But the burghers were still dissatisfied with so precarious a tenure of independence. There was a proposal which came to nothing to unite the bailiff and jurats of the town with the bailiff and jurats of the marsh; but in 1484 the people profited by the troubles of Richard’s reign to plan a thoroughgoing revolution.[788] They set up a mayor for themselves, and sent to have a silver mace made at Canterbury under the very walls of the Cathedral precincts. The Archbishop called in the help of the Crown and the great people of the London law courts, and after much battling and negotiation the matter was ended before the year was out by a Privy Seal being sent down to Romney to depose the mayor. Before a generation had passed away however the struggle broke out again with new vigour, and in 1521 town and prelate were again quarrelling over all the old grievances.[789]
The main point of the burghers’ argument was to deny the Archbishop’s assertion that “the town is all bishopric.” The jurats contended that “from all time” they had had the privileges of one of the capital Five Ports, that their grant of “streme and strond” of the sea and all other rights came to them from the King and not the Archbishop; and that they held the greater part of their town directly from the Crown,[790] on which land the Archbishop had no right to enter, and the commonalty had rights of justice. So also the Archbishop had no right to the marsh and pasturage of four hundred acres which had once been creek and haven, but had been left dry land since about 1380 by the withdrawal of the sea a good half-mile from the town, for this “void place” left by the main course of the stream through the town belonged to the King. Arguing therefore from this fiction of being on royal soil the jurats went on to claim the popular control of justice which was used in royal boroughs, and frowardly kept the courts without the bailiff, boldly asserting in their own defence that he was at the best but a minister of the King’s courts in Romney and not a judge; for if the town courts were in fact courts of the King, they were under the royal grants and charters which ordained that mayor and jurats, or bailiff and jurats, _elected by the people_, were to hold courts, hear pleas, and have fines and amercements and other profits of leets and law-days; and therefore since the bailiff of Romney was not elected by the commons he was clearly excluded and had nothing to do in the said courts save as minister and executioner, and any record of pleas before him was void. In times past, they declared, he had merely been allowed to sit among them by favour, and not of duty. The fines raised at leets and law-days they claimed for the town’s use, saying that these had only been given to the most Reverend Father by the favour of the jurats to obtain his good lordship; but that he had never any right whatever to leet or law-day, fine or amercement. So persistent were their protestations of independence that it seems as though ultimately the Archbishop’s heavy wrath settled down to rest on the town. When Cranmer leased out the bailiwick of Hythe to the townspeople,[791] he refused to give to Romney a similar lease—a gift which it had begged of Courtenay a hundred and fifty years before. Cranmer’s lordship indeed came to an end at the Reformation, but even then Romney was for a time governed by its senior jurat, and it was not until 1563 that it seemed to have sufficiently purged its iniquity, and that Elizabeth finally allowed its people to elect a mayor.