Book excerpt: Excerpt from British Borough Charters, 1216-1307 Dolphus ballard, who died in 1915 at the early age of forty-eight, was a conspicuous instance of single-minded and fruitful devotion to a chosen study. The son of an alderman of Chichester, and himself for many years town clerk of what he liked to describe as the smallest borough in England, his innate zest of inquiry naturally turned to the field of town history. It was quickened and widened by the striking results of the researches of Gross, Maitland and Miss Bateson into municipal origins in this country. After preparing the ground by a series of studies and articles, he published in 1913 his British Borough Charters 1042 - 1216, which established him in the position of leading authority on early municipal growth in the British Isles. A further volume, to extend to the end of the reign of Edward I was projected and by the time of his death about nine-tenths of the charters had been copied and typed. A few notes and textual corrections were made, provisional dates were affixed to the undated charters and the position of each clause in his subject classification was indicated on the slips, but the introduction still remained to be written and the tables of sources and contents to be drawn up. A page or two of rough jottings was the only guide left to the very varied and Widely scattered sources from Which he had drawn the charters. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.