eir population
increase continuously. Suburbs join the old enclosure; new markets are
established; new churches are built for the new comers; and soon the
primitive nucleus of the town, surrounded on all sides by the houses of
the immigrants, becomes merely the quarter of the priests, bound to the
shadow of the cathedral and submerged on all sides by the expansion of
lay life. Much that at the beginning was the essential is now nothing
more than the accessory. The episcopal burg disappears amid
faubourgs.[11] The city has not been formed by growing with its own
forces. It has been brought into existence by the attraction which it
has exerted upon its surroundings whenever it has been aided by its
situation. It is the creation of those who have migrated toward it. It
has been made from without and not from within. The bourgeoisie of the
oldest towns of Europe is a population of the transplanted. But it is at
the same time essentially a trading population, and no other proof of
this need be advanced than the fact that, down to the beginning of the
twelfth century, _mercator_ and _burgensis_ were synonymous terms.

Whence came these pioneers of commerce, these immigrants seeking means
of subsistence, and what resources did they bring with them into the
rising towns? Doubtless only the strength of their arms, the force of
their wills, the clearness of their intelligence. Agricultural life
continued to be the normal life and none of those who remained upon the
soil could entertain the idea of abandoning his holding to go to the
town and take his chances in a new existence. As for selling the holding
to get ready money, like the men of a modern rural population, no one at
that time could have imagined such a transaction. The ancestors of the
bourgeoisie must then be sought, specifically, in the mass of those
wandering beings who, having no land to cultivate, floated across the
surface of society, living from day to day upon the alms of the
monasteries, hiring themselves to the cultivators of the soil in harvest
time, enlisting in the armies in time of war, and shrinking from neither
pillage nor rapine if the occasion presented itself. It may without
difficulty be admitted that there may have been among them some rural
artisans or some professional peddlers. But it is beyond question that
with very few exceptions it was poor men who floated to the towns and
there built up the first fortunes in movable property that the Middle