The Boundaries of Popular Control in Late Medieval English Towns

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship on pre-modern popular politics often focuses on speech, identifying the ways in which people outside the elite could have a “voice” in government. Using examples from late medieval English towns, this article argues for the existence of a particular kind of popular politics that centered on seeing and hearing rather than speaking. This type of politics—labeled “popular control”—concerned the right of the urban political community at large to observe rituals of governance and to audit financial accounts. Through these acts of collective witnessing, lesser citizens and non-citizens exerted an indirect political power to restrict leaders’ freedom of action and to ensure that their performance of office abided by set rules. The unusually detailed Hall Rolls and Hall Books produced by the civic government of Lynn in 1412–13 and 1418–25 illustrate that “popular control,” far from being a vehicle for increasing the urban commons’ “voice” in municipal decision-making, often stood in opposition to principles of elected representation. After 1418, more people were being admitted to the inner sanctum of virtuous individuals deemed capable of offering rational counsel to mayors and jurats, but there were fewer opportunities for the wider public to witness performances of governance by this expanded group of decision-makers. The crux of debate in fifteenth-century English towns—and, perhaps, in the tumultuous world of late medieval Europe more generally—was often less about who should exercise political influence and more about how popular political power could be exercised most appropriately and effectively.