s
congenial to later liverymen, hawking, cock-fighting, and much more. The
word _cockney_ is not improbably derived from _cocayne_, the name of an
imaginary land of ease and jollity.

The city of London within the walls was not wholly built, many gardens
and open spaces remaining. And the houses were never more than a single
story above the ground-floor, according to the uniform type of English
dwellings in the twelfth and following centuries. On the other hand, the
liberties contained many inhabitants; the streets were narrower than
since the fire of 1666; and the vast spaces now occupied by warehouses
might have been covered by dwelling-houses. Forty thousand, on the
whole, seems rather a low estimate for these two centuries; but it is
impossible to go beyond the vaguest conjecture.

The population of Paris in the middle ages has been estimated with as
much diversity as that of London. M. Dulaure, on the basis of the
_taille_ in 1313, reckons the inhabitants at 49,110.[466] But he seems
to have made unwarrantable assumptions where his data were deficient. M.
Guerard, on the other hand (Documens Inedits, 1841), after long
calculations, brings the population of the city in 1292 to 215,861. This
is certainly very much more than we could assign to London, or probably
any European city; and, in fact, his estimate goes on two arbitrary
postulates. The extent of Paris in that age, which is tolerably known,
must be decisive against so high a population.[467]

The Winton Domesday, in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of
London, furnishes some important information as to that city, which, as
well as London, does not appear in the great Domesday Book. This record
is of the reign of Henry I. Winchester had been, as is well known, the
capital of the Anglo-Saxon kings. It has been observed that "the
opulence of the inhabitants may possibly be gathered from the frequent
recurrence of the trade of goldsmith in it, and the populousness of the
town from the enumeration of the streets." (Cooper's Public Records, i.
226.) Of these we find sixteen. "In the petition from the city of
Winchester to king Henry VI. in 1450, no less than nine of these streets
are mentioned as having been ruined." As York appears to have contained
about 10,000 inhabitants under the Confessor, we may probably compute
the population of Winchester at nearly twice that number.

NOTE VI. Page 32.

The Lords' committee extenuate the presumption that