Political contract in late medieval english towns
p. 397-416
Texte intégral
1Historians regard the growth, consolidation and entrenchment of urban oligarchy as the defining feature of the political history of towns in late medieval England.1 The issue of oligarchy has dominated historical inquiry to such an extent that, although there has been debate about the appropriateness of the term and differences of opinion about the relative importance of its ideological and material foundations, there is agreement about the ultimate triumph of a form of government in which power was concentrated increasingly in the hands of the few. The scholarly consensus has encouraged historians to shift their attention from the causes of oligarchy to its character and to feel confident in asking, not «if» there was oligarchy, but «how did English medieval oligarchy work?».2
2Urban historians have explored thoroughly the economic basis of oligarchy. In her study of Exeter, Maryanne Kowaleski argued that the political power of members of the civic elite was grounded in their social and economic status as merchants. Their wealth, but, more importantly, their dominance of the conduits of commerce, enabled them to obtain political control of the city. These rulers were then able to take advantage of the financial opportunities which accompanied political influence in order to solidify their economic position, thus demonstrating the fundamental circularity of power.3 In late medieval York, according to Heather Swanson, the mercantile oligarchy of the city manipulated the organs of civic government to keep craftsmen individually and collectively in their place. Both the imposition of the system of crafts and the policing of the Corpus Christi play cycle contributed to an urban social and political structure in which the relationship of artisans to merchants was characterised by submission and dependence.4
3Government by the rich, it is claimed, went unchallenged because of a mentality of deference towards social superiors. The highly stratified nature of urban society was a reflection of the divine order in which everyone knew his place and social unity was the ideal.5 The recent work of Philippa Maddern has shown how, in an urban context, this rather abstract notion of natural harmony was articulated in the metaphor of the body.6 The consequence of this «political theology» was that, in cities such as Norwich, civic magistrates believed that they had an obligation «to ensure that all parts of the body politic, in all their functions, were duly obedient to godly order».7 Organic imagery, which conceived the city as a human body, expressed a mode of thought whose essential meaning was the subordination of the members of the body politic to its head. The legitimacy of magisterial rule also depended upon its ability to speak for the public good and to act, publicly at least, in the interests of the wider urban community.8 The concepts of the body and the common profit were not peculiar to the city. They also shaped, to a significant extent, the discourse of national politics and the conduct of the crown. Indeed, one school of thought sees the intervention of royal government as vital in shoring up the power of urban elites, who increasingly viewed themselves–both in practice and theory–as agents of central authority.9
4Taken together, it is argued, these economic, ideological and external political forces contributed to a decisive shift towards oligarchy in late medieval English towns. This was a trend reflected in and reinforced by the introduction of «more institutionalised and closed forms of rule by the rich».10 Nomination replaced election in the appointment of civic officials, many of whom were now also chosen for life. These constitutional developments, which climaxed in the establishment of «closed corporations» at the end of the period, provided the formal structure of oligarchy.
5This view of the character of urban political life between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries invests the ruling elites of English towns with a greater degree of political power than they actually enjoyed. If the late medieval period was «an age of deference», this is a characterisation which has more relevance to rural than to urban society.11 The vulnerability of urban rulers was acknowledged and could be exploited by those within the governing circle of English cities. In 1500 William Staveley, a merchant, citizen and former chamberlain of the city of York, whose brother followed the established civic cursus honorum, holding successive positions as chamberlain, sheriff and mayor, expressed sentiments which were perhaps all the more threatening to civic authority because of the location of their source. After directing abusive comments at the person of the mayor, of whom he declared, «if he had not the swerd tofore hym he set not an stray by hym», Staveley was committed to the mayor’s prison. Staveley’s words laid bare the uncomfortable question of what distinguished the mayor from an ordinary inhabitant of the city: in this case, the answer was the dignity of a ceremonial sword.12
6Members of the urban elite were typically merchants who did not possess land, in the form of manorial estates, outside the city. Those who did own land tended to regard it primarily as a commercial investment rather than an opportunity for enhanced social status. In this respect, merchants did not occupy an inherited position in local society. Urban rulers also lacked the kind of coercive power which the possession of land and tenants made possible. Nor did they maintain the ties of blood and lineage which remained so important in the countryside and which underpinned the exercise of lordship. There were very few mercantile dynasties in late medieval English towns.13 The premise of this paper is that urban magistrates had to engage in dialogue with their subjects in order to rule and that «the authority of civic government had constantly to be negotiated and could rarely be assumed».14 The political power of urban magistrates was «conditional» in the sense that it was not absolute: it was always open to debate. From this perspective, the theme of «contract» has a particular resonance.
Contractual discourse
7How might we best approach this subject in urban political life? In the last week of July 1496 two «seducious» bills were «founde» in the city of Coventry.15 Their discovery was not accidental. The bills appeared in public spaces of sociability, areas of the city characterised by regular and complex social interaction. One had been «cast», that is to say, thrown down and left in the street for the attention of casual passers-by. The second had been fixed to the door of the cathedral priory of St Mary’s, the major ecclesiastical institution within the city, which lay cheek-by-jowl with Coventry’s principal marketplace and commercial centre.
8Written in the vernacular and in verse, these texts are less familiar to historians than to literary scholars, for whom they are examples of the political literature of protest and complaint, an emerging genre of writing in late medieval England whose history has been documented in the recent work of Wendy Scase.16 The bills from Coventry can be incorporated into a wider narrative chronicling the uses of English and the transmission and social reach of literacy, but the texts are also important for the ideas they contain: ideas about power, government and the framework of social and political relations between governors and governed. These two relatively short texts provide a useful starting point from which to consider the political culture of late medieval English towns because of their allusions to the place occupied by contractual ideas, structures and practices within urban political life.
9The dominant discourse within the texts was contractual, but the notion of contract was freighted with three related, but not identical, meanings. First of all, the bills hinted at a broad definition of contract as a form of reciprocity, involving the mutual exchange of rights and duties between civic magistrates and subjects. The invocation of this concept of reciprocity in Coventry will not surprise those historians who regard the medieval English town as a «community» bound together by a series of «mutual obligations, including obligations between rulers and ruled».17 According to this reading of medieval urban political thought, townspeople believed that civic rulers ought to govern for the benefit of the urban community, whose members owed obedience in return. The different parts of the urban body politic had a separate function to perform in order to guarantee the well-being of the whole. In the words of Susan Reynolds, the political ideals of unity and harmony dictated that «ruler and ruled, rich and poor, all had their parts to play», yet critically, «each had his place, not equal but related».18 Medieval townspeople attributed conflict to sin and to the weaknesses of individual office-holders rather than to any dissatisfaction with the system of government itself. According to Stephen Rigby, «social protests normally centred on the alleged failure of the rich to carry out their side of the social contract, rather than rejecting the social contract per se».19 The existence of a «social contract», considered here to be synonymous with the concepts of reciprocity and mutual responsibility,20 meant that conflict was the product of the perceived failure of one party to live up to its duties.
10In late-fifteenth-century Coventry the relationship between rulers and subjects rested upon a much more fragile and discerning sense of conditional political reciprocity. Good governance within the city was, in theory, dependent upon a union between rulers and ruled, a unity borne of mutual love and the ties of friendship. In Coventry, however, a very different situation prevailed, one in which outward appearances might conceal as much as they revealed. In the words of one of the bills:
«And euer ye haue nede to þe Cominalte
Such favour as ye shewe vs such shall ye see.
We may speke feire & bid you good morowe,
But luff with our hertes shull ye haue non».21
11Leaving aside for a moment the difficult question of the identity of the «commonalty» of the city,22 the bill articulated a narrowly pragmatic and considerably more calculating view of mutual obligation which recalled the Aragonese royal coronation oath («If not, not») reputedly sworn by vassals on the accession of a new king.23 If it did not quite endorse the right to resist, the bill promised that obedience to civic authority would only be superficial. The connections between governors and governed in Coventry were now entirely onesided. The first lines of an earlier bill pinned to the door of St Michael’s parish church, in the heart of the city, in August 1495, declared:
«Be it knowen & vnderstand
This Cite shuld be free & nowe is bonde».24
12The tie which bound was the coercive force of serfdom rather than the consensual and voluntary relationship of reciprocity.
13Such reciprocity was inscribed in the civic oaths which citizens and officeholders of the city swore to uphold. On becoming a freeman, a citizen made a promissory oath in which he pledged his steadfast loyalty to the civic rulers. Citizenship bestowed significant economic and political privileges upon the recipient, but it also brought with it a set of expectations about the proper conduct of the «good citizen» which might be of an onerous nature. The record of the oath of the citizens of Norwich in the city’s Liber Albus, a fifteenth-century civic register, makes explicit the full extent of the obligations of citizenship. The new citizen was to be obedient («buxum ben») to the mayor and to all the other governors of the city at all times. More specifically, he was liable to pay taxes and tallages and to support other unnamed charges, as well as to uphold «alle ordenaunces made or to be made with in this Cite».25 In return for this oath of allegiance, civic officials promised to act tirelessly for the common profit of their city and, in particular, to dispense justice. In Norwich the mayor swore to do «egall right aswell to þe pore as to þe riche».26 The fifteenth-century oath of the mayor of Bristol repeated this maxim practically verbatim. In Bristol the mayor was expected to «trewly, and with right, trete the people of my bailly, and do every man right, as wel to the poer as to the riche».27 This Aristotelian concept of justice was precisely what the author of the Coventry bills had in mind.
14The bill attached to the door of the cathedral in 1496 cautioned Coventry’s rulers that they should govern justly, as their oaths prescribed:
«Ye þat be of myght,
Se that ye do right,
Thynk on youre othe».28
15Drawing upon the sentiment of a familiar proverb, the bill reminded its audience that might was not right. Those in positions of power and influence had a responsibility to exercise that power in accordance with the dictates of justice. They were instructed to right wrongs without delay, or to otherwise suffer the wrath of the commons of the city, whom the author of the bill likened to a swarm of bees or wasps. In this allegory, these small, simple creatures might also sting if Coventry’s governors were not vigilant in their enforcement of the law. The other bill posted in the summer of 1496 repeated the warning and advised the members of the civic elite, in the starkest terms, of the danger of inaction:
«Cherish þe Cominalte & se they haue their right
ffor drede of a worse chaunce be day or be night».29
16Here was a view of the oath of office as not simply a job description, whose words set out the basic criteria of good governance within the city, against which the performance of civic officials might be judged, but a tangible contract containing avowed promises, the breaking of which meant that those in breach had to face the consequences.
17Customarily sworn on the Bible, oaths were solemn vows, but their violation was much more than a «breach of faith».30 Civic oaths have been seen as the foundation of urban oligarchy in the sense that the oaths of civic office at once informed new office-holders of their collective responsibilities towards the urban community and simultaneously created division and differentiation within the civic body. The oath represented a transitional moment, in which the oath-taker acquired a new identity and entered a new world of the civic elite, whose members were bound together by rules of office and codes of conduct which emphasised the confidentiality of its discussions. Civic oaths, therefore, reinforced notions of hierarchy and order. The taking of an oath was inherently both an inclusive and exclusive act which, in a civic context, signalled the unequal distribution of political power within the city.31 This line of argument is persuasive insofar as oaths, particularly those of the highest ranking office-holders within the city, also articulated a descending notion of authority in which civic officials were as much agents of royal authority as representatives of the urban community over which they ruled.
18All English towns had lords and were subject to the demands of lordship. Those urban communities with the greatest rights of self-government were held directly of the crown, but even these royal towns were not wholly autonomous. In return for their chartered privileges, urban rulers had important responsibilities to discharge. In the late fifteenth century the mayor of Bristol was required to swear an oath of fidelity to the king, to preserve «this his Toune of Bristow» and to maintain the king’s financial and judicial rights.32 In fifteenth-century Norwich the mayor actually swore two oaths: one in respect of his duties to the community, and the other with regard to his standing as the king’s escheator in the city and to his obligation to safeguard the king’s «profite» there.33 The mayor’s essential duty to keep the king’s peace was taken sufficiently seriously for kings to respond to a period of urban disorder by taking a city into his own direct control (in manu regis). This act involved the withdrawal of a city’s rights of self-government and the imposition of a royal warden upon the town instead of an elected mayor. This is precisely what happened, for example, in London in 1392, in York in 1405 and Norwich in 1437.34 Observed in this light, civic oaths were thus an articulation of the exchange of rights and obligations which was characteristic of a political system of self-government at the king’s command.
19Yet within the internal politics of the city, civic oaths had a meaning and power of their own. Oaths of office were sworn before a wider urban audience than the ruling elite. In his extraordinarily rich picture of the inauguration of the mayor of Bristol c. 1480, the town’s common clerk, Robert Ricart, described the communal setting within which the new magistrate pronounced his oath. Although he stood in an elevated position at the dais end of the guildhall, the incoming mayor made a public declaration of his obligations «byfore all the seide Comyns» of the town.35 Similarly, in late-fifteenth-century York, there was a well established annual practice by which the senior civic office-holders, comprising the mayor and two sheriffs, as well as the aldermen and senior councillors of the city, swore an oath before the commons upon the day of the mayor’s election. Present in York’s guildhall in February 1487, for example, was «the hole Commonaltie after the custome usid in the saide Citie».36 Before this general assembly each member of the governing elite individually swore his oath. Such practice makes more sense when we think about the content of civic oaths. All delineated the office-holder’s duty to uphold the common good of the city. However vaguely defined a political maxim, a perceived failure to act in accordance with this fundamental principle of urban governance could provide grounds for dismissal. Thomas Yotten, York’s common clerk, was removed from office in 1476 because he was believed to have acted against «our commen wele and proffit» and, after further investigation, he was indeed found guilty of not being «able to occupie amonges us for our wele and proffit».37 In November 1500, one of York’s aldermen was discharged from his post for having «not don his duete in that rome after his othe maid in that behalf».38 Civic oaths of office made political as well as spiritual demands upon those who swore them. There may remain questions about the binding nature of these oaths, since their enforcement was at least in part a matter of interpretation, but in an urban context, such oaths did constitute a compact between the individual office-holder and the community of enfranchised citizens.39 The notion of accountability, which was firmly embedded within the language and practice of oath-taking, was the foundation of the entire edifice of civic government.
20Admonished to reflect upon their oaths, Coventry’s leaders in the 1490s were reminded that they were answerable to the urban community. These were not only words of caution issued to censure those who had mistaken the purpose of civic authority. It was from the commons that the city’s magistrates derived their legitimacy. This line of thought was set out in the opening lines of one of the 1496 bills. Their aphoristic quality perhaps made them an ideal political slogan:
«The cyte is bond that shuld be fre.
The right is holden fro þe Cominalte».40
21According to this ascending view of political authority, the source of the civic elite’s right to rule lay in its relationship with the commons, whose consent was presented as an essential principle of urban political life.
22In short, the Coventry bills provide three ways of exploring the theme of «contract» in an urban context: first, in the rather loose, communitarian sense of an exchange of rights and responsibilities; secondly, in the practice of oathtaking which enshrined a belief in the conditional nature of civic authority; and thirdly, in the realm of political ideas and the evidence of the contractarian principle that legitimate political rule depended upon the consent of the governed.41
23The remainder of the paper explores this aspect of social contract theory. Rousseau’s notion of the social contract is not especially helpful here. Although he had much to say in Book III about the construction of government and about its role as the servant of the people, his contract referred specifically to the original, founding convention which created the polity through the collective agreement of its individual members, rather than to the relationship between the government and the people.42 However, if urban society was not founded upon a «contract», the presence within the city of broader contractarian ideas about the importance of informed and active consent helps to explain the characteristic feature of urban government in late medieval England: not the growth of urban oligarchy, but the emergence of urban constitutionalism. This phenomenon involved the extension of the constitutional apparatus of the city and the appearance of a more formal civic constitution.
The consent of the commons
24A cursory examination of the language of English civic ordinances between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveals the frequency with which the written acts of urban government were said to have been made «with the assent of the whole commonalty».43 Assent, of course, is not the same as consent, in the sense that the former could mean nothing more than acquiescence, whilst consent implies a more active engagement with the decision-making process. It is certainly tempting to reduce the commonalty’s role in the formulation of civic legislation to a rubber-stamping exercise: since all rulers were seen in part to derive their authority from the people, popular authority might be invoked in order to confer legitimacy upon the actions of the political elite. According to one historian of late medieval York, the function of the commonalty «was to approve the oligarchs’ decisions».44 Equally problematic is the identity of the «commonalty». The word, along with its variants, community, communitas or commons, had several shades of meaning.45 On the one hand, it continued to denote the entire political community of the town or city comprising burgesses or citizens. These were the freemen, who enjoyed the privileges and rights that citizenship entailed.46 On the other hand, the term «commons» was also more frequently deployed to describe «ordinary citizens»: certainly not the lower orders who remained outside the civic franchise, but nevertheless those who did not hold high civic office in the city.
25The division between the probi homines and commons was «the greatest, most pervasive and perhaps even positively continuous political fissure within the late fourteenth-century English town».47 This was as true of Norwich as of the city of York,48 but in York the distinction was given an institutional form in the shape of the council of forty-eight. In contrast to the councils of twelve and twenty-four, whose members were former mayors, sheriffs and chamberlains of the city, the council of forty-eight represented the commons of York. In 1475, when the council of forty-eight presented a petition to the mayor and his colleagues, the so-called probi homines, it justified its involvement in urban politics on the basis that, «for alsmuch as we ben all one bodye corporate, we thynke that we be all inlike prevaliged of the commonalte, which has borne none office in the cite».49
26This petition was presented on the feast of St Blaise (3 February), probably the most important date in York’s civic calendar, since it was the beginning of the mayoral year. Although elected on 15 January, the mayor formally entered office a few weeks later.50 The commons of York, through the mouthpiece of the council of forty-eight, had a constitutional role in the election of the mayor. In the second half of the fifteenth century, a series of popular protests and disturbances at the time of the mayoral election provoked electoral changes which enhanced the political influence of the commons.51 In 1464 the council of forty-eight gained the privilege to nominate members of the council of twelve for appointment as mayor, a power which was extended in 1473 with the right to elect the mayor directly.52 The consequences of this «decisive widening of the political system» were felt almost immediately in the city of York.53 From the moment of the council of forty-eight’s creation in the 1370s, the commons had always presented petitions to the probi homines on matters relating to the common profit of the city, notably but not exclusively the state of civic finances.54 Around 1400, for example, the commons asked the mayor, aldermen and probi homines of the city that civic taxation should in future be levied only after the members of the council of forty-eight, drawn from the city’s crafts, had first consulted with the craftsmen whom they directly represented.55 If these petitions were not always answered favourably by York’s probi homines,56 the transformation of the city’s electoral system in 1464 and 1473 provided the commons with a greater bargaining power than they had hitherto enjoyed. Participation in the election of York’s mayor was linked specifically to the presentation of petitions. One was the condition of the other. On 16 February 1487, less than two weeks after the official commencement of the mayor’s office and the day on which the mayor and members of the councils of twelve and twenty-four swore their oath in the city’s guildhall before the assembled commons, «the Commons presented unto the saide Maior a bill of supplicacon».57
27This notion of reciprocity enabled the commons to act as a legislative body, whose petitions provided the basis of civic legislation and proclamations. On 5 February 1490, two days after the mayor’s formal installation, the mayor, sheriffs and councils of twelve and twenty-four gathered in the guildhall, where «the articles comprehendit in a bill of peticion by the commones was openlie red tofore all the presence».58 These articles addressed various financial matters, particularly the size of the annual fees paid to the city’s mayor and recorder. The commons pressed for a lowering of the mayor’s fee to £ 20 and, although the demand was refused, the probi homines agreed to conduct an audit of the accounts of every mayor from 1469–70 to the present day, the declared purpose of which was to learn how best to reduce the «inordynate costes and charges» associated with the office. Similarly, the pressure of the commons resulted in a decision to limit the fee of York’s recorder (the principal legal representative) to 20s. and to retain no more lawyers than were currently employed by the city.
28However, the power that the commons could wield arising from their constitutional role in the mayoral election is demonstrated most clearly and dramatically in the events of 15 January 1504. This was the day on which the council of forty-eight normally met to initiate the electoral process, but on this occasion it chose to deliver «a bill of diverse articlez» to the probi homines meeting in the council chamber in the city’s guildhall and to delay its electoral function until the mayor and his colleagues had first «graunted theym all theyr askyngs and desyrez». To prevent a change of heart and to formalise a contractual obligation where previously there had been an unspoken quid pro quo arrangement, the mayor was also to append his official seal of office to the petition containing the commons’ demands.59 In the version of events recorded in the main civic register, the council of forty-eight, fortified by the presence of 3,000 unnamed persons, kept the probi homines imprisoned within the guildhall until six o’clock in the evening until they formally accepted the commons’ petition, whereupon it nominated candidates for the mayoralty. On St Blaise’s day itself, when the mayor was officially invested, the members of the council of forty-eight refused to swear their oath of office and the new mayor, like his predecessor, was incarcerated in the guildhall until he too «had sett his signet unto theyr pauper bill».60 Unfortunately, the details of the commons’ petition are not known, but what motivated their actions in 1504 was «the conviction that the commons should, through the exhibition of grievances, have a role in the determination of the policy of the city».61 In their unrelenting ambition to hold the city’s rulers to account, the commons reminded the governing elite of the importance of the principles of consent and consultation.
29Equally interesting is the conflicting nature of the stories which the protagonists told. The account provided to the king’s council explained that it was, in fact, normal procedure for the probi homines to receive a petition from the council of forty-eight acting on behalf of the commons of the city before the mayoral election took place.62 It was also routine practice, according to this record, for the mayor to give his consent to the bill through the addition of his seal, after which the electoral process would begin. On this occasion, it was claimed, the mayor’s hostility towards five of the items in the bill prevented him from sealing the document. This intransigence produced a fair amount of «horse-trading» by both sides before a compromise was reached. In contrast, the record in the civic register indicates that the commons’ determination to secure the redress of grievances before the election was extremely unusual, if not unconstitutional. What York lacked was a written constitution which might have resolved these questions of procedure.
30The city of Norwich, however, did have such a constitution, which took the form of a tripartite indenture sealed by the mayor, sheriffs and commonalty of the city on 14 February 1415.63 The indenture has been understood primarily as the product of the processes of negotiation, mediation and arbitration which defined the efforts to keep the peace in Norwich in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.64 This was a period when the East Anglian city enjoyed an unwelcome reputation for disorder and division.65 It was on a love day that an arbitrator customarily announced his compromise for the reconciliation of the disputants.66 In this respect, the feast of St Valentine’s made the ideal choice for the occasion of a love day (jour d’amour) between conflicting parties. Yet the 1415 indenture was not a record of the decision of the arbitrator. No evidence survives of his settlement.67 The 1415 indenture was not a love day award; it was something more. Love had a resonance beyond its legal context, within an urban milieu.
31Love was in fact one of the three pillars of good governance which Brunetto Latini of Florence wrote about in the third part of his encyclopaedic text, Li Livres dou Trésor. The final section of Latini’s work was designed explicitly for guidance of the rulers of a city.68 Andrew Horn, London’s chamberlain in the 1320s, made extracts from this third book and placed them at the beginning of a civic custumal that was known in the fifteenth century as the Liber Legum Regum Antiquorum. Horn’s selections from Latini’s original treatise, «On the government of cities», were carefully tailored to suit a London rather than Florentine context, but the ideal of virtuous government remained the same: mutual love between ruler and subjects was essential to the preservation of civic concord; and the establishment and maintenance of peace between citizens was the ultimate purpose of good government.69 The achievement of civic harmony rested upon the morality of love. In Norwich, where previously love between rulers and ruled had been signally absent, the intercession of St Valentine had helped the city «make pees unite and acord poore and ryche to ben oon in herte loue and charite».70 The themes of love and charity were not peculiar to a love day; they were «part of the contemporary discourse of urban social relations».71
32What was distinctive about the invocation of love and amity within the Norwich indenture of 1415 was the acknowledgement that love could not be assumed to be the natural state of affairs between rulers and ruled. It was the product of negotiation, of formal written documents, of rules and procedures. Love also had a distinct meaning. The indenture was a kind of marriage contract.72 Although the mayor, two sheriffs, and the commonalty of the city each appended their seal to the tripartite document, the compositio (as it was known) was to all intents and purposes an agreement between the two parties whose increasingly bitter relationship had prompted the peace settlement in the first place: the probi homines and the commons.73 The compositio was issued in the name of the Holy Trinity, the patron of Norwich cathedral but also the special protector of the city, whose common seal bore the image of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. These figures were witnesses to and guarantors of the contents of the formal pact between the commons and the probi homines of Norwich. St Valentine’s Day was described in the Norwich compositio as a time of carnal rather than spiritual love, a period of mating and courtship, «ye day […] whan creatures thourgh loue of kynde as it [is] seid, chesen her make».74 The preamble to the agreement noted specifically that it had received the «assent of ye good Comonalte of ye Cite of Norwich». Witnessed and blessed by the church, and sealed and validated by two consenting partners, the compositio sought to create consensus by means of a contract.
33This was a contract that did not envisage divorce and that could not be broken. The authority of Norwich’s civic government depended upon this contract. The importance attached to the document is evident from its inclusion in the city’s Liber Albus, a compilation which was first put together in 1426 and which includes copies of civic charters and oaths of office. The record of the 1415 compositio in the Liber Albus is a neat copy, written in one hand almost certainly at the point of the civic register’s initial assemblage.75 The text is embellished throughout with marginal glosses, both visual and verbal, from pointing figures to short injunctions such as nota bene, inscribed by hands of varying dates, from the fifteenth century to the early modern. Thus the marginal comment that the mayor and sheriff ought to be libere homo condicionis is rendered, in the vernacular, «no bonde man to be» in a later hand.76 The copy of the 1415 compositio in the Liber Albus was a working document for several centuries. The civic constitution prescribed in 1415 remained essentially the same until the Municipal Reform Act of 1835.77
34The compositio was the consequence of considerable negotiation and debate. Its details were worked out right up to the moment of its drafting. Two portions of the tripartite indenture survive, and both contain numerous erasures, corrections and interlineations.78 The agreement brought together two opposing parties, between whom there was profound hostility. Underlying this dispute were different views of the degree of popular participation in urban political life and the basis of political authority. In 1475 the commons of York appropriated the familiar metaphor of the body to present a relatively inclusive notion of the body politic. It was precisely this more active meaning of citizenship which so distressed the probi homines of Norwich that, in 1414, when they presented their complaints about the behaviour of the commons to an arbitrator, they asked for the removal of the word «commonalty» from a royal charter recently granted to the city. Norwich’s civic elite claimed that the very word had encouraged
«every person of the smallest reputation of the said city to have as much authority and power in all the elections and other business within the same city as have the most substantial persons of the city» (chescun persone de le pluis meindre reputacioun de dite Citee dauoir a taunt dauctorite et poair en toutz les elecciouns et autres affairs deins mesmes la Citee come auerount les pluis sufficiantz persones dicell Citee).79
35The involvement of the inferiores in the business of civic government was, it was alleged, to the detriment of the peace, good order and tranquillity of the city. This was, then, a political environment characterised by contested beliefs about political equality and the meaning of consent. Urban political life was not founded upon a shared set of assumptions about the operation of civic government.80 That the commons of Coventry chose to remind their governors of the popular basis of power in the 1490s indicates the presence within the city of alternative political views. In Norwich, it was the existence of such conflicting ideas which forced the city to adopt a written constitution in the second decade of the fifteenth century.
36One of the most intractable questions concerned the role and importance of popular consent in political life. In 1378 the «citizens» of Norwich successfully petitioned the new king, Richard II, for a new charter which enabled the city’s governing elite–the four bailiffs and the council of twenty-four–to issue by-laws as and when the situation demanded it.81 This power needed to be reinforced, the petition claimed, because of the hostile behaviour of «many of the commons of the said town» («plusours de la comune de lour dite ville»), whose rebellious actions would persist unless new ordinances were made for «the good governance» of the town.82 As Ben McRee has argued, the significance of this extension of the city’s chartered privileges is that the new grant removed the commons, through their mouthpiece, the city assembly, from the legislative process.83 When the commons presented their grievances for arbitration in 1414, the first complaint was about the events of 1378. Not only had the new charter been acquired «privily» and «without assent of the commonalty» («priuement sans assent de la Commonalte»), but the grant was also «defective» because the document itself made «no mention of the assent of the said Commonalty» («nient fesant mencion de lassent la dite Commonaltee») in the formulation of civic ordinances.84 The more general constitutional question lay in the symbolic and practical importance of the charter of 1404, which raised Norwich to the status of a county corporate, which introduced a new hierarchy of civic officials to rule the city on the king’s behalf, notably a mayor and two sheriffs in place of the four bailiffs, and which greatly increased the fiscal and juridical powers of the civic elite.85 The charter created a dramatic shift in the source of political authority in Norwich. It is no coincidence that Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose «good lordship» had helped to persuade the king to grant Norwich the charter of 1404 in the first place, was subsequently called upon to mediate between the two parties.86 Written in the vernacular, rather than in Latin, the 1415 compositio should be seen as a genuinely popular document, whose contents were meant to be accessible to and understood by the commons of the city.87
37The 1415 indenture was both a peace settlement and a form of contract in a period of political strain. Yet it was also an attempt to establish a new, more collaborative form of government. The contractual partnership extended to the terms of the accord, which divided responsibility for the election and appointment of all civic officials, however minor, equally between the commons and the probi homines of Norwich.88 Thus, for example, the mayor was to be appointed first through nomination by the common assembly and then election by the mayor and council of twenty-four, whilst the commons were each year to choose one sheriff and the mayor and his council the other.89 The agreement also stipulated that henceforth, contrary to the terms of the 1380 charter, the aldermanic council of twenty-four «shal no þyng do ne make yt may bynde or charge ye Cite wit owte ye assent of ye Commonaunte».90 The common assembly, now known as the common council, was the representative body of the commonalty, and it was only with the prior consent of this council that the decisions of the city’s mayor and aldermen were binding upon the citizens. Indeed, should the mayor and aldermen seek to make new ordinances for the common profit of the city, they would need to inform the common council, whose members should, if they so required it, have time for reflection and deliberation upon the proposed legislation.91 The mayor would present a bill containing the matters put forward by the aldermanic council of twenty-four to the common council via the commons’ speaker, and the commons would meet to discuss the bill before delivering their answers. All past and current ordinances and regulations would also be scrutinised by the mayor, sheriffs, aldermen and common council and those deemed contrary to the common interest of the city would be annulled.92 The 1415 compositio was both a literal contract and a statement of contractarian ideas of popular consent, consultation and representation from which civic government derived political legitimacy.
Conclusion
38In this paper I have explored the theme of «contract» in both political theory and political practice. I have considered the different ways in which relations between the rulers and the ruled within the late medieval English town might be viewed as contractual. I have demonstrated that, if there was no single meaning of contract, the notion of consent, fundamental to social contract theory, was a powerful idea in urban politics. But most of all, I have pursued the theme of «contract» to outline a different view of the political history of late medieval English towns and to suggest, at the very least, that we should revise the familiar story of the unilineal growth of urban oligarchy. Internal harmony remained the goal of civic government, but love alone was not enough to secure peace. Good government was dependent upon formal structures as well as the personal virtues of those who occupied the senior offices of the civic administrative hierarchy.
39What is striking about the Norwich document is its image of civic authority. Institutionalised and highly bureaucratic, Norwich’s government consisted of an extraordinarily large number of officers, from the mayor’s sword-bearer and sergeants, to chamberlains, treasurers, auditors, common sergeants and a commons’ speaker, to councillors, sheriffs and a mayor. It adhered to strict rules and procedures and, most of all, it was buttressed by a series of elaborate checks and balances designed to ensure that the powers of the mayor and aldermen were placed under rigorous and continuous examination. If the Norwich indenture was the product of a highly volatile period in the city’s political history, it also fits into a broader picture of urban political life. Medieval urban political discourse consisted of several modes of thought, and consensus «did not simply exist; it had to be created and maintained».93 Nearly forty years ago Caroline Barron wrote a seminal article about a protest movement in London in the 1430s and 1440s that was led by Ralph Holland and that was important, she concluded, because the dispute raised fundamental issues of political principle: amongst others, the «advocacy of a wide civic franchise» and «the belief that the authority of a governor rests upon a basis of conscious consent». Since then, urban historians have been tempted to view the «Ralph Holland affair» as an interesting, but isolated, example of contested political authority.94 The evidence adduced here, from Coventry, York and Norwich, would suggest that political debate was a far more regular experience. It might be more accurate to describe urban political culture in this period in terms of «the search for the right constitution».95 In this context, contractual practices and contractarian ideas were part of the very fabric of urban life.
Notes de bas de page
1 D. G. Shaw, The Creation of a Community: The City of Wells in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1993, p. 167. I would like to thank Richard Britnell and John Watts for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
2 D. G. Shaw, «Social Networks and the Foundations of Oligarchy in Medieval Towns», Urban History, 32, 2005, p. 200.
3 M. Kowaleski, «The Commercial Dominance of a Medieval Provincial Oligarchy: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century», in R. Holt and G. Rosser (eds.), The Medieval Town, London, 1990, p. 184–215.
4 H. Swanson, «The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns», Past and Present, 121, 1988, p. 29–48.
5 S. Reynolds, «Medieval Urban History and the History of Political Thought», Urban History Yearbook, 1982, p. 20–21.
6 P. Maddern, «Order and Disorder», in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds.), Medieval Norwich, London, 2002, p. 205–212.
7 Ibid., p. 208.
8 S. H. Rigby and E. Ewan, «Government, Power and Authority 1300–1540», in D. M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. I: 600–1540, Cambridge, 2000, p. 304–305.
9 See, for example, C. D. Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350–1400, Woodbridge, 2005.
10 S. H. Rigby, «Urban ‘Oligarchy’ in Late Medieval England», in J. A. F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, Stroud, 1988, p. 81.
11 P. R. Coss, «An Age of Deference», in R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (eds.), A Social History of England, 1200–1500, Cambridge, 2006, p. 31–73.
12 York Civic Records, ed. A. Raine, 8 vols, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 98–119, 1938–1952, vol. II, p. 148–149. I would like to thank my student, Sarah Cotton, for drawing this reference to my attention.
13 P. Fleming, «Telling Tales of Oligarchy in the Late Medieval Town», in M. A. Hicks (ed.), Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, Woodbridge, 2001, p. 178.
14 S. Rees Jones, «York’s Civic Administration, 1354–1464», in id. (ed.), The Government of Medieval York, Borthwick Studies in History 3, 1997, p. 125.
15 The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M. D. Harris, 4 vols, Early English Text Society, Original Series 134–146, 1907–1913, vol. II, p. 577–578.
16 W. Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553, Oxford, 2007.
17 S. Reynolds, «Medieval Urban History», p. 16.
18 Ibid.
19 S. H. Rigby, «Urban ‘Oligarchy’ », p. 68.
20 The work of the American sociologist, B. Moore Jr., is relevant here: see Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, London, 1978, p. 20–22, 506, 509–510.
21 Coventry Leet Book, vol. II, p. 578.
22 The issue of ‘who’ were the urban commons is addressed below.
23 R. E. Giesey, If Not, Not: The Legendary Laws of Sobrarbe, Princeton, New Jersey, 1968. I would like to thank John Watts for this suggestion.
24 Coventry Leet Book, vol. II, p. 567.
25 Norfolk Record Office (hereafter NRO), NCR Case 17b, f. 185r. The last few folios of the Liber Albus are filled with oaths. They are listed in W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, Revised Catalogue of the Records of the City of Norwich, Norwich, 1898, p. 127.
26 NRO, NCR Case 17b, f. 182v.
27 R. Ricart, The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar, ed. L. T. Smith, Camden Society, New Series 5, 1872, p. 73.
28 Coventry Leet Book, vol. II, p. 577.
29 Ibid., vol. II, p. 578.
30 For this view of the essentially religious character of oaths, see S. Brigden, «Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth-Century London», Past and Present, 103, 1984, p. 86–89.
31 This is the argument of J. Lee, «‘Ye Shall Disturbe Noe Mans Right’: Oath-taking and Oathbreaking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bristol», Urban History, 34, 2007, p. 27–38.
32 R. Ricart, Kalendar, p. 72.
33 For the mayor’s oath as the king’s «escheator», see NRO, NCR Case 17b, f. 183r. The two oaths are also printed in Records of the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, 2 vols, Norwich, 1906–1910, vol. I, p. 123.
34 For references, see C. D. Liddy, «William Frost, the City of York and Scrope’s Rebellion of 1405», in P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.), Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr, Donington, 2007, p. 75 n. 51.
35 R. Ricart, Kalendar, p. 72.
36 York Civic Records, vol. II, p. 2. For much earlier evidence of the «custom», see York City Archives (hereafter YCA), D1, f. 11r.
37 The York House Books, 1461–1490, ed. L. C. Attreed, 2 vols, Stroud, 1991, vol. I, p. 47.
38 York Civic Records, vol. II, p. 160.
39 R. Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640, Oxford, 1998, p. 203.
40 Coventry Leet Book, vol. II, p. 577.
41 P. Riley, «Social Contract Theory and its Critics», in M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge, 2006, p. 347.
42 For this important distinction, see Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch, Cambridge, 1997, p. 49–51 and 83; M. Lessnoff, «Introduction: Social Contract», in id. (ed.), Social Contract Theory, Oxford, 1990, p. 14.
43 S. H. Rigby, «Urban ‘Oligarchy’ », p. 66.
44 J. I. Kermode, «Obvious Observations on the Formation of Oligarchies in Late Medieval English Towns», in J. A. F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople, p. 89.
45 C. E. Carpenter, The Formation of Urban Elites: Civic Officials in Late-Medieval York, 1476–1525, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of York, 2001, p. 212–214.
46 J. Watts, «Public or Plebs: The Changing Meaning of the ‘Commons’, 1381–1549», in H. Pryce and J. Watts (eds.), Power and Identity in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2007, p. 245–246.
47 R. B. Dobson, «The Risings in York, Beverley and Scarborough, 1380–1381», in R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (eds.), The English Rising of 1381, Cambridge, 1984, p. 139–140.
48 For Norwich, see B. R. Mcree, «Peacemaking and its Limits in Late Medieval Norwich», English Historical Review, 111, 1994, p. 835–836.
49 York Memorandum Book, ed. M. Sellers, 2 vols, Surtees Society 120–125, 1912–1914, vol. II, p. 246.
50 J. I. Kermode, «Obvious Observations», p. 89.
51 These changes–in 1464, 1473 and 1489–are discussed briefly in ibid., p. 89–90. I intend to explore their political context more fully in a future article.
52 For 1464, see Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1461–7, p. 366; for 1473, see Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1467–77, p. 416.
53 The quotation is from S. Rees Jones, «York’s Civic Administration», p. 135.
54 For the emergence of the council of forty-eight, see C. D. Liddy, «Urban Conflict in Late Fourteenth-Century England: The Case of York in 1380–1», English Historical Review, 118, 2003, p. 8–9. For an early commons’ petition, see The National Archives (hereafter TNA), SC 8/212/10596.
55 YCA, D1, f. 348r. The aldermen were the members of the council of twelve.
56 See, for example, YCA, D1, f. 348r-v.
57 York Civic Records, vol. II, p. 2–3.
58 For this and for what follows, see York House Books, vol. II, p. 674.
59 York Civic Records, vol. II, p. 191. This episode is discussed briefly in E. Miller, «Medieval York», in P. M. Tillot (ed.), A History of Yorkshire: The City of York, London, 1961, p. 83, and more fully in R. W. Hoyle, «Petitioning as Popular Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century England», Historical Research, 75, 2002, p. 368–370.
60 York Civic Records, vol. II, p. 191–192.
61 R. W. Hoyle, «Petitioning», p. 370.
62 Here I draw upon ibid., p. 369. The source is TNA, STAC 2/26/232.
63 NRO, NCR Case 8c/5.
64 B. R. Mcree, «Peacemaking and its Limits», p. 846–853.
65 P. Maddern, «Order and Disorder», p. 190.
66 M. Clanchy, «Law and Love in the Middle Ages», in J. Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, Cambridge, 1983, p. 59.
67 B. R. Mcree, «Peacemaking and its Limits», p. 851.
68 Q. Skinner, «The Rediscovery of Republican Values», in id., Visions of Politics, vol. II: Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge, 2002, p. 19.
69 For Horn’s adaptation of the Trésor, see J. Catto, «Andrew Horn: Law and History in Fourteenth-Century England», in R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-hadrill (eds.), The Writing of History in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1981, p. 387–388. The London text is printed in Munimenta Gildhallae, ed. H. T. Riley, 3 vols, Rolls Series, 1859–1862, vol. II (i), p. 15–25.
70 Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 94.
71 F. Riddy, «‘Publication’ before Print: The Case of Julian of Norwich», in J. Crick and A. Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, Cambridge, 2004, p. 48.
72 I have found very useful R. H. Helmholz, «Marriage Contracts in Medieval England», in P. L. Reynolds and J. Witte (eds.), To Have and to Hold: Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600, Cambridge, 2007, p. 260–286.
73 B. R. Mcree, «Peacemaking and its Limits», p. 852.
74 Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 93–94.
75 NRO, NCR Case 17b, f. 157r-160r.
76 NRO, NCR Case 17b, f. 158v.
77 Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 93 n. 1.
78 NRO, NCR Case 8c/5.
79 NRO, NCR Case 8c/4. The copy in Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 81, contains a couple of minor errors of transcription.
80 S. H. Rigby, «Urban ‘Oligarchy’ », p. 65–67.
81 The petition is printed, in translation, in Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 64–65, along with the 1380 royal charter, p. 29–30. The original petition is TNA, SC 8/18/892.
82 TNA, SC 8/18/892.
83 B. R. Mcree, «Peacemaking and its Limits», p. 840. McRee also explores the background to the petition, but this is less important for my argument here. For the legislative and financial powers hitherto held by the common assembly, see P. Maddern, «Order and Disorder», p. 192.
84 Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 69.
85 For the charter, see Calendar of Charter Rolls, 1341–1417, p. 421–423.
86 For Erpingham’s role, see L. Attreed, The King’s Towns, Oxford, 2001, p. 113–114.
87 For a similarly «open» urban constitutional statement, see D. G. Shaw, City of Wells, p. 178–179.
88 B. R. Mcree, «Peacemaking and its Limits», p. 852.
89 Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I, p. 95–97.
90 Ibid., vol. I, p. 98.
91 Ibid., vol. I, p. 100.
92 Ibid., vol. I, p. 103–104.
93 S. H. Rigby, «Urban ‘Oligarchy’», p. 67.
94 C. M. Barron, «Ralph Holland and the London Radicals, 1438–1444», in R. Holt and G. Rosser (eds.), Medieval Town, p. 183. This is a reprint of the 1970 essay, and it contains a brief but useful introductory commentary by the editors.
95 C. M. Barron, «The Political Culture of Medieval London», in L. Clark and C. Carpenter (eds.), Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, Woodbridge, 2004, p. 132.
Auteur
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Christian D. Liddy
Durham University
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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