t communication there existed a great diversity of burghal laws,
entailing considerable inconvenience and hardship, especially in the
case of those engaged in trade. Since the adoption or growth of customs
depended on the interests or sentiments of particular communities,
diversity was, to some extent, inevitable, but the tendency to local
independence--an independence tenaciously maintained and jealously
guarded--was tempered by counter-tendencies. Thus it was not always to
the interest of a town or city to stand in complete isolation from
centres of a similar type, or possibly of a superior organization; and,
in such instances, a smaller, weaker, less perfectly developed community
might seek to improve its status or fortune by modelling its
arrangements on those of a more advanced and more powerful neighbour,
and in addition to and as a corollary of this, enter into a formal or
informal alliance with it, in which the latter would hold the position
of protector or patron.

In the Middle Ages there subsisted between the towns and the feudal
aristocracy an antagonism sometimes silent and slumbering, sometimes
wakened into fierce consciousness and expressing itself not only in
hardy words, but in sanguinary deeds. On the Continent the towns were
the hotbeds of revolution, and the commune, with its mayor as
figure-head, signalized the triumph of the insurrectionary temper. This
state of things was more marked on the Continent than in England, where
the Barons led the assault on tyranny, and where, for his own purposes,
the monarch fostered the prosperity of towns of his own planting. But
Mr. J. H. Round, in his singularly able article on "The Origin of the
Mayoralty of London," contributed to the "Archaeological Journal," shows
conclusively that this institution, now the aegis of all that is staid,
stable, and respectable, was the offspring of the spirit of revolt which
spread like a contagion from Italy to France, Germany, and the Low
Countries, and thence to the Thames.

Dr. Gross's valuable contribution to the "Antiquary" (1885), treating of
the affiliation of towns, is of a general character, and illustrated
largely by continental examples; anyone, however, who wishes to grasp
the full significance of mediaeval relationships as between town and
town, will be well advised in consulting that succinct account. Here we
must confine ourselves to English experience, in which the same traits
appear, only more faintly. Before