After an arrangement which left to the abbot all the weighty matters of government, the control of the burghers’ trade and a charge on their profits,[560] it was no wonder that before a hundred years were over the inhabitants of Reading, restless and discontented, were again battling for larger privileges. In 1351 the mayor and commonalty refused obedience to a constable appointed by the abbot’s steward, claiming for themselves the right to choose the constables, and present them to take their oaths before the king’s justices and the justices of the peace instead of before the abbot. At the same time they raised various fundamental questions as to their rights, just as Lynn was doing almost in the very same year. They asked whether the town was not a royal borough and therefore in no way dependent on the abbey; whether the townsmen had not therefore a right to elect their own mayor; and whether that mayor ought not to exercise jurisdiction over the burgesses and commonalty “according to the custom of the borough and Guild”—questions which one and all afforded fair subjects of dispute for the next hundred and fifty years.
The burghers henceforth gave the abbot no rest. In the long quarrel the Merchant Guild became the real centre of the common activity, just as it did wherever a town subject to a lord temporal or spiritual failed to win independent jurisdiction of its own.[561] For if there were free boroughs where the mayor, with his council and the common assembly of the burghers in which the whole conduct of government was centred, were in name and fact the accepted constitutional authorities; on the other hand in dependent towns where political freedom was still incomplete the Merchant Guild appears as ostensibly the only means by which the will of the community could find expression; as men recognized in it the one society in whose disciplined ranks they might be enrolled to fight for the liberties they claimed, its organization was held to be the most important of their privileges and the truest symbol of their common life; and it necessarily became the bond of fellowship, the pledge of future freedom, the school of political energies.[562] In such towns therefore the Merchant Guild had a vitality and a persistent continuity of life which was unknown elsewhere, and was often preserved in full vigour two or three centuries after it had perhaps suffered decay or transformation elsewhere.