Note 326 — Chapter IX · The State.

Asser. in Mon. Hist. Brit., vol. 1, p. 474, 492, 493. Also Appendix F. Defence seems everywhere to have been the original bond of union in burghs—defence against the Moors, for instance, in Spain; but where the Goth and the Roman had dwelt, in a certain sense, on an equality long before they amalgamated, an intramural population, with Roman traditions and Roman law, must have existed many a year before it was recognised as a separate “Estate” in return for defending towns against the infidel. In the great German Burghs the Traders were originally a separate class from the Burghers, and the distinction is still traceable in those regulations of the Scottish burghs which denied admittance to the Guild privileges to all who worked at certain trades with their own hands. What was the previous condition of the Traders—what their state before their town became a Burh with privileged defenders, amongst whom they were gradually enrolled? At the best, it must have resembled that of other Fiscalini, and few “full-born” Teutons could have entered willingly into such communities until they went as free and privileged defenders of a Burh, rather than as members of a class which they looked upon as inferior and unprivileged. Their arms and their free rights they carried with them—the one was identical with the other in the olden time—becoming free members of a civic, as they had previously been of a rural association, and following such civic occupations as were not considered derogatory to the dignity of a Freeman. Germanic law long ignored written documents, and the customs of the Burgh were mostly in accordance with that older allodial system which the progress of Roman innovation stamped as Roturier. Men possessed property in land long before it was secured by written documents, and many a burgh had been in the enjoyment of rights and privileges by unwritten law long before it was thought necessary to obtain the sanction of a feudal charter, which must no more be regarded as necessarily creating a new burgh, than as necessarily introducing a foreign settler into Scotland, and eradicating a native proprietor. In both cases the charter was often only confirmatory of pre-existing rights. But it would be erroneous to imagine that the Teutonic Burghs ever existed as independent associations against “the tyranny of the noble class.” Some notice of such a state of society, had it existed, would surely be traceable in the regulations of the Carlovingian era. It was this very class, lay or ecclesiastical, who joined with the sovereign in building Burghs for defence, or introducing free burghers into towns which had hitherto been unfree and comparatively defenceless. The spirit of antagonism arose with the increasing power of the greater burghs. In England the Burgh arose out of the necessities of the Danish invasion; and if a Teutonic element existed previously amongst the resident intramural population, it was scarcely on the footing of Burgh-Thegns. There is no word in the Anglo-Saxon language expressive of a free and trading community associated within walls. The Burh was originally the place of strength, and the inhabitants of Bebba’s Burh were surely not traders. Wic is a very vague word, and Ceaster unquestionably of Roman origin. The latter is the word most often found in the translation of Beda—as in London-Ceaster, and Eofer-wic-ceaster—and as the Wealh remained at the basis of the population in the rural districts, a similar element probably supplied the bulk of the inhabitants of the Ceaster before its conversion into a Burh introduced the Teutonic Burh-Thegn.