Throughout these years the mayor and officers were constantly at Maidenhead, London, or Canterbury, holding consultations about legal business with Lyttleton and the most famous lawyers. They succeeded in buying a charter for their Guild Hall with sums contributed by rich citizens; and gratefully adorned the building with a picture of the King. The mayor of the guild became more and more the representative of the burghers’ hopes, and his greatness the symbol of their triumph. They had not only raised his salary in 1459 to ten nobles,[568] but like their brethren at Lynn they got permission from Henry the Sixth to have a mace carried before him; and in 1459 the mace was actually bought.[569] At this extravagance, however, the abbot made a firm stand, and Henry had to send a letter to the Mayor of Reading, just as he had done eleven years before to the mayor of Lynn, ordering that this privilege should remain with the abbot alone as the token of his supremacy. But the mayor possibly gained his point a little later, for in 1487 he was allowed two Mace-serjeants, so it would seem that at least his tipped staves were now borne by his own servants.[570] He secured too for himself and for the burgesses exemption from serving on juries; and in the same year assumed supervision of the cloth trade. In 1480 the burgesses had done away with individual payments of the “chepin gavell” tax to the abbot, by ordering that it should be given from the Town Chest; and in 1486 a citizen bequeathed property for its payment, so that the townsmen were henceforth freed from all personal difficulties in this matter.[571]
Either the question of the cloth-market or that of the mace-serjeants brought the battle to a climax. The abbot absolutely refused to appoint any “master of the guild, otherwise called mayor,” and took upon himself to admit such people as he chose to the office of constable.[572] The guild retorted by choosing a mayor for themselves, who nominated his own officers to keep order, while all alike in this emergency gave their services freely, for in 1493 “nothing was paid to the mayor, because neither he nor any one else charged anything on the office.”[573] In the case of the lesser offices the burghers held their own, and when in 1499 the abbot appointed two constables, the mayor thrust them out of their places.[574]