Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/606

588 were "bound to attend the shire-moot and hundred-moot" under penalty of "large fines for neglect of duty"; and that in the thirteenth century in Holland, when the burghers were assembled for public purposes, judicial or other, "any one ringing the town bell except by general consent, and any one not appearing when it tolls, are liable to a fine."

After recognizing this primitive relation between popular duty and popular power, we shall more clearly understand the relation as it reappears when popular power begins to revive along with the growth of industrialism. For here again the fact meets us that the obligation is primary and the power secondary. It is mainly as furnishing aid to the ruler, generally for war purposes, that the deputies from towns begin to share in public affairs. There recurs under a complex form that which at an early stage we see in a simple form. Let us pause for a moment to observe the transition.

As was shown when treating of "Ceremonial Institutions," the revenues of rulers are derived, at first wholly and afterward partially, from presents. Beginning as irregular and voluntary, the making of presents grows periodic and more or less compulsory. The occasions on which assemblies are called together to discuss public affairs (mainly military operations for which supplies are needed) naturally become the occasions on which the expected gifts are offered and received. When by successful wars the militant king consolidates small societies into a large one—when there comes an "increase of royal power in intension as the kingdom increases in extension" (to quote the luminous expression of Professor Stubbs); and when, as a consequence, the quasi-voluntary gifts become more and more compulsory, though still retaining such names as donum and auxilium—it generally happens that these exactions, passing a bearable limit, lead to resistance: at first passive and in extreme cases active. If by consequent disturbances the royal power is much weakened, the restoration of order, if it takes place, is likely to take place on the understanding that, with such modifications as may be needful, the primitive system of voluntary gifts shall be reestablished. Thus, when in Spain the death of Sancho I was followed by political dissensions, the deputies from thirty-two places, who assembled at Valladolid, decided that demands made by the king beyond the customary dues should be answered by death of the messenger; and the need for gaining the adhesion of the towns during the conflict with a pretender led to an apparent toleration of this attitude. Similarly in the next century, during disputes as to the regency while Alfonso XI was a minor, the Cortes at Burgos demanded that the towns should "contribute nothing beyond what was prescribed in" their charters. Kindred causes wrought kindred results in France; as when, by an insurrectionary league, Louis Hutin was obliged to grant charters to the nobles and burgesses of Picardy and of Normandy, renouncing the right of