lay the life of Englishmen who were doing
more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their
home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their
steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.

[Sidenote: London]

London stood first among English towns, and the privileges which its
citizens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs. Even
at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all
its ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited
by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger. One
immediate result of William's success was an immigration into England
from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed
quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he
quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered
his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French
domestics about him. Round the Abbey of Battle which William founded on
the site of his great victory "Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver,
Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," dwelt mixed
with the English tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants play so
notable a part as in London. The Normans had had mercantile
establishments in London as early as the reign of AEthelred, if not of
Eadgar. Such settlements however naturally formed nothing more than a
trading colony like the colony of the "Emperor's Men," or Easterlings.
But with the Conquest their number greatly increased. "Many of the
citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers
in this city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and better
stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic." The
status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They could no longer
be looked upon as strangers in cities which had passed under the Norman
rule. In some cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in
a separate French town, side by side with the English borough. But in
London it seems to have taken at once the position of a governing class.
Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later
days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of
its mayors; he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses within
the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in the
annual v