232
THE BOROUGH COMMUNITY
account had a gild aspect,1 but the title conforms to the
Oxford use. It is almost certain, too, that the aiderman of the
gild merchant of Leicester, who about 1226 is called “ aider-
man of Leicester,” 2 held the same position as chief officer of
the town until his title was changed to that of mayor ; and
the same may be said of the aiderman of the Southampton
gild, which succeeded in suppressing the mayoralty when
one was created, and finally invested the aiderman with the
rival title.3 There was a tradition or belief also at Chester 4
and at Lynn 5 that, before they had a mayor, the warden or
aiderman of the gild merchant was their civic head. Gross
passes this over in silence, and the existence in the later
middle ages of some eight boroughs whose principal officer
was an aiderman only suggested to him an untenable theory
of descent from an Anglo-Saxon town officer, who, as a matter
of fact, never bore that title.6
The evidence advanced above, and especially the last part
of it, may seem to be undermining Gross’s main contention
and reviving the view, which he is supposed to have refuted,
that the medieval town constitution was merely an enlarge-
ment of the gild merchant. For he singled out as a typical
expression of this view “ the words of Thompson, the historian
of Leicester,” that “ the whole area of municipal government
was occupied by the Gild Merchant, the head of the borough
and that of the Gild being identical and ‘ burgess ’ tanta-
mount to ‘ gildsman 7 It is possible, however, to hold that
both these statements are roughly true of some, perhaps
many, twelfth-century boroughs, without conceding the whole
position to the advocates of the gild theory. The municipal
history of London, Norwich, and Colchester, none of which had
a gild merchant,8 sufficiently shows that the gild was not the
ɪ They had seized the cloths of the dyers and fullers ; the fullers’
cloth was seized, however, because “ non habent legem vel comunam cum
Iibens Civibus ” (Curia Regis Rolls, ι 259-60) The dyeιs had dyed then
own cloth, a definitely gild offence A rather cryptic writ to the bailiffs of
Lincoln on 3rd November, 1217, Oidered them to give such seisin of the
aldermanry of Lincoln and its appurtenances to John de Holm as his uncle
Adam had die quo se dιmιsιt de majorιtate (Rot Litt Claus 1 340⅛) The
mayor of Lincoln appears as early as 1206 (below, p 291, n 4)
2 Bateson, Records of Leicester, 127 3BBCn lvιι. 386
4 Gross, op cιt 11 41-2 5 Ibid pp 168-9. Cf B B C 11 362-3
6 Gross, op cιt 1 79 His reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chron a 886
relates to Ethelred, aiderman of Mercia ! ’ Ibid 1 61
8 It is a curious testimony to the widespread use of the gild as a doorway
to citizenship in the thirteenth century that a royal charter of 1252, con-
ferring all the rights of London citizens upon a Florentine merchant and
his heirs, invents a London gild merchant to which to admit them (EHR
xvιιι. 315)
COMMUNITY AND GILD MERCHANT
233
indispensable nucleus round which everything else gathered,
and even in twelfth-century Oxford, where, as we have seen,
there seems to have been little or no practical distinction be-
tween burgess and gildsman, and the gild aiderman was
undoubtedly head of the borough, the formal distinction
between the two aspects of citizenship is preserved. Gross’s
reluctance to accept an interpretation of the early evidence,
so far as it was known to him, which seemed to threaten his
main point that the later municipal constitutions originated
in the portmoot and its officers, not in the gild, might have dis-
appeared, had he grasped the true course of municipal develop-
ment in the twelfth century. He was unaware of the feebly
developed status of the community in portmoot in that period
and consequently did not realize the importance of the gild
organization to the burgesses or the diminution of that im-
portance in most boroughs when in the reigns of Richard I
and John the borough community began to obtain, in its own
right, a real corporate existence with an elected mayor or
reeves (bailiffs) and to be freed from the local control of royal
sheriffs and reeves by the acquisition of the fee farm. In
a few towns where the gild had a strong separate organization
—Andover, Leicester, and Southampton are the best known
instances—it retained its hold upon the civic administration,
though it was not without a struggle at Southampton, and
the later substitution of the title of mayor for that of aiderman
there and at Leicester brought these two towns formally into
line with the general type of borough government.1 Andover,
however, continued to be governed by its gild down to the
sixteenth century.2
Thus while, with Gross, we must still claim for the borough
community in portmoot and its officers their rightful signi-
ficance in the evolution of municipal constitutions, we need
not follow him in depreciating the part that the gild played in
the earliest struggles for communal liberty, when other forms
of unfettered combination were forbidden. If the gild was not,
as the older school of municipal historians contended, the
sole nucleus of borough institutions, it may claim a place
as the most effective outlet for burgensic energy and aspira-
tions until the last decade of the twelfth century. The gild
ɪ Oak Book of Southampton, ɪ xιx f ; Bateson, Records of Leicester,
ɪ. Introd , p. xlιu.
2 Gross, op. at. iɪ. 346-7 ; Furley, City Government of Winchester,
P∙ 72∙