INTEGRITY AS A SYSTEM
The capacity of urban law for growth and its tendency toward growth were connected with its character as a legal system, which was also partly inspired by the systematic character of both Roman law and canon law.
Especially in the Italian cities, but to a lesser degree elsewhere as well, urban law was considered to be based, in the first instance, on custom (mos, consuetudo, usus), and in the second place, on rules enacted by rulemaking authorities, which were in turn divided into ordinances (statuta) of guilds and other associations and laws (leges) of the city legislative authority or of the king or emperor. Statuta and leges had the quality of being written, which gave them a special significance. Nevertheless, the writing down of the customs by order of public authority did not necessarily deprive them of their quality as customary law. In urban law as in canon law and the other legal systems of the time, in cases of internal conflict among the sources of law, custom yielded to statute and statute to lex. Guild statutes were subject to frequent examination and approval by urban authorities, which often imposed on guilds the duty to revise their statutes periodically.Other characteristics of urban law were connected with specific features of social and economic relations within the city or town. Thus it was characteristic of urban law that the citizen or townsman could legally acquire land and buildings by a form of tenure called burgage tenure, or
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town tenure. In sharp contrast to clan and feudal tenures, town tenure included the right to devise the property by will, to sell it, to mortgage it, to lease it, and, in general, to have rights similar to what in the eighteenth century came to be called "ownership" (propriete, Eigentum). However, the restrictions upon private use of land and buildings were much greater in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries than in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since urban economic activities in the earli er period were usually strictly regulated by customary law, on the one hand, and by guild rules, on the other.