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THE BOROUGH COMMUNITY
but only their own aiderman and minister. By other clauses
his officers were forbidden to accuse the burgesses in any court
but their portmoot, and if the reeve impleaded them without
a prosecutor they need not answer. He was also prohibited,
under heavy penalty, from oppressing them with burdensome
exactions, old or new. There are two points of interest here.
First, the reeve is not the elected head of the community of
burgesses, but a royal officer against whom they have to be
protected. Secondly, it is only as members of the gild that
they are dealt with in a corporate capacity and have an officer
of their own. Their other privileges are merely guaranteed to
them jointly and severally.
It would be going much too far to suppose that the royal
reeves in the boroughs were always on unfriendly terms with
the burgesses. They were burgesses themselves, and at Oxford,
at least in the second half of the twelfth century, they are
found holding the office of aiderman after they had been reeves.
Nevertheless, their first duty was to the king, and the enforce-
ment of his financial claims, often excessive, was bound to
cause friction from time to time. It is true that in some eight
cases, at one time or another during his reign, even Henry II
allowed the burgesses themselves to farm their town and thus
not only relieved them of the direct control of the sheriff over
their finances, but gave them more hold over their reeves.
These arrangements, however, were always terminable at the
king’s will, and sometimes of short duration.1
The antagonism of reeve and burgesses at Wallingford
strongly reminds us of the state of things in the many mesne
boroughs where the courts were under the control of bailiffs
chosen by the lords, in the case of which Gross admitted that
as early as the thirteenth century the gild became “ the real
axis of the burghal polity—the only civic centre round which
they could rally their forces in struggling . . . for an extension
of their franchises or in battling for any other cause.” 2 Except
that the king was more remote and they themselves stronger,
this exactly describes the position of the burgesses of royal
towns during the greater part of the twelfth century. An
exchange of land between the abbey of Malmesbury and “ the
burgesses who are in the merchant gild of Malmesbury,”
apparently of thirteenth-century date, in which the aiderman
of the gild with seventeen other named persons “ et tota
Communitas intrinseca eiusdem ville et gilde mercatorie ”
1 Above, p. 176. t Gross, op. oil. i. 90-1.
COMMUNITY AND GILD MERCHANT
229
quitclaimed part of Portmanshethe to the abbey, has some
features which recall the proceedings at Oxford in 1147,
though here community and gild are more inextricably inter-
mixed.1
The short style above, applied to the burgesses in the
abbey deed, may throw some light upon the same formula as
used in certain twelfth-century charters to Winchester and
charters to other boroughs copied from them, which formed
the main argument of the advocates of the complete identity
of borough community and gild, but which Gross maintained
to be only employed when the privileges conferred specially
concerned merchants. An early charter of Henry II, granting
freedom from toll alone to “ cives mei Wintonienses de gilda
mercatorum,” complies with this interpretation,2 but it will
not explain the general charter of Richard I in 1190, which
begins with a grant to the same of the usual privilege of exemp-
tion from outside courts, and grants each further privilege
(including exemption from trial by battle) to them {eis).3 It
is true that King John’s regrant and expansion of this charter
(1215) is made generally to the citizens and their heirs, but it
still retains the concession of the right of trial in their own
courts to the citizens who are in the gild merchant.4 Now,
this was not, as Gross claims, a special concern of the merchant,
but perhaps the most vital security of every burgess. For
what was meant was not, as Gross seems to have thought,
freedom from trial in towns to which business took them, but
from all external jurisdiction in cases arising within the town
itself. It was a privilege widely conferred upon boroughs
without qualification. Why should it have been limited to a
special class in the second city of the realm ? The only
reasonable conclusion from the facts before us would seem to
be that at Winchester in 1190, as at Malmesbury in the next
century, the borough community and the gild were only two
aspects of the same body, and the gild with its right of com-
bination under an aiderman was still the dominant aspect.5
1 Gross, op. at. ii. 172.
2 B.B.C. i. 181. The privilege was sometimes granted to the burgesses
of other towns " as the burgesses of Winchester who are of the gild merchant
are quit,” but without mention of the gild of the recipients (ibid. p. 185).
3 Stubbs, Select Charters, ed. Davis, pp. 260-1.
1 Gross, op. cιt. ii. 253.
6When Hawise, countess of Gloucester, between 1183 and 1197,
granted to all her burgesses who had built or should build in Petersfield
" all the liberties and free customs which the citizens of Winchester have
in their city who are in gild merchant '' (ibid. iɪ. 387), we may suspect that