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THE ENGLISH TOWNS 1

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 35

THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 75

THE COMMON LIFE OF THE TOWN 124

THE TOWNSPEOPLE 169

THE PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT 197

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM 226

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM 250

BATTLE FOR FREEDOM 277

BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY 309

THE TOWNS AND THE CHURCH 333

CONFEDERATION 384

TOWN LIFE

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

THE ENGLISH TOWNS

THERE is nothing in England to-day with which we can compare the life of a fully enfranchised borough of the fifteenth century. Even the revival of our local institutions and our municipal ambition has scarcely stirred any memory of the great tradition of the past, of the large liberties, the high dignities and privileges which our towns claimed in days when the borough was in fact a free self-governing community, a state within the state, boasting of rights derived from immemorial custom and of later privileges assured by law.

The town of those earlier days 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-dependent life. The inhabitants defended their own territory, built and maintained their walls and towers, armed their own soldiers, trained them for service, and held reviews of their forces at appointed times. They 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, and as time brought new problems and responsibilities, made and re-made and revised again their ordinances with restless and fertile ingenuity, 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. No alien officer of any kind, save only the judges of the High Court, might cross the limits of their liberties; the sheriff of the shire, the bailiff of the hundred, the king's tax-gatherer or sergeant-at-arms, were alike shut out. The townsfolk themselves assessed their taxes, levied them in their own way, and paid them through their own officers. They claimed broad rights of justice, whether by ancient custom or royal grant; criminals were brought before the mayor's court, and the town prison with its irons and its cage, the gallows at the gate or on the town common, testified to an authority which ended only with death. In all concerns of trade they exercised the widest powers, and bargained and negotiated and made laws as nations do on a grander scale to-day. They could covenant and confederate, buy and sell, deal and traffic after their own will; they could draw up formal treaties with other boroughs, and could admit them to or shut them out from all the privileges of their commerce; they might pass laws of protection or try experiments in free trade. Often their authority stretched out over a wide district, and surrounding villages gathered to their markets and obeyed their laws; it might even happen in the case of a staple town that their officers controlled the main foreign trade of whole provinces. In matters that nearly concerned them they were given the right to legislate for themselves, and where they were not allowed to make the law, they at least secured the exclusive right of administering it; the King and the Parliament might issue orders as to weights and measures, or the rules to be observed by foreign merchants, but they were powerless to enforce their decrees save through the machinery and with the consent of the town. Arduous duties were handed over to them by the state--the supervision of the waters of a river basin, the keeping of the peace on the seas. They sent out their trading barges in fleets under admirals of their own choosing, and leaned but lightly on state aid for protection or revenge, answering pillage with pillage, and making their own treaties with the mariners of other countries as to capture and ransom and redemption of goods, and the treatment of common sailors or of "gentlemen" prisoners. The necessity of their assent and co-operation in greater commercial matters was so clearly recognized that when Henry the Seventh in 1495 made a league of peace and free trade with Burgundy the treaty was sent to all the chief towns in England, that the mayor might affix to it the city seal, "for equality and stableness of the matter;" and the same form was observed at the marriage of the Lady Mary. Two hundred and twenty-six burghers sat in Parliament beside the seventy-four knights of the shire; and each borough freely decided for itself what the qualifications of its members should be, and by what manner of election they should be chosen, at a time when for country folk all such matters were irrevocably settled by the king's law. While the great lords with their armed bands of liveried retainers absolutely ruled the elections in the shires, in spite of all statutes of Parliament, the towns asserted their freedom to elect without fear or favour, and sent to the House of Commons the members who probably at that time most nearly represented the "people," that is so far as the people had yet been drawn into a conscious share in the national life.

Four hundred years later the very remembrance of this free and vigorous life was utterly blotted out. When Commissioners were sent in 1835 to enquire into the position of the English boroughs, there was not one community where the ancient traditions still lived. There were Mayors, and Town Councils, and Burgesses; but the burgesses were for the most part deprived of any share whatever in the election of their municipal officers, while these officers themselves had lost all the nobler characteristics of their former authority. Too often the very limits of the old "liberties" of the town were forgotten; or if the ancient landmarks were remembered at all it was only because they defined bounds within which the inhabitants had the right of voting for a member of Parliament; and in cases where the old boundaries now subsisted for no other reason, it was wholly forgotten that they might ever have had some other origin. In other boroughs where the right of voting was determined in another way, the townspeople had simply lost all remembrance of the ancient limits of their territory; or else, guided by some dim recollection of a former greatness with broader jurisdiction and wide-reaching subject estates, the corporation still yearly "walked the bounds" of lands over which they now claimed no authority. As the memory of municipal life died away there were boroughs where at last no one suspected that the corporate body had ever existed for any larger purpose than to choose members of Parliament. Knowing no other public honour or privilege and called to no other public service, the freemen saw in a single degraded political function the sole object of their corporate constitution; the representation of the people was turned by them into "a property and a commerce," and this one privilege, fed on corruption and private greed, survived the decay of all the great duties of the ancient civic life.

There were it is true exceptions to this common apathy, and towns like Lynn might still maintain some true municipal life, while others like Bristol might yet show a good fighting temper which counted for much in the political struggles of the early nineteenth century. But the ordinary provincial burghers had lost, or forgotten, or been robbed of the heritage bequeathed by their predecessors of the fifteenth century. With the loss of their municipal independence went the loss of their political authority; and the four hundred or so of members whom they sent to Parliament took a very different position there from that once held by their ancestors. In the Middle Ages the knights of the shire were the mere nominees of the wealthy or noble class, returned to Parliament by the power of the lord's retainers, while the burgesses of the towns preserved a braver and freer tradition. At the time of the Reform Bill, on the other hand, a vast majority of the town members sat among the Commons as dependents and servants of the landed aristocracy, whose mission it was to make the will of their patrons prevail, and who in their corrupt or timid subjection simply handed back to the wealthier class the supreme political power which artisans and shopkeepers and "mean people" of the mediaeval boroughs had threatened to share with them.

The true story of this singular growth of independence in the English boroughs and of its no less singular decay would form one of the most striking chapters in all our national history. But the materials for such a story, obscure, fragmentary, and scattered as they are, still lie hidden away in municipal archives, state rolls, and judicial records, as though the matter were one with which Englishmen had nothing to do. It is true indeed that the many ingenious expedients which the burghers devised to meet the peculiar difficulties of a past age would ill serve as models for our use to-day, nor can their success or failure be urged on either side of our modern controversies. They tell us nothing of the advantages or drawbacks of protection in our own time, or of the uses of state regulation of labour, or of the advisability of trade guilds. We cannot revive their courts or their privileges, any more than we can set up their gallows or call out modern citizens to dig a moat that shall be their defence from a hostile world. We cannot borrow their experience and live idly on the wisdom of the dead. But there is no more striking study of the perpetual adjustment and contrivance by which living communities adapt themselves to the changing order of the world than the study of our provincial boroughs in the Middle Ages; and 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 a quickened interest the little stage of the mediaeval 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.

There is no better starting point for the study of town life in England than the fifteenth century itself, when, with ages of restless growth lying behind them, and with their societies as yet untouched by the influences of the Renascence or the Reformation or the new commercial system, the boroughs had reached their prosperous maturity. It would be vain to attempt any reconstruction of their earlier history without having first stood, as it were, in the very midst of that turbulent society, and by watching the infinite variety of constitutional developement learned to search out and estimate the manifold forces which had been at work to bring about so complex a result; and no study of their later history is possible without an understanding of the prodigious vitality of the mediaeval municipalities. There 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. There the men who were ultimately to make the Reformation were schooled in all the vexed questions between church and state, and in the practical meaning of interference in civic matters by an alien power, so that the final crisis of religious excitement was but the dramatic declamation on a grand scale of lessons diligently repeated class by class for many a generation beforehand. There, too, long before the great national struggles of later centuries between England and the continental powers exalted patriotism to its highest ardour, men were already inspired by the vision of the English nation holding its post against the world, and by a passionate allegiance to its great destiny; and in every market and harbour the love of country was quickened by the new commerce with its gigantic ambition to win for England the dominion of the seas, its federations of merchants held together by the desperate struggle for supremacy, and its hordes of pirates who swept the ocean with the wild joy of their Norse ancestors. There is no break in our history when the old world merged into the new, for the spirit of the fifteenth century was the spirit of the sixteenth century as completely as it is the spirit of to-day.

The towns as we find them in the fifteenth century were the outcome of centuries of preparation. It was by a very slow and gradual process that England was transformed from a purely agricultural country, with its scattered villages of dependent tillers of the soil, into the England we know to-day--a land of industrial town communities, where agricultural interests are almost forgotten in the summing up of the national wealth. Our modern towns, indeed, can almost all trace back their history into the obscurity of a very distant past; but their record as we find it in Domesday, or under the Norman kings, is simply that of little country hamlets, where a few agricultural labourers gathered in their poor hovels, tilling by turns their lord's land and their own small holdings; or of somewhat bigger villages which lay at the branching of a great road, at a river ford, or at a convenient meeting-place for fair or market, and thus grew into some little consequence as the centres of a small local trade; while along the coast a few seaports were just beginning to draw merchants with their wares to a land that had long been almost forgotten by the traders of the Continent. It was not till the twelfth century that our boroughs began to have an independent municipal history--from the time, that is, when the growth of the wool trade under Henry the First gave them a new commercial life; and the organization of local government under Henry the Second opened for them the way into a new world of political experiment and speculation. From this time all went well with the municipalities for three hundred years. In the course of the thirteenth century the great majority of towns obtained rights of self-government, until finally these grants came to an end simply because there were no unenfranchised towns left. Not indeed that the flow of royal charters ceased, for burghers who had got the first instalments of independence were constant in pressing for all such further privileges as could magnify their authority or protect their dignity; and successive generations of patriotic citizens gathered into their town chests under the safe keeping of half a dozen locks piles of precious parchments, each of which conferred some new boon or widened the borders of liberty. Determined as it was by local circumstances the struggle for independence was carried on after an irregular fashion, first in one town, then in another; here the burghers pressed forward riotously, and there loitered indifferently or stopped discouraged on their way. Some towns were allowed to elect their mayor before 1200, others did not win the right till three or four centuries later; Bristol was made a shire in 1375, more than a hundred years before Gloucester; and in the fifteenth century there were still boroughs which had to gain their first charters, or else to exchange narrow and insufficient rights for full emancipation. But the forward movement never ceased; every victory counted for liberty, and every success justified faith and inspired new zeal. 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.

At first indeed municipal life, even at its best, was on a very humble scale. The biggest boroughs could probably in 1300 only make a show of four or five thousand inhabitants, and of enfranchised burgesses a yet smaller number; while the mud or wood-framed huts with gabled roofs of thatch and reeds that lined their narrow lanes sheltered a people who, accepting a common poverty, traded in little more than the mere necessaries of life. It was not till the middle of the fourteenth century that the towns as they entered on a larger industrial activity began to free themselves from the indescribable squalor and misery of the early Middle Ages; but from this time forward we begin to detect signs of stirring prosperity, at first under the guise of a frugal well-being, and later carrying its luxury with happy ostentation. In the course of the next hundred years we see trading ports such as Lynn, Sandwich, Southampton, or Bristol, and centres of inland traffic such as Nottingham, Leicester, or Reading, and manufacturing towns like Norwich, Worcester, York, heaping up wealth, doubling and trebling their yearly expenditure, raising the salaries of their officers, building new quarters, adorning their public offices and churches, lavishing money on the buying of new privileges for their citizens, or on the extension of their trade. And while the bigger boroughs were thus enjoying their harvest of blessing and fat things, the small seaports and market towns also gathered in their share of the general good fortune by which all England was enriched.

Evidence of accumulating wealth indeed gathers on every side. The labour and enterprise which in earlier centuries had covered England with castles and cathedrals and monasteries was now absorbed in the work of covering it with new towns. A journey through any part of the country to-day is enough to show us how ruthlessly the men of the fifteenth century swept away the parish churches which their fathers had built in the fourteenth century, to replace them with the big bare fabrics where size and ostentation too often did service for beauty, and in the building of which prosperous burghers gave more conspicuous proof of wealth and lavish generosity than of taste and feeling. In Canterbury and Worcester and Nottingham and Bristol and a host of other towns we may still admire the new houses that were being raised for the traders, with their picturesque outlines and fine carved work. Waste places in the boroughs were covered with buildings and formed into new wards. On every side corporations instinct with municipal pride built Common Halls, set up stately crosses in the market-place such as we still see at Winchester or Marlborough, paved the streets, or provided new water-supply for the growing population. If we count up the new gates, and quays, and bridges, and wharves, and harbours, and sluices, and aqueducts, and markets of which the town records furnish accounts, we are filled with amazement at an activity which was really stupendous. Public duty and private enterprise went hand in hand. Sometimes the whole commonalty was called out to help at the church-building, or the digging of a new harbour; sometimes the charity once given to religious uses was turned into the channel of civic patriotism, and good citizens left money to found hospitals and almshouses and schools, to pave the streets, to pay the tolls of their town, to fee lawyers to defend its privileges, or buy a charter to protect its rights from invasion. Thus it was two traders of Canterbury who built in 1400 the first private bridge over the river; and in 1485 a mercer from London, William Pratt, constructed at his own expense the first main drain under the Old Street to carry off the rain-water into the river. In Birmingham the whole community formed itself into a "guild and lasting brotherhood" for the doing of works of charity, and chiefly it would seem for the repairing of two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous ways on the high road to Wales--a work which the Corporation was too poor to undertake.

Nor was this growth in wealth the only, or indeed the most striking part of the town's history during these three centuries from the time of Henry the Second to the time of Henry the Seventh. Trade is pretty much the same wherever it exists at all, and from its narrow dominion much of human energy will always make a way to escape. When Englishmen had spent a measure of their force in creating a nation of shopkeepers, there was still enough of buoyant and exuberant strength left to elaborate an art of government which has affected the history of the world; and the truly characteristic part of the mediaeval 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. There was much to be done in the new ordering of life. Already in the twelfth century a new force had declared itself when in France the middle and lower classes for the first time found a voice in literature. From that time onwards poets of the people and teachers of socialism, writing in the vulgar tongue for common folk, proposed startling questions and boldly pressed home their conclusions. Nothing was safe from their criticism; as they discussed the original rights of men, the "social contract" between the people and their lords, the tyranny of nobles, or the rights of peasants, these new thinkers among the people gave warning of growing energies too big and passionate to live at ease in the narrow bondage of mediaeval custom and tradition. The inevitable changes however came slowly, and those who lived in the midst of the movement were themselves unconscious of the real transformation that was going on. Even at the end of the fourteenth century the writer of Piers Ploughman, when he paints for us the picture of the feudal world as it then was, has no dream that its bondage can ever be broken, that there is any escape out of the prison-house of mediaeval society. For the first time we there see England, not as it appeared to historians and satirists of the court or the monastery, but as it looked to one standing in the very midst of that vast "field full of folk from end to other"--to the poet who walked among the people with his heart full of charity and pity, who by day mixed with the crowd at the fair, or watched the bargainings in the market-place, or travelled along country by-ways and entered the hovels of the poor, and at night sat in the ale-house among beggars and mendicant friars. But while he shows us all the trouble and confusion of that tumultuous crowd, the social order remains to him simple and unchangeable--fixed, in his belief, as firmly as the decrees of God and nature could establish it. He could only repeat the old time-honoured counsels of work and obedience as the final remedy for all social ills: "Counsel not the commons the King to displease." But it was more than possible that work and obedience might still leave, as it had left before, life empty of all but misery. Then the last solace lay in resignation.

"him lord antecedent, Both their head and their King, holding with no party, But stand as a stake that sticketh in a mire Between two lands for a true mark";

if his power was absolute, and he could

"claim the commons at his will To follow him, to find him, and to fetch at them his counsel,"

yet even then Conscience warned the sovereign that to frame a righteous government "without the commons' help it is full hard, by my head"; and Reason

"counselled the King his commons to love, For the commons is the King's treasure."

The whole part however played by the towns in national politics, the degree of influence they exercised, in what ways it differed from that of the aristocratic class, how it affected matters of administration, finance, foreign policy, commercial laws, the strength of the monarchy, and the forms of the constitution--all these questions have still to be investigated. What is perfectly clear is that wise rulers in those days saw the tremendous change that was taking place in the balance of forces in the State, as even the most foolish among them felt that the power of the purse at least was passing from the country magnates to the town merchants; and they gave expression to their convictions by a change in the whole character of their policy. To kings and statesmen the friendship of the burghers even in times of comparative quiet was daily becoming a matter of greater consequence to be bought at their own price. It was no longer the nobles whom they sought to bribe to their interest, but the towns; and as gifts and pensions to Court favourites declined, courtesies and gracious remissions of rent were lavished on the boroughs. From this time, even when the towns had fallen to their lowest estate, their heritage of power was never wholly lost, and through their later humiliation and corruption we may still discover the evidence of their political consequence, since the measure of their influence was in fact the price set on their obedience.

If such a tale of long centuries of national growth ending in a satisfied maturity carries its suggestion of dull monotony, we need only turn to the history of towns in other times and places to discover that in this very monotony is hidden a real element of singularity. The most striking contrast lies perhaps close at hand, in the brilliant and dramatic story of the communes in France--the shortest lived of all the feudal independent lordships in Europe. Of earlier origin than the English, their history goes back to the first part of the twelfth century, fifty years before the movement had effectively begun in England; and the story of their liberties is, taken all together, but a brief tale of some two hundred years, from 1130 to 1330. Their progress was rapid and their decay as swift. Indeed decline had already set in by 1223, at the very time when Norwich, Nottingham, and a number of the greater English towns were just receiving for the first time powers of choosing their own rulers and administering their own justice. In 1280 their condition was almost hopeless, and half a century later the life of the free communities was over and their liberties utterly extinguished, saving always the liberty to carry on trade.

And yet we can only wonder that the attempt lasted for two hundred years, set as they were amid difficulties wholly unknown to English burghers, or with the ghosts or dim reflections of which these at the worst had only to contend in a kind of phantom fight. What were the far-off echoes of foreign conquest or defeat heard on our side of the water, or the report of an occasional local rising, compared to the devastating wars that swept the plains of France, and amid the miseries of which the communes were struggling into life? The necessities of war proved fatal to local liberty, and that in more ways than one. If warring kings and lords created independent communities for their own purposes, with the sole idea of forming fortified centres capable of self-defence, such communes could hardly prove strongholds of freedom, and the self-government of the people soon fell in fact before the requirements of military discipline. Sometimes the death of freedom was brought about by more violent methods; and the trembling inhabitants who made their way back from the woods to their ruined homes after a town had been sacked and burned by the enemy, would pray to be disenfranchised that they might thus be delivered from the burdens and dues of a commune which they were no longer able to maintain. Abroad moreover feudalism retained the authority which had been torn from it here by Norman kings, and was yet more dangerous to the burghers than war itself. Against the might of their feudal lord, king or noble or ecclesiastic, they could make in the long run but a sorry fight, and perhaps after a century of desperate struggle for emancipation in which the peasants saw their brethren slain in thousands, their farms devastated, their wealth torn from them, their emigrants driven back starving to plundered homesteads, the outcome of all their misery was finally to gain a few trading privileges by consenting to a charter which once more laid them bound at the feet of their master. Too often the lord avoided open violence by calling political craft to his aid, and devised for his burghers some form of charter which while it admirably suited his own purposes robbed the communal government of any true democratic element and made the name of liberty a mockery. As for the vast number of towns big and little under ecclesiastical dominion, they contended in vain against princes of the Church whose mighty state was measured on the grand scale of the Continent--princes with the Pope always in the background, ready at their complaint to fulminate the decree of excommunication which left all the burghers' goods at the mercy of their lord. Whether the prelate sought to annihilate rebellious serfs with fire and sword, whether with more subtle intention he devised some cunningly delusive form of charter, or contrived to hinder all the operations of free government, to thwart its developement, and to check the spread of its influence, the tragic close was always at hand--political slavery and degradation. Amid the innumerable troubles that compassed the French communes round about, the administrative difficulties, the financial cares, the public bankruptcy of town after town, the evil moments when the king's fiscal officer and the starving people made alliance to destroy the privileges of the burghers, civic freedom failed. Time and fate were allied against the commune, and the issue of the battle was decided before the fight had well begun.

Against the century of growth and the century of decay which made up the record of the French communes, we have to set three hundred years of unbroken prosperity and privilege in which the English burghers added charter to charter and filled their "common chests" with a regularity that knew no check. It is not necessary, however, to assume that Englishmen reached that happy state wholly by virtue of their native superiority; it would perhaps be truer to thank the good fortune of insignificance that so long waited on them. England, in fact, was lagging far away in the rear, where there was little of the noise and dust of battle. It was not there that the idea of municipal liberty was first proclaimed; for in the Dark Ages of riot and disorder and piracy, Celts, Latins, Teutons, all the members of the European brotherhood in fact, found in association their natural succour against danger and aid to labour; and along the great trade routes that traversed Europe the more important societies of men confederated for protection and assistance were formed before ever Englishmen had begun to organize themselves into self-governing communities. In that European drama, everything took great continental proportions; men disputed for tremendous stakes, and in the long battle the mighty lords of the old world were never wholly routed, but still laid their grip on the modern society that was struggling to usher in a new order. In the great fight there were great defeats, such as we have seen in France, and liberty had to begin its course afresh and lead men along new roads in search of freedom and content. But we in our distant island had throughout the Middle Ages all the advantages of obscurity. According to any valid method of determining our place in the European order, whether by yearly income, or size of merchant fleets, or strength of armies, or number of inhabitants, we remained for a time after the loss of Normandy and Anjou unimportant in the eyes of Europe-of little account among the peoples; and as far as popular feeling went ourselves heedless of what went on on the Continent. Tranquil and secure because no one took the trouble to think of us while we were regardless of their quarrels, we were left to learn our lessons as slowly as we would, to lay sure, if lowly, foundations, to practise our skill by safe experiments till our art was mastered. The humble display which we made in our national capacity was repeated in our municipal story. There indeed the tiny dominion of the community, the sparse population, the poor little treasure-box, the solitary "common barge," the handful of militia passing in review with their clubs and forks, present a sorry figure beside the majestic state of the big corporations over sea. But this humble condition was their true security. 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. Within the narrow area enclosed by the city wall and ditch, amid a scanty population scarcely bigger than that of a small country town to-day, experiments which would have been impossible on a great scale were tried with every conceivable variety of circumstance and expedient; and the boroughs owed to their early insignificance and isolation a freedom from restraint and dictation in which real political experience became possible.

Thus in England, as elsewhere, the character of the nation and the mould of its political thought were ultimately shaped by outward circumstance; and the forms of our freedom have been profoundly affected by the way which the towns took to liberty, by the manner in which they modified its expression according to the peculiar conditions to which each community was subject, and by the use they made of their power. But since the very existence of the towns as important centres of life, as well as the character of their development, depends on the complete transformation which English society underwent in the later Middle Ages, I venture, before beginning my real story, to give a very brief and rapid sketch of the Industrial and Commercial Revolution in which mediaeval England was buried and modern England born.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

THE history of the fifteenth century has long remained but little known. It is very generally regarded as the "profoundly tragic close of a great epoch," and the historian looks back to the golden age of the thirteenth century as the glorious time of English and of European history--the culminating period to which all the foregoing generations slowly mounted, and from whose heights the later sons of men as slowly and surely declined and went backward. The period of this backsliding is seen as an age altogether wanting in picturesqueness and moral elevation, sunk in materialism, sordid and vulgar, a time of confused and indiscriminate corruption, where "heart and treasure" were linked in ignoble union, and the political demoralization of the people was only matched by their private degradation; and the fifteenth century has long borne the heavy burden of its evil reputation, while its records have been left comparatively undisturbed by inquisitive search. For hackneyed as the period of the Wars of the Roses may seem to the superficial reader, no student has yet adequately studied the secret of the age in which the great revolutions of the next century were being prepared--the age which made possible for England the revival of letters and the reformation, which founded her commercial greatness, which revolutionized her industrial system, which cast away the last bonds of feudalism and laid the foundations of the modern State.

It is indeed true that no great man has made this century illustrious. No general or warrior of the first rank distinguished wars which were born in iniquity, and kept alive by greed. No gifted statesman left his mark on the government or administration of the country. Among the people themselves interest in national affairs seemed dead; they made revolutions and set up new kings as they were bidden to do, and kept stores of badges of the houses of York and Lancaster alike, to be ready with either sign of loyalty as the fortunes of war turned this way or that; they forgot the stirring political ballads of former generations and sang moral ditties instead. In place of the mighty theologians of an earlier time there came commentators and interpreters of little significance. Nor did a single religious leader or reformer or scholar arise to stir the popular thought or conscience: Lollardy with its questionings and criticisms was still heard of from time to time in the bigger towns and manufacturing districts, but the people generally acquiesced in the demands of the authorized religion and discipline. Literature was well nigh lost as well as the graver kinds of learning. In the beginning of the century one or two nobles had collected libraries and brought tidings of the Renascence in Italy, and later on half a dozen scholars made their way to the Italian universities; but there was neither poet nor scholar to follow the masters of an earlier age. In the fifteenth century the very language in which Chaucer wrote was but half intelligible to the mass of the people, and his tales must have been unknown out of court circles. Men were content with rhymes innumerable--on morals, on manners, on heraldry, on the art of dining, on the rules of thrift and prosperity; and in all our history there is no time so barren in literature as the reign of Henry the Sixth.

Even in a democratic age it is not easy at first sight to recognise where the interest lies of an epoch destitute of all that has made other times illustrious, and whose significance seems to shrink in comparison with the struggles and victories of the ages that preceded, and the splendid achievements of the age that followed it; and historians finding themselves face to face with so dreary a century may have been tempted to give it a character of its own for grossness, for cruelty, for any distinction whatever which will at least take it out of the range of the absolutely commonplace. But the distinguishing mark of the fifteenth century lies neither in its crime nor in its vulgarity. We must judge this period in fact as a time of transition in many ways extraordinarily like our own. In the centuries between the Great Plague and the Reformation, just as in the nineteenth century, the real significance of our history lies in the advent of a new class to wealth and power, as the result of a great industrial revolution. The breaking up of an old aristocratic order, and the creation of a middle class to be brought into politics and even into "society," the enormous increase of material wealth, the new relation of the various ranks to one another, and the failure under altered circumstances of traditional rules of conduct, the varied careers suddenly opened to talent or ambition, the reproach for the first time attached to incompetence and poverty, the vulgarization of literature and morality which followed on their adaptation to a class as yet untrained to criticism or comparison, the extension of a habit of religion closely related to a plain morality--all these things recall to us many of the experiences of our own days, and may make us more tolerant of the unpicturesque and Philistine element whether then or now. If the chief centre of interest had once lain in the offices of the royal palace it might now be seen rather in the new Town Hall which was being built in almost every borough in England, or in the office where the mayor's clerk was busied in making his copies of Magna Charta or extracts of Domesday, or in translating from the old French the customs and ordinances of the town, or in hunting up the rolls of the itinerant judges; or over the country-side where estates were being sold and bought with the development of a provincial instead of a national nobility and the rise of new men to possess the old acres, and where the quickening of the struggle for life was reflected in the stormy conflicts and significant concessions of the manor courts. The new middle class of shopkeepers and farmers had indeed no chroniclers and no flatterers, for it was long before men could realise how rapidly and completely the weight of influence was being transferred from the old governing class to the mass of the governed, and chroniclers still went on mechanically retailing events now comparatively trivial and unimportant. It was not till the next century that they turned from spinning out these worthless annals to a discussion of matters really important which had by that time forced themselves on the dullest apprehension.

The whole interest of the fifteenth century thus lies in the life of very common folk--of artisans and tradesmen in the towns, and in country parts of the farmers, the tenants of the new grazing lands, the stewards and bailiffs and armies of dependents on the great estates, who did all the work at home while the lord was away at the wars or at the halls of Westminster. If the century produced no great administrator or statesman, it did create a whole class of men throughout the country trained in practical affairs, doing an admirable work of local government, active, enterprising, resolute, public-spirited, disciplined in the best of all schools for political service. If there was no great writer, the new world of the middle class was patiently teaching itself, founding its schools, learning its primary rules of etiquette and its simple maxims of morals, reading its manuals of agriculture or law or history, practising its Latin rhymes, and building up in its own fashion from new beginnings a learning which the aristocratic class had been too proud, too indifferent, or too remote to hand on to it. If no religious revival shook the country, the new society was solving in its own way the problem of helping the sick and poor; it was earnest in religious observance, it was framing its English litanies and devising its own plans for teaching the people an intelligent devotion. The burghers began to perform in the national economy the work which in earlier centuries had been performed by the great monastic societies. The extension of trade and manufacture had fallen into their hands; they were busied in the gathering together and storing up of the national wealth. They gave to labour a new dignity in social life and a new place in the national councils. From the towns came a perpetual protest against war and disorder; throughout the troubles of the fifteenth century, civil war, court intrigues, the tyranny of usurpers and the plots of the vanquished, local raids of private revenge or of land hunger, their influence was always thrown on the side of peace and quietness. Art found in them patrons; illuminators and painters, architects and bell-founders, the makers of delicate shrines and images, engravers of seals, goldsmiths and workers in brass, whether of English birth or brought from foreign parts, prospered within their gates; while their harpers and minstrels doubtless had a part in the musical developement of the country at a time when English artists set the fashion of the best music as far as the court of Burgundy. They laid in fact the foundations of a new English society. The men of the New Learning, the men of the Reformation, the men who revealed the New World, were men who had been formed under the influences of the fifteenth century.

All this activity was the outcome of the great industrial and commercial revolution which was passing over the country. Until the middle of the fourteenth century, England had been to Europe what Australia is to-day--a country known only as the provider of the raw material of commerce. At the close of the fifteenth century she had taken her place as a centre of manufactures, whose finished goods were distributed in all the great markets of the Mediterranean and of the Northern Seas. It is no wonder that during a change which transformed the country from a land of agricultural villages into a land of manufacturing towns, and opened for her the mighty struggle to become the carrier of the world's commerce, the whole energy of her people, thrown into a single channel, should be absorbed in accomplishing their enormous task. Every one was honestly busy in learning either how to make or how to sell, and in conquering the difficulties that beset traders as they strove to push their way into the world's market on equal or, if possible, more than equal terms with competitors who had long held unquestioned supremacy.

From the twelfth century wool had been the one great export of England, and the one great source of wealth for nobles, churchmen, farmers, even kings. So important was its sale that statesmen very early saw the necessity of securing for the national Exchequer a share in the profits of the main national trade; and in aid of the royal treasury they devised in the first half of the thirteenth century a system which was quite peculiar to England, the organization of the Staple.

The Staple was an appointed place to which alone certain goods might be brought for sale, raw materials such as wool, wool-fells, skins, lead, or tin, of which wool was far the most important. Fixed for the first hundred years in some foreign town, generally in Bruges, it was shifted from place to place by Edward the Third, who from 1353 made various experiments as to establishing it in England; but finally about 1390, Calais was decided upon as the most advantageous spot. Thither every dealer had to carry his wares ; and he must carry them along certain appointed routes only--from Lincoln by St. Botolph, from Norwich by Yarmouth, from Westminster by London, from Canterbury by Sandwich, from Winchester by Southampton, as the government in its wisdom might decide. In a kind of secondary sense these places where the wool was gathered for export thus became towns of the Staple, and certain officers, Mayors and Aldermen of the Staple were appointed to control their trade. The merchants' goods, first weighed at the point of departure, must be weighed again at the port where they were shipped, and sealed with the seal of the Mayor of the Staple, while to check fraud there was an elaborate system of official papers to be sent to the Treasury in London and to the Staple in Calais for every such transaction of weighing and toll-taking. Every possible precaution was taken to maintain the position of the merchants in the European market by rules which practically forced the wool into the hands of foreign and not native buyers, so that English traders complained that their interests were sacrificed to courting the patronage of the Continent. If, for example, the chief Staple town was for any reason moved from over sea to England, native dealers were absolutely forbidden to export any Staple wares, so that foreigners might be forced or encouraged to come and take part in the trade. Foreign dealers were allowed to vote along with them for officials, and so late as 1445 the English merchants vainly prayed that no Stapler might take part in election of Mayor or Constable of the Staple unless he had ten sacks of wool cocketed at Calais.

But so far as the State was concerned all this elaborate system for the protection of the wool-trade had simply grown out of the fundamental conception of the Staple as a fruitful source of supply for the royal treasury; and this theory was carried out to its logical issues. A fixed sum was demanded from the merchants year by year which they had to pay whether their trade was good or bad; while in their mercantile dealings they were terribly hampered by a host of regulations issued as to the mint in Calais, and invented by financiers who from the middle of the fourteenth century were haunted by alarms as to a possible dearth of gold and silver, and arbitrarily used the Staple as a means of forcing the flow of precious metal into England. Nor was the drain of taxation at all times legal and regular. Merchants paid money down for the protection and favour of the king in reiterated loans or gifts, whether free or forced. The Captain of Calais, as head of the only standing army which the English kings then possessed, advanced a kind of public claim on the Staplers' wealth for the security of his soldiers' pay; and the merchants had many a time good reason to tremble for their wool, and might cry in vain for redress if their whole store was confiscated to pay the soldiers' arrears of two or three years, or if militant lords "shifted with the Staple of Calais" for ?18,000 or so for costs of war.

All these burdens however could be borne so long as business prospered in their hands. If a Parliament like that of 1258, or a great statesman like Simon de Montfort, urged that England should herself become an independent and self-supporting centre of manufactures, these seemed as idle words to monopolists dealing in wool with command of the world's market, who saw no need to forsake their easy path to wealth at a moment when the growth of manufactures in the Netherlands opened a vast market for English produce. In the time of Edward the Third it is said that 30,000 sacks of wool were shipped every year from English ports.

But before the reign of Edward had closed, the exporters of wool knew that they had fallen on evil days. Trade began to slip from their grasp. The revenue they paid from their profits to the King's Exchequer fell in the few years from 1391 to 1411 to one-fifth of its former value, and was still calculated at this melancholy fifth in 1449. Instead of the thirty thousand sacks which they yearly counted in the fourteenth century, they could not at the close of the fifteenth century collect more than 8,624 sacks, and in the last year of Henry the Eighth even this number had shrunk to under 5,000. Taxes which lay comparatively lightly on them in happy days, fell as an intolerable burden when their warehouses lay empty, and their ranks were thinned by bankruptcy and desertion. At the very moment when all England was being rapidly turned into a land of sheep pastures for the endless production of wool, the great company of the wool traders was finally and irrevocably ruined.

The wool, in fact, was being sold at home, and out of the ruin of the merchants of the Staple the cloth-makers sucked no small advantage. For the great revolution in trade was rapidly being completed--the revolution by which England was turned from being a country whose chief business was exporting wool into a country whose chief business was exporting cloth. The people had indeed long manufactured rough cloth for common use. But during the reigns of the three Edwards the idea had constantly gained ground that by working up their own raw material Englishmen might easily retain for themselves the profits which foreigners had till now secured, and manufacturers were undoubtedly doing a considerable export trade in the middle of the fifteenth century. Half a century later, in 1411, the very year when the subsidy on wool fell to a fifth, broad-cloths are first mentioned in an Act of Parliament; and from this time they became the chief cloths of trade. As though they had been for a while half forgotten by the Exchequer, the exporters of cloth found themselves free from all subsidy tax and only obliged to pay to the indifferent authorities tolls that amounted to less than two per cent. for natives and merchants of the Hanse occupied in the trade, and less than eight per cent. for aliens; and complacently measured this sum with the tolls of the Staplers--the thirty-three per cent. paid by merchants of the Staple, or seventy per cent. by all other traders, a tax which perhaps explains why in 1424 Parliament had to forbid the carrying of sheep over sea to shear them there. The manufacturers, too, made alliance with the discontented wool-growers. A farmer who could sell his wool next door, did not trouble to send it with vexatious formalities over sea to Calais; and in course of time the cloth merchants insisted upon laws which gave to them during certain seasons the first choice of the wool before the Staplers were even allowed to enter the market.

Under these circumstances trade grew apace. Carracks of Genoa carried English cloths to the shores of the Black Sea; galleys of Venice fetched them to the pits of the Venetian dyers; merchants of the Hanseatic League sold them in the fair of Novgorod; English traders travelled with them to the inland markets of Prussia, and gave them in exchange for casks of herrings in Denmark. At the close of the century the English Merchant Adventurers exported about 60,000 pieces of cloth yearly; and in the beginning of the sixteenth century the cloth dealers boasted that never before in the memory of man was so much cloth sold out of England. The 60,000 bales rose in 1509 to 84,789 pieces, and in 1547 to 122,354; and the dealers claimed further gratitude and admiration of their country for the fact that they had "by their industry" raised by a fifth the price demanded from the foreigner. Meanwhile the manufacturer was also getting hold of the home market, as the great religious corporations and landowners who had once provided on their own estates for all local wants recognized the new condition of things, and instead of making cloth at home as of old, sent every year far and wide across the country to the great clothing centres to buy material for the household liveries, seeking from one place the coarse striped cloth of the old pattern and from another the goods of the new fashion. The fine black copes of worsted were favourite gifts of benefactors to churches, and a patriotic Norfolk gentleman, after seeing a "tippet of fine worsted which is almost like silk," decided to "make his doublet all worsted for worship of Norfolk."

Nor was the growth of manufacturing enterprise confined to the making of cloth. For a couple of centuries the iron trade had made of the Weald the Black Country of those days, and had stirred the Forest of Dean with the din of its seventy-two moveable forges; and now, what with the metals and what with the coal of the country, "the merchants of England maintain and say that the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above." In the reign of Edward the Fourth when there was a riot among the Mendip miners, and the Lord Chief Justice went down to "set a concord and peace upon the forest of Mendip," it is said ten thousand people appeared before him at the place of trial. But for all this miners could no longer keep pace with the demands of the country, now that new industries on all sides required metal that had once gone to supply the wants of the farmer only; and though stores were brought from Sweden and Spain, the price of iron increased to double what it had been before the Plague. Shipbuilders at the end of the fourteenth century were fitting out vessels for foreign as well as for English buyers. English gunsmiths began to send out of their workshops brazen guns and bombards superior to anything made in France, and which were said to have given England its success in the French war under Henry the Fifth. A number of towns, big and little, boasted of their bell-foundries, as for example London, Salisbury, Norwich, Gloucester, Bridport, and others. The copper-workers of Dinant had traded with England since the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth century had an entrep?t at Blackwall; but in 1455 the founders set up their industry in England, stealing away secretly from Dinant to profit by the cheaper labour and ready sale in this country. Flemish experts taught to Englishmen the art of brickmaking, and native builders were setting up throughout the country the first brick houses that had been seen in it since the departure of the Romans. A whole series of industrial experiments proclaimed the enthusiasm with which the people accepted the challenge to secure for themselves the profits of foreign manufacturers. Artificers often more ambitious than skilful tried to establish a native industry of glass painting. Instead of fetching from abroad carpets and the tapestry used for churches, manufactories were set up at Ramsey, whence came perhaps also some of the "counterfeit Arras" which adorned the humbler tradesmen's homes. Frames "ordained and made for the making of silk" were at work; lace-makers and ribbon weavers begged the protection of the government; and English workers sent into the market large quantities of the linen called Holland from its first home. The export of raw material fell altogether out of fashion. Traders no longer carried skins over sea undressed to be prepared by foreign labour, but had the work done by English artizans at home. And whereas at the beginning of the fifteenth century merchants brought beer from Prussia to England, at its close they were carrying beer from London to Flanders.

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