and sometimes of the general amount
only of all those taxes.[31]
But how servile soever may have been originally
the condition of the inhabitants of the
towns, it appears evidently, that they arrived
at liberty and independency much earlier than
the occupiers of land in the country. That
part of the king's revenue which arose from
such poll-taxes in any particular town, used
commonly to be let in farm, during a term of
years, for a rent certain, sometimes to the sheriff
of the county, and sometimes to other persons.
The burghers themselves frequently
got credit enough to be admitted to farm the
revenues of this sort which arose out of their
own town, they becoming jointly and severally
answerable for the whole rent.[32] To let a
farm in this manner, was quite agreeable to
the usual economy of, I believe, the sovereigns
of all the different countries of Europe, who
used frequently to let whole manors to all the
tenants of those manors, they becoming jointly
and severally answerable for the whole rent;
but in return being allowed to collect it in
their own way, and to pay it into the king's
exchequer by the hands of their own bailiff,
and being thus altogether freed from the insolence
of the king's officers; a circumstance
in those days regarded as of the greatest importance.
At first, the farm of the town was probably
let to the burghers, in the same manner as it
had been to other farmers, for a term of years
only. In process of time, however, it seems
to have become the general practice to grant
it to them in fee, that is for ever, reserving a
rent certain, never afterwards to be augmented.
The payment having thus became perpetual,
the exemptions, in return, for which
it was made, naturally became perpetual too.
Those exemptions, therefore, ceased to be personal,
and could not afterwards be considered
as belonging to individuals, as individuals,
but as burghers of a particular burgh, which,
upon this account, was called a free burgh,
for the same reason that they had been called
free burghers or free traders.
Along with this grant, the important privileges,
above mentioned, that they might give
away their own daughters in marriage, that
their children should succeed to them, and
that they might dispose of their own effects by
will, were generally bestowed upon the burghers
of the town to whom it was given. Whether
such privileges had before been usually
granted, along with the freedom of trade, to
particular burghers, as individuals, I know not.
I reckon it not improbable that they were,
though I cannot produce any direct evidence
of it. But however this may have been, the
principal attributes of villanage and slavery
being thus taken away from them, they now
at least became really free, in our present
sense of the word freedom.
Nor was this all. They were generally at
the same time erected into a commonalty or
corporation, with the privilege of having magistrates
and a town-council of their own, of
making bye-laws for their own government,
of building walls for their own defence, and
of reducing all their inhabitants under a sort
of military discipline, by obliging them to
watch and ward; that is, as anciently understood,
to guard and defend those walls against
all attacks and surprises, by night as well as
by day. In England they were generally
exempted from suit to the hundred and county
courts; and all such pleas as should arise
among them, the pleas of the crown excepted,
were left to the decision of their own magistrates.
In other countries, much greater
and more extensive jurisdictions were frequently
granted to them.[33]
It might, probably, be necessary to grant to
such towns as were admitted to farm their
own revenues, some sort of compulsive jurisdiction
to oblige their own citizens to make
payment. In those disorderly times, it might
have been extremely inconvenient to have left
them to seek this sort of justice from any
other tribunal. But it must seem extraordinary,
that the sovereigns of all the different
countries of Europe should have exchanged
in this manner for a rent certain, never more
to be augmented, that branch of their revenue,
which was, perhaps, of all others, the most
likely to be improved by the natural course of
things, without either expense or attention of
their own; and that they should, besides, have
in this manner voluntarily erected a sort of
independent republics in the heart of their
own dominions.
In order to understand this, it must be remembered,
that, in those days, the sovereign
of perhaps no country in Europe was able to
protect, through the whole extent of his dominions,
the weaker part of his subjects from
the oppression of the great lords. Those whom
the law could not protect, and who were not
strong enough to defend themselves, were obliged
either to have recourse to the protection
of some great lord, and in order to obtain it,
to become either his slaves or vassals; or to
enter into a league of mutual defence for the
common protection of one another. The inhabitants
of cities and burghs, considered as
single individuals, had no power to defend
themselves; but by entering into a league of
mutual defence with their neighbours, they
were capable of making no contemptible resistance.
The lords despised the burghers,
whom they considered not only as a different
order, but as a parcel of emancipated slaves,