XI
THE COMMON COUNCIL OF THE BOROUGH1
The character of the development in town government,
which ended in the close corporations swept away by the
Municipal Corporation Act of 1835, has been variously judged,
because for a century and a half it was discussed with party
bias and for even longer the true facts were largely buried in
the disorderly muniment rooms of the boroughs. Brady in
1690 2 and Merewether and Stephens in 1835 3 propounded
with equal confidence exactly opposite theories of the origin
of borough oligarchy. Brady contended that the close cor-
porations existed from the first, Merewether and Stephens
that the boroughs were free and happy democracies until the
introduction of municipal incorporation in the fifteenth cen-
tury. Approaching the subject in a more scientific spirit,
Gross 4 and Colby 5 in 1890 corrected many of the errors of
their predecessors. Gross showed that even formal incorpora-
tion was a century older than Merewether and Stephens
maintained, but so far agreed with them as to hold that “ a
popular and not an oligarchic form of government prevailed
in English boroughs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” β
From the fourteenth century, however, “ the development in
England was from government by a democratic burghal
community to the exclusive sway of a narrow aristocratic
‘ select body 7 Neither Gross nor Colby, however, had
gone very deeply into the early history of town councils, and
it was reserved for Mrs. J. R. Green two years later to discover
the essential unreality of this early democracy and the exist-
ence of “an oligarchical system of administration which was
1 Reprinted from E.H.R. xlv (1930), 529-51.
* An Historical Treatise of Cities and Boroughs.
s The History of the Boroughs and Corporations of the United Kingdom.
1 The Gild Merchant.
s "The Growth of Oligarchy in English Towns,” E.H.R. v. 633 seqq.
’ Gild Merchant, i. 108. 7 Ibid., p. 171.
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LONDON
303
in its full strength in the English boroughs as early as 1300
and can even be traced back at least fifty years earlier.” 1 All
the evidence which has since come to light tends to confirm
and carry farther back the practical oligarchy of the thir-
teenth century potentiores, to whom, in the nature of the case,
the actual administration inevitably fell. The complaints
of the “ lesser commune ” at Oxford in 1257 2 could hardly
be paralleled in the next century, and the grievances of the
London commonalty half a century before the Oxford petition
are sufficiently attested by Fitz-Osberfs movement and John’s
supersession of the city Superiores in 1206.3 It is significant
of the weakness of “ democracy ” in that age, and of the control
over the boroughs exercised by the Crown, that in normal times
popular recalcitrance was generally confined to petitions
against unjust taxation and similar oppression. Attempts on
the part of the borough commonalty to seize the direction of
municipal administration were only possible when the Crown
itself was temporarily under baronial control. It is the great
merit of Mrs. Green’s work to have shown that democratic
self-assertion was far more general and for a time more success-
ful towards the close of the middle ages than it had ever been
before. The new “ common councils ” which were set up in
the last quarter of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth
gave the commons a share in the actual work of administra-
tion.4 Unfortunately, inadequate systems of election and
more generally the use of nomination soon put the common
councils out of touch with the mass of the commonalty, and
in the end they did no more than broaden the basis of civic
oligarchy.
I
The first common council of this type, and the only one
still existing, was that of London, which dates from 1376.
The name was, indeed, applied in the preceding quarter of
a century to new councils at Bristol, Exeter, and Colchester,
and in the same year as at London to one at Cambridge,
but these were single councils, the result of movements
initiated or headed by the potentiores in the name of the
1 Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, ii. 243.
2 Above, p. 276. 3 Ibid., pp. 267-8.
4 For the establishment of similar popular bodies in some of the great
foreign communes, as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century,
under the name of jures or Prudhornmes du commun, see Luchaire, M anuel des
Institutions Françaises, p. 424.