THE TOWN MANNERS

The controversy concerning the bounds and limits of their freedom, which the English boroughs were forced to maintain with powerful organizations already settled in the land—with the monarchy, the baronage, or the Church—represented in the history of each municipality that which in the case of States of greater magnitude we call the foreign policy of the commonwealth. But whatever may be the compass of a dominion, whether it be a borough or an empire, no influence is more potent in shaping the character and destiny of the community than the nature of its external relations. It was in the single-handed conflict with foreign powers, whether superior lord or insidious rival, that the drapers and mercers, the smiths and butchers and weavers of every country town were forced, with a patriotism quickened by necessity, to meddle in matters of State and to concern themselves about the public weal; their ardours were stirred by legends of an ancient freedom, while their political instinct was trained by incessant discussion of legal precedent and right; and in the strain of perpetual taxation, in heavy burdens imposed upon a people whose prosperity was new, uncertain, or shifting; above all in the strengthening of certain forms of narrow municipal despotism born of the struggle against external danger, they paid the price of a bracing public discipline.

But there is another side of the town history which is not less important, and which is far more complicated than the question of its foreign relations and policy—that is, the problem of its own nature, of the spirit by which it was animated and the inherent resources of its corporate life. In the town a new world had grown up with an organization and a polity of its own wholly different from that of the country. Members who joined its community were compelled to renounce all other allegiance and forego any protection from other patrons. The chief magistrate set over its inhabitants must be one of their own fellow-citizens—“not a far dweller” unless in time of special need, such as war, and then only “by the pleasure of the commonalty.”[1] Adventurers from the manor-houses of the neighbourhood and strangers in search of fortune were equally shut out; and it was only when a county squire was willing to throw in his lot with the burghers, to turn into a good citizen and honest tradesman, and to prove his credit and capacity by serving in a subordinate post,[2] that he could hope to rise to the highest office. It is true that country folk were welcome to pay a double price for having a stall in the market, or a store-room in the Common House for their wool; while the impoverished knight might come in search of a renewal of his wasted fortunes through the dowry of some rich mercer’s daughter. But otherwise the town carried on its existence apart, in a watchful and jealous independence. Its way of life, its code of manners, its habits, aims, and interests, the condition of the people, the local theories of trade by which its conduct of business was guided, the popular views of citizenship and government under the influence of which the burghers regulated their civic policy—all these things must be kept in view if we would gain a clear idea of the growth of the borough from within.

The way of thinking and acting of the new world of traders and shopkeepers and artizans lives again for us in a wholly new literature which first sprang up in England about the middle of the fifteenth century—in Books of Courtesy and popular rhymes as to the conduct of daily life. The first English manual of etiquette appeared about 1430. Germany had had its book of courtesy more than two hundred years before, a set of rules composed for a distinguished society by equally fastidious writers, one of whom laments that his pen had been made “common” by writing about masters and servants, and explains that it was never happy save in describing knights and ladies. In northern Italy a similar book drawn up in the thirteenth century had taken a very different character. There the merchants and shopkeepers of the towns, impatient of “new ceremonies” brought in from over the mountains which they deemed contrary to all the traditions of the traders of Lucca and Florence and only fit for the degenerate Neapolitans, framed rules to suit their own needs and aspirations. The French followed rather later, at the end of the fourteenth century; and then last of all came the English experiment.[3]

The very appearance of such a book at this time is most significant. The nobles had already their own literary traditions handed down from an older world; and in the ideal of chivalrous conduct which was enshrined for them in the “Morte d’Arthur,” the Knights of the Round Table still served as a standard of social virtue and good bearing for the upper classes—a standard with which the burghers had nothing whatever to do. But the new literature was for the townsfolk themselves, and it bore on every line the impress of its origin. A growing sense of dignity and self-respect in the middle class of traders and artizans wakened aspirations for polite manners, and intercourse with strangers abroad gave fresh stimulus to social ambition. Englishmen who visited Flanders towards the end of the century were as much impressed by the Flemish manners as by the Flemish wealth: “they can best behave them and most like gentlemen,” was their comment.[4] In England the new society, with no heritage of tradition and no recognized array of models in the past, had to create its own standard of behaviour, to shape its own social code, to realize for itself the art of life. Compilers worked busily in the service of the middle-class aspirants. One book of courtesy after another was adapted for the vulgar use. The “Rules of S. Robert,” the good Bishop of Lincoln, whereby “whosoever will keep these rules well will be able to live on his means and keep himself and those belonging to him,” were put into English in a brief form, after wearing a more courtly garb of French or Latin for three centuries.[5] A Latin treatise on manners was translated for the unlearned by a writer who prayed for help in his work from Him who formed man after His own image, from Mary the gracious Mother, and from Lady Facetia the Mother of all virtue.[6] Sound codes of morals were put in the form of an A B C.[7] The right conduct of life, especially as it concerned polite behaviour, was set out in little songs “made for children young, at the school that bide not long.”[8] Plain directions in verse pointed out the duties of girls, of young men, of housewives, of wandering youths looking for service. The rhymes are of the homeliest kind, with trite and prosaic illustrations taken from the common sights of the market-place, the tavern, the workshop, or the street with its wandering pigs and its swinging signs; it is in their very rudeness and simpleness that their interest lies. Meanwhile political and satirical songs which had been so common in the foregoing centuries mostly died out of fashion and were heard no more, as the burghers, quickened into a new self-consciousness, began to be concerned for a time with matters nearer home.

These fragments of old speech and song lead us into the very midst of the lanes and workshops of a mediÆval town. They recall for us the countless political and social troubles amid which the trader was slowly fighting his way upward, and which left their deep impress on his character and view of life. A pervading suspicion, a distrustful caution, are the ground-note of many a song. Rude proverbs of daily speech, jingling rhymes of wise counsel, all are profoundly marked by the narrow prudence of people set in the midst of pit-falls, to whom danger was ever present, whether at the council chamber or at the tavern or at a friend’s dinner table, and among whom talk and clatter with the tongue were looked on as an unspeakable indiscretion.[9] They picture a life anxious and difficult, whose recognized condition is one of toil that knows no relaxation and no end, of hardship borne with unquestioning endurance—a life amid whose humble prosperity family affection and the family welfare are best assured by having one roof, one entrance door, one fire, and one dining table, and a “back door” is looked on as an extravagance which would bring any household to ruin. After a man had lived hard and worked strenuously he still stood in need of the constantly recurring warning against any bitterness of envy at the prosperity of a lucky dealer next door. The limits of his ambition and his duty are bounded by rigid lines; and the standard of conduct is one framed for a laborious middle class, with its plain-spoken seriousness, its sturdy morality, its activity and rectitude and independence, its dulness and vigilance and thrift. It is the duty of good men to set their people well to work, to keep house carefully, to get through any heavy job steadily and swiftly, to pay wages regularly, to give true weight, to remember ever that “Borrowed thing must needs go home.” They are not to ape their betters in dress, only

“Be as pure as flour taken from the bran
In all thy clothing and all thine array.”

With one whom “thou knowest of greater state” there should be no easy fellowship, no dining or betting or playing at dice; above all there must be no show of overmuch “meekness” or servility, “for else a fool thou wilt be told.”[10] A practical religion adds its simple obligations.[11] Men ought to pay their tithes, to give to the poor, to be strong and stiff against the devil. The prayer on awaking, the daily mass before working hours, the duties of self-control and submission, must ever be kept in mind. For the trader indeed the way of virtue was a narrow one and straight. Three deaths ever stand menacingly before him. First comes the common lot, the mere severing of soul and body.

“The tother death is death of Shame,
If he die in debt or wicked fame;
The third death, so saith the clerks,
If he hath no good works.”[12]

But side by side with directions about mercy, truth, and fulfilling the law, come other warnings—warnings about carving meat and cutting bread and dividing cheese, about a formal and dignified bearing, how to walk and stand and kneel, how to enter a house or greet a friend in the street—all carefully and laboriously shaped into rhyme. In the new sense of changing customs, of fashions that came and went with the revolutions of society,[13] training and thought and conscious endeavour were called in to replace the simplicity of the old unvarying forms. Manners became a subject of serious anxiety. Throwing aside the mass of tradition handed down from century to century, when every usage was consecrated by custom, and determined by immemorial laws as to the relations of class to class, the burghers, side by side with the professional and middle classes all over the kingdom, were tending towards the realization of a new social order, in which men were no longer obliged as formerly to pass through the door of the Church to find the way of social advancement, but might attain to it along the common high road of secular enterprise. The notion of the worth of the individual man was none the less important for the homely and practical form given to it in their rude and untrained expression. No one, they declared simply, need be shamefaced, of whatever lowly position he might come, for

“In hall or chamber, or where thou gon,
Nurture and good manners maketh man.”

In whatever society he might find himself, the humblest citizen should therefore so order his behaviour that when he left the table men would say “A gentleman was here.”[14] The practical divinity of plain people easily drew the graciousness of outward demeanour within the sphere of religion, and “clerks that knew the seven arts” explained

“That courtesy from heaven came
When Gabriel our Lady grette
And Elizabeth with Mary mette.”[15]

Since “all virtues are closed in courtesy and all vices in villany” or rudeness, the best prayer one could make was to be well-mannered, for the virtues of a fine behaviour reached as far as thought could go.

“In courtesy He make you so expert,
That through your nurture and your governance,
In lasting bliss He may yourself advance.”

These books of courtesy show us one side of the great change that passed over society[16] when the mediÆval theory of status was broken down by the increase of riches which trade brought with it, and the new chances of rising in the world through wealth. The yeoman might become a gentleman by getting into a lord’s household, and “spending large and plenty.” The squire who would be a knight without the danger of bearing arms need only go to the king’s court with his purse full of money. The man of letters, the merchant, the seeker after pleasure, whoever and whatever a man might be, he could win neither degree nor worship “but he have the penny ready to take to.”[17] When the acquisition of wealth or the passage from one class to another was practically impossible, poverty and a low estate might still be dignified. But as soon as fortune and position had been brought within the reach of all, the man who remained poor might be looked on as idle or incapable. A new test of superiority was applied, a test of material prosperity, and by this measure the townsman was judged by his neighbours and naturally judged himself. On all sides we find indications of the excited ambition which had begun to stir in every class,

“Now every boy will counterfeit a knight,
Report himself as good as he.”[18]

New distinctions of rank and caste began to appear, and an aristocracy of energy and skill constantly recruited and invigorated made its influence felt in every borough, as public honour was attached to trade in proportion to the wealth which its followers could win. The wool trade especially held a place of distinction in common esteem; and people who took to the selling of cloth were supposed to “live like gentlemen” and rejoice in a really superior station.[19] More and more the enriched burgher hastened to give proof that he had risen into the leisured class by donning the fine dress whose cumbrous folds bespoke a sedate idleness and luxury, so that whereas “sometime afar men might lords know by their array from other folk, now a man shall stand or muse a long throw which is which.”[20]

As the chance of rising in the world stirred in the trader a new ambition, so it stirred too the sense of the power of knowledge. When the writer of Piers Ploughman counts up the gifts of the Spirit that were distributed among the commons at the descent of the Holy Ghost as “treasure to live by to their lives’ end,” and “weapon to fight with when Anti-Christ assaileth,” he carefully reckons in with the rest the wit to use words skilfully as preachers and prentices of law who live leally by labour of tongue, the crafts and “connynge” of sight by which men win their livelihood with selling and buying, the wisdom to till and thatch and cook as their wit would when the time came; the art of divining and dividing numbers, and all such learning of the schools.[21] Already the workers of the town were reaching forward, as some of their rough rhymes show, to a true love of learning.[22] Their zeal took very practical form. Side by side with the great movement for education which was going on under the patronage of kings and queens, of archbishops and bishops, and great lords and ladies, humbler work was taken in hand by burghers and tradesmen for the teaching of their own people.[23] The founding of free grammar schools all over England was the work of the trading classes themselves. Sometimes the schools were founded by Guilds.[24] Sometimes townsmen who had thriven in the world remembered gratefully the place of their birth or their education. “By some divine chance” a “teacher of grammar learning” came to live in Rotherham about the beginning of the fifteenth century, and one of the town boys, Thomas Scott, who had been taught by him about 1430, became in 1474 Lord Chancellor, and in 1480 Archbishop of York. In 1483 he founded a college in his old home with a Provost and three Fellows who were to teach freely any one who came to them. One was to give lessons in grammar, poetry, and rhetoric; the second in music, especially singing, playing, and broken song; and if possible these two were to be priests, or at least one of them. The third Fellow was to teach writing and arithmetic to youths who were not intended for the priesthood, but for trades and other employments; for among the children of Rotherham, said the archbishop, there were many who were “valde acuti in ingenio.”[25] In the same way bishop Alcock of Rochester, the son of a Hull merchant, established a free grammar school at Hull, where the master was to “teach all scholars thither resorting without taking any stipend or wages for the same, and should have for his own wages £10.”[26]

So in one way or another the work of education went on throughout the fifteenth century—a work whose magnitude and importance have been too long obscured by the busy organizers of the Reformation days, who, for the giving of a new charter or adapting the school to the new system established by law, clothed themselves with the glory of founders and bore away from their silent predecessors the honour of inaugurating a new world. Not only in the busy centres of commerce, but in the obscure villages that lay hidden in forest or waste or clung to the slopes of the northern moors, the children of the later middle ages were gathered into schools. Apparently, reading and writing were everywhere common among the people,[27] and as early as the reign of Richard the Second the word “townsmen” had come to mean people instructed and trained, and no longer ignorant rustics.[28] But the most remarkable thing about the growth of the new grammar schools was the part taken in their foundation by laymen—by the traders and merchants of the towns. The great benefactor of Sandwich, Thomas Elys, left provision in 1392 for one of the chaplains of his chantry to serve as schoolmaster for the town boys; and the son of a draper who had had his education in this school afterwards founded a grammar school. Sir Edmund Shaa, goldsmith and once Lord Mayor of London, established a school at Stockport by will in 1457, and appointed a chantry priest of the parish church, who, being “cunning in grammar,” should “freely without any wages or salary asking or taking of any person, except only any salary hereunder specified, shall teach all manner persons, children and other, that will come to him to learn as well of the said town of Stopford as of other towns thereabouts, the science of grammar as far as lieth in him for to do.” And another London mayor, Sir John Percyvale, who had been born close to Macclesfield, left money in 1502 to endow a free grammar school there, because there were few schoolmasters in that country and the children for lack of teaching “fall to idleness and so consequently live dissolutely all their days.”[29] It seems also that the Manchester Grammar School was first planned by a Manchester clothier, who at his death left money for its foundation; and was completed in 1524 by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, a native of Oldham;[30] the children were to be taught “after the manner of the school of Banbury,” and inhabitants of the town were compelled to contribute to its support by being forced to grind their corn at the school mills—a custom which was kept up till 1759.

The new movement marked the beginning of that revolution which was ultimately to take education out of the exclusive control of the Church and hand it over to the people themselves. Up to this time the privileges and profits of teaching had been practically a monopoly of the clergy, and there was no possible competition save that which might spring up between licensed and unlicensed teachers within the ecclesiastical order.[31] A document drawn up by order of the abbot of Walden tells how the clergy of the parish church there had taught some children of the village the alphabet, and even more advanced lessons, without leave from the abbot, who claimed by the statutes and customs of the monastery a perpetual monopoly of teaching or licensing schoolmasters. A petition was made by the inhabitants in favour of the priests, and in consequence of this petition the abbot, to the great satisfaction of the townsfolk, graciously allowed that every priest of the Church might (during the goodwill of the abbot and convent) receive one “very little child” of each inhabitant, and might teach the child in “alphabete et graciis”[32] but not in any higher learning; a legal instrument embodying this concession was drawn up by a clerk of the York diocese, and signed with a beautiful notarial monogram which must have cost him the greater part of a day to draw.[33]

But under the new state of things another element was brought into the controversy. The town itself occasionally became the aggressive party, and took the teaching straight out of the hands of the priest. An order was made at Bridgenorth in 1503 “that there shall no priest keep no school, save only one child to help him to say mass, after that a schoolmaster cometh to town, but that every child to resort to the common school in pain of forfeiting to the chamber of the town twenty shillings of every priest that doeth the contrary.”[34] Burghers accustomed to manage their own affairs easily assumed the direction of education, and the control of schools gradually passed from clerical to lay hands and became the charge of the whole community. In Nottingham, where there had been a grammar school before 1382 at which it would seem that a boy’s education cost eightpence a term,[35] a new free school was founded in 1512, probably by the widow of a former mayor, and was put directly under the management of the mayor and town council,[36] and as these apparently proved somewhat negligent in the business the Leet jury constantly interfered in the most officious way in the government of the school and the choice and supervision of its teachers. “It will be a credit,” they said, “to have a good master and a good ussher in one school.”[37]

Of the intellectual life of the towns we know scarcely anything, and there is perhaps not much to be known. Scholars naturally drifted away to the Universities or London, and the society of the borough was occupied with other matters than learning. In Nottingham, in spite of the educational zeal of the jury, the first evidence we have of a town clerk who knew enough of the classics to quote a line of Vergil and a line of Horace is in 1534-1545; while it is not till 1587 that we find a clerk who had learned Greek.[38] On the other hand Bristol was evidently a centre of radiant light. An excellent education was given in its school, if we judge from the famous Grocyn, who was brought up there and left the school in 1463;[39] and its society was adorned by men of culture and wide intellectual curiosity. William of Worcester, the enquirer after universal knowledge, a man of science who practised medicine and cultivated his garden of herbs, as well as a man of letters, who at forty-three “hath gone to school to a Lombard called Karoll Giles to learn and to be read in poetry or else in French,” and to whom “a good book of French or of poetry” seemed as fine a purchase as “a fair manor,” might be seen in his later days at Bristol, practising the art of annalist, in which character he surveyed the whole town and carefully measured it by paces from end to end.[40] His friend Ricart, town clerk and historian, spent the twenty-seven years of his clerkship in writing his Calendar or Chronicle of 332 leaves in six carefully arranged parts, the first three being devoted to history and the last three to local customs and laws, in which he carried the story of Bristol through 3,000 years from the days of Brut to the reign of Edward the Fourth.[41]

It was inevitable that the purpose and theory of education should ultimately be modified by the change of masters, as well as by the change of manners, and already fervent reformers like Caxton began to look beyond “the alphabet and humanities” and discuss training in the mysteries of the English tongue itself. Among the “fathers ancient” who should command the reverence of scholars they counted the famous men of their own race and speech—men removed from them by but a generation or two—Chaucer “the father and founder of ornate eloquence,” Lydgate, the maker of “volumes that be large and wide,” and Occleve; and it is touching to see men, on the very eve of the heroic age of English literature, wistfully looking back to the vanished glories of their grandfather days, when, as it seemed to them, all the “fresh flowers” of style had been reaped by this handful of ancient worthies, and “of silver language the great riches” stored away in their treasury, so that the painful toiler who came after in search of “the embalmed tongue and aureate sentence,” could now get it only by piece-meal, or at the most might glean here and there by busy diligence something to show that he had reverently visited the fields of the blest.[42] The enlightened zeal of the learned indeed had still to wage a long warfare with the pedants of the schools and the barbaric notions of education that governed men’s minds; and the training vouchsafed to the poor boys of the fifteenth century was then and for many a century afterwards a rude and brutal one.[43] No doubt, too, the trader’s view of education, practical as it was, had a touch of unashamed vulgarity. “To my mind,” says the Capper in the Commonweal, “it made no matter if there were no learned men at all,” for “the devil a whit good do ye with your studies but set men together by the ears;” what men wanted was “to write and read, and learn the languages used in countries about us, that we might write our minds to them and they to us.” Scholars, on the other hand, trembled at the results to civilization and knowledge of the crude ideals of the mere man of business, who if he had his way would “in a short space make this realm empty of wise and politic men, and consequently barbarous, and at the last thrall and subject to other nations; for empire is not so much won and kept by the manhood or force of men as by wisdom and policy,[44] which is gotten chiefly by learning.” But whatever were their faults it was in the schools as much as in the council-chamber or shop that the revolution of the next century was being prepared; and the wide-reaching results of the spread of education in town and village were potent factors in the developement of a later England. “The fault is in yourselves, ye noblemen’s sons,” wrote Ascham, “and therefore ye deserve the greater blame, that commonly the meaner men’s children come to be the wisest counsellors and greatest doers in the weighty affairs of this realm.”[45]