A great deal more might be extracted from this short chronicle. Enough, however, has been taken to show the uncertainty of the City during the first century of the new order: the people always ready to assert their rights, fancied or real, as the Commons; the Aldermen standing, as a rule, for the old rights; the King taking offence, often, one acknowledges, deservedly, and revenging himself by taking the City into his own hands, by fines, by depositions, by refusals to receive Mayor or Sheriffs; nothing settled as to the rights and methods of procedure in elections, or in continuance of office, or in the power and authority of the Mayor, while of the new Council of twenty-four, as I have said, not one single word. In the next chapter we shall have to consider the City under its new form of government, after the powers of the various offices have been defined and the manner of election has been settled. CHAPTER VII AFTER THE COMMUNE In the year of our Lord 1419, John Carpenter completed his great work on the temporal government of the City of London, the _Liber Albus_. It is in this work that we find the only complete description of the administration of the City as it was at the beginning of the fifteenth century, with all the officers, their duties, and their responsibilities, and the laws which governed the citizens. The author was Town Clerk from the year 1417 to 1438. He was twice Member of Parliament for the City; he was executor to Whittington; and he was buried in the Church of St. Peter, Cornhill. The book itself, and a copy made in 1582, are preserved in the Crypt of the Guildhall. Riley, who looked through the copy, says that it abounds in errors which have never been corrected. His own translation was made from the original, which has long since lost the purity of aspect from which it derives its title. Some one has written on the cover the following Latin lines:— “Qui ‘Liber Albus’ erat, nunc est contrarius albo, Factus et est unctis pollicibusque niger. Dum tamen est extans, istum describite librum; Ne, semel amisso, postea nullus erit. Quod si nullus erit—nonnulla est nostraque culpa— Hei! pretii summi, perdita gemma, Vale!” The design of the work is thus laid down by John Carpenter himself:—