Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 31
times a year. Thus the differentiation was well started,
and yet there was no borough government apart from
the court, which was, no doubt, conducted much as was
the hundred court.1 And there was no greater unity,
nothing looking more towards modern municipal corporate-
ness, than in any of the rural villages. All the elements
that had gone to form this primitive borough, the old
arable fields of the original settlers, with the pasture and
waste surrounding, and the rural traditions and customs
which these implied, the houses owned by the great men
of the shire, the descendants perhaps of those who kept
the early garrison, the people wrho looked to these men as
their lords, and, finally, the later industrial group, that
was tending to assimilate the rest—all these remained
clearly discernible, and traces of them lingered for a long
while. But what these midland boroughs had was a dis-
tinctive name, a court that enforced a strict peace, a
position of importance in the shire, a somewhat shifting
and mixed population, and a beginning of industrial and
commercial activity. Yet by no means all the fortresses
built to hold the midlands were nuclei of boroughs.
After the idea of a borough had taken shape, there was
always the possibility of its being more or less consciously
adopted by centres of population where no king's burh
had been. But it cannot be stated that all the boroughs
of later times either began as king's burhs or received their
distinguishing governmental forms from places that had
so started. And it is not certain that the midland fortress
boroughs were the first places to differentiate from the
rural communities, though they seem to have furnished
a name that, by some means, became identified with such
differentiation. The fortified residences of great nobles,
monasteries, seaports, or any places well located for the
establishment of markets were centres about which people
might gather; and, to meet the judicial needs of such
*It has been conjectured (Chadwick, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institu-
tions} that the court which met thrice yearly was made up of county
landowners who had houses in the borough, and that there must have
been more frequent meetings of the burgesses themselves.