charters, town

Royal grants of certain privileges, rights, or immunities made to towns from early times.

History William I, seeing the importance of the towns, included most of them in the royal demesne, and the practice arose of granting town charters of incorporation, with privileges. Such privileges were, generally, the right of independent jurisdiction and the right of paying firma burgi, or a fixed sum as rent to the king in lieu of taxes to the sheriffs. These town charters were granted to the ‘fully qualified members of the township or hundred court of the town’, either by the king or, in the case of towns belonging to nobles, by the owner; thus Leicester obtained a charter from its earl, and Beverley from Archbishop Thurstan.

Most of the large towns seem to have been vested in the Crown in the time of Henry I, and by the reign of Henry III had succeeded in obtaining a clear recognition of their privileges and immunities. The readiness with which the towns undertook municipal government, and the ease with which they were incorporated by charter, were due to the fact that they already had a more or less complete organization in the guild system. When in course of time the election of the mayor of a municipal borough passed from the whole body of burgesses to the aldermen and councillors, the latter formed themselves into a close corporation, ignored the rights of their fellow townsmen, and secured their position by applying for and obtaining town charters of incorporation framed according to their wishes and modifying any charter or town charter which the town might already have possessed.

This restrictive tendency was carried still further towards the end of the 15th century. The rights of the freemen disappeared; the corporation came to be looked upon as the owner of the town property, and developed into an exclusive oligarchy; and even the election of members of Parliament was, in some cases, entrusted to them. In this way the Crown could secure the return to the Commons of its own candidates. However, the independence shown by the corporations under the Stuarts moved Charles II to remodel their charters. He proceeded against the corporations by writ of quo warranto, calling on the corporation to show by what authority it exercised its prerogative powers (in 1690 an act of William and Mary declared all these legal proceedings null and void).

The charters of the towns surrendered through the instrumentality of Judge Jeffreys were replaced by others ‘framing the constitution of these municipalities on a more oligarchical model and reserving to the Crown the first appointment of those who were to form the governing part of the corporation’. The very use of the word ‘oligarchical’ shows that the king was concerned not for the rights of the burgesses but for his own powers. James II, in the hope of conciliating the nation over the abrogation of its privileges, restored a number of the old charters; but this in no way improved the position of the burgesses as a whole, and throughout the 18th century the principle of the close corporation was maintained and all the borough patronage was in the hands of the councillors, who almost invariably neglected their duties to the town in order to further their own private interests.

This corrupt state of things continued until the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which madeprovision for the election of the town councillors by the burgesses or resident ratepayers, and which was the first of various acts of Parliament in the 19th century laying the foundation of the 20th-century system of local government.