are not arbitrarily devised: and since the place where this constitution existed is intimately connected with our classical recollections, the account of it is by no means alien to this work.

It was a pleasing thought of the Neapolitan jurists, that the seggj of their native city had arisen out of the Greek phratries: and if it was a delusion to derive the old and perplexing name of those bodies, tocchj, from the Greek Owko, yet it is hard to keep oneself from being led astray by it. At all events however that derivation must not pass for more than a venerable reminiscence: for substantially all we can expect to find in Naples under its dukes, as in all the other free cities dependent upon the Roman throne at Constantinople, is a constitution arising out of the municipal institutions of the western empire, an ordo and possessores. These proprietaries, whose nobility consisted, like the evryéveia of the Greeks, in hereditary birth and hereditary wealth, were registered according to their lineage in tocchj, which were connected with particular districts of the city, and were of two kinds. Of the great tocchj, according to the earliest mention of them, there were four, to which two were afterward added: the number of the lesser cannot be determined, since they are only spoken of incidentally. The former may be compared to the tribes, the latter to the curies; with this difference, about which there can be no question, that both were open to receive new citizens. Tocchj was the ancient name for their places of assemblage or chambers, their curies; but under the kings of the house of Anjou they obtained that of seggj.

These kings, who pursued a system of grounding their usurpation on feudality and a military nobless, changed the character of the Neapolitan citizens, by their readiness to bestow knighthood on such as were well-born or even rich and since the forein nobles who resided in the capital, took care to be enrolled in the seggj, the consequence was, that, at the time when everywhere else the

power of the noble houses in the towns was sinking, at Naples an aristocracy of houses was introduced. The newly admitted citizens must have entered immediately into the six great seggj: for the lesser all gradually disappear; because, as is expressly stated, the few families that were left in them became extinct.

Thus only the six great seggj remained: and these by the union of two were reduced to five; probably with a view of giving the vacated one to the commonalty, against whom the tribes on becoming noble had been shut; and who in this country could not succeed in establishing anything like corporate institutions, while the kings were in need of their assistance against the turbulent nobility.

The five noble seggj were not absolutely closed: but the reception even of noblemen into them was so obstructed, that the number of families in them continually lessened; while there was a continual increase of the nobles who resided in the city without being admitted among the members, and yet were superior to many of them in rank and honours.

This is the parallel to the state of things I conceive to have existed at Rome, when the reformer, whom we call Tarquinius Priscus, was desirous of forming new tribes. The last-mentioned families made interest with the Spanish kings that they would vouchsafe to erect a new seggio: but, wretched and paltry as were the privileges of a Neapolitan patrician, the jealousy of the oligarchy opposed their reasonable request, and yet was just as unwilling to receive them and distribute them among the existing seggj*. But in course of time it gave way in single exceptions; and thus things went on, until the revolutionary government of 1799 got rid of the seggj and eletti, and the restored one availed itself of this riddance, no less than of that of every other corporate institution which presented even the shadow of a limit to its arbitrary will, as so much gain to itself. Indeed

華 Giannone xx. 4.

this municipal constitution had long since become so worthless and open to abuse, nay mischievous, that neither did its venerable origin excite interest at the time of its abolition, nor is its loss now felt.

Every person had a vote in a seggio, who belonged to any patrician family enrolled in it, whatever his residence might be; and in fact this institution was far more a representation of the barons of the whole kingdom, than of the citizens, or even the nobless of the city.

Had Naples been the capital of Campania alone; had its constitution lived and grown, enlarged and completed itself, in that case the ottine of the people would have become plebeian tribes, in the same way in which the Roman commons obtained a constitution, and thereby multiplied the vital energies of the republic.

THE COMMONALTY,

AND THE PLEBEIAN TRIBES.

959

IN every state the constitution of which has been grounded on a certain number of houses, a commonalty has grown up or subsisted by the side of the burghers or the freeholders. The members of this commonalty were not only recognized as freemen, but also as fellow-countrymen they received like succour against foreiners, were under the protection of the laws, might acquire real property, had their motes for making by-laws and their courts, were bound to serve in time of war, but were excluded from the government, which was confined to the houses 60

The origin of such a commonalty, though admitting of many varieties, in cities mostly coincides with that of the rights of the pale-burghers; of the dwellers within the pale or the contado: but it increased in extent and still more so in importance, when a city acquired a domain, a distretto, containing towns and other small places. The inhabitants of such a domain were sometimes taken in a mass under the protection of the law and admitted to the rights of freemen; more frequently this was

959 Il commune. When a number of such commonalties exist in a larger state, along with the ruling part of the nation, they are les communes, the commons.

60 This was also the condition of the proselytes of righteousness in Judea. Those of the gate answered to the metics.

61 Like the English pale in Ireland, before James the First. In Germany they were called pfahlbürger, pale-burghers, which in French was distorted into fauxbourgeois.

done for such as removed into the city: these would be persons of very different rank, gentle and simple. In like manner freemen out of such forein places as were connected by a community of civic or national law, and bondmen who obtained their freedom with the consent of their lords, were received into the commonalty: so that, from the variety of elements it contained, its name was fully justified by its nature..

Now since among the ancients civic trades and commerce were in low repute, while agriculture was in the highest; whereas during the middle ages the scale of their estimation was directly reversed; it came to pass that in the former period the commonalty was often made up of the inhabitants of the domain; in the latter on the other hand the neighbouring country was seldom admitted to a fellowship of rights, but within the walls there grew up a commonalty of artisans and tradesmen of all sorts. These were impelled by a feeling of their necessities to unite in companies, which in consequence of their local compression developed such a force as was not to be found among the rural population: but owing to this peculiarity in their nature, the revolutions by which the commons gained the upper hand in the middle ages, had an entirely different character from that of those whereby the demus or the plebs among the ancients acquired first freedom, and then the superiority in the state: the consequences too were entirely different. The government of the traders and manufacturers made the free cities unwarlike, as Machiavel remarks with regard to Florence; that of the countrypeople made them bold and firm, as was the case at Rome.

As opposed to the houses, the demus, the plebs, and the commonalty are the same thing, and of the same kind : in order however to form a picture of what the plebeians were, and of the station they occupied alongside of the citizens, let the reader take—as an easily intelligible instance from among a multitude-the territory of Zurich,