[361] Ibid. i. 43, 61, 158-9.
[362] Ibid. i. 282-3.
[363] Gross, i. 61-63, 85. Sometimes the grant of a guild was given before the grant of other rights. In other cases it followed. Thus in Gloucester the first charter was given by Henry the Second “to my burgesses of Gloucester” in 1155. The Guild did not appear in the charter till 1200, when John granted certain municipal rights to “our burgesses of Gloucester,” and others mainly of a trading sort to “our burgesses of Gloucester of the Merchant Guild”; and in 1227 a charter of Henry the Third seems for the first time to enact that burgesses must not only dwell in the borough, hold land, and pay lot and scot, but must also “be in the Merchant Guild and Hanse.”
[364] Ibid. i. 43-52, 158-9.
[365] Ibid. i. 63, 85, 114. “In some places their powers appear to have been gradually enlarged during the thirteenth century so as to embrace jurisdiction in pleas relating to trade.” (Ibid. 65.)
[366] Ibid. i. 114-115.
[367] Gross, i. 117, 159-60.
[368] Ibid. i. 116.
[369] Dr. Gross holds that all guilds of merchants formed after the decline of the Gilda Mercatoria in the thirteenth century must be considered as being merely craft-unions of the ordinary kind—in most cases superseding the Guild Merchant (i. 129).
[370] By Dr. Gross’s definition, “What had once been a distinct integral part of the civic body politic became vaguely blended with the whole of it.” (Gross, i. 159-60, 163.)