while within this enclosure a new church, gorgeous with all the latest developements of Norman architectural skill, was now fast approaching completion.[129] S. Paul’s was the rallying-point, as it had been the nucleus, of municipal life in London. In time of peace the folkmoot assembled at the eastern end of its churchyard at the summons of its great bell; in time of war the armed burghers gathered at its west door and beneath its banner, with the lord of Baynard’s castle as their standard-bearer.[130] The internal constitution of London, however, was scarcely a town-constitution of any kind; it was more like an epitome of the organization of all England. The ordinary system of the parish and the township, the special franchises and jurisdictions of the great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds--all these were loosely bundled together under the general headship of the bishop and the port-reeve, to whom King William addressed his one surviving English writ, just as he would have addressed the bishop and sheriff of a county. The writ itself merely confirmed to the citizens “all the law whereof they had been worthy in King Eadward’s day”;[131] but by the end of Henry I.’s reign the Londoners had got far beyond this. By virtue of a royal charter, they had exchanged their regally-appointed port-reeve for a sheriff of their own choice, and this officer served at once for the city and for the shire of Middlesex, which was granted in ferm to the citizens for ever, as the other shires were granted year by year to their respective sheriffs; they were exempted from all tolls and mercantile dues throughout the realm, and from suit and service to all courts outside their own walls, even the pleas of the crown being intrusted to a special justiciar elected by themselves. Yet there was no complete civic organization; the charter confirmed all the old separate jurisdictions and franchises, the various “sokens” and “customs” of churches, barons and burghers, the wardmoots or assemblies of the different parishes or townships, as well as the husting or folkmoot in which all were gathered together,[132]--and left London as it found it, not a compact, symmetrical municipality, but, as it has been truly called, simply “a shire covered with houses.” [126] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Memorials of Becket_, vol. iii.), p. 3. [127] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.