In December 1448, the city of Exeter agreed with the bishop and dean and chapter of the cathedral church to abide by the arbitration of two local magnates who settled a complex dispute over urban jurisdiction. That the arbitrators decided against the city, which suffered a slight constitutional setback as a result, is only one of several important conclusions to be drawn from a study of the dispute and its resolution. The nature of the argument and the procedures by which both parties sought to resolve it shed light on the character of urban constitutional growth in the later Middle Ages, on legal procedures and what medieval people thought about the law, and on the lengths they were willing to go to assure a decision that was as favorable as possible without poisoning relations between two institutions that coexisted within city walls. The case also illustrates the important role arbitration played in dispute settlement and reveals this method to be as viable an alternative as recourse to the common-law and equity courts of the royal government.

Exeter's case is unique in that so much written evidence survives to testify to the financial investments and political aims of both parties involved. Comparisons will be drawn to other boroughs that endured similar jurisdictional disputes in the fifteenth century, but their evidence is far less revealing of decision and motivation than that remaining for Exeter. Although many of the major documents associated with the case have been in print for over a century, and examined in some detail in a brief monograph published over fifty years ago, the nature of the records has focused more attention on the city's participation than on that of the cathedral.

On such diary entries as this one of Samuel Ward's, historians have built an edifice called “puritanism.” It is rigid, narrow, and quaintly absurd in design. It is the sort of structure on which twentieth-century people can look down with complacency from the heights of their own intellectual towers. It makes one glad to have escaped the confining corridors of faith and piety by rendering them dark, small, and rather shabby.

The language of politics is, by its very nature, both imprecise and artificial. Its meaning is shaped, not so much by linguistic conventions, but by the very political processes of which language constitutes the essential currency. One can, therefore, only understand the nuances of a given political vocabulary when one relocates it within those historical and political frameworks that it both animated and circumscribed. Once political language is viewed as central to the political process, one can begin to appreciate the extent to which even the basic vocabulary of politics must itself be plastic. One might indeed go further and suggest that the dynamism of a given political system is reflected in organic transformations in the political language it employs. These transformations are most apparent in the radically different meanings that are imputed to terms such as “legitimate” and “constitutional,” on the one hand, or “liberty” and “equality,” on the other. The process of political evolution can be traced as clearly in the development of political vocabulary as it can in the reform of political institutions. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one of the principal impacts of the French Revolution in Britain lay in its stimulating a renewed struggle over the language of politics.4 Nowhere was that struggle more apparent than in the transformed language of patriotism that emerged from the debates of the 1790s.