To trace out the Bristol of the twelfth century in the Bristol of to-day is a matter of difficulty not only from the enormous growth of the town, but from the changes which have taken place in the physical conformation of its site. Nominally, it still stands on the peninsula formed by the junction of the Frome and the Avon; but the courses of both rivers have been so altered and disguised that the earlier aspect of the place is very hard to realize. The original Bristol stood wholly upon the high ground which now forms the neck of the peninsula, then a small tongue of land surrounded on the south-east by the Avon, on the north, west and south by the Frome, which flowed round it almost in the form of a horse-shoe and fell into the Avon on the southern side of the town, just below the present Bristol Bridge.[76] Before the Norman conquest, it seems, the lower course of the Frome had already been diverted from its natural bed;[77] its present channel was not dug till the middle of the thirteenth century, across a wide expanse of marsh stretching all along the right bank of both rivers, and flooded every day by the tide which came rushing up the estuary of Severn almost to the walls of the town, and made it seem like an island in the sea.[78] Within its comparatively narrow limits Bristol must have been in general character and aspect not unlike what it is to-day—a busy, bustling, closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life of commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin, Northmen from the Western Isles and the more distant Orkneys, and even from Norway itself, had long ago learnt to avoid the shock of the “Higra,” the mighty current which still kept its heathen name derived from the sea-god of their forefathers,[79] and make it serve to float them into the safe and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships could ride at anchor.[80] As the great trading centre of the west Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom,[81] surpassed in importance only by Winchester and London. The most lucrative branch of its trade, however, reflects no credit on its burghers. All the eloquence of S. Wulfstan and all the sternness of the Conqueror had barely availed to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men for the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was again in full career in the latter years of Henry I. we learn from the experiences of the canons of Laon. They eagerly went on board some of the vessels in the harbour to buy some clothes, and to inspect the strange wares brought from lands which can have had little or no intercourse with the inland cities of Gaul. On their return they were solemnly implored by their friends in the city not to run such a risk again, as they would most likely find the ships suddenly put to sea and themselves sold into bondage in a foreign land.[82]

No such dangers awaited them at Bath. With their reception there by the bishop[83]—whom the healing virtues of its waters had induced first to remove his bishopstool thither from its lowlier seat at Wells, and then to buy the whole city of King Henry for the sum of five hundred pounds[84]—their itinerary comes to an abrupt end. If they penetrated no further up the Severn valley than Bristol they turned back from the gates of a region which was then reckoned the fairest and wealthiest in England. The vale of Gloucester is described as a sort of earthly paradise, where the soil brought forth of its own accord the most abundant and choicest fruits, where from one year’s end to another the trees were never bare, where the apples hung within reach of the traveller’s hand as he walked along the roads;—above all, where the fruit of the vine, which in other parts of England was mostly sour, yielded a juice scarcely inferior to the wines of Gaul. Another source of wealth was supplied by the fisheries of the great river, the fertilizer as well as the highway of this favoured district. Religion and industry, abbeys and towns, grew and flourished by Severn-side.[85] Worcester was still the head of the diocese; but in political rank it had had to give way to Gloucester. Standing lower down the river, Gloucester was more accessible for trade, while its special importance as the key of the South-Welsh border had made it one of the recognized places for assemblies of the court from the time of the Danish kings. The chief town of the neighbouring valley of the Wye, Hereford, had once been a border-post of yet greater importance; but despite its castle and its bishop’s see, it was now a city “of no great size,” whose broken-down ramparts told the story of a greatness which had passed away.[86]

Far different was the case of Chester. What the estuary of the Severn was to the southern part of western England, that of the Dee was to its northern part; Chester was at once the Bristol and the Gloucester of the north-west coast—the centre of its trade and its bulwark against the Welsh. Beyond the Dee there was as yet little sign of industrial life. Cultivation had made little or no progress among the moorland and forest-tracts of western Yorkshire, and its eastern half had not yet recovered from the harrying with which the Conqueror had avenged its revolt in 1068. For more than sixty miles around York the ground still lay perfectly bare. “Cities whose walls once rose up to heaven—tracts that were once well watered, smiling meadows—if a stranger sees them now, he groans; if a former inhabitant could see them, he would not recognize his home.” The one thing which had survived this ruin was, as ever, the work of the Roman.[87] York still kept its unbroken life, its ecclesiastical primacy, its commercial greatness; the privileges of its merchants were secured by a charter from the king; they had their gild with its “alderman” at its head,[88] their “hans-house” for the making of bye-laws and the transaction of all gild business; and they were freed from all tolls throughout the shire.[89] Far to the north-west, on the Scottish border, Carlisle, after more than two centuries of ruin, had been restored and repeopled by William Rufus. The city had been destroyed by the Danes in 875, and its site remained utterly desolate till in 1092 the Red King drove out an English thegn who occupied it under the protection of Malcolm of Scotland, and reunited it to the English realm.[90] The place still kept some material relics of its earlier past; fragments of its Roman walls were still there, to be used up again in the new fortifications with which the Red King encircled his conquest; and some years later the triclinium of one of its Roman houses called forth the admiring wonder of a southern visitor, William of Malmesbury.[91] But the city and the surrounding country lay almost void of inhabitants, and only the expedient of a colony sent by Rufus from southern England, “to dwell in the land and till it,”[92] brought the beginnings of a new life. Yet before the end of Henry’s reign, that life had grown so vigorous that the archbishop of York found himself unable to make adequate provision for its spiritual needs, and was glad to sanction the formation of Carlisle and its district into a separate diocese.

The chief importance of Carlisle was in its military character, as an outpost of defence against the Scots. On the opposite coast we see springing up, around a fortress originally built for the same purpose, the beginning of an industrial community at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The “customs” of the town contain provisions for the regulation of both inland and outland trade; if a merchant vessel put in at the mouth of the Tyne, the burghers may buy what they will; if a dispute arise between one of them and a foreign merchant, it must be settled before the tide has ebbed thrice; the foreign trader may carry his wares ashore for sale, except salt and herrings, which must be sold on board the ship. No merchant, save a burgher, may buy wool, hides, or any other merchandise outside the town, nor within it, except from burghers; and no one but a burgher may buy, make, or cut cloth for dyeing.[93] Round the minster of S. John of Beverley, on the marshy flats of Holderness, there had grown up a town of sufficient consequence to win from the lord of the soil, Archbishop Thurstan of York, a charter whose privileges were copied from those of the metropolitan city itself. As a whole, however, the north was still a wild region, speaking a tongue of which, as William of Malmesbury complained, “we southrons could make nothing,” and living a life so unconnected with that of southern England that even King Henry still thought it needful to reinforce his ordinary body-guard with a troop of auxiliaries whenever he crossed the Humber.[94]

This isolation was in great part due to physical causes. What is now the busy West Riding was then mainly a vast tract of moor and woodland, stretching from Wakefield to the Peak and from the Westmoreland hills to the sources of the Don; while further east, the district between the lower course of the Don and that of the Trent was one wide morass. Such obstacles were still strong enough to hinder, though not to bar, the intercourse of Yorkshire with mid-England. The only safe line of communication was the Foss Way, which struck across the central plain and along the eastern side of the Trent valley to Lincoln, and thence turned north-westward to cross the Trent and wind round between forest and fen to York. Lincoln was thus the chief station on the highway between York and the south. Under the Norman rule the city had risen to a new importance. Two of its quarters had been entirely transformed; the south-western was now covered by a castle, and the south-eastern by a cathedral church. Neither building was the first of its kind which had occupied the spot. Few sites in England could have been more attractive to a soldier’s eye than the crest of the limestone ridge descending abruptly to the south into a shallow sort of basin, watered by the little river Witham, and on the west sloping gradually down to a broad alluvial swamp extending as far as the bank of the Trent. The hundred and sixty-six houses which the Conqueror swept away to make room for his castle[95] were but encroachments on an earlier fortification, a “work” of mounds and earthen ramparts of the usual old English type, which now served as a foundation for his walls of stone.[96] To the ardent imagination of the medieval Church, on the other hand, the rocky brow of Lincoln might well seem to cry out for a holier crown, and a church of S. Mary was already in existence[97] on the site where Bishop Remigius of Dorchester, forsaking his lowly home in the valley of the Thames, reared his bishopstool amid the foundations of that great minster of our Lady whose noble group of towers now rises on the crest of the hill as a beacon to all the country round.[98] But there were other reasons for the translation of the bishopric than those of sentiment or of personal taste. Of the vast Mid-Anglian diocese, which stretched from the Thames to the Humber, Lincoln was beyond all comparison the most important town. Even in Roman times the original quadrangular enclosure of Lindum Colonia had been found too small, and a fortified suburb had spread down to the left bank of the Witham. During the years of peace which lasted from the accession of Cnut to that of William, the needs of an increasing population, as we have seen, covered the site of the older fortress with dwellings: when these were cleared away at William’s bidding, their exiled inhabitants found a new home on a plot of hitherto waste ground beyond the river; and a new town, untrammelled by the physical obstacles which had cramped the growth of the city on the hill, sprang up around the two churches of S. Mary-le-Wigford and S. Peter-at-Gowts.[99] Some fifty years later Lincoln was counted one of the most populous and flourishing cities in England.[100] The roads which met on the crest of its hill to branch off again in all directions formed only one of the ways by which trade poured into its market. Not only had the now dirty little stream of Witham a tide strong enough to bring the small merchant vessels of the day quite up to the bridge: it was connected with the Trent at Torksey by a canal, probably of Roman origin, known as the Foss Dyke; this after centuries of neglect was cleared out and again made navigable by order of Henry I.,[101] and through it there flowed into Lincoln a still more extensive trade from the lower Trent Valley and the Humber. The “men of the city and the merchants of the shire” were already banded together in a merchant-gild;[102] and it is doubtless this gild which is represented by the “citizens of Lincoln” who in 1130 paid two hundred marks of silver and four marks of gold for the privilege of holding their city in chief of the king.[103]

The removal of Bishop Remigius from Dorchester to Lincoln was in accordance with a new practice, which had come in since the Norman conquest, of placing the episcopal see in the chief town of the diocese. The same motive had prompted a translation of the old Mercian bishopric from Lichfield, now described as “a little town in the woodland, with a rivulet flowing by it, far away from the throng of cities,”[104] to Chester, whence, however, it was soon removed again to the great abbey of Coventry.[105] The same reason, too, caused Norwich to succeed Thetford as the seat of the bishopric of East-Anglia. It was but very recently that Lincoln had outstripped Norwich as the chief city of eastern England. The mouth of the Yare, which had a tideway navigation quite up to the point where the Wensum falls into it, was no less conveniently placed than that of the Witham for intercourse with northern Europe; and the Scandinavian traders and settlers in the first half of the eleventh century had raised Norwich to such a pitch of prosperity that at the coming of the Norman it contained twenty-four churches, and its burghers seem to have been more numerous than those of any town in the realm except London and York.[106] Twenty years later their number was indeed greatly diminished; the consequences of Earl Ralf’s rebellion had wrought havoc in the city. But if its native population had decreased, a colony of Norman burghers was growing up and flourishing in a “new borough,” now represented by the parishes of S. Peter Mancroft and S. Giles; the number of churches and chapels had risen to forty-four,[107] and in the Red King’s last years the foundations of the cathedral were laid by Bishop Herbert Lozinga, whose grave may still be seen before its high altar.[108] Once in the next reign Norwich supplanted Gloucester as the scene of the Midwinter Council; King Henry kept Christmas there in 1121.[109] It may have been on this occasion that the citizens won from him their first charter; but the charter itself is lost, and we only learn the bare fact of its existence from the words of Henry II., confirming to the burghers of Norwich “all the customs, liberties and acquittances which they had in the time of my grandfather.”[110]

It was, however, in the valley of the Thames that English town-life was growing up most vigorously. Tried by the test of statistics, indeed, Oxford was still but a small place; in the time of the Confessor it had only contained about a thousand dwellings, and before the Domesday survey was made the town had, through some unexplained cause, suffered such decay that more than half of these were waste.[111] But the “waste” was quickly repaired under the wise government of Robert of Oilly, to whom the chief command at Oxford was entrusted by the Conqueror, and of his nephew and namesake who succeeded to his office. Before the close of Henry’s reign every side of that marvellously varied life of Oxford which makes its history seem like an epitome of the history of all England was already in existence, though only in germ. The military capabilities of the site, recognized long ago by Eadward the Elder, had been carefully strengthened; within the natural protection of its encircling rivers, the town was “closely girt about with rampart and ditch,”[112] and the mound, raised probably by Eadward himself, at its western end had been made the nucleus of a mighty fortress which was soon to become famous in the struggle of Stephen and Matilda.[113] Nor was fortification the sole care of the D’Oillys; within and without the city, works of piety and of public utility sprang up under their direction. The ancient ford which had given the town a name was no longer the sole means of crossing the network of streams which fenced it in on every side save one; the High Bridge of our own day represents one built by the first Robert of Oilly.[114] Of the sixteen churches and chapels which Oxford now contained,[115] S. George’s-in-the-Castle was certainly and S. Peter’s-in-the-East probably founded by him;[116] several of the older parish churches which had fallen into decay were restored at his expense;[117] and those of S. Michael and S. Mary the Virgin, as well as that of S. Mary Magdalene without the walls, were all founded in his time or in that of his nephew, if not actually by their munificence.[118] One of these, S. Mary the Virgin, was to become famous in after-days as the University church. As yet, the centre of intellectual life at Oxford was the ancient monastery of S. Fritheswith or Frideswide, which after many vicissitudes had finally passed into the hands of the Austin canons,[119] and entered upon a new career of prosperity under its learned prior Guimund, the builder of the beautiful church which now stands hidden away beneath the later splendours of Christ Church, like a buried and yet living relic of an earlier and simpler age. Even S. Frideswide’s, however, had a formidable rival in the priory of Oseney which the younger Robert of Oilly founded, also for Austin canons, in the island-meadow overlooked by his castle-tower.[120] The Augustinians were a new order whose rise was closely associated with the revival of intellectual and social culture; their houses were the best schools of the time—schools in which the scholars were trained for secular no less than for clerical careers—and their presence at Oseney and S. Frideswide’s was already preparing the intellectual soil of Oxford to receive, at the close of Henry’s reign, the seeds of the first English University in the divinity lectures of Robert Pulein.[121] The burgher-life of the city had long gathered round the church of S. Martin; in its churchyard was held the portmannimot or general assembly of the citizens; they had their merchant-gild and their gild-hall;[122] they had their common pasture-land,[123] the wide green “Port-meadow” beyond the Isis; and we see the growth of a local industry in the appearance of the leather-sellers’ and weavers’ gilds. Shortly before Henry’s death, there were indications that Oxford was soon to regain the political position which it had held under the old English and Danish kings, but had entirely lost since their time. A strange legacy of awe had been left to the city by its virgin patroness. The story went that Fritheswith, flying from the pursuit of her royal lover, sank down exhausted at the gate, and, despairing of further escape, called upon Heaven itself to check him; as he entered the town he was struck blind, and though her prayers afterwards restored his sight, no king after him dared set foot within the boundaries of Oxford for fear of incurring some similar punishment.[124] It must be supposed that the councils held at Oxford under Æthelred and Cnut met outside the walls; we cannot tell whether any countenance was given to the legend by the circumstances of Harald Harefoot’s death; but from that time forth we hear of no more royal visits to Oxford till 1133—the very year of Robert Pulein’s lectures. Then we find that Henry I., whose favourite country residence was at Woodstock, had been so drawn to the neighbouring town as to build himself a “new hall” there,[125] just outside the northern wall, on the ground afterwards known as Beaumont-fields. He held but one festival there, the last Easter which he ever spent in England; but each in turn of the rival candidates for the throne left vacant by his death found Oxford ready to become a political as well as a military centre of scarcely less importance than London itself.