But in itself it was simply a township or group of townships where men clustered whether for trade or defence more thickly than elsewhere.
The towns were different in the circumstances and date of their rise.
Some grew up in the fortified camps of the English invaders.

Some dated from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate Roman towns.

Some clustered round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the walls of church and monastery.

Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.
There was the same variety in the mode in which the various town communities were formed.

While the bulk of them grew by simple increase of population from township to town, larger boroughs such as York with its "six shires" or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its shire or share of the town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the town-community.