If, however, during the years of conflict the craft associations may have done good service to the commonalty, they were met by a counter organization of the merchants and upper class. It seems to have become common after the Peasant revolt, when a new terror was stirred as to what the poor commons might do if left to follow their own will and appetite, for the richer sort to unite for self-protection and the preservation of their authority. In Norwich a Guild of S. George was founded in 1385 as a fraternity with the usual religious colour, and a – “going each Monday about in the city remembering and praying for the souls of the brethren and sisters of the said guild that be passed to God’s mercy.”[769] At first an informal body, consisting apparently of the wealthier and more powerful people, both lay and ecclesiastic, of Norwich and the surrounding country, its weakness lay in the fact that it was “desevered by constitutions and ordinances made within the city,” and according to the old rule by which the formation of any guild was forbidden, it was, in fact, an illegal body. The governing class, however, probably enlisted considerable sympathy at court in the negociations for the charter of 1417; and the associates of S. George won from Henry the Fifth in 1418 permission to constitute themselves into a permanent society, and received a sword of wood with a carved dragon’s head to be carried before their alderman on S. George’s day.[770] The great people of the county and their wives entered the order, bishops, monks and rectors, counts, knights, and merchants – something like four hundred of them – all men of substance who rode on horseback to the guild assembly, where the uniform of S. George was varied by the mayors, sheriffs, aldermen, or masters of crafts, riding in the garments of their order. The government of the society was put in the hands of a very close corporation, and the alliance between Church and State in the guild is manifested by the association of the prior, mayor, and sheriffs of the city in its government.[771]
The real danger of such a fraternity lay in the peculiar position of Norwich, and the impossible task of local government which had been thrown on its burghers. Beyond the city territory lay a great manufacturing district – a whole county studded with villages where weaving and worsted making were carried on in every house – and over all this district Norwich had the supervision of the woollen trade. The difficulties of the arrangement by which, in 1409, at the request of the commons, the mayor, sheriffs, and commonalty were granted the right of measuring and sealing all worsteds made in Norwich or Norfolk,[772] must have been extreme. The great employers settled in the city who organized the country labour and supplied cloth for the export trade were thus given a certain judicial authority in the county; while the great wool sellers – land-owners whose vast flocks of sheep[773] pastured on the broad downs of undulating chalk, and who were turning into traders on their own account – were forced in their own interest to meddle with Norwich politics. Besides the general commercial questions which affected both city and county, there must have been many a vexed question as to the tenants who owed suit and service to the courts of their lords, but who as artizans were subject to Norwich rule and whose fines were swept into the Norwich treasury. On every hand the door was thrown open to trouble. If the Norwich corporation was to busy itself in county affairs, the county was bound to exert some control over the Norwich corporation, whether by guilds of St. George, by securing office in Norwich for sympathetic mayors, recorders, or sheriffs, by winning the help of the Earl of Suffolk or of bishop or prior, by choosing the Norwich members for Parliament, or if all other means failed, by bribery and violence and the stirring up of street factions.
From one point of view, therefore, the story of the long years of strife and calamity which followed the reformation of the Norwich constitution in 1415 is singularly interesting. In presence of a foreign foe internal dissension is suppressed, and the main story is no longer, as in Nottingham, that of a struggle between the two classes of the community itself. When a mayor of alien interests is imposed on Norwich by a foreign faction he stands alone, and aldermen and commons hold apart from him as betrayer of the common interests. The enemies whom Norwich had to fear came from without the community itself, and if the story of the city remained a singularly troubled one, the troublers of its peace were not those of its own household. Factions of the State and factions of the shire flung confusion into the city politics, and the old burning question of ecclesiastical rights embittered every local dispute.[774] Norwich was befriended by the Duke of Gloucester and had a persistent enemy in the Earl of Suffolk, and its fortunes swung backwards and forwards with the rise and fall of court parties. From the day when the recorder, John Heydon, betrayed the city into their hands, the county despots whom we know so well in the Paston Letters, meet us in its streets and assembly hall, ever followed by the curses of the people. Heydon of Baconsthorpe, Esq., sheriff in Norwich in 1431, and recorder from 1441-3, – the man whose putting away of his wife had created such a scandal that the very mention of it made him turn pale, the land-jobber, the smuggler of wool, the exactor of bribes, the parasite of the great lords whose support he could buy, the organizer of outrages and murder, the audacious schemer willing to spend two thousand pounds rather than lose the control of the Norwich sheriff, the patron of liveried followers, the “maintainer” in the courts of men who defied the law, the overbearing bully whose very presence was enough to cow the commons into refusing to present their complaints to the king’s judges,[775]– can be pictured by every one who tracks his tortuous ways through the letters of the Pastons. In conjunction with Sir Thomas Tuddenham and others he overwhelmed the city with extortions, oppressions, and wrongs. These men “through their great covetousness and false might oppressed all such citizens as would not consent to make such mayors and sheriffs as they liked,” “purposing for great lucre to have as well the rule of the city of Norwich as they had of the shire of Norfolk,”[776] and “trusting in their great might and power which they had and have in the country by the means of the stewardship of Lancaster and other great offices and for divers other causes that no man at that time durst make resistance against them, knowing their great malice and vengeance without dread of God or shame of the world.” Even when the people sought to buy the favour of Sir Thomas, he took their money “by briberous extortion against all faith and conscience,” and yet showed them no mercy.[777]
It is just possible that the danger to the city called into being a fraternity to confront the society of S. George, and that the burghers in their turn seized on the machinery of the religious guild. We catch one passing glimpse of a curious association known as “Le Bachery”; which was declared by the mayor and commons to be merely a company of citizens who out of pure devotion kept up a light in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the Fields (the ancient place for the assembly of the people) and from mere motives of decency had chosen a livery; but in whose pious and decent union the hostile fraternity saw an association fashioned to break the power of S. George, and made haste to use against it the old argument applied to its own youth – the charge of being an “illegal guild.”[778]
The association was founded in stormy days. After Heydon was turned out of office by the people for betraying their interests to the prior,[779] his friend of S. George’s guild, the mayor Wetherby, an ally of Tuddenham and a “hater of the commons,” led the party of the county and the priory, and till his death fourteen years later the city knew no peace. Four times between 1433 and 1444 its franchises were forfeited for riot or stormy elections; twice the common seal was violently taken out of the treasury by aldermen and commons to prevent the sealing of proposals rejected of the people. Wetherby forced on the election, as his successor, of a mayor refused by aldermen and commons. John Qwerdling, falsely pretending to be common speaker, had carried to the chamber a name not set down by the commons for election; Hawk the town clerk had written down a wrong return; Nicholas Waleys had taken bribes enough to win him the name of “ambidexter”; the two city serjeants had packed juries, and the gaoler had threatened and struck the resisting commons on the head with his mace. The mayor’s faction held the guild hall, while the aldermen’s party retired to a private house, and having elected another candidate, put the offending officers out of their places, took the common seal out of the guild hall into their own keeping, and lest by any chance their election should be held invalid, refused to disperse till the mayor came down to confirm it, and called the bishop to join them in opposition to the prior. For the moment Wetherby yielded, but revenged himself by applying for a commission from the king to examine into the state of the city.[780] The enraged citizens kept up the broil till 1436, when another commission was appointed which forced the commons to submit, to restore the seal to its accustomed place in the treasury, and to put back the officers they had displaced in 1433.[781]
At the next election, in 1437, commissioners were sent by the privy council to see that all was done in order according to the charter, and in case of riot to seize the franchises of the city into the king’s hand;[782] and thus quiet was secured. But Norwich was not to keep its restored franchise long. Riots and daily disturbances “concerning their liberties” broke out between the city and the prior;[783] in June the inhabitants of Norwich had to appear before the Privy Council, and in July the franchises of the city were seized and the place committed to the custody of John Welles, a London alderman who was made citizen and alderman of Norwich.[784] At the prayer of the bishops of Norwich and Lincoln the liberties were once more restored in 1439, to be as quickly lost again.[785] For Thomas Wetherby “who bare a great hatred to the commons” watched for an opportunity of making fresh trouble. By his counsel the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm prosecuted the city in 1441 for certain mills it had built on the Wensum; and Thomas Tuddenham, John Fray, and William Paston (a friend of the abbot’s), judged the case at Thetford and gave it against the the city, ordering the commons to pay £100 damages to the abbot and £50 to the prior. At this the assembly gathered in great numbers, crowded to the hall, in January, 1442, and took away the common seal that the award might not be sealed. By the influence of the Earl of Suffolk, the abbot, and Wetherby, the city was prosecuted for rebellion, and in spite of the protection of the Duke of Gloucester the mayor was ordered to appear in London, where he was fined £50 and imprisoned in the Fleet, and the liberties of the city were again seized into the king’s hands. The mayor being thus fast in the Fleet, Wetherby got the common seal out of the chest, sealed the bond of £100 to the abbot of S. Bennet’s at Holm, £50 to the bishop, and £50 to the prior, without the knowledge of the mayor, sheriffs, or commons; and then destroyed the new mills.[786]
This led to fresh troubles. On the Shrove Tuesday of 1443 the mayor and commonalty, at this time united in the mysterious guild of “Le Bachery,” raised an insurrection, declaring they had power enough in the city and adjacent country to slay Thomas Brown the bishop,[787] the abbot of Holm, and the prior of Norwich. John Gladman, a merchant, rode with a paper crown as king at the head of a hundred and thirty people on horseback and on foot. At the ringing of the city bells three thousand citizens assembled, armed with swords, bows, arrows, and helmets, surrounded the priory, laid guns against it, and at last won a glorious victory, and forced the monks to deliver up the hateful deed falsely sealed with the common seal which bound the people to pay 4s. a year to the prior and to abandon claims to jurisdiction over certain priory lands.
Such a triumph was naturally followed by a fresh visit of royal commissioners in 1444.[788] Wetherby and the prior brought a long list of charges against the mayor;[789] while the city protested that Tuddenham and Heydon alone had made mischief out of their peaceful show; and that Gladman had only “made a disport with his neighbours, having his horse trapped with tynnsoyle and other nice disguisy things, crowned as king of Christmas,” while “before him went each month disguised after the season required, and Lent clad in white and red herring skins and his horse trapped with oyster shells after him.”[790]
Meanwhile the king had his own grievance against Norwich, for the city had unluckily brought a suit for £100 which it had formerly lent him, and now refused to advance any more money when he sent to solicit it.[791] Once more, therefore, in 1444, its liberties and franchises were confiscated. But now at last troubles began to lighten. Thomas Wetherby died, as well as the bishop who had supported him,[792] and the new bishop, of an old Norwich family, was for peace. In 1447 the liberties were restored, and in 1448 the king visited the city.[793] Two years later however, Heydon was again to the front, ready with Tuddenham to spend £2,000 in buying favour in high quarters in London, and £1,000 to secure a sheriff in Norwich committed to his interest.[794] It was suggested that the Norwich folk, the mayor with the aldermen and all the commons, should ride to meet the Duke of York when he visited the city, “and all the women of the same town be there also, and cry out on them also, and call them extortioners, and pray my Lord that he will do sharp executions upon them … and let that be done in the most lamentable wise, for Sir, but if my Lord hear some foul tales of them, and some hideous noise and cry, by my faith they are else like to come to grace.”[795] The commission of judges[796] finally sent to try Heydon for felony, his defiant ride through the town into the abbey, the rumours that he was to bear rule once more, his mode of meeting and outwitting or terrorising the commissioners by turns, all these are told from day to day almost in the Paston Letters. Finally, in 1452, Judge Yelverton arranged some kind of peace in Norwich,[797] helped possibly by the poverty and exhaustion of the city.[798] By giving a loan to the king and a present to the queen with a promise to befriend her in her anxieties, Norwich got a new charter in 1452.[799] In this the guild of S. George, which seems to have been united to the corporation about 1450, was apparently victorious.[800] It was agreed that the day after the mayor left office he should be chosen alderman of the guild, and the common council was taken into the council of the guild.
For the next seventy years the citizens were occupied by strife with the prior, which dated back to the day when the Norwich burghers were given the city into their hands.[801] The bickerings of three centuries ended in a compact drawn up in 1524, when questions of jurisdiction, tolls, pasturage, water, and rights of way were settled; and it was admitted that the mayor, sheriffs, citizens, and commonalty might go to the cathedral church on feast days and occasions of solemn processions, the mayor with sword and maces borne before him, on condition that he claimed no jurisdiction, while the prior and monks “of their amiable favour shall forbear as far as they lawfully can or may” to arrest any of the corporation or the citizens during these great processions.[802]
Such stories of local wranglings might well be left forgotten and obscure if there lay in them nothing more than vulgar quarrels. But the political experiment of Norwich was one of such serious purpose and such singular quality, that even in its failure it kindles our sympathy with men who for two hundred and fifty years had been laboriously working out the problem of administration. With an admirable political sagacity they had used in turn every form of local organization to perfect their experiment in self-government. They had taken the principle of an elected jury and adapted it for use in their courts, their council chamber, and their legislative assembly. They had turned to the problem of the general assembly, altogether useless in its primitive and unwieldy form, and developed out of it (taking a pattern from London) a representative council which should guide its deliberations and express its will. The craft-guilds were organized, and it is possible that in the struggle their discipline gave order and strength to the commonalty. When the battle grew hot the machinery of the religious guild was brought into play on either side, and S. George measured his force with the Virgin of the Fields. No doubt these various methods have no claim to originality, being frankly copied from customs known elsewhere; nor is it in the discovery of a new path that the merit of the Norwich burghers lies, but in the sound political instinct by which they steadily directed their way into the broad track whose ultimate goal is civil freedom, rather than the narrow road of privilege. As we watch the growth of the house of representatives which was established among them, an independent deliberative assembly elected by the commons; and compare it with the chamber of magnates at Nottingham that by a fine mockery was supposed to typify a gathering of the whole community; we have a just measure given us of the value of this more liberal experiment in municipal politics – an experiment so early in time, so serious in conception, so strong and orderly in execution, that it might have justified an enduring success.
But in spite of all the ingenuity and sagacity and resolution which the men of Norwich brought to their fine attempt at ordering public life, misfortune still waited on their steps, and from the outset the disaster of the fifteenth century darkens and throws long shadows. For Norwich was fighting with its doom already proclaimed – harassed by the harsh dry climate in which fine cloth needed for the foreign market could not be woven; by the hurry of the new export trade which drove masters to set up their mills by the streams of Yorkshire and Gloucestershire, where labour was free and cheap; by changes in methods of making worsted which shifted the manufacture over to the Netherlands; and by the false economy which to help a failing trade, made English weavers refuse Norfolk yarn to foreign buyers – the Norwich burghers had still to endure the last calamity of pestilence, and the sweating sickness, which first burst on them in 1485, filled up the tale of disaster. Industrial difficulties alone might have been conquered. But a more insidious danger threatened all their liberties. By a fatal accident of position and circumstances the city, as we have seen, had been invaded and conquered by the county – by a society wholly separate from it in political developement. It had bitterly proved the truth of the extreme apprehension with which men of the towns at that time looked on the intrusion among them of “foreigners,” bringing into their newly ordered civic life the feudal traditions of the county magnates, scattering liveries among their people, and pouring into their law courts a commanding army of retainers – “because,” to use their own words, “by such maintainers and protectors a common contention might arise among us, and horrible manslaughter be committed among us, and the loss of the liberty or freedom of the city, to the disinheritance of us and of our children; which God forbid that in our days by the defeat of us should happen or fall out in such a manner.”[803] The story of Norwich shows that in a provincial town, as in a greater state, a constitution framed for home uses and needs may be shattered by the violence of foreign affairs over which it has no power, against which it has no arms, and for the guidance of which it has no instructions.
NOTE A
Mr. Hudson believes that in Norwich the word “citizen” at first meant merely an enfranchised equal, being frequently described as “par civitatis,” and that from the thirteenth century onwards the most prominent idea which it imported was that of a privileged trader, in which sense it is used through the series of Leet Rolls. In one class of documents, however, at the close of the thirteenth century, he finds it apparently restricted to a limited body of substantial burghers, into whose hands the management of the public business had gradually passed. In enrolled deeds which have been examined for the years 1285-1298 a great number of persons are described merely as drapers, tanners, fishmongers and so on, while others are mentioned as “merchant citizen of Norwich,” or “tanner, citizen of Norwich,” and others again are put down simply as “citizen of Norwich.” Out of the hundred and fifty persons to whom the words “citizen of Norwich” are applied there are fifty who are apparently of no trade; and of the remaining hundred, thirty-two are merchants, twenty-four drapers and linendrapers, and the rest, about fifty, belong to a variety of occupations, but generally to the skilled handicrafts. No smith is mentioned as citizen, and very few among the butchers and bakers. From these facts the general conclusion is drawn that the word “citizen” was being gradually restricted by the most important burghers to themselves, the lower classes of those who held the freedom of the city being massed together as the “communitas.” (Arch. Journ. xlvi. No. 184, 318-319.)
The argument, however, rests on entries made in the last years of the thirteenth century, between 1285 and 1298, at a time when the state of things in Norwich was exceptional. The city rule was that every man who bought and sold in Norwich should have “made his ingress” into the town and become of the “franchise” or “liberty.” How often the law was evaded we see from the presentments of the leet courts. (For the last ten years of the thirteenth century see Town Close Evidences, 12-15.) It would seem that as the prosperity of the city increased new inhabitants had begun to flock to it who were far more concerned in making their own bargains than in carrying out the laws and customs of the borough; and who, especially the poorer sort engaged in humble trades, were anxious to escape the payments and responsibilities of citizenship. Blomefield (iii. 73) states that about 1306, owing to difficulties in paying the ferm, it was ordered that every one who had traded for a year and a day in the city must take up his freedom, paying for it a fine of 40s. if he were not entitled to the franchise by birth or service. Since every citizen was bound to have a house, building went on fast, and can be measured by the increase of rents from houses. For “in 1329 Simon de Berford the King’s escheator on this side Trent gave the city much trouble concerning a number of houses, shops and tenements lately erected by grant of the city on the waste grounds of the said city, on pretence that all the waste belonged to the King and not to the citizens, and that the rents of all such buildings should belong to the Crown (Custom Book fo. 2) by which means great part of the city rents, namely all the rents de novo incremento or new increased rents, would have been lost from the city to the value of £9 11s. 8d. a year, by which we may calculate the surprising increase of the inhabitants of this place from the beginning of Edward II. to this time. The small rents or old rents of houses erected upon the city waste from its original to Edward the Second’s time amounted to but 9s. 2d., so that if we compare the new increased rents with the old ones we shall find in about thirty years’ time nineteen times as many houses erected upon the waste as there were before, an argument sufficiently showing how populous it grew by its flourishing trade, and indeed its increase continued as surprisingly till that fatal pestilence in 1349.
“To remedy this imposition the citizens sent to Thomas Butt and John Ymme, their burgesses in Parliament, then held at Winchester, to complain of the usage to the King and Parliament; upon which the King afterwards directed his writ to the said Simon, certifying him, that by the grants of his progenitors, Kings of England, the citizens held the city and all the waste ground by fee-farm, in inheritance, and that therefore he had nothing to do to molest them in letting out such void grounds to be built upon for their profit and advantage towards paying their fee-farm. This writ bears date at Reading March 25, in the 4th of his reign.” (Blomefield, iii. 80-1.)
These facts seem to indicate that citizenship was a less frequent thing among the inhabitants of Norwich at the end of the thirteenth century than in the first half of the fourteenth century – and was at that time possibly confined in practice to those who gained it by birth or service, and that purchase was rare.
For the very different law made by the Bishop of Norwich in 1307 for Lynn see p. 408. He may have desired to secure for Lynn the small traders who found themselves hard pressed by the Norwich decree of 1306.