I. There was a distinct difference in the lot of towns under the control of a bishop, and others which were subject to a convent. Burghers who owed allegiance to a bishop had to do with a master whose wealth, whose influence, whose political position, whose training, made him a far more formidable opponent than any secular lord. On the other hand he probably lived at some distance from the borough, and, charged as he was with the administration of his bishopric and the estates of the see, besides all the business of a great court official occupied in weighty matters of state, he had but limited attention to give to its affairs. As the see passed from hand to hand, a resolute fight with an over-ambitious borough which was begun by one bishop might die away under the feebler rule, the indifference, or the wiser judgement of his successor. In the case therefore of towns on episcopal estates, if the struggle was arduous and costly, still its issue was not irrevocably determined beforehand, and the burghers might hope for at least partial victory. But the emancipation of the townsmen was long deferred, and in the fifteenth century there were boroughs where the bishop’s hand still pressed heavily on the inhabitants.[519]
One of the greatest trading towns in England gives such a record of ceaseless contention carried on to win rights which had been peacefully granted long before to every prosperous borough on the royal demesne. The Bishop of Norwich had been lord of Lynn since its earliest history.[520] It is true that about 1100 A.D., one Bishop Herbert made a grant of the Church of S. Margaret and the little borough that lay around it—between Millfleet and Purfleet—to the monks of Norwich. But the land beyond these boundaries still belonged to the see. Lying as it did at the mouth of the Ouse, and forming the only outlet for the trade of seven shires, Lynn was destined to be one of the great commercial ports of the east coast, and the bishops proved good stewards of their property. As population outgrew the Lynn of older days, with its little market shut in between the Guildhall and S. Margaret’s where the booths then as now leaned against the walls of the parish church, and its tangle of narrow lanes leading to the river side, houses began to reach out over the desolate swamp that stretched to the north along the river side. Under the energetic rule of the prelates the sea which ebbed and flowed over the marsh was driven back, and a great wall raised against it, 340 feet long and nine feet thick at the base; while another stone wall ran along the eastern side to protect the town from enemies who might approach it by land. In the second half of the twelfth century the “Bishop’s Lynn” rose on the newly won land along the river bank, with its great market-place, its church, its Jewry, its merchant houses; and soon in the thick of the busiest quarter by the wharves appeared the “stone house” of the bishop himself, looking closely out on the “strangers’ ships” that made their way along the Ouse, laden with provisions and merchandise.