Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2 (of 2)

WITH the reign of Henry the Eighth a wholly new chapter opens in the history of the towns. In the preceding centuries we have traced their gradual rise out of obscure poverty in...

under Richard the Second. (Ibid. vi. 492; xi. 3-8; iv. 1, 438-9.) Some of the guild returns were on paper in 1389. (English Guilds, 132-3.) In 1467 there was a rule in Worcester...

WHEN we turn from the southern to the eastern coast the first impression is that of being transported to a new atmosphere. It is not only that the outer forms of administration...

power to enroll non-residents among its numbers. (Gross, i. 47, 52, 122, 139, 153, 191, 218.) In cases of abuse there was an appeal to the king. (Rep. on Markets, 25, 60.)

PROBLEMS of government sat lightly on the people of Nottingham. Singularly favoured as it was by fortune compared with many other towns, there is something phenomenal in the rec...

THERE are two grounds on which Southampton may claim to stand first among examples of early municipal government. For centuries it was the great port of the south—the harbour wh...

FROM the mediæval Craft Association to the modern Trade Union the distance, as we have seen, is great. In the guild or “mistery” of the older world, instead of associations of w...

CLOSE under the sheltering walls of the parish church we may look for the market of a mediæval town, with stalls leaning against the building where possibly the first beginnings...

IT is evident that if the towns had been called on for a confession of faith, the declaration of a pure and unadulterated freedom would have been in every mouth. There remains t...

IN the conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we see the town society rent into two factions; and whether the contending groups call themselves the Burghers and Com...

WITH the appearance of the new commercial society in the boroughs we feel that the history of modern England has begun. By the formation of a prosperous middle class, a new type...

IT was not in Norwich alone that the people, refusing submission to a governing plutocracy, made the experiment of creating a lower house of commons to represent the burghers at...

IT was in the fifteenth century, at the very time when the towns seem to have been most energetic in tightening the bonds that held the crafts fast to their service, that we fin...

presented a petition complaining that many of the mayors were prevented from exercising their office thoroughly by the special charters which had been granted to certain misteri...

THE early history of the craft guilds, like that of the municipalities, is the story of communities in the first strength of youth, growing by the force of their own vitality in...

THE fifteenth century has been popularly taken as the time when victory crowned the local oligarchies and liberty fled from the English boroughs, and the restriction of popular...

THE controversy concerning the bounds and limits of their freedom, which the English boroughs were forced to maintain with powerful organizations already settled in the land—wit...

PERHAPS no complaint is at first sight so startling amid the vigorous growth of manufacture and commerce which marked the fifteenth century, and in a society where pestilence an...

ACCORDING to a theory which is commonly accepted the English borough in its first condition, and probably during a considerable part of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, did...

COMPARATIVE POLITICS. Six Lectures read before the Royal Institution in January and February, 1873. With The Unity of History: the Rede Lecture read before the University of Cam...

THE attempt in various boroughs to create a municipal house of commons for the protection of popular liberties is so striking a fact in the town history of the fifteenth century...

Guild Records, xxiv.). The Nottingham Records mention the “land of the community” (ii. 269. See also 304-6). A grant of six acres of mosses was given to Liverpool in 1309 (Picto...

under Foreign Kings, 1013-1204. Chap. III. The Great Charter, 1204-1265. Crown 8vo, 3_s._ Part II. Chap. IV. The Three Edwards, 1265-1360. Chap. V. The Hundred Years’ War, 1336-...