whole community against arbitrary proceedings of the borough
officers. They therefore require separate treatment.¹

The London common council differed from nearly all
those which were created later in being an adaptation of a
pre-existing selected assembly of the community. The only
organ of burghal democracy, such as it was, in the thirteenth
century, was an assembly which bore various names in dif-
ferent towns and was not always of the same origin. It
might be the undifferentiated city court, as apparently it
was at Exeter, or a burwaremote that had thrown off a separate
judicial court as at Winchester or the assembly of a merchant
gild as at Leicester. London had originally two assemblies,
the open-air folk(es)moot at St. Paul’s and the smaller
husting which, by the thirteenth century, met in the Guild-
hall. Already in the twelfth, however, the folkmoot had
ceased to have any part in ordinary legislation and ad-
ministration, and the work of the husting had become pre-
dominantly judicial in the thirteenth century, though it
was even yet not entirely free from administrative business.²
The affairs of the city, so far as they could not be. dealt with
by the mayor and aidermen alone, were transacted in a new
common assembly (congregatio], meeting in the Guildhall,
which seems to have grown out of the husting. The most
striking feature of this assembly is that it met by individual
summons, and the judges in the London iter of 1221 were
told, in reply to a question, that its business could not be
held up by the absence of a certain number of aidermen
“ or others ” and that there was no penalty for default.³
It is not here called a congregatio, but the recurrence of the
question of non-attendance in the assemblies of the fourteenth
century, when it was at last found necessary to amerce
absentees, shows that we are dealing with the same body.
It may go back to at least the earliest days of the city

ɪ See Appendix I, p. 330.

² As late as 1312 it was still regarded as a court in which the whole
community could give its assent to admissions to the freedom of the city
(Cal. of Letter Book D, p. 283) ; a clerk of the chamber was elected there
in 1320 in the presence of the mayor, aidermen, and commoners (ibid. E,
pp. 20-1) ; ordinances of the tapicers were approved in 1322 (ibid., p. 252) ;
auditors were assigned there by the mayor, aidermen, and community in
1337 (ibid. F, p. 4) ; and an ordinance about the conduit was made by
the mayor and aidermen with the assent of the community in 1345 (ibid.,
p. 128).

³ Munim. Gildhall. London, i (Liber Albus), 69-70. For the suggested
origin of the congregatio in the husting, see A. H. Thomas in the Calendar of
Plea and Memoranda Rolls of London, 1364-81, Introd., p. xv.

LONDON

“ commune,” if Miss Bateson was right in identifying the
“ skivini et alii probi homines ” in the freemen’s oath of
1193 with the aidermen and others specially summoned.¹
Whether others than those who received summonses had
ever had a right to appear there is nothing definite to show.

The reluctance to attend administrative assemblies did
not extend to those which met to elect the mayor and sheriffs.
In the fourteenth century, although a larger number of
citizens was summoned for this purpose, difficulty was found
in excluding others, and a royal writ forbidding their intrusion
had to be obtained. Mr. A. H. Thomas is, indeed, inclined
to trace the magna or immensa Congregatio for elections or
other specially important business to a different origin as
“ a diminished survival of the old Folkmoots.” ² In the
days of sheriffs appointed by the Crown the citizens had met
in folkmoot every year at Michaelmas to know who was
to be sheriff and to hear his charge.³ The later election
assemblies no doubt continued the tradition, but they were
rather a substitution than a survival. When the right of
election was secured for the community, it could not be
left to a civic mass meeting without obvious risk of disorder
and danger to the aldermanic monopoly of power. The same
principle of selection was adopted as for the ordinary ad-
ministrative assemblies of the community and, until the
fifteenth century, the same method of selection. Like them
the election assemblies met at the Guildhall, not at St.
Paul’s, the ancient meeting-place of the folkmoot. Folk-
moots were occasionally summoned in the thirteenth century,
at any rate in the civic crises of the Barons’ War, but the
name never clung to the election assemblies.

In these assemblies the commonalty had very little more
real voice than they had had in the folkmoot of the twelfth
century. The claim of the aidermen and magnates in the
thirteenth century to rule the city and decide the choice of
its chief officials is written large over the contemporary
chronicle of aiderman Arnold fitz Thedmar.⁴ They might
voluntarily obtain the assent of universi cives to an important
ordinance, as was done in 1229-30,⁵ but unluckily we are not

ɪ Above, p. 266.

² A. H. Thomas, Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of London,
1364-81, Introd., p. Iviii. This was Norton's view also. See infra, p. 3τ2,n. 2.

³ Munim. Gildhall. Land. i. (Liber Albus), pp. 118-19; E.H.R. xvii.
(1902), 502.

⁴ Liber de Antiquis Legibus, pp. 91, 149 el passim.         ⁵ Ibid., p. 6.

<<   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   >>

More intriguing information