158
FIRMA BURGI AND COMMUNE
The proffers of London and Lincoln for their farms in
1130 are the first signs that the leading English boroughs
at least were no longer content to remain mere reservoirs of
revenue of which royal officials were the conduits, but had so
far developed a communal spirit as to aim at collecting the
borough issues themselves, putting an end to intermediate
profits and extortions and getting rid of distasteful interference.
They aspired, in fact, to secure the emancipation of the borough
from the shire in finance as well as in justice. That Henry I
was prepared to go some way in satisfying this ambition is
shown by his acceptance of their proffers and by his subse-
quent charter to London which not only allowed the citizens
to farm the city and the small county in which it lay, at a
greatly reduced rate, but placed them in a more favourable
position than the citizens of Lincoln in the power to elect the
justiciar who tried the pleas of the Crown arising in the city.1
These concessions may not have been entirely induced
by the sums which the boroughs were ready to pay for the
privilege and by Henry’s desire to secure their support for his
settlement of the succession to the Crown. His other town
charters show him favourable to their liberties and if he kept
a strict control on the formation of craft gilds, he was pro-
bably meeting the wishes of the governing class in the boroughs.
He had shown his confidence in the higher business qualities
of townsmen by letting the farm of the silver mine of Alston
to the burgesses of Carlisle.2 As a statesman, he may have
thought that the best way to exclude the violence of the
communal movement on the other side of the channel was to
remedy grievances, bring the towns into more direct relations
with the Crown and satisfy reasonable aspirations. Even the
less liberal policy of the French kings was successful in ex-
cluding the commune, essentially an uprising against mesne
lords of towns, from the cities of the royal domain. In England
where mesne towns were rare and recently mediatized and
where the royal power was normally much stronger than
in France and still more than in the Empire, the influence of the
continental movement never became really disturbing save
at times of political crisis.
The phrasing of Henry Ts grants to Lincoln and London,
1 The bishop seems to have been ex officio justiciar of Lincoln and
Lincolnshire (Registrum Antiquissimum of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. C. W.
Foster (Line. Rec. Soc., no. 27), ɪ. 63, cf. 60).
2 P.R. 31 Hen. I, p. 142.
FIRMA BURGI, 1086-1154
159
especially that to Lincoln as it is to be inferred from the Pipe
Roll entry, suggests at first sight a close parallelism to the
French commune as defined by Luchaire, a seigneurie collective
populaire.1 Formally, indeed, the English grants are in stricter
feudal form than the French, for while Henry conceded to the
citizens of Lincoln to hold their city in chief of the Crown and
to those of London and their heirs to hold Middlesex [and
London] of himself and his heirs, the communal charters
merely grant the right to have a commune without any such
security for permanence as at London, and defining its rela-
tion to the lord only by specific clauses similar to those in
charters granted by Anglo-Norman lords to new boroughs in
England and often containing severe restrictions on the in-
dependence of the commune. Henry’s grants are, so far as
we know, made without express restrictions and his con-
cessions, like the communal grants, allowed the election of
municipal officers by the citizens, though by making royal
officers elective, not by allowing the creation of new popular
officials. The burgesses of English royal boroughs already
enjoyed the elementary rights which the communes were
formed to secure, freedom of person and protection of their
possessions against the arbitrary power of feudal lords and
officials, with, normally, a court for all but the most serious cases
arising within the boundaries of the town. It might seem that
when they had obtained a lease of their farm, they had nothing
to envy the continental commune.2 Yet we shall find London
and at least one other town which occupied this privileged
position attempting to set up a commune, and in the case of
London perhaps for a moment succeeding.
What did the greatest English boroughs lack which con-
tinental communes possessed ? In the first place, it must be
remembered that a strong monarchy, which drew a large
part of its revenue from this source, kept them normally under
strict control. Even in France, as we have seen, the French
kings, while usually favouring the communal movement in
towns belonging to other lords, did not allow communes in
the more important cities of their own domain. Neither
ɪ We need not commit ourselves to the extreme form in which this con-
ception was finally stated. Cf. Stephenson, Borough and Town, pp. 215 ff.
There seems no evidence of French communes obtaining farming
leases until the grants of Philip Augustus to Pontoise, Poissy, Mantes, and
haumont (Hegel, Stddte und Gilden der germanischen Volker, ii. 68).
t is possibly significant that these were all in or adjoining the French
∙exm, on the Norman border. Cf. Madox, Firma Burgi, p. 3.