Fabian and St. Sebastian in the castle, abused him as a thief, “because he was a Galloway man”--a species of reasoning still sometimes current in cases of unpopular nationality. On the following Thursday, when Adam was standing in the doorway of a house, a woman called out to him that Richard was coming up the street, warning him to be on his guard. “My knife is as sharp as his,” replied the miller; attacking Richard at once, who drew his sword and struck Adam with the flat side of the weapon. The miller closed his arm upon the sword, and in disengaging it sharply, Richard inflicted a mortal wound upon his assailant, exclaiming, on seeing the catastrophe, “you caused your own death.” All the Burghers testified on oath that Richard was a man of good repute, but that Adam was a rogue; and the “Barons” concurring, an unanimous verdict of acquittal was pronounced. Barons and Burghers both seem to have been concerned in this trial, which affords a very fair specimen of the lawless manners of the age, and of the advantages of the “jugement del pais” over the earlier system expressed in the legal axiom “buy the spear or bear it”--pay the _were_ or stand the feud.[331] Such were the leading regulations of David’s community of Burghs. They correspond closely with the ancient customs of Newcastle, to which indeed allusion is made in the Burghal Code, the English community having been consulted apparently upon the law of inheritance;[332] and there can be little doubt that the Anglo-Norman Burgh, itself in most respects a confirmation of the Anglo-Saxon, except where the custom of Borough-English existed, was the model for the burghs introduced by David throughout the land. In imitation of their sovereign, the greater magnates, lay and ecclesiastical, occasionally enfranchised their towns, or founded burghs, filling them with a class of freemen on a footing with the royal burghers, though the latter were reckoned higher in the social scale, and were privileged to decline the challenge of a member of a lesser burgh; just as the _Scepenbar_ man, who could count his “four ancestors and his _hant-gemahl_,” was entitled to refuse the challenge of his equal in position who was not his equal in blood.[333] The royal burghs generally retained their ascendancy, though not invariably; for in spite of the jealous rivalry of Dunbarton and Rutherglen, upon the margin of her own fair river, the great episcopal city of Glasgow has long been acknowledged the undisputed mistress of the western waters. The original burghers, as a class, were, with few exceptions, of foreign origin, emigrants from southern Britain, and not unfrequently Flemings; as in Berwick, where the Flemings long dwelt apart as a separate guild.[334] It was long before the native element entered largely amongst the privileged civic population, clinging to Scottish customs and to the rural districts, especially in the distant North, where the towns must have