The general powers for the whole town possessed by the Mayor and his council were quite distinct from the local powers of each Alderman in his district. For my part, I cannot resist the impression that, while the sheriff, bailiff, or reeve represented the power of the Crown, and the Alderman the old local officer, the council of twenty-four, so closely associated with the Mayor, and not the representatives of districts, were a later introduction, of different character, and representing the commercial as against the territorial element. Whether the Aldermen joined the council in later days or not, they were never, I believe, originally or essentially, a part of that body. The chief objection, probably, to connecting the “commune” of London with the “Établissements de Rouen” will be found in the fact that the latter refer to a system based on a body of a hundred _pares_, of which body there does not seem to be any trace in England. At Winchester the _pares_ were “the twenty-four.” It is obvious that, in this respect, there is a marked discrepancy; but if the electoral body was different, the executive, at any rate, was the same. And if, as must be admitted, there was a foreign element introduced, it would be naturally from Normandy that it came.[507] Writing in 1893, before I had discovered the documents on which I have dwelt above, I insisted on the _foreign_ origin of the London “commune,” and pointed out that the close association between London and Rouen at the time suggested that the office of Mayor was derived by the former from the latter.[508] It may be permissible to repeat this argument from presumption, although its form was adapted to a wider circle than that of scholars. The _beffroi_ of France, to which the _jurat_ looked as the symbol and pledge of independence, is found here also in the bell-tower of St. Paul’s, which is styled in documents either by that name (_berefridum_), or by that of _campanile_, which brings before us at once the storm-tost commonwealths of Italy. It was indeed from Italy that the fire of freedom spread. With the rise of mediæval commerce it was carried from the Alps to the Rhine, and quickly burst into flame among the traders and craftsmen of Flanders. Passing into Picardy, it crossed the Channel, according to a theory I have myself advanced, to reappear in the liberties of the Cinque Ports, with their French name, their French “serements” and their French _jurats_.[509] Foreign merchants had brought it with them to the port of Exeter also, almost as early as the Conquest, and we cannot doubt that London as well was already infected with the movement, and eager to find in the foreign “commune” the means of attaining that administrative autonomy and political independence which that term virtually expressed.