13б SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION TO юбб
after, the Conquest by the presidency of a reeve appointed by
the king, but it is not unlikely that trading interests were
already stimulating communal feeling outside the courts.
It may well be that Gross drew too sharp a line between
the Anglo-Saxon Cnihtengilds of London, Canterbury and
Winchester, and the Anglo-Norman merchant gilds. The
London Cnihtengild continued for half a century after the
Conquest to be composed of the leading English merchants
and the chapmangild of Canterbury, whose members were
cnihts, though first mentioned by that name about ɪɪoo, has
every appearance of a pre-Conquest origin. It was probably
indeed, the gild of burgesses which appears in Domesday.1
Its head significantly was the portreeve of the city, and from
his name possibly an Englishman. Dover, too, had its
English gihalla burgensium. Such gilds are not, indeed,
attested elsewhere, but, except at London, they are only
casually mentioned and even the later merchant gilds are
found only in a minority of boroughs.
The active element in the medieval borough court was
naturally its wealthiest and most experienced members.
A casual record reveals the existence of this practical aris-
tocracy nearly fifty years before the Conquest in a group of
boroughs far remote from the Channel ports. When a bishop
of Crediton in 1018 wished to secure full publicity for a mort-
gage of part of his lands, he sent a formal intimation of it to
the witan (burhwitori) not merely of the county town, but also
of the three smaller boroughs of Devon.2 This was clearly a
recognition of the boroughs as communities, for otherwise he
would have sent his notice to the king’s reeves of the respective
boroughs.
That the Norman Conquest ultimately gave a great impulse
to English trade and urban development is not in dispute.
The questions at issue are how far it made a new start in this
development, and whether the old English borough-port
from the first did not contain a germ of urban growth which
might indeed come to little or perish, as it did in not a few
small “ free boroughs ” of post∙Conquest creation, but which
marks it as essentially different from the burg of the Low
Countries. On this latter point Dr. Stephenson adheres to
the view he expressed in his article of 1930. On the first he has
yielded a good deal of ground. He no longer maintains that
See above, p. 120.
2 See above, p. 42.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION TO юбб 137
there was no urban continuity between the Anglo-Saxon
borough and the Anglo-Norman “ town,” except in a few
seaports of the south-east. But he regards this urban growth
before 1066 as quite recent, and he still leaves us with a large
and indefinite class of “ ordinary ” boroughs, agricultural, save
for insignificant local trade. Unfortunately, some of the evidence
he adduces for this is equally applicable to larger boroughs
in which he now admits trading settlement. This seems to be
due to insufficient reconsideration of certain conclusions from
Domesday in his original article. His study of the Anglo-
Saxon borough began with the survey of 1086, and he was too
much impressed by features which seemed capable of a non-
urban interpretation.
It would be idle to deny that the Anglo-Saxon borough,
even in the middle of the eleventh century, had features which
were not in harmony with autonomous municipal organiza-
tion : ecclesiastical and lay immunities, the sokes of the larger
towns, burgesses dependent on rural estates, differences of
rank, in some cases personal services in addition to money
rents. Municipal autonomy, however, lay in a somewhat
distant future. The Norman kings took over the boroughs
from their predecessors, subject to rights, partly flowing
from land ownership, partly from sovereignty, yielding,
relatively to area, a larger revenue than their rural domains.
If in some respects the borough system before long became
a little more orderly, thanks partly to the influence of the new
Norman foundations, in others the disorder was retained and
even extended. Feudalism increased the number of sokes
and preserved the Anglo-Saxon heriot in some boroughs as
a feudal relief. At Norwich, Northampton, and Nottingham,
English and French boroughs, with different customs, Jived
uneasily side by side. The gild merchant while preparing
the way for the communal movement and incorporation,
which ultimately swept away the relics of a disorderly past,
introduced a further conflict of ideas and occasionally severe
friction in practice.
If it is not possible to draw a perfectly sharp line of de-
marcation in the development of the borough at the Norman
Conquest, it is equally difficult to draw such a line at the
settlement of the Danes in the northern boroughs or indeed
at any earlier date after the permanent re-occupation of
the old Roman towns. It is all one story. A study of
ɪts various phases certainly discourages the old quest of a neat