No Middelburger can be arrested or held in durance within Flanders or Holland, except for crime." This document was signed, sealed, and sworn to by the two sovereigns in the year 1217.

It was the model upon which many other communities, cradles of great cities, in Holland and Zeland, were afterwards created.
These charters are certainly not very extensive, even for the privileged municipalities which obtained them, when viewed from an abstract stand-point.

They constituted, however, a very great advance from the stand-point at which humanity actually found itself.

They created, not for all inhabitants, but for great numbers of them, the right, not to govern them selves but to be governed by law: They furnished a local administration of justice.

They provided against arbitrary imprisonment.
They set up tribunals, where men of burgher class were to sit in judgment.