Alice Stopford Green

[1] The right of pit and gallows was never formally revoked. The last case was under Charles I. (Rogers’s Agriculture and Prices, i. 132). The gallows at Southampton stood on the common; in Colchester at the end of East Street.

[2] The Inquisition de quo Warranto, Ed. I., proves that S. Martin’s and other villages were under the jurisdiction of Canterbury; inquests at these places were held by the city coroner. York had a territory of 2,700 acres. (Agric. and Prices, iv. 579.) The burgesses of Dorchester claimed the right to weigh all goods within twelve miles of the town. A special statute was passed in 1430 “that they shall not be disturbed of their right,” in consequence of the Act of 1429 ordering weights and measures in every town. (9th Henry VI. cap. vi.) Other instances, such as Norwich, Nottingham, &c., are too numerous to give.

[3] The mariners of the Cinque Ports drew up treaties with “French shipmen,” as to ransom for mariners, sailors, or fishing boats that might be captured on either side; the people of the coast were to be set free without charge, while “gentlemen” and merchants were to pay whatever the captors chose to ask. The shipowners and merchants of each port signed the compact; and all the towns of the coast from Southampton to Thanet joined the league. The document which was drawn up was handed over to the keeping of the Lord Warden in Dover, and in case of dispute messengers from the Ports rode there to see its provisions, or to make a copy for their own guidance. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 537-8; iv. i. 434.

[4] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 146; xi. 3, pp. 12-13, 171, 113. For 1340 see Ashley’s Arteveldes, 126-7.

[5] Stubbs Const. Hist. iii. 484-488. Hallam Const. Hist. iii. 36. Gneist, who gives different figures, considers that one of the greatest dangers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the irrational and meaningless increase of town representation. (Constitution Communale, tr. by Hippert, i. 333, 338; ii. 9.)

[6] Rep. of Com. on Mun. Corp., 1835, 20, 21; 29-34; Papers relating to Parl. Representation, 93, 94. Vol. ix. No. 92. ii.; 31 x.

[7] See Paston Letters, i. 160-1, 337, 339-40; ii. 78, 28, 31, 35-36; iii. 52-3. Richard the Redeless, passus iv. The great people occasionally exercised influence in towns; Hist. MSS. Com. v. 497; ix. 138. For various modes of voting in towns see Lynn, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 146-151; Chichester, Gross. Gild Merchant, ii. 48; Reading, Coates, 459; Sandwich, Boys, 402; Exeter, Freeman, 152; Worcester, Eng. Guilds, 373, 393; Bristol, Hunt, 86; Cinque Ports, Boy’s Sandwich, 774, 796.

[8] The first mention of burgesses in the Empire is in 1066 at Huy, in the bishopric of Liege. Pirenne, Dinant, 18.

[9] Dr. Gross gives a list of 150 towns which had gained the right of having a merchant gild—most of them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

[10] Edward the First in the thirty years of his rule created fifty-four new boroughs. In the first eighty years of the fifteenth century the kings only issued nine charters of this kind.

[11] London was not apparently before other cities in the winning of liberties. (Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville, 372.) There were reasons enough for especial caution of Henry the Second in the matter of London.

[12] Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 73, note; ArchÆologia, vii. p. 337-347; Stubbs, ii. 486.

[13] Burgage rents in the earliest times were accounted for by the officers not in a lump sum but “as the pennies come in.” Rep. on Markets, 13.

[14] Cutt’s Colchester, 111-117, 126-7.

[15] Two other innkeepers had much the same stock-in-trade.

[16] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. part i. 491-2, 478, 489. In Reading at the muster roll of 1311 there appeared eight men armed with sword, bow, arrows, and knife; thirty-three with bows, arrows, and knives; and over two hundred and thirty-five (besides some names lost at the foot of the roll) with hatchets and knives. In 1371 the town was able to raise a body of archers for service abroad; and under Edward the Sixth it sent fifty soldiers armed with bills, swords, daggers, bows, and arrows, and paid each soldier forty pence “for the King’s affairs into Boulogne.” Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 7, 171, 182.

[17] Ibid. v. 497.

[18] Act of Parliament for paving Gloucester, 1455; Fosbrooke’s Gloucestershire, i. 157. For Exeter in 1466; Freeman’s Exeter, 91. For Canterbury in 1474, because the “evil report” carried away by pilgrims “would be stopped if the roads were properly pitched with boulders and Folkestone stone”; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 168, 144, 174. For Southampton in 1477, after a century of vain attempts to pave the streets; Davies, 119, 120; in 1384 a tax was levied for pavage; in 1441 accounts were rendered of paving stones provided; payments were made in 1457 to a London paviour. By the Act each citizen was ordered to pave before his own door as far as the middle of the street since “the town was full feebly paved and full perilous and jeopardous to ride or go therein, and in especial in the High Street,” so that “strangers thither resorting have been oftentimes greatly hurt and in peril of their lives.” For Bristol in 1491 when the whole town seems to have been new paved. Ricart, 47-48.

[19] To take a single instance, in 1421 the water-supply of Southampton was undertaken by the council, and new leaden pipes provided by the grant of a burgess who had thus bequeathed his money “for the good of his soul.” An aqueduct was made at considerable expense in 1428; 261 days’ work at it was paid at from 4d. to 6d. a day; over £12 more was spent on an iron grating for it, and 27s. 2d. given to the plumber who fixed it; great stones from Wathe called “scaplyd stonys” were carried, with loads of chalk, quicklime, pitch, rosin, solder, wax, and wood. In 1490 a new well was made with a “watering-place for horse and a washing-place for women.” Davies, 115, 117; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 138-40. In many towns wells were repaired, enclosed with a wall and covered with a roof and put under the care of wardens.

[20] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 137, 145. See Paston, i. 434; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 7, 169; x. 4, 529-30.

[21] English Guilds, 241, 249.

[22] For the contrast in this respect between the shire and the borough see Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 356-7.

[23] Luchaire, Communes FranÇaises, 22-25. See Piers Ploughman, passus i. 139-146; ii. 90-99; ix. 19-76; x. 223-227.

[24] Piers Ploughman, passus xvi. 248-255.

[25]

“The Jews that were gentlemen, Jesus they despised,
Both his lore and his law, now are they low churls,
As wide as the world is woneth (dwelleth) there none
But under tribute and tallage as tikes and churls.
And those that become Christian by counsel of the Baptist
Are franklins and free....
And gentlemen with Jesus.”

(Piers Ploughman, ed. by W. Skeat for Early English Text Society, part iii.; pass. xxii. 34.) I have ventured to give quotations from mediÆval writers in modern spelling, as I am here concerned neither with philology nor the history of literature: and there are many to whom the old methods of spelling only serve to obscure the sense.

[26] Stubbs, ii. 137-144, 239-244.

[27] Ibid. ii. 560, 671.

[28] Stubbs, ii. 332-4.

[29] Ibid. ii. 257; iii. 16.

[30] The former devices for illegal taxation on the King’s part broke down when the commons looked so sharply after these matters that no attempt at unauthorised taxation of merchandise was made after the accession of Richard the Second. Stubbs, ii. 574-578. How completely the relation of King and commons had been reasoned out by the people we see in Langland’s writings.

“Then came there a King, and ‘by his crown,’ said,
‘I am a king with crown the commons to rule,
And holy Church and clergy from cursed men to defend.
And if me lacketh to live by, the law wills that I take
There I may have it hastelokest; (quickest) for I am head of law,
And ye be both members, and I above all.’
···········
‘On condition,’ quoth conscience, ‘that thou conne defend
And rule thy realm in reason right well, and in truth;
Then, that thou have thine asking as the law asketh;
Omnia sunt tua ad defendendum, sed non ad deprehendendum.’”

(Piers Ploughman, passus xxii. 467-472, 478-481.)

[31] Stubbs, iii. 77; Rogers, Agric. and Prices, iv. viii.

[32] See the description of a session of Parliament in Richard the Redeless, passus iii. A.D. 1399.

[33] Piers Ploughman, passus iv. 376, &c.

[34] Ibid. passus v. 176.

[35] Ibid. passus vi. 181. M. Jusserand (EpopÉe Mystique du Moyen Age, 101-118), justly points out what a typical representative of common opinion Langland was. Compare the popular manifesto of 1450. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 267.) “They say the King should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods are his; the contrary is true, for then needed him never to set Parliament and to ask good of them.”

[36] The burden of taxation was gradually being transferred from one class to another as subsidies on moveables, and customs on import and export were found more productive and more easily managed. Stubbs, ii. 570.

[37] Reductions of rent are too numerous to give; they occurred everywhere, and were sometimes apparently bought at a considerable price. (See Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 366.) Loans from the towns seem to have been voluntary. In 1435 the Sandwich commonalty refused to lend money to the King; and further excused themselves from sending him soldiers for the defence of Calais, “having all the men they can spare already employed in the service of the Duke of York.” (Boys, 672.) A grant to the King was again refused in 1486. (Ibid. 678.) The Norwich citizens got into trouble for instituting a suit to have their loan returned (Blomefield, iii. 147, 152). In 1424 Lynn lent 400 marks, and in 1428 the council agreed that burgesses of parliament should receive from executors of the late king a hundred pounds for a pledged circlet of gold because they could not get more (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 161). In 1491 the king was at Bristol, where he had a benevolence of £1,800 (Ricart, 47-48). At the coming of Richard the Third in 1484, York, to gain a reduction of the fee-ferm, agreed to give him 100 marks in a cup of gold, and to the queen £100 in a dish. A list is given of the citizens who subscribed—the mayor giving £20, the recorder £100, and so on. The whole sum subscribed was £437 (Davis’ York, 167-9, 174). It would be quite impossible to mention all the loans, but the instance of Canterbury is curious as the first foreshadowing of the national debt. In 1438 £40 was lent to the king, and in 1443 £50; in these cases private individuals advanced the money in various amounts according to their taste for speculation, and probably got certificates promising interest and redemption at par (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. part 1, 139).

[38] Luchaire, 288-9.

[39] Luchaire, 64, 137.

[40] M. Jusserand in his EpopÉe Mystique du Moyen Age has well pointed out that the war with France was royal rather than national. Pp. 7-9, 117.

[41] Stubbs, Lectures on MediÆval History, p. 342; Friedman, Anne Boleyn, i. pp. 1-4; Gneist, La Constitution Communale, trans. by Hippert, i. p. 334, &c. “England at the accession of Henry the Seventh was far behind the England of the thirteenth century.” (Denton, Lectures on the Fifteenth Century, 120, 118.) “This low and material view of domestic life had led to an equally low and material view of political life, and the cruelty which stained the Wars of the Roses was but the outcome of a state of society in which no man cared much for anything except his own greatness and enjoyment. The ideal which shaped itself in the minds of the men of the middle class was a king acting as a kind of chief constable, who, by keeping great men in order, would allow their inferiors to make money in peace.” (Gardiner’s Student’s History, 330-1.) “The despondency of the English people, when their dream of conquest in France was dissipated, was attended with a complete decay of thought, with civil war, and with a standing still or perhaps a decline of population, and to a less degree of wealth.” (National Life and Character, by Charles Pearson, p. 130-1.) “There are few more pitiful episodes in history. Thirty-five years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had both soured and demoralised the nation.” “England had entirely ceased to count as a naval power.” As for the burgesses, “if not actively mischievous they were sordidly inert.” (Oman’s Warwick, 4-11, 67, 133.)

[42] In Ricart’s Calendar in Bristol he enters duly the fact that a battle had been fought and that one side or other was victorious without further comment. He misplaces the date of the murder of Suffolk three years, though he might well have remembered it; and he writes as a sort of after-thought in the margin of his record, “and this year the two sons of King Edward were put to silence in the Tower of London.” (Ricart, 40-46.) In 1460 Norwich had its captain and 120 soldiers with King Henry in the north, and all the rest of its available forces had to hurry off to Edward at his accession. (Blomefield iii. 162-163.) The city raised £160 for the coming of Richard the Third to the city, and £140 for the coming of Henry the Seventh. (Ibid. 173-174.) For Nottingham, see vol. ii. There is no mention of Bosworth in Canterbury, and Henry the Seventh was received with the same pomp as former kings. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 145.) For Bosworth, where men stood afar off waiting to join the victorious side, see Fabyan, 672-673. The policy of the burghers was the same in this respect as that of the great Churchmen, who were entirely passive in the real crises of the civil war, and so ready to serve every king, that not one of them suffered loss from fidelity to any side. (Rogers’ Agricul. and Prices, iv. 9, 10.) The people in general were equally indifferent. “I have read thousands of documents penned during the heat of the strife, and have found only one allusion to the character of the times in the earlier, and one about the later war of 1470-1.” (Ibid., 19.) An interesting parallel to the indifference of the trading communities of the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses may be seen in the action of the Merchants’ Company in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. (Lambert’s Gild Life, 177-178.)

[43] See vol. ii. ch. i.

[44] In Lydd corn was given to the poor at Christmas and Easter, and gifts to lepers; payments made from 1480-1485 for Goderynge’s daughter, “poor maid,” “hosen, shoes, her keep, kertyl-cloth and for making thereof;” also in 1490, “paid to the poor man keeping the poor child 12 pence.” After a long list of expenses for a thief and making stocks for him and a halter, “paid for one pair of shoes to his daughter 3d.,” and “given to the quest of women 4d.”; summoned perhaps in reference to the daughter. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 527, 526.) In Rye sums were paid to the poor on opening the box of maltotes. (Ibid. 494.) For Southampton, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 112; the steward’s book in 1441 contains a list of alms, £4 2s. 1d., given away every week to poor men and women. (Davies, 294.) According to the usual calculation at this time in almshouses of a penny a day for living, this sum would mean that the corporation paid weekly for the mere subsistence of 140 persons. For Bristol, Ricart’s Kalendar, 72-80, 82, &c. For Chester, Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 371. For Romney, Hist. MSS. Com. v. 535-6. The Mayor of Sandwich had to manage the hospitals of S. Bartholomew and S. John, to appoint their officers, to audit their accounts, and administer their estates made up of innumerable parcels of land and houses left by pious people. (Boys, 17-21, 526.) The municipal council of Exeter appointed every year a Warden of the Poor to look after their many charitable foundations. It had charge of Magdalen Hospital, of the Ten Cells Hospital for Poor, founded in 1406 by Simon Grendon, Mayor; the Combrew Almshouse, founded by Sir William Bonville, 1408; and an almshouse founded by John Palmer. (Freeman’s Exeter, 175-6.) There was a municipal almshouse in Hereford supported by way of payment to the corporation from ecclesiastical tenants for a share in the city’s privileges. (Arch. Ass. Journ. xxvii. 481.) In the fifteenth century bequests by burgesses for these purposes were very frequent and were usually left to the management of the corporation. In all large towns the mayor and aldermen presided over the court of orphans. (Davies’s Southampton, 239.) The indications of poor relief by the towns must modify Mr. Ashley’s conclusion (Economic History, I. part ii. 338) that “no attempt was made by the State as a whole, or by any secular public authority, to relieve distress. The work was left entirely to the Church, and to the action of religious motives upon the minds of individuals.” It seems difficult to follow in this connexion his distinction drawn between the craft associations which had or had not grown out of religious fraternities (p. 325).

[45] Besides the customary Latin prayers a Norfolk guild used English prayers for Church and State, harvest and travellers, like our Litany. (English Guilds, 111-114.) The play of the Lord’s Prayer was performed by a York guild. “They are bound to find one candle-bearer, with seven lights, in token of the seven supplications in the Lord’s Prayer.” “Also they are bound to make, and as often as need be to renew, a table showing the whole meaning and use of the Lord’s Prayer, and to keep this hanging against a pillar in the said cathedral church near to the aforesaid candle-bearer.” (Ibid. 137-9.) See also Hibbert’s Shrewsbury Guilds, 62. For Pecok as “the first author of the Middle Ages who propounded reason as a judge of faith,” and one who “might be claimed as at once the forerunner of the Erastian theory of the church, and of the Rationalist interpretation of its theology”; and for the place now given to general councils see Rogers’s Agriculture and Prices, iv. 11-13. For the first signs that the revenues of monastic houses were to be devoted to other purposes. (Ibid. 101.)

[46] Agriculture remained stationary during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was in fact but little changed from the time when Walter of Henley published his treatise until the time when Fitz Herbert wrote his work about 1523 embodying most of the rules which Walter had given before him. The real progress lay not in the country but in the town.

[47] Nott. Records, ii. 143, 145, 167, 179, 191; iii. 21, 29.

[48] ClÉment, Jacques Coeur, 196-7. Nicholas Sturgeon was ordered by the Privy Council in 1442 “to go and choose six singers of England such as the messenger that is come from the Emperor will desire for to go to the Emperor.” Proceedings and Ordinances of Privy Council, ed. Sir Harris Nicholas, 1834, v. 218.

[49] Mr. Jacobs tells me that he has found no direct evidence of Jews lending to townspeople in the twelfth century; there are only some indications such as that they sought for debtors in S. Paul’s; (The Jews of Angevin England, p. 45) and that they claimed to attend the assizes at Bury. (Ibid. 142.) If their business lay, as it seems, with nobles and landowners, it would prove the absence of any demand for capital in the towns.

[50] For an account of the Staple see Schanz, i. 327 et seq.; von Ochenkowski, Englands Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters, 220; Stubbs, ii. 446-8.

[51] Schanz, i. 329, &c.

[52] Ibid. 657.

[53] Schanz, i. 543; von Ochenkowski, 216-7. For the Law Merchant see Mr. Maitland’s Pleas in Manorial Courts (Selden Soc.), p. 137. For Staple Statutes see 14 R. II. cap. 3, 4.

[54] Schanz, i. 332, 338.

[55] See Paston Letters, iii. 166.

[56] Schanz, i. 501.

[57] Von Ochenkowski, 202, 210; Schanz, 495-500. Petition of merchants in 1442 to be relieved from these rules refused. Proc. Privy Council, v. 217.

[58] In 1442 the merchants of the Staple of Calais begged that payment should be made to the soldiers for the surety of the merchants’ wools. (Proceedings of Privy Council, v. 215, 216.) When the lords seized Calais in 1459, “they shifted with the Staple of Calais for £18,000” to carry on the war with. After Edward’s accession, in 1462, the merchants claimed repayment. Edward refused, and after long efforts the merchant who represented them and had borne the chief charges died a ruined man in sanctuary at Westminster (Fabyan, 635, 652-3).

[59] A sack was 364 lbs. of 16 oz. each (Schanz, ii. 569).

[60] Stubbs, iii. 69, Stat. 27, H. VI. c. 2.

[61] Schanz, ii. 15.

[62] Under the system of paying a fixed sum in good and bad years alike the poor merchants became bankrupt, and in the middle of the sixteenth century the number of wool exporters fell enormously (Schanz, ii. 17). An extremely interesting statement by the Staplers of the causes of their decay is given by Schanz in vol. ii. 565-9.

[63] In the years from 1485 to 1546 general trade had increased by one-third, while the wool trade had decreased by one-third (Schanz, ii. 12).

[64] In the Paston Letters there is even in the fifteenth century complaint of the quality of Norfolk cloth, i. 83.

[65] Ashley’s Woollen Industry, 39, afterwards expanded in his Economic History, part ii., chap. iii. This book was published after these pages had been printed. Riley’s Mem. London, 149-50; Schanz, i. 436-440, 588-9.

[66] The first charter to the company of drapers or dealers in cloth in London was in 1364.

[67] This statement is made by Schanz, i. 441, and his reasons are given, ii. 1-7. 31 H. VI. c. 8.

[68] 4 H. VII. c. 11; Schanz, i. 449.

[69] Schanz, i. 11; ii. 17, 18.

[70] Schanz, ii. 571-2.

[71] In 1472 the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, buys from a London alderman two pieces of cloth for gentleman’s livery, nine for yeoman’s, and five for groom’s, the price, £39 14s.; from a “raymaker” in New Salisbury he buys similar cloths in 1475 and 1480; again from Hadley, in 1499, he got eighteen pieces, and russet cloths from a Cranbrooke clothier. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 436-7, 459.) Fastolfe bought cloth for his soldiers at Castlecoombe, Wilts (Paston Letters). The Warden of Merton, Bishop Fitz James, bought for his fellows and himself at Norton Mandeville in Essex. (Rogers’ Economic Interpretation of History, 151.)

[72] Paston Letters, ii. 235. 1465.

[73] Debate between the Heralds of France and England, probably published from 1458 to 1461, translated by Pyne, p. 61. Published in French by the SociÉtÉ des Anciens Textes FranÇais. In 1454 the commons petitioned that silver mines in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, should be worked (Schanz, i. 493). For coal see Paston, iii. 363. Nottingham Records, i. 145. In 1307 there were complaints about the corruption of London air by use of coal. Cruden’s Gravesend, 84-5.

[74] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 347.

[75] Rogers’ Econ. Interpretation, 276.

[76] Brazen pieces, invented 1340 or 1370, were first used in England at the siege of Berwick, 1405 (Eng. Chron. 1377-1461, p. 184); not known in France so well (Three books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, 9-10 Camden Society). For the Lydd gun of 1456 the gunmakers were paid 11s. 8d.; the binding and iron for it cost 18s. “Guns with six chambers” mentioned as early as 1456 in Cinque Port towns. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. xvii.)

[77] Journ. of ArchÆl. Association, 1871, p. 416; Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 489.

[78] Pirenne, Dinant, 102, 94, 95. In the fifteenth century the Dinant traders sent their wares by Antwerp, not by Damme.

[79] For English brick building see Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, iv. 440. First notice of bricks at Cambridge 1449, in London 1453, in Oxford 1461; common in eastern counties before end of fifteenth century. Ibid. iii. 432, 433. The proverb, “as red as Rotherham College,” refers to one of the first brick buildings in Yorkshire.

[80] There is good fifteenth century English glass at Malvern and elsewhere. But according to Dugdale English glass was forbidden in the Beauchamp chapel at Warwick.

[81] Turner’s Domestic Architecture, 98.

[82] Silk manufacture in London in the fifteenth century was carried on by women; their complaints of the Lombard merchants noticed in Act of 1454 (33 H. VI. c. 5). A bill with the royal sign manual prays that the king would grant to Dom. Robert Essex his frames “ordeigned and made for the makyng of sylkes,” with their instruments which now “stondith unoccupyed within your Monastery of Westminster,” and he will ordain workmen to use them. Temp. Edward the Fourth, Hist. MSS. Com. iv. I, 177.

[83] Libel of English Policy. (Political Poems and Songs, composed between 1327 and 1483, ii. ed. Wright Rolls Series.) For export of English beer to Flanders, see Foedera, xii. 471 1492. Beer was a “malt liquor flavoured with bitter herbs,” as distinct from ale, made before 1445, though commonly ascribed to a century later.

[84] Blomfield, iii. 160. 33 H. VI. cap. vii.

[85] Piers Ploughman, Introduction to Text C, xxxi.

[86] Schanz, ii. 35, 36.

[87] Italian Relation, 42-3 (Camden Soc.); Schanz, i. 513; Heralds’ Debate, 65.

[88] Plummer’s Fortescue, 114-5, 132. Compare Bacon’s Henry the Seventh, 71-72.

[89] Heralds’ Debate, 61, 1453-1461.

[90] Richard the Redeless, passus iii. 172.

[91] Brinklow’s Tracts, published in the first half of the sixteenth century, afford interesting illustrations of the type of radical politician formed in the towns. His proposal for a single chamber and the list of reforms sketched out are not more significant than his criticism of parliamentary despotism and inefficiency, “This is the thirteenth article of our creed added of late, that whatsoever the Parliament doth must needs be well done. and the Parliament, or any proclamation out of the parliament time cannot err ... then have ye brought Rome home to your own doors and given the authority to the King and Parliament that the cardinal bishops gave unto the Pope ... if this be so, it is all vain to look for any amendment of anything.” Brinklow’s Complaynt, E. E. Text Society, 35. See also pp. 8, 12.

[92] Libel of English Policy (Political Poems and Songs, ii. 157-205. Roll’s series, ed. Wright). The Libel was probably written after 1436. The Bishop was murdered in 1450. (Agric. and Prices, iv. 533.)

[93] Wright’s Pol. Poems, ii. 282-7. Schanz, i. 446.

[94] Compare the very similar expression of faith in a modern labour paper. “To this island, small as it is, has been given the work of leading the industrial organization of the world; that is to say, of governing and ordering the affairs of the world.” Trade Unionist, Dec. 26, 1891.

[95] Compare Paston Letters, i. 531; Brinklow’s Complaynt 11.

[96] Pauli, Drei volkswirtschaftliche Denkschriften, s. 61, 75.

[97] In 1447 exactions in England were so heavy “as that the minds of men were not set upon foreign war, but vexed above measure how to repel private and domestical injuries, and that therefore neither pay for the soldier nor supply for the army were as need required put in readiness.” (Polydore Vergil, 77 Camden Soc.) For interruption of trade by the war, Paston, i. 425-6. Davies’ Southampton, 252-3. The Staplers complain that before the war the French bought yearly 2,000 sacks of wool, now only 400 (Schanz, ii. 568). For effect of the war on the salt trade, Rogers’ Econ. Interpretation of History, 100. For the wine trade, &c., Schanz, i. 299-300, 643-50. “It cannot be brought to pass by any mean that a French man born will much love an English man, or, contrary, that an English will love a French man; such is the hatred that hath sprung of contention for honour and empire.” (Pol. Vergil, 82.)

[98] Schanz, i. 32-33.

[99] See the series of statutes with which the reign of Edward the Fourth opens. 4, Ed. IV. c. 1-8. Schanz, i. 447.

[100] Ashley’s Wool. Ind. 81-2; expanded in his Economic History, part ii. Schanz, i. 445.

[101] Schanz, i. 446. “The caryage out of wolle to the Stapul ys a grete hurte to the pepul of Englond; though hyt be profitabul both to the prynce and to the marchant also.” (Starkey, England in the Reign of Henry the Eighth. Early English Text Society, p. 173.)

[102] Brinklow’s Complaynt, E. E. Text Soc. p. 11. Schanz, i. 479, note.

[103] The fellowship of the mercers and other merchants and adventurers living in London “by confederacy made among themselves of their uncharitable and inordinate covetous for their singular profit and lucre contrary to every Englishman’s liberty, and to the liberty of the Mart there” made an ordinance and constitution that every Englishman trading with the marts of Flanders or under the Archduke of Burgundy should first pay a fine to the Merchants’ Fellowship in London on pain of forfeiture of all their wares bought and sold. The fine was at first half an old noble, and demanded by a colour of a fraternity of S. Thomas at Canterbury, and “so by colour of such feigned holiness it hath been suffered to be taken for a few years past.” Finally, however, the London Fellowship raised the fine to £20, then the other merchants began to withdraw from the marts and the cloth trade to suffer. On the complaint of the merchant adventurers living outside London Parliament ordered that the fine should only be ten marks. (12 Henry VII., cap. 6.) For the complaint of the Hull traders against the merchant adventurers of London in 1622 see Lambert’s Gild Life, 171-2.

[104] Schanz, i. 342.

[105] Schanz, ii. 571.

[106] 3 Ed. IV. c. 4.

[107] Schanz, i. 618-19.

[108] Bacon’s History of Henry the Seventh, 38.

[109] The men of Cologne had a house in London as early as 1157.

[110] Founded before 1240 (Schanz, i. 291-3). Some interesting details are given in Mr. Hudson’s Notes on Norwich (Norfolk ArchÆology, xii. 25; see section on madder and woad.) For merchants of Lorraine, Denmark, &c., Liber Custumarum, Nunimenta GildhallÆ Londiniensis (Rolls Series), vol. ii. part 1, xxxiv. &c.

[111] In the beginning of the fourteenth century (Schanz, i. 113-8).

[112] See Keutgen, Die Beziehungen der Hanse zu England, 40.

[113] Boys’ Sandwich, 375; Paston, iii. 436. The foreign trade is illustrated by some of the things in Fastolf’s house; the Seeland cloth, i. 481; iii. 405—brass pots and chafferns of French making, i. 481—silver Paris cups, 475; iii. 270-1, 297-8—blue glasses, i. 486—habergeons of Milan, 487—”overpayn of Raines,” 489—cloth of Arras, 479—harness from Almayne, iii. 405—German girdles, iii. 270-1—the treacle-pots of Genoa, ii. 293-4, bought of the apothecary. The merchant’s marks were especially noted for fear of adulteration. The grocer, or dealer in foreign fruits, also sold hawks, iii. 55-6. In the reign of Henry the Eighth about a dozen shops in London sold French or Milan cups, glasses, knives, daggers, swords, girdles, and such things. Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 93. “A discourse of the commonwealth of this Realme of England.”

[114] Libel of English Policy; Political Poems and Songs (Rolls Series), ii. 173, 172. Fabyan, 630. See petition of burghers against the Lombards, 1455, in Rot. Parl. v. 334

[115] Schanz, i. 65. Strangers exporting wool had to pay 43s. 4d. a sack, English merchants only 5 nobles or 33s. 4d. (Fabyan, 594-5).

[116] In 1372 there is a receipt by two of the company of the Strozzi for money from Archbishop Langham. Hist. MSS. Com. iv. part 1, 186.

[117] Clement, Jacques Coeur, 23-4.

[118] For the failure of this company in 1437 and its effect on English traders, see Bekynton’s Corres. i. 248-50, 254.

[119] Libel of English Policy. Pol. Poems and Songs, ii. 172.

[120] Schanz, i. 124-6.

[121] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 11, 87. 11 H. IV. c. 7. Yarn and unfulled cloths paid only subsidy—finished cloths paid also customs and measuring tax. Schanz, i. 448, note.

[122] Davies’ Southampton, 254.

[123] Denton’s Lectures, 192; Paston Letters, iii. 269.

[124] Pauli’s Pictures, 126-132.

[125] Keutgen, 41.

[126] Keutgen, 41. Dinant was the only town outside German-speaking countries that belonged to the Hanseatic League. It entered the League in the middle of the fourteenth century as a sort of external member—only sharing its privileges in England and never voting in its assemblies—tolerated rather than holding its right by formal grant. Pirenne, Dinant, 97-102.

[127] Keutgen, 5, 30.

[128] Keutgen, 14-18.

[129] For a description of the Steel-yard see Pauli’s Pictures.

[130] The ordinary size of French ships seems to have been 1,000 or 1,200 tons. (Heralds’ Debate, 51-2.) Cannyngs, of Bristol, had in his little fleet vessels of 900, 500, or 400 tons. (Cruden’s Gravesend, 131.) The “Harry Grace À Dieu,” built at Woolwich, 1512, was of 1,500 tons, and cost £6,472. (Ibid. 143-9.)

[131] 1382; 5 Richard II., Stat. 1, c. 3. See Schanz, i. 360, for the scope of this law.

[132] 6 Richard II., Stat. 1, c. 8.

[133] A small war vessel with probably about forty sailors, ten men-at-arms, and ten archers. Nott. Rec. i. 444.

[134] Southampton had to keep a ship, “le GrÂce de Dieu,” at its own expense for the king’s service. In the last year of Henry the Sixth its master received from the mayor £31 10s. 0d. In the first year of Edward the Fourth the mayor paid for the victualling and custody of the ship £68 5s. 10d. In 1470 there was a great deal of difficulty about the matter. The king ordered certain payments to be made for the ship which the town for some months absolutely refused to carry out. The sheriff at last stepped into the breach and paid the sums due from money in his own office, and the next year the town was forced by the king to refund what he had spent. Three successive sheriffs were in difficulties about this dispute between the king and the town. They made payments as best they could, and were afterwards given indemnity for the sums they spent. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 98-100; Davies, 77. See also H.M.C. xi. 3, 215-16, 188-191, 221-2; Ibid. iv. 1, p. 426, 429-31; Ibid. v. 517-18, 521, 494; Boys’ Sandwich, 663; Nottingham Records, i. 196; Paston Letters, ii. 100-105; Rot. Parl. i. 414, ii. 306-7.) Full accounts of the making of a barge in Ipswich in 1295 are given in Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 257-8.

[135] Schanz, i. 356-7, 362, 367. On page 357 he quotes from a petition of the commons in 1371 (Rot. Parl. ii. 306-7) to prove that the one result of the foreign policy of Edward the First was the narrowing of town franchises, and consequent decline of the navy. If the petition is read to the close the passage seems to be merely a piece of fine writing to arrest attention, and the town franchises are not mentioned again when the king asks to have the real grievances stated. In the second petition (Rot. Parl. ii. 332) the gist of the complaint is that foreign merchants are allowed to sell and buy in England, which is represented as a loss of all their franchises.

[136] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 501.

[137] Edward the Fourth made one futile attempt to revive the protection of English shipping, but the Act only lasted three years. (3 Ed. IV. c. i.)

[138] Schanz, i. 328.

[139] Heralds’ Debate, 51-2.

[140] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 528. See the hiring out of the London barge; loss by accident from tempest or enemies to fall on the commonalty; Mem. Lond., 478.

[141] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 215-16, 221-2, 188-191.

[142] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 534-540.

[143] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 496. Rye kept its own “schipwrite,” John Wikham, who had the freedom of the town for sixteen years while building the ships of the port, and at last left in 1392 with a glowing testimonial from the mayor and barons of Rye. Along with other towns it had made profit by selling ships to aliens, which might afterwards be used by the enemies of England, and a proclamation was sent to Rye in 1390 forbidding such sales. For the export of eggs from Norwich in 1374, as well as butter and cheese and corn, and possibly oysters, see Hudson’s Norwich Leet Jurisdiction (Selden Society), 62, 63, 65. The practice of forestalling, carried to so great an extent as is here and elsewhere described, doubtless implied buying for the foreign market.

[144] Hunt’s Bristol, 74, 94-96.

[145] Schanz, i. 328. For St. Mary’s Gild in York see Hist. MSS. Com. i. 109, 110. This “mystery of Mercers,” or “Community of Mercers” in York formed into a body with a governor in 1430—in fact, became a company of Merchant Adventurers. (Gross, ii. 280.) The Shipmen’s Guild of Holy Trinity in Hull drew up its constitution in 1369, but got its first royal grant in 1443. The Merchant Guild of S. George also dates from the fifteenth century. (Lambert’s Guild Life, 128-131, 156-161.)

[146] In 1422 a writ was issued by the Privy Council to permit a Bristol merchant to take two vessels laden with cloth, wine, salt, and other merchandise not belonging to the Staple. The cloth and wine were to be sold, and meat, hides, salmon, herrings, and fish to be bought, and the salt used for salting these provisions. Proc. Privy Council, ii. 322-3.

[147] When Taverner built his ship for the Mediterranean trade he got no reduction of tolls, but had to pay the high export dues fixed for foreigners. Schanz, i. 367.

[148] Keutgen, 79; Plummer’s Fortescue, 232-3.

[149] Eng. Chron. 1387-1461, 113. French pirates “whirling on the coasts so that there dare no fishers go out,” (Paston Letters, iii. 81) behave “as homely as they were Englishmen.” (Ibid. i. 114-116.)

[150] For the frequent disputes in the reign of Henry the Fourth see Hist. MSS. Com. v. 443. In 1419, when some Bristol merchants had seized vessels belonging to the Genoese, the King sent a messenger to choose for him a portion of the prize, for which, however, he promised honestly to pay the merchants. Proc. Privy Council, ii. 267. The mayor of Lynn attended by two proctors travelled with the King’s embassy to Bruges in 1435 “for the worship of the town” as its representative to declare the wrongs done to Lynn merchants “by the master of Pruce and his subjects and by them of the Hanse.” Hist. MSS. Com., xi. 3, 163; Polydore Vergil, 159; Davies’ Southampton, 252-3, 275, 475.

[151] Stubbs, ii. 314, iii. 57, 65; Plummer’s Fortescue, 235-7. From time to time money was collected for the protection of trade; (Nott. Rec. ii. 34-36). In 1454 Bristol gave £150 for this purpose—the largest sum given by any town save London. (Hunt’s Bristol, 97-8.)

[152] Rymer’s Foedera, viii. 470.

[153] Debate of Heralds, 49. In 1488 a letter from London to the money-changer Frescobaldo, at Venice, told that Flanders galleys which left Antwerp for Hampton fell in with three English ships, who commanded them to strike sail, and though they said they were friends, forced them to fight. Eighteen English were killed. But on the complaint of the captain of the galleys the King sent the Bishop of Winchester to say he need not fear, as those who had been killed must bear their own loss and a pot of wine would settle the matter. Davies’ Southampton, 475.

[154] See Libel of English Policy, Pol. Poems and Songs, ii. 164-5. For complaints in 1444 and 1485 see Rot. Parl. v. 113.

[155] Libel of English Policy, Pol. Poems and Songs, ii. 159. Capgrave de Illust. Henricis, 135. A man at Canterbury was accused in 1448 of saying that the king was not able to bear the fleur-de-lys nor the ship in his noble. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 455.)

[156] Heralds’ Debate, 17.

[157] Schanz, ii. 27.

[158] 4 H. VII. cap. x.; Schanz, i. 368-9. Encouragement was also given to building of English ships—as for example by remission of tolls on the first voyage (Schanz, ii. 591).

[159] Keutgen, 55, etc.

[160] Ibid. 54.

[161] Schanz, i. 332; ii. 575. A list of the charters granted to them follows, ibid. 575-8. See also treaty given, ibid. 159.

[162] Ibid. i. 339, 340.

[163] Ibid. ii. 162.

[164] Ibid. i. 340.

[165] 1500; Schanz, ii. 545-7.

[166] In 1505. Henry VII. issued regulations for the Merchant Adventurers. They might meet in Calais to elect governors; and they were at the same time to elect a council of twenty-four called “assistants,” who were to have jurisdiction over all members and power to make statutes, and to appoint officers both in England and in Calais to levy fines and to imprison offenders. The council filled up its own vacancies. Every merchant using the dealings of a Merchant Adventurer was not only to pay its tolls and taxes, but must enter the fellowship and pay his ten marks. The Calais officials were to proclaim the marts whenever required to do so. The Adventurers might appoint their own weighers and packers, and have nothing to say to the royal officers. (Schanz, ii. 549-553.)

[167] Schanz notes the settlement in Antwerp as one of the most critical turning points of English industrial and commercial history (i. 339). The movement had well begun in the fourteenth and early part of the fifteenth centuries, but the real influx of English traders was from 1442-4 (ibid. i. 9). For the treaties with the Duke of Burgundy in 1407 concerning English traders in Flanders, Rymer’s Foedera, viii. 469-78.

[168] Schanz, ii. 577, 581, 582.

[169] Ibid. i. 343, 344.

[170] 12 Henry VII. c. 6.

[171] Wheeler, Treatise of Commerce, 19, 23.

[172] “DÉjÀ au quinziÈme siÈcle les Écossais avaient À Veere en ZÉlande un dÉpÔt pour leurs marchandises, administrÉ par un ‘Conservator.’ Sir Thomas Cunningham remplit cet office jusqu’À sa mort en 1655, et ce ne fut que le 28 novembre, 1661 (sic), que Sir W. Davison en fut chargÉ; il demeura de temps en temps À Amsterdam, oÙ il eut des querelles À l’occasion des impÔts municipaux. Plus tard, il eut des diffÉrends avec le pasteur Épiscopal Mowbray, qui par suite fut dÉplacÉ, et enfin avec les Écossais de Veere eux-mÊmes. En 1668 Davison fit un traitÉ avec la ville de Dordrecht, pour y transporter les affaires d’Écosse; mais comme les Écossais ne voulurent pas s’y conformer, Davison fut contraint de prendre son congÉ en mai 1671; Veere resta le dÉpÔt du commerce Écossais. Consultez encore l’ouvrage trÈs rare. “An account of the Scotch Trade in the Netherlands, and of the Staple Port in Campvere. By James Yair, Minister of the Scotch Church in Campvere. London, 1776.” (Œuvres ComplÈtes de Huygens. Amsterdam, 1893. Note on a letter from R. Moray to Huygens, Jan. 30, 1665.)

[173] Libel of English Policy. Pol. Poems and Songs, ii. 180, 181. See Hist. MSS. Com. x. 4, 445-6. William Mucklow, merchant at London, sent commissions to his son Richard at Antwerp; a Richard Mucklow was warden of S. Helen’s, Worcester, either in 1510 or 1519 (446). An account book of Wm. Mucklow, merchant, “in the Passe Mart at Barro, Middleburg, in the Synxon Mart at Antwerp, in the Cold Mart and in Bamys Mart,” in 1511 records sales of white drapery and purchase of various goods—a ball battery, fustian, buckram, knives, sugar, brushes, satin, damask, sarsenet, velvet, pepper, Yssyngham cloth, spectacles, swan’s feathers, girdles, “socket,” treacle, green ginger, ribands, brown paper, Brabant cloth, pouches, leather, buckets, “antony belles,” “sacke belles,” sheets, &c.; and the names of the vessels in which the goods were shipped.

[174] Rot. Parl. iv. 126; Schanz, i. 443-445. For English reprisals, 27 H. VI. cap. i.; 28 H. VI. cap. i.; 4 Ed. IV. cap. 5.

[175] Schanz, ii. 191-3, 203-6. Negotiations were still going on in 1499 as to the trade disputes between Henry the Seventh, the Archduke, and the Staple at Calais (Schanz, ii. 195-202). The main point in dispute was allowing English cloths to be cut in the Netherlands for making clothes.

[176] In 1493; Schanz, i. 17, 18.

[177] Schanz, ii. 582-5.

[178] Ibid. i. 7-11.

[179] Schanz, i. 31, 32.

[180] Ibid. i. 339.

[181] Schanz, i. 345; ii. 561, 562.

[182] Instances, Schanz, ii. 557, 558.

[183] Ibid. ii. 564.

[184] Ibid. ii. 543.

[185] From Antwerp Archives; Schanz, ii. 539-43.

[186] In November, 1504, the Staplers and Adventurers appeared before the Star Chamber. The Staplers pleaded a charter which declared them free from the jurisdiction of the Adventurers. The Star Chamber decided that every Stapler who dealt or traded as an Adventurer was to be subject to the courts and dues of the Adventurers: and every Adventurer dealing as a Stapler in like manner to be subject to the Staple (Schanz, ii. 547). This decision seemed to imply the ruin of Staplers, but the next year it was explained that the authentic interpretation was simply that “the merchants of the Staple at Calais using the feate of a Merchant Adventurer passing to the marts at Calais should in those things be contributories to such impositions and charges” as the Adventurers had fixed (ibid. 549); and that they could not be compelled to join the Adventurers’ company. In 1510 Henry the Eighth repeated the decree of Henry the Seventh that the Adventurers must not force Staplers to join their body (555). For the pleadings before the Star Chamber under Henry the Eighth see Schanz, ii. 556-564.

[187] Schanz, i. 249.

[188] Keutgen, 42, 51-54.

[189] Schanz, i. 251.

[190] Keutgen, 30, 81.

[191] Ibid. 44, &c.

[192] Pauli’s Pictures, 172, 185. Keutgen, 10-43. Richard the Second complained to the Grand Master that traders were forced to carry their cloth to Elbing instead of Danzig (ibid. 72). In 1388 three citizens of London and York were sent to Marienberg with an interpreter to make a treaty of commerce with the “general master of the house of S. Mary of Teutonia.” (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 109.) In 1397, however, trade with the Easterlings was practically stopped. The English imposed enormous duties on German imports; the Germans forbade traffic in English cloth. For the negotiations carried on by Henry the Fourth see LiterÆ Cantuarienses, iii. xxviii.-xxxi., and the various letters on the subject. The English colony in Danzig increased greatly after the peace of Marienberg. (Schanz, i. 231.) In 1392 more than 300 English came into Danzig to carry corn. (Keutgen, 71.) But the resistance of the Danzig burghers to English trade was strenuous. They were less jealous of the Netherlands manufacturers, and the Teutonic Order in the fifteenth century sent to Dinant for the rough cloth needed for the Baltic trade. (Pirenne, Dinant, 97; Keutgen, 81-83.)

[193] Pauli’s Pictures, 135-8.

[194] 8 H. VI. c. 2; Proc. Privy Council, iv. 208; Schanz, ii. 170.

[195] In 1425 there were letters from Henry the Sixth to the King of Dacia, Norwegia, and Swecia, concerning the merchants of Lynn who traded with the parts of North Berne; (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 203). In 1427 he wrote to the English merchants “in partibus Prucie, Dacie, Norweie, Hanse, and Swethie commorantes,” to assemble in a sufficient place, elect governors and make ordinances for self-government in mercantile matters, and for reasonable punishment of any merchants disobedient (203). At times the English even forced compensation from the Hanse merchants for outrages (Schanz, i. 250). In 1438 rye was brought from Prussia “by the providence of Stephen Browne,” the mayor, at a time of famine in England, when a bushel of corn was sold for 3s. 4d., and the people were making bread of vetches, peas, beans, and fern-roots. (Fabyan, 612.)

[196] Schanz, i. 254.

[197] Libel of English Policy. Pol. Poems and Songs, ii. 191. The bailiffs and community of Chepstowe did trade with Iceland and Finmark. (Proc. Privy Council, iv. 208.) In 1426 Lynn forbade trade with Iceland to its inhabitants and the whole community sent a petition against the trade to the King’s Council. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 160.)

[198] Hunt’s Bristol, 94-6. In 1491 fishing-smacks starting for Iceland had to get leave to sail, after finding surety that they would not carry more grain nor any other forbidden thing than sufficed for their own food. Paston Letters, iii. 367-9.

[199] Keutgen, 30.

[200] Ibid. 84-5, 70-71. For these negotiations see Rymer’s Foedera, x. 656-7, 666-70, 753. Bekynton, i. 215.

[201] In 1439. Bekynton’s Corres. i. 183-4.

[202] “Whereof the payment was kept secret from writers” (Fabyan, 657.)

[203] The fortunes of Memling’s Last Judgement now at Danzig give a curious illustration of this war and the trade complications of the time. Ordered at Bruges through the Florentine agents there (the Portinari), probably by Julian and Lorenzo de Medici, the picture could not be carried to Florence on account of this war begun in 1468. At last in 1473 it was sent off from Sluys in a British-built ship, which had been bought by English merchants as a French prize, chartered by Florentines in Bruges for a voyage to London, registered in the name of the Portinari, commissioned by a French captain, and navigated under the Burgundian flag for greater security against capture. It was, however, taken off Southampton by a privateer sailing under the Danzig flag and commanded by a noted captain Benecke. In spite of a bull issued by Sixtus the Fourth the cargo was sold at Stade and the picture brought by the owners of the ship to Danzig. (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Early Flemish Painters, 257-260.)

[204] Henry the Sixth, on the other hand, brought the help of the Genoese. Possibly the excessive price of fish mentioned in the Paston Letters in 1471 may have been caused by the political troubles (iii. 22, 254).

[205] Schanz, i. 172-9; ii. 388-396. Pauli’s Pictures, 185-7.

[206] Schanz, i, 186.

[207] Schanz, i. 294.

[208] Schanz, i. 257.

[209] Schanz, i. 237-42.

[210] For the negotiations between the Easterlings and the English merchants, see Schanz, ii. 397-430; i. 179-201. In 1498 Archduke Philip, seeing the utter ruin into which Bruges had fallen, tried to revive it by ordering that all foreign merchants should do their business there only, by improving the harbour, and by making it the Staple for English cloths in Flanders. (Schanz, i. 26-27.) In 1501 Philip made Bruges a Staple where English cloth might be sold in Flanders under strict conditions. (Ibid. ii. 203-6.) In 1506 Henry won from the Archduke the right to sell cloth by the yard and to have the manufacture of it finished in all his dominions except Flanders. (Ibid. i. 31.)

[211] The friendly way in which the English merchants even in 1405 looked on Genoese traders is illustrated in the story told by Fabyan (571), of three carracks of Genoa laden with merchandise plundered by English lords. The Genoese merchants made suit to the King for compensation, and meanwhile borrowed from English merchants goods amounting unto great and noble sums. When their suit was seen to be in vain they made off with their spoils “to the undoing” of many merchants.

[212] Hunt’s Bristol, 97-8.

[213] For the anxiety as to the friendship of powerful maritime states see the French boast of the alliance of Spain and Genoa; Heralds’ Debate, 59. It is interesting to notice that both Edward the Fourth and Henry the Seventh preferred Florence to Venice. Disputes about the Venetian wool trade under Henry the Sixth are mentioned in Bekynton’s Corresp. i. 126-9.

[214] The price of wine had been raised in England by new rules about measures.

[215] A pilgrim to Rome in 1477 got letters in London on the bank of Jacobo di Medici. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 361.)

[216] 1. English merchants might trade freely with Florence in all kinds of wares of home or foreign origin.

2. The Florentines promised to buy no wool save from English ships. The English on their side were bound to carry yearly to Pisa an average quantity for all the Italian states save Venice. In Pisa they were to have all the privileges of inhabitants and to have land for a building.

3. The English were to be free from personal services and from taxes which might be raised on trade.

4. The merchants might form a corporation in Pisa.

5. Quarrels between Englishmen to be settled by their own head. Quarrels between an Englishman and a foreigner to be decided by the municipality and the English consul. Criminal cases by the municipality alone.

6. The English to share all advantages the Florentines might win by trading treaties.

7. The wishes of the English to be considered in all new privileges granted in the Florentine dominions.

8. The English King was to allow no stranger to carry wool out of England. The Venetians only might carry 600 sacks.

9. The wool was to be of good quality and well packed. (Schanz, i. 126-137.)

[217] Schanz, i. 119-142; 7 Henry VII. c. 7.

[218] An interesting account of this is given in Hist. MSS. Com. v. 461.

[219] Schanz, i. 298.

[220] In 1475, 1486, and 1495. (Schanz, i. 299-304.) In 1475 a proclamation in Cinque Ports forbade Englishmen to buy Gascon wine of an alien. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 494.)

[221] An interesting trace of foreign connections is given in the will of Wm. Rowley, who left money to a parish church and a nunnery at Dam in Flanders, and to two places in Spain. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 326.)

[222] Schanz, i. 275-7.

[223] Ibid. i. 285-90. The Portuguese were among those who were allowed to export woollen cloths under Henry the Sixth. (Proc. Privy Council, v. ii. 11.)

[224] Notices of English trade with Portugal in the second half of the fifteenth century may be found in the complaints of the merchants; Schanz, ii. 496-524. For Portuguese in Lydd in 1456, Hist. MSS. Com. v. 521.

[225] In Piers Ploughman a graphic illustration is taken from the mediÆval borough thus isolated and protected.

“He cried and commanded all Christian people
To delve and dike a deep ditch all about unity,
That Holy Church stood in holiness as it were a pile.
Conscience commanded then all Christians to delve,
And make a great moat that might be a strength
To help holy Church and them that it keepeth.”

—Pass. xxii. 364-386.

[226] Journ. Arch. Assoc. xxvii. 461.

[227] Piers Ploughman, passus iv. 386.

[228] Journ. Arch. Assoc. xxvii. 466.

[229] “And we use that during the siege if the bailiff be an unable and impotent man or unlearned, to choose us one other for the time being; but not a far-dweller unless by the pleasure of the commonalty.” (Ibid. 488.) See Proc. Privy Council, iv. 217.

[230] Journ. Arch. Assoc. xxvii. 463, 488.

[231] In Rye there was a tax “from every stranger, as though from a prisoner taken, payment of his finance for his ransom, and when he has entered the fortresses of the port for his passage thence, 3s. 4d.; he having to pay towards the building of the walls and gates there what pertains to the common weal of the town.” (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 490.) For the strengthening of Canterbury wall against the French, (ibid. ix. 141.) It had twenty-one towers and six gates, and mayors in 1452 and 1460 left money for the gates. (Davies’ Southampton, 62-3, 80, 105. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 167.)

[232] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 518-24, 492-3. The Common House at Romney was only provided with bows until in 1475 a gun was laid on it. Burgesses were sometimes driven from towns by the excessive charges of war and of watch and ward. (Owen’s Shrewsbury, i. 205.) For Southampton, see Davies, 79, 80, Chester, Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 370.

[233] Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 370. In 1399, when the master-weavers and tradesmen came armed to the cathedral and led an attack on “William of Wybunbur and Thomas del Dame and many of their servants called journeymen in a great affray of all the people of the city against the peace of the Lord King.” Ibid. 367. See also Paston Letters, i. 408; Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 432.

[234] Plumpton Correspondence, liv. lxii.

[235] Davies’ York, 183. For the directions given about the gathering of troops, see ibid., 152-157. For cost of arms and maintenance of troops to towns, see Stubbs ii. 309. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 143.

[236] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 7, p. 171.

[237] The authorities of York decreed that the soldiers sent on a Scotch campaign should be given their wages for the first fourteen days, and the captain should have in his pocket the money for the second fortnight. The troops struck, however, and insisted on having the whole twenty-eight days’ pay before they started, and the town had at last to give in as the only way of getting the expedition started. (Davies’ York 132-7.) The soldiers, once paid, often did no more than start on their journey and then “sraggle about by themselves” with their pay in their pockets. (Paston Letters ii. 1-2.)

[238] Eng. Chronicle, 1377-1461, pp. 71, 83, 90, 109.

[239] Piers Ploughman, passus iv. 478, 479.

“‘Therefore I counsel no King any counsel ask
At conscience if he coveteth to conquer a realm,
For should never conscience be my constable
Were I a king y-crowned, by Mary,’ quoth Meed,
‘Nor be marshall of my men where I most fight.’”

—Passus iv. 254-8.

[240] In Canterbury, any man drawing a knife was fined or imprisoned forty days. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 172.) In Sandwich if any one wounded another with a sword or knife he might choose one of three punishments, a fine of 60s. to the commonalty, imprisonment for a year and a day, or to have his hand perforated with the weapon by which he had inflicted the wound. (Boys 502.)

[241] Parker, Manor of Aylesbury, 20-21. “Also I complain,” said one of them pitifully, “upon James Fleccher for fraying of my wife about 10 o’clock in the night and I ready for to go to bed, standing scolding at my door bidding me come out of thy doors an thou dare with his dagger in his hand ready to break the king’s peace.” The prudent constable, however, refrained from coming out and was content to appeal to the next court; “he is coming and therefore I beseech you of peace of his godabery.” In Canterbury one of the watchmen called to a person “walking out of due time” to know wherefore he walked there so late. “The suspect person gave none answer, but ran from thence into St. Austin’s liberty and before the door of one John Short they took him. And the same John Short came out of his house with other misknown persons and took from the said watchmen their weapons and there menaced them for to beat contrary to the oath of a true and faithful freeman.” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 174.)

[242] “The freemen of the borough of Huntingdon have this week been engaged in the observance of a curious and ancient local custom. With their sons, the whole of the freemen of the borough have assembled in the morning in the Market-place. The skull of an ox borne on two poles was placed at the head of a procession, and then came the freemen and their sons, a certain number of them bearing spades and others sticks. Three cheers having been given, the procession moved out of the town and proceeded to the nearest point of the borough boundary, where the skull was lowered. The procession then moved along the boundary line of the borough, the skull being dragged along the line as if it were a plough. The boundary holes were dug afresh, and a boy thrown into each hole and struck with a spade. At a particular point, called Blacktone Leys, refreshments were provided, and the boys competed for prizes. The skull was then again raised aloft, and the procession returned to the Market-place, where three more hurrahs were given before it broke up.” (From the Pall Mall Gazette, September 16th, 1892.) In Hythe Holy Thursday was the day of perambulation. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. i. 432.) For Canterbury in 1497 see Hasted’s Kent, iv. 399-401.

[243] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 434.

[244] History Preston Gild, 41, 42; Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 345; Nottingham, Records, i. 150-151, 268, 164-165.

[245] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 519.

[246] For common pasture and closes see short account in Rogers’ Six Centuries of Work and Wages, i. 89-90, taken from Fitzherbert’s Treatise. In 1484 a great riot broke out in York on the question of the common lands. The King had begged the council to make an order that a close which belonged to S. Nicholas, but was common from Michaelmas to Candlemas, should be “closed and several” for the use of the hospital if the commons would agree to the same. The order was made, but a few days after Michaelmas, when the close was not thrown open as was customary, the citizens met in a “riotous assembly or insurrection” which led to interference of the King. (Davies’ York, 190-198.) In Winchester (1414) John Parmiter was punished for accusing the mayor of intending to sell the Coitebury mill without consent of the citizens. (Kitchen’s Winchester, 171.) For other instances see Vol. II. “Democracy in the Towns,” Note A.

[247] At Worcester the common coffer which contained the city deeds and moneys was fastened with six locks; three keys were kept by the bailiff, an alderman, and a chamberlain, chosen by the “Great Clothing,” or the council of “the twenty-four above;” the other three by a chamberlain chosen by the “Low Election” or the council of “the Forty-eight beneath,” and by two “thrifty commoners.” Eng. Gilds, 377.

[248] In case of error or fraud, or if the bailiff refused to make answer to complaints of the burghers, he was brought before the court of his fellow-citizens “and he shall make satisfaction as the commonalty shall think fitting.” Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 462.

[249] In Romney the town paid every year to have seats put in the church of S. Lawrence on the day of the Annunciation. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 546.) In the same way town accounts at Rye were made up and audited in the church at the end of the year. (Ibid. v. 494.) Lydd in 1471 “spended in the church upon the bailly and jurats when they enquired what lyvelod men have in Lydd two pence.” (Ibid. 525.)

[250] Hist. MSS. Com. i. 106, 107.

[251] See p. 41, note 2.

[252] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 438. The Hythe barge brought back three lasts of herrings which were sold for £12. In 1409 Romney Jurats got 6s. increase upon white salt bought for the community. (Ibid. v. 537.) If a corporation was in need of money it could always fall back on loans from rich townsmen, who were willing to lend even on long credit. In 1455 or 1456 one Canterbury merchant lent £13 6s. 8d., which was needed for a gift to the queen, then travelling on pilgrimage, and he was only repaid in 1464. Three leading men, who advanced large sums to do honour to Edward the Fourth on his first coming to the city in 1460, waited four or five years for their money. (Ibid. ix. 139-140.) In Lynn the loans to the corporation were on a very great scale according to the ideas of the time, and the municipal debt, entirely raised on the spot, was as permanent and as progressive as that of a modern town.

[253] Madox, Firma Burgi, 159. See also in 1322, when the missing ferm was to be levied of the bailiffs’ goods, chattels, and lands, and, if this did not suffice, of the goods of the citizens. Documents pr. 1884. (Stanley v. Mayor, &c., 24.) See Note A at the end of chapter.

[254] Davies, 111, 37.

[255] Eng. Gilds, 362-363; Nott. Records, i. 267.

[256] Records of Nottingham, iv. 449. Afterwards a paviour was appointed who was paid, or partly paid, by a toll taken for corn “shown” for sale in the market. This tax, known as “shewage” or “scavadge,” gave rise to our later word scavenger (iv. 453). Rules for keeping streets clean in Southampton. (Gross, ii. 223.)

[257] Ricart, 28. 1240 A.D. For carrying great stones for the quay and walls of Rye. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 492, 493.

[258] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 434.

[259] One man received £30 10s. in various sums, 3s. 4d. a rod for nineteen rods, 1s. 8d. a rod for 106 rods, and 12d. a rod for 380 rods. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 434.) For forty years the men of Romney fought a desperate battle with the sea and the changing bed of the Rother to preserve the harbour on which their prosperity depended. In 1381 they spent nearly £9 on making a sluice (Boys’ Sandwich, 803); there were heavy payments for it again in 1388, and in 1398 John Roan was brought over from Flanders to take charge of it. The commons turned out in 1406 for “digging the common Rie,” or bed of the Rother, and in 1409 were again busy “digging the water-course.” In 1410 Gerard Matthyessone was brought over from Holland to make the sluice at a cost of £100; in 1412 over £44 was spent on it besides clothing for Gerard and his household; and in 1413 payments were still being made to him. A few years later in 1422 his place was taken by another Dutchman, Onterdel, who seems to have finished the work, for after this there are only charges for slight repairs. Their improvements remained the model for neighbouring towns, and when Lydd was occupied in works of the same kind its citizens came to study the jetty at Romney.

[260] Ibid. vi. 495-7. A messenger went as far as Kent and Essex to gather alms for making the harbour. He collected groats, pence, fleeces of wool, broken silver and rings, a dish full of wheat, malt, or barley, a piece of bacon and so forth; and got a man to help him who swore before the canons of Christchurch that he would be true, but declared he must have a crucifix and writing as sign of authority, and got a goodly crucifix with beryl set therein and a new suit of clothes, and then made off with his booty.

[261] Shillingford’s Letters, 141, 142. Rec. Nottingham, i. 183. For Rochester, Eng. Chron. 124; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 76. For London see Lit. Cantuar. iii. 169.

[262] Boys’ Sandwich, 673, 676, 684. The town council of Lynn decreed in 1431 “that the three players shall serve the community this year for 21s., and their clothing to be had of every house;” but two years later the players demanded an increase of their “reward,” and a grant was made to each of them of 20s. and their clothing, in return for which “they shall go through the town with their instruments from the Feast of All Saints to the following Feast of the Purification.” (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 162-3.) In Canterbury four minstrels were appointed every year, and each one was given a silver scutcheon worth 100s.—a badge which was returned at the end of the year to the city chamberlain.

[263] Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (Camden Society), 12.

[264] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 147-8. A most interesting example of an English play is given in the “Commonplace book of the fifteenth century,” ed. by Miss Toulmin Smith, pp. 46-9, the play of Abraham and Isaac. The vivacity, the pathos, the dramatic movement, the strong human interest, are very remarkable.

[265] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 516-527.

[266] Piers Ploughman, pass. i. 34-38.

[267] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 518, &c.

[268] Ibid. pass. viii. 98.

[269] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 540, 541, 544, 552, 548, 549.

[270] Ibid. xi. 7, 172-4.

[271] “Two Sermons of the Boy Bishop at S. Paul’s” have been published by the Camden Society, 1875.

[272] Eng. Guilds, 430.

[273] Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 363.

[274] See vol. ii.

[275] Davies’ York, 43, 77; Eng. Guilds, 141-3. The expenses that fell on a town at a royal visit were exceedingly heavy. (Davies’ York, 69.) For Canterbury, Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 140-151.

[276] In 1415 there were fifty-seven crafts in York, each of which had its special play. (Davies’ York, 233-236; English Guilds, 141-3; Hist. MSS. Com. i. 109.) Plays were given over to certain trades to act. Abraham and Isaac, for instance, was given to the slaters in Newcastle, the bowyers and fletchers in Beverley, the weavers in Dublin, the parchminers and bookbinders in York, the barbers and wax-chandlers in Chester. (Commonplace Book, ed. by Miss Toulmin Smith, 47-8.)

[277] The prices charged by players and minstrels seem to have risen considerably between 1400 and 1500. For a growing economy, see Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 345.

[278] Ibid. ix. 173.

[279] Ibid. ix. 274. For the Worcester rules of 1467, see English Guilds, 385, 407-8.

[280] Hist. MSS. Com. i. 103-104, no date.

[281] Ibid. x. 4, 426.

[282] The York hostellers contracted in 1483 to bring forth yearly for the next eight years a pageant of their own, The Coronation of Our Lady.

[283] A small fee was sometimes paid to the parson when the church was used as storehouse for grain or wool as in case of Southampton. Roger’s Agric. and Prices, ii. 611.

[284] Paston Letters, iii. 436.

[285] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 306. York Ritual.

[286] The belfry where the clock hung played so important a part in the communes of France that the right to have a belfry and a town hall were given by charter when the commune was established, and were taken away when it was suppressed (Ordonnances des Rois de France, vol. xi., cxlii., cxliii.), and the bell-tower often formed the town prison. In England, on the other hand, the town clock and the assembly and curfew bells in almost all cases were set in the tower of the parish church, and the ringers paid by the corporation.

[287] Piers Ploughman, passus vii. 144. In Totnes in the thirteenth century there is a long list of entries such as these:— “Alice wife of Walter Cochela sits above the seats of Walter rustic;” “Nicholas son of Henry has his seat by common purchase;” and so on. And down to recent times the mayor, who by tradition represents the head of the Merchant Guild, was charged with appointing seats in the church to the inhabitants. (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 242-3.) In Liverpool, “according to ancient custom,” the city officers and their wives had special seats in S. Nicholas, and after them the householders; “apprentices and servants shall sit or stand in the alleys.” (Picton’s Liverpool, ii. 53, 54, 57.) For allotment of seats in the parish church see Toulmin Smith, The Parish, 2nd Edition, 1857, 441.

[288] In Cumberland stray sheep were proclaimed at the church on Sunday. At Rotherham the penalties decreed in the manor court were commonly ordered to be published by the bailiff in the church. (Hunter’s Doncaster, ii. 10.) In 1462 the king’s judges sat to hold trials in the Grey Friars’ Church at Bridgewater for cases of assault and theft. (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 316.)

[289] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 537. Romney. Ibid. iv. 1, 436.

[290] Shillingford’s Letters, 48, 94. For the church of S. Nicholas Romney, 1422, see Hist. MSS. Com. v. 542. In Dover barons of Cinque Ports met at the church of S. James. (Ibid. v. 528, 538.) For Rye, Ibid., 499. The meetings of the town council in Southampton were probably first held in the church of S. Cross or Holy Rood, where the assembly bell and curfew bell hung; and so closely did the idea of the town life come to be connected with this spot that when a town hall was built in the fourteenth century the church was moved further back that the hall might stand on its exact site. As late as 1470 the mayor and his brethren met in the parish church to settle a question of town business.

[291] Shillingford’s Letters, 93. Report on Markets, 25. Fairs forbidden on Sundays and feast days; 27 Henry VI., cap. 5.

[292] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 436.

[293] It is interesting to note the scientific experiments of “Doctor Wren” in the tower of old S. Paul’s, described in a letter from Moray to Huygens, Sep. 23, 1664. Œuvres ComplÈtes de Huygens. Amsterdam, 1893, vol. v.

[294] The mayor and jurats of Rye had the nomination of the chaplain of S. Bartholomew’s. (Lyons, ii. 367.) For Sandwich Boys, 672-3. The Bridgewater burgesses were lay rectors of the church. (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 312.) For the Wells corporation, Hist. MSS. Com. i. 106. At Dartmouth the parish church was built by the mayor; and a dispute began between mayor and vicar who was to have fees for masses; fresh dispute raised every thirty years from that time till 1874, when it had come to a question of pew rents, and a compromise was made. In Andover the custodians of the cemetery were chosen by the people (Gross, ii. 331). “If any person shall be a water bearer in Totnes he shall cry the hour of the day and shall carry the holy water every Sunday throughout the whole ville of Totnes.” (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 344.) Payment was often made for sermons. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 549. Davies’ York, 77.)

[295] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 495. For the presenting of parish priests and clerics by the town juries see Cutts’ Colchester, 129. “And also the parish priest of St. Peter’s for over assessing of poor folks and men’s servants at Easter for their tythes and other duties.” (Nott. Rec. iii. 364.) In 1476, when the chaplain of Old Romney Church was arraigned for felony, “according to the custom of the Cinque Ports, for his acquittance it is assigned that he shall have 36 good and lawful men to be at the Hundred Court next to come at his peril.” Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 544. See ch. v. p. 175, note.

[296] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 272.

[297] For the rise of the new parish administration, Gneist i. 282-5; ii. 21.

[298] Hythe, Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 432. Bridport, Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 495; Andover, Gross, ii. 345. In Lynn all houses leased for 20s. a year were bound to supply the blessed bread and wax for S. Margaret’s, and the most elaborate rules were drawn up to regulate the contributions which were to be paid by tenements lying together, or by various tenements under one roof. In case payment was refused the common sergeant, or any officer sent by the mayor, might levy a distress and carry off the tenant’s goods to the Guild Hall to be kept till he had made satisfaction or paid a fine of 20s. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 161.) Payments for the holy fire are frequent. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 432, v. 549.) Sometimes fines for breach of trade laws went to church uses. (Gross, ii. 331, 345.) In Rye, if any animal got into the churchyard the owner paid 3s. 4d. to fabric of church. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 489.)

[299] In Bridport the bequests for the church from 1450 to 1460 consist of such things as a brass crock, a ring, small sums of money, and more often one or two sheep or lambs. Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 494. Manorial Pleas (Selden Soc.), 150. Hist. MSS. Com. x. 4, 524, 529, 531. Gross, Gild Merchant, ii. 345.

[300] Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 345, 346. When Hythe set up its new steeple in 1480 the twelve jurats headed the list of subscriptions, the greatest sum given by them being 10s. Then came the commons giving from 20s. down to 1d., that is, a day’s subsistence. (Ibid. iv. 1, 433.)

[301] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 273. Money was collected for the church at Yaxley, in Suffolk, in 1485 and the following years, by a similar custom of the yearly “church ale,” the usual amount contributed from each householder for his bread and drink being about 4s. or 5s. (Ibid. x. 4, 465.)

[302] Boys’ Sandwich, 784.

[303] In 1327 a violent quarrel broke out between Sandwich and Canterbury. The convent was put to great inconvenience, and the prior wrote to “the mayor and bailiff of Sandwich” asking to be allowed to buy food and wax, as they had been put to great straits. The Sandwich men agreed on condition that the monks should in no manner relieve or give supplies to the Canterbury citizens. (Lit. Cantuar. i. 248-254.) There was great jealousy between Norwich and Yarmouth. Yarmouth was made a Staple town in 1369, in spite of all the efforts of Norwich. In 1390 Norwich paid large sums to have the wool staple at Norwich again. (Blomefield, iii. 96, 113.) In the fifteenth century Yarmouth set up a crane, which the Norwich men forced it to take down again.

[304] 1478. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 88.

[305] The towns were not wholly untouched by the struggle but their interest was very languid. Many, like London, were divided in sympathy. (Polydore Vergil, 106; English Chronicle, 1377-1461, 20-1, 67, 95; Fabyan, 638.) During this queasy season the Mayor of London feigned him sick and kept his house a great season. (Ibid. 660; see also Warkworth’s Chronicle, 12-22.) Bristol and Colchester were Yorkist (Hunt’s Bristol, 97-100, 102; Cutts’ Colchester, 131-2). For Nottingham see vol. ii. The chief interest was probably felt in Kent and Sussex. (English Chronicle, 1377-1461, 84, 91-4.) Canterbury was against Cade and Lancastrian in sympathy (ibid. 84-95; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 140-3, 168, 170, 176-7); but in 1464 entered in its accounts presents to the brothers of the king “nunc.” The city suffered severely. The Cinque Ports went generally for Warwick and York. Lydd sent Cade a porpoise to London, and a letter to have his friendship in case he succeeded. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 518, 520, 523, 525.) For Romney, ibid. 543, 545; Rye, ibid. 492-4; Sandwich, Boys, 676.

[306] The agricultural tenants and labourers on a manor were accustomed to elect from among themselves a “Provost” to be head over them and to stand between them and their lord, whom they were pledged to obey in all things, and who on his side undertook to answer for them to their master. Bound by the closest ties of mutual responsibility, their fortunes were inseparably connected. If the lord suffered any loss, small or great, by the tenant’s fault, the provost had to pay the value, recovering it afterwards as best he could from the servant who was to blame; and on the other hand if the damage had come through the provost’s neglect, and he had not of his own property the wherewithal to make it good, all those of the township who elected him had to pay for him; and hence people and lord alike in self-protection upheld the rule that the provost must be no stranger of doubtful character or property, but chosen “from their own men,” and that “by election of the tenants.” (Walter of Henley, edited by E. Lamond, Husbandry, 65.) It is easy to see the similarity between the simple methods of rural government and the organization of municipal independence under an elected mayor. An admirable illustration is given in Mr. Maitland’s Manorial Pleas, Selden Society, 161-175.

[307] A citizen of Preston was obliged to show a frontage of twelve feet to the street; in Manchester or Salford he was bound to own at least an acre of land. Custumal in Hist. of Preston Guild, 75. Thomson’s Mun. Hist. 165; Gross, i. 71, note.

[308] Ipswich, Hist. MSS. Com. ix. p. 244. Otherwise he was not allowed to be of the common council of the town.

[309] At Bury S. Edmunds there were seventy-five tradesmen of various kinds, bakers, tailors, shoemakers, &c., who were bound to cut corn in harvest, the services being commuted for a rent called reap silver when the place became a borough. At Battle, under Henry the Second, 115 burgage tenements were occupied by tradesmen who had to work in the meadows or at the mill, but were called burgesses “on account of the superior dignity of the place’s excellence.” Rep. on Markets, 17, note.

[310] From examination of the names of the Norwich inhabitants in the Conveyance Rolls, Mr. Hudson thinks it certainly within the mark to assume “that the city of Norwich, towards the close of the thirteenth century, had attracted within its sheltering walls natives of at least four hundred Norfolk, and perhaps sixty Suffolk, towns, villages, and manors.” Notes on Norwich, Norfolk ArchÆology, vol. xii. p. 46.

[311] Picton’s Mun. Rec., i. 10-12. For the survival in Wareham of these burgages of various sizes, Hutchins’ Dorsetshire, i. 77. Henry the First of England gave charters to some of his towns in Normandy early in the twelfth century, by which the burgess was obliged to own a house, and was originally granted three acres and a garden, but with the right of creating other burgesses by giving up to them a part of his land. Flach, Origines de l’Ancienne France, ii. 347-8.

[312] In Nottingham a subsidy roll in 1472 gives a list of the 154 owners of freehold property in the town, headed by one the tenth of whose property was assessed at 74s. 7½d.; then came one whose tenth was worth 67s. 7½d.; six others paid sums from 30s. to 20s.; and a great number paid from 5s. to 2s. At the bottom of the list came three men whose tenth was assessed, one at 1¼d. and one at ¼d. Nott. Records, ii. 285-297.

[313] The old feeling about burgage property is shown in the custom of Nottingham that when a man sold land his nearest heirs might redeem it if they made an offer in the Guild Hall within a year and a day of the sale to pay to the buyer the price he had given; and they might thus redeem even if the buyer refused to accept their offer. Cases of a messuage and a butcher’s booth thus redeemed (Nott. Rec. i. 70, 100). See also at Dover (Lyon’s Dover, ii. 274). In Lincoln and Torksey no burgess could sell his burgage tenement save to a burgess or a kinsman without leave (Rep. on Markets, 35). The mayor and jurats of Rye might compel a tenant to keep his house in proper order, “at the request of him that is in the reversion.” (Lyon’s Dover, ii. 362.)

[314] For London rules in 1319 see Lib. Cust. 269-70.

[315] As, for example, John de Ypres at Romney (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 542. Ibid. iv. i. 427). Foreigners no longer lived separately, as in towns of the Conqueror’s time, but tended to become completely united with the English in customs and law. See Nott. Rec. i. 109; Norwich documents, printed 1884, in the case of Stanley v. Mayor, p. 1.

[316] Ricart, The Mayor of Bristol’s Kalendar, Camden Society, 41. In 1439 two severe ordinances were passed by the Bristol Council that no Irishman born might be admitted to the Council by the Mayor under penalty of £20 each from the Mayor and from the Irishman. In Canterbury also the Irish were busy and unpopular traders (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 173). When Irishmen were ordered out of England in 1422, burgesses and inhabitants of boroughs of good reputation were excepted. (Statutes 1st Henry VI. cap. 3.)

[317] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 468. There was constant communication between various towns about the character of new settlers who offered themselves, and the testimonials preserved to us show how careful the towns were in such matters. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 488. Piers Ploughman, edited by Skeat, Part iii. passus iv. 108-116.) No one of illegitimate birth might be a burgess. Nott. Rec. ii. 66.

[318] A bondman born could in many if not in most towns win the freedom of the city, as in Norwich where serfs were admitted to the franchise; but it is clear that here certainly mere residence without admission to citizenship was no protection against the claims of a feudal lord. (Norf. Arch. vol. xii.; Hudson’s Notes on Norwich, Sec. xi.) It is most probable that the common phrases of “dwelling in the town a year and a day, and holding land in it and being in lot and scot,” or of being “in the Merchant Guild,” or of “remaining in the town without challenge,” were in fact equivalent to having been received as burghers; and in such cases emancipation was won not by a year’s residence but by a year’s citizenship. In Norwich a serf had to produce his lord’s license. (Hudson’s Leet Jur. in Norwich, Selden Soc. lxxxv.-vi.) For a similar instance of feudal claims urged by a lord over his serf dwelling in a city, see Owen’s Shrewsbury, i. 133. Compare the references given by Gross, i. 30. There were exceptions, as in London, where men who held land in villeinage of the Bishop of London were not allowed in 1305 to be freemen of the City (Riley’s Mem. 58-9). And after the Peasant Revolt some towns withdrew the privilege (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 109).

[319] A chaplain and four parsons of churches in Norwich were presented before the Leet Court of Norwich for various offences in 1292, in 1374, and in 1390. One of them had occupied himself with a large brewing business, another traded as a wool merchant, and two were charged with not being citizens. There were in all towns plenty of “clerici” who were citizens. (Hudson’s Norwich Leet Jurisdiction, Selden Soc. pp. 45, 63, 65, 76.) For burgages owned by parsons and clerics in Southampton, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 65, 70, 71, 75, 81. In Romney, where “the freedom” seems to have meant more than the right to trade, it was given to the vicar and others. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 540, 542, 546-7.) Monks and heads of religious houses were, according to Dr. Gross, excluded from citizenship (i. 66) though given rights of trade; but from the Charter Rolls, John, 1215, it appears that in Bridgewater the brethren of the Hospital of S. John were to be capable of taking up burgages in the town and to have the same liberties within and without the town as burgesses. This instance, has been kindly given to me by Miss Greenwood from her study of the muniments of the town; she adds that in the documents at Bridgewater there are many instances of houses and market-stalls being held by clergy. In all the bills of sale stalls in High Street are named burgages, and a lawsuit shows that a wool-stall there was sold to the abbot of Michelney. For Ipswich, Gross, ii. 123; and Andover, ibid. 321. Local customs doubtless differed. The Guild Merchant at Lynn allowed no “spiritual person” to work on their quay—that is, to trade there (ibid. ii. 166)—a circumstance which reflects the greater credit on the hermit who about 1349 lived in the Bishop’s marsh by Lynn and set up at his own great cost a certain remarkable cross of the height of 110 feet, of great service for all shipping coming that way (Blomefield viii. 514). When the burgesses of Totnes admitted the abbot and convent of Buckfastleigh into the Merchants’ Guild, so as to make all their purchases like the burgesses, all sales that they might attempt to make “by way of trading” were excepted. Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 343.

[320] In Bristol; Hist. MSS. Com. v. 327. In Rye, “by the Common Seal of the Barons of the Ville of Rye;” ibid. v. 513, 499. For the old custom of sealing through rush rings see ibid. ix. 234-5.

[321] For the various ways of winning municipal freedom see First Rep. of the Commissioners on Mun. Corporations, 1835, 19, and especially the table given on page 93. Even towns as closely connected as the Cinque Ports differed much in their willingness to admit new burgesses. The freedom of Sandwich might be acquired in six ways—by birth, by marriage with a free woman, by buying a free tenement, by seven years’ apprenticeship, by purchase, by gift of the Corporation. In New Romney freedom could only be acquired by birthright in the male line, and grant of the Corporation; while in Hythe all children born after the father’s admission to freedom were entitled to the freedom, and daughters could convey it upon their marriage (Boys’ Sandwich, 787, 796, 799, 812, 821). The same differences existed in other towns. See Davies’ Southampton, 140; Boase’s Oxford, 48; English Guilds, 390; Freeman’s Exeter, 142; Hereford, Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 471, 468.

[322] Leet Jur. in Norwich, Selden Soc. xxxvii. I have met with but one instance in which the King interfered—when Edward the Second by Royal Letters Patent granted the right of burgesses at Southampton to John de London of Bordeaux, and in 1312 extended them to his wife and children. (Davies, 190.) Henry the Fourth granted to the Archbishop of Canterbury the right to trade in Ipswich; but this right carried with it no political privileges in the town. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 246.) For the granting of franchises by French kings, see Luchaire, Les Communes FranÇaises, 56-7.

[323] Piers Ploughman, passus iv. III, 114.

[324] Hereford; Journal Arch. Ass., xxvii. 468.

[325] Gross, ii. 257.

[326] Totnes, Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 342, 343. Preston Guild Rolls, xvi., xix. In Nottingham one pledge was required in the fourteenth century; generally two in the fifteenth century. See Nott. Records, i. 285-7, ii. 272, 302, iii. 58, 80, 84, 90, 102.

[327] In 1397 the burgesses of Preston paid sums varying from 3s. to 40s. (Preston Guild Rolls, xvi.-xix.) In Exeter an artificer had to pay 20s., a merchant whatever the Mayor chose to ask (Freeman’s Exeter, 142). In Canterbury freemen were admitted in the fourteenth century for 10s.; in 1480 the sum had risen to 40s. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 144). See also Hereford (Journal Arch. Ass., xxvii.). In the sixteenth century the jury of the Mickle Tourn of Nottingham presented a request that every foreigner should henceforth pay £10. (Nott. Rec. iv. 170-1. Wells, Hist. MSS. Com. i. 106.) In Dover the payment was “put into the common horn” by the new freeman (Lyon’s Dover, ii. 306).

[328] In Preston the rule was that if he had received for his burgage “a void place” he must set up a house on it within forty days; in other towns, as in Norwich or Hereford, he was allowed a year and a day. (Custumal of Preston, given in Hist. of Preston Guild, 74. Hudson, Municipal Organization of Norwich, 27. Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 468.)

[329] In Preston regulations had to be made to prevent builders blocking up a street by temporarily fixing in it the framework of a house. (Hist. Preston Guild, 47.)

[330] Carlisle Mun. Records, Ed. Ferguson and Nansen, 63-4.

[331] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 472, 475; Lyon’s Dover, ii. 362.

[332] Gross, ii. 276. Custumal, Preston Guild, 75. Hist. MSS. Com. viii. i. 426.

[333] In Hereford the freeman who lost his position for perjury could never recover it save by the special favour of the commonalty, “and by the redemption of his goods and chattels at least for twice as much as he gave before.” Any citizen who had been sentenced to the pillory, tumbrill or the like, “by that means let him lose his freedom; but afterwards by the special favour of his bailiff and the commonalty he may be redeemed.” (Journal Arch. Ass., xxvii. 468, 481.)

[334] English Guilds, 403.

[335] Also at Andover; Gross, The Gild Merchant, ii. 320, 324. Public disapproval was held to be a powerful motive. In Hereford if a plaintiff brought a writ of right for the possession of a tenement into the court and the defendant refused to appear at the court, “there ought to be taken from the tenement demanded one post and to be brought unto the court and delivered to the bailiff; and the second time two; and the third time three; and this to be done always towards the street, in reproach to him, and to the noting of his fellow-citizens; and if he shall not come, the house ought to be thrown down, by taking one post towards the street, and so forward and forward until the whole house be thrown down to the ground.” (Journal Arch. Ass., xxvii. 481-2.)

[336] A copy of the Charter of Manchester, granted 1301, is given in Baines’ History of County of Lancaster ii. 175-6. A comparison of the special privileges of the burgesses with those in the Preston custumal illustrates the variety in the customs of different towns. (Cutts’ Colchester, 169-170. Davies’ Southampton, 111.)

[337] See von Ochenkowski, Die wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters, 66. Stubbs’ Charters, 107, 159. The monopoly was sometimes the privilege of the Merchant Guild. “So that no one who is not of that Guild shall make any merchandise in the said town, unless with the will of the merchants.” (Hist. of Preston Guilds, Custumal, 73. Gross, ii. 122, 127, 129.) In other towns where we do not hear of a Merchant Guild it belonged to the whole body of burgesses. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 425.)

[338] An alien living in Romney paid double Scot to the town. (Lyon’s Dover, ii. 332.)

[339] English Guilds, 392, 384. Lyon’s Dover, ii. 332.

[340] Boys’ Sandwich, 521. Lyon’s Dover, ii. 365, 366, 367, 386; Pleas in Manorial Courts, Selden Soc. 137.

[341] An Act to prevent Mayors from levying shewage from denizens. Statutes 19 Henry VII., Cap. 8.

[342] “The Mayor of the city of York and his brethren made great instance” to Lord Surrey to see that their fellow citizen, Thomas Hartford, bower in Norwich, should not be annoyed by Thomas Hogan, a shoemaker. (Paston Letters, iii. 366.) This protection however was only given on the condition of his renouncing all other aid. The mayor of York and his brethren aldermen in 1488 were applied to by Sir Robert Plumpton to protect some “servants and lovers” of his dwelling in York from annoyance by certain York citizens. The mayor answered in the name of himself, the aldermen, and the common council, that these dependants of Plumpton’s had been franchised and sworn to keep the customs of the city of York, that they were therefore bound to show any variance or trouble to the mayor “and to none other, and he to see an end betwixt them.” The mayor plainly intimates that these men must either go home and live under the protection of their master there, or else if they stay in York must submit their affairs to the mayor alone “as their duties had been.” (Plumpton Correspondence, 57-58.)

[343] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 425.

[344] Preston Guild Rolls, xxiv.; Freeman’s Exeter, 144; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 241, 242, 246. For instances of royal pressure brought to bear on the town courts, see Proc. Privy Council, ii. 152; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104.

[345] There was a hot dispute on this question between Wycombe and the Abbot of Missenden under Edward the First, and the jury was finally formed of seven burgesses and five foreigners, “thus saving to the said burgesses their liberty aforesaid.” (From Pleas de Quo Warranto, Bucks, Rot. i. Edw. I., 1286. Parker’s Hist. of Wycombe, 23-4.)

[346] Parker’s Hist. of Wycombe, 12.

[347] Especially in matters of debt and arrest. Stubbs’ Charters, 107. In Romney a burgess might recover money owed to him by a stranger in the town by himself going, in the absence of the bailiff, to make distraint on the stranger’s goods under the sole condition of delivering the distraint to the bailiff. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 425. For Rye see Lyon’s Dover, ii. 358; Boys’ Sandwich, 449. See also for the difficulties of aliens, Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 243.)

[348] English Guilds, 391; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 170-1. Henry the Second granted to burgesses of Wallingford that if his provost impleaded any one of them without an accuser, he need not answer the charge. (Gross, ii. 244.) See Newcastle, Stubbs’ Charters, 107. The importance of these provisions is obvious if the custom of Sandwich was common. There the mayor might arrest and imprison any one whom he chose as a “suspect.” After some time the prisoner was brought from the castle to the Mastez and a “cry” made to ask if there were any one to prosecute him. If no one appeared he was set free on giving security, but if he could find no security he might at the mayor’s will be banished for ever from the town. The bailiff could not arrest on suspicion as the mayor did. (Boys’ Sandwich, 687, 466-7.) For mediÆval notions of punishment see the sentence of the King in Piers Ploughman, pass. v. 81-82—

“And commanded a constable to cast Wrong in irons,
There he ne should in seven year see feet ne hands.”

[349] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 170-1. Boys’ Sandwich, 445 and 443. In Winchester the freeman was summoned three times to the court, others only once. (English Guilds, 360.)

[350] English Guilds, 391. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 152.

[351] In Norwich the bailiffs were liable to such heavy expenses in bad years that in 1306 it was ordained that they could only be compelled to serve once in four years. (Blomefield, iii. 73. Ordinances in Hist. of Preston Guilds, 12.)

[352] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 145.

[353] Parker’s Manor of Aylesbury, 20, 21.

[354] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 536-541.

[355] Davies’ Southampton, 168. In 1422 a Winchester burgess paid £10 to be free of holding any office save that of Mayor for the rest of his life. Another paid five marks to be freed from ever taking the office of bailiff. (Gross, ii. 259-260.) In Lynn, when a man was chosen jurat, “he took time till the next assembly to bring ten pounds into the Hall, or otherwise to accept the burden.” (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 167.) Fine for refusal to go to Yarmouth as bailiff of Cinque Ports, and payment to substitute (Ibid. v. 541). In 1491 an Act was passed forbidding the burgesses of Leicester to refuse the Chamberlainship. Sixty years later another Act ordered them not to refuse the Mayoralty. By Acts of 1499 and 1500 members who absented themselves from the Court of Portmanmote at Whitsuntide and Christmas were fined. (Ibid. viii. 426.) In Canterbury certain powers were exempted by writ from serving on juries, 1415. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 169.)

[356] Shillingford’s Letters, xxiii.

[357] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 527.

[358] Lyon’s Dover, Custumals, vol. ii. 267, &c.

[359] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 425; Boys’ Sandwich, 679, A.D. 1493. Gross, The Gild Merchant, ii. 276.

[360] The charter of Edward the Fourth to Colchester declared that the burghers should never be appointed against their will in any assizes or any quests outside the borough; nor to any post of collector of taxes or aids, or of constable, bailiff, &c., nor should they be liable to any fine for refusing these posts. (Cromwell’s Colchester, 257.) The Winchester people paid a sum about 1422 “to excuse every citizen of the city from being collector of the King’s money within the county of Southampton.” (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 602.)

[361] Thus in Hythe there was a privileged body who were not of the franchise, but were still apparently subject to the town jurisdiction, and excused by a writ called Dormand from Hundred Court and Shire Court and inquests. See also Preston Guild Record, xii., xvi., xx., xxix.

[362] English Guilds, 394. Blomefield, Hist. of Norfolk, iii., 80.

[363] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 544-545. At one time when Preston was much distressed, it was ordained that decayed burgesses unable to pay their yearly taxes should not lose their freedom because of poverty. (Thomson’s Mun. History, 104. Custumale in Hist. of Preston Guild.)

[364] See ch. x.

[365] See ch. xi.

[366] See vol. ii., The Town Market.

[367] The non-burgesses of Lynn, the “Inferiores,” were men of substance and formed an important body, whose struggles for a re-distribution of power fill the annals of the town in the fifteenth century.

[368] English Guilds, 386, 399

[369] Paston Letters, ii. 293.

[370] 7 Henry IV. cap. 17. The coming of country apprentices into towns, though forbidden by Richard II. and Henry IV., was afterwards permitted in London, Bristol, and Norwich. (Statutes 8 Henry VI. cap. 11; 11 Henry VII. cap. 11; 12 Henry VII. cap. 1).

[371] Paston Letters, iii. 481. Apprentices in London and Bristol might not be under seven years old. Ricart, 102.

[372] Manners and Meals, xv.

[373] Piers Ploughman, Passus x. 206-207, 253-4.

[374] Custumal in History of Preston Guild, 73-78. As late as the time of James I. lords here and there were fighting to keep up old customs. An action was brought by a lord against a townsman of Melton for not baking his bread at the lord’s oven; “and the action,” wrote the steward, “is like to prove frequent, for the lord’s court there is scarce able to preserve his inheritance in this custom of baking.” Lives of the Berkeleys, ii. 342-3.

[375] If a Preston burgher died suddenly, neither lord nor justices might seize his lands, which passed on to the next heir; only if he had been publicly excommunicated they were to be given in alms. Custumal. Hist. Preston Guild, 77. Compare Luchaire 248.

[376] Journ. Arch. Assoc. xxvii. 471. The age was sometimes fixed at twelve, sometimes at fourteen. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 244.) The burgher had no power to leave by will any lands he held outside the town liberties, which must pass to the heir appointed by the common law. For the frauds to which this might give rise, see Hist. MSS. Com. x. 3, 87-9. Wills bequeathing land were read publicly in the borough courts (Nottingham Records, i. 96), and there enrolled by the mayor as a Court of Record. The muniments of Canterbury show that from this right the mayor went on to claim probate, possibly following the example of Lynn. The claim was perfectly illegal, but was energetically pressed.

[377] Birmingham, which under Henry the Eighth had 2,000 houselings, and was said to be “one of the fairest and most profitable towns to the King’s highness in all the shire” (English Guilds, 247-9), only counted in Doomsday nine heads of families. In 1327 these had risen to seventy-five. The burghers first won the lightening of feudal dues, when Birmingham was freed from ward and marriage, heriot and relief, so that if a burgess died the lord could only take his best weapon—a bill or a pole-axe—or forty pence. (Survey of the Borough and Manor of Birmingham, 1553. Translated by W. B. Bickley, with notes by Joseph Hill, pp. xii., 108.) The bailiff and commonalty rented the stalls in the market from the lord, and leased them out by their constables to the townsfolk, fishmongers, butchers, and tanners, and in this way secured complete control of the town market (pp. 60-61), where burgesses were exempt from toll, while strangers free of the market paid a small sum, and those not free a larger amount. After the Plague a “free burgage by fealty” grew up, with an oath to observe the customs and services of the manor. The normal holding of the villein seems to have been forty-five acres, that of the cotters less (pp. xii., xiii. See Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, i. 12, 298). As population increased new pastures in the foreign were leased out for a term of years at an annual rent, and while the increase of perpetual free tenures thus ceased the alienation of the whole domain was prevented (pp. xiv., 74, 102). Though the town was not made a borough by royal grant, it had even in the thirteenth century secured an independent life, called itself a borough and elected its officers (pp. 60-1, 108-9). Its public acts were done under the style of “bailiff and commonalty” or “bailiff and burgesses.” See also Manchester Court Leet Records, 12, 14, 169, 170. For examples of the first privileges which the townspeople sought to win see the “customs” of Newcastle under Henry I., Stubbs’ Charters, 106-8.

[378] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 491, et seq.

[379] For the injuries that might be inflicted on a community by a lord’s reeve, see Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Selden Society.

[380] If the lord of the soil held the town as a market-town, and not as a borough, the inhabitants had to attend the Sheriff’s tourn, where their petty offences were judged by him or his deputy. In all cases which were not specially exempted they had to appear also twice a year at the court of the shire for view of frank pledge and for judgment of their more serious crimes. Manchester Court Leet Records, 14.

[381] The coroner was an officer elected in full county court, and was charged with guarding the interests of the Crown. His intrusion in the towns was much resented.

[382] When a robber from Bridport escaped from the town prison a set of girths or horse-nets was sent by the town to Dorchester to mitigate the sheriff’s anger.

[383] For abuses in appointing tax collectors, see Paston Letters, i. li.

[384] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 491.

[385] See Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 361-3.

[386] Close Rolls, I. p. 273, 1216.

[387] Nottingham Records, i. 46.

[388] This appears in the records of Gloucester. The scot-ale was a very common method of collecting money for other purposes. See Malmesbury, Gross, ii. 172, Newcastle (183), Wallingford (245), Winchester (253), Cambridge (358). It was an article of inquiry for Justices Itinerant in 1254. (417) Stubbs’ Charters, 258-259.

[389] Hundred Rolls, i. 49, 55. The jurors of Bridgenorth complained in 1221 that the sheriff’s bailiffs and the men of the country had committed to them the duty of following the trail of stolen cattle through their town and fined them if they failed, whereas they could not follow a trail through the middle of the town. Select Pleas of the Crown, Selden Society, 113.

[390] Piers Ploughman, Pass. iii. 59, 177, iv. 172.

[391] For the profits to be made in this business and its opportunities of fraud, see Winchelsea (Rot. Parl. i. 373). Sometimes the escheator divided the fines levied between himself and the King; in other cases the office was farmed out and the King took a fixed sum leaving the escheator a free hand to do what he pleased. In the towns the office was finally given to the mayor at a fixed salary. The Mayor of Norwich received as escheator £10; that is, an equal salary to that which he received as Mayor (Blomefield, iii. 179). As Mayor of the Staple he was given £20. (Ibid. iii. 94.)

[392] He was forbidden by Richard the Second to ride with more than six horses, or tarry long in a town. (Statutes, 13 Richard II. 1, cap. 4, and 16 Richard II., cap. 3.) In 1346 the King by charter freed Norwich from “the clerk of the market of our household,” so that he should not enter the city to make the assay of measures or weights, or any other duties belonging to his office. (Norwich Doc., pr. 1884, case of Stanley v. Mayor, &c., p. 26.) For clerk of the market in Calais, Lives of Berkeleys, ii. 198.

[393] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 545.

[394] Statutes, 13th Richard II., I, cap. 3.

[395] In Rochester “the King’s hackney-men” took oath to be ready at all times, early and late, to serve the King’s Grace with able hackney horses at the calling of the Mayor, and to provide at all times for any man riding on the King’s message, and to give information to the Mayor in case any hard-driven hackney-man in the town “purloin or hide any of their able hackney horses in any privy places, whereby the King’s service may be hindered, prolonged, or undone.” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 287.) For Romney see Lyon’s Dover, ii. 341. In some towns certain innkeepers had letters patent to require horses and carts for the King’s service. The right was greatly abused, and such patents declared void by Statute. (28 Henry VI. cap. 2.)

[396] For purveyors, Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, 1., 119, 166. Brinklow’s Complaint, 19, 20. Rot. Parl. i. 400. At Lynn the King’s Larderer would claim ships to go out fishing for the King’s provisions, or perhaps to carry 5,000 fish for the King’s household. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 188-9.) As late as 1493 it was necessary for Canterbury (which had been freed by charter from these exactions in 1414) to get a “breve” from Henry the Seventh to give its inhabitants a summary means of resisting the demands of the King’s Purveyors. (Ibid. ix. 168.) For seizing of carts, see Nottingham Records, i. 118. The King’s cart-takers in the seventeenth century, Hist. MSS. Com. v. 407.

[397] Instances in Chester, 1282, Hemingway’s Chester, i. 132.

[398] Among the Bristol liberties was one that no burgess nor inhabitant of Bristol shall against his will receive none host into his house by lyverance of the King’s Marshall. (Ricart, 24.)

[399] Instances of the necessity for new grants and confirmations and the heavy consequent expenses are too numerous to quote. In Canterbury £36 was paid in 1460 for a new charter, and other payments connected with the same business were made in the following year. In 1472 messengers were sent to London for the obtaining again of a charter of liberties. Two years later an envoy rode to London to treat with the Treasurer, Lord Essex, about a writ of proviso touching the liberties of the city, and a grant was then made, probably in return for heavy payment, which confirmed a recent restoration of ancient privileges. A magnificent supper given to Lord Essex expressed the gratitude of the city. In 1474 the city paid for a proviso to confirm the restorations of their liberties. In 1475 there was an investigation in camera of the charters and muniments concerning the bounds of the liberty; and in 1481 payments were made to friends and patrons who had helped them with the King in preserving the liberties of the city. At the accession of Henry the Seventh it became necessary to buy renewal and confirmation of the charter, and this was completed in 1487. In 1490 the Mayor conferred with Cardinal Morton on the renewal and extension of the liberties of the city. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 140 et seq., 170.) See Romney, Ibid. v. 534-5, 537, 539, 543-4.

[400] Writ of inquisition as to privileges of Cinque Ports. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 544.) The instance of charters forfeited on these grounds are very frequent.

[401] In Southampton a hogshead of Gascony wine was given “by common consent” to the sheriff to have his friendship in the return of a jury. In 1428 a sum of 13s. 4d. was paid for returning “friends of the town” on a jury to settle a question which had arisen between the King and Southampton as to which was to have the goods and chattels of a felon who had run away. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 140, 142.) See also Ibid. v. 518.

[402] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 539. The Lieutenant of Dover, who settled the amount and division of benevolences required from the Cinque Ports, had also his offerings from the various towns that they might be well dealt with. (Ibid. v. 527.)

[403] Ibid. v. 528. These courts on the sea-shore meant considerable expense in fees and feasts.

[404] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 491. In 1474 money was given by Canterbury to Kyriel, that he might excuse the city from sending men and ships to the war. (Ibid. ix. 143.)

[405] Ibid. v. 518, 522.

[406] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 543. Three and fourpence, and 18d. for a pair of boots as a reward.

[407] See in Winchester the gifts to the coroner’s clerk, to jurors at the Pavilion, to the King’s taxers, to the wife of the Sheriff, to the Bailiff of the Soke of Winton, and so on. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 595-605.)

[408] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 138-149. The expenses at Lynn were very great. (Ibid. 218-225.)

[409] Doubtless a scribe’s error for Llandaff. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 145.) The Bishop of St. David’s writes that “in many great cities and towns were great sums of money given him which he hath refused.”

[410] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 141-3.

[411] At the important meeting in 1474, when the constitution of the town was reaffirmed, William Haute, the lord of the manor of Bishopsbourne (four miles away), who was then patron of the town, was put at the head of the list before even the five aldermen, the sheriff, or any town officers, as establishing and ordaining the town ordinances. Poynings, Browne, Guildford, were at different times patrons of the city.

[412] Davies’ York, 128-9, 123-5. For an interesting instance of beneficent protection in 1605, see Hibbert’s Influence and Development of Guilds, p. 95.

[413] The election of a Mayor as a responsible person through whom the King could deal with the town was probably often connected with the settlement of the fee-farm rent. In Liverpool the first mention of a Mayor is in 1356, the very next year the fee-farm was granted to the Mayor and others on behalf of the burgesses for ten years. (Picton, Municipal Records of Liverpool, i. 13-15.)

[414] As against the idea of Merewether and Stephens, that charters of municipal incorporation only began in 1439, Dr. Gross points out that such a charter occurs in 1345, that in the time of Edward the First the technical conception of municipal incorporation was familiar, and that long before the judicial conception came into being the borough had a real corporate existence, and exercised all the functions of a corporate body. (Gild Merchant, i. 93, &c.)

[415] In 1391 the Statute of Mortmain was extended to cities and boroughs. (Statutes, 15 Richard II., cap. 5.) Even when license to hold land was granted by the Crown the amount was strictly limited, and the power of refusal or of limitation was a serious consideration to the town.

[416] According to Mr. Round, London found means of annexing the shire of Middlesex instead of asking to be separated from it. (Geoffrey de Mandeville, 347-373.)

[417] We have a hint of a troublesome mode of interference with the municipal taxation in an incident in Norwich in 1268, when “the lord the King commanded all his bailiffs that, for a fine £10, which Margaret the Taneresse of Norwich made with the same lord the King, he granted to her such liberty that for the whole time of her life she should be quit from all his tallages in the town of Norwich ... for whatsoever cause they may be made. And he commanded that they vex not the aforesaid Margaret contrary to this his grant.” (Norwich Documents, pr. 1884, 9.) In any case where the tallage was a fixed sum due from the town some one else would have to pay Margaret’s share.

[418] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 478.

[419] Journ. Arch. Ass. 479. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 241-2. Statute of Maintenance, 13 Richard II., Stat. 3. For the jealousy of the towns as to any inhabitant relying for protection on a lord outside, see p. 183, note 2.

[420] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 482. For a duel in Leicester in 1201, see Select Civil Pleas, Selden Society, p. 33. Judicial combat in Fordwich with an alien had to take place in the middle of the river Stour, the alien standing up to his middle in the water, while the Fordwich man apparently fought from a boat tied to the quay, with an instrument called an “ore,” three yards long. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 442.) In 1200 “the citizens of Lincoln came and produced the king’s charter which witnesses that none of them need plead outside the city walls except the king’s moneyers and servants, and that they need not fight the duel because of any appeal.” An accused man answered the charges against him “word by word as a free citizen of Lincoln,” and “according to the franchise of the town” waged law with thirty-six compurgators. (Select Pleas of the Crown, Selden Society, p. 39.) For compurgation in Sandwich in 1493, Boys, 680.

With old forms of trial old forms of punishment were allowed to survive. In Sandwich, if a man failed to clear himself by compurgation of a charge of homicide or theft he was condemned to be buried alive in a place called the Thiefdown at Sandown. (Ibid. 465.) Felons were also drowned in a stream called “the Gestling”; but in 1313 a complaint was made that the prior of Christchurch had diverted the course of the stream, and that criminals could not be executed in that way for want of water. (Ibid. 664.) At Dover and Folkestone a thief was killed by being thrown from a cliff, and at Winchelsea was hanged in the salt marsh. (Lyon’s Dover, i. 231.) In others of the Cinque Port towns when a thief was taken his ear was nailed to a post or cartwheel and a knife put in his hand, he had to free himself by cutting off his ear, to pay a fine, and to forswear the town. In 1470, 12d. was paid “for nailing of Thomas Norys his ear.” (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 525, 530.)

[421] Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 407. Nottingham retained the old usage till after the fourteenth century; Records, i. 175. Exeter till 1581; Freeman’s Exeter, 119. The question may have partly turned on the form of government adopted in the town and the work required of the common assembly in which the burghers voted.

[422] It has been argued (Gneist, Constit. Communale, tr. Hippert, i. 263; v. 275) that the State created local government in the towns as a method of developing better administration, and that it was therefore only accidentally and as a secondary consequence that independence and local liberties came in the wake of this administrative system. The facts, however, of their story make it perfectly clear that municipal liberties were of natural growth, and sprang out of local needs rather than out of Court statecraft.

[423] Gross, i. 23; ii. 115.

[424] The seals of English towns of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were of finer workmanship than any in Europe. They generally represented a fortress or walled town, a ship, a patron saint, or heraldic arms, but it is interesting that in no case is the figure of the Mayor used to typify the borough save in the London seal, where he stands among the corporation and citizens. Sometimes a bridge is given, as at Barnstaple; in two or three cases the Guild Hall.

[425] A few towns, in the case of some members of the Cinque Ports, depended on another borough.

[426] For the position of tenants on ancient demesne, see Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, ch. iii. Mr. Maitland (Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, ii. 99, &c.) gives an account of King’s Ripton, a manor on ancient demesne, whose tenants when transferred to the Abbey of Ramsey were always fighting with their new lords as to the services due from their holdings. “The privileged nature of the tenure had engendered a privileged race, very tenacious of its land and of its customs” (p. 105). The study of the way in which the customs of ancient demesne affected the later constitution of the boroughs lies outside my subject, and is therefore merely indicated.

[427] Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, 89. Compare the claim of Bristol to be “founded and grounded upon franchises, liberties, and free ancient customs, and not upon common law.” (Ricart’s Kalendar, 2.) For its liberties, see p. 24-5.

[428] As a matter of fact the various towns of this kind which applied to Hereford for any information as to its customs on any point had to pay one hundred shillings for the answer vouchsafed to them. (Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 470.)

[429] There was constant watchfulness on both sides as to their rights. In 1400 the bailiffs of Ipswich granted land for the building of a mill for the benefit of the corporation; the King’s officers declared the grant to have been made without the royal licence, and the mill was seized for the King. On the other hand, when the sheriff of the county arrested a felon in the liberties of Ipswich and put him in the King’s jail, the bailiffs required that he should be given up to them. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 231, 246.)

[430] That is on the plea of lack of justice in the borough court. In 1401, when the citizens of Canterbury were summoned by the Crown to appear at Westminster about a breach of the statutes for the regulation of the victualling trades, they pleaded that by their charter they could not be called to answer civil suits out of their own city. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 167.)

[431] In 1299 the amercements ordered by the Leet Court of Norwich amounted to £72 18s. 10d.; the amount accounted for by the collectors was £17 0s. 2d. (Hudson’s Leet Jurisd. of Norwich, Selden Soc. xl.) Where there was profit to be made the King was, however, always on the alert. In Piers Ploughman, Passus v., 169, he complains bitterly of the lawyers; “through your law I believe I lose my escheats!”; and it was often late before he made the mayor escheator. In 1492 two Scotch priests were arrested in Ipswich for treasonable talk, and the King granted their chattels to one of his own serjeants. The bailiffs sent the Town Clerk to Henry to represent that the forfeited goods of felons rightly belonged to the town; to which the King answered that he would not for a thousand pounds infringe in the least degree their charters, but that the community had really no right to these particular chattels, since the priests, being Scotch and not the King’s subjects, could not fairly be accused of treason, and had a perfect right to talk as they chose. On this plea he kept the goods. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 247.)

[432] This was strictly enforced, and the town charter forfeited if the rent fell into arrears. (Madox, 139, 161-2.) The towns therefore made careful provision for the discharge of the debt, sometimes setting apart a mill or some valuable property for its payment (Madox, Firma Burgi, 251-2; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 198-9; Nott. Rec. i. 313), or assigning certain tolls or customs; (Shillingford’s Letters, 92); or collecting it as rent from house to house. (Custumal in Hist. Preston Guild, 75.)

[433] When the ferm of Carlisle was raised from £60 to £80 the citizens were granted, as a help towards its payment, all fines, inflicted by the King’s judges within their walls. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 198, 200.) See also Norwich Documents, 16, 17.

[434] Thus the Nottingham men paid 13s. 4d. a year to Henry the Sixth, at least from 1454, for liberties granted them. There is no entry of this in the King’s accounts, and the only evidence of it is in the Nottingham Records (iii. 133). The loyal theory of Hereford was that “our goods and chattels are to be taken and taxed at his pleasure, saving unto ourselves a competent quantity for our sustentation and tuition of our city.” (Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 471.)

[435] Nott. Rec. i. 225, 227, 413, 421.

[436] The agreement made in the fourteenth century which fixed the tenths and fifteenths for the towns at a permanent fixed sum, made it easy for the King to give over to local officials the levying of this tax without fear of injury to the Exchequer. (Stubbs, ii. 599, 600.)

[437] Blomefield, iii. 137.

[438] The Admiral and his deputy had jurisdiction over everything done on the sea and the great rivers up to the first bridge. (13 Richard II. St. 1, cap. 5; 15 Richard II., cap. 3; Blomefield, iii. 103; Davies’ Southampton, 239-40.) In 1487 the commonalty of Ipswich by a covenant with the King bound themselves to take surety of every owner, master, or purser of every English ship to twice the value of the ship, that the mariners should keep the peace on the sea; that if the surety by any means became less than twice the value of ship, tackle, and victuals, new security should be taken; and that the town should strive to arrest every robber and spoiler in the sea or the streams thereof. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 259-60.) In 1463 a charter was given to the corporation of York, constituting them the King’s justiciaries for overlooking and preserving the main rivers of Yorkshire. For the expenses and difficulties which this involved, see Davies’ York, 59-63, 82, &c.

[439] As an illustration of his difficulties, see the statute allowing sheriffs and escheators to remain for four years in office, because owing to pestilence and wars there was not a sufficiency of persons to occupy these offices. (9 Henry V. St. 1, cap. 5.)

[440] In the lack of officials to carry out the regulations for the control of trade a number of private people got royal letters appointing them surveyors and correctors of victuallers in various cities and boroughs, and freely used their privileges for extortion and oppression, and the taking of heavy fines and ransoms; their patents were gradually withdrawn; and in 1472 an Act was passed that all such letters and patents should be void, and that the duty of searching and surveying victuals should rest wholly with the mayor or bailiff. (12 Edward IV. cap. 8.)

[441] In this matter the King was not allowed to interfere. In 1489 there was a dispute in Leicester between the Town Council and the Commons about the election of a Mayor. The matter was referred to the King, who issued a precept under the seal of the Duchy of Lancaster, showing that it was as Lord of the Manor and not as King that he interfered. He set aside both candidates and reappointed the last Mayor. The next year the question was settled by Act of Parliament. (Thomson, Mun. Hist., 84.) For authority exercised by Parliament see Norwich (Doc. Stanley v. Mayor, &c. 30.) When the citizens applied in 1378 to the King and Council for a renewal of their ancient liberty that no stranger should have power to buy or sell by retail, they were answered that it would not be valid “without Parliament”; they therefore pray for a grant by charter.

[442] See Hudson’s Leet Jur. in Norwich, Selden Soc. xxvii. xc. “For he doth represent to us the body of our King.” (Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 462.) See the proclamation of the London Mayor: “We do command, on behalf of our Lord the King, that no dyer or weaver shall be so daring,” &c. —”Memorials of London,” p. 309. An illustration of how the King’s law and the town law ran side by side may be seen in the fines for the breach of certain rules, as, for instance, the rule against liveries, which had to be paid both to the King and to the town. (English Guilds, 388-9.)

[443] Piers Ploughman, Passus ii. 156, 157.

[444] Warkworth’s Chronicle, 2.

[445] See Gross, ii. 245.

[446] The instances of similar grants made to various towns at almost the same date are too numerous to give, but they would form a striking list.

[447] Charter of Lincoln the same year; that of Winchester, 1190. (Stubb’s Charters, 257-8). Nottingham and Northampton in 1200 (ibid. 301-3). The system of government adopted at Norwich was followed or imitated a little later by the neighbouring towns of Yarmouth and Colchester.

[448] Norwich Doc. Stanley v. Mayor, &c. p. 3. In the great majority of cases this grant was made once for all; but occasionally it was renewed from time to time. Thus Henry the Sixth in 1437 gave the mayor and burgesses of Bristol a lease of the town and its profits for a term of twenty years. In 1446 he granted a new lease for sixty years. In 1461 Edward the Fourth renewed the lease, not for a term of years, but for ever. (Seyer’s Charters of Bristol, 105.) The ferm was granted in the same way for a term of years in the case of Dunwich, a royal town, where it was let out to the highest bidder. Here, however, the collection of rent was peculiarly uncertain from special circumstances (Madox, 235-8, 241); and in 1325 Dunwich, ruined by the filling up of its port, prayed to have the town taken into the King’s hand and a guardian appointed. (Rot. Parl. i. 426.) For the inconvenience of this letting out to the highest bidder, see Madox, 251.

[449] Hudson, Municipal Organisation in Norwich, 20; Leet Jur. in Norwich, Selden Society, xvi. lxxii.

[450] Hudson’s Notes about Norwich, Norfolk Arch. vol. xii. p. 25.

[451] In 1288 the four bailiffs presided over the courts of these leets. (Hudson, Municipal Organisation, 16, 21.)

[452] Norwich Doc., Stanley v. Mayor, &c., p. 5.

[453] Ibid. 6, 8, 10. Blomefield, iii. 46, 62.

[454] The convent sided with De Montfort. For the state of affairs in the city, see Blomefield, iii. 52, &c.

[455] Blomefield, iii. 49.

[456] Norwich Doc., Stanley v. Mayor, &c., 7.

[457] Norwich Doc., Stanley v. Mayor, &c., 16, 17.

[458] Ibid. 10-12.

[459] This meant that it was the town bailiff who was to return the certificate of what he had done in execution of a writ addressed to him, instead of this being returned, as formerly, by the sheriff.

[460] Norwich Documents, 16, 18.

[461] Norwich Documents, 25.

[462] Ibid. 26.

[463] Blomefield’s Hist. of Norfolk, iii. 103.

[464] Ibid. iii. 81, 94-5. In 1393 the corporation was granted shops and houses held of the King and worth £10 yearly, the profits of which were to be spent on repairing the walls and towers. For this licence they had to pay the King £100. Norwich Documents, 32.

[465] Ibid. 33-37.

[466] Gross, i. 240-267.

[467] Report on Municipal Corporations, 1835, pp. 16-17. Gross, i. 94, note 1.

[468] This change was evident from the time of Richard the Second, when the powers of the Justices were rapidly enlarged. See Statutes, 12 Richard II. cap. 10; 13 Richard II., 1, cap. 8; 13 Richard II., 1, cap. 13; 13 Henry IV. cap. 7; 2 Henry V. cap. 4; 2 Henry V., 1, cap. 8; 2 Henry VI. cap. 12; 2 Henry VI. cap. 14; 2 Henry VI. cap. 18; 6 Henry VI. cap. 3; 18 Henry VI. cap. 11.

[469] Southampton, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 104. Cases of interference occur in the unpublished records of Coventry. For Romney see Lyon’s Dover, 313. In 1489 there was some such trouble in Leicester (Thompson, Mun. Hist., 84). And in 1512 there is another instance in Nottingham (Records, iii. 341-2). From the time of Richard the Third there seems evidence of the growth of a new anxiety in the central government about the democratic movement in the boroughs, and a determination to reserve power in the hands of a small corporation. An earlier instance may perhaps be found in the Exeter quarrel from 1477 to 1482 (English Guilds, 305, &c.); and in York in 1482 (Davies, 122-4).

[470] There were many cases in which a town’s privileges were forfeited, whether for arrears of rent (Madox, 139, 161-2) or for other causes (154-5, 157). The franchises of Nottingham were twice forfeited for some unknown cause—in 1283 for three years (Records, i. 56), and in 1330 for a short time. (Ibid. 102.) In the same year Edward the First seized the franchises of Derby because of exactions of the Merchant Guild, but restored them on payment of a fine. (Gross, ii. 53.) For the case of Sandwich (Boys, 661, 676). Ipswich charter withdrawn, 1285; regranted, 1291. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 230, 239, 243.) Chester in 1409. (Hemingway’s Chester, i. 137.) The liberties of Carlisle were forfeited for a short time for some irregularity in the town courts in the thirteenth century. (Gross, ii. 38.) Southampton lost its freedom in 1276 and 1285, and again in the next century for letting the French into the town. (Davies’ Southampton, 33, 35, 79.) Norwich suffered several times; for its attack on the Priory in 1272; for an accusation of having exceeded its powers in punishing crime in 1286; for riots about the election of mayor in 1437; and for Gladman’s insurrection in 1443. (Stanley v. Mayor, &c., Norwich Doc., 9-12. Proceedings, Privy Council, v. 45. Hist. MSS. Com. i. 103.) In these cases a royal officer was appointed to rule the town; and the complaint of Scarborough, when Edward the Second in 1324 deprived it of the right of direct payment to the Exchequer, shows how a town suffered when its ferm was leased out. (Rot. Parl. i. 423.) The loss of liberty was always temporary, lasting from a few months to five or six years, and had no political significance as in France, where it formed part of a settled policy and had results which to the English mind seem of peculiar importance in the history of constitutional development.

[471] Gross, ii. 235-243.

[472] Occasionally a borough was granted to a great noble or court favourite; but more commonly as time went on the grant merely meant giving a charge on the rent of the town. Thus before 1339 Preston had been granted at various times to neighbouring lords. In 1361 John of Gaunt held the manor, but long before this the rights of the lord were so reduced that they are practically never mentioned in the history of the town. (Hewitson’s History of Preston, 7-8.) For the troubles to which the nobles’ claims to rent might lead, see Davies’ Southampton, 112. Edward the Fourth granted the ferm of Bristol to the Queen for her life. The treasurer of the King’s chamber declared it had been assigned to him in payment of a debt and brought an action for it against the Bristol sheriff. Bristol proved the money had been paid to the Queen and gained the case, 1465. (Madox, 227-8.)

[473] In 1273 Henry de Tracy held the borough from the King in chief at a ferm of about £5 14s. 2d. There were 36 tenants whose rent amounted to 23s. 8d. and some tenants in a suburb who paid an uncertain rent, but generally about 6s. 8d. A market was held every Friday which yielded in tolls to the lord about £3 a year, and a yearly fair gave 10s. Fines, reliefs, &c., came to about 13s. 4d. a year. The wealth of the town increased after the building of the “Long Bridge” in 1280 over “the great hugy, mighty, perylous, and dreadful water named Taw,” and the increase of the cloth trade about 1321. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the legacies and accounts show that the burghers were laying up considerable wealth and doing a thriving trade. Hence probably the dispute as to the claim to profits. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 206-213. See also case of Bridgewater, ibid. iii. 310-14.

[474] They even claimed the right of infang theof and outfang theof, and to be impleaded only in their own court. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 206.

[475] Rich. Redeless, ed. Skeat, Early English Text Society, Text C, Pass. iii. 177, &c.

[476] Book of Precedence, E. E. Text Society, 105-108. Langland in Richard the Redeless describes the noble who “keepeth no coin that cometh to their hands, but changeth it for chains that in Cheap hangeth, and setteth all their silver in samites and horns;” and

“That hangeth on his hips more than he winneth
And doubteth no debt so dukes them praise.”

Richard the Redeless, Passus iii. 137-40, 147-8.

[477] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 467. Nott. Rec. ii. 425.

[478] The landowner of the fifteenth century was usually a mere landlord subsisting on his rents and not interested in the produce of the soil except as a consumer. He was only occasionally a trader. (Rogers’ Agriculture and Prices, iv. 2; see Berkeleys, i. 365-6; ii. 23; Paston, i., lxxxviii-ix., 416, 430, 431, 454; ii. 70, 106; iii. 430; Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 263; iv. 1, 464.) The really important classes were the new proprietors who rented land for trading purposes.

[479] See Fastolf, Paston Letters, i. 187-8.

[480] Treasures were apparently stored in different quarters for greater security. See Fastolf’s stores at Caistor. (Paston Letters, i. 416, 473-475; S. Benet’s, 468, 508; S. Paul’s, London, 493; Bermondsey, 474; White Friars, Norwich, ii. 56.) The religious houses had their reward in the form of benefactions for which masses were sung for the donor. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. i. 461.) In the Paston house there was stored away over 16,000 ounces of silver plate, nearly 900 yards of cloth, about 300 yards of linen, and coats and hats without number. See also Hist. MSS. Com. vii. 537; viii. 93; Berkeleys, ii. 212. Plumpton Corresp. 10-11, 13, 37.

[481] Berkeleys, i. 167.

[482] John of Gaunt retained Rankyn d’Ypres to dwell with him for peace and war for the term of his life, granting him board and twenty-five marks a year from the ferm of Liverpool, in time of peace. (Picton’s Municipal Records of Liverpool, i. 16.) For the management of a great house with the giving out of wool for spinning and weaving and accounts audited by a master clothier, see Berkeleys, i. 167; Hist. MSS. Com. v. 330; Denton’s Lectures, 293; Paston, ii. 354-5; Hist. MSS. Com. x. 4, p. 297. Often they supplied their own livery. (Brinklow’s Complaynt, 45; Paston, ii. 139.)

[483] Lives of the Berkeleys, ii. 63.

[484] Plumpton’s Correspondence, 13, 20-1, 41, 71, 72, 97, 99, 148, 194, 206, 187, 198-9. The abbot of Fountains had to write a severe letter to order that a wine-seller in Ripon shall be paid for a tun of wine. (Ibid. 62.) For courtiers who “paid on their pawns when their pence lacked,” Richard the Redeless, Pass. i. 53-4; Paston Letters, ii. 333-5, 349-50; iii. 99.

“Butt drapers and eke skynners in the town
For such folk han a special orison
That florisshed is with curses here and there
And ay shall till they be payd of their here.”

Book of Precedence, Early English Text Society, 107.

[485] Paston Letters, iii. 326, 194, 219, 358.

[486] Ibid. iii. 6-7, 20, 23, 24, 35, 46, 49, 114-5, 219, 258.

[487] Lives of the Berkeleys, ii., v.; Brinklow’s Complaynt, 40.

[488] Richard the Redeless, Pass. iii. 172.

[489] Berkeleys, i. 159.

[490] Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 130. A charter given by Baldwin of Redvers to Plympton, 1285, grants the same rights as the citizens of Exeter had from the King, except that Baldwin’s serfs, if they lived in the borough, might not be granted its liberties without his leave. (Madox, Firma Burgi, 42.) The King could grant a number of privileges which were beyond the power of any other lord—such as freedom from tolls throughout the kingdom, exemption from the sheriff’s jurisdiction, freedom from interference of royal officers, and so on; and the matter of tolls was so important that towns on private estates were practically obliged to get a royal charter as well as a charter from their lord. Compare the charters given in Stubbs’ Charters, 105; and Gross, ii, 136; with royal charters such as those in Stubbs’ Charters, 103; and Nott. Rec., i. 1. See also Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 273.

[491] Berkeleys, i. 341.

[492] Berkeleys, i. 226, 228.

[493] Ibid. i. 183-185.

[494] Ibid. i. 227.

[495] Plumpton’s Correspondence, 1-li.

[496] Berkeleys, i. 233-236, 272, 280. Compare the story of Sir William Plumpton, who fought at Towton on the losing side. He was brought before the chief justice in York and gave a bond for the payment of £2,000 before next Pentecost, and failing to procure it had to give himself up a prisoner at the Tower. He obtained a pardon, was released from his bond in 1462, and had new letters of pardon in 1463, but was still unable to return home till 1464, after he had been through a new trial and been acquitted. (Plumpton’s Corres. lxvii-ix. 30.)

[497] Freeman’s Exeter, 166-7.

[498] Berkeleys, ii. 95. Compare the expenses of Fastolf in a lawsuit of ten years, the costs of which were recorded in a roll of seven skins. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 461.)

[499] Berkeleys, ii. 65-73, 75, 84, 103-116.

[500] Freeman’s Exeter, 164; Paston, i. xcviii, 350-1; Proceedings of the Privy Council, v., xc-xci.; vi. lxxviii-ix. In 1437 a commission of inquiry into felonies and insurrections in Bedford could not be held because Lord Grey, to whom the town belonged, appeared with a strong armed force, and was met by Lord Fanhope ready to oppose him with another army. (Proceedings of Privy Council, v., Preface xv-xvi.) Account given by witnesses before Privy Council, v. 35, 39, 57. Fresh troubles in 1442, v. 192.

[501] For the evils of liveries and maintenance under Richard the Second, see Richard the Redeless, Pass. i. 55 &c., ii. 74 &c., iii. 309 &c. The wearing of liveries was forbidden in Shrewsbury lest “when any affray or trouble fall in the said town each man having livery would draw to his master or to his fellow and not to the bailiffs.” (Owen, i. 217.) From the towns these evils seem to have been rigorously and effectually banished by ordinances from 1309 (Freeman’s Exeter, 165, 143) throughout the two following centuries. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 557; Eng. Gilds, 385, 388-9, 393, 333; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, page 16.) The cases of trouble which occur are rare. (Nott. Records, ii. 384; iii. 37, 344-5. Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 415. Hunt’s Bristol, 103-5.)

[502] Leicester shows the comparatively slow growth of freedom in one of the most favoured towns dependent on a great lord. Its great charter given by Edmund Crouchback in 1277, and translated into English under Henry the Sixth, was mainly concerned with the ordering of legal procedure for the burghers; and it was not till 1376 that the town bought from its earl the right to appoint its own bailiff, and to receive the annual profits of its courts, and various other dues and fines. The town property was simply a tenement, a chamber, and a small place yielding a few pence yearly till 1393, when it was allowed to hold a little property for the repair of the bridges; and not till 1435 were the mayor and the corporation given the right to acquire lands and rents for the sustenation of the town and mayoralty. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 404, 412, 413, 414. Thompson, Mun. Hist., 74. A pamphlet on the Origin of the Leicester Corporation by J. D. Paul gives a translation of Crouchback’s charter.) Doncaster belonged to the family of De Mauley till the middle of the fifteenth century, when it passed for a few years to the Duke of Northumberland, and in 1461 was taken into the possession of the Crown. Edward the Fourth made it a free borough and gave it a common seal. Henry the Seventh in 1505 granted to the corporation all the property which the Crown had acquired at Doncaster on the attainder of Percy in 1461, and for a yearly rent of £74 13s. 11½d. secured to it the rights which had belonged to the ancient feudal lords. (Hunter’s History of the Deanery of Doncaster, i. 13-15.)

[503] Picton’s Municipal Rec. of Liverpool, i. 1-4.

[504] Picton’s Municipal Rec. of Liverpool, i. 5-7.

[505] Ibid. 13, 14, 16. From this time leases of the ferm were very numerous and were constantly granted to one or more individuals; between 1354 and 1374 Richard de Aynesargh and William Adamson, who were often mayors, took such leases for several terms. (Picton’s Memorials of Liverpool, ii. 54.)

[506] Picton’s Mem. of Liverpool, i. 35-36.

[507] Ibid. i. 27-28.

[508] In 1413 the burgesses presented a petition complaining that their privileges were infringed upon by the shire officers coming into the borough and holding courts by force, by which “the said burgesses are grievously molested, vexed, and disturbed, to the great hindrance and detriment of the said borough and the disinheriting of the burgesses.” It was declared on the other side, that the mayor and bailiffs had held the King’s Courts without authority and received the tolls and profits. It is not known how the case ended. Ibid. i. 31-2. Picton’s Mun. Records, i. 20.

[509] The revenue from Liverpool in 1296 was £25: it then had 168 inhabited houses. (Picton’s Mem. of Liverpool, i. 20.) In 1342 the personalty of the burgesses taxed was £110 13s. 3d., that is, the average personalty of each was about one mark (25). The revenue in 1327 was £30; in 1346 it was £38 (26), and remained the same in 1394 (31). In 1444 it was reduced to £21; in 1455 to £17 16s. 8d.; and under Edward the Fourth to £14 (36-7). In 1515 an inquiry was made as to the decay of the revenue (38), and the Act of 1544 put Liverpool in the list of towns which had wholly fallen into decay (45). Two plagues, one in 1540, another in 1548, probably carried off half its population (47); and in 1565 it had but 138 inhabited houses, and probably seven or eight hundred inhabitants, and twelve vessels navigated on an average by six men each (55). There were five streets under Edward the Third, and seven under Elizabeth (62).

[510] Fortified in 1406. Picton’s Mun. Records, i. 21, 22.

[511] A little thatched building in the High Street which had to serve as toll house, town hall, and gaol, but the greater number of criminals were imprisoned and judged in the Stanley and Molyneux Castles. Picton’s Memorials, ii. 25-6.

[512] Picton’s Mem. of Liverpool, i. 32-3.

[513] Picton’s Mem. of Liverpool, i. 36, 37.

[514] Ibid. i. 37, 38, 46, 48-9.

[515] Picton, i. 63.

[516] As an illustration of the reverse process, showing the impulse given to municipal liberty when a borough was transferred from private ownership to the State, see the case of Sandwich (Ch. XII.).

[517] See charter to Beverley; Stubbs’ Charters, 105; Lambert’s Gild Life, 73-6, York; Stubbs’ Charters, 304, Salisbury; Gross’ Gild Merchant, ii. 209-10.

[518] Pol. Poems and Songs (Rolls’ Series). Ed. Wright, i. 327, 334.

[519] The Bishop of Salisbury by a royal charter of 1304 got the right to tallage the townspeople of Salisbury, while the burghers were given municipal privileges the same as those of Winchester. In 1305, however, the burghers, rather than pay tallage to the bishop, surrendered their municipal privileges to the King, and promised to give up to him their common seal. (Rot. Parl. i. 174-6.) But in the composition made the next year between the lord bishop and the citizens, those who had shared in the revolt and had not made their submission were utterly separated and removed from privileges of trade or government. (Gross, ii. 209-10.) In 1396 there was again a quarrel between the bishop and the citizens, and the case was carried to the King’s Council, when the mayor and commonalty entered into a recognizance to the King in £20,000 to behave well to the bishop, and two hundred of the citizens entered into recognizances to the bishop, each one in the sum of £1,000. In the agreement, however, certain provisions were made to prevent the ecclesiastics from taking advantage in any way of this treaty. (Madox, 142.)

The Commons in giving the grant of 1435 pray that no prelate may be a collector, adding that the dioceses of bishops and the neighbourhood of abbeys were greatly oppressed by ecclesiastical lords. (Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, iv. 164.)

[520] Our Borough, by E. M. Beloe, 1-3.

[521] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 185-6.

[522] For the troubles of the mayor and community in trying to carry out the King’s laws in the presence of this divided jurisdiction, see Rot. Parl. i. 331.

[523] There had been trouble the year before which Robert’s soft words failed to dissipate. “Know, dear friends,” he writes, “that I am surely concerned for your trouble, and if I could give you ease or alleviation of your trouble I would do it most readily, but assuredly, dear friends, I am at present in such misfortune of money that ... wherefore I pray you, my dear friends, that you put me in possession of my moneys as speedily as you can, since of a truth I can no longer dispense with them which much troubles me. And with respect to the wrong that was done to my bailiff, you have sent me word that the parties are in agreement. Know you that though peace be made between them the contempt done to me is not redressed, wherefore, I pray you, dear sirs, that you will take order amongst yourselves that amends may be made to me for the aforesaid contempt. Adieu, dear friends! May he give you happy and long life!” Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 241-4.

[524] For the King’s bailiffs, see the petition in 1382 to the Lord Chancellor for relief from extortionate demands of the bailiffs of the Tolbooth. The bailiffs were perhaps not to blame; in 1396 and 1397 they had to pay 20 marks of silver out of receipts to the Duke of Britanny; in 1398, 10 marks to the Duke of York; in 1400, 8½ to the Duke of Lancaster. Ibid. 244-5.

[525] The charter of 1268 granted the right to elect a mayor in accordance with the former charter of the bishop. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 186, 246; Gross, ii. 158.

[526] Gross, ii. 165.

[527] Gross, ii. 155; Paston Letters, ii. 86-7.

[528] Gross, ii. 155-6.

[529] See Vol. II., Chap. XIV.

[530] Blomefield, iii. 163.

[531] In 1403. Blomefield, viii. 531.

[532] Proceedings of Privy Council, vol. i., 167 (1401).

[533] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 186-7. In 1307 the mayor and community got a grant of land from the bishop for their basin for water. Ibid. 239.

[534] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 240.

[535] Ibid. 213-215.

[536] A will was proved after a proclamation by the serjeant that on such a day it would be read in the Guild Hall before the mayor, and anyone who wished to contradict it must then appear. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 153, 189.) In the earliest wills no mention is made of probate before the ordinary; in later registrations it is recorded that the will had received episcopal probate before coming before the mayor. (Ibid. 155.) The cost of this was what the people desired to avoid.

“For who so woll prove a testament,
That is not all worth tenne pound,
He shall pay for the parchment
The third of the money all round;”

—Pol. Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, i. 323.

[537] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 207.

[538] Ibid. 205.

[539] Ibid. 189.

[540] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 188.

[541] Blomefield, iii. 513. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 189, 205.

[542] Blomefield, iii. 516-17.

[543] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 222. It would seem that in 1377 the mayor and burgesses were made responsible for the custody of the town, and were ultimately given power of distress for subsidies for its defence. (Ibid. 190, 205.)

[544] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 165.

[545] Ibid. 225.

[546] Paston Letters, ii. 86-7.

[547] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 205.

[548] Ibid. 246.

[549] Proc. Privy Council, i. 127. Beecham’s Hist. Cirencester, 154-8.

[550] In 1333 St. Alban’s brought its charter to the King’s Chancery and renounced there all the liberties contained in the said charter. The keeper of the rolls at their request broke off the seal of wax, and cancelled the enrolment in the Chancery rolls. The townsmen also brought their common seal of silver, which at their request was destroyed and the silver given to the shrine of St. Alban. (Madox, 140.) Common as it was in France for a commune to renounce its freedom, there is scarcely any instance in England save on ecclesiastical property. The case of Dunwich was peculiar and I have met with no other.

[551] Occasionally a convent drove a hard bargain. In 1440 an agreement was made between the convent of Plimpton and the commonalty of Plymouth, by which the commonalty was to pay £41 yearly, and if this rent was unpaid fifteen days after quarter day, the officers of the convent might seize all the goods and chattels of the mayor and commonalty and of any burgesses and of any others residing and abiding there which could be found within the borough and the precinct thereof. Madox, 222-3.

[552] The organization of the guild does not seem to have been at all of a democratic or “advanced” kind, but after the pattern of the oligarchic societies of the time. Four men owning goods to the value of 10 marks were elected yearly, by a committee of twelve burgesses, to hold the guild, and summoned to do their duty by two officers of the guild called “les Dyes.”

[553] Gross, ii. 29-36. Yates’ Bury S. Edmunds, 123-135.

[554] Statutes, 6 Richard II., 2, cap. 3.

[555] Coates’s Reading, 49.

[556] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 224.

[557] Gross, ii. 208.

[558] Coates’s Reading, 49-50.

[559] Gross, ii. 202-4.

[560] Some of the fines levied were doubtless used for the townsmen’s benefit. For example, there were nineteen bridges within the limits of the borough, which after the dissolution of the monastery fell into decay and were repaired in the time of Elizabeth with the stones from the abbey walls. (Coates’s Reading, 64.) But material advantages did not take the place of political freedom.

[561] Gross, i., 90-1. The number of burghers in the Guild seems to have been very small. In 1486, 28 burghers paid chepin gavell; in 1487, 22 burgesses; and in 1490-93, 31 burgesses. In 1510 there were 45 burgesses. (Coates’s Reading, 58.) There were many who paid fines and dues to the abbot who were of the town and not of the Guild, and this class was doubtless encouraged by the convent, following the same policy as the bishop in Lynn. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 172, 175-6.)

[562] The Guilds were naturally looked on with very little favour by the ecclesiastical lords in such cases. There was a conflict between abbot and town at Malmesbury in the time of Edward the First. The burghers claimed to have a Guild of their own people, who alone had a right to trade in the town, and to take certain taxes for the support of the Guild from all traders who were not of it. The abbot refused to allow them to use their rights. The town fell back on its liberties when it had been a royal borough, and appealed to the King. (Gross, ii. 173.) See also the precautions taken by the Bishop about the Guild at Salisbury. (Ibid. 209-10.)

[563] Coates’s Reading, 53.

[564] They got afterwards from Henry the Eighth the church of the Grey Friars for their Guild Hall.

[565] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 172-3.

[566] Coates’s Reading, 53, 54. All this time matters were made easier for the townspeople by constant talk of loans to the King. In 1420 the town officers went to Wallingford to discuss the matter with the King. There was a loan made in 1430, and another in 1445. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 173, 174.

[567] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 174.

[568] Under Henry the Eighth, he received £10. (Coates’s Reading, 55, 56.) A woman of the town left three silver cups and one gilt cup for the mayoralty in 1479. Public dinners at each election began in 1492, and feasts for the burgesses at Christmas and Shrovetide. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 180-1, 176.)

[569] Ibid. 180.

[570] Eng. Guilds, 298.

[571] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 175, 180.

[572] Ibid. 212.

[573] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 176.

[574] Coates’s Reading, 52, 53.

[575] Coates’s Reading, 54-5. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 7, 168-9.

[576] Miller’s Parishes of Worcester, vol. I. Rot. Hun., p. 282, 3 Edward I. In Canterbury there were still in 1835 not less than fifteen precincts within the limits of the corporate authority but exempt from its jurisdiction (Rep. on Mun. Corpor., 31). For crown property in York not under municipal law, see Davies’ Walks through York, 27-28.

[577] Ricart’s Kalendar, 117.

[578] In 1285 the Bristol charter was forfeited because of encroachments on the rights of the constable of the castle. Seyer’s Bristol, ii. 74.

[579] Seyer’s Bristol, ii. 88-109.

[580] Norwich Doc., Stanley v. Mayor, &c., 25. Here the fee was given to the citizens as early as 1346.

[581] There were also occasional difficulties as to the jurisdiction of Bristol over the Temple fee, which first belonged to the Templars, then to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and was not finally incorporated with the city till 1543. (Seyer’s Bristol, i. 134-6.)

[582] In 1240 the inhabitants of Redcliffe were combined and incorporated with the town of Bristol; and the ground of S. Austin’s by the river was granted to the commonalty by the abbot for certain money paid by the said commonalty. Ricart, 28.

[583] Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 177, 196-201.

[584] They took to trading about 1367. Berkeleys, i. 365-6. Ibid. i. 23. Thomas Berkeley got leave from Henry the Sixth “for three of his factors to go with the ship called the Cristopher with any lawful merchandise, and to sell the same and return and go again. And the year before, this Thomas and two of his partners had the like licence to go with their ship called the Trinity of Berkeley, to Bordeaux, and there to unload and load again, and bring any merchandise into England.” Ibid. ii. 83, 136.

[585] Ibid. ii. 68.

[586] Ibid. ii. 113-4.

[587] The new marquis was very angry at the unworthiness of such a match with so mean blood, and made it an excuse for disinheriting him. Ibid. ii. 172, 173.

[588] Berkeleys, ii. 175, 176.

[589] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 461.

[590] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 480.

[591] Ibid. 481.

[592] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 467.

[593] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 480.

[594] Gross, ii. 265.

[595] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 601. Gross, ii. 254.

[596] The bailiff of the Soke was sometimes called the Mayor of the Soke to emphasize his independence.

[597] Gross, ii. 254. For the way in which a bit of the town under ecclesiastical and not under municipal control might serve as a sort of sanctuary against the tax gatherers, see the complaint of the Bristol commonalty about Temple Street. (Rot. Parl. i. 434.)

[598] They had once been occupied by “good citizens,” but all through the Middle Ages were filled by a very poor population. (Kitchin’s Winchester, 75.)

[599] Kitchin’s Winchester, 46-7, 75-7.

[600] In 1264 there was a violent fray near the King’s Gate, the citizens fighting to keep the monks from admitting the followers of De Montfort. (Ibid. 130.) The convent kept control of the King’s Gate till 1520. (Ibid. 132.)

[601] For the bishop’s rights during the fair such as tronage, authority to take all weights and measures and bear them to the Pavilion and there make assay, to demand that the people of the city should come to the Pavilion to present cry raised and bloodshed, and other things touching the peace of our Lord the King, see Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 595-605. Compare his powers in Southampton during the same fair. There he might send his bailiff to see that only food was weighed or sold in the town, that no merchant whether resident or not ventured to sell anything except food, that there was no weighing or measuring, that merchants who came with their goods swore they did not bring them to sell at this time. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, pp. 67, 68.) The convent also had its own home and foreign trade on a very large scale. (Kitchin’s Winchester, 161.)

[602] English Guilds, 353, &c. 358. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 495-605.)

[603] This custom, once common (Madox, 152-3), was abandoned in Ipswich as early as 1317, and seems to have generally died out in the fourteenth century, though Gloucester sent its bailiffs to Westminster till 1483.

[604] In 1244 a mayor who had obeyed the King’s orders to shut the city gates against a bishop whose election the King opposed, was severely punished by the bishop when he gained possession of his see and palace. (Kitchin’s Winchester, 121.) The mayor was thrown into a London prison because a state prisoner had escaped from Winchester. (Ibid. 139.)

[605] Compare the action of Norwich. In the Wars of the Roses the Winchester people were, like their bishop Wayneflete, Lancastrian, but they had neither energy nor power to play any important part. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 147.)

[606] ArchÆologia, i. 91, 93-4.

[607] Gross, ii. 260-1.

[608] Payments for stalls went to the King’s ferm. (Ibid. 262.) The question was therefore one of revenue and not one of protection.

[609] ArchÆologia, i. 102.

[610] The fraternity of St. John allowed nearly £35 a year towards the maintenance of the bridge and walls.

[611] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 77.

[612] Ibid. vi. 595-605.

[613] Gregory’s Chronicle of London, ed. Gairdner, Early English Text Soc. 199.

[614] A charter of Edward the Fourth still speaks of Winchester as now being “quite unable to pay the fee-farm rent of 100 marks.” (Kitchin’s Winchester, 174.)

[615] See the case of Lincoln, Rot. Parl. i. 156-7.

[616] Hudson’s Leet Jurisdiction of Norwich (Selden Soc.).

[617] Cutts’ Colchester, 149. Hudson’s Norwich Leet-Jurisdiction (Selden Soc.), 17. See pp. xxxvii., xli. The constables of Nottingham at the court leet present the “Master Official (of the archdeacon) for excessive and extorcious taking of fees” for probate of testaments, and for over assessing poor folks and men’s servants at Easter for their tythes. (Records, iii. 364.)

[618] 13 Richard the Second, 1, c. 18. Statute 4 Henry the Fifth, c. 5, repeats with some alterations that of Richard.

[619] 1454, Cutts’ Colchester, 150-1.

[620] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 496.

[621] Freeman’s Exeter, 165.

[622] Freeman’s Exeter, 84-5, 165-6.

[623] Shillingford’s Letters (Camden Society), p. 68. An order of the town had been issued in 1339 that no clerk of the consistory court was to be chosen mayor or bailiff or allowed to meddle with the elections. Freeman’s Exeter, 147.

[624] The bishop had taken an action years before in 1432-3. Shillingford’s Letters, xiv.

[625] Shillingford’s Letters, xxii.-iv.

[626] Ibid. 98.

[627] Ibid. xiv.

[628] Shillingford’s Letters, 86-7.

[629] Shillingford’s Letters, 75-6.

[630] Ibid. p. 95-6.

[631] Ibid. p. 1, 43.

[632] Ibid. 10.

[633] Shillingford’s Letters, p. 43, 44.

[634] Ibid. xiv.-xvi.; Freeman’s Exeter, 158-60.

[635] Shillingford’s Letters, p. 143, et seq.

[636] Ibid. p. 58.

[637] Shillingford’s Letters, 17.

[638] Ibid. pp. 67, 68.

[639] Ibid. 23.

[640] Shillingford’s Letters, p. 6.

[641] Ibid. p. 12.

[642] Ibid. p. 12-15, 63.

[643] The Recorder of Exeter.

[644] Shillingford’s Letters, 146.

[645] Ibid. 9.

[646] Ibid. 23, 150.

[647] Shillingford’s Letters, 37, 38.

[648] Shillingford’s Letters, 11, 47.

[649] Ibid. 43, 45.

[650] Ibid. 32, see 11, 14, 20.

[651] His temper towards ecclesiastical interference and his urbanity in argument are admirably shown in a letter to the bishop’s counsel. The rough draft of the letter ends with a fine outburst of anger. “We would fain have an end,” he writes, and goes on to ask how it was possible for any one ever to conceive that “John Shillyng, for no dread of great words of malice, disclaunders, language, writings, nor setting up of bulls to that intent to rebuke me and to make me dull to labour for the right that I am sworn to, for truly I will not be so rebuked nor dulled, but the more boldlier.” But he struck out this vigorous passage in the second draft in favour of a less belligerent sentence—”for ye may fully conceive that my fellows and I would fain have a good end and peace, praying you to apply your good will and favour to the same.” Shillingford’s Letters, 25.

[652] Shillingford’s Letters, 52-3.

[653] Ibid. 78.

[654] Shillingford’s Letters, 97.

[655] Ibid. 53.

[656] Ibid. 66, 10, 94.

[657] Shillingford’s Letters, 53.

[658] Ibid. 64.

[659] Ibid. 93, 104.

[660] Shillingford’s Letters, 16.

[661] Ibid. pp. 10, 14, 91, 99, 104.

[662] Ibid. 83-4.

[663] Shillingford’s Letters, 83, 84, 99. Compare Norwich, Blomefield, iii. 62. In Canterbury the murder of a citizen by a waggoner of the priory in 1313 gave rise to a hot dispute as to the jurisdiction of the city coroner. The Convent refused him admittance within the priory gates, smuggled in an alien coroner to view the body, and then had it buried by the prior’s grooms. The story is given in an Inspeximus of Richard the Second; Muniments of Canterbury.

[664] The distribution of taxes was a matter of special arrangement in the different towns. By the request of the canons the ecclesiastical tenants at Grimsby were not tallaged with the burgesses (Madox, 270). In Leicester the tenants of the Bishop’s Fee just without the walls did suit and service to the Bishop of Lincoln; a compromise had been made in 1281 by which it was decided that the Bishop’s tenants should share in certain common expenses, and should in return enjoy the franchises and free customs which had been won by the Merchant Guild of Leicester; but while the burgesses had to bear the charges both of “the community of the town,” and “the community of the guild,” the bishop’s tenants only paid for such matters as touched “the community of the guild,” and were not liable for the general town taxes. (Gross, ii. 140-1.) As early as 1189 the Guild of Nottingham obtained the right to raise contributions to the ferm rent from tenants of all fees whatsoever. In Norwich this was given in 1229 (Norwich Doc., Stanley v. Mayor, etc., 5, 6). But the question of collection still remained a burning one, and the itinerant justices having failed in 1239 to settle matters between the convent and the city, the King himself went to Norwich to insist on an agreement in 1241. (Blomefield, iii. 46.) See p. 357, note 4.

[665] Shillingford’s Letters, p. 13.

[666] Ibid. 79.

[667] Shillingford’s Letters, 96.

[668] Ibid. pp. 98, 108.

[669] For the mayor’s defence, see p. x. 107-9.

[670] The tenants of the hospital of S. John in Worcester refused to aid in tallages, to submit to the assize of bread and beer, under the town’s officers, and to keep watch and ward. In 1221 they were ordered to do all these things. (Select Pleas of the Crown, Selden Soc. p. 97.) In 1331 Norwich resisted the handing over of three houses to the prior and convent “for that a very great part of the same city which is inhabited, is in the hands of the prior and convent and of other religious persons, whereby the inhabitants are at their distress, and cannot be tallaged to the tallages and aids of the lord the King and of the city aforesaid as tenants should be, nor can they be in assizes, juries, and recognizances, whereby others dwelling in the same city are burdened and grieved more than usual by such gifts and assignments.” (Norwich Documents, Stanley v. Mayor, pr. 1884, 24, 25).

[671] Shillingford’s Letters, 44-45.

[672] Ibid. 52.

[673] Shillingford’s Letters, 91-2, 104-5.

[674] Ibid. 92.

[675] Ibid. 100, 109.

[676] Shillingford’s Letters, 84-5, 99.

[677] In Canterbury also the Convent was bent on getting possession of that part of the covered way which lay along its territory, and the city wall itself so far as it touched the Cathedral precincts. Their first step was taken in 1160, and their final success was not assured till 1492, when the city resigned to the Convent the wall and covered way between Burgate and Northgate with the waste land adjoining, and the chapter was allowed to make a postern and to build a bridge across the foss. Such an arrangement was of course only possible at a time when peace with France, and the close of civil wars and riots at home had freed the town from danger of siege or revolution. (Lit. Cant., i. 60-2, iii. 318-20.) See also Davies’ Walks through York, 11, 12.

[678] Shillingford’s Letters, 88, 89, 96.

[679] Shillingford’s Letters, 93, 94.

[680] Shillingford’s Letters, pp. 85, 86, 101, 110.

[681] Ibid. 9.

[682] Ibid. 20.

[683] Shillingford’s Letters, 12.

[684] Ibid. 10, 19.

[685] The Commons had perhaps some reason to ask in 1371 that none but a layman should have charge of the seal. (Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors, i. 262.) This system, however only lasted till 1378, and in the next hundred years, out of 35 chancellors only eight were laymen.

[686] Shillingford’s Letters, 11.

[687] Shillingford, 136-140.

[688] In 1463 when Edward granted the city fresh franchises and powers he exempted the close from civic jurisdiction. Freeman’s Exeter, 91.

[689] In 1452 the judges held their assize in the hall of the bishop’s palace; the King being in the town it was proved to him that holding of assize in the bishop’s hall was a breach of the privileges of the church; two traitors who had been condemned were therefore pardoned by the King. Ibid. 89.

[690] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 150.

[691] Ibid. 169.

[692] Lit. Cant. i., lxi. Sandwich and Stonor were the two ports of London and therefore of considerable consequence. For the history of Stonor see Boys’ Sandwich, 552-5, 658-62.

[693] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 172-3.

[694] Ibid. 150.

[695] Ibid. 172-3, 141.

[696] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 139, 145.

[697] Ibid. 173.

[698] The cost was entered on the chamberlain’s accounts, but there is nothing more to tell how the matter ended. Ibid. 144.

[699] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 169-70.

[700] Ibid. 170.

[701] The details as to the costs of many of these feasts are preserved—the claret and wines white and red, and the beer and ale, which recommended a dinner made up for example of a swan, five capons, two geese, a side of brawn, two lambs, four rabbits, beef, marrow bones, a jowl of salmon, gurnards, roach, bread, spices, salt, vinegar, butter, milk, eggs, lard, and suet. Sacks of coal were always bought for the cooking of these great dinners, either charcoal sold in sacks, or “sea-cole” sold by the tub. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 146, 163.

[702] Ibid. 143-4.

[703] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 77.

[704] Ibid. 112.

[705] Lit. Cant. i. 216.

[706] Ibid. iii. 379, 380.

[707] Ibid. 318-320; Hist. MSS. Com. v. 433-4.

[708] These charges were heavy in the southern towns. For example, Canterbury and Sandwich had to provide Warwick and his garrison with victuals in Calais in 1457. Oman’s Warwick, 64.

[709] Lit. Cant. i. 213-222. This quarrel was 100 years old at this time. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 433.

[710] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 98.

[711] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 521.

[712] The last Jubilee, when the oblations amounted to £600, was celebrated in 1470. In 1520 the Pope demanded a half of the gross receipts, but the archbishop and chapter not being disposed to grant this no Jubilee was held. LiterÆ Cantuar. iii. xxxv., xxxvi.

[713] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 145-146.

[714] Ibid. v. 433.

[715] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 433-4.

[716] Ibid. ix. 146-7. The chamberlain’s accounts give the costs of one visit to London of mayor and aldermen on business of the town. Three counsel were paid 10s.; one of them “in the cloister at Paul’s when he corrected the copy,” got 3s. 4d. and his clerk 12d. The mayor gathered together all the witnesses in a house beside Paul’s to rehearse their evidence “against they came into the Star Chamber,” and paid for bread and drink and house room for them 16d. At Westminster Hall the three counsel got 3s. 4d. each, and for the three days following the same fees were daily paid. In the Star Chamber Master Roydon paid for examination of sixteen persons at 2s. 4d. a man, 37s. 4d.; two days after fees were again paid to two counsel, and a breakfast given to Sir Matthew Browne. Master Fisher was paid for the fees of the Hilary term 19s. Warrants of attorney cost 4s., and copies of the panels 2s. The counsel had to be looked up in their country houses, and messengers were always crossing Tilbury Ferry to look for “Master Raimond,” and give him a retaining fee “to be our counsel,” or going to Finchley to seek “Master Frowick,” perhaps to find that “he was then ridden to Walsingham, so the said Thomas came to London homeward again.” The Master Recorder of London was met coming to the Temple and besought “to be good master to the city,” and retained at a cost of 6s. 8d. with a breakfast to his servants in Fleet Street. Then a messenger waited at the Guild Hall for the recorder, and again watched for him “the same day at afternoon at Milord Dawbeny’s place, there waiting till the said Master Recorder had supped, and when he came out we besought him to speed us, for the time of the forfeit passed not three days; which answered that he was sore occupied and might not entende it so shortly, where we took him 6s. 8d., and then he bade us wait on him on the morrow in the Temple. The next day when Mr. Recorder had contrived the bill and corrected it, for his reward 6s. 8d. Paid for a pike given to Master Mordaunt 3s. 4d.” The mayor then sent to Canterbury to direct that some gift should be sent up which might be used in “making friends”; and several members of the Common Council travelled up with two trouts (one trout cost about 10s.) and ten capons. The witnesses examined in the Star Chamber each got 6s. 8d. and their travelling expenses; after their examination they adjourned to the buttery for an entertainment, and paid “in reward to the officers of the King’s buttery for their good cheer 12d. and to the cook of the King’s kitchen 8d.” Besides all this there was a great deal of feasting and drinking in eight of the London inns, in Southwark, Cheap, Fleet Street, Paul’s Chain, and Holborn. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 147.

[717] The Plague. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 147.

[718] Ibid. 150.

[719] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 433-4.

[720] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 434.

[721] The dispute in Norwich was brought before the king’s court in 1512. Documents, Stanley v. Mayor, &c., pr. 1884, 50-64.

[722] Gross, i. 241-281.

[723] See the saying of Bacon quoted by Anderson in his Origin of Commerce, ii. 232. “I confess I did ever think that trading in companies is most agreeable to the English nature, which wanteth that same general vein of a republic which runneth in the Dutch and serves them instead of a company; and therefore I dare not advise to adventure this great trade of the kingdom, which hath been so long under government, in a free or loose trade.”

[724] Boys’ Sandwich, 770. The Custumals of Dover, Sandwich, Romney, Rye, and Winchelsea, are given in Lyon’s Dover, ii. 267-387.

[725] The Ports with corporate members were:—Hastings: (Seaford, Pevensey). Sandwich: (Fordwich, Deal). Dover: (Folkestone, Faversham). Romney: (Lydd). Rye: (Tenterden). Hastings had six non-corporate members; Sandwich six; Dover seven; Romney four; and Hythe one; each of which was governed by a Deputy sent by the head Port.

[726] Dover had always remained in the King’s hands, but Hythe and Romney belonged to the Archbishop, while Sandwich had been given to Christ Church, Canterbury, and Hastings, Winchelsea, and Rye had been handed over to the Abbey of FÉcamp. A few details about the relations of FÉcamp to its possessions at Hastings, Winchelsea, and Rye, may be found in Leroux de Lincy’s Abbaye de FÉcamp, pp. 289, 294, 300, 327, 331; and a notice of the tax called aletot which was paid by the inhabitants of Rye to FÉcamp, p. 299. The two parish churches of Hastings, being part of the alien priory of FÉcamp, were never appropriate or belonging either to the College of S. Mary or to the Priory. They were afterwards granted away by Henry the Eighth (Horsfield’s Hastings, i. 448). The Counts of Eu held the Castle with the whole of the rape of Hastings and the manor till their estates were forfeited by rebellion about 1245 and given by Henry the Third to his son Edward. Moss’ Hastings, 3-4, 63.

[727] There was a considerable change in the century that followed the complete political separation of England from the Continent. Henry the Third got back Rye and Winchelsea, and at least the Castle of Hastings if not more; and Edward the First Sandwich; while Hythe and Romney remained with the Archbishop.

[728] For rights possessed in the time of Henry the Second see Hist. MSS. Com. v. 454.

[729] Confirmed by Edward the First, 1293. Rot. Parl. i. 101. There were no coroners in the Cinque Ports except the mayors of the various towns. Lyon’s Dover, ii. 269, 347, 371, 303.

[730] A writ of error lay to the Shepway Court only from any of the Ports; but from the Shepway finally there might be an appeal to the King’s Bench. (Boys’ Sandwich, 697, 771.) A mayor of Sandwich accused of assaulting the sheriff’s bailiff refused to answer except at the Court of Shepway. (Ibid. 661.)

[731] Lyon’s Dover, ii. 304. See Rot. Parl. i. 332. For the charter of Edward the Third see Boys’ Sandwich, 568-9.

[732] Boys, 470-1.

[733] Montagu Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 73-4. The Cinque Ports joined Simon de Montfort against the King. Possibly this revolt was due to the limits fixed to their territory by Henry in 1259-60, for a little later the Barons’ party extended those limits. (Ibid. 107.) It was in this war too that they finally secured freedom from summons before the King’s Justices.

[734] Boys’ Sandwich, 445. “Within the Cinque Ports there is no trial by jury as in other places.” Ibid. 452. For the system of compurgation see p. 465.

[735] Ibid. 468.

[736] Boys, 681.

[737] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 425; v. 496; ix. 151.

[738] Boys’ Sandwich, 682.

[739] In 1395 Romney contributed nearly £10 to the maintenance of the liberties of the Cinque Ports, and in 1407, 1408, and 1409, it had to spend over £5 each year in payment for such purposes. The renewal of these charters on one occasion cost Hythe £17 as its share. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 535, 537.) These payments were over and above the sums which had to be given for the charters of each separate Port, and which were also a heavy cost.

[740] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 545.

[741] Ibid. 525, 494, 517-18, 520.

[742] The usual number was four or five. Lyon’s Dover, i. 251. Romney sent six. Ibid. ii. 342. For the capons, geese, etc., with which they came laden see Hist. MSS. Com. v. 534.

[743] In 1281 the mayor and townsmen of Sandwich were accused of assaulting the sheriff’s bailiffs. Boys’ Sandwich, 661.

[744] Ibid. 462.

[745] Lyon’s Dover, i. 254.

[746] Ibid. i. 260-1.

[747] In 1410 jurats from Romney spent three days and three nights at Dover at such an inquisition. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 538.

[748] From about 1471 the court only met at Shepway for the installation of the Lord Warden and the presentation of the courtesy of £100 offered him on the occasion by his subjects. Montagu Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 186. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 539.

[749] It only took cognizance of five points, high treason, falsifying money, failure of ship service, false judgment, and treasure box.

[750] Montagu Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 66-7, 73-5. See the agreement of the Ports drawn up in 1358. Boys’ Sandwich, 560-3.

[751] See Rot. Parl. i. 32, 332.

[752] Every year a letter was sent to each Port asking “whether a Brotherhood or Guestling is necessary to be arreared this year,” and when the common consent was given the summonses were issued. Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 177.

[753] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. i. 427.

[754] These four bailiffs aided by a provost chosen by the Yarmouth commonalty, took over the keys of the prison, issued all ordinances and held pleas. This went on till 1663. (See Hist. MSS. Com. v. 553, 533, 535, 539-43.) Boys’ Sandwich, 576-7. But the question of the Yarmouth fair gradually declined in importance, and in the fifteenth century became relatively of so little consequence that the Brodhull decreed in 1515 that the yearly report of their bailiffs sent to Yarmouth might be dispensed with. (Lyon’s Dover i. xii.)

[755] Lyon’s Dover i. iv. v.

[756] It was already well established in the fourteenth century, and possibly much earlier, that orders of the Court of Shepway as to the taxes required for the King or for the general purposes of the Ports became the basis of agreements made between the Ports at the Brodhull concerning the share of taxes to be paid by each Port. See Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 180-1.

[757] In 1412 a curious agreement between the mariners of France and England was signed by Romney and Lydd, and probably by all the ports from Southampton to Thanet. It provided that if any master or mariner were captured the only ransom to be asked on either side should be six nobles for the master and three for the mariner with 20 pence a week board for each; a fishing boat with nets and tackles was to be set free for 40 pence; any man taken on either coast should be charged no ransom, but a gentleman or merchant who was taken might be charged any ransom that his captor chose. In case of any dispute, arbitrators were appointed; if these were disobeyed 100s. was to be paid on one side to S. Nicholas at Romney, on the other side to the Church of Hope All Saints. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 537-538.) The arrangement as to the place of payment of the fine was doubtless different in each town of the league. The common serjeant of Hythe in the same year rode to Dover to get a copy of the composition for his own town. In a disputed case when the plaintiff and defendant seem to have been of Romney, questions touching the “Law of Oleron,” i.e., the Law Maritime, were decided “by the judgment of the masters of ships and boats of the vills of Hastings, Winchelsea, Sandwich, and Dover,” that is, a majority of the seven towns. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 543.)

[758] At any time the court might be summoned to redress a wrong, and not only the jurats and commonalty of a town but any aggrieved person whatever in the whole confederation might claim that a Brodhull should be summoned if he was wronged on any point touching the charters, usages, or franchises of the Ports. Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 181.

[759] Ibid. 177-8. The Guestling sometimes sat separately for special business, generally perhaps at Winchelsea, for the affairs of the three Sussex Ports. For an instance in 1477 see Hist. MSS. Com. v. 489.

[760] Moss’s Hastings, 21. The importance of the Guestling Court gradually declined and in 1601 the Brotherhood Court (then near its own extinction) passed a decree that the yearly Guestling might be abolished. Lyon’s Dover i. xii.

[761] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 539.

[762] Burrows (Cinque Ports, 238) suggests that Lydd, like the supposed case of Faversham, might have owed its incorporation under a mayor and jurats to the Court of Shepway. He does not give any reasons for this supposition. Lydd was under the Archbishop; Faversham under the abbot until the suppression of the abbey. Ibid. 234.

[763] Dover and Sandwich were the first of the Ports to have a mayor, the mayors of Sandwich being continuous from 1226. Then came Rye and Winchelsea about 1297. The other three, Hastings, Hythe, and Romney, were ruled by bailiffs till the time of Elizabeth.

[764] For goods imported into Sandwich see Boys, 435-9, 658-9. Iron was brought from Spain and Cologne and wine from Genoa; all kinds of skins, and furs, with silk, spices, and frankincense from the Levant. For the taxes on merchandise, cellars, and warehouses see Hist. MSS. Com. v. 458. Under Edward the Third it fitted out for the King’s service 22 ships with 504 mariners. Boys, 783-4.

[765] LiterÆ Cant. i. lxix.-lxxii. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 74. Boys’ Sandwich, 663. Edward the Third completed the process in 1364. Ibid. 669.

[766] In 1422 an agreement was made that the corporation should go in and out on the quay freely, and use the monks’ gate, “to provide for the guard and the defence of the town.” The ground along the quay was to be deemed a highway. Ibid. 671.

[767] Under a patent of white wax because Sandwich would not obey an Exchequer patent under green wax. Boys, 441, 404, 435-457.

[768] LiterÆ Cant., i. 46-48. In 1324 the convent however repeated the offence. Ibid. 118-120.

[769] Boys’ Sandwich, 435.

[770] Pleas of the Crown were held at Sandown in a place called the Mastez either on the Monday of the Hundred Court or any other Monday. Ibid. 443.

[771] Ibid. 457.

[772] Ibid. 311, 501. The mayor is the judge and gives such judgment as he thinks proper, whereas the bailiff has nothing further to do with the business than to receive the amercements. Ibid. 459.

[773] Boys’ Sandwich, 527. See also 450.

[774] Ibid. 510, 536-7.

[775] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 533-4, 535,537, 539,541-2. In 1340 Romney was divided into thirteen wards, and 941 persons above fifteen were assessed to the subsidy granted to the King that year. The whole sum assessed was £48 9s. 6d. Forty-five persons were assessed in Old Romney at 43s. 6d. The receipts from taxes, rents, etc., in 1381 seem to have been nearly £180. (Boys, 799-801.) Romney seems to have come to the height of its prosperity about 1386. One barge was built 1386; one in 1396; one in 1400; one hired in 1420. (Ibid. 535-40.)

[776] This was an old family in the town, for in 1314-15 complaint was made that Hugh Holyligebroke and the community were sheltering and defending robbers and felons so that the country could not get justice on them. Rot. Parl. i. 324.

[777] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 535-42.

[778] Ibid. 535-42.

[779] Ibid. vi. 543-4.

[780] Hist. MSS. Com. iv. I, 425, 429; Ibid. vi. 541.

[781] Bailiff and jurats were allowed to hold taverns of wine and ale “notwithstanding their office, so that they do not sell more dear on account of their office.” Lyon’s Dover, ii. 337.

[782] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 534, 535, 539, 543, 544.

[783] The twelve jurats were summoned by the common horn to assemble for business in the parish church until they hired a room in 1410 to hold their meetings and to store the goods of the community; in 1421 they built or repaired a common house with thatched roof and glass windows, an exchequer table covered with green cloth, and a bell to ring for the election of jurats. A book of customs was probably drawn up under Richard the Second, a small seal made in 1389, and a bell in 1424. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 534, 537, 540, 541, 546.

[784] Lyon’s Dover, ii. 313-14.

[785] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 535.

[786] Boys’ Sandwich, 806-8.

[787] One bailiff appointed in 1415 was only ratified in 1421. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. i. 429.) The contrast with the habit in other boroughs is very striking.

[788] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 547.

[789] Boys’ Sandwich, 806-8.

[790] For notices in Domesday on this point see Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 48.

[791] In 1412 Hythe sent two of its citizens to London to see the Archbishop and the Lord Chancellor and succeeded in winning some relief from the ancient customary services to the King. In the fifteenth century the Archbishop sometimes appointed the bailiff of Hythe, and sometimes leased out the appointment to the town for a term of years. Cranmer leased it out for ninety-nine years. It only got a mayor under Elizabeth. (Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 215, 217-218; Hist. MSS. Com. iv. i. 434, 429. Boys’ Sandwich, 811.) One man was bailiff for six years from 1389; and a wealthy publican for two years from 1421.

[792] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 531-2.

[793] Ibid. 525-6, 532, 536.

[794] In 1403 “Jurats of Lydd and Dengemarsh made account in the church of S. Nicholas at Romney before the Jurats there of all their outlays and expenses.” Ibid. 536.

[795] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 524-5.

[796] Ibid. 522, 524, 526, 528.

[797] Ibid. 516, 532.

[798] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 606-7.

[799] It was a common custom in the Cinque Ports for the accuser to be executioner. Burrows’ Cinque Ports, 76.

[800] The customs levied by S. Augustine’s on the imports at Fordwich quay were to be the same as those collected by Christ Church at Sandwich. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 443.

[801] LiterÆ Cant. iii. 358. Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 326.

[802] See case of Old Romney. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 544.

[803] For the difficulties which attended the government of a group of dependent villages by the head town see Lyon’s Dover, i. 26-29. See also the relations of Sandwich and Stonor. Boys’ Sandwich, 547-8.

[804] Polydore Vergil, 84.

[805] ArchÆologia Cantiana, vii. 234; Hist MSS. Com. v. 520.

[806] See especially the account of Canterbury in Hist. MSS. Com. IX. 176-7. Lydd incurred heavy expenses in the war of 1460. In Rye there is an entry of 19s. 3d. for the expenses of the mayor, bailiff, common clerk and four jurats at Dover, “going and returning on carrying the men’s quarters, when the mayor and bailiff with four jurats were sent under the heaviest penalty, and on pain of contempt of our lord the King.” Another two pence was spent in giving them a drink of malmsey before dinner (Hist. MSS Com. v. 492, 493); and the same year “the men of the Lord Warwick entered the town with a strong band and took down the quarter of the man and buried it in the churchyard.” In 1470 Romney and the other Cinque Ports supported Warwick against Edward, 1469-70. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 545.) For Lydd, p. 525; and Sandwich, Boys’ Sandwich, 676. At the return of Henry the Sixth from October 1470 to April 1471, an entry in Lydd records “on the second Sunday after the feast of St. Michael the Archangel in the year of King Henry the Sixth.” (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 525.) The clerk did not know what year to call it. For the sufferings of Kent in the war see Warkworth’s Chronicle, 21-22.

[807] Luchaire, Communes FranÇaises, 77, etc.

TRANSCRIBER’NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—The transcriber of this project created the book cover image using the front page of the original book. The image is placed in the public domain.