The City of London obtained from Henry I. the right of appointing their own sheriffs, which was a very great privilege, and there must have been some very strong reason to induce the King to grant this great favour. Bishop Stubbs writes of this charter of Henry I. to the citizens of London: 'The privileges of the citizens of London are not to be regarded as a fair specimen of the liberties of ordinary towns, but as a sort of type and standard of the amount of municipal independence and self-government at which the other towns of the country might be expected to aim. At a period at which the other towns were just struggling out of the condition of demesne, the Londoners were put in possession of the ferm or farm of Middlesex, with the right of appointing the sheriff; they were freed from the immediate jurisdiction of any tribunal except of their own appointment, from several universal imposts, from the obligation to accept trial by battle, from liability to misericordia or entire forfeiture, as well as from tolls and local exactions such as ordinary charters specify. They have also their separate franchises secured and their weekly courts, but they have not yet the character of a perpetual corporation or _Communa_, and thus although possessing, by virtue of their associations in guilds, of their several franchises, of their feudal courts, and of their shire organisation under the sheriff, many elements of strength, consolidation and independence, they have not a compact organisation as a municipal body. The city is an accumulation of distinct and different corporate bodies, but not yet a perfect municipality, nor although it was recognised in the reign of Stephen as a _Communio_, did it gain the legal status before the reign of Richard I.'[200] Mr. Round shows, however, that the city possessed the privilege only for a short time: 'We see then that in absolute contradiction of the received belief on the subject, the shrievalty was not in the hands of the citizens during the twelfth century (_i.e._, from '1101'), but was held by them for a few years only, about the close of the reign of Henry I. The fact that the sheriffs of London and Middlesex were, under Henry II. and Richard I. appointed throughout by the Crown, must compel our historians to reconsider the independent position they have assigned to the city at that early period. The Crown, moreover, must have had an object in retaining this appointment in its hands. We may find it, I think, in that jealousy of exceptional privilege or exemption which characterised the _régime_ of Henry II. For, as I have shown, the charters to Geoffrey remind us that the ambition of the urban communities was analogous to that of the great feudatories, in so far as they both strove for exemption from official rule. It was precisely to this ambition that Henry II. was opposed; and thus, when he granted his charter to London, he wholly omitted, as we have seen, two of his grandfather's