Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1. Green Alice Stopford

there is any escape out of the prison-house of mediæval society. For the first time we there see England, not as it appeared to historians and satirists of the court or the monastery, but as it looked to one standing in the very midst of that vast “field full of folk from end to other” – to the poet who walked among the people with his heart full of charity and pity, who by day mixed with the crowd at the fair, or watched the bargainings in the market-place, or travelled along country by-ways and entered the hovels of the poor, and at night sat in the ale-house among beggars and mendicant friars. But while he shows us all the trouble and confusion of that tumultuous crowd, the social order remains to him simple and unchangeable – fixed, in his belief, as firmly as the decrees of God and nature could establish it. He could only repeat the old time-honoured counsels of work and obedience as the final remedy for all social ills: “Counsel not the commons the King to displease.” But it was more than possible that work and obedience might still leave, as it had left before, life empty of all but misery. Then the last solace lay in resignation.

      “Yea, quoth Patience, and hente out of his poke

      A piece of the Pater Noster and proffered to us all.

      And I listened and looked what livelihood it were;

      Then was it ‘Fiat voluntas tua’ that should find us all.

      ‘Have, Actyf,’ quoth Patience, ‘and eat this when thee hungreth

      Or when thou clomsest for cold or clyngest for drought;

      And shall never gyves thee grieve nor great lord’s wrath,

      Prison nor other pain for —patientes vincunt.”24

      Such was Langland’s final solution for the disorders of his time. But the English were not a patient people, and the problem of the reorganization of society had become a very serious one towards the close of the Middle Ages, and was perhaps more urgent to men’s fears and consciences in the fifteenth century than it had ever been before, or was to be again till our own day. It was a pressing question for humble folk, for shopkeepers and traders and artisans and journeymen who in the absence of privilege were driven to think of liberty; and in the crowded lanes, the mean workshops, the disorderly market-place, the little thatched Common Hall of the mediæval town, great principles of freedom found their early home, and fought their way to perfection and supremacy. It was not enough that the burghers should create societies of free men – ”gentlemen,” as Piers Ploughman would have said,25 to whom the great difference that distinguished between man and man was not wealth or poverty, labour or ease, but freedom or bondage. This was the easier part of their task, and was practically finished early in their history. It was a longer and more difficult business to discover how the art of government should be actually practised in these communities, and to define the principles of their political existence. But in these matters also the burghers became the pioneers of our liberties, and their political methods have been handed down as part of the heritage of the whole people. As by degrees the multitude of privileges promised and confirmed left the important towns with no more demands to make, they turned their energies to the work of framing those elaborate and highly artificial constitutions which mark the highest point to which their proud and self-sufficient independence had attained. Instead of tamely accepting the pattern or the theory of its neighbours, every town was making its own peculiar experiment in the art of governing, with a vivacity and a restless ingenuity proper to the culminating moment of their activity.

      Meanwhile by a happy coincidence the boroughs were called to take part in the great movement by which the House of Commons was created, at a time when the discipline and experience of local self-government had prepared them to exercise a very real influence in the moulding of the English constitution into its present form. Having for the most part secured their fundamental liberties just before Simon de Montfort in 1265 summoned the middle class to take their share in the work of Parliament, and having steadily strengthened their position during all the thirty years of changing counsels and tentative experiments which followed, they saw the representation of the boroughs definitely established in 1295 – the very year after county representation had been at last perfectly acknowledged.26 If for a time they played apparently a small part in political battles, if the separate action of the borough members is scarcely mentioned,27 the fact still remains that throughout the century during which the House of Commons was being fashioned28 members sent from these free self-governing communities formed almost two-thirds of that House. Edward the First sent Parliamentary writs to 166 towns, and in the Parliament of 1399, 176 representatives of boroughs sat by the seventy-four knights of the shire.29 Silent and acquiescent as they were for a while, there are significant instances to show the steady growth of their importance, and the way in which statesmen had begun to appreciate the new force with which governments had henceforth to reckon.30 By the close of the fourteenth century their influence was marked; and it was doubtless through its vigorous burghers that the House of Commons in the early part of the fifteenth century laid hold of powers which it had never had before, nor was to have again for two hundred years.31 In the list of petitions and statutes throughout the century in which their influence on legislation was plainly dominant, we may look for the true beginning of democratic government in England.32 Indeed at a yet earlier time, when the House of Commons was not seventy years old, its power had been already measured and men’s imaginations kindled by its mighty destiny. If supreme over all the King kept his state at Westminster,

      “him lord antecedent,

      Both their head and their King, holding with no party,

      But stand as a stake that sticketh in a mire

      Between two lands for a true mark”;

      if his power was absolute, and he could

      “claim the commons at his will

      To follow him, to find him, and to fetch at them his counsel,”33

      yet even then Conscience warned the sovereign that to frame a righteous government “without the commons’ help it is full hard, by my head”;34 and Reason

      “counselled the King his commons to love,

      For the commons is the King’s treasure.”35

      The whole part however played by the towns in national politics, the degree of influence they exercised, in what ways it differed from that of the aristocratic class, how it affected matters of administration, finance, foreign policy, commercial laws, the strength of the monarchy, and the forms of the constitution – all these questions have still to be investigated. What is perfectly clear is that wise rulers in those days saw the tremendous change that was taking place in the balance of forces in the State, as even the most foolish among them felt that the power of the purse at least was passing from the country magnates to the town merchants;36 and they gave expression to their convictions by a change in the whole character of their policy. To kings and statesmen the friendship of the burghers even in times of comparative quiet was daily becoming a matter of greater consequence to be bought at their own price. It was no longer the nobles whom they sought to bribe to their interest, but the towns; and as gifts and pensions to Court favourites declined, courtesies and gracious remissions of rent were lavished on the boroughs.37 From this time, even when the towns had fallen to their lowest estate, their heritage of power was never wholly lost, and through their later humiliation and corruption we may still discover the evidence of their political consequence, since the measure of their influence was in fact the price set on their obedience.

      If such a tale

24

Piers Ploughman, passus xvi. 248-255.

25“The Jews that were gentlemen, Jesus they despised,Both his lore and his law, now are they low churls,As wide as the world is woneth (dwelleth) there noneBut under tribute and tallage as tikes and churls.And those that become Christian by counsel of the BaptistAre franklins and free…And gentlemen with Jesus.”

(Piers Ploughman, ed. by W. Skeat for Early English Text Society, part iii.; pass. xxii. 34.) I have ventured to give quotations from mediæval writers in modern spelling, as I am here concerned neither with philology nor the history of literature: and there are many to whom the old methods of spelling only serve to obscure the sense.

26

Stubbs, ii. 137-144, 239-244.

27

Ibid. ii. 560, 671.

28

Stubbs, ii. 332-4.

29

Ibid. ii. 257; iii. 16.

30

The former devices for illegal taxation on the King’s part broke down when the commons looked so sharply after these matters that no attempt at unauthorised taxation of merchandise was made after the accession of Richard the Second. Stubbs, ii. 574-578. How completely the relation of King and commons had been reasoned out by the people we see in Langland’s writings.

“Then came there a King, and ‘by his crown,’ said,

‘I am a king with crown the commons to rule,

And holy Church and clergy from cursed men to defend.

And if me lacketh to live by, the law wills that I take

There I may have it hastelokest; (quickest) for I am head of law,

And ye be both members, and I above all.’

···········

‘On condition,’ quoth conscience, ‘that thou conne defend

And rule thy realm in reason right well, and in truth;

Then, that thou have thine asking as the law asketh;

Omnia sunt tua ad defendendum, sed non ad deprehendendum.’”

(Piers Ploughman, passus xxii. 467-472, 478-481.)

31

Stubbs, iii. 77; Rogers, Agric. and Prices, iv. viii.

32

See the description of a session of Parliament in Richard the Redeless, passus iii. A.D. 1399.

33

Piers Ploughman, passus iv. 376, &c.

34

Ibid. passus v. 176.

35

Ibid. passus vi. 181. M. Jusserand (Epopée Mystique du Moyen Age, 101-118), justly points out what a typical representative of common opinion Langland was. Compare the popular manifesto of 1450. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 267.) “They say the King should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods are his; the contrary is true, for then needed him never to set Parliament and to ask good of them.”

36

The burden of taxation was gradually being transferred from one class to another as subsidies on moveables, and customs on import and export were found more productive and more easily managed. Stubbs, ii. 570.

37

Reductions of rent are too numerous to give; they occurred everywhere, and were sometimes apparently bought at a considerable price. (See Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, 366.) Loans from the towns seem to have been voluntary. In 1435 the Sandwich commonalty refused to lend money to the King; and further excused themselves from sending him soldiers for the defence of Calais, “having all the men they can spare already employed in the service of the Duke of York.” (Boys, 672.) A grant to the King was again refused in 1486. (Ibid. 678.) The Norwich citizens got into trouble for instituting a suit to have their loan returned (Blomefield, iii. 147, 152). In 1424 Lynn lent 400 marks, and in 1428 the council agreed that burgesses of parliament should receive from executors of the late king a hundred pounds for a pledged circlet of gold because they could not get more (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. part 3, 161). In 1491 the king was at Bristol, where he had a benevolence of £1,800 (Ricart, 47-48). At the coming of Richard the Third in 1484, York, to gain a reduction of the fee-ferm, agreed to give him 100 marks in a cup of gold, and to the queen £100 in a dish. A list is given of the citizens who subscribed – the mayor giving £20, the recorder £100, and so on. The whole sum subscribed was £437 (Davis’ York, 167-9, 174). It would be quite impossible to mention all the loans, but the instance of Canterbury is curious as the first foreshadowing of the national debt. In 1438 £40 was lent to the king, and in 1443 £50; in these cases private individuals advanced the money in various amounts according to their taste for speculation, and probably got certificates promising interest and redemption at par (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. part 1, 139).