History of
medieval IpswichHistory of
medieval Ipswich
| Development of local government |
Although not a town of the first rank in terms of size, population and wealth, it was the chief town of Suffolk and the seat of the shire court; a county gaol was built there in 1220. It also had a role (if not so important as that of Yarmouth) in providing ships and sailors for royal service and for defense of the east coast, on one occasion describing itself, as Yarmouth did, as a "frontier town". At the time of Domesday, the borough was being farmed by the sheriff of Suffolk, Roger Bigod, and Ipswich was later used as a base for Hugh Bigod when he supported the sons of Henry II in their rebellion. By 1194 the townsmen had taken responsibility for the farm and a couple of years later were negotiating with Richard I for a charter of self-government; but this was not to be obtained until the beginning of the reign of his successor.
Unlike Lynn or Maldon, Ipswich had no powerful overlords with whom the townsmen had to struggle to win freedoms, except for the king, who was usually persuadable when it was to his financial advantage. Nor, unlike Yarmouth or Norwich, did it have commercial rivals who seriously jeopardized its local control of trade. The Priory of neighbouring Woodbridge held a weekly market there, but the townsmen opposed this in 1233, and legal action led to a compromise whereby the town was allowed half of the trading tolls collected at the market, and burgesses were allowed to trade in the Woodbridge market without paying tolls themselves; by the fifteenth century Ipswich had farmed its half of the tolls to the Prior.
More intractable was the threat to Ipswich's commerce from Harwich, situated at the very mouth of the Orwell. In the 1270s Harwich was receiving assistance from its lord, the earl of Norfolk, who had blocked the river with a weir, in order to divert to Harwich ships bound for Ipswich. In 1340 an inquisition concluded that the port of Orwell (itself possibly an urbanizing settlement which ultimately failed to preserve an independent identity), and the estuary leading to Ipswich were within the (admiralty) jurisdiction of Ipswich, and that it was the Ipswich authorities – not those of Harwich – who could collect tolls at Orwell port. In 1378-79, Ipswich and Harwich were again in contest, over a location in Orwell Haven called Polles Head, which an inquisition decided should be considered part of the port of Ipswich. There were other clashes with rival jurisdictions – notably in regard to the hamlets within the half-hundred, whose right to leet jurisdiction in particular was challenged by Ipswich – but they were relatively few and minor.
Ipswich is best known for the detailed account which has survived of the setting up of local self-government in 1200. In this we see the delegation of power from the community, through a meeting which appears like the ancient folkmoot, to its elected representatives; the location where the community gathered was at St. Mary Tower, an important church and possibly a traditional meeting-place of the folkmoot.
The king was the sole lord of Ipswich and self-government was premised on his charter dated May 25, 1200, which gave the townsmen control over collection and payment to the Exchequer of Ipswich's fee farm of £40, along with the broad grant of all liberties and customs that the king's "free boroughs" in England had (excepting only those particular to London). A number of specific rights were spelled out, including:
Just over a month later, on June 29, an assembly of the whole community was held in the churchyard of St. Mary Tower to elect the bailiffs and coroners, according the terms of the charter; elected by unanimous agreement of the community (or so it was claimed), the new officers took oaths of office which included the reference to equal justice to all. At the same meeting, it was decided also to elect a town council, justifying this (by implicit reference to the charter terms) on the grounds that such was the case in other free boroughs. So on July 2 the community reconvened and by a method of indirect election – the bailiffs and coroners, with community agreement, choosing 4 reputable men from each parish to make the election – a council of 12 "Capital Portmen" (a title which is again heard of in 1255 ), meaning head townsmen, was chosen from the more capable townsmen. The portmen were sworn to guard and govern the borough well, protect its liberties, and render judgements in court with equal justice to rich and poor. The community then took oath to obey and support the town's officers, and to respect and maintain the town liberties. The royal charter was then delivered to the custody of two of the portmen.
The first meeting of the new town government took place on July 13, when bailiffs, coroners and portmen made a series of decisions on the fundamentals of administration:
At the next community assembly in October, the bailiffs displayed the newly-made common seal; 3 men were elected as custodians of the seal and the king's charter, and sworn to ensure the seal was used only for the benefit of the community. Officials of the Merchant Gild were also chosen and sworn to be responsible for the gild and its possessions, and to treat all gild brothers fairly; they in turn instructed all burgesses to become members of the gild {which involved a membership fee). A discussion followed on how the operations of the gild were to be financed, and it was decided that the alderman would have a monopoly on the sale of certain types of stone and marble, with bailiffs and coroners auditing the annual accounts of such sales, and that no townsman should buy the specified stone from any other source. Similar provision was made for compensating the portmen for their labour on behalf of the town: they were given exclusive rights of grazing their horses in Oldenholm meadow; at some later point in the century, provision was made for tolls on certain produce to be put towards financial compensation for the bailiffs. Finally, it was decided at the meeting that all of the local customs by which legal matters were ruled should be set down in a roll to be called "le Domesday" (hearking back to an Anglo-Saxon term – dooms – meaning "judgements"); the bailiffs were to have custody of this roll, as a reference tool, just as the gild alderman would have keeping of a record of the ordinances governing the gild.
Later that month, an inquisition was held to determine what status, within the free borough, should be held by certain religious dignitaries who had lands and tenants in the town. It was decided that the tenants should be subject to tolls on goods, except for those grown on their own lands or bought for their own use. Beginning in November the status of foreign burgess was granted to various lords who wished to acquire exemption from toll, for themselves and their villeins, on products grown on their estates and on goods bought for personal use; unlike that of resident citizens, this status was not hereditary. Appropriately, the earl of Norfolk, Roger Bigod, was the first. In return the lords made an in-kind contribution to the Merchant Gild, guaranteed a yearly payment towards the fee farm, and promised to respect and uphold the liberties of the town. In later years we find cases of lords desiring only exemption from toll on their grain, and paying a few pence and one or two bushels of corn; this was more of a licensing situation, and it was specifically stated in 1256 that such men were not to be at scot and lot with the burgesses. In the same year the Priors of Holy Trinity and of St. Peter's, Ipswich, acquired the wider exemption privileges by larger money contributions towards the farm, in-kind contributions to the Gild, and a promise to be at scot and lot "as if an intrinsic burgess" (we find later Priors still doing the same in 1446).
These variations in status seem to have caused confusion and descendants of some foreign burgesses claimed to continue the exemption without obligation towards the fee farm. Consequently, the borough authorities ordained in 1274 that foreign burgess status could only be held for life and for a donation towards the fee farm; the two different levels were reiterated: exemption from all tolls, which required the party to be at scot and lot, or exemption only on produce grown on the party's lands and on goods bought for personal use. The borough continued this system throughout the medieval period: Sir Roger Chamberleyn, a holder of local manors, acquired exemption on the latter terms in 1454; although he took an oath to be at scot and lot and maintain all franchises of the town, this appears to be prompted by the fact that rents were due the borough from some of his properties (presumably within the liberties).
As indicated, the basic qualification for an intrinsic burgess, or freeman, was to be at scot and lot. In 1328 it was added that entrants to the franchise should, within a year and a day of being made a burgess, have a house within the town or else be disfranchised. The reason for this further specification (which may simply have been taken for granted earlier) was so that the freeman was clearly a resident and had a location at which he could be summoned, or by which he could be distrained, to answer to justice.
As was often the case with royal charters, some of what was granted was merely an official recognition of the status quo. This was the case with the Ipswich community having responsibility for its own fee farm and may have been the case with it having elected officers to deal with the duties involved in collecting the various dues that went towards paying the farm. Nor is it implausible that the council of portmen was foreshadowed by a less formal association of leading townsmen (perhaps a Merchant Gild), who were behind the movement to acquire self-government – certainly there were representatives of the town negotiating with the king prior to 1200 for the acquisition of liberties. The men chosen to office in 1200 were undoubtedly from the upper ranks of town society – none more so than the first bailiffs, two brothers. Nonetheless, the charter made it desirable to have some standardized method of dealing with governmental matters.
We see in the narrative of the events of 1200 not only the logical stages for creating the mechanisms of urban self-government, but also some of the political theory underlying the same: the emphasis on unity within the community and loyalty to the borough, the need to define just who had a share in the rights and privileges granted by the king, delegation of power to representatives, and the reciprocal obligations between rulers and ruled, guaranteed through the swearing of oaths. At the same time we see the reality of borough government, which is the dominance of decision-making by the most prominent townsmen.
Although historians are inclined to skepticism about the degree of public unanimity claimed by the chronicle, the euphoria surrounding the first steps towards self-determination give this a certain plausibility. That matters may not have been to everyone's liking, however, is suggested by the case of Elias de Gippewyc, who had served as a reeve of the town at some time before 1200 and yet is absent from that group who took the reins of the new administration. In 1212 Elias complained to the king that the borough authorities had relocated the fish-market from its traditional site (the quayside?), resulting in a loss of revenue from it; this forced the authorities to justify their action. In 1206 another complaint (source unknown) had prompted the king to investigate the authorities' building of a dam. A conspiracy was hatched among some of the townsmen in 1213 to murder Elias; after his death the bailiffs claimed the right to deal with the case in the town court, but Elias' widow did not find there the justice she wanted and had to complain to the king. There is some evidence that the first bailiffs were young blood. Perhaps there were conservative and progressive elements active in town politics.
Although the chronicle of 1200 suggests that a popular assembly was the key vehicle for local government, this reflects the ancient institution of the folkmoot; although St. Mary's churchyard may have been the usual meeting-place of the community at that time, references to a part of the town called Thingstead ("place of the folk") may indicate an even older location of the folkmoot, possibly even before Ipswich ranked as a town. After 1200, however, it was instead the borough court that was the focal point of community administration. The Portmanmoot, as it was known, held major sessions (Great Courts) every second Thursday to hear pleas of the crown, pleas initiated by royal writ, and pleas relating to burgage tenements. Other pleas – personal actions – were heard twice a week by sessions known (eventually) as Petty Courts; during the course of the thirteenth century, the volume of court cases increased to the point where the two types of courts had separate records kept for them. By mid-fourteenth century, another specialized court emerged to hear, and record, public acknowledgements of property transfers, known as recognizances, including those made through testaments. From the 1430s we hear of the General Court, a facet of the portmanmoot that dealt with business we today would consider administrative rather than judicial.
The authenticity of the unique account of 1200 is not beyond question, since it is known only from a copy drawn up in circumstances from which it could be hypothesised that the narrative was reshaped to justify the constitutional situation of that later time rather than ninety years earlier. In 1272 the town clerk, avoiding imminent charges for dereliction of duty, made off with the original Domesday and other borough records. In 1285 the king punished the town for some (unknown) communal crime by suspending its chartered liberties and subjecting it to the government of a warden; this lasted until June 1291. Following restitution of self-government, it was decided necessary to reconstitute a definitive – i.e. written – version of the borough customs. At the same period we see a clique of leading townsmen starting to try to monopolize government for self-gain. Despite these factors, which could have influenced the wording of the custumal and the account of the proceedings in 1200, the broad terms of the account seem plausible and the names of the officers elected were certainly genuine leading townsmen of the early thirteenth century.
It is likely that the original account was written as an introduction or appendix to the custumal in the Domesday and also to the list of gild ordinances (probably untouched by the town clerk's theft). Six medieval editions and one Tudor copy of the custumal have survived and they incorporate not only the reconstruction from memory of the original list of borough customs, but also later information, copied from various borough records, of concern to the integrity and protection of the borough liberties. This included lists of tolls leviable on different types of merchandise, definition of the boundaries of the leets into which Ipswich was divided, lists of outsiders given burgess status, and later additions to the local by-laws (of which the customs were the foundation).
A little over a century after the weeks, full of enthusiastic vigour
and common purpose, during which mechanisms of self-government were
first set in motion at Ipswich, we are given our next detailed look
into the halls of government and the scene is a less happy one. Most
of the families who had led Ipswich into that degree of independence
it might acquire in a country where power was relatively centralized
had been eclipsed by newcomers with a different agenda. An attempt – for
some years successful – by a group of prominent townsmen to
monopolize key offices and, possibly, to
The document began by emphasizing one of the terms of the royal charter acquired in 1317, prohibiting the all too common offence of forestalling or any trading outside of the public marketplace; the same charter had, perhaps ominously, eliminated the obligation to seek royal approval of newly-elected bailiffs and had reduced the number of coroners to two. The document went on to observe that it was a common right, by reason of the franchise, that every burgess paying scot and lot and contributing to aids of the town had equal entitlement to a share in any merchandise being sold in the town (a principle that forestalling undermined). However, certain burgesses had contravened this, particularly by becoming hosts of outsider merchants and selling their goods for them in private places, sometimes even without consent of the visiting merchants, and claiming a quarter of the merchandise as their hostage fee – which happened to be a custom of the town (unless an introduction into the custumal by the ruling clique, whose leading members had three decades earlier been involved in the reconstruction of the custumal). Consequently, the following ordinances (which went far beyond correction of the problem identified in the preamble) were enacted:
In the short term the reform initiative led to further power struggles and the deposition of the bailiffs of that year; the repercussions of political hostilities lasted for years and culminated in another seizure of the borough liberties back into the king's hand in 1344. The reforms themselves had relatively little long-term effect, however. The office of chamberlain, upon which so much rested, does not seem to have survived for more than a few years (a counter-roll exists from 1324/25), although it had been revived by the 1380s as evidenced by the contra-rotulation function specified in the ordinances of 1320. It was perhaps enough to have displaced one apparently corrupt set of politicians, even at the risk of introducing a new set hardly any better. There is little sign of further political conflict in Ipswich during the remainder of the Middle Ages, except for minor matters, although a further set of ordinances in 1361 again had to forbid that new burgesses be made without the consent of the greater part of the community and to prohibit the bailiffs from taking the entrance fees, the preference being to apply the money to repairs to the "hall of pleas" called the Tolhouse.
The financial difficulties – particularly the burdensome fee farm – in which the borough found itself in the fifteenth century (apparent in 1446/47) were used as the rationale to secure from Henry VI additional powers for the borough in 1446. This charter granted incorporation, with the right to a seal (which, as we have seen, had been used since 1200) and to acquire lands and rents (similarly well evidenced before 1446). The bailiffs and four capital burgesses (i.e. portmen) were to have powers of Justices of the Peace and hear cases that would earlier have been dealt with by external Justices; the fines levied in such cases were to be put towards the fee farm. This was followed up with a local ordinance in 1447 stating that members of the community could use force to intervene in any violent assault and that anyone breaking the peace with such violence was to be disfranchised. The charter also granted one bailiff the powers of king's escheator, with any fines or revenues from escheated goods going towards the farm. It was around this time that Ipswich's government was expanded by the creation of a Common Council. Edward IV confirmed the 1446 charter in 1463, again referring to the borough's "impoverishment", and redefined the borough's incorporation in more definite terms. By this point local government had the basic shape which was to characterize it for the next few centuries.
 previous |
 main menu |
 next |
| Created: August 29, 1998. Last update: January 8, 2019 | © Stephen Alsford, 1998-2019 |