In spite of these changes in principles and spirit, the
organs of communal government are almost everywhere the same. The executive
power is vested in a board or committee, called in Italy the consules,
in France the echevins, jurati, or syndics, in Germany the Rath
(council). Commonly this board has a president, known in France and England as
the mayor, in Germany as the burgomaster, who represents the body-corporate in
all negotiations with the seigneur or the Crown or other communes. One or more
councils (sapientes, pares, etc.) are often found assisting the
executive with their advice; and in the older type of commune the mass-meeting
plays a conspicuous part, not only electing magistrates and councils, but also
voting taxes, auditing the accounts of expenditure, and deciding on all
questions of exceptional importance.
Where the general assembly is non-existent
or moribund, offices are filled either by co-optation or by elections in the assemblies
of the craft-gilds, or are even allowed to descend by hereditary right. As the
popular control over the executive declines, jealousy of the executive leads to
some disastrous changes: to the multiplication of offices, to the shortening of
terms of office, to the creation of innumerable checks and balances, to the
organisation of this or that powerful interest or party as a state within the
state. But the morbid pathology of the communes in their last stage of decline
is a subject with which we need not here concern ourselves. These intricate expedients,
which are best exemplified in the constitution of fourteenth-century Florence,
weakened the government but could not make it more impartial or more tolerant.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the ordinary burgess was prepared to hail the
advent of a royal bailiff or a self-constituted despot, as the only cure for
the inveterate disorders incident to freedom.
