against the church walls, and a tangle of narrow lanes leading to
the river-side, was in no way fit for the great demands of an awakened
commerce; its life went on as of old, but the sea was driven back by a
vast embankment, and the "Bishop's Lynn" rose on the newly-won land along
the river-bank, with its great market-place, its church, its jewry, its
merchant-houses, and its guild-houses; and soon, in the thick of the
busiest quarter, by the wharves, rose the "stone house" of the bishop
himself, looking closely out on the "strangers' ships" that made their
way along the Ouse laden with provisions and with merchandise.

But this growing wealth was still mainly confined to the towns. The
great bulk of the country was purely agricultural, and had no concern in
any questions of trade. There is a record of over five hundred pleas of
the Gloucestershire fifty years later, and among all these there is
outside the _town_ of Gloucester but one case which deals with the lawful
width for weaving cloth, and one or two as to the sale of bread, ale, or
wine. The agricultural peasants seem, from the glimpses which we catch
here and there, to have for the most part lived on the very verge
of starvation. Every few years with dreary regularity we note the
chronicler's brief record of cattle-plague, famine, pestilence. Half
a century later we read in legal records the tale of a hard winter and
its consequences--the dead bodies of the famine-stricken serfs lying in
the fields on every side, and the judges of the King's Court claiming from
the starving survivors the "murder-fine" ordained by law to be paid for
every dead body found when the murderer was not produced. The system of
cultivation was ignorant and primitive. Rendered timid by the repeated
failure of crops, the poor people would set aside a part of their land to
sow together oats, barley, and wheat, in the hope that whatever were the
season something would come up which might serve for the rough black bread
which was their main food. The low wet grounds were still undrained, and
the number of cases of eye-disease which we find in the legends of
miraculous cures point to the prevalence of ophthalmia brought on by damp
and low living, as the army of lepers points to the filth and misery of
the poor .The "common fields" and pastures of the villages must have lain
on the higher grounds which were not mere swamps during half the year. But
to these a dry season brought ruin. In time of