Who was more important for 16th century Londoner: his mayor, his lord or his king? The ties of loyalty in Robert Fabyan’s “Chronicles”

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is reconstruction of 16^th century Londoner’s hierarchy of the ties of loyalty. The main source is the “New Chronicles of England and France” written by London merchant Robert Fabian in the beginning of the 16^th century. City chroniclers never spoke about their scale of values. In order to understand who was more important for 16^th century Londoner – his mayor, his lord or his king – the author of this article analyzes the context in which the words, denoting the break of social ties (“treason”, “betrayal”, “traitor”, “traitorous”), were used in Fabian’s “Chronicles”.

It seems that, according to the results of quantitative analysis, Londoners at the beginning of the 16th century first of all felt themselves to be loyal subjects – in about 65% of cases Fabian meant “treason” as “high treason”. But for the chronicler a king wasn’t a being above morals. Fabian believed that fratricidal strife for a throne was a kind of treason. Even more, he argued that the loyalty of the citizen should belong first of all to his town, and the loyalty of noblemen – to his lord. In fact narrow social identities always overwhelmed and limiter the loyalty to the king.