352 EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND
in his alternative draft exemption from the assize of mort
d'ancestor, which was only devised in the reign of Henry II, on
the strength of an obviously absurd legal argument of the
thirteenth century. Nor did either of Miss Bateson’s critics
do adequate justice to the general merits of articles which
revolutionized the study of medieval urban institutions in
England.
In considering some features of this class of Seignorial
boroughs in which French influence played a very important,
though not exclusive part, we may put aside the small number
of boroughs, Bath, Chester, Leicester, Newcastle-under-Lyme,
Stamford, Warwick, and for a short time Colchester, North-
ampton and Exeter, which were mediatized by the Crown
in favour of a member of the royal house or other great
magnate. His interest was mainly financial and did not very
seriously retard their growth. Leicester, it is true, had no fee
farm grant from her earls until long after most royal boroughs
possessed it, but, as we have seen, the farm was a doubtful
blessing except in so far as it prevented the financial inter-
meddling of the sheriff, and from that Leicester was already
exempt. Chester had its own purely urban sheriffs, before
any other English city,1 for the sheriff, later sheriffs, of
London had jurisdiction over Middlesex as well as the city.2
The boroughs which were founded by Anglo-Norman
lords, with or without a written charter, were very numerous
and varied greatly in size and importance. Local magnates
anxious to increase the revenue from their estates were not
always good judges of the economic possibilities of the sites
at their disposal. Many such foundations were still-born
or failed to reach maturity. Of the twenty-three boroughs
created in the poor and backward district of which Lancaster
was the capital between Iθ66 and 1372, with burgesses ranging
in number from six up to one hundred and fifty or so, only
four retained an established borough status at the end of the
middle ages. Many had become extinct, though vestiges of
burgage tenure in some cases kept their memory alive, the
rest, such as Manchester and Warrington, had lost any
germs of independence they had once possessed and lapsed
into a sort of urban manors. As early as 1300 a lord of
Warrington, alarmed at the growing aspirations of its borough
1 Before 1150, Chart, of St. Werburgh1S Abbey, Chester, ed. Tait (Chetham
Soc. N.S. 79 (1920)), p. 53.
2 Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 347 fi.
EARLY MUNICIPAL HISTORY IN ENGLAND 353
court (curia burgensium}, had forced the townsmen to renounce
it and take their cases to his manorial court.1 Some of these
extinct and dormant boroughs were revived by the industrial
revolution, but at the present day seven have no higher rank
than that of urban districts (or part thereof) and five are
governed by parish councils.
Lancashire laboured under some special disadvantages,
but economic difficulties and the dead hand of manorialɪsm
were operative everywhere, and arrested the progress of many
a promising borough. The extent to which they were at the
mercy of their lords is well illustrated by the story of Burford
in Oxfordshire, to which Mr. R. H. Gretton has recently
devoted an admirable monograph.2 Under the lordship of
great absentee earls, and afterwards of the Crown by escheat,
the little borough attained a status which superficially seemed
as well established as that of many a small royal borough,
but the sale of the Crown rights early in the seventeenth
century and the settlement of the purchaser in the town
proved fatal to its liberties, already undermined by the loss
of substantial trade.
A point which has been much discussed is the exact basis
of the application of the term borough on the one hand to
such large and ancient towns as Leicester or Northampton,
not to speak of those which enjoyed the higher title of city,
and on the other to petty manorial communities with a mere
handful of burgesses. In other words, what was the lowest
qualification for borough rank, or, as Maitland put it, “ the
inferior limit of burgality ” ?
Some common features all boroughs had, which were
essential but not distinctive. Every borough, large or small,
possessed by prescription or by royal licence a market3 if not
also a fair or fairs, but in England licences were freely granted
to feudal lords for manors which they had no intention of
converting into boroughs.4 I say “in England” because in
Scotland such licences seem to have been confined to boroughs.
In an article published posthumously on “ The Theory of the
Scottish Borough,” Ballard showed that the Scottish kings
1 V.C.H., Lanes., iii. 319, where "burgesses” is a slip for “com-
munity ” (communitas) ; B.B.C. ii. 182.
1 The Burford Records, Oxford, 1920.
3For possible abnormal exceptions, see above, pp. 67, 207, n. ɪ.
i Before this practice began in the later Anglo-Saxon period, the market
was a more distinctive feature of the borough, for other buying and selling
merely required official witnesses. See above, p. 28.
2З