Mary Dormer Harris

“ That it was foolishness to go on a pilgrimage to the image of Our Lady of Doncaster, Walsingham, or the Tower of Coventry, for a man might as well worship by the fireside in the kitchen as in the aforesaid places, and as well might a man worship the Blessed Virgin when he seeth his mother or sister, as in visiting the images, because they be no more but dead stocks and stones. ”

“ Modern industry seems to have entirely passed through, and, as it were, forgotten this immature phase of its existence. The companies in Coventry which were able to survive the shock of the suppression of the guilds and chantries under Edward VI., and have lasted to our own day—the mercers, drapers, cappers, fullers, clothiers, and worsted weavers—possess none of the powers or organization of their predecessors, and are mere survivals of a bygone time, "the shadows of a great name." ”

“ The sight of these houses, grandly planned and strongly built, with lovely gables where barge-board and finial are marvels of the house-carver's art, is a fitting close to a day in Coventry. Let us hope that no restorer, modern builder, well-meaning or enterprising commercial man will ever rob us of the loveliness of Bond's Hospital and Wheatley's School at Bablake. ”

“ The quarrel resounds once more in the guild-hall. The stern recorder testifies against the supposed factiousness of Laurence Saunders; and the aged men, lifting up their hands, swear to the ancient extent of the common pasture. These are not heroic or world-known scenes, but they represent the life of the citizens of an old-time city, men whose labours are not entirely forgotten. ”

“ It is with the earl's burghers that the main part of our story lies. It was they who won, after many checks and struggles, such liberties of trading and self-rule as helped to make their city rich and famous in after days. For wherever townspeople found that their lord, whether he were a noble or the King himself, had need of their money or support, they bargained with him for a charter, a duly written and attested document giving them the power to exercise certain rights, such as the collecting of their own taxes or the managing of their own courts, without the interference of his officials. ”

“ When trouble again arose, the convent of S. Mary found that the enemy had sprung up under the very shadow of the monastery itself, and that the men of Coventry were even more implacable foes than the canons of Lichfield had been in times past. These quarrels between ecclesiastical bodies and their burgher tenants were of common occurrence in mediæval life. The strong corporate feeling which flourished amongst the monks, the zeal they bore for their order in general and their house in particular, which involved them in endless quarrels, caused them to play a notable part in municipal history. ”

“ The king found "benevolences" or forced loans more convenient than subsidies granted by parliament, and in the wars a treaty better served his purpose than a battle, when the French king was willing to pay for peace. The frequent interference of the Prince of Wales's council in city disputes at first ruffled the tempers of the great folk at Coventry not a little. "We, your humble and true servants here," the corporation wrote to the Prince of Wales in 1480, "know of no variance ... here but that we among ourselves, be the grace of God shall amicably and righteously settle." ”

“ Nobles, too, were often willing to forego their manorial privileges for the sake of a substantial sum of money. But with churchmen and religious corporations the case was different. They were unwilling, under any circumstances, to part with the rights of the Church, "for fear," as the Coventry monks said, "of blemishing their consciences." In growing and prosperous communities, where men suffered by the restrictions laid upon their trade or persons, the attitude of the religious community, which stood to them in place of feudal lord, gave rise to great bitterness of feeling among the tenants. ”

“ The city turns its most prosperous side southwards, and the common view of the spires is the one from the south, where the tree-bordered road from Kenilworth, whereon so many kings and queens have travelled, slips into Coventry, past a fringe of ample, comfortable houses, that the well-to-do have raised in our own time. This was Tennyson's view of the spires, and George Eliot must have seen it daily in her school-life, which she passed in the house that is farthest from the town in Warwick Row. ”

“ There were many sights in a mediæval city to remind us that men seldom cared to cloak their brutality in those days. The stocks, where offenders were held by their feet, the pillory, where they were held by the head and hands, stood conspicuous, probably in neighbourhood of the guild-hall. A pillory, a favourite place for the chastisement of fraudulent bakers, may yet be seen in Coleshill, and stocks stand yet on many a village green. ”

“ The gallows, naturally reared on high where all men might see them and their ghastly burden, were probably in sight of the prison; and rich and poor crowded to see a condemned man drawn in a tumbril, or executioner's cart, to the gallows, or a woman exposed to open shame. "It is ordained," an order of leet ran, "that William Rowett, capper, and his paramour be carried and led through the town in a car, in example of punishment of sin, and that all other that be proved in the same sin from this time forward shall have the same pain." ”

“ In Coventry, as elsewhere, the rich merchants and craftsmen set carvers to carve the miserere seats—enjoying the grim humour these sometimes display, a quality which crops up everywhere in the fifteenth century, even now and then in legal documents—and bade the engraver commemorate the dead by tracing their effigies on brass, or the mason by fashioning their portraits in stone. ”

“ In the end the sermons gained the day, and it would be hard to find in the Midlands—save Banbury—a more staunchly Puritan town than Coventry under the Stuarts.
In the sixteenth century the corporation appear to have become disquieted at the reckless lives and illicit amusements of those over whom they ruled. A new era was about to dawn, wherein mediæval barriers would be broken down; and it seems as if the discreet and worthy burghers were afraid of the lawlessness and unrest which had entered into the spirit of society, and which in itself was the sign of coming change. ”

“ But how did the men live who inhabited Coventry, who were neither warriors nor monks, but the rank and file of the townsfolk, the mere tillers of the ground and retailers of food and clothing, farmers, bakers, butchers, shoemakers, weavers, and the like? These men owed fealty, according to the position of the land they held, either to the prior or the Earl of Chester. ”

“ If the English townsfolk never produced a Van Eyck or a Da Vinci, a Peter Fischer or a Donatello, they patronised all the local forms of art they knew. They had the same great delight in the common possession of a beautiful object as the people of the Italian republics. ”

“ To the north of Trinity churchyard are the Cathedral ruins. Little more than the bases of a few fine pillars are left of the once splendid minster, dedicated to S. Mary, S. Peter, S. Osburg, and All Saints. From the gates of Trinity church you pass the top of the picturesque Butcher Row, and, if time does not fail you, may turn down Cross Cheaping—alas that the cross should be no longer there!—till you come to the Old Grammar School, at the corner of Hales Street. ”

“ How early the citizens became aware of the trend of [Pg 76] affairs we know not, but it is, maybe, significant that that popular discontent began to manifest itself within a generation after the incorporation of the city. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the commonalty set order at defiance, reviled the mayor in the guild hall, and sought occasion to break out in riot and tumult, while under the veil of religious societies, industrial combinations—akin to the modern strike—formed again and again, and were with difficulty suppressed. ”

“ After Cheylesmore and the Earl's-half became a royal manor, kings and princes very frequently visited the city; for as Coventry had by this time become an important place—already accounted the fifth city in the kingdom—its wealth was an attraction to needy kings, who desired to be on good terms with burghers who were becoming a power in the land. It was this wealth which enabled the citizens to establish their position in the reign of Edward III. and his grandson by the purchase of fuller and yet fuller charters of liberty ”

“ Prior's-half and Earl's-half
In Coventry we now enter upon a period where the townsmen not only sought to make good the privileges they had already won, but strove to gain, either by fair means or foul, such fresh concessions as they deemed necessary for their comfort and prosperity. The story of the struggle for liberty in English towns, though little known, is one of great interest. Though the whole thing is on a small scale, yet the narrative of events is no less stirring than the account of the revolt of a great nation. ”

“ So when the terms of this new charter were known the Earl's-folk rose in tumult, withstood the priory coroner when he attempted to see the body of a man, slain, no doubt, in these brawls, and prevented their neighbours in the Convent-half from forming the guild according to the permission vouchsafed to them. Nor could the sheriff's officer, sent by the royal order at the prior's request to proclaim these charters and liberties in Coventry, bring the unruly townspeople to obedience. ”

“ God keep you all." [21]
Thus the monastery was endowed by Leofric and Godiva with twenty-four lordships of land; and by the king with full rights of jurisdiction over the tenants dwelling in these various estates, privileges greatly valued by the monks. They laid the two generous founders, the husband in one porch, the wife in the other, of the minster in Coventry, when they came to die. As for this building, it was one of the glories of the age, and seemed too narrow, a chronicler tells us, to contain the abundance of treasure within its walls. ”

“ It is doubtful whether even Buckingham's great influence would have been sufficient to turn the scale in favour of Lancaster in the coming season of strife if the frequent visits of the King and the princes of the reigning family, as well as the old connexion between the city and the first prince of the blood as Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester, had not bred among the citizens a feeling of loyalty, which kept them on the side of Henry and Margaret for many years. ”

“ Much has perished in the destruction of the cathedral, the friars' and other chapels, the cross, a parish church, a guild-hall, and many unremembered buildings; but enough remains to show that we owe a great debt to [Pg 319] those dear, dead folk who knew so many things we have forgotten and loved so many things we have ceased to care for, and above all, knew what to do with stone and glass and metal, and loved their handiwork, for it was good. ”

“ Nowadays, however, it is only old women who profit by their benevolence.
On reaching High Street, which is part of the great north-west road, and the old coaching way between London and Holyhead, it is best to go right on down Pepper Lane, which immediately faces you, until you come to S. Michael's churchyard. This broad open space was, and is still, the centre of the life of the town. Here stood the cathedral and the two great parish churches, the house containing the cloth market, and the guild-hall, where the rulers of the city assembled to take council together. ”

“ Excitements in the guild-hall when the men, whose wages were fixed at statute rate, found they would not avail to buy them proper food, the shouting of angry crowds when the chamberlains at their Lammas ride refused to pull down fences to admit the freemen's sheep and cattle as they had done in times past, must have warned the mayor and his brethren to give heed to their ways. ”

“ Gone, too, is the splendid conduit in the Cross Cheaping, S. Nicholas' Hall in the West Orchard, meeting-place of the Corpus Christi guild; and S. Nicholas' Church, out to the north beyond Bishop Street, which fell to ruin soon after the Reformation. But the "proud pyramidès," the "three spires," remain yet, and give greeting to all who approach Coventry, dominating the flat midland country for many a mile, changing their relative position as the spectator moves, and their colour in the shifting lights. ”

“ In Gosford Street, long, ancient and grimy, was formerly the first station for the performances of the pageants; and in Cox Street, anciently Mill Lane, which runs to the north of Gosford, were the pageant-houses or places for storage of theatrical paraphernalia owned by the crafts. From Gosford the long thoroughfare street passes into Jordan Well—commemorating the well sunk by Jordan Shepey, mayor of Coventry, who died 1349, the year of the Black Death—and thence into Earl Street, where, it may be, a castle of the Earls of Chester once stood with an entrance at Broadgate. ”

“ Coventry was already ceasing to be the well-ordered and peaceful place whereon the mind of King Henry loved to dwell. Next year we hear that the civic finances were disorganised, that the officers of the city were negligent in the performance of their duty, and that the citizens, being "of froward dispositions," were inclined to appeal to "mighty men in strange shires" for their support in carrying on lawsuits against their neighbours in courts without the city. ”

“ Bad times seem rather unaccountably to have befallen the people of Coventry; the city was deeply in debt, and on that account the citizens were probably more willing to lend an ear to Warwick's emissaries. It is possible that foreign trade relations may have more to do than we are at present aware with town politics. The great merchants of the Staple, who were heads of the powerful civic families, and who possessed the monopoly of trade in wool, would welcome the alliance with Burgundy, and a ready export of the raw material to Flanders ”

“ Guilds are best remembered, however, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as monopolist organisations, and a third of all the towns in England, with the possible exception of London, had their merchant guild, or body of traders and handicraftsmen, engrossing the local commerce to the exclusion of all men without their ranks. The craft guild was a century behind the merchant guild in its rise and development. ”