o desecrate
churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests. They grew
famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the
day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and
knight's chargers and horses for ambling or for trotting. They thanked
Heaven for the "blessings of fatness and fleeces," as foreign weavers
sought their wool and the gold of Flanders was poured into their
treasure-houses. The same enterprise and energy which in modern days made
England the first manufacturing country of the world was then, in fact,
fast pressing her forward to the place which Australia now holds towards
modern Europe,--the great wool-growing country, the centre from whence
the raw material for commerce was supplied. In vain the Church by its
canons steadily resisted the economic changes of a time when wealth began
to gather again and capital found new uses, and bitterly as it declaimed
against usury and mortgages, angry complaints still increased "that many
people laying aside business practised usury almost openly."

Nor were the towns behindhand in activity. As yet, indeed, the little
boroughs were for the most part busy in fighting for the most elementary
of liberties--for freedom of trade within the town, for permission to hold
a market, for leave to come and go freely to some great fair, for the right
to buy and sell in some neighbouring borough, for liberty to carry out
their own justice and regulate the affairs of their town. They were buying
from the lord, in whose "demesne" they lay, permission to gather wood in
the forest, right of common in its pasture, the commutation of their
services in harvest-time for "reap-silver," and of their bondage to the
lord's mill for "multure-penny." Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with
the king's justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the
borough perhaps to "swear by itself,"--that is, to a jury of its own or its
freedom from the general custom of "frank-pledge." As trade advanced
commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds;
and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the
town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole
body of its burghers--that is, of those who held land within its walls.
The English borough began, in fact, to resemble the foreign "Commune."
Gilds of bakers, of weavers, of mercers, of fullers, of butchers,
goldsm