by Gwyn, Peter
But what there was not in 1517 was any major dispute between the City, or any particular interest group within it, and foreign merchants that might directly explain the explosion of racial antagonism; nor does there appear to be any other obvious reason, such as a sudden dislocation of trade or a catastrophic harvest. It is true that England’s efforts to bring the French to heel without actually declaring war against them were failing, and, as was suggested earlier, this may have led to some unease at court.154 But it is not immediately clear why this unease should have transferred itself to City circles, for England’s trading position was not affected. On the other hand, some accounts of the rioting do suggest that the mob’s anger was especially directed against the French, which could have reflected the anti-French stance that the government was taking abroad. Still, foreign policy hardly provides a full explanation for Evil May Day, and more to the point may have been a series of minor incidents going back at least to the previous spring, when anti-alien placards had been posted on the doors of some London churches.155 There was almost certainly some deliberate stirring by particular people or interest groups, though only scraps of information have survived. In February or early March the Mercers’ Company had sought the help of the earl of Surrey ‘to subdue all strangers that be breakers of the privileges of the said City’.156 At the instigation of a certain John Lincoln, the preacher at the Easter Monday sermon at St Mary’s Spital in London, had played upon anti-alien feeling, declaring that it was the duty of all Englishmen ‘to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal’.157 Then on the day that the riot began certain citizens including a skinner, William Daniel, had been bound on pain of death not to hurt any Frenchmen or strangers, while their servants were not to be allowed ‘to go forth May day now next coming’.158
As so often, there is the problem of deciding to what extent the rioting was spontaneous or had been deliberately incited. After it was over Henry did tell a delegation from the City that ‘you never moved to let them nor stirred once to fight with them … but you did wink at the matter’.159 Whether he really believed this is not clear; he could just have been seeking a bargaining position, or at least trying to ensure that next time they did a little better. Whatever particular groups or individuals were doing, the City authorities had been anxious to prevent trouble. Indeed, as so frequently happens, it may have been some of the preventive measures that in the end provoked the riot. In particular, there seems to have been a very late decision to proclaim a curfew, to begin at 9.00 p.m. On the eve of a major public holiday, when the City was traditionally en fête, any curfew was bound to cause some resentment, but the lateness of the decision led only to uncertainty and confusion, and thus to even greater resentment. Minor incidents quickly escalated, and in a very short time hundreds of people were on the rampage. In fact, though a lot of property was destroyed, nobody was killed, and the trouble was over before dawn. This may have been partly because much of the rioting had more to do with high spirits than with anything very vicious or planned. On the other hand, it may reflect the success of the steps taken, which to some degree were organized by Wolsey, to deal with the expected trouble. Important places, including apparently Wolsey’s residence at York Place, were protected, and troops under the command of the duke of Norfolk, in company with his son, the earl of Surrey, and the earl of Shrewsbury, were standing by, though it is probable that calm had been restored by the time they entered the City.
Almost immediately severe punishment was meted out against a dozen or so of the most prominent rioters; then on 22 May the famous scene was acted out at Westminster Hall in which Wolsey pleaded with Henry to grant a royal pardon to four hundred penitents dressed, as was traditional on such occasions, in only their shirts and with halters round their necks. At the first time of asking Henry declined,
whereupon the said right reverend cardinal, turning towards the delinquents, announced the royal reply. The criminals, on hearing that the king chose them to be hanged, fell upon their knees, shouting ‘Mercy!’, when the cardinal again besought his majesty most earnestly to grant them grace, some of the chief lords also doing the like, so at length the king consented to pardon them, which was announced to these delinquents by the said right reverend cardinal with tears in his eyes; and he made them a long discourse, urging them to lead good lives and comply with the royal will which was that strangers should be well treated in this country … It was a very fine spectacle and well arranged, and the crowd of people present was innumerable.160
And the emphasis has to be on ‘arranged’. As with the other great set-pieces of Wolsey’s time, when for instance he had knelt before Henry at Baynard’s Castle apparently to defend the clerical cause in the Standish affair, what was taking place was state theatre, in which the speeches had been prepared beforehand. Rather than the spotlight being on the kneeling Wolsey, it ought to be on Henry, sitting in state surrounded by his court, because the whole point of the exercise was to emphasize the aweful power of majesty; hence the purpose of the initial refusal to grant a pardon was to increase the dramatic effect of the eventual consent.161 Be that as it may, the image of Wolsey as mediator between City and king is an appropriate one with which to convey his relationship with the City during his fifteen years in high office. And an image is required because here the detail will largely be ignored, partly because the work has been done by others with a much better knowledge of London’s affairs, but also because much of the detail has little to do with social or economic matters. Wolsey’s main preoccupation was patronage and Henry’s attempts to provide offices and favours in the gift of the City or large livery companies on his own nominees. Wolsey’s task was largely to put into effect the royal wishes. Naturally, royal interference was resented in the City and indeed resisted. Wolsey could try to bully, but tact was as effective, and in the cut and thrust of negotiations Wolsey was, as always, the supreme master. He did have things to give that the City wanted, most obviously their charter of liberties. This Henry at the start of his reign had been slow to renew, no doubt because the City was anxious to win back some of the ground it had lost to Henry VII, and the new king saw no good reason to concede. However, when in the summer of 1513 he suddenly gave way, the City chamberlain was instructed to deliver £20 to ‘Mr Wolsey, the king’s almoner, for his labour and good will and for the confirmation of the liberties of the City’.162
That the City was pleased with Wolsey on this occasion, and at least pretended to be on a number of subsequent ones, may come as a surprise. Some conflict there undoubtedly was, though: significantly, however, it arose over essentially national issues such as the request for a forced loan in 1522 and for the Amicable Grant in 1525. On both these occasions the principal bargaining with the City was conducted by Wolsey in person, and on both occasions he took an extremely tough line. He had much more success in 1522 than in 1525; indeed, it is not certain that he was having any at all when the attempt to raise the Amicable Grant was called off. Certainly, he had quickly made a significant concession to Londoners, allowing them to pay what they felt able to instead of the fixed rate originally asked, but this had not prevented all opposition. When reminded that by a statute of Richard III all benevolences had been declared illegal, he marvelled that anyone dared to mention a man who ‘was a usurper and a murderer of his own nephews’, a good debating point but one that, at least according to Hall, still failed to secure any definite promise of money.163 Even if the earlier argument is correct, that the eventual calling off of the Amicable Grant was not the defeat it appears to have been, these negotiations cannot have helped Wolsey’s relationship with the City. Whether it was permanently impaired is another matter,164 and there is perhaps something a little bit too whiggish about a view of a gradually worsening relationship. For instance, the reason why Wolsey negotiated in person with the City authorities and took such a strong line had nothing to do with a growing animus against them. Instead, the most simple explanation is that, being mainly resident in the City, he was the obvious
person to conduct the negotiations. It was vitally important for the success of the overall policy that the City should pay up, as is indicated by the fact that as soon as concessions were made, they were used elsewhere to resist the grant. Thus, though one may well have doubts about the way Wolsey handled the City, to accept too easily what is essentially Hall’s version of an arrogant bully boy trying to browbeat the good burghers of London is a mistake. Yes, Wolsey could take an aggressive stance, but he could also be charming and helpful, as the City was well aware. Or to put it another way, it was policy rather than personality that was involved. If the king’s policy was unpopular, then Wolsey would have problems, as in 1522 and in 1525. From late 1526 a combination of events – bad weather, bad harvests, plague and sweating sickness, an unpopular divorce leading to an anti-Imperial stance with inevitable repercussions on England’s vital trade with the Netherlands – did make life very difficult for Wolsey, but they would have done so for any minister. And, where national issues did not obtrude too much, Wolsey and the City authorities remained capable of doing business together right up until his fall. It can, of course, be countered that Wolsey must take his share of responsibility for the unpopular policies – some would want him to take sole responsibility. But he surely cannot be blamed for the weather and in this account he will not be blamed for Henry’s wish for a divorce. Moreover, in the autumn of 1529 no one in the City sought to provide the king with amunition against the fallen minister, and Henry was then on the look out for anything to blacken Wolsey’s name. Moreover when one looks back at the City’s relationship with the Crown in previous reigns, in particular at the history of conflict in Henry VII’s reign, when in the five years before his death in 1509 three former lord mayors were imprisoned and heavily fined, the election of a sheriff was quashed, various royal nominees to important offices were foisted on them – the truth seems to be that, despite a difficult brief, Wolsey managed the City of London not at all badly.165
What of Wolsey’s management of other cities and towns? In fact, it is an absence of management on his part that offers the most interesting line of inquiry, in particular his failure to remedy or even to recognize what some historians have seen as a crisis in England’s urban life. The failure is undoubted. There was, for instance, no legislation in the 1523 parliament that touched upon the subject, and neither did any proclamations during Wolsey’s time. Admittedly, he did seek to ameliorate ‘the great decay, poverty and calamity of your poor city of York’,166 but as archbishop of York, Wolsey would have been expected to act as the city’s ‘good lord’ and, indeed, did so. It is also true that he saw enclosure and in particular depopulation as having a deleterious effect on urban life, believing that a town’s prosperity depended on the demand for its goods and services generated by the agricultural activity of the surrounding countryside. Of course, then as now, towns varied considerably as to function and style. York, for instance, was an important administrative centre for both Church and state; Bristol was a thriving port; boom-time Lavenham or pushy Newcastle were heavily dependent on a particular product respectively cloth and coal. Most English towns were small. Outside London, only Bristol, Exeter, Norwich, Salisbury and York could claim 8,000 people, and of the six hundred or so towns that deserve to be so classified, five hundred had populations of no more than 600 to 1,500.167 They all functioned to some extent as market towns in a country in which agriculture and its related products, especially wool, dominated the economy. Thus, it made sense for Wolsey to believe that in doing something about enclosure, he was doing something to ease the plight of the towns which, in the 1526 proclamation concerning enclosure, were described as ‘brought to desolation, ruin and decay’. Yet, if there was an urban crisis, as some historians have claimed, Wolsey’s response was totally inadequate, so whether there was one is of some importance.
The language of the 1526 proclamation raises the same question about early sixteenth-century language, and the government’s use of it, that arose when considering the problems of law and order. Perhaps it should have been raised earlier, for even Longland’s description of what he supposedly witnessed with his own eyes – the evil effects of enclosure in the Midlands – may well have shown the symptoms of that disease of hyperbole to which sixteenth-century man seems particularly prone. The difficulty is in finding an answer, for if things had really been as Tudor statutes and proclamations suggest, life would have been intolerable. Meanwhile, the existence of the disease furnishes one reason for being sceptical of any urban crisis, which is not to say that there were no urban problems.
The inability or unwillingness of a town’s crafts and industries to adapt to changing techniques and fashions was one. This certainly occurred in the cloth industry, which for various reasons tended to migrate to the countryside, or to different urban areas, to the detriment of older centres such as Winchester and, to a lesser extent, York. Some of the reasons, for example the increasing need for water power, were outside anybody’s control. Moreover, unlike the countryside, where there was much under-employment, towns found it difficult to provide enough of the right kind of part-time labour that certain of the most important textile processes, such as spinning and weaving, required. Something that town authorities might have done more towards was to free industry, and more generally civic life, from unnecessary and harmful regulation; this does seem to have been tried, but with little success, and it increasingly looks as if it could only ever have brought about marginal improvements. Also, towns were burdened with heavy expenses. There was an enormous amount of civic entertaining and ceremonial to be paid for. If it was an incorporated town, it would have to pay an annual fee-farm to the Crown, or to whomever the Crown had granted it. Thus, much of York’s theoretical £160 fee farm was paid not to the Crown but to the Manners family and St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster.168 Another expense was sending MPs to parliament. Above all, there was taxation. For the 1522 loans Coventry raised £1,195 and for the 1523 subsidy £974.169 Admittedly, these large sums were mainly found by the wealthy, and some of Coventry’s merchants were amongst the wealthiest in England, but nonetheless a considerable burden was imposed on the town. Then there were the many endemic problems of urban life: it is difficult to provide enough food and employment; disease spreads more easily; poverty is a common feature, in part for the paradoxical, but perhaps significant, reason that towns are also seen as centres of hope and prosperity for the rural poor, who thus migrate to them in great numbers.
Such were some of the slings and arrows that afflicted early sixteenth-century towns; but neither they nor the accompanying complaints were new – and anyway if one is going to complain, there is little point in not laying it on thick. So, when in January 1528 the dean of York suggested to Wolsey that the city would disappear unless it secured some financial relief, he was obviously writing nonsense.170 What is true is that by the 1520s York, having once been second only to London, had declined to about sixth in the urban pecking order.171 One of the reasons was that its cloth industry was losing out to towns in the West Riding such as Halifax, Leeds and Wakefield. It did not like this, so it squealed. Moreover, it saw no reason not to take advantage of the fact that the present incumbent of the archiepiscopal seat happened to be one of the most important men in England. York was also suffering from a significant decline in population, from about 12,000 in 1400 to about 8,000 in the 1520s,172 and the same is true for every other major town. One inevitable consequence was that they were left with a lot of empty houses, something that almost every complaint or petition from a town made great play of. Thus, in 1452 the Winchester authorities cited as evidence of its poverty that 997 houses stood empty, while in 1518 a sheriff of Bristol lamented that 800 houses were unoccupied.173 But while these memorials to the Black Death and subsequent epidemics may have been an eyesore, and may also have begun in the 1530s to create legal problems, as a rising urban population sought to reclaim the ruined properties,174 they are no more evidence of genuine poverty than those empty houses in the
rural areas were. Moreover, it is suspicious that these complaints about empty houses came not only from towns, such as Winchester, which had been in decline for about two hundred years, but also from towns such as Bristol, which appear to have been flourishing.175
In assessing the urban crisis, historians have perhaps too often ignored the simple point that a declining population and consequent decline in the gross national product does not have to mean a decline in per capita wealth. As a result they have taken too gloomy a view of late medieval economic activity. But if the volume of economic activity undoubtedly had declined from the high levels of the thirteenth century, there are plenty of signs that England’s economic health was in good order, fuelled from the 1460s onwards by a buoyant foreign trade spearheaded by a booming textile industry. In such a context it is difficult to believe in crisis. What may be true is that the decline in population had a disproportionately adverse effect on civic finances. Incomes from rents would have been directly affected, while the decline in the volume of trade would have meant less revenue from tolls. At the same time, many of a town’s financial commitments, for instance the payment of a fee-farm and parliamentary taxes, remained the same. Moreover, the decline in population had been accompanied by a tendency for people to move into suburbs, outside the jurisdiction and financial control of the town authorities. None of this has to mean that urban prosperity was declining, but it might well explain the numerous petitions to the Crown from the towns for tax relief, many of which were favourably received. It may also be true that some towns were facing particularly severe problems. Lincoln had suffered badly from the silting up of the River Witham. Hull’s export trade to the Baltic was destroyed by the Hanseatic League’s increasing stranglehold on all trade to that area; Boston’s export trade, too, seems to have considerably diminished, though in both cases the volume of coastal traffic may have increased.176 The long-term decline of Winchester as a result of the collapse of its cloth industry has already been mentioned. But it is Coventry that has been advanced as the main instance of urban crisis: a town, allegedly, not only suffering a chronic illness, but by 1525 in its death-throes. The cause was apparently a combination of difficulties in its own textile industry, a short-term but severe slump in cloth exports, high food prices and heavy taxation.177 Perhaps, but there must be serious doubts about a crisis whose chief symptom was a ‘conspiracy’ of no more than fifty people, and for which no one was executed. In fact, far from being Coventry’s death-throe, the conspiracy was no more than an enclosure riot, which at Coventry had, during the previous fifty years, traditionally taken place on Lammas day (1 August), as some of its citizens sought to ensure that the town-fields were made available for common pasturage, which by custom they should have been.178
