332
THE COMMON COUNCIL
type is recorded in 1296-97, and entries on the rolls of 1264
and 12ε>7 nave been claimed as showing the existence of a
sirmιar bcdy at those dates. The.general silence of the rolls,
however, hardly supports the assumption of a permanent
council of twenty-four, though under 1333 thère is a list of
twenty-six persons who are described as elected by common
counsel to be with the mayor and four stewards in all the great
affairs of the community whenever summoned beforehand
by the bailiffs. This certainly looks more like a council than
such a selected assembly as we have found at London and
Norwich in the thirteenth century. The suggestion of con-
tinuity from 1296-97 is, however, confronted by the appear-
ance in ɪ 324 of an elected body of twelve with the same func-
tion, but whose consent is expressly stated to be necessary
for the validity of the mayor’s acts. This experiment was
recurred to with more success in x345j when the misdoings of
mayors and stewards “ contra voluntatem meliorum civitatis ”
and tending to its impoverishment and disinherison provoked
the creation of a body of twelve citizens “ of the better and
more discreet,” excluding all the higher officers, without whose
consent and counsel, or that of the greater part of them, no
amercements, fines, or arrears beyond a small fixed amount
should be pardoned, none admitted to the freedom of the
city, no letters or obligations touching the city sealed, and
no important civic business determined. This council of
twelve was annually elected along with the mayor and
stewards, and in the same way for more than a century, and
the record of its appointment always insists on the necessity
of its consent in the “ ardua negotia ” of the city.
It is clear that, like the change at Bristol the year before,
this was no triumph of a popular party over the potentiores,1
but the successful assertion of the control of the well-to-do
over the officers of the city. A few years before, in 1339, it
had, indeed, been necessary to forbid tumultuous assemblies
of freemen at the election of these officers, but the ruling class
had clipped the wings of the commonalty very effectively.
The appointment of officers was in the hands of one of
those elaborately nominated election committees of which we
ɪ ʌ possible case of popular agitation for representation, but at a much
earlier date, may be contained in a too brief entry on the Exeter Court
Rolls (now called Mayor’s Court Rolls) to which my attention was kindly
called by Miss R. C. Easterling. " On the first roll (1264),” she writes,
" very inconspicuously placed, is a list containing 24 (or 25) names headed
, Isti electi sunt per médiocres.’ ”
SINGLE COMMON COUNCILS
333
have seen a typical example at Lynn.1 At Exeter a first four
chose thirty-six who made the elections. These were always
meliores. In fact, though everything was done in the court of
Exeter in the name of the community, and the new council of
twelve discreets was described from 1365 at least as the com-
mon council of the city, the municipal government was in
practice oligarchic. Here, as in so many other boroughs,
the fifteenth century saw a democratic uprising against the
domination of the meliores, which was at first successful, but
produced no lasting effects. Nothing is known, unfortunately,
of the circumstances in which there appeared in the council
in 1450 a second body of twelve, “ elected by the community
for the community,” and not by the thirty-six who chose
the first twelve, now distinguished as de magnalis. But
assimilation must have gone on rapidly, for from 1455 we hear
only of a single common council of twenty-four, elected
apparently by the thirty-six. In the last years of the century
fresh dissensions seem to have arisen, apparently over the
election of the mayor, and a royal ordinance is said to have
abolished the thirty-six and to have given the selection of
the two ex-mayors or receivers from whom the commons
were to choose the mayor as well as the direct choice of the
other officers to the council of twenty-four. By Henry VIIFs
charter of 1509, which professed to follow his father’s ordin-
ance, the councillors sat for life, and were not removable
save for serious cause, and then only by their own body, which
moreover filled all its vacancies. As the two from whom
the mayor was selected were councillors, the government of
Exeter at the beginning of the sixteenth century could hardly
have been more oligarchic.
Nearly thirty years later than the setting up of common
councils at Bristol and Exeter, a somewhat similar step was
taken at Colchester. Here again it was the arbitrary pro-
ceedings of the town officers, not the privileged position of
a ruling class, that it was sought to curtail. Until 1372 the
whole income of the town had passed through the hands of
the two bailiffs, who were its chief officials, as there was no
mayor. They were alleged to have spent it at their will in
defiance of constitutions made by the whole community and
the more worthy of the sworn men of the town, from which
it would appear that there was already a council, but that it
was not unanimous in opposition to the action of the bailiffs.
1 Above, p. 319.
Z