If David may be looked upon as the regulator of the “Two Estates,”--the Clergy, and the Baronage and Freeholders connected with the land,--he may be regarded as the founder of the “Third Estate” in Scotland, the actual creator of the free population connected with the towns. An intramural population was an anomaly amongst the people of the North, and in their older codes no provision was made for a free proprietary dwelling in towns, land, and land only, being connected with freedom and hereditary right. It is only in the old Burgundian code that the craftsman connected with the city is mentioned, and he was placed by the regulations of Gundobald upon a servile footing. It scarcely admits of a doubt, indeed, that a civic population, for which no provision was made in any Germanic code, must have lived, whether free or servile, by Roman law, retaining probably their original institutions, after they survived the first fury of the storm, without much interference from their conquerors; nor would the privileges subsequently belonging to free towns have been of much moment, had there not been a time when all such communities were neither free nor privileged. Britain, however, was peculiarly situated, no Roman population remaining to preserve the civilized institutions of imperial despotism, side by side with the rude, but free, traditions of their Anglo-Saxon conquerors--most fortunately for the liberties of England--and as no regulations for a free civic proprietary are traceable in the earlier Anglo-Saxon laws, it may be doubted whether any such proprietary existed. The shattered remnants of the old Roman cities of the island became the property of the owners of the district in which they were situated--petty kings and Ealdormen originally, like Hrofa and Cissa, who gave their names to Hrofa’s _ceaster_ and Cissa’s _ceaster_, _Rochester_ and _Chichester_; and latterly the sovereign of one of the greater states, or the nobleman to whom he entrusted the district--the population remaining probably on a _Lœtic_ or dependant footing, the Teutonic element entering very little into its composition in early times. The British _town_, according to Cæsar, was a portion of the forest separated from the rest by a bank and ditch, the Briton in time of danger securing his cattle and family within the precincts of this “circumvallation;” and as amongst several of the Germanic tribes the same word _Wic_ meant _a grove_, _a temple_, and _a town_, it may be surmised that the original _Wick_ was a portion of the forest similarly encircled with a bank and ditch, and used as a temple for the gods, and a place of security in times of danger, instead of the caves which, in the days of Tacitus, appear to have been used, for places of concealment rather than for defence. London-_wic_ and other British towns may have occasionally supplied the place of such earlier and ruder “places of strength,” the resident population remaining on a dependant footing, and the