REVIEW. 11 



householders, and these altogether constituted the commonalty 

 of the place. 



But when the right of kings came to be decided by the sword, 

 between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, the reigning 

 king, whether de facto or de jure, soon found, that his title was 

 much strengthened against his rival by the possession of the good 

 will, and physical strength of the inhabitants of the different 

 boroughs; the nobles were exhausted, and their dependents and 

 retainers reduced by constant struggles ; the meaner sort, therefore, 

 of freemen, were elevated in proportion as the old military strength 

 of the monarchy was depressed, and the king deigned to court 

 the personal, as well on the pecuniary aid and assistance of the 

 citizens and burgesses : and thus we find, by the work before us, 

 that the first creation of a municipal corporation by the crown, 

 was in the 18th of Henry the 6th, (1439) when the King granted 

 his charter to Kingston-upon-Hull, separating from the juris- 

 diction of the sheriff", and constituting the whole borough, that is 

 all the responsible inhabitants, a corporate county of itself. 



The ordinary progress of society was slowly raising the commons 

 into importance, but the civil wars of the fifteenth century 

 effected this with great rapidity, the example of the Lancastrians 

 in encouraging the municipal corporations was followed by the 

 Yorkists, and hence these bodies, by repeated charters of incor- 

 poration, had become so important, that the Tudor family 

 found it prudent to court them by the like extension of similar 

 favors. 



In many of the boroughs, the leet jurors and officers elected 

 half yearly by the inhabitants, had been continued as a matter 

 of course for several succeeding years, till at length they assumed 

 a permanent character, filled up vacancies in their numbers 

 themselves and exercised all the powers of office not as tempo- 

 rary delegates but by an assumed indefeasible right, and thus 

 constituted themselves a body selected from the burgesses at 

 large. 



The Tudor family and the Stuarts seem to have found it more 

 subservient to their view of strengthening the power of the Crown 

 to encourage rather than repress these local usurpations, and 

 hence we find, by the work before us, that almost countless 

 charters were granted by these princes, some, by way of apology, 

 falsely asserting, that the select bodies were prescriptive or 

 immemorial, and others without even this pretence encorporating 

 select bodies of individuals in the place and constituting them to 



