Contesting the City

Abstract

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

Citizenry and Nationality: the Participation of Immigrants in Urban Politics in Later Medieval England

“…Christian Liddy has demonstrated that honesty and a good reputation were the most essential virtues expected from burgesses in English cities and towns. 85 By proving that Nicholasson was hiding part of his past, the potentiores wanted to show, above all, that he did not have the necessary qualities to be a good citizen of Lynn (something of which, as we have seen, they also accused others), let alone to represent the town in parliament. That he benefited from the situation materially as well would also have seriously undermined the criticisms by the mediocres of the potentiores' financial malpractices.…”

“…In 1415, the citizenry of Norwich decided that immigrants could not be elected into any public office in the city. 19 In Ipswich in 1435, it was ordained that no alien burgess would be admitted into the assembly, the meeting of the town's freemen. In 1483, and again in 1485, anyone born outside England was also barred from entering the freedom in Ipswich, as had happened in London nearly fifty years earlier.…”

“…In one case, indeed, unity among the citizens was quite explicitly promoted at the expense of immigrants: the 1415 stipulation that stated that aliens could not be elected to public office in Norwich was part of the 'New Composition', a constitution which, after years of discord, sought to restore cohesion between the city's probi homines and its commonalty. 23 It is important, however, to take into account the interests of those who controlled both the government and the citizenry in those places where regulations against immigrants' political involvement were issued. During the fifteenth century, craftsmen and merchants in English cities and towns struggled with the economic competition of outsiders.…”

“…28 In Norwich, the New Composition of 1415 was agreed under pressure from the guilds. 29 There is no surviving record of craft guilds in later medieval Ipswich, but its various trades and crafts had some degree of organization and coherence. 30 Often, the decisions made in these cities and towns not only excluded those competing with native artisans and traders from participation in urban political life, but also served the latter's economic interests more directly.…”

“…Yet the same applied to native-born residents: in nearly all English cities and towns, women and economically marginal people were a priori excluded from the citizenry. 68 The attitude of these aliens invested in citizen politics was not necessarily one of acquiescence and tacit collaboration with the city or town governors. We have already referred to the case of Henry May, the Irish citizen of Bristol who confronted the mayor over an issue with his apprentice.…”