138 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION TO юбб
legal definition of the borough, applicable at all periods.
Government officials in the fourteenth century found this
no easier than does the student of the Burghal Hidage and
Domesday Book. Yet, if, with Dr. Stephenson, it is preferred
to find the common thread in the gradual development of
a trading community, why should its humble beginnings be
ignored ?
THE POST-CONQUEST PERIOD
VII
THE FIRMA BURGI AND THE COMMUNE, 1066-11911
The outstanding features in the history of the English boroughs
in the century and a half after the Norman Conquest are the
growth of merchant and craft gilds, the evolution of the con-
ception of “ free borough ” (liber burgus), the gradual acquisi-
tion by some of the more important boroughs of the privilege
of farming the revenues which the Crown drew from them and
the influence exercised upon them by the communal move-
ment on the Continent. Of these developments, the third,
though it was almost peculiar to England, has received the
least attention. Madox in his well-known treatise, Firma
Burgi, studies only the fully developed fee farm system of
the thirteenth century onwards. The student of the dynamic
side of borough growth will look in vain in his pages for an
account of the early hesitation of royal policy between tem-
porary and permanent concession of the farming privilege
which the money needs of Richard and John ended in favour
of the fee farm or perpetual lease. The comparative neglect
of this aspect of municipal development has not been due to
lack of material, for the long series of Exchequer Pipe Rolls
contains the fullest and most exact information for nearly the
whole of the period in which the way was being paved for the
shower of fee farm grants to towns which descended in the
reigns of Henry IΓs sons. But until recently the rolls for
this period were only partly in print. Now that they are
published down to the great crisis when the citizens of London
recovered the farm of their city and county, which Henry I
had granted and his nephew and grandson had withdrawn, and
were allowed to set up a commune, the time seems come to
1 Reprinted from E.H.R. xlii. (1927), 321-60.
139