The river Dee washed the walls of the Water Tower, and great iron rings, to which the barges were moored, were fixed in the Tower walls. The ships brought wines from Gascony and cloth from Flanders, whither the monks of Vale Royal and Combermere sent the wool of the flocks that pastured on their meadows. Some of the Flemish weavers left their own country and settled on the shores of the Mersey near Birkenhead. In nearly every field in the pastoral parts of Cheshire are to be found one or more small round pools, often fringed with willows and reeds. You know them well, for you have been to them often to watch the tadpoles and the minnows. But you have not wondered why they are there, and why there are so many of them. Yet they have something to tell of the wool-raising in the days of the three Edwards. For they are marl-pits, and many of them were dug first when the first Edward was king; the marl, which is a great fertilizer, being taken out of the earth and spread over the grass-lands on which the flocks were pastured. The farmers do not use it now, for new and easier ways of enriching the soil have been found. The marl-diggers, or 'marlers' as they were called, had their own particular feast-day once a year, when they claimed toll of every passer-by, and in the evening sang their marling songs in the village ale-house. When shut the pit, the labour o'er, He whom we work for opes his door And gies to us of drink galore, For this was always Marler's law. Who-whoop who-whoop wo-o-o-o-o. CHAPTER XVI THE COMING OF THE FRIARS Three streets in Chester in the neighbourhood of the Church of S. Martin bear the names of Grey Friars, Black Friars, and White Friars respectively. During the thirteenth century numbers of begging friars, clad in simple grey or black or white tunics, came to Chester and settled in the poorest quarters of the city. Like the early disciples of Christ, whose lives of poverty they sought to imitate, they carried with them neither gold nor silver, and walked unshod, begging their food and shelter as they journeyed from town to town. Their simple teaching appealed to the poor, who soon began to look upon them as their best friends. For they brought the Gospel of Christ to them in their streets, and tended the sick and the aged amid their squalid homes. They were forbidden by the rules of their Orders to receive either money or lands. The first to arrive in Chester were the Dominicans or Black Friars, who settled near the Watergate when Randle Blundeville was earl. The old palace of the Stanleys formed part of the home of the Black Friars. They were followed a few years later by the Franciscans or Grey Friars who also lived by the Watergate, near the spot on which the Linen Hall was afterwards erected, and in the reign of Edward the First the White Friars or Carmelites took up their abode in the neighbourhood of White Friars Street.