of Paris that commerce, which needed
liberty as well as protection, at first progressed most rapidly. The
northern provinces had early united manufacturing industry with traffic,
and this double source of local prosperity was the origin of their
enormous wealth. Ghent and Bruges in the Low Countries, and Beauvais and
Arras, were celebrated for their manufacture of cloths, carpets, and
serge, and Cambrai for its fine cloths. The artizans and merchants of
these industrious cities then established their powerful corporations,
whose unwearied energy gave rise to that commercial freedom so favourable
to trade.

[Illustration: Fig. 194. Whale-Fishing. Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the
"Cosmographie Universelle" of Thevet, in folio: Paris, 1574.]

More important than the woollen manufactures--for the greater part of the
wool used was brought from England--was the manufacture of flax, inasmuch
as it encouraged agriculture, the raw material being produced in France.
This first flourished in the north-east of France, and spread slowly to
Picardy, to Beauvois, and Brittany. The central countries, with the
exception of Bruges, whose cloth manufactories were already celebrated in
the fifteenth century, remained essentially agricultural; and their
principal towns were merely depots for imported goods. The institution of
fairs, however, rendered, it is true, this commerce of some of the towns
as wide-spread as it was productive. In the Middle Ages religious feasts
and ceremonials almost always gave rise to fairs, which commerce was not
slow in multiplying as much as possible. The merchants naturally came to
exhibit their goods where the largest concourse of people afforded the
greatest promise of their readily disposing of them. As early as the first
dynasty of Merovingian kings, temporary and periodical markets of this
kind existed; but, except at St. Denis, articles of local consumption only
were brought to them. The reasons for this were, the heavy taxes which
were levied by the feudal lords on all merchandise exhibited for sale, and
the danger which foreign merchants ran of being plundered on their way, or
even at the fair itself. These causes for a long time delayed the progress
of an institution which was afterwards destined to become so useful and
beneficial to all classes of the community.

We have several times mentioned the famous fair of Landit, which is
supposed to have been established by Charlemagne, but which no doubt wa