The name is absent

official as were the bailiffs. We must be on our guard against
assuming any close copying of continental precedents. The
sacred number twelve and its double had long been in use in
England, as elsewhere, for local bodies affected to various
purposes ; and their comparatively recent application to
the sworn inquests of presentment in the courts Ieet (to use
their later and not very accurate name), which were to exer-
cise no unimportant influence upon the administration of
the medieval town,¹ might have suggested further develop-
ments of the idea. The names most usually applied to borough
councillors, jurés [iurati), prudes hommes (probi homines), and
pairs or peers [pares), were used in the foreign commune too,
but they belonged to the common stock of French-speaking
lands. Only once—in the London communal oath of 1193
—is the term most characteristic of the continental councils,
scabini, skiυini, échevins, given to the members of an English
town council, and this has been thought by some to have
been a merely casual use of a foreign name.² However this
may be, London did not copy any foreign model in the end.
There are some signs of hesitation under John, though no
proof of any such direct imitation of Rouen as Round
maintained,³ but the city was ultimately content to adapt its
native body of aidermen to the new purpose. This is note-
worthy since it was the first English town to come under
foreign influence and the sole recipient of formal permission
to set up a commune.

Ward aidermen were not sufficiently general, or numerous
enough where they existed, to supply councils on the London
pattern in other boroughs,⁴ but as London’s constitutional
influence was widespread, the use of the number twenty-four
may have been imitation of the capital. Something ap-
proaching positive evidence of this is forthcoming in the case
of Dublin, where the receipt in 1229 of licence to elect a
mayor couched in the form granted to London in 1215 was
apparently followed at once by the appointment of a council

¹ There is, indeed, reason to believe that such a jury developed into
an administrative council in at least one small town on ancient demesne :
Godmanchester.

¹ Above, p. 266. Eskevyns or skevins are otherwise only known in
England as officers of the merchant gɪld (Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 26).

’ See above, p. 266, and the criticism of Corbett, E.H.R. xvi. 766.

⁴Canterbury seems to have converted its six “ borghs ” into alder-
manries with (hundred) courts in the twelfth century in direct imitation
of London, but even here the aidermen cannot have furnished more than
half the council of twelve.

of twenty-four.¹ Neither here nor elsewhere is there any hint
of that duality which existed in the twenty-four of the Rouen
gro_sup of communes, and which Round rather hastily thought
he had traced to London.²

London influence need not necessarily be excluded even
where so large a council was not considered to be advisable,
for the only lesser number generally possible was the half
of twenty-four. This is but one, however, of the possible
sources of the very common municipal council of twelve
members.

One well-known group of such councils, the twelve jurats of
the Cinque Ports and their members, has been ascribed by
Round to direct borrowing from abroad, but not from Rouen
in this case.³ Starting from the penalty of house demolition
for offences against the community, which he thought peculiar
to the Ports on this side of the Channel, but found both in
northern and south-western France, he seemed inclined for
a moment to suggest direct influence from Gascony, which had
commercial relations with the Ports, and where, as he learnt
from Thierry, “ the form ‘ jurats ’ more especially belongs.”
But on realizing that the punishment in question was probably
derived in Gascony from the north, that Amiens afforded
the only exact parallel to the Cinque Ports’ infliction of it
for refusal to serve as mayor or jurat, and that Picardy had
communal confederations to explain the confederation of the
Ports which he persisted in believing to have been formed
as late as the thirteenth century; he put forward his hypo-
thesis of the Picard origin of the Cinque Ports organization.
The subsequent discovery that the penalty of house demoli-
tion, even for refusal to serve as mayor, was in use elsewhere
in England, Scotland, and Ireland,⁴ and that the confederacy
was at least fifty years older than the joint communes of
Picardy,⁶ has long since demolished his hypothesis, but no
one seems to have pointed out that, after explaining that the
form “jurats” especially belonged to Gascony, he silently
treated it as a possible Picard form. As a matter of fact
“jurat” was confined to the south, the northern form being
everywhere “juré.”⁶ Unless, therefore, we are prepared to
affiliate the Cinque Ports to Bordeaux or Bayonne, “ jurat ”

ɪ Above, p. 275.                           ’Above, p. 266.

³ Feudal England, pp. 552 fi.

‘ Bateson, Borough Customs (Selden Soc.), ɪ. 30, 264, 280 ; ii. 38-40.

⁶ E.H.R. xxiv. 732 ; Petit-Dutaillis, Studies Supplementary to Stubbs,
ɪ- p∙ 87.                                            ∙ See Littré, s,v.

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