Together this band of late night policymakers agreed a piece of law to establish and underpin future royal charters, a medieval form of documentation first used in 1066, most commonly to turn towns into cities.
For a few precious frost-nipped weeks, these museum-piece cities of Olde World Europe flicker back to the Middle Ages -- not the ossified medieval throwbacks of soot-blackened cathedrals and tourist-bedeviled museums, but the living, breathing yesteryear of a bustling outdoor marketplace.