Hostile though our kings might be to the communal movement here, they favoured it for purposes of their own in their Norman dominions. This is a factor in the problem that we cannot afford to overlook, considering the peculiar relation in which Normandy stood to England. As M. Langlois has observed: Jamais en effet la France et l’Angleterre n’ont été, même de nos jours, aussi intiment en contact ... Jusqu’à la fin du xii^{me} siècle, les deux pays eurent à peu près les mêmes institutions politiques, ils pratiquaient la même religion, on y parlait la même langue. Des Français allaient fréquemment dans l’île comme touristes, comme colons, comme marchands. Was it not then from Normandy that London would derive her commune? And if from Normandy, surely from Rouen. We are apt to forget the close connections between the two capitals of our Anglo-Norman kings, London on the Thames, and Rouen on the Seine. A student of the period has written of these: Citizens of Norman origin, to whom London, in no small measure, owed the marked importance which it obtained under Henry I.... Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst.... Norman refinement, Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the English burghers.... The great commercial centre to which the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors, attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign.[510] * * * * * It is known from the ‘Instituta Londoniæ’ that, so far back as the days of Æthelred, the men of Rouen had traded to London, bringing in their ships the wines of France, as well as that mysterious “craspice,” which it is the fashion to render “sturgeon,” although there is reason to believe that the term denoted the porpoise and even the whale. The charter of Henry, duke of the Normans, to the citizens of Rouen (1150–1), brings out a fact unknown to English historians, by confirming to them their port at Dowgate, as they had held it from the days of Edward the Confessor. And the same charter, by securing them their right to visit all the markets in England, carries back that privilege, I believe, to the days at least of Henry I.; for, although the fact had escaped notice both in France and England, it could neither have originated with Count Geoffrey nor with Duke Henry his son.