It is indeed conceivable that the true peril to popular liberty was of a far more subtle character than the words of any charter would suggest, and rather grew out of developements in the unwritten constitution of the borough, than in the written law. Not only in elections, but in the meeting of the general assembly, insidious changes may have been brought about by the mere growth of common custom. In the institution of “the Clothing” there were latent possibilities which time alone could bring to light. For over half a century sheriffs and chamberlains were quietly bowed out of office, and transferred with all their fur and finery to the brilliant company of the liveried ex-officials to await a happy re-election. But in due course, as its numbers multiplied, the Clothing was made manifest to all men in its stately ranks or “clene scarlet” as the very body-guard and sworn defenders of the central group of high officials, the traditional depositories of power. Surrounded and shielded by a band of forty or fifty friends who had already held office and might hold it again, men dedicated to their interests and disciplined to their methods, the mayor and his brethren were no longer left face to face with the whole community. Under the established custom by which any burgesses who were present at an assembly were taken to represent the whole body, it was evidently easy even while outwardly observing constitutional form, to summon to the meeting only members of the Clothing; and the decrees of the council having been submitted to this loyal gathering were assumed to have obtained the assent of the commonalty. Popular control might thus be absolutely extinguished, and that without revolution or going beyond the letter of the law, when a council chamber crowded with the official class[700] replaced the assembly of the commons, and exercized its powers simply by preserving its name.
The plan of forming a select committee of the General Assembly nominated by the mayor seems to have been a very favourite custom. In Coventry, for example, the mayor summoned certain citizens who were added to the twenty-four to form a common council. Their number was perhaps at first uncertain, for in 1444 we hear of a meeting of fifty-three, twenty-four of the council and twenty-nine other burgesses; but apparently from 1477 twenty-four citizens always assembled with the twenty-four jurats to form the common council of forty-eight. Generally, as in Leicester or Gloucester, a fixed number of representative citizens was summoned. A lower chamber of this pattern evidently assured the triumph of the oligarchy; and the idea of popular control was perhaps more completely banished by this narrow and formal interpretation of the common right of meeting than by mere idle neglect of the assembly. In Nottingham, so far as we can judge from the few council minutes preserved during the sixteenth century, the mayor and his brethren acted with perfect independence of the burgesses at large, and no longer mentioned the name of the community even in ordinances which touched the common lands.[701]