There is no doubt that the protection which used to be accorded to the market-place from the earliest barbarian times has played an important, though not an exclusive, part in the emancipation of the medieval city.  The early barbarians knew no trade within their village communities; they traded with strangers only, at certain definite spots, on certain determined days.  And, in order that the stranger might come to the barter-place without risk of being slain for some feud which might be running between two kins, the market was always placed under the special protection of all kins.  It was inviolable, like the place of worship under the shadow of which it was held.  With the Kabyles it is still annaya, like the footpath along which women carry water from the well; neither must be trodden upon in arms, even during inter-tribal wars.  In medieval times the market universally enjoyed the same protection.(2) No feud could be prosecuted on the place whereto people came to trade, nor within a certain radius from it; and if a quarrel arose in the motley crowd of buyers and sellers, it had to be brought before those under whose protection the market stood—­the community’s tribunal, or the bishop’s, the lord’s, or the king’s judge.  A stranger who came to trade was a guest, and he went on under this very name.  Even the lord who had no scruples about robbing a merchant on the high road, respected the Weichbild, that is, the pole which stood in the market-place and bore either the king’s arms, or a glove, or the image of the local saint, or simply a cross, according to whether the market was under the protection of the king, the lord, the local church, or the folkmote—­the vyeche.(3)

It is easy to understand how the self-jurisdiction of the city could develop out of the special jurisdiction in the market-place, when this last right was conceded, willingly or not, to the city itself.  And such an origin of the city’s liberties, which can be traced in very many cases, necessarily laid a special stamp upon their subsequent development.  It gave a predominance to the trading part of the community.  The burghers who possessed a house in the city at the time being, and were co-owners in the town-lands, constituted very often a merchant guild which held in its hands the city’s trade; and although at the outset every burgher, rich and poor, could make part of the merchant guild, and the trade itself seems to have been carried on for the entire city by its trustees, the guild gradually became a sort of privileged body.  It jealously prevented the outsiders who soon began to flock into the free cities from entering the guild, and kept the advantages resulting from trade for the few “families” which had been burghers at the time of the emancipation.  There evidently was a danger of a merchant oligarchy being thus constituted.  But already in the tenth, and still more during the two next centuries, the chief crafts, also organized in guilds, were powerful enough to check the oligarchic tendencies of the merchants.