112 THE BURGESSES AND THEIR TENURE
royal cities and boroughs. Although bourgage (burgagium)
gave a name to the tenure, it did not drive out in these towns
more general terms for the burgess holding, the English
haw, old French words derived ultimately from the Latin
manere, “ to dwell,” and akin to the mansa of Anglo-Saxon
charters : mansion (common in Domesday as mansio), mesuage
and the feudal tenement. Nor is this conservatism surprising
since we find that even in France it was long before bourgage
was applied to the tenement as well as the tenure, and that
terms such as area and mansura (a frequent alternative to
mansio in Domesday) are used not only in documents relating
to the old ciυitates but in those of bourgs such as Cacn.1
The real change which the Normans wrought in the
English boroughs did not consist in the transformation of
their tenurial groundwork, though that, after the first dis-
organization following the Conquest, was gradually simplified,
but in the new spirit which they brought into town life.
Their racial energy and commercial enterprise speedily made
themselves felt in the rapid development of merchant gilds,
and these in turn stimulated communal self-consciousness
and provided a new and more effective organ, alongside the
borough court, through which the boroughs secured from
needy kings confirmation and extension of their freedom
over against a now more deeply manorialized countryside and
ultimately a large measure of municipal autonomy. Judged
by such a standard, the Anglo-Saxon borough, so far as it is
revealed to us, seems a dull and lifeless place, but we must
not hastily assume that it was normally devoid of communal
organization and feeling. Some glimpses of these may be
obtained even from the arid legal and financial records which
are almost our only sources.
Legras, op. cit. p. 43.
THE BOROUGH COMMUNITY
If the burgesses of an Anglo-Saxon borough were not a hap-
hazard and heterogeneous population exhibiting every variety
of status found in the rural world without its walls and no
others, but had this in common that they held their tenements
by render of landgable and other customs, an early form of
burgage tenure, we may expect to discover, even in the
financial details of Domesday, some evidence of common
interests, organization and action. Alienation of customs by
the crown had indeed marred this tenurial uniformity, but,
in favour of laymen at least, to a far less extent than the
greed of Norman barons in the first twenty years after the
Conquest. The burgesses had not yet suffered the heavy
losses in numbers and status which it brought about, and as
they were more numerous, more prosperous and, we may add,
less subject to financial oppression, they may be presumed to
have been not less but more alive to their interests as a com-
munity than they could be under the Normans until their
revival in Henry Γs time.
It will be vain, of course, to look for more than the germs
of that municipal development which only reached its zenith
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Resistance to
the Danes must, indeed, have aroused communal spirit in the
burgesses, but they lacked the incentives to co-operation which
the pressure of feudalism and a more advanced commerce
gave to their continental fellows. It was in the ordinary
routine of their lives that the seed of municipal self-con-
sciousness lay, in the making and enforcement of by-laws for
their participation in the common fields, meadows and pas-
tures, in the regulation of trade in the borough market and in
the conduct of their financial relations with the king or rather
his local representatives, the portreeve and the sheriff. Then,
as afterwards, their progress was not uniform. It was naturally
ɪɪʒ