could rival the
financial operations of Lombard or Tuscan, and climb into the baronial
class. The proud and mutinous temper of the Londoners was largely due
to their ever-increasing wealth. We are on the threshold of the careers
of commercial magnates, like the Philpots and the Whittingtons. Even
when Edward III. was still on the throne, a London mayor of no special
note, John Pyel, could set up in his native Northamptonshire village of
Irthlingborough a college and church of remarkable stateliness and
dignity. The growth of the wool trade, and its gradual transfer to
English hands, the development of the staple system, the rise of an
English seaman class that knew all the havens of Europe, the beginnings
of the English cloth manufacture, all indicate that English commerce
was not only becoming more extensive, but was gradually emancipating
itself from dependence on the foreigner. Thus before the end of
Edward's reign England was an intensely national state, proudly
conscious of itself, and haughtily contemptuous of the foreigner, with
its own language, literature, style in art, law, universities, and even
the beginnings of a movement towards the nationalisation of the Church.
The cosmopolitanism of the earlier Middle Ages was everywhere on the
wane. A modern nation had arisen out of the old world-state and
world-spirit. In the England of Edward III., Chaucer, and Wycliffe, we
have reached the consummation of the movement whose first beginnings we
have traced in the early storms of the reign of Henry III. It is in the
development of this tendency that the period from 1216 to 1377
possesses such unity as it has.

During the years of peace after the treaty of Calais, Edward III.
completed the scheme for the establishment of his family begun with the
grant of Aquitaine to the Black Prince. The state of the king's
finances made it impossible for him to provide for numerous sons and
daughters from the royal exchequer, and the system of appanages had
seldom been popular or successful in England. Edward found an easier
way of endowing his offspring by politic marriages that transferred to
his sons the endowments and dignities of the great houses, which, in
spite of lavish creations of new earldoms, were steadily dying out in
the male line. Some of his daughters in the same way were married into
baronial families whose attachment to the throne would, it was
believed, be strengthened by intermarriage with the king's kin; while