THE COMMON COUNCIL OF NORWICH

When we turn from the southern to the eastern coast the first impression is that of being transported to a new atmosphere. It is not only that the outer forms of administration are different, for these differences, however interesting, are but the changes rung on a common system of local self-government. But in the political temper, the vitality of the popular institutions, the vigour of reform, we breathe a bracing air unknown in the Southampton docks and slums.

For the traders and artizans of the eastern coast lived in an exhilarating clime. Across the water the towns with which they traded were full of the movement of a free expansive life, very different from the political depression of the communes which the Southampton traders knew best. It was to the eastern coast that immigrants came flying from tyranny and clamorous for freedom; and traders from the eastern towns who watched in the streets of Ghent and Bruges and Ipres and Dinant, the violent and tumultuous life of cities where the people were still fighting for liberty, doubtless brought back from oversea tales of the passionate temper of independence which swept through the manufacturing boroughs of the Netherlands.

But however this may be, the towns of the east were distinguished by an intense vitality; and among the eastern boroughs where civic life was keenest and most fertile in experiment, Norwich was the pioneer in the way of freedom,—twenty or forty years ahead of Yarmouth in time[718]—beyond Colchester in the generosity with which the commonalty was called to share in the work of government[719]—happier and stronger than Lynn in having secured the union of its people into one undivided community for civil purposes. It is not impossible indeed that it stands in the forefront of all the English boroughs for the quality and value of its political experiments, and the elaborate finish of its constitution.

Originally, as we have seen, four bailiffs ruled the four great leets of the city, from 1223 to 1403. Their mode of administration has been very minutely described.[720] Each leet was for convenience’ sake divided into sub-leets, the lesser divisions being at first probably twelve in number and afterwards ten. The sub-leet was itself composed of as many parishes as grouped together would contain at least twelve tithings, and could therefore produce sufficient capital pledges to hold a leet court. For all purposes of business every tithing was supposed to be represented by its own capital pledge, who was probably chosen by the tithing men, but who, once elected, seems to have held his post for years, perhaps for life. He lived in the parish, perhaps in the very street of his tithing, and was generally a man of substance, one of the respectable middle class of the city, and occasionally might even aspire to enter the official body. In the whole city the number of capital pledges was probably a hundred and sixty.[721]

The business of each sub-leet was taken in its turn before the four bailiffs all sitting together in the little thatched tolbooth that stood in the central market place. There the capital pledges appeared to answer for their tithings at the view of frankpledge; and when this business was over they served as a jury for “presenting” offences at the leet court.[722] Year after year there came up the same body of comfortable well-to-do burghers, who did their business quietly, without thought of entering into any controversy with the government, like the juries of Nottingham and Southampton.[723] Whether this was the result of summoning the pledges in small groups from one sub-leet at a time, or due to the fact that in Norwich the people already possessed other means of expression, there is not as yet enough evidence from other towns to show, but the fact is important.

In later records we learn what was doubtless true in 1223 as well as in 1365, that one of the bailiffs was chosen for each great leet; and we also have the first account of the manner of their choosing. A body of twenty-four men, six from each leet, was elected by the whole community, and the twenty-four then chose the bailiffs.[724] The first mention of a custom in fragmentary records by no means implies its first institution, and this mode of election may have dated from the earliest times. It also appears that before the close of the thirteenth century the bailiffs were assisted in judicial business by a select body of citizens, whose share in considering the case of offenders seems to show that they were “present in the court as informal assessors to the bailiffs, or, in other words, forming the court of which the bailiffs were the sole executive;”[725] and it is possible that for other business also some of the leading citizens were summoned to attend at assemblies, and their name affixed to deeds, separately or collectively.[726] A complaint of “the mean people of the commonalty”[727] shows that administration and taxation had even at that early time fallen into the hands of a small body—the bailiffs and “the rich”; and the “customs” of the city (which were perhaps drawn up about 1340, but which must in many respects contain traditional usages of an earlier date) give us some idea who were “the rich” here spoken of. A body of twenty-four men elected by the community, six from each of the four great leets, is there described as forming a court for the control of the whole trade of the city. It appointed supervisors over the various crafts, and received reports of fraud in trade—charges which, if it had not been for the intervention of the twenty-four, would have gone to the leet juries. And the same body of twenty-four had official supervision of the city finances and received all accounts of the treasurers and collectors of taxes or town money.[728] Once more, in 1344, we find them exercising yet another function—“the twenty-four in the same year elected and ordained by the whole communitas, in the presence of whom, or of the greater part of them, if all cannot be present, the business of the city touching the communitas might be enrolled.”

Lastly it appears that the twenty-four gradually assumed the power of making laws for the community, and “used this custom that they might remedy new defaults and mischiefs arising by making new ordinances for the common profit of the town and the citizens and of others coming or conversant there.”[729] Apparently the assembly itself was almost superseded, for on the plea that when assemblies were summoned for the common good of the city and the country, the citizens did not take the trouble to come, to the great hindrance of public business, it had been ordained some time before 1340 that for the calling together of the commonalty the bailiff’s serjeant should summon certain of the most worthy and discreet men of each leet who were to be fined two shillings if they failed to obey the summons.[730]

A council of leading citizens, though it was already organized in this elaborate way early in the fourteenth century, scarcely appears in records of the later thirteenth century, and even then dimly in a vague inchoate form. It is, however, important to notice that from the very beginning two official styles were in use in the city documents, which seem at no time to have been interchangeable one with another. In the Pipe Roll of 1255 there seems to be a distinction between “the citizens” and “the men of Norwich”;[731] and both in this year and later, whenever the borough has any dealings with Westminster it is “the citizens” who ask for favours, and it is to “our beloved citizens, they and their heirs,” or to “the bailiffs and citizens their heirs and successors” that grants are made throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[732] Exceptions to this form are rare. In 1347 when Edward the Third asked for soldiers to be furnished for the French war he addressed himself to “the mayor, bailiffs, and the whole community”;[733] but as there was at that time no mayor in Norwich, the phrase was possibly that of a new clerk brought into the War Office in a hurried rush of business. In 1355 he sent a close letter to the “bailiffs and commonalty” of Norwich to provide him with a hundred and twenty armed men; and in 1371 a letter to the “bailiffs, good people, or commons” of Norwich to fit him out a ship. In all these cases it is obvious that the king’s claim on the people was altogether independent of any obligations resting on them as citizens of a chartered borough. Very rarely did the community address the king. In 1304 and 1307[734] the “mean people of the commonalty of the city” asked his aid; and once “the commune of the town of Norwich” sent a special petition to Parliament. The city liberties had been forfeited into the King’s hands in 1285, and the royal officer set over it had wrongfully distrained the people’s goods to the value of £300;[735] but since “the citizens” in the technical sense of a corporate body possessing certain rights ceased to exist when the city lost its franchise, the Norwich people had to fall back on that which lay behind all chartered corporations—on that out of which all other rights had sprung; it was to “the commune of the town” that wrong had been done, and “the commune” appealed against it. On the other hand, whenever a question arose as to common lands or common property the business was always done in the name of “the commonalty” or “the bailiffs and commonalty,” and in such cases the style of “the citizens” was never used.[736]

There seems, therefore, ground for thinking that from first to last the Norwich burghers officially described themselves by two distinct styles, which to the common understanding had different meanings, and were not used at hazard. I venture to suggest that here and elsewhere “cives” was the term used for the corporate body of citizens possessing chartered rights; while “communitas” stood for the citizens in another aspect, as the community which held property and enjoyed privileges by immemorial custom, before the charter of a free borough had been obtained. The holding of common property was probably the signal survival of customary rights, the others being gradually merged in the privileges enjoyed by charter; and hence it was in deeds relating to land that the traditional form of “cives et communitas” was chiefly preserved. In every town in England, however, whatever might be its special constitution, we find other rights universally claimed by the commons, which carried an authority that their opponents never dared in any single instance to gainsay, even when they sought to evade it. We may, perhaps, date back to a distant past the claim of the whole community to have all laws ratified by their “entire assent and consent,” to be made privy and consenting to all elections, to know verily how the town moneys were raised and spent, to admit new burgesses by the common vote of the people. These were rights which the oligarchies constantly endeavoured to make void from the time of Henry the Third to the time of Henry the Eighth; yet no attempt was ever made to deny or to revoke them. It may be that their authentic force was derived from that obscure time of which no memory is, when the ancient “communitas” slowly built up the great tradition of its customary rights; and that when the remembrance of the primitive community had by lapse of time fallen into the background its power was still present, and to the last the name was one of dignity and carried with it a mandate from an older world. No doubt, however, in the vulgar tongue “commonalty” came to be used in a popular sense, and sometimes with an air of obloquy or contempt, to describe the general mass of citizens who had the right of meeting in common assembly, as distinguished from the official class. For by degrees old lines of division between the ruling and the subject classes were drawn sharper and deeper—when government by the select few took legal form; when a council of twenty-four sat as assessors in the courts, audited the town accounts, controlled its trade, and claimed to make its laws; when the assembly was reduced to a gathering of special men called by the bailiff’s serjeant; and when even the attendance at the leet began to fall off as at the end of the fourteenth century[737] its business passed more and more into the hands of the twenty-four. Then the word “communitas” took a new shade of meaning. Before 1378 “the citizens” had come to mean in common talk the governing council, as opposed to the “commonalty” who were left outside.

It is true that the legal privileges of the community still remained. They had a claim on part at least of the public property. No new burgher could be admitted save by the act of the whole commonalty, or of twelve of them who might be taken to represent the entire body.[738] Taxes might only be assessed by will of the whole commonalty[739] or of the greater part of the same. Whatever might be the prevailing habit, the twenty-four had no legal right to act in the name of the whole people, and if the commons refused to obey their ordinances they could not appeal to any court of law to enforce their submission. In the Assembly Rolls the burghers are mentioned as sharing in the business of elections, grants of money, and taxation.[740] That they asserted their rights in a way which seemed to the governing class “contrarious” we gather from the fact that in 1378 “the citizens” (who in this case must certainly have meant a very limited body) presented a petition to Richard the Second in which they declared that of late “many of the commonalty of the said town have been very contrarious, and will be so still unless better remedies and ordinances be made for good government”; and they pray that the bailiffs and twenty-four citizens to be elected yearly by the commonalty may have power to make ordinances and to amend them from time to time when necessary.[741] A ship which they had just built at the king’s orders possibly commended their request to his judgment, and the grant of the desired charter placed the council in a position of absolute authority, having power to issue ordinances without the consent of the people, and to enforce them by appeal to the royal courts.

What controversies and threats of revolution agitated the men of Norwich for the twenty-five years that followed this great change we do not know. The exact position of the twenty-four in the municipal assembly is not easy to trace from the paucity of existing documents.[742] The rolls which survive might be expected to shew some sign of the effect of the charter of 1378 by which the official authority of the twenty-four was established. Yet such is not the case. The description of the Assembly both before and after remains exactly the same. A select group of citizens attends at every meeting, and takes the whole charge of administration. Yet it is worthy of notice that neither before nor after 1378 is any order or resolution ever attributed to the twenty-four, though such orders are constantly referred to the action of the “tota communitas.” Throughout these rolls the only authorities mentioned are the bailiffs and the commonalty.[743] If it is possible to believe, as I have suggested, that the right of the community to give or withhold consent in legislation was an immemorial custom which could not be abrogated by charter, the failure of the twenty-four to carry their point can be understood. No doubt party feeling on both sides ran high. It became necessary for a settlement to have a new charter; and in 1403, probably, at the instance of the ruling class, the city bought a fresh constitution at the heavy price of £1,000.[744] By this charter Norwich was made into a county; the four bailiffs were replaced by a mayor and two sheriffs, to be elected by the citizens and commonalty; and, in confirming previous grants, the customary phraze used in the charters of earlier centuries, “the citizens” was replaced by “the citizens and commonalty”—a term which is recognized in the charter as being already in use,[745] but which had not until now been invariably employed as the official style.

The charter of Henry the Fourth seems to have been in effect a confirmation of the charter given by Richard the Second, and to have set the victorious conclusion to the whole system of oligarchical government expressed by the council of twenty-four. The people were quick to appreciate the difficulty of making use of the powers which had been attributed to them and to perceive the tendency of the charter. A crisis was brought about by the very first elections held under the new constitution. The charter ordered that the sheriffs were to be elected, not as the old bailiffs had been by the electors of the four Leets, but by “the citizens and commonalty.” In the ordinary assemblies, however, made up of the twenty-four and “others of the community,” at which Parliament men, city treasurers, and officials, had been chosen, the twenty-four were practically supreme, and elections carried out in these gatherings were, as a matter of fact, in their hands. On March 1st, 1404, a mayor was chosen, and twelve days later two of the bailiffs were made sheriffs (the mayor’s book says by the “cives”).[746] The altered mode of appointing the sheriffs, as compared with the more popular custom of electing the old bailiffs, immediately roused the commons. An assembly was called to frame ordinances for the new state of things, and the people determined by their own authority to create a representative council of the burghers at large. It was ordered that eighty persons should be elected to attend all assemblies and act in the name of the people. To this council was given the right of nominating the sheriffs; the eighty were to go apart by themselves and name three persons, but if the commons did not approve of their choice they had again to retire and choose other names until their masters were content. Then the town clerk and some of the eighty carried the three names to the mayor and the twenty-four “probi homines”; the mayor chose one and the twenty-four the other.[747] The new council took part in the Michaelmas elections of that same year 1404, when the mayor was reappointed, and two new sheriffs were chosen.

This settlement evidently excited violent hostility, and in 1415 a Composition was framed to put an end to the discords by which the city was “divided and dissolved and in point to have been destroyed.”[748] This document did not err on the side of any lax notions as to the seriousness of a written constitution. With pedantic nicety it touched almost lovingly on the minutest details of ceremony and dress, as well as on the greater problems that vexed the state—the position of the twenty-four; the rights of the commons; and the share which the two parties were to have in appointing the officers of the city.

The effect of this Composition of 1415 was to create a miniature copy of the English kingdom, a little community governed by its three estates, the mayor, the co-citizens of the mayor’s council, and the commons. The twenty-four “probi homines” now became “the twenty-four co-citizens of the mayor’s council,” the mayor having the same authority over them “as the mayor of London hath,”[749] and the dignity of the municipal House of Lords was fitly marked by their dress, a livery “furred and lined as the estate and season of the year asketh.”[750] Above all it was decreed that they should no longer be a body elected yearly but should “stand corporate perpetually,” and even if this should accidentally not be embodied in the charter to be asked for later, “the citizens” declared that they could establish that law for themselves and not by point of charter, in virtue of the right given them in 1378, to make such ordinances as they chose in difficult or defective cases for which no remedy clearly existed in the city constitution.[751]

On the other hand the organization of the lower chamber was made more complete, and the relative position and authority of the two houses of the mimic parliament were defined with punctilious exactness. The common council was reduced from eighty to sixty members,[752] to be elected from the four wards by all citizens “inhabiting and having houses on their own account.” It had its Speaker,[753] its own mode of procedure, its system of elaborate etiquette in all dealings with the upper house. Henceforth it was to take a part in legislation which entirely annulled any claim “the citizens” might have put forward by virtue of their charter of 1378; for though the mayor and the twenty-four preserved the right of proposing all new laws, “they shall nothing do nor make that may bind or charge the city without the assent of the commonalty.” All ordinances made by the upper body must therefore be formally laid before the common council, and if it seemed to them that the matter “needeth longer advice and deliberation of answer, they shall ask it and all that seemeth expedient for the city by the common speaker of the mayor and of his council.” If needful they could ask for “a bill of the same matters to be delivered to them,” that they might give their answer in the next assembly; and “the mayor shall be beholden as ofttimes as they ask it to grant them for to go together in an house by themselves without any denying, and none other with them but the common speaker, and if they will have more to them as oft as they ask, the mayor shall be beholden to send for them without any withsaying. And in matters that seem to the aforesaid sixty persons for the common council that needeth not great nor long advice, be it lawful if they will, to go apart by themselves or in to the floor with their common speaker, and goodly and speedily, without great delay to come in with their answer as them seemeth speedful and needful to the purpose.” Finally, in “all other points that be necessary to be had for the welfare of the city that come not now to mind, it is committed to the whole assembly thereupon to ordain and make remedy by ordinance and assent of the whole commonalty for profit of all the city.”[754]

In the matter of elections, however, the general assembly reappeared in full force. When a new mayor was to be chosen the two councils were summoned to the hall; “and also all the citizens dwellers within the same city unto the aforesaid election shall freely come as they are beholden, and the doors of the hall to all citizens there willing to enter and come in shall be open and not kept, nor none from thence forbarred nor avoided but foreigners.” After the mayor and the twenty-four had proclaimed the election from the bench they withdrew to the chamber, and the whole people in the hall then chose from among those who had already been mayors or sheriffs two names of “sufficient” persons, “and if that any variance happen among the commons in the hall that it may not clearly be known to the common speaker by no manner of form by him unto them, for to be put or showed, which two hath the most voices, then the common speaker and the common clerk shall go up to the mayor and to him shall declare the variance of the people in the hall. And then the mayor shall give to the common speaker in commandment for to call together the sixty persons for the common council of the city, or as many as there be there into an house by themselves. Which there shall try the aforesaid variance in the same form as it hath been and yet is used in the city of London.” The names were carried to the chamber by the common clerk, the common speaker, and the recorder, with six of the common council; the six commons returned to the hall, leaving the three officers to take the votes of the mayor and council, and bring back to the commonalty the name of the elected mayor.

The election of all other municipal officers was carefully divided between the two parties in the state. The mayor and the twenty-four elected the common clerk, one sheriff, one chamberlain, one treasurer, one coroner, two keepers of the keys, two auditors, and eight constables. The common council chose the common speaker, a second sheriff, chamberlain, treasurer, and coroner, two keepers of the keys, two auditors, and eight constables. The whole assembly appointed the common serjeant, the recorder, the bell-man, and the ditch-keeper; they also chose the men who were to gather in the king’s taxes, appointing four men in each ward to assess the tax and two to collect it. The new mayor named two sword-bearers, of whom the assembly chose one; in the same way the mayor nominated four persons for serjeants, and the assembly chose two of them.[755] Members of Parliament were chosen by the common assembly.

Thus the commons of Norwich made their decorous entry on the official stage, with a punctilious care to secure their dignity and make fast their liberties by countless ceremonial ligatures. The Composition which vindicated their right against the oligarchy proved, however, like the Ordinances of 1404, a hard saying to many; and disputes between the mayor’s council and the commonalty were so violent[756] that the citizens appealed to Henry the Fifth in 1417 for a charter which should make the late agreement legally binding. The mayor’s council no doubt brought influence to bear in high places, for their position was now somewhat bettered. By the charter, for which the city had to pay over £100,[757] the twenty-four, now first called aldermen, got rid of one serious difficulty in their way by securing the clause that they “shall stand perpetually as they do in London,” and henceforth the old ceremony of annual election was simply recalled by the custom of reading out the names every year before the wards. In the composition it had been settled that in making “new ordinances for the welfare of the city that come not now to mind it is committed to the whole assembly thereon to ordain by ordinance and assent of the whole commonalty,”[758] but the new charter decreed that the mayor and aldermen should have full power to amend the laws and constitution with assent of the sixty of the common council.[759]

For the rest of the century the government of the city[760] remained of this pattern. The four great leets which had once elected the bailiffs now became the four wards, and were ultimately divided into twelve small wards. Each of these was represented in the upper council by two aldermen chosen for it by the electors of its own great ward. Each great ward also elected a fixed proportion of the members of the common council. The sheriffs held their “tourns” for the four wards, and appointed for each ward a jury drawn from the “men of good name and fame.” Meanwhile the leet courts of the sub-divisions over which the bailiffs used to preside carried on an obscure and feeble existence, and the capital pledges which formed the leet juries sank into insignificance[761] under the combined usurpations of the sheriffs and the two councils. Once when the capital pledges attempted to secure to the small trader some advantage in landing their goods at a staith where apparently they escaped some city tolls, the governing body promptly repressed their insubordination.[762] Evidently the administration of the city was neither more lax nor more popular because its governing body was enlarged.

In the obscure years of conflict between 1378 and 1415 we are told nothing about the men or the organizations of men that made the revolution. But we know that a very important movement was going on in Norwich itself in the growth of the craft guilds. Long forbidden by the civic government because of the loss to the city chest when the craftsmen were withdrawn from the common courts, they apparently made matters easy for themselves by regular payment of fines, and continued to flourish.[763] Between 1350 and 1385[764] a number of guilds were either founded or reconstituted so as to obtain public recognition in the city,[765] and the one fact that we catch sight of in their ordinances amid the absolutely monotonous and formal recital of religious duties, is that they were in some cases allowed to choose their own aldermen and council, instead of being subjected as before to the twenty-four. The importance of this is at once evident in the ordinances of 1404, where the guilds take a very prominent place; and in the composition of 1415, when they were finally sanctioned and given a completed form.[766] Not only was the power of choosing their own officers granted to every trade, but it was decreed that “citizens of the city shall be enrolled of what craft he be of” on pain of forfeiture of his franchise; and that all “that shall be enfranchised from this time forth shall be enrolled under a craft and by assent of a craft.” Such a rule practically made the craft-masters the judges of a new candidate for the city privileges, for if they refused to admit him to the guild he could never become a burgess.[767] On the other hand it was commanded that all the members of a craft must become freemen; foreigners were to hold shops under tribute and fine for two years and a day, and were then forced to buy the franchise of the city. “The master of the craft shall come honestly to him and give him warning to be a freeman or else spear in his shop-window.” If he did not obey within fourteen days the master with an officer of the mayor again visited him with his spear, “and he so speared in, nor no other, shall not hold his craft within house nor without.” Thus no trader or shopkeeper could remain exempt from the dues and charges of the city, and the whole commonalty was placed under the police supervision of the craft masters. The very dress of the crafts was made a matter of strict definition; all liveries and hoods of former days were to be given up, and the crafts were to wear liveries the same as those of London.[768]

If, however, during the years of conflict the craft associations may have done good service to the commonalty, they were met by a counter organization of the merchants and upper class. It seems to have become common after the Peasant revolt, when a new terror was stirred as to what the poor commons might do if left to follow their own will and appetite, for the richer sort to unite for self-protection and the preservation of their authority. In Norwich a Guild of S. George was founded in 1385 as a fraternity with the usual religious colour, and a - “going each Monday about in the city remembering and praying for the souls of the brethren and sisters of the said guild that be passed to God’s mercy.”[769] At first an informal body, consisting apparently of the wealthier and more powerful people, both lay and ecclesiastic, of Norwich and the surrounding country, its weakness lay in the fact that it was “desevered by constitutions and ordinances made within the city,” and according to the old rule by which the formation of any guild was forbidden, it was, in fact, an illegal body. The governing class, however, probably enlisted considerable sympathy at court in the negociations for the charter of 1417; and the associates of S. George won from Henry the Fifth in 1418 permission to constitute themselves into a permanent society, and received a sword of wood with a carved dragon’s head to be carried before their alderman on S. George’s day.[770] The great people of the county and their wives entered the order, bishops, monks and rectors, counts, knights, and merchants—something like four hundred of them—all men of substance who rode on horseback to the guild assembly, where the uniform of S. George was varied by the mayors, sheriffs, aldermen, or masters of crafts, riding in the garments of their order. The government of the society was put in the hands of a very close corporation, and the alliance between Church and State in the guild is manifested by the association of the prior, mayor, and sheriffs of the city in its government.[771]

The real danger of such a fraternity lay in the peculiar position of Norwich, and the impossible task of local government which had been thrown on its burghers. Beyond the city territory lay a great manufacturing district—a whole county studded with villages where weaving and worsted making were carried on in every house—and over all this district Norwich had the supervision of the woollen trade. The difficulties of the arrangement by which, in 1409, at the request of the commons, the mayor, sheriffs, and commonalty were granted the right of measuring and sealing all worsteds made in Norwich or Norfolk,[772] must have been extreme. The great employers settled in the city who organized the country labour and supplied cloth for the export trade were thus given a certain judicial authority in the county; while the great wool sellers—land-owners whose vast flocks of sheep[773] pastured on the broad downs of undulating chalk, and who were turning into traders on their own account—were forced in their own interest to meddle with Norwich politics. Besides the general commercial questions which affected both city and county, there must have been many a vexed question as to the tenants who owed suit and service to the courts of their lords, but who as artizans were subject to Norwich rule and whose fines were swept into the Norwich treasury. On every hand the door was thrown open to trouble. If the Norwich corporation was to busy itself in county affairs, the county was bound to exert some control over the Norwich corporation, whether by guilds of St. George, by securing office in Norwich for sympathetic mayors, recorders, or sheriffs, by winning the help of the Earl of Suffolk or of bishop or prior, by choosing the Norwich members for Parliament, or if all other means failed, by bribery and violence and the stirring up of street factions.

From one point of view, therefore, the story of the long years of strife and calamity which followed the reformation of the Norwich constitution in 1415 is singularly interesting. In presence of a foreign foe internal dissension is suppressed, and the main story is no longer, as in Nottingham, that of a struggle between the two classes of the community itself. When a mayor of alien interests is imposed on Norwich by a foreign faction he stands alone, and aldermen and commons hold apart from him as betrayer of the common interests. The enemies whom Norwich had to fear came from without the community itself, and if the story of the city remained a singularly troubled one, the troublers of its peace were not those of its own household. Factions of the State and factions of the shire flung confusion into the city politics, and the old burning question of ecclesiastical rights embittered every local dispute.[774] Norwich was befriended by the Duke of Gloucester and had a persistent enemy in the Earl of Suffolk, and its fortunes swung backwards and forwards with the rise and fall of court parties. From the day when the recorder, John Heydon, betrayed the city into their hands, the county despots whom we know so well in the Paston Letters, meet us in its streets and assembly hall, ever followed by the curses of the people. Heydon of Baconsthorpe, Esq., sheriff in Norwich in 1431, and recorder from 1441-3,—the man whose putting away of his wife had created such a scandal that the very mention of it made him turn pale, the land-jobber, the smuggler of wool, the exactor of bribes, the parasite of the great lords whose support he could buy, the organizer of outrages and murder, the audacious schemer willing to spend two thousand pounds rather than lose the control of the Norwich sheriff, the patron of liveried followers, the “maintainer” in the courts of men who defied the law, the overbearing bully whose very presence was enough to cow the commons into refusing to present their complaints to the king’s judges,[775]—can be pictured by every one who tracks his tortuous ways through the letters of the Pastons. In conjunction with Sir Thomas Tuddenham and others he overwhelmed the city with extortions, oppressions, and wrongs. These men “through their great covetousness and false might oppressed all such citizens as would not consent to make such mayors and sheriffs as they liked,” “purposing for great lucre to have as well the rule of the city of Norwich as they had of the shire of Norfolk,”[776] and “trusting in their great might and power which they had and have in the country by the means of the stewardship of Lancaster and other great offices and for divers other causes that no man at that time durst make resistance against them, knowing their great malice and vengeance without dread of God or shame of the world.” Even when the people sought to buy the favour of Sir Thomas, he took their money “by briberous extortion against all faith and conscience,” and yet showed them no mercy.[777]

It is just possible that the danger to the city called into being a fraternity to confront the society of S. George, and that the burghers in their turn seized on the machinery of the religious guild. We catch one passing glimpse of a curious association known as “Le Bachery”; which was declared by the mayor and commons to be merely a company of citizens who out of pure devotion kept up a light in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the Fields (the ancient place for the assembly of the people) and from mere motives of decency had chosen a livery; but in whose pious and decent union the hostile fraternity saw an association fashioned to break the power of S. George, and made haste to use against it the old argument applied to its own youth—the charge of being an “illegal guild.”[778]

The association was founded in stormy days. After Heydon was turned out of office by the people for betraying their interests to the prior,[779] his friend of S. George’s guild, the mayor Wetherby, an ally of Tuddenham and a “hater of the commons,” led the party of the county and the priory, and till his death fourteen years later the city knew no peace. Four times between 1433 and 1444 its franchises were forfeited for riot or stormy elections; twice the common seal was violently taken out of the treasury by aldermen and commons to prevent the sealing of proposals rejected of the people. Wetherby forced on the election, as his successor, of a mayor refused by aldermen and commons. John Qwerdling, falsely pretending to be common speaker, had carried to the chamber a name not set down by the commons for election; Hawk the town clerk had written down a wrong return; Nicholas Waleys had taken bribes enough to win him the name of “ambidexter”; the two city serjeants had packed juries, and the gaoler had threatened and struck the resisting commons on the head with his mace. The mayor’s faction held the guild hall, while the aldermen’s party retired to a private house, and having elected another candidate, put the offending officers out of their places, took the common seal out of the guild hall into their own keeping, and lest by any chance their election should be held invalid, refused to disperse till the mayor came down to confirm it, and called the bishop to join them in opposition to the prior. For the moment Wetherby yielded, but revenged himself by applying for a commission from the king to examine into the state of the city.[780] The enraged citizens kept up the broil till 1436, when another commission was appointed which forced the commons to submit, to restore the seal to its accustomed place in the treasury, and to put back the officers they had displaced in 1433.[781]

At the next election, in 1437, commissioners were sent by the privy council to see that all was done in order according to the charter, and in case of riot to seize the franchises of the city into the king’s hand;[782] and thus quiet was secured. But Norwich was not to keep its restored franchise long. Riots and daily disturbances “concerning their liberties” broke out between the city and the prior;[783] in June the inhabitants of Norwich had to appear before the Privy Council, and in July the franchises of the city were seized and the place committed to the custody of John Welles, a London alderman who was made citizen and alderman of Norwich.[784] At the prayer of the bishops of Norwich and Lincoln the liberties were once more restored in 1439, to be as quickly lost again.[785] For Thomas Wetherby “who bare a great hatred to the commons” watched for an opportunity of making fresh trouble. By his counsel the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm prosecuted the city in 1441 for certain mills it had built on the Wensum; and Thomas Tuddenham, John Fray, and William Paston (a friend of the abbot’s), judged the case at Thetford and gave it against the the city, ordering the commons to pay £100 damages to the abbot and £50 to the prior. At this the assembly gathered in great numbers, crowded to the hall, in January, 1442, and took away the common seal that the award might not be sealed. By the influence of the Earl of Suffolk, the abbot, and Wetherby, the city was prosecuted for rebellion, and in spite of the protection of the Duke of Gloucester the mayor was ordered to appear in London, where he was fined £50 and imprisoned in the Fleet, and the liberties of the city were again seized into the king’s hands. The mayor being thus fast in the Fleet, Wetherby got the common seal out of the chest, sealed the bond of £100 to the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm, £50 to the bishop, and £50 to the prior, without the knowledge of the mayor, sheriffs, or commons; and then destroyed the new mills.[786]

This led to fresh troubles. On the Shrove Tuesday of 1443 the mayor and commonalty, at this time united in the mysterious guild of “Le Bachery,” raised an insurrection, declaring they had power enough in the city and adjacent country to slay Thomas Brown the bishop,[787] the abbot of Holm, and the prior of Norwich. John Gladman, a merchant, rode with a paper crown as king at the head of a hundred and thirty people on horseback and on foot. At the ringing of the city bells three thousand citizens assembled, armed with swords, bows, arrows, and helmets, surrounded the priory, laid guns against it, and at last won a glorious victory, and forced the monks to deliver up the hateful deed falsely sealed with the common seal which bound the people to pay 4s. a year to the prior and to abandon claims to jurisdiction over certain priory lands.

Such a triumph was naturally followed by a fresh visit of royal commissioners in 1444.[788] Wetherby and the prior brought a long list of charges against the mayor;[789] while the city protested that Tuddenham and Heydon alone had made mischief out of their peaceful show; and that Gladman had only “made a disport with his neighbours, having his horse trapped with tynnsoyle and other nice disguisy things, crowned as king of Christmas,” while “before him went each month disguised after the season required, and Lent clad in white and red herring skins and his horse trapped with oyster shells after him.”[790]

Meanwhile the king had his own grievance against Norwich, for the city had unluckily brought a suit for £100 which it had formerly lent him, and now refused to advance any more money when he sent to solicit it.[791] Once more, therefore, in 1444, its liberties and franchises were confiscated. But now at last troubles began to lighten. Thomas Wetherby died, as well as the bishop who had supported him,[792] and the new bishop, of an old Norwich family, was for peace. In 1447 the liberties were restored, and in 1448 the king visited the city.[793] Two years later however, Heydon was again to the front, ready with Tuddenham to spend £2,000 in buying favour in high quarters in London, and £1,000 to secure a sheriff in Norwich committed to his interest.[794] It was suggested that the Norwich folk, the mayor with the aldermen and all the commons, should ride to meet the Duke of York when he visited the city, “and all the women of the same town be there also, and cry out on them also, and call them extortioners, and pray my Lord that he will do sharp executions upon them ... and let that be done in the most lamentable wise, for Sir, but if my Lord hear some foul tales of them, and some hideous noise and cry, by my faith they are else like to come to grace.”[795] The commission of judges[796] finally sent to try Heydon for felony, his defiant ride through the town into the abbey, the rumours that he was to bear rule once more, his mode of meeting and outwitting or terrorising the commissioners by turns, all these are told from day to day almost in the Paston Letters. Finally, in 1452, Judge Yelverton arranged some kind of peace in Norwich,[797] helped possibly by the poverty and exhaustion of the city.[798] By giving a loan to the king and a present to the queen with a promise to befriend her in her anxieties, Norwich got a new charter in 1452.[799] In this the guild of S. George, which seems to have been united to the corporation about 1450, was apparently victorious.[800] It was agreed that the day after the mayor left office he should be chosen alderman of the guild, and the common council was taken into the council of the guild.

For the next seventy years the citizens were occupied by strife with the prior, which dated back to the day when the Norwich burghers were given the city into their hands.[801] The bickerings of three centuries ended in a compact drawn up in 1524, when questions of jurisdiction, tolls, pasturage, water, and rights of way were settled; and it was admitted that the mayor, sheriffs, citizens, and commonalty might go to the cathedral church on feast days and occasions of solemn processions, the mayor with sword and maces borne before him, on condition that he claimed no jurisdiction, while the prior and monks “of their amiable favour shall forbear as far as they lawfully can or may” to arrest any of the corporation or the citizens during these great processions.[802]

Such stories of local wranglings might well be left forgotten and obscure if there lay in them nothing more than vulgar quarrels. But the political experiment of Norwich was one of such serious purpose and such singular quality, that even in its failure it kindles our sympathy with men who for two hundred and fifty years had been laboriously working out the problem of administration. With an admirable political sagacity they had used in turn every form of local organization to perfect their experiment in self-government. They had taken the principle of an elected jury and adapted it for use in their courts, their council chamber, and their legislative assembly. They had turned to the problem of the general assembly, altogether useless in its primitive and unwieldy form, and developed out of it (taking a pattern from London) a representative council which should guide its deliberations and express its will. The craft-guilds were organized, and it is possible that in the struggle their discipline gave order and strength to the commonalty. When the battle grew hot the machinery of the religious guild was brought into play on either side, and S. George measured his force with the Virgin of the Fields. No doubt these various methods have no claim to originality, being frankly copied from customs known elsewhere; nor is it in the discovery of a new path that the merit of the Norwich burghers lies, but in the sound political instinct by which they steadily directed their way into the broad track whose ultimate goal is civil freedom, rather than the narrow road of privilege. As we watch the growth of the house of representatives which was established among them, an independent deliberative assembly elected by the commons; and compare it with the chamber of magnates at Nottingham that by a fine mockery was supposed to typify a gathering of the whole community; we have a just measure given us of the value of this more liberal experiment in municipal politics—an experiment so early in time, so serious in conception, so strong and orderly in execution, that it might have justified an enduring success.

But in spite of all the ingenuity and sagacity and resolution which the men of Norwich brought to their fine attempt at ordering public life, misfortune still waited on their steps, and from the outset the disaster of the fifteenth century darkens and throws long shadows. For Norwich was fighting with its doom already proclaimed—harassed by the harsh dry climate in which fine cloth needed for the foreign market could not be woven; by the hurry of the new export trade which drove masters to set up their mills by the streams of Yorkshire and Gloucestershire, where labour was free and cheap; by changes in methods of making worsted which shifted the manufacture over to the Netherlands; and by the false economy which to help a failing trade, made English weavers refuse Norfolk yarn to foreign buyers—the Norwich burghers had still to endure the last calamity of pestilence, and the sweating sickness, which first burst on them in 1485, filled up the tale of disaster. Industrial difficulties alone might have been conquered. But a more insidious danger threatened all their liberties. By a fatal accident of position and circumstances the city, as we have seen, had been invaded and conquered by the county—by a society wholly separate from it in political developement. It had bitterly proved the truth of the extreme apprehension with which men of the towns at that time looked on the intrusion among them of “foreigners,” bringing into their newly ordered civic life the feudal traditions of the county magnates, scattering liveries among their people, and pouring into their law courts a commanding army of retainers—“because,” to use their own words, “by such maintainers and protectors a common contention might arise among us, and horrible manslaughter be committed among us, and the loss of the liberty or freedom of the city, to the disinheritance of us and of our children; which God forbid that in our days by the defeat of us should happen or fall out in such a manner.”[803] The story of Norwich shows that in a provincial town, as in a greater state, a constitution framed for home uses and needs may be shattered by the violence of foreign affairs over which it has no power, against which it has no arms, and for the guidance of which it has no instructions.

NOTE A.