BOROUGH, bfir'6 (AS. bush, burg, Ger. Burg, a fort, from AS. beo•gan, to protect). In Great Britain, an incorporated municipality, either vil lage, town, or city, having the right of return ing one or more members to Parliament. The word burh appears in many forms in the names of towns, as in Canterbury, Edinburgh, Peter borough, Hamburg, and has kindred forms in several of the Continental languages, such as the French bourgeois. It originally signified a hill or mound; as places of defense were thrown up on elevated positions it came to mean a castle or fort, and afterwards the collection of houses and other buildings which gathered naturally beneath the fortified hill. Boroughs existed in England from the earliest times. According to the Domesday Book, there were eighty-two boroughs. Each of these had a market or an annual fair, was ruled by an elective officer, usually called the port-reeve, and had the privilege of a special borough-court, which was independ ent of the larger divisions, known as hundreds and shires. The Normans utilized these units of government, supplanted the port-reeves with offi cers deriving their authority directly from the throne, and in time the boroughs received the privileges belonging to municipal corporations. By the time of 'Henry VI. the boroughs had gen erally become municipalities, with the power of government vested in the members of the princi pal guilds. During the same period the boroughs obtained the right of sending burgesses to Parlia ment. In course of time many of these boroughs decreased in population and became little more than names, but without losing their Parlia mentary representation; others came entirely under the control of members of the nobility, and acted in elections only under such restraint.
These two classes of boroughs received the names respectively of 'rotten boroughs' and 'pocket boroughs.' Many of these were swept out of existence as regarded their Parliamentary rights by the Reform agitation, which culminated in the Reform Bill (q.v.) of 1832. The borough system of Scotland is even of greater antiquity than that of England. A confederation of bor oughs for purposes of mutual defense and the protection of trades existed in the reign of David I., and was called a Hanse.
In Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, the term borough is applied to in corporated towns or villages of a lower grade than a city. William Penn's charter to the territory west of the Delaware River authorized him in 1631 to erect the country, among other divisions, into boroughs similar to those of Eng land. This system of boroughs continues in Pennsylvania to the present time. In 1619 Vir ginia had eleven boroughs, the delegates of which sat in the House of Burgesses; but bor oughs, as in incorporated towns, never obtained a footing in that State. The charter granted to Lord Baltimore entitled him to create boroughs in Maryland, but they were never so created. In New Jersey, boroughs date back to the early part of the Eighteenth Century, but they were erected by special acts and without uniformity of sys tem until 1818, when a General Borough Act was passed.
Greater New York, by an act passed by the Legislature of 1897, was made a city, composed of five boroughs—Manhattan, the Bronx, Brook lyn, Queens, and Richmond.