Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/727

318 and let it be: though, when they got more civilized, the long extinct glories of Rome took some revenge for this destruction, by the impression which they made on the descendants of the destroyers: e.g., an Anglo-Saxon poet of about the time of Athelstane wrote a poem on the ruins of an old Roman city which is as pathetic and beautiful as any lyric extant in any language, and you may, if you please, look on it as a forecast of the glories of the cities that were yet to come.

"Gradually, as civilization grew, the population thickened in certain places where the protection of the feudal lord—Baron, Bishop, or Abbot—made a market possible; and in short the growth of such places made our mediæval towns; though, as was like to be, where an old Roman town like York or London was still in existence, it was used as such a centre. But doubtless our mediæval towns were very small, smaller than our imagination of them pictures them to us; while on the other hand, the country villages were in many cases much larger than they are now. In fact in those days it was not so much the houses that made the town, as the constitution, the freemen and the guilds, which gradually grew into the Corporation. My familiarity with Oxford makes it easy to me to see a mediæval town of the more important kind: a place of some extent within its ancient walls, but the houses much broken by gardens and open spaces within the walls, and without them, a small estate it may be called, the communal property of the freemen. On the whole, then, the towns of the Middle Ages, in this country at least, were a part of the countrysides where they stood.

"In the Middle Ages even London was no more of a centre than Bristol or York, or indeed other