ORIGINS OF THE BOROUGH
are always two main problems to be solved. When and in
what circumstances did the town become a separate judicial
area ? At what date and by what means did it secure the
right of self-government ? The materials for answers to these
questions, especially the first, are unfortunately imperfect
in all countries and a massive literature has gathered round
them, especially in Germany. The view that municipal
life had survived from Roman times has long been discredited,
but the hot controversy whether the town was in the beginning
essentially a mere natural extension of a rural community
or a fortress (or an appendage of one) or the locality of a
market, has not yet been settled to everybody’s satisfaction,
though the last suggestion has now few, if any, continental
supporters.
If the early growth of the English borough has much in
common with that of the continental town, it has also some
marked peculiarities, due to the insular position of the country
and the course of its history. The chief of these is the
limited hold which feudalism obtained here as compared with
Germany and still more with France. Even in Germany the
Ottonian dynasty (ioth century) delegated public justice
in the great episcopal cities to their bishops, not without risk
of confusion between the unfree inhabitants of episcopal
domain and the citizens outside its bounds.1 In thoroughly
feudalized France cities had to wrest liberties from episcopal
lords. In England, on the other hand, the crown retained
its direct authority over all but a few small boroughs in the
south-east down to the Norman Conquest and though some
larger towns were mediatized by the new rulers of the land,
the process never went to dangerous lengths. This direct
relation to the king was doubtless in part accountable for
the slower development of towns in England than abroad
and for the complete absence during the Anglo-Saxon period
of such urban charters as were being granted, sparingly
enough, by feudal lords in France in the eleventh century and
even occasionally in the tenth. Athelstan’s alleged charter to
Malmesbury 2 is of course the most obvious of post-Conquest
forgeries and there is not even a medieval copy of that to
Barnstaple.3
1 F. Keutgen, Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung (1895), pp. 14 ff.
2 C.S., no. 720, vol. ii., p. 428.
3 In an inquisition taken shortly before 1344 it was found that '' there
was nothing certain about the charter of king Athelstan whereby the
burgesses pretend that certain liberties were granted to them ’’ {C.P.R.
INTRODUCTORY
The absence of military and political feudalism in Anglo-
Saxon England explains a further marked difference between
the early English borough and a large class of continental
towns. In the Low Countries the burg was the feudal castle
round which or a fortified ecclesiastical settlement the towns
fj>oorte) mostly grew up, while in France similar settlements
below the feudalized walled cités of Roman origin came to be
distinguished from them as bourgs when in their turn they were
surrounded with walls. This distinction between old and
new was unknown in pre-Conquest England 1 where urban
life began within the walls 2 of old Roman towns and the new
burhs founded by Alfred and his family, when not mere forts,
were normally existing settlements, now for the first time
surrounded by a wall or stockaded rampart.
The scientific investigation of the origins of the English
borough began much later than corresponding studies abroad
and was strongly influenced by them. It was not until 1896
that Maitland, much impressed by Keutgen’s theory of the
vital part played by the defensive burg in the rise of towns in
Germany, gave a forecast in the English Historical Review s
of the “ garrison theory ” of the origin of English towns
which he expounded at length in the next year in Domesday
Book and Beyond. Briefly, his theory was that the burgesses
and houses recorded in Domesday Book as paying rent to
manors outside the borough in the eleventh century were
relics of a duty of the shire thegns of the ninth and tenth
to keep men in the boroughs for their defence, who became
the nucleus of the borough community.
Though slightly guarded by his admission that “ no one
theory will tell the story of any and every particular town ” 4
and that “ we must not exclude the hypothesis that some
1343^45. P∙ 290). Yet in 1930 the corporation publicly celebrated the
millenary of the granting of the charter to “ the oldest borough in the king-
dom.” Malmesbury wisely made no protest.
1 Except perhaps in a minor degree at Worcester. See below, p. 20.
8 At Canterbury these had been extended northwards before the
coming of St. Augustine (Bede, bk. i. c. 33 ; C. Cotton, The Saxon Cathedral
at Canterbury (1929), p. 4) ; but the Burgate, the “ Borough Gate,” was in
the old Roman wall. Dr. Mortimer Wheeler has recently advanced the
theory that Saxon London originated in the western half of the area within
the Roman wall because that, always thinly populated, had probably
been found deserted, while the nucleus of Londinium, east of the Walbrook
was still occupied through the fifth and sixth centuries by a Romano-
British population, " if only as a Sub-Roman slum " (Antiquity, viii. (1934),
Pp. 290 fi., cf. ib., 437 ff.). This suggestion is still under discussion and in
any case the first Saxon settlement would not have been one of traders.
, xi. (1896), pp. 13 ff. 4 D.B. and B., p. 173