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. 650
