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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1522632" data-attributes="member: 3146">Quite true. It was true of London as well. In the time of Shakespeare, the city fathers were not at all fond of actors and closed down all of the theatres in their section of the city. The reason that Blackfriars was still able to operate was that it was on land that had been a part of a monastery and law enforcement (and creation) there was the responsibility of the monastery. When Henry VIII disestablished the Catholic Church, the monastery and its lands became the property of the crown and were supposed to be administered directly by the Privy Council until the king or the council appointed someone to administer it. They never did so there was nobody to make or enforce laws against theatre in Blackfriars.I would imagine that a lot of cities worked like that. I would also imagine that the guards routinely ignored their lack of jurisdiction when apprehending or punishing common crime but that when it came to regulating things that weren't obviously wrong, it was a different matter.On the other hand, the Free Cities of Germany actually were centralized much earlier. Nuremberg, for instance, was centrally governed for centuries preceeding the Reformation and there were no power groups to compete with the city council within the city.I expect that the kind of disorganization and jurisdictional chaos that existed in London and Paris was largely a feature that large royal cities acquired as their footprints grew to encompass domains that had formerly been separate.</blockquote>

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