Occupying as it did, among English towns, a position apart, in wealth as in importance, London had a municipal development of her own, a development of which our best historians can only tell us that it is “obscure.” That obscurity, however, has been sadly increased by the careless study and the misapprehension of her great charters of liberties. Broadly speaking, and disregarding for the moment the statements of our accepted authorities, the great want of London, in her early days, was an efficient, homogeneous government of her own. The City--for the City was then London--found itself in fact, during the Norman period, in the same plight as greater London found itself in our own days. “The ordinary system of the parish and the township,” as an accomplished writer has observed, “the special franchises and jurisdictions of the great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds--all these were loosely bundled together.” For the cause of this state of things we should have to go back to the origins of our history, to show that the genius of the Anglo-Saxon system was ill-adapted, or rather, wholly unsuitable, to urban life; that, while of unconquerable persistence and strength in small, manageable rural communities, it was bound to, and did, break down when applied to large and growing towns, whose life lay not in agriculture, but in trade. In a parish, a “Hundred,” the Englishman was at home; but in a town, and still more in such a town as London, he found himself, for administrative purposes, at his wits’ end. Putting aside the “English Knightengild,”--the position of which as a governing body has been far too rashly assumed,[465] and rests upon no foundation,--the only institutions of which we can be sure are the “folkesmote” and the weekly “husteng” of Henry I.’s charter, and the Shrievalty. The “folkesmote” was the immemorial open-air gathering, corresponding with the “shire-moot” or “hundred-moot” of the country, the “borough-moot” or “portman-moot” of the town. The small “husteng,” as is obvious from its name, was a Danish development, akin to the “lawmen” of the Danish boroughs. If these represented, in London, a kind of legal unity, the shrievalty, on the other hand, involved a kind of financial unity. If, however, as I have urged in my study on the early shrievalty,[466] the administrative development of London had proceeded upon these lines, it would no more have brought about a true municipal unity than the sheriff and the county court could evolve it in the shire; a “Corporation” was wholly alien to administration on county principles.