Throughout these times--we will say the twelfth century and early in the thirteenth,--England was waxing every day stronger, though it grew strong in a rough and bloody way; the great Norman castles were a-building up and down the land--such as Conway and Rochester and Cardiff and Kenilworth: the older cathedrals, too, such as Durham and Winchester and Canterbury and Ely were then piling column by column and vault by vault toward the grand proportions which amaze us to-day. It was the time of growing trade too: ships from Genoa and Venice lay off the Thames banks, and had brought thither cargoes of silks and glass, jewels, Milanese armor, and spices. Cloth-makers came over from Flanders and made settlements in England. Perhaps you have read Scott’s story of the “Betrothed.” If so, you will remember his description of just such a Flemish settlement in its earlier chapters, with its Wilkin Flammock and its charming Rose. The scene is laid in the time of Henry II., that sturdy King, who had such woful trouble with his wild sons, Richard and John, and still larger trouble with Thomas à Becket, (known now, as Harold is known, by Tennyson’s tender music) who came to his death at last by the King’s connivance, under the arches of Canterbury Cathedral; and so made that shrine sacred for pilgrims, whether they came from the “Tabard Inn,” or otherwheres. That story of the “Betrothed” puts in presence winningly, the threefold elements of English population in that day--the Britons, the Saxons, and the Normans. The Britons are pictured by a scene of revel in the great rambling palace of a Welsh King, where the bard Cadwallon sings, and that other bard, Caradoc--both historic characters; and it is upon a legend in the chronicle of the latter, Southey has based his poem of “Madoc.” The Normans are represented, in the same romance, by the men-at-arms, or knights of the Castle of _La Garde Doloureuse_, and the Saxons by the fierce old lady in the religious house of Baldringham, where Eveline the heroine, had such fearful experiences with hobgoblins over night. There may be lapses in the archæology--as where Scott puts a hewn fireplace upon the wall of the dining-room of the Lady Ermengarde--antiquarians being pretty well agreed that chimneys of such class were unknown up to the fourteenth century; but still the atmosphere of twelfth-century life in England is better given than in most of our histories.[25] _Richard Cœur de Lion._