Book III: Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.

OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF CITIES AND TOWNS, AFTER THE FALL OF THE ROMAN
EMPIRE.

The inhabitants of cities and towns were, after the fall of the Roman
empire, not more favoured than those of the country. They consisted, indeed,
of a very different order of people from the first inhabitants of the
ancient republics of Greece and Italy. These last were composed chiefly of
the proprietors of lands, among whom the public territory was originally
divided, and who found it convenient to build their houses in the
neighbourhood of one another, and to surround them with a wall, for the sake
of common defence. After the fall of the Roman empire, on the contrary, the
proprietors of land seem generally to have lived in fortified castles on
their own estates, and in the midst of their own tenants and dependants. The
towns were chiefly inhabited by tradesmen and mechanics, who seem, in those
days, to have been of servile, or very nearly of servile condition. The
privileges which we find granted by ancient charters to the inhabitants of
some of the principal towns in Europe, sufficiently show what they were
before those grants. The people to whom it is granted as a privilege, that
they might give away their own daughters in marriage without the consent of
their lord, that upon their death their own children, and not their lord,
should succeed to their goods, and that they might dispose of their own
effects by will, must, before those grants, have been either altogether, or
very nearly, in the same state of villanage with the occupiers of land in
the country.

They seem, indeed, to have been a very poor, mean set of people, who seemed
to travel about with their goods from place to place, and from fair to fair,
like the hawkers and pedlars of the present times. In all the different
countries of Europe then, in the same manner as in several of the Tartar
governments of Asia at present, taxes used to be levied upon the persons and
goods of travellers, when they passed through certain manors, when they went
over certain bridges, when they carried about their goods from place to
place in a fair, when they erected in it a booth or stall to sell them in.
These different taxes were known in England by the names of passage,
pontage, lastage, and stallage. Sometimes the king, sometimes a great lord,
who had, it seems, upon some occasions, authority to do this, would grant to
particular traders, to such particularly as lived in their own demesnes, a
general exemption from such taxes. Such traders, though in other respects of
servile, or very nearly of servile condition, were upon this account called
free traders. They, in return, usually paid to their protector a sort of
annual poll-tax. In those days protection