274
ORIGIN OF TOWN COUNCILS
that, with three exceptions, the whole membership should have
been changed within four or five years.
The Northampton writ of 1215 serves as a warning not to
assume that the twenty-four afterwards recorded in many
boroughs was necessarily the original number of councillors.
4. Leicester. Leicester is the only mediatized borough in
our list, and it has the further peculiarity that its council
seems to have originated in the merchant gild which had
grasped administrative control of the town. In its archives
is a list, conjectured to belong to 1225, of those elected by the
common counsel of the gild “ to come at every summons of
the aiderman (of the gild) to give counsel to the town and to
assist the aiderman in the business of the town to the best of
their power, . . . penalty (for neglect) 6d.”1 There are
twenty-four names, in which the aiderman’s is included, but
a new list incorporating just over half of these names con-
tains twenty-five, the aiderman making the twenty-fifth.2 In
1264 a body described as the twenty-fourjwj√s (jurati, juratores)
of Leicester first appears in the records, sentencing a thief,
coram Communitate, to lose an ear.3 Nine years later a list of
these jurés, “ elected by the community,” is preserved in
close association with one of a twenty-four chosen by the gild
to maintain its laws and liberties.4 The personnel of the two
bodies was largely identical, completely according to Miss
Bateson, but the evidence in her note only shows that they
had two-thirds of their members in common. There is no
mention of the gild body (which does not appear again)
being bound by an oath. Though the primary duty of the
jurés was to render judgements in the portmanmote, they are
soon found transacting administrative business, constituting,
with the mayor and bailiffs, the governing body of the town.
The office of aiderman of the gild and head of the community
had been converted into a mayoralty in or shortly before
1250,6 and the analogy of similar bodies elsewhere would
suggest that as a sworn council, elected by the community,
the twenty-four jurés came into existence at the same time.
Even if the ancient doomsmen of the city court had been
1 ', Ad venienduɪn ad omnes Summoniciones Aldermanni ad Consulen-
dam villam, et ad eum Sequendum in negociis ville pro posse suo . . . sub
репа de vid " (Bateson, Records of Leicester, i. 34).
2 Ibid., p. 35. 3 Ibid., p. 104.
4 Ibid., pp. in-12 and note.
5 Ibid., p. 64. In my original article (p. 185) by an unfortunate mistake,
I placed this change in 1257.
LEICESTER, DUBLIN 275
limited in number to twenty-four, they would not have been
bound by oath or elected by the community.1 The oath of
the juré, while first of all binding him to render justice in-
differently to rich and poor, required him also to maintain
loyally the assize of bread and ale with his mayor and to keep
the franchises and good customs of the town to the best of
his power?
5. Dublin. The citizens of Dublin seem to have instituted
a council of twenty-four on receiving, in 1229, a grant of the
right to elect a mayor from their own number. The charter
was a copy mutatis mutandis of that granted to London in
1215,3 and the number of councillors may have been imitated
from that of the London aidermen. In the French custumal,
which was apparently drawn up at this time, the amercement
for striking one of the twenty-four was fixed at £10, one-fourth
of the penalty for striking the mayor.4 But in addition to the
twenty-four, Dublin had two wider bodies of a sort unknown
in England and only to be explained by the peculiar conditions
of Ireland. At the end of the custumal there is a statement
that :
“ The citizens who have bought the franchises of the city
. . . have established . . . that the above franchises shall
be guarded . . . against all . . . that is to say that there
shall be twenty-four jurés to guard the city, besides the mayor
and bailiffs, and the twenty-four are to elect of young people
(ioesne gentz) forty-eight and the forty-eight are to elect
ninety-six. And these ninety-six shall guard the city from
evil (mal) and damage.” s
It was part of the duties of the twenty-four to look after the
manners of the “ young people.” They took the forty-eight
by relays to festes “ pur eus sure et curtesie aprendre.” When
a tallage had to be raised, each of these bodies in turn assessed
j The story of the origin of gavelpence, given by a jury in 1253 (Bateson,
Records, i. 40 ff.), carries back the twenty-four jures as doomsmen to the
first quarter of the twelfth century, but is not a good authority.
2 Ibid. ii. 33.
3 Except that it was definitely a grant in perpetuity (B.B.C. ii. 361).
4 Gilbert, Historical and Municipal Documents of Ireland (Rolls Series),
P∙ 244.
3 Ibid., p. 266. The same triple arrangement was adopted at Waterford
soon after 1300, but the numbers here were twelve, twelve, and six, and it
was the thirty thus made up who were to guard the city against damage
(Bateson, Borough Customs, I., hv). It may be mentioned here that the
Communityof Kilkennyin 1230 regulated the election of sovereign, provosts,
and councillors (Hist. MSS. Comm., Rept. I, Appendix, ρ. 130a).