l about a certain piece of land concerning which a dispute had
arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour,
each conquering by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he
came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and was
about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him 'Take care of the pit,
turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.' Thereat so much clamour and
noise was made by the bystanders and those who were sitting around that
the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he enquired
of some how it was there was such a clamour, and answer was made to him
that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that
one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood
over the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him. Then the
townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they
should give him threepence yearly for each house in the High Street
that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the
twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from
that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among
themselves."

[Sidenote: Division of Labour]

At the time we have reached this struggle for emancipation was nearly
over. The larger towns had secured the privilege of self-government, the
administration of justice, and the control of their own trade. The reigns
of Richard and John mark the date in our municipal history at which towns
began to acquire the right of electing their own chief magistrate, the
Portreeve or Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the crown. But
with the close of this outer struggle opened an inner struggle between
the various classes of the townsmen themselves. The growth of wealth and
industry was bringing with it a vast increase of population. The mass of
the new settlers, composed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders
without landed holdings, of families who had lost their original lot in
the borough, and generally of the artizans and the poor, had no part in
the actual life of the town. The right of trade and of the regulation of
trade in common with all other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in the
hands of the landed burghers whom we have described. By a natural process
too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh division between the
"burghers" of the merchant-gild and the unenfranchised