CHAPTER VII

_The Corporation and the Guilds_

After the Settlement of 1355 the figure of the head of the great religious house at Coventry fades into comparative insignificance, and all further quarrels between city and convent hardly rise above the level of petty squabbles of no historical moment. The prior is no longer lord of the place; he merely appears as host of the royal folk, kings, and kings' sons, representatives of the ancient line of the Earls of Chester, when they sojourn within the city. The rent of the Earl's-half[128] now swells the revenue of the Princes of Wales, hence the appellation "Camera Principis," or the prince's (Treasure) chamber, the familiar motto on the city arms.[129]

With the disappearance of earl and prior from the foreground of the picture there emerges another figure, the city merchant, type of a newly-enriched class, the future guide of the destinies of the place. Curiously enough, it is this man's work in stone that has best survived the test of time. What has become of the castle of Hugh and Ranulf? It has utterly disappeared; indeed, its very existence has been sometimes doubted; the name "Broadgate" alone recalls the entrance (_latam portam_) whereto reference is made in one of Earl Hugh's charters.[130] Where is the priory of Irreys and Brightwalton? Mean streets cover the site, and of the cathedral nought remains but a few bases of clustered shafts in Priory Row and a portion of the North-West tower converted into a dwelling-place. But the outline of S. Michael's spire[131] built by the people is still the wonder of Coventry, and the guild-hall of S. Mary with its glorious roof and window has behind it five hundred years of continuous civic life.

Coventry was now a free and independent corporate borough. The townsmen had power to elect their own officers, and hold their own courts, taking for the common use the profits of jurisdiction, so long as they paid into the royal exchequer the annual fee-ferm of £50 and the prior's ferm of £10. The leading men of the place, most likely the wealthy merchants and others, who had won the charter of liberties from Queen Isabel,[132] now set to work to reorganise courts, elect officials, in short to shape the whole administration to fall in with the new order of things.[133] We know nothing of the manner in which this was done, and as so many of the early records have been lost we can give no account in many cases of the form of municipal rule chosen by the citizens. Here and there curious documents give us a glimpse of the working of certain courts, or the municipal action of this or that body of men. But the information concerning very important points is unfortunately lacking. We are referred, for instance, to the "old custom" of electing officials, but we do not know what the old custom was, and are hence left in ignorance of the manner in which the election was made.

What part the poorer folk--menus gentz--smaller craftsfolk, and working-people played in the struggle for liberty is dark to us, but we may infer from the analogy of other towns,[134] and from the subsequent history of Coventry, that they had but little effective power under the new constitution. The growth of oligarchy[135] in towns is a matter of much debate. How early the few in Coventry engrossed the governing power of which the whole community was--in theory at least--the source, it is impossible in our present state of knowledge to determine. We have testimony as early as 1450 of the great influence of the leading crafts, mercers, and drapers. The evidence--though not always so clear as we could wish--points to a gradual absorption of the conduct of affairs during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a small official class. In the end this clique succeeded so effectually in freeing itself from every device framed to ensure some regard for the popular will, that the charter of 1621 vested all power--and incidentally considerable official emolument--in a close select body "entirely independent of the rest of the community."[136] How early the citizens became aware of the trend of affairs we know not, but it is, maybe, significant that that popular discontent began to manifest itself within a generation after the incorporation of the city. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the commonalty set order at defiance, reviled the mayor in the guild hall, and sought occasion to break out in riot and tumult, while under the veil of religious societies, industrial combinations--akin to the modern strike--formed again and again, and were with difficulty suppressed.

After 1420, when the graphic chronicle contained in the _Leet Book_[137] begins to be available for our researches, a glimpse is given of a fully evolved constitution in working order. On January 25, the feast of the Conversion of S. Paul, the mayor, chamberlains, and wardens were annually elected, the permanent officials, the recorder, legal adviser of the corporation, and the coroner re-appointed, the justices of the peace selected, while the bailiffs, according to ancient custom, received nomination at the Michaelmas assembly of the court leet. The justices of the peace--with the exception of the recorder--served also as key-keepers of the chest containing the common treasure. The court of portmanmote, mentioned in Ranulf's charter, still survived under various names, and in it pleas for debt were tried by the presiding officers, the mayor, and bailiffs. At quarter sessions the mayor, recorder, and three other late mayors, justices of the peace, dealt with criminal offences, and it was, probably, the activity of these comparatively recently created officials,[138]that brought about the degeneration of the leet or view of frankpledge, normally a court of justice for the trial of minor criminal offences, particularly evasions of the assize of bread and beer.[139] By the fifteenth century, the Coventry leet had retained little or nothing of its judicial functions, and merely survived as a court wherein by-laws, binding on the whole community, and grounded on petitions of grievances, received the sanction of the jurats of the leet. Another body, which also possessed legislative functions, was the mayor's council of forty-eight, later known as the common council. While it is from a small select body called the council-house, of which the mayor and aldermen appear to have been ex-officio members, that there sprang the close, corrupt corporation of later times.

There are certain officials whose elections or appointments are not entered in the regular municipal records, but who, nevertheless, had great weight in the councils of the city. Such were the aldermen, who first appear in 1477.[140] These officials discharged certain police duties in their respective wards and were of the inner council of the mayor. Under the charter of James I. they became permanent justices of the peace, and members of the corporation. While as justice of the peace, key-keeper, head of the electoral jury and jury of the leet, the master of the Trinity guild was one of the foremost figures among the municipal rulers. His connection, and that of his fellow, the master of the Corpus Christi guild, with the mayoralty was very close. Two years before entering office each mayor was master of the Corpus Christi, and two years after quitting it, master of the Trinity guild. The control they exercised over the revenues of the guilds, which were often put to municipal uses, gave these masters much power and authority with the magnates of the city. The guilds joined their funds with those of the wardens to pension deserving townsfolk[141] and pay the salary of the recorder.[142] Before 1384 the Trinity guild discharged the ferm of £10 due to the prior, receiving a share of common land to be held in severalty[143]--that is separate from the lands of the community--as compensation. Indeed, the guild officers were so clearly considered as officers of the corporation that when they, together with the city wardens and chamberlains, neglected to present their accounts at the annual audit[144] they were one and all brought to book by the leet, and ordered to remedy their neglect under pain of punishment.

The origin of societies known as guilds is involved in controversy, but they were common throughout all Europe in the Middle Ages, bearing eloquent testimony to the fortifying power of combination. They afforded mutual protection to their members, frequently making good any loss sustained from an insurance fund to which all were contributory, and devoting other portions of their revenues to feasts, almsgiving, and public works. Guilds are best remembered, however, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as monopolist organisations, and a third of all the towns in England, with the possible exception of London, had their merchant guild, or body of traders and handicraftsmen, engrossing the local commerce to the exclusion of all men without their ranks. The craft guild was a century behind the merchant guild in its rise and development. Its members met together to make rules, by which all who practised a particular calling in the locality were to be directed in all affairs connected with their trade or handicraft. They devoted some of their revenue to religious uses, the members frequently supporting some church or chapel, or providing candles for altar or processional lights. Other local guilds not definitely commercial, but rather social, in character, often called after some saint, were active in the performance of all good works; they clad the poor in their livery, supported churches, colleges of priests and grammar schools, and pensioned decayed and deserving members. At Coventry, in the later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries, guilds rose rapidly, and as rapidly coalesced, or, in the case of those "yeomen" or journeymen fraternities, which served to focus the prevailing industrial discontent, failed to maintain themselves in face of the hostility of other powerful previously existing associations. Two fraternities survived to play a great part in the city's mediæval history, the Corpus Christi guild, founded in 1348, and the better-known society of the Holy Trinity, S. Mary, S. John the Baptist, and S. Catherine, properly a fusion of four different fraternities, founded between 1340 and 1364, and known for brevity's sake as the Trinity guild.

It is possible that it was to the foundation of the merchant guild of S. Mary[145] in 1340, the kindred associations which sprang up around it, and to the gifts of their members in lands and money that the townsfolk owed the purchase of the incorporation charter.[146] It is frequently found that the same man serves in different years as mayor and master of the merchant fraternity.[147]

The town hall of S. Mary, in which not only the guild feasts were held, but municipal business[148] was transacted, and the town chest, as well as the guild plate,[149] stored, tells by its name of its connection with S. Mary's brotherhood. The vaulting of the entrance porch of this building still bears on its central boss a carving which represents the coronation of the Virgin; another of the porch carvings--now weather-worn--recalled the Annunciation, and a scene on the famous tapestry within the hall, the Assumption,[150] so that the guild brethren, could be everywhere reminded of the scenes in the life of their chief patroness. No church, however, recalls the Virgin's name, though materials from an unfinished building, which should have borne that dedication, were transported from Cheylesmore to Bablake, where the stately, early Perpendicular church of S. John the Baptist was rising on ground granted by Queen Isabel in 1342 to the fraternity called after that saint.[151] Both S. John the Baptist's guild and S. Catherine's--the latter connected with S. Catherine's chapel in S. John's Hospital,[152] coalesced between 1364-5 with the guild merchant, to be absorbed later by the all-embracing Trinity fraternity. This fusion of the guilds, which had certainly taken place informally before 1384,[153] was ratified by patent in 1392,[154] when the united revenues were increased to the amount of £86, 13s. 4d. a year. The completion of S. John's church became the especial care of the Trinity guild, and the dues taken at the Drapery, where cloth was sold, were devoted to that purpose, while a college of priests, whose number was in 1393 increased to nine, officiated at this church, and lived on the bounty of the brotherhood.[155]

The priests of the merchant guild, as was meet, occupied from the beginning the most honourable place of all. They sang their "solemn antiphonies" in the lady-chapel of S. Michael's, the great parish church of the Earl's-half, a practice which was still continued after the title of the guild became merged in the society of the Trinity;[156] while the guild of the Corpus Christi, composed, it would seem, of the prior's tenants, occupied the corresponding chapel in the parish church of the Trinity.[157]

One guild, that of the fullers and tailors, called after the Nativity, carried on an obscure existence in connection with the since demolished chapel of S. George outside the Gosford gate. The formation of this society was violently opposed by the powers that were in 1384 on the ground that the purpose of its members--"labourers and artificers of the middling sort" and strangers--was to withstand the mayor and officers of the city, and not to promote the welfare of souls.[158] After 1400, further guild-making had come to have little favour with the ruling men of the city. Three several times did the mayor and bailiffs obtain patents forbidding the formation of guilds other than those already existing within Coventry.[159] While the close alliance of the older fraternities and the corporation is shown in the fact that the meetings of the guilds of S. Anne and S. George, formed by journeymen tailors in the first quarter of the century, were suppressed by royal command under the pretext that their meetings were to the manifest destruction of the ancient foundations, the guilds of Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi.[160]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 128: See above, page 70.]

[Footnote 129: _Cf._ the expression "queen's-chamber" as applied to Bristol, where the ferm was paid to the queen-consort.]

[Footnote 130: The "Casteldich" is mentioned Corp. MSS. C. 61.]

[Footnote 131: On the belfry as continental symbol of independence, see Round, _Commune of London_, 244.]

[Footnote 132: For instance, one of the twelve whose names are handed down in the mayor-lists as winners of the freedom of the city was Walter Whitweb. He was master of the guild merchant in 1353 (Corp. MS. C. 148). Four of the twelve served afterwards as mayor, some others as bailiffs of the city. We may note that the leading families under the prior still continue to take the foremost place after the incorporation. Thus to Lawrence de Shepey, member of Edward I.'s assembly of merchants (_Parl. Writs_, i. 135), and in 1300 member for the borough (_Ib._, I. lii.), succeeded Jordan de Shepey whose name is yet commemorated in Jordan Well, second mayor of the city and first master of the guild merchant (Gross, ii. 49). A parallel case is shown in the Kelle family. Robert was burgess in 1298 (_Parl. Writs_, I. lii.), and Henry one of the founders of the Trinity guild in 1364, and four times mayor of the city.]

[Footnote 133: On the solemn consultations thus involved in the case of Ipswich, see Gross, _Gild Merchant_, i. 23.]

[Footnote 134: On the troubles attending the grant of a charter to Norwich in 1380, where the commonalty were "very contrarious," see Hudson, _op. cit._, I. liv. _sqq._]

[Footnote 135: Bateson, _op. cit._, II, lxvi.]

[Footnote 136: Charter 17 Jas. I. On the corruption of the Coventry corporation, see _Munic. Corp. Report_ (Coventry, 1835) 12; Webb, _Local Government_.]

[Footnote 137: _Coventry Leet Book_, 1420-1555, edited for the Early English Text Society by the present writer; part i. 1907, part ii. 1908, part iii. 1909, part iv. in progress.]

[Footnote 138: The mayor, recorder, and four lawful men of the city are allowed to exercise all that appertains to the office of justice of the peace for labourers and artificers in the county of Warwick, _i.e._ fix the rate of wages (Charter 22 Rich. II. Burton MS. f. 253). For a trial of felons by the justices of the peace, see Sharp, _Antiq._, 212.]

[Footnote 139: Hearnshaw, _Leet Jurisdiction_, _passim_.]

[Footnote 140: _Leet Book_, 420.]

[Footnote 141: _Leet Book_, 59.]

[Footnote 142: _Ib._, 681.]

[Footnote 143: We learn in 1384 that the annual ferm of £10, due to the prior according to the terms of the Tripartite, was drawn from the coffers of the guild (_Leet Book_, 2-6). Directly the guild lands were confiscated in 1545 the corporation made a great outcry concerning their poverty. They had, they declared, no lands whence they might derive an income to meet the yearly ferm of £50, and in trying to discharge it one or two of the citizens were yearly ruined (Vol. of Correspondence, f. 63, Corp. MS. A. 79).]

[Footnote 144: _Leet Book_, 295.]

[Footnote 145: Gross, _Gild Merchant_, ii. 49; Toulmin Smith, _Eng. Gilds_, 231. In the return of 1389 it is stated that several messuages worth £37, 12s. 4d. a year are waiting for the licence of the King and the mesne lords to be given to the guild. No doubt the Statute of Mortmain was often evaded. The corporation records show that the guild held house property as early as 1353 (Corp. MS. C. 148).]

[Footnote 146: The foundation of the guild has evidently a municipal reason, since the statute of 1335, by declaring that all merchants might traffic with whomsoever they would, and in what vendibles they chose, effectually did away with this monopoly of the merchant guild (Ashley, _Econ. Hist._, i. pt. i. 84).]

[Footnote 147: Many early mayors were masters of the guild merchant; the cases of Jordan de Shepey and Walter Whitweb have been noted. In William Holm, master in 1356 (Corp. MS. C. 153), we have undoubtedly William Horn of the mayor-lists.]

[Footnote 148: Sharp, _Antiq._, 211. The guild hall was used for municipal purposes as early as 1388.]

[Footnote 149: _Ib._, 212.]

[Footnote 150: In Mantes the guild "aux marchands" was one with the "confrèrie de l'assomption de la Vierge" (Luchaire, _Communes Françaises_, 34).]

[Footnote 151: _Vict. County Hist._, ii. 120.]

[Footnote 152: Sharp, _op. cit._, 159.]

[Footnote 153: _Leet Book_, 3.]

[Footnote 154: _Rot. Pat._ 16, Ric. II., pt. i. m. 19. The guilds of S. Mary and S. John were united as early as 1362 (Corp. MS. C. 159). Sharp says that the union took place between 1365 and 1369 (_op. cit._, 131); but in a deed executed in 1372 the guilds mentioned are SS. Mary, John the Baptist, and Catherine (Corp. MS. C. 165).]

[Footnote 155: Sharp, _op. cit._, 130-2.]

[Footnote 156: Sharp, _op. cit._, 24-5.]

[Footnote 157: _Ib._, 81.]

[Footnote 158: See _Vict. County Hist. Warw._, ii. 154-6.]

[Footnote 159: Corp. MS. B. 35. Letters patent against the formation of new guilds, dated Nov. 18, 8 Hen. IV. (1406), confirmed in 1414 and 1441 (B. 38 and 47). A great deal of confusion and wrong dating exists in the Hist. MSS. Com. Catalogue with regard to this point.]

[Footnote 160: Corp. MS. B. 40 (1406); B. 41 (1414); B. 43 (1424).]