It thus seems probable that administration in Southampton underwent singularly little change from first to last, save the raising of councillors into self-elected aldermen and justices of the peace. Whether the system of close election by the council recognized in the charters of 1401 and 1445 was new, or whether, as is equally probable, the custom was already of old standing, it seems plain that no popular disturbance or protest was excited by these charters. It was not till fifteen years later, in 1460, that the commons rose in open revolt under the leadership of the sheriff and five burgesses, and then the battle raged round the election of the mayor.[600] A hundred or more rioters rushed to the Guildhall, broke in upon the meeting there with drawn daggers and loud cries, and proceeding at once to elect their leader the sheriff as mayor, carried him in triumph on their shoulders, and set him on the mayor’s seat, while another of the ringleaders was appointed in his place as sheriff. But the riot had no great results. The defeated party procured a patent which declared that their old custom of election was to be observed, and a mayor was lawfully chosen by it; but as they were unable to displace the usurper, the quarrel finally ended in a compromise whose only effect was slightly to increase the part taken by the aldermen in elections. By this new system the mayor and aldermen met in the audit house a month before the day of election, and chose four burgesses for nomination; on the day of election they again met and struck two names off the list. The remaining two names were proposed to the burgesses and one of them elected by ballot; the outgoing mayor let it be known which was to be elected, and the ballot was a matter of form. The people put their necks once more under the yoke, and the mayor nominated his successor and handed on to him the traditions of office which he had himself received.[601]
Twenty years later there seems to have been another impotent effort to reform the system of election. At this time all such attempts were watched from the Court with suspicious fear; and Richard the Third wrote to the mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, pointing out that by their letters patent they had truly the right both to elect municipal officers and to remove them for reasonable cause, and directing them, since “certain indisposed persons are about to trouble and vex you in due execution of the said grant, so to punish the said indisposed persons as shall be the good and fearful example of others, and if they be such persons whom ye may not accordingly punish in that behalf, to certify us thereof to the intent we may provide such a lawful remedy in the same as may accord with your said privileges.”[602]
In these dissensions it does not seem that the popular anger was excited by alleged political usurpations, but simply by corrupt administration, especially perhaps in relation to public money and the common lands. There was certainly financial trouble. In 1459, as we have seen, the auditor’s accounts had fallen short by large sums; and as from of old one of the auditors was appointed by the mayor, and the treasure chest was kept in the mayor’s house and the keys by the mayor and discreets, there was probably ground for suspicion on the part of the people.[603] The remedy, however, was slowly and hardly won, and it was not till 1505 that a very moderate reform was carried out by passing a decree that the mayor’s salary should be paid through the steward by the auditors; “to the intent following that no mayor from this day forward take upon him to receive or handle any of the town’s money, that is, to wit, he shall make no fine except it be at the audit house, calling to him two or three of the aldermen or of the discreets at the least, and the money thereof coming to be put into the Common Box in the said audit house.”[604] In course of time it was also ordered that the common chest should be kept in the guild hall[605] instead of the mayor’s own house.
In the same year, 1459, there was probably some alarm also as to the common lands.[606] The 376 acres of Southampton Common, the various closes, the God’s House Meadow, and the Saltmarsh, were, as we have seen, the special care of the “community”;[607] and a quarrel had been going on for centuries with S. Julian’s Hospital as to a tract of marsh which was claimed by the town as part of its common in spite of all the fences raised by the warden of S. Julian’s to vindicate his claims.[608] In 1459 a new warden perhaps suggested the plan which he carried out a few years later, after the failure of the popular revolt, when he disseised the town in 1466 of a part of the great marsh or common, having bought over the mayor by a grant of some of the land in question to be held of the hospital. Under a later mayor in 1471 the burghers again broke down the fences put up by the hospital,[609] and appealed to the king and council to defend their ancient privileges. “Ancient men” (one aged 104 and more) gave their depositions as to boundaries,[610] and an award was finally made in 1504, followed by the necessary legal settlements, in 1505. A new quarrel arose when the corporation attempted to raise a tax for keeping up the sea-banks or cutting sluices to save the fields from floods; and proposed, if this failed, to enclose and hire out a part of the common land to pay these expenses.[611] The townsmen, on the alert for danger, sent in eager declarations that the poor commons “will be ever ready to withstand all manner of persons with their bodies and goods that would attempt to usurp upon any point or parcel of the liberties and franchises of the town.” They would not hear of letting any part of the common; as to paying any money for sluice, bridge, or cut made by the corporation, “they pray your wisdoms in that matter to assess none of them, for they intend to pay none in no wise”; unless indeed some better and happier times might befall them, “remembering your poor commons are not as yet at a fordele in riches, trusting to God to increase under your masterships.”[612] The period of wealth, however, tarried, and so did the taxes; so a few years later the corporation ordered part of the marsh to be enclosed. Upon this three hundred of the commons, men and women, marched out to the waste, broke down fences and banks, and triumphantly proceeded to the guild hall, making “presumptuously and unlawfully a great shout” to the annoyance of the court within. Flushed with success they next walked two and two in procession with their picks and shovels to the mayor’s house near Holy Rood Church and Cross, and one cried out, “If master mayor have any more work for us we be ready”; after which they went home without doing further harm. Four days later one of the king’s council came down with letters ordering the arrest of the chief offenders, and perpetual banishment was proclaimed against the ringleaders who had fled, while six other men were seized, taken to London, and put in the Marshalsea. The Southampton rioters were struck with terror and repentance. Petitions were got up in every parish for the prisoners; the town promised to restore the banks, and never sin again in like fashion; the corporation sent out a proclamation that all those who had taken part in breaking down the banks should go out to build them up again, and only when this was done was the petition for mercy forwarded to London. Finally, sentence was given by the cardinal and the council that the prisoners should be sent home, and at their coming to Hampton should sit in the open stocks under the pillory, till the mayor and his brethren and the king’s lieutenant walked down the street, when the penitents were to plead for mercy and forgiveness and confess their guilt. All this was done; the mayor, in the name of his brethren, magnanimously, of his great mercy, accepted the apology and promised that no grudge should be borne against them. “And thereupponne [he] commaunded them owt of the stokkes, and hadd them to the audite hous, and bound them by obligacon to be good aberying ageynst the kinges grace and the mayor and his brethryn hereafter, and so delyveryd them.”[613] The municipal dignity was vindicated, though the quarrel was still left to drag on for the next two hundred years.[614]
In spite of irritation over questions of financial fraud and the management of the common lands, however, there seems to have been little political activity in Southampton. The civic life stretches out before us like stagnant waters girt round by immutable barriers. Scarcely a movement disturbs its sluggish surface. The twelve perpetually gather round the mayor and rule the town with a despotic power which hardly suffers change during the centuries from John to Henry the Eighth. Even the modest claim of townsfolk for some closer connexion with their mayor only reveals with what a steady hand the venerable oligarchy maintained its ancient discipline. Against their consecrated order the commons from time to time made a riotous and disorderly protest;[615] but there is no attempt to bring about real constitutional reform. We scarcely hear of the general Assembly; there is no appeal to old traditions of freedom; no talk of a representative council of the commons; no organized resistance of the crafts – possibly because these, however numerous, were too poor and weak (if we may judge from their inability to maintain the walls and towers, even when grouped together) to make head against a very powerful corporation. Mere outbreaks of unorganized and intermittent revolt, which were occasionally kindled by some grave scandal, died away fruitlessly before the steady resistance of the authorities in power, and such paroxysms of transient activity on the part of the people remained without permanent result.
Southampton had, in fact, a peculiar history and a fixed tradition in government, which left its people in a singularly helpless position before authority. The conditions, political and commercial, of its municipal life necessarily gave the expert a supreme place in administration; and it is possible that a compact body of merchants had from the first imposed their methods of government and election on a population who had no voice in the matter. The state of affairs was exactly reflected in the attitude of the mayor, who held a place of singular pre-eminence and might. Far removed from popular criticism or control, as direct minister of the king[616] he conducted a vast mass of business in absolute independence, both of the community and of the guild, not only as being the king’s escheator, the gauger and weigher of goods at the king’s standard, and measurer over the assize of cloth, the mayor of the staple of wool, and mayor of the staple of metals under the king’s orders, but also as the king’s admiral within the town and its liberties, with supreme control of the port and coast from Christ Church Head to the Needles thence to Hill Head at the mouth of Southampton Water, over the port of Cowes and of Portsmouth;[617] and even as a sort of secretary for foreign affairs, for we must remember that nowhere, save in London, was the “foreign” question so big and important. Settlers from France or the Netherlands, such as those in Sandwich or Norwich, who took up their dwelling there and became absorbed in the general body of the townsfolk, formed a very different class from the merchant visitors who flocked to Southampton to look after business interests which extended all over the country, and to a great extent conducted the whole carrying trade of the south; and who, as strangers under the peculiar protection of the king, constituted a foreign colony, ruled by special laws and kept under special supervision.[618] In all these different departments of his government the mayor ruled by other laws than the municipal ordinances; he did not need the municipal seal for his decrees, nor the assent of the community for his acts; and the great departments in which his actions were removed from all possibility of local criticism, and local control must have made absolute rule the easier and less singular in all other relations of his office.
Nor ought we to forget wholly the outer influences which were acting on Southampton from the world beyond the water. With Flanders it seems to have had little direct communication. So long as the Mediterranean galleys carried its wool to the Netherland ports, and returned to pick up their freight for the homeward journey, the associations and commerce of Southampton were with the great cities of Italy, too far removed from it in every conceivable respect to serve as schools of political freedom; and with the communes of France whose liberties had long suffered decay, and in the fifteenth century were finally extinguished by the policy of Louis the Eleventh, the subtle enemy of popular liberties.[619] It is hard to tell how far Southampton may have been affected by such foreign associations, but at least they did not tend to weaken the influences at home which made for oligarchic rule. Undoubtedly if we compare this town with other English boroughs where civic life was more free and expansive in its growth, the municipal record, in spite of its brilliant commercial side, is one of singular monotony, and leaves us with the sense of a stunted developement in the body politic. Southampton, in fact, was by its position and dignity called to play so great a part in the national history, both in war and commerce, that all claim to private and local independence was superseded. At a far earlier date than other towns its destiny was merged in the fortunes of the whole commonwealth,[620] and the king suffered no deviation from the service required of it to the state. In a very remarkable way Southampton anticipated the history of boroughs which under the Tudors were drawn into the same duty and service; through successive centuries its burghers acquiesced in the expert administration of a small official class, scarcely fettered by popular control; and abandoned the pursuit of new ideals of communal life or new experiments in government.
CHAPTER XIII
THE COUNCIL OF NOTTINGHAM
Problems of government sat lightly on the people of Nottingham. Singularly favoured as it was by fortune compared with many other towns, there is something phenomenal in the record of a town so tranquil, so uniformly prosperous, so exempt from apprehension, with so complacent a record of successful trading and undisturbed ease. Administration was carried on in its simplest form, and few sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants, whether of labour or of money, compared with the efforts which were required of less fortunate towns. The interest, in fact, of its history lies in the quiet picture that is given of a group of active and thriving traders, at peace with their neighbours, and for the most part at peace with themselves.
The position of Nottingham was one of great military importance; for lying almost at the centre of the kingdom, the town held the approach to the one bridge over the Trent by which the main road from the south struck northward: and further commanded the navigation of the river from the point where, broadened by the confluence of the Derwent and the Soar, it became a great highway of internal communication. Throughout its history, therefore, from the time of the Danes down to the time of the Civil War, Nottingham could not be left out of account when any fighting was going on. But England was in the main a land of peace, and the occasional and intermittent importance of an internal fortress was wholly different from the consequence that attached to a border castle like that of Bristol, or to outposts against foreign foes such as the walled seaport towns of the coast. Hence the military advantages of its site made but little mark on the character and history of the town, and the castle which crowned the sandstone cliff that rose precipitously from the waters of the river Lene played no great part in the life of the mediæval borough. Lying well out of reach of all foreign foes, it fell into no misfortunes such as Rye, which was destroyed by fire twice in half a century, nor was it impoverished by taxes for defence against the French such as threatened to leave Southampton desolate; and its merchants were only occasionally required to make contribution towards the protection of the coast and the safety of the sea-borne trade which added to their wealth and luxury. Thus, when the keeping of the sea was given in 1406 to the English merchants, their elected Admiral of the Fleet, Nicholas Blackburn, wrote a peremptory order to Nottingham for £200 as its share of the cost;[621] but the merchants’ experiment failed, and they were relieved of their responsibility before they had levied any second toll.
But the same geographical position which, under other circumstances, would have made of Nottingham a strategic centre, did under the actual conditions of English life assure the fortunes of the borough in industry and commerce. By land and by water, trade was almost forced to its gates. The bridge which spanned the Trent, after it had fallen into ruins as the property of the kings, was granted by Edward the Third to the townspeople, who willingly undertook the heavy charges of its repair and maintenance; each division of the town territory was made responsible for one or two of its nineteen low arches,[622] and the wardens appointed to oversee the whole appeared from time to time before the municipal officers with laborious and portentous accounts. Over this bridge all traffic from south to north was bound to pass; while boats from Hull and the eastern ports travelled up the river to unload at the quays of Nottingham. Thus the burghers, more fortunate than those of Canterbury, Norwich, or Shrewsbury, had no cause to fear the troubles of a shifting commerce, of manufacturers driven away to seek for brighter prospects, or of merchants forsaking the old ways for some new trade route. A uniform prosperity seems to have reigned in the town. Traders of every kind were in 1395 winning more than the law allowed them,[623] and the market-place, which is said even now to be the largest in England, was covered with booths; there were twenty fish-boards, thirty-two stalls in the Butchers’ House, thirty in the Mercers’ House, twenty in the Drapers’ House, and so on, the rents of which were rapidly rising in the second half of the fifteenth century;[624] and the stately Guild Hall, besides its council room, and its upper prison for felons and gaols for debtors with iron grating to the street, had its storage room for merchandise. Buyers and sellers crowded to the market, for new burgesses were still willingly admitted[625] on the payment of 6s. 8d., and it was only at the close of the next century that the ready hospitality of the town gave way to a jealous exclusiveness. Strangers without number paid for license to trade, besides rents for stalls or shops;[626] and the number of suits between burgesses and “foreigners” or non-burgesses, was so great that sometimes in a single year twenty rolls or more were closely written on both sides with the records of these suits alone – a fact which points to trade dealings with the outer world on a scale quite unknown to previous times.[627] Even the geological position of the town added to its sources of wealth, and the corporation as well as traders made profit from the neighbouring coal-mines.[628] All kinds of industries seem to have flourished. As early as 1155, when probably there were few places in England where cloth was dyed, bales were sent to Nottingham to be coloured red, blue, green, and tawny or murrey; and if their scarlet dye was liable to turn out not scarlet but red[629] even in 1434, we must remember that at this time for a fine scarlet dye English cloth had to be sent to Italy.[630] Nottingham manufacturers made linen as well as woollen goods.[631] Its famous workers in iron lived in Girdler Gate and Bridlesmith Gate. There was a foundry for bells well known in all the neighbouring counties, and the bell-founder, besides his bells, made brazen pots. Moreover, there were artists of repute.[632] Among English churches of the early Perpendicular period, there is none more beautiful than S. Mary’s, lifted high above the market on the steep hill side.[633] The Nottingham goldsmith was sent for to repair the cross in Clifton Church.[634] The town had its own illuminator, Richard the Writer; and its image-maker, Nicolas Hill, who sent his wares as far as London (on one occasion as many as fifty-eight heads of John the Baptist, some of them in tabernacles or niches) and as he worked also in painting or gilding alabaster salt-cellars, was commonly known as the “Alablaster Man.”[635]
The wealth of Nottingham was possibly not equal to that of towns like Bristol or Lynn, where at a time when capital was scanty the burghers had accumulated in their coffers good store of gold and silver. But a general air of substantial comfort and well-being seems to have pervaded the town. The subsidy roll of 1472 which gives a list of 154 owners of freehold property, from one whose tenth was 74s. 7-1/2d. down to one whose tenth was set down at 1/4d.,[636] the inventories of household goods, and the legacies which occur from time to time, show a considerable class of citizens living in wealth and luxury, and a yet larger class of comparatively well-to-do people after the measure of those times. While the richer merchants were building or adorning with handsome carved oak houses which a later age called “palaces of King John,” humbler tradesmen contented themselves with homes such as are described in a builder’s contract of 1479, where the little dwelling with a frontage of 18 feet on the street, was to have two bay windows and to cost altogether about £6.[637] Before the latter part of the sixteenth century[638] at least there is no indication of poverty such as we find in various other towns, in Southampton, or Romney, or Chester, or Canterbury – all places which had to suffer from special causes of distress – and even the wills do not contain the frequent bequests for the relief of the poor and of prisoners which occur in places where the calls of distress were more pressing and insistent. The financial problems of the corporation were perfectly simple and regular, and presented no more formidable difficulty than the keeping in repair of the great bridge. When the ferm of the town was reduced to £20 by Edward the Fourth it was done, so far as the municipal records tell the tale,[639] without any of the complainings of utter misery and desolation by which such favours were commonly won; and in the next half century there is no more serious hint of distress than is marked by the fact that in 1499 two of the butchers’ stalls and a few other holdings were lying vacant, and that the Corporation had borrowed some small sums.[640]
Nottingham was unfretted too by trouble from without. Set on the outskirts of Sherwood Forest, but exempted since the time of John from the Forest laws and the jurisdiction of the Forest officers,[641] its very position tended to free it from the neighbourhood of any powerful lord who could threaten its citizens, diminish its rights, or tax its people with petty wars or law-suits, as Liverpool and Bristol and Lynn were taxed and harassed. In its only trouble – an occasional dispute as to the control of the waters of the Trent – it was invariably supported by the Crown. Sometimes weirs and fishing nets obstructed the river; sometimes when the water was low boats coming from Hull had to be dragged along from the banks, and the river-side owners demanded fines for use of the towing path, so that the price of goods in Nottingham was increased to “a great dearness.” Then the Nottingham men would hasten to move the king by “a clamorous relation”; and forthwith royal commissioners were sent down to inquire into the obstructions; royal proclamations were issued to forbid the exacting of river-side tolls; and royal orders forbade the neighbouring lord of Colwick to divert the waters of the Trent to his own uses to the injury of Nottingham.[642]
Nor were its burghers troubled by claims of any ecclesiastical power within the town walls, such as those which vexed Norwich and Exeter and Canterbury. Ecclesiastical interests indeed play no great part in Nottingham. Two churches already existed under Cnut, and before the fourteenth century one more was added.[643] But no abbey had been founded within its liberties, and the yearly journey of the mayor and his brethren to carry Whitsuntide offerings to the mother church at Southwell was but a picturesque ceremonial that recalled the time when Paulinus first founded there a centre of mission work among the pagans.[644]
As for Court factions and dynastic intrigues, distant traders with much work of their own on hands were generally prompted by a prudent self-interest to side with the dominant power in the State. The burghers easily transferred their sympathies from the Lady Anne of Bohemia to Henry the Fourth;[645] they stood by Henry the Sixth so long as the triumph of the rebels was doubtful, but no sooner were the fortunes of Edward the Fourth in the ascendant than by gifts out of their treasure and little detachments of their militia they testified to a new loyalty, and thus obtained the renewal of their charter and a reduction of their ferm for twenty years, “to have a reward to the town of Nottingham” “for the great cost and burdens, and loss of their goods that they have sustained by reason of those services.”[646] In 1464 they ordered off a little troop in red jackets with white letters sewn on them[647] to join the king at York, and once more at Edward’s restoration in 1471,[648] the town spent about £60 for “loans for soldiers” and liveries, besides many other costs. In October of 1482, the jury “presented” an offender charged with wearing the livery of the intriguing Richard of Gloucester;[649] but before the battle of Bosworth the town hospitably entertained Richard himself, and in its castle he received the Great Seal;[650] while no sooner was the day lost for York than a deputation was sent in hot haste to make peace with Henry the Seventh and obtain a safeguard and proclamation.[651] Stall-holders and burghers, in fact, intent on their own business, only asked that Court quarrels might be settled with the least possible trouble to themselves; and throughout the Wars of the Roses the Nottingham men did just what the men of every other town in England did – reluctantly sent their soldiers when they were ordered out to the aid of the reigning king, and whatever might be the side on which they fought, as soon as victory was declared hurried off their messengers with gifts and protestations of loyalty to the conqueror. Meanwhile they went steadily on with the main business of trade and watched the rents of their booths and the profits of their shops going up and their wealth constantly accumulating.[652]
Like all boroughs that held under the Crown, Nottingham won very early the rights of a free borough. Henry the Second from 1155 to 1165 granted its burgesses freedom from toll, a market, the monopoly of working dyed cloth within the borough, and free passage along the Trent; and further gave them power to tax inhabitants of all fees whatever for common expenses.[653] Originally governed by a reeve who collected its yearly ferm and managed its affairs on behalf of the king, Nottingham obtained by charter from John in 1189 a Merchant Guild, and leave to elect a reeve of the borough who should answer for the ferm to the Exchequer.[654] In 1230 the burgesses were allowed to appoint coroners, and (the ferm being fixed at £52) to levy a tax for weighing at the common scale all goods brought to the town.[655] A charter of 1255 granted them the freedom from arrest for debt which was being so commonly given at this time; the return of writs; and an order that no sheriff or bailiff should interfere in the exercise of justice in Nottingham unless “the burgesses” had not done their duty. And ten years later they were freed from the aid of 100s. formerly paid to the sheriff for his good will and that he should not enter their liberties.[656]
In the reverses of the Welsh war, when Edward the First summoned two great provincial councils of knights and burgesses to bestow a grant for completing the conquest of Wales, Nottingham used his necessities to secure its own profit; for three years the town had been in disgrace, with all its franchises forfeited, but in 1284 it not only regained them, but won permission to elect a mayor “by unanimous consent and will” of “both boroughs of the same town” – that is the French and the English boroughs which from the time of the Conquest had been established side by side, each governed by its own bailiff[657] according to the different laws and customs of the two peoples. During the Scotch war in 1314 their position as masters of the northern road possibly disposed Edward the Second to grant readily any favours they might demand; and immediately after Bannockburn they received power to hold all pleas before the mayor, and alien sheriffs or bailiffs were forbidden to enter the borough.[658] Yet later one of the first acts of Henry of Lancaster, after the deposition of Richard in 1399, was to make interest with the keepers of the stronghold of middle England. He gave lavishly all he had to give: the assize of tenure formerly held before the judges; all fines, forfeitures, and ransoms which had not yet been handed over; the election of four justices of the peace; the placing of the mayor upon all commissions of array of men-at-arms, so that neither sheriff of the county, nor officer of the court could henceforth tax the town for military aid without his assistance and consent.[659] In 1448 Henry the Sixth completed the emancipation of Nottingham by granting it a charter of incorporation under the title of “the mayor and burgesses of the town of Nottingham.” By this charter the town, with the exception of the king’s castle and gaol, was entirely separated from the county and made into a shire; its bailiffs became sheriffs, and were henceforth not to go out of the town to take their oath, but were to be sworn before the mayor; and the mayor himself was made the king’s escheator.[660] If the king in these difficult times, with Normandy almost lost, and England on the eve of rebellion, offered bribes for loyalty, he required a due return; and in 1450 the Nottingham men had to pay their part of the bargain, by hiring men to go to the help of the sovereign at Blackheath against Jack Cade, which they accomplished by leasing some of their common lands for a sum of £20 to be paid in advance.[661]