Note 328 — Chapter IX · The State.

Leg. Burg, 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 15, 17, 98, 101, 106, 107, 110, 112. Such seems to have been the real meaning of this provision—it eliminated the servile element from amongst the burgherhood. A native-man might run away from his district, but how could he take with him the property to purchase a burgage-tenement? Stock was his property, and it is difficult to conceive how he could carry the stock with him, or sell it, unknown to his lord, with all the machinery of witnesses and warrenter required for sales and purchases. But it is easy to imagine how the settlement of native-men in the towns may have been encouraged by their lords as a source of private profit. The whole trading class was once probably on such a footing, and the greater the wealth acquired by the trader, the more would he have paid for permission to remain away from his district—for he was not necessarily a slave in the modern acceptation of the word, but “inborn” to a certain district, from which he could not separate himself without his lord’s permission. He who settled in a town, and prospered in his unfree condition, if he aspired to become a free burgher, must, in all ordinary cases, have bought his freedom from his lord—as in the case of Renald prepositus of Berwick in 1247—and after enjoying his tenement for a year and a day no further claim could be raised against him. Vide Scotland in the Middle Ages, p. 142. It was admission to the Guild in a Free burgh that conferred the same privileges in England. Vide Glanville, l. 5. c. 5.