Citizen

The word ‘citizen’ was used in England from the Middle Ages to describe the inhabitant of a city or town, or the subject of a larger polity who possessed various rights and privileges. ¹ In 1275, the Statutes of Westminster granted ‘des Citieins & de Burghes’ the right to collect ‘murage’, a toll for building and repairing city walls. ² This view of citizen status is seen in Henry VIII's acknowledgment of the rights of ‘citizens and inhabitaunt of the seid Cities and Townes’, their status underlined by the fact that taxes would need to be collected from those ‘Citezens of Cities and Burgeys of boroughes and Townes’. ³ However, early modern ideas of citizenship were heavily influenced by the recovery of the conceptual vocabulary of classical Greek and Roman civitas. The rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics favoured the emergence of a humanist ideal of civic self-government, sustained by the citizen as an honest, virtuous, politically educated individual who worked for the common good. ⁴ Furthermore, the idea of civitas implied a social contract that bound together or excluded individuals from collective bodies or organisations such as guilds, corporations, and cities.