TOWN, in its popular sense, is a large assemblage of adjoining or nearly adjoining houses, to which a market is usually incident. Formerly a wall seems to have been considered necessary to constitute a town ; and the derivation of the word, in its Anglo-Saxon form " tun," is usually referred to the verb " tinan," to shut or enclose. In legal language "town" corresponds with the Norman " vill," by which latter term it is frequently spoken of in order to distinguish it from the word town in its popular sense. A vill or town is a subdivision of a county, as a pariah is part or subdivision of a diocese • the vill, the civil district, being usually co-extensive with the tho eccle siastical district, and, prima facie, every parish is a vill, and every will a parish. Many towns however, not only in the popular, but in the legal sense of the term, contain several parishes, and many parishes, particularly in the north of England, where the parishes are exceed ingly large, contain several villa, which villa arc usually called tithings or townships. As until the contrary is shown the law presumes towns (or villa) and parishes to be co-extensive, Lord Coke goes so far as to say that it cannot be in law a vill unless it bath, or iu times past hath bad, a church, and celebration of divine service, sacraments, and burials.
But this, for which no authority is given, appears to confound parish and vill, and to bo inconsistent with the cases in which it has been held that a parish may consist of several villa. (1 Lord Raymond, 22.) The test proposed by Lord Holt is, that a vill must have a constable, and that otherwise the place is only a hamlet, an assemblage of houses having no specific legal character. Hence a vill is sometimes called a constableuick. Towns are divided into cities, boroughs, and upland towns, or (as we should now call them) country towns. Towns be longing to the last of these classes have been described as places which, though enclosed, are not governed, as cities and boroughs are, by their own elected officers. The Anglo-Saxon "tun" terminates the names of an immense number of places'in England ; and in the southern counties the farm enclosure in which the homestead stands is usually called the barton (barn-toren), in Law Latin, bertona.