premise: There is nothing in England today with which we can compare the life of a fully enfranchised borough of the fifteenth century. The town of those earlier days, in fact, governed itself after the fashion of a little principality. Within the bounds which the mayor and citizens defined with perpetual insistence in their formal perambulation year after year, it carried on its isolated self-dependent life. The inhabitants defended their own territory, built and maintained their walls and towers, armed their own soldiers, trained them for service and held reviews of their forces at appointed times. They elected their own rulers and officials in whatever way they chose to adopt, and distributed among officers and councillors just such powers of legislation and administration as seemed good in their eyes. They drew up formal constitutions for the government of the community, and as time brought new problems and responsibilities, more were made, re-made and revised again; their ordinances with restless and fertile ingenuity, till they had made of their constitution a various medley of fundamental doctrines and general precepts and particular rules, somewhat after the fashion of an American state of modern times. In all concerns of trade, they exercised the widest powers, and bargained and negotiated and made laws as nations do on a grander scale today. They could covenant and confederate, buy and sell, deal and traffic after their own will; they could draw up formal treaties with other boroughs, and could admit them to or shut them out from all the privileges of their commerce; they might pass laws of protection or try experiments in free trade. Often, their authority stretched out over a wide district, and surrounding villages gathered to their markets and obeyed their laws; it might even happen in the case of a staple town that their officers controlled the main foreign trade of whole provinces.
hypothesis: Town life in the 15 th century is more comparable to the American state of modern times than England in modern times.