_The Kings Peace._--When Alfred took over London it must have been in the main a decayed Roman city. In giving the great burh into the hands of the Mercian Ealdorman, Ethered, he was but restoring its capital to Mercia, but he must also, and mainly, have had in view the need for providing means of defence to the frontier fortress of the March country. Even so, alongside of a supreme military rule a more domestic organisation of a customary nature must have been carried on or reintroduced. It is probable that this, following the shire model, was constituted with hundreds or wards; the people met in wardmote and folkmote, and the king was represented by a Sheriff or Portreeve. London, however, was and remained pre-eminently a royal burh, and must have shared in all the characteristics of the burhs, drawing on certain shires for upholding its defences, having a Witan, coining money, having special privileges as to residence, gilds, and markets, and being subject to the King's Peace. As to the contributions for defence, Dr. Maitland, as we have seen on p. 105, says, "There were shires or districts which from of old owed work of this kind to Londonbury."[204] Regarding the King's Peace, it was provided by the laws that every crime committed, in a street which ran right through the city and likewise without the walls for a distance of over a league, was a crime against the king. In London the man who was guilty had to pay the king's burh-bryce of five pounds. The burh was to be sacred from private quarrels--"the King's house-peace prevails in the streets."[205] Some such fact as this is probably the origin of that almost mythical phrase applied to the city by Lydgate and earlier writers--"the king's chamber of London." It is to this aspect as the great model burh that the Saxon laws of London printed by Thorpe refer. There must have been a Burh Witan meeting periodically. A Crediton charter of 1018 was made known to the Witans of Exeter, Barnstaple, Lidford, and Totness, _i.e._ the Devonshire burhs. The Witan was thus a court of record or witness. Probably the Hustings court is a form of the same assembly. * * * * * _Portreeves._--Fabyan says that at the coming of William the Conqueror and before, the rulers of the city were named Portgreves. "These of old time, with the laws and customs then used within the city, were registered in a book called Domysday in Saxon tongue then used, but of later days when the said laws and customs altered and changed and for consideration that the said book was of small hand and sore defaced and hard to be read or understood, it was the less set by, so that it was embezzled or lost, so that the remembrance of such rulers as were before the days of Richard the First (_i.e._ the institution of the mayoralty) were lost and forgotten."