SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



becoming, if it had not already become, the wealthiest and most populous in 

 the county. The cloth industry, which was destined to transform the social 

 life of the county, was already established there, and a little later Bury was 

 to supply London with its leading cloth manufacturer." The yearly fair of 

 Bury was much frequented by the merchants of London," who could buy in 

 its Skinners Row and its Vicus Francorum the costly wares of Flanders and 

 Italy. ^* When Henry III wished to replenish his wardrobe and the ward- 

 robe of his sister Isabella with a set of furred robes of scarlet and black 

 burnet, and with tunics, over-tunics, and mantles wrought in the looms of 

 Ghent and of Ypres, he issued his mandate to William the royal tailor to go 

 in his proper person and bargain for them in Bury Fair.^' The enterprise 

 of such a centre of trade could not flourish if the management of its affairs 

 were to be controlled from the chapter-house and if every extra shilling of 

 profit were to be held on sufferance at the will of the abbot. 



In point of fact the burgesses had practically established themselves in a 

 certain degree of independence. They chose their own bailiffs, though they 

 might go through the form of presenting them at the abbey, and when the 

 bailiffs had paid a fixed farm of £,^0 they considered themselves entitled to 

 let the shops and stalls in the market-place to the best advantage of the town. 

 They would not allow the abbot's servants to be free of toll in the market 

 unless they were selling his produce or buying for his use. If they dealt for 

 their own profit they must belong to their merchant gild. They had, 

 moreover, their borough court or portmanmoot, presided over by those who 

 were nominally the abbot's servants, but who were really their own elected 

 magistrates, and the wardship of minors went not to the lord of the borough, 

 but to the next of kin." Such was the situation in the time of Abbot Sampson 

 (i 1 82-1 21 1), who was statesman enough to perceive the futility of trying to 

 enforce on a vigorously growing community the letter of a legal arrange- 

 ment that was becoming obsolete. For the sake of pacifying the monks he 

 insisted on the bailiffs receiving the horn of office from the prior, but he left 

 them in unfettered exercise of the office, was ready to meet the townsmen 

 in their attempts to get rid of feudal obligations, and even promoted a 

 compromise by which those tenants of the cellarer who lived outside the 

 town gates might share in one of the chief privileges of the borough. The 

 monks had no sympathy with these concessions. They thought the farm of 

 the town should' be raised. When rep-silver and sor-peni were commuted, 

 the convent took it in ill part, and Benedict the sub-prior, answering for all 

 in the chapter, said, 'That man, Abbot Ording, who lies there would not 

 have done such a thing for five hundred marks of silver.'" 



The rights and privileges which in the case of Bury were only conceded 

 partially, impUcitly, and with reservations that boded a future of stubborn 

 conflict, were at the same time in the towns that had no lord except the 

 king being achieved much more fully and explicitly by the grant of a 

 royal charter. In the reign of John — a great epoch of municipal enfranchise- 

 ment — and both in the same year of 1200, Ipswich and Dunwich received 



" Fulk de St. Edmund, to whom there are many references in Letter Bk. A of the London records. 



" Mem. (Roll Ser.), i, 278. " Harl. MS. 27. 



» Cel. Close, 1231-4, p. 4. " Mem. (Rolls Ser.), i, 277, 281. 



" Ibid, i, 300. 



