as the same variety in the mode in which the various town
communities were formed. While the bulk of them grew by simple increase
of population from township to town, larger boroughs such as York with
its "six shires" or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show
how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and
claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its shire or share of the
town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the
town-community. But strange as these aggregations might be, the
constitution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of
the people at large. Whether we regard it as a township, or rather from
its size as a hundred or collection of townships, the obligations of the
dwellers within its bounds were those of the townships round, to keep
fence and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd, and a
reeve and four men to the hundred court and shire court. As in other
townships, land was a necessary accompaniment of freedom. The landless
man who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life; for
purposes of government or property the town consisted simply of the
landed proprietors within its bounds. The common lands which are still
attached to many of our boroughs take us back to a time when each
township lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once as
boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of York had its common
pasture; Oxford has still its own "Port-meadow."

[Sidenote: Towns and their lords]

The inner rule of the borough lay as in the townships about it in the
hands of its own freemen, gathered in "borough-moot" or "portmanni-mote."
But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal
requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it
affected the rest of the country. Some passed into the hands of great
thegns near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.
A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution.
It was the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and administered
justice in it; it was he who collected the lord's dues or annual rent of
the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. To modern
eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection. When
Leicester, for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into
those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's
cor