This mass of growing life lay chiefly north-east of S. Paul’s, where a crowd of lesser churches, conventual and parochial, rose out of a network of close-packed streets and alleys thronged with busy craftsmen and noisy, chaffering traders. Through the heart of it flowed the “Wall-brook,” on whose bank there lingered, long after the stream itself was buried and built over, a tradition of the barges laden with merchandise which were towed up from the Thames to a landing-place at the eastern end of the Cheap.[133] Beyond the Walbrook lay the East-Cheap, almost busier and more crowded still; while to the north, along the upper course of the Walbrook, was a thriving Jewish quarter.[134] Population was spreading, too, beyond the walls. Many of the wealthier citizens dwelt in pleasant suburban houses, surrounded with bright gardens and shady trees.[135] Some two miles higher up the river, the populous suburb of Westminster clustered round the famous abbey built in honour of S. Peter by the last Old-English king, and the palace of William Rufus, a splendid edifice with a breast-work and bastion stretching down to the water’s edge.[136] North-west of the city, just outside the wall, lay the plain of Smithfield, where a great horse-fair was held every Friday.[137] Beyond was an expanse of fruitful tillage-lands and rich pastures, watered by running streams and made merry with the rush of countless watermills;[138] and this tract was sheltered by a wide belt of woodland stretching away across the northern part of Middlesex to the foot of the Chiltern Hills. Here the stag and the fallow-deer, the boar and the wild bull, had their coverts, beside a multitude of lesser game; all of which the citizens were by a special privilege entitled to hunt at their pleasure.[139] Such quasi-regal sport was doubtless only enjoyed by the greater and wealthier among them; the mass of the young burghers were content, in the summer evenings when their day’s work was done, with a saunter among the shady gardens and fresh springs which enlivened the northern suburbs; while in winter their favourite resort was a tract of low-lying moor or marsh—the Moorfields of later times—on whose frozen surface they could enjoy to their heart’s content the exercises of sliding, sledging and skating.[140] Business, pleasure, piety, intellectual culture, all had their places in the vigorous life of the great city. Each of the two great minsters, S. Paul’s and S. Peter’s, had a school attached to it, and so had the abbey of our Lady at Bermondsey, just over the water.[141] Money-getting did not absorb all the energies of the burghers; “they were respected and noted above all other citizens for their manners, dress, table and discourse.”[142] “Moreover, almost all the bishops, abbots and great men of England are, in a manner, citizens and freemen of London; as they have magnificent houses there, to which they resort, spending large sums of money, whenever they are summoned thither to councils and assemblies by the king or their metropolitan, or are compelled to go there by their own business.”[143] And between these visitors and the resident citizens there was no hard and fast line of demarcation. Neither the knight-errant’s blind contempt for practical industry nor the still blinder contempt of the merely practical man for everything which has not its value in hard cash had as yet come into existence. Under the old English system the merchant who had made three long voyages over sea on his own account was entitled to rank as a thegn, and to take his place among the nobles of the land. Under the Norman system a link between the two classes was supplied by the citizens of Norman origin, to whom London in no small measure owed the marked importance which it attained under Henry I. The Norman knights had no monopoly of the enterprizing spirit of their race; the victorious host had scarcely settled down upon the conquered soil when it was followed by a second invasion of a very different character. Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst. The fusion of races in this class, the class of which the town population chiefly consisted, began almost from the first years of the conquest. The process was very likely more helped than hindered by the grinding tyranny which united all the Red King’s victims in a community of suffering; but its great working-out was in the reign of Henry I. His restoration of law and order, his administrative and judicial reforms, gave scope for a great outburst of industrial and commercial energy. England under him had her heavy burthens and her cruel grievances; they stand out plainly enough in the complaints of her native chronicler. But to men who lived amidst the endless strife of the French kingdom or the Flemish border-land, or of the Norman duchy under the nominal government of Robert Curthose, a country where “no man durst misdo with other,” and where the sovereign “made peace for man and deer,”[144] may well have looked like a sort of earthly paradise. It is no wonder that peaceable citizens who only wanted to be quiet and get an honest living came across the sea to find shelter and security in the rich and prosperous island. For settlers of this kind it was easy enough to make a home. No gulf of hatred and suspicion, no ever-present sense of wrong suffered and wrong done, stood fixed between them and their English fellow-burghers. Even before the Conqueror’s reign had closed, English and Normans were living contentedly side by side in all the chief cities of England: sometimes, as we have noticed in the case of Norwich, the new-comers dwelt apart in a suburb or quarter of their own, but the distinction was one of locality only; the intercourse was perfectly free and perfectly amicable; Norman refinement, Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the English burghers; and intermarriages soon became frequent.[145] In the great cities, where the sight of foreign traders was nothing new or strange, and the barriers of prejudice and ignorance of each other’s languages had been worn away by years of commercial intercourse, the fusion was naturally more easy; in London, whither the “men of Rouen” had come in their “great ships,” with their cargoes of wine or sturgeons,[146] long before their countrymen came with bow and spear and sword, it was easiest of all. The great commercial centre to which the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign; and the attraction grew still stronger during the unquiet times in Normandy which followed the Conqueror’s death. “Many natives of the chief Norman cities, Rouen and Caen, removed to London, and chose them out a dwelling there, because it was a fitter place for their trade, and better stored with the goods in which they were wont to deal.”[147]

That the influence of these Norman burghers was dominant in the city there can be little doubt; but they seem to have won their predominance by fair means and to have used it fairly. If they, as individuals, prospered in the English capital, they contributed their full share to its corporate prosperity, and indirectly to that of the nation at large. They brought a great deal more than mere wealth; they brought enterprize, vigour, refinement, culture, social as well as political progress. In their pleasant, cheerful, well-ordered dwellings many a noble knight or baron may have been glad to accept a hospitality such as his own stately but comfortless and desolate castle could never afford; many a learned and dignified ecclesiastic may have enjoyed a refinement of society such as he could rarely hope to meet among the rough and reckless swordsmen with whom the ranks of the high-born laity were filled. We are not dependent on mere general statements; we can do as did these barons and prelates themselves; we can go with them to visit the home of a typical London citizen of the early twelfth century. In the heart of the busiest trading quarter, on the spot where Mercer’s Hall now stands in Cheapside, under the shadow of S. Mary Colechurch, and well within sound of the bells of the more famous S. Mary-at-Bow, was the house of Gilbert Becket and Rohesia his wife. When their son, grown to manhood and high in office, was asked of his origin and extraction, he answered simply that his parents were citizens of London, dwelling blameless and respected among their fellow-burghers.[148] Had not the inquisitive zeal of his biographers led them to search more closely into his pedigree, we might never have known that his father and mother were foreigners—Gilbert, born at Rouen, of a respectable burgher family; Rohesia, sprung from the same rank of life at Caen.[149] Gilbert once filled the office of port-reeve of London,[150] and bore a high character for intelligence, industry and upright dealing. Rohesia was the pattern of wives and mothers. Her domestic affections and her wider Christian sympathies, her motherly love and her charity to the needy, are seen exquisitely blended together in her habit of weighing her little son at stated intervals against money, clothes and food which she gave to the poor, trusting thereby to bring a blessing on the child.[151] As soon as he was old enough, he was sent to school at Merton Priory in Surrey,[152] where his father seems to have been treated as a friend by the prior; and when the boy came home for his holidays, it was to spend them in riding and hawking with Richer de L’Aigle, a young knight sprung from one of the noblest families of Normandy, and a constant visitor and intimate friend of the little household in Cheapside.[153] It is plain from the simple, matter-of-fact way in which that household is described that it in nowise differed from the generality of burgher-households around it. Its head was wealthy, but not to such a degree as to excite special notice or envy; he and his wife lived in comfort and affluence, but only such as befitted their station; they seem to have been in no way distinguished from the bulk of respectable, well-to-do, middle-class citizens of their day. The one peculiarity of their home was the circumstance to which we owe our knowledge of its character and its history:—that in it had been born a child who was to begin his career as Thomas of London the burgher’s son, and to end it as Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop, saint and martyr.

The Norman settlers were not the only new element in the population of the English towns. Flanders, the border-land of Normandy, France and the Empire, the immediate neighbour of the Norman dukes, the ally of the English kings, had been for ages associated with the destinies of England. The relation between the two countries was primarily a political one; but kindred blood, kindred speech and kindred temper drew Fleming and Englishman together in the bonds of a natural sympathy which grew with the growth of both nations. The merchants of Bruges were even more familiar visitors in London than those of Rouen and Caen. The trade with Flanders was the most important part of the trade of eastern England. Not only was the estuary of the Scheld a high-way of communication with the more distant regions of central Europe, but Flanders herself was the head-quarters of a flourishing industry for which the raw material was in great part furnished by England. The cloth which all Europe flocked to buy at the great yearly fairs of Bruges and Ghent was made chiefly from the wool of English sheep. Dover was the chief mart for this export; in the itinerary of the canons of Laon we see Flemish merchants dispersing to buy wool all over the country and bringing it up to Dover in great bales, which were deposited in a warehouse built for that special purpose till they could be shipped over sea.[154] As yet the Flemings had almost a monopoly of this weaving trade, although the appearance of weavers’ gilds at Huntingdon, Lincoln, Oxford and London may show that Englishmen were already beginning to emulate their example; it may, on the other hand, point to a Flemish element in the population of these towns. In the time of William the Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish queen had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in the time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous and prosperous enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans and English. It may have been partly to allay this jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless, a marked testimony to their character as active and trustworthy members of the state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was the one remaining element of disturbance in his realm, planted a colony of these Flemings in the extremity of South Wales, the southern part of our Pembrokeshire.[155] The experiment was a daring one; cut off as they were from all direct communication with England, there must have seemed little chance that these colonists could hold their own against the Welsh. The success of the experiment is matter not of history but of present fact; South Pembrokeshire remains to this day a Teutonic land, a “little England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of the Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather than for Wales. They are the first links of a social and industrial, as distinguished from a merely political, connexion between England and the Low Countries, which in later days was to exercise an important influence on the life of both peoples. They are the forerunners of two greater settlements—one under Edward III. and one under Elizabeth—which were to work a revolution in English industry.

A third class of foreign settlers stood in a totally different position from both the Fleming and the Norman. These were the Jews. Their first appearance in England is said to have been due to the Conqueror, who brought over a Jewish colony from Rouen to London.[156] They were special favourites of William Rufus; under Henry they play a less conspicuous part; but in the next reign we find them at Lincoln, Oxford, and elsewhere, and there can be no doubt that they were already established in most of the chief English towns. They formed, however, no part of the townsfolk. The Jew was not a member of the state; he was the king’s chattel, not to be meddled with, for good or for evil, save at the king’s own bidding. Exempt from toll and tax and from the fines of justice, he had the means of accumulating a hoard of wealth which might indeed be seized at any moment by an arbitrary act of the king, but which the king’s protection guarded with jealous care against all other interference. The capacity in which the Jew usually appears is that of a money-lender—an occupation in which the scruples of the Church forbade Christians to engage, lest they should be contaminated with the sin of usury. Fettered by no such scruples, the Hebrew money-lenders drove a thriving trade; and their loans doubtless contributed to the material benefit of the country, by furnishing means for a greater extension of commercial enterprize than would have been possible without such aid. But, except in this indirect way, their presence contributed nothing to the political developement of the towns; and in their social developement the Jewry, a distinct quarter exempt from the jurisdiction of merchant-gild or port-reeve as well as from that of sheriff or bishop, shut off by impassable barriers from the Christian community around it, had no part at all.

Outside this little separate world of the Jewry the general manner of life was much the same in all ranks of society. The domestic arrangements of the castle or manor-house differed little from those of the citizen’s dwelling. In both the accommodation usually consisted merely of a hall, a “solar” or upper chamber raised on a substructure of cellars, and a kitchen with its appendant offices.[157] The hall was the general living, eating, and sleeping-apartment for the whole household. Its floor was of wood, strewn with hay or rushes;[158] a fire blazed upon a great stone hearth in its centre, or in a wide recess at one end; and round the fire were ranged in due order the tables and benches at which the family, guests and servants all assembled for meals. In the higher ranks of society the king’s friend Count Robert of Meulan had set a fashion of taking but one daily repast—the mid-day dinner—and those who wished to ape courtly manners followed his example; the practice, however, found little favour with the mass of the people, who attributed it to aristocratic stinginess, and preferred their four meals a day according to ancient English custom.[159] It was in the hall that noble or merchant transacted his business or conversed with his friends; and it was in the hall too that at nightfall, when the tables were cleared and the wooden shutters which closed the unglazed windows safely barred,[160] guests and servants, divided at most by a curtain drawn across the room, lay down to sleep in the glow of the dying fire.[161] The solar was used at once as bedroom and private sitting-room by the master and mistress of the house;[162] a curtainless bed and an oaken chest,[163] serving as a wardrobe and fastened with lock and hinges often of elaborate ironwork,[164] made up its ordinary furniture; in the story of S. Thomas we catch a glimpse, too, of the cradle in which a burgher-mother rocked her baby to sleep, wrapped in a dainty silken coverlet.[165] The whole house, whether in town or country, was commonly of wood.[166] With open hearths and chimneys ill-constructed, or more probably altogether lacking, the natural consequence was that fires in towns were of constant occurrence and disastrous extent; Gilbert Becket’s house was burnt over his head several times, and in each case a large part of London shared in the destruction.[167] But the buildings thus easily destroyed were as easily replaced; while the cost of a stone house was beyond the means of any but the great nobles, unless it were here and there some exceptionally wealthy Jew; and there was no other building material to be had except wood or rubble, for the nearest approach to a brick which had yet come into general use was a tile;[168] and although these were sometimes used for roofing, the majority of houses, even in great cities like London, were covered with thatch.[169] All the architectural energy of the time spent itself in two channels—military and ecclesiastical; and even the castle was as yet a very simple edifice. The various buildings which occupied its outer ward were mere huts of wood or rubble; and the stone wall of the keep itself, though of enormous thickness and solidity, was often nothing more than a shell, the space inside it being divided by wooden partitions into rooms covered with lean-to roofs of thatch. Even where the keep was entirely of stone, all thought of accommodation or elegance was completely subordinated to the one simple, all-important purpose of defence. It is this stern simplicity which gives to the remains of our early castles a grandeur of their own, and strikes the imagination far more impressively than the elaborate fortifications of later times. But it left no scope to the finer fancies of the architect. His feeling for artistic decoration, his love of beauty, of harmonious light and shade, had free play only in his work for the Church; while the more general taste for personal luxury and elegance had to find expression chiefly in minor matters, and especially in dress. During the last reign the extravagance of attire among the nobles had been carried to a pitch which called forth the energetic remonstrances of serious men; prelate after prelate thundered against the unseemly fashions—the long hair curled and scented like a woman’s, the feminine ornaments, the long pointed shoes and loose flowing garments which rendered all manly exercises impossible.[170] After the Red King’s death a reforming party, headed by the new sovereign and his friend Robert of Meulan,[171] succeeded in effecting a return to the more rational attire of the ordinary Norman knighthood; a close-fitting tunic with a long cloak, reaching almost to the feet, thrown over it for riding or walking.[172] The English townsfolk, then as now, endeavoured to copy the dress of their neighbours from beyond the Channel. Among the rural population, however, foreign fashions were slow to penetrate; and the English countryman went on tilling his fields clad in the linen smock-frock which had once been the ordinary costume of all classes of men among his forefathers, and which has scarcely yet gone out of use among his descendants.