ABSTRACT
The word borough in English medieval history is used chiefly in a legal sense, to designate a community with liberties of a burghal nature. Burghal liberties varied so greatly from place to place, however, that there were various ways in which the term might be defined even from a lawyer’s point of view. Heavy mortality often caused property to change hands more quickly than usual, and this may account for the large number of fines from the second quarter of the fourteenth century, nineteen of them from the three famine years 1315-17. High mortality might explain some of the activity of the 1350s and 1360s. The burghal features of market towns were mostly established before 1300, and the increasing occurrence of landless messuages in the fourteenth century indicates either a higher rate of transfer from one owner to another or some change in the economic status of such messuages.
