nd was the legal proprietor of the soil and tenements; though
I by no means apprehend that the burgesses were destitute of a certain
estate in their possessions. But of a town in fee-farm he only kept the
superiority and the inheritance of the annual rent, which he might
recover by distress.[41] The burgesses held their lands by
burgage-tenure, nearly analogous to, or rather a species of, free
socage.[42] Perhaps before the grant they might correspond to modern
copyholders. It is of some importance to observe that the lord, by such
a grant of the town in fee-farm, whatever we may think of its previous
condition, divested himself of his property, or lucrative dominion over
the soil, in return for the perpetual rent; so that tallages
subsequently set at his own discretion upon the inhabitants, however
common, can hardly be considered as a just exercise of the rights of
proprietorship.

[Sidenote: Charters of incorporation.]

Under such a system of arbitrary taxation, however, it was evident to
the most selfish tyrant that the wealth of his burgesses was his wealth,
and their prosperity his interest; much more were liberal and sagacious
monarchs, like Henry II., inclined to encourage them by privileges. From
the time of William Rufus there was no reign in which charters were not
granted to different towns of exemption from tolls on rivers and at
markets, those lighter manacles of feudal tyranny; or of commercial
franchises; or of immunity from the ordinary jurisdictions; or, lastly,
of internal self-regulation. Thus the original charter of Henry I. to
the city of London[43] concedes to the citizens, in addition to valuable
commercial and fiscal immunities, the right of choosing their own
sheriff and justice, to the exclusion of every foreign jurisdiction.[44]
These grants, however, were not in general so extensive till the reign
of John.[45] Before that time the interior arrangement of towns had
received a new organization. In the Saxon period we find voluntary
associations, sometimes religious, sometimes secular; in some cases for
mutual defence against injury, in others for mutual relief in poverty.
These were called guilds, from the Saxon verb _gildan_, to pay or
contribute, and exhibited the natural, if not the legal, character of
corporations.[46] At the time of the Conquest, as has been mentioned
above, such voluntary incorporations of the burgesses possessed in some
towns either landed property of their own, or rig