all pending questions concerning feuds arisen from insults, assaults, or wounds, and they swore that henceforth in the quarrels that should arise they would never again have recourse to personal revenge or to a judge other than the syndics nominated by themselves in the guild and the city.
This was long since the regular practice in every art or good-neighborship guilds in every sworn fraternity. In every village commune such had formerly been the custom, before bishop or kinglet had succeeded in introducing—and later in enforcing—his judge. Now the hamlets and the parishes which constituted the borough, as well as all the guilds and fraternities that had developed there, considered themselves a single amitas. They named their judges and swore permanent union between all these groups.
A charter was hastily drawn up and accepted. In case of need they sent for the copy of a charter from some small neighboring commune (we know hundreds of these charters to-day), and the commune was constituted. The bishop or prince, who had up till then been judge of the commune and had often become more or less its master, had only to recognize the accomplished fact, or else to fight the young "con-juration" by force of arms. Often the king—that is to say, the prince who tried to gain superiority over other princes, and whose coffers were always empty—"granted" the charter, for ready money. He thus renounced imposing his judge on the commune, while giving himself importance before other feudal lords. But this was in nowise the rule: hundreds of communes lived without any other sanction than their own good pleasure, their ramparts, and their lances.
In a hundred years this movement spread, with striking unity, to the whole of Europe,—by imitation, observe well,—including Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Russia. And to-day, when we compare the charters and internal organisations of French, English, Scotch, Irish, Scandinavian, German, Bohemian, Russian, Swiss, Italian, and Spanish communes, we are struck with the almost complete sameness of these charters and of the organisation which grew up under the shelter
