alls
left and a gateway, which show how strongly the town was fortified.
The old Cinque Port, Sandwich, formerly a great and important town,
lately decayed, but somewhat renovated by golf, has two gates left,
and Rochester and Canterbury have some fragments of their walls
standing. The repair of the walls of towns was sometimes undertaken by
guilds. Generous benefactors, like Sir Richard Whittington, frequently
contributed to the cost, and sometimes a tax called murage was levied
for the purpose which was collected by officers named muragers.

The city of York has lost many of its treasures, and the City Fathers
seem to find it difficult to keep their hands off such relics of
antiquity as are left to them. There are few cities in England more
deeply marked with the impress of the storied past than York--the long
and moving story of its gates and walls, of the historical
associations of the city through century after century of English
history. About eighty years ago the Corporation destroyed the
picturesque old barbicans of the Bootham, Micklegate, and Monk Bars,
and only one, Walmgate, was suffered to retain this interesting
feature. It is a wonder they spared those curious stone half-length
figures of men, sculptured in a menacing attitude in the act of
hurling large stones downwards, which vaunt themselves on the summit
of Monk Bar--probably intended to deceive invaders--or that
interesting stone platform only twenty-two inches wide, which was the
only foothold available for the martial burghers who guarded the city
wall at Tower Place. A year or two ago the City Fathers decided, in
order to provide work for the unemployed, to interfere with the city
moats by laying them out as flower-beds and by planting shrubs and
making playgrounds of the banks. The protest of the Yorks
Archaeological Society, we believe, stayed their hands.

The same story can be told of far too many towns and cities. A few
years ago several old houses were demolished in the High Street of the
city of Rochester to make room for electric tramways. Among these was
the old White Hart Inn, built in 1396, the sign being a badge of
Richard II, where Samuel Pepys stayed. He found that "the beds were
corded, and we had no sheets to our beds, only linen to our mouths" (a
narrow strip of linen to prevent the contact of the blanket with the
face). With regard to the disappearance of old inns, we must wait
until we arrive at another chapter.

We will now