javelins beyond a mark, and duels with shields. As for the maidens, they have their exercise of dancing and tripping till moonlight. The hearts of our Puritan forefathers would have been rejoiced to perceive that there is here no mention of "mixed dancing." In winter-time, on holidays, before dinner there is hunting and baiting of boars, bulls, and bears, or sliding and skating on the ice over the marsh now known as Moorfields. Our monk seems to be rather an enthusiast for the latter sport, and describes it minutely. Fetching a run, and setting their feet at a distance, and placing their bodies sideways, they slide a great way. Some who are better practised to the ice bind bones to their shoes, and hold stakes in their hands headed with sharp iron, which sometimes they strike against the ice, and fly along like a bird in the air or a dart from a military engine. And our narrator proceeds to describe with unfeigned glee the concussion of two skaters, and the consequent downfall and damage to skin and limb. Most of the citizens, he tells us, delight in hawking and hunting in the woods with dogs. They have authority to hunt in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, all the Chilterns, and in Kent as far as GrayWater.

The only plagues of London, he declares, are the immoderate drinking of fools, and the frequent fires. Taking the former statement into account, it is singular at first sight that we do not find the subject of drunkenness once alluded to in all the civic regulations and penal legislation of the succeeding century. Perhaps Mr. Riley's conjecture is the true one, that "it was probably not deemed an offence by the authorities if unattended by violence. The best ale too, which was no better than sweet-wort, was probably so thin that it might be drunk in pitchers pottle deep,' without disturbing the equilibrium of the drinker. Fermented liquors were drunk too in these days as new as possible; and there can be little doubt that the ale was used the moment it was made. This, combined with its possible thinness and its lusciousness, would additionally tend to prevent it from producing inebriety." On the other hand, the smallest ale-measure noticed in the City regulations is a quart; and there was an extensive consumption of wine, which at one period was little more than twice as dear as ale, but, it must be also remembered, was no better probably, if as good, as vin ordinaire.

Be that as it may, Fitz-Stephen allows of but two drawbacks in the case of London to the picture of a perfect city. It is true that the later entries in the Guildhall Record-books reveal circumstances which somewhat modify any feeling of regret on our part that we did not live in those merry days

of old London; but it is evident enough, from the tone of Fitz-Stephen's account, that what would to us, with our modern tastes and notions, have proved unbearably oppressive restrictions on personal liberty and social happiness, weighed lightly enough on the minds of the citizens of the days of the Plantagenets. In this point of view, then, the narrative from which we have just drawn so largely may prove a useful corrective to any hasty conclusions which we might be otherwise inclined to draw from the City records as to the happy or wretched condition of the medieval Londoners.

Of the corporate constitution of the City Fitz-Stephen tells us little. He merely claims for London a superior antiquity to Rome, based on the legend of the wandering Trojan Brutus; and to this supposed kindred origin with the people of Enæas he attributes the existence of similar laws and institutions in the two cities. London, like Rome, he says, is divided into districts, or, as we should call them, "wards." In place of Consuls it has yearly "Vice-Comites;" it has a senatorial rank and inferior magistrates. It has common sewers and aqueducts in the streets. It has its respective courts for deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial causes." It has also the right of holding "Comitia" on fixed days. This scanty intelligence leaves us to gather from other sources what was the municipal government of London in the days of which we are speaking. In the Saxon times the civil head of the City appears to have been styled "Portgerefa," "Portreve," i. e. keeper or administrator of the port. Edward the Confessor calls him "my Portgrave," and couples with him "all the burgesses of London." He was probably then the king's officer simply. Sometimes there seem to have been two officers bearing the name. William the Conqueror in his charter addresses the "Portgerefa and all the Burghers." In the time of Henry I. and Stephen, we find one officer called "Portgrave," and the other "Justiciarius" or "Provost." Henry granted to the citizens of London the sheriffwick thereof, and also of Middlesex, for the yearly farm of 3007. We now find the title "Vice-Comites" applied to the chief civic officers, who are sometimes two, sometimes three or more in number. In the first year of Richard the citizens were confirmed in the right of electing annually two "Bailiffs," who were the "Sheriffs;" and soon, if not immediately after, the office of "Mayor" was constituted; that officer being probably merely one of the "Vice-Comites" separated for peculiar and superior functions. He held originally also the offices of "Chamberlain" and "Coroner." John and the succeeding kings granted or confirmed to the citizens, by various charters, the right of

electing their own mayor and sheriffs. In Fitz-Stephen's account it will be observed that a "senatorial" dignity is spoken of, evidently referring to the "Aldermen" who presided over the wards, which were frequently named after them. In the ordinary copies of Fitz-Stephen a passage occurs in which it is said that the inhabitants of other cities are called "citizens," but those of London "barons." This is omitted in the Guildhall copy, for what reason we are left to conjecture. The compiler of the Liber Albus, however, asserts that the title "Baron" was applied to the "Aldermen." And in the "Iter" held in the 14th year of Edward II. the title is used more than once with reference to the higher classes among the citizens. The first "Mayor" of London was "Henry Fitz-Alwin, draper, Fitz-Leofstane, goldsmith." This Leofstane, the grandfather of Fitz-Alwin, was "Provost" or "Justiciary" in the time of Henry I. Fitz-Alwin himself lived in Candlewick Street, now Cannon Street, "near London Stone" (one of the two great thoroughfares of the City), and served the office of mayor for more than twenty-four years, until his death. From this time the list of mayors and "Vice-Comites," or sheriffs, is continuous, being only broken by occasional arbitrary interventions of the Crown, when "the liberties of the City" were seized, and the power given to an officer of the king, with the title of "Custos." In the disturbances in the reign of Henry III., connected with the fortunes of Simon de Montford, such an interference might only be naturally looked for; since, although we learn from the French Chronicle that the aldermen and wealthier citizens leant to the king, the mayor and the mass of the citizens sided with De Montford, and eventually, owing to the continued exactions of Henry, he became an object of hatred and contempt with all classes alike. But in the reign of Edward I. the royal power was exercised at the expense of the citizens with far less excuse. In the list of chief officers of the City, we find under the year 1285 the following significant entry "Gregory de Rokesley, mayor until Friday the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, on which day the City government (civitas) was taken into the hands of the king." It appears that the king's great officers of State came to the Tower of London, and summoned Sir Gregory Rokesley to appear before them there. He refused to do so in any but his private capacity, appealing to the privileges of the City; and for this spirited conduct he was deprived of his office and thrown into prison, and the liberties of the City were confiscated for eleven years, though the offices under that of "Mayor" still nominally continued. But in general the citizens seem to have held their own on questions of public right against

the Crown and the great nobles, not only sturdily, but with success; and arbitrary interferences from without, such as the above, become fewer and fewer.

Within the walls, however, a system of interference with the natural rights of individuals had grown up, which would seem, in our eyes, wholly incompatible with any real liberty. The general character of these restrictions is thus summed up by Mr. Riley.

"The 'good old times,' whenever else they may have existed, assuredly are not to be looked for in days like these. And yet these were not lawless days; on the contrary, owing in part to the restless spirit of interference which seems to have actuated the law-makers, and partly to the low and disparaging estimate evidently set by them upon the minds and dispositions of their fellow-men, these were times the great evil of which was a superfluity of laws, both national and local, worse than needless; laws which, while unfortunately they created or protected comparatively few valuable rights, gave birth to many and grievous wrongs.

"That the favoured and so-called free citizen of London even, despite the extensive privileges in reference to trade which he enjoyed, was in possession of more than the faintest shadow of liberty, can hardly be alleged, if we only call to mind the substance of the pages just submitted to the reader's notice, filled as they are with enactments and ordinances, arbitrary, illiberal, and oppressive: laws, for example, which compelled each citizen, whether he would or no, to be bail or surety for a neighbour's good behaviour, over whom, perhaps, it was impossible for him to exercise the slightest control; laws which forbade him to make his market for the day until the purveyors for the king and the 'great lords of the land' had stripped the stalls of all that was choicest and best; laws which forbade him to pass the City-walls, for the purpose even of meeting his own purchased goods; laws which bound him to deal with certain persons or communities only, or within the precincts only of certain localities; laws which dictated, under severe penalties, what sums, and no more, he was to pay to his servants and artisans ; laws which drove his dog out of the streets, while they permitted 'genteel dogs' to roam at large: nay, even more than this, laws which subjected him to domiciliary visits from the City officials on various pleas and pretexts; which compelled him to carry on a trade under heavy penalties, irrespective of the question whether or not it was at his loss; and which occasionally went so far as to lay down rules at what hours he was to walk in the streets, and, incidentally, what he was to eat and what to drink. Viewed individually laws and

ordinances such as these may seem, perhaps, of but trifling moment; but 'trifles make life,' the poet says, and to have lived fettered by numbers of restrictions like these must have rendered life irksome in the extreme to a sensitive man, and a burden hard to be borne.

"Every dark picture, however, has its reverse; and in the legislation even of these gloomy days there are one or two meritorious features to be traced. The labourer, no doubt, so far as disposing of his labour at his own time and option was concerned, was too often treated little better than a slave; but on the other hand, the price of bread taken into consideration, the wages of his labour appear at times at least-to have been regulated on a very fair and liberal scale. The determination, too, steadily evinced by the civic authorities, that every trader should really sell what he professed to sell, and that the poor, whatever their other grievances, should be protected in their dealings against the artifices of adulteration, deficient measures, and short weight, is another feature that commands our approval. Greatly deserving, too, of commendation is the pride that was evidently felt by the Londoners of these times in the purity of the waters of their much-loved Thames, and the carefulness with which the civic authorities, in conjunction with the Court, took every possible precaution to preserve its banks from encroachment and its stream from pollution. The fondness, too, of the citizens of London in former times for conduits and public fountains, though based, perhaps, upon absolute necessity to some extent, is a feature that we miss in their representatives at the present day. A few other points also for commendation, even in this enlightened century, may possibly be found in their voluminous code of short-sighted and mistaken legislation; but if such there be, few they assuredly are, and very far between."

Even

The judgment of the learned Editor of the Guildhall Records on the civic life of old London is, it will be seen, not a very favourable one, and perhaps, in an absolute point of view, is not an unjust estimate. Relatively, however, to the actual intellectual and moral condition of the people in those days, and their own actual ideas of comfort and discomfort, the picture appears to us one too darkly coloured. supposing that a great change had taken place since the days in and of which Fitz-Stephen wrote, and that the spirit of corporate interference with individual rights was much more rife in the days of the Edwards, to which the documents from which these particulars are gathered chiefly belong, yet we can well conceive that the term "gloomy" was little applicable to the life of a London citizen even then. The sense of discom