lent of a county court. Each ward, moreover, had its own representative board, which was the equivalent of a hundred court. "Within the wards, or hundreds, the burgesses were grouped together in township, parish, or manor. . . Into the civic organization of London, to whose special privileges all lesser cities were ever striving to attain, the elements of local administration embodied in the township, the hundred, and the shire thus entered as component parts." Constitutionally, therefore, London was a little world in itself, and in a less degree the same was true of other cities and boroughs which afterwards obtained the same kind of organization, as for example, York and Newcastle, Lincoln and Norwich, Southampton and Bristol.

In such boroughs or cities all classes of society were brought into close contact, barons and knights, priests and monks, merThe guilds chants and craftsmen, free labourers and serfs. But trades and manufactures, which always had so much to do with the growth of the city, acquired the chief power and the control of the government. From an early period tradesmen and artisans found it worth while to form themselves into guilds or brotherhoods, in order to protect their persons and property 1 Hannis Taylor, Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, vol. i. p. 458.

against insult and robbery at the hands of great lords and their lawless military retainers. Thus there came to be guilds, or "worshipful companies," of grocers, fishmongers, butchers, weavers, tailors, ironmongers, carpenters, saddlers, armourers, needle-makers, etc. In large towns there was a tendency among such trade guilds to combine in a "united brotherhood," or "town guild," and this organization at length acquired full control of the city government. In London this process was completed in the course of the thirteenth century. To obtain the full privileges of citizenship one had to be enrolled in a guild. The guild hall became the city hall. The aldermen, or head men of sundry guilds, became the head men of the several wards. There was a repre

Mayor, aldercommon

men, and

sentative board, or common council, council elected by the citizens. The aldermen and common council held their meeting in the Guildhall, and over these meetings presided the chief magistrate, or port-reeve, who by this time, in accordance with the fashion then prevailing, had assumed the French title of mayor. As London had come to be a little world in itself, so this city government reproduced on a small scale the national government; the mayor answering to the king, the aristocratic board of aldermen to the House of Lords, and the democratic common council to the House of Commons.

A still more suggestive comparison, perhaps, would be between the aldermen and our federal Senate, since the aldermen represented wards, while the common council represented the citi

zens.

The city of
London

The constitution thus perfected in the city of London1 six hundred years ago has remained to this day without essential change. The voters are enrolled members of companies which represent the ancient guilds. Each year they choose one of the aldermen to be lord mayor. Within the city he has precedence next to the sovereign and before the royal family; elsewhere he ranks as an earl, thus indicating the equivalence of the city to a county, and with like significance he is lord lieutenant of the city and justice of the peace. The twentysix aldermen, one for each ward, are elected by the people, such as are entitled to vote for members of Parliament; they are justices of the peace. The common councilmen, 206 in number, are also elected by the people, and their

1 The city of London extends east and west from the Tower to Temple Bar, and north and south from Finsbury to the Thames, with a population of not more than 100,000, and is but a small part of the enormous metropolitan area now known as London, which is a circle of twelve miles radius in every direction from its centre at Charing Cross, with a population of more than 5,000,000. This vast area is an agglomeration of many parishes, manors, etc.

legislative power within the city is practically supreme; Parliament does not think of overruling it. And the city government thus constituted is one of the most clean-handed and efficient in the world.1

Having

English cities

the bulwarks

of liberty

The development of other English cities and boroughs was so far like that of London that merchant guilds generally obtained control, and government by mayor, aldermen, and common council came to be the prevailing type. also their own judges and sheriffs, and not being obliged to go outside of their own walls to obtain justice, to enforce contracts and punish crime, their efficiency as independent self-governing bodies was great, and in many a troubled time they served as staunch bulwarks of English liberty. The strength of their turreted walls was more than supplemented by the length of their purses, and such immunity from the encroachments of lords and king as they could not otherwise win, they contrived to buy. Arbitrary taxation they generally escaped by compounding with the royal exchequer in a fixed sum or quit-rent, known as the firma burgi. We have observed the especial privilege which Henry I. confirmed to London, of electing its own sheriff. London had been prompt in recognizing his title to the crown, and such support, in days when the succession was not

1 Loftie, History of London, vol. i. p. 446.

well regulated, no prudent king could afford to pass by without some substantial acknowledgment. It was never safe for any king to trespass upon the liberties of London, and through the worst times that city has remained a true republic with liberal republican sentiments. If George III. could have been guided by the advice of London, as expressed by its great alderman Beckford, the American colonies would not have been driven into rebellion.

The most signal part played by the English boroughs and cities, in securing English freedom, dates from the thirteenth century, when the nation was vaguely struggling for representative government on a national scale, as a means of curbing the power of the Crown. In that memorable struggle, the issue of which to some extent prefigured the shape that the government of the United States was to take five hundred years afterward, the cities and boroughs supported Simon de Montfort, the leader of

Simon de

the cities

the popular party and one of the Montfort and foremost among the heroes and martyrs of English liberty. Accordingly, on the morrow of his decisive victory at Lewes in 1264, when for the moment he stood master of England, as Cromwell stood four centuries later, Simon called a Parliament to settle the affairs of the kingdom, and to this Parliament he invited, along with the lords who came by