cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French domestics about him.  Round the Abbey of Battle which William founded on the site of his great victory “Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor,” dwelt mixed with the English tenantry.  But nowhere did these immigrants play so notable a part as in London.  The Normans had had mercantile establishments in London as early as the reign of AEthelred, if not of Eadgar.  Such settlements however naturally formed nothing more than a trading colony like the colony of the “Emperor’s Men,” or Easterlings.  But with the Conquest their number greatly increased.  “Many of the citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers in this city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and better stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic.”  The status of these traders indeed had wholly changed.  They could no longer be looked upon as strangers in cities which had passed under the Norman rule.  In some cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in a separate French town, side by side with the English borough.  But in London it seems to have taken at once the position of a governing class.  Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of its mayors; he held in Stephen’s time a large property in houses within the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in the annual visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in a little chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of St. Paul’s.  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 from Caen.

[Sidenote:  Freedom of London]

It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no doubt to the long internal peace and order secured by the Norman rule, that London owed the wealth and importance to which it attained during the reign of Henry the First.  The charter which Henry granted it became a model for lesser boroughs.  The king yielded its citizens the right of justice; each townsman could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court or hustings whose sessions took place every week.  They were subject only to the old English trial by oath, and exempt from the trial by battle which the Normans introduced.  Their trade was protected from toll or exaction over the length and breadth of the land.  The king however still nominated in London as elsewhere the portreeve, or magistrate of the town, nor were the citizens as yet united together in a commune or corporation.  But an imperfect civic organization existed in the “wards” or quarters of the town, each governed by its own alderman, and in the “gilds” or voluntary associations of merchants or traders which ensured order and mutual