350 EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND
borough of Warnemouth ” or Warenmouth in Northumberland
disappeared so completely that by the end of the seventeenth
century its unclaimed charter was calmly appropriated by
the burgesses of Sunderland, an offshoot of Bishop Wearmouth
in Durham. That their pretension should have been ad-
mitted by the royal courts, as it was, is evidence that the
early history of the palatinate of Durham was as little under-
stood by the judges of Charles IΓs time as the etymology of
place-names. For, of course, a medieval charter to Sunderland
would have been granted by the bishop and no eccentricity
of sound-change could have converted Wearmouth into
Warnemouth.
Leaving the royal towns, we pass to that great class of
boroughs which stood on the lands of feudal lords, lay or
ecclesiastical, and were mostly of their creation, for the Crown
seldom granted a royal borough to a subject, however great.
Outside the palatinates, the mediatized town was exceedingly
rare.
Unlike the towns which had no lord but the king and in
the great majority of cases boasted immemorial origin, the
mesne or Seignorial borough was, with rare exceptions, a
post-Conquest creation which we owe to the Norman lord’s
recognition of the value of urban centres in the peaceful
penetration of newly conquered districts, and as sources of
larger income than could be raised from purely agricultural
communities.
The second motive continued to operate long after the
first had ceased to exist, except in Wales and Ireland, where
it was largely responsible for the creation of many boroughs,
both by the Crown and by private lords. In Wales and
Ireland the medieval boroughs were English outposts in
an unfriendly country, as the first Norman boroughs in
England had often been.
As they were more artificial than the older boroughs,
these new creations show a much greater uniformity in the
size and rent of tenements or burgages, as the Normans
called them, and of their appurtenances in the town fields
and meadows. There was probably also more uniformity of
legal custom. It is not surprising that their founders should
have been apt to take as models for these new towns the little
bourgs of their native Normandy. Yet until the beginning
of this century their predominantly foreign origin had not
been grasped. We owe its recognition and the discovery of
EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND 351
the widespread influence of one small Norman bourg to the
now famous articles of Miss Bateson on the “ Laws of
Breteuil.”1 An unfortunate confusion of Britolium, the
Latinized form of Breteuil, with Bristol had misled even the
very elect, and of the list of nearly fifty boroughs which Gross
had entered in his table of affiliations as directly or indirectly
drawing their institutions from Bristol, nearly half were at
once struck out. This would have been a notable achieve-
ment, even if it had not been accompanied by a patient and
elaborate attempt to recover the lost customs of Breteuil from
the charters and custumals of her daughter towns on this side
the Channel. This part of Miss Bateson’s work has more
recently been subjected to severe criticism by Dr. Hemmeon 2
with greater acumen than good taste, and more fully and
courteously by Ballard.3 It must be admitted that, as was
natural enough in the first flush of so striking a reversal of
preconceived ideas, Miss Bateson showed somewhat less than
her usual caution in the work of reconstruction. She did not
allow sufficiently for the intermixture of English with Norman
customs in documents, few of which belong to the first age of
Anglo-Norman borough-making. The strength of this in-
fluence of the native English borough upon the new founda-
tions is attested by the prevalence in some of them of that
power of free or restricted bequest of land which was so
striking a feature in the normal English borough, but did not
exist in those of Normandy. The possibility of the inclusion
of some custom which, though Norman was not Bretollian,
does not seem to have been quite excluded by Miss Bateson,
and there was a distinct element of danger in assuming the
general identity of the customs of Verneuil, which have been
preserved, with those of its neighbour Breteuil which mostly
have not. The mere fact that king John granted the liber-
ties of Verneuil to Breteuil in 1199 suggests that there must
have been important differences. In drawing exactly the
opposite conclusion from this grant, Miss Bateson seems
unconsciously to have let the wish be father to the thought.
It is not very safe to ascribe Verneuil customs to Breteuil
unless there is strong support from other quarters. There is
some reason to believe, therefore, that her reconstruction of
the laws of Breteuil errs by excess, but Ballard himself inserted
1 E.H.R. vols, xv, xvi.
2 Burgage Tenure in England, pp. ι66 ff.
2 E.H.R. xxx. 646 fi.