Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/39

Rh MUNICIPALITY 29 mens of these charters can be seen in the Ordonnances des Rois, Kemble s Anglo-Saxons, and Bouthors s Coutumes locales du Baillage d Amiens. They show us a political revolution directed against the feudal lord by townsmen associated in merchant-guilds or sworn into a new sort of brotherhood. To break the oath of loyalty to the com mune is a crime of the gravest kind. &quot; If any of us aid or comfort our enemies he is guilty of lese-commune, and we will pull down his house, if we can. . . . Whoever wounds with weapon any of his fellows shall lose his fist or pay nine livres &quot; (Amiens). &quot; The men shall take what wives they please, first asking leave ; if their lord refuse, and a man take a wife from another lordship, he shall pay but five sous for a fine. Every one living within the dis trict shall take the communal oath or answer with house or goods &quot; (Soissons). These charters are important because the communa of London was founded under Richard I. in direct imitation of the French example, and soon became the type of the independence which the other boroughs continually struggled to attain ; and, as in France, the great men deplored the revolt as tumor plebis, timor regis, tepor sacerdotii, while the kings for their own pur poses encouraged the popular movement. And in the same way Philip Augustus and his successors were so ready to protect the communes that they eventually claimed and obtained an immediate seigniory over all the chartered boroughs to the exclusion of any private lords to whom the towns had formerly belonged. Another point of importance lies in the fact that the lords not only settled the local laws of inheritance and other customs &quot;running with the land,&quot; but sometimes changed them at the townsmen s request, as if it were merely an affair between lord and tenant. There are English examples of the same practice, which seems to have been not entirely discontinued until the reign of Edward I. A prerogative of this nature was exercised by the archbishop in Kent, and Simon de Montfort in 1255, at the request of his burgesses of Leicester, abolished the custom of descent to the youngest son. Fitzosberne appears by Domesday Book to have granted a separate set of customs to his &quot;Frenchmen&quot; in Hereford, and a difference of the same kind which existed at Stafford and Nottingham must have been caused by similar grants ; in the latter place it was found on a trial in the reign of Edward III. that there were two districts in the town, the one called the &quot; French borough &quot; and the other the &quot; English borough,&quot; where descent was to the youngest son, a circumstance which gave its name to the custom of &quot; borough-English.&quot; Municipal freedom was granted in Spain at an earlier date and on an ampler scale, as beseemed the poverty of the kings, the weakness of the nobles, and the constant danger from the Moors. The Visigothic laws were imbued with the principles of the Theodosian code, and it was easy for the Spaniards to regard the incorporated cities as bodies politic of the highest importance. The first instance of the erection of such a community was the grant in 1020 of a code of privileges to Leon. Such grants were treaties between the king and the chartered towns, by which the latter obtained fixed laws, extensive territories, and the choice of their own magistrates in return for a tribute and universal service in the militia. The king appointed a governor to take charge of the fortified places, but in almost every other respect the inhabitants governed them selves. This democratic constitution was after a time impaired by the claims of the knights or &quot; caballeros &quot; to a monopoly of office ; but what actually led to its destruc tion was the increase in the power of the crown. The disorders inseparable from popular elections were declared, as in England under the Tudors, to be a reason for vesting the government in a small and close corporation, which was soon found to be quite amenable to the influence and dictation of the court. The municipalities of every country have a separate history of their own, and it is difficult to find any general law for determining their methods of development. Ac cording to their opportunities the oppressed wear out their conquerors patience and too often become oppressors in their turn : as the state becomes more complex the old confederacies are broken up, and the scattered communities are reduced to order by a central government, and as privilege begins to disappear the towns are regulated by a common set of rules, or the whole country, as in France, is parcelled out again into a new series of communes or corporate districts. In Spain, as we have seen, the needs of the state gave immediate freedom to its defenders. In Italy the cities grew too soon into a crowd of independent republics. The history of Lincoln and Exeter and the cities of the Danelagh shows that &quot; the tendency of the great cities of England was towards a more than muni cipal independence &quot; (Freeman, Engl. Toivm, p. 206). If these movements had not been checked by the Norman Conquest, English history might have been &quot; like that of the imperial kingdoms.&quot; But, as this event turned out, there is little in the record of the German cities which bears upon that of English municipalities, excepting some slight resemblances between the powers acquired by the city of London and those of the Hanse towns and the mercantile principalities of Nuremberg and Augsburg. The free cities of Germany were at first divided between the emperors and their immediate vassals, the former ruling through the bishops as imperial vicars ; in the 1 2th century the citizens began to elect councils and to administer a concurrent jurisdiction ; in the next century they either purchased full powers or drove out the vicars and bailiffs by force ; the revolutions which followed the fall of the Hohenstauffen family enabled the cities to free themselves from the mediate lords and to hold directly of the empire, and they were soon afterwards admitted to the diet on equal terms with the rest of its sovereign constituents. The borough when it appears in English history is essentially a place of defence, and the definition includes the powerful city which formed the metropolis of an ancient kingdom, the border-fortress, the walled seaport, the &quot;burh&quot; erected in a disaffected province, and the fortified village on the private demesne of the king. There is another sense of the word &quot;borough,&quot; as used in Kent and the neighbouring counties, to denote the small rural division which is elsewhere called a &quot; tithing,&quot; the constable or tithing-man being the same officer as the &quot; borsholder &quot; or &quot; borough-elder &quot; of the eastern counties ; but the verbal similarity is accidental, the rural &quot; borough &quot; having been the district of the &quot; frank-pledges &quot; or neighbours under a pledge or &quot;borh&quot; to act as bail for each other. The borough or &quot; burh &quot; was confined to the precinct of the walls, though the town or city might extend to a greater distance, or the burgesses might be joint-owners of estates outside the lines of defence. There might even be two &quot; burhs &quot; side by side if the nature of the locality required it. We read in the Chronicle, for instance, of the con struction of the &quot;northern burh&quot; at Hertford in 913, and of &quot; burhs &quot; being built five years later on both sides of the river at Buckingham ; and many other examples will be found collected in Kemble s list of the towns. Little is known of the civil constitution of the boroughs before the Norman Conquest, and even the Domesday survey fails to give much information as to their internal affairs where the king s rights were not immediately con cerned. It appears indeed that Lincoln and the other cities of the Danelagh were almost independent ; an aristo cratic commonwealth in each case was governed by twelve