Tag Archives: freedom of the city

The right to vote in 19th century Britain

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If you see human history as a story of unending progress, leading from ignorance to enlightenment, you might at the very least want to admit that progress hasn’t gone in a straight line. Take, for example, Britain and the right to vote. The number of people who could vote did gradually expand, but boy did the country find some interesting ways to go a-wandering on its path toward universal suffrage.

I’m picking up here on an earlier post about the 1832 voting reforms. This one isn’t specifically about that set of changes, although it is connected. If you haven’t read the older one, I’ll never know, but if you want to go back and fill in the blank, here’s your link. Meanwhile, the rest of us will waddle on, never knowing whether you’re with us or not. 

Irrelevant photo: Mallow

 

Women, men, and freedom of the city

In many nineteenth-century boroughs–that pretty much translates to towns and cities–men with the freedom of the city had the right to vote.

The freedom of the what? 

The phrase goes back to feudal times, when a freeman was someone who wasn’t the property of a feudal lord and when living in a city for more than a year and not getting hauled back to the land could free you.  

Were there free women? Yes, but they don’t seem to have gone into the language in the same way. Funny how that works. 

Even while feudalism was turning to dust, echoes of the system were burrowing their way into the language, and the freedom of the city is one of the echoes. In those nineteenth-century boroughs (didn’t think I’d get back to that, did you?), having the freedom of the city gave you more than the right to vote. Depending on what city you lived in, it might also give you the right to trade or own property in the city; it would connect you to a network of people with money and power; it might allow you to graze your cattle on the town square, but only if you actually owned cattle. But let’s focus on that one benefit, the right to vote.

 

How could you get the freedom of the city?

You could get it by being apprenticed to a freeman or you could inherit it from your father. Or grandfather. Or–well, how many generations back you could go would depend on what city’s freedom you were claiming. 

In some towns, only one son could inherit it; in others multiple sons could. And in some, a daughter could inherit, only she couldn’t use it to cast a vote herself. What she could do was enfranchise her husband so he could vote. The widow of a freeman (again, only in some boroughs) could do the same, enfranchising a second husband, and if he died, possibly a third.  

After the 1832 electoral reforms, the number of boroughs where women could enfranchise a husband shrank from 90 to 15 (did I mention that progress doesn’t know what a straight line is?), but at a time when women’s power in the public sphere was somewhere between minuscule and not noticeable at all, this bit of compromised power is worth  noticing.

Like everything else connected to this story, terms and conditions applied and they varied from place to place. As did the proportion of voters who were enfranchised by their wives rather than voting in their own right: it might’ve been a third here, a sixth someplace else. Pull a number out of a hat and you can convince me that it applied somewhere. 

In some boroughs, marriage wasn’t enough to enfranchise a man. The wife’s consent was required as well. 

 

Why the right to vote mattered

I’ve always taken it for granted that having the vote was about political power, so expanding it was about spreading the power outward and giving new groups of people a voice. I’ve lived around universal suffrage all my life, which is long enough to know that it hasn’t even come close to spreading power out universally, but that didn’t completely knock the rose-colored glasses off my face. 

The belief that having the vote meant you had a voice isn’t entirely wrong–people fought for it and some died for it, and it has made a difference–but it isn’t the whole story either. In the nineteenth century, having the vote gave you some immediate benefits many people would’ve found more useful than that abstraction about having a voice.

Political wheelers and dealers might’ve offered them free food, drink, and until polling places moved closer to the voters, (generous) travel expenses on polling day. Outright bribes weren’t uncommon. In 1774, in Hindon, Wiltshire, householders (a group who were eligible to vote after the 1832 reforms expanded the electorate) were given as much as 20 guineas each. That would be something along the lines of £2,000 in today’s money. 

It wasn’t legal but it also wasn’t uncommon. 

People’s votes were public, so they couldn’t just pocket the money and vote for the candidate they liked. Not only did they have to declare their vote publicly, it would be written down, along with their name, occupation, and address, becoming part of the public record.

A candidate might also get an opponent’s supporters too drunk to vote. If you’re the opponent, that’s dirty pool, but if you’re a voter and don’t much care who wins, a drink is a drink and a chance to get so drunk you land on the floor? Let’s drink to that.

So forget about using their vote, these voters were without question being used, but for a lot of people the material advantages of being voters would’ve outweighed any abstraction. And I’ll bet a ham sandwich that it was a rare election when the outcome made a difference to the voters’ circumstances after the food and drink were gone and the bribes had been spent.

What does freedom of the city mean?

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Not long after Prince Andrew gave up on huffing and puffing until he blew down Virginia Giuffre’s house–in other words, after he settled her lawsuit out of court–the city of York rescinded an honor it had given him back when he looked a bit less sleazy than he does today: the freedom of the city.

This is significant because, um, why?

Well, it’s not, really. Or it is, but only if you take British traditions seriously, which I have some trouble doing but I’m sure Andy doesn’t. No one could run around dressed in those uniforms if they didn’t take it all seriously. 

Still, in the avalanche of bad publicity that’s fallen on him lately, York’s contribution is barely a pebble. But since it’s an intriguing pebble, let’s talk about what this freedom of the city business is.

Irrelevant photo: This was taken during either Storm Dudley or Eunice, although I’m damned if I remember which one. My partner swore they sounded like an aunt and uncle from Oklahoma–ones no one looked forward to seeing. All that white stuff? That’s foam. We had enough wind to whip the ocean into a meringue.

Starting at the beginning

Freedom of the city dates back to the middle ages, when lords were lords and serfs weren’t free and any sensible person would’ve told you this was the natural order of things. 

All that non-freedom is what made the freedom of the city matter.

According to a “purported law” of William the Conqueror’s–he’s the guy, remember, who won England as his very own plaything in 1066–“If serfs reside without challenge for a year and a day in our cities, or in our walled towns, or in our castles, from that day they will effectively be free men and forever free from their bonds of servitude.”

For a law that’s no more than purported, it seems to have had an impressive impact. It was repeated in various ways by various cities and rulers. Henry II gave Lincoln a charter saying, “Should anyone reside in my city of Lincoln for a year and a day without being claimed by any claimant, and he is contributing towards the customary dues of the city, and the citizens can prove (by the customary legal process of the city) that a claimant was present in England but made no claim upon him, thereafter he may remain in my city of Lincoln, undisturbed as before, as my citizen, without legal challenge.”

For claimant, you can substitute lord–someone with a feudal right to claim this person as, effectively, his property.

Elsewhere, you’ll find specific statements about a villein (that’s what you and I would call a serf) being freed of villeinage if he lives “undisturbed for a year and a day in any privileged town, to the point that he is accepted into its community (that is, gild) he is thereby freed from villeinage.”

Gild? That’s what we’d call a guild. Hold onto that word, because we’ll come back to it.

 

Consulting the grownups about this

Notice that bit about privileged towns. This year-and-a-day stuff didn’t work in just any town. You couldn’t hide out for the required time in your local market town and hope to be free. The magic only worked if the spell was written into the town’s charter. 

But not every town or city was welcoming to fugitive serfs.

Do I have details about that? I do not. The best I can tell you is that historians aren’t in universal agreement over how common it was for villeins to free themselves this way, or how welcoming or unwelcoming towns were. And since historians are the grownups in this discussion, we’ll leave this for them to work out while we go upstairs and do whatever they told us not to.

It’s worth knowing that free men didn’t live only in cities. They also lived in the countryside, working the land more or less as serfs did. The difference was that they rented their land, didn’t owe the lord any service in kind, and were free to leave, although they couldn’t necessarily afford to. You could be free and as poor as the neighboring serf–or poorer. 

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

 

Two footnotes 

  1. Becoming a free man didn’t make you a freeman. That was a different category and we’ll get to it in a minute. What being a free man did do was make you not-a-serf, which was a major change in status,even if it wasn’t the solution to all your problems. 
  2. Almost everything I’ve found talks about free men. Only the Guild of Freemen of the City of London website acknowledges references to women having been guild members. Given the English language’s counterproductive tradition of sometimes insisting that men means both men and women and the rest of the time insisting that men means only men, figuring out what we’re talking about here isn’t easy, but the year-and-a-day thing does seem to have applied to women. As far as I can tell.

 

Guilds, freemen, and free men

It’s not just the men and women who are hard to tell apart. Several websites get woozy about the difference between free men and freemen. So when the city of Birmingham, by way of example, explains what freemen means, it’s hard to know if it applies to both free men and freemen.

Don’t you just love the English language?

What does the Brimingham website say? “The medieval term ‘freeman’ meant someone . . . who had the right to earn money and own their own land. People who were protected by the charter (rules) of their town or city were often ‘free’, hence the term ‘Freedom of the City.’ ”

Are you confused yet? 

Good. Then you’re following the discussion. You could live in a city and be free, but not be a freeman, and therefore (at least as time went by) not someone who had the freedom of the city. To become a freeman of a city or town, you had to be accepted by one of its guilds, and they limited their membership. If too many people have the right to practice as, say, goldsmiths, prices will drop.

The medieval guilds were powerful organizations, made up of merchants or craftspeople (who weren’t always men). They had a monopoly on their corner of the economy and regulated trade, standards,  apprenticeships, and prices. Each one protected its interests, and they often controlled city or town governments.  

If you couldn’t become a member–and unless you had connections, you probably couldn’t–you might well be free and a man, but you were stuck working as a laborer. You weren’t a freeman of the city.

 

More about freemen

The Portsmouth City Council website skips over free men and goes straight for freemen: “The institution of freemen or burgesses dates from the early beginnings of municipal corporations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Freemen or burgesses enjoyed considerable political privileges, being entitled to elect the officers of the corporation and its representatives in Parliament, although they were not necessarily resident in the borough of which they were burgesses or freemen.”

In this context, the corporation was the city government.

“In choosing freemen or burgesses, boroughs found it convenient to admit men of national importance who might be able to secure greater economic or political privileges for the area. Prominent local landowners with interests in a borough would reward their supporters by securing their admission as freemen or burgesses–between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries a very high proportion of the known burgesses in Portsmouth were not resident in the borough.”

In other words, freemen were a select group of a city’s residents (or, just to confuse the picture, non-residents). They were people with power and money. That held until 1835, when the Municipal Corporations Act established city councils. After that, they might very well still have held power, but they had to exercise it differently.

 

Can we confuse the issue a bit more?

Of course we can. Let’s go to Texas, where a couple of Freedom of the City certificates are sitting in the Ransom Center, which led the center to write about them.

One certificate was issued in London in 1776 to Michael Dancer at the end of his apprenticeship. It was big–2 feet by 5 inches–and came with a tube so Mick could roll it up and carry it around with him. The Ransom Center swears that people would have carried these the way we might carry a passport or driver’s license today, to prove identity and citizenship. 

I offer you a grain of salt to go with that explanation. They might well have needed the document for one thing and another–only people who’d been granted freedom of the city could exercise a trade within London’t city limits, and that held true until 1835–but I’d guess it was too important to cart around the streets every day like a driver’s license. 

The Ransom Center tells us that along with a freedom of the city certificate, London also presented its new members with “a book titled Rules for the Conduct of Life, which was intended to guide them in their life as freemen. While providing many basic laws and recommended codes of conduct, the book also outlined several interesting freedoms available only to freemen.  For example, the book notes freemen have the right to herd sheep over the London Bridge, go about the city with a drawn sword, and—if convicted of a capital offense—to be hung with a silken rope. Other ascribed privileges are said to include the right to be married in St. Paul’s cathedral, to be buried in the city, and to be drunk and disorderly without fear of arrest.”

I’m not exercised about where I get buried–I hope to be past caring by then–but that silken rope might make freedom of the city worth pursuing. 

 

What does being a freeman of the city get you today?

Not much. Let’s limit ourselves to London: You can’t drive sheep across London Bridge anymore. Capital punishment’s been abolished, so if you want to be hung with a silken rope you’ll have to make your own arrangements. I’m not sure what the law is on drawn swords, but I‘d recommend doing some research before you try it. Folks get twitchy about swords these days, no matter what certificate you’re carrying.

That makes the freedom of the city something you can put on your resume, if you have one, but that’s about it. It’s just a bit of English tradition that you’re welcome to take seriously if you can.