Upon entering the city some scouts, sent ahead, found many rebels determined to offer every possible resistance. Fighting followed immediately and thus London was plunged into mourning for the loss of her sons and citizens. When the Londoners finally realized that they could resist no longer, they gave hostages and surrendered themselves and all they possessed to the most noble conqueror and hereditary lord.1
William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The London that William now ruled was already the largest and richest city in his kingdom, the centre of national and international trade, but it was not the political or royal capital. William’s need to guard himself ‘against the fickleness of the vast and fierce population’ led to the construction of three towers: Baynard’s Castle, Montfichet Tower and the White Tower. The first two were later demolished, but the limestone White Tower still dominates the Tower of London, surrounded now by the walls added in the thirteenth century.
The City government that would come to dominate the affairs of the capital was still embryonic. There would be no mayor for 100 years and the two sheriffs, royal appointees responsible for delivering tax to the Crown, were named the leading officials. But the City was already divided into twenty-four wards, and the aldermen who would represent them on the City’s governing council were beginning to appear. The trade guilds and fraternities were also in formation.
An important opening episode in the City of London’s long struggle with the Crown followed the death of Henry I in 1135. The succession was disputed between Henry’s daughter Matilda and Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois. The powerful group of nobles backing Stephen got their way, but at the cost of plunging the nation into nearly twenty years of civil strife. Chroniclers describe this period as one in which ‘Christ and his saints were asleep’, while Victorian historians called it simply ‘The Anarchy’.
Stephen’s base of support was in south-east England, but the Crown was too weak to impose order. This gave the City of London an unusual moment of leverage. In Stephen’s time of greatest danger, while held captive in Winchester by Matilda in 1141, he obtained the support of London by granting it virtual commune status. This is the closest the City came to being a self-governing urban confederation able to collect its own taxes and choose its own officials on the European model. In return, when Matilda tried to have herself crowned queen while she held Stephen captive, the masses of London rose and attacked her and her supporters at their pre-coronation feast. They were driven from the City and Londoners also provided the arms to free Stephen from his captivity in Winchester. The commune status of London was reasserted in 1191.
London first began to express its independence from the Crown in the twelfth century. This was, of course, nothing resembling democracy but rather the ability of the aldermen to select their own sheriff following the model of city states, like those in northern Italy. But the concessions that the City was able to extract from weak or cash-strapped monarchs fell far short of the ideal. Italian Republics or the communes found in Flanders and the Rhineland were widespread in the feudal period, but not in England. They were based on a pledge of allegiance among citizens that released them from aristocratic or royal control. This pact offered a completely different form of social coexistence: a ‘community of equals’ governed by a social contract.2 London never achieved this status, but its struggle for autonomy was a feature of the conflicts with the Crown in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What the London elite wanted was the liberty to appoint their own administrative leader, run their own legal system, gather their own taxes, and regulate their own trade. Even powerful monarchs might be minded to grant some of these wishes, if they thought it would enhance London’s prosperity and therefore their own income.
London’s would-be governing classes only began to achieve some autonomy in the reigns of King Richard I and King John, between 1189 and 1216. Richard’s absence in Palestine gave the City the chance to ally with John against Richard’s unpopular deputy, William Longchamp, Constable of the Tower. In return for supporting John’s claim to rule in Richard’s absence, London’s aldermen were given the right to choose a mayor. On Richard’s return, however, the City refused to back John’s attempt to take the throne in 1194. Yet when he eventually became king in 1199, and upon payment of a gift of 1,500 marks, he allowed the commune to stand. For the further sum of 3,000 marks the City was permitted to elect its own sheriff.
Paradoxically, King John’s defeat by the barons who forced him to sign Magna Carta in June 1215 at Runnymede was the event that finally institutionalized the concessions he had made to the City years before. In order to buy London’s loyalty against the barons, John granted the City a new charter in May 1215 that introduced the principle of an annually elected mayor. But a minority of the City sided with the barons and, despite John’s concessions, opened the gates to the barons a few days later. This allowed the barons to use the City as a base for their negotiations with the king, and as a result the City’s ‘ancient liberties and customs’ were inscribed in Magna Carta itself. From now on the sheriffs were elected by the City oligarchy and increasingly subordinate to the mayor. And the mayor was elected from among the aldermen each October at a gathering of the ‘commonalty’, those who had gained by inheritance, purchase, or apprenticeship the right to name the ‘citizen’ or ‘freeman’ of the City. From now on, mayor and aldermen became increasingly responsible for the law in the City.
This was obviously not democracy in the modern sense, since it excluded apprentices, masterless men, wage labourers, the poor in general and women in total. But neither was it a complete sham, for these excluded classes were not as numerous as they are now, and the ‘citizens’ represented a broad swathe of the population, many of whom were not part of the traditional feudal ruling class. These layers came to form the Common Council of the City, which the aldermen were likely to consult on matters of importance. By the fourteenth century the members of the Council were elected by wards and, sometimes, guilds. Although it may have been used earlier, the Guildhall was from the twelfth century the meeting place of City administration, such as it was. In 1411 the hall was rebuilt on a grander scale, and much of the original remains visible in the modern building.
The London oligarchy which ran this system was rich from land, commerce and trade, and royal patronage. They owned shops and tenements, warehouses and quays, urban and rural manors. They were traders, but not exclusively so and not in a single commodity – that would come later. As some trades and businesses prospered and others faltered, so power migrated from one section of the elite to another. But we should be careful of concluding that these interests always put the City elite at odds with the Crown. The City wanted self-government, but it also needed an economic and a foreign policy that suited its interests, and this was something that only the Crown could provide. Moreover, the Crown was a market in its own right and most members of the London elite profited directly from royal contracts and employment. Over half the sheriffs and aldermen between 1200 and 1340 whose interests can be identified held posts in the Royal Exchequer or the Royal Wardrobe, were royal suppliers or contractors, or were in some other way in Crown service.3
There were always, however, underlying tensions in the relationship between Crown and City. And at certain moments the voice of the citizens, and sometimes of the popular mass below them, could exploit these tensions with movements and demands of their own. One such moment was seized by William Longbeard.
THE REBELLION OF WILLIAM LONGBEARD
William Longbeard’s 1196 revolt is little studied by historians, but it is an early example of a class revolt in English history, and it was no accident that it happened in London.4 Longbeard’s true name was William fitz Osbern and he seems to have been a member of London’s elite: ‘in origin of the most noble citizens of London’. He was possibly a lawyer and seems to have taken part in the Third Crusade, which again suggests a relatively high social rank. Nevertheless, in the early stages of the revolt – which may have lasted for over a year – he appealed to the king to lift the burden of taxation on the poor. Longbeard’s complaint in particular was against the ‘insolence of the rich and powerful’ and their plans to place the tax burden upon the poor. A contemporary chronicler, Roger of Howden, records that ‘the rich men, sparing their own purses, wanted the poor to pay everything’, and notes that William Longbeard ‘becoming sensible of this, being inflamed by zeal