When, in the crisis of October, 1191, the administration found itself paralysed by the conflict between John, as the king’s brother, and Longchamp, as the king’s representative, London, finding that she held the scales, promptly named the “Commune” as the price of her support. The chroniclers of the day enable us to picture to ourselves the scene, as the excited citizens who had poured forth overnight, with lanterns and torches, to welcome John to the capital, streamed together on the morning of the eventful 8th October, at the well-known sound of the great bell, swinging out from its campanile in St. Paul’s churchyard. There they heard John take the oath to the “Commune,” like a French king or lord; and then London for the first time had a municipality of her own. This much at least we may deem certain; but what the chroniclers tell us has proved to be only enough to whet the appetite for more. Of the character of the “Commune” so granted, of its ultimate fate, and of the part it played in the municipal development of London, nothing has been really known. The only fact of importance ascertained from other sources has been the appearance of a Mayor of London at or about the same time as the grant of a “Commune.” It cannot, indeed, be proved that, as has sometimes been supposed, the two phenomena were synchronistic; for no mention of the Mayor of London, after long research, is known to me earlier than the spring of the year 1193.[472] But there is, of course, the strongest presumption that the grant of a “Commune” involved a Mayor, and already in 1194 we find a citizen accused of boasting that “come what may, the Londoners shall have no king but their Mayor.” It was precisely in the same spirit that the ‘Comuneros’ of Salamanca exclaimed of their leader in 1521: “Juras à Dios no haber mas Rey ni Papa que Valloria.” Before I explain my discoveries on the “Commune” granted to London, it may be desirable to show how great a discrepancy of opinion has hitherto prevailed on this important but admittedly obscure subject. The first historian, so far as I know, to treat the subject in the modern spirit was the present bishop of Oxford; and it is a striking testimony to his almost infallible judgment that what he wrote on the subject a quarter of a century ago is the explanation that, to this day, has held the field. In his ‘Select Charters’ (1870), he expressed the view that