All this story, however, comes to us from the side of the town, and has something of the ring of a lordly municipal pride; it almost sounds like an ideal view of the compromise between the contracting powers as conceived by the burghers, and one to which the Church party must have demurred. At any rate by whatever means the municipality of Hereford had won a jurisdiction of this sort over the bishop’s tenants, it was singular in the possession of such authority, which has no parallel in towns like Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Exeter, and many more. But the situation, even as the citizens put it, is so complicated in its arrangements that we could scarcely wonder if a state of truce depending on provisions so elaborate should under provocation be transformed into a state of open war; nor can we question the wisdom of townspeople everywhere in making it their fixed purpose to establish one undivided and supreme law for the government of each community. How important the question at issue really was to the town’s life we may see from the story of Winchester.
The mayor of Winchester was at the head of what seems, on paper at least, a powerful and elaborate corporation, worthy of a great city which held itself to have been built “in the age of the world 2995, ninety-nine years before the building of Rome,” and “environed with stone walls” exactly 533 years later.[594] A common assembly met twice a year. There were two coroners and two constables, six aldermen of the wards with their six beadles, a town clerk and four serjeants, a council of twenty-four elected every year, and four auditors of this council, besides a body of twelve jurors chosen whenever there was necessity, who sat at “the Pavilion,” and with whom the mayor perambulated the liberties to view the rivulets and rivers.[595] The boundaries of the city were apparently marked out by a rough square formed by the walls and ditch; but to the mayor and aldermen of the fifteenth century, the idea that their authority should reach as far as the limits allowed by the girth of the walls would have seemed a far-off counsel of perfection.
For right across the city from the east to the west gates stretched the High Street, cutting the town into two equal halves; and to the south of the High Street one may say roughly that the mayor had no authority at all. Near the west gate stood the King’s castle, where municipal law of course did not run. Beside the castle lay the great convent of S. Swithun, and next to it the cathedral, both fenced round by a wall which shut out all lay jurisdiction or intrusion of any kind. Nearer to the east gate lay the palace of the bishop, who was also of course exempt from secular interference, and who ruled with supreme authority over the bishop’s Soke that stretched away beyond the gate, and took tolls of all merchandise that passed along the river.[596] His tenants while remaining outside municipal control had still the right to buy and sell all kinds of merchandize in the city which according to the burghers’ complaint was to their hurt and loss; and the exceeding difficulty of any regulation of trade in the midst of this competition of privileged workers, with the ruin of the city treasury which it threatened, are shown by a quarrel between the bishop and the burghers as to a street which the bishop had claimed as his property in 1275; for when people discovered that in that liberty so appropriated they paid nothing, since the city bailiff could not enter it to make distraint, nearly all the clothworkers forthwith withdrew themselves from the other streets and went to live there to the manifest loss of the community, and the great profit of the bishop.[597]