Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 33
Uncertain service was the characteristic of unfree tenure,
and when this was commuted into burgage tenure by the
lord of a semi-servile industrial group, it went far towards
marking off that group from an ordinary manor, and
started it towards the organisation and privileges of the
older boroughs.
As the boroughs grew in wealth through industry and
trade, it became possible for their lords to get a greater
income from them; and, as the royal boroughs were the
most numerous, the king profited most. The imposition
of various tolls was always the accompaniment of a
flourishing market upon any lord's domains. As the
business of the borough courts increased, the fines received
from them by the king, as from the shire courts, increased.
Thus a substantial revenue was furnished the king from
his boroughs, consisting of rents, tolls, and fines. These
items, taken together, were known as the firma burgi, and
formed part of the ferm of the shire for which the sheriff
was held responsible.
The boroughs were not slow to recognise that they
differed from the other communities, that they had special
needs, and that, as population and wealth increased, so
did their power to obtain privileges from their lords. To
gain the right to pay the sheriff the firma burgi in the form
of a fixed, lump sum, instead of running the chance of its
increase and suffering the petty annoyance of having it
dealt with in detail, was the first important step towards
independence taken by the boroughs. To be able to deal
with the sheriff solely at the gate became an ambition.
But the story of the borough's strife for independence
follows, rather than precedes, the Conquest. The facts
to note here are that the boroughs had come to contain
an important, middle-class population; that they had a
form of government of their own, an increasing esprit de
corps, and a knowledge of their own special needs.
d. Anglo-Saxon Feudalism.—With the consideration of
the boroughs, there has been completed a brief survey of
the Anglo-Saxon local government as it existed in tlie