Being both the capital of England, and by far its largest city, London has always enjoyed a disproportionately powerful influence on the government of the country – there are plenty of instances of the immense significance of the position that the city took when balancing the demands and causes of various competing factions, from its capitulation to William the Conqueror in 1066 and its refusal to admit the Empress Matilda in 1141 to its central importance during the period known as the Wars of the Roses. So it is not too surprising that, as early as the reign of Henry I (1100-35), London increasingly secured the right to elect its own officials, beginning with the right to choose its sheriffs, but extending in time to the office of Lord Mayor.

The office of Lord Mayor dates to the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189-99) and it emerged in large part as a result of the political jockeying for position that occurred when Richard was held in captivity in Austria during his return from the crusades. In return for offering support to Richard's brother, the future King John, London was granted the right to organise its own commune (communam suam), or, more likely, had a pre-existing commune that dated from the time of Stephen recognised by the crown. The organisation probably followed that in place in Rouen, in Normandy, still then a possession of the English crown; in any case, recognition of the commune brought with it the right to appoint a head, or mayor, the first of whom was Henry FitzAilwin. London's new position was cemented on Richard's death when, in return for the support he received from the city, John granted it three charters that collectively confirmed many of its privileges and acknowledged its right to appoint its own sheriffs in exchange for the substantial payment of 3,000 marks. It's important to recognise, therefore, that the mayor was never a royal official, but rather the "head of the jurés", that is chief of the commune of London.

Mayors were elected by the liverymen of the city, meaning the members of London's guilds, but we have very little information as to how exactly this system worked in such an early period – and in any case, all holders of the office had to be confirmed by the king or, in his absence, by the justiciar. In the earliest periods of the mayoralty, the king generally exercised fairly strict control over appointments - Edward II, for instance, "held a tight hand on the mayoralty till he appointed the great goldsmith, Sir Nicholas Farindon" (whose name survives in the London district of Farringdon), mayor "as long as it pleased him," but from 1308 the office was held for only one year at a time, although a man might serve several different terms as Lord Mayor.

From that time, Lord Mayors of London have always been chosen by the city's trade guilds, which collectively controlled a high proportion of London's wealth, and hence its political influence. (FitzAilwin was a draper, while Walworth was a member of the Fishmonger's Guild; in fact a large statue of him still stands in the entrance hall of the guild's headquarters today.) For this reason, it's hardly surprising that the most important of the mayors' duties was to protect the various liberties and concessions granted to the city over the centuries. The short duration of the mayors' terms, meanwhile, was a product of the significant rivalry that existed between the major guilds, which regularly squabbled over matters of precedence and power. At some point it also became customary for mayors to be knighted by the monarch on the first occasion after their election that the monarch visited the City of London.

Walworth himself was pretty typical of the sort of man who became mayor in the medieval period. Rather than thinking of him as some sort of glorified shopkeeper, we need to recognise that he was a man of significant independent means, wealthy enough to advance personal loans to the king. He had been born in Durham and come to London in early life, taking up an apprenticeship to John Lovekyn, a prominent member of the Fishmonger's Guild. In the course of his successful career, he was appointed sheriff of London (1370), alderman of Bridge ward in the city (1368), and twice Lord Mayor (1374-5 and 1380-1), as well as being Member of Parliament for the City four times.

While today we're often inclined to see the peasants who revolted in 1381 as justified in their opposition to heavy taxes and very limited personal freedom, moreover, it's important to realise that, for the elite Londoners who peopled the guilds and elected the Lord Mayors, Walworth was very much a hero who, by his actions in confronting the peasants and personally killing their leader, Wat Tyler, had saved the city from the possibility of being sacked and the country from the possibility of having to grant economically injurious new rights to the mass of the populace. Which is why the statue of him at Fishmongers' Hall depicts him wielding a vicious-looking dagger.

Sources

Emma Hatfield, London's Lord Mayors: 800 Years of Shaping the City

Christopher Brooke and Gillian Keir, London 800-1216: the Shaping of a City

Walter Thornbury, 'The Lord Mayors of London', in Old and New London Volume 1 (London, 1878), pp. 396-416. British History Online.