[Sidenote:  The Town]

If we pass from the English University to the English Town we see a progress as important and hardly less interesting.  In their origin our boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of the western world.  The cities of Italy and Provence had preserved the municipal institutions of their Roman past; the German towns had been founded by Henry the Fowler with the purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppression around them; the communes of Northern France sprang into existence in revolt against feudal outrage within their walls.  But in England the tradition of Rome passed utterly away, while feudal oppression was held fairly in check by the Crown.  The English town therefore was in its beginning simply a piece of the general country, organized and governed precisely in the same manner as the townships around it.  Its existence witnessed indeed to the need which men felt in those earlier times of mutual help and protection.  The burh or borough was probably a more defensible place than the common village; it may have had a ditch or mound about it instead of the quickset-hedge or “tun” from which the township took its name.  But in itself it was simply a township or group of townships where men clustered whether for trade or defence more thickly than elsewhere.  The towns were different in the circumstances and date of their rise.  Some grew up in the fortified camps of the English invaders.  Some dated from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate Roman towns.  Some clustered round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the walls of church and monastery.  Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.  There was 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.”