THE TAILORS OF EXETER

It was in the fifteenth century, at the very time when the towns seem to have been most energetic in tightening the bonds that held the crafts fast to their service, that we find the crafts on their side most impatient of subjection, and eager to test their strength in a direct conflict with the civic rulers. Their restless energy broke down all barriers between trade and politics, and forced each into the service of the other; for by whatever stratagem the crafts proposed to compel the constituted authorities to recognize them in a partnership of power—whether a wealthy guild planned the winning of a charter which should make it a free and independent corporation in the town; or whether a combination of less powerful trades demanded to be officially included in the municipal government which regulated their business, or in any other way to control its action—in any and every conflict with the ruling oligarchy the guilds were forced to enlist the sympathy of the burghers and to become leaders of popular discontent. On the other hand the commons, with no resource against the official class save an occasional mass meeting, eagerly welcomed the aid of the disciplined army enrolled in the guild, and under the politic guidance of expert leaders, to give weight to their claims for more power. Thus under the stress of the growing passion for political emancipation, trading interests constantly seem to merge altogether into the ambitions and animosities of parties wholly occupied in a conflict about civic rights. No doubt a prevailing suspicion of some such intimate connection between the desire of the crafts to escape from municipal control and a democratic movement in city politics, gave fire to the discussions which from the first origin of the question disturbed market-place and council-chamber, law-court and Parliament, and proclaimed the vehemence of feeling with which so great a matter was debated.

In the Tailors’ Fraternity of Exeter we have a very curious example of the part which the Guild organization played in municipal politics. We have already seen the optimistic view taken by the Mayor and his Fellowship of “the great commonalty of the city,” united and harmonious, and worthily represented by the patriotic officers into whose hands an absolute and unquestioned power had been committed; so that when John Shillingford sends to the Recorder and the Fellowship an account of his doings in London in the matter of the Dean and Chapter, he simply begs them first to make such corrections as they saw fit, and adds, “This done I pray you to call before you at the Hall the substance of the commonalty praying every one of them in my name and charging them in the most straightest wise in the King’s behalf to come before you in haste for the tidings that I have sent home to you; and that ye wisely declare before them these answers; so that they say manly yea and nay in such points as you think to be done.”[320] Throughout the whole of the Mayor’s letters there is not the slightest indication that he had ever heard of any “impetuous clamours” of a revolutionary Exeter mob, little mindful of the honour of the city; nor that after a hundred years or more of gathering discontent a crisis was close at hand when the commonalty was to measure its strength against the corporation. Nevertheless the union of the moment was but the union that comes of confronting a common enemy; and the townsmen seemed to be only waiting till that strife was temporarily hushed to fling themselves again into the discussion of their own domestic differences.

It is probable that from the time when the people of Exeter began to elect their own mayor, bailiff, and eight aldermen of the wards, they were also accustomed to appoint a body of twelve men to aid the mayor in all difficult business.[321] As at Colchester, Norwich, and many other towns, the elections were made by a double jury of Twenty-four; but how the Twenty-four were themselves elected we do not know. In the fourteenth century they seem already established, like the Twenty-four of Norwich, as a permanent council to advise and assist the Mayor; but the Twelve apparently survived alongside of them, for freemen were forbidden to assemble for the election of a mayor “in the absence of the Thirty-six”; and the Twenty-four were unable to perform any act save in the presence of Twelve men.[322] Until the records of Exeter are published, however, it is impossible to define the relations of the two bodies; and the manner in which the Twenty-four took possession of the Council Chamber is unknown.[323]

In Exeter, as elsewhere, trouble broke out in the middle of the fourteenth century between the two factions of the community—between the commons, discontented and rebellious; and the governing class, who appear, not as innovators or usurpers, but as the conservative guardians of “the ancient orders and customs of the city.” The quarrel began in 1339 with “impetuous clamours” of the people against the constant re-election of one or two men as mayors; and for one year at least they carried their point, perhaps by some breach of former customs of election, for a decree was immediately issued that the people were not to gather together on the day of the mayor’s election “in the absence of the Thirty-six”; perhaps by some help from the Church and from country patrons, for it was further ordered that no clerk of the Consistory Court, nor any man who did not live in the city should be elected mayor or allowed in any way to meddle with the election. The decree that no burgher might be excluded from the office who was resident, had been seneschal and had the hundred shillings of property which was generally required in all boroughs was, if we may judge from other boroughs, simply a recapitulation of the common custom.

That the quarrel was still agitating the people’s minds some years later is shown by the ordinances of 1346 and 1347. The first forbade that a mayor should be immediately re-elected—an order evidently made to quiet public opinion but which the Twenty-four had no intention of observing. The second ordinance of 1347 decreed that the election should be made “by Twenty-four persons who upon their several and respective oaths shall make the election”—in fact it declared anew the custom which had been already recognized for fifty years, and probably from the first institution of the office, though of late years it had been called in question.

The victory of the governing body was apparently complete,[324] and it was indeed inevitable that so long as the city had to keep up its struggle with Earl and Bishop the needs and discipline of war should strengthen the position of the leaders and tighten their hold on their fellow-citizens. In 1427 the Twenty-four appear with the name of “the Common Council,” ordinances are issued in the name of “the Mayor and the Common Council,” and “in open court the Mayor and Bailiffs by the assent of the Twenty-four” transact all manner of town business, whether it concerned the city franchise, the hearing and carrying out of the King’s orders, or the voting of money for public purposes.[325] To them also undoubtedly Shillingford wrote his long letters from London, respectfully addressing them as the “Fellowship” or “his Fellows,” with whom he was accustomed to take counsel.

The ordinary burgesses of Exeter therefore, so far back as we can trace its history, played a modest part in city politics, nor had their attempt to assert themselves in 1339 won for them any advantage whatever. In 1460 the townsfolk made a new effort of a different and singularly interesting kind.

There was in Exeter a certain Tailors’ Guild. Its rules, written or copied in 1460, ordained that every full tailor worth £20 “shall be of the Master’s Fellowship and Clothing” and pay as his entrance “a spoon of silver weighing one ounce and the fashion,” besides buying a livery once a year and giving twelve pence to the yearly feast. Other shop-holders were entered as of the Fellowship of the Bachelors, each paying 8d. to the feast and his offering.[326] There were special charges for the “free sewers”; and every servant who took wages was also brought into the organization and had to pay his sixpence yearly to the Guild.[327] The master and wardens sat every Thursday at nine o’clock to do business, and general meetings of the wardens and shop-holders were held four times a year, where after they had dined the free sewers were given the remains of the feast. There was a council of Eight;[328] and the usual rules for protecting the trade monopoly, for maintaining discipline, and for collecting funds were made.

So far the Guild was as other Guilds. But rich, powerful, and well drilled, it cherished ambitions beyond the perfecting of the tailors’ art.[329] In the struggle between York and Lancaster, the sympathies of official Exeter were apparently Lancastrian, and when Edward the Fourth came to the throne[330] he probably found it politic or necessary, by a generous grant to the Tailors’ Company, to make friends of the trading classes that had been left outside the governing caste. By the charter of incorporation which he allowed them they were granted singular privileges, of a kind which the municipal government bitterly resented. The charter placed the guild in direct dependence on the King, not on the mayor. They were given a rare liberty—the right “to make ordinances among themselves, as to them might beseem most necessary and behovefull for the said fraternity,” and to “make search” and correct faults, apparently without need of the mayor’s sanction.[331] Not only so, but they obtained authority to “augment and enlarge” their Guild as they chose; and did forthwith begin daily to take into their company “divers crafts other than of themselves, and divers others not inhabitants within the same city”—men in fact of every conceivable trade and occupation, free brethren who swore to be true and loving brothers of the guild, never to go to law with any of the fraternity, to pay their fines duly during life to the treasure box, and leave a legacy to it at their death. The usual rule that no man of the craft could be admitted to the freedom of the city save by the consent of the master and wardens gained a new political significance when the bulk of the inhabitants were thus enrolled under the Tailors’ Guild, and when consequently it was the master of the Tailors who decided what men should or should not be made free of the borough.

From this moment the Tailors’ Guild was really a great political association. The Master and Fellowship of the company were scarcely less powerful than the Mayor and Fellowship of the Corporation. By their right of search the guild officers could enter by day or night almost any house in the city or suburbs. By their authority to amend defaults they were able to leave the city courts deserted and the city treasury empty of its accustomed fines. The granting of citizenship was practically in their hands. Their funds and organization afforded the means for a steady and ordered attack on the governing oligarchy. Taking into their ranks all crafts and all classes, they gathered into one body the overtaxed and discontented populace whose anger at the authorities had grown big with long suppression; while they also enlisted members that lay beyond the authority of the corporation—country people as well as church tenants who, as we know, were already murmuring at the assessing of their taxes, and prepared to make common cause with the burghers.

Up to this time the authority of the Mayor over the trades of Exeter had been unquestioned. Merchants, grocers, drapers, mercers, the tailors themselves had been subject to his rule as in other towns; till by this alarming conspiracy the Mayor and Fellowship found themselves confronted with what naturally seemed to them a “great disorderly body” of revolutionists, who held conventicles and stirred up commotions in the town, who even overawed the Mayor and threatened to destroy his authority—men of “such evil disposition and unpeaceable that the Mayor of the said city may not guide and rule the people ... nor correct such defaults as ought by him to be correct,” so that “evil example” was “likely to grow to subversion and destruction of the same city.”[332] The royal charter obtained by the Guild was looked upon by the Corporation as a breach of municipal privilege; and the Guild members were required to renounce it by oath or to lose the city franchise; while the Mayor made an example of some of the burgesses who belonged to the fraternity by striking them off the roll of citizens. The shop windows of the refractory were fastened down, and inhabitants were forbidden to have garments made by certain tailors whose names were set down in a black list, “nor with no other of their opinion.” Members of the craft who were on the city council were refused the Christmas gifts of wine and canon bread given to the councillors, and if they held to the craft were indeed excluded from the Chamber.[333] On the other hand if a luckless inhabitant sought to make his peace with the Corporation by withdrawing from the Tailors, and swearing upon the Crucifix and the Holy Evangelists to renounce their charter as contrary to the liberties of the city, the armed brethren of the Guild visited his house and levied his contributions by force of arms, that is to say by jacks, doublets of defence, swords, bucklers, glaives, and stones.[334] Then the town officers retorted by “presenting” the guilty tailors at the next court for the crime of riotously collecting fees, and throwing them into prison; and so the war went on, evidently at the expense of the weakest members of the community.

Presently however the quarrel was carried beyond the city courts. The Corporation appealed to Westminster and was once more plunged into legal expenses. In 1477 both parties appeared by attorneys before Edward the Fourth, who used the opportunity of the strife to tighten the hold of the central authority both on the town and on the craft. He set aside the contention of Exeter that the Corporation had any exclusive right of granting charters: the Guild had received its incorporation from the King and this remained valid; and in future all disputes between city and guild were to be laid before the King and his Council. But the royal rights being thus secured, the sympathy of the central government veered round to the side of the town as against the craft; and the conditions imposed on the Guild if it would preserve its charter were such as must necessarily break up the organization in its actual form. The fraternity was cut down again to the limits of the tailors’ trade, and might enlist no members and make no search among those of other occupations, nor beyond the city boundaries; and even within these limits “saving always the franchises of the Mayor and Commonalty.” It might issue no order against the rights of Bishop or Mayor: nor might it admit any man to the freedom of the city by enrolling him in the craft unless he were first presented to the Mayor. They suffered indeed a yet further humiliation, for while the Mayor was given the right of refusing to accept a candidate if he were suspected of not being of good disposition or conversation; yet if the master and wardens attempted to prevent a man from gaining the freedom of the city by refusing to testify in his favour and to make him free of the craft, the Mayor, bailiffs, and common council might insist on his being accepted by the Guild.[335]

Provisions such as these, involving the dissolution of the actual fraternity as it then existed, the ruin of its political position, and the end of its control over the roll of burgesses, proclaimed the triumph of the municipal authorities; and “the malice and grief which was conceived thereof could not in long time be satisfied or appeased.” The Guild indeed apparently refused to accept defeat; for ordinances were made in 1479 requiring fresh contributions fixed for seven years from masters, shop-holders, and free sewers “to the finding of a priest”[336]—contributions which were assessed so high as to suggest some “feigned colour of sanctity” in the desire to provide for a chaplain so unwonted an opulence, in addition to his board at the Mayor’s cost; and which evidently lasted beyond the seven years, since in 1500 an order was again made that all serving-men, whether working by the year, by the week, or by the piece, should pay a penny a quarter to maintain the priest, and at Michaelmas for the wax. The Guild indeed was still in good repute and able to hold its own. One of the Tailors was Mayor before 1482;[337] and in 1481 the Company arrogantly defied the authority of the Corporation. A tailor summoned to choose between keeping his place as member of the Guild and retaining the freedom of the city solemnly renounced his oath to the Guild before the Mayor, whereupon the master and wardens sued him for perjury; so “by the mean of gentlemen and money” he made peace with them and was again sworn to the Guild. But absenting himself from the duties it required of him “without cause reasonable” he was fetched out of his house, brought to Tailors’ Hall and set in the stocks, and finally compelled to find sureties for good conduct in the future.[338] The town councillors of Exeter learned caution from such incidents; and when in this same year they granted to the Cordwainers a confirmation of their charter, it was on condition that the master and wardens of the guild should yearly come before the Mayor and surrender all their powers, after which on payment of a fine they should receive them back again by grant of the Mayor.[339] The next year, 1482, when the Bakers desired to have new ordinances,[340] the Corporation stipulated that all corn must be ground in the city mills; that the wardens in making search in bakers’ shops or in hucksters’ houses should always be accompanied by a city officer or serjeant; and that if any guild rules were made which were against the city liberties, the Mayor and council might change them at their will.

The rebellious Tailors, however, had fought their last battle. In 1482 a new petition was laid by the city authorities before Edward the Fourth praying, in spite of the King’s award, for the total abolition of the Tailors’ charter; and the Twenty-four voted in this and the following years over £50 for business in Parliament and legal expenses “touching the annulling of the charter.”[341] From the history of other towns about this time, it would seem that considerable anxiety was beginning to grow up at Court as to the commotions of the populace and the growth of democracy in the boroughs; the petition was granted as a matter of course, and the Tailors’ Fraternity sank back into the subject position of an ordinary craft guild. Discontent and murmurings were still heard in the city streets, but the corporation had no reason for fear. In 1496 when one John Atwill was about to be chosen for the fifth time, “a great division happened amongst the citizens about the election of the mayor, and for avoiding the like for the future, was ordered by the mayor and common council hereof, that no man should be mayor or bear any office here, nor any election hold good, unless the same were held according to the ancient orders and customs of the said city, and withal that the Mayor and four and twenty of the said Common Council should elect the Mayor and all other officers of the said city.” To make matters quite safe the city got a charter the next year from Henry the Seventh. The new charter did indeed slightly limit the claims which the Council had freely set forth in 1496: they were no longer allowed to elect the Mayor, but were to choose two candidates for the office, one of whom was to be appointed by the freemen; but on the other hand they still retained absolute power to fill up their own vacancies, and to choose the bailiffs. Their name too was for the first time recognized, and instead of using any longer the old style of the city, “the Mayor, Bailiffs, and Commonalty of the city,” the king legislated “by the assent and consent of the Common Council.”[342]

The Tailors, thus beaten in open fight, could only fall back on the indirect influence of their wealth and compact majority, and make alliance with the power which they could not destroy. In 1516 the Master of the craft was also Steward of the city, another member was Receiver or Treasurer, and others were of the Council of Twenty-four; while others again had been Mayors or Treasurers of past years. By the will and consent of these officers of City and Guild, the constitution of the Tailors’ Company was amended, so as to blot out the last trace of government by the will of the fraternity; and the Eight men, “the sent of the occupation,” by whose authority laws had once been made for the trade, were replaced by a council of those who had once been masters of the craft, to be summoned by the Master.[343] The full significance of this step can only be understood by taking it in connexion with the position which was at this time being given to “the Clothing” in municipal government.[344] But it is plain that the ancient strife was now closed by a division of the spoils of power; and the sorrows of defeat were left to the populace at large. These lay more hopelessly than before at the mercy of their rulers, for masters of crafts when they controlled town government had a double reason for maintaining the authority of the corporation—the instinct of the master tradesman and the instinct of the town councillor.

The story of Exeter is invaluable from the light it throws on the mutual attitude of town and craft in the struggle for autonomy. Nothing is more intelligible than the passionate resistance of a corporation to royal charters given over the heads of the town officers,[345] if we realize the quick alarms to which a municipality which had had experience of the long fight for supremacy with king and church and baron, was liable when it saw a new enemy, an enemy which it had long supposed vanquished, springing up in its very midst to threaten with a fresh danger the unity of the borough. It was speedily discovered how great an internal weakness must follow from this cleavage in the political society of the towns; and how the very appeals for arbitration to the State, and the interference of King and Parliament, must constantly tend yet further to limit municipal independence; while there were other hints of danger in the new chances offered for the country gentry to interfere with the independence of the town life, when they could make the guild, detached from the town, an engine for their own political projects.[346] Even for the guilds themselves, there were to be set against the advantages, whatever these amounted to, which they actually won by emancipation, grave dangers for the future—dangers from the difficulty of enforcing discipline without government support; from the hostility of the corporation and the annoyances it could inflict by rendering honour to their most unruly members; and from the encouragement given to a more aggressive animosity on the part of other companies, rivals in independence and determined foes in monopoly.[347] The emancipation of the greater trading companies from local control may have been a necessary step in setting free a growing national commerce; but it was the evident sign that the age of municipal freedom and local self-government had entered on its decline.

Usually, however, it seems that the big trading companies had their own methods of making terms with authority, or of leading the corporation captive and peacefully installing themselves in the place of power; as we may see in the case of the great merchant fraternities and wholesale dealers who, like the Drapers and Mercers of Coventry, the Drapers of Shrewsbury, and possibly guilds of the same kind at Walsall,[348] had made of their combinations the dictators of the civic administration. But commercial unions such as these, standing in a group by themselves, somewhat apart from the Exeter Tailors, must be separately considered. The Tailors’ fraternity may perhaps be taken as holding a sort of intermediate position—on one side figuring almost as a merchant company, and on the other as an ordinary manufacturing craft; and it is in this second aspect that its history indicates to us the very important part which the trades played in rallying the elements of revolt, drilling their forces, and lending the guild organization for the strife. No single instance can ever be taken as in any way typical or representative, for everywhere the position of the crafts resolves itself into questions of local circumstances, and of delicate changes from place to place in the balance of conflicting forces. Whether there was any town under normal conditions in which successful resistance was made to a governing oligarchy save with the help of a good craft organization we cannot as yet say. In every borough there seem to have been disputes, more or less acute, between the governing and the governed, whether the conflict took the form of the attack and defence of a close corporation as at Exeter; or of a powerful guild merchant controlling the corporation as at Lynn; or of the great mercantile fraternities as at Coventry. And in some boroughs in which the commons succeeded in modifying the old oligarchic system, we can certainly trace the direct action of the manufacturing crafts. Occasionally the working trades rose against the merchant societies, and forced their way into the Council Chamber. In Carlisle the Merchant Guild, while remaining distinct from the municipal body, gave to the town more mayors and aldermen than any other guild; and as it admitted no strangers to membership of its society “for no money whatsoever”[349] its posts and honours became practically hereditary, until eight crafts or occupations of the town (seven of them being unions of artificers, and the eighth a union of shopkeepers, seedsmen, apothecaries, haberdashers, and so on) put an end to this despotism in the sixteenth century by creating a council of thirty-two, four from each trade, who joined the council of the mayor and aldermen, and claiming to act in the name of the whole community took part in making bye-laws; in choosing the “out-men” who were to be made burgesses; in auditing accounts; in removing the town officers if necessary; and in keeping the keys of the common chest.[350] That such powers as these were voluntarily or even quite peaceably handed over by the ruling guild is conceivable, though its improbability is shewn by all analogy. In Newcastle it was after “great commotions, unlawful assemblies, confederacies,” and general riots that the mercers, drapers, and corn-dealers were forced in 1516 to admit nine other crafts to share with them the government.[351] In Norwich, where it was found possible even for guilds proscribed and forbidden to force an honourable compromise with their opponents, the settlement was only brought about after discords by which the city was “divided and dissolved and in point to have been destroyed.”[352] When Edward the Fourth, in 1464, sent a royal patent to York ordering that for the future the craftsmen of the trades should nominate two aldermen, one of whom was to be chosen mayor, the action must imply that there had been dissension in the city society, out of which the king perhaps hoped to make his profit[353] by attaching to himself an important faction in the community. No doubt there were many cases where the trades had to confess the entire failure of their attempts, or where their success was but partial, as in London where the crafts would willingly have increased their influence if popular opinion could have been taken out of the way.[354] In a great number of boroughs we know that the crafts insisted that the only way to the municipal franchise should lie through their societies;[355] but to what extent this condition prevailed, to what political uses it was put, and how far it served as a trial of strength between parties in power and revolutionary factions, are as yet only matters of guess-work.

The scanty state of our knowledge indeed makes it impossible to sum up in a phrase the character of a strife which was universal, which involved every class in a most complicated and highly organized industrial society, and of which the history has not yet been fully made out for a single borough. But so far as our evidence yet goes, the developement of municipal government involved everywhere a struggle between the classes triumphant and the classes put under subjection. To discuss whether the subject class who attempted to create new associations or use old ones to fight their battles, were mere common burgesses contending with a municipal corporation, or bodies of artificers resisting a guild of merchants, or an indiscriminate mob opposed to a religious fraternity of the Holy Trinity or the Holy Cross, is often a mere juggling with words. For as we shall see, it was possible for one group of men to bear the three names, and in their character of “magnates” or “potentiores” to act not only as the Town Council but also as the Guild Merchant; and to shelter both functions under a specious colour of sanctity. Under such circumstances it is of no great consequence under which name they fought, nor by what name they called the mob, whether commonalty or another; since no change in their nominal relations materially affected the attitude of men in power towards those outside, or the policy of merchant and master tradesmen towards the working people. We must always remember, too, in discussing the social changes that took place in England, that the absence of violent dramatic effects, the limited and provincial character of the contests of classes, were but necessary consequences of the conditions of English life, at a time when industrial and political disputes were carried on by the local forces of every little town independently, in a series of particular conflicts fought out with varying success by groups of combatants trained in small detachments for separate service. It would be too much to imagine, because we read of no open war of classes, no burning of towns or insurrections quenched in blood, that the whole industrial society of mediÆval England moved together in a harmonious and orderly progression, each new group as it arrived being peacefully lifted to its destined place in wealth and council, without the jealousy of predecessors, or the bitter grudge of after-comers. On the contrary all evidence goes to show that the tenacity of Englishmen in holding to power, and their stubbornness in insisting on freedom, were as characteristic of the race in the fifteenth as in the nineteenth century; that antagonism between the man who asks and the man who pays a wage, were very much the same as now; and that class interests were if anything far more powerful. If therefore we suppose the social and political developement of the later middle-ages in this country was naturally brought about by the logical sequence of economic developement, we must allow that stern sequence to include then, as it would include now, the passionate efforts of a strong people to turn aside by their might the impending calamities of fate, and to lay a violent grasp on her uncertain benefactions.