chants of Köln or Bruges would have started into a civic importance such as the victory of Hastings gave to the Norman traders.

For the immediate effect of the Conquest was to increase the number of the settlers. It is a side of Norman history which has hardly received the notice it deserves, this peaceful invasion of the Norman industrial and trading classes which followed quick on the conquests of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he quartered himself on English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English cloister, gathered French artists or French domestics round him for his new castle or his new church. Around Battle, for instance, French dependents-"Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Mauger the Smith, Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor"-mixed with the English tenantry. More especially was this the case with the capital. No sooner had London submitted to Duke William, than "many of the citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers in that city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading, and better stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic." A yet more important result of the Conquest lay in its giving the rapidlyincreasing colony a civic existence. It was impossible that the countrymen of the Conqueror should remain strangers in the Conqueror's capital. A curious monument of London's history tells us how quickly Chron. de Bello, pp. 14-16.

† Anon. Lambeth, Giles' Beket, ii. 73.

the change took place. In the archives of Guildhall is still preserved a little slip of parchment, in length and breadth hardly bigger than a man's thumb, scored with a few lines in the Old English tongue. It would be difficult to exaggerate the interest or the real importance of this relic-William's Charter to the Burgesses of London-when we remember that the liberties thus preserved became the model and precedent of the great bulk of English municipal charters, or how much of the future of England itself lay hid in the liberties of London. But the simple words of its opening indicate that, while possessing the full rights of citizenship and occupying in William's eyes a position even superior to the older English burgesses, the new colony still preserved its separate existence :— William, King, greets Bishop William and Godfrey the Portgrave, and all the burgesses in London, Frenchmen and Englishmen, friendly."*

66

With one of these Norman burghers the life of St. Thomas brings us in contact, and, scanty as are the details of the story, they agree in a very striking way with the indications afforded us by the charter of the king. The story of the early years of Thomas Beket has very naturally been passed over with little attention by his modern biographers in their haste to fight the battle of his after-career. But long before he became St. Thomas, Archbishop Thomas, or Thomas of Canterbury, he was known as Thomas of London, son (to use his own boast) of "a citizen, living without

*Liber Custumarum, i. 25.

blame among his fellow-citizens." his fellow-citizens." So completely was the family adopted into the city, that the monks of Canterbury could beg loans from the burgesses on the plea that the great martyr was a Londoner born; and on the city seal of the fourteenth century, London addressed him as at once her patron and her son, “Me, quæ te peperi, ne cesses, Thoma, tueri." The name of his father, Gilbert Beket, is one of the few that remain to us of the Portreves, the predecessors of the Mayors, under Stephen; he held a large property in houses. within the walls; and a proof of his civic importance was long preserved in the annual visit of each newlyelected chief magistrate to his tomb in the little chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of Pauls.* Yet Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of the Conqueror. He was by birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a burgher family of Caen; he claimed kinship with the Norman, Theobald, and received the Norman Baron de l'Aigle as a guest.

But the story of the Bekets does more than illustrate the outer position of the Norman colony: it gives us a glimpse, the more precious because it is unique, of its inner life. Students of hagiology learn to be cautious about the stories of precocious holiness, the apocryphal gospels of the infancy, which meet him at the outset of most saints' lives; but it is remarkable that in the life of St. Thomas there is no

pretension of the kind In the stead of juvenile miracles, we are presented with the vivid little picture

Liber Albus, p. 26.

of a London home, which sets the Norman colony fairly before us. We see the very aspect of the house (the Mercers' Chapel, in Cheapside, still preserves its site for us), the tiny bed-room, the larger hall opening directly on the bustle of the narrow Cheap. We gain a hint from the costly coverlet of purple, sumptuously wrought, which Mother Rohese flings over her child's cradle, of the new luxury and taste which the Conquest had introduced into the home of the trader as into the castle of the noble. A glance at the guests and relatives of the family shows how the new colony served as a medium between the city and the court: the young Baron Richer of Aquila is often there, hunting and hawking with the boy, as he grows up; Archdeacon Baldwin and Clerk Eustace look in from Canterbury, to chat over young Thomas and his chances of promotion in the curia of Archbishop Theobald; there is a kinsman, too, of Gilbert's, a citizen of his own stamp, Osbern Huit-deniers, "of great name and repute, not only among his fellowburghers, but also with those of the court."* Without the home, the Norman influence makes itself felt in a new refinement of manners and breeding; the young citizen grows up free and genial enough, but with a Norman horror of coarseness in his geniality.† London shares in the great impulse which the Conquest has given to education; the children of her citizens are sent to the new Priory of Merton; the burghers flock to the boys' exercises at the schools attached to * Roger, apud Giles, S. T. C. i. 98.

"Rusticitatis notam cavens." Anon. Lamb. S. T. C. ii. 74.

the three principal churches of the town. The chief care of Rohese was for her son's education; in his case it is finished at Paris, before the young Londoner passes to the merchant's desk.

The little picture reflects for us very faithfully the double aspect of the new colony,-fully accepting their position among their fellow-citizens, but preserving jealously their Norman connection and Norman feeling; and able, from the lead which they necessarily took among the burghers, to give their Norman tone to civic policy. And in this great crisis of London history it was the Norman antipathy to the Angevin that told strongest for Stephen. For a whole century, the bitterest of provincial feuds had severed Normandy from Anjou; and the marriage of policy by which Henry endeavoured to propitiate his most restless enemy only deepened the hatred of the Normans by the fear of an Angevin master. Their awe of the king-duke hushed, but could not check, the stern resolve to reject his successor. No pages in Orderic's story of the time are more vivid than those in which he tells how Normandy rose as one man when Count Geoffry Plantagenet crossed the border on tidings of Henry's death, to claim the duchy in right of his wife; how the tocsin pealed from every steeple how farmer and labourer poured out from cottage and grange-how the Angevin marauders, the hated "Guirribecs," were knocked on the head like sheep, and the proud count fled homeward through wood and ford, with loss of baggage and arms. was hatred and dread of the Angevin that made Nor

It