In 1100 royal, aristocratic or ecclesiastical authority over towns was universal. England’s largest towns had royal castles imposed on them under William the Conqueror and remained central points of the king’s government of the shires. The fact that towns, with their castles and castle garrisons, were important for the military organization of the kingdom meant that until the early thirteenth century they were vulnerable to political instability, and suffered badly in periods of civil war, such as the Anarchy of Stephen’s reign or the rebellion against King John. Many new towns of the twelfth century were constructed by castles or monasteries, to which they were treated as appendages. Even when founded at a distance from centres of power, their administration was integrated into that of the lordship to which they belonged. Many such towns remained for centuries in the same dependent situation without achieving any advanced measure of autonomy. Seigniorial boroughs were just as subject to the king’s laws and to his right to tax or levy troops as royal boroughs were, but the lord’s estate steward presided over their court of law, and his officers collected judicial fines and tolls. Some of the best-known examples are monastery towns, St Albans, Bury St Edmunds, Peterborough and Durham. Seigniorial towns were not necessarily economically disadvantaged by their dependent status, which might even bring advantages, such as the lord’s responsibility for maintaining the fabric of bridges and market installations.
The task of administering a large town was more than some landlords wanted, and there were attractions in letting townsmen take some responsibility for managing their day-to-day affairs. The word townsmen is precise, in this context, since there was no question of women participating in urban government at any level. The delegation of responsibility started earliest and proceeded farthest in the larger royal boroughs. The leasing of royal revenues to burgesses collectively, rather than to individual royal appointees, is first known from London and Lincoln in 1130, though at that stage the arrangement was not permanent. Grants of this right in perpetuity began early in the reign of Richard I, in charters to the men of Bedford, Colchester, Hereford, Northampton and Worcester.29 The existence of such liberties implied that their beneficiaries, the freemen or burgesses, were a hereditary group. In practice, as well as admitting new burgesses by inheritance, towns were willing to admit others on paying an entry fee to the community chest, or completing an apprenticeship to an existing freeman. Only freemen, who constituted in law the ‘community’ of the borough, were allowed trading privileges and other rights over pastures and fisheries. Burgesses adopted rules to protect their position in their own market against outsiders. Larger towns often did so under the institutional form of a merchant guild, though their powers were confined to the town itself, and, unlike Scotland, did not create extensive territorial monopolies. Burgesses also had the right, graded according to their status in the community, to participate in the government of the town and the election of borough officers. From the thirteenth century onwards, but particularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth, it became common for chartered boroughs to issue ordinances or by-laws to modify their constitutions or to supplement the statutory regulation of agriculture and trade.
Lords other than kings often granted some autonomy to the towns on their demesne. Three well-known examples of charters of liberty from Lancashire are those granted to Salford by Ralph, earl of Lincoln (c.1230), to Stockport by Robert of Stockport (c.1260) and to Manchester by Thomas Grelley (1301).30 The burgesses of all three were allowed to choose their borough reeve, though not to lease the lord’s revenues nor to hold their own courts unless the overlord’s steward presided. As this implies, there were different degrees of urban autonomy, and the distinction between self-governing boroughs and those without such independence was never an absolute one.
In the light of these distinctions, urban society may be divided into three status groups with differing degrees of political weight. The first, which was unlikely to be found at all in the smallest towns, comprised merchants, lawyers and owners of multiple properties. It was characteristically from this group that the ruling elite of the larger towns was drawn. They rarely employed more than a dozen servants, though by 1500 some clothiers had many more dependent workers. The second rank of town-dwellers were self-employed traders and craftsmen, usually householders, usually employing only one or two apprentices and servants. In a chartered borough such people needed to be freemen in order to trade freely without having to pay tolls, and they constituted the majority of the burgesses. They had subordinate political rights and duties, such as rights of election, and they would be expected to approve publicly the acts of the council from time to time. They would also serve as minor officers of the borough in the market and in the courts. In an unchartered town men of this class had trading privileges as householders and would be prominent in the town court as jurors and pledges. Below their ranks were those who were not freemen or householders, and who were characteristically sub-tenants or lived in with an employer. They had no political or trading rights, and constituted the wageearning class and the destitute. Their proportion of the urban population varied considerably, but was largest in London and the bigger provincial towns. Their conditions improved after 1349 because of shortages of labour, which reduced the problem of unemployment and pushed up real wages.
In larger English towns with an advanced level of autonomous administration, there were two main types of elective office in the late middle ages. There were executive officers such as those of the mayor or bailiff, who were directly responsible to the crown for the good rule of the city. There were also consultative officers, notably common councillors and aldermen. Aldermen constituted an inner group of councillors who were especially concerned with financial decision making and auditing the annual accounts. Towns differed greatly in the number of elective positions, particularly in the number of aldermen and councillors. One of the smaller English councils was established by the burgesses of Colchester in 1372, when their new constitutions provided for eight aldermen and sixteen others to make up a council of twenty-four. The biggest establishment was that of Norwich from 1417, with twenty-four aldermen and sixty additional councillors.31 Such differences reflected to some extent differences in the size of towns and the number of citizens available.
It was universally expected that responsible office, whether executive or consultative, was held by the wealthier townsmen. This became more explicit from the later fourteenth century, when the constitutions of chartered towns were codified more tightly than previously. Executive officers were to be drawn from a narrow group, usually from amongst the aldermen, and greater security of tenure was given to those who reached high status, so that it was difficult for electors to remove them. One explanation for the increasingly oligarchic formulae by which town governments were constituted is that fifteenth-century townsmen saw office as a public service rather than as a route to personal aggrandizement, particularly in towns whose collective income was adversely affected by the urban crisis of the late middle ages. There were few private pickings to be made from high office in a decaying borough, and security of tenure was a means of enhancing the dignity of office-holders in such a way as to increase the non-material rewards for taking on responsibilities.
Historians now see less significance than some of their predecessors did in the contrast between self-governing boroughs and those supposedly administered by their lords. The procedures of urban justice involved townsmen in similar ways in towns of all degrees of autonomy. The courts depended on the willing involvement of urban elites just as much in seigniorial boroughs as in self-governing ones. Policing depended upon the panelling of jurors to report those who used false weights and measures, who disregarded regulations, who obstructed the highway, and so on. In seigniorial boroughs the lord’s officers needed to know when property had changed hands, or tenants had died, and such business required cooperation from the wealthier inhabitants. For most people it made little difference whether the president of the court was nominated by an overlord or elected by burgesses, since the set-up of courts and the routines they followed were much the same in both cases. In towns without chartered privileges, resident elites were sometimes able to secure some further control through the religious fraternities that became a common feature of late medieval society. At Westminster, for example, the fifteenth-century fraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary assumed many of the functions of a town council, reducing friction between inhabitants, organizing social events and acting as trustee for the bequests of deceased members.32
Nor was conflict between town-dwellers and landlords a phenomenon peculiar to seigniorial boroughs. It is true that in towns dominated by powerful landlords living in close proximity, the relationship between lord and borough was often difficult. There were many grounds for conflict, though the incidence of overt antagonism was governed as much by the willingness of the parties to resolve disputes as by the seriousness of the real issues at stake. There is no easy explanation why there was repeated aggression between the inhabitants of Bury St Edmunds and St Albans and their landlords, though the fact that the landlord was monastic was a significant contributory cause. The monks had no choice but to live beside the towns they had created, and intended to retain control of their assets and their environment. But, for similar reasons, conflicts between townspeople and landlords were common in larger boroughs of all sorts, especially those with extensive lands. A growing number of monasteries, friaries and hospitals or colleges was a distinctive feature of urban growth in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and they acquired urban property by gift and purchase. Even the most proudly self-governing town might find itself in conflict with such neighbours. The self-governing citizens of York were more torn both by conflict amongst themselves and with landlords than the inhabitants of most seigniorial towns, since they had in their midst the dean and chapter of York, the abbot of St Mary, and the warden of St Leonard’s Hospital, all of whom had lands and tenants in the city streets and fields.
Such parallels between different types of town are a corrective to simplifying schemes that categorize towns as either ‘feudal’ or ‘free’, but they do not imply that all urban government was the same. Throughout England, structures of royal law, taxation and military service imposed some external framework on urban institutions, and common problems were implied by the class structure and distribution of wealth, but even within these constraints it is difficult to predict in detail just what to expect. The most useful distinctions between different town constitutions are to be found by ranking them according to the extent of their departure from the rural norms of manorial organization. These differences correlated (imperfectly) with size, since smaller towns were mostly seigniorial, and capable of little effective resistance to their overlords. The records of a large self-governing borough, if they survive, have been preserved by a succession of town clerks appointed by the burgesses, and if they are of any bulk they record a number of different executive bodies of townsmen acting at different times for different purposes - holding court sessions, meeting in council, auditing accounts, collecting tallages and taxes, surveying borough property, holding guild meetings, and so on. They record decisions taken by these bodies without reference to any superior except, perhaps, the king. A new burgess in a free borough swore fealty to the king and the borough, and service in the ruling group often required that a man should not be retained by any local landlord. The case of a small seigniorial borough is strikingly different. The smallest sort of town usually had separate court sessions, but they were presided over by an official of the lord of the borough. Their court records were often sewn up with those of manorial courts on the same estate, and might even be written on the same membranes of parchment. Such responsibility for local government as their elites possessed, however real, was little greater than that to be found in village society. Any burghal privileges were minimal, and there were no civic institutions, no guilds, and no invitations to send members to parliament.
World History
