[56] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.). [Illustration: Plan I. WINCHESTER in the XII century. Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co. ] We may glance at some of the towns of southern England in company with some travellers from Gaul who visited them in the later years of Henry’s reign. The cathedral church of Laon had been burnt down and its bishop Waldric slain in a civic tumult in 1112. Waldric had once been chancellor to King Henry,[57] and the reports which he and others had brought to Laon of the wealth and prosperity of the island[58] led some of the canons, after perambulating northern Gaul to collect donations for the restoration of their church, to venture beyond sea for the same object. They set sail from Wissant--seemingly in an English ship, for its captain bore the English-sounding name of Coldistan--in company with some Flemish merchants who were going to buy wool in England, and they landed at Dover after a narrow escape from some pirates who chased their vessel in the hope of seizing the money which it was known to contain.[59] They naturally made their way to Canterbury first, to enlist the sympathies of the archbishop and his chapter, as well as those of the scarcely less wealthy and powerful abbey of S. Augustine.[60] Thence they apparently proceeded to Winchester.[61] The old West-Saxon capital had lost its ancient rank; London, which had long surpassed it in commercial and political importance, had now superseded it as the crowning-place and abode of kings. But its connexion with the crown was far from being broken. Its proximity to the New Forest made it a favourite residence of the Conqueror and his sons; William himself had built not only a castle on the high ground at the western end of the city, just below the west gate of the Roman enclosure, but also a palace in its south-eastern quarter, hard by the cathedral and the New Minster; it was here that he usually held his Easter court, and his successors continued the practice. One very important department of the royal administration, moreover, was still permanently centred at Winchester--the Treasury, which under its English title of the “Hoard” had been settled there by Eadward the Confessor, and which seems not to have been finally transferred to Westminster till late in the reign of Henry II.[62] Of the two great religious foundations, one, the “Old Minster,” or cathedral church of S. Swithun, the crowning-place and burial-place of our native kings, assumed under the hands of its first Norman bishop the aspect which, outwardly at least, it still retains. The other, the “New Minster,” so strangely placed by Ælfred close beside the old one, had incurred William’s wrath by the deeds of its abbot and some of its monks who fought and fell at Senlac; to punish the brotherhood, he planted his palace close against the west front of their church; and they found their position so intolerable that in 1111, by Henry’s