© 1936 MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the University of Manchester at
The University Press
316-324 Oxford Road, Manchester 13
Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd.,
London
PREFACE
As its sub-title indicates, this book makes no claim to be the
long overdue history of the English borough in the Middle
Ages. Just over a hundred years ago Mr. Serjeant Mere-
wether and Mr. Stephens had The History of the Boroughs
and Municipal Corporations of the United Kingdom, in three
volumes, ready to celebrate the sweeping away of the medieval
system by the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835. It was
hardly to be expected, however, that this feat of bookmaking,
good as it was for its time, would prove definitive. It may
seem more surprising that the centenary of that great change
finds the gap still unfilled. For half a century Merewether
and Stephens’ work, sharing, as it did, the current exaggera-
tion of early “democracy” in England, stood in the way.
Such revision as was attempted followed a false trail and it
was not until, in the last decade or so of the century, the
researches of Gross, Maitland, Mary Bateson and others
threw a flood of new light upon early urban development in
this country, that a fair prospect of a more adequate history
of the English borough came in sight. Unfortunately, these
hopes were indefinitely deferred by the early death of nearly
all the leaders in these investigations. Quite recently an
American scholar, Dr. Carl Stephenson, has boldly attempted
the most difficult part of the task, but his conclusions, in
important respects, are highly controversial.
When in 1921 an invitation to complete Ballard’s un-
finished British Borough Charters induced me to lay aside
other plans of work and confine myself to municipal history,
I had no intention of entering into thorny questions of origins.
A remark of Gross in the introduction to his Bibliography of
British Municipal History (1897) that “ certain cardinal
features of the medieval borough, such as the firma burgi, the
judiciary and the governing body, still need illumination ”
suggested the studies, printed, chiefly in the English Historical
Review, between 1925 and 1930, which, with some revision,
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