Ancient borough

However, neither in the early English language nor in the contemporary Latin was there any fixed usage differentiating the various words descriptive of the several forms of human settlement, and the fortified communal refuges cannot accordingly be clearly distinguished from villages or the strongholds of individuals by any purely nomenclative test.

[4] This network is described in a manuscript document which has survived in later iterations, named by scholars the Burghal Hidage, which lists thirty three burhs in Wessex and English Mercia.

Following the successful reconquest from the Vikings by Alfred's descendants Edward and Æthelstan, the latter made a series of reforms in law, the Codes issued at the Council of Grately, which gave additional impetus to the urban development of the burhs which hitherto had been mainly forts.

Mercantile transactions in the burhs or ports, as they were called when their commercial rather than their military importance was accentuated, were placed by law under special legal privileges in order no doubt to secure the king's hold upon his toll.

A law of Edgar, about 960, required that it should meet three times a year, these being in all likelihood assemblies at which attendance was compulsory on all tenants of the burghal district, when pleas concerning life and liberty and land were held, and men were compelled to find pledges answerable for their good conduct.

[2] In charters of the Anglo-Saxon period a haw, or enclosed area within a burh, was often conveyed by charter as if it were an apanage of the lands in the neighbourhood with which it was conveyed; the Norman settlers who succeeded to lands in the county succeeded therewith to houses in the burhs, for a close association existed between the thegns of the shire and the shirestow, an association partly perhaps of duty and also of privilege.

The burh generally shows signs of having been originally a village settlement, surrounded by open fields, of which the borough boundary before 1835 will suggest the outline.

[2] The wide districts over which the boroughs had had authority were placed under the control of the Norman castle which was itself built by means of the old English levy of burhwork.

Money was raised, possibly by order of the borough court, to buy a charter from the king giving the right to choose officers who should answer directly to the exchequer and not through the sheriff of the county.

Henry I about 1131 gave the London citizens the right to choose their own sheriffs and a justiciar answerable for keeping the pleas of the crown.

By the end of the 12th century many towns paid by the hand of their own reeves, and John's charters began to make rules as to the freedom of choice to be allowed in the nomination of borough officers and as to the royal power of dismissal.

The chartered right to choose two or more citizens to keep the pleas of the crown gave to many boroughs the control of their coroners, who occupied the position of the London justiciar of earlier days, subject to those considerable modifications which Henry II's systematisation of the criminal law had introduced.

Certain it is that the communities in the 12th century became alive to the possibilities of their new position, that trade received a new impulse, and the vague constitutional powers of the borough court acquired a new need for definition.

The vulgus were able to take effective action by means of the several craft organisations, and first found the necessity to do so when taxation was heavy or when questions of trade legislation were mooted.

The pressure of taxation led in the 13th century to a closer definition of the burghal constitutions; the Commons sought to get an audit of accounts, and (in London) not only to hear but to treat of municipal affairs.

Where the commons succeeded for a time in asserting their right to take part in borough elections they were rarely able to keep it, not in all cases perhaps because their power was feared, but sometimes because of the riotous proceedings which ensued.

These councils bore a heavy burden of taxation in meeting royal loans and benevolences, paying per capita, like the magnates of the 12th century, and for a time there is on the whole little evidence of friction between the governors and the governed.

[8] Elizabeth repeatedly declared her dislike of incorporations "because of the abuses committed by their head rulers," but in her reign they were fairly easily controlled by the privy council, which directed their choice of members of Parliament and secured supporters of the government policy to fill vacancies on the borough bench.

The Commons quite often decided in favour of the more popularly elected candidate against the nominee of the town council, on the general principle that neither the royal charter nor a by-law could curtail the usual franchise.

But as each case rested on the national body swayed by the dominant political party, no principle was steadily adhered to in the trial of election petitions.

In 1660 it was made a rule that all future (town) charters should reserve expressly to the Crown the first nomination (naming) of the aldermen, recorder and town-clerk, and a proviso should be entered placing with the common council the return of the member of parliament.

The Corporation Act 1661 gave power to royal commissioners to settle the composition of the town councils, and to remove all who refused the sacraments of the Church of England or were suspected of disaffection, even though they offered to take the necessary oaths.

A London jury having returned a verdict hostile to the crown and taxation, after various attempts to bend the city to his will, Charles II issued a quo warranto against the mayor and commonalty to charge the citizens with illegal encroachments beyond their chartered rights.

The way this was analogous to well-precedented Crown rights to regulate the actions of organised groups of men such as rebels, made it easy for the crown judges to find legally flawed actions of the boroughs, and also made it possible for the Londoners to argue that no execution could be taken against the mayor, commonalty and citizens, a "body politic invisible"; that the indictment lay only against every particular member of the governing body; and that the corporation as a corporation was incapable of suffering a forfeiture or of making a surrender.

[9] Under James II in 1687 six commissioners were appointed to "regulate" the corporations and remove from them all persons who were opposed to the abolition of the penal laws against Catholics.

If the electorate was increased, it was done so by the wholesale admission to borough freedom (burgess status) to voters willing to vote as directed by the corporation at parliamentary elections.

[10] Before the Reform era dissatisfaction came to occasional fruition in Local Acts (of Parliament) which placed under the authority of special commissioners a variety of administrative details, which if the corporation had not been suspected would certainly not have been assigned to its care.

In the 17th century Sheffield was brought under the act "to redress the misemployment of lands given to charitable uses",[10] and the municipal administration of what had been a borough passed into the hands of the trustees of the Burgery or Town Trust.

The many special authorities created under act of parliament led to much confusion, conflict and overlapping, and increased the need for a general reform.

In 1832 the exclusive privileges of the corporations in parliamentary elections having been abolished and male occupiers enfranchised, the question of the municipal franchise was next dealt with.