Winchester suffered also from the memory of its ancient state as the capital and residence of the West Saxon Kings; and its mayor almost alone among the mayors of English towns in the fifteenth century had to go to London to take his oath of office from the King’s judges,[603] just as the mayor of London does to this day. He could win neither freedom nor independence. At home he was beset with dangers; he might be imprisoned by the King for one offence, and punished by the bishop for another.[604] Against such odds as the burghers had to face it was almost hopeless for any corporation to contend; and the helpless townsfolk could but show their impatience and discontent in petty quarrels with the convent as to the site of a market, or blindly do battle for worthless Kings such as Henry the Third or Edward the Second if the monks took up the opposite party.[605] The struggle for independence has no fine record of stirring incidents; but that there should have been any conflict at all before the settling down of quiescence and final apathy is a striking instance of the vitality and persistence of municipal institutions.
It is impossible not to attribute to the hopeless situation of the municipality before the rival authorities in the city, and especially the powerful lords of convent and cathedral, much of the calamity of its history. For at a time when prosperity was generally increasing, its fortunes steadily sank. In 1450 the citizens drew a terrible picture of the local distress, not in the vague phrases which we meet with elsewhere when for some special purpose happier boroughs put on a temporary show of distress, but with a minute exactness which betrays the truth and the whole measure of their suffering. Winchester, they declared, “is become right desolate.” Nine hundred and ninety-seven houses stood empty, and in seventeen parish churches there was no longer any service. A list is given of eleven streets “that be fallen down in the city of Winchester within eighty years last passed”; and in each case an account is added of the number of householders that had formerly lived in the street, a hundred, a hundred and forty, or two hundred, as the case might be, where there were now but two or three left. Since the last Parliament held there eighty-one households had fallen. “The desolation of the said poor city is so great, and yearly falling, for there is such a decay and unwin, that without gracious comfort of the King our sovereign lord, the mayor and the bailiffs must of necessity cease, and deliver up the city and the keys into the King’s hands.”[606] To produce a distress such as this no doubt industrial causes were at work, and Winchester probably suffered as Canterbury did from changes in the woollen manufacture and in trade routes. But nowhere in any considerable city do we find a parallel to the utter ruin of this unfortunate community. Nowhere, on the other hand, were the conditions of municipal life so fatal, if once prosperity began to dwindle or the pressure of outward circumstances became such as to call on the resources of the people. Through the breaking up of the city into separate and independent fragments the whole burden of any difficulty had to be borne by the little company of inhabitants governed by the mayor; and so heavily did the common municipal charges and expenses fall on the scanty population of burghers shut into the narrow area which was under municipal government, and from which alone the authorities could gather the fee-farm and the royal taxes, maintain the bridge and walls, provide householders for the nightly watch, and furnish men and arms for the defence of the city; and we do not wonder that the inhabitants at last began to renounce, or refuse to accept, a franchise which brought such formidable responsibilities, or that they sought to escape from a city doomed to ruin. An attempt was made in 1430 to revive manufacture and commerce by an invitation to all kinds of traders and artificers to come and do business in Winchester free of toll.[607] But the experiment in free trade was quickly abandoned, probably because the corporation could not meet the heavy yearly expenses without the customary taxes levied on trade;[608] and in 1450 the citizens laid a petition before Henry the Sixth, praying him to consider the extent of their distress.