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 Another Random Document on
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more into the hands of the twenty-four. Then the word
“communitas” took a new shade of meaning. Before 1378 “the
citizens” had come to mean in common talk the governing council,
as opposed to the “commonalty” who were left outside.
It is true that the legal privileges of the community still remained.
They had a claim on part at least of the public property. No new
burgher could be admitted save by the act of the whole commonalty,
or of twelve of them who might be taken to represent the entire
body.[738] Taxes might only be assessed by will of the whole
commonalty[739] or of the greater part of the same. Whatever might
be the prevailing habit, the twenty-four had no legal right to act in
the name of the whole people, and if the commons refused to obey
their ordinances they could not appeal to any court of law to enforce
their submission. In the Assembly Rolls the burghers are mentioned
as sharing in the business of elections, grants of money, and
taxation.[740] That they asserted their rights in a way which seemed
to the governing class “contrarious” we gather from the fact that in
1378 “the citizens” (who in this case must certainly have meant a
very limited body) presented a petition to Richard the Second in
which they declared that of late “many of the commonalty of the
said town have been very contrarious, and will be so still unless
better remedies and ordinances be made for good government”; and
they pray that the bailiffs and twenty-four citizens to be elected
yearly by the commonalty may have power to make ordinances and
to amend them from time to time when necessary.[741] A ship which
they had just built at the king’s orders possibly commended their
request to his judgment, and the grant of the desired charter placed
the council in a position of absolute authority, having power to issue
ordinances without the consent of the people, and to enforce them
by appeal to the royal courts.
What controversies and threats of revolution agitated the men of
Norwich for the twenty-five years that followed this great change we
do not know. The exact position of the twenty-four in the municipal
assembly is not easy to trace from the paucity of existing
documents.[742] The rolls which survive might be expected to shew
some sign of the effect of the charter of 1378 by which the official
authority of the twenty-four was established. Yet such is not the
case. The description of the Assembly both before and after remains
exactly the same. A select group of citizens attends at every
meeting, and takes the whole charge of administration. Yet it is
worthy of notice that neither before nor after 1378 is any order or
resolution ever attributed to the twenty-four, though such orders are
constantly referred to the action of the “tota communitas.”
Throughout these rolls the only authorities mentioned are the bailiffs
and the commonalty.[743] If it is possible to believe, as I have
suggested, that the right of the community to give or withhold
consent in legislation was an immemorial custom which could not be
abrogated by charter, the failure of the twenty-four to carry their
point can be understood. No doubt party feeling on both sides ran
high. It became necessary for a settlement to have a new charter;
and in 1403, probably, at the instance of the ruling class, the city
bought a fresh constitution at the heavy price of £1,000.[744] By this
charter Norwich was made into a county; the four bailiffs were
replaced by a mayor and two sheriffs, to be elected by the citizens
and commonalty; and, in confirming previous grants, the customary
phraze used in the charters of earlier centuries, “the citizens” was
replaced by “the citizens and commonalty”—a term which is
recognized in the charter as being already in use,[745] but which had
not until now been invariably employed as the official style.
The charter of Henry the Fourth seems to have been in effect a
confirmation of the charter given by Richard the Second, and to
have set the victorious conclusion to the whole system of oligarchical
government expressed by the council of twenty-four. The people
were quick to appreciate the difficulty of making use of the powers
which had been attributed to them and to perceive the tendency of
the charter. A crisis was brought about by the very first elections
held under the new constitution. The charter ordered that the
sheriffs were to be elected, not as the old bailiffs had been by the
electors of the four Leets, but by “the citizens and commonalty.” In
the ordinary assemblies, however, made up of the twenty-four and
“others of the community,” at which Parliament men, city treasurers,
and officials, had been chosen, the twenty-four were practically
supreme, and elections carried out in these gatherings were, as a
matter of fact, in their hands. On March 1st, 1404, a mayor was
chosen, and twelve days later two of the bailiffs were made sheriffs
(the mayor’s book says by the “cives”).[746] The altered mode of
appointing the sheriffs, as compared with the more popular custom
of electing the old bailiffs, immediately roused the commons. An
assembly was called to frame ordinances for the new state of things,
and the people determined by their own authority to create a
representative council of the burghers at large. It was ordered that
eighty persons should be elected to attend all assemblies and act in
the name of the people. To this council was given the right of
nominating the sheriffs; the eighty were to go apart by themselves
and name three persons, but if the commons did not approve of
their choice they had again to retire and choose other names until
their masters were content. Then the town clerk and some of the
eighty carried the three names to the mayor and the twenty-four
“probi homines”; the mayor chose one and the twenty-four the
other.[747] The new council took part in the Michaelmas elections of
that same year 1404, when the mayor was reappointed, and two
new sheriffs were chosen.
This settlement evidently excited violent hostility, and in 1415 a
Composition was framed to put an end to the discords by which the
city was “divided and dissolved and in point to have been
destroyed.”[748] This document did not err on the side of any lax
notions as to the seriousness of a written constitution. With pedantic
nicety it touched almost lovingly on the minutest details of ceremony
and dress, as well as on the greater problems that vexed the state—
the position of the twenty-four; the rights of the commons; and the
share which the two parties were to have in appointing the officers
of the city.
The effect of this Composition of 1415 was to create a miniature
copy of the English kingdom, a little community governed by its
three estates, the mayor, the co-citizens of the mayor’s council, and
the commons. The twenty-four “probi homines” now became “the
twenty-four co-citizens of the mayor’s council,” the mayor having the
same authority over them “as the mayor of London hath,”[749] and
the dignity of the municipal House of Lords was fitly marked by their
dress, a livery “furred and lined as the estate and season of the year
asketh.”[750] Above all it was decreed that they should no longer be
a body elected yearly but should “stand corporate perpetually,” and
even if this should accidentally not be embodied in the charter to be
asked for later, “the citizens” declared that they could establish that
law for themselves and not by point of charter, in virtue of the right
given them in 1378, to make such ordinances as they chose in
difficult or defective cases for which no remedy clearly existed in the
city constitution.[751]
On the other hand the organization of the lower chamber was
made more complete, and the relative position and authority of the
two houses of the mimic parliament were defined with punctilious
exactness. The common council was reduced from eighty to sixty
members,[752] to be elected from the four wards by all citizens
“inhabiting and having houses on their own account.” It had its
Speaker,[753] its own mode of procedure, its system of elaborate
etiquette in all dealings with the upper house. Henceforth it was to
take a part in legislation which entirely annulled any claim “the
citizens” might have put forward by virtue of their charter of 1378;
for though the mayor and the twenty-four preserved the right of
proposing all new laws, “they shall nothing do nor make that may
bind or charge the city without the assent of the commonalty.” All
ordinances made by the upper body must therefore be formally laid
before the common council, and if it seemed to them that the matter
“needeth longer advice and deliberation of answer, they shall ask it
and all that seemeth expedient for the city by the common speaker
of the mayor and of his council.” If needful they could ask for “a bill
of the same matters to be delivered to them,” that they might give
their answer in the next assembly; and “the mayor shall be beholden
as ofttimes as they ask it to grant them for to go together in an
house by themselves without any denying, and none other with
them but the common speaker, and if they will have more to them
as oft as they ask, the mayor shall be beholden to send for them
without any withsaying. And in matters that seem to the aforesaid
sixty persons for the common council that needeth not great nor
long advice, be it lawful if they will, to go apart by themselves or in
to the floor with their common speaker, and goodly and speedily,
without great delay to come in with their answer as them seemeth
speedful and needful to the purpose.” Finally, in “all other points that
be necessary to be had for the welfare of the city that come not now
to mind, it is committed to the whole assembly thereupon to ordain
and make remedy by ordinance and assent of the whole commonalty
for profit of all the city.”[754]
In the matter of elections, however, the general assembly
reappeared in full force. When a new mayor was to be chosen the
two councils were summoned to the hall; “and also all the citizens
dwellers within the same city unto the aforesaid election shall freely
come as they are beholden, and the doors of the hall to all citizens
there willing to enter and come in shall be open and not kept, nor
none from thence forbarred nor avoided but foreigners.” After the
mayor and the twenty-four had proclaimed the election from the
bench they withdrew to the chamber, and the whole people in the
hall then chose from among those who had already been mayors or
sheriffs two names of “sufficient” persons, “and if that any variance
happen among the commons in the hall that it may not clearly be
known to the common speaker by no manner of form by him unto
them, for to be put or showed, which two hath the most voices, then
the common speaker and the common clerk shall go up to the mayor
and to him shall declare the variance of the people in the hall. And
then the mayor shall give to the common speaker in commandment
for to call together the sixty persons for the common council of the
city, or as many as there be there into an house by themselves.
Which there shall try the aforesaid variance in the same form as it
hath been and yet is used in the city of London.” The names were
carried to the chamber by the common clerk, the common speaker,
and the recorder, with six of the common council; the six commons
returned to the hall, leaving the three officers to take the votes of
the mayor and council, and bring back to the commonalty the name
of the elected mayor.
The election of all other municipal officers was carefully divided
between the two parties in the state. The mayor and the twenty-four
elected the common clerk, one sheriff, one chamberlain, one
treasurer, one coroner, two keepers of the keys, two auditors, and
eight constables. The common council chose the common speaker, a
second sheriff, chamberlain, treasurer, and coroner, two keepers of
the keys, two auditors, and eight constables. The whole assembly
appointed the common serjeant, the recorder, the bell-man, and the
ditch-keeper; they also chose the men who were to gather in the
king’s taxes, appointing four men in each ward to assess the tax and
two to collect it. The new mayor named two sword-bearers, of
whom the assembly chose one; in the same way the mayor
nominated four persons for serjeants, and the assembly chose two
of them.[755] Members of Parliament were chosen by the common
assembly.
Thus the commons of Norwich made their decorous entry on the
official stage, with a punctilious care to secure their dignity and
make fast their liberties by countless ceremonial ligatures. The
Composition which vindicated their right against the oligarchy
proved, however, like the Ordinances of 1404, a hard saying to
many; and disputes between the mayor’s council and the
commonalty were so violent[756] that the citizens appealed to Henry
the Fifth in 1417 for a charter which should make the late
agreement legally binding. The mayor’s council no doubt brought
influence to bear in high places, for their position was now
somewhat bettered. By the charter, for which the city had to pay
over £100,[757] the twenty-four, now first called aldermen, got rid of
one serious difficulty in their way by securing the clause that they
“shall stand perpetually as they do in London,” and henceforth the
old ceremony of annual election was simply recalled by the custom
of reading out the names every year before the wards. In the
composition it had been settled that in making “new ordinances for
the welfare of the city that come not now to mind it is committed to
the whole assembly thereon to ordain by ordinance and assent of
the whole commonalty,”[758] but the new charter decreed that the
mayor and aldermen should have full power to amend the laws and
constitution with assent of the sixty of the common council.[759]
For the rest of the century the government of the city[760]
remained of this pattern. The four great leets which had once
elected the bailiffs now became the four wards, and were ultimately
divided into twelve small wards. Each of these was represented in
the upper council by two aldermen chosen for it by the electors of its
own great ward. Each great ward also elected a fixed proportion of
the members of the common council. The sheriffs held their “tourns”
for the four wards, and appointed for each ward a jury drawn from
the “men of good name and fame.” Meanwhile the leet courts of the
sub-divisions over which the bailiffs used to preside carried on an
obscure and feeble existence, and the capital pledges which formed
the leet juries sank into insignificance[761] under the combined
usurpations of the sheriffs and the two councils. Once when the
capital pledges attempted to secure to the small trader some
advantage in landing their goods at a staith where apparently they
escaped some city tolls, the governing body promptly repressed their
insubordination.[762] Evidently the administration of the city was
neither more lax nor more popular because its governing body was
enlarged.
In the obscure years of conflict between 1378 and 1415 we are
told nothing about the men or the organizations of men that made
the revolution. But we know that a very important movement was
going on in Norwich itself in the growth of the craft guilds. Long
forbidden by the civic government because of the loss to the city
chest when the craftsmen were withdrawn from the common courts,
they apparently made matters easy for themselves by regular
payment of fines, and continued to flourish.[763] Between 1350 and
1385[764] a number of guilds were either founded or reconstituted
so as to obtain public recognition in the city,[765] and the one fact
that we catch sight of in their ordinances amid the absolutely
monotonous and formal recital of religious duties, is that they were
in some cases allowed to choose their own aldermen and council,
instead of being subjected as before to the twenty-four. The
importance of this is at once evident in the ordinances of 1404,
where the guilds take a very prominent place; and in the
composition of 1415, when they were finally sanctioned and given a
completed form.[766] Not only was the power of choosing their own
officers granted to every trade, but it was decreed that “citizens of
the city shall be enrolled of what craft he be of” on pain of forfeiture
of his franchise; and that all “that shall be enfranchised from this
time forth shall be enrolled under a craft and by assent of a craft.”
Such a rule practically made the craft-masters the judges of a new
candidate for the city privileges, for if they refused to admit him to
the guild he could never become a burgess.[767] On the other hand
it was commanded that all the members of a craft must become
freemen; foreigners were to hold shops under tribute and fine for
two years and a day, and were then forced to buy the franchise of
the city. “The master of the craft shall come honestly to him and
give him warning to be a freeman or else spear in his shop-window.”
If he did not obey within fourteen days the master with an officer of
the mayor again visited him with his spear, “and he so speared in,
nor no other, shall not hold his craft within house nor without.” Thus
no trader or shopkeeper could remain exempt from the dues and
charges of the city, and the whole commonalty was placed under the
police supervision of the craft masters. The very dress of the crafts
was made a matter of strict definition; all liveries and hoods of
former days were to be given up, and the crafts were to wear
liveries the same as those of London.[768]
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.
 CHAPTER XV

THE COMMON COUNCIL OF LYNN

It was not in Norwich alone that the people, refusing submission

to a governing plutocracy, made the experiment of creating a lower
house of commons to represent the burghers at large. The peculiar
difficulties that beset popular government in that city were absent in
other towns, but in no case was the experiment a simple matter.
Everywhere unforeseen dangers were presently disclosed, dangers
new and various, and capable of overwhelming the new movement
in ultimate ruin and confusion. Even at the moment when Norwich
was forming its second chamber, the town of Lynn, but a very few
miles away, was developing a common council wholly different in its
origin and its constitution, and threatened by occasions of failure
and betrayal of which Norwich had no experience.
The case of Lynn is one of singular interest. Nowhere else in
England was there a corporation more wealthy, or more formidable
from its compact organization and great authority. On the other
hand nowhere else perhaps was there a community of “mean
people,” burgesses and non-burgesses, so prosperous, active, and
united; sustained as they were in every emergency by the effectual
protection of their lord the Bishop, who, in his jealousy of the
governing class, was forced to become the ally of the subject
people, and to make their cause his own. Under these circumstances
the conflict between the commons and the plutocrats who ruled over
them had some original characteristics, and the problem of church
and state in Lynn emerges in a new and subtle form.
The ruling class of the town was from the first the governing
body of the Merchant Guild.[804] For here, as in other leading ports,
it is evident that the rich traders quickly became dominant in civic
affairs, even though their association in a Guild Merchant of itself
gave them no right to govern. In Lynn a powerful merchant class
must have been formed at a very early time. Through the town lay
the one way by which Norfolk could be entered from the west; and
its port was the only outlet for the trade of seven counties. Lynn was
therefore the centre for the largest cattle market in the east of
England, whence the export trade drew supplies of wool and fells
and hides;[805] its middlemen and merchants held in their hands the
commerce with Gascony, the Rhineland, Zealand, “the parts of North
Berne,” with Prussia, and Dacia, and the Hanse towns; and as early
as 1271 the German merchants had some sort of local organization
there under their alderman Symon, a citizen of Lynn, of whom we
hear that he gave a pledge on behalf of some Lübeck merchants to
the amount of £200.[806] No interest in the borough could compete
with the great commercial company[807] by whom the whole volume
of trade that was borne over the waters of the Wash “rowing and
flowing,” was ultimately controlled. Under the name of the Holy
Trinity it had obtained a charter from John, and by the time of
Edward the Second had nearly nine hundred names on its bede-roll.
The sons of its old members were allowed to enter the guild on
payment of 6s. 8d.; while others, men and women, were willing to
give 60s. or 100s. to be counted among its brethren, the men
looking to share in the political as well as commercial benefits it
offered, while women were perhaps consoled with its spiritual gains;
and men and women alike paid the same entrance fee to be enrolled
after death in consideration of the eternal advantages of such
membership.[808] In 1392 the guild employed thirteen chaplains
yearly to say masses in the churches of S. Margaret, S. Nicholas, and
S. James, used much wax for lights in churches and chapels, and
from the profits of the common staith gave alms and fulfilled works
of charity.[809]
The spiritual blessings of the guild, however, pale before the
financial and political boons it had to offer. As a great trading
company it heaped up wealth and increased power. The aldermen
and his brethren made laws to regulate the commerce even of those
burgesses who did not belong to their select company, but carried
on business by virtue of the charter of free trade granted to the
whole borough.[810] The guild owned along with other property the
common staith and all its appurtenances, the quay where by its
decree “no bad persons, nor any spiritual persons should work,”[811]
and the right of passage for a boat beyond the port.[812] The
monopoly of various profitable trades was secured to its members,
as for instance the sale of mill-stones,[813] paving-stones, and
grave-stones which were sold at from 20s. to 30s. apiece. The
brethren of the guild were the bankers and capitalists of the town.
[814] They lent money out on usury, and not only did the corporation
come to borrow from their treasury, but in 1408 more than fifty
townsmen were in their debt for sums varying from £1 to £119. The
trading activity of the company may be measured by the fact that in
1392 the guild had in ready money £60 13s., and in divers
merchandise £200;[815] and in 1408 the loans came to £1,214. In
1422 its wealth was £1,403, of which the debts due to it made up
£1,210. Its expenditure was generous and magnificent. Large sums
were spent on the new guild hall, beginning in 1422 with £132 4s.
The silver plate in its treasury weighed in the first half of the century
440 ounces. A silver wand was borne before its dean; and its
members were carried to their graves under a covering of cloth of
gold.[816]
Financial transactions on such a scale as this would in any case
have given the guild control over a town government whose
expenses were fast increasing, and which in every time of need
turned to its coffers for money. But the company of the Holy Trinity
exerted far more than an indirect authority over the corporation. It
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