Many there are of this school in Italy, where you will often
find to-day a commune of three hundred inhabitants, with its one or
two constables wearing the imperial badge, "_Senatus Populusque
Albanensis_" or "_Verulensis_," as the case may be. Truly a suggestive
anachronism! It is true that in remote ages especially, when the
records of history are few and uncertain--and the period we are
considering in this paper can almost be called the prehistoric age of
municipal institutions in Northern Italy--much can be learned and much
truth inferred from the evidence of a name. But this is a species of
evidence we can never be too cautious in using, as the temptation is
always to infer too much rather than too little.
In the following pages I will try to sift the evidence obtainable,
with the impartiality of one trammeled by the support of no particular
theory; always bearing in mind, however, one fact, all-important in a
study where so much depends on nomenclature, namely, to give that
shade of meaning and that amount of weight to any term which it
possessed in the age in which it was used, carefully distinguishing
this from its use in any earlier or later age. The importance of this
caution will be soon seen when we come to discuss the origin of
corporate life in the communes, where many have been misled by
attaching to the words _respublica_ and _civitas_, for example, so
continually recurring in the old laws and charters, a meaning which
was entirely foreign to the terms at the period of their use.
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