Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/518

502 the Romans had done before them. The Teutonic invaders, in other words, took the best agricultural lands for themselves, while the Kelts were driven back into the rugged primary tract of hill and forest. Throughout the middle ages, agriculture and grazing formed the staple English industries. Accordingly, during the early English period, we find all the more important towns occupying the cultivable valleys or gentle plains. Canterbury and Rochester, the two Kentish capitals, stand in the midst of tertiary lowlands; London, the final royal city of the West Saxon kingdom, lies surrounded by a similar tract; the Oxfordshire Dorchester, first home of the Wessex kings, is on the border of the rich vales of Aylesbury and Oxford; Winchester, their later seat, commands the valleys of the Itchin and the Test. Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds, and Ipswich were important centers for the East Anglian drift. Peterborough and Ely rose among the levels of the Nen and the fens of the Ouse. Lincoln, Oxford, and Chippenham stood upon the great central oölitic belt. Cambridge occupied a low-lying corner of the cretaceous system. Exeter, Lichfield, and Chester were girt round with the fertile triassic meadow-lands. York still remained the capital of the north, and the metropolis of a kingdom which long retained the foremost position held by the north under Roman rule. These were the great cities of England before the Norman Conquest, and not one of them stands upon a primary formation. All of them, save only London, have now sunk to the position of mere cathedral cities, university towns, or agricultural centers. But Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Bristol, and Cardiff, the great cities of to-day, are all built upon primary rocks; while the only two important modern towns which rest on later strata are Birmingham, on the borders of the Black Country coal-field, and Liverpool, which lives by conveying the cotton of America to the great Lancashire colliery district around Manchester, Rochdale, and Oldham.

In the later middle ages England became a wool-stapling country. Bales of wool were shipped from the Orwell for Flanders and Italy, as they are now shipped from Australia for Leeds and Bradford. This was the first step toward making Britain a commercial country. Before the Norman Conquest it had been an essentially agricultural and self-sufficing community, growing all that it required to meet its own simple needs, and neither exporting nor importing goods to any noticeable extent. But the wool export created a foreign trade. Ports sprang up along the south and east coasts, from Dartmouth, Topsham, and Lyme Regis to the now forgotten haven of Ravenspuron-Humber, the precursor of our modern Hull. This trade gave importance to the chalk districts, high sheep-walks now the barest and least inhabited portion of southeastern England. Not a single town of any pretensions at present occurs in any part of the downs or wolds. But Dorchester, Shaftesbury, Old and New Sarum,