the English Municipal Tradition
We have to start somewhere. Due to imbedded relevance, we fail to realize the importance of levels of policy-making (provincial versus sub-provincial, for example). Normally, the academy and popular historians focus on the provincial level, leaving the service-delivery and government closest to the people to the obscurity they deserve. Their called counties, towns (or townships), cities or municipal corporations, villages or boroughs. Pennsylvania today has an awfully lot of each–especially boroughs whatever it is they might be (they are principally a 19th century phenomenon so you won’t find much help in our colonial history). What did these “entities” come from?
They came from England, not Scotland, not Ireland–England. Since Great Britain did not yet exist when Penn landed these institutions were constructed and evolved from English history and experience. They were imported from England by Penn in his Frames–where for all practical purposes not a word about them was written. Penn made little to no reference to them in his constitution. In that nearly all his First Settlers were English, the structures and institutions were also simply assumed as the natural order of things–and everybody after arriving in Pennsylvania just assumed they existed and so they did. Penn sanctified these assumptions by formal executive orders, or proprietary decrees. Not a lot of thought went into this sub-provincial governance thing.
As we shall see, like wine, some institutions can travel well–some cannot. Not all the ingredients for the English institution could be found in the new American wilderness–and so some improvising had to be done. I’m not sure much thought went into that either. There is more thought about it in today’s histories and text books than it apparently engendered from our original settlers. Hindsight allows us to fill in the gap but I am not sure there is evidence that having a gap in thought and a past conceptual history bothered anyone back then. After all, the English constitution is still unwritten.
The simple reality of an initial settlement in the American wilderness is that one initially settled on a piece of land which was carved out (surveyed) for homesteads, trade and business. An initial map divided it into three counties, several towns and one borough, Philadelphia) a year later (1683)–and there we have it. As we have already seen, Penn’s governance Frame, his plans for mice and Pennsylvanians went astray. Philadelphia never got a formal government, and was more or less left to the not-so-benign governance of the “county”, wonderfully supplemented by the intrusive but often out of session provincial legislature–which by miserable fortune met in Philadelphia. The hinterland towns and settlements, however, more in Penn’s eye than Philadelphia, got more attention on their governance. We shall tell that tale in the next section. In this section we are concerned with Philadelphia.
Philadelphia was supposed to be Pennsylvania’s prime urban settlement: a city or as the English called it, a “municipal corporation”. The reader will still find evidence of that term/concept on corporate seals or on boundary highway signs. What is a municipal corporation? It is the English form of city government that was “assumed” as the form to be implemented in the new colony. Somehow, it appears the barrel in which it was packaged, got lost or damaged on the way across the Atlantic. When they got here and unpacked the barrel on the pier, as we shall describe, several parts of the English city were either not available, or were damaged. To see what was available and understand how the parts were supposed to work, we need a manual of olde English government institutions. This module is it.
What is this thing called municipal corporation? What happened to it when it was unpacked in Pennsylvania?
Medieval Governance of a “City”
Timing is everything. There is no “popular” date for when the Medieval Age ended and “Modern” history began. Historians have all sorts of dates, but we simply need to keep in mind that the 1600’s, the 17th Century is a century of transition from one to the other. The Industrial Age begins around 1750, Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations in 1776, and the evolution of the democracy we take for granted today is a work in progress. A key piece, for instance, Locke’s separation of powers, was not written until a decade after the settlement at Philadelphia. The term “mercantilist”, which is more economic than political, is probably the best term to use for this period–but mercantilism does little to help us in the governance of an urbanized settlement.
So Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were founded in the transition between the English Civil War and Cromwell, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. Suffice it to say this was a period of political, administrative, and governmental flux–with all sorts of reform movements floating around in England–and all sorts of stuff we would call corruption in government (aristocracy, fused private and public, i.e. inherent and fundamental conflicts of interest and blurring of private and public). English colonial policy (the English Empire did not exist) was just in its first days, 1651 was the very first English Navigation Act, and so the English themselves had no real manual to use in their administration of the colonies. In any event in this flux and transition, the English municipal corporation made its way to the colonies.
Arguably the most prominent scholar of English municipal government’s importation to colonial America was Jon C. Teaford. Teaford carefully, but unequivocally, asserts that throughout Europe, the urban center, the city whether it be large or small, second tier or incorporated town, held an unique role in each country “as a center for trade and commerce. Amid the agricultural world of medieval Europe, cities existed as alien bodies requiring extraordinary powers and special protection” if they were to exist at all against the onslaughts of an near-exclusive agricultural economic base ruled by a divine right king and his bickering warlike feudal aristocracy.
In other words, economics and economic development, was a primary explanation for the emergence of settled urban areas–and in an agricultural economic base, the non-agricultural functions of these urban areas had to be protected from the King and feudal nobles. The municipal corporation developed over hundreds of years, as the structure to provide that protection for the city’s chief function: economic growth.
In contemporary 2020 American politics we are well-aware of the so-called “sanctuary city”. For most of us, however, we are not aware the city itself was formed, chartered, and protected to provide a sanctuary to those engaged in manufacturing, commerce, and finance. Like Penn’s Pennsylvania charter, each city was awarded from the King a charter incorporating it as a municipal corporation. Why a charter for a municipal corporation?
the idea of the municipal corporation crossed the Atlantic and set the parameters for city life in urban centers flanking the Hudson, the Delaware, and the James. The English municipality was the preface to urban history in the New World–the starting point from which the saga of the American city [and local government] began [99] Jon C. Teaford, the Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650-1825 (University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 3
Long before capitalism, or even mercantilism, existed, kings, nobles and counties learned they did not live by bread (and wine) alone. If they wanted to fight and war, they needed money for both-and weapons to be made.
One couldn’t have salt, or beer, or perfume and dyes for color–nor could one war upon each other–with commerce, manufacturing and finance. It was perhaps the Silk Road, that sand and grass highway, which spawned the trading city, and from the Mediterranean created the ports, piers, wharves and ships that serviced the capital cities and villages alike. It was what these cities did, the functions they served, that created the need to protect them so they could function, grow, and prosper. Out of necessity, the powers that be granted charters of protection to those that performed these functions. That charter is the municipal corporation.
Kings and Queens “incorporated” an urban center, and endowed it with a municipal charter that permitted some level of autonomy, special and independent governance, and certain prerequisites for their occupants that made it worthwhile for them to work with the King. In that sense at least “corporation” was a good thing back then; it contained features and protections very similar to today’s constitution. But before we go too far on this municipal corporation “thing”, it is wise to take a moment so not to pass over why urban centers/municipalities needed a corporation. We must restate that notwithstanding their certified rights and obligations to the King and Crown, they were empowered with a political autonomy that provided a sanctuary for trade, commerce, finance, and manufacturing.
Said and done, these core functions–economic activities all–were why cities were protected and encouraged to grow. You didn’t move to a city back then for the lifestyle; they well hellholes of disease, crime, congestion, and filth–and were noisy. When the Black Death bounced around, people headed for the countryside. Rather cities were granted certain powers and privileges because special, needed special protections in return for which they to perform key economic functions.
the Engine of the Municipal Corporation: the Guild
Among those key functions included industry/sector self-regulation to promote order for production efficiencies, workforce development, successful entrepreneurism, and importantly consumer protection. The guild system, the entity entrusted with self-regulation, had evolved over several centuries. Late medieval (Stuart period) self-regulation had evolved to protect and manage the quality of a city industry’s output. A guild was formed in each urban city, and it would manage the affairs of the incorporated city. Naturally, protectionism of each city was its central objective as urban competition was, aside from the King and nobles, a very significant threat to each city’s economic growth–which was pretty much thought of in zero-sum alternatives in a vicious competitive world. Economic growth meant goods-services that provided value to those who bought them–and whose purchase was fair and honest.
Central to that quality was a workforce-career path that transformed a raw recruit into an apprentice, to journeyman to master craftsman. For each industry-sector the guild for that sector prescribed wages and a benefit plan (sleep upstairs, three squares a day, and off for Christmas sort of thing) were built-in to each stage of the career path. It was a built-in mentoring system with strong overtones of indentured servant. In larger cities, a an industry training institute could be established. Prices were set for the final product.
At its best, this guild workforce system offered a not unrealistic possibility of ownership if not of the master’s business, but experience and background also to spin off on his own. Startups were not entrepreneurial in today’s sense. The city’s industry/sector guild restricted/limit entry of newcomers, protected existing business from intrusions from other sectors seeking to merge/drive out existing firms (arguably at a cost to disruptive innovation), and protected business from some supply chain/materials costs. It also often provided a physical area to establish a business and a market place to sell them. It could also provide the infrastructure (bridge) to gain access to city merchants.
This regulation reduced the product/service scope of a business. No candles were sold at a cheese-maker. There is a strong dose of protectionism inherent in this system and potentially some tension with the consumer. In a sense this was a sort of city/state, run by businessmen, with one city’s businesses protected and nurtured from competition by the city down the road a bit. This protectionism no doubt extended into the city’s hinterland–and interestingly, industry/sector privileges often were extended to hinterland businesses.
To foster quality and a reasonable product the city guild which dominated the city council and its offices, hired a number of industry inspectors, instituted a weights and measurement /inspection bureaucracy that also closed down illegible startups that snuck up in the backstreets. The business-run city government bought into, to some degree, the adage that an educated customer is a best consumer by keeping tract of unfair price competition on the low end, and price extortions (called then “immoderate gain”) on the high demand end.
Buy goods and services from your own city businesses was natural, and the also natural was a desire to export. Logically, this was facilitated by industry guild “exchanges” that set both quality and price to goods shipped to other places (eliminating “forestalling”–lowering the price of sale). Intra Industry complaints and conflicts were also adjudicated. Urban guild-led municipal corporations, although economic in function, were political and policy-making bodies of the municipal government.
Each municipal guilds formally separated their business activities/relationships. In each city the various industry-sector guilds elected representatives to a guild council. That guild council was the workhorse for inter-trade guild matters–but each trade handled its own trade affairs. The individual trade guild councils handled for the most part trade specific practices and rules. Hence, the guild council would serve as the aggregator of multi-guild needs, demands, and initiatives.
It was the municipal guild council that either appointed (initially) designated members to the municipal city council,, or over time fielded candidates in a freeholder democratic election. Urban freeholders were chiefly business owners and artisans–as franchise required property ownership or social/aristocratic status. Nothing like todays remarkable open franchise existed in 17th century urban government. English Quaker merchants, Penn’s First Purchasers, were very aware of guild-dominated urban governance.
Teaford suggests guild-dominated British local government assumed a level of responsibility for protecting the poor from the rich, the small operator from the large, and the city-resident producer from the foreign business competitor. [99] Jon C. Teaford, p.7. When a business sold an item, a pint of beer for example, the price was usually set by the city–bread also was a set-price. Wood for fuel, a necessity in 17th century households was led by the guild-dominated city council.
Business-run cities usually assumed responsibility for both business-relevant infrastructure of business, and urban quality of life infrastructure required for quality of urban life: safety, public health, fire, and therefore water. The first port facilities, wharves, piers, dredging, and storage (including barrel-making) were usually installed by the business and exempted from taxes, and supplemented with city services. Cities in those days didn’t tax; they got most of their revenues from fees and duties (excise taxes) for services/products, and their investments in infrastructure.
The grist mill was a public/private affair and ferries also. Industry/sectors paid for their own self-regulation–absorbed in their price, I assume. They were able to draft labor for roads and clean up campaigns, and paving major roads and streets of averaged-sized cities was common. The critical function of creating a “marketplace” for sale of goods was left to the city, and in larger cities that meant specialized marketplaces as well as the “central marketplace, i.e. downtown. Fairs and religious sites/pilgrims, what we call tourists, also were a city function. Because city aggregations were not uncommon in several industry/sectors (clothing and apparel) government loans to business did happen, but were not commonplace. City council members did travel to other cities to acquire a better sense of the competition, and make deals for their businesses.
Guilds Didn’t Cross the Atlantic
The uniqueness of Pennsylvania’s approach to urban governance lie in the use the Quaker Annual Meeting, and community-level Friend congregations to handle what formerly were guild initiatives and regulatory activity. That recourse to religious organizations was characteristic, in different ways, of the three colonies chosen in this history. Penn in his writings reveals a rather consistent, if naïve and romantic, belief that he could “manage” his governmental affairs by stressing the virtues and opportunities of his Holy Experiment–which was certainly his binding tie to the Quaker religion. He was the undisputed Quaker elder in Pennsylvania.
It was hard in both Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to ignore or fail to see the role of religion in politics and policy in what was in core a religious colonial endeavor. Virginia, on the other hand, was not; it imported religion as a form of social and political control and a tool in preserving its fragile medieval base.
As to why guilds did not seek extension of the guild system to North America I suspect they were by the 17th century firmly rooted in the individual municipalities. The Crown’s use of a corporate or sole proprietor charter for each of its colonies injected a new level of authority between the Crown and the city corporation– and that proprietary or sole corporation’s charter plus three thousand miles of treacherous water and winds gave it both inevitable day-to-day autonomy, and a need to adjust to North American realities quickly, asking for forgiveness when it needed to.
The sole proprietary or the joint stock corporation evolved into an American state after a hundred or more years in operation, and after having drifted to independence and then to revolution. This is perhaps the root dynamic explaining the almost inherent federalism of the United States of America, its earlier Republic the Articles of Confederation, and the tenor of the individual province’s drift to independence and revolution. The Proprietor nor the joint-stock corporation had any particular interest in fostering a guild system. If it did not develop naturally in America then it was not going to be imposed on it.
When the time came the 1789 U.S. Constitution set up a federal republic with two layers of sovereignty: state and nation. Absent a Crown Charter, municipal corporations and sub-provincial sovereignty was lodged in the colonial proprietorship and its colony-wide provincial government. Herein lies the kernel of Dillion’s Law, in which sub-state governance is a “creature of the state government”. We never inherited that from the English. England was then, as Great Britain is now (maybe): a unitary state, with local government a responsibility and an administrative division of the national government.
The Guild-based Municipal Corporation, ultimately based its legitimacy from a charter to the municipality by the King to each municipal corporation. The intervening delegation of authority, one step removed from sovereignty, to a sole proprietor or a joint-stock corporation was a fatal disruption from the style and authority relationships of English local governments to those which were established in the colonies of the British Empire.
To be sure each colonial proprietorship used its own forms of sub-provincial incorporation, and that municipal incorporation served as the shell that house the governance of a city, but in no instance did a proprietor also require the formation of a guild. If so English municipal governance was like an egg, an egg without its yolk, transported to to the colonies. The yolk was housed in the proprietor, and he or it would eventually lodge it in its colonial legislature.
Interestingly, there is some evidence the guild attempted to seed itself into the New World. The earliest effort to form a sector-trades guild appeared in Massachusetts. In 1648 the coopers ((makers of barrels, pipes, kegs, and bulk wooden packaging for exports of fish/meat) successfully asked the Massachusetts legislature/General Court for a charter to be a “Company with the power to set standards for their trade” in Boston and Charlestown. They were incorporated “as a guild” by the Legislature for a period of three years–“but no longer“.
In New York, the coopers tried a different way to come at forming a guild by applying for the right to be a “cartel” with powers to set prices for their wares. The General Court thought not and fined them for past actions in that regard. Finally, the “Master Coopers’ of Philadelphia “who made an abundances of Caske for the Sea” sought successfully to form a guild-like company [referred to as “the mistery [sic] of cooperage” that included Philadelphia, Newport (RI), and Charlestown (MA).[99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America 1625-1742, Vol. 1 (Capricorn Books, 1938), p. 36-7). Coopers were the exception that proved the rule, however, that guilds were not able to develop in most New World trades and sectors on their own. Individual private entrepreneurship and informal cooperation, with legislation as required directly through municipal corporations/towns or provincial legislatures was the usual method of business regulation
As a consequence, most New World colonial businesses and trade sectors was radically different from 17th century England in both function and composition. Colonial American businesses were essentially private individual startups. Many became family owned businesses passed on to each generation. Many failed. Because of immigration, market demand was strong counterbalanced by weak barriers to entry there was no insurmountable barrier to entry–although risk was high, no guild stood in the way to limit competition within each municipality.
What I found surprising was that except for English finance capital and export logistics, early colonial business ventures were autonomous ventures, and poorly, if at all, linked to British counterparts (i.e., few branch enterprises). Also religious groups, and family, were major sources of venture capital.
The series of English Navigation Laws required American merchants use British ships, and required American exports to be sent to London for sale by British merchants–but from their start, these laws were resisted by American entrepreneurs. British colonial policy, especially the Navigation Laws, were arguably the single most important driver fueling the drift to American Independence. There were four wars fought in the colonial period, and border relationships with Native Americans, whatever the border at the time, were unstable.
Pennsylvania under Penn was the best of a bad lot–but the core dysfunction was the individuality of American immigrants. Indenture/property slavery was the only serious control by local authority over immigrant movement. Once they reached the hinterland, only their cultural approach to agriculture, and Indian tensions inhibited movement. Immigrants walked on the Great Wagon Road–which through most of this period could not accommodate wagons and impaired horses across the Appalachians.
In any case, a number of colonial historians, looking at individual early colonial American cities, have found ample evidence that much of the conventional English city business model was transferred/copied [99] See Jon C. Teaford’s, Chapter 2, pp. 16-34; included in that chapter is a number of Pennsylvania examples relevant to time period of this module.
At every step in the transport, sale, and purchase … the colonial municipality intervened, the vital role of promoter and regulator. For before the 1730’s and 1740’s the American borough, like its British ancestor, was primarily a commercial community governed by commercial participants for the service of trade and industry. Merchants and artisans had carried this European concept of urban government to the new continent and during the first century of English colonization it molded the nature of the American municipality [99 … [For example,) when William Penn granted the Philadelphia charter … in order to achieve ‘the more immediate and entire Government of the said Town, and the better Regulation of Trade within’. By 1750 fourteen such [municipal] chartered corporations lined the Atlantic seaboard from Albany in the north to Norfolk in the south, each created as an instrument for stimulating commercial development by regulating and promoting trade [99] Jon C. Teaford, pp. 16-7.
Whether the contemporary reader likes any of this stuff, or not, this is what usually accompanied a business/commerce approach to medieval urban governance. When you flesh out just what is involved in the conventional English business run city, it involves a lot of economic development. This is not detail which the reader should be spared. From an economic development perspective a lot of ED that one way or another we deal with today was lodged inside this government/guild/business nexus.
When during the seventeenth century these British traditions and urban institutions were shipped to North American cities, unspoken and largely unnoticed, they were retained and copied in early colonial American cities/towns. What was missing, however, and it was a key omission was the guild. Functional alternatives did rise up, especially in artisan-prone sectors as we shall see in forthcoming modules.
But the reader ought remind me that Penn’s Free Society of Traders was arguably an attempt to install a guild-like structure to Pennsylvania economic development. The almost instant opposition it engendered, and the failure to take root among Quaker-run businesses hint Quaker political culture/entrepreneurial personalities were not fertile ground. One suspects the guild’s inability to take root in almost any form did play a major role in differentiating the early colonial American business/commercial/artisan firm from its British counterpart.
In so doing, the reader is also alerted that there will be two major exceptions to English/commercial-urban nexus in America: the New England Town, and New York City (Dutch New Netherlands). Sam Bass Warner coined the term “Privatism” for his characterization of post 1750 Philadelphia–and we shall discuss that in a latter module. Privatism became a cornerstone concept in the description of American pre-1900 urban governance. What I think was most lacking in Warner’s approach to American municipal privatism was the distinctions and differences to privatism within each of the colonial provinces. Culture and religion greatly shaped each colony’s public-private approach, which in turn grounded each colony’s private participation and involvement in the colony’s public affairs.
For this module content myself with alerting the reader that Privatism, in my opinion, represents a continuation of the English urban governance heritage, as it evolved in English North America. That he found it much in Philadelphia, and not in Boston is to me support that our discussion in this and the next chapter is firmly grounded in its cultural distinction between the two urban centers. . Sam Bass Warner, it is clear from his works, clearly preferred Boston, for what we shall see are obvious reasons: Boston culture and economic development includes huge doses of what we shall later label as ‘community development”. But that is a story for another day–indeed the next chapter.
Absent the guild a vital cog in the European/English urban governance model was overtime fundamentally disrupted. In the European/English model certification by the guild was key to being defined as a “freeholder” who was eligible to vote and become an officeholder. By the turn of the century (1700, or so) American cities finally grew to the point they could no longer sustain a franchise so limited to outright business owners. For philosophical and sheer power reasons a substitute had to be found: a certain level of property ownership.
Land was the most common form of property in colonial America, and accordingly, the franchise of urban America passed into the hands of the property-holders, rather than business owners, a fundamental transformation that broadened the American urban franchise. Having said this, however, in the hinterland property was considerably cheaper to purchase than in the urbanized city. The franchise in the hinterland, therefore was often considerably larger and more equitable than that of the urban center. In fact in the latter, the reverse was true. From this, what today is called mal-apportionment between urban and hinterland developed and increased through to the American Revolution.
In wrapping this section up, I will offer one insight and one conclusion or take away. The takeaway is, as simply put as I can make it, that commercial economics and economic development are central functions and purposes of an English municipal corporation. Urban governance and business development were literally hand-in-the-glove closely connected, essentially unable to distinguish between. That it transferred to English North America is why economic development is an excellent prism or filter by which to understand the early American urban policy system.
English kings from the Normans through the Stuarts granted charters of incorporation drafted to serve the needs and peculiarities of communities of butchers. tailors, merchants and drapers. Commerce was the organizing principle of the municipality’s government, and its offices, suffrage requirements, ordinances, and pageantry all reflected the economic practicalities underlying its existence. The municipal corporation was a community of trade and industry, an organization molded by the distinctive needs of commercial life amid a world of subsistence agriculture [99] Jon C. Teaford, p. 4
As to the observation I will add one other feature of the English urban/business model that also did not travel well to North America. In an British municipal corporation business leaders could elect both their guild leadership and governance officials. In fact they were often literally one and the same. That happened because to vote in a municipal election one must be a “freeman”. To be a freeman on had to be engaged in a trade, a guild. Occupation provided access to an urban citizen to the right to participate in its policy system and process.
In an urban medieval and Stuart policy system the “municipal corporation was a commercial community in which the commercial class was the governing class. … Elizabethan York (England’s second largest city at the time) disregarded geographic wards [as voting districts] and apportioned its thirty-eight common councillors among twenty-six occupational groups. Similarly in the [much smaller] borough of Morpeth [a market town in the remote north Northumberland], each of the seven vocational companies [guilds] held permanent claim to one seat on the board of aldermen. [99] Jon C. Teaford, p. 5. The electoral franchise in a municipal corporation created a very closed commercial dominated policy system.
Absent the guild, an immense vacuum opened up in the definition of the municipal corporation’s electoral franchise. Teaford observes, and amply supports, that “The men who drafted America’s [urban] ordinances and by-laws were well-qualified to deal with questions of urban commerce, for the colonial alderman and councillors were drawn from an extensive variety of commercial interests. American cities were primarily hubs of mercantile endeavor and [for example] in New York City between 1675 and 1725 64% of council members for whom occupation data is available earned their living as merchants. Another 31% made their living as artisans and innkeepers” [99] Jon C. Teaford, p. 25. He also cites that for a later period an almost identical occupational breakdown was found in Philadelphia–with lawyers garnering the bulk of the remainder after merchants, artisans and innkeepers.
These fine folk were elected, not appointed, and so the natural question is why were businessmen/artisans overwhelmingly elected to municipal offices? The answer appears to be that in the absence of a guild, ownership of land (an expensive form of property in an urban center) were required prerequisites for franchise eligibility. If the guild had functioned as the aggregator (broker) of municipal industry/sector political preferences, absent that institution left the American policy system with a “property substitute” that left the field for political officeholding to the ambitions and interests of individuals with property.
The same type of folk were elected to municipal officeholders in both systems, but how, and why they got there differed hugely. Instead of representing an institution based on an industry/sector, American business-related public officials ultimately represented themselves or whatever else they chose to serve. The character of the American urban policy system, then, at least potentially, had departed from the traditional English system of urban governance–and the municipal corporation took on new meaning, and biases. Shades of Sam Bass Warner, it had been privatized.
Ron W. Coan 