point to a Flemish element in the population of these towns. In the time of William the Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish queen had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in the time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous and prosperous enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans and English. It may have been partly to allay this jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless, a marked testimony to their character as active and trustworthy members of the state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was the one remaining element of disturbance in his realm, planted a colony of these Flemings in the extremity of South Wales, the southern part of our Pembrokeshire.[155] The experiment was a daring one; cut off as they were from all direct communication with England, there must have seemed little chance that these colonists could hold their own against the Welsh. The success of the experiment is matter not of history but of present fact; South Pembrokeshire remains to this day a Teutonic land, a “little England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of the Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather than for Wales. They are the first links of a social and industrial, as distinguished from a merely political, connexion between England and the Low Countries, which in later days was to exercise an important influence on the life of both peoples. They are the forerunners of two greater settlements--one under Edward III. and one under Elizabeth--which were to work a revolution in English industry. [154] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 5 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 536). [155] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 401 (Hardy, p. 628). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 64; Ann. Camb. a. 1107; Brut y Tywysogion, a. 1105.