Rochester and Chichester are mere villages, and they possess nothing for which they should be called cities, but the Sees of their bishops. Oxford scarcely, I will not say satisfies, but sustains its clerks. Exeter supports men and beasts with the same grain. Bath is placed, or rather buried, in the lowest parts of the valleys, in a very dense atmosphere and sulphury vapour, as it were at the gates of Hell. Nor yet will you select your habitation in the Northern cities nor in Worcester, Chester, Hereford, on account of the desperate Welshmen. York abounds in Scots, vile and faithless men, or rather rascals. The town of Ely is always putrefied by the surrounding marshes. In Durham, Norwich, or Lincoln, there are very few of your disposition among the powerful; you will never hear anyone speak French. At Bristol there is nobody who is not, or has not been, a soap-maker, and every Frenchman esteems soap-makers as he does nightmen. After the cities, every market, village or town, has but rude and rustic inhabitants. Moreover, at all times, account the Cornish people for such as you know our Flemish are accounted in France. For the rest, the kingdom itself is generally most favoured with the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth; and in every place there are some good, but much fewer in them all than in Winchester alone. This is in those parts the Jerusalem of the Jews, in it alone they enjoy perpetual peace; it is the school of those who desire to live well and prosper. Here they become men, here there is bread and wine enough for nothing. There are therein monks of such compassion and gentleness, clergy of such understanding and frankness, citizens of such civility and good faith, ladies of such beauty and modesty, that little hinders but I should go there and become a Christian with such Christians. To that city I direct you, the city of cities, the mother of all, the best above all. There is but one fault, and that alone in which they customarily indulge too much. With the exception I should say of the learned and of the Jews, the Winchester people tell lies like watchmen, but it is in making up reports. For in no place under heaven so many false rumours are fabricated so easily as there; otherwise they are true in everything. JOHN'S GRANT TO THE ABBEY OF CROYLAND (1202-1206). +Source.+--_Ingulph's Chronicles._ Bohn's Libraries. G. Bell & Sons.