Let us pass on to consider the daily life of the people. To begin with, they were a busy people; there were no idle men: everybody followed some pursuit; there were the wholesale merchants, the retailers, and the craftsmen. I have submitted a rough division of London streets into belts. In thinking of the aspect of the City, understand that there were no shops in the streets at all; nor was there any crying of things up and down the streets. All the retail trade was carried on in the markets, West Chepe and East Chepe, and the wholesale trade was conducted in Thames Street beside the quays and the warehouses.
The markets were, first, Billingsgate for fish, salt, onions, other fruits and roots, wheat and all kinds of grain; every great ship paid for “standage” twopence; every small ship one penny; a lesser ship one penny; a lesser boat a halfpenny; for every two quarters of corn the King was to have one farthing; on a comb of corn, one penny; on every tun of ale going out of England, fourpence; on every thousand herrings, a farthing, etc. Queenhithe, or Edred’s Hithe, was probably of later date than Billingsgate.
London had already among her inhabitants many merchants of foreign descent; they came from Caen and from Rouen, from Germany and from Flanders. The “Emperor’s Men” had already set up their steelyard and begun to trade within walls of their own, protected by strong gates, and possessed of extensive privileges. The men of Lubeck, Hamburg, and the Flemings, who did not belong to the “Gildhalla Teutonicorum,” also set up their fortified trading-houses. I do not suppose that the connection which was afterwards established between London and the country gentry had yet been established; indeed it is impossible, seeing that most of the manors of England had been granted to the Norman followers of King William, and as yet these new masters of the soil were in no sense English. But, as we have seen, many of the nobles already had their town houses in London.
In the “Dialogus Scaccario,” printed in full in Madox’sHistory of the Exchequer, and in Stubbs’sSelect Charters, there is a most valuable passage on the fusion of the Normans and the English. It is as follows:—
“In the early condition of the Kingdom after the Conquest, those who were left of the subject English used to lay snares secretly against the race of Normans suspected and hateful to them: here and there, wherever the chance offered, they murdered Normans in their forests and remote places, in punishment for which, when the Kings and their ministers for several years raged against the English with exquisite modes of torture, yet found that they would not wholly desist, it was at length resolved that the Hundred in which a Norman was found murdered, if the murderer was not discovered or took to flight, should be condemned to pay a large sum of money, sometimes as much as thirty-six or even forty-three pounds, according to the character of the place and the frequency of the crime....”
“Now, however, the English and the Normans living together and intermarrying with each other, the two nations are so mixed that it is difficult to distinguish, among free men, who is English and who is Norman by descent.”