224
THE BOROUGH COMMUNITY
that villeins were admitted into the commune by admission
into the gild or, he adds less happily, into a gild.1 This inter-
pretation would be more convincing if the text read “ in
gildam,” but to translate with Gross “ in a commune of theirs ”
is more awkward, and he himself clearly had little or no con-
fidence in his suggestion. It is not obvious why Glanvill
should have introduced the gild by a term of double meaning
when gild alone was deemed sufficient in the clause of the
Hereford type of charter referred to above. Communa was
certainly not understood in the narrower sense in a London
version of GlanvilPs sentence, inserted in a copy of the
Exposiciones Vocabulorum,i which omits “ scilicet gildam,”
because there was no gild merchant there. Hegel’s explana-
tion of eommuna seems, therefore, preferable to that ventured
by Gross,3 and if his interpretation of the whole passage be
right, it would appear to have become ambiguous and in-
complete 4 by over-conciseness.
It would probably be rash to suggest, as an alternative,
that Glanvill may have been more concerned to disclaim for
eommuna any association with the foreign “ commune ” than
to distinguish nicely between two aspects of the burgess body.
It may be said, however, on the strength of evidence unknown
to or misunderstood by Gross, that the gild played a much
more prominent part in the twelfth-century borough than
either he or Hegel supposed, and that some confusion between
the two aspects is already not inconceivable.
In his discussion of the relation of borough community to
gild, Gross took little or no account of the great development
which the community underwent when the repressive hand of
Henry II was withdrawn.5 He seems to assume that the
powers of the community were much the same before as after
that event, that, for instance, the reeves were elected as its
chief officers precisely as mayors and bailiffs were later. As a
matter of fact, however, the borough community qua com-
munity had, generally speaking, very little more independence
1 To meet the case of towns like London with no gild merchant. But
admission through craft gilds did not come until the fourteenth century.
2 Hist. MSS. Comm., Rept. IX, App., pt. i, p. 6o ; Red Book of Exchequer,
iii. 1038. See below, p. 232, n. 8.
3It is doubtful whether the gild was ever spoken of as a commune,
except where it had a strong separate organization, as at Leicester and
Southampton.
* Incomplete because, despite Hegel’s suggestion, it does not cover the
case of boroughs, like London and Norwich, which had no gild merchant.
6 Above, pp. 177 fi.
COMMUNITY AND GILD MERCHANT
225
of action before 1189 than its rural cousin. The privileges of
the villa privilegiata were mostly of a passive order, fixed rents
for all service, a special court, the portmoot, for their own
cases and so forth. Its reeve or reeves in royal towns seem
usually to have been named by the king or the sheriff and were
Crown officials, whose main duty was the collection of rents,
tolls, and court amercements which made up the farm due to
the king. In a very few cases they paid it directly to him, but
generally to the sheriff or other royal farmer.1 They presided
in the portmoot, which was primarily a court of justice.2 The
community could hold land, but had no common seal with
which to authenticate grants of it. It is doubtful whether it
could tax itself for any but the most obvious practical needs,3
and its annual revenue (apart from that earmarked for the
farm) must in most cases have been almost negligible. Any
sworn combination of the burgesses for communal action was
severely punished.4 There was a natural antagonism between
the king’s interest in the borough, the provostry Ifirepositura,
provostria from prepositus, “ reeve ”), and the communal
interest of the burgesses. This antagonism lasted on in a
milder form long after they had won the right to elect the
reeves. A clause in a Northampton custumal of c. 1260
forbade the making of any communa whereby the provostry
should lose its rights.8
The borough community would have been sorely handi-
capped in its aspirations to greater freedom of action if it had
not very generally secured at an early date, by grants of gild
merchant, a larger measure of independence than it could
exercise in portmoot. It is true that such gilds were licensed
purely for trading purposes, but they were readily adaptable
to other ends. The right to exact entrance fees, which was
expressly granted, laid the foundation of a substantial revenue
available for communal objects. Only in mesne boroughs
like Leicester do we hear of the gild being subject to payments
to the lord of the town.® Even more important was the right,
1 Above, pp. 149, 176.
2 Yet we have seen that as far back as 1018 the borough magnates could
be dealt with, in some matters, directly, not through the reeve (above, 42).
3 Even at the end of the century, the citizens of Lincoln were only
claiming the right to levy rates for civic purposes (Curia Regis Rolls,
ɪ. 418-19; E.H.R. xxxix. 271). 4 Above, p. x76.
s Bodl. MS. Douce 98, fo. ι6r. IowethisreferencetoMissCam. For
alater English version, see Markham and Cox, Records OfNorthampton, i. 228.
3Stenton, Danelaw Charters (Brit. Acad.), pp. 259, 293. Cf. Trenholme,
The English Monastic Boroughs (Univ, of Missouri Studies, 1927), p. 22.
IS