Our inquiry into boroughs commences with a different situation from that held by the church or the feudal system. From the fifth to the twelfth century, these latter, although they afterwards underwent new developments, exhibited themselves as nearly complete, and in a definitive state; their birth, growth, and maturity, all occurred within that interval. It was very different with boroughs. It was not until the end of the epoch upon which our attention is engaged, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that they took any place in history; not meaning thereby that their previous history calls for no examination, or that the traces of their existence long before that period are not discoverable, but that it was only in the eleventh century that they made a distinct appearance on the great stage of the world, and came out as an important element of modern civilisation. Thus, in surveying the feudal system and the church from the fifth to the twelfth century, we have found effects developed and produced from causes, or, in other words, whenever, by induction or conjecture, we have deduced results from certain principles, we have been able to verify them by reference to facts. This is a facility which we do not possess with the boroughs. At the present moment, I shall only speak of causes and origins; and what I may say upon the effects of their existence, and upon their influence on the progress of European civilisation, will be in some sort by way of prediction, as the adducement of contemporary and known facts will be impossible. It is not until a later date, in the period stretching from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, that we shall perceive corporations take their development, as an institution bear fruit, and history prove our predictions. I mark this difference of situation the more emphatically, in order to obviate objections against the incompleteness and prematureness of the picture I am about to give. {123}