but mainly to the select body and to the justices of the peace. But even after the Gild Merchant and the borough had thus become identical, the old dual idea did not completely disappear, the Gild being often regarded as a particular phase or function of the town, namely, the municipality in its character of a trade monopoly. Hence the modern survivals of the Gild Merchant help to elucidate its actual functions in ancient times. In a few boroughs the select governing body of the town—the narrow civic corporation, in distinction from the burgesses or freemen at large—succeeded to the name and traditions of the Gild Merchant. In some of these cases the signification of the latter gradually dwindled down to a periodical civic feast of the privileged few. … In the eighteenth century we meet the word much less frequently than in the seventeenth; and toward the beginning of the present century it became very rare. The Municipal Corporations Commission, in 1835, found it still used in only a few boroughs. The remnants of the Gild Merchant and of the craft fraternities were rapidly vanishing before the new ideas of a more liberal age,—the age of laissez faire. The onerous, self-destructive restrictions of gilds were now being superseded by the stimulating measures of Chambers of Commerce. More than six centuries elapsed before the enactment of Magna Carta that all merchants 'may go through England, by land and water, to buy and sell, free from all unjust imposts,' became a realised fact throughout the realm. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 provided that 'every person in any borough may keep any shop for the sale of all lawful wares and merchandizes by wholesale or retail, and use every lawful trade, occupation, mystery, and handicraft, for hire, gain, sale, or otherwise, within any borough.' In a single town of England the Gild Merchant still subsists, but only as the shadow of its former self—a spectre from the distant past. At Preston the Gild Merchant has been 'celebrated' regularly once every twenty years for more than three centuries, on which occasions the burgesses renew their freedom and indulge in all the festivities of a civic carnival. The last Gild Merchant was held in 1882. There was then much feasting and dancing, there were gay processions of townsmen, and much talk of the glories of the past. And yet how few even of the scholars and noblemen there assembled from various parts of Great Britain knew what an important role the Gild Merchant had played in the annals of English municipal history, what strange vicissitudes it had undergone, what a remarkable transformation the centuries had wrought in it." _C. Gross, The Gild Merchant, chapters 1 and 9 (volume 1)._