Gloss, in verb.

Baro.] If it be unreasonable to think that the vassals of a barony, though their tenure was military, and noble, and honorable, were ever summoned to give their opinion in national councils, much less can it be supposed that the tradesmen or inhabitants of boroughs, whose condition was so much inferior, would be admitted to that privilege.

It appears from Domesday, that the greatest boroughs were, at the time of the conquest, scarcely more than country villages; and that the inhabitants lived in entire dependence on the king or great lords, and were of a station little better than servile.[*] They were not then so much as incorporated; they formed no community; were not regarded as a body politic; and being really nothing but a number of low, dependent tradesmen, living, without any particular civil tie, in neighborhood together, they were incapable of being represented in the states of the kingdom.

Even in France, a country which made more early advances in arts and civility than England, the first corporation is sixty years posterior to the conquest under the duke of Normandy; and the erecting of these communities was an invention of Lewis the Gross, in order to free the people from slavery under the lords, and to give them protection by means of certain privileges and a separate jurisdiction.[**] An ancient French writer calls them a new and wicked device, to procure liberty to slaves, and encourage them in shaking off the dominion of their masters.[***] The famous charter, as it is called, of the Conqueror to the city of London, though granted at a time when he assumed the appearance of gentleness and lenity, is nothing but a letter of protection, and a declaration that the citizens should not be treated as slaves.[****] By the English feudal law, the superior lord was prohibited from marrying his female ward to a burgess or a villain;[*****] so near were these two ranks esteemed to each other, and so much inferior to the nobility and gentry.

Besides possessing the advantages of birth, riches, civil powers and privileges, the nobles and gentlemen alone were armed a circumstance which gave them a mighty superiority, in an age when nothing but the military profession was honorable, and when the loose execution of laws gave so much encouragement to open violence, and rendered it so decisive in all disputes and controversies.[*****] [* "Liber homo" anciently signified a gentleman: for scarce any one beside was entirely free.Spel.Gloss, in verbo.] [** Du Gauge's Gloss, in verb.