Town, Toivnsliip cuid TifJting. 143 



for analogies with them, not so much in the institutions of Germany, from 

 which those of England were in a sense derived, as in those of New Eng- 

 land, which are simply a continuation of those of England. 



That the towns in England formed a comj^lete territorial system as sub- 

 divisions of the hundreds, needs no argument, as it is amply attested by 

 mediasval writers and documents. It is a familiar fact that they were 

 regularly represented in the courts of the hundred and the shire. I will 

 also cite the authority of Chief Justice Fortescue, in his De Laudibus 

 Legum Angliae, who says that the Shires or Counties were divided into Hun- 

 dreds, and the Hundreds into Towns or Vills (ch. xxiv). Hutidreda vero divi- 

 duntur per villas. This language indicates clearly that ' ' towns " were in the 

 middle of the fifteenth century territorial divisions of the hundreds; that is, 

 that the entire area of the hundred, and therefore of the county, was di- 

 vided up into the areas of the several towns composing the hundred. And 

 this is still further shown by his going on to say that under the ai^pellation 

 of towns, " the cities and boroughs are included. For the boundaries of 

 these vills are not ascertained by walls, buildings or streets, but by a compass 

 of fields, large districts of land, some hamlets, and divers other limits, as 

 rivers, water-courses, woodlands and wastes of commons." It is evidently 

 the intention of the writer in these words to contrast the English towns 

 with some other towns, the bounds of which are determined not by natural 

 objects, but by artificial ones; and this object of comparison can be only the 

 walled towns and cities of the continent, especially of France, the country 

 with which Fortescue constantly compares England. Attention is here 

 drawn to the important fact that, whereas upon the continent the munic- 

 ipal system was si^oradic, the open country having no institutions of local 

 self-government proper, the English municipal system was continuous, em- 

 bracing the entire territory of the country. The borough was, as Bishop 

 Subbs says (vol. i, p. 93), "simply a more strictly organized form of the 

 township;" and the city a bishop's seat, with borough organization. And 

 both borough and city made, as Chief Justice Fortescue says, a part of the 

 town system. 



This town system was brought over to this country by our ancestors, and 

 put in operation in aU the northern colonies. The town system of New 

 England, as a system of territorial areas, is the town system of medieeval 

 England; and when the people of New England had outgrown the town 

 system in its primitive form, they developed a new form of organization 

 on precisely the same lines as the Enghsh. The New England "city" 

 (and so the Pennsylvania " borough "), is simply a specially oi-ganized town, 

 and forms a part of the to^^^l system, just as is the case with the boroughs 

 and cities of Cliief Justice Fortescue's difinition. A city is territorially a 

 town. And here, as in the case of so many so-called Americanisms, we 

 have preserved the old English usage, wliich has disappeared in England 

 itself. Tlie town, in its ecclesiastical organization, was a "parish," and in 

 the sixteenth century the parish organization began to supersede the co- 



