Battle for Freedom

(3) Towns on Church Estates

The towns on ecclesiastical estates form a distinct group, whose lot was materially different from boroughs on ancient demesne or on feudal lands. All lay property was subject only to laws and customs which had been ultimately determined by the necessities of social or political expediency, and which, dealing with secular possessions for secular purposes, were capable of being unmade as they had been made. But the towns which were reckoned among ecclesiastical estates lay under the special conditions that governed those estates, where religious and supernatural influences had been forced into the service of material wealth, and the attempt was made by spiritual authority to fix fluctuating political conditions into perpetual immutability. Prelates of the Church professed to rule with a double title, not only as feudal lords of the soil, but as guardians of the patrimony of S. Peter, holding property in trust for a great spiritual corporation, and exercising an authority maintained by formidable sanctions. If the watchwords of property are always impressive, among lay folk they are still open, under sufficiently strong pressure, to reasonable discussion; and it is admitted that temporal rights may be plausibly exchanged for others more expedient, or may be fairly bartered away as a means of buying a continued and secure existence. The Church, however, by a fruitful confusion of the terms ecclesiastical and religious, assumed to hold property by another tenure than any temporal owner; girt round about by tremendous safeguards to which the lay world could not aspire, and leaning on supernatural support for deliverance from all perils, it could the better refuse to discuss bargains suggested by mere political expediency.

The difficulty of reconciling this assumption of permanent and indivisible supremacy with the actual facts of life became very apparent with the passage of the centuries, when from a variety of causes it was no longer possible for the clerical order to maintain the place it had once held as the advanced guard of industry and learning, and its tendency was to sink into the position of a parasite class, producing nothing itself, but clinging to the means of wealth developed by the labour of a subject people. With the wisdom born of experience the Church was ready to give to its tenants all trading privileges, and any liberties that directly made for the accumulation of wealth;[517] but the flow of its liberality was suddenly dried up when townspeople proposed to add political freedom to material gain, nor was it likely to be quickened again by the crude simplicity with which the common folk resolved the question of the lordship of canons and monks.

“Unneth (scarcely) might they matins say,
For counting and court holding;”
······

“Saint Benet made never none of them
To have lordship of man nor town.”[518]

The rising municipalities on the other hand, even if they had a history but a century or two old, were endowed with all the young and vigorous forces of the modern world; nor is there a single instance of a town where a lively trade went hand in hand with a subservient spirit, or where a temper of unconquerable audacity in commercial enterprise did not throw its exuberant force into the region of government and politics. With all their abounding energy, however, burghers had still to discover that freedom might be won anywhere save at the hands of an ecclesiastical lord. If Norwich received from the bounty of Kings one privilege after another in quick succession till its emancipation was complete, its neighbour Lynn, equally wealthy and enterprising, but subject to the Bishop of Norwich, was fighting in 1520 to secure just such control of its local courts as Norwich had won for the asking three hundred years before. The royal borough of Sandwich had been allowed to elect its mayor and govern itself for centuries, while Romney, also one of the Cinque Ports but one which happened to be owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, did not gain the right to choose its own mayor till the time of Elizabeth, and was meanwhile ruled by any one of the archbishop’s squires or servants whom he might send as its bailiff, and forced to adopt any expedient by which while under the forms of bondage it might win the practice of freedom. A dozen generations of Nottingham burghers had been ordering their own market, taking the rents of their butcheries and fish stalls and storage rooms, supervising their wool traders and mercers, and admitting new burgesses to their company by common consent, while the men of Reading were still trying in vain every means by which they might win like privileges from the abbot who owned the town. Everywhere the same story is repeated, with varying incidents of passion and violence. The struggle sometimes lasted through centuries: in other cases it was brought to an early close. Some boroughs won a moderate success, while others wasted their labour and their treasure for small reward. In one place ruin settles down on the town, in another gleams of temporary success kindle new hopes, in a third the dogged fight goes on with monotonous persistence; but everywhere anger and vengeance wait for the day of retaliation, when monastery and priory should be levelled to the ground.

I. There was a distinct difference in the lot of towns under the control of a bishop, and others which were subject to a convent. Burghers who owed allegiance to a bishop had to do with a master whose wealth, whose influence, whose political position, whose training, made him a far more formidable opponent than any secular lord. On the other hand he probably lived at some distance from the borough, and, charged as he was with the administration of his bishopric and the estates of the see, besides all the business of a great court official occupied in weighty matters of state, he had but limited attention to give to its affairs. As the see passed from hand to hand, a resolute fight with an over-ambitious borough which was begun by one bishop might die away under the feebler rule, the indifference, or the wiser judgement of his successor. In the case therefore of towns on episcopal estates, if the struggle was arduous and costly, still its issue was not irrevocably determined beforehand, and the burghers might hope for at least partial victory. But the emancipation of the townsmen was long deferred, and in the fifteenth century there were boroughs where the bishop’s hand still pressed heavily on the inhabitants.[519]

One of the greatest trading towns in England gives such a record of ceaseless contention carried on to win rights which had been peacefully granted long before to every prosperous borough on the royal demesne. The Bishop of Norwich had been lord of Lynn since its earliest history.[520] It is true that about 1100 A.D., one Bishop Herbert made a grant of the Church of S. Margaret and the little borough that lay around it—between Millfleet and Purfleet—to the monks of Norwich. But the land beyond these boundaries still belonged to the see. Lying as it did at the mouth of the Ouse, and forming the only outlet for the trade of seven shires, Lynn was destined to be one of the great commercial ports of the east coast, and the bishops proved good stewards of their property. As population outgrew the Lynn of older days, with its little market shut in between the Guildhall and S. Margaret’s where the booths then as now leaned against the walls of the parish church, and its tangle of narrow lanes leading to the river side, houses began to reach out over the desolate swamp that stretched to the north along the river side. Under the energetic rule of the prelates the sea which ebbed and flowed over the marsh was driven back, and a great wall raised against it, 340 feet long and nine feet thick at the base; while another stone wall ran along the eastern side to protect the town from enemies who might approach it by land. In the second half of the twelfth century the “Bishop’s Lynn” rose on the newly won land along the river bank, with its great market-place, its church, its Jewry, its merchant houses; and soon in the thick of the busiest quarter by the wharves appeared the “stone house” of the bishop himself, looking closely out on the “strangers’ ships” that made their way along the Ouse, laden with provisions and merchandise.

Lynn was now in a fair way to become the Liverpool of mediÆval times. Under King John its prudent bishop obtained for the town charters granting it all the liberties and privileges of a free borough, saving the rights of its lords;[521] and then at once proceeded by a bargain with the convent at Norwich to win back for the see the whole of the lay property in the old borough, leaving to the monks only the churches and spiritual rights. Once more sole master of the town, his supremacy was only troubled by the lords of Castle Rising who, by virtue of a grant from William Rufus, claimed half the profits of the tolbooth and duties of the port, while the bishop had the other half. In 1240 however an exact agreement was drawn up between prelate and baron as to their respective rights; and the bailiffs of both powers maintained a somewhat boisterous jurisdiction over the waters of Lynn,[522] collected their share of dues paid by the town traders on cargoes of herrings, or on the wood, skins, and wine they imported from foreign parts, and in their own way made distresses for customs, plaints, and so forth. Thus Robert of Montault, in the time of Edward the Second, set up a court under his own bailiff at one of the bridges, and caused the merchants “rowing and flowing to the said town of Lynn with their ships and boats, laden as well with men as with merchandise,” to be summoned, distrained, and harassed, “both by menacing them with hurling of stones that they come to land and tarry, and by extorting heavy fines from them,” till at last in despair the traders gave up their business, and sold all their ships and boats. And when the exasperated burghers in their turn set upon these alien officers in 1317 and threw Robert himself into prison,[523] this outbreak only brought upon them new calamities, for they were condemned by the King’s judges to make atonement for their crime by paying to the offended lord within the next six or seven years a fine of four thousand pounds; which was practically equal to the confiscation of the whole of the municipal expenditure for about thirty years. Soon after this, however, the rights of the lords of Rising were sold to the Queen Dowager Isabella and passed through her to Edward the Third; so the rough and ready methods of their bailiffs came to an end.[524]

The power of the bishop on the other hand was still untouched. He held the Hall Court through his steward; and held further the Court Leet and view of frankpledge; and owned the Tolbooth Court. There was indeed a mayor,[525] but his authority was small, for the bishop who had been eager to grant his burghers the privileges of trade[526] was less eager to see them set up any real self-government. Owing his post to the bishop’s approval and nomination, if the mayor failed in obedience or respect his place might be at once forfeited. His power of levying taxes was limited and subject to his lord’s control, nor could he make distress for sums levied on the commonalty. He was not charged with the custody or the defence of the town; it was the bishop who had command of the town gates, who could order them to be shut at his own will, and with a following of men-at-arms could enforce the order.[527] What was far more important, the bishop on the plea of protecting the poor from tyranny had withdrawn from him the power of compelling inhabitants to take up the franchise, and by thus establishing in the borough a population dependent on himself had permanently divided its forces.[528]

As in other towns, however, so here the Guild Merchant proved itself a most powerful organization for the winning of local independence.[529] Lynn was already in the thirteenth century becoming one of the richest towns in the country, and the mayor was supported by a Guild as masterful and as wealthy as any in England. When once the question was raised whether he or the bishop was really to command within its gates, two equally matched and formidable forces were brought into play; and a war of two hundred years was conducted on either side with violence and craft, and remained of doubtful issue to the last. The bishop narrowly watched every effort made by the mayor to enlarge his powers or exalt his state; and the mayor was no less jealous of the pretensions of his lord. In the course of many experiments in the making of constitutions for its government, Lynn was again and again torn with disputes, and harassed by the difficulties of rightly adjusting the powers of its various classes; and in every constitutional struggle the bishop interfered anew, and often almost dictated the final settlement. The burghers treated him as occasion served. Constant gifts were offered to soften his heart. A pipe of red wine, a vessel of Rhine wine, portions of oats with a sturgeon, pike and tenches, formed one of these peace offerings;[530] at another time it would be a costly gift of wax. But what they gave with one hand they were ready to take away with the other; and when chance happily favoured them appropriated without scruple a house, 100 acres of land and twenty acres of pasturage which the bishop held in right of his church of Holy Trinity at Norwich.[531] As disputes grew hot, now over one point, now over another, prelate and town alike called the king’s authority to their aid. If a sea-wall was washed away by a high tide, the burghers would cry to the Privy Council to compel the bishop to rebuild it;[532] or they would demand justice against him on the plea that he had usurped their own officers’ right to hold the Leet Court and the Tolbooth Court. The decision of the crown was given sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other; or the sovereign might for a time take the disputed authority into his own hands. But it was inevitable that the final gain should fall to the king, whose authority was strengthened by every appeal to his supreme jurisdiction; while lesser profits came to the court by the way—gifts to high officials and great people, and to the royal judges when they came to hold their assizes in the Guild Hall, and the town lavished its treasures in costly dinners and varied wines and presents to them and to their clerks.

From the beginning of the fourteenth century we can trace the progress of the long strife as the town gradually perfected its municipal organization. First came the necessary financial precautions. In 1305 the Guild established itself more firmly by a charter which secured to it all its lands and tenements; and the mayor obtained power to distrain for sums levied on the commonalty.[533] Then at an assembly held in the Guildhall in 1314 authority was given to twenty-six persons to elect twelve of the more sufficient of the town to make provision for all business touching the community in the King’s parliament and elsewhere.[534] But the real struggle seems to have begun about 1327 when much money was spent on lawyers, negotiations with the bishop, and a new charter, and the business was still going on in 1330 with more counsels’ fees and messengers to London. Finally in 1335 the town bought a new charter from the king at a cost of £55 and a multitude of gifts to king and queen and bishop.[535] In this year or the next it obtained, among other things, the right to have all wills that affected property in the town proved in the Guild Hall before the mayor and burgesses.[536] The bishop seems to have found means of defeating the burghers’ intention in this particular claim; but there still remained the one important question which lay behind all minor struggles—that of the administration of justice in the town—the question whether it was the mayor or an ecclesiastical officer who should preside in the courts, and whether their profits, fines, and forfeitures should go to enrich the treasury of the bishop or of the municipality. The mayor held a court in the Guild Hall twice a week, and had jurisdiction over all transgressions and debts arising by water between the limits of S. Edmondness and Staple Weyre,[537] and he seems now further to have laid claim to the view of frankpledge and the criminal jurisdiction of the Leet Court. The bishop answered with a vigorous retort. In 1347 he assumed the view of frankpledge of the men of Lynn and tenements formerly held by the corporation, and withdrew or threatened to withdraw from the burghers the right of electing their mayor. On this an appeal was made to the king, who sent a royal commission to enquire into the dispute, and meanwhile seized with his own hand the view of frankpledge and the lands, giving the first over for the time to the sheriff of the county and the second to the king’s escheator.[538] Possibly there was some attempt at a compromise, but the new charter of 1343 in which the bishop confirmed the liberties granted by his predecessors,[539] even if it may have allowed the mayor’s election, left the great question of the courts unsolved. The burghers still debated whether the town officers were not entitled to hold the view of frankpledge, and the husting court, and to have cognizance of pleas—in fact to exercise all the more important rights now monopolized by the bishop; and insisted on the election of their own mayor. It was in vain that Edward the Third ordered the mayor and community under pain of forfeiture of their liberties to alter their demeanour and not cause prejudice and damage to the bishop;[540] and the whole matter was at last brought before the King’s Court in 1352, when the judges decided against the town in every question raised. In spite of the verdict, however, there was one point on which the people refused to submit; and the bishop was compelled to confirm their right to elect yearly one of themselves as mayor, though he enforced a significant confession of subjection by requiring that the mayor should immediately after the election appear before himself or his steward, and swear to maintain the rights of the church of Norwich.[541]

But the burghers never yielded their consent to the decision of the King’s justices, and at every provocation loudly renewed their protest. When the bishop visited Lynn in 1377, he demanded that in recognition of his supremacy the town serjeant should carry before him the wand tipped at both ends with black horn, which was usually borne before the mayor himself. For their part they were heartily willing, answered the courteous mayor and aldermen, but they feared that at such a flagrant breach of their ancient customs and liberties, the commons, “always inclinable to evil,” would certainly fall on the bishop’s party with stones and drive them out of the town. But the bishop roughly rebuked the mayor and his brethren for “mecokes and dastards,” thus fearing the vulgar sort of people, as if it mattered to him what the common folk should say; and set out on his ride with the rod borne before him. He rode alone with his followers, however, for no burghers would accompany him; and as he went the whole people rose, and with their bows and clubs and staves and stones broke up the brave procession, and put the bishop and his men to flight, carrying off many hurt and wounded.[542] It seems possible that the fray was really excited by the astute mayor and council as a means of making a final breach between the bishop and the common people. But their opponent was too strong for them. The bishop carried his complaint to the King’s Council, and “for the transgression done to him in the town” the burgesses barely escaped punishment by spending a sum equal perhaps to two years of the town revenues in fines and gifts to the king, his mother, and others who had “laboured for the community”; besides paying £116 10s. 0d. for the expenses of the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses, in going to London on the business.[543] Seventy years later, after a series of constitutional troubles, the old quarrel as to rights of jurisdiction and the use of the symbols of supreme authority broke out anew. The mayor in 1447 got a grant from the King allowing a sword to be carried before him[544] with the point erect, the last and highest emblem of absolute jurisdiction. At this outrage to his dignity the bishop interfered promptly and resolutely, and the next year the King had to write that in spite of his good inclinations he must remember his coronation oath to observe the rights of the Church, and that the mayor must henceforth cease from having any sword or mace borne before him. In 1461, however, whether the town had got a new grant from Edward, or was taking advantage of troubled times to re-assert its claim, the common accounts register a payment of 4d. for the “cleaning of the mayor’s sword,” and 6s. 8d. for “crimson velvet for the sword and for making it up.”[545] And when in 1462 the bishop came to the town with a following of sixty armed men, and ordered the gates to be shut after him, the attitude of the people was not to be mistaken, “the mayor and all the commonalty of Lynn keeping their silence” when the bishop was openly defied in the streets by the lord of Oxenford with his fellowship, even though “the bishop and his squires rebuked the mayor of Lynn, and said he had shamed both him and his town for ever, with much other language.” So clear was the state of things to the bishop’s sixty men-at-arms that “when we met there bode not with him over twelve persons at the most with his serjeant-at-arms, which serjeant was fain to lay down his mace; and so at the same gates we came in we went out, and no blood drawn, God be thanked.”[546]

The incident was not one to soften passions or conciliate rivals; but the issue of the strife as compared with the hostilities in the last century shows how the balance of power was shifting. The bishop’s resources were being exhausted faster than his pretensions; every trader in Lynn was perpetually reminded that in Norwich, only fifty miles or so distant, the citizens had held their own borough court since 1194, and the higher court with view of frankpledge since 1223. For these privileges they themselves had waited now for three hundred years, and only one settlement was possible. In 1473 the quarrel as to the view of frankpledge was still going on,[547] but the bishop was driven at last to a compromise which preserved his historic claims untouched in theory, while it handed over the real power to the municipality. For the sake of peace he consented in 1528 to lease to the mayor and burgesses the yearly Leet, the Steward’s Hall Port, and the Tolbooth Port;[548] besides various dues from fairs and markets, with waifs and strays, and some other rights. A ruder and more effective close was before long put to the quarrel by the sharp methods of the Reformation, when Bishop’s Lynn became finally the King’s Lynn.

II. If boroughs attached to a bishopric were in a difficult position, the difficulty was vastly increased in the case of those subject to the lordship and rule of a monastery. Towns owned by abbot or prior were like all the rest stirred by the general zeal for emancipation, but they were practically cut off from any hope of true liberty. The power with which they had to fight was invincible. Against the little lay corporation was set a great ecclesiastical corporation, wealthy, influential, united, persistent, immortal. All the elements which went to make up the strength of the town were raised in the convent to a yet higher degree of perfection, and the struggle was prolonged, intense, and at the best remained a drawn battle, setting nothing beyond dispute save the animosity of the combatants. Sometimes the defeat of the borough in the fifteenth century was as complete as it had been two hundred years before. Cirencester which had won extended privileges from Henry the Fourth in return for political services in his time of difficulty, was utterly beaten at last,[549] and fell back under the control of the Abbey as completely as St. Alban’s had done in earlier times.[550] In other cases the resistance was more energetic and sustained, and some slight measure of success was its reward.[551]

As in the case of towns on feudal estates, any borough that possessed traditions of freedom handed down from a state of larger liberties might have some hope of ultimate success, but otherwise rebellion could only issue in defeat so final and decisive as to leave no further room for argument. Under the impulse of the popular movement which seems to have agitated many towns after the rising that took place in the days of Simon de Montfort, the men of S. Edmundsbury kept up for about seventy years a desperate struggle with the abbot who ruled them. For in 1264 it happened that “the younger and less discreet” of the town organized a conspiracy under colour of a Guild called “the Guild of Young Men,” and despising altogether the ancient horn of the community set up a new common horn of their own. Three hundred and more of these hopeful conspirators, known by the name of “bachelors,” having bound themselves to obey no bailiff save the aldermen and bailiffs of their own Guild, to answer to the sound of their new common horn instead of the old moot horn, and to count all who did not join them as public enemies,[552] soon found themselves engaged in riotings and in violently resisting the abbot from behind closed gates. On the abbot’s appeal to the Crown, however, the town grew frightened; the Guild was annihilated by the help of the more prudent sort, and the insurrection suppressed.

In less than thirty years, however, the burghers were renewing the memory of their old offences—forcing townsmen against their will to go to the hall of the Guild, and take an oath of allegiance to it; levying tolls and taxes, distraining on merchants who sold in the abbot’s market to extort money from them; hindering the execution of justice on merchants suspected of selling goods outside that market; and refusing to allow any member of the guild to bring a plea in the abbot’s court against any other brother of the guild: while the abbot on his side asserted his right to choose the alderman of the town and to appoint the keepers of the gates. In spite of a compromise made before the king’s judges sent the next year to enquire into the case, the same charges were again brought against the men of Bury before a royal commission of judges in 1304. The accused confessed that the abbot was lord of the whole town and its courts, but they still urged a claim to be free burgesses and to have an alderman, and a Merchant Guild with certain rights of justice belonging to it and with an elaborate code of procedure, and asserted their right to hold meetings for the common profit of the burgesses, and to levy taxes from men trading in the town. All this the abbot denied, whether the right to a Merchant Guild, or pleas belonging to it, or a community, or a common seal, or a mayor; according to him the townsfolk only had a right to a drinking feast, which they maliciously turned into an illegal convention, and if they took any fines it was against the merchant law and the King’s peace. The case was given for the abbot. The leaders were fined and put in jail, some of them escaping by payments while others through poverty lay in prison a month.

Once more, however, the burghers took heart, and in 1327 broke into the abbey and forced the abbot to concede to them a community, a common seal, a Guild merchant, and custody of their gates, with other liberties. But their triumph was short; utterly defeated by the forces of abbot and king, they were forced in the concord of 1332 to renounce for ever the claim to a community;[553] and when after the Peasant Revolt there was much general begging for pardon, the men of S. Edmundsbury, who were ordered to sue for their pardons specially, had to find surety not only to the King but to their lord the abbot.[554]

If S. Edmundsbury was one of the most unfortunate ecclesiastical towns Reading was perhaps the most fortunate. For Reading was originally a borough on royal demesne, which was granted by Henry the First to the new monastery founded by him.[555] From this time the town lay absolutely in the control of the abbot. He owned all its streams, from which the inhabitants had “chiefly their water to brew, bake, and dress their meat.”[556] The mills were in his hands; he did as he chose with the market, controlled the trade, and had the entire supervision of the cloth manufacture. He appointed the Warden of the Guild or mayor, and the various town officers; and claimed a decisive voice in the admitting of new burgesses or members of the Guild, while from every burgher’s son who entered the Guild he claimed a tax of 4s., and from every stranger one-half of the fine paid as entrance fee—the sum of the fine being fixed in presence of a monk who might raise objections so long as he was not overborne by the joint voices of six legal men of the Guild. Every burgher in the Guild had further to pay to him a yearly tax of chepin gavell for the right of buying or selling in the town.[557] For any breach of the law fines were gathered in to increase his hoard, since all the administration of justice lay in his hands. Before the abbot alone the emblems of supreme authority might be borne, and the mayor when he went in state was only allowed to have two tipped staves carried before him by the abbot’s bailiffs.

From the time of Henry the Third there was unceasing war between the townsmen and their lord. Violent dissensions broke out in 1243, when the burghers “lay in wait day and night for the abbot’s bailiffs,” and “hindered them from performing their duties,” till order was restored by a precept from the King.[558] The townsfolk were appeased by the grant of certain trading privileges; but ten years later the quarrel broke out again. The abbot, as they maintained before the King’s Court at Westminster, had taken away their Guild, summoned them to another place than their own Guild Hall to answer pleas, changed the site of their market, and forced them to render unwonted services. An agreement was drawn up before the judges, by which the burghers won the right to hold their corn market in its accustomed place, to own their common Guild Hall, with a few tenements that belonged to it, and a field called Portmanbrok (the rent of which was set apart for the salary of the mayor), and to maintain their Guild merchant as of old. On the other hand the townspeople conceded that it was the abbot’s right to select the Warden of the Guild from among the guildsmen, and require him to take oath of fidelity to himself as well as to the burgesses. The abbot might tallage the town at certain times, and his bailiffs were still to administer justice, and might at any time claim the keys of the Guild Hall, sit there to hold pleas, carry off all profits to the abbot’s treasury, and fine the burgesses any sum which it was in their power to pay. Finally it was admitted that the meadow beyond the Portmanbrok belonged to the lord.[559]

After an arrangement which left to the abbot all the weighty matters of government, the control of the burghers’ trade and a charge on their profits,[560] it was no wonder that before a hundred years were over the inhabitants of Reading, restless and discontented, were again battling for larger privileges. In 1351 the mayor and commonalty refused obedience to a constable appointed by the abbot’s steward, claiming for themselves the right to choose the constables, and present them to take their oaths before the king’s justices and the justices of the peace instead of before the abbot. At the same time they raised various fundamental questions as to their rights, just as Lynn was doing almost in the very same year. They asked whether the town was not a royal borough and therefore in no way dependent on the abbey; whether the townsmen had not therefore a right to elect their own mayor; and whether that mayor ought not to exercise jurisdiction over the burgesses and commonalty “according to the custom of the borough and Guild”—questions which one and all afforded fair subjects of dispute for the next hundred and fifty years.

The burghers henceforth gave the abbot no rest. In the long quarrel the Merchant Guild became the real centre of the common activity, just as it did wherever a town subject to a lord temporal or spiritual failed to win independent jurisdiction of its own.[561] For if there were free boroughs where the mayor, with his council and the common assembly of the burghers in which the whole conduct of government was centred, were in name and fact the accepted constitutional authorities; on the other hand in dependent towns where political freedom was still incomplete the Merchant Guild appears as ostensibly the only means by which the will of the community could find expression; as men recognized in it the one society in whose disciplined ranks they might be enrolled to fight for the liberties they claimed, its organization was held to be the most important of their privileges and the truest symbol of their common life; and it necessarily became the bond of fellowship, the pledge of future freedom, the school of political energies.[562] In such towns therefore the Merchant Guild had a vitality and a persistent continuity of life which was unknown elsewhere, and was often preserved in full vigour two or three centuries after it had perhaps suffered decay or transformation elsewhere.

This was the case in Reading. The burghers fell back on the Guild as the one authorized mode of association for public purposes, and in its “morghespeche,” or “morning talks,” the leading townsfolk discussed how the independence of the borough might be advanced. Successive mayors of the Guild, though still to all appearance appointed as officers of the abbot, became really the representatives of the town, identified themselves absolutely with its interests, and readily led their fellow citizens in revolt against the convent. In 1378 the burghers paid about £5 for a new charter; and twice sent the mayor to London to assert their privileges, and to insist that the convent should be forced to bear a just share of the burden of taxation, and pay a part of the tenth demanded by the King. The messengers were lavish with their gifts to judges and officers and lawyers who might befriend them, eels and pike, perches and salmon and capons; and succeeded so well that the town charters were confirmed in 1400, in 1418, and in 1427.[563] In 1391 the burghers carried the dispute about the appointment of constables to the king’s judges at Westminster; and seem to have succeeded in this matter too, for in 1417 the mayor elected the constables in the Guild Hall, and the justices of the peace admitted them to office. About 1420 a Guild Hall was built close to the Hallowed Brook, though the burghers complained of being “so disturbed with beating of battle-dores” by the women washing in the brook that they could scarcely hold their courts or do any public business.[564] They made payments for the clock house, and set up a bell for the community,[565] and appointed a permanent salary for the mayor of five marks, to be paid from the Common Chest instead of the uncertain rent of the Portmanbrok. But when they went on to build a new “Outbutchery,” and buy “smiting stocks” for butchers not living in the town, the abbot at once saw an attempt to limit his own market profits which he immediately resented, denying the burghers’ right to hold their new out-butchery or receive rents from it. They on their side protested that their Guild was a body corporate, having a Common Hall, a seal, and the right of possessing common property; that they held also a wharf, a common beam or weighing-machine, and the stocks and shambles; that they had been granted freedom from toll throughout the kingdom; that they returned two burgesses to Parliament; and were freed from shire and hundred courts; and finally they asserted, to sum up all the rest, that they had held of the King long before the monastery was founded.[566] In 1431 lawyers were appointed to search the evidences in the Common Chest as to agreements between the town and the abbot. At the same time a Register of the Acts of the mayor and burgesses was begun, and continued year after year without break. In 1436 and 1439 payments were made for the writing out of certain articles as to the privileges of the town; and counsel were again employed to look over the evidences in 1441.[567]

Throughout these years the mayor and officers were constantly at Maidenhead, London, or Canterbury, holding consultations about legal business with Lyttleton and the most famous lawyers. They succeeded in buying a charter for their Guild Hall with sums contributed by rich citizens; and gratefully adorned the building with a picture of the King. The mayor of the guild became more and more the representative of the burghers’ hopes, and his greatness the symbol of their triumph. They had not only raised his salary in 1459 to ten nobles,[568] but like their brethren at Lynn they got permission from Henry the Sixth to have a mace carried before him; and in 1459 the mace was actually bought.[569] At this extravagance, however, the abbot made a firm stand, and Henry had to send a letter to the Mayor of Reading, just as he had done eleven years before to the mayor of Lynn, ordering that this privilege should remain with the abbot alone as the token of his supremacy. But the mayor possibly gained his point a little later, for in 1487 he was allowed two Mace-serjeants, so it would seem that at least his tipped staves were now borne by his own servants.[570] He secured too for himself and for the burgesses exemption from serving on juries; and in the same year assumed supervision of the cloth trade. In 1480 the burgesses had done away with individual payments of the “chepin gavell” tax to the abbot, by ordering that it should be given from the Town Chest; and in 1486 a citizen bequeathed property for its payment, so that the townsmen were henceforth freed from all personal difficulties in this matter.[571]

Either the question of the cloth-market or that of the mace-serjeants brought the battle to a climax. The abbot absolutely refused to appoint any “master of the guild, otherwise called mayor,” and took upon himself to admit such people as he chose to the office of constable.[572] The guild retorted by choosing a mayor for themselves, who nominated his own officers to keep order, while all alike in this emergency gave their services freely, for in 1493 “nothing was paid to the mayor, because neither he nor any one else charged anything on the office.”[573] In the case of the lesser offices the burghers held their own, and when in 1499 the abbot appointed two constables, the mayor thrust them out of their places.[574]

But the triumph of the people was short-lived, for in the long run they proved powerless against the great spiritual corporation which ruled over them. In the very next year, 1500, the inhabitants were utterly defeated as to the election of the mayor himself; and as they still protested, there was once more an appeal eight years later to the judgment of the King’s Court. The verdict of the judges threw back the whole question almost to the very point where it had stood centuries before at the time of the earlier appeal in 1254, and the brethren of the Guild were declared of ancient time to have had no other right than the power to present from among themselves three persons, of whom the abbot should choose one as mayor. The two constables, and the ten wardmen of the five wards, might be elected by the mayor and commonalty, but they must be sworn in before the abbot. According to ancient custom the name of any proposed burgess must be given to the abbot fourteen days before his election, and a monk must be present for the assessing of his fine of forty shillings, half of which went to the abbot; an alien’s fine might be determined by six burgesses, and if they affirmed on oath that the fine was reasonable the abbot was bound to accept it. The question of the out-butchery still remained undecided; but the dispute as to the cloth-trade was settled by a compromise. As in the case of the mayor, the town was to choose three men and present them to the abbot, who should then appoint one of the three to be the keeper of the seal for sealing the cloth.[575]

So closed for the moment the long struggle of two hundred and fifty years—a struggle whose gain was small in comparison with all the cost and labour, the civic enthusiasm, the learning and ability which had been lavished on it. The easy passage to freedom by which the royal towns had travelled, the large and regular expansion of their liberties, the liberal admission of their right to supremacy over their own trade and over the higher matters of law and justice, might well kindle in the subjects of abbey and priory a perpetual unrest, and anger deepened against their masters as they saw themselves, in an age of universal movement, bound to the unchanging order of the past, and condemned to perpetual dependence under a galling system of administration which the secular government had abandoned three hundred years before.