The Mediæval Towns of England

DURING the past few years the history of mediæval municipalities has been attracting considerable attention in Europe. Sohm, Hegel, Schulte, Pappenheim, Von Below, Gothein, Giry, Luchaire, Pirenne, and others have made valuable additions to our knowledge of the subject, not to mention a host of contributors to the history of particular towns. No branch of German constitutional history has ever before been enriched to such an extent within so short a space of time. One reason for this great interest in the subject is that most of the important questions of mediaeval constitutional history are more or less connected with the problem of the origin of municipalities. One writer contends that the town constitution emanated from the guilds, another that it originated in market privileges granted by the crown, and another that it was merely the expansion of an older village constitution. Though the battle has been carried on with the polemical zeal and acrimony which usually characterize German research, and though some of the main questions in dispute have not been settled, we are much nearer their solution than we were ten years ago. Not merely in Germany, but also in France and the Netherlands, considerable progress has recently been made in this branch of study.

In England there is no such activity, but only stagnant quiescence. England lags behind her neighbors in this even more than in other branches of historical research. This may be due in part to "the meanness and dullness of the municipal story ” in England, but its dullest aspects — the study of Roman relics, church epitaphs, and royal pageants — have received most attention, and in Germany and France the dramatic phases of municipal history do not occupy the foreground. “ The traveller who has asked at the bookshop of a provincial town for a local history, or even for a local guide,” says the most recent historian of English municipalities,¹ “ is as well able to realize the distance which parts us from France, Italy, or Germany as is the student who inquires for a detailed account of liow civic life or any of its characteristic institutions grew up among us.”

But Mrs. Green unduly exaggerates the extent of this apathy and neglect. There have been signs of an awakening interest in English municipal history in recent years, and a few good treatises on particular boroughs, on guilds, and on the economic development of town life have been published. The preface of the work before us intimates that Mr. Green revolutionized the study of municipal history ; that since he wrote nothing has really been accomplished ; and that, in fulfillment of a promise made to him, she continues the epoch-making work which he began. No one will deny that Mr. Green’s picture of mediæval boroughs is “ vivid and suggestive ; ” but, while respecting the loyalty of his wife to his memory, we must protest against his exaltation to a high place among the historians of English towns. In fact, he added little to our knowledge of municipal development; and, however meagre the literature of town history may be, there are at least a dozen writers who have made more substantial contributions to it than Mr. Green did. Mrs. Green has made considerable use of their works, but gives them little credit in her preface ; in the body of her treatise she even casts ungracious and caustic sneers at some authors from whom she has drawn scores of important references.

The historian who attempts to trace the development of any characteristic municipal institution of mediæval England meets with what seems to be an insuperable obstacle, the lack of published records. He finds in print portions of the muniments of only a few boroughs. What is most needed at present are scholarly monographs on particular towns, and copious extracts from the local archives. The author who aspires to write a good general history of English municipalities cannot depend solely upon the data now accessible in printed books; he must have the courage to spend many months of hard work among the town archives. Mrs. Green, like most English writers on municipal history, has exhibited no inclination to resort to this heroic method of solving the problems of the past. Her material is derived from printed books, not from manuscripts. The result is that she leaves some of the most weighty questions unanswered, and she is constantly bemoaning the lack of data, “ the thick darkness which still envelops the subject,” “ the confusion and ignorance which at present prevail.” In one place she tells us that “ we have not yet the means [that is, in print] of measuring the extent ” of an important movement; in another place she says that “ the scanty state of our knowledge indeed makes it impossible to sum up in a phrase the character of a strife which was universal, which involved every class in a most complicated and highly organized industrial society, and of which the history has not yet been fully made out for a single borough ; ” the facts regarding still another aspect of the subject “ lie hidden in municipal archives ; ” and, finally, she closes her work “ with feelings of compunction and dismay.” Though the meagreness of her sources of information has not deterred her from making some very sweeping generalizations, it has led her, on the other hand, to drift into numerous excursions on the history of particular towns. A large part of the second volume consists of sketches of the history of Exeter, Coventry, Southampton, Nottingham, Norwich, Lynn, and Sandwich, and similar sketches are conspicuous in the first volume. What she herself says of one of these is true of all: they are “ drawn in faint and uncertain outline.” Thus, the treatise as a whole is discursive and crowded with unnecessary details. The author would doubtless have accomplished much more by concentrating her attention upon some prominent phase of municipal history, and by filling the gaps in the material directly from the town archives. Such scraps as the extracts printed in the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, on which she so frequently relies, though valuable so far as they go, do not afford sufficient data for a history of English boroughs.

Mrs. Green prefers to view civic life from the vantage ground of the later mediaeval period, for reasons not easy to comprehend. She says it is the age “which revolutionized her [England’s] industrial system,” and “ cast away the last bonds of feudalism,” — the age in which “the weight of influence was being transferred from the old governing class to the mass of the governed.” “ The bonds of feudalism ” were, however, felt after the close of the Middle Ages, and the greater part of the second volume purports to demonstrate that the governed had little to do with town government. The truth is that the crucial century of English municipal growth was the thirteenth, and until the civic institutions of that period are carefully investigated the solution of the main questions at issue will remain a hopeless task. Nor does she prove that there were any epoch-making changes in the town constitution during the fifteenth century. On the contrary, she tells us again and again that in most boroughs its essential features had undergone no change; that an oligarchy was supreme “from the first ” or “from the beginning,” and remained dominant in town politics, in spite of some attempts on the part of the commons to place the government on a more popular basis. The revolution in civic life, according to her own account, was mainly an external one, affecting the relations of the borough to the king or manorial lord, and that revolution was accomplished before the fifteenth century. Moreover, the title of her book is misleading, for she devotes many pages to the thirteenth century, she deals with the fourteenth as much as with the fifteenth century, and occasionally drifts into the sixteenth. Even when ostensibly speaking of the fifteenth century she draws many of the illustrations in her footnotes from earlier times. “ The question of origins,” she says in the preface, “ I have deliberately set on one side, from the conviction that the beginnings of a society may be more fruitfully studied after we know something of its actual life.” This statement is incomprehensible, for a large part of volume i. is devoted to the origin of municipal freedom, and in a chapter of volume ii. she even goes back to the “ primitive ” constitution of boroughs. In some respects her account of municipal development in the fifteenth century is even less comprehensive than her account of it in the preceding period. Some of the most interesting and most characteristic problems of town life in that century — for example, the relations of the burghers to popular uprisings, the part played by the boroughs in national politics, the disputed question of the decay of many prominent towns — are only incidentally touched, or are wholly neglected.

It is unnecessary to present an outline of the contents of volume i. ; for, as is intimated in the preface, it contains no new generalizations. The author gives some account of the changes that took place in industry and commerce in the latter part of the Middle Ages, the various classes of inhabitants in boroughs, the duties and privileges of the burghers, the attainment of personal and political freedom by towns on the royal demesne and on baronial and church estates, the variety of separate jurisdictions within the civic boundaries, the relation of the church to the boroughs, and the organization of the Cinque Ports. In dealing with these subjects she does not often penetrate far below the surface ; the more difficult problems are passed over in silence, or are summarily consigned to the limbo of “ thick darkness.” Such questions as the limits and organization of the local judiciary and the relations of the crafts to the attainment of citizenship are nowhere investigated.

A few brief extracts from the first chapter will illustrate her style of writing, and also her method of investigation : “ The town of those early days [the fifteenth century] in fact governed itself after the fashion of a little principality. Within the bounds which the mayor and citizens defined with perpetual insistence in their formal perambulation year after year it carried on its isolated, self-independent life. The inhabitants . . . elected their own rulers and officials in whatever way they themselves chose to adopt, and distributed among officers and councillors just such powers of legislation and administration as seemed good in their eyes. They drew up formal constitutions for the government of the community . . . till they had made of their constitution a various medley of fundamental doctrines and general precepts and particular rules, somewhat after the fashion of an American state of modern times. . . . The townsfolk themselves assessed their taxes, levied them in their own way, and paid them through their own officers.

. . . They sent out their trading barges in fleets under admirals of their own choosing. . . . Englishmen who now stand in the forefront of the world for their conception of freedom and their political capacity, and whose contribution to the art of government has been possibly the most significant fact of these last centuries, may well look back from that great place to the burghers who won for them their birthright, and watch with quickened interest the little stage of the mediæval boroughs where their forefathers once played their part, trying a dozen schemes of representation, constructing plans of government, inventing constitutions, with a living energy which has not yet spent its force after traversing a score of generations. . . . These were the workshops in which the political creed of England was fashioned ; where the notion of a free commonwealth, with the three estates of king, lords, and commons holding by common consent their several authority, was proved and tested till it became the mere commonplace, the vulgar property, of every Englishman. . . . The burghers went on filling their purses on the one hand, and drawing up constitutions for their towns on the other, till in the fifteenth century they were in fact the guardians of English wealth and the arbiters of English politics. . . . On every side corporations instinct with municipal pride built Common Halls, set up stately crosses in the market-place, such as are still seen at Winchester or Marlborough, paved the streets, or provided new water-supply for the growing population. . . . The truly characteristic part of the mediæval story is that which enables us to measure the political genius with which the forerunners of our modern democracy shaped schemes of administration for the societies they had created of free workers. ... It was not enough that the burghers should create societies of free men, to whom the great difference that distinguished between man and man was not wealth or poverty, labor or ease, but freedom or bondage. This was the easier part of their task, and was practically finished early in their history. It was a longer and more difficult business to discover how the art of government should be actually practised in these communities, and to define the principles of their political existence. But in these matters also the burghers became the pioneers of our liberties, and their political methods have been handed down as part of the heritage of the whole people. . . . Set from the first in pleasant places, where by conquering kings the lofty had been brought low and the humble lifted up, and where no enemy of invincible strength lay any longer across their path, the burghers might carry on their own business without care ; . . . and the boroughs owed to their early insignificance and isolation a freedom from restraint and dictation in which real political experience became possible.”

This idyllic picture of self-government and municipal freedom gradually fades from the reader’s mind as he peruses the succeeding chapters of Mrs. Green’s book, until finally, when he comes to the end of volume ii., he is inclined to believe that he must have read of all this civic liberty and independence in some other work. If this book were a mediæval manuscript, a learned editor would demonstrate to every one’s satisfaction that chapter i. was an interpolation by a later hand. Instead of little principalities leading an “ isolated, self-independent life,” we learn that their privileged existence was a mere matter of royal caprice, and that boroughs were often laid prostrate before the throne. The king could at any moment and on the most trivial pretext rob a town of all its franchises, and retain them until they were rebought for hard cash. “ The burghers lay absolutely at his mercy for all the liberties and rights which they enjoyed.” ² “ The whole of their complicated system of administration was kept in working order by a generous system of bribes ” paid to the king and his officials. In the internal government of these municipalities “ with complete local independence ” the king frequently interfered, either “ to protect the select oligarchy against the commons;” or for any other purpose that conduced to his profit. The fortunes of important cities like Norwich “ fell backwards and forwards with the rise and fall of court parties.” Even the highly privileged Cinque Ports were constantly pestered with royal inquisitions. The towns did not always establish their own schemes of government, even after they had attained “ complete independence ; ” for example, “ in 1403 the citizens of Norwich bought [from the crown] a new constitution at the heavy price of £1000 ; ” and Henry V. “ utterly annihilated ” the civic ordinances of Lynn. Instead of enjoying tranquil self-government, with “ no enemy of invincible strength across their path,” we find that almost every borough was broken up into various separate sokes — most of them ecclesiastical jurisdictions — which were continually in conflict with the civic authorities and prevented the full attainment of municipal liberty. Hence “ ecclesiastical tradition stood between the people and freedom,” and “ was fatal to the healthy development of municipal self - government.” Instead of the inhabitants “ electing their officials ” and “ distributing powers of legislation,” we are informed again and again that “ these forerunners of our modern democracy ” had no real liberty and self-government, but “ from the beginning ” (from the beginning of what the author does not say) were ground under foot by a harsh and despotic oligarchy. It was a “ government by the select few,” by a close caste or “governing plntarchy,” “who ruled for their own ends with frankness and capacity,” and, in the fifteenth century, “ cast into the freeman’s dungeon the burgher who still prated of a free community.” “ Nor must it be forgotten that from the first no man of the people could hope to aspire to any post in the administration of the town.” Everywhere “ the oligarchy fixed their yoke on the neck of the people.” We learn that these “ pioneers of English freedom,” these “ arbiters of English politics,” who fashioned England’s political creed, these “ burghers who won for Englishmen their birthright,” these “ shopkeepers who carried across the ages of tyranny the full tradition of liberty,” kept aloof from the great political movements of the fifteenth century, and truckled to one king after another with every change of dynasty. "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 a 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.” The town trader, “ in the hurry of business, had no time and less attention to give to political problems that lay beyond his own parish.” In most towns we look in vain for municipal trading barges in fleets under municipal admirals. We also look in vain for societies of free workers : the air of the borough is not redolent of liberty ; as an old writer expresses it, there is “ much franchise and little freedom ; ” at every turn the craftsmen and other inhabitants are trammeled by their rulers. We hear little of boroughs where “ the lofty had been brought low and the humble lifted up ; ” man is sharply distinguished from man, not merely by freedom or bondage, but “ by wealth or poverty, labor or ease.” Wealth is the stepping-stone to high station, and especially to a place in the ruling plutarchy. A “ broad chasm ” separates merchant traders from retail dealers, and rigid harriers keep apart master craftsmen and journeymen and servingmen or common laborers. “ All evidence goes to show . . . that antagonism between the man who asks and the man who pays a wage were [sic] very much the same as now ; and that class interests were if anything far more powerful.” “The burghers yearly added to their number half a dozen, or perhaps even a score of members wealthy enough to buy the privilege, while the increase in the unenfranchised class, which had begun very early in town life, proceeded by leaps and bounds.” We find few corporations “ instinct with municipal pride,” constructing good pavements and magnificent civic monuments, but we are presented with a lurid picture of decayed buildings, and streets reeking with filth and obstructed with refuse. “ The first sight of a mediæval town must have carried little promise to the visitor.” In Hythe “ streets were choked with the refuse of the stable, . . . flooded by the overflow of a house. . . . Timber dealers cast trunks of trees right across the street, dyers poured their waste waters over it till it became a mere swamp. . . . There was hardly a street or lane which was not described as ‘ almost stinking and a nuisance.’ . . . Everywhere gates and bridges were falling to decay, ditches unrepaired, and hedges overgrown. . . . Nor was this the condition of smaller towns only.” The streets of Nottingham were “ blocked with piles of cinders.” In Norwich “ the market-place was not yet paved in 1507. but a judicious order was issued that no one should dig holes in it to get sand without the mayor’s license.”

In volume ii. Mrs. Green deals mainly with the internal development of boroughs as distinguished from the history of the struggle with the lords for municipal franchises. There are chapters on manners, the market, traders, artisans, and crafts. In treating such subjects as manners and “ books of courtesy ” the author is more at home than in dealing with institutions of government. The greater part of this volume is devoted to the nature of the town polity, the question whether its government was democratic or aristocratic. At the outset we are told that the “commonly accepted ” theory is that borough government in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was democratic, and later gradually became aristocratic. Certainly, this has not been the prevailing theory during the past twenty-five years. Since Brentano wrote his essay on guilds most English writers have accepted his dictum regarding the dominance of an early aristocracy, and the few historians who have vigorously protested against this theory do not seem to have disturbed England’s faith in Brentano. Mrs. Green appears to accept his view on this point; she rejects with disdain the theory of “ the passage from democracy to oligarchy,” and yet she speaks in a vague way of a primitive communitas, of which she claims to be the discoverer, and which she calls the early town democracy ; and then she proceeds to prove that after the thirteenth century almost every town was ruled by an oligarchy or “official caste.” “We may, perhaps, date back to a distant past the claim of the whole community to have all laws ratified by their ‘ entire assent and consent.’ to be made privy and consenting to all elections, to know verily how the town moneys were raised and spent, to admit new burgesses by the common vote of the people. These were rights which the oligarchies constantly endeavored to make void from the time of Henry the Third to the time of Henry the Eighth.” In the great majority of towns a second council was formed, but even this system “ to some extent represented a victory of the oligarchy.” Despite what she has said regarding the prevalence of an early democratic community, she tells us that, in certain towns at least, the oligarchy had been Supreme “from the first” or “from the beginning.” She informs us more than once that we seem to discern traces of this oligarchy very early or from the beginning, but what these traces are she does not state. Her views are so protean that it is difficult to follow her in this part of her work. In one place she appears to sneer at the theory of the passage from a democracy to an oligarchy, but in the chapter on the Town Democracy she evidently believes that the democratic communitas was the original nucleus of borough government, and in the last chapter of the book she says, “ What had been the democracy of 1200 became the oligarchy of 1500.” Thus she agrees with Dr. Colby, who investigated the subject some years ago at Harvard University, and whose paper in the English Historical Review Mrs. Green either has not read or has passed over with silent contempt.

Mrs. Green wields a very facile pen, and she often works up old material with a skillful hand ; but the style of the book is not in keeping with “ the meanness and dullness of the municipal story.” She herself dwells repeatedly upon the lack of dramatic elements in English municipal history, upon its “ dull monotony.” Of one of the most prominent boroughs she says, “ The civic life stretches out before us like stagnant waters girt around by immutable barriers; scarcely a movement disturbs its sluggish surface ; ” and of another important municipality, “ There is something phenomenal in the record of a town so tranquil.” In the narration of such a story we expect a less lofty strain, simpler language, and fewer ponderous phrases. Her well-rounded, labored periods grow wearisome as we penetrate into dry details of industrial growth and town life. No amount of frills and furbelows — not even copious citations from Piers Plowman — can make the theme fascinating, however edifying the story may be. Though her statements are generally lucid, she has obscured the sense of one whole chapter by the exuberance of her phraseology; and her fine writing sometimes covers loose thinking and delusive generalizing.

Though her treatise is useful in the present condition of the literature of the subject, the English municipalities of the fifteenth century still await an historian.