MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS. The term Municipal is derived from the Latin adjective Municipalis, which signi fies appertaining to a Municipium. The word Municipium had several early his torical signification among the Romans, which it is not necessary to explain here. We use the Roman term Municipal to indicate the corporation of a town, but our municipal corporations resem ble the Italian cities in the later period of the Republic. After the Social War, D.C. 90, the Italian towns became mem bers of the Roman state ; they were sub ject to Rome, but retained their own local administration. Both the original Roman colonies in Italy and the Municipia (not colonies), as they were called, enjoyed this free condition. A municipal consti tution was the characteristic of these Italian towns. The notion of an incorpo rated body, as applied to a community, was familiar to the Romans, and their several municipalities were accordingly considered and called republics (lies Publicie). The Roman colonies in Italy had a popular assembly and a senate, as Rome had; the people chose their own magistrates, and they had legislative power in their own concerns. The chief magistrates were sometimes two (duum vin) and sometimes four (quatuorviri): their principal duties were the administra tion of justice. Their office was annual. The history of these Italian municipali ties is traced by Saviny, in his History of the Roman Law in the Middle Ages (vol. i.). The Romans had colonies, in their sense (Colonise, COLONY, p. 559) also in the provinces, in Africa, Spain, France, and Britain. All these colonies had a mu cipal organization. They were subjects of Rome and under the general law of Rome, but they managed their own inter nal administration as corporate bodies. As these communities existed wherever the Romans formed a provincial govern ment, it is all but historically demon strated that the town communities of our country, and of other parts of Europe where they exist, have either been directly transmitted from the Roman town-com munities as they existed under the em pire, or have been formed on that modeL London itself, though never a Roman colony, in the strict sense of that term, was a place of considerable trade under the empire, and as England was then a Roman province, we may assume that this flourishing Municipium would have a local administration like that of other large towns within the Roman provinces.
The Romans had also colonies in Eng land, in the proper sense of that term ; and the word Colonia always implies a local administration. It cannot be proved that the Saxons brought with them to Eng land such a system of town-communities ; nor was their mode of settlement of such a character as to lead us to suppose that they could have established them at first. They certainly found them existing in the chief towns of the kingdom, and it is probable that this Roman institution has continued without interruption from the first reduction of England to a Roman pro vince to the present time.
Some writers however are of opinion that our municipal corporations are of Saxon or Teutonic origin ; and the re marks which follow are made in con formity to that opinion. The Anglo Saxon terms byrig, byrg, burp, &c. the various old forms of borough, like the Ger man burg of the present day, was the ge neric term for any place, large or small, fortified by walls or mounds. The munici pal organization of the Anglo-Saxons was not, however; confined to their towns. Their boroughs were only parts of one great municipal system, extending over the whole territory. But the boroughs by distinction, the boroughs in political esti mation, were those towns (apparently all the considerable ones) which had each, under the name usually of burgh-rere or port-reve, an elective municipal officer exercising functions analogous to those of the elective-reve of the shire or skire-revs. Of this local organization enough is dis coverable to show most clearly that it had never been moulded by a central an thority, but, on the contrary, that the central authority had been, as it were, built up on the broad basis of a free mu nicipal organization.