342 EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND
as belonging to some rural manor and paying rent to it, or
occupying houses which paid such rents, is more than dubious.
Domesday itself shows that the lordship of burgesses and
houses was being transferred pretty freely before the Conquest,
and the burgesses’ right of sale may account for a good many
of these manorial ownerships. The tendency of the rural
landowner to acquire property in the local town, and even to
reside there occasionally, is early evidenced and continued
down to modern times. “ Tenurial heterogeneity,” the awk-
ward phrase which Maitland coined to express the fact that
such boroughs were on no single lord’s land, whether king’s or
subject’s, may have grown up quite independently of military
arrangements.
The borough which was the property of one lord was not,
however, unknown in Anglo-Saxon times, witness Dunwich in
Suffolk with its lay lord and Sandwich in Kent, which belonged
to the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury.1 Not the least
striking of the effects of the Norman Conquest in the field
of municipal history was the wide extension of this class of
dependent or Seignorial boroughs, of which more will be said
later.
Another result of the Conquest is the real beginning of
our evidence for municipal history. We have no genuine
pre-Norman town charter, much less any civic record, judicial
or administrative, of that date. For these latter, indeed,
we have to wait until the later years of the twelfth century,
but there is a growing stream of charters from the first estab-
lishment of the new dynasty. More than three hundred
had been issued by the Crown and private lords before the
end of John’s reign, and these have been brought together
in a form convenient for students of borough formation
and organization by Ballard in the first volume of British
Borough Charters.i Materials for a further volume, extending
to the death of Edward I, had been largely collected by him
before his death, in 1915, and will shortly be published.3
It is noteworthy that the most liberal grantor of charters
to royal boroughs was John, whose appreciation of the sums
they were ready to pay for privileges was probably not checked
by much consideration whether the permanent interests of
the Crown would be served by the greater independence he
allowed to the towns. However, the leases of Crown revenue
which he gave were such hard bargains that there is no
l D.B. ɪ. ɜa, I. 2 Cambridge, 1913. 3Ibιd., 1923.
EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND 343
reason to suppose that those interests suffered materially.
His son was less lavish, except when in dire financial straits,
as in the year or two before the Barons’ War, and his grandson
even less so, save where the foundation and enhancement
of towns served his general policy.
The policy of enlightened self-interest on the whole pursued
by our Norman and Angevin sovereigns can be well studied
in their treatment of those older towns which may now be
called royal cities and boroughs in a fuller sense than before.
Hitherto the king, though in possession of the borough
administration and receiving the danegeld and the revenue
of its court and market, had been but one, if the greatest,
of its landlords. It was, however, in these centres of growing
wealth that the replacement of the antiquated danegeld by
more remunerative forms of (поп-feudal) taxation was begun
and its extension by Henry II, ultimately under the name of
tallage, to the ancient (rural) demesne of the Crown 1 brought
the boroughs under the general head of dominia and, aided by
the gradual extinction of manorial lordships (sokes) paved the
way for the theory that all land in the borough was held
of the Crown by socage or burgage. The tallage and sub-
sequent revenue developments were fruitful in results for
the towns. They yielded a revenue which, even when ul-
timately made dependent on parliamentary consent, retained
traces of its origin in the higher rate at which the towns and
the ancient demesne were charged, and it disposed the king
to grant to them such privileges as would enable them better
to meet this and their other financial obligations to the
Crown. Indeed, we need not limit royal graciousness quite
so narrowly, for, where nothing was lost by so doing, the
claim of the Crown dependents to special favour was fully
recognized. From this point of view the curious parallelism
of some of the privileges of royal boroughs and those of
ancient demesne is instructive. Both were quit of suit to
shire and hundred courts and in general exempt from taking
their cases to outside courts, other than the highest. They
both ultimately almost excluded the sheriff. The privilege
of freedom from toll throughout England, or even the whole
of the king’s dominions, was generally enjoyed by both.
Both gave freedom to the serf unclaimed by his lord for a
year and a day. Moreover, some communities on ancient
1 Stephenson, Borough and Town (1933), pp. 160 ff , has cleared up
the order of these events.