elling-place of a
stationary clan, surrounded by palisades or by a dense quickset hedge.
Now where such small enclosed places were thinly scattered about they
developed simply into villages. But where, through the development of
trade or any other cause, a good many of them grew up close together
within a narrow compass, they gradually coalesced into a kind of
compound town; and with the greater population and greater wealth, there
was naturally more elaborate and permanent fortification than that of
the palisaded village. There were massive walls and frowning turrets,
and the place came to be called a fortress or "borough." The borough,
then, was simply several townships packed tightly together; a hundred
smaller in extent and thicker in population than other hundreds.[4]

[Footnote 4: Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, vol. v. p. 466. For a
description of the _hundred_, see above, pp. 75-80.]

[Sidenote: The borough as a hundred.]
From this compact and composite character of the borough came several
important results. We have seen that the hundred was the smallest area
for the administration of justice. The township was in many respects
self-governing, but it did not have its court, any more than the New
England township of the present day has its court. The lowest court
was that of the hundred, but as the borough was equivalent to a
hundred it soon came to have its own court. And although much
obscurity still surrounds the early history of municipal government in
England, it is probable that this court was a representative board,
like any other hundred court, and that the relation of the borough to
its constituent townships resembled the relation of the modern city to
its constituent wards.

[Sidenote: The borough as a county.]
But now as certain boroughs grew larger and annexed outlying
townships, or acquired adjacent territory which presently became
covered with streets and houses, their constitution became still more
complex. The borough came to embrace several closely packed hundreds,
and thus became analogous to a shire. In this way it gained for itself
a sheriff and the equivalent of a county court. For example, under the
charter granted by Henry I. in 1101, London was expressly recognized
as a county by itself. Its burgesses could elect their own chief
magistrate, who was called the port-reeve, inasmuch as London is a
seaport; in some other towns he was called the borough-reeve. He was
at once the chief executive