12. Distinguish between citizens and burgesses in England.
Section 2. Origin of English Boroughs and Cities.
[Sidenote: "Chesters.">[ [Sidenote: Coalescence of towns to fortified boroughs.] What, then, was the origin of the English borough or city? In the days when Roman legions occupied for a long time certain military stations in Britain, their camps were apt to become centres of trade and thus to grow into cities. Such places were generally known as casters or chesters, from the Latin castra, "camp," and there are many of them on the map of England to-day. But these were exceptional cases. As a rule the origin of the borough was as purely English as its name. We have seen that the town was originally the dwelling-place of a stationary clan, surrounded by palisades or by a dense quickset hedge. Now where such small enclosed places were thinly scattered about they developed simply into villages. But where, through the development of trade or any other cause, a good many of them grew up close together within a narrow compass, they gradually coalesced into a kind of compound town; and with the greater population and greater wealth, there was naturally more elaborate and permanent fortification than that of the palisaded village. There were massive walls and frowning turrets, and the place came to be called a fortress or "borough." The borough, then, was simply several townships packed tightly together; a hundred smaller in extent and thicker in population than other hundreds.[4]
[Footnote 4: Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 466. For a description of the hundred, see above, pp. 75-80.]
[Sidenote: The borough as a hundred.] From this compact and composite character of the borough came several important results. We have seen that the hundred was the smallest area for the administration of justice. The township was in many respects self-governing, but it did not have its court, any more than the New England township of the present day has its court. The lowest court was that of the hundred, but as the borough was equivalent to a hundred it soon came to have its own court. And although much obscurity still surrounds the early history of municipal government in England, it is probable that this court was a representative board, like any other hundred court, and that the relation of the borough to its constituent townships resembled the relation of the modern city to its constituent wards.
[Sidenote: The borough as a county.] But now as certain boroughs grew larger and annexed outlying townships, or acquired adjacent territory which presently became covered with streets and houses, their constitution became still more complex. The borough came to embrace several closely packed hundreds, and thus became analogous to a shire. In this way it gained for itself a sheriff and the equivalent of a county court. For example, under the charter granted by Henry I. in 1101, London was expressly recognized as a county by itself. Its burgesses could elect their own chief magistrate, who was called the port-reeve, inasmuch as London is a seaport; in some other towns he was called the borough-reeve. He was at once the chief executive officer and the chief judge. The burgesses could also elect their sheriff, although in all rural counties Henry's father, William the Conqueror, had lately deprived the people of this privilege and appointed the sheriffs himself. London had its representative board, or council, which was the equivalent of a county court. Each ward, moreover, had its own representative board, which was the equivalent of a hundred court. Within the wards, or hundreds, the burgesses were grouped together in township, parish, or manor…. Into the civic organization of London, to whose special privileges all lesser cities were ever striving to attain, the elements of local administration embodied in the township, the hundred, and the shire thus entered as component parts.[5] Constitutionally, therefore, London was a little world in itself, and in a less degree the same was true of other cities and boroughs which afterwards obtained the same kind of organization, as for example, York and Newcastle, Lincoln and Norwich, Southampton and Bristol.
[Footnote 5: Hannis Taylor, Origin and Growth of the English
Constitution, vol. i. p. 458.]
[Sidenote: The guilds.] [Sidenote: mayor, aldermen, and common council.] In such boroughs or cities all classes of society were brought into close contact,—barons and knights, priests and monks, merchants and craftsmen, free labourers and serfs. But trades and manufactures, which always had so much to do with the growth of the city, acquired the chief power and the control of the government. From an early period tradesmen and artisans found it worth while to form themselves into guilds or brotherhoods, in order to protect their persons and property against insult and robbery at the hands of great lords and their lawless military retainers. Thus there came to be guilds, or "worshipful companies," of grocers, fishmongers, butchers, weavers, tailors, ironmongers, carpenters, saddlers, armourers, needle-makers, etc. In large towns there was a tendency among such trade guilds to combine in a "united brotherhood," or "town guild," and this organization at length acquired full control of the city government. In London this process was completed in the course of the thirteenth century. To obtain the full privileges of citizenship one had to be enrolled in a guild. The guild hall became the city hall. The aldermen, or head men of sundry guilds, became the head men of the several wards. There was a representative board, or common council, elected by the citizens. The aldermen and common council held their meetings in the Guildhall, and over these meetings presided the chief magistrate, or port-reeve, who by this time, in accordance with the fashion then prevailing, had assumed the French title of mayor. As London had come to be a little world in itself, so this city government reproduced on a small scale the national government; the mayor answering to the king, the aristocratic board of aldermen to the House of Lords, and the democratic common council to the House of Commons. A still more suggestive comparison, perhaps, would be between the aldermen and our federal Senate, since the aldermen represented wards, while the common council represented the citizens.
[Sidenote: The city of London.] The constitution thus perfected in the city of London[6] six hundred years ago has remained to this day without essential change. The voters are enrolled members of companies which represent the ancient guilds. Each year they choose one of the aldermen to be lord mayor. Within the city he has precedence next to the sovereign and before the royal family; elsewhere he ranks as an earl, thus indicating the equivalence of the city to a county, and with like significance he is lord lieutenant of the city and justice of the peace. The twenty-six aldermen, one for each ward, are elected by the people, such as are entitled to vote for members of parliament; they are justices of the peace. The common councilmen, 206 in number, are also elected by the people, and their legislative power within the city is practically supreme; parliament does not think of overruling it. And the city government thus constituted is one of the most clean-handed and efficient in the world.[7]
[Footnote 6: The city of London extends east and west from the Tower to Temple Bar, and north and south from Finsbury to the Thames, with a population of not more than 100,000, and is but a small part of the enormous metropolitan area now known as London, which is a circle of twelve miles radius in every direction from its centre at Charing Cross, with a population of more than 5,000,000. This vast area is an agglomeration of many parishes, manors, etc., and has no municipal government in common.]