Borough

“ Look at the willing assortment of dreams playing Sally Waters around town. Isn't this borough a bower of beauty—a flowery thicket where the prettiest kind in all the world grow under glass or outdoors? ”

“ Is not the Borough a very improper place for the king's, or any other, college?—Is it not the very mart of trade, and consequently ever noisy and in confusion?—And what a magnificent improvement would its erection near Westminster Abbey be to that ancient and very sumptuous pile. ”

“ On the adjacent Borough Hill are extensive earthworks, and the discovery of remains here and at Burnt Walls, immediately south, proves the existence of a considerable Roman station. The chief industry of the town is the manufacture of boots and shoes. The borough is under a mayor, four aldermen and twelve councillors. ”

“ I find that into my idea of the village has entered more of the elm than of the human being. They are worth many a political borough. They constitute a borough. The poor human representative of his party sent out from beneath their shade will not suggest a tithe of the dignity, the true nobleness and comprehensiveness of view, the sturdiness and independence, and serene beneficence that they do. They look from township to township. . . . They battle with the tempests of a century. ”

“ We might perhaps have guessed that the boroughs would be the places of all others in which such communalism as there was in the ancient village community would maintain and develop itself, until in course of time the borough corporation, the ideal borough, would stand out as the owner of lands which lay within and without the wall. ”

“ But though we fully admit that each of our boroughs has lived its own life, our evidence seems to point to the conclusion that in those truly ancient boroughs of which we have been speaking, though there might be many inhabitants who held and who cultivated arable land lying without the walls, there were from a remote time other burgesses who were not landowners and were not agriculturists and yet were men of importance in the borough. ”

“ There was not much change for many centuries in the way in which towns and villages were governed.
2. The borough towns, which gained their charters back in the days of King John, or King Henry III, had them confirmed by various kings in later times; but the powers of the towns were not much altered. The corporation of a borough was usually made up of men chosen by the freemen; but if the freemen did not admit many persons to the freedom of the borough, the power of electing, in the course of years, fell into the hands of a very few people. ”

“ In the fourth year after the Restoration the Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses petitioned for a ratification of their existing privileges and for an enlargement of them, which Charles II. granted, “the borough being an ancient and populous borough, and he being desirous that for the time to come, for ever, one certain and invariable method might be had of, for, and in the preservation of our peace, and in the rule and governance of the same borough, and of our people in the same inhabiting, and of others resorting thither ”

“ Holcomb glances at the antiquity of the borough in England, considers the meaning of the term, especially as used in Pennsylvania, in distinction from "town," studies early borough government in Germantown as the first borough organized in the State, and in Bristol as a type of the boroughs of the eighteenth century, and examines the character and the possibilities of the present borough. ”

“ While the bulk of them grew by simple increase of population from township to town, larger boroughs such as York with its "six shires" or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its shire or share of the town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the town-community. But strange as these aggregations might be, the constitution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of the people at large. ”

“ The borough has a public art gallery, a public park and a general hospital. Coal and fireclay abound in the vicinity, the Beaver river furnishes good water power, and the borough has various manufactures. ”

“ It is indeed only a kind of town socage; as common socage, by which other lands are holden, is usually of a rural nature. A borough, as we have formerly seen, is distinguished from other towns by the right of sending members to parliament; and, where the right of election is by burgage tenure, that alone is a proof of the antiquity of the borough. Tenure in burgage therefore, or burgage tenure, is where houses, or lands which were formerly the scite of houses, in an antient borough, are held of some lord in common socage, by a certain established rent. ”

“ In vain an expiring interest in a borough calls for offices, or small livings, for the children of mayors, and aldermen, and capital burgesses. His court rival has them all. He can do an infinite number of acts of generosity and kindness, and even of public spirit. He can procure indemnity from quarters. He can procure advantages in trade. ”

“ Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with the king's justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the borough perhaps to "swear by itself,"—that is, to a jury of its own or its freedom from the general custom of "frank-pledge." As trade advanced commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds; and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole body of its burghers—that is, of those who held land within its walls. ”

“ The borough is built on ground sloping gently towards the river, which furnishes valuable water power. The surrounding country is well adapted to agriculture, and abounds in coal, iron, fire clay, limestone and white sand. ”

“ For the obtaining of a borough charter no fixed requirement of population is laid down. Each application is considered upon its merits, and while the size and importance of an urban community weigh heavily in the decision other factors not infrequently are influential, with the consequence that some boroughs are very small while some urban centers of size are not yet boroughs. Of the present number of boroughs, seventy-four, or about one-fifth, are county boroughs. ”

“ The borough community and its lord.
We have seen that in the boroughs a group of men is formed whose principle of cohesion is not to be found in land tenure. The definition of a burgess may involve the possession of a house within or hard by the walls; but the burgesses do not coalesce as being the tenants or the men of one lord; and yet coalesce they will. They are united in and by the moot and the market-place, united under the king in whose peace they traffic; and then they are soon united over against the king, who exacts toll from them and has favours to grant them. ”

“ The borough is built on land which rises gradually from the river-bank for about 1/4 m. and then becomes quite level, but the surrounding country is for the most part occupied by hills, several of which rise to considerable height. It has a variety of manufacturing establishments, among which are cotton and woollen mills, rolling mills, steel mills, foundries, boiler shops, tube works, and works for making surgical instruments and artificial stone. ”

“ Of this, however, no traces remain, the rights of the borough, which must have come into existence during the 13th century, being purely prescriptive. Stockton was divided into two parts: the "town," governed by the bailiff of the bishop and afterwards by the vicar and vestrymen, and the borough, under a mayor and aldermen. The bishop's bailiff was also the keeper of the castle, though in the 17th century the office belonged to the borough-bailiff. The borough is first mentioned in 1283, when the king took tallage from it during the vacancy of the see. ”

“ The inner surface of this space is paved with cobble-stones, worn smooth by centuries of usage: it is only of late years that the conservative spirit of the old borough has so far accommodated itself to modern requirements as to provide foot-paths in front of the shops and houses. ”

“ A borough was run by a mayor elected usually for life. By being members of a guild, merchant-traders and craftsmen acquired the legal status of burgesses and had the freedom of the borough. Each guild occupied a certain ward of the town headed by an alderman. The town aldermen, who were unpaid, made up the town council, which advised the mayor. The Mayor of London received 40 pounds for hospitality, but in small towns, 20s. ”

“ In all these cases the foundation of the bishopric has been speedily followed by a royal proclamation raising the borough to the rank of a city. This is' exactly according to the doctrine implied in Henry the Eighth's Gloucester charter. The foundation of the bishopric does not make the borough a city, but it gives it a right to be made one. ”

“ In the boroughs of Queens and Richmond, on the other hand, large tracts of land are given over to farms and market gardens.
Manhattan is at once the smallest and the most important borough in the city. Here are the homes of more [14] than 2,000,000 people, the business section of Greater New York, and the chief shipping districts. ”

“ Now for the counties and the universities residence is not necessary; and even in the boroughs, where it is required, plural voting is restrained only in part, because a man may have more than one residence, and because residence within seven miles of the borough is enough, so that the men who carry on their business in the town and live in the suburbs are qualified in the borough by reason of their offices or workshops, and in a suburban borough or the county by reason of their dwellings. ”

“ In the days of Edward the Elder we find that Grantbridge, a derivation of Cambridge is giving its name to a shire, in a new division of Mercia. In the 11th century the borough began to expand beyond the narrow Roman limits. A population grew up by degrees on the other side of the river. Religious foundations gradually took their place in the borough. We begin to have authentic annals in the 12th century. Learned men came hither anxious to teach, and scholars anxious to be taught. ”

“ The charters of all boroughs have been brought into substantial agreement and the organs of borough control are everywhere the same. The governing authority is the borough council, which consists of councillors, aldermen, and a mayor, sitting as a single body. The councillors, varying in number from nine to upwards of one hundred, are elected by the voters of the borough, either at large or by wards, for three years, and one-third retire annually. ”

“ The great boroughs were honeycombed with sokes, or areas of seignorial jurisdiction, within which the royal reeve’s authority was greatly restricted while that of the lord’s reeve took precedence. Even the haws, being “burhs” or strongholds within a stronghold, enjoyed a local “peace” which protected from official intrusion. Besides heterogeneity of tenure and jurisdiction in the borough, there was also heterogeneity of status; there were burh-thegns and cnihts, mercatores, burgesses of various kinds, the three groups representing perhaps military, commercial and agricultural elements. ”

“ When [Pg 301] any city, borough, or township is partly within and partly without the twenty-five mile limit, the whole of such city, borough, or township shall be regarded as within the Suburban Metropolitan District.
Section 2. There shall be an executive department created for every Suburban Metropolitan District, to be known as the Department of Suburban Metropolitan Planning, which shall be in charge of a Suburban Metropolitan Planning Commission. ”

“ All these boroughs where you were born, and hope to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient magnificence,—Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea, Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms, and, if convenient, a gathering cry. ”

“ It is slightly less in Scotland than in England and Ireland.
[213:3] Aug. 30.
[214:1] A man cannot vote in more than one division of the same borough. 48-49 Vic., c. 23, § 8. But there is no such limitation in the case of divisions of a county. Ibid., § 9. Metropolitan London is not a single borough, but a collection of boroughs, several of which contain more than one division, and hence the effect of this provision is quite irrational there. ”

“ In old English boroughs the responsible men—those who owned property, and paid taxes, and chose representatives—were the burgesses. Bearing always in mind this equivalence between the borough and the hundred, we may note further that in early times the hundred was a unit for military purposes; it was about such a community as could furnish to the general levy a [Pg 228] company of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit of representation in the ancient English shire-moot or county court. ”

“ The little disfranchised borough contains many objects to engage the artist's pencil, notably the eminently picturesque almshouses.
The noble church has been very badly "restored." The Norman work is fine. ”

“ It is served by the New York Central & Hudson River, the Pennsylvania, and the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburg railways. The borough is about 1105 ft. above sea-level, in a rather limited space between the hills, which command picturesque views of the narrow valley. The river runs through the borough. Coal and fireclay abound in the vicinity, and these, with leather, iron, timber and the products of the fertile soil, are the bases of its leading industries. ”