III. Nor was there any serious difficulty as to the exercise of the sovereign rights of the crown. To the King it mattered little whether he sent a special deputy direct from the court, or whether he delegated powers to the mayor, and used him as an official immediately responsible to the crown; while on the other hand such a change meant much present solace to the townsfolk. A compromise was therefore easily brought about between the monarch and the people. The mayor was invariably appointed as the King’s Clerk of the Market, the Measurer and Gauger at the King’s Standard, the Manager of the King’s Assize; he became the representative of the sovereign in the most important charges of administration, as one of the King’s Justices[437] in the town, as Admiral,[438] as Mayor of the Staple. Administrative changes such as these left the power of the sovereign untouched and cost him nothing; while on the other hand the central government was by this means provided with a ready-made staff of trained officials,—a staff which the King could not possibly have created,[439] nor paid out of his empty exchequer even if he had been able to create it—but which had become absolutely essential for carrying out the supervision of local affairs at a time when such supervision was growing more important every day, from the point of view both of the King and of the people. The towns on their side, relieved by the new system from miseries[440] under which they had suffered, readily forgot distinctions between laws made by them and made for them, so long as these were administered by officers of whom they were allowed the election and control.[441]
IV. Finally if the towns suffered from the officers of the royal household, a remedy was easily granted them. The sovereign found no personal inconvenience in transferring the duties of these officers to the governors of the boroughs themselves; and the mayor or bailiff became the King’s Steward, and Marshal of the King’s Household in the borough. In short, as the towns advanced to independence, all manner of powers and responsibilities were heaped together on their chief officer, with no clear discrimination between his various and oddly mingled functions. Men did not pause to ask which of his masters the mayor at any given moment was serving, whether he was acting as head of the city government to carry out the burghers’ will, or as the officer appointed by the sovereign to execute his laws;[442] and nice questions as to the exact division of authority which had really taken place were so manifestly irrelevant in presence of the harmonious concentration of all power in a single hand, that jealousies and suspicions on both sides were allayed, to the great furtherance of peace and concord. To the mediæval poet who drew a picture of Love as “the leader of our Lord’s folk in Heaven,” standing as a “mean” or mediator of peace, there was one obvious comparison—even “as the mayor is between the King and the commons.”[443]