The third great element, the _People_, are represented by the few narrow, winding streets and the crowded houses, sending up blue smoke from their hearths, clustering round the great buildings of Church and State. The town itself is almost entirely in the eastern section of the city. On the western side the houses are grouped along the river bank and between Micklegate Bar and Ouse Bridge; there are several monasteries and churches in this section also. The third estate, the closely living masses, the people, has its outstanding buildings, but these are of comparatively local and small importance. Although the _city_ and _guild_ halls stand out utilitarian yet beautiful above the dwelling-houses, yet they are not at all so prominent as the great erections of the Church and the State. A glance over the city to-day from the Walls or the top of a church tower emphasises the dominance of the cathedral over the whole city. The castle keep (Clifford's Tower) is still an important feature in the view. There were as rivals neither factories nor great commercial offices in the fifteenth-century city. St. Clement's Nunnery and six churches, of which three were not far from Walmgate Bar and one was near Monk Bar, were actually outside the city walls. Without the city and the cultivated land near by most of the country consisted of great stretches of forest,[1] _i.e._ wood, marsh, moor, waste-land. This surrounding forest-land was crossed by the few high-roads leading to and from the city, which they entered through the Bars. The country was not all wild and tenantless, for here and there, scattered about, were baronial castles and estates, and monastic houses and lands, all of which had their farming. In the forests there were villages each consisting of a few houses grouped together for common security, where lived minor officials and men working in the forest. The great Forest of Galtres, to the north of York, was a royal domain. In the fifteenth century the population of York, the greatest city of the north, was about 14,000. Newcastle was the next greatest, being one of the ten or twelve leading cities of mediæval England which had a total population of about 2-1/2 millions. The inhabitants of York registered in 1911 numbered 83,802.