The name is absent

340 EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND

from “ commonness ” to “ corporateness ” in the English
borough which rounds off a famous chapter of the History of
English Law and in the more debatable treatment of the
Domesday boroughs in Domesday Book and Beyond. We
may think that the boldness has gone too far in the latter
case, without withholding from him and his zealous disciple,
Adolphus Ballard,¹ the credit of having made what is really
the first of our documentary materials for the history of English
boroughs more intelligible and more significant.

A later stream of French influence than that detected by
Miss Bateson was explored by Dr. Horace Round in articles
on the Cinque Ports ² and the Commune of London,³ though
the direct affiliation to foreign communes which he thought
he had shown has not found acceptance.

All these workers were in the prime of life, and in the ordi-
nary course many years of fruitful investigation might have
been expected from them. But a sort of fatality seems to
have attended on the group. Dr. Round is still happily with
us, though he has not pursued the municipal studies of earlier
years, but all the others had died before the end of 1915,
Maitland, the longest-lived of them, at the early age of fifty-
six. The loss to this particular branch of historical research
was irreparable. The barrenness of the last decade in this
field, with the notable exception of an excellent study of Burgage
Tenure in Englandf by an American scholar, Dr. Hemmeon,
a pupil of Gross, who himself died early, cannot be attributed
wholly to the war and its sequel.

Maitland’s chief contributions to the story of the evolution
of our oldest towns emphasized two somewhat opposite features
of their origin—continuity with the nucleus of an agricultural
township and the stimulation produced by a period of foreign
invasion, the latter perhaps over-emphasized.⁵

In impressing upon us that “ those who would study the
early history of our towns have fields and pastures on their
hands,” Maitland did not claim originality. The very word
“ town ” is an unmistakable finger-post. Beginning as an
Old English word for a village, or even a single homestead,
it has been narrowed down in this country, though not in

ɪ The Domesday Boroughs, 1904.

² Feudal England (1895), 552 fl. Cf. above, p. 293.

³ The Commune of London and other Studies (1899), 229 ff. Cf. below,
P∙ 347∙

¹ Harvard Historical Studies, xx. (1914).

⁶ Still more subsequently by Dr. Stephenson. See above, passim

EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND 341

New England, to mean an urban as distinguished from a
rural community. The transition thus indicated had been
noted by Stubbs, but the vivid picture of the agricultural
aspects of medieval Cambridge in Township and Borough
placed it in a new and stronger light.

More novel was Maitland’s attempt to account for the
possession by our chief towns, when they first come well into
view after the Norman Conquest, of a court which was not
that of a rural township, if indeed the township had a court,
which he did not believe,¹ but parallel with the court of the
hundred which was an aggregation of townships. He traced
this borough court with some other features of later town
life to the age of the Danish invasions. The necessity of
defence brought about the fortification of many old and new
centres, and he suggested that courts were established in them
to settle the quarrels of the ruffling warriors placed in them
by the landowners of the county, upon whom the burden of
their upkeep was thrown. The general application of the
term “ borough,” which means a place of defence, to such towns
was regarded by him as supporting this “ garrison theory ”
of the origin of our oldest towns. Though whole-heartedly
adopted by Ballard, it has not secured universal acceptance.
Maitland himself explained, in answer to criticism, that he
did not mean to offer it as a solution of the problem in all
towns, or even as completely covering the ground in those
where it is most plausible. It does not profess, therefore,
to account for the urban organization of towns which, like
London, Lincoln, or Canterbury, had existed, if not from
Roman times, at any rate from a date not much later, or even
of a distinctly later town like Norwich. There were other
influences making for urban aggregation and organization,
especially the growth of trade. It is significant that the general
spread of the term “ borough ” in its urban sense was accom-
panied by the use of a word which expressed the trading aspect
of the same community. This was “port,” the derivation of
which from portas, “ harbour,” seems, like the parallel word
“ poort ” in the Netherlands, to point to the first seats of trade
having been on the coast or navigable rivers.

The existence of a military element, fleeting or more dur-
able, in many boroughs need not be denied, but it was not the
only element, and its identification with the burgesses who in
Domesday Book are recorded in most of the greater boroughs

¹ Professor Vmogradoff is less sceptical (Growth of the Manor, 194, 274).

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