ABSTRACT
'Come what may,' cried Robert Brand in 1193, 'Londoners shall have no king but their mayor!' In that excited spring they had in truth no king; Richard Lionheart lay in captivity abroad. Their mayor, however, was serving as treasurer of his ransom money, in company with Hubert Walter and the earls, exercising an authority which was to some as alarming as it was novel. For it was scarcely eighteen months since John Lackland and the magnates, summoned by the great bell of St. Paul's, had assembled at the Folkmoot site and sworn to maintain the commune of London. Not for a million marks, wrote the chronicler Richard of Devizes, would Henry II or the absent Richard have sanctioned this. The dread commune, 'terror of kingdoms', had appeared on English soil. 1
