startling questions and boldly pressed home their conclusions. Nothing was safe from their criticism; as they discussed the original rights of men, the “social contract” between the people and their lords, the tyranny of nobles, or the rights of peasants,[23] these new thinkers among the people gave warning of growing energies too big and passionate to live at ease in the narrow bondage of mediæval custom and tradition. The inevitable changes however came slowly, and those who lived in the midst of the movement were themselves unconscious of the real transformation that was going on. Even at the end of the fourteenth century the writer of Piers Ploughman, when he paints for us the picture of the feudal world as it then was, has no dream that its bondage can ever be broken, that there is any escape out of the prison-house of mediæval society. For the first time we there see England, not as it appeared to historians and satirists of the court or the monastery, but as it looked to one standing in the very midst of that vast “field full of folk from end to other”—to the poet who walked among the people with his heart full of charity and pity, who by day mixed with the crowd at the fair, or watched the bargainings in the market-place, or travelled along country by-ways and entered the hovels of the poor, and at night sat in the ale-house among beggars and mendicant friars. But while he shows us all the trouble and confusion of that tumultuous crowd, the social order remains to him simple and unchangeable—fixed, in his belief, as firmly as the decrees of God and nature could establish it. He could only repeat the old time-honoured counsels of work and obedience as the final remedy for all social ills: “Counsel not the commons the King to displease.” But it was more than possible that work and obedience might still leave, as it had left before, life empty of all but misery. Then the last solace lay in resignation.

“Yea, quoth Patience, and hente out of his poke
A piece of the Pater Noster and proffered to us all.
And I listened and looked what livelihood it were;
Then was it ‘Fiat voluntas tua’ that should find us all.
‘Have, Actyf,’ quoth Patience, ‘and eat this when thee hungreth
Or when thou clomsest for cold or clyngest for drought;
And shall never gyves thee grieve nor great lord’s wrath,
Prison nor other pain for—patientes vincunt.”[24]

Such was Langland’s final solution for the disorders of his time. But the English were not a patient people, and the problem of the reorganization of society had become a very serious one towards the close of the Middle Ages, and was perhaps more urgent to men’s fears and consciences in the fifteenth century than it had ever been before, or was to be again till our own day. It was a pressing question for humble folk, for shopkeepers and traders and artisans and journeymen who in the absence of privilege were driven to think of liberty; and in the crowded lanes, the mean workshops, the disorderly market-place, the little thatched Common Hall of the mediæval town, great principles of freedom found their early home, and fought their way to perfection and supremacy. It was not enough that the burghers should create societies of free men—”gentlemen,” as Piers Ploughman would have said,[25] to whom the great difference that distinguished between man and man was not wealth or poverty, labour or ease, but freedom or bondage. This was the easier part of their task, and was practically finished early in their history. It was a longer and more difficult business to discover how the art of government should be actually practised in these communities, and to define the principles of their political existence. But in these matters also the burghers became the pioneers of our liberties, and their political methods have been handed down as part of the heritage of the whole people. As by degrees the multitude of privileges promised and confirmed left the important towns with no more demands to make, they turned their energies to the work of framing those elaborate and highly artificial constitutions which mark the highest point to which their proud and self-sufficient independence had attained. Instead of tamely accepting the pattern or the theory of its neighbours, every town was making its own peculiar experiment in the art of governing, with a vivacity and a restless ingenuity proper to the culminating moment of their activity.

Meanwhile by a happy coincidence the boroughs were called to take part in the great movement by which the House of Commons was created, at a time when the discipline and experience of local self-government had prepared them to exercise a very real influence in the moulding of the English constitution into its present form. Having for the most part secured their fundamental liberties just before Simon de Montfort in 1265 summoned the middle class to take their share in the work of Parliament, and having steadily strengthened their position during all the thirty years of changing counsels and tentative experiments which followed, they saw the representation of the boroughs definitely established in 1295—the very year after county representation had been at last perfectly acknowledged.[26] If for a time they played apparently a small part in political battles, if the separate action of the borough members is scarcely mentioned,[27] the fact still remains that throughout the century during which the House of Commons was being fashioned[28] members sent from these free self-governing communities formed almost two-thirds of that House. Edward the First sent Parliamentary writs to 166 towns, and in the Parliament of 1399, 176 representatives of boroughs sat by the seventy-four knights of the shire.[29] Silent and acquiescent as they were for a while, there are significant instances to show the steady growth of their importance, and the way in which statesmen had begun to appreciate the new force with which governments had henceforth to reckon.[30] By the close of the fourteenth century their influence was marked; and it was doubtless through its vigorous burghers that the House of Commons in the early part of the fifteenth century laid hold of powers which it had never had before, nor was to have again for two hundred years.[31] In the list of petitions and statutes throughout the century in which their influence on legislation was plainly dominant, we may look for the true beginning of democratic government in England.[32] Indeed at a yet earlier time, when the House of Commons was not seventy years old, its power had been already measured and men’s imaginations kindled by its mighty destiny. If supreme over all the King kept his state at Westminster,

“him lord antecedent,

Both their head and their King, holding with no party,
But stand as a stake that sticketh in a mire
Between two lands for a true mark”;

if his power was absolute, and he could

“claim the commons at his will

To follow him, to find him, and to fetch at them his counsel,”[33]

yet even then Conscience warned the sovereign that to frame a righteous government “without the commons’ help it is full hard, by my head”;[34] and Reason

“counselled the King his commons to love,

For the commons is the King’s treasure.”[35]

The whole part however played by the towns in national politics, the degree of influence they exercised, in what ways it differed from that of the aristocratic class, how it affected matters of administration, finance, foreign policy, commercial laws, the strength of the monarchy, and the forms of the constitution—all these questions have still to be investigated. What is perfectly clear is that wise rulers in those days saw the tremendous change that was taking place in the balance of forces in the State, as even the most foolish among them felt that the power of the purse at least was passing from the country magnates to the town merchants;[36] and they gave expression to their convictions by a change in the whole character of their policy. To kings and statesmen the friendship of the burghers even in times of comparative quiet was daily becoming a matter of greater consequence to be bought at their own price. It was no longer the nobles whom they sought to bribe to their interest, but the towns; and as gifts and pensions to Court favourites declined, courtesies and gracious remissions of rent were lavished on the boroughs.[37] From this time, even when the towns had fallen to their lowest estate, their heritage of power was never wholly lost, and through their later humiliation and corruption we may still discover the evidence of their political consequence, since the measure of their influence was in fact the price set on their obedience.

If such a tale of long centuries of national growth ending in a satisfied maturity carries its suggestion of dull monotony, we need only turn to the history of towns in other times and places to discover that in this very monotony is hidden a real element of singularity. The most striking contrast lies perhaps close at hand, in the brilliant and dramatic story of the communes in France—the shortest lived of all the feudal independent lordships in Europe.[38] Of earlier origin than the English, their history goes back to the first part of the twelfth century, fifty years before the movement had effectively begun in England; and the story of their liberties is, taken all together, but a brief tale of some two hundred years, from 1130 to 1330. Their progress was rapid and their decay as swift. Indeed decline had already set in by 1223, at the very time when Norwich, Nottingham, and a number of the greater English towns were just receiving for the first time powers of choosing their own rulers and administering their own justice. In 1280 their condition was almost hopeless,[39] and half a century later the life of the free communities was over and their liberties utterly extinguished, saving always the liberty to carry on trade.

And yet we can only wonder that the attempt lasted for two hundred years, set as they were amid difficulties wholly unknown to English burghers, or with the ghosts or dim reflections of which these at the worst had only to contend in a kind of phantom fight. What were the far-off echoes of foreign conquest or defeat heard on our side of the water, or the report of an occasional local rising, compared to the devastating wars that swept the plains of France, and amid the miseries of which the communes were struggling into life? The necessities of war proved fatal to local liberty, and that in more ways than one. If warring kings and lords created independent communities for their own purposes, with the sole idea of forming fortified centres capable of self-defence, such communes could hardly prove strongholds of freedom, and the self-government of the people soon fell in fact before the requirements of military discipline. Sometimes the death of freedom was brought about by more violent methods; and the trembling inhabitants who made their way back from the woods to their ruined homes after a town had been sacked and burned by the enemy, would pray to be disenfranchised that they might thus be delivered from the burdens and dues of a commune which they were no longer able to maintain. Abroad moreover feudalism retained the authority which had been torn from it here by Norman kings, and was yet more dangerous to the burghers than war itself. Against the might of their feudal lord, king or noble or ecclesiastic, they could make in the long run but a sorry fight, and perhaps after a century of desperate struggle for emancipation in which the peasants saw their brethren slain in thousands, their farms devastated, their wealth torn from them, their emigrants driven back starving to plundered homesteads, the outcome of all their misery was finally to gain a few trading privileges by consenting to a charter which once more laid them bound at the feet of their master. Too often the lord avoided open violence by calling political craft to his aid, and devised for his burghers some form of charter which while it admirably suited his own purposes robbed the communal government of any true democratic element and made the name of liberty a mockery. As for the vast number of towns big and little under ecclesiastical dominion, they contended in vain against princes of the Church whose mighty state was measured on the grand scale of the Continent—princes with the Pope always in the background, ready at their complaint to fulminate the decree of excommunication which left all the burghers’ goods at the mercy of their lord. Whether the prelate sought to annihilate rebellious serfs with fire and sword, whether with more subtle intention he devised some cunningly delusive form of charter, or contrived to hinder all the operations of free government, to thwart its developement, and to check the spread of its influence, the tragic close was always at hand—political slavery and degradation. Amid the innumerable troubles that compassed the French communes round about, the administrative difficulties, the financial cares, the public bankruptcy of town after town, the evil moments when the king’s fiscal officer and the starving people made alliance to destroy the privileges of the burghers, civic freedom failed. Time and fate were allied against the commune, and the issue of the battle was decided before the fight had well begun.

Against the century of growth and the century of decay which made up the record of the French communes, we have to set three hundred years of unbroken prosperity and privilege in which the English burghers added charter to charter and filled their “common chests” with a regularity that knew no check. It is not necessary, however, to assume that Englishmen reached that happy state wholly by virtue of their native superiority; it would perhaps be truer to thank the good fortune of insignificance that so long waited on them. England, in fact, was lagging far away in the rear, where there was little of the noise and dust of battle. It was not there that the idea of municipal liberty was first proclaimed; for in the Dark Ages of riot and disorder and piracy, Celts, Latins, Teutons, all the members of the European brotherhood in fact, found in association their natural succour against danger and aid to labour; and along the great trade routes that traversed Europe the more important societies of men confederated for protection and assistance were formed before ever Englishmen had begun to organize themselves into self-governing communities. In that European drama, everything took great continental proportions; men disputed for tremendous stakes, and in the long battle the mighty lords of the old world were never wholly routed, but still laid their grip on the modern society that was struggling to usher in a new order. In the great fight there were great defeats, such as we have seen in France, and liberty had to begin its course afresh and lead men along new roads in search of freedom and content. But we in our distant island had throughout the Middle Ages all the advantages of obscurity. According to any valid method of determining our place in the European order, whether by yearly income, or size of merchant fleets, or strength of armies, or number of inhabitants, we remained for a time after the loss of Normandy and Anjou unimportant in the eyes of Europe-of little account among the peoples; and as far as popular feeling went ourselves heedless of what went on on the Continent.[40] Tranquil and secure because no one took the trouble to think of us while we were regardless of their quarrels, we were left to learn our lessons as slowly as we would, to lay sure, if lowly, foundations, to practise our skill by safe experiments till our art was mastered. The humble display which we made in our national capacity was repeated in our municipal story. There indeed the tiny dominion of the community, the sparse population, the poor little treasure-box, the solitary “common barge,” the handful of militia passing in review with their clubs and forks, present a sorry figure beside the majestic state of the big corporations over sea. But this humble condition was their true security. Set from the first in pleasant places where by conquering kings the lofty had been brought low and the humble lifted up, and where no enemy of invincible strength lay any longer across their path, the burghers might carry on their own business without care. Within the narrow area enclosed by the city wall and ditch, amid a scanty population scarcely bigger than that of a small country town to-day, experiments which would have been impossible on a great scale were tried with every conceivable variety of circumstance and expedient; and the boroughs owed to their early insignificance and isolation a freedom from restraint and dictation in which real political experience became possible.

Thus in England, as elsewhere, the character of the nation and the mould of its political thought were ultimately shaped by outward circumstance; and the forms of our freedom have been profoundly affected by the way which the towns took to liberty, by the manner in which they modified its expression according to the peculiar conditions to which each community was subject, and by the use they made of their power. But since the very existence of the towns as important centres of life, as well as the character of their development, depends on the complete transformation which English society underwent in the later Middle Ages, I venture, before beginning my real story, to give a very brief and rapid sketch of the Industrial and Commercial Revolution in which mediæval England was buried and modern England born.

CHAPTER II

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

The history of the fifteenth century has long remained but little known. It is very generally regarded as the “profoundly tragic close of a great epoch,” and the historian looks back to the golden age of the thirteenth century as the glorious time of English and of European history—the culminating period to which all the foregoing generations slowly mounted, and from whose heights the later sons of men as slowly and surely declined and went backward. The period of this backsliding is seen as an age altogether wanting in picturesqueness and moral elevation, sunk in materialism, sordid and vulgar, a time of confused and indiscriminate corruption, where “heart and treasure” were linked in ignoble union, and the political demoralization of the people was only matched by their private degradation; and the fifteenth century has long borne the heavy burden of its evil reputation, while its records have been left comparatively undisturbed by inquisitive search.[41] For hackneyed as the period of the Wars of the Roses may seem to the superficial reader, no student has yet adequately studied the secret of the age in which the great revolutions of the next century were being prepared—the age which made possible for England the revival of letters and the reformation, which founded her commercial greatness, which revolutionized her industrial system, which cast away the last bonds of feudalism and laid the foundations of the modern State.

It is indeed true that no great man has made this century illustrious. No general or warrior of the first rank distinguished wars which were born in iniquity, and kept alive by greed. No gifted statesman left his mark on the government or administration of the country. Among the people themselves interest in national affairs seemed dead; they made revolutions and set up new kings as they were bidden to do, and kept stores of badges of the houses of York and Lancaster alike, to be ready with either sign of loyalty as the fortunes of war turned this way or that;[42] they forgot the stirring political ballads of former generations and sang moral ditties instead. In place of the mighty theologians of an earlier time there came commentators and interpreters of little significance. Nor did a single religious leader or reformer or scholar arise to stir the popular thought or conscience: Lollardy with its questionings and criticisms was still heard of from time to time in the bigger towns and manufacturing districts, but the people generally acquiesced in the demands of the authorized religion and discipline. Literature was well nigh lost as well as the graver kinds of learning. In the beginning of the century one or two nobles had collected libraries and brought tidings of the Renascence in Italy, and later on half a dozen scholars made their way to the Italian universities; but there was neither poet nor scholar to follow the masters of an earlier age. In the fifteenth century the very language in which Chaucer wrote was but half intelligible to the mass of the people, and his tales must have been unknown out of court circles. Men were content with rhymes innumerable—on morals, on manners, on heraldry, on the art of dining, on the rules of thrift and prosperity; and in all our history there is no time so barren in literature as the reign of Henry the Sixth.

Even in a democratic age it is not easy at first sight to recognise where the interest lies of an epoch destitute of all that has made other times illustrious, and whose significance seems to shrink in comparison with the struggles and victories of the ages that preceded, and the splendid achievements of the age that followed it; and historians finding themselves face to face with so dreary a century may have been tempted to give it a character of its own for grossness, for cruelty, for any distinction whatever which will at least take it out of the range of the absolutely commonplace. But the distinguishing mark of the fifteenth century lies neither in its crime nor in its vulgarity. We must judge this period in fact as a time of transition in many ways extraordinarily like our own. In the centuries between the Great Plague and the Reformation, just as in the nineteenth century, the real significance of our history lies in the advent of a new class to wealth and power, as the result of a great industrial revolution. The breaking up of an old aristocratic order, and the creation of a middle class to be brought into politics and even into “society,” the enormous increase of material wealth, the new relation of the various ranks to one another, and the failure under altered circumstances of traditional rules of conduct, the varied careers suddenly opened to talent or ambition, the reproach for the first time attached to incompetence and poverty, the vulgarization of literature and morality which followed on their adaptation to a class as yet untrained to criticism or comparison, the extension of a habit of religion closely related to a plain morality—all these things recall to us many of the experiences of our own days, and may make us more tolerant of the unpicturesque and Philistine element whether then or now. If the chief centre of interest had once lain in the offices of the royal palace it might now be seen rather in the new Town Hall which was being built in almost every borough in England, or in the office where the mayor’s clerk was busied in making his copies of Magna Charta or extracts of Domesday, or in translating from the old French the customs and ordinances of the town, or in hunting up the rolls of the itinerant judges; or over the country-side where estates were being sold and bought with the development of a provincial instead of a national nobility and the rise of new men to possess the old acres, and where the quickening of the struggle for life was reflected in the stormy conflicts and significant concessions of the manor courts. The new middle class of shopkeepers and farmers had indeed no chroniclers and no flatterers, for it was long before men could realise how rapidly and completely the weight of influence was being transferred from the old governing class to the mass of the governed, and chroniclers still went on mechanically retailing events now comparatively trivial and unimportant. It was not till the next century that they turned from spinning out these worthless annals to a discussion of matters really important which had by that time forced themselves on the dullest apprehension.

The whole interest of the fifteenth century thus lies in the life of very common folk—of artisans and tradesmen in the towns, and in country parts of the farmers, the tenants of the new grazing lands, the stewards and bailiffs and armies of dependents on the great estates, who did all the work at home while the lord was away at the wars or at the halls of Westminster. If the century produced no great administrator or statesman, it did create a whole class of men throughout the country trained in practical affairs, doing an admirable work of local government, active, enterprising, resolute, public-spirited, disciplined in the best of all schools for political service. If there was no great writer, the new world of the middle class was patiently teaching itself, founding its schools, learning its primary rules of etiquette and its simple maxims of morals, reading its manuals of agriculture or law or history, practising its Latin rhymes, and building up in its own fashion from new beginnings a learning which the aristocratic class had been too proud, too indifferent, or too remote to hand on to it.[43] If no religious revival shook the country, the new society was solving in its own way the problem of helping the sick and poor;[44] it was earnest in religious observance, it was framing its English litanies and devising its own plans for teaching the people an intelligent devotion.[45] The burghers began to perform in the national economy the work which in earlier centuries had been performed by the great monastic societies. The extension of trade and manufacture had fallen into their hands; they were busied in the gathering together and storing up of the national wealth.[46] They gave to labour a new dignity in social life and a new place in the national councils. From the towns came a perpetual protest against war and disorder; throughout the troubles of the fifteenth century, civil war, court intrigues, the tyranny of usurpers and the plots of the vanquished, local raids of private revenge or of land hunger, their influence was always thrown on the side of peace and quietness. Art found in them patrons; illuminators and painters, architects and bell-founders, the makers of delicate shrines and images,[47] engravers of seals, goldsmiths and workers in brass, whether of English birth or brought from foreign parts, prospered within their gates; while their harpers and minstrels doubtless had a part in the musical developement of the country at a time when English artists set the fashion of the best music as far as the court of Burgundy.[48] They laid in fact the foundations of a new English society. The men of the New Learning, the men of the Reformation, the men who revealed the New World, were men who had been formed under the influences of the fifteenth century.

All this activity was the outcome of the great industrial and commercial revolution which was passing over the country. Until the middle of the fourteenth century, England had been to Europe what Australia is to-day—a country known only as the provider of the raw material of commerce.[49] At the close of the fifteenth century she had taken her place as a centre of manufactures, whose finished goods were distributed in all the great markets of the Mediterranean and of the Northern Seas. It is no wonder that during a change which transformed the country from a land of agricultural villages into a land of manufacturing towns, and opened for her the mighty struggle to become the carrier of the world’s commerce, the whole energy of her people, thrown into a single channel, should be absorbed in accomplishing their enormous task. Every one was honestly busy in learning either how to make or how to sell, and in conquering the difficulties that beset traders as they strove to push their way into the world’s market on equal or, if possible, more than equal terms with competitors who had long held unquestioned supremacy.

From the twelfth century wool had been the one great export of England, and the one great source of wealth for nobles, churchmen, farmers, even kings. So important was its sale that statesmen very early saw the necessity of securing for the national Exchequer a share in the profits of the main national trade; and in aid of the royal treasury they devised in the first half of the thirteenth century a system which was quite peculiar to England, the organization of the Staple.[50]

The Staple was an appointed place to which alone certain goods might be brought for sale, raw materials such as wool, wool-fells, skins, lead, or tin, of which wool was far the most important. Fixed for the first hundred years in some foreign town, generally in Bruges, it was shifted from place to place by Edward the Third, who from 1353 made various experiments as to establishing it in England; but finally about 1390, Calais was decided upon as the most advantageous spot. Thither every dealer had to carry his wares (unless he was ready to pay a high tax to the Crown, or to buy at the King’s price a license for free trading); and he must carry them along certain appointed routes only—from Lincoln by St. Botolph, from Norwich by Yarmouth, from Westminster by London, from Canterbury by Sandwich, from Winchester by Southampton, as the government in its wisdom might decide. In a kind of secondary sense these places where the wool was gathered for export thus became towns of the Staple, and certain officers, Mayors and Aldermen of the Staple were appointed to control their trade. The merchants’ goods, first weighed at the point of departure, must be weighed again at the port where they were shipped, and sealed with the seal of the Mayor of the Staple, while to check fraud there was an elaborate system of official papers to be sent to the Treasury in London and to the Staple in Calais for every such transaction of weighing and toll-taking. Every possible precaution was taken to maintain the position of the merchants in the European market by rules which practically forced the wool into the hands of foreign and not native buyers, so that English traders complained that their interests were sacrificed to courting the patronage of the Continent. If, for example, the chief Staple town was for any reason moved from over sea to England, native dealers were absolutely forbidden to export any Staple wares, so that foreigners might be forced or encouraged to come and take part in the trade. Foreign dealers were allowed to vote along with them for officials, and so late as 1445 the English merchants vainly prayed that no Stapler might take part in election of Mayor or Constable of the Staple unless he had ten sacks of wool cocketed at Calais.

In thus forcing all the export trade of the country through one narrow channel the first purpose of the State was merely to provide a convenient method of gathering customs into the Exchequer; and in course of time it further discovered that this trading system might be used as a weapon against foreign peoples in case of quarrel. But the very last object of the Staple organization was the convenience of the traders. Nor had the merchants themselves any illusions in this respect. To them the Staple seemed at its beginning contrary to the liberties of Magna Charta;[51] and a long experience taught them how its provisions might keep them shut in between the rapacity of those in authority and the hatred of the farmers who produced the wool which they sold.[52] They could however still wring a rich advantage out of superficial calamity—the advantage to be found in monopoly and corporate privilege—and this was developed with consummate art. The wool trade gathered into their hands was hedged round with monopolies and regulations, protected by fixed prices and times of sale. The concourse of customers at Calais was diligently maintained; no buyer was allowed to order his work through a commission house, so that traders might be forced to come to the market in person and do their business. By the charter of Edward the Third a Mayor and twenty-four Aldermen chosen by the whole body of merchants absolutely ruled the Staple trade, appointed officers, supervised markets, made regulations as to the treatment of foreigners, the duties of innkeepers, or the general conduct of business, and administered justice according to the Law Merchant with a sworn jury of foreigners or English or both together, according to the case to be tried.[53] And since the governing body had general control beyond Calais itself over all English merchants, not only in Bruges but throughout Flanders, while they governed in England through their local officers, the power of the Staple extended far and wide and brought all the scattered merchants under one general organization.[54] Formidable through their wealth and power, they could command the support of English kings and Burgundian dukes against rival traders. The profits to be made at Calais tempted the landowners at home,[55] and all who were wealthy enough to pay the required dues and fees flocked into their body, till the great association at last included all rich wool-growers and shut out only the poor farmers and people of no account in the country. Their monopoly was so complete, and their discipline so effective, that they could absolutely dictate prices; and a judicious pooling system took away any temptation on the part of the members to break the ranks.[56] At last against the original intentions of legislators they even got into their own hands the carrying of the export trade, and so long as wool remained the chief export of England 80 per cent. of this trade passed through their hands.

But so far as the State was concerned all this elaborate system for the protection of the wool-trade had simply grown out of the fundamental conception of the Staple as a fruitful source of supply for the royal treasury; and this theory was carried out to its logical issues. A fixed sum was demanded from the merchants year by year which they had to pay whether their trade was good or bad; while in their mercantile dealings they were terribly hampered by a host of regulations issued as to the mint in Calais, and invented by financiers who from the middle of the fourteenth century were haunted by alarms as to a possible dearth of gold and silver, and arbitrarily used the Staple as a means of forcing the flow of precious metal into England.[57] Nor was the drain of taxation at all times legal and regular. Merchants paid money down for the protection and favour of the king in reiterated loans or gifts, whether free or forced. The Captain of Calais, as head of the only standing army which the English kings then possessed, advanced a kind of public claim on the Staplers’ wealth for the security of his soldiers’ pay; and the merchants had many a time good reason to tremble for their wool, and might cry in vain for redress if their whole store was confiscated to pay the soldiers’ arrears of two or three years, or if militant lords “shifted with the Staple of Calais” for £18,000 or so for costs of war.[58]

All these burdens however could be borne so long as business prospered in their hands. If a Parliament like that of 1258, or a great statesman like Simon de Montfort, urged that England should herself become an independent and self-supporting centre of manufactures, these seemed as idle words to monopolists dealing in wool with command of the world’s market, who saw no need to forsake their easy path to wealth at a moment when the growth of manufactures in the Netherlands opened a vast market for English produce. In the time of Edward the Third it is said that 30,000 sacks of wool were shipped every year from English ports.[59]

But before the reign of Edward had closed, the exporters of wool knew that they had fallen on evil days. Trade began to slip from their grasp. The revenue they paid from their profits to the King’s Exchequer fell in the few years from 1391 to 1411 to one-fifth of its former value,[60] and was still calculated at this melancholy fifth in 1449. Instead of the thirty thousand sacks which they yearly counted in the fourteenth century, they could not at the close of the fifteenth century collect more than 8,624 sacks, and in the last year of Henry the Eighth even this number had shrunk to under 5,000.[61] Taxes which lay comparatively lightly on them in happy days, fell as an intolerable burden when their warehouses lay empty, and their ranks were thinned by bankruptcy and desertion.[62] At the very moment when all England was being rapidly turned into a land of sheep pastures for the endless production of wool, the great company of the wool traders was finally and irrevocably ruined.

The wool, in fact, was being sold at home, and out of the ruin of the merchants of the Staple the cloth-makers sucked no small advantage. For the great revolution in trade was rapidly being completed—the revolution by which England was turned from being a country whose chief business was exporting wool into a country whose chief business was exporting cloth.[63] The people had indeed long manufactured rough cloth for common use.[64] But during the reigns of the three Edwards the idea had constantly gained ground that by working up their own raw material[65] Englishmen might easily retain for themselves the profits which foreigners had till now secured, and manufacturers were undoubtedly doing a considerable export trade in the middle of the fifteenth century.[66] Half a century later, in 1411, the very year when the subsidy on wool fell to a fifth, broad-cloths are first mentioned in an Act of Parliament; and from this time they became the chief cloths of trade. As though they had been for a while half forgotten by the Exchequer, the exporters of cloth found themselves free from all subsidy tax and only obliged to pay to the indifferent authorities tolls that amounted to less than two per cent. for natives and merchants of the Hanse occupied in the trade, and less than eight per cent. for aliens; and complacently measured this sum with the tolls of the Staplers—the thirty-three per cent. paid by merchants of the Staple, or seventy per cent. by all other traders,[67] a tax which perhaps explains why in 1424 Parliament had to forbid the carrying of sheep over sea to shear them there. The manufacturers, too, made alliance with the discontented wool-growers. A farmer who could sell his wool next door, did not trouble to send it with vexatious formalities over sea to Calais; and in course of time the cloth merchants insisted upon laws which gave to them during certain seasons the first choice of the wool before the Staplers were even allowed to enter the market.[68]

Under these circumstances trade grew apace. Carracks of Genoa carried English cloths to the shores of the Black Sea; galleys of Venice fetched them to the pits of the Venetian dyers; merchants of the Hanseatic League sold them in the fair of Novgorod; English traders travelled with them to the inland markets of Prussia, and gave them in exchange for casks of herrings in Denmark. At the close of the century the English Merchant Adventurers exported about 60,000 pieces of cloth yearly; and in the beginning of the sixteenth century the cloth dealers boasted that never before in the memory of man was so much cloth sold out of England. The 60,000 bales rose in 1509 to 84,789 pieces, and in 1547 to 122,354;[69] and the dealers claimed further gratitude and admiration of their country for the fact that they had “by their industry” raised by a fifth the price demanded from the foreigner.[70] Meanwhile the manufacturer was also getting hold of the home market, as the great religious corporations and landowners who had once provided on their own estates for all local wants recognized the new condition of things, and instead of making cloth at home as of old, sent every year far and wide across the country to the great clothing centres to buy material for the household liveries,[71] seeking from one place the coarse striped cloth of the old pattern and from another the goods of the new fashion. The fine black copes of worsted were favourite gifts of benefactors to churches, and a patriotic Norfolk gentleman, after seeing a “tippet of fine worsted which is almost like silk,” decided to “make his doublet all worsted for worship of Norfolk.”[72]

Nor was the growth of manufacturing enterprise confined to the making of cloth. For a couple of centuries the iron trade had made of the Weald the Black Country of those days, and had stirred the Forest of Dean with the din of its seventy-two moveable forges; and now, what with the metals and what with the coal of the country, “the merchants of England maintain and say that the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above.”[73] In the reign of Edward the Fourth when there was a riot among the Mendip miners, and the Lord Chief Justice went down to “set a concord and peace upon the forest of Mendip,” it is said ten thousand people appeared before him at the place of trial.[74] But for all this miners could no longer keep pace with the demands of the country, now that new industries on all sides required metal that had once gone to supply the wants of the farmer only; and though stores were brought from Sweden and Spain, the price of iron increased to double what it had been before the Plague.[75] Shipbuilders at the end of the fourteenth century were fitting out vessels for foreign as well as for English buyers. English gunsmiths began to send out of their workshops brazen guns and bombards superior to anything made in France, and which were said to have given England its success in the French war under Henry the Fifth.[76] A number of towns, big and little, boasted of their bell-foundries, as for example London, Salisbury, Norwich, Gloucester, Bridport, and others.[77] The copper-workers of Dinant had traded with England since the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth century had an entrepôt at Blackwall; but in 1455 the founders set up their industry in England, stealing away secretly from Dinant to profit by the cheaper labour and ready sale in this country.[78] Flemish experts taught to Englishmen the art of brickmaking, and native builders were setting up throughout the country the first brick houses that had been seen in it since the departure of the Romans.[79] A whole series of industrial experiments proclaimed the enthusiasm with which the people accepted the challenge to secure for themselves the profits of foreign manufacturers. Artificers often more ambitious than skilful tried to establish a native industry of glass painting.[80] Instead of fetching from abroad carpets and the tapestry used for churches, manufactories were set up at Ramsey,[81] whence came perhaps also some of the “counterfeit Arras” which adorned the humbler tradesmen’s homes. Frames “ordained and made for the making of silk” were at work;[82] lace-makers and ribbon weavers begged the protection of the government; and English workers sent into the market large quantities of the linen called Holland from its first home. The export of raw material fell altogether out of fashion. Traders no longer carried skins over sea undressed to be prepared by foreign labour, but had the work done by English artizans at home. And whereas at the beginning of the fifteenth century merchants brought beer from Prussia to England, at its close they were carrying beer from London to Flanders.[83]

What with the inland and the outland trade, riches gathered into the hands of the merchants with bewildering rapidity, and with results which alarmed good conservatives. A statute of Parliament passed in 1455 lamented the good old days when Norfolk and Norwich used to employ only six or eight attorneys at the King’s Court, “in which time great tranquillity reigned in the said city and counties.” This “tranquillity” was broken by the manufacturing and export trade, for now a body of eighty or more lawyers busily frequented every fair and market and assembly, moving and inciting people to lawsuits, and while having nothing to live on but their attorneyship yet prospered so well that a wise legislature had to order that Norfolk should henceforth as of old have only six attorneys and Norwich two.[84] Nor does it seem that Norwich was exceptionally wicked, even though in Piers Ploughman Covetousness is represented with a “Norfolk nose,”[85] for about the same time we read in Nottingham of twenty-four rolls written within and without with the pleas concerning trading questions of a single year. The whole country in fact shared in traders’ profits from king to peasant. It is calculated that in the reign of Henry the Eighth English exports so far exceeded imports as to bring about £50,000 yearly into the country, and the balance of trade inclined yet more strongly in favour of England under Henry the Seventh.[86] Not only did the king lay up vast treasure, but the very goldsmiths’ shops in London were reported by a foreign traveller to contain more precious metals than all those of Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice taken together.[87] So far as the middle class is concerned evidence of accumulating wealth is to be found on every side, and the masses of the people in spite of the drain of war taxation shared in the general prosperity. In the middle of the fifteenth century Chief Justice Fortescue contrasts their state with that of the French commons. “These drink water; they eat apples with bread right brown made of rye. They eat no flesh, but if it be right seldom a little lard, or of the entrails and heads of beasts slain for the nobles and merchants of the land. They wear no woollen but if it be a poor coat under their outermost garment made of great canvas and called a frock. Their hosen be of light canvas and pass not their knee, wherefore they be gartered and their thighs bare. Their wives and children go barefoot; they may in none otherwise live.... Their nature is wasted and the kind of them brought to nought. They go crooked and be feeble, not able to fight nor to defend the realm; nor they have weapon nor money to buy them weapon withal.... But blessed be God, this land is ruled under a better law; and therefore the people thereof be not in such penury, nor thereby hurt in their persons but they be wealthy and have all things necessary to the sustenance of nature.” “In France the people salt but little meat except their bacon, for they would buy little salt” unless the king’s officers went round and forced every household to take a certain measure, such as they thought reasonable. But “this rule would be sore abhorred in England, as well by the merchants that he wont to have their freedom in buying and selling of salt as by the people that use much to salt their meats.”[88]

An industrial revolution on such a scale as this brought a political revolution in its train. The English population, says a writer of about 1453, “consists of churchmen, nobles, and craftsmen, as well as common people.”[89] It was a novel and significant division. Traders and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their fellow politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save its middle class—a busy, hard, prosperous, pugnacious middle-class. Slowly emerging from its early obscurity, in this century it had arrived at power definitely, ostentatiously, carrying a proud look and a high stomach, intent on its own affairs, heedless of the Court, regardless of ministers save when it had to bribe them, irreverent to the noble, the “proud penniless with his painted sleeve,”[90] tolerant of ecclesiastics and monks only so long as they could be kept rigidly within their allotted religious functions.[91] Henceforth in the workshop and the market-place home politics and foreign affairs were discussed from a new point of view—the interest of the trader and the manufacturer; and the middle and working classes presently began to fling to the winds the old statecraft whose maxims had done service before their advent among the makers of the national policy.

In the matter of our foreign relations we see the drift of public thought and discussion reflected in a pamphlet by which one of the King’s ministers, Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, sought to appeal to the popular imagination and define our right attitude to continental peoples. His Libel (or Little Book) of English Policy, published about 1445, was clearly designed for the vulgar use.[92] Written, as the common taste of the day demanded, in rhyming form where the absence of poetic art and the inspiration of a plain common-sense constituted a double claim on public attention, it made its frank appeal to the prejudice of the stall-holder in the market and of the craftsman who lived by making his homely English wares—men who saw in foreign products articles whose sinful extravagance could only be matched by the worthlessness that distinguished all work not turned out by an Englishman. With vigorous strokes the Bishop sketched the outlines of England’s trading interests with every nation in Europe, and at the end of each paragraph passionately drove home his moral. Laying hold of the fundamental axiom that the sole and undivided concern of England in all her foreign relations was the protection of her commerce, he maintained that so long as she kept a firm hold on the narrow seas between Dover and Calais, she might rule the trade of the world. For there all commerce from north to south or south to north had to pass through the strait gate held by her sentinels on either side; so that while an inexorable fate drove the nations into her net, England safely hidden behind her wall of defence, the stormy Channel, need have no care so long as she looked well to her navy and kept it swift to seize her prey and strong to drive her enemies back from looking over the wall. At its very outset the commercial society had thus its Cobden to preach after his kind the doctrine of non-intervention and the kingdom of the seas.

The exponents of a new home policy pressed hard on the heels of the founders of a new diplomacy. About thirty years after the Libel of English Policy, another “Libel” was composed in imitation of the first tract.[93] Less pretentious and elaborate than the first, the new poem was probably the work of some person of less exalted rank, whose converse had been with the working men of the country rather than with merchants of London or peers of the realm and ministers of the King, and who was far more troubled about our industrial policy at home than our commercial policy abroad. His view of our position was also finely optimistic. For, seeing that foreign traders were bound, whether they would or no, to come to us either for wool or for cloth, and thus depended on England for one of the first necessaries of life, we, who were put in this happy position of universal provider, were clearly “by God’s ordinance,” destined first to satisfy ourselves, and then “to rule and govern all Christian kings,” and make paynims also “full tame”;[94] and so “of all people that be living on the ground” were most bound to pray and to please God. The recognition of these inestimable blessings should bring of course its corresponding sense of our duty to sell our goods as dear as we could; to “restrain straitly” the export of wool so that “the commons of this land might have work to the full”;[95] and in any case to export only the coarsest wool, on the working of which the margin of profit must be small—but a fifth in fact of what might be made on good material. “The price is simple, the cost is never the less; they that worked such wool in wit be like an ass.” Above all, the working men must be protected by law in the conditions of their labour, so that “their poor living and adversity might be altered into wealth, riches, and prosperity,” and that for the profit of the whole realm. The growth of industry was already bringing in its train a modern theory that “the whole wealth of the body of the realm riseth out of the labours and works of the common people.... Surely the common weal of England must rise out of the works of the common people.”[96]

From this time therefore the policy of England was to be the policy of a great industrial state. But the new way on which its people were thus striving to enter was not to be a way of good-will at home or of harmony with the nations. Merchant and burgher might remain, as they did, absolutely indifferent to all schemes of mere military aggrandizement[97] such as the conquest of France, so that after the taking of Bordeaux by the French in 1445 not a single cry was raised for the recovery of our lost possessions; and they might rather look for the extension of their trade to the bold enterprising genius of trading companies and pirates exulting in freedom from royal interference and military restrictions, and only calling on the State for diplomatic aid in the case where this proved convenient for the winning of a commercial treaty. But the secret of peace was not yet found, nor was the settlement of industrial frontiers to prove simpler than the definition of military borders.

For as yet England had wakened no jealousies simply because she had never been a competitor with other nations; but obvious trouble lay in wait for her people so soon as they were fairly swept into the commercial struggle of the Continent, and introduced by their manufactures to their first real trade disputes. The weaver of the Netherlands, for example, had gladly welcomed the English trader as the inexhaustible provider of his raw material; but it was another matter when the Englishman came as a rival manufacturer laden with bales of cloth, grudging the old supply of wool, and setting up stalls in Flemish markets to seduce away his ancient customers. The Flemish towns had seen an end to their prosperity, and towns in such a case were bitter in negotiations with their rivals.[98] Bruges which in the thirteenth century had 40,000 looms, was at the end of the fifteenth century offering citizenship at a mere trifle to draw back inhabitants to its deserted streets; Ypres, which in 1408 had a population of from 80,000 to 100,000, and from 3,000 to 4,000 clothworkers, had in 1486 only from 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, and twenty-five to thirty cloth-factories; and in Ghent matters were little better. Against all the misery of a century of slow death in Flanders—a misery on which the English weaver throve and fattened—the doomed manufacturers set up hasty barriers on this side and on that, taxes and tolls and municipal ordinances and State decrees to shut English cloth out of Flanders, which were met by angry English rejoinders forbidding Flemish cloth in the English markets. Similar difficulties followed everywhere the appearance of the English trader with his goods. The Hanseatic League drove him out of Denmark, and the Teutonic Order banished him from Prussia. Moreover while disputes of manufacturers kept the North in a tumult, commercial quarrels disturbed the South, and English merchant vessels met the Genoese or the Venetians in the seas of the Levant to fight for the carrying trade of the Mediterranean. No limit was set to the pirate wars that raged from Syria to Iceland till a great statesman, Henry the Seventh, made his splendid attempt to discover through international treaties the means of securing a settled order for the new commercial state.

Nor was the question of home politics more easy of solution. Under the steady pressure of public feeling the government was gradually forced out of the early simplicity of its view of regulating commerce as a financial expedient in aid of the Treasury, and began to concern itself anxiously about the protection of industry in the interests of the community. Cloth manufacturers in particular entered on a period of protected security such as the Staplers had never known, when kings became the nursing fathers of their trade, and its prosperity was considered an absorbing charge to the government. But when Parliament began in 1463 (almost the very year in which the second “Libel” appeared) to concern itself very actively with industrial problems,[99] the question of trade legislation had already become extremely complex and difficult. As soon as the village weaver began to make cloth for the Prussian burgher or the trader of the Black Sea instead of for his next door neighbour, the old conditions of his trade became absolutely impossible. The whole industry was before long altogether re-organized both from the commercial and the manufacturing side. The exporting merchants, as we shall see later, drew together into a new and powerful association known as the Merchant Adventurers. Meanwhile the army of workmen at home was broken up into specialized groups of spinners, weavers, carders, fullers, shearers, and dyers. The seller was more and more sharply separated from the maker of goods. Managers and middlemen organized the manufacture and made provisions for its distribution and sale. The clothier provided the raw material, gave out the wool to be made up, and sold again to the draper.[100] And the draper “lived like a gentleman,” and sold to the big public, despising the lower forms of trade. Old-fashioned economists and timid conservatives looked on aghast at the accelerating changes, and declared that the country was being brought to certain ruin by the reckless race of its people to forsake handicrafts or the production of wealth, and press wholesale into the ranks of merchants or mere distributors.

With this division of labour and the quickened contest for profits, there started into life rival interests more than enough to break up the whole community into groups of warring factions. The “upper classes” generally, statesmen, treasury officials, nobles, the greater proprietors lay and ecclesiastical—in fact all the wealthy owners of flocks who could enter the company of the Staplers and share their profits—desired an abundant export of wool; while the small farmers and the yeomen, shut out by poverty from the association, and bitterly hostile to the wealthy monopolist, sided with the townsfolk to whom visions of wealth had first dawned in the manufacturing industries and the export of cloth, and who would gladly have kept all the wool of the country at home.[101] Merchants and manufacturers had their own special controversy, for while the foreign trader was boasting of his energy in raising the price of cloth, the middlemen and makers at home, whose whole interest lay in rapid sales, complained that people in the Netherlands would no longer buy English goods owing to the increased cost, and that the English towns were thus brought to destitution.[102] Moreover the great London merchants were making a determined effort to force the whole foreign trade of England through their warehouses in London, and to shut all channels of commerce save those provided by themselves;[103] and demanded that all cloth for the Netherlands, that is practically one-third of all the cloth then exported, must be carried by the maker to London, and there sold, as was averred, to the exporting merchants either for credit or below cost price.[104] Here of course they came into conflict with the local dealers who wanted frequent and convenient markets for their wares, and liberty to make their own bargain with foreign buyers visiting their town; for to the clothier this question of distribution was all-important, since it was in vain for him to increase production by machinery, or by the improved organization of labour, or by division of toil among groups of skilled artizans, unless he could find his profit in a corresponding developement of the means of sale. The exporting merchants had also a quarrel with the artizans, who naturally desired to keep the dressing and finishing of cloth in their own hands, while the merchants insisted on the advantages of a free trade in undressed cloth; in their judgement the cloth-dressers, seeking but their “singular and private wealth,” forgot that more men lived by making and selling cloth than by dressing it, and that therefore the rapid developement of exports by carrying out material in the rough to be finished in the Netherlands was really for the enriching of the whole realm.[105] These same dealers, however, looked more leniently on the “singular and private wealth” that went into their own pockets through the profits of the export trade, and also found themselves set at variance with the big public of consumers who were always anxiously on the watch against the raising of prices. At times the manufacturer had his grievances against the municipal authorities, whenever he found himself worried and fettered by the traditional wisdom of Town Councils, who for a variety of reasons of their own wanted to keep the ultimate control over his trade so as to draw a profit for the town. Lastly, the working class had begun to feel difficulties springing from the new methods of industrial organization, and troubles about wages and prices and the relation of employer to employed assailed the authorities both at Westminster and in the municipal councils. Artificers of all kinds, it was constantly declared, could no longer live of their occupation and were in great misery;[106] in fact, to judge by preambles to Statutes, and the loud complaints as to his condition, the working man believed himself to be in such bad case as to need all the aid of the State to keep him supplied with employment.

This old industrial revolution in short brought with it difficulties which bear to us the familiar look of our own constant and persevering visitors—visitors that force their entrance at every breach in the accustomed order by which trade is fenced round, and that appear as the unwelcome escort of every new form of industrial competition. Moreover, to add to the troubles of the mediæval legislator, the consumer of those days was always insisting on his vested right to the first consideration of the government, as the ultimate dictator for whose benefit the whole colossal structure of trade had been reared, and by whose approval alone it was allowed to remain at that ambitious elevation. With every fresh enterprise of manufacturer or merchant, the problem with which the law-makers had to deal became more subtle and complex. Driven hither and thither by the new conflict of public opinion and the passion of rival interests, baffled by the insoluble problem of how to frame laws which should benefit equally all the claimants for its aid, the government hesitatingly felt its way along an ill-defined path, veering from side to side according to the direction of the last impelling force. Even Edward the Fourth had no fixed policy of protection, and passed laws now on this side, now on that, as the imperious necessity of the moment seemed to demand.

But with a rapidly increasing trade, and with a House of Commons three-fourths of whose members were burghers personally concerned in these questions, it was impossible to stand still; and the new industrial legislation gradually became the expression not of the autocratic rule of kings, but of a self-conscious government of the people.[107] A long series of Statutes illustrates this great experiment. The new protection devised by burghers and merchants for the fostering of industry was altogether different from the old protection devised by a Court mainly occupied with the problem of re-filling an empty Treasury. The English manufacturer and the English working man were its recognized charge, and in their interest no measure was considered too heroic and no detail too insignificant, whether the matter in hand was the closing of English markets to a whole people, or the decision of how big a piece of leather it might be well in the interest of the shoemaking trade to allow the cobbler to buy for the patching of an old boot. All native trades were “protected” by laws which declared that none of the wares which Englishmen could manufacture at home might be imported from foreign parts, and that none of the raw material they used might be carried out unwrought, or even half finished, to be worked up abroad. The whole people, save a few of the “great estates” and mighty men, must go simply clad in honest goods of English make, and so save themselves from waste, and English workers from poverty. As to the long dispute about admitting foreigners to trade in England, in which the King and the people had ever been in strong opposition, that matter was now more and more regulated according to the desires of the traders. England ceased to be the acquiescent host of guests who, in the vulgar opinion, came to thrive and fatten on her wealth; and a determined resistance was declared against the competition of strangers, till the Hanseatic trader scarcely dared show his face outside the strong walls of his Steel-yard citadel, and the Lombard vainly struggled to protect his last privileges from the assaults of his enemies.

The theory of State protection of industry grew fast, and by the time of Henry the Seventh its triumph was complete, and the foundations of a new national policy were firmly laid—a policy which was to be largely guided by industrial interests and to represent the claims of an elaborate industrial organization established by law and built into vast proportions by international agreement. The new relation of a sovereign to his people in such a State was seen at the end of the century in the first peaceful king of England whose subjects had submitted to his rule, the only English monarch till then who had not been a strong leader in war and who had yet escaped murder or imprisonment at the hands of his people. It has been the singular misfortune of one of our greatest rulers, Henry the Seventh, to be the first sovereign of the modern pattern who ruled over Englishmen, and his memory has in consequence come down to us shorn of all the conventional glory that tradition had until then declared proper to royalty. He has remained in history as we see him in one of his portraits, a dim obscure figure, sadly looking out from the background of a canvas where the big blustering figure of his son, set squarely in front, seems to elbow all virtue save his own out of recognized existence. But in the delicate, careworn, refined face with its suggestion of unrecorded self-effacement, in the penetrating intelligence devoted to the apprehending of the new problems and the infinite labour spent in solving them, in the inscrutable acquiescence with which, “loving to seal up his own dangers,”[108] he carried the burdens that were henceforth to fall to the lot of kings, and the unflinching resolution of his methods, we recognize a new type of royal dignity, and measure the work demanded of rulers who saw the power of mere personal dominion founded on force gradually passing from their hands, and in the changing order of the world were called to take up the leadership of the new commonwealth that was to be.

CHAPTER III

THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

A French proverb of the twelfth century tells us what the world thought in old days of the origin and uses of a navy. “Point de marine sans pelerinages,” men said, seeing in pious penitents its means of support, and in the shrines of St. James or St. Peter or the Holy Sepulchre its destinations. Trade in those days avoided the way of the ocean, and followed the well-known land routes across the heart of Europe, and where the land came to an end took the very shortest way over the water to the next point of solid earth.

And slowly as commerce by sea developed in Europe it developed yet more slowly among the English. All goods that came to them from abroad were carried to their shores by powerful confederations of foreign merchants who controlled the great continental trade routes of the north-west. The “men of the Empire” or the Hanse of Cologne, masters of the highway of the Rhine and of Cologne, the great seaport of the Empire, commanded the whole Eastern trade which then for the most part passed through Germany.[109] The Flemish Hanse of London,[110] which included all the great towns of Picardy and Flanders, and perhaps at one time even Paris itself, carried over sea the wares that were gathered from half of Europe to the great fairs of Champagne. Through these two great companies England first exchanged her wool for certain necessaries such as salt and fish and iron and wood, and for a few luxuries such as spices and silks from the Levant.

And even when commerce swept beyond the narrow seas and passed out of the hands of the men of Cologne and the Flemish Hanse, it was not Englishmen who took their place. If the waterway of the Rhine was forsaken of half its trade as merchants of Northern Italy abandoned the old route across Europe, and instead of sending their goods to the warehouses of Cologne despatched fleets through the Straits of Gibraltar to the ports of the Channel and to Bruges; if the fairs of Champagne languished when armies encamped on its plains and turned them into battle-fields, and the Flemish Hanse of London slowly sank into insignificance—it was only to make way for other competitors of foreign blood. Commerce with the East through the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay was seized by the ships of Florence and Genoa and Venice.[111] The towns of the German Ocean and the Baltic gathered under the banner of Lübeck into a new Hanseatic League[112] which broke the supremacy of Cologne, claimed the whole carrying trade of the Northern seas, and opened a new line of communication with the Levant. Novgorod became the centre of the Baltic trade, as Alexandria was the centre of the Mediterranean traffic, and the merchants of the Teutonic Hanse offered to the English trader the silks and drugs of the East, with skins and hemp and timber of Novgorod, and the metals of Bohemia and Hungary.

The Mediterranean merchant was the great minister to the growing luxury of mediæval England. “The estates and lords of the realm” and bishops and prelates and parish priests bought from him cloth of gold, rich brocades, vestments of white damask powdered with gold of Venice,[113] and precious work of goldsmiths and jewellers, new-fashioned glass, and many other fine things—articles that “might be forborn for dear and deceivable,” grumbled the English dealer in homely goods of native manufacture. The whole luxurious traffic down to the “apes and japes and marmosettes tailed, nifles, trifles, that little have availed,”[114] roused the bitter jealousy of the home trader; and even statesmen foretold with alarm the perils that must come to the nation from a commerce which filled the land with fancy baubles and vanities, and carried away in exchange the precious wealth of the people, their cloth and wool and tin, sucking the thrift out of the land as the wasp sucks honey from the bee. But in spite of the hostility of English dealers needy kings anxious to win favour with the great banking companies of Italy diligently encouraged the trade; and (always in consideration of adequate tolls for privileges) freed merchants who came from beyond the Straits from the vexatious control of the Staple;[115] allowed their vessels to put into port undisturbed at Southampton instead of being forced to go to Calais; and their agents to travel through the country and buy and sell at will.

It was Florence which in the first half of the fourteenth century took the lead in the trade of the Mediterranean with England,[116] and whose merchants lent to Edward the Third the money which alone enabled him to carry on the war with France. But when Edward declared himself unable to pay his debts and repudiated the whole of the Florentine loans ruin fell on the city; its trade was paralyzed, and commercial disasters ended in political revolution. Bankers of Lübeck took the place of its financiers as the Rothschilds of the mediæval world; and ship-masters of Genoa seized the commerce which fell from its hands. Though the winning of the port of Leghorn in 1421 brought a fresh outburst of trading activity to Florence,[117] though its merchants established depots and banks and commercial settlements in all the great towns of the North, though cargoes of wool were again shipped to its harbour (one English merchant alone in 1437 selling to an agent of the Albertine Company wool to the value of almost £12,000),[118] the supremacy of the Republic in the Mediterranean trade was never restored.

For its great competitors, Genoa and Venice, were now fairly in the field. Through their station on the Black Sea the Genoese held until the Turkish conquest the chief market in the East for European cloth; and their fleets laden with cloth of gold, silk and spices of the Levant, with alum and mastick from the subject islands of Chios and Phocœa, with the woad of Toulouse, and the wines of Provence, sailed to Southampton to exchange their cargoes for English cloth, which they sometimes carried back direct to the Black Sea, and sometimes took on to sell at the Flemish markets, and so make a double profit on their journey.[119] For their world-wide business the Bank of St. George was founded at Genoa in 1407, with a system of credit notes of acknowledgement for money deposited which could be transferred from hand to hand.

The great galleys of Venice, however, were formidable rivals of the carracks of Genoa. For Venice, hidden away in the Adriatic, with nothing of its own save salt to offer, showed in perhaps a higher degree than any other Italian State what might be achieved by a lavish system of State protection.[120] It was the State that built its merchant fleets; the State that leased out the vessels every year to the highest bidders for trading purposes; the State that ordered the conduct of their business for the greatest public wealth; the State that protected them from competition by forbidding its citizens to send out their spices by the overland route, or to take in cloth from England that had not been carried in Venetian galleys by long sea. By the authority of its government Venice had been made the emporium of the Mediterranean, and Italian traders obediently carried cloths or tin or bales of skins from England to Venice, and from Venice to Corfu. Fortune favoured the most astute among her wooers, and showered on Venice the coveted blessings of trade. Her ships travelled far, and Italian merchants who had once been only known in England as financial agents employed by the Papal Court to collect the tribute due to Rome, now flocked to the island on business of a very different character. The harbour of Southampton was crowded with galleys, in which cunning tailors sat day and night cutting the bales of material bought into garments, so as to save the export dues on cloth.[121] In the time of Richard the Second a Genoese merchant who had leased the castle as a storehouse for his wares proposed to the King to make of Southampton the greatest trading port of the west, and he might well have carried out his promise if the London merchants had not prudently sent a messenger to murder him at his own door.[122] Notwithstanding the inhospitable and grudging welcome given by London itself the Lombards found means by the King’s help to maintain a thriving settlement, and in the fifteenth century the Venetian Consuls gathered letters for the regular mail to Venice once every month.[123]

What the Venetians were to the commerce of the Mediterranean that the merchants of the Hanseatic League were to the commerce of the Baltic and the German Ocean. A double strength had been given to the confederation of towns which Lübeck had drawn under its banner by its union with the Teutonic Order—an order which had originated in Bremen and Lübeck and then settled on the Baltic to create the trading prosperity of Danzig and Elbing. These Prussian cities, while they owned the Grand Master of the Order of Teutonic Knights as their feudal chief, were still dependent on Lübeck.[124] And with them were joined a multitude of towns so imposing in their very numbers alone that when the ambassadors of the Hanseatic League in England in 1376 were asked for a list of the members who made up their vast association, they answered scornfully that surely even they themselves could not be supposed to remember the countless names of towns big and little in all kingdoms in whose name they spoke.[125] Under the strangely diverse lordship of Kings, Dukes, Margraves, Counts, Barons, or Archbishops, they found a link in their common union in the Holy Roman Empire, and ever counted England, cut off from that great commonwealth, as a “foreign” nation.[126]

In war or in commercial negotiations this mighty confederation, with its members disciplined to act together as one body, dealt proudly as a nation on equal terms with other peoples, and in the strength of its united corporation it was in fact a far more formidable force than the jealous and isolated Republics of the South. Denmark was laid at its feet by a triumphant war. Norway was held in complete subjection. It forced the English traders in the North Sea to bow to its policy and fight at its bidding. So powerful was the League in the fourteenth century, that when Edward the Third had ruined the banks of Florence it was the merchants of Lübeck who became his money-lenders; they were made the farmers of the English wool-tax; they rented the mines of the northern counties and the tin-works of Cornwall.[127] The whole carrying trade of the northern seas lay in their hands. It was vessels of the Hanse that sailed from Hull or from Boston to Bergen with English wares and brought back cargoes of salt fish;[128] that fetched iron from Sweden, and wine from the Rhine vineyards, and oranges and spices and foreign fruits from Bruges; and that carried out the English woollen cloths to Russia and the Baltic ports, and brought back wood, tin, potash, skins, and furs. Within the strong defences of their Steel-yard[129] on the banks of the Thames by London Bridge, the advance guard of the League lived under a sort of military discipline, and held their own by force of the King’s protection against the hatred of London traders and burghers, which now and then burst into violent riots.

Thus throughout the fourteenth century it was strangers who held the carrying trade to England along the two great commercial routes—the passage by Gibraltar to the harbours of Italy and thence to Alexandria, and the passage by the Sound to the Baltic ports and so to Novgorod. All the profits of transit as of barter were secured by alien dealers who travelled from village to village throughout the country in search of wool or cloth to freight the foreign vessels that lay in every harbour—vessels bigger and better built for commerce than any of which England could boast.[130] Moreover, the English government was content to have it so, and Kings who wanted to build up alliances for their foreign wars, or to replenish their failing treasury at home, in all commercial regulations showed their favour mainly to foreign traders and left the native shipowner to do as best he could for himself. Once, indeed, in the reign of Richard the Second, a solitary attempt was made to encourage the shipping industry, and the first Navigation Act passed in England ordered “that none of the King’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandise in going out or coming within the realm of England but only in ships of the King’s liegance.”[131] This Act, however, after the fashion of the time, was only to be in force for a few months; and after very brief experience Parliament wisely decided that the law need only be obeyed when “the ships in the parts where the said merchants shall happen to dwell be found able and sufficient ... and otherwise it shall be lawful to hire other ships convenient.”[132] With this the experiment of State protection came to an end for the next century; and against the great confederations and State-protected navies of the Continent English merchants were left to wage singly as best they could their private and adventurous war.

English shipping, indeed, so far as it existed at all, may be said to have existed in spite of the law. There was no navy whatever in any national sense. A few balingers[133] and little coasting vessels lay in the various ports—some of them belonging to private merchants, some to the town communities—and when the King wanted ships for the public service, whether it was to fish for herrings for his household or to fight the French, he simply demanded such vessels as he needed in any harbour, kept them and their crews waiting on his will for weeks or months, sent them wherever he chose, and laid all costs on the town or the owner’s shoulders.[134] Moreover, the unlucky merchant forfeited his ship to the Crown for any accident that might happen on it—if a man died, or fell overboard, or if it struck another vessel or touched a rock. The masters might suffer ruin, or in mere self-defence give up the owning of ships, and the sailors might forsake the sea and turn to other occupations to escape being impressed for war: government interference to regulate wages only sent men to take service at more tempting pay in foreign boats.[135] We cannot wonder that towards the end of the fourteenth century it seems to have been thought more profitable under these conditions to make ships for others than to own them, and that builders were selling their vessels to aliens, and these aliens “by reason of the excessive profits thence arising have often sold the same to the enemies of the realm.”[136] Henry the Fifth, indeed, proposed to build up a royal navy, but his plans were cut short by his death and his ships sold under Henry the Sixth, and matters went on as before.[137]

English traders, however, did not sit down idly to wait for State protection.[138] Already in the middle of the fourteenth century a new life was stirring in the seaports, and before long every one of them began to send its contingent to the host that went out for the conquest of the sea. Towns big and little were creating or strengthening their fleets, made up either of the “common barges” of the community, or the private ships of their trading companies. Shipbuilding was dear in England from the want of wood in the country as well as of iron suitable for the purpose, and cost, if we may believe a contemporary observer, twice as much as in France.[139] So poor communities like Lydd that could not afford big ventures made shift by hiring vessels from Britanny, Sandwich, or London, and fitting them out as economically as might be, with an old wine-pipe sawed in half to serve for a bread barrel.[140] On the other hand, prosperous ports like Lynn added large sums year after year to the town budget for shipping.[141] A far poorer place, Romney, spent £73 on its common barge in 1381; in 1396 another was bought and fitted out for £82; and a third in 1400 at over £40; while a few years later yet another ship was procured for the Bordeaux trade. These vessels sailed to Scotland and Newcastle and Norfolk and the ports of the Southern coasts; or to Ireland for wood, to Amiens for sea-coal, to Britanny for salt, to Flanders for the wares of the Levant, to Southern France for cargoes of wine, and oil, and wood. In 1400 “the new barge” carried forty-two tuns of wine from Rochelle; in 1404 it brought forty tuns besides oil and wood, and in a later voyage carried fifty-six tuns.[142] Everywhere the trading temper laid hold upon the people. In Rye, where the inhabitants had been wont to pay their yearly oblations punctually on the 8th of September, there came a time when so many of them were abroad, some attending fairs, some fishing in remote seas, “that Divine worship is not then observed by them as it ought to be, and the due oblations are withheld and hardly ever paid;” and the day of offering had to be changed.[143]

The more important side of the movement, however, was the growth of private enterprise as shown in the associations of merchants formed in all the bigger towns for trading purposes. Already in the time of Richard the Second there was a “Fellowship of Merchants” in Bristol who directed the whole foreign trade and the import of foreign merchandise, and who even then did business on a very considerable scale, for when in 1375 Bristol ships laden with salt were captured and burnt in the Channel the losses were set down at £17,739. Before fifty years were over their trading vessels were known in every sea from Syria to Iceland. The richer merchants built up by degrees little fleets of ten or twelve vessels varying from 400 to 900 tons; and one of them, William Cannynges, an ancestor of Lord Canning, who in 1461 had ten ships afloat (one The Nicholas of the Tower from whence came Suffolk’s headsman), employed 800 seamen and 100 carpenters, masons, and artificers.[144] Nor was Bristol singular in its activity. The Guild of Merchants at Lynn rivalled that of York. “With the Divine assistance, and the help of divers of the King’s subjects,” John Taverner of Hull in 1449 built a great “carrack” on the scale of the mighty ships of Genoa and Venice. Far and wide the movement spread till the brief tale of 169 merchants which had been counted up by Edward the Third when he wanted to borrow money from them, expanded towards the close of the fifteenth century into a company of more than 3,000 traders engaged in sea-commerce alone.[145]

From whatever town they came these traders with foreign ports were all alike known to the men of the fourteenth century by one significant name—the Adventurers. For since there was but one protected industry in England, the Staple, every merchant who was not a Stapler was a free Adventurer. All trade that lay outside the Staple was for his winning.[146] Bound to no place or company or government or laws, he was left to discover for himself a corner in the world’s market, and to protect himself on sea and land. A perfectly indifferent State gave him no help in his first ventures to become the carrier of English commerce, and vouchsafed no encouragement to shipbuilder or master by offers of special favours or grants of reduced tolls on a first voyage.[147] He sailed out of port into a sea of peril. Pirates of all nations, Vitalien Brüder in the Baltic and the North Sea, Likedelers of Calais,[148] Breton cruisers, vigorous monopolists of the Hanse, outraged merchants of the South burning for vengeance, lay in wait on every quarter of the horizon. In 1395 Norfolk traders were robbed of £20,000 “by the Queen’s men of Denmark, the which was an undoing to many of the merchants of Norfolk for evermore afterwards;”[149] and frequent and piteous were the complaints that went up to the Privy Council from English shippers begging redress and protection as outrage followed outrage.[150] But a State which was without any organized naval force was powerless to establish order. Whether it gave the charge of keeping the peace on the high seas to the merchants themselves, or to the Staplers, or by special commission to the Admirals[151] of the coast, or to a committee of lords, or to the foremost among the offenders, the Captain of Calais himself, its experiments were equally vain. In self-protection town barges and merchants’ ships sailed in companies under an admiral of their own choosing, armed to the teeth like little men of war against the enemy, and even carrying cannon on board as early as 1407, before any kind of hand-guns had been invented.[152] If when disaster overtook them their masters appealed for compensation to the government they did not wait solely on the State for redress; and English rulers seem to have been often less perplexed to bring a remedy to their sufferings than to conciliate the great foreign confederations whose anger had been roused by their swift and violent retaliation. There were indeed probably no more formidable pirates afloat than these English cruisers themselves, for they were hard fighters who took a prompt revenge; and among foreigners at all events they won the reputation of using their shipping for no other purpose than to harass all trade of other peoples in the narrow seas, and “obstruct the utility of commerce throughout all Christendom.”[153]

Under these conditions we can easily understand that throughout the century whenever the question of the English navy emerges in Rolls of Parliament and Statutes and official statements, we have a contemporary picture drawn in the gloomiest colours.[154] Statesmen heap up details to show how badly the merchant service fulfils its vague functions as a royal navy. Ship-owners bring their loud complainings to prove how ill they have been used by the State. Each side burns to waken the other to a sense of its duty, and talk of the decay of English power by sea might be pressed into the service of either, while the loss of Southern France and the temporary blow which this gave to English shipping was used to point the argument on both sides. The sea was our wall of defence, it was said; but now the enemy was on the wall and where was our old might of ships and sailors? The very Dutch were laughing at our impotence, and when they insolently jested at the ships engraved on the coins of Edward the Third and asked why we did not engrave a sheep on them instead, the pun was felt to inflict a deep wound on the national honour.[155]

Such judgements, however, should be read in the light of the records which tell us what English ships afloat upon the sea were actually doing in those days. For at this very time the unofficial Englishman seems to have been boasting that his people possessed a greater number of fine and powerful ships than any other nation, so that they were “kings of the sea;”[156] and if the boast was a little premature it lay on the whole nearer to the truth. Even now the fleets of the Adventurers were going forth to the conquest of the seas, and their enterprise marks one of the great turning points in our history. It was in fact during this century that England raised herself from the last place among commercial peoples to one of the first. At the close of the fourteenth century, as we have seen, English merchandise was mostly borne in foreign ships; a hundred years later, English vessels carried more than a half of all the cloths exported from the country, and about three quarters of all other goods,[157] and the Navigation Act that had failed under Richard the Second was put in triumphant operation by Henry the Seventh.[158]

It was in the Northern Seas that the real stress of the battle lay. There from a very early time bands of roving adventurers went cruising from harbour to harbour to discover what spoils of trade the orthodox merchants of the Staple or the Hanse had left ungathered, and how the fertile resources of the lawless free-trader might be used to shatter these stately organizations. When the older merchants concentrated themselves in Bruges and Calais the free lances of trade sought out the neglected markets of Brabant and Holland. Driven from the marshes of Middleburg they turned to Antwerp which the Staplers had forsaken. Scarcely had the Hanse merchants under the stress of their Danish wars withdrawn from Bergen than the Adventurers forthwith slipped into their place, set up their own Staple, gathering goods there to the value of 10,000 marks, and for years fought steadily against fire and sword to hold their own.[159] If the Baltic towns fell behind the western members of the League in maritime enterprize, the Adventurers’ fleets flocked to their harbours, so that three hundred of them were seen in the harbour of Danzig alone, carrying dealers in cloth ready to spread their wares in every market town of Prussia. They pushed their way into the fish-markets of Schonen, offering bales of cloth instead of money[160] for salt herrings, and rousing the alarm of the Hanseatic merchants there also. By the close of the fourteenth century they had so prospered in the world on all sides that they professed to look on large branches of trade as their own exclusive property, and to make a grievance of interference with their profits by other “meddling merchants who were not content with their own business in which they had been brought up and by which they were well able to live.”

This was the beginning of a new stage in their history. The Adventurers now proposed to enter the decent ranks of recognized associations, and exchange their roving wars for the more formal aggressions of a chartered company; and at their prayer Henry the Fourth granted them in 1406, for their better ordering and for their protection from other “meddling merchants,” a charter by which they took as their official title their old name of the Merchant Adventurers.[161] The grant included all dominions over-sea, and allowed them to wander where they would in the wide world, and to draw within their ranks all the Adventurers of England.[162] As yet their organization was loose and free, and was in fact no true incorporation as a Guild. But it marked the passing away of their free and stormy youth. From this time privileges came to them from all sides by English grants, by gifts from foreign towns, by protection of the rulers of various countries. Finally in 1446 they received a new charter of privileges from the Duke of Burgundy[163] by which their tolls were fixed, full protection assured to them, and an organization provided which lasted for the next century. So confident did they become of their power, that when Henry the Seventh at his accession raised the tolls required of them they refused to pay, and he did not dare to enforce the order.[164] Seeing indeed in their success the triumph of English commerce, he remained their steady supporter, confirmed their privileges,[165] and when at Calais they desired greater centralization and a stricter discipline, he gave them a regular organization after the pattern of the Staplers under Edward the Third, with governors and a council of twenty-four assistants.[166] Amid all their successes it was little wonder that there came a time when they themselves forgot the free audacity of their adventurous youth. In their maturer years, as the vehement assertors of monopoly and State protection, they cast behind their backs the very remembrance of their lawless predecessors, and for a braver pedigree they traced their greatness back to ancestors made respectable by a fabled charter from King John himself, and boasted of Aldermen clothed in scarlet who were supposed to have borne rule over them in good old times in Antwerp.

The legend was the product of a time when Antwerp was in fact the capital of the Merchant Adventurers—the home and centre of their trade. For there in the fifteenth century they entered on an inheritance which had been left waste when the merchant princes of the Staple had finally retired to Calais, and had thus practically abandoned all direct trade between Antwerp and England to private hands. The Adventurers soon solved the question of who was to carry it on.[167] In 1407 the city gave them a House in perpetual succession. Three of their merchants sat in the Toll-hall with the toll-keepers of the borough to see justice done to their brethren. Known among the people as “the nation,”[168] they early showed their power, and in the first half of the fifteenth century privileges in the English trade were more and more withdrawn from the native traders of the Netherlands, and gathered into their own hands. They used their powers to the full, governed firmly, ordered the whole English trade with the Low Countries, dictated what fair was to be attended, and ruled the prices, in spite of the loud remonstrances of the unlucky natives.[169] At the great marts held in the Netherlands four times a year[170] “they stapled the commodities which they brought out of England, and put the same to sale,”[171] and by 1436 they could boast that they bought more goods in Brabant, Flanders, and Zealand[172] than all other nations, and that if their merchants were withdrawn it would be as great a loss to the French trade as though a thousand men of war were sent into the country.[173] The growing jealousy of the manufacturers in Flanders indeed threatened at times to cut off their entire business; and as they were the first to bear the rising storm of commercial rivalries, so again and again they were brought within sight of ruin by the laws passed on either side the water forbidding all import or export trade.

For in their desperate attempt to save the Flemish weavers from ruin the Dukes of Burgundy forbade dressers to finish English cloth, or tailors to cut it in the Netherlands, and laid heavy penalties on any man in Flanders who was seen dressed in woollen stuffs of English make;[174] but still the cloth came in, smuggled by speculating dealers from Antwerp, or scattered broadcast by licensed merchants who had bought from the authorities leave to evade the law.[175] Once in consequence of political disputes[176] the Adventurers had to migrate to Calais, and see the legal trade with the Low Countries given to the Easterlings, a sight which “sore nipped their hearts;” but first in “disordered” fashion, then lawfully, they were soon back at their old occupations.[177] With the steady support of Henry the Seventh, whose whole policy was directed to develope the trade with Burgundy and bind England and the Netherlands into a united commercial state, their prosperity was assured; and before the close of the century Antwerp, after two hundred years of struggle for supremacy in trade, took its place as the great centre of commerce[178] in the Netherlands, while its rival Bruges sank into utter poverty and decay. When at last after many chances and changes, the English won in 1506 through Henry the Seventh free trade in cloth throughout all the dominions of the Archduke Philip save Flanders, they actually found themselves better off in the Netherlands than the native merchants, paid less tolls than they, and were in a position whence they might easily overrun the country with their wares and finally destroy its decaying cloth industry.[179]

From their central stronghold in Antwerp the Merchant Adventurers further maintained a lively war to right and left, on the one side with the Staple at Calais, on the other with the Hanseatic League.

It was practically the jealousy of the Staplers that had first driven the Adventurers from Bruges, and no sooner did they feel their strength than they prepared to make their ancient enemies pay the penalty for old wrongs. Towards the merchants of the Staple the very character of their trade from the first forced them into a militant attitude. Shut out from all interest in the sale of wool, their fortune rested solely on the manufacturing industries, and the more weaving at home was encouraged the greater were their gains.[180] And since the wool merchants proceeded both to claim and to practise the right of exporting and selling cloth as well as wool, they became in a double sense obnoxious to their rivals. Now, however, the Adventurers could fight from the vantage ground given them by their new position as a chartered company. Out of their acknowledged right to demand tolls on the sale of cloth in their marts, they deduced by a liberal interpretation of their powers the right to require from each trading Stapler in addition to the ordinary tolls an entrance fee or hanse of ten marks, by payment of which he became a freeman of the Adventurers’ Company and was made subject to their laws and courts,[181] and if he refused to pay they seized his wares, or imprisoned him till he gave the “hanse.”[182] Wealthy merchants of the Staple who had taken their wares to Middleburg might find themselves thrown into prison among felons and murderers infected with odious diseases; the resolute Adventurers refused bail, and quietly ignored royal letters of remonstrance.[183] Already in 1457 the Staplers complained bitterly to the English King and to the Duke of Burgundy, that under colour of letters patent and charters, their enemies so vexed them both in their goods and persons as to threaten them with utter ruin.[184] But the decision of Henry the Sixth that the Adventurers were asserting unjust claims which were strictly forbidden for the future[185] scarcely interrupted the battle, and the same series of complaints and aggressions was brought in 1504 before the Star Chamber, by whose judgement the Adventurers were again forbidden to go beyond their right of levying tolls. But if the law was against them they had on their side their own inexhaustible activity, their unscrupulous audacity, their large self-confidence, and the weakness of the dying company of the Staple. Six years later when the Staplers again summoned them before the King for their “crooked minds and froward sayings” and lawless deeds of violence, they answered with uncompromising contempt. The Staplers, they allowed, might have certain privileges in Calais—but as to talking of rights in Burgundy, that in their opinion was absurd to urge after the removal of the Staple thence. Outside Calais the Staplers had no rights. With regard to their claim to exclusive jurisdiction over their members, “that article might have been left out of their book, for why every reasonable man knoweth the contrary.” In spite of such “reasonable men,” however, once more the law was proclaimed to be against them; but as they knew well the law was powerless to set up again the ruined company of the Merchant Staplers.[186]

With the second and more formidable army arrayed against them, the merchants of the Hanseatic League, the war of the Adventurers had to be carried on with greater circumspection. Through a couple of centuries the doubtful conflict was maintained on every sea and in every port from Danzig to Iceland. For the first hundred years things went ill for the Adventurers. The League monopolized the whole commerce between the Scandinavian kingdoms and England;[187] drove out the English from Schonen, the centre to which all the fishers of the Baltic and North Seas gathered for the salting, packing, and selling of their fish;[188] harassed them with fire and sword in Bergen, the Staple town of the north,[189] scattering them at one time by starvation, at another by decrees of expulsion; banished them from the Prussian towns belonging to the Teutonic Order which they were “destroying” with their cloth,[190] and sought to ruin their trade by issuing an order that no merchant of the Hanse should buy English cloth outside England itself. When the League waged war with Denmark and Norway in 1368-9 to confirm its mastery of the Northern Seas, it dragged the English traders at its heels into the fight, and at its close threw them off without a thought.[191] It gave a scornful answer to demands made by Parliament under Edward the Third and Richard the Second that the tolls exacted from Hanseatic traders for exporting goods from England should be increased; and retorted by a decree that all trade with England should be utterly broken off, thus shutting the great market at Elbing to the English merchants who had made it the centre of their trade with Russia and the towns of Prussia.[192]

The English traders, however, took all misfortune with the hardihood and exuberant courage of youth. Help from their own government was beyond hoping for, so long as conquering kings like Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth were bound hand and foot to the great mercantile houses of Lübeck and the Hanse towns by the loans raised from them to carry on the French wars; while Henry the Fourth, who, before he came to the throne, had been in Danzig and seen the troubles of the English merchants there,[193] and who in his anxiety to win the support of the trading class, was persistent in negotiations to improve their position, had not the power to give effect to his desires. The Adventurers, therefore, could only follow the one obvious course open to them, and kept up a steady brigandage on the seas and a series of opportune attacks on the enemy’s out-posts. They held on desperately at Bergen,[194] and stoutly clung to the formal right which Henry the Fourth had given them to organize themselves under consuls in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, for the carrying on of their trade.[195] Fishing boats which were shut out from the Baltic or from Bergen sailed on to Iceland, where, as the island was the private property of the King of Norway (who was himself the servant of the League) and was allowed to receive no ships save the King’s, or those licensed by the King, opportunities for illegal trade were abundant and profits large. A frugal people, needy and remote, eagerly welcomed smuggled goods from England in exchange for their fish; and the smugglers carried on a rough business—outlaws and daring men of their company plundered and killed and stole cattle and desolated homesteads, and bartered after their own self-made laws.[196] It mattered nothing to them that Henry the Fifth, in obedience to the League, forbade the trade, or that in a storm of 1419 twenty-five English ships were driven on the coast of Iceland in three hours. Bristol men found their way to its shores by help of the compass, leaving for us the first record of its use in England, probably in 1424; and about 1436, in a year when the English had been expelled from Bergen, so many vessels sailed to Iceland that they could get no return cargo, and half of them had to come empty home.[197] But the northern trade was not all violent or lawless. English merchants bought double licenses from the English and the Norwegian kings, which allowed them to carry on a regular traffic; and in the middle of the fifteenth century one of the Bristol merchants, Cannynges, had in his hands the chief trade with northern Europe. Not only were his factors established in the Baltic ports, but his transactions with Iceland and with Finland were on so great a scale that when in 1450 all English trade with these regions was forbidden in virtue of a treaty with the King of Denmark, Cannynges was specially exempted on account of the debts due to him there by Danish subjects, and for two years he had a monopoly of the trade.[198]

Meanwhile the Adventurers watched their opportunity to carry the war nearer home, for the League, already weighted with the effort to maintain its monopoly before the rise of Scandinavian powers and the consolidation of the Duchy of Burgundy, was further troubled within its own ranks by divided counsels.[199] In the reign of Henry the Sixth, therefore, the English renewed among other claims their old demand that the Hanseatic merchants should no longer be favoured at their expense, but should be treated like any other foreigners and forced to pay the same tolls on wine and wool. There was a chance of success, for Lübeck and the western towns finding in their strength and self-reliance arguments for a policy of peace with England, were generally for amicable compromise; though the eastern towns led by Danzig, weaker at sea and peculiarly sensitive to any increase of money burdens, preferred fighting to submission with its apprehended dangers.[200] The party of violence won the day and a fierce maritime war followed with open hostilities and reprisals and lawsuits and endless negociations. On one occasion the English seized a fleet of 108 sail returning to Lübeck and Riga, and the men of the Hanse retaliated by laying hands on rich English prizes. Trade was so ruined that Henry the Sixth declared himself unable to pay to the Count Palatine the dowry of his aunt Lady Blanche, because there were now no dues and customs coming into his Treasury from the German merchants.[201] At last the dispute came to a climax in 1469, when the English quarrelled with the German traders in London, summoned them before the courts and imposed a fine of £13,520,[202] while members of the Steel Yard were thrown into prison, and the corporation nearly broken up.[203] The answer of Bremen, Hamburg, and Danzig was given in a fleet which gathered against England under the leadership of Charles the Bold. But just at this moment came the English revolution by which Edward the Fourth was driven out of the country, and all the great trading bodies, the Hanseatic League, and the Flemish and Dutch corporations, seeing the danger which threatened their commerce from the new political situation, cast aside minor quarrels and united to set Edward again on the throne.[204] Such a service demanded a great reward; and in 1474 a treaty was signed at Utrecht, by which the Hanse was given back all its earlier privileges, and secured in possession of its Guild Hall and Steel Yard in London, and its houses in Boston and Lynn. The Adventurers who made a bold demand that the Easterlings should renounce the right of carrying out wool or wool-fells from England can scarcely have expected to succeed; but they at least gained some measure of peace for their colony in Danzig.[205]

The Hanseatic League, however, had now come to an end of its triumphs. From this time the English pressed them hard. A law which forbade the import of silk and the export of undressed cloths struck a heavy blow at their trade. Then came the order that Rhine wine must only be carried in English ships. Officials used their infinite powers of annoyance with hearty good will, and the merchant who landed with his goods, harassed first by the relentless officers sitting at the receipt of custom, and then thwarted in every possible way by the Mayor and corporation,[206] was at last driven by public abuse behind the walls of the Steel Yard, so that in 1490 a member of the Hanse dared scarcely show himself in the streets of London.

Meanwhile the great confederation of Commonwealths itself showed grave signs of falling asunder. The bigger towns that no longer needed the protection of the association were quite ready to forsake it, and in 1501 began to refuse to bring their cloth to the Staple at Bruges, and to look for freer conditions of trade. At the same time the monopoly of the League was being threatened on all sides. The Prussian and Livonian towns treated them as enemies. A Dutch fleet competed with them in the Baltic. A Danish trading company had risen to dispute their monopoly in Denmark. The Swedes shut them out. The Norwegians made intermittent experiments at independence. At last in 1478 came the worst calamity that could befall their trade, the capture of Novgorod by the Muscovites, with the destruction of its free government and the ruin of its position as one of the commercial capitals of the world.

With the demolition of the League factory, the loss of all its possessions in the city, and the whole dislocation of the Eastern traffic, the supremacy of the Hanseatic Confederation was shattered, as the supremacy of the Italians in the Southern trade had been shattered half a century before by the conquest of Alexandria. English Adventurers naturally saw in every fresh trouble that assailed their rivals a new argument for aggression, and welcomed in Henry the Seventh a leader equal to the great occasion. Never had they found a better friend, or one who so finely interpreted the popular instinct of his time. How completely his determination to strengthen by every means in his power the position of the Adventurers in Antwerp against the Hanseatic traders at Bruges, and to bind England and Burgundy together into a united commercial state, fell in with the needs and temper of his people was strikingly shown after a two years’ interruption of commerce with the Low Countries caused by the affair of Perkin Warbeck, when a burst of popular joy hailed the renewal of trade, and the wild enthusiasm of the people gave to the treaty of 1496 which restored the old kindly relations the high-sounding name of the Intercursus Magnus.

The big name has, as usual, imposed a little on later generations, and greater treaties have gone unnoticed for want of an equally pompous title. At first, indeed, amid the political disquiet and the trade depression which marked the early years of his reign, Henry went to work slowly and patiently, and in 1486 even confirmed the Utrecht treaty of 1474 which ensured a number of privileges to the Hanse. But this policy of peace was only assumed for a brief space while he was making ready for war. In 1486 he renewed the commercial treaty made by Edward with Britanny in 1467.[207] The real campaign, however, may be said to have opened by the Navigation Act of 1489, when the shipping trade was definitely taken under State protection. And what that State protection implied was at once shown in a series of commercial treaties with almost every trading country of Europe, whether its traffic lay in the northern or the southern seas. Building up on every hand alliances against the Hanseatic Confederation he steadily drew to himself the friendship of the Scandinavian peoples tired of the domination of the League. In 1489 he sent an embassy (two of the deputation being Lynn merchants), to make terms for a commercial alliance with Denmark and Norway, and won from the Northern powers freedom of trade for the English in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, with the right to acquire land, to form corporations and choose aldermen, and to be under special protection of the Danish King.[208] To defeat the pretensions of Danzig he turned to the Livonian towns, and by treaty with Riga attempted to secure a Russian trade which might open the way of Novgorod and the East to English Adventurers—an attempt which however was frustrated a few years later.[209] A conference was held in 1491 at Antwerp with the Hanseatic envoys, whom Henry with diplomatic insolence kept idly waiting for four weeks till the messengers he had sent to Denmark with friendly proposals of a treaty as unfavourable as possible to the interests of the Hanse, returned with their answer. The promise of this inauspicious opening for the League was amply fulfilled in the long negotiations which lasted at Antwerp from 1491 to 1499, and in which the foreigner was consistently humbled before the triumphant Merchant Adventurer, all his compromises rejected so far as they tended to limit the freedom of the English trader, and the League compelled to accept terms ruinous to its interests and disastrous to its great tradition of supremacy.[210]

The story of these Antwerp negotiations gives us a true measure of the place gained during the last hundred years by the Merchant Adventurers in the North, where, having dealt the last blows to the ancient company of the Staple, and broken the power of the Hanseatic League, their fleets now sailed triumphantly on every sea. And yet this was but half their work; for the North was a small thing to win unless they could also load English vessels with the cargoes of the East and the tribute of the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean. Until the middle of the fifteenth century the trade of the eastern Mediterranean had been altogether carried on by Italians.[211] It was only in 1432 that the French merchant Jacques Coeur (the stories of whose wealth and power read like fables beside the modest doings of our native traders), had sent out some ships to take part in the Eastern trade; and the Levant was not really opened to Western merchants till 1442, when the Venetians were driven out of Egypt and the monopoly of the Italians broken up. It was very soon after that a Bristol merchant, Sturmys, fitted out probably the first English ship that visited the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. But the new inheritors of the East were received with bitter jealousies. Rival vessels fought for the spoils and carried off the booty like common pirates; and the Genoese traders in their anger seized Sturmys’ ship on its return voyage and robbed it of its cargo of spices and green pepper. He reckoned his loss at 6,000 francs, and on his complaint to the government all the Genoese merchants in London were thrown into prison until they should give bonds for the payment of this sum.[212]

The question of the Mediterranean was thus vigorously opened. In London, indeed, the Italians might securely reckon on hard treatment. Merchants just beginning to feel their strength, half-ruined Staplers, London shopkeepers and manufacturers, all alike hated their Italian rivals with a common hatred, and were crying out for the most decisive measures against foreign competition. Less careful than their King of nursing political alliances[213] in view of foreign wars and complications, the traders boldly proposed a bill in the Parliament of 1439 to forbid the Venetians from carrying any wares save those of their own manufacture—a measure which if it had passed would have practically annihilated the whole Venetian trade to England. Their next proposal was a law to forbid selling anything to the Genoese or carrying anything to their port. Steadily supported as the Lombards were by the King against the people, they nevertheless saw their privileges from this time limited step by step; and once after the persecution of 1455 in London even attempted to leave the capital for ever. The great days of their trade monopoly were gone. Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third laid heavy burdens on them. Henry the Seventh kept them dependent on his arbitrary will for a very slight increase of freedom, such as he might see fit to grant from time to time, tried to limit their gains, and in the very first year of his reign forbade them to carry French woad or wine, or silk goods, and further hindered them in the export of wool.

At this time the population of the Venetian Republic was bigger than that of all England, and English traders had a good many other affairs on their hands beside their quarrel with Venice. The dispute, nevertheless, did not languish. No sooner were Henry’s regulations proclaimed in 1485 than English merchants set sail for Crete, bought up the stores of malmsey there,[214] and carried them off to the Netherlands under the very eyes of the Venetian captains. Venice passed a law against such traffic, and in the stress of anxiety as to the English competition took to building better ships to maintain her own carrying trade; while England retorted by setting up a monopoly of her own wool in revenge for the Venetian monopoly of wine.

Meanwhile, the quick-witted Florentines, driven out of traditional routine by the intensity of the long competition for supremacy, had begun to doubt the value for them of the old policy of naval protection which the city had shared with Venice and Genoa; and had frankly adopted in 1480 a system of free-trade. In Constantinople and Egypt Florence began again to hold her own against Venice and to win back command of Eastern markets, and she eagerly welcomed English wool merchants to her port at Pisa.[215] In 1485, the year when England entered into the lists with Venice, these had become so numerous and powerful a body that a consul was appointed over them; and five years later, Henry made a commercial treaty with Florence which was one of the most remarkable acts of his reign. By its provisions English merchants undertook to carry every year to Florence sufficient wool to supply all the Italian States save Venice, and in return they were given every privilege their hearts desired.[216] The only resource left to the Venetians was to forbid that any wine should be shipped from Crete to Pisa, so that English vessels which went out laden with wool finding no return cargo should be driven to sail home empty. Henry immediately set such heavy import duties on malmsey in England that the Venetians, seeing their wine-trade on the point of ruin, bowed at last to the inevitable. The victory of the English merchants was finally proclaimed when Henry in 1507 only consented to renew the charter that gave Venetians rights of trade in England on condition that they bound themselves to do no carrying trade between the Netherlands and England, but to leave that to the Merchant Adventurers.[217]

Meanwhile, in all the ports visited by English ships between the Mediterranean and the Channel the same buoyant spirit of successful enterprise vanquished every obstacle. Englishmen had always traded much with their fellow-subjects in Aquitaine. From the days of St. Thomas Canterbury had dealings with the wine-growers of the south.[218] Ships of Bordeaux were known in every port of the Channel, and in 1350, 141 vessels laden with wine sailed thence to London alone,[219] while the early wealth of Bristol had been created by the cargoes of wool carried from its port to feed the Gascon manufactories, and the casks of wine sent back to fill its cellars. Conditions so pleasant for the Bristol burghers were rudely changed when in 1445 Bordeaux fell into the hands of the French, and English traders instead of being the masters had to go humbly at the bidding of the men of Bordeaux with a red cross on their backs, doing business only in the town, or going into the country under the guardianship of a police agent. But if the burghers of the later fifteenth century cared nothing for the re-conquest of the French provinces, on the other hand they were determined not to lose their trade. The wool dealers, shut out of Bordeaux, turned to the North, to Rouen and Calais, changed their wool there for the wine of Niederburgund, and so started the woollen manufactures of Normandy, while those of Bordeaux declined. By a succession of commercial treaties[220] and by the Navigation Act of 1489, which shut out Gascon ships from the English wine trade, Henry secured for English merchants in Bordeaux such adequate protection that the efforts of Louis the Twelfth to limit their freedom of trade by passing a Navigation Act of his own were utterly vain. The Bordeaux citizens, filled with impotent rage, watched the English traders going up and down the land, 6,000 to 8,000 of them, as they averred, armed with sticks, and scouring the country for wine.

The ports of Spain and Portugal also were visited by increasing numbers of English vessels on their way to the Mediterranean, and old trading alliances were renewed with countries whose harbours were such valuable resting places.[221] There had long been commercial treaties with Castile and Catalonia, who competed for the profits to be won by carrying to England Spanish iron and fruits along with the wine and woad of neighbouring lands. But Henry the Seventh took the occasion of the negotiations for the Spanish marriage in 1489 to stipulate anew for freedom of trade and protection of English ships; while at the same time the English merchants asserted that by the new Navigation Act the whole export trade was now their exclusive right, and under the plea that their ships could not make the voyage to Spain unless they had a certainty of coming back well laden, forbade the carrying of Toulouse woad and Gascony wine in Spanish ships. By this time the Englishman had as usual roused the fear and hatred of the native merchants, and the Spaniards violently resisted the new policy. Heavy tolls were imposed on either side to ruin the trade of the other, and in one season eight hundred English ships were sent home empty from Seville because the patriotic Spanish dealers with one accord refused their wares to the enemy. Again fortune came to help the pertinacity of the Adventurers. In 1492 Spain drove the Jews and Moors from her shores. But their business simply fell into alien hands waiting to receive it, and the hated English merchants flocked to Spanish harbours now swept of their old rivals, and sailed back to England laden with the gold of the New World.[222]

Nor was the good chance that favoured them in Portugal less wonderful. With the traders of Lisbon and Oporto England had entered into a commercial treaty in the middle of the fourteenth century—a treaty which was altered in 1386 to include the whole of Portugal.[223] But by some happy destiny whose favours strewed the path of English traders, they asked and obtained in 1458 a revision of old agreements so as to secure the utmost advantage for their own interests, and all this had been completed just before the discovery of the Cape route gave to Portugal its enormous naval importance and threw Eastern commerce into a new channel. The quarrel with Venice inspired the English with increased ardour in their friendship for the new masters of the spice trade; and when Portuguese dealers invited English merchants to make their bargains for Eastern wares in Lisbon instead of journeying to Venice, these gathered in such numbers to the new emporium of Indian goods that their own shipping failed to carry the wealth offered to them and the merchants had to hire Portuguese vessels.[224]

Thus it was that in the face of the powerful confederations that held the trade of the Northern and the Southern Seas English merchants were laying violent hands on the commerce of the world. They had vanquished their rivals in the north, while in the south they had firmly planted themselves in every important trading port along the western coast of Europe, and competed with the Italian Republics not only for their own carrying trade but for that of the Netherlands as well. If in the reign of Edward the Third practically the whole of the foreign commerce of England was carried in foreign vessels, in the reign of Henry the Seventh the great bulk of the trade had passed into English hands. British merchants were to be found in every port from Alexandria to Reykjavik, and wherever they touched left behind them an organized and firmly established trade. As we have seen, their battle for supremacy in commerce had in its beginnings been fought by free-traders and pirates warring against the orderly forces of organized protection; but the final victory was awarded to them in their later stage of a company of monopolists sustained and cherished by the State. The question, indeed, of how far protection contributed to the success of the English or to the loss of the foreigner is far from being a simple one. For in its first stages the work done by protection may possibly consist for a time mainly in the abolition of privilege, and this process may pass by very slow and imperceptible degrees to its last stage, that of conferring privilege. It is, therefore, hard to decipher the lesson when we are studying a commerce where protection has but begun its work in conflict with a commerce when that work is perfected. In the history of the later fifteenth century, moreover, the problem is yet further complicated by the present working of those vast forces which make or unmake the fortunes of continents, and before which the wisest policies of States, policies of protection or of free-trade or of any other elaborate product of human intelligence, are powerful as an army of phantoms.

CHAPTER IV

THE COMMON LIFE OF THE TOWN

We who have been trained under the modern system have forgotten how people lived in the old days, when the necessity of personal effort was forced home to every single member of the fellowship of freemen who had life or liberties or property to protect. For in spite of the vigour and independence of our modern local administration every Englishman now looks ultimately for the laws that rule his actions, and the force that protects his property, to the great central authority which has grown up outside and beyond all local authorities. He is subject to it in all the circumstances of life; whether it exercises wholly new functions unknown to the middle ages; or takes over to itself powers which once belonged to inferior bodies, and makes them serve national instead of local ends; whether it asserts a new direction and control over municipal administration; or whether, instead of replacing the town authorities by its own rule, it upholds them with the support of its vast resources and boundless strength. By whatever right the State holds its manifold powers, whether by inheritance, or purchase, or substitution, or influence, or the superiority of mere might, he feels its working on every hand. It is to him visibly charged with all the grand operations of government.

But to a burgher of the middle ages the care and protection of the State were dim and shadowy compared with the duties and responsibilities thrown on the townspeople themselves. For in the beginnings of municipal life the affairs of the borough great and small, its prosperity, its safety, its freedom from crime, the gaiety and variety of its life, the regulation of its trade, were the business of the citizens alone. Fenced in by its wall and ditch[225]—fenced in yet more effectually by the sense of danger without, and the clinging to privileges won by common effort that separated it from the rest of the world—the town remained isolated and self-dependent. Within these narrow borders the men who went out to win the carrying trade of the world learned their first lessons in organization, and acquired the temper by virtue of which Englishmen were to build up at home a great political society and to conquer abroad the supremacy of the seas—the temper which we recognize in an early confession of faith put forth by the citizens of Hereford as to the duties which a man owed to his commonwealth and to its chief magistrate. “And he to be our head next under the King, whom we ought in all things touching our King or the state of our city to obey chiefly in three things—first, when we are sent for by day or by night to consult of those things which appertain to the King or the state of the city; secondly, to answer if we offend in any point contrary to our oath, or our fellow-citizens; thirdly, to perform the affairs of the city at our own charges, if so be they may be finished either sooner or better than by any other of our citizens.”[226] Public claims were insistent, and under the primitive conditions of communal life, in small societies where every man lived in the direct light of public opinion, no citizen was allowed to count carefully the cost of sacrifice, or stint the measure of his service, when the welfare of his little community was at stake. His duties were plainly laid down before him, and they were rigidly exacted. According to the accepted theory it was understood that all private will and advantage were to be sacrificed to the common good, and Langland speaks bitterly of the “individualists” of his day.

“For they will and would as best were for themselves,
Though the King and the commons all the cost had.
All reason reproveth such imperfect people.”[227]

I. The inhabitants of a mediæval borough were subject to a discipline as severe as that of a military state of modern times. Threatened by enemies on every side, constantly surrounded by perils, they had themselves to bear the whole charges of fortification and defence. If a French fleet appeared on the coast, if Welsh or Scotch armies made a raid across the frontier, if civil war broke out and opposing forces marched across the country, every town had to look to its own safety. The inhabitants served under a system of universal conscription. At the muster-at-arms held twice a year poor and rich appeared in military array with such weapons as they could bring forth for the King’s service; the poor marching with knife or dagger or hatchet; the prosperous burghers, bound according to mediæval ideas to live “after their degree,” displaying mail or wadded coats, bucklers, bows and arrows, swords, or even a gun. At any moment this armed population might be called out to active service. “Concerning our bell,” say the citizens of Hereford, “we use to have it in a public place where our chief bailiff may come, as well by day as by night, to give warning to all men living within the said city and suburbs. And we do not say that it ought to ring unless it be for some terrible fire burning any row of houses within the said city, or for any common contention whereby the city might be terribly moved, or for any enemies drawing near unto the city, or if the city shall be besieged, or any sedition shall be between any, and notice thereof given by any unto our chief bailiff. And in these cases aforesaid, and in all like cases, all manner of men abiding within the city and suburbs and liberties of the city, of what degree soever they be of, ought to come at any such ringing, or motion of ringing, with such weapons as fit their degree.”[228] At the first warning of an enemy’s approach the mayor or bailiff became supreme military commander.[229] It was his office to see that the panic-stricken people of the suburbs were gathered within the walls and given house and food, that all meat and drink and chattels were made over for the public service, and all armour likewise carried to the Town Hall, that every inhabitant or refugee paid the taxes required for the cost of his protection, that all strong and able men “which doth dwell in the city or would be assisted by the city in anything” watched by day and night, and that women and clerics who could not watch themselves found at their own charge substitutes “of the ablest of the city.”[230]

If frontier towns had periods of comparative quiet, the seaports, threatened by sea as by land, lived in perpetual alarm, at least so long as the Hundred Years’ War protracted its terrors. When the inhabitants had built ships to guard the harbour, and provided money for their victualling and the salaries of the crew, they were called out to repair towers and carry cartloads of rocks or stones to be laid on the walls “for defending the town in resisting the king’s enemies.”[231] Guns had to be carried to the church or the Common House on sleds or laid in pits at the town gates, and gun-stones, saltpetre, and pellet powder bought. For weeks together watchmen were posted in the church towers with horns to give warning if a foe appeared; and piles of straw, reeds and wood were heaped up on the sea-coast to kindle beacons and watch-fires. Even if the townsfolk gathered for a day’s amusement to hear a play in the Court-house a watch was set lest the enemy should set fire to their streets—a calamity but too well known to the burghers of Rye and Southampton.[232]

Inland towns were in little better case. Civil war, local rebellion, attacks from some neighbouring lord, outbreaks among the followers of a great noble lodged within their walls at the head of an army of retainers, all the recurring incidents of siege and pitched battle rudely reminded inoffensive shopkeepers and artizans of their military calling. Owing to causes but little studied, local conflicts were frequent, and they were fought out with violence and determination. At the close of the fourteenth century a certain knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of Stanley, raised eight hundred fighting men “to destroy and hurt the commons of Chester”; and these stalwart warriors broke into the abbey, seized the wine and dashed the furniture in pieces, and when the mayor and sheriff came to the rescue nearly killed the sheriff.[233] When in 1441 the Archbishop of York determined to fight for his privileges in Ripon Fair he engaged two hundred men-at-arms from Scotland and the Marches at sixpence or a shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman, Sir John Plumpton, gathered seven hundred men; and at the battle that ensued, more than a thousand arrows were discharged by them.[234]

Within the town territory the burghers had to serve at their own cost and charges; but when the King called out their forces to join his army the municipal officers had to get the contingent ready, to provide their dress or badges, to appoint the captain, and to gather in money from the various parishes for the soldiers’ pay, “or else the constables to be set in prison to abide to such time as it be content and paid.”[235] When they were sent to a distance their fellow townsmen bought provisions of salt fish and paniers or bread boxes for the carriage of their food,[236] and reluctantly provided a scanty wage, which was yet more reluctantly doled out to the soldier by his officer, and perhaps never reached his pocket at all.[237] Universal conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace. To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the market stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and ungrateful service where reward and plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand; and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which they had measured all the misery.[238] When the common people dreamed of a brighter future, their simple hope was that every maker of deadly weapons should die by his own tools; for in that better time

“Battles shall never eft (again) be, ne man bear edge-tool,
And if any man [smithy] it, be smit therewith to death.”[239]

II. Nor even in times of peace might the burghers lay aside their arms, for trouble was never far from their streets. Every inhabitant was bound to have his dagger or knife or Irish “skene,” in case he was called out to the king’s muster or to aid in keeping the king’s peace. But daggers which were effective in keeping the peace were equally effective in breaking it, and the town records are full of tales of brawls and riots, of frays begun by “railing with words out of reason,” or by “plucking a man down by the hair of his head,” but which always ended in the appearance of a short dagger, “and so drew blood upon each other.”[240] For the safety of the community—a safety which was the recognized charge of every member of these simple democratic states—each householder was bound to take his turn in keeping nightly watch and ward in the streets. It is true indeed that reluctant citizens constantly by one excuse or another sought to escape a painful and thankless duty: whether it was whole groups of inhabitants sheltering themselves behind legal pretexts; or sturdy rebels breathing out frank defiance of the town authorities. Thus in Aylesbury, according to the constable’s report, one “Reygg kept a house all the year till the watch time came. And when he was summoned to the watch then came Edward Chalkyll ‘fasesying’ and said he should not watch for no man and thus bare him up, and that caused the other be the bolder for to bar the King’s watch.... He saith and threateneth us with his master,” add the constables, “and thus we be over ‘crakyd’ that we dare not go, for when they be ‘may ten’ they be the bolder.” John Bossey “said the same wise that he would not watch for us”; and three others “lacked each of them a night.”[241] But in such cases the mayor’s authority was firmly upheld by the whole community, every burgher knowing well that if any inhabitant shirked his duty a double burden fell upon the shoulder of his neighbour.

III. All inhabitants of a borough were also deeply interested in the preservation of the boundaries which marked the extent of their dominions, the “liberties” within which they could enforce their own law, regulate trade, and raise taxes. Century after century the defence of the frontier remained one of the urgent questions of town politics, insistent, perpetually recurring, now with craft and treachery, now with violence and heated passion breaking into sudden flame. Every year the mayor and corporation made a perambulation of the bounds and inspected the landmarks;[242] the common treasure was readily poured out if lawsuits and bribes were needed to ascertain and preserve the town’s rights; and if law failed, the burghers fell back without hesitation on personal force. In Canterbury the town and the convent of Christ Church were at open war about this question as about many others. The monks remained unconvinced even though the mayor and council of thirty-six periodically “walked the bounds,” giving copper coins at the various turning points to “divers children” that they might remember the limits of the franchise, while they themselves were refreshed after their trouble by a “potation” in a field near Fordwich. At one time the quarrel as to the frontier raged round a gigantic ash-tree—the old land-mark where the liberties of the city touched those of Fordwich—which was in 1499 treacherously cut down by the partizans of Christ Church; the Canterbury men with the usual feastings and a solemn libation of wine set up a new boundary stone. At another time the dispute shifted to where at the west gate of the town the river wound with uncertain and changing course that left frontiers vague and undefined. A low marshy ground called the “Rosiers” was claimed by the mayor as under his jurisdiction, while the prior asserted that it was within the county of Kent; and for thirty years the question was fought out in the law courts. On July 16th, 1500, the mayor definitely asserted his pretensions by gathering two hundred followers arrayed in manner of war to march out to the Rosiers. There certain monks and servants of the prior were taking the air; one protested he had been “late afore sore sick and was walking in the field for his recreation”; another had a sparrow-hawk on his fist, and the servants declared they were but peaceful haymakers; but all had apparently gone out ready for every emergency, for at the appearance of the enemy bows and arrows, daggers, bills, and brigandiers, were produced from under the monks’ frocks and the smocks of the haymakers. In the battle that followed the monks were beaten, and the citizens cut down willows and stocked up the dyke made in the river by the convent; and boldly proceeded the next day[243] to other outrages. The matter was brought to judgement, and a verdict given against the mayor for riot—a verdict which that official, however, lightly disregarded. It was in vain that the prior, wealthy and powerful as he was, and accustomed to so great influence at court, appealed to the Star Chamber to have the penalty enforced, for no further steps were taken by the government. It probably judged wisely, since in such a matter the temper of the citizens ran high; and the rectification of frontiers was resented as stoutly as a new delimitation of kingdoms and empires to-day.

IV. Resolution in the defence of their territory was no doubt quickened by the sense which every burgess shared of common property in the borough. The value of woodland and field and meadow which made up the “common lands” was well understood by the freeman who sent out his sheep or cows to their allotted pasture, or who opened the door of his yard in the early morning when the common herd went round the streets to collect the swine and drive them out on the moor till evening.[244] The men of Romney did not count grudgingly their constant labour and cost in measuring and levelling and draining the swamps belonging to their town and protecting them from the encroachments of “the men of the marsh” beyond, for the sake of winning grazing lands for their sheep, and of securing a “cow-pull” of swans or cygnets for their lord the archbishop[245] when it was desirable “to have his friendship.” In poor struggling boroughs like Preston, in large and wealthy communities like Nottingham, in manufacturing towns like Worcester with its busy population of weavers, in rich capitals like York, in trading ports like Southampton where the burghers had almost forgotten the free traditions of popular government, the inhabitants never relaxed their vigilance as to the protection of their common property.[246] They assembled year after year to make sure that there had been no diminishing of their rights or alienation of their land, or that in the periodical allotments the best fields and closes had not fallen to the share of aldermen and councillors; and by elaborate constitutional checks, or if these failed, by “riotous assembly and insurrection,” they denounced every attempt at encroachment on marsh or pasture.

V. So also in the case of other property which corporations held for the good of the community—fisheries, warrens, salt-pits, pastures reclaimed from the sea, plots of ground saved in the dry bed of a river, building sites and all waste places within the town walls, warehouses and shops and tenements, inns and mills, the grassy slopes of the city ditch which were let for grazing, the towers of the city walls leased for dwelling-houses or store rooms, any property bequeathed to the community for maintaining the poor or repairing the walls or paying tolls and taxes all this corporate wealth which lightened the burdens of the taxpayer was a matter of concern to every citizen. The people were themselves joint guardians of the town treasure. Representatives chosen by the burghers kept one or two of the keys of the common chest, which could only be opened therefore with their consent.[247] Year after year mayor or treasurers were by the town ordinances required to present their accounts before the assembly of all the people “in our whole community, by the tolling of the common bell calling them together for that intent”[248]—an assembly that perhaps gathered in the parish church in which seats were set up for the occasion at the public expense.[249] There the people heard the list of fines levied in the courts; of tolls in the market, or taxes taken at the gates or in the harbour; of the “maltodes,” or sums paid on commodities for sale; of the “scot” levied on the property of individuals; of the “lyvelode” or livelihood, an income tax on rates or profits earned. They learned what means the corporation had taken of increasing the common revenue; whether it had ordered a “church-ale,” or an exhibition of dancing girls, or a play of Robin Hood;[250] what poor relief had been given in the past year;[251] what public loans with judicious usury of over ten per cent., it had allowed, as when in Lydd “the jurats one year lent Thomas Dygon five marks from the common purse when going to the North Sea, and he repaid the same well and trustily and paid an increase thereon seven shillings;” or they were told whether the Town Council proposed to do a little trading for the good of the community; and how a “common barge” had been built with timber bought at one town, cables and anchors at another, pitch and canvas at a third; and how, when the ship was finished, the corporation paid for a modest supply of “bread and ale the day the mast was set in the barge,” before it was sent out to fish for herrings or to speculate in a cargo of salt or wine, for the profit of the public treasury.[252]

Lessons in common financial responsibility had been early forced on the burghers everywhere by the legal doctrine that the whole body might be held responsible for the debt of one of its members, while each member on his part was answerable for the faults of his fellows, whether singly or collectively. Thus when Norwich failed in paying debts due to the King in 1286, the sheriff of Norfolk was ordered to enter the liberty and distrain twelve of the richer and more discreet persons of the community;[253] and when the rent of Southampton was in arrears, one of its burgesses was thrown into the Fleet in London.[254] Under such a system as this the ordinary interest of citizens in questions of taxation and expenditure was greatly quickened. The municipalities were stern creditors. If a man did not pay his rent for the King’s ferm the doors and windows of his house were taken off, everyone in it turned out, and the house stood empty for a year and a day or even longer before the doors might be redeemed in full court, or before it passed to the next heir.[255] But it was probably rather owing to the happy circumstances of the English towns than to the vigilance of the burghers that there is no case in England of a disaster which was but too common in France—the disaster of a borough falling into bankruptcy, and through bankruptcy into servitude and political ruin.

VI. In the town communities of the middle ages all public works were carried out by what was in fact forced labour of the whole commonalty. If the boroughs suffered little from government interference neither could they look for help in the way of state aid or state loans; and as the burgher’s purse in early days was generally empty he had to give of the work of his hands for the common good. In Nottingham “booners”—that is the burgesses themselves or substitutes whom they provided to take their place—repaired the highways and kept the streets in order.[256] The great trench dug at Bristol to alter the course of the Frome was made “by the manœuvre of all the commonalty as well of Redcliffe ward as of the town of Bristol.[257] When Hythe in 1412 sent for a Dutch engineer to make a new harbour, all the inhabitants were called out in turn to help at the “Delveys” or diggings. Sundays and week days alike the townsmen had to work, dining off bread and ale provided by the corporation for the diggers, and if they failed to appear they were fined fourpence a day.[258] In the same way Sandwich engaged a Hollander to superintend the making of a new dyke for the harbour; the mayor was ordered to find three workmen to labour at it, every jurat two, and each member of the Common Council one man; while all other townsmen had to give labour or find substitutes according to their ability. The jurats were made overseers, and were responsible for the carrying out of the work; and so successfully was the whole matter managed that in 1512 the Sandwich haven was able to give shelter to 500 or 600 hoys.

Forced labour such as this could of course only be applied to works where skilled artificers were not necessary; but occasions soon multiplied when the town mob had to be replaced by trained labourers, and we already see traces of a transitional system in the making of the Hythe harbour, where the municipality had to engage hired labour for such work as could not be done by the burgesses.[259] But undertakings for which scientific skill was needed sorely taxed local resources, and the burghers were driven to make anxious appeals to public charity. In 1447, when Bridport wanted to improve its harbour, collectors were sent all over the country to beg for money; indulgences of forty or a hundred days were promised to subscribers by archbishops and bishops; and a copy of the paper carried by one of the collectors gives the sum of the masses said for them in the year as amounting to nearly four thousand: “the sum of all other good prayers no man knoweth save only God alone.”[260] The building and repairing of bridges as being also work that demanded science and skilled labour involved serious cost. When the King had allowed the bridge at Nottingham to fall into the river, he generously transferred its ownership and the duty of setting it up again to the townspeople; who appointed wardens and kept elaborate accounts and bore grievous anxiety, till finding its charges worse than all their ordinary town expenses they at last fell to begging also. So also the mayor of Exeter prayed for help in the matter of the bridge there, which had been built by a wealthy mayor and was “of the length or nigh by, and of the same mason work as London Bridge, housing upon except; the which bridge openly is known the greatest costly work and most of alms-deeds to help it in all the west part of England.”[261] Such instances reveal to us the persistent difficulties that beset a world where primitive methods utterly failed to meet new exigencies, and where the demand for technical quality in work was beginning to lead to new organizations of labour. Meanwhile the burghers had to fight their own way with no hope of grants in aid from the state, and little to depend on save the personal effort of the whole commonalty.

VII. The townspeople all took their part not only in the serious and responsible duties of town life but apparently in an incessant round of gaieties as well. All the commons shared in supporting the minstrels and players of the borough. The “waits” (so called from the French word guet) were originally and still partly remained watchmen of the town, but it was in their character of minstrels, “who go every morning about the town piping,” that they were paid by pence collected by the wardmen from every house.[262] Every town moreover had its particular play, which was acted in the Town Hall, or the churchyard, before the Mayor and his brethren sitting in state, while the whole town kept holiday. In 1411 there was a great play, From the Beginning of the World, at the Skinner’s well in London, “that lasted seven days continually, and there were the most part of the lords and gentles of England.”[263] At Canterbury the chief play was naturally The Martyrdom of S. Thomas. The cost is carefully entered in the municipal account books—charges for carts and wheels, flooring, hundreds of nails, a mitre, two bags of leather containing blood which was made to spout out at the murder, linen cloth for S. Thomas’ clothes, tin foil and gold foil for the armour, packthread and glue, coal to melt the glue, alb and amys, knights’ armour, the hire of a sword, the painting of S. Thomas’ head, an angel which cost 22d., and flapped his wings as he turned every way on a hidden wynch with wheels oiled with soap. When all was over the properties of the pageant were put away in the barn at S. Sepulchre’s Nunnery, and kept safely till the next year at a charge of 16d. The Canterbury players also acted in the Three Kings of Cologne at the Town Hall, where the kings, attended by their henchmen, appeared decorated with strips of silver and gold paper and wearing monks’ frocks. The three “beasts” for the Magi were made out of twelve ells of canvas distended with hoops and laths, and “painted after nature”; and there was a castle of painted canvas which cost 3s. 4d. The artist and his helpers worked for six days and nights at these preparations and charged three shillings for their labour, food, fire and candle.[264]

Minstrels and harpers and pipers and singers and play-actors, who stayed at home through the dark winter days “from the feast of all Saints to the feast of the Purification,” to make music and diversion for their fellow citizens, started off on their travels when the fine weather came, and journeyed from town to town giving their performances, and rewarded at the public expense with a gift of 6s. 8d. or 3s. 4d., and with dinner and wine “for the honour of the town.”[265] It was an easy life—

“Some mirth to make as minstrels conneth (know),
That will neither swynke (toil) nor sweat, but swear great oaths,
And find up foul fantasies and fools them maken,
And have wit at will to work if they would.”[266]

Entries in the town accounts of Lydd give some idea of the constant visits of these wandering troops, and of the charges which they made upon the town treasure.[267] Players from Romney came times without number, others from Rukinge, Wytesham, Herne, Hamme, Appledore, Stone, Folkestone, Rye; and besides these came the minstrels of the great lords, the King, the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord De Bourchier, Lord Fiennes, the Earl of Warwick, the Duke of York, Lord Arundel, Lord Exeter, Lord Shrewsbury, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Dacres, etc.; all of whom doubtless the town dared not refuse to entertain, but “for love of their lords lythen (listen to) them at feasts.”[268] Besides this Lydd had its own special plays, The May and The Interlude of Our Lord’s Passion, and the whole town would gather on a Sunday to hear the actors, while watchmen were paid to keep guard on the shore against a surprise of the French. Its players seem to have set the fashion in the neighbourhood; the Romney Corporation “chose wardens to have the play of Christ’s Passion, as from olden time they were wont to have it,” and paid the expenses of a man to go to Lydd “to see the original of our play there,” besides giving the Lydd players a reward of 20s. for their performance.[269]

Other wanderers too knocked at the gates of Lydd—”the man with the dromedary,” a “bear-ward,” or the keeper of the King’s lions travelling with his menagerie and demanding a sheep to be given to the lions; archers and wrestlers from neighbouring towns whom Jurats and Commons gathered to see, and supplied with wrestling collars and food for themselves and their horses, as well as a “reward” at the public expense.[270] Besides bull-baiting, Lydd, doubtless, like other towns, had its occasional “bear-baiting.” There were the Christmas games and mumming, and the yearly visit of the “Boy Bishop”[271] of S. Nicholas who came from Romney to hold his feast at Lydd. And there was the universal festival of the “watch” on S. John’s Eve, when Lydd paid out of its common chest for the candles kept burning all night in the Common House, and for the feast—not a trifling expense if we may judge by the case of Bristol where the crafts who took part in the watch divided among them ninety-four gallons of wine.[272]

This festival was observed everywhere, but other local feasts were arranged according to local traditions. In Canterbury every Mayor was bound “to keep the watch” on the Eve of the Translation of S. Thomas. “And in the aforesaid watch the Sheriff to ride in harness with a henchman after him honestly emparelled for the honour of the same city. And the Mayor to ride at his pleasure, and if the Mayor’s pleasure be to ride in harness, the Aldermen to ride in like manner, and if he ride in his scarlet gown, the Aldermen to ride after the same watch in scarlet and crimson gowns.” The city was to be lighted by the Mayor finding “two cressets, or six torches, or more at his pleasure,” every Alderman finding two cressets, and each of the Common Council with every constable and town clerk one cresset. In Chester the great day for merry making was Shrove Tuesday, when the drapers, saddlers, shoemakers and many others met at the cross on the Roodeye, and there in the presence of the Mayor the shoemakers gave to the drapers a football of leather “to play at from thence to the Common Hall.” The saddlers at the same time gave “every master of them a painted ball of wood with flowers and arms upon the point of a spear, being goodly arrayed upon horseback accordingly.” The whole town joined in the sports, and everyone married within the year gave some contribution toward their funds.[273]

To these festivities we must add the yearly pageants of the Guilds—whether of the great societies like the Guild of St. George at Norwich,[274] whose Alderman in scarlet robe followed by the four hundred members with their distinguishing red hoods, marched after the sword of wood with a Dragon’s head for the handle which had been presented to them by Henry the Fifth;—or of the Corpus Christi Guild which evidently played a political part in the life of every great town. In York it is said to have had in the sixteenth century nearly fifteen thousand members, and at its great pageant, the Mayor and Town Council “and other worshipful persons” joined in a common feast, and sent wine and fruits at the public expense to great nobles and ladies in the city, till perhaps supplies ran out and the town was “drunken dry.”[275] The Craft Guilds also, whether voluntarily or by order of the Corporation, had their pageants, acting the same play year after year.[276]

It has been commonly supposed that the English people had in the later middle ages a passion for pageantry and display, which was one of the strongest forces in maintaining their guild organization. But towards the end of the fifteenth century at least it becomes less and less clear that the freewill of the craftsmen had much to say to the maintenance of these public gaieties, or that they felt any enthusiasm for amusements which yearly grew more expensive and burdensome.[277] There were places where the crafts, whether through poverty or economy, neglected to spend a due proportion of their earnings on the public festivals, and in one town after another as popular effort declined the authorities began to urge the people on to the better fulfilment of their duties. In 1490 a complaint was made in Canterbury that the Corpus Christi Play, the City Watch on S. Thomas’ Eve, and the Pageant of S. Thomas had fallen into decay. Some Mayors indeed “in their year have full honourably kept the said watch;” but others had neglected it, and “all manner of harness within the city is decayed and rusted for lack of the yearly watch.” It was therefore decreed that every Mayor should henceforth “keep the watch,” and that the crafts who apparently hoped to escape from the heavy charges of these plays by declaring themselves too poor to be formed into a corporate body, should forthwith be grouped together into a sort of confederation or give up their bodies for punishment.[278] In the same way when the tailors of Plymouth were incorporated in 1496, they had to bind themselves to provide a pageant every year on Corpus Christi Day for the benefit of the Corpus Christi Guild,[279] and so on in many other towns. Occasionally indeed the Corporation took a different and more merciful line; for the Mayor and Sheriffs of Norwich petitioned the Lords and Commons to pass an Act or Order to prevent Players of Interludes from coming into the city, as they took so large a share of the earnings of the poor operatives as to cause great want to their families, and a heavy charge to the city,[280] and Bridgenorth got an order from Elizabeth that the town might no longer pay players or bear-wards; whoever wanted to see such things must see them “upon their own costs and charges.”[281]

On the whole it is evident that long before the Reformation, and even when as yet no Puritan principles had been imported into the matter, the gaiety of the towns was already sobered by the pressure of business and the increase of the class of depressed workers. It was not before the fanaticism of religion, but before the coming in of new forms of poverty and of bondage that the old games and pageants lost their lustre and faded out of existence, save where a mockery of life was preserved to them by compulsion of the town authorities. And the town authorities were probably acting under pressure of the publicans, and licensed victuallers. Cooks and brewers and hostellers[282] were naturally deeply interested in the preservation of the good old customs, and it was in some cases certainly this class, the most powerful in a mediæval borough, who raised the protest against the indifference and neglect of the townspeople for public processions and merry-making, because “thereby the victuallers lose their money, and who insisted on the revival of these festivals for the encouragement of trade. Probably where the crafts were strong and the votes of the working people carried the day, the decision turned the other way.

VIII. All the multitudinous activities and accidents of this common life were summed up for the people in the parish church that stood in their market-place, close to the Common House or Guild Hall. This was the fortress of the borough against its enemies—its place of safety where the treasure of the commons was stored in dangerous times, the arms in the steeple, the wealth of corn or wool or precious goods[283] in the church itself,[284] guarded by a sentence of excommunication against all who should violate so sacred a protection.[285] Its shrines were hung with the strange new things which English sailors had begun to bring across the great seas—with “horns of unicorns,” ostrich eggs, or walrus tusks, or the rib of a whale given by Sebastian Cabot. From the church tower the bell rang out which called the people to arm for the common defence, or summoned a general assembly, or proclaimed the opening of the market.[286] Burghers had their seats in the church apportioned to them by the corporation in the same rank and order as the stalls which it had already assigned to them in the market-place. The city officers and their wives sat in the chief places of honour; next to them came tradesmen according to their degree with their families honourably “y-parroked (parked) in pews,” where Wrath sat among the proud ladies who quarrelled as to which should first receive the holy bread;[287] while “apprentices and servants shall sit or stand in the alleys.” There on Sundays and feast-days the people came to hear any news of importance to the community, whether it was a list of strayed sheep, or a proclamation by the bailiff of the penalties which had been decreed in the manor court against offenders.[288] The church was their Common Hall where the commonalty met for all kinds of business, to audit the town accounts, to divide the common lands, to make grants of property, to hire soldiers, or to elect a mayor. There the council met on Sundays or festivals, as might best suit their convenience; so that we even hear of a payment made by the priest to the corporation to induce them not to hold their assemblies in the chancel while high mass was being performed.[289] It was the natural place for justices to sit and hear cases of assault and theft; or it might serve as a hall where difficult legal questions could be argued out by lawyers. In the middle of the fifteenth century when the Bishop and the Mayor of Exeter were in the height of a fierce contest about the government of the town they met for discussion in the cathedral. “When my lord had said his prayers at the high altar he went apart to the side altar by himself and called to him apart the mayor and no more, and there communed together a great while.” And on this common ground the dean and chapter on the one side and the mayor and Town Council on the other, attended by their respective lawyers, fought out the questions of law on which the case turned.[290] In fair time the throng of traders expected to be allowed to overflow from the High Street into the cathedral precincts, and were “ever wont and used ... to lay open, buy and sell divers merchandises in the said church and cemetery and special in the king’s highway there as at Wells, Salisbury and other places more, as dishes, bowls, and other things like, and in the said church ornaments for the same and other jewels convenient thereto.”[291] In a draft presentation to a London vicarage of 1427 there is a written memorandum with an order from the king that no fairs or markets shall be held in sanctuaries, “for the honour of Holy Church.”[292] Edward the First had indeed forbidden such fairs in his Statute of Merchants, but such an order was little in harmony with the habits and customs of the age; and if there was an occasional stirring of conscience in the matter, it was not till the time of Laud that the public attained to a conviction, or acquiesced in an authoritative assertion, that the church was desecrated by the transaction in it of common business.[293]

In the middle ages however the townspeople were connected with their parish church after a fashion which has long been unknown among us. They were frequently the lay rectors; they appointed the wardens and churchwardens; they had control of the funds, and the administration of lands left for maintaining its services and fabric; sometimes they laid claim to the fees paid for masses.[294] The popular interest might even extend to the criticism and discipline of the rector; so that in Bridport an enquiry of the bishop as to whether his chaplain, “a foreigner from Britanny,” was “drunk every day” was held in presence of “a copious multitude of the parishioners,” and twelve townsmen acted as witnesses.[295] If a religious guild had become identified with the corporation, the town body and the Church were united by a yet closer tie. The corporation of Plymouth, which on its other side was the Guild of our Lady and St. George, issued its instructions even as to the use of vestments in St. Andrews, ruling when “the best copes and vestments” should be used at funerals, and how “the second blue copes” only might be displayed at the burial of any man who died without leaving to the Church an offering of twenty shillings.[296]

The people on their side were taxed, and heavily taxed, for the various expenses of the Church.[297] Sergeants sent by the Town Council collected under severe penalties the dues for the blessed bread and “trendilles” of wax, or “light-silver” for the lights burned beside dead bodies laid in the church; and the town treasury paid for “coals for the new fire on Easter Eve.”[298] If a church had to be repaired or rebuilt the pressure of spiritual hopes or fears, the habit of public duty, the boastfulness of local pride, all the influences that might stimulate the common effort, were raised to their highest efficiency by the watchful care of the corporation. All necessary orders were sent out by the mayor, who with the Town Council determined the share which the inhabitants were to take in the work; and in small and destitute parishes where the principle of self-help and independence was quite as fully recognized as it was in bigger and richer towns, real sacrifices were demanded. Men gave their money or their labour or the work of their horse and cart, or they offered a sheep or fowls, or perhaps rings and personal ornaments.[299] In the pride of their growing municipal life the poorest boroughs built new towers and hung new chimes worthy of the latest popular ideals. The inhabitants of Totnes were so poor that in 1449 there were only three people in the town who paid as much as twentypence for the tax of half-tenths and fifteenths for the King. But since Totnes had four new bells which had been anointed and consecrated in 1442, it decided that the old wooden belfry of the parish church should be replaced by a new stone tower. A master mason was appointed in 1448, and “supervisors” were chosen to visit the bell towers of all the country round and to make that at Totnes “according to the best model.” The proctors of the church provided shovels and pick-axes, and the parishioners were called out to dig stones from the quarry; every one who had a horse was to help in carrying the stones, “but without coercion,” while “those who have no horses of their own are to work with the horses of other persons, but at their own cost.” Last of all an ordinance was made that the mayor, vicar, and proctors of the church should go round to each parishioner and see how much he would give to the collection on Sundays for the bell tower, and those who contributed nothing were to have their names entered on a roll and sent to the Archdeacon’s Court.[300] When St. Andrews at Plymouth was enlarged the town authorities decided that the money should be collected by means of a yearly “church-ale.” Taverns were closed by order of the council on a certain day, and every ward of the town made for itself a “hale” or booth in the cemetery of the parish church. All inhabitants of the wards were commanded to come with as many friends and acquaintances as possible “for the increasing of the said ale,” and to bring with them “except bread and drink such victual as they like best”; but they must buy at the “hale” “bread and ale as it cometh thereto for their dinners and suppers the same day.” After ten years of these picnics in the churchyard the new aisle of St. Andrews was finished at a cost of £44 14s. 6d.[301]

In the midst of this busy life—a life where the citizens themselves watched over their boundaries, defended their territory, kept peace in their borders, took charge of the common property, governed the spending of the town treasure, laboured with their own hands at all public works, ordered their own amusements, the mediæval burgher had his training. The claims of the commonwealth were never allowed to slip from his remembrance. As all the affairs of the town were matters of public responsibility, so all the incidents of its life were made matters of public knowledge. The ancient “common horn” or the “common bell”[302] announced the opening of the market, or the holding of the mayor’s court, or called the townspeople together in time of danger. Criers went about the streets to proclaim the ordinances of the community, and to remind the citizens of their duties. From the church stile or in the market-place they summoned men to the King’s muster, or called them to their place in the town’s ship or barge; or if danger from an enemy threatened, warned the citizens “to have harness carried to the proper places,” or “to have cattle or hogs out of the fields.” They exhorted the people “to leave dice-playing,” “to cease ball-playing and to take to bows;” to shut the shops at service time; “to have water at men’s doors” for fear of fire. The crier “called” any proclamation of the King in the public places of the town; he declared deeds of pardon granted to any criminal, or proclaimed that some poor wretch who had taken sanctuary in the church had abjured the kingdom and was to be allowed to depart safely through the streets. Perhaps the “cry” was made that a prisoner had been thrown into the town gaol on suspicion, and accusers were called to appear if they had any charge to bring against him; or it was announced that the will of a deceased townsman was about to be proved in the court-house, if there were any who desired to raise objections; or there was proclamation that a burgher had offended against the laws of the community and was degraded from the freedom of the town, or perhaps banished for ever from its territory. At other times players and minstrels would pass through the market-place and streets “crying the banns” of their plays. The merchant, the apprentice, the journeyman, the shopkeeper, gathered in the same crowd to hear the crier who recorded every incident in the town life or brought tidings of coming change. News was open, public, without distinction of persons.

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 Sarum[304] 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 affairs[306]—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 town[310] 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 estates[365] 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.

III. There was another class of privileged traders,—those who lived altogether outside the town,[366] who knew nothing of its courts, and bore none of its charges. We find everywhere these country traders under various styles and with various privileges according to the town’s discretion and convenience. Sometimes the citizens sold rights of trade to cultivators of the surrounding lands and occasional visitors to fair or market, and nobles and landowners were ready to give large yearly payments for freedom of the market and for the right of having granaries in the town. Peasants who owned a plot of land just outside the borough increased their scanty store by learning some little handicraft or doing a small trade in the town; or craftsmen settled down beyond the boundaries to escape the town dues and live more cheaply. At first the settlement of workmen and traders at their gates may have seemed a matter of small consequence, but as time went on the danger which was hidden in these communities of free-traders became apparent. The manufacturer or dealer was able by one device or another to protect himself against the enterprising man of the suburbs who came in with his cheaper goods; it was the journeymen of the towns who failed before the stress of the battle, driven back from their poor entrenchments by the masses who pushed forward on all sides to contest with them admission into the lower ranks of industry where the scantiest skill sufficed to earn a bare subsistence.

IV. Last of all came the non-burgesses, who had neither any share in the government, nor any rights to rent a stall in the market, nor to own shop or workroom in the town. These formed an obscure company of workers without records or history. They counted among their number ancient burghers who had fallen into low estate and could no longer pay their burgage dues, as well as the poor who had never prospered so far as to buy a tenure or citizenship. But they were not all necessarily poor or miserable.[367] Rich merchants came from foreign parts to settle for four or eight months at a time, as the law might allow them, and bought and sold within the four walls of the room which the Town Council had ordered in some inn as their dwelling-place, with the host standing at their elbow to witness every bargain. Foreign workmen sometimes came to settle, like the Flemish weavers in Bristol, or the Dutch makers of canals and sluices whom we find in the towns of the southern coast. Companies of tilers or builders gathered in towns where stone houses were becoming the fashion, or where the Council had issued an order that within the next few months every house must provide itself with roof and chimney of brick or tiles.[368] The seaports had their uncertain element of sailors, “shipmen that had nought, and cared never an they were once on the sea whether they come again or not,” and who at Yarmouth formed a riotous population, so that it was said that “no thrifty man would live in it.”[369] Labourers from the country came in to win freedom from serfage. Others came to look for higher wages, and the hope which town life held out to the enterprising and the ambitious; so that in 1405 an Act of Parliament declared that the fields were deserted, and the “gentlemen and other people of the nation greatly impoverished” by the labourers seeking apprenticeship in towns, “and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs that servants do use in the same.”[370] Children came, constantly as young as seven, never older than twelve—when they were expected to begin the work of life just as at that age their brothers of a better station took on themselves the duties of citizenship, for “every poor man that hath brought up children to the age of twelve year waiteth then to be holp and profited by his children.”[371] Thenceforward they had to fight their own way, looking for assistance not to their fathers but to their patrons, “whence it proceeds that, having no hope of their paternal inheritance, they all become so greedy of gain that they feel no shame in asking almost ‘for the love of God,’ for the smallest sums of money; and to this it may be attributed that there is no injury that can be committed against the lower orders of the English that may not be atoned for by money.”[372]

But if apprenticeship ever brought with it “pride of clothing,” the poor working class of the towns fared roughly and worked hard among artizans who “hold full hungry house,” who know “long labour and light winning,” who taste no wine from week to week, whose bed has no blanket, and on whose board no white bread ever comes.”[373] Once this rough living and rougher toil had been a sure way of entering into the privileges of municipal freedom. But even in the fourteenth century this was no longer the case. The poorer burghers opposed the admission of new comers to share their common lands, and insisted on selling the franchise dearly. The crafts had already begun to form themselves into close companies, and by prohibitive fines shut out all save the descendants of their own members; while at the same time the custom was growing up that the town franchise should be given only to those who were enrolled in a craft or trade guild; and strangers therefore found the way barred against them; they could neither become masters in their craft nor burgesses in their town, and went to swell the general mass of journeymen and serving men. Moreover the Peasant Revolt had carried with it widespread terror, and from that time some towns, as for instance York and Bridgenorth, refused to allow any born bondman, whatever his estate, to receive the freedom of the city. Thus from one cause or another groups of men were formed in the midst of every town who were shut out from the civic life of the community, and whose natural bond of union was hostility to the privileged class which denied them the dignity of free citizens and refused them fair competition in trading enterprise. The burghers yearly added to their number half a dozen or perhaps even a score of members wealthy enough to buy the privilege, while the increase in the unenfranchised class, which had begun very early in the town life, proceeded by leaps and bounds; till presently the old balance of forces in the little state was overthrown, the ancient constitution of a free community of equal householders was altogether annulled and forgotten, and a comparatively small class of privileged citizens ruled with a strong hand over subject traders and labourers to whom they granted neither the forms nor the substance of liberty.

CHAPTER VI

THE PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT

Bridport

The comfortable independence in which the townspeople of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had stoutly entrenched themselves, was the reward of a couple of centuries of persistent effort, in which they had steadily laboured at their double work of emancipation, freeing themselves on the one hand from the feudal yoke, and on the other from political servitude. No independent life of the community could arise so long as the inhabitants of a town acknowledged an absolute subjection to their feudal lord, and bore the heavy burdens of services and taxes which, however they might differ according to the usages of the several manors, weighed upon the people everywhere with persistent and intolerable force. The lord might destroy their industry by suddenly calling out the inhabitants to follow him in a warlike expedition, or demanding services of forced labour or laying on them grievous taxes; his officers could throw the artizan or merchant into his prison, or ruin them by fines, or force upon them methods of law hateful and dangerous to their conceptions of a common life; as he claimed supreme rights over the soil it was impossible for the burgher to leave his property by will; and on the tenant’s death officers visited his house and stables and granaries to seize the most valuable goods as the lord’s relief. It was necessary to gain his consent before any new member could be admitted into the fellowship of citizens; and without his permission no inhabitant might leave the borough to carry on his trade elsewhere. He could forbid the marriage of children arranged by the fathers, or refuse to allow a widow to take a new husband and so make him master of her house and freeman in her town. He fixed the market laws and the market tolls. He forced the people to grind at his mill and bake at his oven.

If therefore the burghers were ever to develope commerce, or gather wealth, or form an organized society, or keep order in their streets, it was before all things necessary that serfs should be made into freemen; and the first object of the town communities was to find deliverance by purchase or negociation from those tyrannous usages by which their masters pressed most heavily on them. Vexatious feudal obligations were commuted for fixed payments in one town after another as their inhabitants grew rich and independent. A bargain was made, for instance, with the lord of Preston that he should no longer summon any burgess to follow him on a warlike expedition which lasted more than one day nor imprison on any accusation whatever a townsman who found sureties; and he was forced to sell or renounce the right of compelling the people to carry their corn to the lord’s mill or oven or kiln, and to allow any householder who chose to build an oven on his own ground.[374] The burgher everywhere became the acknowledged guardian of his own children and might betroth them at his pleasure; the right of widows to re-marry was secured against any interference from without; and absolute security was given to every citizen that under no circumstances could his tenement or plot of ground be claimed by any superior lord.[375] When the burgesses of Hereford were asked by a neighbouring town to give an account of their constitution they proudly dwelt upon the freedom they had won. “We do not use,” they say, “to do fealty or any other foreign service to the lord of the fees for our tenements, but only the rents arising out of the said tenements; because we say that we hold our tenements by the service of burgage, or as burgesses, so that we have not any other lord between our lord the king and us.” “And we do not so use,” they add, “to give any heriot nor mortuary to any one at the death of any of the citizens dying within the said city or suburbs, for any of his tenements.” Moreover “we say that every citizen of the city or suburbs may give and assign their tenements freely and quietly as well in health as in sickness, when and to whomsoever they please, whether those tenements are of their inheritance or of their purchasing or getting, without any malicious detracting of their lord, so that they be of such an age and no less, that they know how to measure a yard of cloth, and to know and tell twelve pence.”[376]

In these ways and in many others by which personal freedom was checked and thwarted, the rights of the feudal lord were irresistibly swept away by the pressure of growing societies of active traders and artizans.[377] But the need for political emancipation was no less urgent; and here the way to liberty was neither simple nor easy. A very hierarchy of powers held the path. The authority which the lord of the manor did not assume was exercised by the sheriff of the county; and where the authority of the sheriff ceased the supreme right of the king began. All government and jurisdiction were divided among powers in high places; and whatever privileges the burghers might secure must be won here a little and there a little, bought for money, or snatched amid the distresses and calamities of their masters, or held as the reward of importunate persistence, the tribute to successful craft, the recompense of some timely service rendered.

The case of Bridport illustrates the life of any provincial town in early times whose burghers still served many masters.[378] It was a busy little trading community in the thirteenth century. Hemp was grown in its fields which was sent to Plympton to be made into rope yarn, returned to Bridport to be woven into ropes, and then sent back again to Plympton for sale, or fashioned at home into the girths, horse-nets, and reins for which the Bridport men were famous. The inhabitants had won a considerable measure of self-rule. They elected the two bailiffs who were at the head of their local government, presided in the little town court, and doubtless regulated the market and controlled the trade. These two had under them under-bailiffs, cofferers, and constables; and were assisted by twelve jurors chosen every Michaelmas, who yearly perambulated the town to watch over its boundaries, and who had charge of the “parish cheste” or coffin and the parish bier, and of the pillory, whipping post, and cucking stool. Twelve men were also chosen to conduct any business in which Bridport was concerned. At the visits of the king’s justices they were summoned with the clerk in council to assist in the business of the court; they represented their fellow burgesses if any question was called for trial before the sheriffs court at Dorchester, or if a dispute arose with the bishop, or a settlement had to be made with the convent at Abbotsbury.

I. The powers of the burgesses however were shut up within the narrowest limits. At every moment of their lives some authority from without stepped in with rigorous control and ceaseless exactions. The Lord of the Manor (who in this particular case was the king) owned the soil of the town; therefore his Steward kept the Law Day,[379] judged the petty offences of the townsmen, summoned them before him to see that each was properly enrolled under the system of frankpledge, and swept their fines and forfeitures into the lord’s coffers.[380]

II. Bridport further owed obedience to the officers of the shire. The coroner[381] came to make inquisition in case of mysterious or violent death or of fire, judged the cause, seized forfeited goods or chattels, and assessed the fines. The sheriff of the county exercised a jurisdiction which extended over the most important affairs of the community, and touched at every point the daily life of the burghers. That his supervision might be constant and effectual, he was accustomed to appoint a deputy or under-sheriff to represent him on the spot, generally some man of importance in Bridport itself, who living in the centre of the town could keep a close watch on its affairs and manage them with a more exact control. It was the sheriff’s business to keep order, and guard against breaches of the king’s law. At stated times he called the town bailiff and constable to appear at his court at Dorchester; crimes which lay beyond the control of the manor court were brought to judgment before him and fines, or the gifts that averted fines,[382] reminded the burghers of his power. As head of the shire forces he ordered at his own will the muster-at-arms of the townsmen, and in times of disturbance called out the levies for the king’s service; he fixed the number of archers and fighting men; he regulated the contribution of bows and arrows, of hemp and cord, of corn or wine or fish. Year by year he assessed and levied the royal taxes,[383] and collected the rent due from the borough to the king’s exchequer. Payments were not made in money in such a town as Bridport; so when the rent day came near the sheriff or his deputy first drew up a list of oxen and other goods which were to be given up by the various inhabitants and ultimately sold on the Monday after Palm Sunday for the ferm. Meanwhile this list was handed over to the charge of the “bailiff-errant,” who travelled from town to town with his clerk and groom[384] on the business of the shire; and certain citizens were made responsible for the safety of the cattle and goods until the appointed day. The choice of goods to be taken from each person, the chance of accident before the day of sale, the naming of citizens who were to bear the charges of making good any possible loss, the various fortunes of the auction and of the prices it might bring, the skilful calculations necessary to ensure that however much the profits might exceed the needed sum they should never fall short of it—all these things created at every turn new chances of corruption, new hopes of profit to those in authority, and new prospects of ruin to those under the law.[385] The division of powers between the sheriff and his deputies, and the practical impossibility of fixing any responsibility or of calling any one of them to account, left the inhabitants mere creatures at mercy, subject to varied and fortuitous hardship; while on the other hand the art of government became to every one concerned in it a mere business of self-preservation. When John in 1216 sent a commission to collect the ferm of Northampton which had fallen into arrears, the commissioner was informed that the king could not afford payment either for himself or for his servants, and that he must therefore provide as best he could for their salaries and provisions out of the arrears of the ferm which he was sent to collect.[386] Such a system quickened zeal on the part of officials, if it did not lighten the troubles of the people. In those days every officer in the scale, from the sheriff to the constable, subject to the claims and exactions of his immediate superior, could only indemnify himself by exercising a corresponding pressure on those below him, and passing on the tradition of fraud and tyranny.

It would be hard to say whether the sheriff’s position as tax-gatherer, as judge, or as recruiting officer and military leader, gave him the largest opportunities for extortion and tyranny; but so long as every office that he held added new pretences for arbitrary interference, the townspeople were driven to win his favour by frequent gifts, whether to himself or to his wife, which indeed his deputies were strict in levying when voluntary action proved tardy. He generally required a “year gift” from towns under his control, either to induce him not to come within their liberties, or to remind him to “shew his friendship” to the inhabitants in their necessities;[387] and it was a common custom, when money fell short, to make collection by means of a “scot-ale,”[388] and summon the townsfolk to a drinking feast where they were bound to contribute a supply of provisions, and to spend a certain sum at the ale-booths set up for the day, while the proceeds of the whole entertainment went into the sheriff’s pocket. Modes of extortion, however, might vary infinitely. In Canterbury the sheriff once broke down the only bridge over the river, and so kept it for three months, while he put a ferry boat on the water which the people were forced to use and pay for on his own terms.[389] The confessed superiority of these officials in the arts of fraud and tyranny was proclaimed by the universal fear and hate which followed them—passions which break out in the popular ballads where by a traditional touch the people’s hero, Robin Hood, is endowed with the hatred of all sheriffs; and which stir the heart of the writer of Piers Ploughman as he pictures these officers in the foremost place wherever there is a gathering of the servants of corruption, and in his parable of the Lady Meed travelling to the Court tells how it was a sheriff who was appointed to bear her softly in a litter from Assize to Assize with tenderest care for her safety, since “sheriffs of shires were shent (undone) if she were not.”[390]

III. The sheriff however was but the deputy of the crown, and the sovereign rights of the King lay behind and above all subordinate authority whatever. When a royal messenger rode through the gates of a town the officers of the lord of the manor and of the shire alike acknowledged a higher law; and such messengers were not rare. The sheriff’s accustomed rule was set aside whenever judges from Westminster sat in the church or the Guild Hall to administer the justice of the King’s Court. Sometimes the king’s escheator came to investigate into lapsed estates, to ascertain whether any socage tenants had died, and claim the customary fines.[391] From time to time Court officials “carrying the mace of the lord the king” appeared to announce statutes or ordinances made in Parliament; or came as unwelcome commissioners to ask for benevolences and loans. The king’s clerk of the market[392] might ride into the town with a troop of horses and followers carrying weights and measures signed with the sign of the exchequer; he would call for all the town measures, test them by his models, see that the false ones were burned, and then claim a fresh relay of horses to carry him on to his next stage. If the sovereign chose he might send an officer under the assize of arms to “sit at Bridport to array the men” and call for archers for the king’s service; or in case of need the king’s “harbinger” or “sergeant-at-arms” came to judge how many soldiers should be billeted on the inhabitants. In time of rebellion or civil war,[393] suspicion of disaffection might fall upon the town, and then commissioners travelled from London to hold a special “inquisition” on the spot.

IV. All these officers represented the king as supreme head of the law; but other messengers came from the court, as unbidden and unwelcome as the last, who claimed for the sovereign a tribute which belonged to his personal dignity and state. When the monarch travelled he carried his own law with him; wherever he went the steward and marshal of his house had jurisdiction for twelve miles to be counted from the lodging of the king;[394] and their authority superseded all other law whether of the borough or the shire. The marshal demanded such supply of horses as was necessary for the king or his messengers;[395] the purveyors and larderers and officers of the household levied provisions on all townsfolk,[396] save the few who had been lucky enough to gain the king’s grant of protection,[397] seized what they needed of their corn and bread and salted meats, called out the inhabitants for forced labour, billeted the crowd that made up the royal train on the various householders,[398] and in fact governed at their own will any town through which the king passed. A happy obscurity and distance from the court could alone preserve a little borough like Bridport from exactions of royal travellers; and its people might bear with resignation a poverty and insignificance which at least protected them from evils of so great magnitude to poor and over-tasked workers.

V. There was yet another form in which the power of the crown pressed upon the inhabitants of a borough. Privileges granted by the king might be withdrawn at his caprice; and the burghers lay absolutely at his mercy for all the liberties and rights which they enjoyed. At the beginning of every reign the confirmation of their charters, and the affixing of the new king’s seal, had to be won by such payments and bribes as the officials in high places judged that the burghers could afford.[399] The king might at any moment raise a question as to the value of their charters; or he might make some public revolution or local disturbance the occasion for a revision or a threatened withdrawal of ancient “customs.”[400] When their rights were menaced the townsmen had but one resource, and hastily met together, as in the case of Bridport, to order by the “common assent” that reins and horse nets should be provided at the public cost and sent to London, for “furthering the common business.”

For the whole of this complicated system of administration was kept in working order by a generous system of bribes—bribes given largely and openly, registered in the public accounts, and granted indifferently to any official, great or small, who might be induced by a timely gift to “show his friendship.” Towns won the renewal or the preservation of their chartered rights by offerings to king or queen, to chancellors and bishops and great officers of the household, with whom they interceded by the aid of a “cow-pull” of swans or cygnets or heronshaws, a porpoise, a store of dried sprats, or a cask of wine. “The law is ended as a man is friended,” said the wise folk of the fifteenth century, and if any legal question arose the town could only “have a verdict” when due “courtesies,” as they were called, were prepared for justices and their clerks, barons of the exchequer and sheriffs and counsel and attorneys, besides any sums required to pay a “friendly” jury.[401] If the king sent pressing and overwhelming demands for money, a deputation of leading burghers would hurry up to Westminster, carrying gifts and bribes to the Clerk of the Rolls and the usher of Parliament as a peace offering.[402] Or some gracious patron might be persuaded to divert from the town “a quest of the Admiralty, that it would not come thither as was intended to come.”[403] When men were called out for war the community would consult by what gifts or “courtesies” it might arrange “to have pardoning that we should not ride up so many men as the said warrant commanded.”[404] At the appearance of the King’s harbinger or sergeant-at-arms the first thought was to collect a sum which might induce their formidable guest to limit the number of troops billeted on the town, or even to march them away altogether.[405] In the same way if a messenger appeared bearing part of the body of a traitor who had been executed, which by the King’s orders was to be set up on the gate of the borough, the inhabitants would give him a present to carry on his burden to some other town.[406]

Counted among the usual incidents of government, and reckoned in the ordinary expenditure of the municipality, the payment of such bribes was to all concerned merely the customary mode of defraying some of the expenses of administration;[407] and the public sense acquiesced in a prudent and necessary method of carrying on the affairs of state. Gifts to great officials were not tokens of servitude required only from dependent towns, but a tribute levied as rigorously from the free boroughs. The bribes demanded were not less in number; the main difference was that they went into different pockets. Thus the offerings required from Canterbury when its municipal existence was most vigorous and self-dependent, were naturally on a scale unexampled in a little place such as Bridport.[408] The gifts of the town were scattered far and wide; a pike to a London lawyer, wine to Master John Fineux the justiciar, a conger eel to the Dean of Windsor, wine to the chancellor of the Archbishop of York, payments to the Bishop of Winchester that the city might “have his mediation,” gifts to Cardinal Beaufort to win his help when it was proposed to change the municipal constitution, offerings to the Bishop of St. David’s—who nominally got a double supply, one present being provided for the Episcopus Menevensis and another for the Episcopus de Seynt Taffey[409] to “have their friendship” with the King in the anxious days of 1483. Royal dukes and court officers, bishops, chamberlains, notaries, clerks of the Rolls, knights who had access to the palace, sheriffs, judges of the king’s court, were sumptuously feasted, and messengers knocked at the doors of their lodgings laden with pheasants, cygnets, capons, rams, oxen, geese, with Rhenish wine, wine of Tyre, claret, muscatel, and red wine and white by thirty or fifty gallons at a time. In the revolutionary times of 1470 the citizens were unluckily associated with the party of Henry the Sixth, and for years after their wealth was lavished in buying back the favour of the court. The Duchess of York, who had once been accustomed to receive her tribute of Rhenish wine, red wine, and wine of Tyre, visited the city in 1471, when her son was in difficulties; but the prudent citizens now only offered the poor lady “for bread 12d.” On the other hand when Edward was again triumphant officers and commissioners of the king of every degree accepted pheasants, geese, capons and red wine. The burghers presented to the Duke of Clarence a load of claret and capons which it took four men to carry. Soon after when the King’s Chamberlain came to Canterbury, he was given his dinner at the “Swan,” one of the inns belonging to the corporation, where he feasted off “a wild beast called a bukk” which had been brought from Westen-hanger; and after the dinner eight men carried a peace-offering to his inn, two swans, two fat capons, four capons, four pheasants, fifty-six gallons of red wine, and half a gallon of muscatel; and shortly after another tribute was sent up to him in London.[410]

But behind this customary system of bribes and gifts lay the deep and permanent trouble of perpetual uncertainty and dread. Everywhere authority came home to the unhappy subjects as a mere matter of arbitrary and violent caprice, and the main function of government as that of rough extortion and successful pillage; while the recognition of privilege on every side blotted out all sense of equality before the law, and the weak, knowing all their helplessness, were as anxious to buy the commodity of protection, as the powerful, conscious of their might, were willing to make a gain of it. Canterbury sought the patronage of leading people in the county or the court;[411] Norwich profited, so long as he was in favour, by the protection of Suffolk; York gratefully recognised the services of the Duke of Gloucester. When he passed through the city, an order was sent out by the corporation that every alderman and council man in livery, and every member of any craft in his best array, should go out to meet him at the gate—the commoners being in their places by the early dawn, at three of the morning, the grand people an hour later in consideration of their rank. In 1482 the Duke acted as mediator between the city and the King in the matter of the election of a mayor, and the council agreed that in regard of “the great labour of the good and benevolent lordship,” that he “have at all times done for the weal of this city,” the whole community should join in giving him “a laud and thank;” and the aldermen dressed in scarlet, with the Council of Twenty-four in murrey or crimson, attended at the mayor’s house to present the Duke with a gift of all kinds of wine and fish, and lead a procession of the whole commonalty to his lodging at the Friar Austins.[412]

Patronage and protection, however, were dearly bought at all times, and at any moment their price, determined by the reckless habits of a lord, or the necessity of a king, or the greed of a sheriff, might be raised so as to bring years of confusion to municipal finances. Demands sudden and irregular, which no wisdom could calculate beforehand and no prudence could avert, wasted the substance of the people; and thrifty burghers learned to measure their progress to independence by their success in limiting the pleas which the great could urge as reasons for levying toll and tribute on their labour. The love of liberty was forced on them by the practical needs of life. A people long used to hardship, dependent on the capricious mercy of their masters, subject without appeal to impositions laid on them by the stronger hand, they learned by daily experience that government by laws made without their own consent, and administered by officers imposed on them against their will, was the very definition of slavery. By a rude experience of alien officials they were effectually taught that the first necessity of a free community was the right of choosing its own governors, that the control of life and goods and the responsibilities of any office of honour and profit and trust in the town should no longer be entrusted to strangers, but committed into the hands of their own fellow citizens, of whose fidelity, patriotism, and credit they could assure themselves. It was impossible that all the fortunes of their commerce should hang on the will of some distant master whose faculty of ruling them in all their concerns rested on the mere superiority of power; and traders everywhere demanded authority to order their own business, and rule their markets. The inhabitants of a town could not claim the property in their own borough till they had secured the right of holding it directly from the crown at a yearly rent which they themselves should pay into the exchequer at Westminster;[413] and even then their privileged existence was a mere matter of royal caprice till they found means to have the corporate succession of the borough legally recognized.[414] Their municipality was threatened with financial calamities unless they could win exemption from the Statute of Mortmain, and obtain the right of holding property for the town’s good.[415] The bondage under which they lay to the sheriff[416] and tax-gatherer could only be broken when they were given full powers to assess and collect all their own taxes.[417] Vexed and impoverished by journeys to distant courts for justice, harassed by the interference in their most private affairs of some far-off governor, forced in every recurring emergency to carry appeals for justice or petitions for favour to an alien power separate from all their interests, they urged the claim that right should be done to the burghers in their own courts and by their own officers as of the very essence of any true liberty. “We are the citizens of our lord the king,” said the burghers of Hereford, “and have the custody of his city for us and for his heirs and for our heirs, and we ought not to go out of our city for the recovering of our debts, for divers dangers and misfortunes which might happen to our wives and children; and if we ought to spend our goods and chattels in parts afar off, by impleading and labouring for that, by that means and the like we shall be impoverished; and being made poor, we shall not have wherewith to keep the city, and so disinheritance by such ways would easily fall upon our children.”[418] And as the burghers claimed that each community should have absolute control over its members for the peace and order of the commonwealth, so they were resolute that no powerful patron, within or without the borough, should on any plea whatever venture to aid or “maintain” a townsman who had offended against the municipal law, “because by such maintainers or protectors a common contention might arise amongst us, and horrible manslaughter be committed amongst us, and the loss of the liberty or freedom of the city to the disinheritance of us and our children; which God forbid that in our days by the defect of us, should happen or fall out in such a manner.”[419] From the first they were forced to look beyond the question of mere personal regard, seeing how deeply legal forms of procedure affected their common life as a separate society, and they had their grave reasons of state for insisting that the older forms of administering justice in their courts should be maintained, and trial by combat rejected and abolished from among them, “by reason of perpetual enmity of us the parents and of our children, which might turn to the ruin or perdition of the city and other innumerable accident dangers.”[420] In the same way they were driven to realize the necessity of having some share in deciding on the laws by which they were to be governed, and which might have the gravest results to their little state; as, for example, when the people of Leicester petitioned for a charter from Henry the Third to do away with the ancient usage of “borough English,” and grant the right of inheritance to the eldest son, since owing to defective heirs and their weakness, the town was falling into ruin and dishonour.[421]

All these privileges and exemptions were matters of negociation between the borough and the king or the lord of the manor to be bought for money, or for political support, or for loans in time of need.[422] The people everywhere simply won such advantages as time and opportunity allowed, and secured benefits which were measured by the grace of the king, or by the price they could afford to pay, or by the show of resistance they could make to their lord. Nor was there anything startling or revolutionary about the first beginnings of independent municipal life. The town assemblies which discussed and inaugurated a new constitution transacted their business with a completeness and accuracy of methodical routine which might kindle the sympathy of a Town Council of modern Birmingham. In the organization of “meetings” the mediæval Englishman seems to have had nothing to learn, and the doings of the people of Ipswich when they got their first charter from King John in 1200 carry us into the quiet atmosphere of a board-room where shareholders and directors of some solid and old-established company assemble for business with the decorum and punctuality of venerable habit.[423] The charter granted those essential privileges which were recognized by all boroughs as of the very first importance—the right henceforward to deal in financial matters directly with the Exchequer, and no longer act as a mere fragment of the shire through the sheriff; to be free of tolls on trade throughout the kingdom, and have a Guild Merchant with all its commercial privileges; to carry out justice according to the ancient custom of the borough; and to elect each year from among themselves officers to rule over the town, who being thus appointed by common consent could only be removed from office by the unanimous counsel of the whole people. The charter was given on May 25, and in the following month a general assembly of the burghers was summoned. At this meeting they first elected the chief officers for the year, the bailiffs and coroners, and then proceeded to decide by common counsel that a body of twelve “Portmen” should be appointed to assist them; and three days later these too were formally chosen through another and more complicated system of election by a select body of citizens named for the purpose. Having taken an oath faithfully to govern the borough and maintain its liberties, and justly to render the judgments of its courts, the new officers then caused all the townsmen to stretch forth their hands towards the Book, and with one voice solemnly swear from that hour to obey and assist them in guarding the liberties of the town. Twelve days after this they met to ordain the most necessary rules for the administration of the town. Two months were then spent in drawing up “Ordinances” which were finally solemnly read to the whole people assembled in the churchyard, and received their unanimous consent. And lastly a month later, on October 12, the organization of the Merchant Guild for the regulation of trade was completed and its officers elected; the newly made Common Seal[424] was inspected; and the community ordered that a record of all their laws and free customs should be written for perpetual remembrance in a roll to be called Domesday. And thus with all the grave ceremony which befitted the dignity of a new republic, Ipswich started on its independent career as a free borough.