special privileges--as for instance the exemption of boroughs from the
ordinary sessions of the county court, under Henry I.[11]--were in their
nature grants from an external source, and were in nowise inherent in
the position or mode of origin of the Teutonic city. And they were,
moreover, posterior in date to that embryonic period of national growth
of which I am now speaking. They do not affect in any way the
correctness of my general statement, which is sufficiently illustrated
by the fact that the oldest shire-motes, or county-assemblies, were
attended by representatives from all the townships and hundreds in the
shire, whether such townships and hundreds formed parts of boroughs
or not.

Very different from this was the embryonic growth of political society
in ancient Greece and Italy. There the aggregation of clans into tribes
and confederations of tribes resulted directly, as we have seen, in the
City. There burghership, with its political and social rights and
duties, had its theoretical basis in descent from a common ancestor, or
from a small group of closely-related common ancestors. The group of
fellow-citizens was associated through its related groups of ancestral
household-deities, and through religious rites performed in common to
which it would have been sacrilege to have admitted a stranger. Thus the
Ancient City was a religious as well as a political body, and in either
character it was complete in itself and it was sovereign. Thus in
ancient Greece and Italy the primitive clan-assembly or township-meeting
did not grow by aggregation into the assembly of the shire, but it
developed into the _comitia_ or _ecclesia_ of the city. The chief
magistrate was not the _ealdorman_ of early English history, but the
_rex_ or _basileus_ who combined in himself the functions of king,
general, and priest. Thus, too, there was a severance, politically,
between city and country such as the Teutonic world has never known. The