At this point it is necessary to seek more closely into the reasons of the weakness which made London an almost unresisting prey to the exactions of this insatiate and insatiable King. The City, which could lend Simon de Montfort a fully equipped army of 15,000 men, might surely at any moment close its gates, keep the mouth of the Thames clear, and defy the King. But for many years it offered no resistance at all. The reason will immediately appear. A change so slow and gradual that it only at this juncture became important was passing over the City of London and its institutions, or to put it more accurately, the institutions themselves remained unchanged, yet assumed new meanings. It was, as has been already advanced, the happiness of London that, except for a very brief episode, its over-lord was the King and none other. The reeve of the borough was the bailiff or steward of this lord. In the name of the lord he was the magistrate; he collected rents, tolls and dues; he called the burgesses to their mote; he took care that the rights of the lord were properly executed. These duties observed, the burgesses were left at liberty to govern themselves. Naturally, when the town became prosperous it began to buy out the privileges of the over-lord. Thus, the Charters of the City of London are the recognition by king after king, that a certain portion of the rights of the over-lord have been bought out or conceded. And the reign of such a king as Henry the Third is a continual disregard of these concessions or purchases, by the assertion over and over again of the rights and powers of the over-lord, never, however, going so far as to give the City to any other over-lord. Thus Henry, as we shall see, in spite of the Charters, held courts in the City by his own justiciar, and called the citizens to plead their own cases at Westminster. These Charters, then, granted their liberties to the citizens. But who were the citizens? “Land was from the first the test of freedom, and the possession of land was what constituted the townsman.... In England the landless man who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life: for purposes of government or property the town was simply an association of the landed proprietors within its bounds.” (Green’s _History of the English People_.)