Excerpt from A History of Municipal Government in Liverpool From the Earliest Times to the Municipal Reform Act of 1835: Part I A Narrative Introduction; Part II a Collection of Charters, Leases, and Other Documents, Transcribed, Translated and Edited With Illustrative Material

His volume, the first of a series by which it is hoped that the history of Liverpool and the surrounding districts will be materially elucidated, has been long in the press and some apology is due to subscribers for the delay. The purpose of the work is perhaps clear from its title page. It aims in the first place at providing historical students with a fairly complete and carefully edited set of the main documents bearing upon the early development of municipal institutions in this city. Though the primary object has been to carry this subject only down to the period of the Municipal Reform Act, it has been thought advisable to make the collection of Royal Charters complete by including the three brief charters which have been granted since that date. To these documents is prefixed a long narrative introduction, in which an attempt is made - for the first time - to give a logical and coherent account of the history of the development of municipal government in Liverpool. It has been the aim of the author to write this narrative in such a way that it may be intelligible and interesting to ordinary readers who are not historical specialists, and are apt to be baffled by the technical terms which abound especially in the realm of municipal history.

The writer of the introduction desires to express his gratitude to Mr. A. L. Smith, to Professor Tait and to his colleagues, Professor Mackay and Mr. W. Fergusson Irvine, all of whom have been good enough to read and criticise parts of his work. He has also had the benefit, for a part of his work, of the minute and learned criticism of Mr. Robert Gladstone, junr.; the book would have gained greatly had it been possible for Mr. Gladstone's criticism to be extended to the whole of it. But his chief debt is to Mr. William Farrer, who has not only given him the inestimable benefit of a criticism that is basedupon an unequalled knowledge of Lancashire antiquities, but who has also, with characteristic generosity, placed at his disposal his great collection of transcripts and documents. Other debts are acknow ledged in footnotes. But it would be wrong to neglect this opportunity of saying that in so far as there is any freshness or value in the treatment of a difficult theme here attempted, it is due to the great work which has been done in recent years in the field of municipal history by a band of scholars, of whom Mr. Maitland is the recognised leader. His work, with that of Miss Bateson, Mr. Gross, Professor Tait and others, has wholly transformed the treatment of municipal history and made it possible to derive from the superficially barren and crabbed documents something like a living picture of the growth of self-government in towns.

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