to the court four questions: (1) Whether any corporation could
be forfeited? (2) Whether the city of London differed from other
corporations as to point of forfeiture? (3) Whether any act of the mayor,
aldermen and Common Council in Common Council assembled be so much the act
of the Corporation as could make a forfeiture? and (4) Whether the acts by
them done in making a certain by-law and receiving money by it,(1532) or
in making the petition of the 13th January, 1681, and causing it to be
published, be such acts as, if done by the Corporation, would make a
forfeiture of the Corporation? After a lengthy argument counsel for the
Crown concluded by asking judgment for the king, and that the defendants
might be ousted of their franchise as a Corporation.

(M785)

The City's Recorder, Sir George Treby, rose in reply. His argument in
favour of the City(1533) tended to show that the corporation of London
_qua_ corporation could not forfeit its existence either by voluntary
surrender or by abuse of its powers, much less could its existence be
imperilled by the action of those representatives of the city to whom its
government had been confided. The corporation of the City was a governing
body elected for specific purposes; if it proceeded _ultra vires_ to
establish market tolls or to offer a petition to the king which was
seditious, an indictment lay against every particular member of that body,
but no execution could be taken against the mayor, commonalty and citizens
of London, a body politic that is invisible, one that can neither see nor
be seen.

Counsel on the other side had laid stress on the fact that the liberties
and franchises of the City had been often seized or "taken into the king's
hands," adducing instances with which the reader of the earlier pages of
this work will be already familiar; and if they could be so seized, they
could also be forfeited. The Recorder argued that this conclusion was a
wrong one. The effect of the seizure of the City's liberties in former
days had only been to place the government of the city in the hands of a
_custos_ or warden. The Corporation continued as before; it might sue and
be sued as before; it was neither suspended nor destroyed. How could the
king seize a Corporation? Could he himself constitute the mayor,
commonalty and citizens of a city, or make anyone else such? No, a
Corporation was not, to use a legal phrase, "manurable"; it could not be
seized; nor had anyone (he