The superiors, anxious to increase their own importance, favored the progress of the little boroughs.

The population, thus collected, began to divide themselves into guilds.

These were soon afterwards erected by the community into bodies corporate; the establishment of the community, of course, preceding, the incorporation of the guilds.

Those communities were created by charters or Keuren, granted by the sovereign.
Unless the earliest concessions of this nature have perished, the town charters of Holland or Zeland are nearly a century later than those of Flanders, France, and England.
The oldest Keur, or act of municipal incorporation, in the provinces afterwards constituting the republic, was that granted by Count William the First of Holland and Countess Joanna of Flanders, as joint proprietors of Walcheren, to the town of Middelburg.

It will be seen that its main purport is to promise, as a special privilege to this community, law, in place of the arbitrary violence by which mankind, in general, were governed by their betters.
"The inhabitants," ran the Charter, "are taken into protection by both counts.