analogous to certain French collective communes and christened, moreover, by the French name of " Cinque Ports," was borrowed from Picardy.1

We shall summarize and discuss further on Mr. Round's articles on the history of London; according to that scholar we have there an example of communal revolution analogous to those of France and suggested by them. Finally, a more certain fact, the Norman

1. Feudal England, pp. 552 sqq. Professor Burrows, in his Cinque Ports (Historic Towns), held that this privileged confederation was in existence before the Norman conquest. Mr. Round, op. cit., vigorously disputes this assertion. He appears to us to have proved that Edward I, in his charter of 1278, does not mention any charter of Edward the Confessor relative to the Cinque Ports. He also shows that we do not possess any royal charter granting privileges to the Cinque Ports as a body, anterior to that of 1278. He recognises that the charter of Edward I did not create the confederation, did nothing but sanction the relations already existing between the maritime towns of the south-east. But he asserts that "even so late as the days of John the Ports had individual relations with the crown, although their relations inter se were becoming of a closer character, as was illustrated by the fact that their several charters were all obtained at the same time (in 1205). Hastings alone, as yet, had rights at Yarmouth recognised hers were the only portsmen styled "barons" by the crown." It is surprising to find a scholar like Mr. Round in error. Formal documents, which are very accessible, refute his view. I have collected, in my Etude sur la vie et le règne de Louis VIII, a fair number of documents concerning the Cinque Ports in the time of John Lackland and Henry III (see my index at the word Cinque Ports.) They prove that, not only did the Cinque Ports in the eyes of the contemporary chroniclers, of the Pope and of the legate, form an official confederation, but John and the counsellors of his infant son treated them as such, and did not reserve the name of barons to the inhabitants of Hastings alone. It will suffice to quote a letter patent of 26 May, 1216, in which John Lackland institutes Earl Warenne as warden of the Cinque Ports, whose "barons," moreover, had decided to take the side of Lewis of France: "Rex baronibus de Quinque Portubus. Quia nolumus quemquam alienigenam vobis capud vel magistrum prefici, mittimus ad vos dilectum nobis et fidelem Ŵ. comitem Warenniae, consanguineum nostrum, ut presit vobis ex parte nostra ad vos custodiendum et defendendum." (Rotuli litt. Pat. i, p. 184, col. 1). Since when had this confederation existed? I do not know whether the question can ever be settled. Mr. Round recognises that the problem is difficult, and Samuel Jeake (Charters of the Cinque-Ports, 1728, p. 121) already said that the origin of the Cinque-Ports and their members was a very obscure question. We cannot, in any case, discuss it with any chance of success until all the documents bearing upon it have been got together. Works such as the

book-a very artistic production it may be admitted-of Mr. F. M. Hueffer (The Cinque Ports, a historical and descriptive record, 1900) are useless to the scholar, owing to the absence of any serious study of the

sources.

conquerors created towns to secure their domination, and gave these towns French customs. This very interesting discovery was made by Miss Mary Bateson.1

The diffusion of the customs of Breteuil

It was thought until recently that the customs of Bristol had served as a model to a great number of English towns ;2 it was, in most of the cases, a mistake, arising from a faulty translation of the place-name Britolium. Miss Bateson has shown that at least seventeen towns of England, Wales and Ireland, perhaps twenty-five,3 had been granted the customs and franchises of the little Norman town of Breteuil, that several of these seventeen towns-Hereford, Rhuddlan and Shrewsbury-served in their turn as models to others, had daughter towns, even grand-daughter towns. Thus Breteuil played the same part in England as Lorris or Beaumont-en-Argonne in France, or Freiburg-im-Breisgau in Germany. It was not a very ancient or very celebrated town; it first appears in history about 1060 when Duke William built a castle there; but William Fitz-Osbern, to whom the castle of Breteuil was entrusted, became one of the greatest personages of Norman England, and it is to him and his powerful family that the diffusion of the customs of Breteuil is due. This diffusion took place principally in the March of Wales, and its history shows how, by

1. The Laws of Breteuil,' in English Histor. Review, xv, 1900, and xvi, 1901. Aug. de Prévost, Mém. pour servir à l'hist. du départ. de l'Eure, 1862, i, pp. 430 sqq., had already given useful information on this subject. See also R. Génestal, La tenure en bourgage dans les pays régis par la coutume de Normandie, 1900, pp. 237 sqq.

2. Mr. Gross enumerates thirty-one towns "affiliated" to Bristol (Gild Merchant, i, pp. 244 sqq.); eleven only, amongst these thirty-one, were so in reality.

3. Hereford, Rhuddlan, Shrewsbury, Nether Weare, Bideford, Drogheda in Meath and Drogheda Bridge, Ludlow, Rathmore, Dungarvan, Chipping Sodbury, Lichfield, Ellesmere, Burford, Ruyton, Welshpool, Llanvyllin, Preston. The eight less certain cases are those of Stratford-on-Avon, Trim, Kells, Duleek, Old Leighlin, Cashel, Kilmaclenan, Kilmeaden.

4. Stubbs, i, p. 389.

Process of urban colonisation

the creation of castles and of free towns the Norman barons definitively colonised and subjected regions far from the centre of government where the pressure of the royal power was comparatively weak. The castle was generally constructed near an already existing village; the village was converted into a free town, or even in some cases a new town was built beside the village. The creation of a market, the assured custom of the garrison, the bait of the franchises of Breteuil, attracted settlers. The former inhabitants of the village continued to cultivate the land, whilst the new population, endowed with very small holdings, comprising, for example, a house and a garden, gave themselves up to industry and commerce. At times even a third element placed itself side by side with the two others; at Shrewsbury, for instance, there was a colony of French merchants, who lived apart and under a régime which had some special features. The article of the customs of Breteuil to which the burgesses attached the most value was doubtless that which reduced the maximum fine to 12 pence. It is to be found in the customs of many towns of Wales, Ireland, Devon, Cornwall, etc., which did not enjoy the rest of the franchises of Breteuil.

Thus the process of urban colonisation, employed throughout the whole extent of France by the church, the feudal baronage and the crown, employed also to civilize Germany, at first by Charlemagne, then by the emperors and princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was also applied in England. The "ville neuve is to be found there1 with franchises borrowed from a French prototype.

It cannot, however, be denied that the development of the English towns had a somewhat peculiar character,—

1. See what M. Luchaire says about the 'villes neuves': Manuel des institutions françaises, pp. 445—450.

above all, because it was slower than on the Continent and was incomplete. The Original features of the English towns never attained complete English towns independence; during the whole of the Middle Ages they remained rather small urban groups. Must we conclude from this that the Anglo-Saxon genius was ill-adapted for city life, and was only at its ease in the organization of the village and the agricultural group? 1 We will not invoke the genius of the race;" it is better to explain this fact by the economic conditions peculiar to mediæval England and by the extraordinary power of its monarchy.2

1. This is what Mr. Round says in a passage which, however, is concerned only with the Anglo-Saxon period (Commune of London, 1899, p. 221.)

2. It will suffice to recall the case of the most important of English towns, London, whose mediocre liberties were unceasingly at the mercy of the kings. See below.

91

IX.

LONDON IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

The charter of Henry I.

ACCORDING to Stubbs,1 the charter of Henry I., granted to the Londoners in the first years of the twelfth century 2 profoundly altered the organisation of London. The complex system of gild and franchise" gave place to the system of the county; the city became a county in itself, and the county of Middlesex, in which it lay, was let at farm to the Londoners by Henry I.; henceforth London had its own sheriff. But Henry I.'s favours were ephemeral; the Pipe Roll of 1130 bears witness to it. The suppression of such precious privileges, the disappearance of the port-reeve, the conversion of the cnihten-gild into a religious house, " signify, perhaps, a municipal revolution the history of which is lost."

Such a statement of the facts treats the searching studies of Mr. Round as if they had never been.3

It is to them that, pending the appearance of a good history of London, which does not yet exist, we must

1. Const. Hist., i, p. 439 sqq.; 673 sqq.

2. Ibid., p. 674.

4

3. The early administration of London, in Geoffrey de Mandeville (1892), "Appendix P," pp. 347-373;-London under Stephen, in The Commune of London (1899), pp. 97-124. Stubbs quotes (p. 440, note 1) the first of these two articles for a detail concerning a misreading of the charter of Henry I, and he adds that "the whole history of London at this period is treated there," but in spite of this admission, he has not rectified his certainly erroneous interpretation of the charter of Henry I.

4. We await with impatience the volumes dealing with London, which are to form a special series in the Victoria History of the counties. Quite recently there has appeared the first volume of a description of London in the Middle Ages by Sir Walter Besant (Mediaval London, 1906, i). There is scarcely a mention in this first volume of the municipal institutions which are to be studied in vol. ii. Sir Walter Besant's work is unprovided with any notes or apparatus criticus.