we remain the same.

Out-of-doors, as Fitz-Stephen shows, the young men skated, wrestled,
played ball, practiced archery, held water tournaments, baited bull and
bear, fought cocks, and rode races. They were also mustered sometimes
for service in the field, and went forth cheerfully, being specially
upheld by the reassuring consciousness that London was always on the
winning side.

The growth of the city government belongs to the history of London.
Suffice it here to say that the people in all times enjoyed a freedom
far above that possessed by any other city of Europe. The history of
municipal London is a history of continual struggle to maintain this
freedom against all attacks, and to extend it and to make it
impregnable. Already the people are proud, turbulent, and confident in
their own strength. They refuse to own any other lord but the king
himself; there is no Earl of London. They freely hold their free and
open meetings, their folk-motes,--in the open space outside the
northwest corner of St. Paul's Churchyard. That they lived roughly,
enduring cold, sleeping in small houses in narrow courts; that they
suffered much from the long darkness of winter; that they were always in
danger of fevers, agues, "putrid" throats, plagues, fires by night, and
civil wars; that they were ignorant of letters,--three schools only for
the whole of London,--all this may very well be understood. But these
things do not make men and women wretched. They were not always
suffering from preventable disease; they were not always hauling their
goods out of the flames; they were not always fighting. The first and
most simple elements of human happiness are three; to wit, that a man
should be in bodily health, that he should be free, that he should enjoy
the produce of his own labor. All these things the Londoner possessed
under the Norman kings nearly as much as in these days they can be
possessed. His city has always been one of the healthiest in the world;
whatever freedom could be attained he enjoyed; and in that rich trading
town all men who worked lived in plenty.

The households, the way of living, the occupations of the women, can be
clearly made out in every detail from the Anglo-Saxon literature. The
women in the country made the garments, carded the wool, sheared the
sheep, washed the things, beat the flax, ground the corn, sat at the
spinning-wheel, and prepared the food. In the towns they had no shearing
to do, but all the r