The English Borough

THE ENGLISH BOROUGH There is no evidence for the theory of continuity of organiza tion between the Roman colony and the old English borough. It is not until the Danish invasions of the 8th and 9th centuries that anything like municipal institutions is discernible. Mainly as a result of these invasions the English kings pursued a policy which both recognized and accelerated the growth of town life and town government. In the first place, mercantile transactions were confined to ports; that is, recognized marketing centres. Secondly, in the campaigns against the Danes the most effective military device was found to be the erection of burhs or forts, for the upkeep and garrisoning of which the men of the sur rounding district were made responsible, and these garrisons of themselves must have brought more custom. Both commercial and military centres enjoyed special legal privileges, notably the borough-peace, under which offences against the peace incurred a heavier penalty if committed inside a borough. Thirdly, after the reconquest of the Danelaw the burhs or boroughs of the mid lands became the centres of the new shires which were organized around and named after them. Lastly, by a law of about 9bo, Icing Edgar recognized the existence of a special law court for the borough, and ordered that it should meet three times a year. Dwellers in the borough were apparently henceforth exempt from attendance at the hundred-moot though not from the shire-moot, and in their own moot could maintain and enforce their own special legal customs. Much archaic law and many interesting local customs were thus preserved and recorded at a later date in the borough custumals edited by Mary Bateson. At the bor ough moot the borough-reeve presided, assisted by senior bur gesses, called lawmen in the Danelaw and aldermen or wise men elsewhere, who declared the law in doubtful cases and otherwise upheld its authority. Besides the three compulsory full sessions, other meetings must have been held at shorter intervals for ju dicial purposes, at which other borough business could be dis cussed. To such smaller gatherings and their administrative activ ities may be traced the beginnings of a town council.

By the time of the Norman Conquest, then, the borough was well on the way to becoming a self-governing unit. It had legal, judicial and economic privileges; it was generally the seat of a mint and in most cases it was outside the hundred. It was still, however, for some purposes under the control of the earl and the sheriff, the heads of the shire government ; and very fre quently the chief gentry or thegns of the shire owned houses, held land, and had considerable influence in the shire borough, their private jurisdictions or sokes cutting across the sphere of action of the borough-reeve.

Effect of the Norman Conquest on the Borough.—The Norman Conquest, by linking up England with the Continent, stimulated the natural economic development of towns; it also led to the deliberate foundation of new boroughs by both king and barons. At least 25 boroughs were founded between 1 066 and 1086. When the Domesday Survey was made in that year, some go boroughs were in existence, of which about a third had baronial lords. These, under the feudal theory then generally applied, held their privileges from their lords who held of the king, and so were known as medial or mesne boroughs. In a few instances, such as Leicester and Northampton, an older royal borough was granted to a magnate, Leicester was held by its earls until they became kings of England in 1399; Northampton re verted to royal control in the 12th century. A large proportion of seignorial boroughs may be regarded as experiments that failed. The judgment of the local lords who founded them was often at fault. Nineteen of the 23 boroughs founded in Lancashire in the middle ages relapsed sooner or later into villages; municipal privileges could not make a borough where the economic raison d'ętre was lacking.

The 12th and 13th centuries are the period of the most rapid advance of the English borough. Besides the new foundations, additional privileges were being granted to boroughs already in existence. The revolutionary municipal movement on the Con tinent affected the English towns and in the 12th century com munes after the French model were proclaimed in London and elsewhere. The government of England, however, kept a firm hand on the development of municipal independence, and the boroughs of England never ceased to be an integral part of the national administrative system, exercising their political powers by grant from and at the good pleasure of the crown. Even Lon don, pre-eminent by its municipal privileges, was taught its place by being "taken into the king's hand" time after time, and never approached the status of the free cities of the Netherlands, Ger many or Italy.

The Chartered Privileges of the Mediaeval Borough.— Some 76o borough charters are extant for the period 1066-1307, and many lost grants of privilege must have been made. Of these some 25o belonged to the reigns of Richard I. and John (118g 1216), which owing to the crown's urgent need for money and the burgesses' desire for liberties proved the period of greatest activity in charter granting. An analysis of these charters shows a very wide range of privileges. The only sine qua non of a bor ough was the much coveted burgage tenure, which freed the burgesses from the customary burdens of manorialism, enabling them to pay a money rent for their land and to sell and devise it freely. Besides legal privileges the other main classes of privilege granted were mercantile, fiscal, jurisdictional and administrative. The commercial privileges included grants of markets and fairs, with accompanying trade monopolies, rights to take toll, free dom of the burgesses from toll elsewhere and the right to have a merchant guild with power to regulate the trade of the bor ough. The organization evolved for the exercise of these rights coincided in some boroughs with the town government and in others was kept distinct. Whilst each borough has its own history it may be said generally that advance towards self-government was achieved by emancipation, first from the fiscal, then from the judicial and finally from the administrative interference of the sheriff. In the I i th century the customary revenue due from the borough to the crown was generally collected and paid over by the sheriff, who accounted for a fixed sum known as the farm of the borough (firma burgi). In the first half of the 12th century special farmers were frequently appointed, who paid over their farms to the king and extorted what they could from the bur gesses. Henry II. 0154-89) began the practice, made per manent by Richard and John, of selling to the burgesses the right to collect the farm themselves and account for it at the Exchequer by their own reeves. Once the borough had acquired the right to deal directly with the royal exchequer the appoint ment of its officials became of more than internal interest. Con cession of the right to choose the reeve who accounted at the exchequer was followed by leave to choose a mayor (granted to London by Richard, and to Northampton, and possibly some other boroughs, by John) and borough coroners. Then came the extension of the jurisdictional powers of the borough courts, and finally, about the middle of the 13th century, the right to execute all royal writs. This meant that not only the shire coroners but also the sheriff was henceforth excluded from the borough until the borough officials had failed to execute the writs which he was now bound to pass on to them. After this, though the borough had to appear by 12 jurors before the justices in eyre, no royal official below the rank of a king's justice need be admitted into the borough. By the end of the 13th century the average bor ough had acquired sufficient powers and evolved an adequate staff for carrying on its own government and enforcing the law of the land without intervention from outside : and this self sufficiency was in most cases reinforced, in the 16th century, by the grant of a special commission of the peace for the borough.

The Struggle of Classes Within the Borough.

From the first the full rights of a burgess were not enjoyed by all in habitants of a borough. The "freedom," both political and mer cantile, was carefully guarded. In the middle of the 13th century, at the time of the Barons' wars, vain efforts seem to have been made by the poorer townsmen in various boroughs (e.g., London, Oxford, Bury St. Edmund's and Northampton) to obtain a share of the power monopolized by the wealthier burgesses. But in most cases the power remained in the hands of a ring whose mem bers exercised in turn the functions of office and controlled the admission to the freedom of the borough. In many towns the contest took the form of a struggle between different guilds for the control of the town government. In the 14th century a typi cal form of government was that by a mayor and council, con sisting largely of ex-officials, who exercised the judicial and administrative powers, and a town assembly or common council which, in form at least, elected the officials annually and had powers, varying from borough to borough, of legislation or regis tration of decrees. In the 15th century a renewed endeavour on the part of the lesser townsmen to influence the town government led to riots and disturbances which furnished the pretext for the limitation by law of the composition and of the powers of the assembly. Practical needs, combined with the development of the law of corporations, made the boroughs apply for charters of incorporation, and in these the national government definitely placed power and responsibility in the hands of the governing clique, and narrowed or even eliminated popular control. From the time of Henry VII. royal policy steadily strengthened the position of the oligarchy, and the borough more and more became identified with the close corporation that administered its govern ment. By the lgth century in only a few exceptional cases, notably at Berwick, Norwich and Ipswich, was there any trace of democracy in the borough constitution: it was only in con nection with parliamentary elections that, here and there, the whole body of townsmen had any share in the liberties of their town.

The King and the Borough.

From the time of Henry III. onwards representatives of the boroughs were summoned to the king's parliaments. Whilst some boroughs may have found the duty of attendance irksome and costly, for it entailed liability to a higher rate of taxation as well as payment of the members' wages, there is evidence that in others the burgesses welcomed the opportunities thus afforded. At the outset Edward I. often sum moned representatives of both boroughs and "merchant towns," but economic facts and the passive resistance of the smaller com munities led to the dropping out of many names, and ultimately the right to receive a summons to parliament became a working means of classifying boroughs. As the House of Commons began to exercise effective political power, a new motive for royal in terference in the boroughs began to operate. Both Elizabeth and James I. created new boroughs freely in order to secure submis sive parliaments, and under Charles II. and James II. a de termined attempt was made to control both the personnel and the policy of the corporations with the double object of influenc ing local administration and parliamentary representation. Under the Corporation Act of 1661 the town councils were purged of persons suspected of disaffection to the crown, and in 1682 a gen eral attack on the borough franchises began. First London and then a series of other towns were charged, under writ of quo warranto, with having exceeded the powers granted in their charters. In the existing state of the law it was easy to give judgment for the king, and the charters were forfeited. The new charters which replaced them secured to the crown the veto on all important municipal appointments, and power to remove officials at will. A special commission of 1687 even ordered the election to the corporations of specific supporters of James' policy. The old charters were restored in 1688, and the corpora tions, guarded alike from royal interference and in most cases from popular control, became irresponsible close bodies, regarding the borough revenues as their own property and themselves prac tically as clubs, whose vested interests were sacred and whose policy it were impertinence to criticize. The material and social needs of the rapidly growing boroughs of the i8th century had for the most part to be supplied by other agencies, both statutory and voluntary. The advance of nonconformity further empha sized the unrepresentative character of the corporations, whose social and political bias even influenced, in some cases, the administration of justice by the borough magistrates. By 183o, with some shining exceptions, they were strrongholds of corrupt and bigoted obscurantism in the midst of a country transformed by industrial development and alive with new political, economic and social movements.

Municipal Reform in the Nineteenth Century.—Parlia mentary reform dealt the first blow to the powers of the close corporations. The parliamentary franchise varied from borough to borough; but even where the franchise was widest, the mayor, as returning officer, could and did determine the results of elec tions. When the tide of party feeling ran high the county mag nates bid against each other for the support of the corporations and the corporations spent the borough funds lavishly in the interests of their own party. At Leicester the corporation advanced i o,000 towards the expenses of the election of 1827 which was never repaid. By the creation of a uniform borough franchise the Reform Act of 1832 removed the main source of the corrupt political power of the corporations. The first reformed parliament set up in 1833 a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the existing state of municipal corporations, whose accurate and lucid reports give a vivid picture of the stagnation and decay of municipal in stitutions in the majority of the boroughs. The Municipal Re form Act of 1835 swept away the whole mass of obsolete and unrepresentative institutions, and set up the form of government by mayor, aldermen and council, elected by the ratepayers, which, modified by a succession of later Acts consolidated in the Munici pal Corporations Act of 1882, with various minor amendments of which the latest are 15 Geo. V., chit., and 15 and 16 Geo. V., ch. 54, has since formed the code of borough administration in Eng land. The Local Government Act of 1888 created the county borough, exempt from the jurisdiction of and with powers equiva lent to those of the county council. By it any borough might apply to be constituted a county borough if it had a population of 5o,000 and upwards : by the County Boroughs and Adjustments Act of 1926 the minimum was raised to 75,00o, and procedure by private bill in place of the provisional order of the Ministry of Health was made obligatory. It may be doubted, however, whether the control by the central government does not unduly hamper the activity and enterprise of such county boroughs as Manchester, whose population is three times that of the self governing dominion of Newfoundland, and whose annual budget exceeds that of some of the smaller European states.