28
ORIGINS OF THE BOROUGH
Catalogue of Coins 1 we learn that there were fourteen mints
working in Kent and Wessex in Athelstan’s reign, eight of
which were new. The Catalogue supplies the names of thirteen
in the Midlands, all of which were new, and the old Northern
mint at York was now working for the English king. The
total of twenty-eight mint-places bespeaks a considerable
demand for coin, but most significant of active trade is the
number of moneyers allowed to the chief ports by Athelstan’s
law, eight to London, six to Winchester, four to Canterbury
(besides one each to the archbishop and the abbot of St.
Augustine’s), and even the two each allotted to Lewes,
Southampton, and Wareham reveal a growing importance.
It is clear that, thanks to the victories of Alfred and his
successors, things were settling down and that, in the South
more especially, trade was reviving. The crown had strong
inducements to foster this revival of trade and to restrict it to
the walled towns for it derived an increasing revenue from
tolls, profits of justice and moneyers’ fees, while the restriction
simplified collection and by the greater publicity of transac-
tions made it easier to prevent fraud.
The attempt to confine all buying and selling to boroughs
was not, however, successful. Athelstan found himself obliged
first to except purchases under 2θd.2 and later to withdraw
the whole requirement.3 And so in Edgar’s law fixing the
number of witnesses of sales,4 the same number was assigned
to rural hundreds, to undertake this supervision, as to small
boroughs. Nevertheless, the advantages of the boroughs for
trading were too great to leave any considerable volume of
it to other centres.
Fortified towns, rare before the Danish invasions, were now
numerous and widely dispersed. Even if their walls were often
only of earth, like those still to be seen at Wareham, they
clearly marked off these boroughs or ports from the rural
“ tuns ” of the country side.5 Centres of administration,
1 Conveniently summarized for this late Anglo-Saxon period by York
Powell in E.H.R. xi. (1896), 759 fi.
2II Atheist. J2, Liebermann, Ges. i. 156. The witness of the reeves
in the folkmoot was accepted as an alternative to that of the portreeve
or other unlying man of Edward’s law. The folkmoot was no doubt the
district court, soon to be reorganized as the hundred court (see below,
p. 36), which, there is reason to believe, usually met in a bv.rh (see below,
ibid).
’ IV Atheist. 2, Liebermann, Ges. i. 171 ; VI. ɪo, ibid., p. 182. It was
now lawful to buy and sell out of port, provided it was done with full and
credible witness. ‘ IV Edg. 5, Liebermann, Ges. i. 210.
s I Edw. I, i, Liebermann, Ges. i. 138 ; IV Edg. 6, Ges. i. 210 ; II Cnut,
24, Ges. i. 326.
AFTER FORTIFICATION
29
many of them had long been, but fresh centres were needed
in the re-united and re-organized kingdom and as market
towns and mint places, exclusively at first and predominantly
always, they concentrated the new growth of trade after the
storms of the invasions. Obscurely, but steadily, we may
believe, a class of burgess traders was growing up within and
about their walls. Materially most of the medieval English
boroughs had come into existence and the difference of these
urban units from ordinary agricultural communities was
clearly recognized in nomenclature. Dorchester, in Dorset,
for instance, which is merely a “ king’s tun ” in the Chronicle’s
account of the first Danish landing in the South,1 is a port and
borough in Athelstan’s mint law. How far did this com-
paratively new type of local community receive special
treatment in form of government and legal status ? We
must put out of our minds at once of course any idea of a
self-governing community electing its own head, the portreeve.
That position was only gained, and not by all the tenth-century
boroughs, after a long process of development which was not
completed until the thirteenth century and only faintly
shadowed forth by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. The
government of the borough remained essentially the same as
that of any royal estate under a reeve (gerefa) of the king’s
appointment, with such check as was involved in customary
consultation with the elders of the community. The
chief difference was that in the freer air of the borough this
check was more serious and in the long run became control.
A really municipal constitution was still remote in 1066, nor
did the Norman Conquest bring any immediate change.
Indirectly, however, the way was already paved for it when
in the second half of the tenth-century judicial reorganization
created a primitive form of the medieval borough court, not
of course as a concession to the burgesses, though it was
destined to be of great use to them in their long struggle for
autonomy, but merely in recognition of the needs of a popu-
lous area and of royal interests. Unfortunately, the origin of
this court, the germ of the burewaremot and the portmanimot
of the twelfth century, has become subject of controversy,
owing chiefly to the ambiguity of the Laws in their references
to courts held in boroughs. The question is complicated and
demands a new chapter.
l A.S.C. s.a. 787. The identification with Dorchester is Ethelwerd’s.
D