the pleasure of their protectors. In the very imperfect accounts which have been published from Domesday-book, of several of the towns of England, mention is frequently made, sometimes of the tax which particular burghers paid, each of them, either to the king, or to some other great lord, for this sort of protection; and sometimes of the general amount only of all these taxes.” {377} “That part of the king’s revenue which arose from such poll-taxes in any particular town, used commonly to be lett in farm, during a term of years for a rent certain, sometimes to the sheriff of the county, and sometimes to other persons. The burghers themselves frequently got credit enough, to be admitted to farm the revenues of this sort which arose from their own town, they becoming jointly and severally answerable for the whole rent.” In return, being allowed to collect it in their own way, and to pay it into the king’s exchequer by the hands of their own bailiff, they would be altogether freed from the insolence of the king’s officers; a circumstance in those days of no small importance. “At first, the farm of the town was lett to the burghers, in the same manner as it had been to other farmers, for a term of years only. In process of time, however, seems to have become the general practice to grant it to them in fee, that is for ever, reserving a rent certain, never afterwards to be augmented. The payment having thus become perpetual, the exemptions, in return for which it was made, naturally became perpetual too. Those exemptions, therefore, ceased to be personal, and could not afterwards be considered as belonging to individuals as individuals, but as burgesses of a particular burgh, which, upon this account, was called a Free-burgh, for the same reason that they had been called Free-burghers or Free-traders. Along with this grant, the important privileges above mentioned, that they might give away their own daughters in marriage, that their children should succeed them, and that they might dispose of their own effects by will, were generally bestowed upon the burghers of the town to whom it was given. The principal attributes of villanage find slavery being thus taken away from them, they now, at least, became really free in our present sense of the word Freedom.—Nor was this all. They were generally at the same time erected into a commonality, or corporation, with the privilege of having magistrates and a town-council of their own, of making bye-laws for their own government, of building walls for their own defence, and of reducing all their inhabitants under a sort of military discipline, by obliging them to watch and ward; that is, as antiently understood, to guard and defend those walls against all attacks and surprises, by night as well as by day. In England they were generally exempted