After the consolidation of the empire; and when the praetor was superseded by the imperial advisers and judges in the capital, the imperial governors became supreme in the provinces. The very curia, or close council, which usurped the power of electing the magistrates, became, in the end, degraded by the uses to which it was made subservient by the imperial government. They were made responsible for the payment of the taxes; and from a supreme legislative and administrative body degenerated into the mere instruments which the imperial officers employed for carrying into effect the more disagreeable functions of government. Before the revival of municipalities the office had become a burden instead of an honour, and it was thrown, as a sign of contempt and oppression, on Jews, heretics, and other persons whom the government desired to mark with disrespect.

We know little on the very interesting point, how far the Roman municipal system existed in Britain. Two English towns are known to have had municipalities, York and Verulam; and it may be supposed that London, mentioned by Tacitus as a considerable place, had the rank of a municipality. There were several colonies and other sub-municipalities in Britain; and if the map of Richard of Cirencester can be believed, they penetrated as far northward as Inverness. Some English towns have retained through all intervening changes names which stamp their Roman origin, as Manchester, Winchester, and all those ending in chester. It is a natural supposition that a portion of the municipal constitution imparted to the more southern British towns by the Romans might have lived through the Saxon period. But archaeologists have found no real evidence of such vestiges, and on this matter we have no better guide than mere conjecture.

How the continental municipalities lived through the troubles which attended the fall of the empire, so as to retain that vitality which enabled them to grow to a second maturity, is among the problems belonging to that epoch of confusion. In most instances the ancient municipal principle ruled or modified the administration of communities which had otherwise grown up. It is certain, however, that several cities of Italy, some in the south of France, and a few in Germany, such as Cologne, may be said at this day to be under the authority of a magistrate who date their origin from the Caesars. Savigny and other writers have proved that the Roman law never died in Europe, to be raised from the grave by the discovery of the Pandects at the siege of Amalfi, according to the old popular belief. Through the strange confusion of nations, ever restless and transitory, an arrangement was adopted, as it were by common consent, that each tribe or people should, as far as consisted with the rights, or rather with the power of their neighbours, use their own laws. Thus the descendants of the Roman citizens, poor, obscure, and ever diminishing by absorption into other communities, kept up the more familiar and daily applicable principles of their own law; and when the world became settled, these, from their comprehensive and symmetrical character, gradually predominated, forcing out of use a more or less proportion of the original customs of the people in every country. The remnant of the Romans were essentially cives, or citizens. Their city was the state; and the term which they used to express attachment to the city has, in the words citizen, civicum, citizenship, and the like, been used in France, and other countries which derive their language from Rome, to express attachment to one's country or state. But in the narrower acceptation of the term, the Romans were still citizens after the fall of their empire, since they were especially the dwellers in towns, while the conquering tribes occupied the open country. Hence, in a general way, we see how they preserved their own laws, and how those laws which affected the constitu-

tion of the places in which they lived were the most sedulously tended. In Italy, besides Rome itself, several of the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy continued to possess municipalities, modelled after the imperial city, with consuls at their head, a senate, and occasionally a tribune. So vital was the municipal system among them, that in the days of Italy's mediæval prosperity they were sufficiently strong to constitute very powerful governments, aristocratically republican; and Europe, when she had become thoroughly feudalized in her notions, looked with astonishment at the anomaly of mercantile or banking citizens, who not only vied with the highest feudal aristocracy, but were, as in the example of the Medici family, virtually royal houses. Nothing is more curious in the preservation of the Roman municipalities, than the method in which an equivalent to the broken authority of the empire was supplied to them from a totally different source. It is needless to remark, that the form of European history and institutions owes much to the fact, that while the civil power of the empire was destroyed, its ecclesiastical power, being attached to the destinies of Christianity, continued to exist, and even to take up many of the elements of the civil power as they dropped from time to time from the imperial grasp. The municipalities required leaders and directors, and the hierarchy of the church was at hand to lead and direct them. In Italy it came to be an almost constitutional rule, that the archbishop or bishop was the head of the leading town, smaller towns being headed by ecclesiastical persons of a lower grade. The system penetrated through part of France and of Germany. It did not reach England in its original purity, but became there mixed with the feudal which made a borough sometimes hold by tenure of an ecclesiastical dignity. It is a matter of dispute by what original title the bishops sit in the House of Lords, and it has been said that they are a remnant of the old feudal baronage by tenure, sitting among the peers in right of the temporal lordships attached to their sees. But old as this origin is, the lordships which bishops may have held over city municipalities is of a still older date. We retain a relic of the municipal authority of the bishop in the notion of a city, which is stated in many legal books of reference to be a town in which there is a bishop's cathedral. The municipal bishop has almost disappeared from Europe, but the prototype of his civic authority still remains in the regal authority exercised by the bishop of Rome as a temporal prince.

Before feudality had come to its maturity, the towns had generally assumed their natural condition as communities governed by their own civic officers, the church betaking herself to things which were, or which she claimed to be, solely within her proper spiritual function. As the feudal system grew in strength, the municipal system, its natural rival and antidote, waxed powerful along with it. The two great types of the character of the age were the feudal lord's castle and the free or regal city,—both invested with characteristics unknown, at least in their fulness, to any previous social conditions of which we have an account. From those peculiarities in the condition of the European powers which divided the territories of the empire, so often discussed and so well known, the dominion over land and the dwellers in it became the great source of feudal eminence, suspending all the other elements of superiority,—such as great moveable wealth, the possession of many slaves, high office, or the privilege of taxation. The feudal lord lived in the country in his domains, and there built a fortalice; which was not a place of strength to which an invaded people might retire for refuge, but an edifice of a new and totally different character,—a fortress overlooking the surrounding country, a prison for the refractory, and a mansion for the feudal chief,—all in one. The peasantry and other feudal inferiors nestled round this place of strength.

Municipal for their own safety, and thus made a town which, while it continued small, was under the dominion of the lord, but sometimes became sufficiently large, wealthy, and powerful to assert its independence, and join the community of free cities which arose in rivalry of the chief and his stronghold. The aggressive spirit of feudalism, bringing all within its grasp as the dependents of some superior lord or other, left no room for separate independence. The *aremanni*, *allodials*, or other men of substance, who were neither lords nor vassals, found themselves crushed out, and naturally took refuge in the same sanctuaries where the remnants of the Roman population had found a congenial retreat—the municipalities.

Various events tended to increase the strength and influence of these. The Crusades brought them trade, the object for which they were best suited, and at the same time weakened the hands of their rivals and oppressors. The revival of the study of the Roman law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was virtually the revival of the peculiar institutions which separated and protected them from feudalism. The Roman law had been promulgated in a despotism, yet it was peculiarly fitted to introduce elements of freedom to a state of society where feudalism was prevalent. It countenanced no distinctions in position among subjects; all under the emperor were equal, with the same rights and obligations, unless, indeed, it were the superiority conferred by citizenship, which yet did not confer power on one man over another. So much for freemen; on the other hand, the slaves were mere property or chattels. Feudality, however, was antagonistic to abstract slavery, having ever a tendency to the serfdom which attached the subordinate to a particular estate or a particular house, in reference to which the theory of the law, at least, gave him rights as well as obligations. The citizens could not well possess that power over their fellow-men which was denied to the feudal lord, and a pure republican freedom, of which the Roman law was an effective and suitable interpreter, prevailed in the cities.

Still the aggressive spirit of feudalism pressed hard on these communities. Except in the case of those which, like the great Italian cities, were powerful enough to be virtually states, in the European system, the towns generally found it necessary to come, in some shape or other, into the feudal hierarchy. If the citizens could not be made vassals individually, the community might acknowledge a superior in a collective capacity; and it became the interest of the towns in this manner to choose a protector. Still the hereditary principle, the several feudal exactions, and, above all, the subinfeudation which put a long hierarchy of masters over the humbler grade of vassals, was resolutely and, in many instances, effectually resisted. Laws still in full practice show vestiges of this long contest between the Roman and the feudal law. They are very distinctly seen in Scotland, where the owner of land or houses in a royal burgh is always a vassal, and can hold by no other tenure, but is a vassal of the crown only, no overlord having been able to intervene between the burgess and the sovereign. In all the surrounding territory there is a system of subinfeudation, by which the owner of land can sell it to another as his vassal, thus reserving, in the shape of the vassal's dues, a sort of perpetual rent called a feu-duty. But the owner of property in burgage tenure can only substitute a purchaser in his own place as a vassal of the crown.

This vassalage to the crown was indeed one of the great elements of strength which carried the municipalities of the middle ages through their difficulties and dangers. Arising from common causes, it had common effects over Europe. As some of the great lordships enlarged themselves into kingdoms, their reigning heads naturally felt that the most dangerous opponents of their rule were the feudal aristocracy, above whose position they had soared. They found on their territories municipal communities possessed of some wealth and strength, whose interests and feelings were opposed to those of the aristocracy; and it was always among the temptations to which a monarch was subject in his hour of feebleness, to make common cause with these communities. When the feudal lord who held a municipality in vassalage was tired out in a long contest with the insurgent citizens, or when he was offered a considerable tribute, he came to terms with them, agreeing to allow them certain exemptions from feudal exaction. The document acknowledging these exemptions, when it became matter of uniform practice, was called a charter. But if such a treaty with a subject lord, whose observance of it could not perhaps be very implicitly trusted, were of any value, far more precious was that royal charter in which a monarch embodied the terms of his alliance, and his protection of the citizens against their oppressors. Thus the municipal corporations became an integral part of the feudal hierarchy,—a fact which, as we shall presently see, had an influence on the national constitution of the European kingdoms, separate from its influence on the constitution and condition of each separate municipality. Hence, when the system was at its prime, the municipalities or boroughs of Europe might be divided into three great classes: 1st. The free cities, which enjoyed such an independent municipal constitution as the Italian and other cities of the Roman world enjoyed before the encroachments of the empire—such as Florence, Venice, Genoa, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Novgorod. Some of these independent cities had been Roman municipalities which shook themselves free at the dissolution of the empire; others had arisen in feudality, and accomplished their freedom by war or purchase, or partly by both; but in all cases they were large, rich communities, capable of maintaining fleets or armies, and of holding a diplomatic character among the European powers. In a feudal hierarchy these held the position of sovereigns, sometimes exercising a very tyrannical sway over districts of which the people and their lords owned them as feudal superiors in the highest grade. It is almost needless to say that the power of the crown prevented such independent municipalities from arising in Britain. London, however, with peculiar privileges and powers, which even at the present day seem sometimes to bid defiance to the power of the legislature, approached very close to municipal independence and the establishment of a free city. The asserted right to exclude the royal troops from the precincts of the city, which possessed its own peculiar army, and the semi-sovereign rank and etiquette enjoyed by the lord mayor, seem to have been very incomprehensible to foreign writers, who have sometimes greatly exaggerated the actual privileges of the city. In the *Dictionnaire de Trévoux*, for instance, it is authoritatively laid down—that the lord mayor is the principal *milord* of the realm, and in the case of a vacancy in the throne is, for the time being, governor of England. The second great class of municipalities were those which held royal charters, and were therefore, like the great lords, in the position of prime vassals of the crown. These in many instances had vassals under them, sometimes in the shape of small municipalities or corporations, sometimes in the shape of individual holders of feudal tenements more or less important. The chief cities in the United Kingdom were of this class; and wherever the crown was strong, it did not permit subject superiors to hold considerable towns in vassalage,—although frequently a neighbouring lord might exercise a very powerful influence in the councils of a royal municipality near his castle, and such a person was often propitiated by being invited or allowed to hold the highest office in the city, becoming its patron and to some extent its ruler. The lowest class of municipalities were those holding, not of sovereign princes, but of lords or subjects-superior, themselves bound to do homage to a sovereign. These were virtually the communities which, from

There were, of course, many minute distinctions and variations in the municipalities of the different European nations; but they will generally be found capable of classification into these leading divisions, since a remarkable uniformity pervades their constitution throughout Europe. This uniformity had its origin in the universal study of that Roman law from which the notion of municipalities was derived, and also, in some measure, from the uniformity of the feudal system itself. The necessary admission of the crown municipalities as an integral part of the feudal system, has been productive of signal importance politically. It came thus to pass, that in the feudal assemblages which acquired more or less vitality in every country in Europe, and in Britain grew in strength until it became the imperial Parliament, the municipalities bore a part. Without them there would have been a gap in the feudal edifice. But all those who enjoyed the privileges of the municipality could not attend at the king's high court; the community must select certain citizens to pay suit and service as it elected its superior officers. Hence came the principle of representation, which made the House of Commons in Britain, and has repeatedly struggled into existence in France; arising fresh from the old municipal system, in the memorable instance of the meeting of the States-General, which began the first revolution.

It may now be appropriate to notice the leading peculiarities in the history and constitution of the municipalities of the United Kingdom. From the causes already noticed, the general uniformity pervading the municipal system extended even to England; but there were fundamental peculiarities in the real nature of the English municipal system which it has never lost. It has already been shown, that though it is not impossible that Roman municipalities may have lived in Britain through the Saxon invasion, no corporation has been actually traced among us to such an origin. The materials on which the corporation system was remodelled under the Norman kings, were evidently those institutions of the Saxons which divided the country into communities of tithings and hundreds, on the principle of common responsibility among the tithing men, and the duty of attendance at the hundred court. There are but faint contemporary traces of the constitution of the Anglo-Saxon towns; but their condition, as the Conqueror found them, may be gathered from Domesday Book, and is in a great measure reflected by the subsequent charters granted to them when they were incorporated by the Norman kings.1

There is a difficulty in understanding the precise nature of the Saxon town; because it was not in its constitutional character any otherwise distinct from other parts of the country, than so far as a thickly-peopled must be distinct from a thinly-peopled place. There existed nothing in the form of a corporation, such as it afterwards became under the feudal system, mixed with the Roman law. The institution nearest to it in character was the body of traders, sometimes united together in a town, with the Saxon designation of a guild. It is possible to find other distinctions, both in name and reality, between the habits and institutions of the town's-people and the country-men. The term borough was in use, having found its way from expressing a pledge or surety, through some course which can be only hypothetically followed, to apply to a body of men associated together, and of course subject to the Saxon law of mutual suretyship. The term alderman, so familiar in later days, does not appear to have been originally burgal, though it became so in the later periods of the Saxon monarchy, after having designated an officer who represented, and was next in rank, to the king, over a shire or some wider district. There came to be such distinctions between county and town as are represented by the shire-revee or sheriff for the county, and the borough-revee or port-revee for the town, with the corresponding shire-gemote and borough-gemote, at which the freemen attended and gave their pledges. The term "freeman" has been well known in late municipal history, chiefly from the easy political virtue of the men who bore so honourable a title. Its origin among the Saxon communities was not associated with general freedom. It was used to distinguish the freemen from the thralls or slaves. There was indeed a greater analogy in social condition between our Saxon ancestors and the southern states of North America, with their republicanism and their slavery, than it is always agreeable to acknowledge.

Although in all such matters broad classifications are open to doubt and criticism, it seems to be a fair conclusion, that at the time of the Conquest, and during the reigns of the early Norman kings, the constituency of a burgh, those who voted in its great affairs and chose its officers, were the free male inhabitants—that is, those who were not slaves. As freemen, they were in municipal matters equal among each other. The feudal usages of the Norman dynasty naturally broke in upon the abstract division into freemen and slaves, communicating to the latter the modified slavery of feudal vassalage. But the condition of free men still attached to the citizens, and came to be communicated as a valuable privilege, by birth, marriage, apprenticeship, or acceptance into the free body of citizens. The serfs of the feudal lords were thus often rescued and enfranchised, much to the annoyance of their masters. Among the corporation records of Hythe are the following entries in the year 1399:

"Thomas Goodall came before the jurats in the common hall on the 10th day of October, and covenanted to give for his freedom 20d., and so he was received and sworn to bear fealty to our Lord the King and his successors, and to the commonality and liberty of the Port of Hethe, and to render faithful account of his lots and scots as freemen there are wont."

"Be it remembered, that on the last day of the month of March, in the Common House, John Brandon covenanted to give for his freedom 6s. 8d., and he was sworn to bear fealty to the Lord the King and to the commonality and liberty of the Port of Hethe: and to render faithful account of his lots and scots when they shall accrue, as persons are wont to do—and the said John Brandon is admitted."

The obligation of "scot and lot," to which these men became liable on their admission to the franchise, is another familiar expression connected with municipal constituencies. It very expressively applied to those who participated in common in the taxation and services of the burgess. The word scot means a tax, coming from the same origin as scutage, and the Danish skat, a tax or tribute, a word still of practical use in the Orkney Isles. The lot means the obligation to perform the public services which might fall to them by due rotation. The freemen—burgesses, or whatever they may be termed—transacted their business by common council; and here we have the origin of another term familiar in modern municipal nomenclature. The commune concilium evidently referred to the collective decision in council of the burgesses—their vote, in short, after

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1 For an ample store of information derived from Domesday Book, the charters, Acts of Parliament, litigations, Parliamentary inquiries, and other sources of information on this head, reference may be made to the three large volumes of The History of the Boroughs and Municipal Corporations of the United Kingdom, by Merewether and Stephens. The chief defect of this book is the large quantity of superfluous matter contained in it.

2 Merewether and Stephen's History of Boroughs, 746.

The term seems, by a metamorphosis which would be interesting if it could be traced, to have come at last to apply, not to the act of the burgesses in transacting their business, but to the select body who transacted it for them. It was not until after incorporation had for some time been in use that the management of the municipal affairs fell into the hands of a select council.

The early Norman kings granted charters to the towns. These did not grant them privileges, but secured to them those privileges and systems of internal organization which they had long been accustomed to. It cannot be said, as Guizot says of France, that the charters were gained by an insurrection and a war, and were in fact the terms of a treaty between the monarch and the insurgents. That act in the drama of the feudal history had passed over before the system in its maturity came over to Britain. But the charters were in some measure extorted from unwilling grantees. It was contrary to the spirit of the feudal monarchy, that there should be within itself acting constitutions not owning the monarch as the author and regulator of their functions. The choice lay between the destruction of the privileges of the boroughs and a frank acknowledgment of them. The latter alternative was of necessity adopted. Many separate local reasons concurred in rendering the granting of charter after charter an act of politic discretion. Not the least of these was the facility of collecting the taxes. If the king appointed a bailiff to collect the revenue of a borough, his task was difficult and dangerous, if in the end successful; it therefore served the interest of both parties, that the citizens should agree to collect among each other, and remit the proper sum, on the condition of their being privileged from the intrusion of the royal bailiff. Sometimes the charters granted not only exemptions from vexations interference, but special and exclusive privileges; and in the acquisition of these, London, from its predominating influence, was from the first conspicuous. Thus the Conqueror himself, in what may be called the earliest charter of the city, says with emphatic brevity,—“William the King friendly salutes William the Bishop, and Godfrey the Portreeve, and all the Burgesses within London, French and English. And I declare that I grant you to be all law-worthy as you were in the days of King Edward, and I grant that every child shall be his father’s heir after his father’s days: and I will not suffer any person to do you wrong. God preserve you!” (Mereweather and Stephens, 287.)

The terms of peace thus hastily communicated were matured into the charter of Henry I., which, among other things, concedes, “that the citizens might place whom they would of themselves to be sheriff, and also one to be justiciary for keeping the pleas of the crown; that none other should be justiciary over the same men of London; that the citizens should not plead within the walls for any plea; that they should be free from scot and lot, danegeit, and of murder, and none of them should wage battel. If any of the citizens should be impleaded concerning the pleas of the crown, the man of London should discharge himself by his oath to be adjudged within the city. No one was to have lodging assigned him within the walls: nor any one of the King’s household, nor of any other, have lodging assigned to him by force. That all men of London should be quit and free with their goods throughout England and the ports of the sea, of toll passage, lastage, and all other customs.”

In the royal charter we have the foreign municipal system, consisting as it did of a mixture of the old Roman municipalities and of feudalism, brought over and superinduced on the Saxon burgal communities. This could not happen without the introduction of the Roman law, cordially as it was hated by the common lawyers. It made a uniformity in appearance between the English and the continental municipality, but the fundamental principles of the old Saxon system still directed the spirit of the English borough. There was, however, a further change at hand. The early charters were not charters of incorporation. The corporation, indeed, was an ingenious result of the joint labours of the civilians and common lawyers. The law books speak of all the boroughs as having been corporations from the beginning; and great caution is necessary in referring even to printed records and acts of Parliament on this point, because the later copyist or editor, saturated with the legal phraseology of his own age, would insert the word “corporate” beside the word “town,” as if its omission in the original had been a mere clerical oversight. Among many other such instances, the title of the act 6th Rich. II., stat. i., chap. 9, in the ordinary printed editions of the statutes is, “that no victualler shall execute a judicial place in a city or town corporate;” while the qualification of being “corporate” does not occur in the body of the act itself. Perhaps the earliest known record of an incorporation dates in the year 1412, when the citizens of Plymouth “state that their town is a great port and resort for ships coming there, and that oftentimes it had been destroyed by the king’s enemies, because it had not been enclosed between any walls or defensible fortress to resist the enemy; and pray that His Majesty would grant to them, their heirs and successors, inhabitants and resiants within the same town, power annually to elect a mayor for the good governance of the same town: and that they, their heirs and successors, may be a body corporate to purchase free tenements for term of life or in fee without the King’s royal license.” In such charters as this, the citizens at large were to be incorporated; but subsequent incorporations narrowed the sphere of the corporate basis, for the purpose of including only that small body of official persons by whom the complex and artificial character of an English corporation could be kept up. There had been ecclesiastical corporations of an earlier date, and the corporation was thus in fact a mechanism calculated for ecclesiastical rather than for civil purposes.

A few considerations will render obvious how it gradually modified, and in the end totally changed, the constitution of the English boroughs. In the first place, the charter itself gave to the office-bearers of the municipality an authority from above, competing with their authority from below, as the elected of the freemen. The power of this sanction was strengthened by the incorporation, because the persons incorporated were in reality the officers, not the citizens. There is a tendency in all elected bodies to strengthen their position and become independent of their constituencies; and the royal charter giving certain privileges and functions to the elected, with that perpetual succession and uninterrupted vitality which are the boasted merits of the English corporation, naturally aided the office-bearers in the assertion of a power independent of the community. But it was the nature of a charter of incorporation not merely to acknowledge but to confer privileges, and their extent and character were dictated by the royal authority which conferred them. The difference between such a process and the mere confirmation of established privileges is obvious. If the rights and privileges of the freemen or burgesses in any ancient city were confirmed by the crown, their character had been originally adjusted by these freemen or burgesses themselves, and in their own way. When the crown absolutely conferred the privilege, the crown could impose conditions on it, and could, in particular, limit the class who were to enjoy it. Thus, after the system of incorporation came to its maturity, the municipal corporations fell into the hands of bodies of men more or less restricted, who

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1 Mereweather and Stephen’s History of Boroughs, p. 295. 2 Ibid. could lay down factious or capricious regulations for the franchise, or in many other ways impair the character of their own opinions or interests to the community. At the same time, what could be conferred by the absolute will of the crown was liable to be revoked. The law said, that if a municipal corporation was false to the tenor of its charter, that charter should be annulled; and as it had come to be a fiction of law, that every municipal privilege and power must be founded on charter, though none could be produced, the whole municipal system was at the mercy of the courts of law at a time when these were under the influence of the crown. Hence came those proceedings by writ of quo warranto, for stripping their privileges from municipalities acting independently, which preceded, and in a great measure caused, the revolution. That event did not put an end to charters of incorporation or improve their character, though, of course, no attempt has since been made to attack and demolish in a body the corporations acting offensively towards the ruling interest. During the reign of William III., and subsequently, the influence of the crown in creating municipal corporations, and adjusting them to the objects of the ministry in power, was profusely employed, and became too conspicuously connected with British history and politics to require commemoration here.

Soon after the era of the Norman conquest we find traces of a municipal system in Scotland closely resembling that of England. From the time of Malcolm IV., downwards, charters were profusely granted; but although they were named charters of erection, and are supposed to have created the municipalities to which they refer, yet they generally contain internal evidence that the communities acknowledged by them enjoyed an earlier existence. In monuments of the reign of David I., chiefly relating to ecclesiastical houses, there are references to towns which are the king's own or royal burghs (e.g., Burgum meum de Haddington). A capitulary of laws of considerable antiquity is called the Laws of the Four Burghs (Leges Quatuor Burgorum). If the collection as a whole be perhaps no older than the fourteenth century, it is supposed that some of the laws themselves may belong to a far more distant date. The four burghs to which it applied were Edinburgh, Stirling, Berwick, and Roxburgh. It is remarkable that several of these laws refer to foreign commerce and the loading and unloading of vessels; and could thus have scarcely applied to any of the four burghs except Berwick. These four burghs formed an important court, of the authority of which there is a curious testimony in the year 1292, when a great part of Scotland was in the hands of Edward I. A question of private right, which came before a Parliament held by Edward in Newcastle, was referred to the court of the four burghs, as expositors of Scottish municipal customs. The similarity of these laws to many of the charters of the English burghs is a striking evidence of the similarity of the municipal customs of the two kingdoms. Many portions of the charter of Newcastle are identical with the laws of the four burghs; and these bear evident marks of a unity of customs and laws, even when compared with the earliest charters of London. As in England, there is no trace of the corporation proper in the early Scottish municipalities. To be a free inhabitant, watching and warding, and paying the imperial dues, was to be a burgess, with the elective rights and other privileges of a burgess; and there was no higher grade but that which was conferred by office. In some instances the possibility of incorporation is negatived, by the charter being granted to all the burgesses spread over a district of country. One charter of William the Lion confers privileges on all burghs in Moravia or Moray; another confers liberum ansum (the right of trading, a term having the same origin as the name of the Hanse towns) on all the burgesses north of the Mount, or of the Grampian chain. The system of free election without a corporation, which separate documents show to have belonged to the English boroughs, is distinctly embodied in the burgh laws of Scotland. The whole election code is translated as follows in a Scottish version, probably of the fifteenth century, of which it is necessary slightly to modify the spelling:—

"At the first mute next after the feast of Sanct Michael, the Aldermen and the Baillies shall be chosen through the counsale of the gud men of the toune, the whilk awe be to lele and of gud fame, and they shall swear feewe to the Lord the King, and to the burges of the toune, and they shall swear to keep the customs of the toune, and they shall not hold laugh [bold law] on any man or woman for wroth na for hatred na for dread or for luze of any man, but through ordinance counsel and dome of good men of the town. Also they shall swear that neither for rudness na for luze na for hatred na for cosynage na for tinsel of their silver—they shall nocht spare to do right to all men." In this succinct little code it will be observed that there occurs the same expression, the counsale, and in the Latin original the commune concilium, which became so curiously perverted in England.

The analogy between the Scottish and the English municipalities remained until the war of independence separated the two nations as hostile kingdoms. During the Saxon dynasty there was no more national division between the north of England and lowland Scotland, than between one province of Saxon England and another; nor was this community of nationality entirely severed even by the Norman conquest of England. After the war of independence however, Scotland, alienated from England, allied herself to England's greatest enemy, France, and the Scottish institutions became more or less tinged by the influence of the alliance. In the early municipal documents we find reference to the mayor, the aldermen, and the coroner, as in England. But afterwards the chief magistrate became the provost, or prevost; the inferior magistrates were bailies; the head of the craftsmen and of the merchant guild became the deacon, dean, or doyen. The towns, as every traveller in Scotland knows, were built after the French fashion; and in their records the streets are sometimes called "rues," a word which, by a natural transition, was corrupted into rows.

The example of France, which had probably given encouragement to the narrowing of the municipal franchise in England, was boldly embodied in an act of Parliament in Scotland. In the year 1469 it was enacted, touching the election of officers in burghs:—"Because of great trouble and contention yearly for the chusing of the same through multitudes and clamour of commons, simple persons, it is thought expedient that none officers na council be continued after the King's laws of burrows further than a year, and that the chusing of the new officers be in this wise—that is to say, that the auld council of the toune shall chuse the new council in such number as accords to the toune; and the new council and the auld of the year before shall chuse all officers pertaining to the toune." This deliberate system of self-election, after meeting with some resistance at first, was the general rule followed, with local modifications and peculiarities, throughout Scotland down to the year 1833.

Long before this period the municipal system had come under deep discredit. In England the charges against it were, political corruption; general waste and extravagance; the mismanagement, misdirection, or appropriation of the property devoted to public purposes; and a general abuse of the powers and privileges of municipal offices for party

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1 See the passages compared side by side in the preface to the Record edition of the Scots Acts, p. 33. Municipal or personal ends. In all parts of the empire it was remarked that, instead of being places of refuge for oppressed liberty, the corporations were frequently centres of oppression and extortion,—those privileges and immunities which were conferred on them for protection against feudal and regal power, being converted into personal monopolies and privileges, which invidiously excluded the public at large, to the detriment of the national welfare. In England the exclusive trading privileges asserted by the corporations were from an early time checked and modified by acts of Parliament. In Scotland monopolies were held and rigidly enforced down to the pursuits of the humblest craftsmen. In the Book of Advice, written by King James for his son, there occur the following unexpectedly sagacious remarks on this subject:—"The craftsmen think we should be content with their work how bad and dear soever it be, and if they in anything be controlled—up with the blue blanket. But for their part, take example of England, how it hath flourished in wealth and policy since the stranger craftsmen came in among them."

The Scottish system, which was admitted to be far more exclusive than the English, was reformed in the year 1833; but the exclusive privileges of trade were not abolished until 1839. In England a general act "for the regulation of municipal corporations," abolishing trading privileges, and providing for vested rights connected with the freeman system, passed in 1835. The English municipal franchise is in the resident householders; the Scottish in the ten-pound parliamentary voters. The Irish municipal system, which was not indigenous, but a mere artificial imitation of the English, exhibiting many of its vices, but none of its virtues, was not reconstructed until the year 1840.

The demand for municipal reform was the companion of the demand for parliamentary reform. It was often said, that could the old municipal system be restored, it would be a rallying-point for the protection of free principles against a corrupt Parliament. Both the reforms were conceded at the same time; and the result has been to place reformed municipalities in an unfavourable contrast with a reformed Parliament. There is no doubt that, had the municipal improvement been achieved earlier and alone, its importance would have been more keenly felt. At present the high public spirit represented in the House of Commons, and the stringent responsibility which that body is enabled to exact in all quarters where power is exercised, supersedes other popular safeguards; and it is often thought that the public languish towards municipal representation and responsibility, is apt to leave such power as local corporations possess, at the absolute disposal of any clever citizens whose activity or ambition prompts them to conduct public business.

In most parts of the Continent, those municipalities which were not strong enough to exist as independent governments fell before the aggrandizing progress of their sovereignties. In France, in one shape or other, the royal authority had by degrees displaced all the substantial powers of the municipalities. In the great towns there was still the maire, presumed to be the elective head of the municipality, with a body of adjoints, assessors, and conseillers, selected from the chief inhabitants. But in great cities the maire, who was the agent of the central government, as well as the head of the municipality, came to be chosen by the crown. In garrison towns the governor or his lieutenant was supreme; and in others the intendant of the province had a supreme authority over all civic bodies. At the first revolution the municipalities, such as they had become, were swept away. In the re-distribution of the country in 1791 into departments, cantons, and communes, the smaller towns were amalgamated with their communes; but the towns containing 5000 or more inhabitants obtained a separate municipality under the new system. Under Napoleon all the local electorates of any importance were superseded by the intervention of the chef de l'état. Under the Munster government of Louis Philippe the king had the nomination of maires and adjoints in the communes which had 3000 inhabitants or upwards; and the royal influence was indirectly exercised by giving the appointment in the inferior communes to the préfet. This arrangement, shaken by the revolution of 1848, was re-adopted under the second empire as convenient and suitable to the policy of the imperial system. From the first revolution downwards, the word municipal, like many others in familiar use in ancient France, has practically dropped out of the constitutional nomenclature of the country.