204
LIBER BURGUS
which Gross mainly relied. The actual charter (1299) might
indeed seem incompatible with his view. It opens with the
Hber burgus clause to which is attached the grant of the
liberties pertaining “ ad liberum burgum ” usually reserved
for the Volumus clause, with a proviso (ita tamen quod) that
the borough should be kept by a warden appointed by the
king, i.e. not by an elective mayor. Eight liberties and
customs are then separately granted : the right of devise,
return of writs, freedom from external pleading, an elective
coroner, a royal prison and gallows (for judgement of infan-
genethief and Utfangenethief), freedom from tolls throughout
the king’s dominions, lot and scot in tallages by all enjoying
the liberties, and two markets and a fair. The free borough
and liberties clause and each of these grants are individ-
ually recited in the Volumus section.1 On the face of it,
there seems to be a distinction made between the liberties
pertaining to a free borough and those which are specified.
Fortunately, there has been preserved and printed by Madox2
the petition from the men of Kingston on which the charter
was granted, and this contains the substance of its clauses
in practically the same order. The inclusion of the proviso
about the warden, and the petition and charter of the men of
Ravenserod, identical except in the market and fair clause,
seem to show that the petition was not uninfluenced from
above,3 but it may well be that the anxiety of the applicants
to have their most important privileges set out in full accounts
for their separate position in the charter. At any rate, we
have a definite statement in the report of an ad quod damnum
inquiry before the royal council (which has preserved the
petition), that these were free borough privileges. The
petitioners, it is stated, asked to be allowed to use and enjoy
“ quibusdam Libertatibus ad Liberum Burgum in Regno
vestro pertinentibus.” For any liberties and customs not
specified but authorized by the general clause of their charter
the new burgesses perhaps used Scarborough as their model,
since they asked for exemption from toll as enjoyed by the
burgesses of that town.
ɪ Madox, Firma Burgi (1726), pp. 272-3.
2 History of the Exchequer, i. 423.
8 The town had been governed by royal wardens since Edward I
acquired it from the abbot of Meaux in 1293. The townsmen had held
by rent from the abbey and under the king the vilɪ is occasionally called
a borough before 1299 (J. Bilson, Wyke-Upon-HiM in 1293 (Hull, 1928),
pp. 61 fi., 71, 104). It will be noted that the warden proviso implies that
an elective head was a normal liberty of a free borough.
DECREASE OF LIBERI BURGI
205
Still further confirmation of Gross’s interpretation of
Hber burgus comes from a charter of Edward which does not
found a new borough, but enlarges an old one. In 1298 he
annexed the lands of Pandon to the borough of Newcastle-On-
Tyne and ordained that they should be one vill and one
borough.1 The charter goes on to grant that the burgesses
of Newcastle should have in the lands and tenements of
Pandon “ liberum burgum sicut habcnt in predicta villa Novi
Castri cum omnibus Iibertatibus et Iiberis Consuctudinibus
ad liberum burgum pertincntibus.” 2 Here liber burgus must
certainly carry more than the mere conversion of the Pandon
lands and tenements into Newcastle burgages, for that is
the subject of a special clause.3
Lastly, at Liverpool, where there was no question of new
foundation or extension, we find the burgesses in 1292 iden-
tifying free borough with their lease of the farm of the town.4
Their case was weak, for they had no perpetual lease, but the
claim confirms Gross’s view.
This Liverpool identification of liber burgus with financial
autonomy perhaps reveals a tendency of the term at the end of
the thirteenth century to take on a narrower and more technical
meaning. For the number of Hberi burgi was certainly decreas-
ing. This was the inevitable result of the extension of higher
franchises to the more advanced boroughs and the differentia-
tion produced by the reorganization of the police system
culminating in the Statute of Winchester (1285) and by the
introduction of a higher borough rate in national taxation. The
smaller mesne boroughs whose privileges did not extend much
beyond burgage tenure were losing burghal status and descend-
ing into the new category of villae mercatoriae. The process
was somewhat slow, and was not complete until the fourteenth
century was well advanced, but its causes lay far back. Among
the boroughs which suffered this fate was Manchester. Re-
cognized as a borough in royal inquisitions as late as 1322,
and having a charter of 1301 closely following that of Salford
(a Hber burgus), it was judicially declared in 1359 not to be
held by its lords as a borough but as a villa mercatoria,i a
ɪ B.B.C. ii. 41. 2 Ibid. p. 6. 3 Ibid. p. 52.
4 See above, p. 196, n. 2. The Liverpool historians describe the lease as
a fee farm, but a fee farm was a lease in perpetuity and the Liverpool
grants were only for terms of years.
δ Harland, Mamecestre, 11i. 449. Yet in the sense of " merchants-town ”
the term could be applied even to Norwich (Hudson, Bec. i. 63) ; cf. Law
Merchant (Selden Soc.), ii. 104 ; Madox, Ftrma Burgi, 250, i, and B.B.C. H.
lii. fi.