For 150 years after 1372 there was no fundamental rethinking of Colchester's administrative and electoral system. Changes were matters of detail. The extent and direction of piecemeal reform are nevertheless of interest for their relevance to social change, and make a necessary introduction to the major revisions of the years 1519–25. The history of government in the borough is best discussed with reference to the question of oligarchy. In his brief account of developments in Colchester, Tait saw the process as one of a progressively increasing concentration of power in the hands of an inner ring of burgesses, a common enough theme in the history of the late Middle Ages, but one which has occasioned debate on a number of separate issues. It is questionable how far ruling groups in towns were cut off from the support and consent of their fellow townsmen. Evidence for increasing oligarchy should sometimes be interpreted rather as the codification of past practice, and even where a more oligarchical form of government was in fact established, the implications for burgesses' welfare need dispassionate scrutiny. The detailed evidence from Colchester makes it feasible both to look at Tait's conclusion more closely and to investigate the wider issues.

At the core of the problem is the question of the part played by the commons in borough affairs. The commons, in this context, were not synonymous with the lower ranks of the burgesses; the term signifies all those burgesses who were neither bailiffs nor members of the council, and so must include the majority of tradesmen and property owners.

This study has not been designed to generate broad generalisations about medieval urban economies, but a few further comments on the exceptional nature of Colchester's economic history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may now conveniently be drawn together. They concern the relevance of Colchester's experience for the general interpretation of English economic performance in this period. In 1334, having failed to benefit much from commercial developments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Colchester's standing as an English town had been a humble one. By 1524 the position was considerably improved. In taxable wealth the borough ranked as England's twelfth largest town, after London, Norwich, Bristol, Coventry, Exeter, Salisbury, Southwark, Ipswich, King's Lynn, Canterbury and Reading. Judged by its number of taxpayers it stood even higher, above Coventry, Reading, King's Lynn and Ipswich. Colchester had overtaken some of England's foremost ports (notably Hull, Boston, Great Yarmouth and Southampton) as well as some major inland cities (Lincoln, Oxford, Gloucester, Winchester, Cambridge). This outstanding success, when set against the record of Colchester's economic performance, suggests a number of observations about the nature of urban prosperity in the late Middle Ages.

Colchester's medieval records confirm that personal wealth in the borough increased between 1334 and 1524 and that this was partly the result of industrial and commercial development.

The history of English towns in the fourteenth century is one of strongly contrasting experiences. While many decayed under the impact of famines and epidemics, others, like Colchester, grew. In the fifteenth century, however, urban fortunes were more uniformly waning, and the early sixteenth century was the last phase in a long period of general urban contraction. Colchester did not have any unique advantages in this context. The townsmen enjoyed easy access to the North Sea and Baltic trades, but in the middle and late fifteenth century urban decay was particularly marked in towns on or near the east coast. Colchester was a centre of the new English cloth industry, but so were York, Norwich and Coventry, all of which had greatly shrunk from their former size by the 1520s. Coventry's population fell by about 40 per cent between 1440 and 1523. Evidence already discussed suggests that water-borne trade through Hythe diminished after the middle of the century and that employment in clothmaking was probably below the peak level of c. 1412–14 for the rest of the fifteenth century except in some years between 1436 and 1449. The chances that Colchester experienced some contraction are therefore high.

The changing number of brewers, as reported by lawhundred juries, constitutes the most continuous evidence relating to consumption in the town (Figure 13.1). The number was greatest early in the fifteenth century, and then declined slowly. By 1522 the number of brewers amerced at the lawhundreds was much the same as it had been in the early fourteenth century. The rate of decline implied by these figures is nothing dramatic.

In spite of heavy losses of population at the time of the Black Death, Colchester immediately entered a new phase of industrial and commercial growth. Colchester merchants increased their trade to Gascony and opened up new relations with the Baltic, exporting local russets in exchange for wine, fish, salt, continental manufactures and other commodities. In the last decades of the fourteenth century even the Mediterranean world offered markets for Colchester cloth through the agency of Italian exporters in London. Cloth output increased to satisfy these expanding markets, creating new employment in the town. This, with its secondary repercussions, brought about an expansion of urban population from below 3,000 immediately after the Black Death to perhaps over 8,000 by the end of the century. The growth of cloth production was accompanied by increasing levels of internal trade in the town and by an even more considerable expansion of credit. The merchant class became rapidly larger. Colchester's good fortune in these years was not unique; the growth of urban industry and trade had parallels elsewhere, notably in Coventry and Salisbury, and the older and larger towns of York and Norwich also enjoyed an industrial upsurge in this period. Nearer at hand, other market towns and industrialising villages were showing features of industrial development, such as at Hadleigh in Suffolk and Thaxted in Essex.

The number of England's inhabitants recovered only slowly from the demographic disasters of the fourteenth century. The best current estimates suggest that, having stood at between 4.5 and 6.0 million in 1348, the population of the kingdom was only somewhere between 2.25 and 2.75 million in the 1520s. If output per head had remained unchanged throughout the period from 1348 to 1525 this would mean that national income in the latter year was approximately one half what it had been in the former. But during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a larger part of the population than before was able to find regular employment, and more resources were available per head of the population. Wage levels rose, and families were able to buy more food and manufactured goods as a reward for their labours. The later fifteenth century was a golden age in the history of standards of living. Even in the 1520s, though real wages had fallen a long way from their fifteenth-century peak, skilled craftsmen could earn 25 per cent more than equivalent wage earners at the opening of the fourteenth century. The implications of these changes for the level and composition of national income are imperfectly understood. There are as yet no aggregate estimates either of incomes or of output sufficiently dependable to assess the combined effect of lower population and higher output per man. Interpretations of the economic history of these centuries vary considerably according to the emphasis which different historians place upon the main economic variables.

Industrial development implied improving prospects for industrial employment. The effect upon total urban employment depended upon what was happening elsewhere in the economy, and it would be rash to make assumptions about the outcome. But amongst the regular reports of lawhundred juries which at first sight repeat themselves monotonously from term to term there is information of considerable interest for this aspect of Colchester's economic development in the late Middle Ages, implying that the consumption of foodstuffs in the town increased for over 50 years after the Black Death and that the number of inhabitants was growing. This is not the sort of evidence that can be used to calculate levels of income or production; the figures relate to burgesses reported for trading offences rather than to the measured output of goods and services. However, with a certain amount of interpretation the evidence is both free from serious ambiguity and consistent with other facets of the borough's economic history. The most valuable part of this material relates to the food and drink trades, which were subject to exceptionally close supervision at the lawhundreds.

The first set of details to be examined concerns millers, whose profession was well known for its proclivity towards sharp practice. Mill toll ought to have been taken at the rate of one grain in 24, but millers notoriously took more than they were entitled to. At every lawhundred a list of the mills where the miller had broken the rules was presented by the jury, and few mills in operation could be expected to run for more than a year or two without appearing in these lists.

Colchester in the early fourteenth century had antiquity and chartered privilege strongly in its favour. Legend, unaware of any breach of continuity there since the time of the Romans, hallowed streets, churches, walls and wells with ancient associations. In recent centuries the borough had kept pace with major constitutional developments elsewhere; the burgesses elected their own officers, held their own courts of law, paid taxes on movables at the borough rate and sent members to parliaments. The court of pleas had come into existence to meet distinctive urban needs. The law administered in the borough courts had changed over the years in response to successive royal ordinances and statutes, so that business in 1310, the year of the first surviving court roll, was very different from what it would have been in 1178 when elected bailiffs first took over the hundred court. Moreover the urban economy had shown some response to the general commercial expansion of the thirteenth century, chiefly at Hythe. The number of inhabitants had increased, woods had been cleared and there were more enclosures than there had been. Colchester had moved with the times in predictable fashion.

But in some respects the borough's circumstances had become less favourable during this period. Administrative autonomy carried little power to mould the commercial and industrial environment to the burgesses' advantage. Ipswich, rather than Colchester, was the chief beneficiary of growing international trade, and new ports had been created at Harwich and Manningtree.

Besides transforming the social composition of Colchester's ruling group, economic development simultaneously multiplied the tasks to be performed by elected officers; the income of the community increased, more pleas were brought to the borough courts and policing the town became more time-consuming. The casual ways of the early fourteenth century were no longer appropriate to the duties involved. And then, also, as Colchester's fame and fortune grew, civic pride took a share in recommending some types of reform and repudiating certain survivals from the past. So within a generation of the Black Death much had changed in the normal government of Colchester, and the constitutional history of the borough supplements the economic evidence to the effect that this was a period of innovation in response to new and higher expectations.

In 1372 the greater part of the burgesses of Colchester swore to observe a new set of ordinances, known as the New Constitutions, whose object was to reform the government of the borough and its electoral system. The stated reasons for the reform, which are rehearsed in the preamble to the New Constitutions, were financial. For a long time, it was said, the town's income both from rents and from fines had been spent entirely at the will of the bailiffs, to the community's loss. The object of the New Constitutions was accordingly to keep a check on this expenditure. It was observed that the total of rents and fines amounted to a great sum each year.

Colchester's growing dependence upon supplies from a distance during the later fourteenth century, when consumption in the borough was growing, seems to have become even more accentuated in the first half of the fifteenth. For certain agricultural products the low costs of water transport, coupled with economies of bulk trading and a growth of expertise amongst Colchester's merchants, ensured that large consignments came from outside the local marketing region. A major source of grain for Colchester was the east coast of Norfolk, where the intensive cultivation of barley was a long established feature of agricultural economy. As it happens, manorial accounts have survived from one of the manors in this region which supplied Colchester with malt in the first half of the fifteenth century, namely Ormesby Hall in Ormesby St Margarets, which belonged to the Clere family. The recorded sales, shown in Table 17.1, add considerably to the evidence of the grain trade available from Colchester's own archives. Evidently a number of burgesses at this time went to Norfolk for malt, and one of them had made it a habit. Purchases were made when prices were low as well as when they were high, demonstrating that this was no emergency trade limited to years of dearth.