On the other hand, the earlier part of this paper does, I hope, demonstrate that the accepted view of the order of events in the year 1191 must be altogether abandoned. This, of course, involves the correction of no fewer than four works in the Master of the Rolls’ series, and of every modern history of England which deals with the period in any detail. Yet the chief interest of the enquiry will be found in its bearing on historical probability and in its demonstration of the value of minute critical study.[462] XI The Commune of London When in 1893, the seventh centenary of the year in which a Mayor of London first appears, I read before the Royal Archæological Institute a paper on “The origin of the Mayoralty of London,”[463] I expressed the hope that some document might yet be discovered which would throw further light upon the Mayor and on his connection with the “Commune” of 1191. Such a document I have since found. Its confirmation of the fact that a “Commune” was actually established in London is as welcome as it is important; but the essential fact which it enables us to determine is that this foreign organization was transplanted bodily to London. It has hitherto been supposed that the only change involved by the erection of the “Commune” was the appearance of its typical officer, the “Mayor,” as an addition to the pre-existent sheriffs and the aldermen of the city wards. It can, however, now be shown that the aldermen of the wards had no part in the “communal” organization, which was modelled exclusively on foreign lines, and was wholly unconnected with the old and English system. The historian’s time can be profitably spent on minute and thorough examination of London institutions in the 12th century. For the origin and development in England of municipal liberties is still, in spite of their paramount interest, involved in much obscurity. As Dr. Stubbs has truly observed: London claims the first place in any such investigation, as the greatest municipality, as the model on which by their charters of liberties the other large towns of the country were allowed or charged to adjust their usages, and as the most active, the most political, and the most ambitious. London has also a pre-eminence in municipal history, owing to the strength of the conflicting elements which so much affected her constitutional progress.[464] And yet, as he reminded his hearers in one of his Oxford lectures, “Mediæval London still waits for its constitutional historian.”