ally Latin plan) he must have been thinking of a
Britain very different from that which his envoys actually found. When
the work was accomplished the little market town of Canterbury was the
seat of the Primate; the old traditions of York secured for it a
second archbishop, great London could not be passed over, but small
villages in some places, insignificant boroughs in others, were the
sites of cathedrals. Selsey, a rural manor or fishing hamlet, was the
episcopal centre of St. Wilfrid and his successors in their government
of Sussex; Dorchester, as we have seen, was the episcopal town, or
rather village, for something like half England. In the names of its
officers also and in the methods of their government the Anglo-Saxon
town was agricultural.

With the advent of the Normans, as one might expect, municipal life to
some extent re-arose. But it still maintained its distinctively
English character throughout the Middle Ages. Contrast London or
Oxford, for instance, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
with contemporary Paris. In London and Oxford the wall is built once
for all, and when it is completed the town may grow into suburbs as
much as it likes, no new wall is built. In Paris, throughout its
history, as the town grows, the first concern of its Government is to
mark out new limits which shall sharply define it from the surrounding
country. Philip Augustus does it, a century and a half later Etienne
Marcel did it; through the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth,
the custom is continued: through the nineteenth also, and to-day new
and strict limits are about to be imposed on the expanded city.

Again the metropolitan idea, which is consonant to, and the climax of,
a municipal system, is absent from the story of English towns.

Until a good hundred years after the Conquest you cannot say where the
true capital of England is, and when you find it at last in London,
the King's Court is in a suburb outside the walls and the Parliament
of a century later yet meets at Westminster and not in the City.

The English judges are not found fixed in local municipal centres,
they are itinerant. The later organisation of the Peace does not
depend upon the county towns; it is an organisation of rural squires;
and, most significant of all, no definite distinction can ever be
drawn between the English village and the English town neither in
spirit nor in legal definition. You have a town like Maidenhead, which