EXETER.*
Or Mr. Freeman it is truer than of most other writers to say, Nihil tetigit quo,. non (outwit, and it is not least tree of this latest work of his, the History of Exeter, which is, he tells us, a kind of introductory volume to what promises to be a most interesting series of local English histories, called Historic Towns. After reading it, we must, indeed, confess that it would appear that the records of English towns are not likely to afford the basis for any very thrilling or dramatic story in the same sense, or anything like the same sense, as the story of Athens, or Florence, or even Ghent and Antwerp, could be made thrilling and dramatic. As Mr. Freeman says, the history of Exeter is not as great as the history of Nuremberg, because the history of Eng- land is greater than the history of Germany. A history of Exeter, since the Conquest at least, can consist of little more than, as it were, the diary of a great statesman in a constitutional State, which may contain scattered incidents and allusions from which the whole history of the State can be guessed at, but which is not a history of the State ; while the history of a city like Athens resembles rather the "books of the Kings" of a despotic monarchy, where the journal of the ruler is the history of the State. Consequently, in reeding this history of Exeter, we do not dwell continuously in a region of la haute politique, but we descend towards the less elevated sphere of parochial history. The history of Exeter may be the history of the "capital of the West," but we cannot forget that it is a local, not a national head, of a provincial and not an Imperial West.
The most interesting thing in the history of Exeter as an English city, is the earliest thing we learn of it, and that rather by inference than by direct narration :-
" The city on the Evil in all ages and in all tongues keeping its name as the City on the Exe is the one great city of the Boman and the Briton which did not pass into English hands till the strife of races had ceased to be a strife of creeds, till English conquest had come to mean simply conquest, and no longer meant havoc and extermination. It is the one city of the present England in which we can see within recorded times the Briton and the Englishman living side by side. It is the one city in which we can feel sure that human habitation and city life have never ceased from the days of the early CEesars to our
own."
The early Caesars are only matter of inference from coins of Nero and Vespasian. The real history of Exeter begins with its seizure by the Danes in 876, on their flight from Alfred; and its siege by them and rescue from them by him in 894. It is by a chance mention in 926 that Athelstan —if we may be pardoned for so writing the name—" cleansed the city of the contaminated race" of Britons, that the inference is raised that here alone in England till that time the original Welsh were allowed to live side by side with the conquering Sassenach. In 1003, Exeter was again taken by the Danes, from a Norman bailiff of the Norman wife of Ethelred the Unready. In 1046, Devonshire and Cornivall were made into a single Bishopric—" home-rule " was only restored to the latter with Bishop Benson—and given to a Cornish Briton with an English name and a Frankish or Belgian education, who removed the See from Crediton to Exeter. Exeter resisted, was besieged, and taken by, William the Conqueror in 1068, and the Castle of Rougemont (which terrified Richard HI. by its name of Richmond) was built to keep the people in order. This siege is the origin of a good deal of what Professor Huxley calls "beneficent iteration," in Mr. Freeman's most interesting style, the first foreign William entering into Exeter by the East Gate as a conqueror, and the second foreign William (of Orange) entering Exeter by the West Gate as a deliverer. Except that both Kings were called William, there seems to be no more reason for harping on this string of analogy than there was for the famous one between Macedon and Monmouth. Exeter was besieged again, but in vain, by Harold's sons in 1069 ; the castle was besieged and taken by Stephen ; the city was besieged in vain by the Lancastrians in 1470, by Perkin Warbeck in 1497, by the anti-Reformation party in 1549, successfully by the Royalists in 1643, unsuccess- • Hietorie 2121D1111. Edited kg E. A. Freeman and W. Htint.—Exeter. By E. A. Freeman, D.O.L., So. London Longmans, Green, and Co.
fully by Fairfax in 1645, for the last time, and successfully, in 1646,—altogether a fair allowance of sieges and takings. But except in 1069 against the Conqueror, and in 1549 against Henry innovations, Exeter never became the head and front of any great national or even local movement, and the last uprising in favour of reaction is not perhaps wholly to its credit.
More interesting is the municipal history of the town. Here, as in London and other cities, we see the same process going on of the ousting from power of the democracy, the immensa cow. munitas, the whole body of inhabitants, by a narrow oligarchy. This oligarchy first appears in 1288, as merely a jury of twenty- four, or double jury, sworn for a definite purpose,—that of electing Aldermen ; in 1301, it is stated that twenty-four elected the Mayor ; in 1347, it is ordered that twenty-four shall elect the Mayor ; by 1427, the Mayor and the Common Council have usurped the legislative power of the Mayor, bailiffs, and com- monalty ; and by 1496, they provide that the Mayor and twenty- four shall elect all the officers of the city. At last, in Henry VII.'s reign, the usurping body receives legal power by charter from the Crown, and from thence to the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, the general body of freemen had no share in the government of the city, beyond nominally choosing for the Mayoralty one of two nominees of the twenty-four. But the general body of freemen themselves had also become an oligarchic and exclusive body in the presence of the " foreigners "who were not free of the city, and in 1835, out of 28,000 inhabitants, numbered only 586. As, however, Exeter had been made a county by Henry VIII., the Parliamentary franchise was not so restricted as in other towns—Winchester, for example—but all freeholders, as well as freemen, had a vote. In old days, the exclusion of non-freemen was a great practical hardship. The City Court was a Court of Probate ; it had its common law and criminal jurisdiction in the Provost's Court ; and the city possessed the power of incorporating Companies, and the crafts of the Taylors, the Bakers, the Cordwainers, the Tuckers, the Carpenters and Masons, and others, traded, like the London City Guilds, with exclusive privileges and freedom from dues and tolls, to be in their turn superseded in wealth and dignity and exclusiveness by the Governor, Consuls, and Society of Merchant Vintners. All of them now have vanished, according to Mr. Freeman, but the Weavers, Tuckers, and Shearmen. Returning to the freemen, it is curious to note as one of their privileges (though seemingly not held a privilege, as it was abolished by Act of Parliament in Elizabeth's reign), that land descended according to the custom of gravelkind, not by primogeniture. The ecclesiastical history of Exeter is not par- ticularly interesting. It is noteworty that Mr. Freeman wholly acquits Oliver Cromwell, as represented by Fairfax (for Cromwell himself never went there), of alleged damage to the Cathedral, or breach of the articles under which the city was taken. The damage actually done he attributes to the excessive zeal of the faithful, who took home bits of "Peter stone," knocked out of the fabric of the Cathedral, as sovereign specifics for divers disorders, and to the destructive reforming energies of its own Canons, Deans, and Bishops under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth.
We may conclude with a word of warning against being his- torical over-mach. When looking on an ancient institution with reference to modern reforms, Mr. Freeman seems to forget alike his Liberal principles and his common-sense. He regards the deprivation of Exeter of one of its Members in 1885 "as a blow to old associations hardly counterbalanced by any practical gain," and seems to look on it as a historic outrage that "old historic London is cat down to two Members, and Exeter to one only." But as Exeter has a population of 37,000 and London of 50,000, while there are many constituencies of 60,000 and 70,000, and some of 80,000 people, the concession to historical sentiment in 1885, which inflicts injustice on the " unhistorical " communities, was really not too little, but too great.
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