ι76 FIRMA BURGI AND COMMUNE
into his own hands again. The terms of the settlement are
given in the Pipe Roll of 1189.1 The burgesses paid
£196 7s. 10d. by tale, the rest of the debt of £276 155. by tale
on their farm was met out of their payments on the fine
(£133 65∙ aɪɪd the surplus of these was set off against the
outstanding amount of the fine, leaving only £19 135. ιod.
which was excused them. Thus the Crown recovered the
whole of the farm for four and a half years and rather more
than a fourth of the fine.
In the last year of the reign of Henry II, only five
boroughs, Lincoln, Cambridge, Northampton, Shrewsbury, and
Bridgenorth, were clearly being farmed by their burgesses,
the first three by charter. Grimsby, Wallingford, and
Gloucester had been in this position for longer or shorter
periods, but occupied it no longer. Colchester and South-
ampton were being farmed by the town reeves, as Orford
and Newbury had been for a time, but there is no hint2
on the rolls that these officers were acting for the bur-
gesses and in the case of Southampton there seems to be
evidence to the contrary. The reeves, like the sheriffs of
London, were primarily royal officers.
Henry II was not only sparing with the farming privilege ;
he deliberately avoided granting it in perpetuity. In no case
did a borough receive a grant in fee farm from him. His
grandfather’s cancelled charter to London remains the only
certain grant of the∕ιmα burgi in fee yet made. Henry ITs
grants were experimental and the experience of Gloucester
and Wallingford emphasized their revocability.
So modest a concession of self-government and so rarely
bestowed did little to satisfy the more aspiring spirits, well
acquainted with the status of the more advanced of the con-
tinental communes. Two attempts to secure wider privileges
under the name of a commune have left traces, unluckily
scanty, on the Pipe Rolls of the reign. That at Gloucester
in 1169-70 is the more interesting of the two, because it makes
clear that a royal grant of a town in capite to its burgesses for
the purposes of the firma burgi, despite the apparent analogy
with the seigneurie collective populaire of the Continent, did
not realize the ambitions which were embodied in the demand
for a commune. As we have seen above (p; 173), the burgesses
of Gloucester received their town at farm from Easter 1165.
1 P. 188. In the second line of this entry IIII is an error for III.
2 See, however, appendix II below, p. 188.
FEE FARMS AND LONDON COMMUNE
177
Their concord with Ailwin the mercer may possibly have
arranged the relations of town and gild merchant, Ailwin
was perhaps aiderman of the gild. He was certainly the most
prominent citizen and when, five years later, the community
incurred a fine of over £183 pro communa, Ailwin’s share was
considerably more than half.1 It is unfortunate that no more
detailed hint is given of the objects of the conspirators, one
of whom fled and had his chattels seized. Despite their
offence, the burgesses continued to farm the borough, through
their reeve Osmund, until Michaelmas 1176 when it deter-
mined, perhaps by effluxion of time, perhaps in consequence
of a new amercement of 60 marks incurred by them. The
change may have been provisional at first, for it was not until
the second year afterwards that the sheriff was charged with
the increment of £5 upon the original farm which the burgesses
had paid for over ten years.2 The king took care not to lose
anything by the reversion to farming by the sheriff. Obscure
as the story of the Gloucester commune is and must remain,
it leaves no doubt that a good deal more than financial in-
dependence of the sheriff was aimed at.
The year which saw the end of burgess farming at Gloucester
for the present, was marked by another futile attempt to set
up a commune, this time at York, where Thomas of Beyond-
Ouse was fined 20 marks “ for the commune which he wished
to make.” 3 York had more reason for discontent with its
status than Gloucester had six years before. The city still
paid its farm through the sheriff and continued to do so, with
one brief interval in the next reign, until its acquisition of
a fee farm in 1212.4
(5) The First Fee Farms and the Commune of London,
1189-91
Richard Γs urgent need of money for his crusade put an
end at once to his father’s cautious policy towards the aspira-
tions of the growing boroughs. It is true that one of the first
steps of the new king, the restoration of the farm of Cambridge
to the sheriff, was reactionary, but the burgesses had con-
spicuously failed as farmers and were ready to lay down a
large sum to close the account.® On the same principle of
ɪ P.R. 16 Hen. II, p. 79. г Ibid. 24 Hen. Il, p. 56.
3 Ibid. 22 Hen. II, p. 106 ; Farrer, Early Yorkshire Charters, i. nos. 118,
333-
i B.B.C. ɪ. 230. δ See above, p. 175.