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.