Among the most cherished privileges claimed by the chartered boroughs were the rights to exact tolls and to place oppressive restrictions upon all rival traders not members of their guilds, foreigners and denizens alike. The confirmation of these privileges in this chapter has been held to contradict chapter 41, which grants protection and immunities to foreign merchants.[496] The inconsistency, however, should not be pushed too far, since the later chapter aimed at the abolition of “evil customs” inflicted by the king, not of those inflicted by the boroughs. At the same time, all favour shown to aliens would be bitterly resented by their rivals, the English traders. If the charter had been put in force in its integrity, the more specific privileges in favour of foreign merchants would have prevailed in opposition to the vague confirmation of borough “liberties” wherever the two came into collision.[497] ----- Footnote 496: Cf. Pollock and Maitland, I. 447-8. Footnote 497: Cf. _infra_, c. 41. ----- CHAPTER FOURTEEN. Et ad habendum commune consilium regni, de auxilio assidendo aliter quam in tribus casibus predictis, vel de scutagio assidendo, summoneri faciemus archiepiscopos, episcopos, abbates, comites, et majores barones, sigillatim per litteras nostras; et preterea faciemus summoneri in generali, per vicecomites et ballivos nostros, omnes illos qui de nobis tenent in capite; ad certum diem, scilicet ad terminum quadraginta dierum ad minus, et ad certum locum; et in omnibus litteris illius summonicionis causam summonicionis exprimemus; et sic facta summonicione negocium ad diem assignatum procedat secundum consilium illorum qui presentes fuerint, quamvis non omnes summoniti venerint. And for obtaining the common counsel of the kingdom anent the assessing of an aid (except in the three cases aforesaid) or of a scutage, we will cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, by our letters under seal; and we will moreover cause to be summoned generally, through our sheriffs and bailiffs, all others who hold of us in chief, for a fixed date, namely, after the expiry of at least forty days, and at a fixed place; and in all letters of such summons we will specify the reason of the summons. And when the summons has thus been made, the business shall proceed on the day appointed, according to the counsel of such as are present, although not all who were summoned have come. This chapter, which has no equivalent among the Articles of the Barons, appears here incidentally: it would never have found a place in Magna Carta but for the need of suitable machinery to give effect to the provision of chapter 12.[498] ----- Footnote 498: On the whole subject of the _commune concilium_, cf. _supra_ 151-4 and also 173-4. -----