The expansion of trade and the creation of industries in England owed a great deal to the spirit of enterprise made possible, or even engendered, by the new municipal life of the towns. All over the country the towns asked for and obtained charters after the fashion of London. There are everywhere, up to the end of the thirteenth century, signs of activity and of prosperity: churches were rebuilt; bridges were thrown over rivers; walls were repaired; gates, wharves, aqueducts were constructed; new trading-ports arose such as Lynn, Sandwich, Southampton, for instance; new manufactures were started at Norwich, Worcester, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Reading, and elsewhere; there are no complaints of poverty and misery; there is no Piers Plowman for London; the merchants are seen to be buying country estates; and whereas in the twelfth century England exported little besides her wool, in the fifteenth century there are entries of industry and manufactures everywhere. And for all these, London was the recipient and the distributor. The Hanseatic League was in existence as far back as the eighth century. The members began to trade with London apparently very soon after that date, and were esteemed as merchants who introduced wares very useful and otherwise difficult to procure. In the reign of Ethelred, A.D. 979, the “men of the Emperor” were accounted worthy of “good laws.” They settled by the river-side, where they obtained a house near Dowgate. Either before or after their settlement the “men of Cologne” settled next to them. After disputes between the two Houses they were amalgamated and formed the Gildhalla Teutonicorum. Their merchandise consisted mainly of wheat, rye and other grain, cables, masts, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, linen cloth, wainscots, wax, steel, and other “profitable merchandize.” (Stow). Not only the citizens of London but the country people looked on the aliens with hate. No royal proclamation was of avail to protect them against this hatred. Partly, no doubt, they were hated because they were foreigners; but mainly, it is certain, because they were monopolists and could charge what they pleased. Thus when Wat Tyler and his merry men held possession of the City they murdered all the foreign merchants, especially the Flemings, dragging them even from the altars. Chaucer says (_Nonnes Prestes Tale_):— “Certes, he Jacke Strawe and his meynee Ne made never shoutes half so shrille, When that they wolden any Fleming kille, As thilke day was made upon the fox.”