Alice Stopford Green

[1] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 461, 488.

[2] Freeman’s Exeter, 146-7.

[3] Book of Precedence, E. E. Text Society, part ii. 8-18, 79, etc. 143, etc. Manners and Meals (E. E. Text Soc.), 175.

[4] Paston Letters, ii. 319.

[5] Lamond’s Walter of Henley 123-145. Monum. Franciscana (Rolls Series), i. app. ix.

[6] Manners and Meals, pp. 250, 251, 252.

[7] Ibid. 258-260.

[8] Ibid. 274.

[9] “Take not every rope’s end with every man that hauls,” ran the warning to the young. “Believe not all men that speak thee fair, Whether that it be common, burgess or mayor.” Manners and Meals, 183. See Songs and Carols (Percy Society, vol. xxiii.) viii. ix. xviii.

[10] Manners and Meals, 182.

[11] Percy Society, vol. xxiii. Songs and Carols, see songs xxxii. and xxxv.

[12] Commonplace book of the fifteenth century edited by Miss Toulmin Smith. Catechism of Adrian and Epotys, p. 40, lines 421-8.

[13]

“Men’s works have often interchange
That now is nurture sometime had been strange.
Things whilom used be now laid aside
And new fetis [fashions] daily be contrived.”

—Caxton’s Book of Courtesy (E. E. Text Society), 45.

[14] Manners and Meals, 271.

[15] Ibid. p. 265.

[16] The popularity of the “Ship of Fools,” with its trite, long-winded, and vague moralities, is an excellent indication of the intellectual position of the new middle class.

[17] Songs and Carols (Percy Society, xxiii.), song xxx.

[18] Songs and Carols (Percy Society, xxiii.) lxxvi.

[19] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 174.

[20] Book of Precedence, 106. “Money maketh merchants, I tell you, over all.” Skelton’s Poems (ed. Dyce) i. 277.

[21]

“‘Though some be clannere than some, ye see well,’ quoth Grace,
That all craft and connyng came of my gift.”

—Passus xxii. 252-3.

[22]

“Son, if thou wist what thing it were,
Connynge to learn and with thee to bear,
Thou would not mis-spend one hour,
For of all treasure connynge is the flower;
If thou wilt live in peace and rest
Hear and see and say the best.”

Book of Precedence, 69. Another rhyme gives the lesson in ruder form.

“Learn as fast as thou may and can
For our Bishop is an old man
And therefore thou must learn fast
If thou wilt be Bishop when he is past.”

—Manners and Meals, 383.

[23] See Manners and Meals, lii to lxii.

[24] At Lynn there was in 1383 a Guild “of young scholars”; at Worcester the Guild of S. Nicholas kept “time out of mind a free school within the said city in a great hall belonging to the said Guild called the Trinity Hall.” The Guild of Palmers supported a school at Ludlow; and so did Guilds at Stratford and at Deritend. The Guild of Kalenders in Bristol had in the twelfth century kept a school of Jews, and when that business came to an end were still charged with education, public lectures, and the management of a free library. (English Guilds, 51, 205, 196, 221, 288. See Hunt’s Bristol, 112, 249, 260.) The Drapers had a school at Shrewsbury (Hibbert’s Inf. of English Guilds, 33); and the Merchant Tailors in London (Clode, 35). I learn from Mr. A. F. Leach that at Ashburton the Grammar School founded 1314 by Bishop Stapledon of Exeter (who also founded Exeter College) was entrusted to the Guild of St. Lawrence, whose chantry-priest was the schoolmaster. The school is still kept on the site of the Guild Chapel, the original tower of which forms part of the School.

[25] Hunter’s Deanery of Doncaster, vol ii. 5-6.

[26] Bentham’s History of Ely Cathedral, 2nd Edition, 182. Hull Grammar School Gazette, 1891, No. 8, p. 88. See Riley’s Liber Albus, xix. There was a grammar master at Ewelme Almshouse 1461 (ibid. 627), where teaching was to be free (ibid. ix. 217-8). Four new grammar schools were opened in London in 1447, and during the reign of Henry the Sixth nine were set up in London alone (Pauli’s Pictures, 452). In 1472 Prior Selling, of Christchurch, reports to the Archbishop of Canterbury that he has provided a “schoolmaster for your grammar schools in Canterbury, the which hath lately taught grammar at Winchester and at S. Antony’s in London” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 105). John Syre, the grammar school master in 1436, lived in Gayhow’s tenement, S. Alphege parish (ibid. 139). The Almshouse of the poor sisters in Reading was in 1486 turned into a grammar school (Coates’ Reading, 15); there was a school in Appleby taught by a chantry priest before the middle of the fifteenth century (Transactions of Cumberland and Westmoreland Arch. Soc. part ii. vol. viii.); and one in Preston whose master was made a burgess in 1415 (Memorials of Preston Guilds, 14). In Liverpool there was an endowed free school before the reformation (Picton’s Memorials, ii. 55-6). Miss Dormer Harris has learned from the town records that the expenses of the grammar school at Coventry in the fifteenth century, were paid by the Trinity Guild—in other words, by the Corporation. It is evident that when William Bingham, who founded a grammar school attached to Clare Hall, Cambridge, says that in 1439 he passed seventy deserted schools in travelling from Hampton to Ripon by way of Coventry (Boase’s Oxford, 108), we cannot infer from this any decay in education. It may have indicated a shifting of population, or more probably perhaps the results of the effort made in 1391 to prevent villeins from being put to the clerical schools in preparation for taking minor orders and so gaining emancipation from their lords. Rot. Parl. iii. 294.

[27] In the royal accounts the principal artizans in each craft audit such parts of the accounts as deal with labour and sign every page (Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, iv. 502).

[28] Richard the Redeless, pass. ii. 41.

[29] The Will of Sir John Percivale, published by the Governors of the Macclesfield School. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. A. F. Leach for this reference—as well as for that about Stockport, and the reference to the School Gazette and the Town Records of Hull. He informs me that the first school founded by a lay person of which we have as yet any record was at Wotton-under-Edge, and was founded by a woman, Lady Berkeley, in 1385.

[30] Baines’ Hist. of the County of Lancaster, i. 296-7.

[31] The author of Piers Ploughman criticizes the education given by the clerics of his day. “Grammar that ground is of all” was neglected so that no one could now either “versify fair” or construe what the poets wrote.

“Doctors of degree and of divinity masters
That should the seven arts conne and assoil ad quodlibet,
But they fail in philosophy, an philosophers lived
And would well examine them, wonder me thinketh!”

—Passus xviii. 107-118.

[32] The “alphabet and the humanities” did not imply culture in anything like our sense of the word, nor yet Latin from the literary point of view, but the old ecclesiastical discipline, which included above all things logic, and which ultimately led, if the pupil advanced far enough, to the scholastic philosophy. Thus for example in the EpistolÆ obscurorum virorum one of the (priestly) correspondents is made to protest against the introduction of the study of Vergil and other new-fangled writers.

[33] Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 281-2.

[34] Hist. MSS. Com. x. part 4, 425-6.

[35] Nottingham Records, i. 246, 263.

[36] Ordinances for Dame Agnes Meller’s School, Nott. Rec. iii. 453-6. The Mayor of Chester had the payment of the master at Farneworth, Lancashire. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 370.) In Coventry the corporation (i.e., the Trinity Guild) paid the master.

[37] Ibid. iv. 191.

[38] Nott. Rec., iv. 214.

[39] Collectanea (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), ii. 334-6.

[40] Paston Letters, i. 431. Hunt’s Bristol, 112.

[41] Introduction by Miss Toulmin Smith to Ricart’s Calendar. Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 5, 7. Skelton was possibly a native of Norfolk, perhaps of Norwich. Skelton’s Poems, ed. Dyce, I. v. vi.

[42] Caxton’s Book of Courtesy, 33-41. See Manners and Meals, lix. Skelton’s Poems (ed. Dyce), I. 75, 377-9.

[43] Directions not to spare the rod were constant. Manners and Meals, 384. See the poor boy’s complaint, p. 385-6. Tusser’s lines show that the system was not confined to the lower schools.

“From Paul’s I went to Eton, sent
To learn straightways the Latin phrase;
Where fifty-three stripes given to me

At once I had,

For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pass thus beat I was.
See, Udall, see the mercy of thee

To me, poor lad!”

Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, singles the schoolmasters out as “a race of men the most miserable, who grow old in penury and filth in their schools—schools did I say? prisons! dungeons! I should have said—among their boys, deafened with din, poisoned by a fetid atmosphere; but thanks to their folly perfectly self-satisfied so long as they can bawl and shout to their terrified boys, and box and beat and flog them, and so indulge in all kinds of ways their cruel disposition.” One such master he tells of who to crush boys’ unruly spirits, and to subdue the wantonness of their age, never took a meal with his flock without making the comedy end in a tragedy. “So at the end of the meal one or another boy was dragged out to be flogged.” Boase’s Oxford, 76-77.

[44] The Commonweal (ed. E. Lamond), 21-23, 30.

[45] Manners and Meals, xxiv. Cf. ibid. xxvi. xlv.

[46] See Crossthwaite. Rep. Royal Com. on Markets, 25.

[47] “Feria” or Saint’s day. The place originally held by the fair is illustrated by the ancient custom in Leicester, that when merchants went to the great fairs, when the “fairs were up no plea was holden no more of them that were at home, than of them that were at the fairs;” this was altered by Crouchback’s charter of 1277, so that those who stayed at home might be tried in case of complaint. Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 423-4.

[48] The Fair of Wycombe was held on the Day of S. Thomas the Martyr from time out of mind. It had begun to decline by 1527, and the Mayor and Bailiffs bitterly complained that now scarcely any one came to keep up the fair and that the shopkeepers kept their shops and stalls at home in the town as usual. A strict order was made by the Council in 1527 that “no manner of man nor woman” should keep open shop in the town on that day or show their goods in the street, but should “resort unto the Fair there as it is wont to be kept.” Parker’s Hist. of Wycombe, 29.

[49] Rep. Royal Com. on Markets, 1, 7, 9.

[50] Ibid. 19, 25.

[51] The grants of fairs and markets in the thirteenth century were about 3,300; in the fourteenth century about 1,560; in the fifteenth century to 1482 about 100; Report on Markets, 108-131.

[52] Rep. on Markets, 9. On the other hand in Scotland the right of market was one of the ordinary privileges of a trading town. Ibid. 26.

[53] Ibid. 19. Sometimes not till the fifteenth century, as in Norwich.

[54] Ibid. 9. For the setting up of the beam and directions about weighing, Ibid. 57, 25. Paston Letters, ii. 106. Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, I. xiii-xv., xviii., xix., xxiv.-xxxiii. Schanz, i. 579-82. Towns were compelled to keep standard measures by Stat. 8 Henry VI. cap. 5; 11 Henry VI. cap. 8; 7 Henry VII. cap. 3. The Commons asked Henry VII. to have measures made at his own cost; he agreed, but refused to take the cost. When they were made in 1495 members of Parliament had to carry them back to their several towns from London. 11 Henry VII. cap. 4.

[55] Boys’ Sandwich, 431, 496, 498, 509.

[56] Report on Markets, 25. Cutts’ Colchester, 154-7. Nott. Rec. i. 314-16.

[57] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 152. For the uncertainty as to the stone of wool, Rogers, Agric. and Prices, i. 367.

[58] Plumpton Correspondence, 21.

[59] Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, i. 660. The introduction of carriers and posts was later in England than in France. Denton’s Lectures, 190-5.

[60] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 489. In very many towns the churchyard was without any enclosure even in the fifteenth century. For the overseer of the streets and his hog-man see Boys’ Sandwich, 674.

[61] Nottingham Records, iv. 190.

[62] Blomefield, iii. 183.

[63] Parker’s Manor of Aylesbury, 14-15.

[64] In 1388 town officers were ordered to clean their towns of all that could corrupt and infect the air and bring disease. 12 Richard II. cap. 13. The shambles were commonly at the very corner of the Tol-booth or Moot Hall. Hewitson’s Hist. of Preston, 36. See Shillingford’s Letters, 89. But in 1487 the Londoners after sixteen years continual remonstrance obtained a statute that no butcher was to kill any beast within the walls of the town, and that the same law was to be observed in all walled towns of England except Berwick and Carlisle. 4 Henry VII. cap. 3.

[65] A grant for paving was given to Liverpool in 1329. Picton’s Mun. Rec. of Liverpool, i. 10. Southampton appointed in 1482 a “pavyour” who should dwell in a house of the town at a price of 13s. 4d. rent free “and to have yearly a gown.” Davies, 119, 120. Nottingham decided in 1501 to have a town paviour at a salary of 33s. 4d. and a gown; and gave order that the chamberlains were to find stones and sand. Nottingham Records, iii. 309. See vol. i. p. 18, note.

[66] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 493. In Canterbury, where the inns were very numerous, there was a law that no hosteler should “disturb no manner of strange man coming to the city for to take his inn, but it shall be lawful to take his inn at his own lust without disturbance of any hosteler.” Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 172.

[67] Married women might become merchants on their own account and carry on trade, hold property and answer in all matters of business before the law as independent traders. (Eng. Gilds, 382. Mun. Records, Carlisle, ed. Ferguson and Nansen, 79. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 174.) Women might become members of the Merchant Gild at Totnes by inheritance, by purchase, or by gift. (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 342-3.) Their property was carefully guarded, and no tenement held by the wife’s right could be alienated or burdened with a rent unless the wife had given her free consent openly in the Mayor’s Court. (Nott. Records, i. 83, 265.)

[68] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 540. Boys’ Sandwich, 498.

[69] The brokers were paid by a fixed tax on the merchants’ goods which passed through their hands. Boys’ Sandwich, 497, 506-7.

[70] Hist. Preston Guild, 16.

[71] Blomefield, iii. 168. Gross, ii. 43, 175, 220. Nott. Records, i. 445-6, 159, 201; ii. 47, 241. See also the serjeant-at-mace in Sandwich (Boys, 504-5), at Nottingham (Rec. iii. 73).

[72] For typical market rules see Reading, Gross, ii. 204-7. Southampton, Ibid. 220.

[73] See Schanz, i. 621-2.

[74] The loaf was changed in weight not in price with the price of corn; the lowest rate conceived by ancient writers was 12d. a quarter of corn; the unit of bread was 1/4d. loaf. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 175.) Twelve kinds are mentioned in the fifteenth century, but in the Assize only three sorts were recognized—Wastel or white or well-baked bread; Coket (seconds); Simnel, twice baked bread, used only in Lent. (English Guilds, 102. Boys’ Sandwich, 543.)

[75] Manorial Pleas, Selden Soc. xxxviii. For control of bread and beer at the time of Domesday see Rep. on Markets, 18. In Norwich supervisors of bread were appointed before 1340. The system seems to have worked well, for no troubles as to the assize of bread are recorded, as in other towns. Leet. Jur. of Norwich, Selden Soc. xxxvi.

[76] Rep. on Markets, 25.

[77] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 288. In certain departments, as in the fixing of the prices of bread and ale, in measures, in various rules about buying and selling, the towns simply carried out laws made by the central government; while in other things such as the regulation of the price of meat, poultry, fish, and wine, they were from time to time given authority to fix their own standard.

[78] Andover, Gross, ii. 310. Cutts’ Colchester, 154-7.

[79] In 1383 the price of unsweetened wine was practically left to the towns for about a hundred years. Schanz, i. 647. For common consumption wine was sweetened with honey and flavoured with blackberries. ArchÆol. Cantiana, vi. 328.

[80] Liber Albus, 289, 373-86, 686-91, Liber Custumarum, 117-120, 385-6. Statutes 22 Edward IV. cap. 2. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 172.

[81] Ricart’s Kalendar, 81-84.

[82] Piers Ploughman. Pass. xxii. 398-404.

[83] Nott. Rec. iii. 357.

[84] Select Pleas of the Crown, Selden Soc. 88-9. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 172. Gross, i. 45. English Guilds, 353, 381-4.

[85] English Guilds, 353.

[86] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 476. English Guilds, 392.

[87] Gross, ii. 1 175. Rep. on Markets, 16.

[88] English Guilds, 390, 392, 406.

[89] The town liberties did not always extend over the whole town territory. The liberties of Carlisle were confined to a small district in the centre of the modern town, and did not extend beyond the limits of this “ancient city.” Hereford up till 1830 was divided into two parts, the In-Borough where the inhabitant householders had the elective franchise and the Out-Borough comprising all beyond the In-Borough that was under the corporate jurisdiction. Papers relating to Parl. Representation, 1829-32.

[90] Collectanea, ii. (Oxford. Hist. Soc.), 13.

[91] Freeman’s Exeter, 143.

[92] Gross, ii. 262. Rot. Hund. i. 356, 3 Ed. i. When an unusual press of people was drawn to the town by some festival or public occasion orders were issued to allow country dealers to bring food within the walls and sell it without paying toll or any other manner of charge. Davies’ York, 167.

[93] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 606-7. Gross, i. 48-9. See Vol. I. p. 182, n. 4. Sometimes the monopoly was given to the townspeople (Gross, i. 46; ii. 28, 46, 205, 255); in other cases to the Merchant Guild which had power to enroll non-residents among its numbers. (Gross, i. 47, 52, 122, 139, 153, 191, 218.) In cases of abuse there was an appeal to the king. (Rep. on Markets, 25, 60.)

[94] Picton’s Municipal Records of Liverpool, i. 17, 18, 28. It is evident that the system of protection was not universally popular, for when in 1515 a commission was sent to examine why Liverpool had so decayed that its contributions to the Exchequer had fallen off, a complaint was made that the mayor had caused the decline in the customs revenue by the enfranchisement of strangers living in the borough, who were thus freed from the payment of dues that had once gone to the Crown. (Picton’s Memorials, i. 38.) Leland writing in 1533 says: “Irish merchants come much thither as to a good haven,” and in the margin he adds, “at Liverpool is a small custom paid that causeth merchants to resort.” The trade of later days had even then begun: “Good merchants at Liverpool, much Irish yarn that Manchester men do buy there.” (Ibid. i. 46.)

[95] Fosbrooke’s Gloucestershire, i. 204-8. For the trade with Wales, ibid. 156-7. See also the rovers of the Forest of Dean and the troubles of Tewkesbury and Gloucester, in Stat. 8 Henry the Sixth, cap. 27. There were similar disputes between Shrewsbury and Worcester as to the limits of their jurisdiction over the Severn. (Owen’s Shrewsbury, i. 300.)

[96] To encourage the carriage of corn in some places, probably in many, while the toll on every horse laden with a pack of marketable goods was 1d[.], a corn-laden beast was charged only one farthing. (Materials for Hist. Henry VII. vol. ii. 332.) For a case of toll illegally levied on victuals see Rep. on Markets 57.

[97] Collectanea (Oxford Hist. Soc.), ii. 120; 50-51. In the sixteenth century when the victuallers’ laws were no longer enforced to any extent, other measures were found necessary to keep a constant supply of corn in the bigger towns.

[98] See Collectanea (Oxford Hist. Soc.), ii. 49.

[99] Riley’s Mem. 180.

[100] Ibid. 181.

[101] Nottingham Records, iii. 354. Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 172-5. Ibid. v. 531.

[102] Preamble of Canterbury regulations for brewers and bakers drawn up in 1487. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 173.)

[103] Ibid. For suburban trades see girdlers and embroiderers in London. (Schanz i. 608. Rolls Parl. iv. 73.)

[104] For the attempt at free trade in Winchester in 1430, following the example of Coventry and New Sarum, see Gross, ii. 261. Another rule of the assembly in the same direction was passed in 1471, apparently in the attempt to find a new source of income for payment of the ferm. Ibid. 262.

[105] Muniments of Canterbury. In Southampton there was a class of Out-burgesses who did not live in the town; they were allowed to vote for a mayor and members of Parliament, but might not be present at a common council. (Davies’ Southampton, 197.)

[106] Preston Guild Rolls, xvi. xx.

[107] For breach of this custom see Rep. on Markets, 57 (Wallingford), 60-61. (Bosworth, Lafford.)

[108] Preston Guild Rolls, xii.

[109] Ibid. xii. xxiv. xxix. xxx.

[110] Rep. on Markets, 61.

[111] In 1209 there were fifty-six foreigners in the Shrewsbury Guild; forty years later they had increased to 234. (Hibbert’s Influence and Development of English Gilds, 18.)

[112] Many merchants of Lynn were made freemen of Canterbury and also admitted to the Brotherhood of the Monastery, by letters of fraternity which gave them a share in certain spiritual benefits. Is it possible that any trading privileges were connected with this?

[113] As far away as Nottingham oxen and sheep were forestalled and sold to butchers of London. Nott. Rec. iii. 48.

[114] Leet Jurisdiction of Norwich (Selden Soc.), lxxiv.

[115] Select Pleas of the Crown (Selden Soc.), 88-9.

[116] Case of the Abbot of Westminster against Southampton. Rot. Parl. i. 20-21. Trial before the King’s Bench at Westminster in 1201 where the Burgesses of Northampton claim that unjust toll is taken from them by the Abbot of Thorney, which he defends by virtue of custom and an older charter than Northampton. Select Civil Pleas (Selden Soc.), i. 11. See a case at Plymouth, 1495; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 273. Leicester and Nottingham; Ibid. viii. 416-417. Southampton and Bristol; Report on Markets, 56. Winchester; Ibid. 55. See also Ibid. 62; Gross, ii. 257-8; 177-182; 147; 379. A merchant from the Cinque Ports who insisted on the privilege of burgesses to pay no toll with regard to some wool in Blackwell Hall, in the time of Henry the Eighth, had to defend his rights and won his case.

[117] Retaliation in taking of toll is expressly mentioned in the charter of London. Stubbs’ Select Charters, 104.

[118] 1238. Gross, ii. 173-174.

[119] Gross, ii. 256.

[120] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 16. For agreement between Southampton and Portsmouth 1239, Marlborough 1239, Bristol 1260, Netley Abbey 1288, Bishop of Winchester 1312, Lymington 1324, New Sarum 1329, Coventry 1456, see Davies’ Southampton, 225-228; Abbot of Westminster Rot. Parl. i. 20-21. Other instances Rep. on Markets, 40-41. Select Civil Pleas (Selden Soc.), i. 11. Nottingham Rec. i. 55, ii. 349, 362. Gross, ii. 389-90, Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 212.

[121] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 416-7. When a gun was made for Lydd, metal for it was bought at Winchelsea and Hastings. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 516-517, 521.) The Nottingham founder sent to Lincolnshire for his bell metal. (Nott. Rec. ii. 143, 145).

[122] Ibid. ii. 179; iii. 19, 21, 29.

[123] Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 414.

[124] Select Pleas of the Crown (Selden Soc.), i. 89. Rep. on Markets, 50-52.

[125] See Calendar of Letters from Corporation of London. 1350-1370, ed. by Dr. Sharpe.

[126] Piers Ploughman. Pass vii. 250.

[127] These can be traced from 1285 to the time of James I.; they were probably Jews who had come with the Conqueror and were allowed to get land. Survey of Birmingham, 50.

[128] For example William Hollingbroke of Romney, whose wife Joanna sold blankets in 1373, was one of the members sent to Parliament and headed the list of taxpayers in a ward named after him Hollingbroke Ward from 1384 till 1401. Then his widow took his place till she retired from business in 1404, and the once opulent family, for a time represented by a single trader Stephen, seems finally to have become extinct in 1441. The chief position in local trade then passed to the Stuppeneys who settled in the town in 1436 and whose local fame is still recalled by the fact that even now the yearly election of the Mayor of Romney takes place in the church of S. Nicholas at the tomb of one of them who was Jurat of the town.

[129] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 523-531.

[130] Between 1353 and 1380. Ibid. vi. 545. Ibid. iv. 1, 424-8. Ibid. v. 533. The mayor of Liverpool, who in 1380 had property to the value of £28 6s. 4d., made up of domestic utensils, grain in store, wheat sown, nine oxen and cows, six horses, and eighteen pigs, was no doubt a very rich man in his own borough. Picton’s Mem. Liverpool, i. 30.

[131] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 534, 535, 536, 539, 541-3.

[132] Piers Ploughman. Pass. iv. 83. A prosperous cook at Oxford in 1400 married his daughter to one Lelham “Dominus de Grove.” By the marriage contract the cook was to give to Lelham twenty marks to be paid at intervals; to the bride and bridegroom he was to give three tenements in Oxford; he was to make provision for them in his own house for eight years, and when after that they were to be set up in a house of their own he was to provide them with a bed, blankets, sheets, and all other furniture needful for the same bed, a vessel for water, a wine vase, two tablecloths, two towels, twelve silver spoons, two cups, two brass pots, one chawfre, four plates, one dozen vessels for garnishing the supper, two salts, two candle-sticks. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 75-6.

[133] See Nott. Rec. iii. 74-76, 342, 353, 358-60, 461, 463. The holding offices of all kinds by victuallers and brewers was forbidden (Stat. 12, Ed. II. cap. 6. 6 Ri. II. st. 1, cap. 9, H.M.C. ix. 174, xi. 3, 19), as a protection to the people from fraudulent administration of the laws concerning food; but these statutes were everywhere broken.

[134] (See pp. 352-3.)

[135] H.M.C. ix. 173-4.

[136] According to Thorold Rogers (Agric. and Prices, iv. 502-5) about 20 per cent. in excess. Skilled workmen, such as architects, artists, trained clerks, &c., were paid at very modest rates, though sometimes they were given honour by being boarded as gentlemen.

[137] Statutes, 12 Richard II. cap. 3.

[138] Riley’s Liber Albus, 261-2.

[139] For particulars of truck wages see Stat. 4 Edward IV. cap. 1. This payment on the truck system was spoken of as a new thing in the middle of the fifteenth century (Wright’s Political Songs, ii. 285), and is referred to in Libel of English Policy. It was forbidden by town ordinance in Winchester and Worcester. (English Guilds, 352, 383.)

[140] Piers Ploughman. Pass. vii. 213-14.

[141] Piers Ploughman. Passes vii. 215-249.

[142] For a description of the various deceits practised in cloth-making see 3 Richard II. stat. cap. 2. Stat. of Westminster 7 Richard II. cap. 9; 15 Richard II. cap. 10. In 1221 the jurors of Worcester were already complaining that the assize of the breadth of cloth was not observed. Select Pleas of the Crown, Selden Soc. 97.

[143] Piers Ploughman. Pass. i. 33-4.

[144] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 259; xi. 3, 70-73, 111. Davies’ Southampton, 82. Hunt’s Bristol, 74, 97-8.

[145] Survey of Birmingham, 50, 51, 52. See above, p. 63.

[146] Journ. ArchÆol. Ass. xxvii. 110-148. This as one among many proofs tends to show how wealth was passing not so much to the mere land-owners as to the new tenants who were combining the cloth trade with big sheep farms—the enterprising speculators who were on the watch for the cheap lands of ruined lords to increase their own business.

[147] Members of the Pepperers Company began to replace the Jews at the King’s exchange in the thirteenth century (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. x-xii.)

[148] Von Ochenkowski, 112, 125. The upgrowth of the true class of merchants is shewn in the Hull Guild whose ordinances date from 1499 (Lambert’s Guild Life, 157-160) and the York Mistery of Mercers of 1430, (Ibid. 167).

[149] For the forbidding of exportation of gold and silver and the consequent regulations about travellers by sea, see 5 Richard II. St. i. cap. 2.

[150] The Chancellor of England was given power to enquire and judge on dealings of “dry exchange,” and also Justices of the Peace of the neighbouring counties. Stat. 3 Henry VII. cap. 6. Compare Luchaire, Communes FranÇaises, 242-4.

[151] When in the parable of Piers Ploughman the wicked Lady Mede defends corrupt gain by the argument that merchandise cannot exist without meed or reward the answer of Conscience is that trade is nothing but pure barter.

“In merchandise is no meed I may it well avow
It is a permutation apertelich [evidently] one penny-worth for another.

”—Piers Ploughman. Pass. iv. 282, 315, 316.

See also the limits set even on barter—

“For it is simony to sell what sent is of grace
That is wit and water, wind, and fire the forth:
These four should be free to all folk that it needeth.”

Ibid. Pass. x. 55-7. Here, however, he has doubtless in his mind the lord’s mill on the hill or by the stream, the rights of turbary and of gathering wood in the forest, and the great need of the people—protection in the law-courts.

[152] Von Ochenkowski, 165, 167, 245-9.

[153] Piers Ploughman. Passus x. 26.

[154]

“And though they wend by the way the two together,
Though the messenger make his way amid the wheat
Will no wise man wroth be, nor his wed take;
Is not hayward yhote [ordered] his wed for to take;
But if the merchant make his way over men’s corn,
And the hayward happen with him for to meet,
Either his hat or his hood, or else his gloves
The merchant must forego, or the money of his purse.”

—Piers Ploughman. Pass. xiv. 42-50.

[155] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 443. For merchants’ marks in S. George’s Church, Doncaster, see Hunter’s Deanery of Doncaster, i. 14.

[156] Plummer’s Fortescue, 235.

[157] Piers Ploughman. Pass. vii. 278-285.

[158] Ibid. Pass. xiv. 50-51.

[159] See Ship of Fools, Barclay, 43, st. 4.

[160] Lib. Eng. Pol. Wright’s Political Poems, ii. 178.

[161] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 601-4.

[162] Hunt’s Bristol, 75, 93-5; 126-8.

[163] Hunt’s Bristol, 94-5, 108. A Bristol grocer left 350 ounces of silver plate to be divided among his children. Ibid. 108. The first fork we hear of in England in 1443 belonged to a citizen family in York. “Unum par cultellorum vocat’ ‘karving knyves’ et unum par forpicum argenteorum.” (Plumpton Correspondence, xxxiv.)

[164] Piers Ploughman. Passus, xv. 90. For Wood’s account of Oxford houses, see Boase’s Oxford, 48-9.

[165] Boys’ Sandwich, 149, 185, 186.

[166] The plate of S. Mary’s, Sandwich, amounted to about 724 ounces of silver, and there was a good deal of silver gilt; it had splendid brocade of gold of Venice and of Lucca, and a mass of vestments of white damask powdered with gold of Venice, and blue velvet powdered with fleurs de lis, or with moons and stars, and so on. (Boys’ Sandwich, 375.) A burgess of Wycombe, Redehode, fitted up the church with beautiful screens of carved wood, and added other gifts to its store of jewels and gilt crowns for Our Lady, and other ornaments of amber, silver, jet, turquoises, with rich garments and ermine fur, damasks, velvets, silks, a baldachino bearing green branches with birds of gold, magnificent robes of cloth of gold, &c., and splendid plate. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 554-5.)

[167] An ironmonger, Richard Fallande, set up a tablet in Hospital Hall to remind the townsfolk of the dangers and terrors of the old ford, of passengers drowned, of poor people pitilessly turned back, or wayfarers robbed of hood or girdle to satisfy the ferry-men’s greed. People were constantly drowned and

“Few folke there were coude that way wende
But they waged a wed or payed of her purse
And if it were a begger had breed in her bagge
He schulde be ryght soone i bid for to goo aboute
And of the poor penyles the hireward wold habbe
A hood or a girdel and let him goo withoute.”

(English Illustrated Magazine, May 1889, p. 951.) For Rochester Bridge, see Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 285.

[168] Davies’ Southampton, 115.

[169] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 247. For similar bequests, Ibid. x. 4, p. 529-30. Ibid. ix. 208-10. The Common Weal (ed. E. Lamond), 18, 19.

[170] Ibid. xi. 7, 169, 174, 175, 180-1. Ibid. ix. 57, 275, 137, 145. Davies’ Walks through York, 30-1.

[171] Piers Ploughman. Pass. i. 22.

[172] See the surprising lists of these stores in the Paston Letters, iii. 312, 270-4, 297-8, 282-9, 436, 313. Compare vol. i. p. 259.

[173] Hist. MSS. Com. x. 4, 297. Paston Letters, iii. 23, 35, 46, 49, 219, 258. See vol. i. 260-2.

[174] Paston Letters, iii. 114-15.

[175] Paston Letters, iii. 194. Hist. MSS. Com. vii. 599.

[176] Richard the Redeless, Passus iii. 145, &c.

[177] Plumpton Correspondence, xxxix. xl.

[178] Sometimes their servants also reached posts of importance. John Russel, one of Fastolf’s servants, paid a sum down to be appointed Searcher at Yarmouth. And Thomas Fry, a steward of the Berkeleys under Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth, was “raised by them to be of principal authority and in commission of the peace of the city of Coventry, and a steward of great power in that Corporation.” (Berkeleys, ii. 215.)

[179] The Poles of Hull were rising into importance. (Paston Letters, ii. 210.) Sir John Fastolf possibly sprang from this class, for his relation Richard Fastolf was a London tailor. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 265.) Two London drapers, a mercer and a grocer were among the forty-seven Knights of the Bath created at the coronation of Elizabeth, queen of Edward the Fourth. (Three XV. century Chronicles, 80.) See the marriage of Whittingham, Mayor of London, whose son entered the Royal Household (Verney Papers, 15-17); of Verney, mayor in 1465 and knighted in 1471 (Ibid. 13, 22); of Sir William Plumpton (Plumpton Correspondence, xxvii.); of Sir Maurice Berkeley (Hunt’s Bristol, 101).

[180] Paston Letters, iii. 383.

[181] For the whole story see Paston Letters, ii. 341, 347, 350, 363-5.

[182] Paston Letters, iii. 109, 219, 278.

[183] Nottingham Records, i. 169.

[184] Plumpton Correspondence, 12. The lady was sister to Godfrey Green, who seems to have been of good family, possibly a connexion of Sir William Plumpton (17 note). Green did a good deal of business for Plumpton (22-3), and was one of the trustees of a settlement, lxxii. note.

[185] See ClÉment, Jacques Coeur.

[186] Ibid. 134.

[187] ClÉment, Jacques Coeur.

[188] (See p. 327).

[189] See Hist. of Eng. People, ii. 142-3, 151, 164-6, 170-2, 188. Brinklow’s writings afford a very good illustration of the radical temper in politics which at this time was developed in the towns.

[190] Stat. 3 Henry VII. cap. 11. The Common Weal, 88-90.

[191] It was often forbidden to employ any woman save the wife or daughter of the master (Hunt’s Bristol, 82; Riley’s Mem. 217).

[192] Lambert’s Guild Life, 238-9; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 11, 87.

[193] Kent had sunk from the fifth to the tenth place in wealth among counties during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1454 the wool of Lincolnshire, Shropshire, and the Cotswolds, represented the best, and that of Kent almost the worst quality; this may account for the decline of Canterbury. The difference in quality would of course tell much more on the prosperity of a district when the home manufacture of cloth was developed.

[194] Schanz, i. 610-11 (1455); 33 Henry VI. cap. 4; Rot. Parl. v. 324.

[195] Schanz, i. 600; Stat. 11 Henry VII. cap. 27.

[196] Lib. Cus. 127. I suspect that the question of these fulling-mills in London was much complicated by the supply of water becoming inadequate to the needs of the growing city, and the great resentment felt by the fullers of cloth against the intrusion of the cap-makers on their domain over the running streams. There is some evidence that this was the case, and it is probable that the want of water-power was one of the causes which drove the woollen manufacture from certain towns.

[197] 22 Edward IV. cap. 5. There had been trouble about fulling machinery in London as early as 1298. (Lib. Cust. Rolls, Series, 127-9.)

[198] In 1416 £22 6s. 8d. was received as a fine for offences from foreigners in Romney. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 539.) In Sandwich the tax on foreigners was assessed by the mayor and jurats. Every indweller having aliens in his service was to keep back as much of their wages as would pay his tax. (Boys’ Sandwich, 787.)

[199] See Schanz, i. 414-6.

[200] Hunt’s Bristol, 82, 93, 111. The complaint seems to have been against master-weavers who employed their own servants and not the Bristol journeymen. See Rymer’s Foedera, v. 137.

[201] See Hibbert’s Influence of Eng. Gilds, 64.

[202] See the Commons’ Petition in Parliament, 50 Edward the Third (1376), Rolls of Parliament, vol. ii., p. 332. “Et come les bones gentz des touz Citees & Borghs parmy ceste terre si pleignent durement, ~q ... toute manere de gentz Aliens, & autres qi ne sont pas Frauncs en les dites Citees & Borghs, poent venir illeo~qs demourrer auxi longement come lour plest, & tenir overtz Hostiels, & recepter ~q con~qs persones qe lour plerra: Et s’ils eiount ascunes Marchandises ils les vendent as autres Estraungers, pur revendre si ~bn par retail come autre ~qcon~q manere ~q lour mieltz semble pur lours Profitz demeisne. Par qi les Marchauntz Denizeins sont trop anientiz, la Terre voide de Moneie, les closures des Citees & Borghs desapparaillez, la Navye de la terre ~bn pres destruite, le Conseil de la terre par tout descovert, toute manere d’estraunge Marchaundise grandement encherie; & qe pys est, par tieles privees receites les Enemys auxint priveez ou ~q les loialx Liges: De qi n’ad mestier de autres tesmoignes fors ~q sentir & vewe ~q molte app’tement en touz degreez la provent.”

[203] Stat. 1 Richard III. cap. 9.

[204] Stat. 1 Richard III. cap. 9. About 1528 the London shoemakers complain that whereas the King had granted leave that a fraternity of forty-four foreigners might exercise the craft of shoemakers in the city, by colour of this grant 220 foreign householders employing over 400 apprentices and servants, had set up in the business. An amusing account is given of the attitude of this foreign company to the English searchers of the craft. There had once been 140 Englishmen of the cordwainers’ livery but now there were only twenty, and the wives and children of those who had been ruined were turned into water-carriers and labourers. These foreigners did not come to settle, but having made their fortunes went off home, while others took their places. (Schanz, ii. 598-600.)

[205] Schanz, ii. 596-8. They pray that the former laws may be put in force, ordering strangers only to dwell in the houses of Englishmen, to sell only in gross and not by retail, and to remain only a month in any town after their first coming.

[206] In the same way Bristol in 1461 forbade its weavers to employ their wives, daughters, and maidens at the loom, lest the King’s people likely to do the King service in his wars should lack employment. (Hunt’s Bristol, 82.)

[207] The customs of Coventry in this respect are exceedingly interesting.

[208] Stat. 25 Henry VIII. cap. 18.

[209] Stat. 21 Henry VIII. cap. 12. In the reign of Henry the Eighth there were complaints that Worcester, Evesham, Droitwich, Kidderminster, and Bromsgrove, had fallen into decay from the growth of the free-traders. (Stat. 25 Henry VIII. cap. 18.) See also the coverlet makers of York. (34 and 35 Henry VIII. cap. 10.)

[210] Piers Ploughman. Passus ix. 187.

“‘It is nothing for love they labour thus fast,
But for fear of famine, in faith,’ said Piers.”

Passus ix. 214, 215.

[211]

“Fridays and fasting days a farthingworth of mussels
Were a feast for such folk, or so many cockles.”

Pass. x. 94, 95; see 72-87. Pollard’s Miracle Plays, 31-2.

[212] Children who had served in husbandry till the age of twelve “shall abide at the same labour without being put to any mystery or handicraft” (Stat. 12 Rich. II. cap. 5).

[213] It is important in the town ordinances to observe the effect of local circumstances. For instance, in Coventry the weavers were allowed in 1424 to take as many apprentices as they liked, “sine contradictione alicujus,” while the number in other trades was limited. This was just such an order as might be expected of a town council of rich merchant clothiers and drapers.

[214] See Chap. V.

[215] The customs of Norwich, 1340, forced some responsibility for these servants on the masters. (Leet Jurisdiction (Selden Soc.), lxvi.)

[216] No general laws for the whole kingdom which seriously limited the employment of apprentices were passed before the sixteenth century, but the various towns made such local laws as seemed necessary. In most cases masters were bound to enrol their apprentices in the town court; and at the end of the fifteenth century the Town Councils and the Guilds were making serious efforts to enforce the law. Miss Dormer Harris tells me that the capper’s apprentices in Coventry were bound by surety for £5 to fulfil their covenant. If an apprentice left his master before the seven years were over, the master might not take another till the time had expired unless he delivered the £5 to the keepers for the use of the craft. The masters of crafts there appear to have been very reluctant to take apprentices, especially after 1494.

[217] In Norwich in spite of the statutes of 1436 and 1503 (15 Henry VI. cap. 6; 19 Henry VII. cap. 7) the crafts persisted in making rules by which apprentices were compelled to pay 20s. or 30s. for entry into the common hall (compare the composition of 1415 in the Norwich documents)—a fine which meant that the craftsmen were practically denied the freedom of the city, and therefore the position of master, and were thus forced to swell the body of journeymen. An Act passed in 1531 ordered that no apprentice should pay more than 2s. 6d. for entry into the common hall; or 3s. 4d. at the end of the term for the freedom of the company; but the companies evaded this law by asking only the statute sum for the freedom of the company, but making the candidates swear they would not trade without license, for which they had to pay at the company’s pleasure. This was again forbidden by Henry in 1537 (Blomefield, iii. 181-2). Among the weavers of Newcastle in 1527 all who had finished their apprenticeship were admitted to membership on payment of 13s. 4d., but any man of the craft desirous to be of the fellowship a brother thereof, with power to set up shop, had to pay £20 (Newcastle Guilds). The London grocers in 1345 paid 20s. for each apprentice; the apprentice who wished to belong to the fraternity paid 40s. on leaving his master (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 11, 12).

[218] Compare Riley’s Mem. Lond. 244, 181, 278, 354. Black’s Leathersellers, 39.

[219] In London no apprentice after his term was to use his trade till he had been sworn to the franchise. (Liber Albus, 272.)

[220] Journeymen among the cutlers and founders who had not served their time as apprentices could only get such wages as the overseers of the trade allowed to them after examination. (Riley’s Mem. Lond. 439, 514.) The system was probably widespread to judge from the many ordinances concerning wages. Unskilled journeymen must be spoken of in the ordinances of the bladesmiths. (Riley’s Mem. 570.) For serving-men who worked by the day for the glovers see ibid. 246. In 1449 at Coventry a reasonable wage seems to have been 4d. a day; but a capper’s journeyman in 1496 got 12d. a week working twelve hours a day (reference to Coventry records given me by Miss Dormer Harris).

[221] 7 Henry IV. cap. 17.

[222] The law was done away with when it turned to the hurt of the employers. In a later state of the cloth industry some of the old centres of industry such as London and Norwich and Bristol found their wealth decayed; and decided that their trade was starved for want of workmen while the young people were growing up to idleness and vice. Then the masters, actually threatened with the loss of their manufacturing industries, insisted on new laws allowing them to take apprentices without regard to the Act of Henry the Fourth (11 Henry VII. cap. 11; 12 Henry VII. cap. 1).

[223] Hudson’s Notes about Norwich; in Norfolk and Norwich Arch. Soc. vol. xii.

[224] English Guilds, 284-6, 337, 350. See in Exeter the relations of the Tailors’ Guild to the suburbs. (Ibid. 310.) Possibly the system may even then have been like the ordinary system which generally prevailed till the end of the last century. In Dereham in Norfolk the site of a line of hovels is still marked in which a group of shoemakers lived and worked for the Norwich masters, whose collector came round every week to collect the finished work. A rich farmer seems to have served as a sort of contractor in the tailoring trade; the upper floor of his house immediately below the roof formed a long room without any partitions in which ten or twelve tailors worked by day and slept by night, and the contractor dispatched their work to the Norwich dealer.

[225] Chap. XII. p. 385. See also the monopoly of the York weavers in the twelfth century, with the control of trade in the whole county which it must have implied. (Gross, i. 108, note.)

[226] English Guilds, 383.

[227] Von Ochenkowski (Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, 128-133) scarcely seems to distinguish sufficiently between the objections to the competition of the dealers or masters from the suburbs, and to the employment by town manufacturers of labour outside the town. The resistance would necessarily have come from different quarters and for different reasons.

[228] Cf. The Common Weal (ed. E. Lamond), 49.

[229] The well-known rioter is described by Skelton. Poems (ed. Dyce), ii. 43-4.

[230] This was sometimes done by royal charter. (Hibbert’s Influence of Eng. Guilds, 96.) All the facts are against the theory of Marx that the merchant was by some hostile force prevented from buying labour, though allowed to buy other commodities. The limitations were of the merchants’ and dealers’ own making for their own purposes. It is equally improbable that the guild organization excluded division of labour in the workshop. (Marx, Capital, &c. i. 352.)

[231] This uniformity is well illustrated in the later ordinances of the Hull Guilds. (Lambert, Two Thousand Years of Guild Life; Gross, ii. 272.)

[232] Clode, Merchant Tailors, p. 2.

[233] In 1311 the “hatters” and the “dealers who bought and sold hats” in London were two quite distinct callings. (Riley’s Mem. 90.) The distinction was well known in 1327 between the saddlers and the various orders of workmen employed in manufacturing for them. (Ibid. 157-8.)

[234] A separation of the guilds into these groups is sufficient of itself to shew of how little value the generalizations of Marx are as to the relations of the crafts to capital; and how misleading it is to represent the guilds as providing the main opposition to merchants or capitalists, especially in the matter of refusing the supply of labour. (See Marx i. 352.)

[235] Seligman (Two Chapters on MediÆval Guilds, 69) states that the crafts were not charitable associations giving relief to poor members till the fifteenth century. Out of twelve crafts mentioned in English Guilds, nine gave relief to poor, and three do not mention it. For the Braelers in London, 1355, see Riley’s Mem. 277; the White tawyers, 1346, ibid. 232; the Lorimers, 1261, Liber Cust. 78-80. Most of the ordinances in Riley’s Mem. make no mention of relief, but the ordinances are so manifestly incomplete—merely additions or alterations made for some special purpose—that no argument can be drawn from them. The vast majority of religious or social guilds had some charitable provisions, and in many cases these were certainly trade guilds. The probability seems to lie on the side of help given to poor members from the first.

[236] The way in which the guilds fought in defence of their voluntary courts of arbitration, and the objection of the towns to these, is in itself proof enough of the importance to their members of a tribunal, however voluntary and arbitrary, which might relieve them from the interference on every occasion of the local magistrates, and the party politics of the town. The advantages of association in case of being called before the greater courts is evident from the account of mediÆval procedure given in Sir J. Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law. The illustrations afforded by the Paston Letters are without number. See Manorial Pleas (Selden Soc.), 136. For the heavy cost involved by the corrupt practices of lawyers, judges, pleaders, and attorneys, see the action brought in 1275 by an advocate against an employer who had withdrawn from the case; the advocate sues for his fees and also for having been prevented by the stopping of the case from getting a very large sum of money out of the other side. (Ibid. 155-6.)

[237] It was a disgrace to the lord if any of his “livery” appeared in the law courts. The protection extended to the members of a craft was really efficient. See the punishment of a grocer who in 1404 had turned another of the company out of his house. (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 93.)

[238] The grocers in London claimed control over every one who kept a shop of spicery even if he did not wear their livery (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 66); but those who refused the livery were fined. The liveried members paid 2s. 6d. for the dinner, and “every man out of the clothing as us seemed they might bear.” (Ibid. ii. 239, 258.) A list was kept of those who wore the livery, those who wore gowns, and householders and bachelors not in livery. (Ibid. 175-177.)

[239] These divisions must be taken in a general sense. Five orders are mentioned among the Merchant Taylors (Clode, 8-9); but these really fall into three main groups. For our present purpose the “Bachelors,” an intermediate rank formed in some of the richer crafts, may be omitted.

[240] See Du Cange.

[241] Riley’s Mem. Lond. 258. See the case of the London bakers where a special ordinance was needed to make the servants liable to punishment for the grossest frauds in the absence of the masters. (Ibid. 181-2.)

[242] If a craftsman not admitted to the freedom of the guild took work, the customer in case of fraud had only the protection of the common law, and could not appeal to the town or guild ordinances. (English Guilds, 322.)

[243] From time to time there were protests on the part of the members of the craft against the power of the oligarchy. There was such a case in the London Grocers’ Company, when an attempt was made in 1444 to limit the power of the wardens in appointing new members. (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 123.)

[244] English Guilds, 30, 35, 289. Twelve of the discreetest of the smiths at Coventry elected the keepers, and formed the court to try offenders.

[245] Lambert’s Guild Life, 113, 129; English Guilds, 156, 159, 162, 217, 160, 169, 31, 164, 167, 318, 445. The weavers’ guild was governed by a council of twenty-four as early as the thirteenth century. (Lib. Cus. 424.) In religious or social guilds there were cases where the election of officers was made by the assent of all the brethren (English Guilds, 47, 49, 148, 213, 232), or “with the assent of the elder part of the brethren and sistern of the guild” (ibid. 150); but the prevailing custom was the appointment of picked men to choose the officers. (English Guilds, 62, 64, 71, 75, 83, 89, 91, 97, 119, 266.) In one case “all the brethren whom the alderman should send for” were to elect officers. (Ibid. 35.) In another the alderman chose two men, the company chose two others, these four chose two more, and the six elected officers. In a later form copied for another craft instead of the “company” the “masters of the guild” chose two men. (Ibid. 276.) In one case a new provost was chosen by the four provosts of the past year. (Ibid. 186.) In the Grocers’ Company the wardens appointed their successors. (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 10, 14, 18.) A similar custom prevailed in the Southampton Guild Merchant.

[246] Riley’s Mem. 348. In the Cordwainers’ Guild of Exeter (1481) two of the wardens were chosen from the shop-holders, and two from the journeymen. (English Guilds, 332.) It would seem that among the coruesers of Bristol the journeymen had a certain recognized position, the visible sign of which was their having the right to provide lights carried in the municipal processions at certain feasts; and when in 1454 “divers debates and murmurs had arisen between the masters and crafts of the coruesers and the journeymen,” and the masters and craft-holders sought to deprive the journeymen of this right, the attempt was vigorously and successfully resisted.

[247] In Ipswich when a youth in 1448 was apprenticed to a barber for seven years it was stipulated that he should get suitable clothing, shoes, bedding, board, and chastisement. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 259.) At Romney in 1451 it was decreed that at the end of his service the apprentice should receive from his master 10s. or a bed of that value. (Ibid. v. 543). A decree against using daggers or knives or making any affray was limited by the phrase, “provided always that it shall be lawful to any inhabitant to correct his servant or apprentice according to the law.” (English Guilds, 390.) But on the other hand when a master among the tailors at Exeter chastised his servant so far as to bruise his arm and break his head, he had not only to give a fine to the craft but to give the servant 15s. and a month’s board and to pay his doctor. (Ibid. 322.)

[248] A master retiring from trade might sell and devise the services of his apprentice to a new master, but if there was any suspicion that a sale had been so managed that the apprentice lost credit for one or two years of the service which he had actually fulfilled both the masters were deprived of the freedom of the city and craft. (Paston Letters, i. 378.)

[249] See note A at end of chapter.

[250] Statutes 6 Henry VI. cap. 3.

[251] Statutes 12 Richard II. cap. 3.

[252] English Guilds, 395, 285-6; Hist. MSS. Com. v. 530; Riley’s Mem. Lond. 246.

[253] Riley’s Mem. Lond. 307; English Guilds, 285-6. Piece-work was common in many trades. In Newcastle the guild of fullers and dyers in their ordinances of 1477 regulated the price of fulling and shearing the various kinds of cloth by piece-work at so much a yard. The weavers also worked by the piece. The Newcastle slaters had been formed into a guild and had ordinances in 1451 with similar regulations; the bricklayers and plasterers were in a guild in 1454 (Newcastle Guilds). There was piece-work among the tawyers. (Riley’s Mem. Lond. 330-1.) In Winchester the weavers probably worked at from 3d. to 4d. a day, as they were ordered to take from Hallow Eve to the Annunciation for their work but 1s. 6d., and from the Annunciation to Hallow Eve but 2s.

[254] In 1265 Leicester weavers were allowed by the guild to weave by night as well as by day. (Gross, ii. 144.)

[255] Riley’s Mem. Lond. 232-3. This was true of a great number of trades. (Ibid. 244, 245-7, 258, &c. For Lincoln tailors, English Guilds, 183. Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 20-21.) In this last company public notice was given of a servant who had left his master to prevent his being engaged by another.

[256] Hibbert’s Influence of English Guilds, 64.

[257] Riley’s Mem. 247-8, 250-1, 256.

[258] Lib. Cus. 84.

[259] Riley’s Mem. 495.

[260] Mem. Lond. 495-6. The friars from time to time appear as supporters of the poorer people. In Coventry the White Friars was the meeting place for the fellowship of the crafts and for the tilers’ company in the fifteenth century; and Friar John Bredon played the part of a local agitator. The policy of the Friars was often, as in Canterbury, part of a general antagonism to other religious establishments. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 98.)

[261] Mem. Lond. 543-4. The suppression of the May-day festival of the journeymen shearmen in Shrewsbury was very possibly a similar putting down of confederations and conspiracies. (Hibbert’s Inf. and Dev. of Eng. Gilds, 120-2.) See also the Bristol Coruesers, p. 119, n. 1.

[262] Riley’s Mem. Lond. 609-12, 653. Clode, 4, 22-29.

[263] The town records of Shrewsbury note in 1516 a reward to the king’s messenger bearing letters concerning the insurrection of the apprentices of the City of London. (Owen’s Shrewsbury, i. 284.)

[264] See p. 102, note 2.

[265] See Note A, p. 160.

[266] English Guilds, cxxi. For an exception at Hull see Lambert’s Guild Life, 188. For Canterbury see H.M.C. ix. 173-4.

[267] “The people must cheerfully maintain the government, within whose functions however it does not lie to support the people.” Cleveland’s Presidential Address. Mar. 6, 1893.

[268] Stat. 11 Henry VI. cap. 12.

[269] Nott. Rec. i. 268-272, 316-318. See also Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 582.

[270] Piers Ploughman. Pass. iv. 80-118. There is an instance of a guild in which no parson, baker, or wife, was admitted. (Eng. Gilds, 271).

[271] Piers Ploughman. Pass. iii. 222.

[272] Riley’s Mem. 182. A summary of the conflict on the price of wine is given in Schanz, i. 642-50. By 5 Richard II. Stat. i. cap. 4 if a vintner refused to sell at the right price the mayor might deliver the wine to any buyer at statute cost.

[273] Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i., xvii., xviii.; Schanz, i. 651.

[274] Norwich Town Close Evidences (Brit. Museum.), 16.

[275] Riley’s Memorials, 174-5. Many other examples might be given. A later instance occurs when the London Corporation brought a complaint against the society of hoastmen in 1603 about the raising of the price of coals in London and the scanty supply, so that “without great difficulty the city cannot be provided sufficiently of sea-coals for the poor.” The fraternity of hoastmen make a statement of their reasons concerning the prices of sea-coals to the Privy Council in answer to the complaint of the Mayor and Aldermen. (Newcastle Guilds, 44.)

[276] The chief objection of the public to the “unreasonable ordinances” by which the crafts closed their corporations was the “common damage to the people,” probably as tending to raise prices. (P. 102, n. 2.) The Coventry Leet opposed the crafts in this matter.

[277] These grants were all of early date, in the twelfth century. Ashley, Woollen Industry, 15-17; Madox, 26, 191, etc., 212, etc., 283-4. The Nottingham weavers paid a rent of 40s. for their guild to the King from the time of Henry the Second. For this they raised a contribution from each loom, and obtained a grant that those who paid might work in the outskirts of the town. (Nott. Rec. iii. 27, 58, ii. 36.)

[278] Riley’s Lib. Cus. 130 etc.

[279] Ibid. 121, 123. The survival of the weavers’ court may be seen in 1321. In certain cases where the bureller was fined by the Mayor, the weaver was punished by the bailiffs of his own guild. (Ibid. 422-3.)

[280] Riley’s Lib. Cus. 423.

[281] In 1327 Edward the Third granted a charter to the girdlers of London, which took in all the girdlers of the kingdom, ordered them under the same rules, and set them under the Mayors of whatever city they might be in. (Riley’s Mem. 154-5).

[282] Some charters were given by Edward the Fourth and later Kings to companies of Tailors, Merchants, and so on, which gave them an existence independent of the town, and power to make their own ordinances. (See p. 173.) No list has been made out of these companies, and the subject needs investigation. From the cases which I have met with I think it may probably turn out that such charters were generally given to companies with a foreign trade, and given for reasons referring to that trade. The second charter of the Merchant Tailors in 1390 allowed them to make ordinances among themselves and of their own authority. (Clode, 3.) This charter seems to have freed them from the Mayor, but if so they were again put under his control in 1436. (Ibid. 5, see pp. 189-191, 193.) This was followed by a violent attempt in 1442 to have a Mayor of their own company, which failed and caused much anger. It is evident from the charter of Henry the Seventh, in 1502, which confirmed their independence, that they dealt in “all and every kinds of merchandises” “in all quarters and kingdoms of the world.” (Ibid. 7, 195.) By this they were again given full power to make ordinances for themselves without interference, so long as these were not contrary to the laws of the kingdom nor to the prejudice of the Mayor; and the Mayor was wholly deprived of the power of search among their subjects—a most important measure, since the master and wardens “had a great number of householders with their servants to rule and govern.” (Ibid. 197-200.)

[283] Though guilds were forbidden in Norwich they existed, doubtless by the payment of annual fines. In the case of the tanners the complaint in 1287 against them was clearly that in case of disputes they “made plaint” to their own aldermen and not to the bailiffs. (Hudson’s Leet Jurisdiction in Norwich (Selden Soc.) p. 13.) The cobblers had apparently an important guild from the money paid; the saddlers, tanners, and fullers had also guilds in 1292. (Ibid. 39, 42, 43.) The King reserved the power of creating guilds, and it was possibly to prevent his exercising it that towns like Norwich and Coventry obtained by charter the right to have no guilds. Such a privilege freed them from the fear of fraternities independent of the municipality, while it left them free to recognise informally associations whose recurring fines were really the tribute paid for existence.

[284] Some of those so-called religious, but really trading guilds, have been identified. It is clear that the guild of S. Benedict at Lincoln was a society of traders or merchants, who traded on loans from the common fund, paying back half of the increase they made on it. (English Guilds, 174.) Among other instances see the Guild of S. John Baptist at Hull (Lambert’s Guild Life, 112, etc. 118, 232, 233); Corpus Christi (ibid. 124); Holy Trinity (ibid. 126.) A very curious and interesting account of the formal founding of the Pepperers’ Company as the Fraternity of S. Anthony in the Monastery of Bury, 1345, is given in Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i., xvii. Compare the records given on 8-15. It had become the Grocers’ Company by 1373. The Drapers’ Guild in Shrewsbury was originally the Guild of the Trinity. (Hibbert’s Inf. and Dev. of Eng. Guilds, 32.) For other instances see Chapter V. The custom was so common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that it is highly probable that under any stress of difficulty it would have been resorted to in earlier days. The artizans must have been fully aware of the fact disclosed to us by the two forms of summonses for guild returns issued in 1388, one for the religious and one for the trading guilds—the fact that the two forms of association were regarded in a different way by the government. Some guilds are avowedly of a double character. (English Guilds, 126-128, 179-185.)

[285] See note A at end of chapter.

[286] Riley’s Mem. 627; see also 118, 120-1, 153-4.

[287] Riley’s Mem. 341.

[288] In the second half of the fourteenth century the London guild ordinances are in the main simply rules against bad or deceitful wares. See the chandlers, curriers and pelterers, cappers, potters, &c. Riley’s Mem. 118, 358; Lib. Cus. 94, 101; goldsmiths, Schanz, i. 613-4.

[289] Mem. Lond. 293.

[290] Lib. Cus. 100.

[291] Mem. Lond. 280-2.

[292] Riley’s Liber Custumarum, 101. See the case of the weavers infra p. 160, where the craft tried to shorten hours and the town forbade it.

[293] Ordinances of Pewterers. Riley’s Mem. 243. See also glovers and hatters, &c., 239, 246.

[294] Ibid. 226.

[295] Riley’s Mem. 226-7.

[296] Ibid. 218.

[297] Annual congregations made by the masons were forbidden by statute of Richard II., continued by later Kings (3 Henry VI., cap. i.). The anxiety of the government was quickened by the number of tilers who took part in the Peasants’ Revolt. (Stubbs, ii. 496.) Cf. The Common Weal (ed. Miss Lamond), 88-9.

[298] Statutes of the Realm, 3 Edward IV. cap. 4; ibid. 4 Edward IV. cap. 1. A law of 1410 withdrew from the worsted-weavers and merchants of Norwich the supervision of the cloth trade that had been granted to them in 1348 (Ashley, Woollen Industry, 54-5); and handed over to the mayor, sheriffs, and commonalty of Norwich, the right of measuring and sealing all worsteds made in Norwich or Norfolk. (Blomefield, iii. 125.) A later law enacted that “the worsted shearers in Norwich shall make no ordinance but such as the Mayor and Alderman shall think necessary.” (Stat. 1494, cap. xi.) In the fifteenth century the Privy Council took away from the Bakers’ and Tailors’ Crafts in London the right of search in their trades which had been granted to their Wardens, and restored it to the Mayor, and ordered the crafts to obey the Mayor after the old usages, customs, and laws of London. 1442. Proceedings Privy Council, v. 196; Seligman, Med. Guilds, 82; Schanz, i. 617.

[299] The mayor and aldermen of London had full jurisdiction over all the various trades quite early in the fourteenth century. Two master-masons were reconciled before the mayor of London in 1298. (Mem. Lond. 38.) For early part of the fourteenth century see ibid. 90, 118, 120, 153-4, 216, 156, 178, 245-6.

[300] In “the ordinances of the Hull Guilds from 1490 to 1723 there is no authorization by any but the mayor of the town.” (Lambert’s Guild Life, 188.) For municipal authority over the Shrewsbury Guilds see Hibbert, 40, 85-6. For Norwich, Blomefield, iii. 130.

[301] A law of 1413 ordered the registration of charters and approval of ordinances and bye-laws—a law which was repeated by the Statute of Henry VI. to prevent the masters of guilds and fraternities making ordinances to the damage of the King or the people, when it was again decreed that all their rules should be certified and registered by Justices of the Peace or by the chief magistrates of cities or towns. 15 Henry VI., cap. 6. See also 19 Henry VII., cap. 7.

[302] English Guilds, 283-286.

[303] Ricart, 78. The examples are too numerous to give. But see the ordinances drawn up in 1448 for the Tailors’ Guild of Lynn by the Mayor and the Council. It was ordered that no new tailor should set up in business unless he was considered “sufficient in conning” not only by the two head men of his craft, but also by the mayor. Every tailor admitted to the guild had to pay a fine as entrance fee to the Mayor and another to the community, as well as his payment to the Guild; and paid a yearly fee to the town for any sewers and apprentices whom he employed. Quarrels between shapers and sewers were to be settled by the Mayor and the head men of the craft. If a tailor sent home an ill-fitting garment the buyer might bring his complaint to the Mayor’s Court, and claim amends before the Mayor and the head men of the craft on condition of paying a fine of 3s. 4d. if he did not prove his case. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 165-6.)

[304] Miss Dormer Harris has kindly given me the rules at Coventry as to how a craft was to proceed to the punishment of a member in 1518. The master of the craft was first to ask a “reasonable penalty;” if the offender refused to pay, the master was to apply again after three or four days and have the refusal recorded; and in case the refusal was repeated a second time he and three or four of the “honest men” of the craft were to come to the mayor; and the mayor and one of the justices were to command the offender to pay a double penalty; and if he refused yet again, to commit him to prison until it was paid to the craft. At the same time the offender was to desire the master to be “good master to him and his good lover.” If the penalty were more than would suffice for a pound of wax, the remainder was to go to common box, i.e., the city funds.

[305] The tilers were strictly ruled by statute as to how the various tiles should be made, thatch tile, roof tile, gutter tile, and so on; how the earth should be prepared and how big the tiles should be. Justices of the Peace, that is in towns the Mayor and the Aldermen, were to hear the cases against offenders and appoint searchers. (17 Edward IV. cap. 4.)

[306] Mem. Lond. 308.

[307] English Guilds, 386, 398-9.

[308] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 174.

[309] Nott. Rec. i. 197. In Winchester every bureller had to give one cloth yearly to the King’s ferm. (English Guilds, 351.)

[310] Enforced contribution of crafts was common; and the cost considerable. (Gross, ii. 51; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 166, 225; ibid. ix. 173-5.) See Kingdon, ii. 260, 318, &c. In Coventry there were complaints in 1494 that the dyers, skinners, fishmongers, &c., were so “self-willed” that they could not be made to contribute to pageants. See Hibbert’s Inf. and Dev. of Eng. Gilds, 63. For the whole question of plays and pageants see Davidson’s Studies in Eng. Mystery Plays, printed by Yale University, 1892. The Corpus Christi processions became after the order of the Council of Vienne, 1318, exceedingly popular; the guilds of Corpus Christi, having charge of the procession, not of the plays (91-2), were probably generally composed of the upper class of people. A list of Miracle Plays and Mysteries has been made for students by F. Stoddard, California University, 1887.

[311] Von Ochenkowski thinks the relation of municipalities and crafts depended on the relative force of the three principles then contending for the mastery—feudal rights, the king’s will, and the common law; in the conflicts between guilds and towns he sees the alternating forces of the king’s law and of the common law. (Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, 59-60.) Many homelier causes than this were probably at work.

[312] The surprising number of guilds formed under Richard the Second and during the next hundred years must strike any one who looks at the town records. As a single example see the list given for Shrewsbury in Hibbert’s Inf. and Dev. of Eng. Gilds, 58-9. In many cases it can be proved that the new fraternity was really an old one, but its re-constitution is as important as a new creation.

[313] Boys’ Sandwich, 678, 680.

[314] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 173-4. “Provided always that any such masters so elected shall be none of the same crafts or mysteries whereof they shall be elected.”

[315] Boys, 685, &c.

[316] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 173-5, 148. Sometimes wealthy guilds united to gain a monopoly of power in the borough. There was a tendency to combine even in the poorer social or religious fraternities. (Eng. Gilds, 219.) A decline took place in the number of miracle plays for the crafts. Pollard’s Miracle Plays, xxx.

[317] See the curious provision made by the mayor of London at the request of the farriers to get their bills paid. (Riley’s Mem. Lond. 294.)

[318] English Guilds, 285.

[319] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 174.

[320] Shillingford’s Letters (Camden Soc.) 4.

[321] Though this body of Twelve appears first in the records in 1344, it is impossible to doubt that it was of earlier origin, in view of the custom of other boroughs. In the same way the notices in 1288, 1301, and later, of the electing jury do not by any means imply that these were its first appearances, and all analogy would point to an opposite conclusion.

[322] Freeman’s Exeter, 147, 149.

[323] Mr. Freeman seems to suggest that the Council of Exeter was formed by the habitual summoning of certain members of the Assembly to advise the mayor, and speaks of it as “a committee of the whole body.” (Ibid. p. 152.) It is, however, not yet certainly ascertained whether the evidence bears out this view as regards Exeter.

[324] The regular list of recorders or law officers begins in 1354. Freeman’s Exeter, 154.

[325] Freeman’s Exeter, 146-7. English Guilds, 303, 307, 308.

[326] Both these classes admitted “out-brothers,” probably “foreigners,” who paid half fees.

[327] English Guilds, 313-316.

[328] Ibid. 318, 324, 327.

[329] Ibid. 321-2.

[330] His first charter to the Tailors was in 1461 (Gross i. 124 n. 2); the second in 1466. A different instance occurs in Shrewsbury, when Edward the Fourth gave in 1461 a charter to the Fraternity of the Blessed Trinity making it into the company of the Drapers. (Hibbert’s Influence and Development of English Guilds, 59.)

[331] English Guilds, 301, 307, 310. Gross i. 124.

[332] English Guilds, 309-311.

[333] English Guilds, 302-304.

[334] Ibid. 303.

[335] English Guilds, 304-8.

[336] English Guilds, 324.

[337] Ibid. 326.

[338] English Guilds, 323.

[339] Ibid. 331-4.

[340] Ibid. 334-7.

[341] This forms the earliest account we possess of the costs of a private bill. Ibid. 308-311.

[342] Freeman’s Exeter, 146-154.

[343] English Guilds, 328.

[344] See Chapter XIII. p. 352-4.

[345] In 1376 the judges held that no guild could be established save by royal charter. (Seligman in his Med. Guilds p. 66, quotes Year Book 49, Edward III. fol. 36.) On the other hand in 1376 the commons presented a petition complaining that many of the mayors were prevented from exercising their office thoroughly by the special charters which had been granted to certain misteries and praying that these special charters might be withdrawn so as to strengthen the hands of the local authorities. (Rot. Parl. ii. 331 No. 54.) See Gross i. 113 note 2. For instances of royal charters to guilds see the Mercers of Shrewsbury (Hibbert, 64), the Tailors of London (Clode’s Merchant Tailors), and various companies in Hull (Lambert’s Two Thousand Years of Guild Life).

[346] A curious instance is given in Hull in which one of the county magnates made use of the guild as an instrument for getting hold of the borough representation in Parliament. (Lambert’s Two Thousand Years of Guild Life, 182.)

[347] The story of the Hull Merchants’ Company is very instructive. Ibid. 180, etc.

[348] See Chapter VIII. The union of crafts in a guild at Walsall (Gross ii. 248) before 1440 seems to have been very like the union of crafts at Coventry a century earlier to get control of the town government, “in eschewing of such great misorder and inconvenience as here of late hath fortuned and happened.”

[349] Carlisle Mun. Rec. ed. Ferguson and Nansen 89-99.

[350] The town customs and bye-laws were drawn up in 1561 by “the Mayor and Council with four of every occupation in the aforesaid city, for and in the name of the whole citizens (Carlisle Mun. Rec. 28, 29, 59). In Beverley the alderman of merchants and twenty-one aldermen of various crafts gave assent in the fifteenth century to ordinances of the governors.” (Gross, ii. 23.)

[351] Gross, ii. 380-3.

[352] See Chapter XIII. 374-5.

[353] Gross, i. 111, note 3. The cases of Durham and Morpeth here mentioned are very late.

[354] Ibid. 112, note 4.

[355] Ibid. i. 124 note 2. Von Ochenkowski (Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, 67) argues that this regulation was made in consequence of the mediÆval view of trade as a public trust not a mere individual act; and that skill in craft was taken as a test of uprightness of character and a pledge of fitness for citizenship. From this conclusion follows the belief, which in its turn supports the conclusion, that the rule was one imposed by the town authorities and not by the will of the crafts.

[356] Stubbs, iii. 607.

[357] This history has been treated by Dr. Gross in his “Gild Merchant.” In the thirteenth century Merchant Guilds existed in at least one-third and probably in a much greater proportion of the English boroughs. (Gross, i. 2, 22, 158.)

[358] Ibid. i. 107.

[359] Gross, i. 74, 107, 108, note 3, 109. There were clergy and women in the Andover Guild (Ibid. ii. 299, 321); and in Coventry (English Guilds, 228).

[360] Gross, i. 66-71, ii. 236.

[361] Ibid. i. 43, 61, 158-9.

[362] Ibid. i. 282-3.

[363] Gross, i. 61-63, 85. Sometimes the grant of a guild was given before the grant of other rights. In other cases it followed. Thus in Gloucester the first charter was given by Henry the Second “to my burgesses of Gloucester” in 1155. The Guild did not appear in the charter till 1200, when John granted certain municipal rights to “our burgesses of Gloucester,” and others mainly of a trading sort to “our burgesses of Gloucester of the Merchant Guild”; and in 1227 a charter of Henry the Third seems for the first time to enact that burgesses must not only dwell in the borough, hold land, and pay lot and scot, but must also “be in the Merchant Guild and Hanse.”

[364] Ibid. i. 43-52, 158-9.

[365] Ibid. i. 63, 85, 114. “In some places their powers appear to have been gradually enlarged during the thirteenth century so as to embrace jurisdiction in pleas relating to trade.” (Ibid. 65.)

[366] Ibid. i. 114-115.

[367] Gross, i. 117, 159-60.

[368] Ibid. i. 116.

[369] Dr. Gross holds that all guilds of merchants formed after the decline of the Gilda Mercatoria in the thirteenth century must be considered as being merely craft-unions of the ordinary kind—in most cases superseding the Guild Merchant (i. 129).

[370] By Dr. Gross’s definition, “What had once been a distinct integral part of the civic body politic became vaguely blended with the whole of it.” (Gross, i. 159-60, 163.)

[371] This is stated to have been very rare. (Ibid. p. 114.)

[372] Ibid. 118, 163. The appellation of the Guild Merchant “was more frequently applied to the aggregate of the crafts” than to the governing body of the borough. (Ibid. i. 114.) In Carlisle had the term “been used at all, it would probably have been applied to the eight guilds aggregately, rather than to the Corporation.” (Ibid. ii. 40.) In proving that the later Guild Merchant was “an aggregate of the crafts,” Dr. Gross carries us at a single step into a much later period (pp. 118-123), where the name tells us little apart from the history of the borough. The case of Coventry seems a doubtful instance.

[373] Gross, i. 161, 163. Lynn is given as an illustration of this change, but the evidence is not adduced.

[374] Ibid. i. 118. No instance is given of this.

[375] Dr. Gross argues that any struggle which did take place was not between the Guild Merchant and the crafts, but between “the governing council (the “magnates,” “potentiores,” etc.) on the one side and the burgesses at large (“communitas,” “populus,” “minores”) on the other.” (Gross i. 110, 285.) The “magnates” of Norwich (Hudson’s Mun. Org. p. 24-5), or “les riches” of the city records, ruled in a city where there was no Guild Merchant. The “potentiores” of Lynn seem from the printed records to have been the Guild Merchant. In the town records “communitas” cannot be understood as synonymous with “populus,” still less with “minores.”

[376] Gross, i. 109. “Not a single unmistakable example of such a conflict has ever been deduced.” On this point Seligman (MediÆval Guilds, 57-8) speaks very dogmatically on most inconclusive evidence, so far as this is given in his notes. The analogy on p. 58 of craft guilds including smaller unions is not shewn, nor their common occurrence proved.

[377] In London, Norwich, and the Cinque Ports, there was no Guild Merchant at any time. In Lynn, Andover, Southampton, and Bristol it was all-powerful. In Nottingham no influence of its action can be traced; the guild mentioned in John’s charter (Nott. Rec. i. 9) is only once mentioned afterwards, in 1365. (Ibid. i. 189.)

[378] Gross, i. 107.

[379] See Lynn, Gross, ii. 157. Southampton, ibid. 216-226. Andover, ibid. 4, 8, 294, 344. Derby, ibid. 51-3. Newcastle, ibid. 184-5; other instances, i. 69. For Reading see vol. i. 302. For the variety in relations of the Guild to the town see Gross, i. 73.

[380] As at Oxford and Lincoln, Lib. Cus. 671. Gross, ii. 146. It is very probable, however, that these were confirmations of older institutions.

[381] Gross, i. 109.

[382] Ibid. i. 33.

[383] Ibid. i. 31. See also Bury St. Edmunds, ii. 30-3.

[384] See p. 219, note at end of Chapter.

[385] Barnstaple, Gross, ii. 12.

[386] Bury St. Edmunds, Gross, ii. 33-4.

[387] Gross, i. 117. Is there any reason to think that if the enjoyment of monopoly was split up and divided among the crafts, the exercize of authority was split up and transferred in the same proportions?

[388] When wealthy individuals of a craft, men perhaps almost in the position of merchants, were admitted to the Guild, no argument can be drawn from this as to the relation of the craft itself to the Guild.

[389] Gross, i. 114-5. In the instances here given (p. 116, note 1) of regulations made for craftsmen by the Guild Merchant it is necessary to define the exact relation between the Guild and the governing body of the town. (See Andover in 1314. Gross, ii. 308. Compare Leicester, ibid. 144.)

[390] Gross, i. 125-6, 159-60.

[391] Ibid. i. 75, 76.

[392] All the materials which I have used in speaking of Coventry have been given me very kindly by Miss Dormer Harris, who has made a careful study of the town records on the spot, and will soon, it is hoped, publish the result of her researches.

[393] Compare Chesterfield, where a Guild was established in 1218 to guard the “liberties of the town”; in case of need its aldermen were to choose twelve men to go before the justices or elsewhere to help these “liberties” of the town; and any one suffering loss for them was to be repaid by the Guild. (English Guilds, 165-167.)

[394] Compare the very small numbers of the Reading Guild, which was a survival of olden times (Vol. I. p. 302, note 1). S. Alban’s was larger, but apparently of a more doubtful character, even in the eyes of the prudent burghers. (Ibid. 296-7.)

[395] They got land from Isabella, and built their church at Bablake—the first church built by the burghers.

[396] The taking of a common name may have been connected with the license to mortmain. S. John’s Guild had got a license in 1342 and land to build its church, but some extended license must have been needed for a larger society which desired to possess new property.

[397] Mercers’ obits were celebrated in S. Catherine’s Chapel; drapers’ obits usually in the Lady Chapel belonging to S. Mary’s or the Merchant Guild.

[398] The early guildhall of York belonged to the guilds of S. George and S. Christopher; and when the new hall was built in the middle of the fifteenth century these two guilds retained considerable power in it. (Davies’ Walks Through York, 49-51.) Sir William Plumpton and his wife joined the fraternity of S. Christopher at York, 1439. (Plumpton Corr. lxii.)

[399] Cf. Norwich (p. 395). This arrangement was probably made for the sake of financial security (see p. 215-6).

[400] English Gilds, 232.

[401] Accounts of the Guild of Corpus Christi are preserved from 1488. The brethren and sisters of the Guild seem to have been spread all over England, and are mentioned at London, Lynn, and Birmingham. They were of all ranks and of all trades and callings. (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 101.) The Prior of the cathedral, the Prior’s bailiff, the vicar of Trinity, various craftsmen of the town and vicars of the neighbourhood, merchants of Queenborough, Dublin, Drogheda, Bristol, Kingston-on-Hull, London, and many other places, a “merchant of the Staple,” and great men of the neighbourhood, such as Thomas Grey, the Marquis of Dorset, Lord Hastings, and others belonged to its association.

[402] S. Mary’s Hall was begun in 1340, and finished in 1413.

[403] The Twenty-four were self-elected; the mayor was elected by the Twenty-four; the common council were appointed and summoned by the mayor.

[404] Compare the case of Southampton where a guild merchant had imposed its methods on a town government.

[405] The list compiled in 1449 of living craftsmen who had held office gives fifteen drapers and eleven mercers, and seven dyers; as against two wire-drawers, two whit-tawyers, and two weavers. The dyers in Coventry were often cloth merchants of great consequence.

[406] In the time of Richard the Second the fullers and tailors first attempted to form a guild, and even obtained a patent which licensed their society to hold property worth a yearly rental of eight marks.

[407] The complaint against the dyers is shown in a petition to Parliament in 1415 (Rot. Parl. iv. 75), in which the community of Coventry say that by reason of a confederacy among the dyers they cannot get their cloth dyed under 6s. or 7s. a dozen, whereas last year’s price was 5s.; and forty pounds of wool was now 30s. which was last year 20s., &c. The dyers are also great and common makers of cloth and take all the flower of the wool for their own cloth, the remnant serving the common people. The petitioners request that on the day of the mayor’s election, those that elect him (that is twenty-four members of the ruling guilds) shall also appoint four persons, two drapers, one dyer, and one woder, sworn to keep watch over the dyers, and present them for any “fault or confederacy” to the mayor, bailiffs, and justices of the peace—in other words to the officers of the Trinity Guild. For the first fault he was to pay a fine to the king, for the second a fine and half a year’s imprisonment. They also prayed that no one who was a dyer should make vendible cloth. These conditions being refused they claimed the suppression of the guild.

[408] The mayor and his brethren carried their complaint to the king in 1424, and by royal writ the assemblies were forbidden. In 1422 the governing guilds issued an order that all wardens should bring the ordinances of the crafts before the mayor, recorder, and bailiffs, and eight of the general council by whom honest, lawful, and good rules should be allowed; and no ordinances might be made against the law in oppression of people, upon pain of imprisonment or fine at the king’s will. In 1424 arbitrators were appointed by the mayor’s order to decide the disputes between the master weavers and their men; and rules were drawn up for the whole craft. It is obvious that this is very different from regulation by a guild which still retained the crafts within its own association.

[409] They gave forty marks for a fresh license for their guild with mortmain up to ten marks, and leave to elect four masters at the Nativity to rule the craft and to plead in courts for the whole body. As of old they seem to have failed in carrying out their scheme in spite of the license, and in 1448 a petition was presented by them (whether it was voluntary may well be doubted) that the union between the fullers’ and tailors’ crafts should be severed. At the suppression of the guilds the shearmen and tailors held a mill and tenements in mortmain for the support of their chauntry.

[410] Cf. Exeter, Chapter VII.

[411] How little freedom was left to far the most powerful craft of all—the dyers—we see from the law of 1530, that if any masters and journeymen of the dyers can be proved before the mayor and justices to have hindered any one from becoming a dyer, they are to be fined. If the journeymen refuse to work for the new dyers, then, without hindrance from the craft or the journeymen, they may hire others not inhabitants. In 1530 it was ordered that a certain Robert Perkins was to become a dyer without “let or hindrance” from craft and journeymen. In general the corporation resisted the tendency of the lesser crafts to prevent the setting up of new masters—a policy which is easy to understand in the rule of merchants, as opposed to that of the manufacturers.

[412] Posted up on the door of S. Michael’s in 1494:—

“Be it knowen and understood
This cite should be free and now is bond
Dame Goode-Eve made hit free
And now the’ be customes for woll and the drap’ie.
Also hit is made that no prentice shall be
But XIII. penies pay shall he,
This act did Robert Grene
Therefore he had many a curse I wene.”

(Sharp’s Antiquities, 235.)

[413]

“This city is bond that shuld be free,
The right is holden from the Cialte.
Our coins that at Lamas open shuld be cast
They be closed in and hegged full fast....
If ever ye have nede to the coialte
Such favour as ye show us such shall ye see.
We may speke fair and bid ye good morwe
But luff from our herts ye shall have nevr....
Cherish the coialte and so they have their right
For drede of a worse chance by day or by night.
The best of all littel worth shuld be
And ye had not had help of the coialte.”

(Sharp, 235.) Perhaps it was from the talk of the streets in some such local disturbance that Langland quoted when he wrote the lines quoted in Vol. I. p. 26.

[414] The Coventry craft-masters’ apprentices paid their fines to the mayor “for the use of the city,” not of the guild; the “searchers” for the trades were appointed and the regulations made at the Leet Court, not at meetings of a guild; the same officials attended, but they had to act as representing the municipality.

[415] As in Lynn, Bristol, and, later, Norwich.

[416] It is a subject for inquiry whether any Guild Merchant gave its name to a municipality unless it had been made responsible for the payment of the ferm, and held openly and to the knowledge of the exchequer some property or rents or tolls for the purpose.

[417] The Coventry Guild held town property for public purposes before this, apparently as a private arrangement.

[418] It is possible that in the earlier part of Richard’s reign the fear inspired by the Peasant Revolt may have quickened the spirit of organization among the wealthier classes. In the Guild of Lichfield, established by charter in 1387, the master of the Guild and the Forty-eight were “steadfastly to abide together and see that good rule be kept in the city.” (Gross, ii. 145.) Similar combinations of the richer classes seem to have been very general.

[419] English Gilds, 244-6, 249, 250.

[420] Gross, ii. 353.

[421] Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 316. This states that all the burgesses and the commonalty of the borough of Bridgewater have ordained that they will choose yearly two seneschals of their guild, and one bailiff to attend on them; such seneschals to have power to punish those offending against these ordinances. If any one among them shall maliciously impute to another a charge of theft, forgery, neifty (“nativitatis,” the being a born bondman), murder, adultery, or excommunication, and be convicted thereof before the seneschals, he shall be amerced and bound to the commonalty to make satisfaction to the other at the award of his peers. No one shall implead another without the borough under pain of amercement. Any one neglecting to appear before the seneschals when summoned is to be amerced. Those opposing execution or distress made by order of the seneschals to be amerced and bound to the commonalty in forty pence. No one is to buy flesh or fish before 9 A.M. for regrating under pain of becoming bound to the commonalty in the price of the flesh or fish so bought or sold. If any one is elected to the office of seneschal of S. Mary’s or of the Holy Cross in the church of the said borough he shall render account for the moneys arising therefrom to the said seneschals whenever summoned so to do. Any person refusing any one of those offices, if elected thereto, is to be bound to the commonalty in the sum of 6s. 8d. The seneschals are to render account for all moneys received by them each year upon the morrow of the circumcision of our Lord. This deed has a large fragment of the castle seal or seal of the lord of the fee still attached. (Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 316.)

[422] Their meetings for business were held in a small chamber attached to the church of S. Helen, which is still the exchequer chamber of their successors, the governors of Christ’s Hospital. (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 98.) Dr. Gross (i. 83-4, note 11) gives the names of some towns where the government was guided by a “simple social-religious gild.” The instances suggest different problems, and need separate examination of the special circumstances.

[423] Madox, 217. How many later declarations of the poverty of corporations was due to this convenient system of dealing with their funds?

[424] This system was devised before the doctrine of Trusts was adopted, in the reign of Henry the Fourth; but even after that doctrine was accepted the holding of property by a friendly corporation would have put considerable difficulty in the way of recovering money owed by the municipality.

[425] English Gilds, 231-5.

[426] See Note A at end of Chapter.

[427] See Chapter XIV.

[428] Dr. Gross is one of the latest writers who insists especially on the passage from democracy to oligarchy. (i. 108-110, 125-6, 160, 171, 285.)

[429] Gross, i. 23-6; ii. 115 et sq. Compare Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 239, for the forms used in 1291. For elections in 1310 see Ibid. 242.

[430] In Romney an instance is given in 1442 of a man being arrested who had come, not being free, to hear the common council. Hist. MSS. Com. v. 540. For Wycombe, Ibid. 557.

[431] Journal ArchÆological Association, xxvii. 464.

[432] Ibid.

[433] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 493.

[434] Boys’ Sandwich, 429. See also Berwick, English Guilds, 344.

[435] Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 462. If a townsman struck the mayor and was too harshly punished the friends of the prisoner might call a jury “of the discreetest and stoutest men of the city,” who should ordain a just penalty. In Rye as in Hereford the old custom was that the man who struck the mayor was to lose his right hand (Lyon’s Dover, ii. 352); in Preston there was some punishment for a mayor who struck a burgess in or out of court (Custumal, Hist. Preston Guild). In Canterbury if a bailiff did wrong to any “that may be found by two lawful men of syght and of hyerth” complaint was made to the twelve aldermen; and if they charged the bailiff in vain to amend the wrong, the case was carried to a court of the thirty-six, the aldermen, and the most wisest men, “and by them right shall be ordained” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 171).

[436] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 559.

[437] Hunt’s Bristol, 103-5.

[438] For the variety of modes in which juries were elected then and later see Rep. Mun. Corporations, 27.

[439] We find also special juries—for example a jury of masons and carpenters to judge “because of a waterfall which fell from the house and gutter of Richard Maidstone upon the house and ground of William Bennett” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 169); and groups of umpires appointed to settle differences (Boys’ Sandwich, 786).

[440] This was the custom in Exeter. At Bayonne every new citizen was sworn upon a book containing the charter and statutes of the commune (Luchaire, 47).

[441] Ricart, 2.

[442] At Wycombe and Dartmouth two Italian copies of the Pandects of Justinian and commentaries were used in the fifteenth century to bind up the corporation books.

[443] See pp. 310-11, 334-6, 366-70. A decree of 1328 in Preston was made by “the mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, with all the commonalty, by a whole assent and consent.” (Thomson, Mun. Hist. 105.)

[444] Mr. Maitland describes the communal organization of the villein tenants on the manor of Bright Waltham in 1293 (Manorial Pleas, Selden Soc. 161-4, 168). They formed a “communitas” which held property, could receive a grant of land, could contract and make exchanges with the lord (172). These rights were recognized in the manorial courts, though at Westminster they would have been held very irregular (163). They elected or recommended the reeve, shepherd, ploughman, swineherd (170), the whole ville “undertaking” for him (168). The steward kept watch that no land of servile tenure should be treated as free, and the villeins themselves were very unwilling that a villein should set up as a freeman on the ground of holding a freehold acre (164).

[445] In Barnstaple a deed concerning a tenement in the High Street in 1416 was sealed with the seal of the commonalty, not that of the mayor. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 213.) In Rye there was a seal of the community different from the mayor’s seal, which last was first used in 1377. (Ibid. v. 489, 511.) Also in Lydd (ibid. 530-2).

[446] See note A at end of chapter.

[447] Worcester, Eng. Guilds, 378.

[448] Frequent cases indicate that where the common lands played an important part in the wealth or industry of a borough the burgesses long preserved an interest in municipal affairs. Thus, in Haverford West, where the townsfolk up to 1832 took a very real part in the election of their officers and the control of business, the common meadow still contained over a thousand acres. (Report on Mun. Corporation, 233, etc.) And at Berwick-on-Tweed, where also affairs were administered by the whole body of burgesses, the annual value of the lands whose profits went to the freemen was near £6,000. (Ibid. 31.)

[449] Piers Ploughman, pass. xi. 239.

[450] Merewether and Stephens, ii. 590-2.

[451] Norwich Town Close Evidences, p. 16. A copy of this volume (a private publication printed in connection with the Town Close case in 1885) may be found in the British Museum.

[452] Norwich Town Close Evidences, 18-19.

[453] Ibid. 17.

[454] It was at this time that the mayor was given power to distrain for sums levied on the commonalty. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 186-7.)

[455] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, pp. 187, 240. Gross, ii. 155-6.

[456] Report on Markets, 62.

[457] Rot. Parl. i. 433.

[458] Madox, 94.

[459] In the list of taxpayers to the poll-tax of 1380 in Oxford, we find four aldermen mentioned—a vintner, a draper, and two others whose trade is not mentioned, but who had eight and ten servants, a number very greatly above the average. The vintner and draper each paid, like the mayor, 13s. 4d.; but the man with ten servants gave only 12d.; and the man with eight is not registered as having paid at all. (Oxford City Documents, Oxford Hist. Soc. 8-45.)

[460] See Note A at end of chapter.

[461] In 1327 a violent dispute broke out between the great people of Andover and the rest of the community. The story of the election of a sort of council of fifteen of the richer people in 1303, and of incidents leading to the riot of 1327 can be traced in the entries quoted in Gross, ii. 297-321.

[462] Inaugural Address at Oxford by Mr. Froude, Oct. 26th, 1892.

[463] Cases occur in the towns under the game laws. The Jurats of Hythe present Henry Colle as “a common destroyer in killing hares with snares and pypys to the great destruction of the sport of the gentry and against the statute”; and another man “for keeping one ferret for hunting against the statute.” (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 1, 431, 2.)

[464] See Piers Ploughman. Pass. ix. 20-31; ii. 96; x. 223, et sq.

[465]

“Then louh (laughed) there a lord and ‘by this light’ said,
‘I hold it right and reason to take of my reeve
All that mine auditor or else my steward
Counselleth me by their account and my clerk’s writing.
With spiritus intellectus they took the reeve-rolls,
And with spiritus fortitudinis fetch it, will he, nil he.’”

—Piers Ploughman. Passus xxii. 461-466.

[466] “If any judgment be given,” say the Hereford Customs, “or any execution of writs of our Lord the King, be to be impleaded or done, or if any doubt or ambiguity shall be upon any of our laws or customs, or anything else touching the whole commonalty, then the bailiff or steward, by all kind of rigour, may compel the discreeter especially, or any other citizen whom they have need of, to come unto them.” (Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 464.)

[467] Hudson, Mun. Org., 24-5.

[468] Royal Commission on Markets, 15, 16. The justices had a right to dismiss poor recognitors, and order the sheriff to cause lawful knights and other proved discreet men to be elected in their stead (Select Civil Pleas, Selden Society, 100). The records of the Manchester Court Leet Jury have only been preserved from 1552. The number varied from about fourteen to eighteen, who were yearly chosen at the court leets from the chief burgesses of the town. When the father died his eldest son or younger brother seems to have been made a juror in his stead. The jurors, in fact, were chosen generation after generation from the same small number of families. The reeve and one or both constables were generally nominated from among the jury then in the box. (Manchester Court Leet Records, 177-8.) Cf. Ship of Fools. Barclay, 99.

[469] Ibid. 62. See Vol. I. 186, 165, note A. In Canterbury there was a law that if by the bailiff’s fault the king should send a writ “in hindering of the liberty” of the town the bailiff should make restitution.

[470] In Colchester for example the number of people assessed for all moveables in 1301 was 390 and the sum raised £24 12s. 6d. In 1377, when it stood twelfth on the list of English towns, it is said to have had about 4,500 inhabitants.

[471] Thus in 1342 Nicholas Langton was elected mayor of York for the seventeenth time (Hargrove’s York, i. 308) and two men bore rule in Liverpool for eighteen years between 1374 and 1406—one for twelve years and the other for six (Picton’s Liverpool, i. 30).

[472] There was a great variety in the names of mayors during the fifteenth century. John Samon held the office several times, but generally speaking the mayors were not re-elected, and in no case did they hold office two years in succession. (See Nottingham Records.)

[473] Gross, ii. 117.

[474] Lincoln and London (Madox, 14; Gross, i. 80). Canterbury (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 167).

[475] See Lynn and Southampton.

[476] Ricart’s Kalendar, 72, etc. The Mayor in Nottingham was bound “to give his brethren knowledge for to see the game of the fishing” ... and “in likewise to give them knowledge of every bear-baiting and bull-baiting within the town, to see the sport of the game after the old custom and usage.” (Rec. iii. 449.)

[477] Hythe, Hist. MSS. Com. iv. i. 432, 434.

[478] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 542. Ibid. vi. 572-580. Any man thrice convicted of “cursing the mayor and slandering him with good and grave people,” was to be deprived of his freedom by sound of the bell of the Guild Hall.

[479] See ch. viii. Freeman’s Exeter, 90.

[480] In Bristol the town clerk, the steward, and the attorney, had forty-two rays, and their under clerks thirty-two rays. (Ricart, xii. 81.)

[481] In 1476 Lydd paid 13s. 4d. for the writing out of its “Customall.” The custumal of Sandwich written in 1301 was copied about 1465 by the Town Clerk, John Serles. The Black Book of Hythe was copied in the same way. For Southampton see Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 8. Instances are too numerous to give.

[482] See the Translation of Crouchback’s Charter at Leicester (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 404); a translation from the French in 1491 of the old book of laws and customs of Yarmouth (Ibid. ix. 305); a translation in 1473 of the ancient rules of the Guild of Southampton known as the Pax Bread. (Davies’ Southampton, 133.)

[483] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 606-7. The clerk was also responsible for deeds which were constantly given into the keeping of the Mayor and Council.

[484] The Domesday Book of Dorchester compiled in the XV. century (Journ. Arch. Ass. xxviii. 29); the Liber Albus of Norwich in 1426 (Blomefield, iii. 141; Arch. Journ. xlvi. 302). Ordinances were drawn up at Rye in 1397 (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 489); the Fordwich Kalendar in the fifteenth century (Ibid. v. 606-607). The oldest Year Book of Sandwich is the Old Black Book in which entries are made in 1432 and end in 1487. Entries in its White Book begin in 1488 and end in 1526. The fact that the laws of the Scotch Marches were codified at this time shews the prevailing tendency.

[485] As in Romney (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 539).

[486] In 1386 the Cinque Ports paid for the copying of Magna Charta (Ibid. 533).

[487] Nottingham Records, ii. 340.

[488] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 489.

[489] Ibid. ix. 223-4.

[490] First paper roll in Reading accounts 1463. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 7, 175.) Accounts at Bridport, Southampton, and Hythe on paper under Richard the Second. (Ibid. vi. 492; xi. 3-8; iv. 1, 438-9.) Some of the guild returns were on paper in 1389. (English Guilds, 132-3.) In 1467 there was a rule in Worcester that the town clerk must be a citizen, and do his own work with daily attendance and not by simple and inefficient deputy, and must engross on parchment. (Guilds, 399.)

[491] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 477.

[492] Ibid. ix. 108.

[493] Ibid. vi. 603.

[494] The difference is seen by comparing with their accounts such documents as presentments at sessions, bills for goods and the like. (Nottingham Records, iii. xiv.) See also entries in the records made by Roger Bramston, mayor of Wycombe, in 1490.

[495] The possible difficulty of getting rid of a clerk is illustrated by what happened when the mayor, sheriffs, alderman, and commons of York, in 1475, by their whole and common assent, dismissed the common clerk “for divers and many offences—excessive takings of money, misguiding of their books, accounts, and evidences, with other great trespasses.” They then wrote to D. of Gloucester to entreat his good lordship and that he would move the king to allow them to name another common clerk; and the Duke having sent letters to Lord Hastings and Lord Stanley, finally received an answer from the king that he had commissioned two serjeants of the law to examine the case, that they had reported in favour of the corporation, and that a new clerk might be elected. The grateful town agreed at a meeting of the council that the D. of Gloucester “for his great labour now late made unto the king’s great grace” should “be presented at his coming to the city with 6 swans and 6 pikes.” (Davies’ York, 53-55.)

[496] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 603. In Hereford the steward might be a “foreigner who is known of the citizens.” (Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 463-4.)

[497] In Sandwich the “town clerk’s” salary was 40s. a year, out of which he had to find parchment, except when he wrote out the cesses, when the commonalty might give him a shilling or two for the parchment and his trouble. Other small payments fell to him when a freeman was made or a corporation letter was signed or suchlike business done. (Boys’ Sandwich, 476.) In 1390 Romney paid as much as 56s. 8d.; then the salary fell to 40s. in 1428; then to 32s. 11d.; and then to 26s. 8d., with 3s. 4d. for parchment. (Ibid. 803.) This corresponded with the decline in the fortunes of Romney.

[498] The common clerk at Hythe, John Smallwood, secured for himself a following of thirty-six men sworn to help him in all his undertakings, and in 1397 he had even gathered sixty men pledged to bring about the death of four of his enemies. For four years the town refused to have any clerk at all, until at last Smallwood made his peace in 1414 by the gift of certain tenements and lands. (Hist. MSS. Com. iv. part 1, 437-8.)

[499] Davies’ York, 207. Thomas Atwood, who was town clerk of Canterbury in 1497, seems to have been mayor in 1500. His brother William was one of the counsel of the city in 1497.

[500] Nottingham Records, iii. 59, 84.

[501] For his writing and one or two of his mottoes see Nottingham Records, III. ix.-xiii. ii. xvi. For Robert de Ricarto of Bristol, see p. 20. For Daniel Rowe of Romney, p. 61.

[502] Thompson, Mun. Hist. 82.

[503] See Paston Letters. Cf. The Common Weal (ed. Miss Lamond), 83-4.

[504] See the case of Norwich. The main effect of the new charters was simply to make the rate of progress apparent, and to some extent to help it forward by the mere process of reducing everything to formal legal arrangement, thus incidentally destroying vague liberties, or hardening the exercise of them into a fixed form which had lost all elasticity.

[505] Piers Ploughman. Passus ix. 174.

[506]

“But while Hunger was their master would none chide,
Ne strive against the Statute, he looked so stern.”

Ibid. Passus ix. 342, 343.

[507] Occasionally we find odd instances of growing independence. In Worcester “at some seasons of wilfulness” the people had shewn their revolutionary temper by choosing for serjeants and constables “persons of worship, to the dishonour of them and of the said city;” and an ordinance was made in 1467 that none of the twenty-four or the forty-eight might be appointed to these offices. (English Guilds, 409.) In like manner the great court of Bridgenorth decreed in 1503 that no burgess should be made serjeant. (Hist. MSS. Com. x. 4, 426.) In 1350 a guild was formed in Lincoln of “common and middling folks” who strongly objected to any one joining them “of the rank of mayor or bailiffs,” or claiming dignity for his personal rank, and made a rule that if any such persons insisted on entering their society they should not meddle with its business and should never be appointed officers. (English Guilds, 178-9.)

[508] Piers Ploughman. Pass. xviii. 88.

[509] The differences of early charters should all be studied. See, for example, the charters of Nottingham and Northampton given in the same year (Stubbs’s Charters, 300-302).

[510] The complexity and apparently inexhaustible confusion of their methods is well illustrated by the lists drawn up in 1833 by the commissioners appointed to inquire into municipal corporations. See appendix to the Rep. on Mun. Corpor. 94, 95; and especially the tables on pp. 102-132. Evidently the burghers have scarcely deserved the reproach of those who consider direct election by the people as the natural rude expedient of unlearned men grouped in political societies and ignorant of the wiser system of nomination which commends itself to trained legislators.

[511] Kitchin’s Winchester, 164.

[512] P. 306.

[513] Municipal Corporations Report, 21.

[514] The modes of election of sheriffs and bailiffs were as various and complicated as those of mayor and council. For illustrations of this see Rep. on Mun. Corp. 24, 25.

[515] There was also a “Great Court” of twenty-four. Hist. MSS. Com. x. part 4, pp. 425-7. At Melcombe Regis (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 578) there was an electing jury of twelve. In Preston the mayor chose in open court two ancient discreet and honest burgesses, who took an oath that they would at once select twenty-four burgesses who should not bear any office in the town during the next year. The twenty-four having been chosen and sworn, elected a mayor, a bailiff, and a sub-bailiff; these three at once took their respective oaths, and the mayor before he left the hall appointed a mayor’s bailiff and a serjeant. Laws were made by the “mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, with all the commonalty, by a whole assent and consent.” Government seems to have been carried on by the mayor and “twelve of those who with him are ordained,” and who were known as aldermen or capital burgesses. By a guild law earlier than 1328 former mayors and bailiffs, though they might sit on the bench as aldermen, were not allowed to meddle with the twenty-four during the election, under penalty of a fine of twenty shillings or loss of citizenship. (Preston, Guild Record, xxiv. Guild ordinances in history of Preston Guild, by Dobson and Harland, 12, 17, 19-23.)

[516] To illustrate the variety of town constitutions I have given three or four, taken at random, in an Appendix at the end of the chapter. Other instances will be found in Chapters. XII.-XVI.

[517] See note A, p. 283, Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 171-2. This plan was perhaps modelled on a system common in ecclesiastical elections and possibly peculiar in Canterbury so far as municipalities were concerned. There was a dispute in 1435 about the mode of presentation to S. Peter’s, Cornhill, to avoid the “great strife and controversy” between the mayor, aldermen, and common council. It was decided that the mayor and aldermen should choose four priests living within the city or a mile of it; that these four should name to the common council four clerks “most meet in manners and conyng”; and that out of these four the mayor, aldermen, and council should choose one. Three Fifteenth century Chron. (Camden Soc., 91-92).

[518] Report on Mun. Corporations, 20.

[519] In Bridport there were twelve jurors. (Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 489-90, 492-3.) In Southampton twelve “discreets,” p. 308. The jurats in Romney and others of the Cinque Ports formed a similar body. So also in Carlisle, and in Pontefract. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 270-1.) A writ from the privy council was addressed to “the mayor, bailiffs, and twenty-four notablest burgesses of our town of Northampton” in 1442. (Proceed. Privy Council v. 191.) Wells had a council of twenty-four. (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 106-7.)

[520] Oxford, by a charter of Richard the First, had a mayor and two aldermen. In 1255 Henry the Third made the aldermen four, corresponding to the four wards of the city, and joined with them eight leading burgesses mainly to keep peace in the city and to have charge of the assize of bread, beer, and wine. The twenty-four common councilmen were elected from the citizens at large. (Boase’s Oxford, 42-44.) In Ipswich besides the twelve “honest and loyal” portmen elected yearly in the cemetery of S. Mary Tower there was a council of twenty-four; and seven of the portmen and thirteen of the twenty-four could together make rules for the town. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 242, 244.) In Yarmouth (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 305; Blomefield, xi. 301-2, 342), twenty-four jurats (afterwards called aldermen) were chosen by the burgesses, and appointed all the officers of the town. Between 1400 and 1407 changes were made in the constitution. Two bailiffs were elected instead of four, and besides the council of twenty-four aldermen a common council was formed of forty-eight members. So also in Colchester and Norwich. Worcester had two councils, “the twenty-four above and the forty-eight beneath.” (English Guilds, 379, 396. Also Leicester, Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 425.) Canterbury had an upper council of twelve and another of thirty-six. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 171-2.) For councils of seventy and eighty see pp. 374, 432. In Chester a charter of 1506 gave twenty-four aldermen and forty of the common council. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 359-60.) In Bristol (Hunt’s Bristol, 85-86) and Liverpool (Picton ii. 26) the council was composed of forty “honest and discreet” men. Colchester had two councils of sixteen each. (Cromwell’s Colchester, 265.)

[521] The manner in which the aldermen took their place in the system of municipal government has not yet been worked out. In London, Canterbury, and Lincoln they were hereditary owners of the various wards. The people of Coventry petitioned for aldermen over the wards in 1450, but the mayor and his brethren refused. In Lynn there were only constables of the wards.

[522] Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 551-569.

[523] Davies’ Southampton, 263.

[524] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. p. 42, 77-82.

[525] Davies’ Southampton, 250.

[526] Gross, ii. 232.

[527] Davies, 253.

[528] 2 Rich. II. St. 1, cap. 3.

[529] Davies, 254.

[530] Ibid. 250.

[531] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 50, 87.

[532] Ibid. xi. 3, 81, 83, 86. Davies, 253-4.

[533] For example, Thomas Payne, whose barge, the “John of Southampton,” traded with Zealand; or the goldsmith, William Nycoll, who was also a merchant, and sent his ship the “Marye of Hampton” to the Bay of Biscay under the charge of a cousin, his factor and purser. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. p. 78, 84, 88.)

[534] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, pp. 70-73. Davies, 97-8. In 1399 Richard the Second granted to the Emperor for the war against the Turks a sum of £2,000, which was sent through a Genoese merchant and charged on the customs at Southampton. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 16. Bekynton, i. lx. note. In 1401 a second £2,000 was paid.

[535] Davies, 61, 256.

[536] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 66-69.

[537] Ibid. 77.

[538] Davies, 255.

[539] Ibid. 471.

[540] Ibid. 255-6.

[541] In 1411 the burgesses made a great wharf with a crane on it at the water-gate to increase merchandise and prevent the evading of customs. Davies, 112. For strangers brought their wines “very contemptuously” and landed them “within this realm where they think good themselves.” (H.M.C. xi. 3, 50-52.)

[542] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 11, 87.

[543] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 90.

[544] Hist. MSS. Com. vi, 551-569.

[545] Davies, 294. This may have supported nearly 140 people.

[546] Davies, 82. For supplies for the King’s ship see Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 113.

[547] Davies, 79. Archers sent to the castle for the defence of the townsmen were charged to their account, and they had to submit patiently to their exactions; a letter from Edward the Fourth ordered the town to release one of the Bowers who had been committed to prison “for his inordinate demeaning,” and to go on paying him his wages like other Bowers. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 99.)

[548] The castle wall was not pulled down before the end of the fifteenth century. Finally the castle hill itself, after its mound had been lowered and planed, was crowned in 1818 with a Zion chapel on the site of the Norman keep. (Davies, 76, 84.)

[549] Ibid. 81. For the inconvenience which a constable might cause to the town if he wished, see p. 83.

[550] See for one example among many, Davies, 81.

[551] Davies, 216.

[552] Ibid. 79.

[553] In the last year of Henry the Sixth the master of one of the King’s ships received from the Mayor £31 10s. 10d. In the first year of Edward the Fourth he again paid for the victualling and custody of the ship £68 5s. 10d. (Davies, 110, 113. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, pp. 85, 98.)

[554] Davies’ Southampton, 214. For sum in 1468 ibid. 72, 100.

[555] Davies, 62-3.

[556] Ibid. 105.

[557] With help from the king if necessary. (Davies, 80.) The town had power to raise a tax on all goods carried in or out of the gates till the wall was finished. (Davies, 60.)

[558] Davies, 80. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 61. So a hundred and fifty years later Henry the Eighth forbade any citizen to leave Chester, because “the city standeth open in the danger of enemies,” and requireth all “for its safety and defence.” (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 370.)

[559] Davies, 60, 61. Similar complaints were perpetually renewed in the next century.

[560] Davies, 35. Southampton was constantly in arrears of its ferm. Ibid. 34.

[561] Margaret of Anjou was allowed in 1445 a grant of £1,000 a year from the great and little customs of the town, and the annuity of £100 which was confirmed to her in 1454 was not resumed by Parliament till 1464.

[562] Davies, 37.

[563] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 111, 112.

[564] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 112-13.

[565] English Chronicle, 1377-1461 (Camden Soc.), 90. Davies, 471-2.

[566] Davies, 111. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 16. See also 98-99.

[567] Davies, 111, 37. In 1462 arrears of the ferm were remitted, and again in 1484 (Ib. 34). In 1463 a mayor of Southampton was deposed by the King’s mandamus (Ibid. 168).

[568] Davies speaks of this John Ingoldsby who paid the debt as afterwards apparently one of the Barons of the Exchequer (p. 38.) A John Ingoldsby had been Recorder of Southampton from at least 1444 (p. 185) to at least 1459 (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 113) and very probably later.

[569] Davies, 36. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. 100.

[570] In 1486 the pension of £154 was paid to the Earl of Arundel as constable of Dover Castle, part of it being given in kind. For other trouble, see Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. 98.

[571] The outlay of the town in this year was £383 9s. 7d. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. 141-2.)

[572] In this last case they were comforted by a promise of release for ten years from payment of 140 marks from the rent of £200 which had been assigned to Queen Joan, and by a grant to the corporation of the right to hold land to the value of £100. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 42-3.)

[573] The Southampton trade did in fact utterly fail before a century was over. In 1530 its rent was reduced by £26 13s. d., and in 1552 the King ordered that when the customs at the port did not amount to £200, and no ships called carracks of Genoa and galleys of Venice should enter the port to load or unload, the town should not pay the accustomed rent of £200, but only £50. To this day certificates are still prepared every year on November 9th that no carracks of Genoa nor galleys of Venice have arrived at the port. (Davies, 38-9. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 49.)

[574] Unfortunately in the brief extracts from the Southampton records which have been as yet published, references to municipal government are so scanty that any sketch of it can only be drawn in faint and uncertain outline. In the opinion of Dr. Gross the Merchant Guild was originally a strictly private fraternity, and only became the dominant burghal authority in the fourteenth century. (Gross, ii. 231.) I have suggested here the idea of an earlier connexion; but the question needs full examination.

[575] Davies’ Southampton, 163.

[576] Hist. MSS. Com. Report xi. Appendix 3. p. 43.

[577] Ibid. 44.

[578] Possibly in 1217, certainly in 1237. Davies, 170.

[579] Gross, ii. 220-5.

[580] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 57. See guild ordinances.

[581] Indenture in 1368 by mayor, four scavins, two bailiffs, the steward, sixteen burgesses named, and the whole community. Ibid. p. 66.

[582] In 1240 the style used is simply “the burgesses.” Ibid. p. 7.

[583] Gross, ii. 214. Davies, 163.

[584] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, pp. 40-2, 43, 46. Compare Nottingham.

[585] Davies, 154, 238.

[586] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 42.

[587] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 45.

[588] Ibid. pp. 46, 81, 84, 87, 106.

[589] Gross, ii. 222-5.

[590] In 1302 a lease of the ferm of the town to certain persons is granted by consent of twenty-two men named, but without any mention of their position, “and all the community of the town.” (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 56.) Ordinances were made in 1349 by the mayor, aldermen, and community. (Ibid. 9.)

[591] Gross, ii. 220, 223, 225.

[592] Gross, ii. 220-3.

[593] See the office assigned to the aldermen in 1504, Davies, 76. For their dress, ibid. 235.

[594] Davies, 237-9. An ordinance was made in 1409 by the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses, and a similar one in 1486 by the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses in common assembly; and an ordinance in common assembly in 1504. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 11.)

[595] Davies, 155. It is possible that at this time the chief aldermen were fashioned into a close body elected for life after the pattern of London; at any rate soon after this we find them and their wives in the orthodox scarlet robes with fur and velvet, in all points the same as those of the mayor. 235.

[596] Davies, 63, 71-2, 125.

[597] Gross, ii. 225. Davies (p. 136) says that whenever the guild became settled as the supreme authority, there entered at that period an element of restriction alien from the more ancient government of the towns; and traces to the guild the narrowing of common privileges and subjection of the community to an exclusive system of local administration. It is possible that wherever a guild merchant did lay hold on a town government, as here, at Lynn, or at Coventry, the tendency may always have been to intensify the existing tendencies to the despotic rule of the richer citizens.

[598] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 7, 60, 61. Ordinances in 1368 and 1393, 9, 8; a concord in 1397, 74; lease of customs in 1390, 72; land in 1373, 1379, 69-70. For other instances see 1403, p. 76; 1410, 77; 1413, 79; 1421, 80; 1422, 80-1; 1433, 82; 1433, 44; 1439, 84; 1462, 85; 1466, 86; 1477, 87; 1482, 90; 1491, 90; 1494, 90-1; 1496, 91; 1507, 91.

[599] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 12, 91, 113.

[600] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 91, 107; Davies, 164. In Nottingham, as in Southampton, we have an occasional indication that the burgesses or common councillors, possibly under some fit of impatience at the pretensions of the aldermen, had intermittent tendencies to side with the people. In Southampton there was possibly at this time a certain bond of sympathy, for seven years earlier, in 1452, the burgesses complained that the aldermen had assumed the right of retaining, as justices of the peace, fines which had always gone to them towards the payment of the ferm; and their contention having been maintained in Parliament, royal orders were sent to the aldermen to molest the burgesses no more. Davies, 156.

[601] Davies, 164, 165.

[602] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 104. In 1617 two burgesses tried to oppose the “private nomination,” but were called before the common council and forced to submit. (Davies, 164, 165.)

[603] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 11.

[604] Ibid.

[605] Davies, 71-2.

[606] As early as 1254 an inquisition of boundaries had been held by twenty-four lawful men. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 7.)

[607] The same sense of insufficiency of the common to the increasing number of burgesses seems to have been felt as at Nottingham. In the next century a man was fined, because “being a bachelor and not keeping house, he ought not to keep any cattle at all” on it.

[608] The hospital had made encroachments and put up fences in 1438, which the then mayor had broken down (Davies, 52).

[609] Davies, 53.

[610] Ibid. 53. Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. p. 14, 91.

[611] Davies, 52.

[612] Davies, 57-8.

[613] Davies, 58-59.

[614] See, for 1549, Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 14; for 1681, Davies, 52. The latest grant of the public land of Southampton was made on Sept. 16th, 1892, by the Mayor and corporation for a graving dock—part of the harbour improvements by which Southampton is to be restored to its old supremacy on the southern coast and once more to give room in its port to the largest steamers afloat. There was a far-away echo of old world controversies in the assurance of the mayor to the people that by this act of the corporation in giving the land at a nominal consideration there was scarcely anybody in Southampton who would not be benefited, and “not a soul in Southampton would be injured.”

[615] In the following century we find them making presentments at the Court Leet about the mayor’s misdoings (Davies, 123).

[616] As the King’s servant orders were sent direct to him without mention of the community. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, pp. 16, 103.)

[617] By admiralty law the sea was supposed to reach up to the first bridge, and he therefore controlled the Itchen as far as Woodhill and the Test as far as Red Bridge, and as admiral held his courts of admiralty in the accustomed places on the sea-shore at Keyhaven, Lepe, and Hamble. Davies, 237-40. Compare the mayor of Rochester (H. M. C. ix. 287).

[618] See for example of one difficulty of this supervision, Davies, 475. For an illustration of his anxieties in the seizing of a carrack, see Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 111.

[619] See Louis XI. et les Villes. Henri SÉe.

[620] See pp. 447-8.

[621] Nottingham Records, ii. 34-6.

[622] Nottingham Records, ii. 222-238.

[623] Ibid. i. 269.

[624] Nottingham Records, iii. 412, 62, etc. 39.

[625] For lists of new burgesses admitted in the latter half of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century each paying 6s. 8d. and in the great majority of cases giving the names of two burgesses as pledges, see Ibid. ii. 303-305. In the fourteenth century only one pledge was needed. Ibid. i. 286. At the end of the sixteenth century strangers who were made freemen paid £10. Ibid. iv. 170-1.

[626] Ibid. ii. 102, 242; iii. 349-52.

[627] Ibid. ii. xi. xii.

[628] There is notice of the transfer of a coal mine in Cossal in 1348. Ibid. i. 145

[629] Nottingham Records, ii. 147.

[630] Bekynton, i. 230.

[631] Nottingham Records, iii. 113.

[632] Ibid. ii. 142, 158, 166, 160; iii. 403, 445.

[633] Among the cases brought before the leet jury was that of a wager as to whether the painter of the rood-loft had been paid or not. (Records, iii. 143.)

[634] Ibid. ii. 178.

[635] Ibid. iii. 18, 20, 28, 83, 180, 499.

[636] Nottingham Records, ii. 284 et sq.

[637] Ibid. ii. 389.

[638] See Ibid. iv. 259. Similar entries become very frequent.

[639] Nottingham Records, ii. 246, 248, 254, et sq.; iii. 414, 416.

[640] Ibid. iii. 65, 68.

[641] Ibid. i. 120.

[642] In 1378 a commission was appointed to inquire into the obstructions of the Trent. Nottingham Records, i. 198. Again in 1382 the King was moved by the “clamorous relation” of the men of Nottingham and a royal proclamation was issued to forbid the raising of such tolls; while a new commission was appointed in the following year, 1383, to prevent Richard Byron, lord of Colwick, from directing the waters of the Trent to his own uses to the injury of Nottingham. (Ibid. i. 225, 227, 413.) Sir John Babington, who owned considerable land in Nottingham, seems to have quarrelled with the corporation about 1500. They appealed to Sir Thomas Lovel for help, who answered that he had written to him to demean himself as he ought to do until Lovel had examined the case and decided on it. (Ibid. iii. 402.)

[643] In the fourteenth century there were nearly 70 churches in Norwich.

[644] Ibid. iii. 362.

[645] Richard the Second seems to have handed it over to Anne of Bohemia. (Nottingham Records, i. 226.) And under Edward the Fourth it was granted to Elizabeth Woodville.

[646] Ibid. iii. 414, 416.

[647] One man was paid for cutting out the letters and another for stitching them on the jackets. (Ibid. ii. 377.)

[648] Ibid. iii. 421.

[649] Ibid. ii. 331.

[650] Ibid. iii. 237.

[651] Nottingham Records, iii. 239, 245.

[652] In 1461 the chamberlains’ expenditure for the whole year came to £124. Ibid. iii. 418. In 1486 they render account for £440 11s. 4d. Ibid. 266.

[653] Ibid. i. 1.

[654] Nottingham Records, i. 8.

[655] Ibid. i. 22, 24.

[656] Ibid. i. 40-46.

[657] Ibid. i. 56, 58, 124, 168. The wife’s dower differed in each. Inheritance went by borough English in the English town; in the French town it went to the eldest son. (Ibid. i. 186.) The jurors from the eastern and western sides always remained distinct. (Ibid. ii. 322, etc.; iii. 344.) By 1330 one of the boroughs had fallen into such poverty that it could no longer find a bailiff, and leave was given by charter to elect the bailiff from the inhabitants of any part of the town that seemed best. (Ibid. i. 109.)

[658] Nottingham Records, i. 78-80.

[659] Ibid. ii. 2-10.

[660] Nottingham Records, ii. 186.

[661] The land was let for thirty years at the yearly rent of a rose, and the corporation was to make enclosures of ditches and hedges. The agreement was made by the mayor, sheriff, and aldermen, “with the assent and consent of the entire community of the town.” Ibid. iii. 408-410.

[662] Ibid. i. 56.

[663] Nottingham Records, i. 363; ii. 362; iv. 43. It will be seen that in this case the word community was sometimes used; the term varied no doubt according to the exact body in which the right was vested that formed the subject of the treaty, and this again might depend partly on the date at which the right was acquired. Cf. the various styles used in Calender of Letters of London Corporation, ed. by Dr. Sharpe.

[664] Some instances of this style follow. There is a mortgage of rent of certain tolls by the “mayor and community,” 1315. Ibid. i. 84. Settlement as to common pasture by “mayor, burgesses, and community,” i. 150. Lease in 1390 by “mayor, chamberlains, and all the burgesses with the assent and will of the entire community,” iii. 425. For similar phrases in 1401 and 1416 iii. 425-6; ii. 106-8. In 1435, ii. 362. In 1443, ii. 408. In 1444, ii. 424. In 1451, iii. 408. In 1467, ii. 269. In 1479 land bequeathed to “mayor, sheriffs, burgesses, and men of Nottingham,” ii. 304-6, 307. For 1480, ii. 420. In 1482 an agreement about the Retford tolls is settled by “the mayor and his brethren and the commonalty of Nottingham,” iii. 427. There is an extreme particularity in the phrase used in 1485, ii. 353. For a lease of land in 1494, iii. 431. For 1504, iii. 325-6.

[665] We may compare this with the Council of Southampton; see pp. 308-11.

[666] In 1435 we read of the mayor, and nine, or possibly eleven, burgesses named “and many other commons in the said hall,” (Nott. Rec. ii. 362.) In 1443 there is something very like the council—the mayor, four justices of the peace named, John Orgram and other “trustworthy men” of the town, and the two chamberlains, who acted “with the assent of the whole community of the town.” (Ibid. ii. 408.) For the fine see ii. 424.

[667] Ibid. ii. 424.

[668] The editor of the Records, Mr. Stevenson, accepts this statement of Gregory, and says that “The council had no existence prior to 1446, and it was at first merely a committee appointed by the burgesses for the management of the affairs of the town.” According to him the townspeople were accustomed to assemble for the discussion of any important business, and “this was the system of government in use prior to the establishment of this committee in 1446.” (Nott. Rec. iv. ix.) He believes further that “it was, no doubt, the abuses arising from this system and the inconvenience of having to call a meeting of the whole community for the consideration of every question connected with the ruling of the town that caused the burgesses to choose the committee of 1446.” (Ibid. xi.)

[669] Ibid. iv. xi.

[670] Nott. Rec. ii. 362, 425, 420. The right of the burgesses to ask for the calling of a common hall is admitted in iii. 342.

[671] Ibid. ii. 186 et sq. There are passages in the charter which seem to convey this impression. In 1465 Elizabeth Woodville confirms a charter to “the mayor, sheriffs, burgesses, and men of the town,” by whatsoever name they might be incorporated and known (ii. 255-7).

[672] Ibid. ii. 202-4. For boundaries of wards see iv. 174.

[673] Ibid. ii. 425; iv. xii. 2. The aldermen were still merged for general business in the council, and appear only three times, possibly acting as a kind of separate estate—once in 1450 when some land was let by the mayor, sheriffs, chamberlains, aldermen, and the whole community; once twenty years later, when in 1471 a complaint was addressed to the King by the mayor, aldermen, and commonalty; and once in 1504 when an ordinance was made by the mayor and aldermen to reduce certain fines to be paid by them for neglect of financial duties, to which they obtained the consent of councillors and commons. (Nott. Rec. iii. 325; iii. 408; ii. 334.) In the first two cases the word may have been used to denote the whole council.

[674] Ibid. iv. xii. xv.

[675] Nott. Rec. iv. xi. xii. xiv. xv. We have only records of the completed changes in the middle of the sixteenth century, probably because of the loss of documents. But in the time of Henry VII. the distinction was already established between the mayor and his brethren and the clothing (those who had served the office of chamberlain or sheriff). iii. 449.

[676] Ibid. ii. 227.

[677] See p. 350. In an agreement made in 1500 between the mayor, council and clothing the names of six inhabitants are included, apparently unofficial, and possibly representatives of the commons. (Nott. Rec. iii. 301.) The names set down for the election of the mayor and officers for the next year are the mayor, recorder, six aldermen, six common councillors, two sheriffs, the six (apparently) plain burgesses mentioned in the last list, and twenty-four others of the clothing. (Compare the lists ibid. iii. 301, 302.)

[678] For a list of the common property and common lands in 1435 see Ibid. ii. 355-361; see also iii. 62-66; in 1351 iii. 366 et sq.

[679] The importance to the burgesses of the common lands may be illustrated by their argument in 1577 against admitting new burgesses “for there is too many of them already; by making of them the poor burgesses commons is eaten up, to the great hindrance of all.” At the same time they insisted that if a burgess let out his part of the land it should be to a burgess and not to a foreigner. (Nott. Rec. iv. 171, 172.)

[680] Ibid. iv. 282. “We present the new council for not setting the town’s grounds to the true meaning of their new election, but hath taken the best ground to the richest men, and let the poor men have nothing that are ancienter burgesses. Also we find that the whole house or the most of them overhipt (passed over) themselves as it came to them by order of their names in the book while they were disposing of Hartliff ground and the coppices, but now that the East Steaner and other good closes come to be disposed of, they share them themselves, and leaves poor men unserved that are both ancient and needful.” This happened in 1606 when the council had got control of the land.

[681] Ibid. ii. 420. No doubt one of the grievances of the people under a despotic administration was the being deprived of any adequate control over the admission of new burgesses to share their lands. Compare Ibid. iii. 459 etc. with the constant remonstrance of the Mickletorn jury.

[682] The conflict of the sixteenth century lies really beyond our period in point of time, but the complaints of the people and the incidents of the fight throw much light on the working of municipal government, even in earlier days.

[683] 1500, Nott. Rec. iii. 74, 76. The chamberlain concerned in this business was John Rose.

[684] 1516, Nott. Rec. iii. 353. A very frequent charge against the aldermen.

[685] Ibid. iii. 344.

[686] Ibid. iii. 300. The Mickletorn mentioned in 1308 was held in the presence of the coroners and bailiffs, and presentments were made by decennaries of the daily market, (i. 66, 68.) Seventeen jurors are mentioned at the Mickletorn of 1395. (i. 268.) It is interesting to compare the procedure at Coventry, as taken by Miss Dormer Harris from the records. All petitions to be laid before the court were given in to the mayor four days before the meeting of the Leet; and these were inspected by twenty-four men summoned by the mayor. On the day of the Leet these petitions, if satisfactory, received the assent of the twenty-four jurats of the Leet.

[687] Nott. Rec. iii. 438.

[688] Ibid. iii. 338-40.

[689] As late as 1480 their right of assembly had been admitted, and at least six of the commons had taken formal part in elections and other business in 1500 and 1504.

[690] This Mr. Treasurer was Sir Thomas Lovel, Treasurer of the Household, Constable of Nottingham Castle, Steward of Lenton monastery.

[691] Nott. Rec. iii. 341-2.

[692] Ibid. iii. 342-3.

[693] In September, 1514, John Rose, mayor, and the burgesses of the town gave a licence to John Sye to enclose part of the common ground for his use at a rent of 2s. a year. (Nott. Rec. iii. 125.) But in February, 1515, when leave was given to the guardians of the free school to enclose land express mention is made of the mayor, burgesses, and community. (iii. 457.) The agreement in 1516 about the Lenton fair was made between the convent and the mayor, sheriffs, burgesses, and commonalty. (iii. 345.) See also 439-40.

[694] June 1513 to Dec. 1514. Again in 1520.

[695] Nottingham Records, iii. 342, 463.

[696] Ibid. iii. 423, 463-4.

[697] Ibid. iii. 357. He apparently neglected their entreaties. 358.

[698] Nott. Rec. iii. 359.

[699] Nott. Rec. iii. 358-60.

[700] Nottingham Records, iv. xiii. For a case in which this certainly happened see p. 356. The same thing seems to have happened in 1504. A law of 1442 had ordered that if the mayor and bailiffs did not render up their accounts before leaving office they should be fined, £20 for the mayor, £10 for the bailiffs; in 1504 the mayor and aldermen together issued a new ordinance reducing the fine to one half, an ordinance which was assented to by three common councillors, while for the commonalty appear the names of seventeen burgesses, of whom one was certainly one of the sheriffs. (Ibid. ii. 424; iii. 325.)

[701] Nottingham Records, iv. pp. xiii. xxvii. xxviii. 100, 101, 1552.

[702] Ibid. iv. 106-8, 215 et sq.

[703] Ibid. iii. 365; iv. 10.

[704] Ibid. iv. 106, 191, 223. The free school was left to the guardianship of the mayor, aldermen, and common council, and if they were negligent to the Lenton convent, now of course suppressed. (Ibid. iii. 453 et sq.)

[705] Nottingham Records, iv. 108.

[706] Ibid. iv. 238.

[707] Ibid. iv. 408-9. The burgesses seem to have twice at least acted with the people against or apart from the aldermen—once in the settlement about the town accounts in 1504 (iii. 325-6); and once in the complaint drawn up by the Mickletorn jury in 1527 against the mayor and aldermen (iii. 358-60.) The people may have hoped to strengthen this element of resistance.

[708] Mr. Stevenson thinks that the Clothing about this date became a portion of the council. Nottingham Records, iv. xiii. The other explanation seems to me to meet difficulties which this leaves unsolved.

[709] Ibid. iv. 171, 172.

[710] Ibid. iv. 191.

[711] Nottingham Records, iv. 191.

[712] Ibid. iv. 214, 237-8.

[713] Ibid. iv. 245-8.

[714] Ibid. iv. 253.

[715] Ibid. iv. 262-3, 265. See 268, xvi.

[716] Ibid. iv. 269, 282.

[717] Ibid. 270. For the final settlement see iv. xvii.

[718] Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 300-305. Blomefield, xi. 300-342.

[719] Cromwell’s Colchester, 264-5.

[720] See Mr. Hudson’s admirable work on Leet Jurisdiction in Norwich. (Selden Soc. vol. v.) For the four “vice-comites” of London see Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 363.

[721] Leet Jur. (Selden Soc.) v. p. xviii. lxii, xliii-li.; Hudson, Mun. Org. in Norwich: Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, 312, 316.

[722] According to Mr. Hudson the Norwich Leet Juries were solely a “police” organization. They existed to make “presentments” which involved a certain amount of previous keeping of the peace in their own little neighbourhood. In their individual capacity the capital pledges were the precursors of the “petty constable” [see Selden Soc. v. lxii. no. 1, and cf. pages there cited]; in their collective capacity as juries they preceded the local “Justice of the Peace,” a function usurped to a small extent between (say) 1360 and 1420 by the “twenty-four citizens,” and afterwards wholly usurped by the “Court of Aldermen,” who were the borough magistrates.

[723] Hudson, Leet Jur. in Norwich, lxxi., note.

[724] Ibid. xv. 1365. Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, 322. In reference to the election of bailiffs or the “twenty-four” the word “leet” means a division of the city, not a court.

[725] Leet Jurisdiction in Norwich, xli.

[726] Besides the deed of 1290 (p. 367 n. 2) Mr. Hudson has kindly sent me the following extracts. Saturday, Vigil of Palms, 27 Edward I. 1298—John the carpenter and Alice his wife grant a messuage next the gates of Nedham to “Ballivi, Cives, et Communitas Norwici” “ad asiamentum muri civitatis erigendi.” (City Domesday, fol. lxxiii.) On folio lxviii. of the same book there is a grant of a messuage near the cathedral to the commonalty, 31 Edward, 1302, in the following form: “to the four Bailiffs (named), Henry Clark, Robert de Holveston, ... Adam de Blicling, citizens of the said city (15 persons), and all the Commonalty thereof.”

[727] Norwich Town Close Evidences, printed privately, 1885. (British Museum), 18.

[728] Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, 322.

[729] They state in 1378 that this had already been the custom. (Town Close Evidences, 30.)

[730] Arch. Journ. xlvi. No 183, 315.

[731] Town Close Evidences, 7. The phraze used in 1218 (p. 5), “men of the city,” is not the same.

[732] Ibid. 7, 13, 17, 18, 25, 26, 30. Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, 325. See Note A at end of chapter.

[733] Town Close Evidences, 27.

[734] Ibid. 16, 18.

[735] Town Close Evidences, 10, 11, 17.

[736] Norwich Town Close Evidences, 14, 24, 27, 31, 32. The same form was used even after the charter of 1403, in 1420 and 1435. (Ibid. 46.) We find “the citizens” joined with “the commonalty” in the thirteenth century. An enrolled deed of 1290, in which license to build a stall in the market is granted by the “Communitas Norwici et cives ejusdam civitatis,” is quoted by Mr. Hudson. (See Mun. Org., Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184.) The double style used is, I think, explained by a contention which occurred a century later, in 1379. “There was a discussion whether the stalls in the meat-market ought to belong to the commonalty or to the bailiffs. They are agreed that the said stalls shall in future remain to the commonalty for ever, without challenge or contradiction to the present bailiffs or the bailiffs in future.” (Town Close Evidences, 31.) At that time a great reorganization of the market was in progress (see Kirkpatrick’s “Streets and Lanes of Norwich,” App. i. pp. 95, 96) with a view to getting as many stalls as possible into the hands of the authorities. As the bailiffs had certain sources of income allotted to them (they being personally responsible for the fee ferm rent) they need not be blamed for trying to help themselves. On the other hand the attempt shows how significant was the use of the word “communitas” in the older deed (see p. 364 no. 1). I think it very possible that property set apart for a definite public purpose was held in the joint names of citizens and commonalty; but I am convinced this last word was never used in a formal way, but always expressed a tenure and control with which the “cives” or the twenty-four could not interfere.

[737] Hudson, Leet Jur. in Norwich, xxxvi. lxxiii. 63. Selden Soc.

[738] Arch. Journ. xlvi. 316-17.

[739] Town Close Evidences, 16-17.

[740] Ibid. 29. Evidently this was a time of very active municipal life. About 1372 the corporation seems to have begun copying out carefully older legal documents, and this copying and re-writing went on through the next century. The account-books which still exist began to be kept in 1393. In 1378 the income of the city was £374 17 s. 4d. Blomefield, iii. 103.

[741] Town Close Evidences, 30.

[742] Mr. Hudson informs me that there are rolls (more or less perfect) for about half the years between 1365 and 1385. Then they fail till 1413, when the constitution of the assembly had been entirely altered.

[743] I have to thank Mr. Hudson for his kindness in giving me this information. He tells me that an assembly on October 7th, 1372, is thus described: “Prima congregatio ibidem tenta die Jovis, &c. ... quatuor Ballivis (eleven persons specially named) et aliis de com’tate presentibus.” This is the constant form in use, whenever the attendance is recorded, down to the last of these rolls in 1385. The number of persons specially named varies from eleven to seventeen. Their similarity in the course of each year suggests that they were specially bound to attend. In two years 1377-8 and 1379-80 the attendances are recorded several times, and, as in the first case the total number of persons named is twenty-five and in the other twenty-four, it seems reasonably certain that they were the actual twenty-four. This is confirmed by the fact that almost all the “committee,” as they would now be called, are appointed from their number and almost the whole burden of administration is undertaken by one or other of them in conjunction with the bailiffs.

[744] Citizens left legacies to help in these expenses. Not only was £1,000 lent to the King, but heavy bribes had to be paid all round. Blomefield, iii. 120.

[745] Town Close Evidences, 36. In considering the new style two views present themselves. We may lay the whole stress on the association of mayor and sheriffs instead of bailiffs with “the citizens and commonalty”; or, as I incline to think, we may also attach importance to the formal association in a charter of “citizens” and “commonalty,” as marking an epoch in the civic history.

[746] Mr. Hudson has been good enough to give me these dates and facts, in which he has been able to correct Blomefield’s statements, from evidence in the Norwich Conveyance Rolls, etc.

[747] Blomefield, iii. 123-124. Hudson, Mun. Org., Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, 299.

[748] Town Close Evidences, 37-43.

[749] In 1354 it was ordered that London aldermen should not be elected yearly but hold office for life. (Stow’s London, 189.) A common council appears as early as 1273; and again in 1347. It was then chosen by the mayor, aldermen, and representatives from the wards. At the end of Edward’s reign the election was transferred to the trading companies, but restored to the wards in 1384; to be given back to the companies by Edward the Fourth in 1467; and restored to the wards in 1650. (Merewether and Stephens, 734-5, 1988-1992.)

[750] All that had been mayors were to ride in their cloaks whenever the mayor rode on pain of £20, each of the twenty-four on pain of 100s. The hat of the mayor cost in 1418 2s. 10d., in 1437 10s. 2d. (Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, iv. 579.)

[751] Town Close Evidences, 40-1.

[752] Conesford elected twelve councillors, Mancroft sixteen, Wymer twenty, and the Ward over the Water twelve.

[753] The Speaker of the House of Commons is first mentioned in 1378.

[754] Town Close Evidences, 39, 40, 41.

[755] Town Close Evidences, 41, 42.

[756] Ibid. 45.

[757] Blomefield, iii. 134.

[758] Town Close Evidences, 41.

[759] Ibid. 45.

[760] In 1423 when the mayor and other judges sat in the city there appeared before them two coroners, 16 constables for the four wards, the constables for the liberties of Holmestrete and Spitelond, with the bailiff of the prior’s liberties in those places, and four men out of each ward possibly for jurymen. In 1424 a tripartite indenture was made by the mayor, aldermen, and commons, with constitutions for the better government of the city, and was ratified at a common assembly in the guild hall. (Blomefield, iii. 136-139.)

[761] Leet Jur. in Norwich, xx. lxxvi. lxxx.

[762] Leet Jurisdiction, lxxx.

[763] Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, p. 326-7. Leet Jur. lxxxix. Before the end of the thirteenth century there were guilds of cobblers, fullers, saddlers, tanners. (Ibid. 13, 39, 42, 43.)

[764] In the list given in English Guilds there is one guild founded in 1307 and ten (or eleven, if we count the masons’ guild on p. 39) founded between 1350 and 1385, some of them craft guilds, others nominally social or religious associations, though it is very probable that in many cases this was but a thin disguise for a craft guild. English Guilds, 14, etc.

[765] See saddlers’ guild, which had existed a century before.

[766] The composition of 1415 decided that each craft in the city was yearly to choose two masters, whose names were to be presented for the mayor’s consent, and who were to take their oaths before him. The Monday after the mayor’s “riding” these masters were to make good and true search in their crafts and to present all offenders before the mayor for judgement; and half the fines were given to the sheriffs, half to the masters of the crafts. The mayor had to accept the presentment of the “masters”; he could not make search either himself or by any of the town officers; only if a craft refused to be searched or to elect masters the mayor might himself appoint two masters and order the search. If the masters concealed any notable default they were to be punished by the advice of the mayor and more sufficient men of the same craft. (Town Close Evidences, 41, 42.)

[767] On being enrolled each man must pay to the craft 40 pence, and to the chamber at least 20s. and “more after the quantity of his good.” (Town Close Evidences, 42.) The profits of admission to the freedom of the city had in old times gone half to the bailiffs and half to the community, but now the craft claimed a definite share of the entrance money. (Arch. Journ. xlvi. no. 184, p. 328.) By the composition six men were to be chosen “to be of counsel with the chamberlains in receiving of burgesses.”

[768] Town Close Evidences, 42-3.

[769] Hist. MSS. Com. i. 104.

[770] English Guilds, 443-4.

[771] Lambert’s Guild Life, 108. English Guilds, 443-60.

[772] 1/2d. was paid for each piece sealed. The right was leased to two citizens at 20 marks rent. Blomefield, iii. 125. By the law of 1442 the weavers were to choose every year four wardens from the craftsmen of the town, who should in their turn choose two inspectors or overseers for the stuff out of Norfolk. The wardens tested the faulty goods and received half of any forfeited stuffs. The law of 1445 ordered them to choose four wardens for Norwich and four for Norfolk, and directed the wardens to make such laws as were needful for the improvement of the trade. (20 Henry VI. cap. 10; 23 Henry VI. cap. 3; 7 Edward IV. cap. 1.)

[773] See Paston Letters.

[774] Not only were there disputes with the prior of Norwich, but with the Hospital of S. Paul (Town Close Evidences, 7-8); the prioress of Carrow (Blomefield, iii. 64, 147); the abbot of Holme (ibid. 153-4); the abbot of Wendling (ibid. 147).

[775] “For the people here is loth to complain till they hear tidings of a good sheriff.” (Paston Letters, i. 166.)

[776] The mayor and citizens were able if necessary to have in harness from two to five hundred men of the town. (Ibid. ii. 414.)

[777] Blomefield, iii. 144-155.

[778] In 1444. Blomefield, iii. 151, 152. The courts were held in the tolbooth, but the assemblies of the commons still gathered in the chapel of the Virgin Mary in the Fields. (Ibid. 92.) Most of the city business was done there as late as 1455. (Ibid. 160.) It appears that the citizens frequently availed themselves of other people’s accommodation (the Priory, Black Friars, Grey Friars) rather than spend money in providing it for themselves.

[779] Ibid. iii. 153.

[780] William Paston was one of the commissioners. (Blomefield, iii. 148.)

[781] Ibid. iii. 144-6.

[782] Proceedings of Privy Council, v. 17-19.

[783] Blomefield, iii. 146-7, 153.

[784] Proceedings of Privy Council, v. 34, 45.

[785] Blomefield, iii. 147. New arrangements were made about the payments of the sheriffs by raising regular taxes; the sword-bearer and the three serjeants for the maces were given their offices for life.

[786] Blomefield, iii. 147-149.

[787] The bishop was on the side of the anti-popular party. At his death he left to John Heydon the cup he daily used of silver gilt with the cover. (Ibid. iii. 538.)

[788] Hist. MSS. Com. i. 103.

[789] Charges that the mayor had sealed with the common seal measures bigger than the standard measures for certain favoured citizens, and that the people were forced to sell to them by these measures; that he had made an evil use of the Pye-powder Court, using its summary and autocratic procedure to imprison many men wrongly and tyrannically (one John Wetherby had been imprisoned); and that he sustained an illegal guild in the city called Le Bachery. In 1477 a statute was made that the Pye-powder Court could only deal with contracts or bargains made during the fair. (Blomefield, iii. 169.)

[790] Ibid. iii. 149-50, 154-5.

[791] Ibid. 147, 152.

[792] He left £40 to Norwich towards payment of the city tax. (Blomefield, iii. 534.) The city, however, asked in vain for the money in 1454 and again in 1460. (159.) Walter Lyhert, made bishop in 1446, was of an old Norwich family. An ancestor of his had been citizen in 1261. (Ibid. iii. 535-6.)

[793] Ibid. iii. 156.

[794] Paston Letters, i. 151, 156, 158.

[795] Ibid. i. 151.

[796] Ibid. i. 123, 183-4, 199-200, 206, 211-2, 225.

[797] In 1460 Heydon left Norfolk for Berkshire. (Paston Letters, i. cxlii.)

[798] In 1456 the common stock was so much wasted that several of the aldermen remitted debts to the city. (Blomefield, iii. 160.) And even the guild of S. George was scarcely able to pay its way. (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 104.)

[799] All ex-mayors were allowed to be justices of the peace. Four of the justices of the peace were to have the powers of King’s justices, and the aldermen were allowed to elect the under sheriffs, town clerks, and sheriffs’ bailiffs. (Blomefield, iii. 158.)

[800] Hist. MSS. Com. i. 104. In 1452 it was ordered that no brother should wear a red gown save the alderman of the guild or any of the twenty-four aldermen of the city.

[801] The first attempt at a settlement was in 1205 about the rights of common of the townspeople. (Town Close Evidences, 4-5.)

[802] Town Close Evidences, 52-64.

[803] Vol. I. p. 221.

[804] Dr. Gross, taking the Trinity guild of Lynn as “a continuation of the old guild merchant,” speaks of its “line of developement” into a “simple, social-religious fraternity” (i. 161); and notes that “though the ancient function of the guild had disappeared, its social-religious successor was a quasi-official part of the civic polity” (p. 162). He does not, however, enable us to trace any such “developement,” or to distinguish “ancient functions” from later ones. From our first glimpse of the guild in the charters of John and Henry the Third to the patent of Henry the Fifth it seems to be singularly free from change, nor is any evidence produced during these centuries for its “transformation into a simple social-religious guild.” In the case of Southampton Dr. Gross sees a developement of an exactly opposite kind (ii. 231).

[805] For a most interesting account of the Lynn cattle and sheep trade, and the Kipton Ash market, set up in 1306, for drafting off the sheep flocks, see Dr. Jessopp’s paper in the Nineteenth Century, June, 1892, on “A Fourteenth Century Parson.”

[806] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 183.

[807] The guild did not include all the town traders (Gross, ii. 166-7), and probably tended to become an exclusive body since it could keep out all save the sons of its members by charging whatever entrance fees it liked (p. 164).

[808] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 210-11.

[809] Blomefield, viii. 515. Gross, ii. 159-170. The guild of Corpus Christi paid in 1400 103s. 2d. for meat and drinks and spices for its feast, and 169s. for making wax torches; and the beginning of the century was marked by the foundation of at least three other guilds, with right to hold land and buildings.

[810] Gross, ii. 166-7.

[811] Gross, ii. 166.

[812] A charter of 1305 secured its possession of certain property. The charter of 1393 was probably connected with the extension of the statute of mortmain to towns. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 186, 191.)

[813] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 211. Gross, ii. 153. The best mill-stones in those days came from Paris, or from Andernach on the Rhine. A good mill-stone might cost from £3 to £4. (Rogers’ Work and Wages, i. 113.)

[814] Even from the thirteenth century. (Gross, ii. 153.)

[815] Gross, ii. 159.

[816] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, pp. 225-231.

[817] Gross, ii. 158, etc. 168.

[818] Compare this with Southampton, where the alderman was himself mayor.

[819] Gross, ii. 155-156.

[820] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 194.

[821] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 195-6. Beloe, Our Borough, p. 19.

[822] Beloe, Our Borough, 15.

[823] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 196.

[824] In 1345 the king called out a hundred men of the most vigorous to go to Gascony. (Ibid. 189.)

[825] See Vol. I. 291-2.

[826] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 218-223.

[827] Ibid. 158-9.

[828] Ibid. p. 229.

[829] Ibid. xi. 3, p. 224.

[830] Cf. for comparison and contrast the custom of Dinant after 1348. (Ville de Dinant. Pirenne, 45-6, 49-50.)

[831] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 191-4.

[832] Mr. Beloe says that the ruling class resisted, and instituted a costly suit to get a decree under the great seal setting aside the award, but he gives no particulars. (Our Borough, 17.)

[833] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 197, 200.

[834] Either officer convicted of false dealing was to lose his office and franchise for ever.

[835] The four chamberlains or treasurers were then to be chosen from the body of burgesses, two by the mayor and jurats, two by the burgesses. But, unlike Norwich, where the council and commons divided the remaining elections between them, in Lynn the only appointment left to the community besides the two chamberlains was the prolocutor. Coroners and constables were nominated by the people, and elected by the jurats, and the other officers, the common clerk, serjeant, janitors, bell-man and wait, taken from the general community both of burgesses and non-burgesses, were directly appointed by the mayor and jurats.

[836] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 196-202. There were “constabularies” which corresponded to wards, over which a captain was appointed in time of war or danger. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 167.)

[837] Beloe, Our Borough, 16.

[838] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 191-4.

[839] Beloe, 17, 18. Gross, ii. 170.

[840] Ibid.

[841] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 195, 203.

[842] Instances of the important place held by the alderman in matters of town government in 1420. (Ibid. 246, and in 1431-42, p. 162-4.)

[843] In 1426 the alderman of the guild chose four fit persons who took the accustomed oath and entered the chamber; they chose four others, who, after being sworn, were brought into the chamber, and the eight then added to their number four more. The whole body of twelve, after sitting from the tenth to the third hour, were finally divided as to the election of the serjeant who had in some way offended the community, and at whose name a “great murmur now arose amongst the people” waiting outside. He was, however, chosen after asking pardon of the mayor and community for his offence. (Ibid. 160.) In 1477 another election is described, which was carried on in exactly the same way. (Ibid. 169.) And in 1470, when a constable had to be elected there was the same procedure.

[844] Beloe, 21.

[845] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 245, 246.

[846] The gradual change in the mode of electing burgesses for parliament illustrates the action of the councils in absorbing influence. In 1314 the jury to elect the burgesses had been chosen by a committee of twenty-six townsmen. But at least from 1425 the mayor assumed the right of choosing the first four of the jury, who then named the remaining eight. In 1433, if not earlier, the mayor was bound to select two of the twenty-four and two of the twenty-seven, and the added eight members were all taken from the same bodies; and in 1442 this custom was made into a permanent law. (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3. 240, 157-8, 163-4, 166-9.) About 1523 the burgesses were chosen by the twenty-four and twenty-seven voting personally in assembly; this assembly, called the “House,” carried on all dealings with members, instructed them, paid them, and received their reports. The first effort of the burgesses at large to take any part in election was at the Long Parliament. (Ibid. pp. 148-9.)

[847] 1427, Ibid. 160; 1428, p. 161; 1441, p. 163-4; 1442, p. 164; 1466, p. 168. Cf. also p. 148.

[848] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 162.

[849] Ibid. 246.

[850] Ibid. 170.

[851] Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 163.

[852] Ibid. 158-9, 161.

[853] Ibid. 167.

[854] Ibid. 168. The use of the word communitas in 1463 is here explained as showing how the term had “already lost its original meaning and was used to designate the humblest and least influential class of the burgesses.” But community was used in exactly this sense in 1305. (Ibid. 187.)

[855] For some details of the seventy-five guilds of Lynn see the Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany, edited by Walter Rye, Part I., pp. 153-183.

[856] Lyon’s Dover, I. xi.; ii. 267-8, 287, 312, 370.

[857] In Dover the common assembly summoned in the same way was called a Hornblowing. (Boy’s Sandwich, 797.)

[858] Ibid. 538.

[859] Ibid. 783-4. In 1565 291 households were English and 129 Walloons. But there were many foreigners in Sandwich at a far earlier time.

[860] In 1466 and 1492. Boys’ Sandwich, 675, 679.

[861] Ibid. 787.

[862] Ibid. 673-6. In 1469 the commons of Sandwich at a Shepway court desire that the mayor may be kept in safe custody for such charges as they will allege against him. (Ibid. 676.)

[863] Boys’ Sandwich, 677.

[864] Lyon’s Dover, i. 206-7.

[865] Boys’ Sandwich, 683.

[866] At the same time the jurats, who as late as 1492 need only have lived a year in the town, “he and his wife together,” must now have been there at least three years. (Ibid. 679-701.) Jurats were ultimately chosen or nominated by the mayor in Dover and in Winchelsea. (Lyon, ii. 268, 371.)

[867] Boys, 686.

[868] Skelton’s Poems. Ed. Dyce, 381-2.

[869] Green’s History of the English People, i. 211-225.

[870] See p. 238. Mr. Maitland’s Archaic Communities (Law Quarterly), 47.

[871] Brinklow’s Papers (Early Eng. Text Soc.) illustrate the uncompromising ideas of radical reform fostered in towns.

[872] Bishop Creighton’s Wolsey, 51, 59.

[873] Skelton’s Poems. Ed. Dyce, i. 386.

[874] See Vol. I. Ch. VII.

[875]

“He rules his commonalty
With all benignity,
His noble baronage
He putteth them in courage
To exploit deeds of arms....
Wherever he rides or goes
His subjects he doth support,
Maintain them with comfort
Of his most princely port.”

Skelton, ii. 81-2.

[876] Vol. I. p. 26, n. 5.

[877] “And then they (princes) daub over their oppression with a submissive, flattering carriage, that they may so far insinuate into the affections of the vulgar, as they may not tumult nor rebel, but patiently crouch to burdens and exactions.” (Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr.), 151.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

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