330
THE COMMON COUNCIL
upon the mayor and aldermen.1 On the other hand, muni-
cipal legislation and taxation were sometimes expressly
reserved by charter for the full council.2
The variety of law and usage which makes a general
description of English municipal institutions in the Middle
Ages, and even later, so difficult, was characteristic of them
from the first and was only gradually mitigated by natural
assimilation and royal policy. There was nothing in England
corresponding to the Scottish Leges Quatuor Burgorum and
convention of royal boroughs. Until the fifteenth century,
English kings were content to exercise a firm control over
their boroughs through the municipal officials, over whose
choice they reserved an ultimate veto, and left them free
to hammer out local organization for themselves. Even in
the charters of Henry VI and Edward IV the clauses which
fix the number and powers of municipal councils perhaps
reflect local desires rather than any definite policy of the
king or his advisers. It is only from the sixteenth century
that royal charters seem to be aiming deliberately at greater
uniformity in municipal institutions.
APPENDIX I
Some Single Common Councils of Early Date
The widespread common council of the fifteenth century
and onwards, added to an oligarchical council to represent
the commonalty, has obscured the earlier existence in a few
boroughs of a single common council of well-to-do burgesses,
established primarily to curb the arbitrary action of mayor
or bailiffs. The first recorded institutions of such a council
occur almost simultaneously at Bristol and Exeter in the
middle of the fourteenth century.
Before that date the municipal history of Bristol is far
from clear, but there is some evidence, arising out of a severe
conflict between the potentiores and the commons in 1312—13,
which may perhaps point to a small council of twelve.3 If
such a council existed and survived that crisis, it was super-
seded in 1344 by a larger one on a different basis. Reforms
1 Hist. MSS. Comm., Rept. IX, pt. i., App., p. 170.
2 As at Colchester (above, p. 323).
* Hunt, Bristol (Historic Towns), pp. 63 ff.
SINGLE COMMON COUNCILS
33i
were called for, “ many good customs having been abused
and some almost forgotten.” And so, runs the official account,
though the mayor is appointed to see to their conservation,
at the instance of Stephen Ie Spicer, who was elected mayor
this year for the better rule of his office {status} and the town,1
there were chosen forty-eight of the potentiores et discretiores
of the said town to be his counsellors {c<msultores} and assessors
and to assist and expedite the town’s affairs.2 Five years
later the forty-eight are described as “ electi ad tractandum in
communi consilio,” 3 and common council was the name by
which their body was afterwards known.4 The charter of
1373, which erected Bristol into a shire, generally confirmed
the new constitution, but reduced the number of the coun-
cillors to forty, probably to bring them into relation with the
five aidermen, at that time elected by the wards. The council
was to be chosen by the mayor and sheriff with the assent of
the community, and this assent was still required by the
charter of 1499, which, however, put an end to the popular elec-
tion of the aidermen, now increased to six by the inclusion of
the recorder. He was appointed by the council, but the others
were chosen for life and were only removable by the mayor
and their fellow aidermen. As the mayor was taken from
the aidermen, and the aidermen from the ex-mayors and com-
mon council men, the government of the town became wholly
oligarchical, except for the shadowy consent of the community
required for the appointment of the forty councillors. Later
charters allowed the council to fill its own vacancies, and the
corporation became close in form as well as in fact. The in-
crease of the aidermen to twelve in 1581 assimilated it to the
normal double council type.
In 1345, the year after the establishment of the Bristol
common council, a similar change was carried through at
Exeter. Owing to the preservation in great part of the city
court rolls from 1264, a good deal more is known of the early
constitution of the city than in the case of Bristol.5 The elec-
tion of a council of twenty-four of the usual thirteenth-century
1 This seems to be the only authority for Mrs. Green’s statement that
" the popular party insisted on the appointment of the forty-eight " (Town
Life, ii. 268).
t Little Red Book of Bristol, ed. Bickley, i. 25-7.
3 Ibid., ρ. 20. * Ibid., p. 86.
5 For the substance of the brief summary of the evidence in the archives
of the Exeter Corporation which follows I am mainly indebted to Dr.
B. Wilkinson’s monograph on The Meditsval Council of Exeter (M.U.P.
I931)∙