Name: Town Life in the Fifteenth Century Volume 2
Author: Alice Stopford Green
ISBN: 1402152884

Town Life in the Fifteenth Century Volume 2

By Alice Stopford Green 10 May, 2019

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The controversy concerning the bounds and limits of their freedom, which the English boroughs were forced to maintain with powerful organizations already settled in the land—with the monarchy, the baronage, or the Church—represented in the history of each municipality that which in the case of States of greater magnitude we call the foreign policy of the commonwealth. But whatever may be the compass of a dominion, whether it be a borough or an empire, no influence is more potent in shaping the character and destiny of the community than the nature of its external relations. It was in the single-handed conflict with foreign powers, whether superior lord or insidious rival, that the drapers and mercers, the smiths and butchers and weavers of every country town were forced, with a patriotism quickened by necessity, to meddle in matters of State and to concern themselves about the public weal; their ardours were stirred by legends of an ancient freedom, while their political instinct was trained by incessant discussion of legal precedent and right; and in the strain of perpetual taxation, in heavy burdens imposed upon a people whose prosperity was new, uncertain, or shifting; above all in the strengthening of certain forms of narrow municipal despotism born of the struggle against external danger, they paid the price of a bracing public discipline. Less

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