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 manoeuvre 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.