[Sidenote:  Emancipation of Towns]

This social change in the character of the townsmen produced important results in the character of their municipal institutions.  In becoming a merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the “town” enlarged their powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control of their internal trade.  It became their special business to obtain from the crown or from their lords wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and exemption from tolls, while within the town itself they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control of markets, and the recovery of debts.  It was only by slow and difficult advances that each step in this securing of privilege was won.  Still it went steadily on.  Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of an English town we find the same peaceful revolution in progress, services disappearing through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities are being purchased in hard cash.  The lord of the town, whether he were king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the building of some new minster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who were ready to fill again their master’s treasury at the price of the strip of parchment which gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of government.  In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the boroughs thus led the way.  Unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble they preserved or won back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty.  The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free meeting, the right to equal justice at the hands of one’s equals, were brought safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and shopkeepers of the towns.  In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place, in the lord’s mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.

[Sidenote:  London]

London stood first among English towns, and the privileges which its citizens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs.  Even at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all its ancient privileges from the Conqueror.  In one way indeed it profited by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger.  One immediate result of William’s success was an immigration into England from the Continent.  A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery.  Every Norman noble as he quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English