Changing definitions of citizenship. Contemporary perceptions of the nature of urban society constantly prove their value but require an understanding of the ideological basis within which they evolved. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, it was members of urban elites, with a patriarchal and top-down view of society, who uniformly generated perceptions of urban society. Consequently, there is a mismatch between the idea of "society" developed by the early sociologists, who attempted to provide models of the entire urban population, and the view of urban society inherited from the medieval jurists, which limited its membership to the citizens or burghers of a particular urban center. These citizens were all part of a corporate body. They not only belonged to the town, and demonstrated this by paying taxes, taking part in the urban militia, and participating, at least in name, in the political process; collectively they were the town.