THE RISE OF THE TOWNS

Every high road leads sooner or later to a market town, and in that town the tourist may be sure of finding a White Hart Inn. The White Hart is the commonest of signs all through England. Half-timbered and rambling, with the marks of decrepit old age and long service writ large all over it, this inn is in evidence near the market-place, often in a street of the same name, to remind us of its importance in the days gone by. Sometimes, as at Guildford and Brentwood, the old building lies hidden behind a more modern front. When the builder has laid violent hands on a White Hart, title-deeds or other authentic records of its antiquity are in nearly every case available.

The White Hart, Brentwood

A vague tradition attempts to explain these inns as royal posting-houses, it being supposed that stations to supply fresh horses for the royal journeys were first established during the last years of Edward III. Undoubtedly the White Hart inns all date from the beginning of the reign of Richard II. After the scandals and misrule during the long dotage of his father, the nation centred all their hopes in the young king who showed promise of becoming a wise and able ruler. The policy of the good Parliament would once more govern in the council, and it seemed a happy omen when he took for his badge the white stag with a collar of gold around his neck. This legend, portrayed on so many signboards, was a delight of the mediÆval romantic writers: the white hart was never to be taken alive except by one who had conquered the whole world. Its oldest form appears in the pages of Aristotle who relates how Diomedes consecrated a white stag to Diana; and how it lived for a thousand years before it was killed by Agathocles, King of Sicily. Pliny gives Alexander the Great, and later writers Julius CÆsar and Charlemagne, as the Emperors who captured the young white stag and released it after decorating it with the golden band. On the Dorchester road, near Stowminster, there used to be an inn with this kingly stag painted for a sign, and underneath the following lines translated from a mediÆval quatrain by some not very conscientious scholar who has imported CÆsar, stag and all, into the West of England:

But when we begin to inquire into the actual title-deeds of the White Hart inns, we find ourselves in the midst of movements of far deeper import than the outburst of national loyalty on the signboards. The story of a great mediÆval fiscal policy; the birth of home manufactures; the struggle of the towns for municipal rights. The sign of the White Hart marks a turning-point in the great social and industrial revolution which was to bring to the great body of Englishmen prosperity and freedom.

No country could compare with England, during the Middle Ages, for the production of wool. From the twelfth century onwards wool was almost the only export and the principal source of wealth for landowners and farmers. So important a trade was bound to receive the attention of Chancellors in search of a new tax. Accordingly, early in the thirteenth century, a system was devised by which no wool could possibly be exported until it had contributed its quota to the royal treasury. Wool, as well as some other raw materials, such as skins, lead and tin, had to be brought for sale to an appointed place called the Staple, where the trade was under the superintendence of a special corporation whose seal must appear on every bale. The Staple was at first fixed at Bruges, the chief seaport of the Flemish cloth manufacturer, but during the reign of Edward III, it was moved to England, and then finally, in 1390, established at Calais. Thither every dealer was obliged to carry his bales by certain approved routes, through Boston, London, Sandwich, Winchester, or Southampton, and these towns became subsidiary centres of the Staple. Staple Inn, in Holborn, was an inn for merchants of the Staple before it became a resort for the lawyers. In the end the merchants of the Staple grew into a ring of powerful monopolists, who controlled prices, regulated times of sale, and even secured the carrying trade in their own hands. The sale of English sheep abroad, either for breeding or for shearing, was also forbidden under very heavy penalties.

All these vexatious formalities in getting his wool to Calais, and the rapacity of the merchants of the Staple, disgusted the English farmer. As early as 1258 Simon de Montfort urged that England ought to be a centre of manufacture, and not merely a source of raw material. Edward III, while with one hand consolidating the power of the monopolists who controlled the Staple, on the other hand stimulated the obvious remedy. He invited Flemish weavers to settle in this country. By the end of his reign the whirring sound of the looms might be heard all through Norfolk, Essex and Kent. From a country of farmers which exported wool, England was soon to be transformed into a country of manufacturers who exported cloth. The sale of wool at the Staple dwindled away, while Yorkshire tweeds and Cotswold broadcloths were winning the preference for price and quality in the most distant markets.

The commercial prosperity of England is generally said to have been built up on the industries arising out of the woolpack. But in the fourteenth century capital was already being found for the development of many other enterprises. In 1307 there were complaints about London fog, owing to the use of coal as fuel. In the Sussex weald and the Forest of Dean the iron trade was so busy that it was necessary to import a considerable portion of the ore from Sweden and Spain. The excellence of English guns, it is said, contributed largely to the victories of Henry V in France.[4] The lost art of brickmaking was reintroduced by the Flemings. Cheaper labour and materials induced copper-founders from Dinant and bell-founders from Liege to transfer their trades hither. Instead of bringing beer from Prussia the shipmasters found it more profitable to export Maidstone ales into Flanders.

Meanwhile, the towns from a position of semi-servitude had been step by step attaining to liberty, wealth and the political franchise. London led the way owing to the presence of merchants from Rouen and Caen who settled there immediately after the Conquest and took the position of a governing class prepared to treat with the King for privileges. The steps by which the various boroughs secured their rights of self-government, free speech in free meeting and equal justice would need several volumes to describe. They were won by steady solid perseverance, by customs allowed to grow up unnoticed during the quarrels between the barons and the royal favourites, by a direct bargain with the lord of the manor, or in a few instances by less ingenuous methods. Most of the towns, like London, were situated on the royal demesne. With these the work was comparatively easy. Secure of his ultimate supremacy, and indifferent to small sources of power, the king was generally willing to surrender local claims for a fixed payment in money. A Corporation was a better security for the payment of dues than petty officers given to peculation. Accordingly, from the reign of Henry I, charters were granted giving a progressive degree of liberty, although until the reign of John the King retained the nomination of the portreeve or mayor.

The feudal baron was not so willing to part with his supremacy. But the nobility were rapidly becoming poorer; and the issue of the battle was ultimately with the strong. Either the powerful merchants’ guild, returning unwearied to the fray after each rebuff, by its steady dogged agitation ended in forcing a compromise, or else the traders deserted the place and let it dwindle away into a poverty-stricken village. Sometimes an ancient charter was alleged to exist and prescriptive rights claimed before a commission in the King’s Courts; and the longest purse could fee the most persistent counsel.Much less hopeful were the prospects of citizens whose lord was a religious house. The monasteries were rich, well acquainted with forms of law, and as trustees not justified in parting with their hereditary assets. Hitherto promoters of progress, the monks now began, to be regarded as a stumbling-block on the path towards freedom. And from this arose the smouldering hatred of the monasteries that underlies so much of the literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During the great revolt of the villeins the monasteries and bishops’ palaces on the route of the insurgents were all burnt and sacked by the mob. At St. Albans, Cirencester, and even in the cinque port of Romney, the struggles of the townsfolk to burst their thraldom were endless and always futile. It was organised force in conflict with organised authority, and the result was that the latter prevailed. At Coventry the motto of the two contending bodies was divide et impera. The Merchant Guild became the Guild of the Holy Trinity and shared with the Corpus Christi Guild (of which the Prior and other Churchmen were members) all authority in the town, nominating the Mayor and all the important officials.Simon de Montfort, “the father of English liberty,” was the first to recognise the growing importance of the commercial middle classes by summoning two burgesses from each of the town boroughs to his Parliament in 1264, and their presence was treated as a matter of course in subsequent Parliaments, though they formed a comparatively insignificant factor. In the reign of Edward III, when the Knights of the Shire associated with them to form the future House of Commons, their growing wealth and ability to make terms with the King as a condition of granting supplies was recognised and a marked increase of parliamentary activity commenced. Their “petitions” became on the assent of the Crown Statutes of the Realm, and henceforward the Lower House was to initiate nearly all legislation.

And now we can return to our White Hart inns. They were the first inns to be built by the corporations, or at least under their licence. Secure in the possession of their charter, proud of their ever-increasing commerce, hopeful of the future privileges and reforms that were likely to be obtained by their burgesses in Parliament, the towns began to provide new inns of a superior kind for the merchants who came regularly to their markets. They were held direct from the King, and to the reigning king alone they looked for any future marks of favour. Hence these inns almost invariably bear the badge of the reigning king. When Richard II was deposed the White Hart gave place to the White Swan of Henry IV, and this latter is nearly as common on the signboards. Barons and earls might dispute and make war on one another as to who was the sovereign de jure; the concern of the towns was with the king de facto. The Commons regarded each change of dynasty from Plantagenet to red rose and from red rose to white rose with the complacency of the Vicar of Bray. The old aristocracy ruined themselves and died out amid these political disputes; meanwhile the burghers grew rich and their posterity formed the nucleus of a new aristocracy of English race and of more patriotic instincts.

The Swan, Felstead

The signboards tell the same tale all through the fifteenth century. The Antelope of Henry VI, the White Lion of Edward IV, and the White Boar of Richard III each take their turn. The changes they represented meant little more than incidental gossip to the burghers. All the real life of the citizens was in their home and trade, in their craft guilds, in treaties with neighbouring towns, or in the little controversies of the town council.

We know only a few incidental details about the internal comforts of the White Hart inns. The majority of the guests slept in large rooms, on couches or wooden bedsteads. Only a few very important grandees were accorded a private camera. The bed was a long sack-like mattress stuffed with straw or hay; great folk would carry with them their own bed on their journeys. Most people lay in their ordinary clothes on the bed, though counterpanes and linen were just coming into use. Carpets were chiefly employed like tapestry for hanging on the walls and diminishing the continual draughts. The women had their special apartments; the serving men slept on the rushes of the hall, while the grooms were left to make the best of stable and barn. Meals were taken at fixed hours, at a long movable table on trestles in the hall, guests and servants sitting down together, but placed according to rank. Some of the dishes would not commend themselves to fastidious moderns, but at least, there was never any lack of good wholesome fare; loaves, joints and meat pasties all on a gargantuan scale. Wines of British as well as foreign extraction competed with the nut brown ale. Essex was in those days the vineyard of England.

How much we have fallen off in the capacity of our stomachs from the good old times of open-air life and daily exercise on horseback may be judged from the following allowance of provisions granted to Lady Lucy, one of the maids of honour to Queen Katherine of Aragon:

When the Warden of Merton College travelled with two of his fellows and four servants from Oxford to Durham in 1331, the season being winter, their average bill was 2d. for beds for the whole party, or for the servants alone, one halfpenny; at the town inns of fifty years later the price of a bed was one penny, and the increased comfort warranted the higher charge.[5] The private rooms, instead of being numbered, received names according to the subject portrayed on the tapestry hangings. This custom continued in old-fashioned inns up to quite recent times, and has served as the basis of stage humour of a sort:

In the minute books of the Grey Coat Hospital, a very valuable religious educational charity, we come across a rather startling entry. On Epiphany, 1698, “After prayers and sermon in church, the children and their parents dined in Hell.” Heaven and Hell were two public dining rooms adjoining the old Palace of Westminster, and so named either from the hangings or other pictorial decoration.