Henry showed himself his father's true son, reproducing the good as well as the evil qualities of the Conqueror. He had the advantage over his father of having been born in England, and of living in a generation when the first bitterness of the strife of races was beginning to be assuaged. If he was selfish and hard-hearted and often cruel, yet he dispensed even-handed justice, curbed all oppressors, and kept to the letter of the law. He made so little difference between Norman and Englishman that the two races soon began to melt together: intermarriage between them became common in all classes save the highest nobility; the English thegns and yeomen began to christen their children by Norman names, while the Anglo-Normans began to learn English, and to draw apart from their kindred beyond the sea in the old duchy. Thirty years after Henry's death, it was remarked by a contemporary writer that no man could say that he was either Norman or English, so much had the two races become intermingled. Much of the benefit of this happy union must be laid to the credit of Henry himself, who both set the example of wedding a wife of English blood, and treated all his men of either race as equal before his eyes. Nor was he averse to granting a larger measure of liberty to his subjects: his charter to the city of London, issued in 1100, was a very liberal grant of self-government to the burghers of his capital, and served as a model ever after to his successors when they gave privileges to their town-dwelling liegemen. He allowed the Londoners to raise their own taxes, to choose their own sheriffs, and to make bye-laws for their municipal government. [Sidenote: =Character of Henry.=] But Henry's character had a bad side: he was at times as ruthlessly cruel as his father; he punished not only rebellion, but theft and offences against the forest laws, by death, or blinding, or mutilation. Once, when he found that the workmen of his mints had conspired together to issue base coins, he struck off the right hand of every moneyer in England. We shall see that he was capable of holding his own brother in close prison for thirty years. He was as grasping and avaricious as his predecessor William, though he was much less arbitrary and harsh in his exactions. His private life, though not a patent scandal like that of the Red King, was open to grave reproach. Above all things he was selfish; his own advantage was his aim, and if he governed the land wisely and justly, it was mainly because he thought that wisdom and justice were the best policy for himself. [Sidenote: =Strength of the monarchy.--=]