[Sidenote:  Towns and their lords]

The inner rule of the borough lay as in the townships about it in the hands of its own freemen, gathered in “borough-moot” or “portmanni-mote.”  But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it affected the rest of the country.  Some passed into the hands of great thegns near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.  A new officer, the lord’s or king’s reeve, was a sign of this revolution.  It was the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and administered justice in it; it was he who collected the lord’s dues or annual rent of the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord.  To modern eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection.  When Leicester, for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord’s corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his pound.  The great forest around was the Earl’s, and it was only out of his grace that the little borough could drive its swine into the woods or pasture its cattle in the glades.  The justice and government of a town lay wholly in its master’s hands; he appointed its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their markets and fairs.  But in fact when once these dues were paid and these services rendered the English townsman was practically free.  His rights were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his lord.  Property and person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure.  He could demand a fair trial on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his master’s reeve it was administered in the presence and with the assent of his fellow-townsmen.  The bell which swung out from the town tower gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exercise rights of free speech and free deliberation on their own affairs.  Their merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, distributed the sums due from the town among the different burgesses, looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and acted in fact pretty much the same part as a town-council of to-day.

[Sidenote:  The Merchant Gild]

The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to closer association which found support in those principles of mutual aid and mutual restraint that lay at the base of our old institutions.  Gilds or clubs for religious, charitable, or social purposes were common throughout the country, and especially common in boroughs, where men clustered more thickly together.  Each formed a sort of artificial family.  An oath of mutual fidelity among its members was substituted for the tie of blood, while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the gathering of the kinsfolk round their family hearth.  But within this new family the aim of the gild was to