Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/95

Rh to the Cinque Ports—originally Hastings, Hythe, Romney Dover, and Sandwich—each of which towns was bound, upon forty days' notice, to furnish and man a certain number of ships of war, in proportion probably to its estimated wealth or population. Other towns in different parts of the coast also appear to have held of the crown by the same kind of service.

One of the old Saxon laws revived or continued by the Conqueror, and the only one in the collection of enactments which passes under the name of his Charter having any reference to trade, is the prohibition against all purchases above a certain amount, except in the presence of witnesses. "No one shall buy," it is declared, "either what is living or what is dead, to the value of four pennies, without four witnesses, either of the borough or of the village."

About the year 1110, Henry I. established a colony of Flemings in the district of Ross, in Pembrokeshire. These foreigners had come over in the reign of the Conqueror, driven from their native country, it is said, by an inundation of the sea, and they had been settled, in the first instance, chiefly about Carlisle and the neighbouring ports, and, as it would seem, with a view merely to the service their hardihood and skill in war might be of in the defence of the northern frontier of the kingdom. But they were as dexterous in handling both the plough and the shuttle as the sword. Henry is said to have been induced to remove them to Wales, by finding that they and the English, with whom they were mixed, did not agree well together. In the district of which he put them in possession, and which he had taken from the Welsh, they maintained their ground against all the efforts of the hostile people by whom they were surrounded to dislodge them, and soon came to be regarded as the force to be mainly depended upon for keeping the Welsh in check. By these Flemings the manufacture of woollen cloths appears to have been first introduced into this country; and it is supposed that they soon came to be made for exportation as well as for home consumption. Giraldus Cambrensis describes the foreigners as "a people