12
ORIGINS OF THE BOROUGH
folcryhf) two feet had to be left between houses to allow
eavesdrip.1
That any members of the thegnly class engaged in trade
at this early period seems unlikely. Its junior members,
the cnihts, had indeed a gild in Canterbury in the middle
of the ninth century 2 and it is tempting to see in them fore-
runners of the cnihts of the chaρmengild there which made
an exchange of houses with Christ Church about the beginning
of the twelfth century.3 But it is a serious obstacle to this
identification that the earlier gild witnessed a charter which
reveals its existence separately from the inner burgware.i
This may possibly be a case of illogical classification, but it
is safer not to take refuge in anomalies.
It will have been observed in the foregoing analysis of
the Rochester and Canterbury charters that the “ tenurial
heterogeneity ” of towns which Maitland imaginatively
deduced from a supposed obligation imposed on the shire
thegns of the tenth century to garrison the burhs and repair
their walls, was already a feature in the eighth and ninth
centuries in those towns for which we have detailed evidence.
Tenements in burhs or ports were being granted to churches
and thegns with or without definite association with estates
outside, as a matter of privilege, conferring honour and profit
and in no case with any military obligation beyond that which
lay on land everywhere to construct and repair burhs {burhbot}
and bridges and do military service.6
The burhbot did not apply to all burhs. This word, as
we have seen, was a general term for fortified enclosure.
It covered the deserted hill “ camps ” of earlier races as well
as the re-occupied Roman civitates and the fortified dwellings
of the English higher classes as well as those of their kings,
but it was only for the old walled town and the royal house β
that the burhbot was available.
In view of the municipal future of burh, it may seem sur-
prising that our local nomenclature preserves it much oftener—
ɪ C.S. 519, ii. 134. This must have been in the main an urban law.
2 C.S. 515, ii. 128.
3 C. Gross, Gild Merchant, iɪ. 37. See below, p. 120.
4 Above, p. 9.
5 Commonly, but inaccurately known as the Trinoda Nécessitas. Cf.
W. H. Stevenson’s article in E.H.R. xxix (1914), 689 ff., especially p. 698.
6 In a Mercian charter of 836 it appears in another association than
that of the Trinoda Nécessitas. Hanbury monastery is freed " a pastu
regis et principum et ab omni Constructione regalis ville et a Uifficultate
ilia quam nos Saxonice fœstingmenn dicimus (C.S. 416, i. 581).
BEFORE THE DANES CAME
13
in the suffix -bury or borough—in village names than in
those of towns, either of Roman or later origin. In the
former ceastert borrowed from Latin castra, was usually pre-
ferred to the native burh in either form as suffix, the only
exceptions being Canterbury and Salisbury,1 while the latter
often grew out of villages with names of a different type.
For the same reason as that last mentioned, port, though
it came to be a synonym for town, in its trading aspect, and,
unlike burh, was exclusively urban, has left few traces in local
names. Much better represented in them, because it was
in older and less exclusive use, is wic, wich. A loan-word
from Latin vicus, its original sense was “dwelling-place,”
“ abode," from which, like tun, it developed the meaning
“ village." By a further, but early, development it was used
in a sense similar to that of port. London was known as
Lundenwic already in the last quarter of the seventh century ;2
its chief officer was the wic-gerefa. The salt workings in
Cheshire and Worcestershire were wiches.
In this early period then the urban community had three
aspects : it formed an agricultural group, its house area was
usually fortified and it was to some extent engaged in trade.
Of these aspects the most primitive was the agricultural,
though in burhs of Roman origin the walls were older than the
first English settlements. It is not unreasonable to suppose
that such settlements, though afterwards overlaid by ad-
ministrative and ecclesiastical elements, contributed a germ
of Communalism which later expanded under the influence of
commerce. Without subscribing to von Below’s theory of
the origin of the town (Stadt) in the self-governing village
(Landgemeinde), we may note that Maitland, though main-
taining that in the absence of some further ingredient the
courtless village could never have developed into the borough,
admits even in Domesday Book and Beyond, and more fully
in Township and Borough, that the medieval borough belonged
to the genus tun, as indeed the name “ town ” and the equi-
valent use even in official language of villa and burgus (or
civitas) sufficiently attest. The equivalence, it is true, was
really very imperfect, ignoring a vital distinction, and its
significance chiefly retrospective. In the very early period
with which wc have been dealing, however, the distinction
1 Lundenburh proved a transient form. See below, p. 23.
i Laws of Hlothaere and Eadric (685-686), c. 16, in Liebermann, Ges. i. ɪɪ,
Cf. C.S. 335, i. 466 ; A.S.C. s.a. 604, ed. Plummer, i. 23.
C