BOSTON PORT
This name for pride or conceit, whether deserved or not, seems to have stuck to Boston, for a rhyme of later day runs thus:—
Boston Boston Boston!
Thou hast nought to boast on
But a grand sluice, and a high steeple,
And a proud conceited ignorant people,
And a coast which souls get lost on.
And certainly Boston once had some reason to be proud, for though the town was quite an infant till the beginning of the twelfth century, in 1113 “Fergus, a brazier of St. Botolph’s town” was able, according to Ingulphus in his “Chronicles of Croyland Abbey,” “to give 2 Skillets (Skilletas) which supplied the loss of their bells and tower.” The gift, whatever it was (probably small bells), must have been of considerable value to Croyland, which had been burnt down in 1091, and argues much prosperity among Boston tradespeople. Indeed, the town and its trade rose with such rapidity during the next hundred years that when, in the reign of King John, a tax or tythe of a fifteenth was levied on merchants’ goods, Boston’s contribution was £780, being second only to the £836 of London. For the next two centuries it was a commercial port of the first rank, and merchants from Flanders and most of the great Continental towns had houses there.
