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338        THE COMMON COUNCIL

APPENDIX III

A Criticism Considered

When the preceding article was first published in the
English Historical Review, the author was criticized for
describing as “ democratic ” or “ popular ” the opposition
to municipal governing bodies and in particular that in
London in 1376 the outstanding feature of the success of which
was the substitution of gild for ward as election unit.1 It
is true that, taken in their strict sense, these terms would
be used more correctly if confined to those disorderly intru-
sions into election assemblies which led to royal intervention
at the instance of the ruling class. But, if properly guarded,
they are convenient short expressions not wholly inapplicable
to the widespread movement against such narrow oligarchies
as that of the London aidermen. As “ democratic ” is the
more ambiguous of the two, I have put it within inverted
commas or substituted “ anti-oligarchic.” Though there
were many cross currents in the London of 1376 and the
popular character of the change from ward to gild may easily
be exaggerated, the enforcement of the long neglected regula-
tions of 1319 for annual election of the aidermen and pro-
hibition of immediate re-election directly connects the move-
ment of that year with the violently anti-oligarchic episodes
of the reigns of Edward II and Henry III. To have entered
into the much debated problems raised by the cross currents
just referred to in a brief summary of the institution of common
councils would have unduly swollen the already disproportion-
ate space allotted to that of the capital. The reader will
find the problems in question fully treated in the late Pro-
fessor George Unwin’s
The Gilds and Companies of London
(1908), especially c. x. and in Dr. Erwin Meyer’s article on
“ English Craft Gilds and Borough Governments of the
Later Middle Ages ” in
University of Colorado Studies, xvii.
(1929-30), 384-401. In an unprinted London thesis on “ Civic
Factions in London—their relation to Political Parties,
!376-99,” Miss Ruth Bird adduces evidence for the view
that the conflict between the victualling and non-victualling
gilds had less to do with the municipal crisis of 1376 than
antagonism to the aldermanic capitalists of the type of Richard
Lyons and Adam Bury, just then condemned by the Good
Parliament.

1E. 1,'. Meyer in Speculttm, vɪi. 249 f.

XII

THE STUDY OF EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN
ENGLAND 1

The twentieth century opened with the brightest prospects
for the study of early municipal history in this country,
prospects which have since become lamentably overclouded.
A group of distinguished scholars had made a remarkable and
unprecedented advance in the solution of the most obscure
problems presented by the initial growth of urban life in
England. In the past the subject had been chiefly in the hands
of lawyers and local antiquaries, and neither class was well
equipped to grapple with its real difficulties. One outstanding
work there was, the
Firma Burgi (1726) of that admirable
eighteenth-century scholar, Thomas Madox, but, great and
permanent as is its value, it deals with an aspect of municipal
growth which was comparatively simple to one of his immense
knowledge of the national archives. Much more complicated
problems were attacked, and to a large extent solved, in the
last decade of the nineteenth century and the first lustrum of
this. Charles Gross dispersed the cloud of error which had
exaggerated the part played by the merchant gild in the evolu-
tion of our municipal constitutions. Mary Bateson found
a French key to some of the most striking peculiarities of the
post-Conquest borough, revealed the great mass of archaic
law which the boroughs preserved throughout the middle
ages, and edited the most complete collection of the records
of a single borough which has yet appeared. Maitland
showed that the oldest English boroughs were rooted in the
soil, that the medieval burgher was still interested in agri-
culture, had one foot on mother earth outside his walls.
His gifts of subtle insight and bold suggestion were never more
evident respectively than in the analysis of the transition

1 A paper read at the British Academy on ɪoth May, 1922, and now-
reprinted, with some revision, from vol. x. of its
Proceedings.

339



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