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It was through burghers admitted into the king's service and acting as administrators or judges in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of the state.
Had the third estate been centred entirely in the communes at strife with their lords, had the fate of burgherdom in France depended on the communal liberties won in that strife, we should see, at the end of the thirteenth century, that element of French society in a state of feebleness and decay. But it was far otherwise.
Nowhere has burgherdom had so wide and so productive a career as that which fell to its lot in France. There have been communes in the whole of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in France.
There is nothing in all this like that slow, obscure, heart-breaking travail of modern burgherdom escaping, full hardly, from the midst of slavery or a condition approximating to slavery, and spending centuries, not in disputing political power, but in winning its own civil existence.
And over the entire body of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and sobriety and industry, its solid worth. For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture.
His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he summoned to the states-general "the commonalties and good towns of the kingdom "to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the succession to the throne, "or to advise as to the means of establishing a uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;" he was perfectly aware that the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the accomplishment of acts so grave.
Now the majority amongst them were burghers, and their number and their power were turned to the advantage of burgherdom, and led day by day to its further extension and importance. Of all the original sources of the third estate, this it is, perhaps, which has contributed most to bring about the social preponderance of that order.
It was the struggle, sometimes sullen, sometimes violent, of feudal lordship against municipal burgherdom. The able and imperious Philip the Handsome had tested the strength of the Flemish cities, and had not cared to push them to extremity.
It was especially in the towns administered in the king's name and by his provosts that there was a development of this spirit, which has long been the predominant characteristic of French burgherdom. It must not be supposed that, in the absence of real communal independence, these towns lacked all internal security.
One thing only has struck sound judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the plebeians and patricians at Rome. They have often been compared; but it is a baseless comparison.
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