A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



the salmon of Suffolk rivers, the shell-fish of its estuaries, the herrings of its 

 coasts, and the cod and mackerel, sturgeon and whale brought by the men 

 of Dunwich or of Gorleston from the North Sea or from Iceland. In the 

 Cloth Market, the Timber Market, and in Mercery Row the foreign 

 merchant met not merely the Ipswich trader, but many others who came 

 from inland towns to bargain with him there." 



The main business of the town was thus to act as a broker between 

 foreigners and upland men, and between these two sets of outsiders and the 

 burgesses. But this function was far too profitable to be effectively 

 retained, as the law required, in pubHc hands. The town's prosperity 

 brought into existence a class of middlemen, and it was from this class that 

 the bailiffs and other town officials were largely drawn. Hence complaints 

 of private brokerage are mingled with denunciations of the abuse of official 

 power. At Ipswich, as at Dunwich,^^ the conflict between the ruling clique 

 and the rank and file of burgesses led to a temporary suspension of the 

 constitution under Edward I. An Ipswich ordinance of 1319 forbids the 

 dealings of those who act as hosts to merchants and make private sale of 

 their commodities, keeping a fourth part to themselves, and in the same year 

 a number of safeguards were erected against the tyranny of the bailiffs. 

 They were to be openly and annually elected, and to receive a fixed fee. 

 Two sufficient persons of the inferior sort of people were to be elected 

 chamberlains and to check the bailiffs accounts, and four men were to be 

 elected to keep the keys of the Common Hutch where the Common Seal 

 was kept." 



While Ipswich was struggling for reform. Bury was still fighting for 

 freedom. After two severe contests in 1264 and 1293 ^^^ abbot and his 

 town confronted each other in a drawn battle. The burgesses held the 

 gates, exercised the power of gild merchants and elected their alderman, but 

 the power of taxation and the control of the town courts remained in the 

 hands of the abbot. In 1304 the men of Bury struck another blow for 

 freedom. They held the town by force, compelled all traders to join their 

 gild, levied taxation and convened the courts under the presidency of their 

 alderman. The abbot, however, soon proved too strong for them. The 

 king's judges set aside all their claims. The gild merchant was no longer to 

 levy its fines, and the alderman elected by the town must swear on the high 

 altar of the abbey to preserve all the rights of St. Edmund. The town had 

 to submit, but treasured its grievance against another day of reckoning." 



The events of the rising of 1327 were part of a national crisis, and the 

 same immediate cause to which the troubles at Bury must be referred — the 

 paralysis of the central government in the last days of Edward II — produced 

 almost exactly the same situation at St. Albans, where the abbot's villeins 

 secured by intimidation a charter which remained in force five years." At 

 Bury the revolution had not run its full course till the new king had been 

 nearly two and a half years upon the throne, and the first victorious phase 

 lasted almost exactly twelve months. On 14 January 1327 a body of several 



" V. B. Redstone, ' The Chaucer MsItii Family ' in Suff. Arch. Inst. vol. xii. 

 "Ca/. Pat. 1272-81, pp. 2, 4, 89. " N. Bacon, Ann. of Ipswich, 54-6. 



" Mrs. Green, Town Life in tit l^th Cent, i, 296-7 ; Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. xiv, App. viii, 125-8. 

 " J. A. Froude, ' Annals of an English Abbey,' in Short Studies on Great Subjects, iii ; cf. also situation at 

 Canterbury : Rogers, Six Cents, of Work and Wages. 



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