No sooner was the dispute finally decided than rancour quickly died away, and the burgesses of Bristol settled down into the most friendly relations with Berkeley castle. The lords of Berkeley took to trading in wool and corn and wine, and went partners with Bristol men in robbing carracks of Genoa as well as in lawful traffic.[584] So far had the wheel of fortune turned that one of the lords who made a treaty of peace with the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury meekly appeared before the mayor and council of Bristol to give surety;[585] and when he went out to fight at Nibley the Bristol merchants sent men to his help.[586] The alliance was cemented by marriage when a Berkeley in 1475 took to wife a daughter of the mayor of Bristol;[587] and when she died in 1517 the mayor, the master of the Guild, the aldermen, sheriffs, chamberlains, and wardens of Bristol, and thirty-three crafts, followed the coffin with two hundred torches—altogether a multitude of five or six thousand people. A “drinking” was made by the family for the mayor and his brethren in St. Mary’s Hall, at which they were entertained with a first course of cakes, comfits, and ale, followed by another of marmalade, snoket, red wine, and claret, and a third of wafers and blanch powder, with romney and muscatel; “and I thank God,” wrote the steward, “no plate nor spoons was lost, yet there was twenty dozen spoons.”[588]
III. Ecclesiastical corporations also nominally held their property in the various towns by the usual feudal tenure, just like the lay lords; and when a borough formally stated its theoretic relations with them both lay and spiritual lords were put on exactly the same level. The “Customs” of Hereford show us the ideal view of these relations as the burghers liked to picture them. “Fees” within the walls[589] were held by both ecclesiastical and lay lords, whose tenants desired a share in the city privileges, and the Hereford men classed them all together under a common description. “There are some lords and their tenants who are dwellers and holders of lands and tenements within the said bounds, which they hold by a certain service which is called ‘liberum feodum’; because long ago they besought us that they might be of us, and they would be rated and taxed with us, and they are free among us concerning toll and all other customs and services by us made, but concerning their foreign services which they do, or ought to do, and of old have done, their lords are not excluded by us nor by our liberties; for we never use to intermix ourselves with them in any things touching those tenures, but only with those which concern us, or their tenures which for a time hath been of our condition.”[590] Tenants still bound to render feudal services to their lords were not reckoned among the true aristocracy of the freemen, who in admitting them to a limited fellowship marked their sense of the difference of status between the free burgher and the man who was but half emancipated; “and such men ought not to be called citizens or our fellow citizens ... because they are ‘natives,’ or born in the behalf of their lords, and do hold their tenements by foreign services and are not burgesses.” It was only when a tenant bought a house in the city and was in scot and lot with the citizens, that they allowed that he “is free and of our condition; but let him take heed to himself that he depart not from the city to any place into the power of his lord.”[591]
