ssize of Clarendon. The
sums raised told, in fact, of the general increase of wealth. The
national income, which at the beginning of Henry's reign had been but
L22,000, was raised in the last year to L48,000, and an enormous
treasure had been accumulated said to be equal to 100,000 marks, or, by
another account, to be worth L900,000. The increase of trade was shown
by the growing numbers of Jews, the bankers and usurers of the time. At
the beginning of Henry's reign they were still so few that it was
possible to maintain a law which forbade their burial anywhere save in
one cemetery near London. Before its close their settlements were so
numerous that Jewish burial-grounds had to be established near every
great town. Their banking profits were enormous, and Christians who saw
the wages of sin heaped up before their eyes, looked wistfully at a
business forbidden by the ecclesiastical standard of morals of that day.

The towns were stirred with a new activity. London naturally led the
way. The very look of the city told of its growing wealth. Till now the
poor folk in towns found shelter in hovels of such a kind that Henry II.
could order that the houses of heretics should be carried outside the
town and burned. But the new wealth of merchant and Jew and trader was
seen in the "stone houses," some indeed like "royal palaces," which
sprang up on every hand, and offered a new temptation to house-breakers
and plunderers of the thickly-peopled alleys. The new cathedral of St.
Paul's had just been built. The tower and the palace at Westminster had
been repaired by the splendid extravagance of Chancellor Thomas, and the
citizens, impatient of the wooden bridge that spanned the river, were on
the point of beginning the "London Bridge" of stone. In the next quarter
of a century merchants of Kiln had their guild-hall in the city, while
merchants of the Empire were settled by the river-side in the hall later
known as the Steel Yard. Already charters confirmed to London its own
laws and privileges, and only three or four years after Henry's death
its limited freedom was exchanged for a really municipal life under a
mayor elected by the citizens themselves. Oxford too, at the close of
Henry's reign, was busy replacing its old wooden hovels with new "houses
of stone"; and could buy from Richard a charter which set its citizens
as free from toll or due as those of London, and gave them, instead of
the king's bailiff, a mayor of their ow